New York Dispatch. 3.

At Tribeca and at the San Francisco International Film Festival, The Bridge had just what distributors of a film tend to want, a chilly frisson that comes with presenting a forbidden subject: suicide. More proof that anything can be marketed. The topic was all the more alluring since the suicides in question occurred when the victims jumped from the elegant Golden Gate Bridge, silhouetted in all its beauty against the San Francisco Bay and the green hills behind it. Trouble in paradise? Rumors were that the film had been rejected at a number of festivals. I couldn't substantiate that. In San Francisco, a few demonstrators (some say they were paid homeless people) stood in the street in front of the Kabuki Theater, sold out for the show last Sunday, with signs that bore a picture of the filmmaker, Eric Steel, tagged: "Unwanted."

The advance word on the documentary, as if such rumors should ever be believed, is that it was a work of exploitation, a snuff film. It's been thirty years now that people have been talking about snuff films, in which a person (almost always a woman, usually a prostitute) is actually killed in front of the camera. "From Latin America, where life is cheap," the old line used to go. You could also call it murder-porn. If such a film exists, I've never seen it, but the term lives on to satisfy the demands of critical short-hand for any gratuitous killing on the screen. Yet who really needs snuff films when you have war footage-on-demand from Iraq and, if that doesn't do it for you, plenty of walking corpses in Darfur. Lots of killing, just not lots of drama, because we've seen so much of it.

The Bridge turns out to be anything but exploitation. The cameras observing the bridge watch in numbing silence as tourists walk by and the occasional person climbs over the rail, sits for a while, sometimes a very long time, depending on the case, and then jumps. Much of the film shows friends and family members grieving for a loss, trying to come to terms with a fate that they weren't able to stop. There's tenderness here, and just as much helplessness. In one case, a father and his suicidal son (who survives miraculously after a jump from the bridge) give a rare account of just how it happens - a despondent young man who fails to live according to the strict regimen and take his medicine at the right intervals ends up trying to take his life, and almost succeeds. It's a sobering lesson - as long as you have the minimum of personal freedom to live outside an institution, you have the freedom to kill yourself. From time to time, the film cuts to the bridge from a long distance, grand and silent. The filmmaker and the aggrieved families are lobbying for a barrier to be placed on walkways, from which it's possible to climb to the outer railings and jump. So far, there's been considerable resistance, mostly because the proposed barrier would be "ugly." Tell me what's uglier than a suicide - and there were twenty-five of them in the year that the film observed.

Now that The Bridge has been shown at festivals, the criticisms of it have shifted a bit. In San Francisco, I heard the reproach that it wasn't systematic enough, that it failed to consider all the suicides in San Francisco that did not involve jumping off the bridge, and, even worse, that splashing sound in the film when a body fell into the water had been added afterward. All these criticisms are true, and valid, as is the fact that not everyone who commits suicide is mentally ill, yet all the suicides in this movie are the result of mental illness. It's true that suicide is a bigger, broader subject than what we see in this ambitious film. Yet Eric Steel should be commended for what he has shown, not attacked for what he hasn't shown. Let's hope for more films on what he missed.

There's a lot more killing in Cocaine Cowboys, the doc by Billy Corben (Raw Deal: A Question of Consent) about the wars to distribute coke in Miami in the 70s and 80s, when Colombians arrived and took over the windfall business. This was the dealer demimonde that turned Maimi from a sleepy town for retirees into the hip party destination for models, gigolos and anybody with narco-dollars and a ruthless violent streak. But before Don Johnson, Stallone and Madonna became the drugstore cowboys of that crowd, the place was ruled by real outlaws. Cocaine Cowboys reminds you just how nasty they could be, and still are.

The doc is narrated mostly by "survivors" of that war, who are in and out of prison. We hear from Mickey Mundey, a pilot who admits to flying tons of coke into the country, and from Jon Roberts, a dealer who moved tons of coke onto the street. It took law enforcement years to catch up.

The doc moves from interviews to archival stills and TV footage of - what else? - corpses. And they are everywhere - in strip malls, stair wells, suburban houses and cars. The movie is a crime scene gallery, with editing that machine guns the images at you.

Once the Colombians make their mark, the sleepy southern city gets lawless and dangerous. A hit man in prison for the rest of his life tells of murder after murder of anyone who gets in the way - anyone, including girlfriends, families and children. If there were ever any doubt, the road to the disco was paved with dead bodies. As if he weren't enough, we soon meet his boss, the queen of a Colombian drug trade who brought her sons into the business and watched most of those around her die. After all that carnage, she's still at large.

Everyone who's been involved with drugs has his or her personal war stories. Sometimes memory impairment from the drugs keeps those tales from being too vivid in retrospect, but not here. If you don't get enough gore from the endless barrage of images, you get it from the stories that the participants tell, yet the film isn't helped by the saturation image-fire that seems like the work of an editor who has himself just snorted a few ounces of coke. Jan Hammer's dirge of a score sounds like it was written on Quaaludes. Sometimes it's better not to mix your drugs.

Ghoulish or not, it's hard to take your eyes off this doc, although you might wonder whether your sympathies belong with these guys, whose deadly trade has taken such a toll. Our narrators don't seem to be suffering too much - except the hit man who'll probably die in jail without too many people mourning that loss. Cocaine Cowboys could make for an exciting dramatic feature. I have to believe that people with that in mind are looking at it. What's not to like about a lesbian with a taste for gold who builds a drug empire, one corpse at a time? Plenty. That's what makes her such a great villain. Actresses may soon be killing each other for a shot at the role.

Posted by dwhudson at May 4, 2006 1:39 AM