What strikes me so deep about this movie is the level of loneliness and isolation that Coppola is able to portray. Even when he's in the city you don't see anyone else, views from the windows of skyscrapers reveal a city that appears to be desolate. San Fransico is such a bright, lively and vibrant city and here Coppola shows it to be positvely dead and grey and unwelcoming. The warehouse where his office consists of a big empty space with shallow lighting, his work workspace is in a corner behind a steel cage. The cieling is held up by thin pillars with nothing to support them. This represents Harry Caul's entire world. He's a man who is entirely empty and void of personal relationships and almost all emotions. Everything that is Harry is locked inside of a cage and no one gets in there.
Harry is a surveillance expert who is paid to spy on people. Harry cannot let anyone into his own life but quietly forces his way into other people lives and makes a living at it. He's so good at it, in his field he is practically a celebrity but he doesn't enjoy what he does and thus cannot acknowledge his celebrity or feel good for the praise he receives; he does it because it's the only way he can relate to anyone; when they don't know he's listening.
We see he keeps a mistress but he has no wife or family to hide her from. He hides her from himself, keeps her at a distance so she cannot hurt him. When she starts asking him questions about himself he essentially leaves without a word. In a later scene when he brings colleagues from a convention to his office for a party, he reveals his feelings to her. He asks her 'if you loved a man who didn't reveal anything about himself or who he was, would you wait for him?' 'How would I know he loved me?' She responds. Harry obviously loved this woman but doesn't even know how to feel that love for himself. He exists outside of everyone and only inside his own mind. He pays his bills by spying on people for corporate espionage and he's very good at his job. Without the ability to personally connect with anyone, eavesdropping into others lives must be natural and yet very painful for him. He claims 'it doesn't matter what the conversation is about' but he's in denial to himself. He yearns to know what the conversation is about if only to live vicariously through someone else for a matter of moments. When Harry discovers a colleague planted a bug in a pen and recorded him, he freaks out. His privacy (which is all he has) is violated in the most viscious manner and he doesn't see it as a joke but an attack on his security. He knows the power of being recorded and is terrified of how he opened up to the woman, being used against him.
We learn he once lived in New York and moved to San Fransico after some people he spied on; a woman her her family, were tied up and decapitated because of his work. The guilt and shame of his involvement in their murders drove him away from the city. However he cannot stop his work because it's all he knows and all he's ever known, how to observe life but not live it. He senses something sinister in his employers during his current job and finds himself drawn into the conversation he recorded, consumed fear of what happened in New York happening again.
Without any flashbacks or backstory to speak of we do not know what made Harry how he currently is; maybe a trauma caused it, something aside fro mthe New York incident or maybe he'd always been like this, a hopeless introvert unable to allow anyone in. During the conversation he records the woman says, in regards to a homeless person, 'I always think this person was once a little baby who had a mother that loved him and now here he is, half freezing on a bench'. Harry was once a little baby who probably had a mother that loved him. Or maybe he didn't. That dialogue to me is poignant in how humans are. What becomes of us when we grow up and no longer have that mothers love? What do we do to try to fill that void? Harry may never of had that love or once had it so strong that when he no longer had it, had nothing at all. He's a baby lost in the world without a mother's love and the security that love brings.
The direction of Coppola is outstanding. His use of lines is amazing. The film is permeated with lines and they exist in almost every shot, giving the film a prison-like atmosphere. No matter where Harry goes or who he is with he's imprisoned in his own mind, shackled by his inability to feel or relate to another human being. Whether it's windows or the outside of a building, stair railings, wallpaper; it all gives up a feeling of claustrophobia and helplessness. We see many shots of chairs that are empty and the sole reason for a chairs existence is to be occupied, further adding to the lonelines of the film. The colours are dark and bleak with the only bright colours coming from lipstick, a half working neon sign, a television screen and the lively scenes of the convention and the opening recording sequence. There is a mime focused on during the credits which perfectly represents Harry, as someone who cannot talk to express himself and is trapped in a mute existence, hoping someone will see his pain and torment from his actions alone.
Hackman is so great in his portrayal of Caul. So much of his performance is in what he doesn't do. He's so introverted you can hardly tell what he's thinking or feeling in his actions. Harry's detatchment from the world oozes through in every scene.
Harry is so secretive of his personal information he wonders how his landlord not only knew it was his birthday or his age but how she got into his apartment, through the multiple locks and alarm. He insists that he wants the only set of keys. His landlord (though we cannot hear) wonders about emergencies if say a fire happened and his personal possessions. "I don't have any personal possessions. I only have my keys" and that is the truth. There is no emotional attachment to any material objects. The only thing that matters is his keys, not just to his apartment but his inner most thoughts, desires and his feelings. As long as he has the keys and no one else, he feels safe. When his employer gets his phone number (so far as he knows no one knows he even has a phone and he uses payphones to make his business calls) he wonders how they knows. "We keep dossiers on anyone who comes in contact with The Director" A young and impsing Harrison Ford says.
Caul is convinced his employers are going to use his recordings to harm the couple he recorded. He tries so hard to keep them. When he reveals parts of himself to a woman and feels safe within her reach, that is destroyed when he awakes to find she took off in the middle of the night with the recordings and gave them to his employer. However his employer merely says 'come by with the picture we want and get your money', they are not angry with Harry but simply couldn't take the chance of them being destroyed. We hear the conversation several times in the movie but have no idea why they are being spied on or why someone could want them dead. Harry rents out the hotel room next to the room they are supposed to meet in and plans on surveilling it. When he hears voices get raised and sees the woman pushed up against glass and a hand smears blood across it he breaks down. He becomes a child, not sure where to go without a mother to hold him and tell him everything will be alright. He crawls underneath the blankets and it is there he sleeps, for how long we do not know. He's ashamed of himself for acting this way; instead of intervening he merely watches and listens in horror as murder is commited due to his actions and is powerless to stop it.
When he awakes the picks the lock of the neighbouring room and inspects it; placecards on the pillows, ribbon on the toilet. It was not only clean but appeared to be recently made over by the hotel staff. He checks the shower and the drain for blood. He opens the toilet and it's clean. Not a spot of blood anywhere. When he flushes the toilet, blood gushes up like a geysers and begins to flow all over the bathroom floor as he looks on in complete horror. I'm unsure what to make of this scene as there isn't a clear cut explaination on whether this actually happened or what a manifestation of his own guilt and shame. The blood pours out from beneath and makes the clean water dirty with blood, much like how he appears serene on the outside but deep down he has blood on his hands, or at least feels he does.
We discover that it wasn't the people he recorded who were killed but the director himself. We see shots of the murder happening inside the hotel room but is that how it happened? The papers say it was a car wreck. How do you move a dead body from the 7th floor of a hotel and not get caught? Wouldn't a maid notice a bathroom floor full of blood? Perhaps this was not a literal translation of the murder but how Harry envisioned it in his own mind. Harry returns to his apartment and plays his saxophone, which appears to his only means of self expression and he only expresses it to himself. His phone rings, it's Harrison Ford, "We know that you know Mr. Caul, you should stay out of this." Harry freaks out. He starts checking his walls, electrical sockets, figurines (breaking his virgin mary one as a last resort) and when he discovers no bugs he starts tearing up the walls and the floors until nothing is left but a skeleton of an apartment. Again, we see many lines in this scene. He's in his prison and now there is nothing left in there at all except him and his saxophone and the one chair he is sitting in. The final shot perfectly personifies Harry's soul. There is nothing inside him but loneliness and self destruction and the gentle, yearning of his music he wishes someone would hear and love.
Originally Posted by Mattrick
)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
