Perhaps it all comes down to Walton Goggins

Boyd Crowder changes hiI'

I'm not the first person to notice that Walton Goggins is the most palpable link between the most fêted films of the current Oscar season, Lincoln (2012) and Django Unchained.  But maybe Mr. Goggins's progress from unrepentant scoundrel Billy Crash, through the ambiguously wicked Boyd Crowder in Justified through the conflicted Clay Hutchins is itself a microcosm of good and evil in the morally compromised landscape of American history.  (And, incidentally, am I unjustified in suspecting that an actor named Walton Goggins who has a certain unpredictable quality will never play a character named Bob Johnson or Tom Smith?)

As portrayed in Tony Kushner's screenplay, Hutchins is swayed to vote in favor of the 13th Amendment by a promise of employment as a postmaster, given that his re-election prospects were virtually nil.  (A Democrat in post-Civil War Ohio was virtually a non-person.)  There has been a lot of harrumphing written about the horse-trading involved in getting slavery outlawed, as if Doris Goodwin or Tony Kushner had invented corruption in the 19th century, when everyone was obviously more pure and good than they are now.  (Which is why they had slavery and child labor and oppression of women and minorities and no labor or product safety regulation.  'Cause folks used to be good and we didn't need all them pesky laws.)  Much of the pleasure of the film is observing the amount and manner of deals that must be made in order to get mediocre people to do great things, a fact confined neither to history nor to the present moment. It is all very well for great people to lead us, but they are going to have to appeal to the desires of the mediocre.

And Clay Hutchins, at least as portrayed here, is no better than mediocre.  So Mr. Goggins, over the past year of his work, moved from the straightforward sadism (probably rooted in self-hatred) of slavemaster Billy Crash, through the amoral Boyd Crowder, who cares nothing for others, but is uninterested in cruelty for its own sake, to the wavering Clay Hutchins, who is willing to do the right thing if there's something in it for himself as well.  Perhaps this is the most accurate representation of the ways in which a democracy moves toward the moral light, through the historical odyssey of Walton Goggins.

Before I go, a couple of random observations about both theatrical features. 

One of the most admirable aspects of Spielberg's Lincoln is how little it looks like a Spielberg film.  I see him as the master of camera movement and manipulation, and it is amazing how quiet and calm the camera is in Lincoln -- even more than it was in Schindler's List.   Evidently, Spielberg discerned that a text this dense was going to require some stillness so that the audience would absorb the words and not be distracted by shifting images.  It's not static by any means, and the shenanigans of Mr. Bilbo are especially entertaining.  (Despite the uniqueness of that patronimic, I can find no connection between William Bilbo and Theodore Bilbo, the odious white supremacist Senator of the 20th century.)

Does anybody else think this is the darkest Spielberg movie yet?  Not in mood or philosophical outlook, but literally low in footcandles?  Good thing we don't have drive-ins any more.  The film does make it clear what a shabby and ramshackle place the Executive Mansion was and how dark most places were after sunset.  Spielberg has called on cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to be quite a chameleon over the course of their work together, and in this film he impersonates Gordon Willis, the Prince of Darkness.

And one bit of trivia about Django.  This is a measure of exactly how big a movie geek Quentin Tarantino is.  The lettering of the opening titles, is not just old-timey-Western sort of lettering.  It references a specific period of late 50s-early 60s B Westerns released by Columbia.  The specific shade of red, the splintered-log style letters, all shout "late Randolph Scott (mostly, but not always directed by Budd Boetticher)!"  This is the definition of Too Hip (or Too Lame, depending on how you want to see it) For The Room.  It's mostly of interest because the critics have only referenced spaghetti Westerns, but of course Django is no dish of spaghetti.  For one thing, it's way, way too talky for a non-English-language Western (not to mention that the lips are synchronized with the sound, which is not true in Italian and German Westerns).  And the talk is interesting and tasty and probably dominates the visuals, which is odd for a Western.  Which takes us right back to Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher and The Tall T, a Western which, for about two-thirds of its running time takes place in a small circle around a campfire.

So what will it take to get Mr. Tarantino to write for the stage?

As it happens

Jane Austen for bi-polar characters, letters included.

The most marvelous thing happened at the showing of Silver Linings Playbook (2012) I attended.  As Jennifer Lawrence's character reveals a very painful portion of her backstory, an audience member gasped and let go of a sympathetic "Ohhhh" as if this confidence was a true story being recounted in our own presence.  Even better, we all resisted the temptation to chuckle at this naive expression of sympathy, because we were not far from where that tender woman was.  At this point, still in the first act, all of us in the audience were already so invested in these characters that we had become genuinely worried about them and concerned for their emotional recovery and survival.

That's particularly impressive because at this point in the movie, they're both a pain in the neck.  That's a hallmark of the characters in writer-director David O. Russell's films, a corpus which includes Spanking The Monkey, Three Kings, Flirting With Disaster, I ♥ Huckabees and The Fighter.  The films and the characters tend to be smart, acerbic, obsessed and a bit superior.  But there is a wonderful echt-Austen moment in the meeting of Lawrence's and Bradley Cooper's characters, the instant recognition of kindred damaged spirits and the consequent opening of hostilities as a mode of flirting.  Obviously, if you hate yourself, you're going to hate anyone you're attracted to, right?  After all, if your mind is broken, at least it shows you have one.



But where body and mind meet, that's where cinema lives.  So the film really takes off when Cooper and Lawrence dance together (charmingly, like the amateurs they are) to Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing."  Arlene Croce said it in her book about Astaire and Rogers:  When two characters sing together, they're falling in love; when they dance together, they want to have (or they are actually having) sex.  There is an intimate energy to the rehearsal montage (that word!) that is irresistible.

One last note -- the family dynamic is astonishingly similar to that of The Fighter, something I was thinking about in the theater before I remembered that the two films had the same writer-director.  There is the oppressive influence of the parents, the slightly soiled (and disapproved) girlfriend, the weight of brotherly expectation.   When you consider that the one piece is based on a true story and the other on an utterly unrelated novel, the critic feels invited to see autobiographical qualities in those shared elements.  And in both cases, Russell smoothly blends stars and journeyman actors into a seamless ensemble.

It seems Russell was always telling us about broken people -- it's just that he has now shifted his emphasis to the ways in which they fix themselves, and the result is exhilarating.

Enough to make you gasp and say, "Ohhhh..."

Surprises from the pre-classical era

I've only just gotten around to The Phantom Carriage (1921) which has been rediscovered and hailed as an early landmark of Swedish and of silent cinema.  As for the content of Victor Sjöström's remarkable and haunting film, I don't have anything to say beyond the reams that have been written, either about the contemplation of death-in-life, nor about the impeccable in-camera double-exposure effects that seem incomprehensibly impossible before the advent of the optical printer.

But it is always a pleasure to see films made before styles and studio procedures were set into the hard expectations of the market and of genre itself, which is one of the principal rewards of early silent cinema itself.  The filmmakers were still working out the rules, syntactical, stylistic and commercial.  And one of the issues that most concerns the producers and exhibitors is making sure that the actors are clearly visible at all times, so that the audience knows that they're seeing the people they paid to see.  This is no concern of the filmmaker, who is driven primarily by narrative (which is not the same thing as plot or story).

So look at this still, which (unlike many production stills) is an accurate reflection of this scene in the film.  The low and partially obscured light source perfectly sets the hushed, anxious yet warm tone of the scene.  Is there any question that this is a deathbed, albeit not a frightening one?  This is the deathbed of a person who is lived well and wishes to die well.  The light is neither evenly balanced, as Classical Hollywood would demand, nor is it dramatically expressionistic, as in Citizen Kane and its film noir offspring. The effect is oblique, but not in overstated way. The light throughout Phantom Carriage is rarely realistic, yet it often seems that it is, because--although it is NOT expressionistic--it is highly expressive of the inner states of the characters.  A photographer like Julius Jaenzon becomes a true co-author in a work like this, especially in silent film, in which dialogue is not a significant factor.

Students and even devoted film lovers are always resisting silent film, perhaps sensing that it requires closer attention and is therefore, harder work.  But without a stream of chatter, sound effects and music closely synchronized to the image, the viewer is forced to shut up and look.  And when it comes to film, the pictures, there's where the goodies are.

How to do coming of age--female edition

Just one of the many awkward moments in MARGARET.

Two films released in the last couple of years represent object lessons-- positive and negative, respectively -- in the dramatization of the coming of age of a young woman.

Margaret (2011), written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me) is not so much a narrative as a core sample, both of the life of its protagonist, Lisa Cohen and of a strata of urban life, and the upper middle class of the Upper West Side of Manhattan in particular.  (Margaret is merely an allusion to a Gerard Manley Hopkin poem.)  Although there is a strong dramatic core that invokes questions of death and the meaning of life without strain, the film loses interest in such things from time to time, letting the camera wander about the landscape in a seemingly aimless fashion, although what it is doing is placing Lisa in her context.

The coming-of-age aspects Margaret touches on include political passion, pretentious language, conflict with parents, awkward sex with contemporaries, inability to express real affection, inappropriate sexual attraction to adults, resistance of threatened step-parents, the desire to engage in a cause bigger than herself, and a need for self-expression greater than her need to understand others.  But the saving grace of Margaret is the way it sets its story against the tapestry of New York and its battered and brittle inhabitants.  No one listens to anyone else and Jeannie Berlin plays what might be the most impossibly irritating character in the history of film, constantly asking people to explain themselves, and continuing to shout over them as they try to answer her.  Nearly everything she hears is an insult or an affront.  By herself she virtually stands for an entire substrata of New York -- the Umbrage People.

(This is a movie so rich that Matthew Broderick can show up just to read the poem that provides the title of the film, Mark Ruffalo can be dealt with in two short scenes and Alison Janney is on hand solely for the purpose of being hit by a bus.  Seems like hard work to be Ken Lonergan's friend!)

 Cierra Ramirez (left). Remember her. Eva Mendes is in it, too.

Margaret seems more like a time capsule than a coming-of-age, whereas Girl in Progress (2012) seems to have been built from a literature class diagram of the bildungsroman.  The youngster in question even organizes her maturation around a checklist of to-dos.  Dye hair, go emo, lose virginity, learn to drive, yada, yada, yada.  Are you paying attention?  The film is actually announcing exactly how formulaic and robotic it intends to be. Girl in Progress and Margaret have virtually identical de-virginization scenes (they both deliberately pick heartless idiots as partners), but where Girl intends to be smart and funny and incorporates a twist meant to be satiric (she rejects the boy because he expresses tenderness), it falls into the trap of teenagers being a heartless pack of jackals.  Lisa's degradation is small and personal; Anciedad's becomes public in a way unfamiliar to people who live among human beings rather than endlessly recycled movie archetypes.  So sad to see a film toss away an opportunity for insight and character growth in favor of a very unpleasant and tired cliche.

There is life in Girl in Progress, which comes from the powerful dynamic between mother Eva Mendes and the whip-smart Cierra Ramirez.  One of the reasons I want to stay alive for another 20 years is to see this generation of brilliant young actresses -- Ellen Page, Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, and add Ms. Ramirez to this list.   (I don't include Anna Paquin, star of Margaret to this list, because I suspect that she is so intelligent she may well have retired from acting in 20 years.)  Ramirez is consistently better than her material, real and precise; I am concerned that she has come from and has now returned to television, which relies on a lot of freeze-dried refried acting...I hope she will get away from that as soon as she can.  As soon as she comes of age.

Looking for something different to watch with the kids?

This is a time of year when parents and children are watching TV together.  If you're feeling fed up with the same animation (especially Disney), and would like to share a very quirky original with your (hopefully) quirky children, here's a 1949 British adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with stop-motion animation by the Louis Bunin studio.  There is a live-action prologue, but it's not all that long, and it sets up a number of characters who re-appear in the story as in the MGM version of The Wizard of Oz. It is probably the most faithful version I've seen, both in incident, spirit and visual approach of the Lewis Carroll classic. It's the perfect family movie for weird families.  And the baby does make a very handsome pig.

A sharp veer to the left and straight off the cliff

I have just seen two films recently which, in a strange coincidence, both feature John Goodman and Melissa Leo (who played a couple in Treme) in separate storylines for which they share no scenes.  And both films start in one genre, suggest a certain layer of complexity which is never fulfilled, and then make a sharp 90-degree veer in a different direction, one with more success than the other.

Michael Parks and John Goodman talk theology.

The films are Red State (2011) and Flight (2012).  Both had wonderful marketing campaigns that were criminally misleading.  I have no idea why Red State was marketed as a horror film, which automatically put a lid on its earning potential, while at the same time directed it to the wrong audience, which rightly rejected it.  The fact is, that the first half-hour of the film trades on a premise which might also be used in a horror-film:  teenage boys lured by the promise of sex, but delivered to a very different and frightening fate -- some sort of unspecified harm by a bunch of Westboro Church-type evangelicals led by Michael Parks.  Except that that particular velvet glove not only lacked an iron fist, it lacked any content whatsoever.  The threat turned out to be utterly fake, and the film morphed into a satire of the inadequacy of government bureaucracy in the face of utter suicidal lunacy.

To Kevin Smith's credit, he started off with a cardboard political agenda which he is simply too good a writer to adhere to and -- perhaps unconsciously -- realizing that when he got there there was no there there, took off not so much for another target, but in favor of character over ideology.  He wanted to make fun of extremist evangelists, but he seems to have been distracted by the idea of some poor working stiff in the ATF having to sort out a potential Waco-type mess he wants no part of without it blowing up in his and everybody else's face.  It's this sort of thing that leads me to wonder if Kevin Smith ever writes second drafts, or whether -- given that it takes him years to get the energy to crank out a script -- he is satisfied with just getting something down on the page, then immediately dials up his production manager and starts perusing the craft services menu.  (Yes, I know that he raised the financing and distributed the film himself, so the process was a bit more complicated, but...)

Nonetheless, once you get past the tedious set up of the premise of the movie, with a long, redundant monologue by Michael Parks, the film centers around the always-satisfying John Goodman as a man in the middle, squeezed between doing the right thing and toeing the line with his superiors.  This is first-rate satire, but it lacks the time and scope to have enough weight to anchor the entire film.  Then Smith tosses in an anti-climax in which what sounds like The Rapture turns out to be some hippies teasing the evangelicals.  I say "tossed in" because what could have been an intriguing and funny scene is conveyed by some dialogue in a brief denouement scene.  (Plus Smith admitted it was added after the fact in his video Q&A, Kevin Smith: Burn in Hell.)  The result feels like an anthology of different films from different genres stitched together sequentially.  I don't know how Red State performed commercially, but I can't help but think that there must have been a LOT of disappointed horror fans.

Denzel got some explainin' to do.

When John Goodman appeared on screen in Flight (2012) a lot of the audience, including me, "ooh"-ed with the feeling of "Oh boy, this is going to be good."  We were also to be disappointed.  After a slam-bang initial half-hour of Washington performing an heroic landing of a wounded passenger plane while drunk and high, one looks forward to the story of transcendence and transfiguration promised by (a) the title of the film; (b) the spiritually suggestive trailers and television ads; and (c) Zemicki's work in Cast Away, Forrest Gump and the failed by aspirational Contact.  No such luck.  John Goodman's role as Denzel's connection turns out to be dispiriting rather than energizing, and the rest of the film is a rehash of The Lost Weekend, Days of Wine and Roses, Clean and Sober, 28 Days and every other movie about a drunk trying and failing to clean up.  These stories are always repetitive -- they have to be if they're going to be realistic, but that doesn't make them any more fresh or insightful.  This is a movie without anything to recommend it other than Denzel's presence, albeit he doesn't have anything else to do.  And a movie that can waste Don Cheadle, John Goodman, Melissa Leo and a lot of less-famous but equally ill-used actors rates as a major waste of time for the audience and the filmmakers.

It would seem that would have been fairly easy to make a much better, much more original film.  And how disappointing that Denzel finally breaks away from the tedious potboilers he has given so much of his working life to (Safe House, Unstoppable, Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Inside Man), the result is still deja vu, just in a more exalted genre.

Found in America

Aladeen explains the fine points of the Bill of Rights to a NYC policeman

You knew as you were watching Sasha Baron Cohen's film Borat that, like Daffy Duck blowing himself up, it was a one-time only performance.  The film's very popularity would make it impossible for Cohen to slip invisibly into another identity with which to trap and trick people.

It turned out to both true and not, as people have short memories and Cohen has a very adaptable face.  Still he is never going to take America by surprise quite the same way again.  So he can hardly be faulted for taking the scripted route to pursue many of Borat's themes and tropes again in The Dictator (2012)   He can be faulted for adopting the hoary old substitute-the-double-for-the-king plot that goes back at least to The Prisoner of Zenda and never seems to stop being reworked.  You'd think monarchies would have the good sense by now to seek out all the perfect doubles that seem to riddle the earth and have them done away with to avoid problems.

Three other observations.  The female lead played by Anna Faris claims to have attended Amherst College.  This is impossible because (a) she is wearing the Mt. Holyoke College uniform (basically grunge drag) and (b) she pronounces the name of her school "Am-hhurst."  Even those who attend U Mass are aware that the "h" is not pronounced.

Second, what is there about comedies about dictators which calls for a speech late in the third act?  Chaplin's Great Dictator speech is (rightly) criticized for being overlong and unfocused.  Cohen avoids such problems and goes straight for the jugular.  Yet, though this is the sharpest humor in the film, it seems to go unnoticed amid the slapstick and buffoonery.



By definition the film can't be as outrageous as Borat but it almost makes up for it by incorporating a large cohort of sketch and stand-up comics, probably the contribution of director Larry Charles, who is more likely to be plugged into American comedy circles.  Aasif Mandavi, Rizwan Manji, Horatio Sanz, Chris Parnell, Jessica St. Clair, Chris Gethard, Fred Armisen, Chris Elliot, Jon Glaser, Bobby Lee, Joey Slotnick, J.B. Smoove, Kathryn Hahn, Seth Morris, Nasim Pedrad, Ed Norton, B.J. Novak, Jim Piddock, John C. Reilly and Gary Shandling all have walk-ins and sometimes quite a bit more in this film.

It really suggests that what Cohen and Charles should be reworking instead of Zenda is an all-star comedy extravaganza along the lines of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

GUEST BLOGGER: Why I Will Never Think Pink

This post is by a suspiciously similarly-named author, Samantha Lockhart, 2010 graduate of the College of William and Mary, environmental activist and organizer and former member of my household.  Following are her thoughts on a childhood favorite, the Fred Astaire - Audrey Hepburn musical  Funny Face (1957).

Contrasting career choices in Funny Face

FUNNY FACE

It is a special experience to rewatch a film that was a favorite as a child, but which you have rarely seen since.  It brings this feeling of comfortable familiarity – like you both know and don’t know what’s about to happen next.  Like having a recurring dream or watching a new M. Night Shyamalan movie.

Often, it means noticing things that you did not see as a child either because your innocence shielded you from it, or simply because you could not have gotten the reference without the social vocabulary that only a liberal arts education can provide.  But for me, and others like me, who grew up watching movies all the time; for those that were raised in part by film and whose life was chronicled in large part by the movies that populated each phase – rewatching these formative movies means so much more.  It’s like finding the pieces of the puzzle that make you who you are today.  Suddenly, you make sense to yourself in some small but important manner.  Like tracing your heritage and discovering your ancestral routes, it is an exercise which can help to show a clearer roadmap that has somehow helped determine fundamental things about the course of your life, your ambitions and your dreams.

Some of this has always been obvious to me, because the watching coincided so closely with my own consciousness of growing-up and self-discovery.  I always knew that The West Wing was a huge part of why I was interested in politics.  That was never a mystery that needed solving, that puzzle piece always fit for me squarely on Wednesday evenings at 9pm on NBC from ages 11 to 17.  But the stuff I watched when I was far too young to notice its impact or to remember it – rewatching those films can be incredibly revealing.  Sometimes it’s in small ways, like realizing that the reason that every time I have only one high heel on, I have the urge to say “Look! I was born on the side of a hill” has something to do with Bringing Up Baby or that every time I wish I was invisible I still shimmy goofily with my arms up because of Time of Their Lives.  But sometimes, the marks that these films leave can reveal themselves to be oddly profound.

Funny Face was one of my favorite movies as a kid, before Fred Astaire’s complete lack of sex appeal bothered to detract from the romance of it.  I remembered most vividly how stunningly beautiful the film is, filled with soft lighting contrasted with sharp, vivid colors that frame Audrey’s stunning face – the true star of the film, but somehow I had forgotten almost everything else. Yet as I watched it, somehow I found myself knowing every word.  One of the tests out there of whether a film has a feminist edge is whether two women ever have a conversation about something other than a man.  Well, Funny Face opens with a scene from a powerful, smart, sophisticated female editor of a major magazine talking to her staff of smart women. True, they’re talking about the color pink, but somehow it doesn’t matter.

Pink=ORDINARY

And the opening number "Think Pink" ends with an hilarious and somewhat empowering moment in which someone asks the fashion editor, Maggie, why she is the only one not in pink, to which she replies “I wouldn’t be caught dead” and walks away in a chic gray suit.  What I love about this is that Maggie is admitting that she is a marketing genius who has manipulated women across the country to like whatever she tells them to like. Right off the bat, this character means more to me than I ever recognized at the time.  Her success is not tied to a man, she is decisive, smart, elegant, sophisticated, wise – and she refuses to wear pink.  I have obstinately refused to wear pink since the age of 4.  I have always associated it with profound mediocrity.  I am obsessed with black and grey. Maggie is extraordinary, and she would not be caught dead.

Modeling=DUMB.

Jo – a boy’s shortening of what is assumed to be a longer girl’s name (Joanne? Josephine?), much like mine – Sam - is smart and never thinks of herself as being beautiful.  She finds fashion and modeling trivial and stupid.  I was a very cute kid.  I was more than cute – I was a stunning little girl.  I’m not saying that to be obnoxious, it’s just true.  I don’t think I measure up now nearly as well.  At the age of four of five, however, I could barely go anywhere without someone asking my parents if I was interested in modeling to which I replied a vehement “NO.”  My mother was confused.  She had been a dancer and actress and occasional model, had no moral objection to the venture that she could have passed onto her young daughter.  My parents were in financial straits and a little modeling money probably would not have hurt, but no one was going to make me do anything I didn’t’ want to do and I did NOT want to model. I perceived modeling as being trivial and stupid.  Of course, I believe that I was too young to appreciate the emotional transformation that Jo undergoes, feeling by the end of the film that modeling could be art, could be glamorous, could help her find the man she loves and could get her a ticket to fulfill her philosophic dreams.  HOWEVER, I do think that I picked up on some other things about Jo.

Sticking to your guns

For one thing – Jo has very strong principles that center around this concept of empathy.  She works in a bookstore in Greenwich Village and worships a philosopher in France.  Though she finds herself falling in love with drama and glamour of the fashion world through Dick, she does not lose herself to it.  Dick believes that once she has fallen in love with him, it means he “has” her.  She has entered his world and left her own.  She does not see it this way and gets angry with him, essentially ending the relationship by saying that they are “too fundamentally different” to be together.  She talks a lot about the importance of her principles which Dick seems to make fun of.  She is willing to give up on her budding relationship before she would give up on what she believes in.  I think this lesson hit home with me and has given me solid footing on the otherwise rocky terrain of love. 

Don’t Rescue Me

Dick’s condescending insistence that he knows better serves only to anger Jo.  Rather than let him fight her battles, she fights her own.  From getting the last word (or dance) in the café following Dick’s attempts to embarrass her to hitting Professor Flostre over the head with a statue – she can take care of herself. I’ve always been a fan of fighting my own battles, paying my own way, and living my own life and was known to yell at Gaston during Beauty and the Beast “When a lady says NO, she meeeaaans NO!”  And while studying abroad in India during college, threatened and shouted obscenities at the Indian men who made lude assumptions about Western Women.

Ya gotta be happy.

But the final and perhaps most important lesson from Funny Face  is “On how to be lovely, you gotta be happy.”  This marks the second time in the film in which women interact together in a burst of YaYa level female empowerment!  Maggie, the magazine editor, teaches Jo how to talk to the press about herself and provides a significant lesson.  In order to be beautiful, like Audrey Hepburn, you have to be joyful.  I have finally learned that my overwhelmingly positive and unflinchingly optimistic disposition can all be traced back to a profound and fundamental vanity. 

But…really?

Of course – I see in this film what I believe I saw then at age four or five.  I am following the interpretation that seems most familiar to me, like finding your way home when lost based on sheer instinct.  Were I to watch this film with completely fresh eyes, I may also point out that Dick is incredibly condescending about Jo’s philosophy and even says of Flostre “he has as much interest in your intelligence as I have” indicating, of course, very little.  Yet Jo, this incredibly beautiful, young, brilliant, principled, woman still ends up with Dick – the condescending photographer with no interest in her intelligence.  I could note that while Maggie is a successful female figure, she also appears to be unmarried and after all, is successful in the field of “fashion” – one typically assigned to women anyway.  I could choose to highlight that Professor Flostre does turn out to be a fraud and only after Jo for romantic reasons, as if to indicate that Dick was right all along and all Jo needed was a good man to show her the way. 

So perhaps it is a chicken and egg situation – maybe I was always a strong and principled girl and the parts of this film that spoke to that in me were the ones that I chose to listen to. But whether it was me looking for a story and  female figures to help more sharply define characteristics I already had or it was me building myself from scratch from the lessons taught by these films, it hardly seems to matter.  Either way, I hate pink.

Way out there in the blue

Looks like Scar had a white daddy, or at least grandpaw...

This blog has been quiet for a while, partly because I've been preoccupied with launching a new film-oriented course, that is, Social Justice and the Media.  This week, we've just finished looking at The Searchers (1956) and I assigned my students to write a reflection on how a visual device or idea is used to support or explicate a theme in the film.  These sorts of ideas are new to my students, so I created a model, and although The Searchers is one of the most written-about films ever mind, I thought I'd share my hair-brained little ideas with you, my friends here.

The overriding theme of The Searchers is a racism which accepts without discussion that European whites and Native North Americans cannot co-exist on the same vast continent, let alone the same home and hearth. (This belief proceeds from both sides.)  The separation among them must be absolute, and any suggestion of crossing the line between those groups brings expressions of anger, contempt and disgrace.

But five characters are bound together visually by their distinctly blue eyes, which “pop” in the bright color process of the mid-1950s – the eyes of Ethan, the angry hater; of Martin Pawley, the “half-breed”; of Laurie, Martin’s probable bride, who turns out to be an unthinking racist and therefore more worthy of contempt than Ethan’s knowledgeable fear and loathing; of Debbie, Ethan’s niece, who might have been and might actually be Ethan’s daughter and the eyes of Scar, killer of Debbie’s family and possibly her husband. The suggestion is that Scar himself may have been the result of miscegenation, bringing further contempt from Ethan’s burning eyes. Their can be no question that director John Ford chose to use a non-Native actor not just because he didn't know any Native actors who were right for the part, but because he wanted those blue eyes and almost Aryan appearance. And in the final analysis, these characters form a strange family-- uncle/father – son – bride – husband, each connected to all, directly or indirectly.

Moreover, the blue of those characters' eyes are mirrored by the bright blue Western sky under which so much of the action takes place; even though the events are dark and the seasons are varied, the blue sky remains a near-constant from first shot to last. (Even the winter scenes and night scenes are played in shades of blue.) Thus, blue becomes the color that unites and embraces the universe of The Searchers, and while Ethan begins the film in a red shirt of anger, at the end,wearing a deep blue tunic, he lifts up his niece/daughter, clad in a long skirt of blue (or perhaps that is the blue blanket Marty wrapped her in); the blue of loving eyes, of the long horizon into the future, of the harmony of creation itself, sky and sea, embracing all living things.  

A bit grandiose, perhaps, but the more you watch The Searchers, the more you see the balances and resonances in it.  Time with this film is never wasted.

Roots of evil

You'll shoot your sister's eye out,  kid.

Finally, someone has made a good film inspired by Columbine, although We Need To Talk About Kevin (2012) is not about Columbine, nor, for that matter is Beautiful Boy (2010). Still, neither film would have been made but for that atrocity.  And the existence of both films illuminates the difference between solid professional craftsmanship and genuine art.

The central question of any such "Bad Seed" movie is whether evil proceeds from the parent, even at a distant, or whether it springs forth spontaneously in a given generation, leaving the parents and other ancestors scratching their heads, attributing evil to random, mutation, the malevolence of a fallen angel or perhaps God's own perversity.

Beautiful Boy, as I would probably do myself, throws its hands in the air and humbly confesses that it has no answers on the subject.  Instead, it is the portrait of a marriage under severe stress.  At the beginning of the film, the stress fractures are already evident, buttoned-up husband Michael Sheen has already asked wife Maria Bello for a divorce and the news that the couple's son has perpetrated a Virginia Tech-type attack seems likely to be fatal to the relationship.  Perversely, they are brought together by the stresses, especially the shunning and vituperation arriving at their doorstep as though they were collaborators in their son's terrible act.

The film's highlight is an acting dual tour de force when the couple has retreated to the anonymous safety of a motel to avoid the scrutiny and hatred of the mob and they pass through a cathartic variety of contributions, including moments of intimacy just short of those in Blue Valentine, and to similarly devastating effect.

But fine work as it is, the film is ultimately a doughnut, circling around its subject, but leaving a hole where there should be drama, or at very least reflection by the characters.   No attempt is made to show any connection between what the parents may have said or done at any time and their son's shooting spree.  It is perhaps meant to be ironic and telling that the final phone conversation with the son, shown in flashback, is mundane, if a bit distant, but in any event contains no foreshadowing of horror to come.  But it raises the question of why the filmmakers designed a story with a central impetus they are unwilling to examine anyway.  To say, "nobody knows where evil comes from" is a cop-out.  If that is so, why make a film about it?

The makers of We Have To Talk About Kevin had no such shyness, and the world was presumably forewarned, as the film is based on a widely-praised novel.  Irony is still on display, as the one thing nobody ever does is talk about Kevin, who really should have been talked about.  He is a Bad Seed, different from previous bad seeds in movie only for the plausibility of his evil, given both the story's less melodramatic scale and tone (compared to, say The Bad Seed, The Omen and similar titles) and by the horrific events of the last dozen years or so, which suggest a persistent subterranean collective psychosis among the nation's young.

Kevin is not afraid to stare into the abyss, at least in the person of his mother, played by the fearless, if not reckless, Tilda Swinton, whose character never wanted a child and resents the obligations of motherhood from the start.  The child's apparent psychopathology emerges as both a judgment on and a product of her indifferent child-rearing.  Honestly, when have the movies given us a bad mother who wasn't a Southern Gothic clown, or a straight-ahead Bad Witch?

The truth is that Kevin's evil stems directly from his desire to irritate and punish his mother, and whether that is cause or effect of her bad mothering is not clear.  And so, when he is incarcerated and robbed of power, she can love him, in one of the eeriest denouements in all of Bad Seed Cinema.

Other writers have pointed out Kevin's most striking cinematic accomplishment, the recasting of the novel's epistolary narrative structure (presumably by writer-director Lynne Ramsay) into a mosaic of flash-forward-and-backs into what is obviously a very carefully designed warp and woof of spiritual horror.  Color, especially red, is used to make connections between distant times and places.  (These places include a very confusing opening montage--I learned by reading online that what is being depicted is a tomato festival that is a cross between the running of the bull sin Pamplona and the Indian festival of Holi, when color is thrown at any and all persons.  It does show Kevin's future mother as a free spirit, but in my case, I had to seek outside help to decipher that sequence, which is not a good thing.)  The resulting cacophony of visual information is perhaps a better, deeper insight into Kevin's mother's mind than the novel's letters may have been -- the memory of images, after all, are pre-conscious, lacking the deliberation of a composed letter.

And Swinton seems to be redefining film acting over and over again.  It seems no accident that she resembles Buster Keaton, who inhabited film more than he appeared in it.  the same might be said for Swinton, who seems to work without self-awareness or self-consciousness, indifferent as to whether or not her character is sympathetic.  Like Keaton, the blanker she is, the better she is.  Wise is the filmmaker who eschews the condescending clarity of melodrama and leaves space for her audience.  OK, Ms. Ramsay, you go on the list.  I'm down for wherever you want to take me.

Still, the greatest Bad Seed film may still, however, be World's Greatest Dad, which truly comes to grips with the awfulness and spiritual void of parenting a truly terrible person and which, black comedy though it be, explores the lengths to which such a parent will go to seek solace for the consequences of their own unintended and perhaps even nonexistent crimes as parents.

Clowns in my coffee, clowns in my coffee

Kevin explains it's all part of a cosmic pattern and it is.

Jeff, Who Lives At Home (2012) is part of the subcategory of Shaggy Dog Stories in which everything takes place on one magical day after which Nothing Is The Same.  Such conceits carry a high component of whimsy (and as Groucho said when told he was full of whimsy, "Can you tell from over there?") but that is somewhat familiar country for the Duplass brothers, as is stories about battling brothers in different places in their lives and the struggle for meaning and purpose.

But Jeff pulls off a neat trick which I can only analogize to Hitchcock's feat of switching audience sympathy from Norma Crane to Norman Bates in Psycho.  As the film starts, one gets the impression of a nascent stoner comedy, with Jason Segal, as Jeff,  trotting out his pathetic man-child yet again.  But he is not so pathetic as he is poetic.  He is part of the half of the human race which thinks everything makes sense cosmically and in the long run and that everything eventually connects.  I just have to point out that this is a natural bias for an author, who has the power to make his or her universe do just that thing, connect, make sense and explain itself.  I would advise authors subject to that trap to spend some time doing group improvisation, let go of the need for control and see what it does for their writing.

In the book of interviews Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitchcock discusses his troubles with the part of the audience he calls the "plausibles."  He dismisses criticism about coincidence, asserting that life is full of coincidences, but rejects convenience, by which the creator makes things too easy on himself and gets the snake to swallow its own tail.  I can't accuse the Duplass Brothers of making things easy for Jeff, but they do permit some self-satisfaction on the basis of a single selfless and, indeed, heroic act which does not do a thing to address the serious problems in Jeff's life, and which in fact, he seems to use to justify his continued aimless existence.  Nonetheless, warm fuzzies all around.

And speaking of coincidence, a man was fished out of his car the very day in the very city I saw this film.  As that provided no benefit to me, I guess Hitchcock was right.  Coincidental, but not convenient.

It is interesting to see the way artists like Les Freres Duplass can enter the mainstream partly because the type of actors they need to execute their ideas, actors like Jason Segal, Jonah Hill, Ed Helms and John C. Reilly are available and bankable (at least for Duplass-level budgets).  A nice case of artistic temperament meeting the zeitgeist.

Speaking of the zeitgeist, can we put to bed, the term "mumblecore."  All it means is a low-budget film which is dialogue based.  That defines at least 80% of low-budget films, because the cheapest thing in the world to shoot (and safest) is people talking to each other.  Untrained actors often don't have the most distinct diction, just like actual humans.  And maybe if film writers stop using the term mumblecore, the Duplasses will no longer feel obligated to fool around with the zoom on the camera constantly.  In at least one case in the film, the zoom felt like a "meta" comment on what was happening, like Jimmy Finlayson swinging his head around in a big vaudeville doubletake in a Laurel and Hardy movie.  This zooming doesn't make the film feel natural, it feels just the opposite, constantly saying to the viewer, "Don't get involved, don't get attached.  This is just a movie, it's all fake."

I direct plays with novice actors and I have to teach them that one of the most unnatural-feeling postures on stage, standing straight with your arms at your side looks the most natural on stage, far better than folding one's arms or clasping hands.  Try it.  Try standing with your arms hanging straight down and doing nothing.  Feels weird, right?  Doesn't look weird.  So in film, it seems artificial to take a camera, pick an angle and plonk the camera down on a tripod and leave it alone.  Almost theatrical, setting a frame around the actors and events.  But on screen, it looks natural, just as cutting between opposite angles looks natural.  Perhaps we've grown accustomed to these conventions, or they are inherently natural, but they pass by our eyes without objection or comment.  Shooting hand-held, whipping the camera around to catch the action and fiddling with the zoom and focus ARE natural, but LOOk unnatural.  So, Duplasses, your next movie, however low the budget, get a tripod.  People will start treating you like grown-ups.

Who is this movie for?

Like it or be indifferent to it (it's hard to hate something so deliberately dopey), the stage musical Rock of Ages knew exactly what it intended and who it was intended for.  It was Mamma Mia for the hair rock crowd, with a borrowed and indifferent plot linking a bunch of familiar hits perfectly suited for singing along, awash in middle-aged nostalgia.  The young people in the story served as surrogates for the audience, who was young 25 and 30 years ago, and the older characters were figures of fun.

The film of Rock of Ages (2012) does not seem to have such certainty.  Whereas people could attach themselves to the abstract surrogates of the young lovers in the stage version, film is always more specific, and the young people are no longer substitutes for the audience, but other, recognizable actors.  (Julianne Hough, specifically is now a veteran of Burlesque and Footloose and better get a job in a non-musical before she becomes unemployable).  We see, in full-color close-up, how young and fresh-faced these kids and they are no longer us.  Now we are the oldsters -- we are burnout Alec Baldwin or trying-to-reclaim-lost-glory Tom Cruise.  Both give superb performances, and both remind us, through their own appearances and our shared history with them, that we are old.  And nobody pays $12 to be reminded that they are older than they ever meant to be.

The other interesting question about the film (and there aren't many) is its narrative conventions.  Traditionally, music in musicals, as derived from the stage took part in the theatrical convention that snogs were heightened speech and that they were experienced by both the singer and the hearer as a heightened experience, but not necessarily as a song.  Song was a conventionalized special type of speech, akin to a character in verse drama launching into a long poetic flight.  The other characters may have felt the thoughts and emotions of the person speaking or singing, but they did not think "Hey- that was a good song" or "Hey - that was a purty poem."  Musicals took place in a parallel universe, or more accurately through a special musical prism which refracted high emotion in the form of music.

One day that convention started to make people uncomfortable.  Who is to say why conventions go in and out of style.  Film is riddled with them, but only some of them are apparent to most viewers.  They are acutely aware of, for instance, narrative cliche, but they refuse to notice that film is made out of bits and pieces of moving images which could not have been captured sequentially in continuous time and do not resemble the way we experience the real world in any way.  (This is excluding long boring art films shot with stationary cameras.)  One set of conventions infuriates people, and others are completely invisible to them.

A-ny-way, people started to think it was funny when film characters began to break into song, presumably because the space they occupy, both in the actual world and in the apparent film world, seemed more "real" to them than the more explicitly symbolic theater.  "People don't really do that."  (Presumably they do engage in high-volume gun battles in the street which have no casualties except for the Bad Guys -- I mean, nobody complains that action films are unrealistic, whereas they are just as stylized as any musical.)  So, since 1972 when Bob Fosse adapted the Broadway show Cabaret in such a way that all the music was what film professors call "diagetic", meaning that the songs are taking place in the world which the characters occupy in the rest of the film, musicals have adopted one of two pretexts for a musical number: (a) that people are performing right here and now in a conventional performance context and that the people present can hear them and are enjoying ; and (b) that the musical number is a sort of fantasy which is only being experienced by the person imagining this musical number.

Some films and shows have it both ways.  Chicago had them both ways at once, in which the events of the character's "real" life were re-imagined by her as performance numbers.  Thus, the songs could be strikingly specific to the story situation, more so than a real performance number would be, and their unreality could be shrugged off as being part of the performance context.

The television show Glee apparently alternates among the conventions.  Mostly, we see the eager children bursting to perform their heartfelt songs which are so coincidentally related to the story situation.   Often the realistic performance context (kids in school clothes in a schoolroom) gives way to an elaborately costumed and staged performance (not to mention processed, compressed and AutoTuned to a fare-the-well).  Since it would be ridiculous to imagine such complex performances being prepared on a weekly basis by high school kids in suburban Ohio, one must presume that the schmancy versions of these songs constitute the children's fantasy of what their number feels like, just the way Snoopy imagines that he really is a World War I flying ace or the way I imagine it's important to maintain this blog.

The other principal use of song in Glee is as inner monologue, as a reflection of a character's inner state.  Traditional theater musicals do this as well, in songs "in one", meaning all the way downstage, with the performer relating directly to the audience.  Dramatically speaking, a play need never define or decide whether this singing is "really" happening.  When Billy Bigelow imagines life with his son -- or his daughter -- in the Soliloquy from Carousel (Hammerstein borrowed the term straight from classical theater), it all takes place in a half-world in which a character sings out loud and strangers seated in front of him hear him and respond and react.  And he is allowed to acknowledge their presence.

Film has no such luxury.  When it does attempt to acknowledge the audience it comes over "theater-y" and stiff.  Buster Keaton was right to rap his knuckles on the glass of the camera lens.  There is a permanent barrier between actor and audience in film, and not just of the lens, but of place and time.  We live in two different "now"s and never the twain shall meet.  So film usually emulates Olivier's Hamlet, beginning the sung monologue with a close-up on the face which is thinking these thoughts.  From time to time the lips may move in synchronization with the music, but they may stop doing so.  Performance energy, which is central to the stage musical, is unnecessary and irrelevant on film.  That energy is provided by camera movement, dynamic staging and editing, rather than the performer's sweat and tears.

Rock of Ages plays it both ways, and the audience's easy acceptance of these two different and perhaps even contradictory conventions of song in narrative may mean that we are finally relaxed about musicals and can accept their artificial interludes in the same way as a kung fu fight, a car chase and other such entertainment elements in the types of films which are put together like fruitcakes; an often undigestible cake which can be tolerated for the periodic bits of candied fruit which are the cake's "raisin d'etre." (Pun intended, so don't e-mail me about misspelling.)

On the other hand, given Rock of Ages's difficulty in finding its audience, perhaps its reception in the theater, positive though it was, is not a significant indicator of anything.