Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Talking Out of Turn: Reviews (Part Three)

Doing Time: HBO's The Night Of


John Turturro and Riz Ahmed in HBO's The Night Of.

In HBO's eight-part procedural drama, The Night Of, which concluded this past Sunday night, everyone is doing time. This temperamental thriller, which is based on the 2008-09 BBC series, Criminal Justice, is about the grinding wheels of the system and how it wears down its servants as much as it does the suspects. Unlike True Detective, which imposed a weary existentialism on a conventional crime story, The Night Of reaches inside the conventions of the detective genre to create a darkly lit tone poem where justice becomes merely a flicker of light. The mini-series, written by Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, is clearly set in post-9/11 New York with its mood of suspicion and fear regarding race and religion, but it also reflects an exhaustion where ideals and purpose have been replaced by expedience. That exhaustion contributes to some of the dramatic weaknesses of The Night Of, but if the story sometimes falls into a kind of stasis, the characters don't. The Night Of is about people who've been lulled to sleep but slowly get woken by a dawning nightmare of what they've become.

The Night Of begins in its first few episodes with a propulsive thrust. Naz (Riz Ahmed) is a Pakistani-American and Muslim whose reckless act of wild spontaneity with a beautiful and troubled white woman, Andrea (Sofia Black D’Elia), ends in her murder. Because he flees from the scene with convincing circumstantial evidence, he's charged with the crime. While awaiting the charges, he's met in his holding cell by attorney Jack Stone (John Turturro), a lawyer with severe psychosomatic eczema, who cuts quick plea deals since no one he gets to represent is ever innocent. But Stone has a hunch that this unlucky young man just might not be guilty, so he takes on his cause. The lead detective, Dennis Box (Bill Camp), who is nearing retirement, knows this may be his last investigation. Tiredly sizing up the evidence, he proposes to the lead prosecutor, Helen Weiss (Jeannie Berlin), that it's a slam-dunk even though some part of him suspects it's not. When Naz's parents (Peyman Moaadi and Poorna Jagannathan) can't afford Stone's legal rates, they turn to Alison Crowe (Glenne Headly), an ambitious defense attorney who takes the case pro bono under the assumption that Naz will plead out for less served time. But when he refuses to do so, Crowe quits. Her assistant, Chandra Kapoor (Amara Karan), stirred by Naz's claims of innocence, decides with Jack Stone to go to trial with the intent of winning the case. As the defense team methodically chases down clues and suspects, Detective Box does likewise. Meanwhile, we watch as Naz turns from a scared young man into a more hardened prisoner.

Pete Postlethwaite and Ben Whishaw in BBC's Criminal Justice.

The Night Of stays pretty faithful to the plot of Criminal Justice, but the implications of the story are radically different. In Criminal Justice, Ben Coulter (Ben Whishaw) is a happy, white middle-class lad who has a drunken and drug-filled evening with a young lady he meets and who ends up murdered. But where Coulter is an innocent adolescent pulled into a living nightmare (and Whishaw is extraordinary at making us feel the pure terror of incarceration), Naz is a Pakastani-American growing up in New York after 9/11 who resorted to acts of violence to both protect himself growing up and assert his need to belong. Criminal Justice is terrifically written (by Peter Mofatt) and very well acted – especially by Ben Whishaw, Bill Patterson as Detective Box, Con O'Neill as Stone, Lindsay Duncan as his barrister, Pete Postlethwaite as his mentor in prison and Vineeta Rishi as Kapoor – but its intricate plotting works itself out too quickly in the end. Criminal Justice also gets inside an area of police corruption concerning the use of snitches that isn't fully satisfying and that The Night Of chooses to avoid.

The Night Of occasionally gets a little languid so that Price and Zaillian become sleepy in providing enough material for the actors to shape their roles. For instance, Amara Karan is lovely as the junior attorney, but when she begins to have romantic feelings for Naz and heedlessly acts them out, she hasn't been given enough motivation to suggest why. We could guess that it's her inexperience, her identification with his plight as a Pakistani-American, or an expression of the bonding between attorneys and their clients that comes with the intense heat of a case, but Karan gives us too little to go on. (The scene comes right out of Criminal Justice, but it makes more sense there since Coulter's vulnerability is what reaches Kapoor emotionally.) There are fascinating scenes with Naz's family, where the father (who shares the taxi that Naz borrows the night of the crime) has to deal with his Pakistani partners who are now deprived of their livelihood; and his mother, who grapples with whether her son is innocent and guilty of the crime partly due to her discomfort at his attraction to hedonism. But you sometimes want more from the characters in their milieu than we get.

The lead performances are all you expect and more. Riz Ahmed, who was equally astonishing as Jake Gyllenhaal's reluctant partner filming violent accidents for TV news in Nightcrawler, accomplishes a similar kind of transformative acting to Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, when he went from being an amiable war hero just out of college and slowly morphed into a criminal overlord. Ahmed gradually shows us the pockets of rage and guile that reside behind his doe-eyed affability. John Turturro as Stone has more to work with than his British counterpart in Criminal Justice, and it's to his advantage. A little like Toshiro Mifune's flea-bitten samurai in Yojimbo, Turturro is a shaggy dog out of step who doesn't have the respect of those in the system, or from the family he lost to divorce. (Also, like Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, Turturro's Stone has an affection for cats – even though he's allergic to them – and has an empathy for a case that others who are smarter than him don't.) Turturro gives a quiet, measured and sympathetic performance that never once turns sappy, or reaches for redemption. James Gandolfini was originally cast in the role, and when he died tragically, Robert De Niro briefly took over, but a scheduling problem lead to Turturro's getting the part.

Jeannie Berlin as Helen Weiss in The Night Of.

It's a shame that we don't get to see Jeannie Berlin much on television, or in the movies, but she makes a huge impact in The Night Of. While Helen Weiss is a master at being the sharp prosecutor who plays with her cards close to her chest, Berlin has pockets of sensitivity that gnaw at her armour. Weiss's breathing rhythms – carefully expressive – hold back as much as they reveal about her character. Michael K. Williams, who was so memorable as Omar, the gay Robin Hood gangster in The Wire, is smoothly seductive as Freddy, Naz's prison mentor. Williams is canny and subtle about how he lets you perceive the sense of loss Freddy feels towards a life he pissed away as a professional boxer and the power he now possesses in prison. His attraction to Naz is based on seeing both the innocence in Naz that he can't claim for himself, and the anger underneath that innocence which Freddy now identifies with. Bill Camp's Detective Box isn't conceived as ambiguously as Bill Paterson's Box in Criminal Justice, but Camp is shrewdly masterful at showing us a man who can't completely turn away from what his instincts tell him is true. (While it's funny that this loner detective also consoles himself listening to operatic arias in his car, Camp is so good he doesn't really need this writer's conceit to further colour his hermetic nature.)

Although The Night Of delves into a contemporary critique of race relations, it unfortunately ends up short-changing some of those issues (especially in its overall depiction of black Americans). For instance, on the night of the murder, Naz is accosted by two black men who see him with a white woman and they call him out as a terrorist. The scene tells us something of how the practice of being marginalized in a racist society can be complex. But this moment never gets developed into something more compelling than an act of race baiting. The Night Of sometimes suffers from having a lot on its mind and not giving enough time (or forethought) to filling out the blank spots in the story. However, the flaws do little to damage the overall impact of the series. The Night Of is a refresher course in the kind of thesis drama that respects the intelligence of its audience. And like the best television, it always has you asking for more.

-- August 30/16

Love, Death and Rock & Roll: Rich Cohen's The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones



"Menace is most effective when its limits are not known. [Mick] Jagger's 'demonic' persona was not enhanced by the death at Altamont, as some people have supposed; it was destroyed. In the face of one man's real death, Jagger's 'demonic' posture was shown to be merely perverse."

- George Trow, "Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse." The New Yorker, May 29 and June 5, 1978.


In his 2012 documentary, Crossfire Hurricane, filmmaker Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) showed how the impudent rebellion of The Rolling Stones' music and their volatile stage performances in the Sixties, which inspired riots everywhere, came from the adolescent impulse to run the table. Unlike The Beatles, who were a still center in a swirling hurricane of love, The Rolling Stones sought out the high winds. They gleefully fanned the flames of discontent until the sweet kick of revolt became a turbulent act of mutiny. But once death greeted them with the passing of co-founder Brian Jones in 1969, and violence and murder answered them at the Altamont Speedway later that same year, the chickens finally came home to roost. From there, it was childhood's end. Their bad boy behavior quickly became a corporate brand of sanctified naughtiness. That branding not only insulated them from the tumult their concerts had created, but it would also rob their music in time of its pulsing vitality. Crossfire Hurricane, taken from the lyrics of their scorching masterpiece, "Jumpin' Jack Flash," is in many ways a coming of age story about the taming of artistic danger.

There's also an urgent quest to peel open the riddle behind that artistic danger (and its taming) throughout author and journalist Rich Cohen's (Tough Jews, The Avengers) captivating new book, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones (Spiegel & Grau, 2016), and it coils through the narrative like an electrical current seeking ground. Having been drawn to their music at ten, by an older brother who was exiled to the attic of their parents' home with his music, Cohen would ultimately become a writer and journalist covering The Stones as they toured in the Nineties (right at a time where their music was long passed the potency that once stirred him as an adolescent). Using the subject of time as a key metaphor to parse brilliance from longevity, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones (a gift title from Keith Richards who realizes that The Stones have been a constant in this young writer's life) is made up of fan notes that are cured in a quick critical eye. Cohen fully understands how the distance his generation has had from The Stones' greatest moments is both a handicap and a blessing. "Time would always separate me from these guys, from this generation," he writes without a trace of bitterness for being born at the wrong time. "Above us, the baby boomers., who consumed every resource and every kind of fun. Below us, the millennials, the children of the baby boomers, who've remade the world into something virtual and cold. The boomers consumed their childhood, then, in a sense, consumed our childhoods, too. They overimbibed, lived to such excess there's nothing left for us but to tell the story." Cohen's story has the power to shrink time so that each song he invokes quickly regains its ability to shock and surprise.

Even though he arrives late to the party so that he's removed from the linearity of The Stones' history and the impact their albums had as they arrived, Cohen chronicles their story as a flashback, from their beginnings as a blues band started by Brian Jones to their eventual flame out in the Seventies. But his distance from the Sixties is an advantage. It gives him both an ephemeral grasp of The Stones' artistic growth ("Art is not linear; it's circular. An artist does not improve, nor progress. He simply rides the wheel, waiting for the clouds to break and the sun to appear.") and an ambivalent relationship to that era ("This is where my generation, Generation X, parts company with the baby boomers. They ruined drugs, as they ruined Frye boots and bell-bottoms. We never shared their dream of opening the doors of perception, or touching the face of God. Because of them, enlightenment seemed like bullshit. All that remained was the high. With their embarrassing enthusiasm, they turned everything into a joke. They ate the fruit and left the peel, smoked the pot and left the resin, swallowed the epiphanies and left the reality.").


The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones is a refreshing read because we've already had far too many books that mythologize and sentimentalize the Sixties. To some degree they always end up deliberately, or inadvertently, condescending to those who weren't there. This gaudy display of self-importance wasn't something present in the World War Two generation. It could have only bloomed afterwards with Boomers in an era of prosperous entitlement that removed them from the pains of sacrifice. (Perhaps this is why, as Greil Marcus pointed out in an essay contained in his book on The Doors, there were never Benny Goodmanheads in the age of his parents just like there were Deadheads for his own generation.) But the later jaded attitude of Generation X and many millennials also resulted in a flaw where there was little trust for sentiment – even in its purest form. They preferred the emotional distance provided by sarcastic skepticism, a detachment that offered more control and emotional protection."My generation is hard-boiled in comparison [to Boomers]," Cohen writes. "Too much sentiment makes us uncomfortable, as we heard so much of it from the big brothers and big sisters who smoked pot under the bridge." The fading of ideals and deliberate rebellious stands can get old when it amounts to nothing more than success and prosperity, but the tale of The Rolling Stones (who embodied that arc) hasn't thankfully turned Cohen into a betrayed fan. Instead it has pushed him deeper into why being a fan creates a thirst for art.

Unlike rock biographies that turn their heroes into objects of fetishism, or others that seek to trash the cultural impact of their subject, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones neither lionizes nor spares its subject. What perspective has given Rich Cohen on The Stones is a means for him to see in his heroes the parts that make up the whole. "The Stones are a train rolling across a valley. I can see every car, the first and the last, the engine and the caboose, which gets smaller as it goes away." He says that you need to understand the end so that you can comprehend what was there in the beginning. That's why he claims the band as his life study whereby their story becomes his Hemingway, Dickens and Homer. Calling The Rolling Stones "a machine that runs on bodies," Cohen sees how they also chew them up. If the drug busts and the trial of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in the late Sixties was a blow to the body of the band, he also claims that it closed them off and separated them from their fans. (The Beatles had already retreated from their admirers after the violent 1966 tour forced them to quit the road and take refuge in the studio.) From there, the drug addiction and collapse of Brian Jones, which would ultimately lead to his firing and death, demonstrated to Cohen a single-minded survivalism that emerged in the band where no one dared get out this band alive. He calls Keith Richards "a trance-ridden melody"while Charlie Watts is the mercenary, "having chosen success over jazz." Bill Wyman is simply described as "the back line"(who would get out alive, but not unscathed in the wrath of Keith Richards). Yet it's in Mick Jagger that Cohen perceives the eternal Stone. In him, he sees the "cruel edge that bleeds into the music." Rather than the Lucifer image that has always fit him like a cloak, Cohen defines Jagger more clearly as pure show business, "a pop version of the classic Hollywood diva, for whom the show must go on, for who obscurity is even more terrifying than death." Beyond the narcissist who craves his own reflection, for Cohen, Jagger seeks to generate "tremendous light, but little heat. People crave that light but get no sustenance from it. It destroys them."

There's such a gliding intelligence in Cohen's writing in The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones that however familiar their story is to us, it still remains fresh and vital. Cohen's perceptions into their songs might not always open up the underlying impact of their appeal (in the way that Devin McKinney's superb Magic Circles did for The Beatles), but you can still hear the raw notes buzzing in his prose. When he tackles the violence at the free concert at Altamont the writing is sure and sound, even when he is missing a number of facts. (For that, you need to read music journalist Joel Selvin's recent unsparing account, Altamont: The Rolling Stones, The Hells Angels, And The Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day (William Morrow, 2016), which parses fearlessly through the hubris, the ugliness and the naivete of that horrible event.) But he senses, as Morgen did in Crossfire Hurricane, that Altamont was a crucible that unleashed a cruelty that always hummed menacingly in their tunes. "At Altamont, the spectators were beaten by the Stones' own security – the band had loosed the furies on its own fans." Not only that, but the violence this time didn't enhance the Stones and their image, it instead left Jagger "overmatched" and "powerless." Far from being destroyed, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones shows what happens when a vibrant rock band becomes an institution that can survive tests even when they don't pass them. Rich Cohen, who also helped develop HBO's moribund Vinyl with Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese, reveals with much more satisfaction and clarity the seductive power that lies under the hunger for freedom that rock always promised. But given the cost of that promise for The Rolling Stones, however, it's more clear than ever why you can't always get what you want even when you sometimes get what you need.

-- September 6/16

A Game of Chance: The Criterion Blu-ray Release of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)


Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Some forty-five years after its initial release, Robert Altman's seductive and allusive 1971 western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, still has the potency of a dream you don't wish to wake from. And as dreams distort the familiar, Altman's picture also alters our sense of reality and transforms the genre's myths we've come to recognize into a lingering reverie of the past. Despite a script, based on an Edmund Naughton 1959 novel (McCabe), Altman doesn't just tell a story here; he lets one unfold intuitively as our narratives often do in life and from directions we can't predict and with outcomes we can't anticipate. The howling wind that opens the film may push gambler John McCabe (Warren Beatty) towards his fate in the growing town of Presbyterian Church (just as it will later bury him in the snow), but Altman is also playing a game of chance, and destiny is as much a crap shoot as the changing weather. While the camera pans right, the credits move horizontally to the left, turning our field of vision into a peripheral map that's always in search of a focal point. It sets us up beautifully for an elliptical tale where the meanings are delineated from between the lines of the story. Robert Altman might draw from the sources of the western, but he does it as if he were trying to uncork an old undiscovered bottle that once stored its essence.

The idea of the stranger who goes out to settle a growing town is a familiar archetype from many American westerns. But Beatty's McCabe doesn't ride nobly on his horse through the barren prairie landscape the way John Wayne, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, or Alan Ladd once did. Riding in the rain through a lush forest and buried in a mammoth fur coat that seems to be swallowing him up, Beatty plays McCabe as a foolhardy dreamer who flies a lot of flags but without the benefit of a flagpole. His uncertainty is also part of his appeal and it leaves him open to various stories of mistaken identity (including one that he is a famous gunfighter, 'Pudgy' McCabe, who killed a cheater in a card game). But it also renders him vulnerable to circumstances that become his tragic undoing. Despite his unmoored ambitions of making the town prosperous and with the best whorehouse in the county, McCabe is still a man disguised the way a poker player keeps his true face masked and his cards close to his bosom – that is, until Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) comes to town.


McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a romantic story about unlikely romantic partners. While McCabe establishes a loosely functioning brothel, the cockney Constance Miller comes to town to show him how he could run it more profitably. Once they become business partners, and the brothel and town starts to prosper, McCabe also begins to fall in love with Mrs. Miller. But where McCabe lives in his dreams and is given to self-deprecation, Mrs. Miller is a strict pragmatist who only surrenders to her whims when she lights up her opium pipe. They are each other's opposites. But they are drawn together like moths to a candle because one completes the other. The inarticulate McCabe, who says he has poetry in him (but also the sense not to write it down), is mesmerized by her cool confidence and that gives him substance (despite her "freezing his soul," as he puts it). For Constance, McCabe is the kind of man she seldom encounters: he wishes to put a smile on her face. Whereas she is used to being in control, and not accustomed to men seeking to make her happy, McCabe opens her up to areas of defenselessness she'd rather not touch.

It's rare to find gifted movie stars who can give the kind of unaffected performances both Beatty and Christie provide here. As good as Warren Beatty was as the callow Clyde Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde, or as the communist idealist, John Reed, in Reds, his moments of reticence in both those pictures came across as self-conscious attempts to deflect the attraction of the light. But in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Beatty gives in to John McCabe's unsureness, and his braggart's pose comes across, as critic Paul Coates described it in his book, The Story of the Lost Reflection, as "a man trying to hold a map straight in the wind." Beatty shows us how the movie star attracts the light while the actor inside provides the flame that gives it the glow. Julie Christie similarly shines with the varnished radiance of what Pauline Kael called "an animal hiding in its own fur." Christie turns down the heat as Mrs. Miller in order to hide the secret flame she holds for McCabe.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which was shot in West Vancouver and Squamish, is a movie in flux and always in process of discovering itself, just as the town is slowly being constructed as the picture goes on. Characters come and go, but they make their impressions felt – whether it's the obsequious presence of the bartender Sheehan (René Auberjonois), the toothy smile of a young hooker (Shelley Duvall), or the touching, brief presence of Cowboy (Keith Carradine), a boy trying to fill a big hat who is doomed to a tragic end born of bad timing. The people in Presbyterian Church are able to move freely as if they are not held in the frame by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond's translucent eye. (Zsigmond's illustrious work was made even more striking by this new restoration in 4K Blu-ray for the Criterion Collection. The picture's soft focus, originally created by 'flashing' the negative with light, shows the rain and snow falling from the sky like droplets of paint continuously dotting the screen.)

As the town grows more prosperous, it draws the attention of the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company, which tries to make a deal with McCabe to sell his holdings. Partly to impress Mrs. Miller, but also trying to use his gambler's sense, he overplays his hand in refusing their agents Sears (Michael Murphy) and Hollander (Antony Holland). Before he can reassess his offer, however, bounty hunters are sent to kill McCabe to obtain the town and make an example of him. While the threat of violence to the civilized man is key to every western, and is why the settler is never allowed to live in the home he's trying to create, the finale of McCabe and Mrs. Miller goes against the grain of the formal gun battle that settles those scores. In every western from Shane to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the gun battle between the righteous settler and the outlaw becomes the story's centerpiece. But Altman contrasts McCabe's fate with the distracted townsfolk trying desperately to put out a fire at the local church (an institution no one has ever attended except for the mad preacher who occupies it and whose lantern accidentally sets it ablaze when he's shot). As the three bounty hunters go after McCabe in the freezing snow, an institution that ties America to its Puritan heritage becomes more valuable than the human life left to die in the drifts.


Robert Altman once described McCabe and Mrs. Miller as an "anti-Western," but it really isn't. Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, with its degrading narcissism and self-reflexive parodism, is probably better defined as an "anti-western"; McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which is perfumed with a frangible melancholy, illuminates the romance of the Western rather than punishing us for believing in it. Altman meditates on its essential themes instead of trashing them. Those themes include the contradictory heart of the country's ideals, where the idea of the lone individual never reconciles with the notion of a civilized country where all men are created equal. Those thoughts are given full value, too, in the delicate ballads of Leonard Cohen ("The Stranger Song," "Sisters of Mercy," "Winter Lady"). Cohen's music, which wasn't composed for the film, seems to come from what Paul Coates calls "the inner voice to which the characters alone attend." Cohen doesn't provide emotional cues to nudge us into a mood; he creates one instead. Altman lets Cohen's music speak for the unacknowledged inner lives of the characters on the screen. "[E]ven on the frontier, people walked around with headphones on," Coates goes on to observe. The Seventies audience at this movie, who did own records and even had headphones, came to imagine that the gambler John McCabe was actually living out that experience heard in "The Stranger Song."

Seen today, John McCabe appears to reach across the decades, beyond the movie's time period and into the age of the Walkman and MP3 player, to perform his own shuffle mix to suit his mood. Maybe McCabe selected "The Stranger Song" as his own because, after all, he was indeed "a Joseph looking for a manger." No doubt fully aware of the pop dreams of the movie audience in 1971, Robert Altman was also in tune with the era's music. Cohen's songs, like cryptic parables, were already being shared by people discovering new ways to walk and talk. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a period movie, but Altman understood, to paraphrase music critic Jim Miller, that popular music was common experience and personal obsession. So much so that he knew the film audience would end up accepting the idea of John McCabe having his own theme song, one that had the power to protect him from the slowly falling drizzle in the lush forest. "The Stranger Song" and "Winter Lady" were his tunes just as "Sisters of Mercy" speak later in the movie for the hookers who attend the desperate dreamers in that frontier town.

On the commentary track of the DVD, producer David Foster laments that if McCabe and Mrs. Miller had a happier ending, where Mrs. Miller was able to save John McCabe from his terrible fate, the picture might have been a hit in 1971. He put me in mind of Brian de Palma's political thriller Blow Out, made ten years later, which also suffered at the box office due to a tragic ending, where the hero couldn't save the woman he loved. But both films, staying true to the dynamics of their stories and transcending the tropes of their different genres, found their audience in time. They did it by having the nerve to reverse our expectations for safety and security and instead trusted in our ability to demand more from the screen than to be placated.

-- November 9/16

Savvy and Sullied: Clint Eastwood's Sully



Clint Eastwood's intermittently gripping biographical drama, Sully, depicts Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger's emergency landing in January 2009 of a passenger jet on the Hudson River, which resulted in his becoming a national hero when all 155 passengers and crew survived (some with only minor injuries). Based on Sullenberger's autobiography Highest Duty (co-written with Jeffrey Zaslow), Eastwood's Sully is after more, however, than simply celebrating a hero who gambled on his years of experience to pull off a risky landing that could have been catastrophic had it failed. With Tom Hanks in the role of Sully, the picture attempts, often successfully, to contrast the growing acclaim in the media and public for a man who pulled off a miracle with the troubled mind of a veteran pilot who suffers the dread of someone who maybe just got lucky.

With a script by Todd Komarnicki, Sully is at its best when it gets into the area of how our conditioned responses are sometimes inappropriate when dealing with matters out of our control. For Sully, this flight is one of many, where his skills at flying are already a relaxed reflex that takes everything into consideration. But when a number of Canada geese unexpectedly fly directly into his two engines and disable them, he has to quickly move out of that comfort zone and into gambled probabilities. Not only does Sully have to work against time, but he and his copilot, Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), have to quickly agree on a course of action that doesn't come with any guarantees of success. For the public and the media cheering the ultimate outcome, there's an equally set response: people -- naturally eager to celebrate a happy story involving crashing airplanes in New York City eight years after 9/11 -- can't see that, despite the results, the man they're now acclaiming as Superman is currently struggling with his own Kryptonite. Sully is about how technology teaches us to acquiesce to its perfection in order to give us the security of control, but that in reality, that belief can be a trap when life suddenly intervenes and trips us up. Using IMAX cameras to depict various versions, from different viewpoints, of the take-off, the crash and rescue, cinematographer Tom Stern creates a widescreen map not unlike the landscape of a huge video game, but he wisely provides the kind of editing and movement that humanize the screen so that we feel the impending anxiety of losing control.

As Sully, Tom Hanks digs in with the kind of wiry trepidation he showed in Paul Greengrass's Captain Phillips,where you could feel echoes of hysteria bleeding through his pores. Unlike in Bridge of Spies, where Hanks played one note of decency – and doggedly – for the entire picture, his Sully is a concerto of conflicting emotions. What keeps Sully grounded in the aftermath is the relaxed and canny interplay he has with Eckhart's Skiles. Their jiving camaraderie has some of the same kick that Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood had as buddies in Unforgiven. (When Skiles informs Sully that he Googled him and discovered his safety consulting business website, he says, “I read all about your company. “Man, I thought I was a good bullshitter, but you take the cake!”) Eastwood's work with the actors is better than usual – from Patch Darragh's hugely empathetic portrait of New York air traffic controller Patrick Harten to Michael Rapaport's local bartender, who creates a drink honouring Sully, a shot of Grey Goose with a splash of water. In American Sniper, Eastwood stayed outside the inner dimensions of his protagonist, but in Sully he provides far more psychological subtext to both the main character and the story.

Aaron Eckhart and Tom Hanks in Sully

But where Eastwood shows less generosity and imagination is in the depiction of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which investigates the crash. In real life the investigation took over a year and a half to conclude, but here it is immediate and also unduly hostile to the pilots. It makes no sense to turn the three agents (played by Mike O'Malley, Anna Gunn and Jamey Sheridan) into villains vying to be The Grand Inquisitor, unless you wish – to use a bad pun – to sully your drama with melodrama so that you can reveal the NTSB to be bureaucratic automatons who need to find their human hearts (which, predictably, they do by the end). This descent into playground polemics also hurts the structure of the film. When Sully needs to touch the ground he calls his wife, Lorraine (Laura Linney), who gets to do nothing more than wring her hands and complain that if he loses his job their family, which includes two daughters, could fall into financial ruin, and to bemoan the fact that, in the aftermath of the crash, the investigation delays their reunion. (Over a year and a half, the real Sully had plenty of time to visit his family.) You don't get a clear picture of their marriage here in the same way you did when you saw the hotshot pilots in Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff commune with their partners. Sully is either isolated and on the hot seat or walking into makeshift victory parades put on by New Yorkers and the media.

Some of the best scenes in Sully actually made me think of parts of The Right Stuff because that movie – sadly underrated at the time – also had an interest in issues of control, technology, the media and heroism. When Gus Grissom (Fred Ward), in a moment of terror, blows the hatch of his space capsule after he lands, he immediately blames the technology because he can't face the fact that, after all his training, he might suffer from human weakness. It may seem unusual that Clint Eastwood, who months before Trump's victory talked about America as a nation of "pussies," would plunge into a more complicated view of heroism. Sully has more savvy than anything he's done since Space Cowboys, yet his need to turn the NTSB into a collection of paper tigers points more directly to his libertarian Republicanism. This is a rather fascinating divided heart never seen in a Clint Eastwood movie before. Eastwood can bring out the troubled soul of a pilot who resists being turned into a machine, but he can't resist turning a regulating government body of troubled souls into machines. Even Dirty Harry would have a hard time resolving that conundrum.

-- November 19/16

The Masculine Mystique: Bobby Roth's Heartbreakers (1984)


Nick Mancuso and Peter Coyote in Heartbreakers

Many claim the subject of male bonding, and the way women become the battlefield where men act out (and often avoid) their competitiveness with each other, to be the domain of John Cassavetes (Faces, Husbands). But I often found the verbal punch-ups between macho guys in his pictures to be ultimately quite wearying. In Bobby Roth's seldom-seen Heartbreakers, the guys aren't frustrated blowhards and the women they're drawn to aren't mere victims of their bluster. Roth sets up his drama, which is set in Los Angeles, in terms of the dynamics that both trap and propel his characters into the relationships they choose, away from the ones they choose to avoid, and into the damage they're not conscious of causing each other. Heartbreakers is less about finding fault in the battle of the genders and more about indulging a curiosity about that battle and what it reveals of the warriors who engage in it.

Peter Coyote plays Blue, an artist who is drawn to fetishism in his paintings of women. Blue is always at the mercy of his obsessions; his current model, Candy (Carol Wayne), a voluptuous subject dressed up in S&M garb, is being painted in a style suggestive of the work of Alberto Vargas, whose pin-ups usually combined both water colour and airbrush. As much as Blue lives in the moment of his appetites, he also flaunts his bohemian independence, much to the frustration of his partner, Syd (Kathryn Harrold), who is growing tired of his emotional distance and is beginning to crave the security of a more committed relationship. What Roth enables us to see – and what the characters themselves don't – is that Blue's self-reliance is also his defense against an emotional dependence on Syd. Meanwhile, she is quickly coming to the realization that her needs are always at the mercy of Blue's whims. Eli (Nick Mancuso), Blue's best friend, is his opposite number. Having inherited his father's garment business, which he hates, he has financial security at his fingertips. Yet he spends his evenings seeking a series of casual affairs with women that allow him to avoid feeling emotionally involved (even though he says he desires to be). When Syd leaves Blue for a rival popular artist, King (Max Gail, of Barney Miller), who has no problem making compromises in order to be successful, Blue becomes unmoored by the breakup. He turns to his buddy Eli, who has just become smitten with Liliane (Carole Laure), a dark, slinking beauty who works for the art gallery about to launch Blue's new show. She becomes the battleground where Blue and Eli are forced to confront their true feelings for each other.

Kathryn Harrold and Peter Coyote

If at times the writing gets a little too explicit in stating its themes, Heartbreakers creates a sonorous mood where the film achieves a certain poignancy through its aching melancholy. With the electronic sounds of Tangerine Dream percolating on the soundtrack, Heartbreakers gets carried along by the moods set by the characters in their hunt for pleasure and satisfaction. (These shifting moods are aided by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, whose neon vibrancy in the night scenes is contrasted by the smudged pastel colours in the morning scenes.) While it's clear that Syd still loves Blue for his passion, King offers her the security that Blue can't. (Max Gail's King has more depths of passion in his personal life than he does in his paintings.) Liliane is sexually bold, but emotionally remote and mysterious, which creates endless frustration for Eli, who feels he's met his twin – except she accepts her own detachment in way that he can't accept his own. That quality makes her more a perfect catch for Blue. What motivates both Blue and Eli to compete over the women they've chosen is their inability to face the issues in their own friendship. What Heartbreakers does most successfully is get at the ugly competitiveness that lurks beneath the strong ties between males.

Perhaps the best scene illustrating that male rivalry takes place in a dance club where Eli and Blue go with Liliane. While Liliane wishes to dance with Eli, he decides to force Blue to dance with her instead so he can watch, while seething masochistically from the sidelines, as his best friend bonds with the girlfriend he can't connect with emotionally. (Despite the obviousness of using Pat Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield" as the accompanying song, the driving force of the tune and Benatar's grieving vocal beautifully underscore Eli's torment.) Eli envies what he perceives as Blue's freedom, his being his own man, where Eli sees himself at the mercy of his father whose world he's inherited and feels trapped in. That envy also fuels his unacknowledged hatred of his friend for having what he can't claim for himself: someone who once loved him like Syd. But what Eli doesn't see is Blue's own jealousy of Eli's security. "Everything is so fucking easy for you," he tells Eli late in the picture. But things aren't so easy for Eli because he covets the intimacy that Blue and Syd shared, which he couldn't abide. "I only wanted her after you were with her," he tells Blue about his own secret desire for Syd. But the emotional crosscurrents between Eli and Blue about women also speak to what they can't express to each other about their own friendship. "We're not kids," Blue realizes by the end, acknowledging tensions both men have chosen to ignore for years.

Peter Coyote, Nick Mancuso and Carole Laure

Peter Coyote's long and limber body adds perfect character lines for a painter whose autonomy is both his shield and his badge of integrity. He can be as flexible as he needs to be while still appealing to those women who mistakenly see him as emotionally available. (Carol Wayne reveals a sweet vulnerability as Candy, who first appears formidable in her leather garb, but later uncovers a delicacy when, hurt, she recognizes that Blue's alleged affection for her is really the selfish sentiments of a man only concerned with the spark he needs to paint his subjects.) Nick Mancuso brings the brooding and mysterious shadings of an urban Heathcliff whose handsomeness masks loneliness and isolation. But if Roth gets a pretty good fix on the men, he doesn't provide enough material for Carole Laure to help us understand her motivation in this triangle. Although her detachment in relationships suits the story, we never see what her detachment hides. (She had more layers when she played a similar character in Bertrand Blier's Get Out Your Handkerchiefs.)

Curiously, Heartbreakers hadn't opened commercially when I first saw it on pay television in 1984, but in the next few weeks good reviews by critic John Harkness in Toronto's NOW magazine and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker seemed to prompt Orion Pictures to give the film a brief commercial run. While it came out eventually on videotape, it has yet to see the light of day on DVD, or to be available for streaming anywhere. That's heartbreaking.

Coda: You may be lucky to still find Heartbreakers streaming on YouTube from someone's upload of their original VHS tape.

-- December 6/16

A Tragedy in Time: Keith Maitland's Tower


Pregnant freshman Claire James and her boyfriend, Tom Eckman, moments before they're shot in Tower

On August 1st 1966, after first murdering his mother and then his wife, Charles Whitman, a mentally ill 25-year-old engineering student, climbed to the top of the campus tower of the University of Texas and began shooting randomly, hitting 49 people and killing 17. Up until the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, this horrible tragedy was the deadliest school shooting in American history. Most of the accounts have focused primarily on the shooter, and how his father was a violent and abusive man who regularly beat his wife and son. There were also stories of Charles Whitman's fascination for guns from a very young age until, as an adult, he became a marine and learned how to use them effectively. Some reports even suggested that an undiagnosed brain tumour may have contributed to his deteriorating mental state. His story has been told in many true crime documentaries. He was the subject of James Jameson's drama The Deadly Tower (1975) with Kurt Russell in the role of Whitman. Singer/songwriter Harry Chapin ("Taxi," "Cats in the Cradle") wrote an epic folk tale, "Sniper," in 1972, which was loosely based on the killer. "[T]he earnestness with which Chapin imbued his folksy love songs serves this macabre subject well," wrote critic Sean T. Collins. "Chapin is no more able to hide behind irony or ambiguity here than he is in his more romantic work, forcing the audience to come directly to terms with the horror of the sniper attack, and the tortured character of the sniper himself." As with most mass murders, we remember the perpetrator of the crime, that "tortured character" Collins identifies – a nobody who through an act of horror becomes a somebody – but rarely do we remember the victims, who end up, ironically, as anonymous as the killer himself was before his shocking deed.

In Keith Maitland's heartbreaking and powerfully affecting documentary, Tower, the focus shifts from Charles Whitman to the people he attacked, to those who helped the victims, and to the individuals who ultimately stopped him. Based on a 40th anniversary piece, "96 Minutes," by Pamela Colloff in Texas Monthly, which was an oral history of the events told from the perspective of the victims, Maitland has done likewise in an imaginative and compelling dramatic fashion. He's also found a complex and fascinating way to tell a heroic story in the face of such horror. We get an intimate account of a number of people caught up in an unimaginable nightmare and see how they responded in a variety of unpredictable ways. Colloff provides the proper context for this unprecedented event in the introduction to her piece:

Before 9/11, before Columbine, before the Oklahoma City bombing, before “going postal” was a turn of phrase, the 25-year-old [Whitman] ushered in the notion that any group of people, anywhere—even walking around a university campus on a summer day—could be killed at random by a stranger. The crime scene spanned the length of five city blocks, from Twentieth to Twenty-fifth Streets, bounded by Guadalupe (“the Drag”) to the west and Speedway to the east, and covered the nerve center of what was then a relatively small, quiet college town. Hundreds of students, professors, tourists, and store clerks witnessed the 96-minute killing spree as they crouched behind trees, hid under desks, took cover in stairwells, or, if they had been hit, played dead.

She also goes further by responding as well to the aftermath, where shock and trauma turned to a denial of history; people decided to stop the clock and pretend the time never happened:

Both the Associated Press and United Press International would rank the shootings as the second most important story of the year, behind only the war in Vietnam. But until 1999, when the university dedicated a memorial garden near the Tower to the victims, the only physical reminder on campus of what had taken place were the few remaining bullet holes left in its limestone walls. (Many of the original scars had, over the years, been filled in with plaster.) No plaques had ever been displayed, no list of names read, no memorial services held. Decades of institutional silence had turned the shootings, and Whitman himself, into the answers to trivia questions. But, of course, there was nothing at all trivial about that day.

Maitland likewise avoids the trivia and denial and brings the horrific immediacy of this 1966 event into the present, where school shootings have become commonplace. He accomplishes this, in part, by allowing the story to unfold as it happens, through the remembered accounts of a few of the key people who were victims and heroes that day. Their stories – taken directly from the interviews Colloff did for her article – bring the shock of an innocence being shattered by bullets fired with no specific target in mind. Since many had never talked about the events before, their memories heard as we watch these events unfold provide a fresh perspective. It's as if fifty years have melted away and the wounds are still in need of healing. We are also aware (despite the apolitical approach of the picture) that we have been plunged into the Vietnam War era where values in the country were starting to change dramatically. It was almost three years after JFK was assassinated in another part of Texas and student radicalism was beginning to have impact on campuses. At the beginning of Tower, the first two victims of the sniper, pregnant freshman Claire James and her boyfriend, Tom Eckman, are seen reading the Port Huron Statement by the Students for a Democratic Society moments before he is murdered and she is wounded and her unborn child is killed. At another moment, an off-duty police officer hearing of the shooting on his radio starts imagining that the revolution has started and the Black Panthers have fired the first round. Tower catches a country in transition, when a political and cultural storm is brewing but nobody yet knows what form it will take. Charles Whitman, with his boy scout demeanor and All-American good looks, gives us the first view of the dark shadow that lurks behind the mythical masculine ideal that will be shattered by the end of the decade.


Since the university was not open to the idea of Maitland recreating the shooting on the campus, he had to find alternate ways to tell this story. Out of necessity, he combined rotoscoped animation of actors playing out the story in his backyard with news footage interspersed with contemporary filmed interviews. But images from the past and present are so smoothly integrated that Tower feels like a thriller being told in real time. (Tower isn't literally told in real time, but the film originally ran 96 minutes, exactly how long Whitman took to shoot his targets until he was killed by local police who pursued him into his perch.) The animated portions are beautifully cut, with the propulsion of a graphic novel where we are compellingly drawn to each image as the pages of the story flip by in the blinking of an eye. I would rather not go into detail about the tales told by various individuals in the movie to avoid spoiling some of the revelations. But I will say that, despite the unspeakable terror that Tower evokes, the documentary includes an extraordinary number of characters who found a bravery within themselves and had a startling impact on the tragedy, just as those who hid have lived with a horrible sense of guilt, feeling they could have done more. Tower passes judgement, however, on no one, but rather lets each individual find his or her own sense of self.

What makes Tower such an original documentary, besides Maitland's technique, is how it deals with the concept of time. Besides demonstrating (as I mentioned above) the way newly acknowledged repressed memories can melt away time, the picture turns the tragedy into time sequences: some people see themselves as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, while others turn out to be in the right place at the right time. Tower also resists using songs as nostalgia. The tunes are heard from radios, decorating time either to create a mood or to contrast it. Maitland takes in the idea of time as continuity: people mark their moment by the random songs they hear (just as they do when they ask you where you were when Kennedy was shot, or what you were doing when 9/11 happened). We hear The Mamas and the Papas' "Monday, Monday," playing on a radio show in Austin -- its opening lyrics are "Oh, Monday morning / Monday morning couldn't guarantee / That Monday evening you would still / Be here with me" -- just before someone loses a partner to a bullet, but Maitland isn't trying to make an ironic point with it; the person who lost her lover actually recalls hearing that song before the bullets struck. A policeman hears Stonewall Jackson's portentous "Waterloo" on the radio ("Waterloo, Waterloo, where will you meet your Waterloo / Every puppy has his day, everybody has to pay / Everybody has to meet his Waterloo") just before he gets called to the campus to investigate the carnage and live out the warning in that song. We hear The Lovin' Spoonful's "Daydream," a lazy song about getting lost in time, just as people are hearing the news. Donovan's innocent "Colors" underscores a tender moment between two lovers in the early days of their relationship - but we hear that song as part of her memory. Meanwhile her partner is bleeding to death on the hot pavement beside her. People are conscious of time throughout the movie, especially as they speak about the events before them. The killer is even shooting at them from under a big clock in the bell tower – marking time and killing time as well as people. Tower is a remarkable time capsule that transcends the moments it depicts.

-- December 20/16

Curve Ball: Paul Verhoeven's Elle


Isabelle Huppert and silent witness in Elle

In the opening scene of Paul Verhoeven's Elle, Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) is raped in her home by an assailant in a ski mask while her grey tabby cat quietly looks on. What Michèle feels about the violent assault, and how she will respond to it, are initially as mysterious to us as trying to read the thoughts of the feline who witnessed it. Afterwards, Michèle simply cleans up the mess and proceeds to have a hot bath, where, in the soap bubbles, she gathers the rising blood from her genitals into a miniature sculpture – and soon afterwards shares a contentious dinner with her son where they argue about the woman in his life. For those used to seeing genre films where rape, murder and betrayal get answered and explained in predicable ways, and can (in the worst pictures) even get exploited to heat up our blood lust, Elle goes completely against the grain. Rather than play to the most melodramatic kind of cause and effect – where sociology and dogmatism replace polymorphous sexuality and psychopathology – Verhoeven sets up a maze of possibilities to characterize a woman who doesn't get pinned down and defined by her circumstances. Not only will that approach upset those who have specific, narrow views of what constitutes rape victim response, but Elle doesn't even tell you if Michèle's behaviour grows out of the trauma of the assault. In fact, the more we get to know her, the more we see that any number of disturbing and bizarre moments have shaped her life. Elle builds its strength and its power by throwing curve balls at our expectations so that we have no choice but to take the character – and the movie – on its own terms rather than the terms we wish to impose on it.

Paul Verhoeven is no stranger to controversy, of course, having already established himself in the Netherlands years ago as its resident enfant terrible in films like Spetters (1980) and The Fourth Man (1983) with their explicit sexuality and hyperbolic violence. Yet despite the furor, his early work lacked the depth of a true taboo breaker because his rebelliousness often came across as impulsive and obvious. Drawing mustaches on sacred cows had the benefit of setting him apart from his targets and earning him the glory of a bad boy who had the smarts to see through all that bourgeois hypocrisy. There may have been movie-making vitality in those bold strokes of his, but the pictures soared on their sensationalism. Not to mention that Verhoeven didn't identify with the targets of his wrath so their social and ethical compromises never got under his skin. He was always on the right side – and so was the audience. This same problem persisted, but in a different way, when he came to America to make Hollywood genre pictures. Attempting to explode their clichés, he merely created new ones that appealed to a younger, attempting-to-be-hip audience rebelling against Hollywood's blockbuster obsessions in the Eighties. In Robocop (1987), a cyberpunk crime thriller, the satiric point of social decay was so transparent and leaden that the movie was bludgeoning rather than illuminating. Starship Troopers (1997), with its heavy-metal Aryan SF satire, got so swallowed up by its own subject that it looked and felt like Aryan propaganda. The bland woodenness of the performers turned out not to be so much a deliberate joke on the genre as merely a fact of bad acting. Verhoeven was more safely in his comfort zone with the erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992), where he heated up the pulp without feeling the need to trash it. As for Showgirls (1995), it was tabloid junk right out of Valley of the Dolls but – despite all the critical grief he got for it – he gave himself over to the picture's purple prose instead of condescending to it. Showgirls had a lurid pulse that gave off a buzz that pictures of that kind seldom do.

Laurent Lafitte and Isabelle Huppert

In Elle, though, he's plumbing whole new dramatic depths and with the authority of a master director. It's the best material he's worked with yet (including his WW II drama, Black Book). Based on the novel, Oh..., by Phillipe Dijon (the author of Betty Blue), and with a screenplay by David Birke (Freeway Killer), Elle is a both a psychodrama and drama of morals where Verhoeven, who sets the film in France, probes the social institutions that hide and protect transgressive behaviour. As in Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (which Verhoeven has openly described as an influence and pays tribute to it in one scene), Michèle and her family and friends are all bound by the social and class institutions that blind them to their own behaviour. In the past, Verhoeven happily heaped anger on those institutions with the relish of a young and bold Luis Buñuel, but in Elle, he moves closer to the later, older Buñuel of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in which he came to terms with the foibles of the middle class and chose to satirize them from the inside. In both cases, the absurdist humour grows out of the conduct of these characters rather than simply from the director's attack on them.

Although we find out more about Michèle after the rape, all it does is scramble our feelings about her ongoing behaviour rather than summing things up; the story doesn't necessarily follow the action. Michèle is the CEO of a successful video game company, where the men who work under her both resent and idolize her. The games they devise mirror the violence she has endured, but that reflection doesn't define who she is and why she's in charge. (We aren't even sure if the culprit who attacked her is one of her employees.) She is the daughter of an incarcerated serial killer who is coming up for parole, but what we learn about the childhood trauma is only that she has an intense hatred for her father and even deeper suspicions about the authorities because of how they investigated the case. Michèle is having an affair with Robert (Christian Berkel), the husband of her best friend and business partner, Anna (Anne Consigny), yet that fact neither explains her sexual behaviour nor conveys any jealousy of Anna.

When Michèle becomes erotically transfixed on her neighbour, Patrick (Laurent Lafitte), a blandly handsome banker, it stirs the darker underpinnings of his marriage. His devout wife, Rebecca (Virginie Efira), clings to him as a lost soul to be saved. Again, however, rather than suggest a motivation for Patrick and Michèle's mutual obsession, this portrait of hsi marriage creates opportunity instead for playing out the drama between them unpredictably. In other words, Verhoeven doesn't provide pat answers for the pathology of his characters – especially Michèle – but instead allows them the autonomy to breathe their own air. Isabelle Huppert has been breathing her own air for some time and displaying surprising daring in a number of roles. Early in her career, when she appeared in pictures like Coup de Torchon (1981) and Heaven's Gate (1980), Huppert was an opaque presence that you couldn't truly account for. But in recent years she has become an actress of subtle strength. In Elle, Huppert sets the mood of the picture rather than becoming an instrument of it and she gives a stunning performance of measured control. Michèle is not a victim of others – even when she is raped – but a woman who uses fortuity to test herself as if she's tempting the demon within. Huppert is the still, yet tightly wound, center of a cast of characters who slowly revolve around her as if she's a mystery to be unraveled.

There's a radical new realism blooming in the impressionistic shades of Elle. The dynamic cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine is so luxuriantly dark and rich, it enhances the movie's disquieting suspense and helps assure that it never feels laboured. Anne Dudley's score, with its hints of Bernard Herrmann, brews on low heat in the background. Elle is as symphonic in its orchestration as Basic Instinct, but Verhoeven is so relaxed with each movement that he resists the scherzos that used to jack up his scenes (like the scatological Marat/Sade madhouse sequence in Black Book). Ultimately, Elle does satisfy the mechanics of the thriller genre by resolving the opening rape scene, but Verhoeven doesn't do it mechanically. Instead he works from the plausibility in the story. Elle is one of the rare suspense pictures that has such supple depth and assurance that it doesn't need to work the audience over with dread. Rather it locates the dread that lurks under the surface of our civilization and all its discontents. Verhoeven's bad-boy laugh is no longer a guffaw.

-- December 27/16



                                                                   2017

Apocalypse Man: Charlton Heston Revisited



In 2008, when actor Charlton Heston died from pneumonia at the age of 84, he had already long characterized himself in movies as something of an icon of American strength and endurance. His profile before the camera always seemed as if it were chiseled in rock and eventually destined for Mount Rushmore – a formidable figure built to scale heights and widen movie screens. Which is why he was the perfect candidate for epics: whether playing the patriarch Moses in The Ten Commandments, the noble Christian Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar in El Cid, or Judah, the Jew who converts to Christianity, in Ben-Hur, he had the broad-shouldered physique and authority to carry the weight of their piety. Even if you could always dismiss the movies, you couldn't quite reject Heston. But his strength was paradoxical. While the strong, silent heroes like John Wayne and Gary Cooper wore stoicism as their badge, Heston brought a grandeur to his roles, as if he truly believed he were a prophet delivering the word. The disappointment and the pain of defeat in the face of failure were equally epic. Charlton Heston was not be a man to go quietly into the dark night. By the time he was addressing the National Rifle Association at their convention in 2000, holding a raised rifle over his head to declare to Democratic presidential candidate, Al Gore, that he would have to take his gun "from my cold, dead hands," it wasn't simply political rhetoric. Heston's defiance was theatrical in its intent and scaled as large as the movies he made.

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, after two decades of devoted liberalism, Heston played roles in a handful of movies that put the idea of American exceptionalism to the test. A Democrat for most of the Sixties, he was one of a handful of actors who joined Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington in 1963. In 1964, he supported Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act and publicly opposed California Proposition 14 , which rolled back the state's fair housing law. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June 1968, Heston joined with James Stewart, Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas to support President Johnson's Gun Control Act. He would go on to support the candidacy of Hubert Humphrey for President. But that same spring, in a film that opened nationally mere days before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Charlton Heston appeared in Franklin J.Schaffner's Planet of the Apes, a film that opened nationally mere days before King's assassination, in a role that seemed to mirror a growing disillusionment, as if every prophetic part he ever played were about to turn into a sick joke. But he wasn't the butt of that joke; his character was simultaneously the hero and the anti-hero.

The ending of The Planet of the Apes

In the movie, based on Pierre Boule's 1963 novel Monkey Planet, Heston plays astronaut George Taylor, a wise-ass cynic who volunteers for the space program because "there has to be something better out there besides man." He and his surviving crew crash-land in a lake on an unknown planet two millennia after their departure in 1972. Packing only cigars and plenty of attitude, as film critic Geoff Pevere once remarked, Heston's Taylor enjoys ribbing Landon (Robert Gunner) -- who plants a little American flag in the soil, as the astronauts on the moon would a year later -- for his good-natured patriotism and hopeful demeanor. Taylor is a hostile man, though his hostility isn't like John Wayne's in The Searchers, where the character's racism and misanthropy are shaped by a sense of loss and defeat in a war. Taylor's comes from an existential place, as he states in a Hamlet-like soliloquy that opens the picture, where he ponders who he is in the face of the great emptiness of space after leaving a planet where mankind always seemed on the brink of blowing itself up. The counter-culture was growing lost and traumatized by the end of 1968, and Taylor, too, has no ideals to motivate him -- just the instinct for survival and the power to govern. One look at the mute humans gathering food, and he comments dryly, "Pretty soon we'll be running this planet." But the joke turns out to be on Taylor: the planet they've landed on is ruled by simians and man is now the inferior species.

Heston's Taylor spends the movie running for his life and avoiding incarceration, lobotomy and castration at the hands of the simians, and he also seems to be reveling in his own physical prowess. (When he is stripped nude before a tribunal, we share Taylor's humiliation at the same time as the actor's ease with his own nakedness.) What makes Heston so appealing in the role is that irony doesn't diminish him; it humanizes him. "[W]e don't hate him, because he's so magnetically strong; he represents American power – the physical attraction and admiration one feels toward the beauty of strength as well as the moral revulsion one feels toward the ugliness of violence," critic Pauline Kael remarked of Heston in her review. When Taylor, finally having escaped from the apes, arrives at his destiny, he rides along the shore line to see what new world awaits him. The concluding scene, with its apocalyptic image, so striking for its time, releases a rage in Taylor that embodies the failure of all that American power. "You maniacs! You blew it up!," he cries out, as if finally recognizing his own powerlessness at stopping it from happening. Coming home hasn't provided the comfort it could have promised. It's as if Moses had suddenly lost the Ten Commandments, or as if his followers opted instead for Edward G. Robinson's Dathan and continued to party with the Golden Calf. Heston is no longer on the mountaintop shouting salvation. He's on his knees before the crippled Statue of Liberty humbled by all that is lost.

Charlton Heston and Rosalind Cash in The Omega Man

By the time Heston appears in The Omega Man (1971), based on the 1954 dystopian novel I Am Legend by the American writer Richard Matheson, he's traded that rage over the loss of a world for the portrait of a largely solitary man coming to terms with his fate. After biological warfare between Russia and China kills most of the world's population. Heston's Robert Neville is a scientist based in Los Angeles after biological warfare between Russia and China has killed most of the world's population. Neville is trying not to succumb to the plague that has wiped out the rest of the planet; when he begins to succumb, he injects himself with an experimental vaccine that renders him immune. While the rest of humanity turn into albino mutants known as The Family who come out at night, Neville spends his days musing to a bust of Caesar while playing chess ("Your move, Imperator"), and watching endless screenings of Woodstock (where Country Joe & the Fish entertain him with "Rock & Soul Music" and Arlo Guthrie reminds him of "Coming into Los Angeles") that lead him to retort, "They sure don't make pictures like that anymore." In Planet of the Apes, Taylor's cynicism turns out to be inadequate to his task; in The Omega Man, Neville's sarcasm leads him to wonder if things were ever any good to begin with. Nevertheless, he remains hopeful and comes up with a serum to help those who have turned. He even has a black girlfriend, Lisa (Rosalind Cash), a survivor he meets who eventually becomes a mutant and betrays him to The Family, though he manages to get the serum out before he dies. The love affair turned out to be revolutionary, with one of the first interracial kisses in Hollywood history. The casting of Cash was due to the growing influence of the Black Power movement in America by 1971. Heston later wrote in his autobiography, In the Arena, that The Omega Man was her debut film as a lead actress, and that kissing Heston made her more than "a little edgy." He wrote, "It was in the seventies that I realized a generation of actors had grown up who saw me in terms of the iconic roles they remembered from their childhoods. 'It's a spooky feeling,' she told me, 'to screw Moses.'"

Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green

In his final dystopian thriller, Soylent Green (1973), Heston plays a New York City police detective, Frank Thorn, in 2022, where 40 million live in squalor while homeless people fill the streets due to pollution, depleted resources, dying oceans, and the year-round humidity due to the greenhouse effect. Based loosely on Harry Harrison's Nebula Award-winning Make Room! Make Room! (1966), Soylent Green focuses on the murder of one of New York's wealthy elites, which may be an assassination rather than a random crime. With the help of his aged friend, the police analyst Sol Roth (Edward G.Robinson), Thorn uncovers not only the source of the murder and its reasons, but also its relationship to a rationed food product called Soylent Green, a green wafer supposedly containing a high-energy plankton. Needless to say, the wafer doesn't come as advertised and Thorn finds out more than he bargained for. Heston's Thorn isn't the lost soul of The Omega Man, or the skeptic of The Planet of the Apes, but a man with no memory of what's been lost in the creation of all this squalid suffering. By partnering Thorn with Sol, however, a man who remembers all too well a world where you could eat meat (he cries in one scene where Thorn finds him some rare beef) and the oceans and vegetation thrived, the movie allows Heston to play Thorn as a hungry and eager detective not satisfied until he understands the truth. But though he eventually gets to it, it offers him no comfort (nor does it offer any to Sol, who decides to check out and pass into the next world). At the end Thorn is carried off by the authorities, once again – as in Planet of the Apes – railing against the crimes of mankind.

It's likely only coincidental that Heston made no more apocalyptic films after Soylent Green and, right at this point, abandoned liberalism and became a neo-conservative. Having rejected George McGovern as Democratic candidate for President in 1972, he changed stripes and supported Richard Nixon, who won in a landslide. By the Eighties, Heston had turned his loyalties fully to the Republican Party, getting behind Reagan and later George Bush. Soon enough, he was President of the NRA, gave speeches about gun rights and the culture wars, and took aim at affirmative action (which he decried as "reverse racism"). If John Wayne (The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), Gary Cooper (High Noon) and Alan Ladd (Shane) were loner Americans who, in their movies, tried to build American communities that their characters ultimately couldn't live in, they accepted that fate as if they knew that the spirit of place that the Founding Fathers created in their constitutional documents would be hard to reconcile in reality. Charlton Heston, on the other hand, acted as if that reality of community, that spirit of place, wasn't so much irreconcilable as something that the follies of men and women had created despite his warnings. Surprisingly, and without too much insufferable vanity, Heston carried on though as if he'd been keeping his word with the nation all along. Who knows? Maybe it's possible that, in Heston's own mind, as he told Al Gore that he couldn't pry that gun from his cold, dead hands, he saw no difference between the looming weapon that continues to rain death on his country and the sacred tablets that brought forth the law in De Mille's 1956 epic.

-- January 10/17

A Change Is Gonna Come: The End of the Obama Era



As many of us this week watched President Barack Obama exit the presidential stage with dignity, grace, and even some humour, an inescapable melancholy also permeated the air. Besides the passing of a historic moment in time, one couldn't help but notice the new history about to be made. We were about to watch Donald Trump – a populist demagogue who built his road to the White House by spending years attempting to delegitimize Obama in a Truther campaign that questioned his citizenship – become president. He continued by bullying opponents, toadying up to Russia and hiding his tax returns (which may provide clues to why he plays footsies with Putin), proudly promoting the traits of a sexual predator, exploiting racism and fear, and making promises that pander to anger rather than seeking the means to healing the wounds that stoke that rage. The democratic dream hasn't died and I believe it will survive the man about to be president who has chosen to demean those ideals. But the Obama era, which opened the door to finally laying rest the stained legacy of racism and exploitation, could not close that door on those who sought to ignore it. The idealistic impulse in American exceptionalism is not bathed in light. "America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion, lynch mobs and escapes, its greatest testaments are made of portents and warnings," critic Greil Marcus writes in The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. "The story of America as told from the beginning is one of self-invention and nationhood." He also reminds us that prophetic voices – from John Winthrop to Martin Luther King Jr. – were "raised to keep faith with the past, or with the future to which the past committed their present." That is also true of the popular culture that reflects that covenant.

When singer Sam Cooke's beautifully lush lament "A Change is Gonna Come," which pined for freedom and justice ("It's been a long time coming / But I know a change is gonna come"), was released on December 22, 1964, it was composed out of that desire Marcus alludes to. But while the song was inspired by many personal insults and racist attacks over Cooke's career, the most significant event was the turning away of his band and his family from a whites-only motel in Louisiana. However, songs as great as "A Change is Gonna Come" grow past incidentals, no matter how odious. In time, the tune grew to be more than just a defiant response to the policies of Jim Crow, or a song inspired by Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," composed a couple of years earlier, that shocked Cooke when he discovered that a young white man from Hibbing, Minnesota had written such an anthem. "A Change is Gonna Come" joined the series of prophetic voices over history that took in the past trials of black America even before Cooke was born ("I was born by the river in a little tent/ Oh, and just like the river I've been running ev'r since") and imagined a possible future that couldn't yet be seen.

In Dream Boogie, his biographer Peter Guralnick wrote that Cooke was actually scared by the song: "He grabbed it out of the air and it came to him whole, despite the fact that in many ways it's probably the most complex song that he wrote. It was both singular – in the sense that you started out, 'I was born by the river' – but it also told the story both of a generation and of a people." Although Cooke would debut the song on The Tonight Show in February 1964 to reach out to that generation, he never performed it live again – partly due to its sophisticated arrangement, but also because he could feel the air of death that surrounded it. Upon hearing him perform it, songwriter Bobby Womack told Cooke that it was "spooky"; Cooke agreed and replied that he heard something larger, grand and possibly tragic, within its melody. It wasn't long, too, before the prophecy of the song brought forth its tragic prescience when he was shot to death at a Los Angeles hotel on December 11, 1964, just two weeks before it was released on the radio. Later it was embraced by the Civil Rights movement. The song was a double-edged sword: it contained both a dream and a nightmare -- perhaps providing, ironically, a lightning rod for those who violently resisted its aspirations. Although the initial version of events surrounding Cooke's murder was that he had kidnapped a woman with the intent of raping her at the hotel, evidence would later come out that suggested that he may have been set up for a robbery, or perhaps there was even a conspiracy to have him killed.

Sam Cooke

Certain songs written to reflect their own time often come to escape it. When folk singer Phil Ochs composed "Crucifixion" (a month before Cooke's death), as he toured the United Kingdom, he may have had something in mind about a timeless song's duality. Although Ochs was writing generally about the role citizens play in creating, deifying, and then destroying their heroes, it was clear that "Crucifixion" was specifically about the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The track lacks the dreamy subtlety of "A Change is Gonna Come," but it is filled with striking contrasting images of planets being paralyzed while mountains are amazed, and moments of innocence catapult the hero onward while "the decadence of destiny is looking for a pawn." The force of passion and disillusionment in Ochs's performance propels him to the song's key perception midway through: "To a nightmare of knowledge he opens up the gate / Binding revelation is laid upon his plate / That beneath the greatest love is a hurricane of hate." The notion that beneath the greatest love is a hurricane of hate was certainly played out during those Sixties years, whether you remember the love that inspired King's "I Have a Dream" speech or the force of hate that led to his assassination in 1968. It was there when you considered the loving hysteria of Beatlemania, so soon after the tragedy of JFK's assassination, which would later turn into "a hurricane of hate" by 1966, when death threats and the burning of Beatles records followed a comment by John Lennon that the group was more popular than Jesus. In 1973 Ochs told Chicago broadcaster Studs Terkel that people would sacrifice their heroes, their greatest hopes, in response to a greater need to break the promise that the nation's founding documents once prophesied. "The Kennedy assassination, in a way, was destroying our best in some kind of ritual," Ochs told Turkel. "People say they really love the reformer, they love the radical, but they want to see him killed. It's a certain part of the human psyche – the dark side of the human psyche."

Phil Ochs

Prophetic yearnings stream through "A Change is Gonna Come" as much as the dread of defeat that Ochs talks about. King likely heard both of those sides in his "Promised Land" speech the night before he was killed in Memphis in 1968, an address that saw a future which contained both the fulfillment of promise and his own death. You could also hear something of Cooke's song in Barack Obama's first presidential victory speech in Chicago in Grant Park to a cheering throng in 2008. "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer," he began triumphantly, and the crowd was filled with young and old, men and women, white and black – including the many survivors of the Civil Rights years who had been there that night when King said that he'd reached the mountaintop. Some in 2008, with tears in their eyes, thought that maybe this night is what King had seen that evening in early April,1968. But what we were to witness over the next eight years was also a denial of that power of democracy Obama invoked. His enemies stonewalled and filibustered every piece of legislation he tried to pass, while some of his allies acted betrayed as if he were turning his back on their dreams of a radical new president to counter the era of George Bush.

Obama's 2008 victory speech

All of this explains why, for the first four years of Obama's presidency, it was hard to find a film, or a piece of music, to reflect the man who occupied the White House. Partly because he was having to act cautiously while others chose to make him invisible, there was little to reflect. But in the past year, when he was finally coming to the end of his term, Obama's voice suddenly found its idealistic core again – especially as Donald Trump took aim at his legacy and dedicated his candidacy to destroying it, as well as to humiliating Hillary Clinton, whose goal was to continue it. At which point, a number of films began to arrive that seemed – even if some were flawed – to try and remind us of what stood to be lost in the Trump years ahead, and they all had something of the vision that Sam Cooke dreamed of in "A Change is Gonna Come." One of those pictures, Moonlight, is a beautifully conceived jewel – a coming-of-age story that emerges on the screen like a slowly developing time-lapse photograph. Director Barry Jenkins (adapting Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue) finds a style somewhere between expressionism and naturalism to trace the tale of a poor African-American boy, Chiron, who lives in Miami. Structured in three acts, Moonlight tells his story at three different ages: nine, sixteen and twenty-six. With the purpose of dramatizing Chiron's path to self-discovery as a gay black man, three different actors (Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes) create a continuity of soul where tenderness confronts toughness, silence meets articulation, and passivity leads to action.

Moonlight

Moonlight begins with Chiron as a shy and withdrawn child (nicknamed “Little”) who gets bullied by other kids due to his size and meekness. He is rescued by Juan (Mahershala Ali), a local crack dealer, who takes him to the home he shares with his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe), and there he's shown the kindness and attention he doesn't receive from his crack-addicted mother, Paula (Naomie Harris). Chiron becomes more drawn to Juan and Teresa as role models while also finding a warm spot in the company of his best friend, Kevin (Jaden Piner), who stokes a desire in Chiron that allows him to grapple with his emerging homosexuality. Moonlight traces how those relationships both deepen and change over the time of Chiron's coming into manhood. Jenkins's conceptual approach to the storytelling is complemented by the strong and grounded performances he gets from his actors. Rather than merely depicting the process of growing up, Jenkins instead dramatizes how, over time, the contradictory impulses of experience ultimately shape our truer perceptions of life. Although we are witnessing the surfacing of a new sensibility at work in Moonlight, we can also feel the naturalistic influences of earlier pictures like Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep and David Gordon Green's George Washington on it. Moonlight succeeds by letting Chiron's experiences dictate the style of the picture, which shifts over time as if gradually mirroring his growing awareness – and, in doing so, ultimately casts a lasting and poignant reflection.

Hidden Figures

Theodore Melfi's Hidden Figures, based on the non-fiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly, is also a picture about black Americans that casts a reflection, but where Moonlight is inventive, Hidden Figures is unfortunately calculating. Set in 1962, the story centers on three female mathematicians who come to work at Langley to calculate flight trajectories for Project Mercury and other missions at NASA at a time when blacks are still suffering the ravages of segregation. While Hidden Figures – a great title that refers both to the women and the mathematical notations they have to invent – is a terrifically optimistic account that reflects the homiletic side of Obama with his audacity of hope, the picture lacks faith in the audience to find that hope for ourselves. Hidden Figures telegraphs everything as if it were an After School Special. While the actresses, Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, bring a spunky freshness to parts conceived simply as role models, the picture can't resist scenes that spout obvious civics lessons. Their victories are anything but hidden; we can see each one coming. Yet the story is so fascinating that the movie is affecting despite the manipulation. Southside with You, a debut romantic drama written and directed by Richard Tanne, is another picture that takes us back in time – to 1989, when Barack Obama (Parker Sawyers) and Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter) go on their first date after they meet working at a Chicago law firm. Tanne seems to be aiming for something close to Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, where we watch a courtship of intellectual equals, but the picture is too earnest and fawning to its subjects to bring out a latent romanticism. Tanne seems to be responding so sharply to the animosity aimed at Obama's Presidency that he goes overboard in demythologizing the couple. And we can't miss the signs of what is to come. Both actors capture the yearnings of what's ahead, but Southside with You doesn't let those yearnings breathe freely. Yet there is still something touching in the way Tanne attempts to recover in the Obamas what Trump is dedicated to taking away. It's the idea of how public office can be a calling rather than a conquest.

Southside With You

Who knows in time what movies will best reflect the arrogant cynicism that Donald Trump represents with his megalomanical isolationism, a jingoism that he's borrowed from the handbook of Charles Lindbergh? For if Obama had to remain allusive and careful, in an eight-year term that was scandal-free, Trump is his opposite – all bombast and scandal-ready, which should make the years ahead not too much of a puzzle. If there's one movie that I think saw Trump coming, long before he even became a factor in the presidential race, it was writer-director Andrew Dominik's 2012 Killing Them Softly, based on George V. Higgins’ novel Cogan’s Trade. The picture is nothing more than a tale about a bunch of thieves who are hired to steal from a poker game and then get hunted down by a hit man (Brad Pitt) brought in by the mob to get their money back. The hit man eventually wipes out the burglers and the guy who staked them. Killing Them Softly may indeed reek of the pretentiousness of pulp fiction that attempts to make larger political points about the desperate state of the country, a nation that, in this story, Obama has just inherited.But as Obama makes his victory speech in Chicago, Killing Them Softly reaches a chilling counterpoint that brings another side of "A Change is Gonna Come" into plain view, perhaps even an awareness that the country Sam Cooke saw as becoming a dream could just as easily revert back into a nightmare of itself.

The picture is coming to its conclusion at the point where Obama says, "We are, and always will be, the United States of America," while Pitt is arguing with the mob accountant (Richard Jenkins) who is just about to pay him for his killings. "Next he'll be telling us we're a community, one people...It's a myth created by Thomas Jefferson," Pitt remarks bitterly, pointing to the new Commander-in-Chief on the screen. Jenkins shoots back, "Now you're going to have a go at Thomas Jefferson." With a steely calm as he bites into a freshly lit cigarette, Pitt answers quietly, "My friend, Jefferson's an American saint, because he wrote the words, 'All men are created equal' – words he clearly didn't believe, because he allowed his own children to live in slavery. He was a rich wine snob who was sick of paying taxes to the Brits. So yeah, he wrote some lovely words and aroused the rabble and they went out and died for those words, while he sat back, and drank his wine, and fucked his slave girl." Looking back up at the television, Pitt continues his lecture in a building rage. "This guy wants to tell me we're living in a community? Don't make me laugh. I'm living in America, and in America you're on your own. America's not a country. It's just a business. Now fuckin' pay me!" Donald Trump has arrived today, where he is currently speaking before the nation as I write, and with Obama quietly sitting behind him. I think of Pitt as he stood in the seedy bar watching the nation's first black president address the nation in 2009, who was carrying the hopes of Sam Cooke that were now seemingly realized. But change has come again and the idea of America as a country, a country once dreamed, as it was in Cooke's impassioned song, could well be in jeopardy. Richard Jenkins had no answer to offer Pitt but the cash that he demanded for his deeds. Time will tell the price we'll come to pay for electing Donald Trump.

-- January 20/17

Checkmate: Mira Nair's Queen of Katwe


Madina Nalwanga in Queen of Katwe

Mira Nair's exultant Queen of Katwe, based on the true story of a 9-year-old slum girl, Phiona (Madina Nalwanga), from Kampala, Uganda, who escapes her life of poverty by becoming a national chess champion in her teens, is a plucky tale of triumph – a rare inspirational film that doesn't sacrifice its dramatic integrity for easy sentiment. By letting the daily barbarity of slum life commingle with the bulging vibrancy that grows from a struggle to escape it, Nair brings forth an exuberance that's surprisingly nuanced and adds both uplift and credence to the tale of a young woman who seeks to live beyond her circumstances. Queen of Katwe is a feel-good movie that doesn't spare you the hardships that come from also feeling despair and defeat. Collaborating with screenwriter William Wheeler (whose sharp instincts help prevent the story from ever dampening) and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (who, rather than imposing oppression on the characters, uses a strikingly colourful palette to boldly illuminate their strong need to survive it), Nair gets inside the tale of an unlikely girl who becomes a champion and depicts the various means by which she makes herself one. What Nair accomplishes with an intuitive flare is to show how chess becomes a mirror for Phiona into both herself and her environment so that she can learn to see beyond it.

Queen of Katwe opens with Phiona on the cusp of becoming the national chess champion, but it quickly shifts to tracing the turbulent road that got her there. From our first view of a squalid and teaming shantytown, we immediately perceive the slim odds for anyone trying to escape their conditions. Situated just outside Kampala, Phiona's single mother, Harriet (Lupita Nyong'o), is forced to raise her four children on her own after her husband has passed away, as well as another child. Each day, she sends them out to hawk husks of corn. She has to purchase stalks of maize from a dealer who'd be more than happy to provide the stalks if she'd do him some sexual favours for free. (Her answer is to spit at his feet.) When Phiona happens upon an outreach program supervised by Robert Katende (David Oyelowo), with the hope of getting some free porridge to quell her hunger, she ends up captivated by his use of chess to teach the students (a group he calls "Pioneers") to overcome the obstacles before them. While Phiona is not initially welcomed into the group (since she has been unable to bathe), her quick instincts and genius for the game make her out to be a natural who Katende feels can take his group into championship matches.

If Harriet is a tenacious woman whose sense of pride propels her family through the demoralizing cycles of impoverishment, Katende has an equal determination to transcend her circumstances by instilling in his charges the ability to think through adversity. This even includes getting past class biases, especially when he enters them into a competition at an exclusive secondary school, King's College Bodo, whose headmaster doesn't want to see the event tarnished by the inclusion of street kids. Katende raises the exorbitant fees and triumphantly enters his charges into the competition. Nair shows with a quiet subtlety how Harriet's steely intelligence and Katende's tenacity of Katende play huge parts in shaping Phiona's emotional life as she rides the curve of both victory and defeat in her journey to become a chess master. Queen of Katwe is firmly rooted in the process of self-discovery that's part of the making of any sports champion, but it's not often explored in movies (from Chariots of Fire to The Natural) that are only interested in winning.

Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo

Madina Nalwanga is remarkably pliant as Phiona, playing her with a guarded intelligence that is as much a tickling pride in her abilities as it is a shield from a world that could just as easily leave her unprotected. For her, the chess pieces are not just part of a game, but stepping stones to a psyche that's in the process of becoming yet has been limited by social neglect. David Oyelowo displays more range here than he did playing Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, where he was ultimately swallowed up by the picture's solemnity. As Katende, he's buoyant and shrewd, musical and playful, and he displays a keen passion that makes the character a perfect mentor to kids who aren't yet convinced of their strengths. Katende's dedication comes from his own painful experiences of having been orphaned at a young age. Harriet may be a victim of circumstances, buy Nyong'o goes against the grain of victimhood and gives this woman a steely intelligence that never wavers and provides a healthy tenacity that Phiona clearly inherits. In 12 Years a Slave, Nyong'o had little to do but be beaten, but in Queen of Katwe, she has a dynamism that illuminates in Harriet her great strength as well as her pain -- a combination of resources she draws on to protect her family and help them survive.

Although Disney produced and distributed the film, Queen of Katwe is not a Disney film in the traditional sense. Based on Tim Crothers's book, The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl’s Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster, the script makes no easy concessions to a North American audience even though it's highly accessible. Studio executive Tendo Nagenda, who helped launch the film, and whose family grew up in Uganda, had a vested interest in telling the story of Phiona, while Mira Nair, who had been living in Uganda, eagerly took up the project with both fervour and imagination. What she accomplishes in Queen of Katwe is a little daredeviltry. She takes what could have been a formulaic story and goes beyond its tropes into the more mysterious terrain of what makes a genius. And like her hero, she finds her own form of triumph.

-- January 24/17

Torpor: Pablo Larraín’s Jackie


Natalie Portman in Jackie

In his new film, Jackie, Chilean director Pablo Larraín (Post Mortem, No) thinks he's getting behind the aristocratic facade of the former First Lady to reveal a tragic portrait of a woman trapped by an illusion. But all he does is create new illusions that fly like lead balloons. Larraín imposes lethargy on the material that's so thick the characters can't carry the weight of the myths he loads on their backs. The audience is also put in such a state of complete torpor (thanks to all the formal melancholy that is doggedly off-base and off-key) that the movie would be laughable if you could rouse yourself from the funk it puts you in. Working from a calamitous script by Noah Oppenheim, which was originally conceived for an HBO mini-series, Larraín sets a funereal mood complete with an onerous chamber score by Mica Levi that drowns the picture in lugubriousness before you can begin to ask yourself why you should be bowing your head in mourning. Jackie is so relentlessly languid and ill-conceived that it would be a camp favourite if it didn't take itself so seriously.

The movie traces the life of Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) from the days when she was First Lady in the White House through her interview with Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup) of Life Magazine conducted in Hyannisport in the days following the assassination. But Jackie has no true grasp of its subject, or even a tone in which to claim it. Perhaps because, in his Chilean pictures, Larraín saw the spectacle of pageantry in his own country as a cover for the totalitarian brutality of Pinochet, he's come to impose the same perspective on the era of the Kennedys, seeing the assassination as ultimately, to quote Malcolm X, the chickens coming home to roost. But his perspective couldn't be more inappropriate. "Merely as a paragon of high fashion and elegant good taste, Jackie [Kennedy Onassis] could not have won the position she retained over several decades in millions of people's affections. It was her baptism by gunfire that deified her," wrote culture critic Camille Paglia in The New Republic, eulogizing the former First Lady in 1994 when she died at the age of 64. "In the blood-spattered limousine in Dallas, an archetypal pietà was forced on Jackie. Cradling the shattered head of state in her lap, she became Michelangelo's grieving Madonna, caught between horror and admiration at the wounded body of her beautiful son." Before her husband's assassination, Jackie Kennedy's elegance and deportment were described by many as the nearest thing to royalty that America had attained. "Jackie, masquerading as the perfect adornment, was a master of manipulation and control, not of the psychological realm, where she was at the mercy of adulterous men, but of the physical realm, which she brought to the highest level of refinement," Paglia explains. With that classical refinement, she was able to build a bridge that, combined with the populist idealism of her husband, created a potent utopian image through the help of television – where America became a picture of aristocratic grandeur in which inclusion and possibility also found root. When this royal kingdom was shattered by the gunshots in Dallas, Jackie blended stoicism and formal ritual in a funeral procession that borrowed from the country's roots in pageantry and folklore to create a regal finale to what many came to idealize as the age of Camelot. None of the power of these moments is dramatically rendered or addressed in Jackie.

(l.to r.) Caspar Phillipson as JFK, Natalie Portman, and Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy 

Instead of exploring how Jackie Kennedy projected an image of refinement and dignity, Larraín does the exact opposite. When he depicts her in the 1961 televised tour of the White House, it's not to reveal, as the actual TV show did, her assertive elegance while she demonstrated her belief in historical continuity as seen through an artistic sensibility. In his view, Jackie is a pawn of the TV camera that creates a fake front disguising a disgruntled lady who is barely able to remember her lines and smile properly. While he fawns over a Jackie whom he sees as a brittle woman oppressed by an imposed image of refinement, he ends up treating this allegedly real Jackie with horrible condescension. For example, instead of depicting her determination to wear the blood-stained dress from Dallas in her trip back to Washington as something out of Greek tragedy, or out of what Paglia called "the polarities of womanhood: the pastel pink of girlhood and romance and the barbaric blood red of birth and death," Larraín gives us a Jackie out of a creaking late-night soap opera, her bloody clothes, and an emblem of a woman who has been betrayed by those she trusted.

If Jackie is boneheaded in its views, it's equally crackers when it comes to the performances. While Natalie Portman looks the part of Jackie Kennedy, and gamely mimics her soft-spoken phrasing, she barely registers her personality. As talented as Portman is, her career has been an erratic series of choices in roles that indicate her judgment is sometimes impaired. Watching her determined flailing in Black Swan, or her mannered steeliness in Jackie, it's clear she can't recognize a bad part when she sees one. She goes at each one with such determined zeal that she only ends up only magnifying its flaws. Just about everyone else is horribly miscast and can't help but show it. The talented Peter Sarsgaard, as Bobby Kennedy, looks like he's desperate to avoid the gaze of the camera while plodding morosely through dialogue as stupefying as "I shouldn't have pushed Jack so hard on Castro." John Hurt even turns up as a priest with handy Biblical parables that would ordinarily be enough for a terrific comedy sketch, but he ends up weighing the movie down even further in solemnity. Only Billy Crudup, as White (credited as 'The Journalist,' perhaps to protect the innocent), seems to know how bad a deck he's been dealt. His scenes have a peculiar jump. Interviewing Jackie in an adversarial tone makes little sense dramatically, but it does make sense if you consider that the actor angrily spitting out these lines is probably responding to his disbelief that he was asked to speak them.

What's lost in Jackie is an attempt to examine a period when youthful sophistication began to capture a nation hungry for glamour after the sleepy Eisenhower years. Especially in light of the current travesty unfolding in the new Trump administration, the Kennedy era (at least in its image) gave Americans an appealing sense of decorum that could ride alongside its more rugged comportment. Unfortunately, Pablo Larraín has no sensual appetite for the pagan rituals of politics which Jackie Kennedy brought to life in her brief time in the White House. What he's brought forth instead in Jackie is a movie about a dynamic woman that barely has a heartbeat.

-- January 27/17

Piety: Martin Scorsese's Silence


Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield in Silence

No question: Martin Scorsese's religious epic, Silence, is aptly named. Unlike his last feature, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), with its frenetic, speed-freak pacing, or the pilot of the HBO series, Vinyl, where the editing rhythms were so percussive that they became assaulting, Scorsese's new picture unfolds with a quiet and solemn reverence, as if we were in church, and the atmosphere is hushed. Silence has a lulling seductiveness going for it (the cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto is both lush and vibrant), so it's clear that the asceticism of Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel has drawn the director – once again – into a sojourn in search of spiritual values and truths, but the drama itself turns out to be no more substantial than in The Wolf of Wall Street. If the sensational highs of sex, cocaine and larceny were the driving force of that picture, rather than an attempt to bring the audience to a dramatic understanding of how Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) swindled his way to the top of Wall Street, the piety of religious faith becomes the drug of Silence, substituting for a rendering of spiritual belief. Scorsese may be aiming for the formalist poetry of Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951), where a man of God gets tested by those who reject him, but the result is actually closer to Carl Dreyer's Ordet (1955) where spirituality is reduced to pedantic dogma.

Silence also has a streak of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness running through it. In that novella, an introverted sailor, Marlow, gets sent up the Congo River to find an ivory trader, Kurtz, who has "gone native." In the course of his journey he grows obsessed with Kurtz as the river leads him like a magnet towards his destination. In Silence, as in Endō’s novel, the journey provides a somewhat different dynamic than Conrad's. In the 17th century, two Portuguese priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver), head off to Japan, where Christians are being forced to renounce their faith or face the horrors of torture and death. What is equally dismaying to both of them is that Ferreira (Liam Neeson), a Jesuit missionary who was their mentor, has become an apostate living a secular life with a Japanese wife and family. Refusing to believe that their own tutor has "gone native," they set out to find the truth, only to discover that Christianity has refused to take root in "the swamp" of Japan. All the while Rodrigues tries to remain convinced that Christ is present despite the suffering of Christians. "Christ is here," he says at one point. "I just can't hear him." In Silence, he never does.

Andrew Garfield and Yôsuke Kubozuka

In Heart of Darkness, Conrad was interested in delving into the psychological terrain of colonialism and examining the latent fears of European colonists who were terrified that those they colonized were also reflections of their darkest desires (which is what their 'civilized' behaviour masked). Marlow's journey up the river metaphorically peels away that mask of civility and uncovers what Europeans feared was the savage they sought to contain – both in the countries they controlled and the impulses they buried within themselves. Silence lacks those nuances when looking at the men of the cloth and what their dark desires might be. It is more interested in the ways the purity of religious faith gets tested by violence and torture, as well as the reasons why God remains silent in the face of such horror. The picture also attempts to come to terms with the forces that drive a man of faith to apostasy, but not what makes him faithful to God under these circumstances. The movie, in the end, doesn't really succeed at revealing the troubling nature of faith because the main characters – the men of God – are portrayed only as dogmatists preaching the gospel. Silence simply collapses into dour pedantry. Despite the brutality of the Japanese towards Christians – torturing them with boiling water, drowning them, wrapping them in straw and burning them, cutting them and hanging them upside down and then slowly bleeding them to death unless they renounce Christ – Rodrigues and Garupe's problem is only how to make devotees out of the Japanese they encounter and protect them from the Inquisitor and his soldiers. Rather than pose questions about how one maintains belief when God doesn't protect those who believe in Him, Silence takes mute sanctuary in lionizing the devoutly faithful.

These questions of belief were pretty central to Scorsese's flawed The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which told Jesus's story as if it were part of the Old Testament. Christ (Willem Dafoe) continually questions God's authority in order to understand his role as a prophet; he even came to imagine what his life would look like if he didn't sacrifice himself on the cross. But despite all the controversy it stirred up, Last Temptation concluded with Christ making the ultimate oblation. By contrast, in Kundun (1997), with the help of Melissa Mathison's delicate and perceptive screenplay, Scorsese dramatized the life of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, the exiled political and spiritual leader of Tibet, as a fairy tale. Kundun is an enchanted story about a deeply spiritual man who lives outside of time (in a realm dictated by reincarnation and an eternal God) as well as in a time where political realities impose themselves on those beliefs. But in both these movies, Scorsese was pulled into the spiritual struggles and conflicts of his main characters (just as he had been in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, New York, New York, and "Life Stories" from New York Stories). In other films, though, his devout Catholicism has shielded him from the very questions of belief that Silence is supposed to be about. As if motivated by a weight of guilt and sin, Scorsese has sometimes removed himself from the dramatic realism of those movies to seek redemption instead for characters guilty of the same sins that his realism uncorked in his best films. When it came to Jake LaMotta, the brutal boxer in Raging Bull, and Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, and the pool shark Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, Scorsese tried to save their souls while neglecting to provide souls for them. (Luckily Paul Newman brought so much devilish panache to the role of Eddie Felson that Scorsese didn't succeed in making him a successful candidate for redemption.)

Liam Neeson as Father Ferreira

The missionaries of Silence aren't so much redeemed by their faith as fulfilled by it. Their behavior -- one martyrs himself for God, while the other ultimately cloaks his beliefs in secular garb in order to survive – robs the film of any moral ambiguity. Scorsese doesn't set out to depict these men of God as missionaries out to end human suffering, but as true believers who choose to identify with human suffering. If Scorsese saw their mission in other terms, the Japanese characters wouldn't have to be drawn so narrowly in the story, as savage villains. One Japanese Christian, Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), is conflicted by his lack of faith, but he comes across as a cartoon – Judas and Gollum rolled into one. The Japanese Inquisitor, Inoue (Issey Ogata), is a verbose caricature who wouldn't be out of place in a World War Two drama from Hollywood. As for Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver, there's so little dimension to their parts that they look as if they might have just walked in from a Fifties Biblical epic. (Ciarán Hinds, as their Jesuit superior, suffers the same fate but the expression on his face suggests that he knows it.) Liam Neeson gives a relaxed performance, but he barely appears until the final third of the story, at which point Silence has pretty much exhausted itself.

When a great director gets caught up in themes that obsess them, they often lose perspective on the material. In Apocalypse Now (1979), Francis Ford Coppola tried to turn Heart of Darkness into a metaphor for the Vietnam War, but it didn't work because the psychological connections weren't there. It didn't even make dramatic sense. Since Willard (Martin Sheen) was already a black ops assassin, how was he going to find his dark side by going up river to meet Kurtz? Given that Kurtz (and everyone else) seemed to know where Willard was at every turn, making his mission less a secret than a burden, why bother sending him up river in the first place? Once Kilgore (Robert Duvall) napalmed a beach so his boys could go surfing, how was Kurtz going to appear any crazier than that? Coppola lost sight of the particulars because he was caught up in the broad strokes of his Vietnam metaphor – which turned out to be nothing but a manifestation of American guilt. Silence is similar to Apocalypse Now in that Scorsese doesn't provide any dramatic particulars for Rodrigues and Garupe's journey other than to demonstrate their need to protect Christians from getting mangled and killed. Garfield and Driver's characters get to suffer out their spiritual pain, but without delving into the question of why their faith might inspire such violence, or even the question of why more people have died for religion than for any other cause.

When demonstrating apostasy, the Japanese captors ask that the missionaries renounce their faith by placing one foot upon a fumi-e (a religious carving of Jesus or Mary). You can feel that same foot coming down on the troubling questions that Silence doesn't answer. There's no allowance for the reasons the Japanese officials (who are Buddhists) might feel so threatened. It's likely they fear that poor and hungry peasants might be susceptible to believing that Christianity will assuage their suffering by promising them paradise in Heaven. There's a peculiar fundamentalism at work here: the picture comes down to faith or unbelief. With all the devotion that Scorsese has put into Silence, a long-standing dream project, he's abandoned the one aspect that makes his best films so vital: his dramatic judgement. Silence has made very little noise since its release last Christmas. Maybe that's because it's mute on the very issues that might make it matter.

-- February 8/17

There Will Be Burgers: Michael Keaton in The Founder



When Michael Keaton made his memorable feature film debut in Ron Howard's agreeably funny 1982 comedy, Night Shift, he played Billy "Blaze" Blazejowski, Henry Winkler's high-strung co-worker in a New York City morgue, who described himself as an "idea man." Endlessly bouncing from side to side, as if hot coals were consistently biting at his feet, Billy Blaze was a whirligig of a hustler and budding entrepreneur, a frugging Sammy Glick, whose eyeballs popped out like headlights in a speeding car at the thought of inventing edible paper. His role in the film was to snap Winkler's sleeping nebbish back to life, and Keaton himself was wide awake, an endlessly riffing jack-in-the-box with the relentless beat of "Jumping Jack Flash" on constant repeat in his brain pan, sending comic bolts through the picture. As he plays Ray Kroc, an Illinois travelling salesman in the mid-fifties down on his luck trying to sell five-spindled milkshake machines to fast-food outlets across America, the blaze has gone out of Keaton's bluster and the beat has gone out of his step, but he's replaced it with the shrewd acumen of finely tuned opportunism. Nipping religiously from a little flask, Keaton's Kroc is Billy Blaze with his headlights dimmed and Norman Vincent Peale setting the beat instead of The Stones, but his shark's teeth haven't lost their razor bite. When Kroc sets his eyes on a tiny burger enterprise in San Bernardino, California, run by brothers Mac (John Carroll Lynch) and Dick McDonald (Nick Offerman), who have begun to revolutionize the concept of fast-food service, he senses opportunity the way a vampire smells blood. Unlike Billy Blaze, who wanted to feed the world his teeming ideas, Michael Keaton's Ray Kroc wants to feed off the ideas of others and then take all the credit for himself. With a prowess that's canny, Keaton plays Kroc as a cipher magnate who, in time, creates a billion-dollar empire by branding an international restaurant chain that never had to bear his own name.

John Lee Hancock's The Founder might be a straightforward chronicle of the transformation of American ingenuity into carny expediency, but it sure couldn't be more timely and it's consistently engaging. You could say the theme is no different than that of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), where the predatory qualities of American capitalism also got an airing, but that picture was seasoned with a whiff of self-conscious irony. The Founder shows an acute curiosity about the rapacious hunger of the aspiring merchant prince instead of being punitive about it like There Will Be Blood – which portrayed America's speculators as symbols, nightmares always lurking under the American dream. The Founder is generously inquisitive about the industrialist. Hancock, along with screenwriter Robert D. Spiegel, cleverly contrasts Ray Kroc's imposed notions of American wholesomeness, which he hopes to sell across the country, with the McDonald brothers' more parochial entrepreneurial spirit, which grows out of their connection to the community they live in. The comparison turns out to be both comical and poignant as the brothers' dream ultimately gets usurped, as Dick says, by the wolf they have let in the hen house. Even if their fate is tinged with comedy - the lumbering John Carroll Lynch and the diminutive yet stocky Nick Offerman are tag-team comics -- Hancock resists turning Mac and Dick into hayseeds for us to laugh at. Their love of enterprise is their bond as brothers; we see how easily Kroc is able to exploit it, and we feel the pain of that exploitation. The Founder gives us an America that is not so much a nation with a unified vision, but a land built on roads that link a transient citizenry. Kroc, who has always been on the road, sees perfectly how McDonald's can be a beacon of golden arches that feed a fractured country bound together by the image he is trying to sell them.

John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman.

For all the wholesomeness that Ray hopes to foster nationwide, his home life is no Norman Rockwell idyll. Hamburger heavens may continue to pop up across the American landscape, but Kroc's wife, Ethel (Laura Dern), tends an empty house where evening dinners with her spouse have gotten to be rare occasions. Although the script has given Dern little character to play, she makes her brief moments count. Ethel's festering melancholy leaves a lingering aftertaste. She's forced to come to terms with a life that has left her an abandoned jewel in a suburban treasure chest. On the other hand, Kroc's future wife, Joan (Linda Cardellini), who, when he meets her, is still married to Rollie (Patrick Wilson), an eager-to-please franchisee, becomes the real gold in Ray's bounty and shares his national dream. The scene of her playfully introducing Ray to an instant powdered milkshake is a beautifully comic twist on the iconic Fifties image of teenagers sharing the real beverage as a dating ritual.

The Founder has a grounded awareness, too, of how factory precision in restaurant food production became popular in the post-war years just as Americans were growing restless and teenage consumers were dotting the landscape. Speed and efficiency were essential in serving a growing number of restless citizens on the move. Hancock doesn't dehumanize these groups, but instead lets us see exactly what Kroc witnesses – the burger as an emblem for those who desire instant gratification.

As a critical commentary on corporate culture, The Founder will likely disappoint those who seek a thesis drama. It avoids delving into McDonald's dining compromises which later contributed to obesity and poor nutrition. The corporation's charitable work is also largely ignored. But The Founder is still a fascinating picture to usher in the Trump era because Keaton's Kroc, while a throwback to the characters in Sinclair Lewis's novels, is also a harbinger of the dogged identity branding that's now part of the populist politics that brought Trump to power. The Founder is about the birth of the huckster millionaire, the real-estate mogul who hard-sells the masses with the promise of a better life. Michael Keaton gets pretty far inside Ray Kroc's tenaciousness -- a brutal game of survival that takes no prisoners -- without ever going soft, or becoming a caricatured archetype (as Daniel Day Lewis' tycoon became in There Will Be Blood). He's the common man as captain of industry, but he's also a con artist. Kroc didn't build on the traditional American model of supply and demand; he reversed it by demanding that America take what he supplied. If you look at Washington today and the political realities now facing the nation, you might just shudder as you recognize what The Founder offers on the menu.

-- February 19/17

Childhood's End: "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane"



A few months ago, director Ron Howard described his documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years, as an adventure story and a tale of survival, and he tells it as if caught up in the tidal drift of its momentum. Retracing the familiar tale of the meteoric rise of Beatlemania, Howard wastes no time in showing both the endurance and the astonishing skill of a young group of musicians who became the pleasure principle in an age of social and political change. Beginning with footage from November 20th, 1963, at Manchester's ABC Cinema where the group performs "She Loves You" and "Twist and Shout" to an ecstatic crowd, Eight Days a Week goes on to chronicle their growing international acclaim as live artists – while also contrasting those shows with the astonishing quality of studio album after studio album despite the band's having to swim daily in a sea of madness.

Howard, whose first documentary was 2013's Made in America, about Jay-Z's music festival of the same name, provides a few choice observations, including The Beatles' stand against racial segregation, while deftly revealing how they always stayed ahead of the cultural curve by making everyone else play catch-up. Although most people who didn't live through that era have today experienced their music in its totality, Eight Days a Week brings you closer to the evolution of their sound so that you hear how remarkably canny they were at resisting being derivative and never repeating themselves. By the end of the film, you can't imagine this feat ever being duplicated again. The footage both familiar and new still carries an explosive charge of adolescent exuberance. Yet Eight Days a Week doesn't shy away from displaying how that adoring adulation would soon turn turtle into the kind of violent fan worship that took the band off the road and later claimed the lives of John Lennon and George Harrison. As Devin McKinney pointed out in Critics at Large, however, Eight Days a Week doesn't go far enough into the shadow side of The Beatles' utopian spirit. But it does catch the jet stream of their impact with a full-force gale. Since it only deals with the touring years, though, Eight Days a Week doesn't delve into the radical changes that followed their departure from the road.


While The Beatles were no longer a touring outfit, they still wanted to make records. On November 24, they would begin work on a track they intended to include on their new album. "Strawberry Fields Forever" was a song that Lennon wrote while in Spain working on Richard Lester’s movie, How I Won the War. In the midst of shooting a battlefield scene, Lennon took a break to smoke some Spanish pot and lie on a beach slowly composing this new song. Actor Michael Crawford, who co-starred in the film, shared a beach house with Lennon and heard him play this new tune with the lyrics, ‘‘Living is easy with eyes closed, / Misunderstanding all you see. . .’’ Strawberry Field was actually a Salvation Army orphanage in Woolton, a mere five minutes from Lennon’s childhood home on Menlove Ave. It had acquired its name during an earlier era when it was a farm that produced strawberries. As a child, Lennon would visit the summer fêtes at the orphanage with his Aunt Mimi and sell bottles of lemonade with his friends Ivan Vaughn and Pete Shotten. His aunt remembered John responding excitedly to the sound of the Salvation Army brass band, pushing her to hurry so he wouldn’t miss the music they played. As Albert Goldman points out in The Lives of John Lennon, this was a prescient memory. The Salvation Army brass band suggested the later Sgt. Pepper image The Beatles stepped into a year later. But, as Lennon thought back on the orphan children he watched playing, he knew he couldn’t conceive "Strawberry Fields Forever" as a nostalgic childhood memory. "[Lennon] knew perfectly well that the little girls in blue and white dresses, their straw boaters tied with red ribbons about their chins, were orphans, like himself," Goldman asserted. "Strawberry Field was not simply John Lennon’s playground – it was his spiritual home." In many ways, the song was also his Heartbreak Hotel. If the early Lennon music was an attempt to forge a dream out of the nightmare of growing up in post-war Liverpool, and enduring the tragic death of his mother, in "Strawberry Fields Forever," he finds a nightmare within the dreamy texture of his song. As Devin McKinney observed in his book, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, "Strawberry Fields Forever" is a "clash between an ineffable dream and its countervailing nightmare – life as it is in a dream, versus life as it is."

"Let me take you down," Lennon states mournfully after the soft opening notes of the mellotron begin the song. Once again, he says, "there’s a place." Only this time, it’s not necessarily in his mind and it's not the mystical void offered up in "Tomorrow Never Knows." He’s found a new place to dwell in another version of Lonely Street. "When Lennon sings 'Strawberry Fields' he sounds like Robert Johnson or something," Elvis Costello commented to Mojo in 1996. "You can tell it’s all in his head. He’s so focused on what he’s doing it’s scary." It’s not surprising that Costello heard Robert Johnson since the song was originally conceived as a talking blues. In that original version, Lennon declared the paradox of who he truly was, different from all others, forever burdened by the knowledge that he was alone both as a boy and a creative man. As critic Steve Turner explained, "[His visits] were . . . like Alice’s escapades down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass. He felt that he was entering another world, a world that more closely corresponded with his inner world, and as an adult he would associate these moments of bliss with his lost childhood and also with a feeling of drug-free psychedelia." For that reason, the song would evolve from a talking blues into an elliptical, dreamy psychedelic ballad. The looking-glass aspect of the song similarly unnerved Martin Carr, of The Boo Radleys. "It’s hard to imagine this being tied down to something as tangible as vinyl – it’s more of a dream than a song," Carr explained. "It transports me to half-remembered places and times." As eerily memorable and evocative as the song is, The Beatles created what Albert Goldman accurately described as "a stoned descent into the maelstrom of the unconscious mind." It took 45 hours of work to make this surreal masterpiece work.

Image from "Strawberry Fields Forever" video

Since Lennon wrote a labyrinthine study of his childhood, McCartney wished to contribute his own more nostalgic view. "Penny Lane" was McCartney’s own version of Lennon’s "In My Life." He recollects the places of his youth though, ironically, none of the things he lists is even found on Penny Lane. Curiously, it was Lennon who once lived on the street with his mother and father. (John had originally included Penny Lane as part of "In My Life," but ultimately dropped it.) The street was named for James Penny, an eighteenth-century slave-ship owner, back when Liverpool was the hub of the slave trade. McCartney mentions Bioletti’s barbershop, which had a collection of photos in the window of various haircut styles, plus the St. Barnabus Church where he was once a choirboy. Like "Strawberry Fields," the song revisits the past, only McCartney is less opaque than Lennon. Childhood is seen as a comfort zone of happy memories, as opposed to John’s picture of confusion and sorrow. In 2006, there was considerable debate over whether the street should be renamed because of its dubious heritage. After all, a number of other streets named for slave traders were being renamed after abolitionists, or for Anthony Walker, a black teenager who was murdered in 2005 in a racial attack. Penny Lane, however, retains its name, perhaps due to the Beatles’ lovely rendering in this song. Over the years, it has even become a tourist attraction. The imposed isolation of fame had brought the two writing partners a need to revisit the real life of their youth. "Penny Lane," like "Strawberry Fields Forever," is an impressionistic view of the lingering memories of the past.


But where Lennon’s is a riveting dirge, McCartney’s is a brightly colored piece of baroque pop. As if to make that association more explicit, McCartney sought out trumpeter David Mason to provide the solo in the bridge. Paul had heard him on the BBC performing Bach’s Second Brandenberg Concerto from Guildford Cathedral. McCartney asked George Martin if they could get him to come and record on "Penny Lane," and Mason agreed. McCartney directed Mason in the studio, while Martin did the musical notations. Three hours later, they had the solo. While "Strawberry Fields Forever" comes across as the more avant-garde of the two songs, it was McCartney who was the Beatles’ avant-gardist. But Paul was also a born entertainer. When he looked to the past, he wanted to present it the way he wished it could be. He sings with great delight, whether remembering a banker with a motorcar or having a go making out with his girl and doing "finger pies." While George Martin was eager for "Penny Lane," backed with "Strawberry Fields Forever," to become part of the group’s next album, Brian Epstein thought it was important to have a new single out for the New Year. It would come out in February 1967, over fifty years ago – and AM radio never sounded the same again.

If The Beatles had become what literary critic Leslie Fiedler once described as imaginary Americans, perhaps they could now imagine themselves as anything. In that world, they could also create an imaginary audience to hear their radical new work. The first step in that process actually began with a promotional film they made earlier in 1966 for "Paperback Writer" and "Rain." While the film did little more than capture them in a garden lip-syncing their songs, it did show The Beatles singing and playing without the accompaniment of their screaming fans. For the first time, we could see them performing their music without the hysteria of the crowd surrounding them. When they issued the conceptual single "Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever," they went even further by accompanying it with a conceptual film. Director Peter Goldmann, along with Beatles aide Tony Bramwell, created two very distinct portraits of the band to promote the songs. For "Penny Lane," the imagery is pretty basic. Lennon waltzes through the busy streets of east London, eventually meeting up with the group for some horseback riding and a picnic in the park. Curiously, as they make their way through the grounds to a huge table with flowers and candelabras, they pass – and then quickly abandon – a makeshift stage with their guitars and Ringo’s familiar drum set on it. If the movie for "Penny Lane" was adorned with quaint psychedelia, the surreal "Strawberry Fields Forever" featured the boldly experimental tinge of the avant-garde.

John Lennon walking down Penny Lane in the music video

Klaus Voorman had first suggested that "Strawberry Fields Forever" sounded like it was played on a strange instrument, so Tony Bramwell decided to invent one for his film. Bramwell first went to Knole Park in Kent, where he found an old tree that he dressed up with long rows of strings. Later he attached those strands to a piano and harp. The Beatles, who look like posh gravediggers, hunch over this strange piano/harp hybrid, as Lennon mournfully sings his psychedelic Gothic memoir. Bramwell created the effect of the Beatles leaping back and forth from the tree to the ground by shooting it forward and backward in the camera. But the jumping about here doesn’t resemble the bounding leaps of freedom we saw in their great escape from the TV studio in A Hard Day’s Night. No longer youthful mop-tops defying age and custom, the group here appears burdened by age, by the weight of their dreams, and more individually distinct with different cuts of hair and mustaches. Adorned with mutton chops, Lennon could have easily stepped out of an Arthur Conan Doyle mystery. Ringo appears in an unaccustomed red military tunic, while Harrison is buried in his thick balaclava.

The picture sleeve for the single itself was a bold departure from the group shots projected in previous covers. Earlier, whether bright-eyed and enthusiastic (Please Please Me), exhausted (Beatles for Sale), or reflective (Rubber Soul), The Beatles were always a recognizable band, the progenitors of a radically new pop sound. But on the front of this new single, the formally posed photo of the group, set in a gold embroidered picture frame, made them appear like arcane artifacts from the nineteenth century. If not for the presence of spotlights and the bright color of the picture, this photo could be a relic from the period of their grandparents. On the back sleeve are featured four separate baby photos placed in different angles to each other. The Beatles are no longer pictured as four parts of one whole, but instead as four discrete individuals. The question for many who heard this new single, saw the cover sleeve, and watched the promotional films on television was: Are they still even The Beatles?


The first test of that question came when Bramwell’s two films premiered on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand television show in early 1967. Clark’s popular long-running variety show had been a lifeline throughout the Sixties for teenagers falling in love with rock ’n’ roll. Before showing the clips, Clark asked some of those in his live audience if they thought The Beatles were through. One teenage girl told him that she’d never pay to see them again while another compared them to The Monkees; one other guy told Clark that The Beatles had gone out with the Twist. Consigning the group to fad status was apparently the easiest way for the audience to rationalize their hurt and sense of abandonment. Clark then cued the "Strawberry Fields Forever" clip. As the audience watched this dreamy pastiche being screened before them, dismissal turned to disillusionment. One viewer expressed shock at their longer hair and thick mustaches. Another kid could only summon up the comment that the group was deliberately becoming weird. Once united behind The Beatles, the audience was now becoming as fragmented as the group itself appeared to be.

The single represents one of the last samples of Beatle alchemy. For Lennon, in "Strawberry Fields" he takes you to a forlorn past where he’s anxious to find relief, and ultimately his true self. His voice, which has the beautiful grain of worn sandpaper, reveals a performer who sings with a hungry desire to be released from the pain he can’t seem to escape from. For McCartney, in "Penny Lane," his visionary spirit is heard in his effortless ability to counter pain and remorse with an ache for the beauty of life. When The Beatles began their quest for fame, they sought out their American musical roots in order to find their own identity as The Beatles. But now removed from the road, from that original quest, the group returned to their own British roots in these two songs. When the single was released, the song became a #1 hit in America. But it stalled at #2 in Britain, when it was ousted by Engelbert Humperdinck’s highly conventional "Release Me." But that was okay. The charts no longer held the same allure as they did in 1964 when "I Want to Hold Your Hand" shot to #1 worldwide. What started as a love affair between a band and its eager, expectant audience had now turned to ritual, routine, and retribution. They began their 1962 Please Please Me album session with the anticipatory "There’s a Place." They would then start the Revolver album with the final surrender of "Tomorrow Never Knows." That title, "Tomorrow Never Knows," was yet another malapropism from Ringo, and it also turned out to be prophetic. After "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane," tomorrow truly didn’t know. All The Beatles really knew was that they were no longer facing and confronting their live audience. For the first time, they were about to truly face each other.

-- March 2/17

Just When I Thought I Was Out....Showtime's Homeland


Mandy Patinkin, Claire Danes and Rupert Friend in Homeland

There's an infamous scene in Francis Ford Coppola's misbegotten The Godfather, Part III where the aging Don Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), having survived an assassination attempt, tells his family in a tone of bitter betrayal, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." The implication is that Michael's criminal life was all due to the pressure of others rather than a choice he made out of family loyalty. I think we're expected to be so sympathetic towards Michael that we can ignore the little detail that he was redeeming himself by laundering money through the Vatican Bank and cutting the other mob bosses out of the huge profits he was due to receive from investing in an international real-estate company (one that would make him its largest single shareholder). Many actors and comedians have gained some comic mileage from that line – including Steve Van Zandt as Silvio in The Sopranos, who entertained Tony's crew by doing a spotless imitation of Pacino. But the remark might be more appropriately spoken by CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) on Showtime's Homeland, a dramatic thriller loosely based on the Israeli television series Hatufim (Prisoners of War). As a bipolar operative, her struggle to claim a happy and independent life for herself is constantly being threatened by a psyche she's not sure she can trust. If anyone has honestly earned Michael Corleone's complaint, perhaps it's Carrie. Just when she's trying to have a normal life, she is constantly being pulled back into action by the agency – and often by her former boss and mentor, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), another character who would be happy to own Corleone's sentiment. What has made the past three seasons of Homeland intriguing and suspenseful has partly been how her hunger to seek a normal life has created fallout for the agents she works with and cares for.

When Homeland debuted in the fall of 2011, it started with a nifty premise that had some of the pedigree of The Manchurian Candidate. An incarcerated terrorist who is awaiting execution tells Mathison that an American POW has been turned by al-Qaeda. She suspects that it is Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a Marine sergeant who had been missing in action and was recently rescued by a Delta Force raid. The premise is that while in captivity he was brainwashed to be a sleeper assassin in America. Although Carrie's instincts are sharp concerning his potential to commit lethal acts of carnage, her bipolar disease leaves her doubtful as to what those instincts are telling her. The first three seasons played out those doubts by creating suspense out of what might (or might not) be true. Both Danes and Lewis were also terrific at keeping us guessing as to whether Brody would succeed at committing acts of terror, or whether Mathison (who had also become sexually involved with Brody) could stop him by convincing her superiors that he's a real threat. Unfortunately, Homeland soon began stretching the credibility of that relationship and the plot itself. In season two and three, despite the fascinating way the characters became soulmates due to the damage to both their psyches, the story line began having schizzy issues of its own and I bailed before the third season concluded. Some trusted friends who felt similarly disappointed, suggested I pick it up again in season four, where the series did a reboot. And while the past three seasons have hardly been perfect, Homeland definitely has returned to more cogent plotting along with an unerring instinct for timely storytelling. With Brody gone from the series, Carrie's dynamic with the agency changes dramatically by season four. As CIA station chief in Afghanistan, nicknamed "The Drone Queen," Mathison approves a strike on Haissam Haqqani (Numan Acar), a high-ranking terrorist in Pakistan, only to discover that their target wasn't at the house in Islamabad that they hit. Instead they bombed a wedding and many innocent people died. When the strike, videotaped by Aayan Ibrahim (Suraj Sharma), Haissam's nephew, ends up on YouTube, their unit comes under scrutiny from home and Carrie is returned to the United States. She ultimately blackmails her way to Pakistan so she can uncover the reasons for the bad intel.

Claire Danes and Suraj Sharma

Moving away from the romantic story of Brody and Carrie allowed Homeland to open up more to the global zeitgeist where media perception – and an awareness of that perception – influences the actions on both sides. For instance, Haissam uses the drone bombing, where the intelligence he secretly gave the CIA's station chief Sandy Bachman (Corey Stoll) was deliberately misleading, with the goal of tainting the American mission against the insurgency. (Bachman later gets killed by an angry mob when Pakastani TV reports that he provided the information for the bombing.) A number of other subplots in this season get developed as well. Carrie had a child with Brody that she has left for her sister to raise until she gets back, but the problem is that she can't reconcile herself to motherhood. Later in the season, when her father dies, she briefly encounters the mother (Victoria Clark) who abandoned her in childhood and she provides something of a psychological template for Carrie's own adult behaviour. Aayan has ambivalent feelings about the strike, which he survived. So Carrie exploits that confusion (especially sexually) to use him as an asset, which ultimately leads to tragic circumstances she hadn't considered. Saul gets kidnapped by Haissam, and we later learn that this event, with its consequences, was orchestrated by forces close to home and engineered by the CIA black ops director, Dar Adal (the wily F. Murray Abraham). While the main thrust of season four is the Pakistani government's collusion with Islamic terrorism, Homeland also examines how American officials allow themselves to be manipulated into that complicity. Since the series features such layered plotting, it's helpful that a number of good actors turn up. As the American ambassador to Pakistan, Laila Robins shows a regal authority that we see crumble when she discovers the source of the corruption in her station. Michael O'Keefe, who in his youth often played characters (The Great Santini, Split Image) fighting off neurosis, is perfectly convincing as a CIA deputy station chief in Pakistan who has become a sodden and drunken cynic. Playwright Tracy Letts, as Andrew Lockhart, the new director of the CIA, is highly effective at conveying the dark humour and expedience of a hardened bureaucrat.

By season five and six (which concluded last Sunday night), Carrie tries to settle her life outside of the agency and raise her child with her current boyfriend, Jonas Hollander (Alexander Fehling). Living in Germany, and working as head of security for Otto Düring (Sebastian Koch), a German billionaire, philanthropist and chairman of Düring Foundation, she attempts to put her skills to work in a less threatening environment. But when two anti-jihadist computer hackers accidentally get access to the CIA servers and download top secret documents that detail collaboration between the CIA and BND, Germany's intelligence agency, Saul Berenson arrives in Berlin to look into the possible leak of classified documents, with chilling implications. Simultaneously, Carrie arranges security for Otto to visit a refugee camp in Lebanon, which sets forth consequences that lead to a potential terrorist attack. As that plan unfolds, Carrie discovers that she is a marked woman and – once again – gets pulled into duty and jeopardizes her relationship with Jonas. She ultimately succeeds at preventing the act of terrorism, but she loses the man she loves, which brings her back to the United States, where she resides in Brooklyn with her now pre-school-aged daughter and works at a foundation whose efforts are to provide aid to Muslims living in the United States. Saul Berenson and Dar Adal are still CIA operatives dealing with counter-terrorism within the United States, but rogue elements within the agency are setting out to undermine the results of a presidential election of a female candidate (Elizabeth Marvel).

Both seasons five and six have eerie resemblances to current events which resonate – especially those relating to Russian operatives in the American government as well as to the use of online malfeasance in order to discredit candidates. But where Homeland is still weak, compared to something like The Americans, is that it provides ongoing manufactured suspense (which is probably fitting for those who want to binge-watch on Netflix). Like 24, Homeland gets single-minded about its drama. Because it keeps the characters in a constant state of crisis, you feel sometimes like you are in a spin cycle. For example, do we really need somebody fucking with Carrie's medication yet again just so we can fear another meltdown right when she most needs to be coherent? How many times do we have to see Dar Adal planning another sinister operation without those close to him – like Carrie and Saul – finally catching on to him? Is he that much of a malevolent genius? The Americans, which deals with Soviet spies passing as Americans in the Reagan era, is suspenseful, too, but rarely because of some nefarious deed that leaves us hanging until the next week. The protagonists themselves are put to the test daily trying to raise two children, passing as American citizens in an era of family values, while they steal, cajole and murder. We get to witness the various ways the mission eats at their core beliefs and convictions while always discovering new things about them. Homeland has some of that quality, but Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin need more to do than just continually hitting the same wall, getting pulled in just when they thought they were out.

F. Murray Abraham and Rupert Friend

But if Danes and Patinkin are the motor that drives Homeland, Rupert Friend as the CIA black-ops assassin, Peter Quinn, is its heart. With Quinn, Homeland gives us a character who continues to morph. In season four, he is unable to save Sandy Bachman from the killer mob in Pakistan and over the next few seasons he becomes more and more haunted by the mounting corpses. Quinn almost becomes one himself when a jihadist group uses him as their test subject for a poison-gas attack in one horrific scene. Where Carrie and Saul keep dramatically covering the same ground, it's Quinn whom we watch getting destroyed by his work. (Perhaps the line, "Just when I thought I was out . . . ," should really belong to him.) In a performance as deep and resonant as Mickey Rourke's playing the haunted IRA assassin in Mike Hodges's 1987 thriller A Prayer for the Dying, Friend gives Quinn a broken soul without any histrionics. In season six, while recovering from a stroke which has left him disabled, he still taps into instincts that help uncork the dark dealings of Dar Adal – the Victor Frankenstein who created him – and assist Carrie. Friend's scenes with F. Murray Abraham crackle with a suspense that is both terrifying and tragic. Peter Quinn is the casualty of an espionage world where collateral damage is a given and his fate casts a darker shadow over the agency's best-laid plans.

The current tension between the Trump administration and the intelligence agency shows that there are endless directions for Homeland to go in future seasons. Since terrorist attacks also show little sign of abetting, the drama will likely find a continued relevance in our ever-fearful post-9/11 world. But I do hope that Homeland finds better ways to expand the characterizations of the key roles on the show. There's only so much that Danes and Patinkin can do, as good as they are, to fill parts that are continually at the mercy of a demand for weekly suspense. If they do continue in this repetitive vein next year, I might find myself once again getting out – and without any desire of being pulled back in.

-- April 11/17

Ghosting: Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper


Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper

In the last few years, when attending various parties and gatherings, I started noticing some unusual new social behaviour among people (often women) that I'd never encountered before. When engaged in a conversation that took on its own momentum from the various subjects it raised -- as opposed to the more careful chatter where familiar anecdotes and social gossip provided ample protection from revealing yourself -- there would reach a point when the person I was talking to would simply disappear without a word. Unlike in the past, where a fascinating conversation could lead to friendship, a relationship, or simply a nice evening that the person you were talking to recognized as she disappeared from your life, these folks would simply vanish. There was no way to discern whether it was something you said, fear of a particular kind of intimacy, or even a perfectly legitimate need to move on. The simple courtesy of closing a conversation was replaced by what someone who had acted towards me in this manner justified as 'ghosting.' The point of 'ghosting' seems to be to remove yourself from a conversation without acknowledging that you are in the process of having one. By asserting control in a situation not predicated on needing it, you can protect your sense of self by making yourself disappear. You experience each encounter as one in a series with equal value, where nuance and feeling are erased, or perhaps never even considered. It 's as if the conversation left no residue because the person who does the ghosting never offers a clue to why she needs to disappear. Just as I've started to wonder how much technology and social media and phone texting have had to bear on this capacity to control the uncontrollable, Olivier Assayas's new picture, Personal Shopper, picks up on this new phenomenon in a fascinating way.

Maureen (Kristen Stewart) exists in a world full of ghosting. She makes her living as a personal shopper for Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten), a model/designer who's virtually invisible to her as, a peripatetic and vanishing jet-setter, she leaves Maureen to buy her clothes and accessories. Maureen is also a self-proclaimed medium who claims to be in touch with the spirit world and is currently occupying the house of her twin brother, Lewis, who has just died from a genetic heart problem that they share. Before he died, they had both made an oath that one would contact the other from the next world and now she waits for clues. As Stewart plays Maureen, she is a private person, at a physical distance from everyone (including a boyfriend who only appears on Skype), but not inaccessible. Maureen does starve for contact – Stewart makes you feel her tactile need for intimacy when she breaks her employer's rules and tries on Kyra's clothes – but only if someone reaches out to her. Like most young people today, however, she is wedded to her phone and responds to texts, another form of ghosting. The suspense in Personal Shopper – and its most innovative moments – comes when Maureen begins receiving texts from a mysterious sender who she feels could be her sibling, but may also be a stalker. Like Lisbeth (Rooney Mara) in David Fincher's version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Maureen is so at home in the digital world of information that she has little grasp of the intuitive instincts that connect us to the body language of human contact. Personal Shopper is a sophisticated ghost story that's not so much interested in instilling fear in the audience as in exploring the nature of fear when we lose touch with the most primal aspects of human communication -- when corporeal contact has been replaced by the ephemeral. Assayas has touched on this subject before in his 2002 SF noir Demonlover, but that film was cluttered with too many ideas that didn't quite gel. In Personal Shopper, he's simplified the story, which enables him to delve further into our precarious relationship with technology and how it raises questions of what is to be human.


While Personal Shopper shows some exciting new innovations in Assayas's work, with suspense growing out of a succession of phone texts, some of the plot points fizzle. The kind of apparitions Maureen eventually encounters in Lewis's home, for instance, are better served in the expressionistic horror of The Woman in Black. There's also a murder mystery that goes nowhere and falls apart (except for the scene where Maureen discovers the body – an unsettling encounter with a ghosting individual who becomes flesh in death). But the overall experience of the picture renders its flaws superfluous. Kristen Stewart gives a phenomenal performance that anchors the story in its own twilight zone. Stewart was terrific in Assayas's last film, Clouds of Sils Maria, where she also played an artist's assistant. But her part was more peripheral there than it is here. She is remarkably skillful at playing characters like Maureen, who live at a remove from others, and she never makes them opaque. In the recent video for The Rolling Stones' cover of Eddie Taylor's "Ride Em On Down" (a tale of fear to join Robert Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail"), Stewart is seen driving alone in a post-apocalyptic city like the one Will Smith occupied in I Am Legend. Whether the dead, the vampires, or even the human survivors (like one she meets) are even paying attention to her appear immaterial to Stewart's joyrider, who figures that as long as her car stereo is working and her hips keep swaying, there ain't nothing dead or alive who can stop her. Stewart has a propulsive drive that animates her sullen expressions, giving them a sensual twirl, as if we were watching a female Elvis who could actually act. Maureen's deep need for contact from the beyond is not about escaping from the world, but about bringing deeper meaning to a world that's become nothing more than deadlines and mundane details.

Critic Kent Jones once wrote about Olivier Assayas that his films have a "sharper and increasingly attentive scrutiny of the strange sensation of living in the changing present...[with an] economical sense of storytelling through ceaseless motion." Even with its narrative flaws, Personal Shopper is caught up in that ceaseless motion where the past and the present – and even the eternal – get full consideration and rendering. Thankfully, Assayas isn't a pill about the younger generation and its struggles with the present, or its coming to terms over what they inherit from the past (a theme which brought his finest film, Summer Hours, to an affecting conclusion). His political awareness (at its sharpest in Something in the Air) and his social scrutiny always derive their strength from the humanist legacy of Jean Renoir, even if stylistically he draws from the modernist well of the late Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Personal Shopper may not answer many of the narrative questions it raises – even the source of the phone texts remain a ghostly mystery – but that is actually part of the point, especially in an age where ghosting is a means of being here until you're not.

-- April 29/17

Defining Race: Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro


author James Baldwin

"Trumpcare was never about the well-being of Americans," actor Jeffrey Wright recently remarked as President Donald Trump continued to dismantle the former president's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. "It was about trying in vain to erase Barack Obama from the history books." Given the erratic nature of Trump's actual policies, where everything is put in direct opposition to Obama's legacy, Wright's claim isn't rhetorical. What he does is open a door into what the early days of the Trump era are all about: inducing social amnesia. The one consistency that both elected Trump and has sustained him so far has been the continuous fermenting rage over having had eight years of America's first black president. Even the term – Obamacare – when it springs forth from the lips of many Republicans, sounds like they're describing some kind of plague or pestilence that has swept the land and needs to be gotten rid of, denying both the intent of the Act (despite its deficiencies) and the political integrity of the man who put it forth. Obamacare never was allowed to be a piece of legislation, which is why the Republican alternative isn't even a sufficient improvement, or close to being a reasoned response to it. During the tenure of his presidency, I think Barack Obama knew that he was a lightning rod for both the unrealistic expectations of his followers and the irrational hatred of his adversaries. He also understood that any daring move on his part to fulfill those two terms in office would have likely led to a cataclysmic outcome given the nation's unresolved racial history and its string of assassinations. So he worked carefully (and with precision) to be both a visible and an invisible presence. Out of office, Obama is still a projection of America's torn psyche, an ineradicable reflection, one part of the nation wishing to bury the whip of slavery while the other refuses to confront and transcend this unsavory legacy.

You can sense these lingering projections as well in Jordan Peele's nervy horror/comedy, Get Out, which plays havoc with the latent paranoia inside racial perceptions. It gets you laughing and yet puts you in a state of paralyzed terror over what you are actually laughing at. Right from the first scene, Get Out twists our notions of racial profiling in knots. We see a black man calmly walking at night through a white suburban neighborhood who he ends up in fear for his life. Peele draws on a variety of pictures from different genre, including Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Stepford Wives, Meet the Parents, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Night of the Living Dead, then takes their familiar themes and revisits them through the prism of a polarized America where nothing is what it seems. After its unsettling opening, Get Out tucks itself snugly inside the uneasy skin of a young middle-class black man Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) who can't be sure that the parents (played by Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams), whom she's taking him home to meet, are as liberal as they claim to be. For most of the picture, Peele plays clever shell games with Chris's notion of what racism is and what it isn't. But he also toys with our perceptions and expectations without providing any emotional distance from the material (as Edgar Wright does in his genre satires Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, which wink knowingly at the audience). Get Out finds bold new ways to get under our own skin, but it ultimately falls victim to its own need to offer simple solutions rather than trusting its uneasy questions. Betraying the conclusion that Peele originally had in mind, which was a beauty and provided a perfect payoff to an earlier scene, he skips over its discomfiting implications. The door out of his unsettling narrative turns out to have an easy lock to pick. Get Out plays comfortably to a predominantly black audience's need for heroism and freedom in order to avoid the true state of the nation after Trump's victory. It's as if Peele were trying to animate the dormant id of Obama.

Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams in Get Out

Raoul Peck's documentary I Am Not Your Negro has some of the same contradictory impulses as Get Out. Peck takes author James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, a reflective memoir about his friendships with black activists Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and tries to fashion a prognostic reading of contemporary racism. (At the time of his death in 1987, Baldwin had written about thirty pages of the manuscript.) While there's true daring in letting Baldwin's words reach through time to make sense of post-Obama America, they often feel imposed on the present rather than illuminating it. Peck's film draws on Baldwin's anger towards white America for making his justified rage into something inappropriate to black progress (something Baldwin also wrote about in passionate detail in The Fire Next Time). But history has also proven that the answer to that claim is far more complex than what Baldwin – or Peck – come up with. I Am Not Your Negro takes up Baldwin's soul-searching and sometimes transforms his eloquence into ready-made slogans.

When Baldwin returned to America from Paris in the mid-sixties, he discovered a country in turmoil over civil rights. But rather than boil racism down to cause and effect, Baldwin's assertions, seen here on The Dick Cavett Show and in his various campus talks, capture the author and activist in the process of discovering the meaning of racism rather than declaring answers for it. As we look back today, the dichotomy between white and black America wasn't so simply drawn in the first place. For one thing, white America wasn't one adversarial entity. Many whites went South to help fight against segregation. Alliances were built between blacks and whites on university campuses to fight against discrimination. I Am Not Your Negro doesn't delve either into the psychological aspects of racism where blacks actually fought each other while struggling for solutions. Peck doesn't mention in his film that it was the Nation of Islam that turned on Malcolm X and had him assassinated (whether or not you believe the government and FBI also had a hand in it). He also doesn't refer to the famous broadside Eldridge Cleaver wrote on Baldwin in his popular book Soul on Ice – a piece dripping in ugly machismo in which Cleaver viciously attacked Baldwin's homosexuality – without a whisper of protest at the time.

There's no question that the urgency in I Am Not Your Negro comes from a strong desire to protest the way black America has been turned today into an innocuous citizenry (especially among polite racists who answer Black Lives Matter with All Lives Matter, as if to say that black America hasn't been under siege). Peck does show a smart awareness when illustrating how in the sixties black activists like Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were murdered for their idealism, whereas now we have a more covert racism at work, but he works against the strength of his thesis by settling for the more comfortable notion that – deep down – things are merely the same as they ever were. I Am Not Your Negro doesn't take the daring leaps that Ezra Edelman did in his thesis documentary O.J. Made in America. In Edelman's more nuanced film, he shows how black athlete O.J. Simpson positioned himself as the anti-Muhammad Ali at a time when others (like Ali) were all about blacks standing proud. Ali's celebrity came from the defiance of one man holding America accountable for all its broken promises. Whereas Simpson, who sped through the doors that Ali had opened, ignored the country's dashed ideals and went for the gold instead. In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the author visibly railed against being both ignored and turned into an expedient symbol, but in O.J.: Made in America, we see the reverse happening. O.J. Simpson is portrayed as a visible celebrity athlete who willfully turns himself into an invisible man by becoming an expedient symbol for whatever and whoever will make him accepted and loved in white America – until years later, when charged with murdering his white ex-wife, he needs to be perceived as black in order to sway the jury into finding him innocent.


Although I Am Not Your Negro doesn't quite open up the paradoxes of American racism the way O.J.: Made in America did, however, it's by no means a negligible film. The desire to move a partisan audience isn't born out of the same carny impulses that Michael Moore employs in his work. Raoul Peck brings an urgency, as if delivering an SOS, trying to step inside James Baldwin's thought processes while looking for clues to make sense of where we are now. And he's not often wrong. While looking into the films of John Wayne killing Indians in Hollywood westerns, he brings up valid (if already familiar) points. His taking shots at the whiteness of Doris Day in her vapid pictures in the sixties isn't. We're never told about her early career as a jazz singer when she played with black musicians and styled herself after Ella Fitzgerald. (Rock Hudson was an equal victim of that stereotypical mask in their romantic comedies, playing the virile all-American heterosexual when the opposite was true.) Playwright Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), who was the first black woman to write a play on Broadway, was a chain smoker who died at 34 of pancreatic cancer. But her death is linked here instead to her tireless struggle for racial equality -- we see Attorney General Robert Kennedy driving her to despair when he doesn't respond to her pleas against the violence against black protesters in the South. These are perhaps picky points to raise but they add up to the paring down of the larger meanings that I Am Not Your Negro is reaching for.

Whatever its flaws, one of the greatest strengths of the documentary is James Baldwin. His mellifluous voice purrs like a cat, but it also has the sharp claws of one. He's at his best in one scene from Dick Cavett when he takes on philosopher Paul Weiss, who complains about Baldwin making an issue out of race instead of focusing on character. Baldwin jumps in with a critique that cuts like a chainsaw to characterize race and character as more considerable for one who is black and denied access to institutions, housing and jobs. Besides being the strongest scene to anchor Peck's thesis (and the one that produces the film's title), it's a bracing time-capsule moment, too. Baldwin and Weiss's fiery argument – with both sides listening to each other – is in striking contrast to today's TV news programs, where people continuously shout each other down. Curiously, Peck's use of Samuel Jackson to narrate ends up working against the picture in ways that he couldn't have considered. Instead of talking in his own voice, which comes equipped with a dynamic strut all its own, Jackson speaks in Baldwin's softer cadences. (Early in the picture, I was having a hard time taking in Baldwin's points and only later realized that, for me, the problem was the timbre of Jackson's narrating voice.) What that vocal choice does is to make Baldwin's observations sound less dynamic, less confrontational, and less passionate. I Am Not Your Negro, a movie whose title lays claim to standing independent, bold and righteous, should never have its black narrator speak in a voice that strips it of its natural colour.

-- May 13/17

Bridge Over Troubled Water: The Fiftieth Anniversary of Bobby Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe"



Throughout the early Sixties, tragic teen ballads – beguiling and haunting mini-operas cured in the melodrama of adolescent angst – dominated the charts. Most were extravagant tales of woe and heartbreak like The Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack," where the rejected biker/lover dies proudly on his wheels, while others included Frank J. Wilson's "Last Kiss," where Frank's girl dies not-so-proudly because of her boyfriend's faulty wheels. Other earlier sagas of loss were downright perverse. Mark Dinning's 1960 hit "Teen Angel" got the sixties off to a fiendishly grim start. His bizarre story concerns the singer's girlfriend, who gets leveled by a train after she rushes back to her stalled car to rescue her high school ring. (Perhaps today you'd have to substitute a cell phone for the prized jewelry.) And if "Teen Angel" weren't already more than enough, Johnny "Mr. Bass Man" Cymbal came along that same year with "The Water is Red," where the singer's girl gets torn apart by a shark while swimming at the beach. The boyfriend, with chivalry as his shield, bravely wades through the bloodied waters, not to just gather up her torn remains, but to take on (with his pocketknife, no less) this early relative of Jaws. By the jaded Seventies, then, it was no surprise that Randy Newman parodied, with expert precision, this strangely popular genre in "Lucinda." Drawing from the slow blues style of Ray Charles, he tells us of a woman who accidentally gets chewed up by a beach-cleaning machine. Lying in the sand in her graduation gown with some boy she just met that night, Lucinda seems to have fallen asleep just as the mechanical contraption started chugging along. Her companion tries vainly to wake her up, but it's to no avail: Lucinda is doomed to lie under the sand. (Given her fate, and the style of the song, Newman may also be parodying murder blues ballads such as "Sleeping in the Ground.") Later in the decade, Warren Zevon went Newman's macabre tale one better with his hilarious satire "Excitable Boy," revisiting the song as if the narrator might be Ted Bundy (and he's backed with affirmative "ooh-wah-ooh's" by Linda Ronstadt and Jennifer Warnes in the manner of gregarious high school cheerleaders ).

If these tragic pop dramas of the past were always bathed in tears (linking them in a significant way to the romantic heartbreak heard in Fifties doo-wop), there was one popular tragic song in the summer of 1967 that drew from different sources, avoiding melodrama altogether and casting a spell on listeners for decades. Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" was a quiet Southern Gothic ballad about suicide and other mundane matters of the day which get shared over the dinner table with the biscuits and peas. Where "Leader of the Pack," "Teen Angel" and "Last Kiss" could have been ripped from the headlines of city tabloids, "Ode to Billie Joe" was as cryptic and mysterious as an old Appalachian murder ballad. What made it even more curious was that the summer of 1967 was hardly a quiet one. Some were celebrating a Summer of Love with the Monterey Pop Festival, but in his book, The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus (in discussing "Ode to Billie Joe") reminds readers that a number of calamitous events were taking place that summer besides growing flowers in your hair and heading west. Fifty years ago today, the day after Gentry recorded her single, twenty-six black citizens were killed in protests in Newark, New Jersey. Detroit almost doubled that number two weeks later. Arthur Penn started a revolution in American movies with the premiere of Bonnie and Clyde, a picture about two Depression-era bank robbers that implicated us in the murders we watched on screen.

While angry protests against a war in Southeast Asia competed with all the domestic malaise, a 22-year-old country singer Roberta Lee Streeter, who became professionally known as Bobbie Gentry, went into a Hollywood studio on July 10, 1967 to record what was initially to be the B-side of a single. (The A-side was planned to be the country rock number, "Mississippi Delta," a statement song about her roots as a Southerner.) What she came up with that day ultimately removed The Beatles' more affirmative "All You Need is Love" from the top of the charts and opened up a mystery that swallowed up listeners, just as it would ultimately consume the woman who wrote and performed it. "Ode to Billie Joe" tells the tale of a young woman, who is singing the song, about to sit down with her family for a typical midday meal where conversation rolls off the tongue as casually as the food getting passed around the table. The singer's mother has just heard the news that Billie Joe McAllister has thrown himself off the Tallahatchie Bridge in Money, Mississippi, just above the Delta, where the singer's family lives. She shares the news with everyone as they begin to gather, but they treat the tragedy as an anecdote. The father tells the clan that "Billie never had a lick of sense" while asking his wife to pass the biscuits. Mother chocks it all up to nothing good ever coming out of Choctaw Ridge. The singer's brother recalls a childhood prank of Billie Joe's but expresses more enthusiasm for his mom's apple pie. Only the singer has no appetite, leading her mother to wonder if that has anything to do with the news that the new young preacher, Brother Taylor, saw a girl who looked just like her with Billie Joe up on Choctaw Ridge – and they were throwing something off the Tallahatchie Bridge. But where most songs would, at that point, provide some kind of answer to the mystery, Bobbie Gentry moves right past it without missing a beat, as if the family had to move on from conversing to doing the dishes. By the next verse, it's a year later and Gentry's character sings about her brother getting married and moving to Elvis's birthplace. Tupelo. Her father has since died of a virus and in the aftermath of his demise her mother seems to have lost her will to live. As for the singer herself, she spends her time picking flowers up on Choctaw Ridge and drops them into the muddy water below the Tallahatchie Bridge.


Bobby Gentry crossing the Tallahatchie Bridge


In all the turmoil of the summer of 1967, how did an unassuming ballad about a young boy's suicide – failing to provide any reason for it, or for that matter, showing no shock or outrage from the singer's family – create such a stir on the radio? Marcus, discussing the song further in The Old, Weird America, notes that although Bobbie Gentry has "an ache in her voice," she avoids being drawn to the high notes. Perhaps it's because in those high notes the full weight of tragedy can be truly felt, whereas the notes Gentry chooses allow the listener to guess at what is being held back. The melody on guitar is less a melody than a keeping time so that the story has a steady bed to rest on. There's orchestration in the song, too, but as Marcus points out, it sounds like it's coming from far off, making it "less orchestration than signs that a memory is being kept." That memory and what it contains are what haunts the singer, the song, and the listeners who would soon discover it, as I did at summer camp that year on my transistor radio. Those who have come of age in a time when any song can be found at any time through social media will never realize the shock and thrill of discovering a song on the radio. You felt like the young boy in Hebrew class in the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, who fades away from his boring lessons so he can better get in tune with Grace Slick offering him a world of questions he finds more profound in "Somebody to Love." That tiny sole earphone offered you a magic portal away from the dull bits in life. Discovering "Ode to Billie Joe" one night as I sat by myself at a small campfire was like being let in on a family secret – but one that, even if I cared to share it with others, I had no answers for because the song didn't provide me with any. "The singer is like the woman who walks the hills in 'Long Black Veil': she knows why Billie Joe went to his death, she knows what they threw into the black water, but not only will she not tell, no one around the table even thinks to ask," Marcus goes on to write. It's that indifference, maybe, that stings the most. In Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn made blood and death matter by viscerally confronting us with it, but it's the absence of confrontation set forth in "Ode to Billie Joe" that's devastating. Nobody cares to know.

Marcus's bringing up "Long Black Veil" is noteworthy, not only because it is also a death ballad, written in 1959 by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin for Lefty Frizzell, but also because secrets are also being kept in it. A man is about to be executed for a murder he didn't commit. But he can't provide an alibi because he was in the arms of his best friend's wife and would rather take their secret to his grave than reveal the truth. In the song's chorus, the wife he slept with walks the hills with a long black veil in the wailing wind to visit his grave. As significant as "Long Black Veil" is to Gentry's, however, it does reveal its secret to the listener; "Ode to Billie Joe" resists the temptation. The Band did a great cover of "Long Black Veil" on their debut album, Music From Big Pink, but first they tackled the mysteries of "Ode to Billie Joe" with Bob Dylan in the Big Pink basement when they recorded "Clothesline Saga," an answer to "Ode." Singing in a monotone cadence, Dylan tells a yawning story about waiting for a line of wet laundry in the yard to dry. As he kills time, a neighbour arrives cheerfully to announce that the Vice-President (who was then Hubert Humphrey) has gone mad. Replying with a shrug that it's too bad but there's clearly nothing that can be done about it, the singer simply carries on waiting for those wet clothes to dry. "Clothesline Saga," which was recorded the same summer as "Ode to Billie Joe," never entered the crap-shoot world of pop radio – in fact, it wasn't even released on record until 1975. But it was an answer song that deliberately parodied and matched the mysterious timbre of "Ode to Billie Joe."

Part of the conundrum of "Ode to Billie Joe"'s being a hit song in the first place is that its power doesn't come from the kind of emotional outbursts that fuel a pop tune like "Leader of the Pack." It carries instead a formal decorum that resists pop conventions. Direct feelings here become masked, and it's that very mask that gives the song its allure. It confounded many who heard it. A friend on Facebook, where I recently noted the anniversary of the song, responded, "The story and presentation was of interest the first few times. After hearing it hundreds of times that summer I was ready to spit bullets into the radio." At a time when "spitting bullets" became the familiar tenor of the country, "Ode to Billie Joe" couldn't help but invoke intense reactions from many Americans. When it became a pop success, the track reached a larger audience than a death ballad by Dock Boggs. Therefore questions remained among many listeners as to just what Billie Joe and his girlfriend threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and why Billie Joe committed suicide. Speculation became as intensely inquisitive as the continued queries into JFK's murder. Fans wondered if the water below the bridge received an aborted baby, flowers, a draft card, or perhaps even a bottle of LSD. "Those questions are of secondary importance in my mind," Bobbie Gentry said later in exasperation. "The story of Billie Joe has two more interesting underlying themes. First, the illustration of a group of people's reactions to the life and death of Billie Joe, and its subsequent effect on their lives, is made. Second, the obvious gap between the girl and her mother is shown, when both women experience a common loss (first, Billie Joe and, later, Papa), and yet Mama and the girl are unable to recognize their mutual loss or share their grief." A pop audience grown used to having songs, even good ones, spell out answers couldn't possibly be satisfied with that explanation. Neither could a politically motivated folk audience that may have heard the song while waiting for the issue to be stated so they could man a barricade. "The song is sort of a study in unconscious cruelty," Gentry would finally tell Billboard Magazine. I think that observation best describes the song's appeal even if it frustrates some listeners. While the country was coming apart and lines were being drawn in the sand, people were looking for answers, not the bottomless mystery of a ballad where the writer told us that it didn't matter what was thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Emmett Till

"Ode to Billie Joe" even became a movie in 1972, directed by Max Baer Jr. (best known as the son of the famous boxer and the Appalachian cartoon Jethro Bodine on The Beverly Hillbillies), but he decided to provide an obvious answer to the mystery of the suicide – which was probably best left unanswered. "Now that I know why Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge," critic Roger Ebert wrote at the time, "I almost wish that I didn't." As for Bobbie Gentry, she took on a number of music styles over the next two decades, running from the questions and obsessions over "Billie Joe." Some of that time was spent recording duets with Glen Campbell, some as a Tiki lounge novelty act. Her career pretty much ended in the early eighties when she retreated into a life of privacy about two hours from the site of the very bridge that made her famous – though the bridge itself had collapsed into the water back in 1972. Other ghosts inhabit those surroundings besides the characters in her song. Many years before the events in Gentry's hit, another body went into the Tallahatchie River and he was no suicide. In 1955, a black youth named Emmett Till was accused of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white girl, at Bryant's Grocery, just around the corner from the bridge. Her husband Roy and JW Milam murdered and mutilated Till and dumped his body into the river. Submerging Emmett Till in the Tallahatchie was a vain attempt to bury the truth of the country's national stain of racism, a viciousness that was hiding under the mask of civility in Southern etiquette, but "Ode to Billie Joe" is about what becomes unspeakable in the language of common folk faced with a mortality that can't be so easily summed up or even recognized.

"Ode to Billie Joe" is still a haunting song to listeners because Gentry, in her exquisite performance, stays true to the people around the dinner table. She invites us into this room of strangers, who might even feel like strangers to each other, and allows them to breathe the air that they can't find the will to clear. Their cadences of somber reflection cause the listener to take stock of the significance of what is often left unsaid, unlike in the topical song which sets out to make a statement. "Ode to Billie Joe" these fifty years later remains a masterpiece of understatement.

-- July 11/17

Unstitched: Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled



In Don Siegel's 1971 Southern Gothic melodrama, The Beguiled, which is set in rural Mississippi in 1863, the middle of the American Civil War, an injured Union soldier named John McBurney (Clint Eastwood) is rescued by 12-year-old Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), a student at an all-girls' boarding school run by Miss Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page). The headmistress is initially reluctant to board the wounded McBurney but she finally agrees to take him in until he heals, at which point she can turn him over to the Confederates. But during the time that he's convalescing, in a locked music room and consistently under watch, he begins to cultivate intimate relations with the young women in the house who have not previously experienced the presence of a man. They include the independent-minded but emotionally scarred schoolteacher, Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman), and a sultry teenage student, Carol (Jo Ann Harris), who teases and flirts with McBurney. The soldier has also stirred feelings in Miss Farnsworth, who keeps her emotions locked up like her girls; it's implied that her stifled demeanor hides the incestuous relationship she once had with her late brother. McBurney spurns her sexual attentions while encouraging relations with Edwina and acting on his lust for Carol. When Edwina catches him in bed with Carol, her fury over his betrayal results in her knocking a pleading McBurney down the stairs and severely breaking his already wounded leg. In order to keep him alive, Miss Farnsworth instructs the girls to preparing him for the amputation of his broken limb, which draws the wrath of the desperate soldier towards the women who have taken him in.

Based on a 1966 novel, A Painted Devil, by Thomas B. Cullinan, Siegel's The Beguiled employs a variety of Gothic tropes – including hyperstylized erotic dreams with religious imagery and taboo trysts – so overripe that they would gag Carson McCullers or Tennessee Williams. Siegel was an efficient B-movie stylist, with the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Crime in the Streets (1956), Hell Is for Heroes (1962) and Ronald Reagan's last picture, The Killers (1964), to his credit. But he has no feel for the turbulent undercurrents of eroticism that lurk under Southern propriety. Which is why Geraldine Page, as the stiffly proper Miss Farnsworth, is allowed to turn sexual repression into a pedestal she mounts stridently rather than a character trait to explore. It's also why Clint Eastwood, whose McBurney begins as the randy fox in the hen house, soon begins hissing lines of self-righteous indignation that within the next year (as in Siegel's Dirty Harry) would become his career trademark. Essentially, The Beguiled is no more than an Eastwood castration fantasy where – despite his wily-scoundrel tendencies – he's essentially playing a man's man who is helplessly at the mercy of sexually starved women (just as he was as the hounded DJ in Play Misty for Me, which Eastwood directed and starred in later that year). Siegel makes everything that's suggestible and mysterious in the best Southern Gothic so explicit and painfully obvious that The Beguiled is to the world of Tennessee Williams what Mark Rydell's adaptation of The Fox (1968) was to D.H. Lawrence – except that the material in The Beguiled is nowhere near as enticing as Williams or Lawrence. The film, with a script by former blacklisted screenwriter Albert Maltz and Irene Kamp, is an ersatz Southern Gothic that uses the genre as stitching to embroider a psychological drama of entrapment, but without the motivating underpinnings of entrapment that would make coherent sense of it. With the exception of Mae Mercer as the black servant, Hallie, whose dynamic performance brings home the torn fabric of a nation at war over slavery, and Elizabeth Hartman's Edwina, whose fragile hopes for fleeing the claustrophobia of Miss Martha's control become cruelly dashed, the picture comes a cropper.

Geraldine Page and Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel's 1971 version

In her new remake, Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, Somewhere) has the good sense to cut away all the Gothic embellishments, like those painfully bad dream sequences. She also dispenses with Miss Martha's barely believable incestuous past. Although Coppola has stirred controversy by removing the character of Hallie, I think the charges against her of whitewashing and racism are completely off the beam. She is trying to shift the focus of the story away from the issues of the Civil War, to McBurney's stoking the libido of the women in the school, their imposed isolation and how their unacknowledged fears and desires get stirred by a male stranger who emerges from the war. Just about everything about Coppola's The Beguiled shimmers with intelligence – from the casting to the dreamily evocative cinematography by Phillipe Le Sourd (A Good Year, The Grandmaster) – except, unfortunately, for the material itself. Ironically, Coppola's wise decision to cut away the dreck of the original has laid bare the weaknesses in the source. And she hasn't really replaced it with anything. The original movie's Gothic pretensions turn out to be the only thing that bound Siegel's version so that it made some kind of point (no matter how questionable). So Coppola is left with nothing but a series of barely articulated scenes that don't hold together. The flaws of The Beguiled become increasingly glaring as the material becomes more unstitched.

As good as the actors are, they're left giving close to pantomime performances. Colin Farrell is without question a stronger choice for McBurney, not only because he's a much better actor than Eastwood but also because he projects a complex machismo that reveals much more than male boast. Farrell's McBurney is a working-class Irish immigrant who joins the Union Army because they pay him to fight. His fear of imminent death is what drives his sexual appetite – and he seeks refuge in the school to satisfy it. The primal terror of being killed also stokes his desire to connect with these innocent women who have been sheltered from the war he's escaped. But the film does little to develop his dread. As Miss Martha Nicole Kidman is a vast improvement over Geraldine Page, but that's almost all she is. As she demonstrated in The Others, Kidman is terrific at animating the tension between what lurks beneath the surface of a character and what that character chooses to reveal, but as she demonstrated in Hemingway and Gellhorn and Lion, at this point in her career Kidman is demonstrating much more range. And in The Beguiled, her repressive hold on the girls is left too ambiguous. We don't really know why she isolates them from the outside world (as she simultaneously schools them in preparation for living in it). My guess – from a brief scene Miss Martha has with McBurney – is that she once had a lover who perhaps died in battle, therefore her need to bottle her grief is also acted out by keeping the girls from experiencing the same romantic heartbreak. (The boys they'd meet might die in battle just as hers did.) But Kidman's character is all shadings with no weight in the role to ground her and give her focus. While I appreciate that Coppola doesn't turn Elle Fanning's Alicia into the overt sultry tease that Jo Ann Harris's Carol was in Siegel's version, her dalliance with McBurney barely makes any sense because there's so little flirtatiousness between them. (These omissions open up some of the flaws in the plot, too. Since McBurney has already promised that night to go to someone else's room, and Miss Martha was also waiting for him to make it to her bed, how does he even begin to think he wouldn't be caught with Alicia?) Kirsten Dunst gives the strongest performance in the picture despite the thinness of the role. She's not only able to make Edwina's hunger to leave the school palpable, but she lets us see how it deepens her feelings for McBurney – even as her desire also blinds her to his predilection for sexual deception.

Billie Whitelaw, Jane Horrocks and Joan Plowright in The Dressmaker (1988)

The reasons people hide themselves from the violence and turmoil of war, with the scent of sex and death always surrounding them, has always been a great subject. Jim O'Brien's The Dressmaker (1988), from John McGrath's script based on Beryl Bainbridge's 1973 novel The Secret Glass, is the picture I thought about most while watching The Beguiled. Set in Liverpool in 1944, during the nightly blackouts and food rations, the story centers on two sisters, Nellie (Joan Plowright), the dressmaker of the title, and Margo (Billie Whitelaw), her younger sibling who works on an assembly line in a munitions plant. While Nellie makes other people's dreams come true with her dresses, she has no dreams of her own. Nellie is a seething spinster who's rigidly devoted to the customs of the past and respectability, that is, the manners that she feels have been disrupted by the war. But her good taste serves as character armour to mask murderous rage. Margo is her opposite: boisterous, up for a song, a good-time gal looking for the next party. Yet she's vulnerable to the watchful eye of her sister. While in Nellie's care, her husband died from mustard-gas poisoning he suffered in World War One. Since that tragedy, the sisters have continued to carry a simmering contempt for each other. At least, it simmers until they do battle over their meek 17-year-old niece Rita (Jane Horrocks), who was left in their care by her father (Pete Postlethwaite) after her mother died. When Rita falls in love with Wesley (Tim Ransom), a young American soldier from Mississippi stationed in Liverpool, it ignites the tension between the two siblings. Like the city itself, Rita is waging an inner war between freeing her desires to express her sexuality like Margo, or becoming as prudish and as hard as Nellie. Rita is strongly attracted to Wesley, who represents the exoticism of America to her. He's a symbol of the very freedom she dreams for. But she is also terrified of his sexual advances towards her. Since Nellie is a self-righteous custodian of old values, she becomes an emotionally suffocating presence in the house.The desperate Rita goes to Margo for help because things for her are becoming emotionally and sexually undone. She hopes that Margo will understand her fears and help her win Wesley. But Margo, despite her libidinous temperament, is too timid to stand up to the power of Nellie's disdain for her. Nellie naturally triumphs in the end.

Kirsten Dunst and Collin Farrell in The Beguiled

The Beguiled is technically much better made than The Dressmaker, but though it shares some of the earlier film's dynamics, it lacks its teeming power and dramatic logic. The audience I saw The Beguiled with actually laughed at some of the later dramatic moments – not because they were trying to shut out parts of the picture that were disturbing them (which is usually the case) but because the links of motivating behaviour are missing between the scenes. Seeing Colin Farrell docile one second and then suddenly raging in the next makes it seem like a reel went missing somewhere. In a sense, The Beguiled is all plot and it's not a very good one to start with. Sofia Coppola has an uncanny ability to find meaning in stories that only have the suggestion of meaning. That's why Lost in Translation (2003), with its floating sense of dislocation and jet lag, reaches its own equilibrium rather than feeling as if someone imposed stability on it. She did the same thing in Somewhere (20111), where the emotionally lost bad-boy actor Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) meets up again with his estranged young daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning). As Johnny and Cleo go through an itinerary of activities – from her skating class to a quick trip to Milan to attend a glitzy award show – Somewhere focuses on the emotional undercurrents of those moments as they morph into one another. By allowing us the opportunity to observe how Johnny and Cleo begin to connect to each other, Coppola stirs us beyond words. The Beguiled is missing all the undercurrents that made Lost in Translation and Somewhere such bracing experiences because she finds no room here to get under the story.

You could say that Sofia Coppola's strengths are the opposite of her father's. Francis Coppola finds his bearings in genre material (The Godfather, The Conversation) where he can bring out the temperament in plot-driven stories, while she functions least successfully in that world (as shown by her muddled debut The Virgin Suicides, and the later Marie Antoinette). On the other hand, she works miracles with narratives that aren't chained to the conventions of storytelling, while when her father goes for mood over story (in pictures like One From the Heart, Rumble Fish and Tucker) he gets hopelessly lost. The Beguiled feels underdeveloped, as if Sofia Coppola thought by shifting the focus of the story she'd find what the original lacked. But all The Beguiled tells you is that her remake is no more beguiling than the original.

-- July 15/17

Man of a Thousand Faces: Eric Clapton Crossroads (1988)



Back in 1970, when Eric Clapton ducked for cover under the name Derek and the Dominos, he actually revealed more of himself than he had earlier in his best music with The Yardbirds, John Mayall and Cream. On the album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, the passion that drove his voice and his playing also had the element of losing control – as he did playing "Crossroads" with Cream on Wheels of Fire – where the music took hold and pulled him kicking and screaming into its tumult. Since Clapton's addictions, I believe, emerged from that plunge into desperate pleasure, it didn't surprise me that as he tackled the substances, the substance of his music became more careful and craftsman lite. While there may indeed be legitimate reasons for not touching the flames that ignite both your follies and your genius (after all, Derek and the Dominos were decimated by drugs and self-destruction), it may be that Clapton never really had a fully defined personality, a self that might have carried him through his addictions without letting him lose his spark.

Watching him with the Dominos sing Chuck Willis's desperately doomed "It's Too Late" on The Johnny Cash Show (which sets up the title track "Layla" on the album), you realize that Clapton's face has always morphed and been shaped by the music he plays. He never really looks the same from band to band. The music gives him definition rather than the other way around. As he trades lines with keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, while invoking the brotherly spirit of Sam & Dave, Clapton doesn't look comforted by the companionship. Driven by the fear of the emotions the song stirs, which is closer to desolation than comfort and satisfaction, he produces some of his best and truest music. The 1988 CD box set, Eric Clapton Crossroads, is a four-disc omnibus that tries to account for his genius through the many phases of a checkered career that in the end that fails to come into focus. Despite the linear chronology, which includes many highlights and duds, Eric Clapton Crossroadsnever identifies the intersection of those four corners because the artist who seems to possess a thousand faces has just as many disguises. Compiled with great care by Bill Levenson (who did a remarkable job the following year with the box set, The Allman Brothers Band Dreams), Eric Clapton Crossroads tries to shape the artist's evolution from a blues purist into a pop craftsman, but in doing so the collection reveals that Clapton's success is something of a hollow victory. (The set begins with The Yardbirds' very white by-the-numbers interpretation of John Lee Hooker's sexy "Boom Boom" and ends with Clapton's late-eighties synth-drenched re-recording of JJ Cale's "After Midnight," which eventually found its home as part of a Michelob beer commercial.)

Derek & the Dominos

Back in the late eighties, as vinyl was giving way to CDs, the box set was a popular means to providing a retrospective on an artist's career since you could fit more music on the compact disc than on an LP, and give it a digital clean-up in the process. What made the prospect so promising, too, was the opportunity to move past the expedience of the typical greatest hits album and into something richer where the music could answer key questions about the artist's value. Eric Clapton Crossroads is certainly a clear-headed attempt to do just that, unlike Bob Dylan's Biograph (1985), which was a shapeless and haphazard mess, or the equally jumbled Miles Davis: The Columbia Years 1955-1985 (1988). You don't experience the shock and surprise in the evolving sounds of Bob Dylan and Miles Davis on those box sets because the track selection is so uneven and arbitrary. Their artistry comes across as accidental. Levenson's Eric Clapton Crossroads shows us through a wide range of material that the guitarist is no accident. In Levenson's view, Clapton has always been at a crossroads in both defining his sound and refuting the idolatry his early music invoked in fans who proclaimed that 'Clapton is God.' So when he joined The Yardbirds in the fall of 1963, he arrived with a religious devotion to the blues and the group delivered on his zealotry with a number of pro forma covers of Billy Boy Arnold ("I Wish You Would"), Jimmy Reed ("Baby What's Wrong"), Naomi Neville ("A Certain Girl") and Sonny Boy Williamson ("Good Morning Little Schoolgirl"). But their devotional tributes were so earnestly bland that they continually missed the mark. It was as if they were speaking the language of the blues so literally that they didn't comprehend the actual meaning of the words. The lasciviousness underscoring Sonny Boy Williamson's original of "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl," for instance, is lost to The Yardbirds, who might as well be promising her an afternoon of Scrabble. It wasn't until the band recorded Calvin Carter's "I Ain't Got You" in 1964 that Clapton's solo guitar break, with biting notes that tore holes in the eardrums, provided the band with some cayenne pepper. But with the group's turn to pop stardom with the infectious "For Your Love," Clapton saw sacrilege in the air and fled the nest. (Truth be told, The Yardbirds found their true identity after Clapton. They were a better pop band with the versatile Jeff Beck on lead guitar, and later the industrious Jimmy Page, on memorable blues/pop hybrids like "Heart Full of Soul," "Over, Under, Sideways, Down" and "Evil Hearted You.")

With John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Clapton found both a comfortable home and a finishing school to hone his craft. Revisiting Otis Rush's "All Your Love" and Robert Johnson's "Rambling on My Mind" reveals Clapton as a quick study of the feeling of the blues while he crafts a sound that both defers to his antecedents and finds his own clear mode of expression. But that breakthrough is heard more dramatically in the later rock trio Cream, which he formed in 1966 with bass guitarist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, where the blues percolates in a psychedelic stew that enables Clapton to build explosive improvised solos. The dramatic tension about where they might end became almost unbearable (as on "Spoonful" from Cream's debut album). Which is why the appearance of Jimi Hendrix at that time woke Clapton up to the possibilities of how the blues could transform popular music into a form of sacred text. On "Sunshine of Your Love," "White Room" and especially "Crossroads," is where you hear Eric Clapton surrendering to a sound like a pilgrim on a sojourn. But as much as he acquiesced, there was fear in the act itself. The presence of drugs in psychedelia caused many casualties, but for Clapton the effect was more psychological. He'd watched Hendrix go to extremes of self-expression in his music that also equalled his appetite for chemical refreshment and it ultimately took his life. From there, where Clapton expressed both anger and fear about Hendrix's passing, music became a tug of war between finding release in his songs (such as "Presence of the Lord" with Blind Faith) and hiding in cautious craftwork ("Blues Power" on Eric Clapton).


That internal battle would also be fought in his romantic life when he fell into deep, obsessive love with George Harrison's wife, Patti Boyd, as if he could only surrender himself to those things he couldn't possess. Yet that bottomless pursuit took his music places emotionally that he hadn't dared reach before. When you listen to "Tell the Truth" and "Layla" on Crossroads, there's a mania in the sound that borders on heightened hysteria, a sense that only death could bring peace to the singer. It was heroin that eased the agony of obsession and brought Clapton's music to a deadened place where, even though he ultimately conquered the drug as well as winning the woman of his desires, he had no reason to reach further into his soul. What we hear by the time we get to the holistic "Let it Grow," his pallid cover of Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff," and his numbing version of Elmore James's aching "The Sky is Crying" is musical torpor. Personal salvation came at an artistic price. When we reach the eighties, Clapton finds a tranquil space in personal domesticity where his concentration on mastery creates an armour that hides a deeper fervour. The soul-tearing sounds of "Layla" become the cautiously friendly "Wonderful Tonight," and the delectably seductive "Strange Brew" becomes J.J. Cale's "Cocaine," which sounds about as threatening as a cup of tea. Phil Collins further commercialized Clapton's music and his guitar playing, which, heard especially on "Forever Man," developed into an everyman's slickness.

Eric Clapton Crossroads ends just before the artist finds commercial success in the middle of the road with his 1992 Unplugged live album, where even "Layla" gets drained of its unrelenting power. There's no question that Clapton's personal life in those years was a series of tragedies that could test any man's desire to reach inside himself to the most vulnerable places. Those risks, of course, have sometimes taken artists to places they never returned from, as Kurt Cobain could attest to from the grave. But Clapton was drawn to the blues for a good reason. He heard a calling in the music that demanded a price be paid to capture its essence. “For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall," he once said. You can hear Clapton scaling those heights on Crossroads in his concluding guitar solo on "Let it Rain," or even earlier with quick machine-gun breaks in Cream's "I Feel Free." The daring in those moments is truly exhilarating to behold. But the later music creates a false excitement where craft is no longer the elation of discovery, but instead the safety of acclaimed mastery. The most depressing aspect of Eric Clapton Crossroads is that he feels no need to resist it.

-- September 2/17

See You At The Curtain Call: Twin Peaks – The Return (2017)



“We are like the spider," said the king. "We weave our life, and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe. That is why it is said, 'Having created the creation, the Creator entered into it'. This is true for us. We create our world, and then enter into that world. We live in the world we have created."

– Thomas Egenes & Kamuda Reddy, Eternal Stories from the Upanishads.


"We are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream, but who is the dreamer?”

– David Lynch.


I think it's safe to say that there hasn't been anything on television close to what director David Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost unleashed the last few months in their 18-part serial Twin Peaks – The Return. More than being simply a sequel to the original 1990 ABC series, Twin Peaks, which focused on the murder investigation of the high school senior Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) by FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), or a mere continuation of the follow-up 1992 film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which examined the circumstances leading to that murder, Showtime's Twin Peaks – The Return was an abstract murder mystery that resisted solutions and begged even more questions. It was like finding yourself seeped in a David Lynch compendium where you experienced the full body of his work – including Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive – as one long amorphous trance as plot lines vanished, dramatic moments imploded, and nightmarish visions suddenly erupted and took hold. Twin Peaks – The Return was the source of much frustration because within that Lynchian theme park of devious delight were also hours of flattened-out kitschy comedy that not only tested your patience, but drew some of his worst instincts, those that had already been on display in Wild at Heart, and parts of Lost Highway. Yet the baggy unevenness of Twin Peaks – The Return wasn't simply a case of the director's intuition taking a holiday and intermittently going wrong. Lynch, who works almost entirely from his unconscious, seemed to be refusing to make any kind of conscious judgement over the material. It was as if he'd decided instead to run the table with whatever came into his mind (bad or startlingly good) to see where it might lead him – and also, of course, the viewer. Knowing that there was an audience out there both nostalgic and fiendishly curious to return to Twin Peaks after such a long hiatus, Lynch turned this epic tale into something more than a conclusion and resolution to the story. Twin Peaks – The Return was a turbulent meditation on the past, on the nature of nostalgia, on the tropes of television serial drama, and on death itself.

The series broke the wall of serial television, which – in both good and bad shows – tends to provide for us the predictable dramatic arcs, climaxes and cliffhangers which in the age of streaming gives us full comfort and safety in the familiar. It also provides the freedom to binge-watch. But who could binge-watch this? Time itself became something close to elastic on Twin Peaks – The Return, where even stasis was sometimes a twist in the story. But I'm going to resist rehashing the plot, not just to avoid revealing spoilers, but also because it would hardly help to explain where the show reaches both its transcendent heights and dives into its impenetrable lows. What I will say is that Lynch and Frost begin by taking us back to the conclusion of the original series where Dale Cooper is possessed by the evil spirit, Bob, and has now become two Coopers – one a noirish psychopath wearing the emblematic leather coat of Dennis Hopper from Blue Velvet, and the other a catatonic, nebbish doppelgänger, Dougie Jones. Cooper ultimately has to become whole again in order to confront the murder of Laura Palmer (dramatized in Fire Walk With Me) and attempt to erase the crime in order to set the future right. While we have to endure long stretches of tedium resulting from both unsatisfying character plots and quirky melodrama, there's no question that when Lynch ultimately enters the same pulsating and nightmarish obsessions that once permeated Hitchcock's Vertigo, the show becomes terrifyingly electric and eerily moving.

The cast and director David Lynch (photo by Marc Hom and retouched by Werkstette).

Most of the bad stuff concerns the story line of Dougie, which doesn't even make much dramatic sense. While Lynch and Frost's story is supposed to operate in the realm of the irrational, and therefore cured in a comprehensive dream logic, they mistakenly take a more naturalistic tone with this savant insurance salesman. As a result, these scenes come across as baffling since nobody seems to notice that Dougie is in a walking stupor – including his wife Janey-E (Naomi Watts), who spends most of the show acting exasperated with Dougie's behavior but not acknowledging that her spouse is about as animated as a turnip. Most of these episodes are played for comic effect, but their attenuated style resembles the kind of numbing satirical longueurs you see in a lot of Wes Anderson's films. Within the Dougie subplot, a number of actors end up being reduced to grotesque parodies, including Robert Knepper and Jim Belushi as Las Vegas gangsters and casino managers and Tim Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh as a pair of self-consciously verbose assassins who appear to be a nod to Quentin Tarantino. Lynch is always at his most effective dramatically when he opens up a Pandora's box of subliminal desires and fears (as he did in Blue Velvet). But in these moments (as in Wild at Heart), he simply stuffs that box with caricatured props who carry unpleasant associations with the pageants of late Fellini movies.

Lynch masterfully fuses our pop dreams and nightmares (and with surreal precision) in episode eight ("Got a Light?"), which goes the full distance in twisting our expectations for and perceptions of what a television episode actually is. Beginning with a mood of contemporary noir right out of Mulholland Drive, this installment quickly shifts without warning into a terrifying and slowly building sonic landscape of atomic horror that exists both in the real world and in the world of our worst imaginings. In that space, where Lynch creates a seductive but inescapably unnerving synergy, he takes us back to 1945 in New Mexico where the first nuclear bomb is set off. Nine Inch Nails create a searing metallic-static soundtrack ("She's Gone Away") ultimately married to Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, but we soon enter the haunting fifties pop of The Platters' "My Prayer" on a radio station in a sleepy American town. Filmed in black and white, dark apparitions of radioactive horror descend on this placid locale as lovers and listeners to the song sway to the soft harmonies of this pining vocal group ("When the twilight is gone and no songbirds are singing / When the twilight is gone you come into my heart / And here in my heart you will stay / While I pray"). While Lynch may be uncorking a slight joke in featuring The Platters since one of their original members was a singer named David Lynch, the song, written in 1939, serves the same purpose as Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" did in Blue Velvet. Within the quiet moments of this song, as The Platters hatch the angels of their romantic pursuits, Lynch reminds us that there are also demons that can take our pop dreams apart.

Listening to The Platters' "My Prayer"

Most of the best moments of Twin Peaks – The Return touch on our fragile desires to undo the potential dread of loss (an anxiety that informs and underlines both "My Prayer" and "In Dreams"). You could say that this goal is also the aim of the show, not only in terms of how the series ultimately concludes, but in our knowledge that many of the actors from the original series were either already dead (Frank Silva, David Bowie), or were in the process of dying during the shoot (Catherine E. Coulson, Miguel Ferrer). Lynch comes to immortalize all of them on film, as ghosts from a past that are suddenly inhabiting the present. But he is simultaneously making us aware of their fleeting presence, where they become faint flickers that will soon vanish into the past once we arrive at the curtain call. In the concluding two episodes, which takes us from the ponderous plot lines that once again inhabit the show after "Got a Light?," Lynch regains his strength. As Cooper becomes once again consolidated into his full self, he finds his assistant and former lover, Diane (a luminous Laura Dern), whom he hopes to return to by literally recapturing the romantic idyll they once shared. But before they attempt to cross over in time, Cooper must first return to the scene of the original crime of Laura Palmer's murder. When he does so, Lynch magically takes us back to the climax of Fire Walk With Me, where Laura Palmer (after discovering the identity of her abuser) meets up with her killer and faces her fate. In a moment that cleverly references The Wizard of Oz – the scene not only morphs from black and white into colour, but also invokes the notion that there's no place like home –the present-day Cooper enters the footage from the 1992 film and attempts to intercede and save the girl from her death. Lynch also returns magically to images from the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, where we revisit those familiar images of Joan Chen looking pensively in a mirror and applying make-up to her face, and the late Jack Nance telling his indifferent wife (Piper Laurie) that he's goin' fishin'. By changing the past as he reminds us of it, Lynch removes that horrifyingly cold image of the body on the shore wrapped in plastic. Nance is seen, for the first time, doing what he never got to do in the pilot episode – casting a line into the water to catch fish rather than coming across the body of a murdered high-school girl.

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

Both the prayers of The Platters as heard in their hit song and the dreams of Roy Orbison as heard in his have their shadow side, which the final episode assuredly reveals. Going home again, Lynch reminds us, or even revisiting the beginnings of a cult TV show, is never the same. When Cooper appears to fail in his task to save Laura from the woods on that fateful night, he attempts instead to reignite his romance with Diane. But they discover that after they have sex (to "My Prayer"), they're different people in the morning. They are no longer the same couple who once shared a romantic passion. Their names have changed, and she disappears, abandoning the room they just shared and leaving him a goodbye note. Under his new identity, Cooper no longer reminds us of the straight-arrow detective we once knew, but instead he seems to be an uneasy combination of Dougie and his noirish nightmare twin. He locates Laura Palmer and attempts to take her home again. But she too has changed: she is no longer the frightened teenager of the past but a middle-aged housewife with a different name and in a different town who has no knowledge of a Laura Palmer. Since she has apparently murdered her husband (whose body sits rotting on the couch) and is looking for a way out of town, Cooper offers to take her back to Twin Peaks to face the past and undo Laura's murder. Like James Stewart's detective in Vertigo, MacLachlan's Cooper tries to retrace the steps of a narrative in order to alter its consequences while inadvertently creating new ones that becoming equally haunting. (The scream heard from Sheryl Lee at the end joins Kim Novak's from Vertigo, and Nancy Allen's in Brian De Palma's Blow Out: cries that are impossible to purge from memory.)

It would most definitely be satisfying to travel back into the earlier scenes of Twin Peaks – The Return to excise the drudge and get to the kernel of what makes the show unforgettable, but somehow I don't think it would work. In a strange sense, those unpleasant moments of dramatic repetition, tawdry comedy, and bloody violence may have been steps Lynch needed to arrive at this more satisfying destination. He once again appears in the show it as the hearing-impaired FBI director Gordon Cole, who is asked at one point if he is going soft. "Not where it counts," he replies with confidence. Though that remark could be taken as a coy double entendre, it may well speak to David Lynch's attempts to just lay everything out in this series, as if the missteps we have in life walk right alongside and often lead to our firm understanding of what life actually offers us in the end. Twin Peaks – The Return is filled with endless strings of plot, and forgettable characters who go nowhere, maybe like people we sometimes encounter in life and quickly forget. But we're left in the end with the one voice that kept us hooked all along – a scream from a frightened young woman who is still very much alive in our memories even if that scream tells us that she is about to return to the spirit world.

-- September 15/17

Run Through the Jungle: Ken Burns & Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War



"I said: ‘Yes, my son is dead … One of the reasons he died was so you’d have the right to do this, so go ahead and demonstrate. Have at it. No, I won’t be joining you. But I tell you what, if you ever ring my doorbell again I’ll blow your damned head off with a .357 Magnum."  
– Country singer Jan Howard of Tennessee speaking in The Vietnam War about an anti-war protester she addresses at her door in 1969
“I think the Vietnam War drove a stake right into the heart of America. . . . Unfortunately, we’ve never moved really far away from that. And we never recovered.”
– Veteran Phil Gioia in The Vietnam War

By the time you arrive at the end of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's staggering 10-part and 18-hour documentary, The Vietnam War, you may feel so emotionally devastated by the experience that you won't find it easy to sum up its impact. Nevertheless, many on the left and right have already attempted to do so. They seem to share common ground in their belief that the series, in its desire to capture the war from all sides, cancels out any strong subjective opinion of it. From the left, you get the impression that they lament the absence of Noam Chomsky, as if Burns and Novick didn't go far enough in their condemnation of America's war policy. As for the right, there is a discomfort that if only William F. Buckley were still around he'd be able to put those liberal intellectuals in their place and we wouldn't be seeing so many North Vietnamese soldiers drawing moral equivalences with the American experience. Yet one thing is certain in all this contentious debate: the Vietnam War continues to divide and polarize Americans to the extent that maybe no film could fully heal the breach. The Vietnam War, with all its flaws and virtues, goes further than any other documentary toward mapping out its tragic course, clarifying the poor policy decisions that needlessly cost altogether millions of lives, and illuminating the traumatic experiences of those who fought in it. Unlike many of the confused attempts by dramatic films as varied as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket to definitively define the conflict, The Vietnam War delves right into the political hubris that created the war rather than rendering it mystical (Apocalypse Now), turning it into a rites-of-passage parable (The Deer Hunter), or reducing the specifics of war trauma to systemic and sadistic conditioning (Full Metal Jacket). At its best, The Vietnam War fully lays out what Burns calls in a recent profile in The New Yorker his "emotional archaeology" so that viewers can come to their own conclusions. But its flaws, some of which grow out of that need to be fair and even-handed, also reveal an unvarying tone which – over such a long stretch – overwhelms the senses.

Burns's fairness doesn't actually grow out of his resisting a point of view, or an attempt to neutralize his subject by creating balance; it comes instead from a boyish earnestness that emphasizes a need to listen. While that sense of decency does come through with the slight blandness of someone who doesn't want to raise his voice and speak too loudly, in The Vietnam War the sounds of war are loud enough. So if the series does occasionally dial down a forceful perspective, it is not to gloss over its subject. “I think that when Americans talk about the Vietnam War . . . we tend to talk only about ourselves," Burns recently told an interviewer. "But if we really want to understand it . . . or try to answer the fundamental question, ‘What happened?’ You’ve got to triangulate." That strategy of triangulation also means avoiding interviews with obvious individuals – Jane Fonda, John McCain, John Kerry, Henry Kissinger – who are already lightning rods for viewers with strong views and concentrate more on the voices of unknown soldiers from both sides, advisers, deserters, POWs, grunts, journalists (Joe Galloway of United Press International and Neil Sheehan of The New York Times, who covered the war), families, and less familiar anti-war activists. (People like Fonda, Kerry and Kissinger appear in archival footage.) In doing so, Burns and Novick remove any prejudices we may already have about the war so that we can respond more openly and in a way less filtered by our preconceived notions. What we get in The Vietnam War, written by historian Geoffrey Ward and narrated by actor Peter Coyote, is a panoramic history filled with hope and horror, illusion and irony, corruption and calamity – and deep, deep sorrow.

Burns and Novick begin their story a century earlier with the French occupation of Vietnam in the late 1850s to ultimately contrast the country's long war against French rule (which would end in 1954 when France lost at Dien Bien Phu) with the American war effort in the sixties. Besides pointing up the obvious similarities and differences in strategy, the episode reveals (as one commentator puts it) that America failed to realize that for Vietnam this was a war of independence (just as America had its battle against Britain when it achieved its autonomy in 1776). Despite America's intent to contain the communists of Ho Chi Minh in the north, it failed to recognize that (for Vietnam) it was also a war of nationalism against colonialism. By the time the country became two entities in 1954, the Americans would come to back South Vietnam's corrupt governments in Saigon, while the communists in the north, with support from the Soviet Union and China, would rule from Hanoi. The Vietnam War illustrates that Ho Chi Minh, who was both a nationalist and a communist, once lived in America and admired Thomas Jefferson and the country's constitutional accords. But it neglects to mention that he had also witnessed the lynching of blacks in the south, which tempered his enthusiasm of America's ideals. Nevertheless, even when the series doesn't pick up on some salient points, it deepens our understanding of others. We discover, for instance, that Ho Chi Minh may have been the driving force of North Vietnam, especially in its earlier battle against the French and Japanese, but during the American war he became more of a symbol. His more radical deputy, Le Duan, ran the show and took his cues from Beijing, where Mao Zedong was fomenting world revolution, while Ho followed the Moscow line of moderation as the Soviets were trying to cool down the Cold War after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

From a political standpoint, The Vietnam War levels with both sides of the conflict. If the North Vietnamese are seen as resilient and brutally determined to win, the American presidents from Kennedy to Nixon are equally driven by their fear of losing the south to communism. JFK's support by sending 'advisers' to aid the unpopular Diem regime goes completely against the grain of Oliver Stone's false claim in his drama JFK that Kennedy wanted to keep America out of Vietnam. By the time Lyndon Johnson escalates the war by sending ground troops after exchanging gunfire at the Bay of Tonkin in 1964, you can hear his mounting despair and dread as he watches his liberal domestic policies turn to rubble when Southeast Asia begins to consume him. (In JFK, Stone suggests that the military was behind a coup to kill Kennedy with Lyndon Johnson "waiting in the wings" because he'd support their war in order to get elected.) As tragic as Johnson's circumstances turned out to be, as he would refuse to run again for president in 1968, The Vietnam War shows how he also misrepresented the war as a winnable one in order to look tough on communism in the face of Republican rivals like Barry Goldwater. But if Johnson comes across as a man destroyed by his bad choices, Richard Nixon is seen as expediently craven in his. When Nixon starts losing in the polls to Democratic presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, in 1968, he meddles in the back channels to delay South Vietnam's participation in the Paris peace talks so that he can look like he can strike a better deal than his opponent. LBJ was actually aware of Nixon's arguably treasonous behaviour, but he refused to announce it publicly because he uncovered it by illegally wiretapping him. As a result of LBJ's silence, Nixon's support soars in the polls and he goes on to defeat Humphrey. In the final years of the Vietnam War, Nixon and Henry Kissinger came to realize that South Vietnam had no chance to win without their dependence on America (even as he told Americans that the 'Vietnamization' of the war, where the South Vietnamese fought their own battles, was a huge success). As he pulls out troops to save face, while also widening the war into Cambodia and escalating the bombing, Nixon deliberately breaks promises of support so that when Saigon falls America has already largely abandoned them. (Nixon's paranoia towards his enemies led to Watergate and he fled the office by 1974 to avoid impeachment right before South Vietnam collapsed.) In the final episode, as Saigon is taken over by the communists, the stench of deceit creates an indelible state of despair that is overpowering to watch.


Although the narrative of The Vietnam War covers poor policy decisions with clarity, the resonance lies with the people featured. There are many on both sides of the conflict who carry the sting of memory and the insights they share crackle with tension. Black marine Roger Harris, from Roxbury, Massachusetts, went to Vietnam in 1967 and describes in precise detail what he encounters:
You go over there with one mindset and then you adapt. You adapt to the atrocities of war. You adapt to killing and dying, whatever . . . When I first arrived in Vietnam there were some interesting things that happened and I questioned some of the Marines. I was made to realize that this is war – and this is what we do.
While he would soon discover that you don't totally adapt to the atrocities, the day he arrives home at Logan Airport and no cab stops to pick him up, it serves to remind him of another atrocity – the racism he left behind:
Six taxicabs passed me by and drove off. I didn’t realize what was happening until the state trooper stepped in and told the next driver, “You have got to take this soldier.” The driver, who was white, looked up at us through the passenger side window and said, “I don’t want to go to Roxbury.” That was my initial welcome home.
Le Minh Khue was 16 when she joined the anti-American Youth Shock Brigade for National Salvation. As she fights for the North Vietnamese, she ironically confesses a love of American literature:
I love Hemingway. I learned from For Whom the Bell Tolls. Like the resourcefulness of the man who destroys the bridge – I saw how he coped with war, and I learned from that character.
POW Hal Kushner was an army doctor who was captured in Vietnam back when "Lucy and Desi slept in twin beds." ("I left Ozzie and Harriett," he would say, "and came home to Taxi Driver.") He talks about both his swagger and his dread:
[My captor] had a little reel-to-reel tape recorder, and he asked me to make a message to my family to let them know that I was safe, and I could do that if I would make a statement against the war. And I told him with great bravado that I would rather die than make a statement against my country. And he said to me, "You will find dying is very easy. Living will be the difficult thing." 
Duong Van Mai Elliott's father worked in the South Vietnamese government and she discusses her family's hopes while we come to see the ways they would later be dashed:
My father was very happy. We were such a small and poor country and the Americans have decided to come in and save us, not only with their money and resources, but even with their own lives. We were very grateful. We thought, sure enough, with this power the Americans are going to win
Anti-war activist Bill Zimmerman succinctly articulates his stance against the war and takes perfect aim at the flaws inherent in American exceptionalism while sharing no comfort from what he knows:
I never considered the Vietnamese our enemy. They had never done anything to threaten the security of the United States. They were off 10,000 miles away, minding their own business, and we went there to their country, told them what kind of government we wanted them to have
One North Vietnamese soldier talks of how the war, after the Americans abandoned the South, became an act of "fratricide" when Vietnamese were killing Vietnamese. His words echo those you see in letters written home by soldiers who fought in the American Civil War a century earlier.

Denton 'Mogie' Crocker Jr. with his siblings (photo: the Crocker Family)

But maybe the most poignant story in the series comes out of Saratoga Springs, New York, where a young man named Denton 'Mogie' Crocker Jr. with a sense of valour went against his family's wishes and enlisted in the army in 1965 to go to Vietnam to "stop communism" – and came home in a casket a year later. Throughout The Vietnam War, Burns and Novick return to Crocker's mother, Jean-Marie, and his sister, Carol, as they try to emerge from the dark shadow that Denton's death cast. "Denton was a great student of history and the highest scorer on the Regents," Jean-Marie Crocker said during in a recent interview with The Saratoga Times Union. "As soon as he began to read, he would read history . . . He felt that it wasn't fair that people who couldn't afford to go to college would be the ones to go to war. [His decision to enlist] really came from caring for people and a certain desire for adventure – to test himself." As a high school student, Denton had enough credits to graduate, but instead insisted on signing up for service. When his parents said no, he ran away from home for three months until his parents promised to let him enlist. He would die the day after his 19th birthday. (Jean-Marie chose Arlington Cemetery as his final resting place because she felt that if he were buried closer to home she'd claw her way into his grave "to feel his warmth.") Over and over, the faces and voices seen and heard in The Vietnam War complicate your responses. In trying to bring a consensus of memory to the series, Burns and Novick show how that process can be both dissonant and haunting.

Although The Vietnam War covers a lot of ground in its run through the jungle – including the Buddhists who set themselves ablaze in protest in South Vietnam, the assassination of a Viet Cong prisoner, the Tet Offensive, Nick Ut's famous photo of a naked Vietnamese girl (with her skin burning away) fleeing a napalm attack, Daniel Ellsberg's The Pentagon Papers, and the horrible massacre at My Lai – it sometimes moves too fast. The tumultuous events of 1968, which include the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations and the riots in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, are included but they need more context in order to make us understand how the country's implosion led to its fearful embrace of Richard Nixon. The shootings at Kent State in 1970 are also dealt with quickly, but the quick rush of images, gunshots and screams bring the horror vividly back to life. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross also buzzes and hums subtly under the constant staccato of automatic fire, while sixties music both predictable ("A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," "The Sound of Silence," "Eve of Destruction," "Let it Be") and unpredictable (Fairport Convention's "The Lord is in This Place"and Nina Simone's "Backlash Blues") heightens the power of certain scenes, and drowns some of them in bathos. (Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Beatles get their due, but curiously no Doors music tweaks the ear.)

At one point in the series, reporter Joe Galloway of UPI says, "You can’t just be a neutral witness to something like war. . . . It’s not something you can stand back and be neutral and objective, and all of those things that we try to be as reporters, journalists and photographers. It doesn’t work that way." Ken Burns and Lynn Novick create a different kind of objectivity in The Vietnam War, one which doesn't take a neutral stand. While their film may lack the cumulative subjective power of Ezra Edelman's O.J.: Made in America, just about the most riveting and original documentary (along with Keith Maitland's Tower) of the past decade, The Vietnam War is about a subject guaranteed to overwhelm the artist as much as it does the people watching it. It's a conflict that hasn't yet been resolved, either – any more than the American Civil War has. Which is why Ken Burns and Lynn Novick open a door with caution and intelligent reserve and let the subject's irresolvable power seep into your pores and percolate.

-- October 1/17

Monsters Among Us: Netflix's Mindhunter

Holt McCallany and Jonathan Groff in Mindhunter
If the average citizen ever comes across [the psychopath] in his reading, he ordinarily imagines raving madmen and consigns them to the care of hospital psychiatrists. Or, if the citizen is a little more sophisticated, he thinks in terms of crime and daring escapades, and relegates the perpetrators to the province of the police. He does not know – he has not been told – that the psychopath is the enemy of his life, the adversary of his welfare. He does not know – he has not been told – that the psychopath is the harbinger of social and political distress, the carrier of a plague of wars, revolutions, and convulsions of social unrest.
– Robert Lindner, Must You Conform? (1956)

When the Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock, recently took out over 500 people at a country music event, people struggled in vain to find a motive. Since there was nothing in recent history with which to compare this horrific deed, people sought the most obvious clues to define his actions. Was he recruited by ISIS? Could he have been a white supremacist? Since Paddock was described in the news as 'a quiet and loving man' by all who apparently knew him (as if silence automatically guaranteed sanity), the question remained: what made him commit such a monstrous act? When you spend many months acquiring a huge arsenal, meticulously planning both your location and your prey, and then you present a horrific display of mass murder, clearly there's a lot more going on than being a 'quiet and loving' guy. At the very least, his actions reveal that he didn't like people very much. But since no one found a convenient label with which to define his actions, Paddock was quickly dropped from the headlines and returned to the oblivion where he once resided. He disappeared from the news as if he had never been there.

With the proliferation of social media and texting, our culture has been losing touch with the sensory when it comes to understanding human behaviour. Using our intuition, where body language can sometimes tell us as much about someone as their words, has been replaced by the need to impose meaning on deeds rather than extrapolating meaning from them. In certain areas of arts education today, human experience is perceived through the prism of societal paradigms which deprive students of the process of being enraptured by the work before they judge it. We are taught to seek out the presence of racism, homophobia, and misogyny before we get to experience art and figure out why we respond to it the way we do. In other words, we are being taught what to think before being shown how to think. Is it any wonder, then, that people – in a world reduced more and more to black and white, victim and victimizer, right and wrong – are losing the capacity to comprehend the complexities of nuance and ambiguity as a means to understanding human transgressions? In his book, Open Minded, philosopher Jonathan Lear suggested that everywhere we look in contemporary culture, knowingness has taken the place of thought. “My own fantasy is that we will be looked back on as a generation that defensively ignored the power of fantasy,” he writes elsewhere. “But the level of fantasy is the level at which people live.” Which is why often the wrong questions get asked when we consider someone like Stephen Paddock and his obvious rage. Instead of fitting him in the duds of a converted jihadist, perhaps we should ask first where this boiling anger came from. Rather than considering him just a product of insane gun laws, we should be asking what fantasies fed a worldview that told him that 500 people must be machine-gunned at a music festival.

Dramatists from Shakespeare to Chekhov have always probed questions of human motivation and their insights are partly what we look to them for. Their dramas are so compelling that they open up many responses in us and they have been able to stand up to endless interpretations, on the page and in production. Philosophers, theologians, psychologists, novelists and filmmakers have also grappled for decades with questions of morality without coming up with simple answers. “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains,” philosopher and humanist Jean Jacques Rousseau mused over two hundred years ago in The Social Contract. Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich would respond to Rousseau many years later, “The social contract, at best, is no more than a makeshift to maintain life. It has heretofore not been able to remove the agony of life.” The seemingly endless quest to understand our nature, which means bravely dipping into those dark areas that produce "the agony of life," is what produces great drama. But we live now in an age where delving into those riddles of human experience has given way to relying on behaviour as a means to defining who we are and why we do what we do. Drama has given way to dogma. I was pondering all this while viewing David Fincher's Netflix thriller, Mindhunter, a bold new series which uncorks the ambiguities that great drama produces as well as the dangers that dogma disguises.


Mindhunter examines with a chilling subtlety the genesis of criminal profiling at the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the late seventies when serial mass murders were starting to become common coin. Although I wouldn't say that the series was made in direct response to that shift away from comprehending the power of fantasy in people's lives, it is what the 10-part first season is ultimately about. Created by Joe Penhale, and based on the true crime book, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, written by FBI agents John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Mindhunter is a factual drama based on their travelling across America to interview a number of the most violent serial killers incarcerated – including Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton), Jerry Brudos (Happy Anderson) and Richard Speck (Jack Erdie) – in order to compile a study that would help the FBI learn more about psychopaths with the purpose of catching them and hopefully preventing further carnage. Mindhunter also examines the kind of damage done to the psyches of those who devote their lives to investigating the monsters among us. In David Fincher's 1995 grisly serial killer drama, Se7en, he played coy intellectual games that exploited our prurient fascination with violent murder, but Mindhunter is more reminiscent of his daring and disturbing Zodiac (2007), where investigators gradually become casualties of their own compulsions in their efforts to find and capture a serial killer.

When the debut episode opens, FBI agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), a straight-arrow investigator based on John E. Douglas, fails to remedy a hostage crisis. While his boss, Shepard (Cotter Smith), is relieved that the only casualty was the perpetrator, Holden is convinced that no one should have been killed at all. Growing more determined to understand better ways to defuse those kinds of circumstances, he teams with FBI veteran Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) – based on agent Robert Ressler – who initially resists Holden's zeal even as he supports the purpose of the task. "How do we get ahead of crazy if we don't know how crazy thinks?" he asks Shepard. What Tench perceives, as an old-school detective, is that he's entered an unexplored realm. A majority of these murders aren't being committed by criminals like John Dillinger anymore, or out of the passion stirred by domestic violence; they are now being done by strangers who defy the normal sorts of incentive. Mindhunter delves into the shadowy recesses of a different kind of criminal mind, and it also shows how these killers can come to manipulate even those who are investigating them.

Hannah Gross as Debbie

The first episode is a little too explicit in laying out the groundwork for the series, but it sets the pattern for the way Mindhunter pulls the rug out from under our expectations. At first, Holden resembles the earnest boy scout that Guy Pearce's Ed Exley was at the beginning of Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential. But once he starts dating Debbie Mitford (Hannah Gross), a post-grad student he meets at a club, he taps into a carnal hunger that fuels his curiosity and it takes him places he hasn't gone before. Initially their pairing appears no more than a conceit. You hardly expect the free-spirited Debbie to find someone as tightly wound as Holden appealing, but Hannah Gross, who's as lithe as a prowling panther, brings a supple humour – like that of the young Lauren Bacall – that makes her scenes both sexy and funny, as if the delectable process of drawing out Holden's unexplored id sends bolts of electricity through her. There's a nifty joke in Mindhunter, too, in such a clean-cut looking character in the seventies pushing the cutting edge of deviant analysis at the FBI. But unlike Kyle MacLachlan's equally innocent Jeffrey in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, who is tickled with curiosity about his own perverse fantasies, or MacLachlan's FBI sleuth, Dale Cooper, in Lynch's Twin Peaks, who is aware that he possesses a shadow in his personality, Groff's Holden goes in a completely unexpected direction.

When we first watch Holden and Bill, they team up like a Mutt and Jeff duo and the wily veteran, Bill Tench, seems too old-fashioned for Holden's radical methods. But their relationship slowly morphs into one where Tench has the greater hold on sanity while Holden becomes as detached and didactic in his methods as the various killers they interview in prison. Holt McCallany has the tough exterior of an old bruiser, but reserves of sensitivity seep through his thick skin – especially in some of the domestic scenes with his wife Nancy (Stacey Roca). His marriage has been strained by an adopted autistic child who does not speak, and the brutality of his work has come to cast a shadow over his home life. There's a lovely scene late in the series where he finally breaks down over the cumulative horror of investigating so many hideous crimes. But unlike many marital stories which succumb to melodrama as the family grows further apart, his confession draws them closer together. Their reconciliation scene is one of the most moving in the series.

Anna Torv as Wendy Carr.

In time, Holden and Bill are joined by Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), a psychology professor working towards getting tenure at a Boston university, who develops a cerebral fascination with Bill and Holden's investigations into deviant psychology and joins their team. Torv plays Carr as a different kind of loner, a closeted lesbian, who lives a double life and isn't content doing so. Her emotional detachment due to her hidden sexuality allows her to take refuge in her intellectual pursuits, but it also serves to isolate her. For all the skills the three of them have in probing the unconscious minds of serial murderers, it's ironic that they show little talent for reading each other's hidden selves. (McCallany's Tench comes closest when he warns Holden that his methods will one day come back to bite him in the ass. And they do.)

If the lead actors are well cast, the gallery of monsters are equally vivid. For instance, Cameron Britton's Edmund Kemper, who had abducted and murdered several women (as well as his mother and his paternal grandparents), is a hulking giant with the soft skin of an adolescent who remains trapped in arrested development. His quiet eloquence as he details his crimes has a narcissistic self-awareness that grows more and more unnerving. Britton's Kemper is so assured in his own capacity for violence that he feels no need to demonstrate danger – and that's what makes him so unsettling. Next to Britton, Anthony Hopkins's mannered menace as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs is nothing more than an actor's stunt. Happy Anderson's Jerry Brudos (a necrophiliac with a fetish for women's shoes) and Jack Erdie's Richard Speck (who murdered eight student nurses in Chicago) are more demonstrative personalities, but the actors never use the opportunity for mugging. The frightening force of their personalities comes to mask deeper recesses of rage and pain that are sealed off from us. Over time, Holden himself recoils inside himself and becomes cut off from his deeper self. Jonathan Groff's performance is riveting in the same way Al Pacino's was in The Godfather, where we watched an open-faced college kid slowly turn into a hardened mobster. In his later scenes with Debbie, as their relationship begins to crumble, Holden is unable to read the urgency of her feelings and takes cold refuge in his methodology to deal with her. Their break-up is the polar opposite of the seductive vibes they gave off when they first meet at the dance club. Holden's curiosity has turned into arrogant calculation: he not only cuts himself off from the woman he cares for, but he also wrongly characterizes a school principal (Marc Kudisch) as a potential pedophile when the circumstances are far more complex.

Cameron Britton as Edmund Kemper

Mindhunter has its faltering moments. In some of the middle episodes, Holden and Bill spend an inordinate amount of time helping law enforcers catch various suspects of deviant crimes and the series begins to resemble another version of CSI crossed with The X-Files. (David Fincher directs the four episodes that bookend the series.) There are also portentous scenes involving a lost kitten that suggest perhaps darker things to come, but could also be a red herring. Teasers like this are common to the conventional thrillers that Mindhunter transcends.

In his best work (Zodiac, The Social Network, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Fincher bridges the analog and digital worlds where technology both frees and chains us. In Zodiac, set in the seventies like Mindhunter, he anticipates, through the doggedness of detectives and journalists hunting a killer, a social-media antecedent that prepares us for the one we have at our disposal today in digital technology. The Social Network is a comedy of malice about a social malcontent who creates an online network (Facebook) which, ironically, creates a Global Village allowing people across the world to be 'friends.' The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about the miracle of a man who is able to live his life backwards – from old age to infancy – but can never find freedom from the curse of mortality. The American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which improves on both the original book and Swedish film adaptation, concentrates on how two radically different people – a journalist who nestles in the analog world of magazines and newspapers and an abused woman who is an online hacker hiding behind a shield of digital armour – need to work together to solve an old murder. Not only is Mindhunter a marvelous distillation of all Fincher's own driven pursuits, it's a timeless reminder of many of the themes that make up our own.

-- October 29/17

To Gather No Moss: Alex Gibney and Blair Foster's Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge



You're likely to be disappointed by Alex Gibney and Blair Foster's two-part four-hour HBO documentary Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge if you're expecting a thorough exposé that trolls through the pop culture magazine's turbulent fifty-year history. For instance, you won't find much of a nuanced portrait of its boy-wonder founder, editor and publisher, Jann Wenner, when they parse through his struggles with sexuality and drugs. They avoid entirely the paradoxical life of Wenner, whose contradictory impulses – both personally and professionally – came to shape the personality of the magazine for half a century. Since the documentary was made under Wenner's aegis, Gibney and Foster also stay pretty clear of addressing directly the popular perception that Rolling Stone Magazine may have begun as an avatar of the counter-culture in 1968, but eventually it became yet another celebrity journal for aspiring yuppies.Yet even if Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge skirts some of the more complex dimensions built into Jann Wenner, and the turbulent direction the magazine would take in its long history, Gibney and Foster don't whitewash their subject either. “[Rolling Stone is] not just about music, but also the things and attitudes that the music embraces,” wrote Wenner earnestly in an editorial published in the debut issue to define its promise. Yet the film recognizes that promises can't always be kept, especially if the culture itself changes in ways you can't possibly predict. So Rolling Stone is currently up for sale, perhaps recognizing that its potent synergy with popular culture is now gone. In light of this coming event, Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge decides to look back at some of the key stories the magazine covered over its fifty years, along with the writers who penned them, to see if (despite the changing tenor of the times and the journal that chronicled those changes) they still managed to live up to their promise.

Joe Hagan's recent biography of Jann Wenner, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine tries to balance the story by addressing the publisher's own obsessions with celebrity that changed Rolling Stone for the worst, but Hagan's effort is tainted by his disdain for its subject. Rather than providing a compelling view through which we could perceive Wenner's singular genius for gathering a pool of talent that would carry Rolling Stone through the decades, despite the personal demons that worked against him, Hagan chronicles with a growing redundancy the means by which Wenner betrayed his staff, his readers, his wife, his business partners – and, of course, ultimately himself. There's so little of Wenner's unrelenting drive as a journalist in the book that the list of his endless bacchanals and betrayals seems to have been his only purpose and goal for the magazine. (In Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge, critic Greil Marcus talks of meeting Jann Wenner in Berkeley in 1964 and finds himself intrigued rather than offended that Wenner could find equal joy in listening to the hip sounds of Mose Allison while also treasuring The San Francisco Chronicle's double-paged spread of the current crop of debutantes. “I was a little taken aback by the combination of the hipster and the society wannabe,” Marcus recalls. “But I liked him. He was so full of personality.”) Instead of trashing Wenner with a typical and conventional tabloid prurience, Hagan builds his tiring biography on broken bricks. He hangs his hat on the worn cliché of the powerful, talented man who gets corrupted by fame and celebrity and couldn't live up to some higher calling. Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge remedies that limited perspective by concentrating on the quality of the content down the years as the culture continually made new demands on the journal, the writers, and the publisher.

Jann Wenner

The documentary opens with Jimi Hendrix prancing about the stage of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival like some polymorphous prophet bathed in bright colours as he offers up Bob Dylan's titanic "Like a Rolling Stone," a song from which the magazine mostly took its name, as a covenant to the audience that spoke of good tidings and delectable pleasures to come. While up the coast in San Francisco, perhaps the most bohemian of American cities, Jann Wenner decided to seize upon this cross-pollination of rock and roll, politics, fashion and hallucinogens that was bringing forth a cultural revolution in the Bay Area. “The important thing about San Francisco is that it's a scene,” he told a reporter in 1968. “It's a warm, supportive friendly city that historically had the bohemians, the Beats, that supported the arts, poetry, jazz and similarly today supports rock and roll.” While Wenner didn't see himself ever making it as a rock star, his acumen as a journalist and his instinct for recognizing zeitgeist moments was first stoked a few years earlier by his coverage of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley for The Daily Californian. Inspired by an opposition to the Vietnam War and a struggle for civil rights, the Free Speech Movement in 1964 resisted the University of California's ban on campus political activities. One of the movement's key followers, Mario Savio, helped organize a student strike to refute that policy and ultimately, in a famous speech, he inspired that group to close the university. Wenner was not only floored by the impact of Savio's speech, which spoke of students putting their bodies to the gears of the machine and making it stop, but he was also caught up in the moment as a chronicler of a key historical moment. “I found myself feeling both sides of it,” Wenner recalls in telling the filmmakers of his role as both journalist and witness.

Being transformed both personally and professionally by the events in Berkeley, Wenner started Rolling Stone in 1967 with prominent jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason, who not only was seeped in that formative American art form but was also open to the percolating sounds of the emerging pop revolution. Gibney and Foster steer clear of unearthing the conflicts that would lead to the parting of ways for Wenner and Gleason by 1975 (which had to do with the direction towards celebrity content in the magazine), but they nevertheless seize upon stories ripe for examination, many of which are surprising (the rise of rock groupies, Tina Turner, the Pulitzer trial), while avoiding perhaps some of the obvious (Woodstock, Altamont, Karen Silkwood). But rather than provide their own commentary on the worth of each story, the filmmakers let the original writer speak for each piece and its time – and usually in the present but without being shown as a talking head looking back nostalgically. Gibney and Foster also include voice-overs (actor Jeff Daniels providing many of them) of excerpts from the articles with occasional tape heard from the original interview while we scan the copy of the written piece on the screen. As he did so skillfully in Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, Alex Gibney finds innovative approaches to impressionistic filmmaking that bring out the distilled essence of his subject so that we can arrive at our own conclusions about the meaning and worth of what he is depicting. In the Frank Sinatra documentary, Gibney even collapsed time by editing together recollections by the artist from over periods of time in order to magically create a single perspective. The technique here serves to put the material to the test as if we're to discern whether the work continues to retain the power (or relevance) it had then.

(l to r, Jann Wenner, Blair Foster and Alex Gibney)

Some of the stories prove more captivating than others, yet there is always an angle on them that reveals something of the sensibility of the writer who created it. Photographer Baron Wolman, using a keen voyeur's eye rather than a leering one, is able to capture with a detached curiosity the emergence of the sexual freedom of young women who actively set out to fuck pop stars. An enterprising young woman who called herself Cynthia Plaster-Caster went one step further and become a traveling sculptor casting the erect penises of various touring musicians into a series of miniature statues she would later turn into a touring exhibition. (Jimi Hendrix apparently became so excited by the glop itself that he ended up fucking the mold.) Writer Ben Fong-Torres, with the assistance of budding photographer Annie Leibovitz, provides a portrait of Ike and Tina Turner that not only digs into their artistic power, but also hints of the turbulent and violent abuse by Ike that would soon tear their marriage and musical partnership apart. Wenner idolized John Lennon, and we see evidence of that worship in the film's coverage of the revealing "Lennon Remembers" interview in 1970, after The Beatles had broken up and he had gone through primal therapy with Arthur Janov. We see it as well in a later touching sequence with Wenner and Annie Leibovitz wistfully going over her photographs of John and Yoko Ono taken shortly before his murder in 1980. But Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge fails to tells us that Wenner fell out with the former Beatle years earlier by turning the 1970 epic interview into a best selling book against Lennon's wishes.


While the documentary does examine Rolling Stone's shift towards celebrity journalism, it does so mostly in the form of Cameron Crowe (one of the few writers seen on screen) whose fan-boy enthusiasm is tempered by a sweet capability to reflect candidly on it. His story of meeting Wenner over a fawning piece he wrote on Led Zeppelin, when the editor showed him what it takes to be a true journalist, is one of the highlights of the movie. So are moments where we see Wenner relent to tastes in music he doesn't share with his writers, such as Mikal Gilmore on The Clash, or Charles M. Young on the emergence of punk, but affords their views freedom. Sometimes, however, the same couldn't be said if critics took on Bob Dylan or The Rolling Stones. And Wenner's distaste for rap was confronted by writer Alan Light, who began writing about U2 and Neil Young but felt that in the early nineties, hip-hop and rap represented the most vital music. “In 1992, a lot of people still looked at hip-hop as an outsider genre, which felt crazy,” Light tells Gibney and Foster. “That was like covering jazz in the Forties when be-bop happened, or covering rock and roll in the Sixties; you knew that every day the most creative force was happening and you were watching the world changing around you.” That world change was inescapable by the time of the 1992 LA riots, which took place right after the release of Public Enemy's incendiary “By the Time I Get to Arizona” (which was only aired once on MTV), and of the later acquittal of the officers who had beaten Rodney King, followed shortly after by Ice-T's controversial hit “Cop Killer.” Rolling Stone had moved to New York many years earlier and Light wanted to bring the magazine back to its West Coast roots. “In the Eighties, hip-hop was an East Coast thing [and] nobody had written about urban LA gang culture, nobody had written about the violence in Los Angeles,” Light explains. In this section of the film, when Ice-T talks about the value of free speech, he reminds you (in these days of such uncertainty) exactly what it is, why it's vital, and what the cost is in protecting it. If anyone has doubts that Rolling Stone had stopped courting controversy by the Nineties, this story justifies the use of the word "edge" in the film's title.

While Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge may be a little too worshipful of the contributions of Hunter S. Thompson to the political cachet of the magazine, there's no question that his early work on the 1972 Presidential campaign and his portrait of Richard Nixon are still scabrously brilliant – political reporting at its most potently acerbic. His successor, William Greider, may have been less mercurial than Thompson, but he possessed some of the grassroots leftist leanings that would later fuel Bernie Sanders's campaign. Curiously, he would also come to prominence by challenging the Clintons. When Bill was running for office, Greider immediately distrusted the direction in which he was taking the Democratic Party. “Clinton was essentially abandoning organized labour and working people,” he tells Gibney and Foster. “It happened literally in the first year of the administration and that was a double-cross of the values he expressed as a young candidate.” By the time Greider comes to interview him, after he's elected president, we hear an explosive side of Clinton when the writer refuses to be seduced by his charm. “He's good at it. But after everything else, I'm a reporter,” Greider explains. When he asks Clinton what he would stand up and die for, the president flies into a rage as if his idealism had been unfairly impugned. “You get no credit around here for fighting and bleeding,” Clinton is heard on tape screaming at Greider. “And that's why the know-nothings and the do-nothings and the negative people and the right-wingers always win. Because of the way people like you put questions to people like me.” Even when Barack Obama became president, it didn't stop Rolling Stone from courting controversy when they commissioned journalist Michael Hastings (who idolized Hunter Thompson) to write a controversial story on General Stanley McChrystal, who was then the top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, until he called into question the policies of Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden and was soon relieved of duty. What Hastings, who was later killed in a car accident, did according to his widow, journalist Elise Jordan, was break “an unspoken code of putting military leaders on a pedestal and by stripping off that veneer he got so much flack.” The documentary takes each story – whether it's the rise and fall of pop singer Britney Spears or that of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart – and gives us a penetrating glimpse into the reporter's strong desire and need for covering it.


Even when the film concludes with the more recent fiasco of Sabrina Rubin Erdely's 2014 false story of a campus gang rape on the grounds of the University of Virginia, Gibney and Foster rightly examine it as a failure of journalism rather than a question of the journalist's disingenuousness. Besides the irony that Erdely, whose work usually centered on folks who did bad things and deceived other people, became a casualty of deception (the rape victim turned out to have made up the whole story), the wheels fall off when the editors fail to do their due diligence in properly vetting it. (Erdely also followed the lead of her source rather than doing any follow-up interviews with the accused men and others who could have provided evidence that the assault never happened.) While Erdely refused to be interviewed for the documentary, managing editor Will Dana did talk to the filmmakers and takes full responsibility for the magazine's failure to get the story right. Jann Wenner also welcomed an investigation into the piece by the Columbia School of Journalism, which he would later publish. What they found was “an environment where journalists with decades of collective experience failed to bring up and debate problems about their reporting or heed the questions they did receive from a fact-checking colleague.”

While Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge doesn't have the penetrating insights of Gibney's Going Clear, where our views of Scientology gradually deepen with horror and stupefaction, or the imaginative scope of Sinatra: All or Nothing at All and his Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown, it's still a solid piece of work that successfully shows how Rolling Stone attempted to gather no moss. The magazine may never again provide a useful barometer for what continues to brew and stew in popular culture, but Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge provides a dependable map of the bumpy road it often takes to get it right.

-- December 17/17

Time Has Come Today: Roman J. Israel, Esq.


Denzel Washington in Roman J. Israel, Esq. 

Of all the great contemporary actors, is it possible that Denzel Washington is the most mystifying? As the defiant private who stood up to his hated sergeant in Norman Jewison's A Soldier's Story (1984), Washington sent currents of electricity through the film. But though he seemed a perfect fit for the charismatic black power leader in Spike Lee's 1992 Malcolm X, he resembled a lifeless icon. His spellbinding matchmaker, Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, in Kenneth Branagh's 1993 adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing was answered later the same year with the dull and earnest attorney who finds redemption defending a lawyer with AIDs in Philadelphia. When he plays the snappy private investigator Easy Rollins in Carl Franklin's crackling Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Washington has some of the quick reflexes of Bogart's Sam Spade, but when he portrays the wrongly imprisoned boxer, Rubin Carter, in The Hurricane (1999), his energy gets sucked up by the character's nobility. Washington is exciting to watch when he gets to fill a role using a card shark's bravado, as he did as the hostage negotiator in Spike Lee's 2006 Inside Man, or when he underplayed the veteran railroad engineer trying to stop a runaway train in Tony Scott's Unstoppable (2010). But more recently, in Fences, he adds little imagination to the role of the embittered sanitation worker. That's because the character is completely worked out in the soapbox speeches playwright August Wilson wrote for him, and when the part is already fully thought through, Washington seems to simply fall back on his actor's skill and leave out his personality. He either becomes part of the scenery or he ends up chewing it. But if the role leaves more room for him to move, he can find surprising corners of the character that can magnetize the camera – and the audience. That's what he does in Tony Gilroy's new picture, Roman J. Israel, Esq., where he has plenty of space to be inventive. He gives an exciting and original performance – even when the film eventually gets muddled in dramatic confusion.

As the title character, Washington is an LA civil rights attorney who is a throwback – in more ways than one – to the early Seventies. With the rotund shape of a man who has lived more in his head than in his body, Roman walks the streets in a rumpled suit with a perfectly coiffed Afro listening to jazz and R&B on old-fashioned Walkman headphones as if they were a time machine connecting him to an era he feels more at home in. At the two-man firm he works for, where he shares the practice with his former professor, Roman is used to being the legal mastermind in the background, a progressive idealist in the shadow, and tethered to a time when he was convinced the laws could be changed. When his partner suffers a massive heart attack and falls into a coma, however, Roman is suddenly thrust into the limelight even though (like Rip Van Winkle) he has no real sense of the contemporary world. When asked by their secretary to get continuances until his mentor recovers, Roman sees the opportunity instead to address the charges before the judge when all the judge wants to do is move on to the next case. Since Roman hasn't seen the inside of a courthouse, his reformer's zeal ends up doing more harm than good, as when he draws a $5,000 contempt charge and provides more grief for his clients. Ultimately, as his partner's condition worsens, Roman takes a job with George Pierce (Colin Farrell), a slick high-powered attorney with success on his mind, and whom Roman's partner put in charge if anything were to happen to him. Roman also reaches out to a group of activists who run a non-profit organization that share his passion for justice, including Maya (Carmen Ejogo), a bright young administrator who becomes intrigued by Roman's old-school ideas for reform. But Roman's ideals don't endear himself to George, with his legal expediency. Then one night after work, Roman gets mugged and it has the effect of completely disillusioning him. “You got the wrong guy,” he screams at his assailant, enraged that a man like those he's fought for would dare turn on him. After the shock of the assault, Roman immediately comes to the conclusion that he is the wrong guy for the wrong time, and decides to turn from being a reformer into a master manipulator in order to fit into this new world order.

Denzel Washington and Colin Farrell

Once he messes up a case where a client, Derrell Ellerbee (DeRon Horton), gets arrested for a holdup-murder and agrees to testify against the real shooter, Roman talks him into telling him who the shooter is and where he can be found. With that information, Roman contacts the relatives of the murdered store clerk and accepts their reward of $100,000. With that cash, Roman turns himself into a new man wearing snazzy suits and sporting a new haircut as he finds a way to finally be accepted into George's firm. But Roman's plan ultimately backfires and his future and sense of self quickly fall into jeopardy.

In some ways, Roman J. Israel is another version of the corrupted outsider that Jake Gyllenhaal played in Gilroy's last picture, Nightcrawler (2014), a creepily effective drama about a thief who roams the night until he becomes fascinated with freelance 'nightcrawlers' who shoot footage of accidents and crimes in Los Angeles and then sell it to news channels. To be equally successful, Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom begins his own nightcrawling business, but he manufactures the death and mayhem he sells. Bloom is the outsider as psychopath with little connection to the real world of people whom he only accepts as either subjects for his videos, or buyers of his products. Nightcrawler is a prescient and unsettling little thriller about a world where everything is reduced to transactions rather than human contact. But Washington's Roman revolts against commodification. He is a man trapped in a time where the causes he is passionate for no longer carry the urgency that they once did. But because his idealism is so steely and firm, rather than flexible, Roman's only way to respond to disillusionment is to create another more adaptable persona which completely erases the man he used to be. Washington provides a pretty compelling portrait of a character who has an abiding fervor for justice but his social autism has made it impossible for him to fully comprehend the people he wants justice for – and how to achieve it in this day and age. And when he changes stripes to become the corporate attorney designed to appeal to George and his firm, Washington slips into the role as smoothly as he slips into his nifty new suit.

However, it seems that once Roman makes this change, Gilroy loses his way in the story. Nightcrawler stumbled along, too, toward the end. Throughout that picture, Bloom sells his material to a local TV news director, Nina Romina (Rene Russo), who is eager to see her ratings jump. Though she's always looking for the sensational to sell her news, she isn't stupid, at least, until the end, when Gilroy asks us to believe that after perceiving Lou's mounting megalomania, she still welcomes him into the executive world of her television station. The picture not only stretched credibility here, but it attempted to make a larger point of claiming that society at large had become a comfortable home for Lou, a world in which he finally fit. Besides making this specious claim, which took us outside the movie's dramatic logic into illogical social commentary, Nightcrawler catered to a chic form of cynicism. Roman J. Israel, Esq. doesn't turn cynical, but instead becomes hopelessly inspirational: Roman's final act brings about an altruistic change that is completely unbelievable. (Apparently, after its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, a number of cuts were made and scenes reinserted elsewhere and that may have hurt the logic of the story.)

Carmen Ejogo as Maya

While Washington has a grip on an original character throughout, many of the other actors have too little to play. Colin Farrell looks great in his pinstripes, but his ambiguous shadings are too vague to read. Given his shark's instincts, it makes little sense for George to be as trusting of Roman as he initially is, and even his keeping him around when that trust has been violently shaken is sketchy at best. Carmen Ejogo, who played Coretta Scott King in both Boycott (2001) and Selma (2014), has a warm and inquisitive presence that matches up perfectly with Washington's detached intensity. Her Maya longs to stoke the same fires within herself that have kept Roman so avidly committed to the cause. But Gilroy hasn't developed her character beyond that avidity, so we don't really know how she thinks Roman's out-moded brand of achieving justice will work for her. Late in the picture, she doesn't even seem to realize that he's not the man she originally perceived him to be. When she and Roman go out to dinner at a high-priced restaurant after he's switched into becoming a corporate attorney, she barely seems to notice the change. Even as she compliments him for the way he has inspired her, she seems blind to his answers, which betray all the things she covets in him.

Dan Gilroy is clearly a smart writer/director who likes to work with interesting ideas. In Roman J. Israel, Esq., he has also created a highly original work. By the last act, though, he isn't thinking through the implications of his ideas so that the picture can arrive someplace new. In a familiar genre exercise, the predictable resolutions tend to fit with the overall conception. But since Roman J. Israel, Esq. takes up some new dramatic directions, the pat conclusions seem too obvious. There's a poster on Roman's wall of Bayard Rustin, the main progenitor of the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963, which reads, “Let us be enraged by injustice, but let us not be destroyed by it.” The irony is that Roman J. Israel is a man who is both enraged and destroyed by injustice – even if the picture ultimately hopes to redeem him.

-- December 19/17


                                                                   2018


Black Day in July: Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit


Will Poulter and Anthony Mackie in Detroit.

There certainly couldn't have been a more timely film released last summer than Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit, which dramatized the 1967 five-day race riots in the Motor City that left 43 dead and close to 1,200 injured. Besides commemorating the 50th anniversary of this ugly tragedy, Detroit is also a powerful, unsettling and politically prescient piece of dramatic realism that creates a reverberating link to a number of contemporary events. As we've seen, race relations in the early stages of the Trump era have deteriorated so badly that within weeks of the movie's release neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched openly and defiantly in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans without fear of recrimination.The fact that Detroit disappeared from screens – without a whisper – within weeks of Charlottesville, amply demonstrates that the picture is still in need of a hearing.

Detroit focuses primarily on an infamous incident at the Algiers Motel in which three black teens – Aubrey Pollard (Nathan Davis, Jr.), Carl Cooper (Jason Mitchell), and Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore) – were murdered by local police in a raid where they were searching for an alleged sniper they believed had been firing at them. Seven other black men, and two young white women, were also beaten and tortured, according to the victims and several officers present that evening. Ultimately, the three white cops would be acquitted of the murders and assaults by an all-white jury. Working from a script by Mark Boal (who also wrote and produced Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty), and inspired by John Hersey's book, The Algiers Motel Incident, Bigelow gives Detroit a shocking documentary-style immediacy. Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd's fluid camerawork catches moments in the action – from the sprawling, darkened streets filled with prowling National Guardsmen, random looters and hidden snipers to the claustrophobic intimacy of the motel interrogation – as if each episode were erupting in the blink of an eye. Editor William Goldenberg's cuts are so precise that the film pulses along like one continuous shot that builds in intensity.

Detroit provides an animated prologue that sets the context for the events of 1967. When many Southern blacks emigrated North after the Second World War to find opportunities denied them, Northern whites quickly abandoned the cities for the suburbs and took the jobs with them. Blacks arrived and remained jobless in segregated poverty and cramped in teeming neighbourhood housing. By 1967, with anger and frustration boiling over in the black community, the riots in July were inevitable. They were triggered primarily by a police raid of a speakeasy where there was a celebration for black veterans returning from Vietnam. Bigelow opens Detroit with that raid and then gives us a widened view of the escalating riots before gradually narrowing in on the main characters who would become part of the tragedy at the Algiers Motel.


During the second day of the riots, we see two cops pursue a looter fleeing with bags of groceries. One of the cops, Philip Krauss (Will Poulter), mortally wounds him with his shotgun, but Krauss is allowed to stay on active duty because his superiors haven't made up their mind, in the midst of the city turmoi,l whether to file murder charges. The Dramatics are an aspiring R&B band hoping to score a contract with Motown, but moments before their scheduled debut at a music hall, the police shut down the concert and order everyone home. The bus they're traveling on is attacked by rioters and the musicians split up. Lead singer Larry Reed (Algee Smith) and Fred Temple decide to rent a room at the Algiers for the night. There they meet two white girls, Julie Ann (Hannah Murray) and Karen (Kaitlyn Dever), whom they try to pick up, but instead they get invited to a party with their friends Aubrey Pollard and Carl Cooper. When Cooper and another friend start playing some nasty games with a starter's pistol, Julie and Karen go to another room to join Greene (Anthony Mackie), a Vietnam War vet, while Fred and Larry return in disappointment to their room. In a moment of frustration over the police occupation, Carl decides to taunt the police outside by shooting them with blanks from his toy pistol. The authorities, though, believe there's a real sniper and invade the motel to interrogate the residents. With them comes Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), a black private security guard, who has been assigned to protect a grocery store from looters and has ingratiated himself with the cops. As Krauss arrives at the motel with his team, Flynn (Ben O'Toole) and Demens (Jack Reynor), he spots Cooper running away and shoots him. After letting him bleed out, he places a knife beside him to make it look like self-defense. Then he begins a protracted interrogation of the remaining witnesses (including the staging of mock executions) to get them to identify the sniper, but what we discover is that they are even more upset at finding two young white women among a number of black men. Detroit demonstrates how racism can be the fear of white men losing their women to virile black men.

Christopher Nolan, the director of Dunkirk, has been acclaimed for creating a series of stunning set pieces that pull you into the awesome experience of that event. But while these scenes are certainly the most impressive action staging Nolan has ever done, the actors end up making very little impression because they're framed as if they were simply part of the set. You may be overwhelmed by the scale of Dunkirk, but you feel little for the characters who are supposed to engage us and to help clarify the story. Kathryn Bigelow achieves in Detroit what Nolan claims to do in Dunkirk. As she did in The Hurt Locker, Bigelow scales her compositions with an added depth of field, as if we were being pulled inside the screen, so that we are drawn into the action while never losing sight of the people caught in the vise of the story. No one actor dominates that story, but we never forget their faces. The youthful joy that drains from Algee Smith's face as Larry moves away from the dynamic pop sounds of The Dramatics at the end of the film turns out to be both scarring and healing. Will Poulter has a devious baby face that can't hide the ugliness of Krauss's racism any more than the same look hid Lt. Calley's in Vietnam during the My Lai massacre. Anthony Mackie's Green has a look of sour disappointment, as if he's come home to the wrong country, where he's treated like a pimp instead of a surviving veteran of the war in Southeast Asia. Both Hannah Murray's Julie Ann and Kaitlyn Dever's Karen are perfectly believable as young white women beginning to embrace the possibilities of racial integration, but finding themselves suddenly encountering the horrors that have made segregation a long, troubling reality in American life.

Kathryn Bigelow directing the actors in Detroit.

It could be argued that the interrogation sequence in Detroit goes on too long and that it borders on exploitation. But despite its accumulating intensity, I still think it works effectively because it allows us to experience not only the political and psychological implications of racism, but also the growing fear that fuels it. Rather than making a quick dramatic statement, Bigelow allows the scenes to build dramatically so that we are pulled into the protracted tension of the interrogation. Detroit does have its flaws. I would have liked more of the trial sequences than we get and the pacing gets a little slack in the last act. But you can't ignore the blinding immediacy of this picture. The issues it raises have changed so little today. How can you watch Detroit and not think of the number of black athletes – like Colin Kaepernick – taking a knee during the National Anthem, or recall the numerous shootings of blacks like Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, in Ferguson, Mo. by a white policeman back in 2014? You don't feel so much that you are looking back in time when you're viewing Detroit as that you are looking inside something boiling over now. The fact that the film disappeared without a trace, or a discussion, or even an argument, shows that maybe we still have a lot more looking to do.

--January 2/18

Deplorable: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri


Woody Harrelson and Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

It felt pretty close to doing full penance just getting through all the grisly condescension and sanctimony of Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. That the picture has been garnering huge acclaim and numerous Best Film awards maybe shouldn't be too surprising given the current political climate. Dialogue in the Trump era has coarsened into Twitter feuds, talking heads on radio (who don't actually talk, but yell), news anchors on television staking out positions rather than discussing issues, and a poisonous air of tabloid prurience perfumes the culture. People do little reflecting now and plenty more reacting. So Three Billboards keeps itself pretty busy staking out positions and reacting loudly in a cartoon atmosphere filled with ugly caricatures. Instead of reflecting on the current calamity, or even satirizing it cleverly, McDonagh chooses to distort the mood of the country and exploit it for pure effect. And the calculating unpleasantness of Three Billboards, with its queasy mixture of slapstick violence and sentimentality, would be bad enough were it not also trying to say something important. The film deliberately abandons any claim to dramatic realism, or even coherence, in order to manipulate and sway frustrated liberal sentiments and prejudices by crudely calling out "the deplorables" – the yahoos-in-a-basket whom Hillary Clinton identified as Trump's supporters in a misguided campaign speech. But the picture, with dialogue as broadly obvious as a billboard, ends up itself being deplorable by endorsing the same demagogic tactics that made Trump president in the first place.

The protagonist, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), is frustrated that many months have passed without the local cops' having apprehended one suspect in her daughter's rape and murder case. So she decides to rent three billboards on a little-used country road to tweak the investigation – and light a fire under the town's revered Police Chief William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) – by using them to spell out (in sequence), "Raped while dying," "And still no arrests?," and "How come, Chief Willoughby?" You expect that what follows from her actions might be an examination of a mother's grief, where anger and helplessness become a natural outcry, while the movie looks inside the complicated roots and values of a small Bible-belt Missouri town. But McDonagh uses the occasion to make coy social commentary about lingering racism, institutional hypocrisy, indifference and more violence. He has almost all the crazed citizens turn against Mildred, forcing her to become a one-woman vigilante in order to be heard. Arthur Penn's 1965 The Chase, written by Lillian Hellman, exploited the Kennedy assassination to condemn the Southern values of the state of Texas. Three Billboards situates itself more as a post-modern black comedy. The characters' crude dialogue is not so much a form of self-expression as a soap box for McDonagh to mount in order to spew self-righteous platitudes that the audience – apparently – wants to hear. The unpleasant jokiness in the tone of Three Billboards draws attention to itself rather than the actual elements of the plot. It's the kind of social critique that's shrewdly cured in outrage so it can allow the audience room to feel righteously hip while putting down the yokels. Imagine Lillian Hellman by way of Quentin Tarantino.


The story barely makes any sense, but I don't think we're even meant to care. Given that Mildred lost her daughter mere months earlier, isn't it possible that maybe a few people might be sympathetic to her anguish? The billboards themselves are hardly incendiary in nature, but you'd never know it by the town's vicious reaction to them. One person does remark that everybody is with her when it comes to her daughter, but "nobody is with you about [these billboards].” But no one builds on this supposed solidarity to help her push the investigation further so that maybe she'll take them down. All McDonagh does is reverse tired old stereotypes in the service of melodrama – a few of Ebbing's black citizens, who are, of course, beyond reproach reach out, while the white folks almost all behave in a completely loathsome manner. A priest even drops by Mildred's house to try to shame her for doing the billboards so Mildred can condemn Catholicism by comparing the Church to L.A. street gangs and lecturing him on pedophilia. The worst of the redneck hicks is Deputy Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), who reads comic books to remind us of his illiteracy. He still lives at home with his ornery mother, who wishes that the South hadn't changed. (Critic Nick Pinkerton in Film Comment suggested that Rockwell must have "devoured all 23 seasons of Hee Haw" in preparing for his role. Actually, watching the whole damn picture is like devouring Hee Haw.) Dixon is the one most outraged by the billboards and he launches into verbal attacks against Mildred. When she calls him out as a law enforcer who beats up black suspects, Dixon answers back that he isn't in the "nigger-torturing business," but "the person-of-color-torturing business." Later, when he brutalizes a man and punches out his secretary, Dixon loses his job, but why doesn't anyone charge him with assault? In time, we're even supposed to accept him as heroic when he suddenly and miraculously becomes sympathetic to Mildred's plight. Curiously, though, his redemption doesn't come from refuting his racist past, his "person-of-color torturing," but from embracing her cause and enlisting in her retribution.

At first, Woody Harrelson's Willoughby seems no different from the rest of the town. In one early scene, he tells Mildred that if every racist on the police force were removed, the only ones left would all "hate fags." Yet it makes little sense that this family man, whose love for his Australian wife (Abbie Cornish) and their two young daughters, is depicted as sweet, would work with these dubious yokel cops and share in their values. Harrelson does try hard to cut beneath the smug humour by bringing his folksy charm to the part, but once we discover he has inoperable cancer the added layer of pathos doesn't square with the picture's mean tone. His exit from the movie – completely predictable – has no purpose except to push Mildred in her mission while supposedly redeeming the townsfolk's anger and hatred.

Sam Rockwell and Frances McDormand.

Frances McDormand says she patterned the role of Mildred on John Wayne, but which Wayne is she's referring to? The one in The Long Voyage Home? The one in True Grit? Whatever Wayne's shortcomings were as an actor, he often embodied all the contradictory and unresolved aspects of being an American hero. McDormand plays Mildred with a stiff stoicism that reveals nothing more than her sheer doggedness – and it gets tiresome as the film goes on. At times, she resembles the pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson she played in the Coen Brothers' 1996 Fargo. But Fargo, despite its own condescending views of the people in Minnesota (where the brothers grew up), was less a grand comment on the state of the nation than a reflection of the Coens' comic trademark of deadpan detachment. And next to Three Billboards, Fargo seems to have been dreamed up by Jean Renoir. McDormand was infinitely better as the lead character in director Lisa Cholodenko and screenwriter Jane Anderson's HBO adaptation of Elizabeth Stout's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 novel, Olive Kitteridge, where she played a woman in crisis who is dealing with depression and feeling like an outsider. In that mini-series, McDormand took us far inside the complicated feelings of a proud woman who is attempting to hold onto a loving but difficult marriage just as she desires meaningful contact with the people in the coastal town in Maine that she resides in. She created an astonishingly complex portrait of a woman struggling to be free of the emotional traps that bind her. In Three Billboards, McDormand is no more than a pawn in McDonagh's game. She isn't portraying a character here; she's a symbol. Mildred is an emblem of the courageous and virtuous mother with an undying desire for justice no matter what the cost. Even by the end, when the picture appears to draw on the blood-lust vengeance of Death Wish, the conclusion turns out to be deliberately ambiguous so as not to alienate those in the audience who've come to empathize with Mildred. Three Billboards doesn't even have the courage to follow through on its own nihilism.

Martin McDonagh is a British playwright (The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Pillowman), born to Irish parents, who turned to feature films in 2008 with the black comedy In Bruges, about two hit men in hiding. He followed that up in 2012 with Seven Psychopaths, which also mixed dark humour with melodrama. But I think Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri will reach an even larger and more accepting audience because people really believe that McDonagh is putting his finger on the ferocious divide in Trump's America. Some are even discussing the film in light of the recent outcry by many women against sexual assault and misconduct. But do they not notice – in respect to that outcry – that Mildred's estranged husband (John Hawkes) is a wife-beater involved with a 19-year old (Samara Weaving) who is continually exploited for laughs as if we're supposed to see her (because of her age) doltish beyond repair? Do they not have misgivings about McDonagh wringing guffaws out of Mildred tossing Molotov cocktails at the police station while a racist who's too dense to notice is about to be engulfed in flames? Why aren't audiences worn down by the consistently bad jokes made at the expense of that wonderful actor Peter Dinklage, whose character is consistently referred to as "the midget," and has to defend himself on a date with Mildred because he knows he's "not much of a catch" because he's "a dwarf who sells used cars." (Any movie that doesn't recognize that Peter Dinklage is always a catch has already lost its credibility.) If Donald Trump has indeed demeaned the level of political discourse in America today, and I believe he has, Three Billboards offers proof that he and his followers don't have a corner on that market.

-- January 9/18

Poker Face: Molly's Game

Jessica Chastain (left) in Molly's Game. (Photo: Michael Gibson)

As Molly Bloom in screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's directing debut, Molly's Game, Jessica Chastain is something of an enigma. Playing a real-life high-stakes entrepreneur who ran exclusive poker games in New York and Los Angeles for over a decade until she was arrested by the FBI, Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty, A Most Violent Year) turns opaqueness into an acting style. Her glamourous deadpan tells us little about the restless hunger that propelled Bloom into hosting a motley collection of players – including Hollywood celebrities (like Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire), business tycoons, gambling addicts and Russian mobsters (which would lead to federal charges against her). Chastain dons a poker face like her clients, but it reveals even less about what's going on with her than the faces of the card sharps at her table bluffing their way to a kill. In Molly's Game, the motivating force – what is hidden behind all her risky moves – is missing in the performance. It's missing in the movie, too, because Sorkin can't identify with the low cunning it takes to pull off what Bloom accomplished. He has higher ideals in his head and they've clouded his thinking.

Sorkin begins the film, which is based on Bloom's book Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker, in Colorado with Bloom as an adolescent hopeful in Olympic downhill skiing, where she is driven to succeed by her demanding psychoanalyst father (Kevin Costner) but abandons the sport after suffering a severe back injury in a fall. According to her memoir, Bloom did have back surgery at the age of 12, but she continued in the sport, even winning a bronze medal with the U.S. ski team when she finished third. She only left professional skiing to pursue other ventures that could lead to more enduring success. But Sorkin fictionalizes this part of Bloom's life because he needs his hero to be an idealist underdog who rises above adversity. Once Molly relocates to Los Angeles, she encounters a sleazy Hollywood real estate agent, Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong), who runs underground poker games on the side. After learning the ropes, she moves to New York to run her own poker tables until she is arrested two years later. Facing prison, Molly seeks out a high-priced lawyer, Charlie Jaffery (Idris Elba), to represent her, and he advises her to sell out her clients in order to cut a deal with the prosecution. From there, Molly's Game bounces back and forth in time through flashbacks to show us how she triumphs to become her own woman.

Idris Elba and Jessica Chastain.

Sorkin wants us to see Molly as a master facilitator of underground poker games who is, however, above the obsessive world of gambling – and this idea guts her as a character. So he overdoses on voice-over narration to compensate for the blank spot at the center of the film. Sorkin overloads the picture with so much exposition that all we get is her story without the benefit of seeing it fleshed out dramatically. It distances us from the protagonist and we don't encounter Bloom's inner demons. When she starts using drugs to cope with the mounting pressures of running games all week, Sorkin depicts it no differently than if she were picking up the laundry. She works the tables with a vast collection of men with damaged egos and turbulent lives, but we don't feel her attachment to this world and what she gets out of it. She doesn't even have a sex life, or any desire for one. You begin to think that Sorkin feels eroticism would darken the pure spirit of his poker princess. Chastain's performance is so chaste that she is beyond malice. Not only does she not want anyone to get hurt (so most of her earned money remains uncollected by hired muscle), but she doesn't even want to incriminate others, though she possesses a collection of revealing e-mails that would free her from the feds. Molly's Game should be about how a woman kept her head above water in a world where the thrill often comes from the ability to exploit someone else's weakness. But Molly transcends all that. She may dress sexy, but she's as pure as the Flying Nun. When we watch Jeanne Moreau in Bay of Angels (1963), or George Segal and Elliott Gould in California Split (1974), or more recently, Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn in Mississippi Grind (2015), we experience the delirious buzz of a gambler's highs and lows. Molly's Game keeps the temperature cool and detached. Only Bill Camp, as a card sharp whose perfect world comes tumbling down, gives us a taste of the frightening dynamics among players when the high stakes are more than just the money on the table. On the other hand, Michael Cera (playing a character loosely based on Tobey Maguire), is horribly miscast as a tough cookie who tries to hustle Bloom. When he tells her, “I don’t like playing poker. I like destroying lives,” he's about as convincing as Fredo running the Corleone family.

While Sorkin has always been something of an idealist with a touch of the proselytizer lurking within, his gift for screwball dialogue has often kept it in check. On The West Wing, his dream White House featured a dazzling collection of comic characters crisscrossing each other in constant motion as if they were trying to keep up with the thoughts teeming and streaming through their brains. His script for David Fincher's The Social Network, which was the story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) the billionaire founder of Facebook, was a sublime comedy of malice about mercenary genius nerds. While the movie didn’t celebrate Zuckerberg's unethical guile, it took us right into the scheming brain of a social outsider who found devious ways to get on the inside. It was like Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) for the computer age. But by the time, Sorkin made The Newsroom for HBO it was as if he had suddenly lost faith in the audience he'd won in The West Wing. Instead of creating the crackling vibe of a television news centre, Sorkin built pulpits from which his characters could preach. His dialogue had lost none of its speed, but its screwball dance turned straight and narrow and quickly wore you down. By the time he wrote Steve Jobs for director Danny Boyle, his machine-gun style had become so redundant that you couldn't connect the words to the characters speaking them. The dialogue began to blur because it seemed to be there for its own sake. Molly's Game contains enough verbiage for three movies, but all it does is pull you away from the drama and the characters.

Jeremy Strong manages to make the most of his vibrant pungency as Molly's disreputable mentor, but Idris Elba is not so lucky. He's no more than a plaster saint as her lawyer. He was sleek and riveting as a drug lord in The Wire, but he's more blandly noble here than he was as Nelson Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013). Since we're given to believe that Molly's drives are tied to her father issues, Sorkin sets up Elba's Charlie as the good and decent father (unlike her own) with a daughter he's also trying to mentor properly and has furnished with a reading list. She is currently studying Arthur Miller's The Crucible; the metaphor is a lead balloon since it's painfully obvious that Sorkin sees Bloom – like John Proctor – as having given her soul but in the end all she wants is her name. Molly Bloom may have a name in Molly's Game, but the picture does little to give her a soul. Sorkin backs away from the enticingly sordid world the story presents because he wants to hold her up as a hero who never got her hands dirty. In poker, you wouldn't even try to bluff an amateur with a hand like that.

-- January 17/18

Going in Circles: Woody Allen's Wonder Wheel


Justin Timberlake and Kate Winslet in Woody Allen's Wonder Wheel 

It's been decades since Woody Allen was the comic voice of the shaggy and diminutive outsider. In those first seventies films (Bananas, Love and Death, Sleeper), Allen not only cleverly tweaked the WASP stereotypes that came to define masculinity and femininity; he also satirized them as role models. The eager audiences who strongly welcomed Allen's verbal and physical slapstick – a whirling affront to cultural and sexual repression – also came to relax around their own neurosis and self-doubt. Describing him as "the first post-Freudian movie comedian," critic Pauline Kael said that Allen was "the first to use his awareness of his own sexual insecurities as the basis for his humor, and when he turned psychodrama into comedy he seemed to speak – to joke – for all of us." But all of that changed once he won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director with Annie Hall in 1978. The massive success of that seminal comedy about neurosis found Woody Allen no longer perched on the outside of mainstream culture. Once accepted by the insiders of Hollywood (for a film that was partly a poison-pen letter to L.A.), he seemed to feel that he had to earn his keep in the Insider's Club. Now viewing making comedy as something akin to embracing the Golden Calf, Allen began to strive for seriousness and started emulating those dramatic artists he worshiped as his betters.

Distrusting his greatest gift – his comic voice – Allen even told Newsweek shortly after the success of Annie Hall that comedy belonged at "the children's table." He quickly started remaking his career doing earnest adultdramas cured in the spirit of Ingmar Bergman (Interiors, Another Woman), Henrik Ibsen (September), Federico Fellini (Stardust Memories), Fritz Lang (Shadows and Fog), Charlie Chaplin (Manhattan) and Arthur Miller (Crimes and Misdemeanors). Other pictures that came later were empty imitations of American classics like A Place in the Sun (Match Point) and A Streetcar Named Desire (Blue Jasmine). Sometimes he'd come through with an inspired idea. When he invoked the early days of Kaufman and Hart (Bullets Over Broadway), or drew lovingly on the New Wave spirit of Truffaut's Jules and Jim (Vicky Christina Barcelona), Allen's comic muse lifted those pictures beyond being merely adoring tributes. But what was missing from most of the other movies was his own voice which seemed to take refuge in some idolized past. (His lovely and successful 2011 comedy, Midnight in Paris, was a critique of finding and welcoming such sanctuary. Ultimately, it was about learning to live in the present.)

Many of his hardcore fans who have held close to him all these years – even if just to condemn his controversial personal life – hardly notice the dramatic change in his films and so continue to attend them zealously. Perhaps they are searching for that same haven Allen seeks as they get older. If so, they will likely be thrilled by his latest movie, Wonder Wheel, which not only goes over the same old familiar ground of borrowing ideas from Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, but adds some other familiar voices to the mix like Clifford Odets and William Inge. The result remains the same. The story he creates from these sources is neither effective, or in a voice that truly makes the material his own.

Jim Belushi and Kate Winslet

Set in the Fifties in an amusement park at Coney Island, Wonder Wheel is yet another pastiche that feels contrived right from the start. Lifeguard Mickey Rubin (Justin Timberlake), a former sailor and current graduate student, passionately talks about his goal of writing great melodramas with larger-than-life characters – and announces that dream right to the camera and to the audience. Drawing on a familiar old-fashioned dramatic device doesn't so much diminish Timberlake's authenticity as a character (he actually gives a good engaging performance as Mickey), but it sets us up too conveniently for the overheated material to come. The characters are not so much larger-than-life as barely lifting off the page and they never get to breathe their own air. Ginny (Kate Winslet) is a waitress at a clam house who hates living in her claustrophobic confines above a shooting gallery with her working-class bruiser husband Humpty (Jim Belushi). A recovering alcoholic who runs the merry-go-round, Humpty is Ginny's second husband and he has an estranged daughter, Carolina (Juno Temple), from a previous marriage who drops in unannounced. On the run from her gangster husband, Carolina brings turbulence to the already teaming household – Ginny is having an affair with Mickey whose talk of writing and theatre awakens in her a pining for her former life as an actress before meeting Humpty. But when the younger Carolina arrives on the scene, Mickey also gets immediately smitten with her which draws jealous and murderous rage from Ginny.

What defeats Wonder Wheel pretty much from the start is that Woody Allen recreates the mechanics of plays like those written by Odets and Inge, but he doesn't provide the dramatic underpinnings that would help you understand why the characters speak such stylized dialogue. In Wonder Wheel, their heated patter sounds blatantly artificial. Even Ginny and Humpty's home feels like a stage set that's been unceremoniously plopped on the roof of an amusement park. Kate Winslet plays Ginny's frustrations with a fevered dedication, but since the material is removed from the depths of character, her dogged tenacity stays on the surface and simply wears you down. When Cate Blanchett did her variation of Blanche DuBois in Blue Jasmine, she miraculously found the depths of character by creating a suspended lyricism in her line readings. She added neurotic shadings so compelling that she often came in conflict with Allen's direction of his own material. Jim Belushi is no more interesting as Humpty as Andrew Dice Clay was as the working-class husband of Sally Hawkins in Blue Jasmine. They both get buried under the weight of heavy-spirited clichés. Ginny's young son from her previous marriage, Ritchie (Jack Gore), who is a budding arsonist doesn't even get to be a cliché – he's a clunking metaphor.

While everyone else is chained to the stumps of the story, Juno Temple brings a comic lightness to Carolina that matches up perfectly with Timberlake's boyish enthusiasm. Their chemistry – especially in a lovely idyll in the car during a rain story – makes you wish the film had actually been about how the love of art and literature stirs romantic and erotic longings in two adult innocents. But there's nothing innocent about Wonder Wheel. Everything feels shopworn and counterfeit. Even the gorgeous and colourful cinematography by wizard Vittorio Storaro does little to bring the artifice of the story to life. What he unwittingly does is emphasis the fakery of the whole enterprise. Instead of the poetic richness of his work in Bernardo Bertolucci's sumptuous The Conformist, Wonder Wheel comes across instead as the bastard sequel to his camera work in Francis Coppola's stillborn musical One From the Heart.

It may be that Woody Allen has lost touch with his own appetite for art and literature because in Wonder Wheel he only recreates the surface without the substance. (Who can forget how substantial his outrageously funny parody of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire was in Sleeper when Diane Keaton turns into Brando's Stanley Kowalski to recreate a primal scene from the Woody Allen's character's childhood?) There's no zest anywhere in this patchwork melodrama and the wheels aren't turning anywhere interesting. Like the carny ride the film is named after, Wonder Wheel only goes around in circles.

-- January 20/18



                                                               ***                                                  

Coda: Time Waits for No One



Coming back to Ryerson University to teach a film course for the first time since being diagnosed with cancer over a year ago, I decided to start with a class about the nature of time. Even though I had had the idea shortly before I became sick, it had acquired some poignancy during the months of treatment. Time wasn't just the philosophical exercise I first considered, but a tangible entity that I was growing quite intimate with. I came to see that you can't beat time because – to paraphrase George Harrison – time flows on within you and without you. We may try to organize time through our calendars and appointment books to construct a linear path of going forward through the weeks, months and years. But we can run out of time despite what our daytimer tells us. When we are awake, we are conscious of time passing. Yet we sleep for eight hours a night and it never seems like eight hours when we open our eyes to the morning.

Time is independent of our existence whether we are conscious of it or not. It may be one reason why some of us fear going to sleep at night because it's then that our futile control over time slips out of our grasp. As we enter the world of dreams, time shifts into realms of abstract reality. It's movies that allow us to experience time in that abstract reality, as if we were to find ourselves in a waking dream. Perhaps that's why some people fear movies and choose to attend only some pictures, while avoiding others that may disturb their sense of order. Unlike in the other arts such as literature, theatre, opera and the visual arts, where we can experience a work in linear time – giving us full control of what we read, watch and hear – movies are about surrendering our control to the eye of the camera and the sensibility of the person behind the lens.

From the moment the Lumière brothers shocked audiences in 1896 with L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station), which was simply about a train arriving at the station, where viewers experienced the sensation of being run over, movies have played exquisite games with our concepts of reality and time. Georges Méliès was a magician on the Paris stage trying to pull off tricks to entertain audiences until he discovered the movie camera thanks to the Lumière brothers. In quick order, he made a number of astonishing short films that defied our idea of time by trying to recreate the world of dreams where linear time is challenged. In The Vanishing Lady (1896), a woman sitting in a chair disappears before our eyes – even at one point reappearing as a skeleton – due to the wizardry of the new technology of the movie camera. One Man Band (1900) had Méliès duplicating himself on screen into a complete musical orchestra with the same deftness that Harold Ramis would reveal later when – thanks to digital technology – he cloned Michael Keaton into multiple characters in the 1996 comedy Multiplicity.

Lumière brothers' L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station)

Given the hand-painted colourization that would adorn Gulliver's Travels (1902), and the narrative and visual complexities he'd impart to A Trip to the Moon (1902), Méliès proved to be a man of his time, but he was also an artist living out of his time. Envisioning and anticipating the innovative techniques of movies in the future, he lacked the technology to advance them beyond the time he lived in. That would be left in a few short years to directors like D. W. Griffith, who took us back to the American Civil War in The Birth of a Nation (1915) – where he also confronted us with a racist narrative from a Southerner's view that had an operatic power. The shock of that film and the ripples of controversy it created forced the filmmaker to respond in 1916 with Intolerance, an epic riposte which intercut four separate stories about inhumanity and injustice. But the picture didn't just contrast Babylon, where pacifist Prince Belshazzar is brought down by warring religious factions, with Judea, where the last days of Christ (Howard Gaye) are depicted in the style of a Passion play, and with France, where Catherine de Medici presides over the slaughter of the Huguenots, or present-day California, where a woman (Mae Marsh) pleads for the life of her husband (Robert Harron) when he is sentenced to hang for a murder he did not commit. Griffith told these stories as if the events were happening all at once. Each era spoke to the others; the present found its own echo in the past. Besides presenting the experience of the simultaneity of time, Intolerance also generated suspense by implicating the audience in what it was watching. (When we are subjected to a car chase in the contemporary story where the passengers are making a desperate attempt to prevent the hanging, it is paralleled with comparative moments from the previous eras.)

Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. (1924) drew more directly from Méliès' magic shows as Keaton's film projectionist dreamed himself onto the movie screen to experience time as out of control. Others – in time – would go even further. In the eighties, Woody Allen replicated some of Keaton's alchemy in movies like Zelig, where he inserted himself into footage of the past – including a Hitler rally – and The Purple Rose of Cairo, where he reversed Sherlock Jr. when a character in a movie (Jeff Daniels) steps off the screen and enters the real world to be with a lonely housewife (Mia Farrow) who was fixated on the film, so that he could be free of the confines that the drama he was stuck in imposed on him. Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936) featured the suspense of watching a boy on a trolley unwittingly carrying a bomb across London hidden in – what else? – containers of film. We watch him being delayed and stalling while the clocks of the city loom down with the inevitability that time will eventually run out and he and innocent others will be killed. We, meanwhile, are helpless to stop time, to enter the screen and save them.

Georges Méliès' One Man Band (1900) 

In Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles depicts the failure of tycoon Charles Foster Kane's first marriage not in a number of dramatic scenes, but as a flashback to the past from Kane's friend Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten). He describes the marriage to a reporter in an anecdote, collapsing time. The years of decline become a brief theme with variations. Composer Bernard Herrmann opens the marriage montage with a romantic waltz capturing the couple's happy moments before their growing unhappiness turns the music into a dirge in little over a minute. In Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, an astronaut (Keir Dullea) reaches the end of his life; Kubrick folds the stages of his death into a series of formal vignettes even as the stillness of the camera shots expands the time in which we experience it. In The Godfather, Part II, Francis Ford Coppola powerfully dramatizes the fall of the son (Al Pacino) who inherited the criminal kingdom of his father (Marlon Brando) by contrasting footage of the early years of his father's rise to power (now with Robert De Niro in the role) with the torpor of the son's later collapse. Sergio Leone's 1984 gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America, goes even further to scramble time and the narrative, so the story bounces in and out of different eras, reflecting the sense of guilt that De Niro's Noodles feels about the failure of his life. In the beginning, as Noodles lies in an opium den drawing on his pipe, we hear a telephone ringing through the various stages of his life until, finally, it is answered by the cops he's called to rat on his partners in crime.

The obsession with time has sometimes served as a dare to directors trying out new ways to expand on the dramatic narrative. Nicholas Roeg's cryptic Don't Look Now (1973), set in Venice, features a love scene between a married couple (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland) who are still grieving the accidental death of their daughter and having trouble connecting to each other in the present. They get stuck emotionally in the past while attempting to find a future for their marriage. Roeg decided to shoot their love scene by cross-cutting between their coital passion and the later dispersion of their sexual excitement when they're getting dressed for dinner. Besides evoking the deathly experience that follows orgasm, Roeg also found a dramatic means of reflecting both the romantic passion of the couple reaching out to each other and the sense of despair they felt about things never being the same again. (Steven Soderbergh filmed a variation on this scene in his 1998 Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out of Sight, where bank robber Jack Foley, played by George Clooney, wins the heart of FBI agent Karen Sisco, portrayed by Jennifer Lopez. As they flirt in a hotel bar, Soderbergh intercuts their foreplay and the later seduction scene in the hotel bedroom. But Soderbergh's aim is the opposite of Roeg's – to build a feeling of erotic anticipation rather than the regret over the death of eroticism in Don't Look Now.)

In David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), not only does the main character (Brad Pitt) live his life backwards, resembling an old man at birth and a child at death, but the movie is framed by a death-bed story by his lover (Cate Blanchett) about a man at the turn of the 20th century who invented a clock that went backwards. His goal was to bring the boys back alive from WW1, including his own son, though the clock could do little to soothe the afflictions of time. Fincher shoots this scene to resemble a scratched silent film, but he also makes it look hand-coloured, as if to suggest that Méliès was around with his brushes to add his sumptuous touch. Alan Rudolph in his little-seen romantic drama, The Secret Lives of Dentists (2002), gets right inside the way events can teleport us back in time so we sketch a path of memory that we hope will take us up to where we are now. In the case of David Hurst (Campbell Scott), a mild-mannered dentist who shares a practice with his wife Dana (Hope Davis), his marriage is put to the test. One night, as she is about to appear in the chorus of their local amateur opera company, he sees her backstage in the arms of another man. Assuming that she's been cheating on him, he makes his way back to his seat, and their children, dazed. As the music starts, he begins to remember their courtship at dental school, their marriage, their first home and the pregnancies that followed. Rudolph has David's memories of his relationship with Dana flood back with a tidal force that's underscored and inspired by the first act of Verdi's Nabucco, where the Jews are being assaulted, conquered and subsequently exiled from their homeland by the Babylonian King Nabucco. We know that an old song on the radio can sometimes bring back long-buried moments in time; Alan Rudolph accomplishes the same sensation with Verdi in The Secret Lives of Dentists.

The inventor (Elias Koteas) and his backward clock in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Most popular SF novels and films (The Time Machine, Time After Time, Frequency) deal more literally with time travel and our fascination with altering the past or future. Perhaps the finest SF picture of this nature is Chris Marker's innovative and masterful 1962 short La Jetée. La Jetée is about a man in the future, a prisoner in a post-apocalyptic France, who has a distinct memory from his childhood of a single incident at Orly Airport in Paris: he sees a woman on the jetty as he watches planes arrive and depart. He also has a lingering image of a death that he can't quite place. As scientists find a means to send people into the past to alter the future, this man is able to revisit that moment, hopefully to resolve the memory. And he does so but not in the manner he hoped for. By using a series of still images to create both the motion of a movie and the manner in which memory works, Marker recreates the process of both gathering time and being overwhelmed by our inability to harness it. "Most times when we recall the past we remember it only in fragments," wrote critic David Churchill in his appraisal of Marker's career when he died in 2012. "These fragments often get mixed in with other memories, too, as our brain zooms through its 'attic' making up its own associations and connections. Many times, these memory fragments do not play like movies, but instead still images; captured moments." As much as Marker's film captures moments, the character in the story is captured by memories that are out of his hands – a theme that emerges again years later in his film essay Sans Soleil (1983). What both movies share as well is a fascination with Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which may itself be the ultimate (if not so obvious) time-travel picture.

Vertigo opens with detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) chasing a criminal across the rooftops in San Francisco. While trying to jump to the next building, he slips and finds himself hanging desperately from an eavesdrop. Another police officer attempts to rescue him but falls from the roof to his death many feet below. From that moment, Scottie is trapped in the past with a trauma that leaves him with vertigo – a fear of heights. He retires from the force but is enlisted by an old college friend, Elster (Tom Helmore), to follow his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who he claims is possessed by the past – by the ghost of Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide once the married man she loved cast her aside after she bore his child. Scottie follows Madeleine through the city streets from the Palace of the Legion of Honor art museum, where she gazes at the Portrait of Carlotta, to Fort Point, under Golden Gate Bridge, where she jumps into the bay. Scottie rescues Madeleine and falls in love with her. As they draw closer, Madeleine recounts a nightmare, the setting of which Scottie identifies as the Mission San Juan Bautista, which is Carlotta's childhood home. When they drive there, Madeleine, overcome, runs into the church and up the bell tower. Scottie tries to follow, but his acrophobia gets the best of him and he can't climb the steps. He's left watching her plunge to her death, an apparent suicide.

James Stewart's Scottie hanging on in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

Having failed to save the woman he loved, Scottie remains obsessively stuck in the past. After spending time in a sanatorium recovering from catatonia, he returns to the streets of San Francisco to retrace his steps, as if, in doing so, he could also undo the past and find a clear route to the future. Hitchcock cleverly maps out these scenes so that we also return to our memories of the earlier part of the movie. He has us time travel (along with Scottie) to the beginnings of the story, where we unravel clues along with him. But once Scottie strays from the path of the past, he spots a woman who looks a lot like Madeleine. Boldly visiting her in her hotel, and finding out her name is Judy, he asks her out for dinner and she accepts. After he leaves, Judy does some time traveling of her own, back into her memories, to the moment when she betrayed Scottie by using him as a patsy for Elster in his scheme to kill his wife. Judy posed as Madeleine and faked her suicide to make Scottie a witness. (It was the real Madeleine, already dead, who was tossed from the rooftop.) Once again, while tracing Judy's flashback, Hitchcock repeats the scenes from earlier in the movie when Madeleine/Judy climbed the staircase – only this time we see moments that weren't in that part of the narrative. Instead of staying with Scottie trapped on the stairs, we go to the rooftop, where we see the faking of the suicide.

Over the last third of the picture, Scottie persuades Judy to recreate herself as Madeleine, not in an attempt to make her over (as some feminist critics have suggested) in the spirit of the male gaze, but in a pathological attempt to bring back the past. And, out of love for him, she agrees to let him recreate this woman who never really existed. Once he has her, though – in a haunting moment when she emerges like Madeleine's ghost from the bathroom – he loses her again, this time when his detective instincts take over. As they get ready to go out to dinner, Judy decides to wear Carlotta's necklace, which reveals to Scottie that he was set up from the first. Out of bitterness, he drives her back to the Mission San Juan Bautista to recreate the scene of the original crime and finally free himself from the past. But although, in confronting Judy, he does free himself from his vertigo, Judy is startled on the roof by an intruder, steps backwards and tumbles to her death. Scottie finally recovers the present, but loses the woman from his past for a second time.

The ghost of Madeleine (Kim Novak) emerges from the bathroom in Vertigo

As Vertigo demonstrates, time traveling doesn't require a machine; we can do it in our own minds. In Francis Coppola's The Conversation, Gene Hackman's wiretapper tries to unravel the meaning of a conversation he's recorded, continually revisiting the past through his tape recorder. But while it functions sufficiently like a time machine, he can't undo the past any more than Scottie can. Vertigo makes you dizzy with its notion of time as a spiral that can't be broken – like the back of Madeleine's hair, a replica of Carlotta's in the painting. Bernard Herrmann's highly romantic score is steeped in Gothic tragedy; it takes its cue from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, with its themes of love and death and its unresolved chords that keep the listener in a state of suspended anxiety. "Hitchcock's film is about obsession, which means that it's about circling back to the same moment, again and again," director Martin Scorsese once told Sight and Sound. "And the music is also built around spirals and circles, fulfillment and despair. Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for – he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession." And that heart of obsession is our desire to break the grasp of time upon us. Yet time waits for no one.

While movies, where we continually engage in daydreams beyond our control, continue to break apart and reconfigure our sense of time, the technology that made watching movies possible has altered our viewing habits dramatically. Where we used to wait for films to open and even feared that we might not have the time to see them before they close – possibly for years, if not for good – today, with the availability of streaming, we are now offered the illusion of being in control of what we can see. We can now catch a recent movie at will on Netflix, even pause it to take a break or to return to it at a later date. There's no longer the urgency of experiencing a picture during its brief stay. We don't even need to be in a big movie house where we can share the communal dreaming with others in the audience. Today we can engage with a movie in the privacy of our home and with whomever we wish. But that doesn't stop filmmakers from toying with time, whether it's Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris, reminding us that no era is free of the prejudices of its time, or Michael Apted in his Up series of documentaries, where every seven years he contrasts the lives of a group of men and women – children of seven when he first filmed them – to see if time ends up shaping them or they shape the times with their evolving values. The extraordinary 2016 documentary, Tower, where director Keith Maitland recreates the first mass shooting in America at the University of Texas in 1966, sets out to make us conscious of time. There was the killer residing in the clock tower, marking time with the bullets he fires. Some victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time; others survived because they turned out to be in the right place at the right time. Tower resists turning the period songs on the soundtrack into nostalgia, but rather lets them function as signposts, the survivors having marked their memories by the tunes they heard. What we discover, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, is that we can't escape the existential puzzle of being trapped in time. But in a good movie we can always imagine, through time's elusiveness, what it's like to experience time as it really is – and as The Dude says in The Big Lebowski, you just have to abide.

-- June 14/17



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