What is left unsaid

It is fascinating to see film writers go after what they consider implausible in the couples-counseling-comedy Hope Springs (2012), a procedure they would never consider undertaking for, say, the latest installment of the Batman franchise.  That is because they think that movies obey different rules according to genre, but the fact is that all narrative adheres to the rules of narrative, and genre merely denotes the existence of conventions, merely a framework of expectations between audience and filmmakers, not a genuine difference in the rules of storytelling.  So it is not necessary to debate the real-world plausibility of this kind of film, but merely examine its consistency according to the rules it sets up for itself.  But because Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones do not dress up in black rubber suits and ride in a jet-powered automobile, the critics seem to expect Hope Springs to be some sort of documentary, rather than an entertainment.  

What is remarkable about a film driven by its script and acting is what it accomplishes by non-verbal means, and by that I don't mean merely the panoply of grunts and shrugs that make up Tommy Lee Jones's performance.  Most especially there is the mise en scene, from the careful calibration of familiar middle-class locales--the home with too-large simulated antique furniture, the spare EconoLodge room, the fussy but delightful New Englande Inne, the spruced-up shabbiness of a New England town undergoing a mini-boom.  There is the extremely careful costume design by theater great Ann Roth, particularly for Meryl Streep's Kay, who nervously vacillates between revealing herself as a woman and trying to cover herself and disappear into the woodwork.  (How interesting that Roth emphasizes Streep's weak point as a film actor--her too-small eyes, by giving her heavy-rimmed glasses to hide behind, so as to better bring off the reveal when those glasses come off and we get a gander at Meryl's baby blues.  And additional kudos to Ms. Streep's hair stylist, who offers similar character hints.)  And I would guess that Tommy Lee Jones's wardrobe was bought entirely at Sears and/or Kohl's, while Steve Carell has been outfitted at L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer, as would be appropriate for a casual professional in Northern New England.

But the greater challenge is the sequence of scenes in Carell's office which are the principal expositional device.  Although there must be at least six or seven of those scenes in the same locale, never once is it lit in the same way, altering not only the pattern of light and shadow but the color temperature, which lends variety to the costumes and even the actors' skin tones.  It would be interesting and instructive to lay screen grabs of all of the office scenes next to each other to see what cinematographer Florian Ballhaus, with the collaboration of production designer Stuart Wurtzel, has done to reinforce and illuminate the narrative thrust of each of those very different scenes.  They range from a warm and sunny red-to-yellow range after the couple has had a rapprochement to a virtual film noir Venetian blind-shadowed look when they are closest to crisis.  And I wonder how much of the audience even noticed.

The most frequent criticism of the film is that its resolution seems unmotivated or unexplained.  I think what people are feeling but not saying is that the resolution is not verbal, not logical and rationalized.  It is the product of non-verbal, nay pre-verbal passion, the very basis of all such relationships.  Such things are not easy to dramatize, and perhaps this one was not well prepared, but it doesn't change the fact that for this viewer, who has lived and been married about the same time as these characters, the ending made perfect sense to me.  Essentially, Jones's character says to himself, "the hell with what I've been fronting all these years, it's better to just be happy.  Never complain, never explain."

The final vows on the beach are utterly charming--I urge you to stay through the whole film.  But I can't think of a beach in Maine that looks anything like the one in film, not surprising since it was shot in Connecticut.  And after all, what would "Hope Springs" be doing in Coast Maine?  Natural springs virtually never occur that near the shoreline of the ocean.  This is a landscape of the heart.

House of Wax





DiCaprio & Hammer with slabs of veal glued to their faces.

  
There is one moment in which Leonard DiCaprio is completely convincing as the titular character in J. Edgar (2011).  It comes toward the end when a stricken Clyde Tolson discovers Hoover stretched out on the floor, white, tubby and lifeless.  I've seen some dead bodies in my time, and in my opinion, Leonardo completely nailed it.

I'm not sure why anyone is still producing these movies from the Madame Tussaud school of filmmaking.  We no longer believe their mythmaking--books of popular biography provide more and better information for those who are interested in historical characters.  For the general public, one needs to cook up a new angle, a fresh scandal or a new interpretation.  My Week With Marilyn tells an untold story, gives us a new window into Marilyn (and into Sir Larry as well) which, together with Michelle Williams' performance, justifies yet another Monroe go-round.

There is nothing remarkable or new in J Edgar, and that includes DiCaprio's predictable performance.  Hampered by the worst make-up since Billy Crystal in Mister Saturday Night, DiCaprio demonstrates no deep understanding about how older people move and think.  He still looks like a boy, albeit a puffy boy, wearing grown-up clothes and acting "old" like the other kids in the school play do, but without having actually done the hard work of thinking through how the moving parts of the body age.  It is utterly mysterious to me how DiCaprio became a Master Actor, playing leads for Scorsese, including the even more inapt Howard Hughes.  Kevin Spacey is a master actor.  William H Macy, Gary Oldman, Ryan Gosling, Stanley Tucci, Paul Giamatti (who would have been a great Hoover if he'd had a good script) are Master Actors.  They make startling choices.  They have supple, expressive voices and eyes.  DiCaprio is well-intentioned, but never surprising, never fresh and rarely authentic.

But even if he were good, he would still be in stuck in a film that no one had taken the trouble to decide what it was about.  It spends most of its time rehearsing the well-known public outlines of Hoover's life, the Palmer Raids, the gangster era, the Lindbergh baby, the Commie hunts, the conflict with the Kennedys.  This is bad TV movie stuff (and executed in exactly that fashion) and utterly unnecessary.  The interesting, juicy stuff between Hoover and alleged lover Clyde Tolson is based virtually entirely on speculation.  Mixing this together indiscriminately with documented fact renders the entire film unreliable and therefore unengaging.  Better to have fabricated everything and focused solely on Hoover's domestic arrangements, with perhaps a nod to the hypocrisy of his public crusades, than to have jumbled docudrama and "drama" drama.  Nonetheless, the question of Hoover's possible homosexuality is neither settled nor explored, so why bring it up at all?  Where a film like Secret Honor is willing to make up the entire inner monologue of Richard Nixon's tortured soul; likewise Oliver Stone's films, especially Nixon and W dare to invent their psychodrama, much as Shakespeare would project his own dramatic ideas onto the House of Lancaster, whether or not those ideas fit the facts.  J Edgar is afraid to veer from the public record, and is stuck with a central character who is too repressed and tight-lipped to enlighten us, or, more sadly, himself.


Meryl Streep attempts to let her dental appliance do the acting.

 
The larger point is that you can't tell a story unless you've decided on a story to tell, which is also the problem with The Iron Lady (2011).  At least it has a bit of a performance, although it is not clear what it is that Meryl Streep is supposed to be doing when she is not doddering around as the dementia-ridden remnant of the feared Margaret Thatcher.  Much of the obligatory "rise to power" sequence is handled by another actress, as we are not expected to accept Meryl Streep as a young woman in her 20s anymore.  So Streep only handles a portion of the flashbacks, but as in J Edgar, it's hard to see what they're getting at.  Thatcher's only motivation to enter public service seems to be to emulate her adored father, small businessman and chamber-of-commerce leader.  Thatcher brings a nearly fully-formed political philosophy to bear, but we never see whwere it came from, how it started or how it evolved.

Art Tatum is my favorite jazz musician.  He might be my favorite musician period.  No one will ever make a story of his life.  At least I hope they don't.  Because Art Tatum arrived as an artist complete and completely sui generis.  His influences are minimal and generic, and the people he influenced few (because few have the technical skill).  His style shifted slightly with the advent of bebop -- he added some extended chords to his toolbox, but there is no mistaking Tatum for anyone else, from his first recording in 1932 or so and his last in 1956.  Great art.  Great, great art, but no story.

The worst thing about spending a lot of time with a person experiencing advanced stages of dementia is that it is very repetitive.  I doff my hat to writer Abi Morgan's fidelity to this painful subject, but major points off for sheer boredom.  If there was anything to say about the dementia, if it was related to Thatcher's career, if there was some metaphoric connection, perhaps maintaining a Conservative outlook requires a bit of amnesia, I don't know, something.  But let's face it, dementia happens to lots and lots of people and there is not anything dramatic about it.  If Michael Phelps gets arthritis, you've got a story.  If Truman Capote, who loved nothing better than to loll on a sofa, gets it -- not much story.  So Streep does her best bent old lady wobble, but so what?  (The Academy Award given to Streep should have gone to the costume designer, the wigmaker and whoever swiped those front teeth from the corpse of Alistair Sim.)  Did somebody think that famous people don't experience the ordinary infirmities of old age?

And why, for heaven's sake, is so much running time given to it?  Were we supposed to have trouble figuring out that husband Dennis isn't really there, it's just in her mind?  (Jim Broadbent was clearly hired in order to repeat what he won an Oscar for in Iris.)  Got that in the first speech, thank you, we saw The Sixth Sense.  So if there is no twist to come, why does that go on and on.  And if she's senile, how can she be accurately remembering her entire political career?  Wouldn't she remember it wrong?  Wouldn't Michael Foot be wearing a chicken suit and Parliament turning into a disco?  As in J Edgar, why the dry factoid rehearsal of her life story without any comment or perspective?

I mean really, why?  I hope nobody expected to get rich on these films.  They're sure not going to get any drama or insight.

Streep straight up

My recently developing interest in Clint Eastwood's earlier work, especially as director, led me to The Bridges of Madison County (1995), which I had avoided at the time because of the dreadful reputation of the potboiling bestseller the film was based on. From what I understand, the screenplay by Richard LaGravanese toned down the purple quality of the book, as well as the self-absorption of the male protagonist. Which makes sense, because there is scarcely a more self-effacing actor or director than Clint Eastwood.

The result is a fairly harmless reworking of Brief Encounter and other similar romanticizings of adultery. It's important to maintain perspective and look at this sort of thing as a fantasy that most intelligent adults recognize as a fantasy. Because how could how a powerful passion by held in such precise check as to be maintained throughout one's life without engulfing one's other relationships. I am no expert, but I cannot imagine passion which can idle in low gear for 30 years without disturbing a pre-existing marriage. It is the nature of passion to sweep all else aside; otherwise it's not passion. So this is a titillating but ultimately silly bit of housewife porn rendered in exquisitely pale good taste by Eastwood & Co., which almost makes it more unpalatable.

So what is left? Meryl Streep. Recently, she graduated from Respected Actress in Serious Films to bonafide Movie Star, a status she clinched with back to back hits Julie & Julia and It's Complicated. The former is the perfect example of utter piffle for which a Real Actress is required. You know what I mean--Cate Blanchett, Gwyneth Paltrow or the Great Meryl.

Funny thing, she is often described as a chameleon who disappears into her roles. I have been watching Meryl act since 1965, which she was a sophomore in high school along with my brother. So while others see all these other identities, I can always see the essential Meryl-ness inside. This is no denigration of her art, which has been more convincing and more artfully concealed as the years go by. (When she was younger I could always see the wheels turning when she acted, all the technique too close to the surface.) She is strangely convincing in Madison County, especially when she stops worrying about maintaining the Italian accent--the character is so improbable anyway--and plays the sweet-and-sour discontent that permits her to drift into a relationship with a somewhat bland stranger. She provides enough color for both actors.

Most unexpected pleasure of this film--the performances of Annie Corley and Victor Slezak as Streep's adult children, who are at first shocked and then led to a re-examination of their lives by reading their late mother's journals of her forbidden romance. Again, a fantasy, but the surprising charm of these actors sell this somewhat distasteful idea. So...well done, I guess.