Too Old to Die Young (2019)

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Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Screenplay: Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker

Cast: Miles Teller as Martin Jones; Augusto Aguilera as Jesus Rojas; Cristina Rodlo as Yaritza; Nell Tiger Free as Janey Carter; John Hawkes as Viggo Larsen; Jena Malone as Diana DeYoung; William Baldwin as Theo Carter

Realising it in the midst of this review, Nicholas Winding Refn is becoming our new Quentin Tarantino. He doesn't have the reach of the latter, who can still somehow get violent and unconventional films playing in a British multiplex in the middle of the afternoon, but since Drive (2011) and its unexpected breakout success, he's the man whose name is used to promote other work and has spent his own money to restore exploitation films he feels are worth preserving. The later through byNWR, whilst not always great in the choices, is enough to point to in terms of him being a great guy¹, but his actual films are divisive. This is an issue in the sense I have nothing but good will for the man, but in this particularly case that'll leave a sadness as what half way through was a great production eventually ends with a bitter taste to the mouth. On paper, following on from giving Sion Sono the mini-series Tokyo Vampire Hotel (2017) to relocate his sense of fun again, Amazon Prime funding this minimalist Refn production created with comic book writer Ed Brubaker was enticing. Whatever your thoughts on Amazon, or just its corporate head, it was at least a huge risk to fund this auteur after the divisiveness of The Neon Demon (2016), but for most of its length, Too Old to Die Young felt like a new, weirder and rewarding turn in Refn's career. Sadly things do take a turn, but let's start at the beginning first before we get ahead of ourselves.

The project was unexpected, deliberately playing to its unconventional history, when Amazon threw wads of cash to Refn, with two middle episodes being premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, a creation that develops a Jekyll and Hyde personality as, when the mini-series is good, Refn has developed a new style of weird, confrontation avant-garde genre cinema waiting to blossom. At its worst, whilst I will still wait with interest for his next work, I cannot hold Refn as a great director for all his indulgence in violence laced in a deadly amount of pretension, perversely emphasised now Tarantino (for his controversial creative choices) has amazing matured and chewed on polarising ideas with deliberate complexity.

Too Old to Die Young is over ten episodes, and is paced as the most extreme of slow cinema where a simple dialogue scene can last over five or more minutes. Its surprisingly comparable to Filipino director Lav Diaz, for who eight hour plus films are a regularity, but whilst Diaz obscures important stories in way too much padding for me for the most part, Refn's deliberately taking a premise of a two hour film and stretching it to an extreme, but still had to make it with a pace appropriate for Amazon Prime where events do transpire of note. This conflict is a fascinating and rewarding result, as was the case for Sion Sono who had to start bringing back his older eccentricity and stretch a long form story out, and here Refn with Brubaker for the first half of Too Old... does create a compelling work.

Two main sides co-exist at first, conflicting each other in the first chunk of the first episode. A cop Martin (Miles Teller), who is involved with shady dealings, will be there when his cop partner is murdered point blank by Jesus (Augusto Aguilera), the son of a cartel boss taking revenge for the murder of his mother Magdalena, who he has is revealed to have an incestuous obsession with. For Jesus, he will flee to Mexico to his father, who is on death's door in illness. Martin will be promoted to a police detective, all whilst his romantic relationship with Janey Carter (Nell Tiger Free), as well as being problematic in that she is only seventeen and underage, will bring him into her life with her eccentric father Theo Carter (William Baldwin). Eventually this series will split from these two men to two women. Diana DeYoung (Jena Malone), a victim's advocate who secretly has hired Viggo Larsen (John Hawkes), a former FBI agent dying of a terminal illness, to kill rapists and child molesters, and Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo), who is the carer for Jesus' father but is secretly the High Priestess of Death, an urban myth who is killing men who harm women, especially those forced into sex work.

My eventual disappointment with the streaming series is tragic as at the start, Too Old to Die Young is very good. The insanely glacial tone mixes with Refn's obsession with neon is a match made in heaven, cinematographers Darius Khondji and Diego García earning their keep with the bold visual style, and Refn's usual composer Cliff Martinez hits it out the park again with his score. Probably the most interesting detail, working with Ed Brubaker, is that over a longer format, you still have to create enough to fill the detail, and this is where the show finds its best virtues.

Episode 2, in a bizarre paradox against its cold nihilism, even has a warm humanity, regardless if it's discoloured in black humour. For me it's the best episode as, when Jesus returns to his family in Mexico, his ailing cartel father despite being evil is made sympathetic as a tyrant reduced to a dying man, obsessed with football, and repeating a memory of seeing Pele over and over again, to the point he uses it as a peace maker between his group and the corrupt police force in their payroll to deal with tensions. In this, Refn had the potential to make even the worst in humanity perversely human in just giving them this detail. It could seem problematic, in Episode 5 when Martin has to track down and kill two brothers who make "rape porn", to have people who create the material argue over what to put on the radio in the middle of a long duration car chase, but it feels tonally appropriate and hits another highlight of the series when Barry Manilow's Mandy gets used in a montage immediately afterwards.

Points of absurd humour and even full blown weirdness are also a godsend. Be it that that car chase is not helped by an electric car used for one of the participants' runs out of energy in the middle of the desert, or how a confused police station reception asks Martin if someone really shot some ducks in a person's pond. Even something as absolute out of place like Diana DeYoung, in the final episode when we are meant to have a climax, having a scene using virtual reality porn with a head visor, even when the series sadly falls into its biggest problems, has a weight of something utterly unconventional and stands out more as its had no connection to anything that took place beforehand. Hell, William Baldwin's character of Theo Carter feels like he's wandered from a David Lynch film, a creep who's uncomfortably close to his daughter in how he finds her beautiful and, upon first meeting Martin, communicates to him waving around one of her plush tigers and growling at him. Refn has had this weirdness before, and it's one of his best virtues, be it The Neon Demon just beforehand, but it's rarely been funny with the exception of Bronson (2008) in the past.

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Even the nihilism at first is spiked with a humane side perversely skipping throughout. America's going to hell in a hand basket, as the problematic vigilante attitude of Viggo Larsen is counteracted by the fact of his despair both over his declining health and that he's also looking after a mother who is suffering from dementia. The only thing on the radio is a conspiracy disc jockey, and either that's contacted by a puppet making an appearance in the finale scene, and everyone's idiosyncratic, from the Jamaican contractors of hits to random samurai groups in the city. Even Martin is a curious one just for how much Miles Teller spits all the damn time and barely says a thing, not exactly Ryan Gosling in the slightest in style. The less said the better about his fellow police detectives the better, the strangest of them all - homoerotic yet joking about it in mock machismo, proudly singing about fascism in group sing longs, creating a mock version of Christ's crucifixion in the office from Martin's leaving party, definitely the weirdest moment of the entire series, and generally acting in a way that one criminal is horrified to even consider they are actually law enforcement at all.

The problems with Too Old to Die Young begin when the first major character is killed off. Callously, just written off, and whilst I tried keeping my enthusiasm up, I really got tired of the nihilism. Having passed my thirtieth birthday, I realise I cannot stand this. The truth is also that, an issue returning back to the likes of Only God Forgives (2013), the mini-series just comes off as juvenile and contrived after a while. The show literally peters off with the two main female leads as heroic vigilantes, a rewarding change of plotting undercut by how nasty and grim the violence also is.

And frankly, the vigilante content, with the pretension, is problematic in an eyeball rolling way, as Malone has a monologue directly to the camera about how in the future the world will turn to death and concentration camps again but she will protect the innocent. Throughout there are references clearly to the political era after Donald Trump became president, Nazi flags appearing more than once, but the idea of killing the evil doers yourself is like Dirty Harry (1971) without any of the ambiguity or whit. Its inherently a cheap sentimentality, a perverse one, to make the villains killed rapists and paedophiles, as no one morally would defend them, but it's still a cheap ad hoc creative choice that's dumb.

Least when you had Episode Five, starting with a disturbing opening of a young man being dragged into a "performance", it was still a show about moral darkness punctured with corpse black humour and how these figures had quirks. Instead, this evokes Drive, his most well known and probably best regarded film which I always found incredibly shallow and too obsessed with nastiness since it first came out. And this sucks as this turned into an accidental bait and switch. The bait was a subversion of Refn's usual material where clichés - the criminals, corrupt cops, murderers and scum - developed more complexity just through the obtuse pacing and eccentricity of the oddest sort.

However Refn falls back on this dull cool misanthropy masquerading in "profound" final episode dialogue and it sucks - even as I hold a few of his films in my personal canon, this is a time I cannot hold Refn on a high level as he's going to keep doing this and annoy me. Even if I still praise byNWR and still take interest in him, this issue is going to now linger in the back of my mind. It was like when I started becoming disengaged with Quentin Tarantino around 2007 to circle back to the beginning. Tarantino is still divisive, still has the problematic violence, but even if I have thoughts about a film like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), he's nonetheless grown up and still engaging. The controversial aspects of his cinema are laced in questions whether he wrote material that was deliberately divisive to get uncomfortable reactions from the type of cinema he creates.

Refn is capable of this, but that I have never seen him really be someone where those questions can be asked about his ideas. This is why controversially I consider his best film was Fear X (2003), the John Turturro production which killed off his first attempt to enter American cinema. Now that he has licked his wounds, and even directed a Miss Marple TV movie, he's been able to make idiosyncratic work but there's a danger not in him becoming more divisive, but that the violence and nihilism is just tedious, something to bear in mind as Fear X had none of it and was a dark, Lynchian puzzle of great interest. (The other film behind it was Valhalla Rising (2009), which was violent, but was also a period Viking freak-out where it made sense to have it and wasn't the main subject matter).

Aspects as a result are lost which could've been taken further. An interesting penultimate episode scene of the cartel discussing their heritage in terms of their work, hating on white taco vans invading their turf and Jesus making an apocalyptic view on the subject, shows what could've been, as is the sub current of actual supernatural content as Diana DeYoung is psychic and even, after one particularly strong one, has to get an exorcism so she can get her eyes back to their normal state. The fact each episode references Tarot cards in their titles, which immediately intrigues me, but never feels like they have any weight to the material just enforces a danger of pointlessness. He even ends the show on an old Judas Priest cut which proves Nicolas Winding Refn has the talent and the style; he just unfortunately falls back on ultimately boring themes.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Minimalism

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) Oh, and relocating a presumably lost Andy Milligan film Nightbirds (1970) that was deemed culturally important as a British production for the British Film Institute to come knocking at his door, or he to theirs, so he's done enough there to earn a pat on the back.

Fear X (2003)

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Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Screenplay: Hubert Selby Jr. and Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: John Turturro (as Harry); Deborah Kara Unger (as Kate); Stephen McIntyre (as Phil); William Allen Young (as Agent Lawrence); Gene Davis (as Ed)

Synopsis: Harry (John Turturro), a mall security guard, becomes obsessed with deliberate but mysterious murder of his wife, only for a growing series of clues and a constant stream of hallucinations to push him towards finding the culprit himself and finding out why his wife died.

Here, all the way back in 2003, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn was already making idiosyncratic films that massively divided viewers. The Neon Demon (2016) may be exceptionally polarising now, but the result of how Fear X did before he had his reputation, his first attempt to break into the US, led his production company to bankruptcy and Refn to have to heal his wounds until the end of the late 2000s, making acclaimed sequels to his debut Pusher (1996),  and making a special in the Miss Marple franchise in 2009, the least excepted part of his filmography, before Bronson (2008) and Valhalla Rising (2009) brought him up to the present day auteur who's both loved and hated. Whilst Only God Forgives (2013) was notorious for him, he still got to make The Neon Demon three years after, whilst Fear X was an entirely different kettle of fish without the reputation of a mainstream smash in Drive (2011) to soften the divided critical opinion.

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Fear X is a very distinct animal that presents what would happen with Refn's later films, a through line to be found but within a work entrenched in a gritty, naturalistic grunginess for most of its length at odds with his later stylised, neon soaked movies. It still follows an almost elliptical tone that remains constant in his career however, which is the most distinct point to take from it. Turturro is prominent in three quarters or even more of the film, slowly unfolding scenes following his building up of clues of who is responsible for his wife's death through a minimalistic take on a very conventional crime narrative. The film starts to become more allusive as it goes on, becoming more like the Refn films of the later 2010s when momentum builds around the protagonist's hallucinations and the cause of the story being merely explained in snippets and hints in the dialogue only.

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The most pronounced aspect of Fear X eventually, when its plot is a straight out crime thriller on paper, is the subconscious flashes of Turturro's mind straight from horror cinema. It could be seen as jarring - red and black visages of faces pushing through membrane¹, flashes of x-ray like shapes layering on top of each other and, probably the most alarming moment in any of Refn's cinema despite all the gore he's depicted, an elevator in an entirely dark room whose light shows the ground being submerged in a foot at least of red water - but it matches an easy to forget the subplot suggesting the weight of the protagonist's grief is slowly evolving into this after it stars with his wife appearing at times to comfort him either as a memory or a ghost, the more nightmarish imagery building from the violence he has witnessed and will eventually find himself in trying to complete his goal. That the figure behind the murder is not an inherently evil figure, but given snippets of an ordinary home life thus forcing the viewer in a moral conundrum, brings a horrible sense of the viewer knowing how badly the story will resolve, the screws being turned more tightly to their discomfort as Turturro eventually finds himself in a red lit hotel straight from a David Lynch film. That the film even in its end credits, a split of various CCTV camera screens, is purposely undercutting the viewer's expectations of what they'd presume would happen in the film forces a cold, unnerving mood to be felt throughout its short running time.

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Technical Detail:

Filmed in a gritty tone for a large part, Fear X has a remarkably different tone from the likes of Drive and later Refn films, feeling closer to the American indie films yore with Turturro's appearance and the wintery small town setting of the first half. Certainly this film brings up the fact Refn is able to take direct influences from many other films but creates his own idiosyncratic style, able to hopscotch between a grounded drama in scenes of Turturro as a security guard in a mall chasing an older man who's shop lifted, to a mix of horror and the montage effect of Stan Brakhage shorts in the more nightmarish imagery. The drastic changes in tone when it becomes more heighted doesn't contradict the more natural, paranoid tone of the first half in the slightest, able to make the two halves whole in how the slow methodical pace used through the film keeps everything controlled and suitable to each other.

The music marks Refn's constant obsession with electronic music, with the legendary Brian Eno with J. Peter Schwalm contributing an unnerving droning score of sounds and noises between them that adds to the sense of paranoia throughout the story.

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Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Grotesque/Mindbender

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

There're numerous films in Refn's filmography which exist within a subjective, sometimes nightmarish, reality which can exist out of time at points. Fear X at first is a grounded, subdued drama but like the later films a lingering sense of dread is felt at the start and, amplified by Eno and Schwalm's unsettling score, grows in intensity constantly next to Turturro's incredibly subtle performance, Refn's tendency for prolonged and lingering scenes having a distorting affect on viewers. Interestingly without the violence of the later films, very minimal throughout, the subjective nature of how its treated becomes even more disturbing in terms of the more fantastical imagery used or the scenes involving CCTV footage which have their own alien, grimy realism. As much a psychodrama drama as a crime mystery, the film entirely removes the expectations of a revenge story in its matter-of-fact anti-climax, turning against the viewer in a way that for me wasn't disappointing but gave me a chill on the back of my neck.

Personal Opinion:

An incredibly underrated film in Nicolas Winding Refn's career and actually my favourite from all the ones I've seen. For all the criticism of the later films being style over substance and for their graphic violence, Fear X qualifies as a significant rebuttal in how it takes a conventional plot and turns it into a subtle, potent experience.

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¹ This is actually reminiscent to the music video for Here to Stay by nu metal band Korn from around this period, only far more subtly creepy.

Valhalla Rising (2009)

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Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Screenplay: Nicolas Winding Refn, Roy Jacobsen

Cast: Mads Mikkelsen (as One-Eye); Maarten Stevenson (as The Boy); Ewan Stewart (as The General); Gary Lewis (as The Priest); Alexander Morton (as The Chieftain); Jamie Sives (as The Son)

Synopsis: In ancient Britain, when the Vikings are being driven into the wilderness by the growing followers of Christianity, such a group of Christian warriors encounter the mute, hulking man named One-Eye (Mikkelsen), an escaped fighter for a pagan tribe who with a young boy join the warriors on a boat trip to take back Jerusalem. Able to see into the future, One-Eye is aware of the doom they are all drifting towards, starting with their way on the ocean being completely blinded by fog...

Nicolas Winding Refn is a curious modern day auteur, one I have not ever given a decisive opinion on but in hindsight to this review may grow more and more respect for finally. To give you the interest the man offers in his filmography, another film that could be covered in the future was the one that sabotaged his first attempt to conquer American due it's sad failure commercially,  Fear X (2003) with John Turturro and music by Brian Eno, blatantly in debt to David Lynch to a possible flaw but an elusive creation that showed a unique filmmaking vision. His success, from the Pusher trilogy to Drive (2011), alongside his rollercoaster of a career, where after licking his wounds from the Fear X experience he even directed a Miss Marple one-off, makes him a fascinating character and his filmography itself is the same, continually subverting and playing with genre cinema in unpredictable ways. Out of what I've seen, if he becomes a great director for me it's not going to be because of his most well known film Drive, which feels generic compared to a filmography that includes the controversial follow-up Only God Forgives (2013), his unconventional biopic Bronson (2008) and Valhalla Rising itself.

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An incredibly low budget mythical film whose surface appearance is that of a Viking movie, Valhalla Rising as it starts drastically contrasts from this with its minimalist tone. It takes on the nose with pride its artistic aspirations and pretensions. A film shot in the massive, full landscapes of Scotland but contrasted by the claustrophobic close-ups used for most shots of the actors. A spiritual journey to Hell but rather than Dante's Inferno it's a very small cast walking amongst mud sodden fields, the excessive violence of many of Refn's films contrasted here by an emphasis more on mood to dictate the narrative, the story told in many places through visuals only. Only Only God Forgives may have taken this film's tone fully rather than the others which change things around. Completely mute in the role of One-Eye, Mikkelsen as a living personification of brutality is also a soothsayer, his prophecies blood red flashes hazy at first to understand but ominous of what will come, Mikkelsen conveying as much as possible through only his body language as the dialogue spoken by everyone else is nearly obtuse, concise dialogue adding to the unnerving tension that seeps more and more into the film as the narrative goes along. The result is an art house genre film but the mixing of the genre qualities and the tones defined stereotypically as "art house" creates a blurred line between the two into uncharted territory. The vibe of the film's tone is comparable to Apocalypse Now (1979), where as the natives are completely unseen but completely threatening, the warriors fall apart and most of them go insane, reducing them less to holy warriors but scared animals.

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One fact that shouldn't be ignored is the subplot of Christianity; set in the era where Christianity would eventually drive away the pagan religions, its yet fraught with conflict as the Christian warriors become disillusioned and broken down just from the prolonged, agonising boat trip in the centre of the film, fog blinding their way and undrinkable seawater all around them as they slowly go mad. As one suggests the young boy who tags along with One-Eye is responsible for the fog and should be killed, it's not said accusing the boy of being a demon or witchcraft being involved but in the tone of a superstitious pagan, the deconstruction and collapse of the Christian groups taking place as One-Eye stays back and only has to be involved if someone threatens him or the boy. Barring the few glimpses of giant crosses, the Christians are still new, still part of the old tribes as they're first seen with a group of completely naked women who've clearly been captured from warring with Vikings, the Christian cause to liberate the Holy Land of Jerusalem less the desire to preserve the message of peace in Christ's sacrifice for humanity but territorial. This could be seen as cheap, anti-Christian rhetoric but it should be remembered that Refn is Scandinavian, from the region where the Vikings would be his real ancestors and Christianity despite its later dominance still a foreign influence on the land as it would on Britain with its Celtic heritage. Subconsciously, even if it's by coincidence, the contradictory states of mysticism and religion without fully evoking them is central to the film, all boiled down to the only clear minded person, without doubt or conflict, being the mute beast of a man who can gladly go to his doom willingly and breaks peoples necks with the chain he's attached to.

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Technical Details:

A very low budget production, made around the time of Bronson, the small cast is dwarfed by locations which fill in the grandness required for the tone to work. Britain, bearing in mind my bias as a native, has incredible outdoor environments. Because of the visual age of such landscapes, you can still feel the history and mythology that has soaked into the rock faces, where the backbone of paganism and British mysticism can be felt and adds to the atmosphere of a film instantly if shot properly on camera. Even under grey skies, with the right mindset they can be powerful and vast in their scale and distance. Even when the Scottish locations masquerade for the landscape the group get to by boat, the advantage taken by the cinematography using them sets the methodical tone required perfectly.

The music by Peter Peter and Peter Kyed only gets to the post-metal guitars and tribal drumming you'd expect from a modern Viking film by the final act, but in general alongside the emphasis on visuals only, depriving viewers of obvious plot explanation, the music generates the needed emotional tone that the mere images may not have by themselves. When the score finally explodes into its most bombastic part its epic.

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Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Mindbending/Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

With clear influence from Werner Herzog and Terence Malick, Valhalla Rising nonetheless is its own film, the violent gore contrasting immensely from the minimalistic presentation. Its economic in this area which adds to its elliptic tone, the minimal adding to its unconventional tone as one is forced to experience the story from the characters' perspective rather than as an outside viewer. As the madness that inflicts the group takes place the film takes on a more editing heavy, chaotic tone when the unforeseen enemy appears and eyes are watching off-screen at the warriors. Because of the presentation the sense of building dread is pervasive and increases throughout the film, culminating into a finale that leaves the end on a sombre note.

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Personal Opinion:

It has been six or so years since viewing Valhalla Rising for the first time, and it's still as dynamic and impactful since that last time. While openly, brazenly, artistic it never becomes hollow and attempting to decorate itself in such art house tropes, making sure that everything done onscreen and in presentation is meant to build up the tensions felt by the characters. It's not a traditional Viking film, which would've disappointed some, but instead it's an incredibly alien experience like many of Refn's films.