As Good As It Gets

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

The movie hinges on the premise that if you put a hippy-looking wig on somebody that they'll be indistinguishable from anyone with long hair. Needless to say Mick Jagger and James Fox don't resemble each other or sound like each other whatsoever. In fact Mick is world renown for having a distinct, weird-looking face.The Fox character is reprehensible and Jagger's character...is also there, for some reason. And there's tits. People watch this because it's an art film. I can't imagine it being green-lighted by a studio if Jagger's face wasn't on the poster. At this point Roeg was just a cinematographer. Cammell would later wind up directing music videos. Neither had any directing experience, and it shows.

I first saw Performance whenever it first came out, the film everyone was raving about and which was thought to be very much of its time. I have no memories of it at all, except that I didn't understand it, was a little frightened by it, and was thoroughly confused by it. Whenever I heard it mentioned, usually in glowing terms, I would think 'well, a little more of the hippy-sh*t memory lane cr*p. Forty-seven years on, I've seen it again and I have to say it stands the test of time remarkably well. By way of comparison Easy Rider, which I saw then and 30 years later, in my view, doesn't (or rather was does stand the test of time isn't the Peter Fonda character's idealism, but the Dennis Hopper character's cynicism).I suspect that when it was written, by Donald Cammell who also co-directed with Nicolas Roeg, although these days the film is always trailed as Roeg's film, the two of them thought they were exploring ideas and their age, ideas about sexuality and identity and conventional as opposed to alternative living.They were also examining, to a lesser extent, different forms of insanity, and also examining what it means to 'perform'. If, like me, you believe that what a film maker thinks she or he is doing and what the film actually becomes are quite often entirely different, you will be relieved to hear that if those ideas are examined, they most certainly don't dominate or suffocate the film. There is more to it which carries it all very well.Forty-seven years on, in fact, ideas which will have been seen as groundbreaking when the film was released (and which horrified Warner Bros, who financed the film), tend to look a little silly and naive if they are still intended to be profound (and are more proof, if more proof were needed, that nothing dates faster than this year's fashion). What we get - 47 years on - is a thoroughly entertaining, visually often stunning, intriguing look at two men, the sadistic gangster and the reclusive rock star, both utterly narcissistic and controlling, who meet by chance and pretty much recognise themselves in the other.It is an irony that rather than wilt, Performance has matured over those 47 years, and what we get is a thoroughly engrossing piece of cinema which is worth every one of the 105 minutes.Check it out. And if some of you disagree with me that it can no longer be taken seriously in the sense it was when it first came out, well, peace man, now go and count your collection of antique joss sticks.

James Fox plays Chas, a East London gangster who delights in sadism, sex, misogyny and violence. He works for Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon), whose orders he disobeys by murdering a low life called Joey Maddocks. Chas is forced to go on the run, the police and Flowers' henchmen hot on his heels. The film is concerned with Chas' chameleon like transformation, as he alters himself in an attempt to remain off the radar. In this regard he dyes his hear, changes his mannerisms and ingratiates himself with the androgynous Turner, played by Rolling Stones front-man Mick Jagger. "I'm determined to fit in. I've got to fit in," he begs, and Jagger obliges, introducing Chas to hallucinogenic drugs, homosexuality, femininity and his fuzzy concepts of "love". End result: Chas drops his previous psycho-sexual, violent, dominative, masculine hangups and becomes a happy drag queen. Think of Jagger as an X rated Deepak Chopra. The film was directed by Nicolas Roeg, whose customarily unconventional editing techniques elevate the film tremendously. Roeg turns the plot into a kaleidoscopic, hallucinogenic identity crisis ("I know who I am," Chas unconvincingly repeats throughout the film), using a non linear, sliding, elliptical editing style to suggest the breaking down and piecing together of Chas' identity. For Roeg, the goal is for anima and animus to collide through technique. His shots are like the drug tainted fragments of a vast mosaic, the final image fuzzy and confusing at first, until each new added piece completes and concretizes the picture. Roeg's editing was breathtaking during this period, culminating in such great films as "Walkabout" and "Don't Look Now". The film ends with Chas transforming into Turner and vice versa, the former adopting a wig, costume and makeup. Chas' face even literally becomes Turner's and Roeg goes so far as to use mirrors and subtle shots to overlay female breasts on Chas' own chest, blurring his psycho-sexual identity. Actor James Fox found the production so disturbing and disorienting that he left acting and fled into religious retreat for nearly a decade. Mick Jagger went on to become a giant sex God.7.9/10 – Hugely influential, but somewhat dated. How do you rate a film that plays like a cross between Guy Ritchie and Catherine Breillat? Incidentally, Roeg's "The Man Who Fell To Earth" presents the flip-side of Chas' transformation, musician David Bowie transforming from androgynous, sexless rock star, to phallus incarnate.

In retrospect, we completely ignore key tipping points, because they become accepted horizons behind us. Only if you are there, or have an insightful observer can you even capture the notion that something radical is going on. An extra bite of toast here, a missed appointment there, a chance with a girl — these will flip a switch and everyone on the planet could have rain instead of sun.I believe that for a few years there was immense power in the Beatles, Stones and Dylan. Not them so much, but in the allure that this form of new public archetypes offered. Decisions they made mattered, because so much weight of soul was loaded onto their trains.Before Yoko captured our John and confused him with sexed heroin, burning the gates to utopia, the fires had already been lit by Anita Pallenberg. She similarly seduced Brian Jones from the pharmaceutical world of color to a world of fast brown. The difference with Anita is that she was far more skilled at mass seduction and more fearless in the face of death. She killed the bird.Later, as a sort of freshly re-enacted journalism, Cammell and Roeg use her and the remaining standing stone in a story about rock performance as violent seduction. The mirrors that include the film focus on the use of the actual Anita, and actual Stone, on- set mushrooms and a then novel hallucinogenic cinematic style. Roeg would go from here to do some rather impressive things and his experiments in his sliding frame style is obvious here. In fact, midway through when the rock half of the story eclipsed the thug first half he assumed directorial control.The mirrors in the story are more obvious and less interesting. As any summary will tell you, the attempt here is to conflate the Jagger persona as hungry avatar (using the pre-computer sense of the word) with that of a violent criminal underling. It worked better then, because the performer-as-whore business had been so overused.Now, well the cinema is tame; no one cares about Mick and his girls and we've all forgotten who was pulling the world then.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.