Cremaster 3 Reviews

Matthew Barney's monumental five-part "Cremaster" series comes to a majestic close with this epic, three-hour fantasia. Its theme: architecture, as manifest in the construction of an art deco skyscraper, an ancient causeway or a series of five beautiful, inscrutable films. Numerically, this final segment comes in middle of the cycle, but it's the keystone that pulls it together. Barney opens with the legend of the Giant's Causeway, a mysterious arrangement of stone columns on the Northern Irish coast that, according to Celtic lore, was built by the heroic giant Fionn MacCumhail (Peter D. Badalamenti) to bridge the sea separating him from his Scottish rival, Fingal (The Mighty Biggs). Barney then fast-forwards to New York City in the late 1920s and the construction of a modern-day marvel: the Chrysler Building, which Barney presents as an Art Deco temple covered in arcane glyphs and Masonic symbols. As workers put the finishing touches on the upper stories, a carefully choreographed demolition derby tears up a lower lobby. Five vintage Chryslers smash an elegant black sedan into a tiny knot of twisted chrome while a leather-aproned mason (Barney) fills an elevator car with cement, then scales the elevator shaft to the swank Cloud Club, the storied speakeasy where shady characters puzzle over a square and compass and a lovely vamp slices potatoes with the blades affixed to the soles of her shoes. After a brief, spectral harness race in which decaying horses make a run for the roses, and a horrifying bit of dental surgery at the hands of Freemasonry's chief architect, Hiram Abiff (played by sculptor Richard Serra), the locale shifts to another modernist landmark — Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, where Barney appears dressed as a Scottish highlander in a pastel tartan. He's the "Entered Apprentice," a first-degree Freemason who must scale the five levels of Wright's famous spiral ramp, each floor corresponding to a degree of Freemasonry as well as to other Cremaster films. He encounters a kick-line of chorines dressed as sheep, dueling New York City hardcore bands and a beautiful amputee (Aimee Mullins) who morphs into a cheetah. At the very top, he finds Serra at work, hurling not his own trademark material, molten lead, but Barney's — Vaseline. Peter Strietmann's elegantly streamlined cinematography sweeps the viewer along on a trip that obeys no logic other than that of Barney's own onanistic mythology. Barney has been criticized as willfully esoteric, but if traditional meaning is once again elusive in this film, it remains an enthralling aesthetic experience, one that's steeped in mystery and a ravishing, baroque beauty.