Dumb and dumber

Alan Parker is at the apex of the British film industry. He has a big new movie, and a retrospective at the NFT. But is his career worth celebrating? Ryan Gilbey wades through all 14 films – and ends up wishing he hadn't

It's been a good six weeks since I saw Alan Parker's latest film, The Life of David Gale. But only now do I realise how fortunate it is that I didn't immediately set down my thoughts about this thriller in which a reporter (Kate Winslet) quizzes a murderer (Kevin Spacey) during his final days on death row. Instead I let the movie settle in my head, turning it this way and that, testing the durability of its twist ending. Gradually it became clear that The Life of David Gale is actually a deeply stupid work, where it had initially struck me as only mildly silly.

It takes an unusual robustness to survive the battering that is commonly received when viewing an Alan Parker film for the first time. And since feeling something, even if it is only discomfort, is preferable to feeling nothing, we might leave the cinema congratulating the film-maker on having moved us – even if he moved us only to flinch. But we should ask for something more over the course of 14 movies. Shouldn't we?

With Parker it can be hard to know. His films (all currently showing as part of a season at the NFT) make us feel that we may not deserve any better: that somehow we have willed into existence the misanthropy of Midnight Express (1978), the cynicism of Fame (1980). Our punishment becomes the point. Certainly, Parker is not alone in experiencing ambivalence toward the very people that he is being paid to entertain. Have you never felt, during Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel or Hitchcock's Rear Window or Polanski's The Tenant, that your enjoyment has been spiked with something unsavoury? The difference is that those film-makers never quite extricate the pain from the pleasure, or the pleasure from the pain. In Parker's work, it is always clear by the end that he has intended us to suffer for his art.

This can manifest itself in any number of ways. There are the basest tortures, where we are tormented along with the characters – with Billy Hayes (Brad Davis), the heroin smuggler banged up in a Turkish prison in Midnight Express, or with Coco (Irene Cara), the budding actress in Fame, or with the broken rock star Pink (Bob Geldof) who finds comfort in fascism at the end of Pink Floyd The Wall (1982). Films that might have exposed the complex frameworks of self-destruction on which human behaviour is predicated were reduced to circus freakshows where the spectacle of humiliation or breakdown was presented to the audience like an example of exotic flora.

Frequently it is the human body itself that is relegated to the status of exhibit. Or, to put it bluntly, Parker is a bit of a breast man. Anyone familiar with Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections will find it difficult to peruse Parker's work without seeing the word breasts in bold type, as one character in Franzen's book does when he realises that the screenplay he has written makes persistent and gratuitous references to the female anatomy. The breast shot in Fame is memorably nasty, with Coco attending an audition in which she is coerced into stripping. (Meanwhile the camera can scarcely contain its delight.)

Breasts are bared to a debauched rock fanfare in Pink Floyd The Wall, and the hero in Birdy (1984) tweaks his girlfriend's breasts inquisitively. Parker's most famous breast shot comes in Midnight Express, when Billy is visited in prison by his girlfriend, who obligingly rubs her naked breasts against the glass partition. I feared the worst when Winslet came to meet Spacey in prison in the new film, and addressed him through an identical partition; a reprise surely couldn't have hurt ticket sales.

Perhaps the obsession with breasts was a kind of cinematic adolescence. Certainly Parker has grown up in other ways. Since The Commitments in 1991, there have been traces of compassion, reaching a tinny sentimental peak in Angela's Ashes (1999). But until that point there were few chroniclers of hard luck stories crueller than Parker. In his most mature film, Shoot the Moon (1982), about an acrimonious break-up, that hardness was essential; it insulated from partiality a story that Parker has admitted was semi-autobiographical. The film was as businesslike as the transcript from a divorce hearing, which made its bursts of fury and regret all the more scalding. The other movies from that period drew no such distinction between objectivity and callousness. Birdy is a philistine's impression of what an art film might be like. And it has to be disturbing to even the most casual viewer that there is no disparity between the tone of Angel Heart, a voodoo ghost story that won't admit it's trash, and Mississippi Burning, an anti-racist thriller that uses pulp tactics to stir up easy outrage.

If there is one thing worse than Parker taking himself too seriously, it is when he feigns irreverence; what might be comic relief in another director's hands becomes wilful hijacking of a film's meaning. Like Philip Kaufman's Quills, Parker's scatological comedy The Road to Wellville (1994) played like the work of a preacher trying to convince his congregation that he was really a stand-up at heart. The film itself needed to succeed only in the extent to which it would prove Parker as jack of yet another genre.

Only The Commitments and his 1976 debut Bugsy Malone feel in any way liberated from that Parker pushiness, though even in those features you feel someone leaning on you to laugh. And the jauntiness is bound to leak from any production in which the director insists, as Parker does in The Commitments, on setting one scene in a video store where a prominent display of his own films is watched over by a life-size cardboard cut-out of himself.

That quest for levity has sometimes led Parker to resort to trick endings as a means of puncturing a sombre mood or subverting expectations. The Life of David Gale closes with an especially deceitful scam that booby-traps the entire movie, reducing to the level of a practical joke everything that has preceded it. Perhaps with time it will seem even worse than the punchline that ended Birdy, but I doubt it. In that film, two hours in the company of a catatonic Vietnam veteran ends with the character appearing to commit suicide, before the camera reveals that he has merely jumped from the roof to a ledge below. Cue end credits.

If there is any doubt that Parker's work is motivated by contempt, then it is dispelled by that moment in Birdy. And contempt remains discernible – mostly for his audience, less these days for his characters, but always for cinema, which he reduces to an instrument for soliciting submission. I have looked long and hard at Parker's work for many years, and still no objective seems more plausible than his need simply to be heeded.

Those fortunate souls who escaped schoolyard bullying can experience vicariously the same feelings of fear and impotence by watching one of Parker's pictures. He can mount a sturdy rant given an appropriate soapbox, as demonstrated by his passionate 1986 documentary A Turnip Head's Guide to British Cinema, which tore into what he perceived as the elitism and preciousness of the indigenous film industry (after seeing The Draughtsman's Contract, he vowed to leave the country if Peter Greenaway was allowed to continue to make films here). The rant implies an element of self-deprecation; it cannot quite condemn those ears that will be deaf to the curmudgeonly pitch of the argument. Parker's cinema, on the other hand, would never stoop to accommodate a mindset immune to hectoring. There's a perfect example of this narrow-mindedness in The Life of David Gale, when flashbacks are introduced by the camera spinning on to handwritten words – "Murder", "Punishment", "Rape", "Revenge" – while guitars snarl on the soundtrack. Surely any audience that pays to see a thriller about the race to save a condemned man, and still requires the instruction of flash cards, is one that is scarcely worth bragging about.

But then, flash cards are his style. The real miracle might be that he didn't arrive at that montage earlier in his career. At the NFT, there will be a screening of Evita in the manner of the recent singalonga Sound of Music phenomenon, where the audience attend in full costume. The same format could be applied to any of Parker's pictures and it would work just as well, so plainly are they structured as strings of overemphatic high notes. Perhaps that could redeem his movies at last. You could bring nooses and burning crosses for singalonga Mississippi Burning, or a cockerel to sacrifice during singalonga Angel Heart, or stock up on fake breasts for pretty much everything else. Then, for the first time, the words "fun" and "an Alan Parker film" might not be mutually exclusive.

'The Life of David Gale' is released next Friday. The Alan Parker season runs at the NFT throughout March

Seven steps to celluloid suffering

Midnight Express (1978)

Oliver Stone's bombastic Oscar-winning script gave Parker plenty of scope to transform the story of the incarceration of drug smuggler Billy Hayes (Brad Davis) in a Turkish jail into a carnival of sex, severed tongues and beastly, swarthy foreigners.

Pink Floyd The Wall (1982)

Even Gerald Scarfe's trippy animated inserts couldn't rescue this rock'n'roll nightmare from the pointlessness and self-pity that characterised the album of the same name.

Birdy (1984)

A young soldier's Vietnam experience gives him leave to escape into his fantasy life as a bird in this allegory with ideas above its aviary. Makes Jonathan Livingston Seagull look like Mean Streets.

Angel Heart (1987)

Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro out-Method one another in this gormless thriller memorable chiefly for a post-Cosby Show Lisa Bonet and the scene where a fat man is found dead in a vat of gumbo.

Mississippi Burning (1988)

Righteous indignation is the order of the day as Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe take on evil Ku Klux Klan wife-beaters.

The Road To Wellville (1994)

The eccentric life of health-nut Dr Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins) is the hook for this low-brow comedy for people who find colonic irrigation hilarious.

Evita (1996)

A movie version of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Eva Perón musical had been mooted for so long that Madonna's diva-by-numbers performance felt like old hat by the time it hit the screen. And who knew she'd be outshone by Jimmy Nail? RG