Eugene weekly., November 16, 2017, Page 19, Image 19

MOVIES
BY RICK LEVIN
BURNT
OFFERINGS
A father is faced with the
ultimate sacrifice in
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
ake just about any film — Casablanca perhaps,
or Fast Times at Ridgemont High — utterly drain
it of emotion and affect, and you’d end up with
something that feels a lot like a film by Yorgos
Lanthimos.
In no way is this meant to diminish Lanthimos’ obvious
brilliance; in fact, it redounds to his credit that, as with
heavies like Kubrick and Lang, the mannered formalism of
his style is becoming so identifiable, so chillingly familiar.
You could parody the hell out of Lanthimos.
But then again, to parody a satirical bent so dark might
prove painfully redundant and distinctly unfunny. In The
Lobster, one of 2015’s best movies, Lanthimos offered
a fantastic vision of a pinched and lonely world where
individuals incapable of forging romantic connections are
turned into animals (or, maybe, exterminated). In that film,
T
VISUAL ARTS
people don’t really connect; they interface, with a flattened,
abbreviated quality that reveals the absurdity underlying
any program of social engineering.
If Orwell and Huxley presented the future as a chilly
dystopian nightmare imposed from without by some
monumental institution of control, Lanthimos would drive
that nightmare inward, to the point where human agency,
the urging of our passions, has been all but extinguished.
Control has been priggishly internalized, and people are
nearly indistinguishable from the inert commodities that
surround them.
On screen, the results of this terse emotional bankruptcy
are paradoxically thrilling, like watching a puppet-play of
your own life. In The Lobster, this registered as a very
dark brand of dark comedy — a bloodless autopsy of
desire sanitized of its inherent chaos. The lobster may be
protected by a hard shell, but does it experience love?
In Lanthimos’ latest, The Killing of a Sacred Deer,
the director at once extends his reach and brings it into
sharper focus, elevating an intimate family (psycho)drama
to the level of mythos. A successful surgeon, Steven (Colin
Farrell), maintains a strange friendship with a wayward
teen, Martin (the excellent Barry Keoghan), a boy whose
attachment to the doctor is stiffly polite but insistent
and more than a bit creepy. With Lanthimos, a master of
affectless suspense, there is a fine line between attachment
and stalking, but eventually Martin crosses it.
Martin — whose father, it turns out, died on Steven’s
operating table — warns the surgeon that, one by one,
his son (Sunny Suljic), his daughter (Raffey Cassidy) and
his wife (Nicole Kidman) will be stricken with paralysis
before they bleed from the eyes and then die, and that the
only way to forestall this rapid fate is to kill one member
of his family.
A stark and oddly detached sense of divine justice — a
mash-up of Greek mythology and the Old Testament story
of Isaac and Abraham — pervades this rather strange and
gloomy film, which is secular in look but cosmic to the
core. Steven, a coward at heart, confronts the illogic of
Martin’s curse with an ever more aggressive logic that falls
apart at every turn, until he is forced, at last, to act. And
that’s when it starts to get really messy.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is challenging to the
point of total unease. As a friend of mine said afterward:
“Well, that was different … I think I need a bath now.” It is
meticulously made, from the taut pacing to the gorgeously
angular cinematography to the veteran acting (Kidman
is especially fine). Many people, I fear, will find it very
unpleasant to sit through.
Then again, there’s nothing particularly pleasant about
the ancient myths Lanthimos injects into modern life. The
question is: Have we lost our stomachs for those myths, or
for life itself — or both? (Broadway Metro)
BY ESTER BARKAI
PERSPECTIVE AND PIGMENT
Interpreting the landscape at White Lotus Gallery
A
n appealing mix of reality and imagination in each of
Jon Jay Cruson’s paintings reminds me of a bit from the
first days of the TV show Saturday Night Live. Father
Guido Sarducci, a character on SNL, suggested that a
planet just like ours existed on the other side of the sun.
We couldn’t see it, of course — because the sun is in the way —
but this other planet was just like ours in every way except that
people who lived there ate their corn on the cob north-south (up-
down) instead of east-west (across). Though this was the only
difference, Father Sarducci didn’t want to go to this other planet
because he said he was a creature of habit and eating corn north-
south would just be too messy.
Cruson has a series of paintings on exhibit at White Lotus
Gallery that are clean and linear — not at all messy. Still, they
have something in common with Father Sarducci’s alternate
planet. They look just like Earth but are, in fact, different. Each
of his paintings looks like a representation of somewhere you
could get to on this planet, if only you were given a location. But
Cruson doesn’t title his landscapes by place. He names them with
titles such as: “A Quiet Road” or “Valley Below No. 2.”
To prepare for his paintings, Cruson does quick sketches of
landscapes and then saves them to use later as reference material,
when he picks and chooses from a handful of sketches to create
just one painting. There is a reality to Cruson’s landscapes but
it’s not a simple one. You may recognize a piece of a painting
but you’ll find nowhere on Earth, at least not this one, where a
place entirely exists the way it’s seen in, say, “A Quiet Road” or
“Valley Below No. 2.”
Organizing spaces differently on his canvas gives Cruson a
“sense of freedom” and allows him to play.
‘A GIVEN DISTANCE’
“I love playing with perspective,” he says.
He plays with perspective in art and also in life. Before he
started this series of landscapes he painted streams, studying
light and water and how waves break. He’d been studying and
painting streams for a long time, he says, when one day in an
open space he looked out, instead of down, and was taken by
the vista. This shift in perspective led him towards an entirely
different subject matter.
What’s interesting about the way this artist plays with per-
spective in his landscapes is the subtlety. His paintings read so
well as actual places that we don’t readily register when a rule
is broken. Lines of roads don’t taper off when they should to in-
dicate distance, values or shadows aren’t always consistent, and
we barely notice at all. We see the overall picture and the rich
warm colors of the Cascades.
Cruson plays with colors too, not feeling restricted by the
seasons or colors attached to any particular subject. He is not
an abstract Color Field artist though. He paints actual fields, the
kind you find in open agricultural spaces; the kind you see near
Sacramento, California, where he was raised, or the kind just
outside Eugene, where he lives now.
Cruson graduated with an MFA from the University of Or-
egon in 1968. By the time Father Sarducci was cracking his corn
on the cob joke on SNL, Cruson was showing in his first art ex-
hibits. Talking to him, I get the sense that his art career has been
as much fun as it’s been work. He speaks a lot about “play.” He
plays with the elements of design, with perspective and color,
and he plays around with what he’s seen and where he’s been.
In the end, he leaves off the location on the titles of his paint-
ings because the places don’t exist entirely as pictured, but
there’s another reason too. He doesn’t want to close off anyone’s
feeling of recognition. When someone thinks they recognize a
place in one of his pictures, he doesn’t want to take that away
from them. He likes to leave his open spaces, well, open. ■
Interpretation of the Landscape: Paintings by Jon Jay Cruson is up through Nov. 28 at
White Lotus Gallery, 767 Willamette Street.
eugeneweekly.com • November 16, 2017
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