Cimino shows that he is a crass and hysteric filmmaker here. His sensibilities place him somewhere between Cecil B. DeMille and Francis Coppola. He's got to film big, so even a cop flick about violence in Chinatown has to be a saga. There's no weight to it, it just has to be a sprawling story that's only vaguely about social issues of importance. He's got to have both the scope and relevance, preferably something to brood over. He's got to have lots of people and lots of scenery in the frame. There's a pretty ludicrous scene set in backwoods Thailand that only seems to exist so that a Triad boss can majestically gallop in view of a swarm of soldiers (and later brandish a severed head).
There's nothing worse than a filmmaker who can only leverage ambition and control in his art (Coppola once in a while had good intuitions). So at its most profound, cinematic beauty is at perfume ad level here, say a woman in silhouette sliding into a majestic night-view of New York. What's the term, 'elephant art'? I say it doesn't breathe.
Worst of all, since he is very much a storyteller, these days a novelist living in Paris, his dramatic sense is a lot of puff and noise on a typewriter. It has no life. It's screen writing 101 like in one of those books that tell you about the 'hero's journey' and where to put the 'inciting incident': the couple is growing bitter and distant, and it's right on the first scene that they have to curse, yell, and throw things as they explain all that's wrong between them: he's never at home, he doesn't care, she wants a baby.
And he's got the ideal writing partner for this. Oliver Stone: so angry barbs at the media, school-lessons in American and Chinese history, and Vietnam is behind all of it. It's all abrasive on this end, as is Stone.
Mickey Roorke, usually game for roles that call for lots of smirking and boyish thrashing-about, is the violent, crazy, anguished new sheriff in 'Town. He browbeats and ridicules the Chinese journalist girl and of course she goes to bed with him the moment he has finished doing so, because what's more charming than a 'flawed protagonist'.
The film is bookended by public funeral processions and that could have been something, connoting obsession, artificial images, false narratives. Watch John Lone in M. Butterfly for that. Watch Fukasaku for chaotic action.
