Cremaster 2 Reviews

This baroque fugue on the genealogy and death of Utah multiple murderer Gary Gilmore is the fourth and most complex installment in multimedia artist Matthew Barney's Cremaster quintet. And while critics may debate the enduring worth of his work, Barney's virtuoso visual sense renders each successive Cremaster more ravishing than the last. The film is grounded in a bit of Gilmore family lore, recounted in Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song: Gilmore's grandmother, turn-of-the-century spiritualist "Baby" Fay La Foe, once enjoyed a brief affair with Harry Houdini, who was Gary's real grandfather. The film is essentially in two parts, divided by locale. In Utah, Barney imagines a meeting between Gilmore's young parents (Lauren Pine, Scott Ewalt) and Baby Fay (Anonymous) over an obviously faked séance, and introduces visual motifs that later come in handy, when narrative logic no longer serves: the hour-glass silhouette of the tightly corseted Gilmore family, the hexagonal shape of the room. The action then shifts to a lonely desert gas station where, as his first victim (Michael Thomson) pumps gas, Gilmore (Barney) fidgets inside a long, honeycomb tube joining two idling Ford Mustangs. Barney then stages Gilmore's execution as an elaborate rodeo set in a salt bullring. The second part moves north, to the 1893 Columbian Exposition where Houdini dazzled audiences with feats of "metamorphosis;" Barney transplants the expo from Chicago to Canada's awesome glacial parks, where Baby Fay prowls the exhibition hall in search of her Houdini (Mailer, in a brilliant stroke). Interspersed throughout are exquisite bits of: A Western couple two-step around a saddle glazed with tiny mirrors; a phallus crowned with a beehive emits a swarm of honeybees. This intriguing film has a hypnotic, often inscrutable, figure-in-the-carpet elusiveness: the longer one watches, the more certain one becomes of an emerging pattern, until it all disappears in a glittering, decorative swirl.