No Other Choice
NO OTHER CHOICE. It can be a stifling, stymying exercise to sit with one’s own predilections and preferences. Our current, rotten era has reinforced this, of course, but in this case, I’m thinking more specifically about the art and artists we enjoy — revere, even. We hope the work will be both reliable and unpredictable. We want to easily enjoy everything they do while also being surprised by it, but we don’t want them to betray our trust and make something that falls outside of our prescribed zone. It’s an impossible arrangement, really, and a wonder that we can ever agree on anything.
To call Chan-Wook Park’s movies divisive is a rank understatement, defined as they are by a granular focus on the venal, violent and vengeful aspects of humanity. But they are simultaneously gorgeous to look at, more often than not technically and aesthetically perfect. Director Park controls the frame as tightly as any of his peers. He also balances the baroque horrors of his subjects with a deeply cynical sense of humor — silliness, even. That balance is a truly delicate thing, though: A few grains on either side of the scale, and things can’t help but slide off and away into something like self-parody. But is that potentially parodical zone where the director wants his work to exist?
Park has referred to his process of bringing his vision of Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax (previously adapted by Costa-Gavras, to whom this version is dedicated) to the screen as something of a life’s work, a self-described attempt at a masterpiece. While it undeniably exhibits many of the great artist’s themes and flourishes, from my seat it felt somehow overworked andunderdeveloped, a movie that should have ended sooner but still struggled to reach a satisfying resolution. Is it me, or is it Park? Does it matter?
Man-Su (Byung-Hun Lee) has made a successful career as a middle manager on the production side of a large paper company. When new ownership restructures, he finds himself summarily unemployed and seemingly unemployable. Troubled by a worsening toothache and increasing austerity measures at home (even the beloved golden retrievers have to go live with grandma and grandpa), Man-Su finds himself with no other choice but to advertise a management position at a fictitious paper company and then murder the most promising applicants, making room for himself in the small pond of contemporary Korean pulp men — simple enough. But he’s also got a nearly nonverbal cello prodigy daughter, a teenaged stepson turning to petty larceny, a deeply committed dental hygienist wife whose fidelity he has, in desperate times, begun to question. Oh right, he’s also working on a decade of sobriety and the legacy of his father’s suicide in the wake of the failure of his once-thriving hog farm; it’s a lot — maybe too much. The narrative ambition of No Other Choice hardly stops there: Each of Man-Su’s would-be targets is also in the midst of a minutely detailed existential crisis, all facing situations that leave them, as they see it, no other choice (it’s a pretty heavily reinforced motif).
The problem, then, is an embarrassment of riches: With so much to work with, how does the film focus? How do we stay centered within it? Unfortunately, for me at least, the answer is that it does not and, as result, we don’t.
While No Other Choice is as darkly beautiful and visually ambitious as any of Park’s best work, it suffers for either a lack or, perhaps more generously, an excess of focus. Is there room, even at almost two and a half hours, for a black comedy about capitalism and murder to tell the interior stories of so many characters in such detail? Or is it so self-aware in its cynicism that it’s part of the joke? Either way, the result, surprisingly and disappointingly, almost drove me to distraction. For all the voluminous, intricate piece work of its character-building, I never felt truly inside any of them, nor did I feel that I stood at adequate distance to observe them ironically. It’s possible that Park’s post-modernism, his inherent understanding of the medium, has led him to a cinematic language I cannot translate; I’m certainly willing to accept that. But it seems more likely that, in the absence of some of his more steadfast script collaborators, he just let this one get away from him — too many, too much, not enough.
There are elements of No Other Choice, as with any of Park’s movies, that will linger in the memory: violent horrors rendered beautiful through craft and care, images and tones unlike those of any other artist. But here they struggle to cohere, caught among the flotsam and jetsam of a choked narrative. R. 139M.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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This article appears in Needles and Ink.