Mandy (2018)

Mandy (dir. Panos Cosmatos, 2018)

Every single review I’ve read of Mandy mentions that Panos Cosmatos’s father was the filmmaker George P. Cosmatos, director of Rambo: First Blood Part II and Cobra, but only one critic–Nathan Rabin late of the AV Club and the much missed The Dissolve–identifies what’s interesting about that on his website:

“Everything clicked into place and I realized that Mandy is in many ways a batshit crazy arthouse/grindhouse/museum remake of Cobra. Both movies are about stoic, heavily armed men of violence who launch a one-man war on a murder gang so unrelentingly, unforgivably evil that they angrily demand to be murdered en masse, not brought to the attention of law enforcement.

The difference is that Cobra turned out so lurid, intense and over the top (not unlike another Sylvester Stallone film from the period, Rhinestone) that it bordered on avant-garde pop art. Mandy, on the other hand, very nakedly sets out to be art.”

Rabin is exactly right, and I will go further that much of the film feels like a response from a son to his father. It’s not simply that the younger Cosmatos uses a particular style that distinguishes his work, but seems to be grappling with the emotions behind all this violence.

Cobra, for all those who haven’t seen it, is essentially what happened when Sylvester Stallone watched Dirty Harry, heard that Pauline Kael line about how fascist its politics were, and decided that Harry Callahan still allowed too much due process. Stallone stars as LAPD officer Marion “Cobra” Cobretti, who says things like “You’re a disease, I’m the cure” before killing a criminal. He’s after a murderous cult called the New World, because firstly, it’s his job, and secondly, because he just likes killing.

Mandy is radically different from that. Nicolas Cage’s Red Miller is a logger trying to live a quiet life with his partner Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). The cult here is not a bunch of social darwinists, but a pathetic New Age leftover from the 1970s called Children of the New Dawn controlled by Jeremiah Sand in an insane performance by Linus Roache. They’re still deadly and dangerous, but they have to contract their abduction of Mandy to a gang of bikers who are basically proto-GWAR members. The revenge that Red seeks against these two parties is as ludicrously violent as anything Stallone’s character does, but he has actual stakes and a personal motivation. When Red attacks and kills someone, you feel that it matters.

I concur with all the praise the film has received. Mandy is amazing to look at, fusing metal album art and acid aesthetics in a manner that feels like an extension of his prior work in Beyond the Black Rainbow. Composer Johan Johansson final score is perfect. Nicolas Cage’s performance almost equals Roache’s in its madness, but we also get to see the other side of his late career in the early scenes where he and his wife talk to each other. Andrea Riseborough’s brilliant and has one of the rarest qualities you can find in an actress: she physically disappears into the role. It’s like I have face blindness, but only for one person. I thought she was great in The Death of Stalin, and now I have to track down her other title role in Nancy.

It also has finally usurped the crown from Texas Chainsaw Massacre II for the best chainsaw duel in cinema, and that is no small feat.

October 31, 2018