Pulling it together

Happythankyoumoreplease (2010) is an agreeable modest debut whose existence is surely owed solely to writer-director-star Josh Radnor's leading role in a television sitcom. Ordinarily a young filmmaker would have gotten such a rudimentary and ramshackle film out of his system in film school or in an ultra lowbudget shot-on-video festival debut on the way to truly gathering his or her powers and making a truly vigorous and authentic gesture as an artist. As is right and proper for the early work of a fledgling filmmaker, its mostly made of bits and pieces from other people's work with the exception the storyline around a woman afflicted with alopecia, richly limned by Malin Akerman and her love interest played by the always welcome Tony Hale.

Of the other main story threads, one is both implausible and vaguely distasteful and the other is quite dull, but there is one sequence to celebrate, borrowed though it is from Annie Hall (Woody Allen is clearly Radnor's model). It is the climactic scene in which all the threads are brought together and resolved, edited to footage of the female lead singing a song of redemption and joy in a nightclub. In Annie Hall it was Diane Keaton singing "Seems Like Old Times." In Happythankyoumoreplease it is the sweet Kate Mara singing a little-known and completely delightful song by John Kander and Fred Ebb called "Sing Happy." (It is from their debut musical, Flora The Red Menace in which art student Liza Minnelli found herself inadvertently mixed up with Depression-era Communists.) To my mind, this little film will have completely justified its existence if it does nothing more than bring "Sing Happy" into the consciousness of more singers, music directors and film goers.

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika

One of the hallmarks of 80's cinema was the well-meaning drama scolding South Africa about what terrible and unjust meanies they were with their bad apartheid. As if the US had never fostered racially-based injustice. It was a good thing we had limited communications with the old South Africa, or they would probably have jumped up and punched us in the nose for lecturing them.

Now that the new South Africa is almost 20 years old, it does seem to make sense to assess what has been happening there. (I had to look this up, but although Mandela was released in 1990, he did not become president until 1994.)

Disgrace (2008) has, at least, a partially South African perspective, although the filmmakers are Australian and the star is American. It is a very dark, perhaps pessimistic work. I choose to read it as a metaphor for the position of minority whites in the new South Africa. Malkovich is morally compromised (he sexually abuses a black student--sort of colonialism in minature), and retreats from the city to land he owns in the country, to become, literally, a Boer, the Dutch word for farmer which is the black South African word for "white" or specifically "white oppressor." He is at the mercy of his black neighbor, Petrus, who begins as a tenant and eventually becomes the owner. His daughter Lucy, is sexually assaulted by three black ruffians while he is helplessly locked in the bathroom (and briefly set on fire). She will not report the assault, and Petrus turns out to be the patron of the principal villain. Lucy even decides to go ahead and bear the child conceived in the assault. The only useful work Malkovich can find is to help the local shelter euthanize unwanted animals. As Malkovich holds one poor dog as its life ebbs away, one can't help wondering if he doesn't seem himself fading away and becoming nothing in this South Africa.

It seems there is nothing left for the whites but acquiescence, due to their pre-existing guilt. I have read various places that the film ends on a note of tentative hope, but I don't see it. It seems to be muddling-through, South-Africa style.

The filmmaking is similarly bleak. South Africa looks bleached and parched, the countryside a barely habitable desert, the city a collection of walled-in spaces. Malkovich's accent is very insecure, but his arrogance and lack of empathy is solidly in place. As usual he asks neither for pity nor sympathy. Is there an American star who cares less about whether the audience likes him? That attitude pays off at the end, since one can grudgingly admire his fortitude at carrying on in spite of his trials.

Disgrace is a hard movie to watch It is uncompromising, unsentimental, unsparing to its characters and its audience. But it is never dull and it is often rewarding.

Invictus (2009) comes off as a feel-good picture by contrast. Much of it is of the "sports overcomes racism" vein, like Remember The Titans and going back all the way to The Jackie Robinson Story. It frequently takes time to repeat its ideas (Mandela is a healer--he wants to preserve white dignity to ensure their participation in the new South Africa) and to congratulate itself for its noble mindedness. I am left with these questions as I watch it?

1. Why Clint Eastwood to direct and why was Eastwood's work so anonymous? On the plus side, it omitted some of the langours of Eastwood's personal projects, but it never gave much scope to the acting, which is Eastwood's hallmark. There were really only two pieces of virtuoso filmmaking, and I wonder to what extent they were scripted. One comes in the sequence when Damon's rugby team visits the prison Mandela inhabited for more than 20 years, and we see the ghosts of the former inmates. This is particularly moving as it is coupled with the words of "Invictus," a poem for which I have a soft spot. (I have recommended it to many students, especially athletes, as a credo, and it is never not been embraced by them.)

The other striking sequence is the one picture here, in which the predominantly white players conduct a rugby clinic in a township, where the game is not familiar, and we literally see the spirit of play transcend other human boundaries. There was nothing new, but it was exhilarating all the same, especially in contrast with the noble talk.

2. Why Matt Damon if he was not going to be given a character to play? If wonder if the plan wasn't, "Hey, there's no character here! No problem--we'll get a well-liked American star and nobody will notice!"

3. If South Africa has a bright future, why does the film look blasted and whitened like a post-apocalyptic film?

4. Why cast Leleti Kuhmalo (the original Sarafina on stage and screen) and not give her a chance to shine? It was lovely to see her again, and she is lit from within, like she swallowed a small star, but it is way past due to feature her in another film.

5. Why the whole subplot about integrating the white and black bodyguard teams? The problem was stated in seconds, and then they kept repeating the trope over and over. It never even really resolved. It was all okay at the end, but not a real resolution.

6. Why no twists or turns after the first 45 minutes or so, when the move to abolish white rugby is turned back by Mandela and he sets the course to win the World Cup? We know they're going to win, or there is no movie, but they seemed to win by becoming the Little Rugby Team That Could.

7. Why not an African music score? Somewhere after the one-hour mark we got a little taste of African music, but up until then, we had the standard generic Hollywood movie cues. (Hint--the first composer listed is named Kyle Eastwood. I don't mind hiring family--it's good to work with people you are familiar with, it saves time and you are often sympatico, but Kyle's imdb page indicates he has not worked for Any Other Director Ever. Might make you think that the rest of the industry doesn't think he can cut it.

8. Why not teach us something about rugby? All games look slightly ridiculous to everyone who doesn't know how they work--there's always some arbitrary and irrational element that looks silly. One could have gotten past that by creating a character who provides a

9. Point of view! There are so many foreign and historical elements to the backstory of this movie than an American journalist or attache or some such character would have been much more useful to the story than the boring security detail subplot. They could have been our eyes, our explainer.

The result is a kind of uncommitted, detached feeling to the film, as if to tip us off at the outset that everything is going to turn out fine, so there's no reason to get worried or upset.

All it needed was Bobby McFerrin singing, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." (And that would have been better music than what was on the track...)

Off-road trip

As horrendous as many aspects of the story told in
Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) are, it is comforting, as an American of Anglo-European origins, to be reminded that we are not the only people to senselessly abuse their indigenous populations.

When I was a kid there was a show on Saturday at noon, when most of the network cartoon shows had ended called CBS Children's Film Festival. It showed films like The Red Balloon showing children's adventures from all over the world. Once you got over the strangeness of these other cultures--which is always hard for us parochial Americans, especially as children--it was fun and interesting to see our commonality as kid-type humans.

Rabbit Proof Fence (which is rated PG) would be an ideal candidate for such a festival. It is a child's adventure from the child's point of view--the difference is the terrible stakes involved, namely, the integrity of the family versus social concepts of race. A government obsessed with marginalizing people of mixed race and encouraging breeding that will lead children to be identified as wholly aboriginal or wholly white adopts the policy of kidnapping mixed-race children from their families and training them for domestic service to white families. Our principal characters, three plucky sisters, escape from their school and follow the rabbit-proof fence across the near-lunar landscape of the outback to find home and their mother. As one might expect, it is based on a true story, punctuated by footage of the actual people depicted in the story (with much the same startling effect as in The Blind Side, discussed below). Children, especially American children would benefit much from seeing this story.

The filmmaking is mostly self-effacing, other than some canted angles in the scenes with the administrator of the program, played in an appropriately bloodless manner by Kenneth Branagh. Director Phillip Noyce has an interesting trick of moving the camera in a lateral or oblique fashion in ordinary dialogues scenes as if something strange or terrifying was about to be revealed, although no such thing is. It lends an air of restlessness to a film which is almost entirely on the run.