Whatever Works

The familiar plot in Woody Allen’s 2009 film Whatever Works centers on an old man who becomes involved with a much younger woman. A relationship develops, they marry, and after a year she meets someone else. Allen’s interest in revolving, evolving personal relationships rolls on. In a way the device is similar to what we find in such plays by Shakespeare as A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Measure for Measure—though in those plays waning and waxing passions intertwine with mistaken and concealed identities. Allen acknowledged the connection in his 1982 film A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (a delightful and underrated film).

Whatever Works might have worked better had it been an animated film. The characters seem broadly, hastily drawn, as if they are caricatures, cartoon parodies of more three-dimensional individuals. As it is, this real-life film is amusing enough, not one of Allen’s best efforts, but an entertaining one nonetheless.

Boris Yellnikoff is an apparently retired physics professor from Columbia University. He is quick to profess his own stellar brilliance and to denounce the moronic ineptitude of the rest of the human race. His great claim to fame is that he was “almost nominated” for the Nobel Prize for his work in string theory. His first marriage, to a woman almost as brilliant as he, ended when he suffered what appeared to be a breakdown. A suicide attempt failed when he jumped from his apartment window and an awning blocked his fall to the sidewalk. He was left somewhat lame as a result. Allen himself could have played Boris, but instead he chose Larry David, the former writer of Seinfeld and star of the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, which is difficult to distinguish from Seinfeld. David plays the part much as Allen would have played it, but with his own flourishes. He is loud and abrasive and relentless in talking about himself and dismissing everyone else. It’s difficult to like him, at least throughout much of the film. He reminded me of the protagonist of Allen’s film Celebrity (1998).

The young woman is from a small Mississippi town. Allen has often used stereotypes for comic effect. The chastely named Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) is such a stereotype. She has never been exposed to the world outside Mississippi. A high school dropout, a frequent participant in beauty contests, she blithely explains to David how she once (only once) committed the sin of having sex with an attractive boy at a catfish fry. Melodie has about as much depth as Al Capp’s Daisy Mae Yokum or as Ellie Mae Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies. She is wholly provincial, small-minded, uneducated, unenlightened, naïve—just the opposite (or so he would have us think) of Boris.

Boris allows Melodie to stay in his apartment for a few nights. She has run away from Mississippi and her overbearing mother to experience life and adventure in New York. The more time Boris and Melodie spend together, the more impressed by him she becomes. She begins to mimic his speech and his thoughts, and he is flattered. One night, after listening to her express some of his own thoughts about life and existence, he realizes he has found someone he likes to spend time with. They marry. After a time Melodie’s mother from Mississippi, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) shows up at their door. She has been looking for her daughter. She is equally small-town and provincial, but with the added trait of religious mania. She is horrified by the man her daughter has married and immediately sets out to find a suitable replacement.

Woody Allen chooses in this film to take a particular view of the American South through the stereotyped characters of these two women: the South in this film means provincialism, repression, small-mindedness, ignorance, fundamentalism, backwardness, catfish fries. One might argue that this is the view Allen takes of the world in general outside the boundaries of New York City.

Once these Mississippi women encounter the sophisticated environs of New York, they open up to life’s possibilities. Marietta discovers her talents as a photographer, has a love affair with two men (she lives in the same apartment and sleeps in the same bed with both of them at the same time). Melodie falls in love with an actor. For Woody Allen these are the patterns of human relationships.

Much of this film comes across like a stage play. It takes place on sets--the apartment of Boris and Marietta, a museum, a boat. The effect is static and confining, just as the shallow characterizations are confining. One can imagine the story working better as a play than it does as a film. In Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979—one of Allen’s best films) Allen uses New York City as a spectacular setting for his characters and their affairs. We know that Whatever Works is set in New York City, but for the most part we see little of the city and feel less of its life. The tight focus is on Boris, Melodie, Marietta.

Rambling Rose

The most important visual image in Rambling Rose (1991, dir. Martha Coolidge) is the view from the front yard of the Hillyer family home. The front yard looks towards the nearby river, and a bridge that arches over the river, approaching the home. This view is what the narrator sees when the film first begins. It is the bridge over which Rose walks when she first comes to live with the family. And it is the closing image of the film. The image of the bridge suggests both the family’s isolation from the rest of the world, and its connection to that world. The bridge is the connection to everything that is out there, to the future, to adult experience. For those approaching from the other side, it is the connection of memory to the past, to the sacred idyll of family and home and childhood.

Rambling Rose uses the tried and true frame of an older man remembering his childhood days at his family’s home in Glenville, GA. We begin as he drives towards his family home, planning to spend time with his elderly father. He arrives, and as he looks for his father he remembers his childhood days there. The film then jumps backward to the mid-1930s, when the narrator was a boy of 14. At the end the film returns to the present. The narrator’s boyhood name was Buddy. His family was an unconventional one for the deep South. His mother (Dianne Ladd) is a graduate student in history working on her thesis. She is hard of hearing and has to turn on a hearing aid whenever anyone speaks to her. She is an independent and outspoken woman who is also kind and compassionate. The house the family lives in a house she bought with her inheritance. The father (Robert Duvall) manages a hotel in the nearby town. The mother and father are full of witticisms and odd expressions. The father speaks with rhetorical flourishes, sometimes fraught with meaning and sometimes not.  Buddy (Lukas Haas) is their oldest son. He has a younger sister and brother. Although the film takes place in 1935, the Depression is mentioned in passing only once, and there is otherwise no mention of it.

Despite their unconventional nature, the Hillyers live in an old Southern house with columns—there is little in the story that plays off the symbolism of the columned plantation house, but it is here nonetheless. The closing credits to the film scroll down the screen as the song “Dixie” plays in the background, not as a “fergit Hell” anthem but rather as a plaintive song of memory, “old times there are not forgotten.” But the use of the song nonetheless seemed odd.

The story revolves around a young woman named Rose (Laura Dern) who comes to work as a housekeeper for the family. She has a troubled past, and the mother and father agree to bring her to work for the family to help her escape her difficulties in Birmingham, where it seems she was being pressured to work as a prostitute. The film doesn’t dwell on the fact, but the mother and father have a sense of social responsibility. They see it as their Christian duty to help a girl like Rose. She quickly bonds with the family. She feels a connection with the mother, who was also an orphan. She develops a crush for the father, and while the mother is away at a meeting she throws herself on him. He rebuffs her advances, after a few long seconds of apparent hesitation. She develops a close friendship with Buddy, who is fourteen. When she comes into his room to talk about her crush on his father, she climbs in his bed. He asks to feel her breasts and other parts of her body, and despite her misgivings she lets him. This is a disturbing scene that reflects both Rose’s strongly sexual passions and the nature of her problems. (Except for the fact that he falls in love with Rose, Buddy seems to suffer no damaging side effects from this episode). Rose has a number of misadventures with various men of the town, including the local doctor. Daddy Hillyer becomes increasingly convinced that the family must let Rose go, while Mama Hillyer resists, insisting that Rose is a good girl, despite her problems.

What I take away from this film are the eccentric family and the theme of sexual repression. Although they are a Southern family from the 1930s, the Hillyers all agree that black people are mistreated (although we see only one black man in the entire film). When Rose makes her advance on Daddy Hillyer, both Buddy and his sister watch through the door, slightly ajar. They are interested at what is going on, curious, but not shocked or ashamed. Therefore we encounter another Southern family that is not representative of the norm. They are exceptions—not typical Southerners—whatever ”typical” means. 

One could argue that because of the sexually repressive, male-centered atmosphere of the South Rose is unable to fully express herself sexually. On the other hand, she is a victim of an abusive childhood. She has been left sterile from a gonorrhea infection, and her sexual appetite is as much a product of her childhood as it is part of her natural character.

The film emphasizes the power of patriarchy. When Rose believes she is pregnant, the family takes her to a doctor, who diagnoses her with an ovarian cyst. This is when we learn that she is sterile. Because of her scandalous reputation in the town, the doctor proposes that when she has surgery for removal of the cyst that she ought to be given a double hysterectomy, which will remove the source of the hormones that fuel her sexual appetite. Such surgery would fundamentally change her. The father at first agrees that this is a necessary measure. The mother refuses to allow it, and the father changes his mind and agrees with her. As sometimes gruff and domineering as the father sometimes appears to be, in the end it is Mother Hillyer who wields authority—she is the source of human judgment and moral standards in the film. She sees through Rose’s loose behavior to the human being that she is. She refuses to allow the surgeon to cut out of Rose’s body an essential part of her identity.

In the final scene of the film we return to the present time where Buddy, now a grown man (played by John Heard) talks with his elderly father about Rose, who has recently died. Buddy had loved Rose, and when she left to get married he wept. He weeps now in the present time, remembering her.  The father and Buddy both agree that they loved Rose and that she was full of life and passion and then the film ends.

It’s difficult to get a handle on this film. The characters carry the film more than the story does. But the big question is what we are to make of Rose. Why is she interesting? Is she significant? Is the film suggesting that she lived in a repressive time that didn’t allow her to give full expression to her sexuality and to the person she was? Or is it suggesting that she was a damaged product of an abusive childhood and of manipulative men such as her father and the doctor and even Daddy Hillyer?  Or some combination of both? After he rebuffs her advances, Daddy Hillyer tells Rose that women and men are different. He says something to the effect that men cannot help but fall victim to their sexual passions, but that woman have the ability to choose not to give in to their passions. This may serve as some sort of justification for the sexual double standard that allows men to wander while their women ”choose” to remain at home. Clearly Rose does not choose to resist her passions—both she and Mother Hillyer insist that love and not sex is what matters to women. We are told that it takes Rose four husbands before she discovers the man meant for her, and they stay married for 25 years.

The film offers something of social commentary, something of melodrama, a fair amount of sentiment and a touch of hokum. Laura Dern is good in her role as Rose. Robert Duvall, who is usually effective in any role, in this one seems more of a caricature than a real person, and the same can be said of Diane Ladd’s portrayal of Mother Hillyer. In a sense, the film comes off like an Erskine Caldwell novel rewritten by the novelist John Irving.

The Hillyers are as middle-class Southern family. Rose comes from a lower-class background. Class difference may have something to do in the film with how the Hillyers view and tolerate Rose’s promiscuity.

The Trip to Bountiful

The film The Trip to Bountiful (dir. Peter Masterson) appeared in 1985, some 32 years after the premier of the Horton Foote teleplay on which it is based. Foote adapted the screenplay and produced the film. The story takes place in east Texas, which geographically speaking is still the Deep South. The story is simple: an old woman, Mrs. Carrie Watts (Geraldine Page) lives in a two-room apartment with her son Ludie (John Heard) and his wife Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn). The time is approximately that of the Depression, though it could be somewhat later, as late as the early 1950s. The son has been in and out of work but presently has a low-paying job. The wife complains endlessly about everything, especially about how they never go out and about the old woman, whose hymn singing, habit of running rather than walking around the apartment, and difficult behavior irritates her. It’s easy to understand why the old woman’s behavior is irritating. Although she is old and near the end of her life, she is somewhat self-centered and, like her daughter-in-law, insistent on getting her way. Her son is caught in the middle of the quarrels that occur, and when he attempts to intervene and calm things down, he doesn’t always succeed.

Carrie wants to go back to Bountiful, the town where she grew up. She is constantly recalling her days there. She manages to sneak out of the apartment, find her way to a bus station, and ride the bus to a town twelve miles from Bountiful. She plans to visit her childhood friend, but when she arrives at her last stop, the bus station attendant tells her that the woman has just died, and that no one is left in Bountiful. Carrie plans to go there anyway, and after she collapses in the bus station, the local sheriff agrees to take her.

The plot of this film is thin, and much of the time it seems simply to be marking time. Early scenes show Carrie’s life with Ludie and Jessie Mae in the drab and cramped apartment—neither Carrie nor Jessie Mae can’t stand each other, and Jessie Mae is intent on forcing her mother-in-law to follow her rules—no running, no hymn singing, no sulking. Carrie has no income of her own, apparently, and no friends or other family. Her entire world is circumscribed by the apartment. We understand why she would want to leave. The middle scenes show Carrie as she travels by bus towards Bountiful. She sits next to a young woman whose husband has just gone overseas with the military. She and Carrie strike up a conversation, and Carrie talks about her life and her past. Geraldine Page does a good job of portraying Carrie (she won a Best Actress Oscar for the part), but I found the character she played constantly irritating. Perhaps this is because Page does such a good job with the role—Carrie is an irritating woman. She is full of mindless small talk, the kind of person who feels a need to fill the silences in conversations with hymns or with stories about her childhood or with other banter. As often as not she is talking about herself and her life. At the same time, as she talks we come to understand her loneliness—she has no friends, all her relatives except her son have died, her hometown is abandoned, and soon she will be dead. Hers is the plight of many an old person.

Where this film comes to life is in the final scenes, which take place at the old home where Carrie was born and where she lived in her childhood with her parents. The house is empty and abandoned, on the verge of collapse, and the film follows Carrie as she walks from room to room, looking contented and happy and sad all at the same time. When Ludie arrives with his wife to pick her up and take her back home, he and his mother talk on the steps of the old house. She asks him if he remembers her father, and at first he says he doesn’t—ultimately he confesses that he remembers it all, but that he doesn’t want to. He expresses disappointment with his own life. The summary may make the ending seem sentimental and maudlin, but in fact it is all deeply moving—an old woman coming to terms with the vanishing remnants of her life, her son confronting the realities of his own disappointments.

The film contrasts the old homestead and Carrie’s memories of her life there with present-day realities of the modern world—a world that compels farmers to leave their farms, divides families, entraps people in small confining apartments in big cities. One might argue that the film is suggesting the advantages of the old life over the new. In fact, it is simply commenting on the nature of time, place, memory, and morality.

Much of the success of the final scenes can be attributed to the cinematography and the absence of music or sounds other than those that naturally surround the old home. We see shots of open and empty fields, and we know they are the canvas of Carrie’s memories. Insects and birds whir and twitter in the background, and they give the final scenes an intense feeling of realness. The effect enhances the credibility and emotions that Carrie is feeling.

In the Heat of the Night

Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) does all it can from the earliest scenes to establish the viewer’s moral superiority over the place and the people of Sparta, Mississippi—the fictional setting of this film. In the first scene we see Virgil Tibbs step down from a train that has stopped in Sparta. In the second scene we see two scrofulous men in a run-down diner. One is trying to kill a fly with a rubber band. The other is a cop drinking coffee. There is tension between them, we later learn its cause, though at first the cause appears to be a lemon pie that the cop loves but which the counterman hides beneath the counter so the cop will think it is sold out. There is one piece of cake beneath a cover, and when the counterman lifts the cover, we see another fly trapped inside with the cake.

Warren Oates plays the policeman, Sam Wood, who manages to perspire throughout the film. Sparta is a hot town. Sam patrols the town, driving down a residential street and slowing in front of a house where, we learn later, he often slows down—to watch a young girl standing naked in front of a window. She is hot too, in more ways than one. When Sam drives on, he discovers a body crumpled in the street, and the plot begins to unfold.

The basic premise of this film focuses on an educated, well mannered African American detective from Philadelphia (PA) who has a layover at the Sparta train station while he waits for a connection. He has been visiting his mother in a nearby town, and when the murdered body is discovered, the local sheriff, Gillespie (Rod Steiger), tells his deputies to look for drifters, hobos, anyone who might be passing through. Tibbs, a strange black man reading in the train station, fits the bill. He’s arrested. The deputy is suspicious of Tibbs as soon as he sees him—primarily because he is a black man whom he doesn’t recognize, probably also because he is well dressed and is reading. He addresses Tibbs as “boy,” a term used throughout the film by various townspeople to express their dislike for and sense of superiority over Tibbs and other African Americans. Tibbs gets Gillespie to call his captain in Philadelphia and is cleared as a suspect but is also assigned to assist in investigating the murder. Tibbs does not want to assist, and Gillespie does not want his help either. They become unwilling partners.

The murder victim Colbert had planned to build a factory in town, a factory that would hire 1000 workers, at least half of whom would be black. He was a Northerner whose factory would have brought change to the town, change that some are resisting, especially the wealthy landowner Endicott. He lives in a grand mansion outside the town. His hobby is growing orchids. Tibbs at first suspects him of involvement in the crime, though he eventually realizes that Endicott’s reputation as a racist had more to do with his suspicions than evidence and clues. The real truth of the crime is more sordid and mundane and in fact not especially intriguing.

The interest of the film grows not out of the efforts of Tibbs and Gillespie to solve the murder but rather out of their interactions with one another, and out of the reactions of the townspeople to an African American detective from Philadelphia, PA, intruding in their affairs. We identify with Tibbs and with no one else in the film.  We share his outrage at his repeated encounters with racism, in comments people make, in a carful of rednecks trying to run his car off the road, in Endicott’s patronizing comments about how black people need to be taken care of like orchids. The film fuels our sense of moral superiority over the inhabitants of Sparta.

The point of the film is to show that racism and racists are bad. This is not an especially sophisticated or shocking lesson, from our standpoint in 2009, but it was a lesson that in 1967 would have had a powerful impact on audiences that saw the film, especially audiences that included people not as clear in their own thinking about race and civil rights as the makers of the film might have regarded themselves to be.

From a 2009 perspective, the film dramatizes the gradual awakening of the mid-twentieth South to the issue of civil rights and racial equality. Gillespie is the character in whom this awakening occurs. At first Gillespie is shown as a good ol’ boy sheriff who is quick to resort to easy conclusions, especially when it comes to solving the murder of a prominent developer such as Colbert. After he gives up on Tibbs as a suspects he then begins to suspect a young man found with Colvert’s wallet. He assumes the man is the murderer. Tibbs points out that the suspect is left-handed but that the murder was committed by a right-handed man because of the nature and location of the wound. Gillespie doesn’t like being shown up and corrected by Tibbs, and he yells. He yells often in the film. Rod Steiger is effective as a fierce Southern sheriff. But Gillespie also grows to appreciate Tibbs’ skills and his determination to solve the murder. (He accuses Tibbs of wanting to prove to all the white people in town that he is smarter than they are—Tibbs does not dispute the accusation, and in fact it convinces him to stay in town and investigate the murder). Gillespie finds his position as sheriff in jeopardy because he is willing to work with and accept the advice of a black man—Endicott and the mayor both imply that he may lose his job as a result.

An interesting scene occurs in Gillespie’s living room. Gillespie is sprawled out on his sofa, and Tibbs is sitting in a chair. They are drinking and talking. Gillespie talks about being lonely and isolated and tells Tibbs that he is the first human being who has ever been in his house. They seem on the verge of forming a bond, establishing a link, but when Gillespie asks Tibbs whether he is lonely and Tibbs responds, “No lonelier than you are,” Gillespie responds by saying that he doesn’t need pity. In this scene we see how much the two men have in common—both are unmarried, without wives or families, both feel somehow out of place and isolated. Gillespie more than Tibbs seems to need human companionship, but the barriers of race and the prejudices of a region and a historical moment prevent him from recognizing in Tibbs a kindred soul—at least until the end of the film.

Gillespie is a man who is more intelligent and of more substance than his time and place might allow him to be. His mettle becomes clear as a result of the murder and of Tibbs role in solving it. Although Tibbs is risking his life as he investigates the crime—in the climactic scenes of the film, two cars full of local citizens with guns are hunting him—Gillespie through his developing respect for Tibbs is risking his job and his place in the town as well.

The film was shot on location, and there are many scenes of local buildings and streets and downtown areas that make the film seem realistic. It is set in a fictional town in Mississippi named Sparta. By showing how Gillespie at first confuses Tibbs’ home town in Pennsylvania with Philadelphia, Mississippi, the film clearly associates its fictional setting with the actual town where only a few years before three young civil rights workers had been brutally murdered. In the Heat of the Night specifically operates within the reverberations of those events and of the civil rights movement in general. On the way to visit Endicott, Tibbs and Gillespie drive past expansive fields of cotton where black people are busy picking the crop and large industrial machines are harvesting it. The scene is an image of change—the comparison between Tibbs himself and the black people working in the fields, the contrast between the laborers picking cotton by hand and the industrial machines harvesting the plant. When Gillespie and Tibbs arrive at the mansion—a large brick plantation house—they go to the front door and a black man answers the bell. Again there is a contrast between the black servant and Tibbs. The contrast culminates in the greenhouse where Colbert tends to his orchids. When Colbert realizes that Tibbs and Gillespie have come to interrogate him about Colbert’s murder, he becomes angry and slaps Tibbs, who immediately slaps him back. Gillespie does not react, and Endicott is enraged at his lack of a response. When Tibbs and Gillespie leave, Endicott is left weeping in anger and humiliation in his greenhouse. This is a wonderful scene, one that (as I recall) promoted audiences to clap and cheer.

A problem with the film is the lack of nuance in how it represents the racism of the people of Sparta. Everyone is racist. Everyone is suspicious of Tibbs and speaks to him with disrespect. No one stands up for him or likes him. The only person who demands that he be kept on the case is Colbert’s widow—she is from the North and therefore more respectful of black men. It is also doubtful how long an aggressive and outspoken black man like Tibbs would actually have survived in a Mississippi town like Sparta in 1967.

There are only two scenes in the film where Tibbs interacts with other black people.

What made Poitier an attractive African American actor in 1967? First and foremost, he in ways was more like a white actor in black skin than an African American. As Virgil Tibbs in the film he spoke with a distinguished accent that sounds almost British. He dressed impeccably. He carried himself with force and dignity and stood up for himself. He was not a black Southerner (though he might have been, since his mother lived in the South). In many ways he portrayed a “safe” African American character for white audiences to admire. Would the film have worked as well, would the protagonist have been as successful in eliciting audience sympathy, if Tibbs had been a black man from Sparta who lacked Poitier’s elegant demeanor and his non-ethnic accent? Of course, the basic premise of the film requires that Tibbs be an outsider, but as a black man so intensively deracinated, Poitier makes it easy for largely white audiences to like him. This is not criticism of Poitier—he was an important transitional actor, a man who paved the way for the participation of African Americans in the film industry, from Denzel Washington to Samuel Jackson to Will Smith to Mos Def.

This is one of the first films in which an African American actor is shown standing up against white characters and surviving—the scene in which Tibbs slaps Endicott is an important moment.

Walk on the Wild Side

Walk on the Wild Side (1962, dir. Edward Dmytryk) is a mannered, dated film about New Orleans in the 1930s. Laurence Harvey plays a young Texas farmer named Dove Linkhorn (the last name bears what must be a deliberate resemblance to “Lincoln”) whose father dies and who sets out on the road to New Orleans, where he means to find his long lost love, Hallie Gerard (Capuchine). On the way, he meets a young, legally under-age woman named Kittie Twist (Jane Fonda). She has run away from an orphanage and is headed towards New Orleans “to have fun.” When she throws herself at Linkhorn, he rebuffs her, and she worms out of him the story of his love for Hallie Gerard. I never regarded Laurence Harvey as much of an actor, and although he isn’t much of one in this film, he at least handless his role well, once you adjust to his effort to speak with what is supposed to be a Texas/Southern accent.

Dove Linkhorn, as we are reminded throughout the film, is an upright lad—morally straight, virtuous, and deeply in love with Hallie. She, it turns out, after an unsuccessful career as an artist in New York, and after waiting for Linkhorn to come find her (he didn’t accompany her to New York because he felt obligated to take care of his sick father on the farm back in Texas), has been lured to a life of high-class prostitution in New Orleans by a woman named Jo, played by Barbara Stanwyck. (Exactly how this happens is never made clear, other than the fact that the only painting Hallie ever sells is one that she sold to Jo). Jo and her henchman keep a house full of attractive young women in what amounts to a state of imprisonment. There is a hint that Jo is attracted sexually to Hallie.

The plot of this film is predictable. A young woman loses her way, falls into prostitution, enjoys the benefits the money and attention can bring, and then is found by the young man she once loved. She resists him, tells him to leave, but ultimately is won over by his moral rectitude and his passion. When she tries to run away with him, Jo’s henchmen viciously beat Dove. Ultimately, in a fight between Dove and one of the henchmen, a gun is fired, and Hallie takes the bullet and dies.

When Dove first arrives in New Orleans, he is befriended by a Hispanic woman named Teresina Vidaverri (Anne Baxter) who runs a gas station and café. Kitty tries to rob her, and when Dove returns the necklace she has stolen, Teresina recognizes that he is a good man and offers him a job until he can get on his feet. She also helps him place an ad in the personals section of the newspaper. Later she professes her love for Dove, but he loves Hallie.

Hallie vacillates too much in this film between self-flagellating and corrupt acceptance of her life in Jo’s house and her love for Dove. She looks constantly miserable and morose when she is not looking corrupted. Oddly, she continues her work as an artist in the same bedroom where, we assume, she sleeps with johns for money.

The film is entirely Hollywood. It’s a Hollywood version of New Orleans. A Hollywood notion of what a prostitute’s life must be like, of what a house of high-class prostitution may be. There are three types of prostitutes in this film—those who are too stupid to know what they are doing, those who are corrupt and enjoy their work, and those who, like Hallie, walk around in a constant state of self-recrimination and guilt over the fallen life they live. The film offers many scenes of the streets in the French Quarter--the standard images every New Orleans film shows. The building in which the prostitutes live, with the central courtyard, resembles the one we see in the film Band of Angels. The music, composed by Elmer Bernstein, is a Hollywood attempt at a New Orleans jazz-type score. Nothing in the film is convincing or realistic. Several songs are featured—we see a band of African American musicians playing, and we hear someone singing, but we never see the actual singer.

Fonda is good in her role. Although she receives equal billing with Capuchine, she in fact has a relatively small part.

This is one of those films that, when it ends, you find yourself asking exactly what the point of it all was.

The Southerner

Jean Renoir’s 1945 The Southerner is the second of his two films about the American South. It has something of the feel of a documentary about it, as it seeks with some deliberation to chronicle the travails of a small farming family somewhere in the South. We first see the family members picking cotton for another farmer, presumably a large landowner. They are working in the fields along with other workers—whites, blacks, Mexicans. It is obviously hot, and one of the family members, Uncle Pete, collapses from exhaustion and soon dies. One point of this opening scene is to show the difficult lives that small farmers lead.

Renoir is not from the American South, so he doesn’t bring any particular Southern ideology to his film, though he may have been aware of issues important to the region. It’s clear he sees meaning and value in what farmers do, in the lives they lead and the values they hold. An underlying argument in the film may be Jefferson’s conviction expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia that “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.” Zachary Scott plays the farmer, Sam Tucker, while Betty Field plays his wife Nona. Scott and Field are so fresh-faced and clean-cut and happy that it’s difficult sometimes to believe that they are leading such hard lives. Yet these very qualities make them likeable and draw us into their lives. They’ve asked for the challenges they face and they do little complaining, even when things seem about as bad as they can get. One could almost say the same of the film itself—it’s clean-cut and fresh-faced—but it’s simple and straightforward as well, and its simplicity should not undermine its message.

One element of this simplicity is the absence of melodrama—with some exceptions. There is little dramatic tension. One scene ends and another begins. In the penultimate episode of the film, a rainstorm strikes and leads to a devastating flood that ruins Sam’s cotton crop and nearly destroys his house. With his friend from town he wades through the flood in search of the milk cow. The camera follows them as they struggle through the rushing water, and as the friend nearly drowns. Sam helps him out of the water. It’s not even fully clear in this scene what is going on, especially after they find the cow. They keep wading and struggling and then they clamber out of the water, soaking wet. The most melodramatic scenes involve moments when a character such as Granny Tucker or Sam Tucker express outrage at the indignities visited upon them—but these are always brief moments.

Before Uncle Pete dies, he murmurs something to Sam about “farm your own land, “and Sam takes this dying message to heart. He makes a deal with the landowner he works for, moves out to an abandoned patch of land, and moves his family into a nearly collapsed ramshackle house. Nearly everything that can go wrong does—the well is bad, a neighbor is unfriendly, the river water is polluted, Tucker’s boy comes down with “spring fever,” the children suffer from a bad diet, Sam and his friend get drunk in town and the friend runs amok after the bartender tries to cheat him, the rains come and ruin the cotton crop, and Sam’s friend almost drowns. This list makes the film seem more melodramatic and cornball than it really is. The Southerner celebrates the pleasures of independence and farming one’s own land, but it also shows the difficulties. The point is to show the importance of what farmers do.

I felt the influence of John Ford in this film, though whether Renoir knew Ford’s early work, such as The Grapes of Wrath or Tobacco Road, I don’t know. Though Renoir doesn’t have the panoramic visual sense of Ford, he does know the value of shots of human individuals set against the landscape as a way of defining what’s important about their lives. Renoir, like Ford, appreciates the value of an array of distinctive characters—the crotchety old grandmother (Beulah Bondi) complains and makes caustic remarks throughout the film. She provides comic relief but is also a source of irritation for Sam and Nona. Sam’s mother, Mama Tucker (Blanche Yurka) and her new husband Harmie (who loves his liquor) also bring humor and color to the film. The scene in which they marry, and the ensuing celebration, suggests the vital heartiness of the farmers and their lives.

An important neighbor is Tim, played by Charles Kemper, a successful farmer embittered by the hard costs he has had to pay for his success (a dead wife and son). He covets the land Sam has come to farm and envies his prospects. He warns Sam of the difficulties he faces but allows him to use water from his well. At the same time, he allows his apparently addled son Finley to run the pigs and cows through the Tucker garden. The ensuing argument ends in a fist-fight that almost leads to gunfire, but when Sam hooks the huge catfish that Tim has been trying to catch all his life, and allows Tim to take credit, they become friends, or at least declare a truce.

The film portrays Sam Tucker’s group as an extended family that assists with, and is supported by, work on the farm. Uncle Pete and Granny Tucker live with the family. Ma Tucker and her new husband are closely associated with it. The portrayal is of farming as an activity that carries on through the generations, and that is a source of family unity and identity. Conversely, one might imagine that the end of farming, the Tucker family’s failure in their efforts to farm their own land, could well mean an end to the family itself.

The film begins and ends with the image of a sporting print of what appears to be a pheasant flushed from hiding by hunters. The print encapsulates the closeness of the farming life to nature, to wildlife, and focuses on the notion of self-sufficiency and sustainability.

Unaware, perhaps, of the specific arguments of Southern agrarianism (something I need to research), Renoir nonetheless reflects those arguments in his film. Although he does to an extent idealize and sentimentalize farming, he also accurately portrays the difficulties and hazards involved. The fact that he titles his film “The Southerner” indicates that he associates Southernness with the agricultural life.

Karate is a Thing of the Spirit, by Harry Crews

Karate is a Thing of the Spirit (1971), by Harry Crews, is not easily described. I can see certain influences in it, especially Nathanael West, maybe Flannery O’Connor. But, fundamentally, it is the sort of novel that only Harry Crews could write. It concerns a young drifter, John Kaimon, who meets a group of radical practitioners of karate on a Florida beach, led by a man known as Belt. None of the karatekas goes by his or her given name. The one female karateka, Gaye Nell, is known only as “the brown belt.” The karatekas devote themselves to karate and to Belt with the zeal of religious fanatics. They consume pills instead of food (some pills are fruit; others are vegetables, and so on). They have given up all material possessions and all aspects of their former lives. John Kaimon joins the group, begins learning karate, and quickly falls into a love affair with Gaye Nell. Early in their relationship she more or less rapes him, though later he returns the gesture. The karate group provides security for various musical events and beauty contests in the area to raise money for a mountaintop karate retreat in Arkansas that Belt wants to build. Gaye Nell takes part in the beauty pageants to raise money. She has won, apparently, 23 competitions.

This is a novel of endless spectacle—the spectacle of the karate practitioners brutalizing one another, and the students they teach, as part of their training, the people on the highway who stop to watch the karate training in the empty hotel swimming pool where the karatekas train, the beauty pageants, the lovemaking of John Kaimon and Gaye Nell, the plane that crashes near the end of the novel.

What are the issues here? Karate in the novel is a way of life by which individuals give up their personal identities to a larger group. They renounce the material world. They devote themselves to a higher calling. Karate is a form of self-discipline. Through it, Gaye Nell represses personal emotional and physical passion. She uses her body to discipline herself and others and to get what she wants, to earn money for the group. Though John Kaimon initially buys into the ethos of the karate group, he never wholly gives up his personal self and interests. He falls in love with Gaye Nell, and ultimately he seeks to restore emotional identity to her through sex. She becomes pregnant by him and wants him to “knock the baby out” of her. John Kaimon visualizes himself as a baby in her womb. He is concerned about saving the baby and wants a life with Gaye Nell. He wants to ensure she doesn’t have an abortion. He needs to restore human identity to her. This is a very vague and uncertain description of what is going on between them in the novel.

The novel includes a number of homosexual characters and seems infused with a deep homophobia. If the karate group is all about self-discipline and abnegation, the gay characters are all about narcissism, self-indulgence, disease. Two of them, masquerading as women in a gay night club, pick John Kaimon up, take him to their dressing room, and rape him. When a group of gay individuals show up at the karate swimming pool and ask to be instructed by John Kaimon, he beats them brutally. Six of them return for an additional lesson. Whatever problem John Kaimon has with his own identity, the gay characters, as the novel portrays them, have assumed identities that reflect the material corruption and narcissism of their world. They also reflect the crisis of gender identity that Kaimon to an extent faces.

In one way or the other, all the members of the karate group come to karate in order to compensate for flaws in their own lives and identities. Belt, we learn, was tried for cowardice during the Korean War. He believes he should have been dishonorably discharged. He pays a company that specializes in printing fake newspaper headlines and certificates to produce for him a certificate that attests to his dishonorable discharge.

Kaimon wears a t-shirt adorned with the image of William Faulkner when he first appears in the novel. He frequently thinks about Faulkner. Although he has never read any of Faulkner’s fiction, he seems to think of the writer as a standard of moral force and concrete identity. He’s always thinking of how Faulkner is watching him, always wondering what Faulkner would have said or thought about one situation or another. Faulkner is the judgmental ancestor who gazes reprehensibly down on the contemporary Southern landscape of the novel. Clearly Crews felt his presence in his writing of the novel and is on the one hand paying homage to him and on the other questioning his relevance.

A climactic episode in the novel involves a July 4^th beauty pageant, and Crews emphasizes the unruly, uncontrollable nature of the crowds (shouting out “Meat! Meat!” as they wait for the pageant contestants to appear. In the parking lot, cars are crashing into one another. The crowds mill and teem. Over the top fireworks displays, one of them a huge image of the American flag in the sky, are prominent motifs. The scene reminded me in a way of the riots towards the end of Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust. This seems to be Crews judgment of popular American culture: unruly mobs, mindless demonstrations of patriotism, lust, drunkenness, anarchy. The beauty contest (which everyone agrees Gaye Nell will win) is interrupted by a crashing plane and the ensuing tumult as spectators wade into the ocean to rescue the pilot (shades of Faulkner’s Pylon here).

Following this spectacle, John Kaimon and Gaye Nell retreat into a trailer house and have sex (it’s not exactly accurate to call their sexual encounters lovemaking). The trailer is dismantled and hauled down the highway while they continue to have sex. Gaye Nell hopes prolonged and perhaps violent sex will lead to her loss of the baby. Later, she and Kaimon return to the abandoned hotel for another sex session, and in this one he seeks to secure emotional reactions from Gaye Nell—he wants her to lose her self-discipline, to be lost in the passion of the moment. He succeeds, and as the novel ends (somewhat abruptly and without much warning) they are leaving the abandoned hotel together. For me, the changes or transformations that occur during these trysts are not especially clear—Crews does not explain the transformational dynamics of sex between Kaimon and Gaye Nell—but clearly the end result seems to be Gaye Nell’s domestication and John Kaimon’s rehabilitation of his male identity.

Many aspects of this novel are problematic—its politics, its homophobia, its ending. Yet it is powerful and disturbing. The opening scene in particular, where Gaye Nell walks forcefully through the Florida landscape in her bikini, heading towards the karate group practicing on the beach, is powerful and in many respects unequalled in contemporary literature. This isn’t an easily categorized book. Crews doesn’t write like a graduate of a creative writing program (even though he taught in one for years). His writing is unruly and brutal and spare and direct.

Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Michael Ruppersburg, and Me

When my children were young, I told them a lot of stories. Some were about things that had happened to me. Others I just made up. My oldest son Michael developed a propensity for yarn-spinning at an early age. I would tell him stories late at night, getting him ready for sleep, and then he’d tell his own tales.

When Michael was four and five, he went to pre-school at Athens Montessori School. Michael Jackson in those years was at the height of his popularity. His album Thriller was selling millions. His music videos, which were truly innovative, and which brought to the music video format the imagination and energy of the best Hollywood musicals, were making a terrific impact. I remember watching Michael and his friends trying to do the moonwalk, the dance step that Jackson popularized. I tried it myself, with no success. Michael and his cousin Bill would sing the lyrics to “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” over and over. They had no idea what the words meant. They just liked the way they sounded.

Every afternoon I’d drive to Montessori to pick Michael up. One afternoon I drove over and got out of my car and headed for the building where I knew Michael would be. I soon found myself surrounded by a group of perplexed little children, starring up at me with looks that combined idolatry, disbelief, and confusion. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I saw those children every day, and they knew me. What was up? Finally one little boy walked up to me and asked, “Are you really Michael Jackson?” No, I assured him, I was not. Michael came around the corner. The boy turned to him, protesting, “But you said your dad was Michael Jackson . . . “

I liked to kid my children. When Michael was barely a year old, I trained him to respond to my question “Where’s Elvis?” by craning his head upwards and pointing to the sky. This was a parlor trick. I regretted doing this to Michael in later years, just as I regretted telling him one day when he had misbehaved about Hell (in which I don’t believe) and about how the sun would eventually burn out. Five year olds don’t need such knowledge. This is the kind of information that terrorized me as a little boy. I’d lie awake at night for hours worrying about tornadoes, earthquakes, meteors.

I used to tell my sons a lot of stories and jokes about Elvis in those years. He had been dead only a few years, and he was still prominent in the popular imagination. Everyone talked about Elvis as the King of Rock and Roll. “Elvis the King” was a phrase heard often in my house, and Michael knew it as well as I did.

When he turned six, it was time for Michael to enroll in first grade. We enrolled him at St. Joseph’s School near downtown Athens, conveniently located close by to where my wife and I work. Michael had a problematic relationship with the head nun at St. Joe’s, a forbidding woman named Sister Ignatia. She was a stern and unforgiving nun of the old school. She didn’t tolerate nonsense. Michael, like many of the children at St. Joe’s, had some run-ins with her, and had some stories to tell. One afternoon I went to pick him up. He climbed in the car and sat down in the seat next to me and sat there, silent, as we headed home. He seemed a little quieter and more thoughtful than usual. Finally he turned to me and said, “Dad, Sister Ignatia says Elvis is not the King. He is an earthly entertainer. She says Jesus is the King.”

In my imagination, I pieced together the encounter between Michael and Sister Ignatia concerning Elvis the King. She would know well enough where Michael got his information. I decided to avoid Sister Ignatia and the judgment she might render on me at all costs.

The Reivers

The Reivers (1969, dir. Mark Rydell) was filmed while the Civil Rights movement was still making inroads in American culture. Although important civil rights legislation had been passed, although barriers were coming down and people’s attitudes were beginning, slowly, to change, the notion of racial equality with all its implications was still fresh and even controversial in the viewing public’s mind. Yet in 1969 the strictures of political correctness had not yet taken hold, and in some ways it was easier to have open discussions about race and ethnicity than it is today. The use of the “N” word in The Reivers is an example. Some characters in the film (for example, Sheriff Butch Lovemaiden) use the term as a racist and hateful expression. Others simply use it as a common term that refers to a black person. Undoubtedly the term carried negative connotations. Although its use did not necessarily connote deliberate racism, when a white man used the word to address or refer to a black man, it clearly carried negative meanings. But it could also be used simply as a vernacular way of naming what a black man was. The use of this word today is far more sensitive and charged than it was when this film was made. To give a historically accurate depiction of life in the South in the early 1900s—a time when the “N” word was in common use, and when not every person using it was a villain deserving of castigation—is a more difficult and risky undertaking today than it would have been in 1969. At the same time, we have a more informed perspective about race and racism today, perhaps, than we had forty years ago. The Reivers as a film tends to camouflage or underemphasize issues of race in order to focus on other aspects of the story it tells, and in order to avoid the controversy that accompanies the issue.

When some characters in The Reivers use the “N” word, the film is accurately reflecting how people in Mississippi and Tennessee of 1905 might have talked. But the film is not an accurate depiction (as best I can tell) of how the white and black races in the American South of that time interacted. The Reivers makes clear that the South is a place of racism where there are clearly demarcated boundaries between black and white people. Typically in the film, blacks are shown working as servants or at menial labor or in the fields. In rare moments, white characters such as Sheriff Lovemaiden threaten black characters—as when he suggests that he if townspeople hear that Uncle Possum is alone with a white woman on his farm, there will be trouble. The character Ned McCaslin is not allowed to accompany Lucius and Boon into the white whorehouse, and he always sleeps separately from the white characters (although Uncle Possum shares a bed with Lucius when the latter spends the night at his house).

The film implies two different kinds of white Southerners. “The Bad Whites” are racist in behavior and attitude—Lovemaiden is an example. The “Good Whites” may do little to change the racial separatism of the times, but they treat black Southerners in a kind and respectful way. What’s more, the film often shows blacks and whites interacting on a more or less equal level when, for example, the train arrives in town carrying Boss McCaslin’s car—everyone rushes to the train station and exhibits a common enthusiasm for the newfangled contraption. (The absolute absence of any consciousness of race in some of these scenes is suspicious and unrealistic). Blacks do tend to group together. Ned McCaslin, who is apparently known for his outspoken and aggressive ways (though he always seems to know when to back off) speaks to Lucius and Boon on an equal basis. The film portrays Ned as a character who keeps his own counsel, who knows when to speak and to remain silent. That is, he is shown as an intelligent black man who for his own well being stays in his place, though he does push the boundaries. Part of his assertiveness, as he takes pain on two occasions to explain, is that he is descended from Lucius Carothers McCaslin, the patriarch of the white McCaslin clan, who had a child by Ned’s great grandmother.

In reality, in 1905, there would have been considerably less interaction between whites and blacks than The Reivers portrays, than even Faulkner’s 1962 novel The Reivers, portrays. In that novel, and in reality, the division in racial attitudes between “good” and “bad” Southerners was considerably less clear than the film would have it. The film wants to ensure comfort in its audience by portraying a society in which racism is not as pervasive and obvious as it in fact was. In doing so, it allows focus on the main story, that of Boon and Lucius and their illicit trip to Memphis, and of Lucius’ initiation into the complex ambiguities of adult manhood. But in doing so it also gives a historically inaccurate view of life in the South in the early 1900s—Faulkner’s novel gives a more accurate view.

When I studied Faulkner in graduate school and in later years, almost everyone dismissed The Reivers as a film. It was generally regarded as having smoothed over and simplified the nuances of Faulkner’s final novel. Undoubtedly, the film does that. It also gives Hollywood treatment to Faulkner’s characters, who are not as glamorous or as easy to pigeonhole in the novel as they are in the film. Ned McCaslin is more of a clown in the novel, while the film portrays him as a more assertive and substantial person. The film also ignores the history of Boon Hogganbeck, his mixed race ancestry and his occasional wild recklessness (the film shows us that Boon is a bad shot—an important aspect of his character in The Reivers and Go Down, Moses—but it does not dwell on the fact. In fact, Boon’s mixed ancestry helps explain his relationship with Ned). The film gives us a considerably sanitized Boon, played in uproarious mode by Steve McQueen.

The film preserves the basic outlines of the novel’s plot and the essence of its themes. Narrated by Burgess Meredith, an elderly Lucius McCaslin who tells the story of his boyhood escapade with Boon, it focuses on the grandfather, Boss McCaslin (wonderfully played by Will Geer) as a source of probity and moral rectitude. While the world portrayed in the film is more like the world of a Disney film than of a Faulkner novel, while the tone of the film is substantially different from that of the novel, the theme of a young man’s education in what it means to be a gentleman, in the ambiguity of truth and virtue, is retained.

See Jonathan Yardley’s column on Faulkner’s novel The Reivers

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008, dir. Bharat Nalluri) feels like a throwaway stage play adapted without much change for the screen. In fact, it’s based on a novel, not a play, but it feels like a play. It’s about a governess, Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand), who has had a long series of unsuccessful appointments and secretary or head housekeeper. She is apparently rigid, stubborn, and puritanical enough that employer after employer finds her unacceptable. After her most recent employer throws her out, her employment agency decides to have nothing more to do with her and tells her to go away. She overhears a conversation about an available position and surreptitiously picks up the address card and goes to the address. There she meets a young woman, Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams) living the high life, sleeping with three different men, casting about for her best option in life. She is a nightclub owner’s mistress, she is sleeping with a young producer in hopes that she will get a part in his play, and she sings with a pianist who loves her and has proposed. This is exactly the kind of woman Miss Pettigrew is most unsuited to work for, but she is desperate. She somehow finds herself working for the woman as a personal secretary. She comes to like her. The film follows the developing situation. Miss Pettigrew gradually relaxes and lightens up. She buys new clothes and suddenly looks attractive. She meets a man, a fashion designer, her own age, and he’s interested in her. She helps Delysia make some important decisions.

The whole situation is improbable. In one day Miss Pettigrew goes from being a homeless person sleeping on the bench in the train station to living the high life and accepting a marriage proposal. Her change in character is the most unlikely aspect of the film for me. I do not doubt that a person can change attitudes, personality, lifestyle, but such transformations usually take place within a longer span of time than 24 hours.

Amy Adams is an attractive, vivacious actress whose fresh appearance and ebullient personality have made her a rising star. In such films as Junebug (2005), Doubt (2008), and Enchanted (2007) she has proven the depth and range of her talents. In this film she is playing a kind of cartoon stick figure, a flighty, disorganized, wholly amoral flapper (though the film is set in the Depression, right before World War II begins) who feels no compunction about using sex to get what she wants. But her mission is survival—she has no wealth of her own, and without the men she relies on and tries to exploit (and who exploit her), she would be out on the streets with people like Miss Pettigrew. Adams is as good in the role as it allows her to be, which means that she mainly has to simper and flirt and cavort and look confused. This is not one of her better roles.

Frances McDormand is a wonderful actress. This is an odd role for her, but she plays it well enough. She knows woebegone.

This film is entertaining, but you know from the start how it all will go. I didn’t like the film. It seemed half-hearted, from the obvious use of sets to the shallow characterizations to the trite and hackneyed script. Most of all it seemed pointless and insulting. Why sympathize with insipid souls like Delysia Lafosse or the three men who pursue her? The problems of these people seem wholly at odds with the environment of depression and war that looms menacingly in the background of the film. There are numerous mindless, empty, vacuous films coming out every month. Why do they get made? Who bothers to watch them? Who cares about or remembers them?

Song of the South

It is never quite clear whether Song of the South (1945, dir. Harve Foster, Wilfred Jackson) takes place before or after the Civil War. We can guess that it occurs after the war, since the young boy’s father is a newspaper writer in Atlanta whose editorials are not popular among many readers. This may have something to do with why the boy and his mother go to live with the grandmother—to escape the unpleasantness of their lives in Atlanta. (It may also have to do with the fact that Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus tales, was a post-Civil War Atlanta newspaper writer). Walt Disney himself claimed the film was about the time following the Civil War. However, if we base the time of the film on the behavior of the African American characters, who work in the fields and at menial jobs and who show fawning respect and deference to the white characters, and who sing contentedly on their way to and from work in the fields, the time could just as well be before the Civil War. Oddly, the film never mentions the Civil War. It might well have never occurred. The film occurs in a sort of alternative universe. This ambiguity about when it is actually set, the absence of references to important events in the outside world, suggests that the makers of Song of the South were uncomfortable with their subject.

Song of the South mentions the city of Atlanta a few times—it is where the father works, where he is going after leaving his unhappy wife and son on the plantation, where Uncle Remus plans to go after being ordered not to have anything to do with the boy. That is, Atlanta is the modern world, the place of controversy, discontentment, dispossession, broken homes, endangered marriages, unhappy families. When the father comes back to the plantation at the end of the field and announces that he plans to stay, the family is reunited and we know where the film’s heart lies—on the plantation, where the darkies sing and Uncle Remus tells his stories, the opposite of everything that big cities represent.

Because it was last available for sale in the 1980s, and last shown on television in the early 1970s, many people have never seen Song of the South and know about it only by reputation, by what others report about it. The film’s reputation as a racist encomium to the Old South has prevented its release in DVD. It is an important document in the response of American films to history, slavery, and to race relations in the 20^th century. Unlike Birth of a Nation, which is an impressive film, and a racist one, Song of the South is not especially distinguished, but it deserves to be seen so that viewers can judge for themselves the film’s reputation and can appreciate how far American race relations and the filmmaking industry have come in the last 60 or more years.

If this film were more tightly focused on the friendship of the boy and Uncle Remus, if the timing of events in the film were clearer, it might be more difficult (though not impossible) to accuse it of racism and racial stereotyping. Remus and the boy are individuals. Individuals have specific and distinctive personalities. Individual relationships can occur in any form and fashion. There is no reason why an elderly black man and a young white boy should not strike up a friendship, especially when the black man is naturally inclined to like children, and when the young boy needs a father figure. If the film does occur shortly after the Civil War, during Reconstruction (of which the film gives barely a hint), and since it is set in the rural South, then certain elements of Remus’ dress, speech, behavior, and living habits make more sense—they reflect the particularities of place and time and economic status. From this point of view, Remus and the boy stand only for themselves, not for anything larger.

It is the larger context of this film that makes it what it is: an apology for racial paternalism and the Old South. In the larger context, Remus is the focus of a film that argues for the good old simplicity of slavery times. Song of the South in this regard is a latter-day version of the 19^th-century apologist stories of Thomas Nelson Page (“Marse Chan”) and others. It invokes all the sacred icons of the venerated Old South, the white columned plantation house foremost among them. The white inhabitants of the house dress in elegance, have swank parties, live a life of leisure. The black servants (or slaves, depending on when the film takes place) love their white masters, regard themselves as members of the family (though they understand the limits of their membership). Uncle Remus himself gives advice to his mistress but knows when to back off. She understands the wisdom of his words but at the same time calls him “an old rascal.” As if to make clear its position, the film trots out Hattie McDaniel, the actress who portrayed Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1938). She plays almost exactly the same character.

Many plantation films focus visually on the plantation house. In this one the columned front of the house is frequently shown, but it is often seen from the perspective of the slave quarters nearby. Thus we see the house not only up close but also in the distance with the slave cabins on the left and the fields of the farm on the right. This is an unusual perspective, one that emphasizes the size of the farm and that perhaps is meant to reflect the importance of the African Americans in the film. When Uncle Remus addresses the boy’s mother or grandmother in front of the house, he always stands at the bottom of the steps, she on the upper steps, looking down at him. He enters the house only when invited to enter.

An underlying premise of the film is that modern times bring family discord and disunity. In the opening scene, when we first see the boy and his parents, as they are headed towards the plantation where the boy and his mother are to stay while the father returns to the city, we can see something is wrong between the father and mother. The nature of their problem is not clear. Although they embrace with passion as the father is about to leave, there is coldness and tension between them. This is about as clear as a children’s film made in 1945 could ever be about the marital problems of parents. The boy isn’t old enough to understand what is wrong, but he senses the discord and is heartbroken when his father leaves. Later that night he tries to run away, intent on going back to Atlanta to be with his father. This is when he happens on Uncle Remus, telling Brer Rabbit stories to a group of black children. The boy has heard about Uncle Remus and has looked forward to meeting him. Remus becomes the boy’s substitute father. Remus is portrayed as a compassionate old man who understands the boy’s unhappiness and is pleased enough to spend time with him.

Song of the South is another film in which an insightful black character helps the hapless white folks solve their problems (a standard stereotype of race relations in film and literature—we see it even in the recent films Black Snake Moan—2006--and in The Secret Life of Bees--2008). The only insight the film offers into Remus’ own personal situation, his possible loneliness and suffering, comes in a few thrown-away comments he makes as he is getting ready to go away to Atlanta.

Uncle Remus as a character symbolizes all the purported virtues of the mythical Old South, especially as compared to the problems and coldness of the modern world. The film clearly endorses the virtues of elegance and entitlement, rigid social and racial hierarchy, white racism, and so on associated with the Old South. It may use the Old South as a vehicle for expressing more general discontent and unhappiness with the state of things in the modern world, it may not even be that interested in the Old South as a real time and place, but even so what it yearns for nostalgically is a past of racist agrarian pastoralism.

In line with the portrayal of older women in such Disney films as Snow White, 101 Dalmatians, Sleeping Beauty, The Littlest Mermaid, and others, Song of the South offers in the boy’s mother (played by Ruth Warrick) one of the coldest characters imaginable. She believes Uncle Remus has a bad influence on her son and ultimately forbids him from seeing the boy. She makes her son dress in Little Lord Fauntleroy-type clothing that embarrasses him, and in general doesn’t seem to recognize his needs as a young child who misses his father. The film implies that she is uncomfortable with the controversy caused by her husband’s unpopular newspaper articles, and that her unhappiness is part of the reason for their separation. She seems more interested in maintaining social status and propriety than in the problems of her son and duties of her husband. Of course, Uncle Remus helps her see things in a proper light.

See my entry on this film in the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

Bubba Ho-tep

The term Southern Gothic vaguely refers to the supposed prominence of violence, the grotesque, and (sometimes) the supernatural in Southern culture. We find early elements of the Southern Gothic in Edgar Allan Poe and in the Southern humorists. The proximity of the frontier in the Deep South for a much longer time than in the northeastern part of the nation may account for these elements, along with the South’s loss of the Civil War, and external perceptions about its languishing condition for nearly a century, with family fortunes lost, family lines burned out, depressed economic conditions, inbreeding, and so on. The decaying ancestral and columned family mansion as a symbol and relic of the dead family fortune and the South’s loss in the Civil War neatly serves the Gothic formula; consider the houses in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! In Bubba Ho-tep (2002, dir. Don Coscarelli) that mansion becomes an old folks home. The creeping Gothic horror is the ancient Egyptian mummy. In the traditional Gothic the creeping horror is often a reflection of family sin and decay. The old folks’ home enshrines the mythology of American cultural icons, especially those connected with the American South.

Bubba Ho-Tep is about an old folks home whose inhabitants include a man who believes he is Elvis Presley and another man who believes he is John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The film allows that these men may be deluded, but it also allows, and depends on, the assumption that they may well be who they think they are—Elvis himself (Bruce Campbell) narrates the film. With J. F. K. (Ossie Davis) he mounts an attack on the ancient Egyptian mummy that is attacking residents of the home and sucking out their souls.

The old folks’ home as a setting symbolizes the distant and irrelevant presence of the mythic Southern past and comments on the more immediate relevance and irrelevance of the myths and symbols that Elvis Presley and J. F. K. signify.

The film builds on the mythology of Presley and of J. F. K. Presley is the modern American hero, idolized and misunderstood, mythologized and ridiculed. His is a Southern Horatio Alger story on the one hand, a Southern Gatsby on the other, destroyed by his own excess and greed and by the greed of others, specifically Colonel Tom Parker, whom Elvis mentions disdainfully in the film. Bubba Ho-Tep exploits our knowledge of Elvis, depends on our familiarity with his life and career, enforces the idea that he was exploited by Colonel Tom Parker and others, that he threw his talent and success away. Elvis in the film clearly believes so. He often mentions with regret his former wife and his daughter. The film depends on our sympathy, and on the idea that we might desire an alternative life for Elvis where things would have gone better. In the decade following Presley’s death, rumors, stories, and folk legends about his survival—in disguise, with another name, in another country—were widely current in American popular culture. (In the film, Elvis tells us that he traded places with the best of the Elvis imitators, Sebastian Haff, who subsequently died of heart disease and drug abuse, while the contract that he and Elvis signed to cement the exchange was destroyed in a trailer fire, so that the real Elvis has no way of proving who he is). The Elvis of the film is the mythologized Elvis—we never go beyond that popular iconic image--what the narration tells us is what we wanted to believe to begin with.

We have another kind of myth-making with J. F. K. We might think of his assassination in a Southern city, Dallas, Texas, as the family sin at the center of the plot, but the film doesn’t go in that direction. Rather through J. F. K. it invokes the conspiracy theories and general paranoia surrounding his assassination and its aftermath. In the film J. F. K. is convinced he was the victim of a vast government conspiracy involving every conceivable person imaginable (including, perhaps, Elvis himself), and that the conspirators are still out to get him. He believes his skin was dyed to make him an African American to hide his true identity. To an extent we might see in Ossie Davis, himself a kind of Southern icon, a commentary on J. F. K. and race. Of all the white people a black man might want to identify with, J. F. K. is a logical choice because of his advocacy of the civil rights bill, not to mention that he is also a symbol of prestige, nobility, popularity, and power, all that we might imagine the character Ossie Davis plays in the film did not have. Davis’ character fantasizes himself into this role--that is, if indeed he is not the actual J. F. K. (Novels by Don DeLillo and Norman Mailer dealt with the mythologizing aspects of the assassination, as does the Oliver Stone film J. F. K. Consider as well the rumors that abounded in the 1960s and 1970s about J. F. K.’s survival of the assassination, his comatose body maintained on the fifth floor of a hospital somewhere near Washington, D. C. A story in a popular scandal magazine described how, after the comatose J. F. K. died, his widow Jackie buried his body in the Aegean Sea during her marriage to Aristotle Onassis.)

The film is infused with major intertextual references to American culture and popular iconography. It especially makes reference to other films: to Ben Hur (in the opening title sequence), Barton Fink (the bug on the wall), The Shining (the hallway scenes), spaghetti westerns, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood.

What is significant, literally and symbolically, about mummies that waken from the dead and that must destroy the living to survive? This is certainly the underlying logic of Bubba Ho-tep. Some reviewer I read suggested that in battling the mummy, Elvis is battling himself, and there is sense in that notion—resisting the mummy that would suck out his soul and reduce him to nothingness (a person whose soul has been sucked away by the mummy, the film tells us, has no prospect of a life after death—the soul simply ceases to exist). Elvis and J. F. K. are battling their aged, infirm physical selves. They are resisting mortality. Elvis is also resisting the caricatured image of himself that he left behind—he’s proving that he is, in the end, a person who can “take care of business.” When, after he sets the mummy afire and pushes its burning carcass into the river, he himself lies on the bank of the river, gasping his last breaths. A message appears in the sky: “All is well.”

In Bubba Ho-Tep the mummy is a caricature of an old West gunslinger, a gambling sharpie, and a geek. The feather in his hat perhaps suggests a Native American connection. But the assemblage of cultural references that he incorporates makes him all the more macabre as well as ridiculous.

A Quantum of Solace

The most substantial element in this 2008 film is the title, taken from an otherwise unrelated Ian Fleming short story. The plot here is one of revenge—James Bond’s quest for vengeance against the individual responsible for the death of his lover Vesper in the predecessor to this film, Casino Royale (2006). To say that this film lacks substance is not a complaint. This is an action film centered on exotic European and South American locales, constant travel and action and suspense, and the acting of Daniel Craig.

Let’s be clear: never has there been in the long series of films based on the Fleming novels a James Bond as persuasive, well-rounded, and enigmatic as Daniel Craig. He is the definitive James Bond. In Casino Royale he reinvented and resurrected the failing series. In A Quantum of Solace he carries it forward. Craig is an excellent actor, and the two scripts for him thus far have been effective vehicles for his talents. No predecessor—most decidedly including Sean Connery—is his equal. A Quantum of Solace is well made, beautifully photographed, tightly edited, aptly paced. If there is a weakness, it is the script, which is not as carefully or deeply developed as it was for Casino Royale, which was about the first assignment in the young James Bond’s career. But those weaknesses are lost in the energy and furor of the action.

Fleming’s Bond novels were premised on the intrigue of cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the absence of that tension, the new Bond films focus on international crime syndicates, eco-terrorists, global criminals. In this film, the bad guy is stealing water and hording it in caverns beneath the Bolivian desert. He plans to sell it back to the Bolivian government at a high price. Various shots of suffering and thirsty Bolivian Indians make clear the damage he is doing. We know that he is evil, not only because of the sneer on his craven, rat-like face, not only because he helps overthrow governments hostile to his interests, but because he killed Bond’s woman.

If production values this high can be sustained, and if Daniel Craig remains interested, all the James Bond novels should be re-filmed.

The Band’s Visit

The Band’s Visit (2007, dir. Eran Kolirin) is a small, modest film that gradually and unexpectedly flowers as you view it. With subtitles in both Hebrew and Arabic, it records the visit of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra to a small Israeli settlement. When one of the band members attempts to get directions to the settlement at an Israeli airport, a difficulty in pronouncing the town’s name results in his receiving directions to a different town, an isolated settlement in the middle of the desert, a place clearly not expecting or prepared for a visit from an Egyptian police band.

Every character in this film is an individual, from the sober, tired looking bandleader Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabi) to a young recruit, Haled (Saleh Bakri), who clearly irritates the bandleader at every turn, to the attractive and hungry-for-male-companionship proprietress of the restaurant, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), whom the band members ask for assistance, to the young Israeli man stuck in an unhappy marriage. The film spends more time with some of these characters than with others. It is quiet and respectful of these individuals—it stands back, in effect, and allows their gestures, their facial expressions, their at first uncomfortable interactions to tell the tale.

At heart, The Band’s Visit is a gentle, compassionate comedy. It shows us how cultural differences and wariness break down as human individuals recognize what they hold in common. The most interesting character of all is the band leader Tawfiq. His wife is dead, we learn, as the result of heartbreak over their son’s suicide, for which he feels responsible. Tawfiq also feels responsible for the fate of the band, whose value has apparently been called into question. Gabi portrays Tawfiq in a wholly understated way. At first we see him as prim and Muslim proper, unwilling to interact on any but the most formal and reserved levels with the Israeli characters to whom he turns for assistance. Gradually we see him relax and emerge, tentatively, from his shell, and then we see him retreat back into it again.

One would expect, in this film about an orchestra (which is really only a small ensemble, a band of eight members), that we would hear the group play. Finally, ultimately, almost as a kind of afterthought, they do play, in a revelatory scene that resonates deeply.

Angels and Demons

Angels and Demons (2009, dir. Ron Howard) is based on the 2000 novel of the same title by Dan Brown, who knows just enough about art history, the city of Rome, and the hierarchy and rituals of the Catholic Church to write an entertaining suspense story about someone who is murdering cardinals, all of whom are candidates to become the next Pope. This novel preceded The Da Vinci Code by three years and features the same protagonist, Robert Langdon (played again by Tom Hanks), an expert on ancient codes and the like. The film follows the novel closely, with the one significant difference that the events in the film Angels and Demons follow, rather than precede, the events in The Da Vinci Code. As in the novel, Langdon is summoned to help find the murder of the cardinals. One clue leads to another. Mostly the clues have to do with ancient paintings and sculptures, many of which involve statues or figures who seem to be pointing conveniently in the direction of the next clue. Langdon has little difficulty deciphering the clues, but he and the crack Vatican security agents tend to arrive just a moment or two after the most recent murder has occurred.

Like the novel, the film highlights the intricate rituals of the Vatican and the Catholic Church, especially concerning the selection of a new pope. The film would have us know that these rituals are obscure and arcane and replete with pointless elements that no one understands but that everyone feels obliged to follow carefully. Like the novel, the film attempts to highlight a struggle between science and faith, with Langdon representing science and the Church representing faith. Like the novel, and like The Da Vinci Code, the film focuses on a secret group that has existed for centuries. In Angels and Demons, this group is the Illuminati, a cabal of scientists who have banded together to resist the efforts of the Church to suppress learning and reason. The film and book make these matters out to be far more straightforward and simplistic and mysterious than they are (if they are at all) in reality. One could imagine an intelligent and interesting film that seriously considers the faith vs. science controversy. This film gives serious lip service to the issue, but little of substance.

The Da Vinci Code featured Audrey Tatou, portraying the beautiful descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdelene. Angels and Demons features Ayelet Zurer, playing a beautiful particle physicist involved in the efforts of the CERN laboratory in Switzerland to study antimatter and to identify the Higgs Boson, the so-called “God Particle.” She is brilliant and somehow becomes Langdon’s sidekick, which means mainly that she uses her intellect to follow him around in high heels—she doesn’t have much to do.

And, oh, yes, someone has stolen antimatter from the CERN laboratory and is threatening to use it to blow up the Vatican.

Most of all, and again like the novel, Angels and Demons is entertaining and unimaginative.

Up

Although Up (2009) is not the best film of the year, as some have suggested, it is well made and entertaining. The film begins with a maudlin review of the main character Carl’s life—his yen for adventure, his meeting as a young boy the girl who would become his wife (she too loves adventure and idolizes the same explorer he does). They marry and discover they cannot have children. As solace they plan to travel, to live that adventurous life they had imagined as children, but one thing happens and then another and their plans never get off the ground. They grow old, she sickens and dies, and he is left alone in the house they shared for all their lives. Once in the country, now it is surrounded by skyscrapers. A soulless developer (he looks almost like an alien) wants to take it over and raze it for another skyscraper. Carl has a run in with construction workers, and a judge orders him to move to a retirement home, where he can be looked after.

This is heavy stuff for a film aimed (at least in part) at children. It made me long for a cup of the old hemlock. People near me were weeping by the time we reached the death of Carl’s wife.

But the tone quickly and abruptly changes. Carl has rigged his house with thousands of helium balloons. He inflates them, the house breaks free, and he is off on a quest to find Paradise Falls, the remote South American location that he and his wife had dreamed of visiting. Along the way we encounter a rotund and irritating cub scout, a talking dog (a pack of talking dogs, in fact), a zeppelin, a famous lost explorer, a thunderstorm, a fabled bird the size of a giant ostrich, and so on. The remainder of the film is replete with the action and dangerous moments and hairbreadth escapes you would escape from this kind of entertainment. The old man bonds with the Cub Scout (abandoned by his parents) and with the talking dog and with the giant colorful bird. Despite old age and infirmity, Carl becomes remarkably energetic and agile, running and jumping, and in general acting half his age. He has his great adventure. He learns that his life isn’t over yet, and he finds reason to go on.

The trouble with this film is, of course, that things are not so simple. Old people left alone by death and poverty and time’s passage and infirmity can’t easily find escape through fantasies and floating houses and adventure. Most of them remain alone. Most abandoned or ignored children don’t find elderly substitutes.

With its sudden and dramatic change in tone, with its shallow solution to the problems of the old, Up is a bit dishonest. At the same time, the animation is stunning (in the conventional fashion of Disney/Pixar), and the film is a pleasure to watch. I saw it in 3-D—the effects were impressive for the first five minutes, after which I didn’t notice them.

Forrest Gump

Late in this 1994 film Forrest Gump speaks to the grave of his dead friend Jenny and tells her that he has always wondered whether we just drift accidentally through life or whether we have a destiny. He says that he has decided that maybe the answer is both. The wafting feather that floats down and alights on Forrest’s shoe at the start of the film, and that wafts away in the final scene, embodies this question. Does it float by accident, or is there a purpose, an intent, to where it lands?

Forrest’s life is a series of fortuitous, accidental coincidences that taken altogether would seem incredible were this film not so obviously the fable that it is. He is at the right place and the right time repeatedly in his life, from teaching Elvis how to swivel his hips to playing football for Bear Bryant to winning the Medal of Honor for valor in Vietnam to playing ping-pong with the Chinese. The film is a summary of events in American history from the 1950s through the 80s, a survey of the Civil Rights era, Viet Nam, the tumultuous 60s, and the AIDs epidemic.

What ties the film together is the character of Forrest himself and his love for Jenny. Forrest is slightly below average in intelligence, and his flat, inexpressive reaction to almost everything is his characteristic demeanor throughout the film. He acts on command. When Jenny tells him to “run” to escape from boys who are throwing rocks at him, he does so, and he remembers that command throughout his life. He fits so well into the military because he can follow commands easily and effectively. He takes events one at a time, without fear or prejudice or concern for his own well being. His mother (Sally Fields) tells him he can do anything he wants, and he pretty much proves the truth of her statement throughout the film.

The optimism of Forrest’s mother, her certainty in the promise of her son, belies a selfless ruthlessness. She will do anything it takes to help him, even if this means sleeping with the superintendent of education to ensure that Forrest can attend a regular school.

The poignancy of the film resides in Forrest’s innate goodness, his innocence, and his love for Jenny. These carry him through all the events he experiences. Some might regard him as a kind of saint. He clearly possesses a strong sense of right, of morality and virtue. But to what extent does he choose to be good and virtuous? To what extent is he simply obeying an injunctive command: run?

Why is the film set in the South, specifically in Alabama? Once again, the South offers a natural, bucolic setting for a set of sometimes eccentric characters—although the main such figure is Forrest himself. The setting contributes to the fabulist nature of the story, a story that seems to take place in our own time but that in some other sense seems to be another place and time. The old plantation house in which Forrest lives with his mother and later with Jenny and their son contributes to this atmosphere. Much of the narrative moves from one episode to another of American history, especially the civil rights movement, and the South is the natural setting for those events.

It is odd that although the film makes note of the deaths of the two Kennedy’s and of John Lennon, it does not mention the death of Martin Luther King. The film does not foreground issues of race, but they are present. At the start of the film Forrest is sitting on a bench in Savannah, and a young black woman sits on the other end of the bench, waiting for a bus. He begins to talk to her, and it is clear that she isn’t initially interested—the image of Forrest on one end of the bench and the young woman on the other end, her clear attempts not to be engaged in conversation, is an image of racial division. The film makes a point of showing how Bubba Gump’s mother and her ancestors have served shrimp to generations of white men—when Forrest makes money out of his investments in the stock market, he gives a share of the money to Bubba’s mother, and the film makes a point of showing her seated at a table, being served shrimp by a white woman. Black Panthers whom Forrest meets at a demonstration in Washington, DC, reflect the racial turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s—the film is neither sympathetic to nor critical of the strident statements their leader makes—Forrest is wholly unresponsive. So we know in the film that racial issues and turmoil are going on around Forrest even if he is largely unaware of them. Forrest himself seems to be wholly color blind.

In a sense, the South in Forrest Gump is an enclave away from the real world. It’s a place of isolation, a backwater, and so Forrest’s rise to prominence is all the more remarkable.

Forrest Gump is a fable of late 20^th-century American life. Forrest is an American Everyman, prominently present in a series of significant and major events—always present to observe, sometimes present as a catalyst. He’s like all us who lived through that era. It happened to us, we had no control over it, we participated in a minor way, and now it has all passed us by.

Forrest’s life-long love affair with Jenny gives the film special poignancy. His love for her is constant and unwavering. Her love for him changes and wavers a good bit, but in the end she comes back to him, both because of his constancy and because she knows he will be a good father to their son. Forrest does his duty, throughout his life, because he knows it is expected of him, because he doesn’t know of an alternative. Once again, with his constancy, his love for those he has lost, his adherence to family roles and obligations, he is like many of us.

Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation

Every now and then I encounter a book or film or painting that lacks a point of reference, an identifying marker or set of markers within the literary or cinematic or art worlds that allows me to place and understand it in comparison to other books or films or paintings. Sometimes—perhaps most of the time—this is the fault of my own ignorance. Perhaps other times the fault belongs to the work itself—to shoddy form or unfocused vision or downright ineptitude. Occasionally it is the result of a distinctive and original artistic vision. Sometimes the reason is just not clear.

For much of Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (1986, dir. Ross McElwee) I thought I was watching a self-indulgent and long-winded home movie. This film is really about another film. The director Ross McElwee begins by announcing that he wanted to make a film about the impact of Sherman’s campaign on the Southeast, especially Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. But just as he was about to begin, he tells us, his girl friend broke up with him, leaving him hurt and traumatized. So instead he makes a film about a quixotic odyssey in search of a romantic partner that takes him through the states through which Sherman marched. Occasionally, he actually talks about Sherman, a man with whom he finds much in common. Sherman for much of his life regarded himself as a failure, a judgment the director levies on himself as well. Following the end of the war, Sherman was criticized for negotiating a surrender with the South in his campaign that was too lenient, and he was treated unfairly. Sherman loved the South, lived there much of his life, and so when he was ordered to wage his campaign of destruction, McElwee finds that fact highly ironic. McElwee believes Sherman was a brilliant writer. By overt connection and implication, he finds much in common with the Civil War general.

But Sherman occupies only a relatively short portion of this two-hour and thirty-seven minute film. Most of it is taken up with what at first appears to be casual and amateurish footage of the director’s visit with his parents and with various women whom he has been involved with in the past, or whom his parents or friends try to fix him up with, or whom he just happens across. Mostly they are in their late twenties or thirties, like him, and like him they are trying to find their place in life. Several aspire to be actresses, one wants to be a singer, another is a Mormon who wants to bring God into her house through marriage, another is a linguist living on Ossabaw Island working on her dissertation, another is an anti-nuclear power activist and teacher, and another is a lawyer in an off-again, on-again relationship with a man.

McElwee easily becomes infatuated with these women, but he seems fairly inept at relationships. This is one of the points of the film, which features McElwee’s attempts to discuss with the various women their reasons for lack of interest in him. In part he blames his own mistakes and weak character. Several women are more interested in their careers than in him. He and the linguist become involved in their idyllic Ossabaw Island setting, for a time, but then he leaves for a part-time job in Boston and she finds someone else. The women with whom he was involved in the past aren’t really interested in rekindling the former connection—they’ve moved on. In part, he blames the nuclear age. How can he sustain a relationship at a time when the threat of nuclear destruction looms constantly in mind?

McElwee portrays himself as a kind of Southern Protestant nebbish. He’s romantically inept and miserable as a result. He’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the end of the film, having failed at romance, he announces that he doesn’t really like the South and travels north to make films and teach filmmaking at Brown University, where he teaches today. With this pronouncement, the end of the film has the effect of subverting in an amusing and ironic way McElwee’s sense of failure and incompetence. He’s clearly good at something.

McElwee defines his own documentary style in Sherman’s March. It’s not a style that could easily be imitated, and indeed, given the length of this film, not one with much commercial potential. It’s a style that is obviously a projection of McElwee’s personality. Despite the casual, deliberate sloppiness to the film, there is a clear method at work, one that parallels the route of Sherman’s march with McElwee’s own romantic odyssey, and that portrays an interesting series of Southern characters—mostly white and female, affluent to varying degrees (with one exception)—at a time when the South was becoming increasingly urban and suburban, deracinated, deregionalized.

A minor sort of theme in the film involves Burt Reynolds. The first woman whom McElwee encounters in the film (in a meeting arranged by his father and step-mother) is an aspiring actress who has a connection with a friend who works for Burt Reynolds. She hopes to wrangle a part in a Reynolds film. Later in the film, McElwee actually runs across the set of a Reynolds film (Stroker Ace? Cannonball Run II?) and tries to film Reynolds but is thrown off the set and threatened with arrest. Does Reynolds represent the authentic South?

In a sense, as a filmmaker from Boston who comes down South to make a film about a man known for his destructive campaign in the South, McElwee joins with those forces that are changing the South in as drastic and fundamental a way as Sherman ever managed to do. The film shows several vistas of the skyline of Atlanta, Columbia, SC, Savannah, and Charlotte during the mid-1980s. These cities represent the South’s recovery from Sherman’s March, and at the same time the long-term and undeniable impact of the victories he achieved.

(In my favorite scene, McElwee walks towards the banks of the Congaree River, in Columbia, SC, gazing at the city skyline. He tries to clamber down the banks towards the river but falls, disappearing from view. The image of this awkward, bumbling figure trying to negotiate the Southern landscape is representative of his demeanor in the film as a whole).

Religulous

Bill Maher’s satiric documentary Religulous (2008, dir. Larry Charles) is a sustained editorial attack on religion. Maher sees religion—particularly Christianity, but the Jewish and Muslim faiths as well—as responsible for hatred, bias, racism, nationalistic bigotry, persecution, superstition, and ignorance that have been the bane of the civilized world for centuries.

Maher’s method is to visit various individuals and locations associated with religion, to interview or talk about them, to point out logical fallacies in what they argue for or represent, to use film clips from religious films, or messages scrolling across the screen, that have the effect of ridiculing them. He’s interested in making fun of his subject more than he is in trying to understand it

Maher is completely transparent about his goals in Religulous. He’s against religion. He’s out to show what’s wrong with it. He doesn’t try to be balanced or fair, though on a couple of occasions, when someone on the “other side” has made a good point, he gives them credit.

In one scene at a recreational park called “Holy Land,” Maher interviews a man impersonating Jesus—not as if he is talking to an individual dressed up as Jesus, but as if he is interviewing Jesus Himself. The costumed Jesus does his best to answer Maher’s pointed questions and to counter his argument, but he’s an easy target.

In another scene, Maher impersonates an evangelist preaching Scientology to a crowd gathered on a street corner in what appears to be London. The scene is hilarious, but the teachings of Scientology make another easy target.

Most of the people whom Maher interviews are easy targets—evangelists, right-wing Jews who deny the Holocaust, semi-coherent Catholic priests, amusement park characters and patrons, a self-described Jew for Jesus who runs a religious souvenir shop, a formerly gay evangelist married to a former lesbian who is convinced that gay people are not really gay (he doesn’t believe in gay people) but are “out of balance,” and so on.

The most interesting figure whom Maher interviews is a priest who is an astronomer for the Vatican. This is an interesting man who has succeeded in reconciling his own commitment to science with his faith in the Catholic Church—but Maher doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity to ask interesting and probing questions about science, logic, religion, and faith. In general, he avoids talking with people of substance.

I have no argument with Maher’s contention that leaders of the world should use logic and education. I agree that it is disturbing to hear leaders invoking irrational and illogical principles, religious nationalism, astrology, superstition, zealotry, all in the name of whatever god they believe in. But Maher resorts to ridicule and satire to make fun of religion and of religious people. In effect, he’s guilty of the same sort of bigotry that he is criticizing. His film is amusing and entertaining but it lacks substance, and it lacks respect for its subject and even for its viewers. It will appeal to people already inclined to agree with its viewpoint but will do little to persuade others.

One could argue that Maher approaches his topic with the same lack of respect and understanding and tolerance that some religious people express towards people or topics with which they disagree—evolution, stem cell research, those who believe in other faiths and creeds, etc. The trouble is, of course, that the term “religious people” encompasses billions of individuals with a wide array of attitudes—you can’t stereotype all religious people as thinking the same way, as having the same attitudes. But Maher does.

To Bill Maher, religion represents illogicality, irrationality, and ignorance. He favors logic, reason, and enlightenment. I favor those ways of thinking too. But the divide between religion and science, faith and logic, superstition and reason, is not as simple or clear as he would have it.

Star Trek

Entertainment value. What does it mean? For the money you spend the product you purchase possesses an intrinsic worth directly proportional to the pleasure it gives you. The entertainment value of the new Star Trek (2009, dir. J. J. Abrams) is high. There is nary a dull moment. While the original television series often took time out for political or philosophical pontifications, the new film takes little time out for anything. It is constant action, motion, noise. It has numerous cliff-hanging moments, free-fall hijinks, warp speed teleportation, sex with green women, phasers set at stun, black holes, imploding planets, brain devouring parasites, you name it. It has a strong sense of fun—it takes seriously the TV series on which it is based, but lacks more than enough respect to play fast and loose with the particulars. If you are a fan of the original series or any of the films it spawned, then you will watch this film with a particular anticipation—awaiting the appearance of each of the original characters, awaiting the appearance of the Enterprise itself. (If you were not a fan of the original, then you will simply be entertained). All the original characters are here, including Scotty, who appears relatively late, but who is immediately recognizable. The characters, especially Spock, seem more three-dimensional than their TV-based originals. Chekhov and Sulu for the first time are genuinely interesting. Uhuru for the first time seems more than a token representative of racial equality—she’s downright fetching, a brilliant linguist, and, as we learn, she and Spock are romantically involved. The film shows the half-human/half-Vulcan Spock in a series of transitions as he chooses to be neither wholly Vulcan nor wholly human. He has logic and precision but also passion and, surprisingly, a temper. Obviously, the full-grown adult Spock is a product of self-discipline. Spock and the actor Zachary Quinto who portrays him are the best human elements in the film.

Basically, and fundamentally, Star Trek is entertaining. It reinvents and reinvigorates the original story line, pays homage (not too reverently) to the mythology of the television series, uses a legion of special effects to the maximum (this is not a film where one can complain of too many special effects), is full of humor and humanity and constant movement.

The film has its problems. For one, Leonard Nimoy’s appearance was contrived and unnecessary. For another, the science underlying the series has always been questionable. It remains so here. A major problem has always been Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Star Trek neatly avoids the light speed limit by use of warp-drive, a technology that allows the Enterprise to bend space and travel light years in only a short time. The series has never offered much explanation for this technology, other than the fact that it relies on the ever-present (and problematic) lithium crystals. Physicists have speculated about warping space as a way of evading the light-speed limit but have not gotten far in proposing how it might be done, other than to suggest that it would require more energy that the galaxy or the universe or certainly human technology can generate. Over the past few years physicists have succeeded in creating a form of teleportation—but this has never involved more than moving a proton or two at a time. Theoretically, teleportation may be possible. Practically speaking, it may not be, and if it is, we are probably millennia away from being able to employ it in the reliable way the folks on the Enterprise do. The film also invokes time travel and parallel universes, and the science for these remains speculative though tantalizing as well. In general, Star Trek depends on the premise that it’s possible to move around in the galaxy without much difficulty—a galaxy that is 100,000 light years across and a 1000 light years thick, populated by some 300 billion stars. In Star Trek the galaxy is conveniently small and navigable. It is like the Old West in cowboy movies, easily traveled, fraught with its own perils. The real galaxy is a lot bigger, emptier, colder than this film would have it.

But Star Trek does not rise or fall on such quibbles. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch

The new biography of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch (Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, Little, Brown, and Company, 2009) gives a better and more three-dimensional portrait of the writer than any other I have encountered. It is not a literary biography--it does not read or interpret her stories and her two novels, and it does not trace her development as a writer in any but the most general details. But it is an engaging and sympathetic account of the writer’s life and of the conditions and challenges she faced. It is also well written. The biography is sympathetic to O’Connor without being hagiographic. Gooch may find much to admire in his subject, but he doesn’t hesitate to bring out issues that might place her in an unflattering light (her views on race, for instance, which moderated over the years).

I have always found O’Connor and her fiction difficult. She strikes me as an exceedingly doctrinaire and uncompromising writer both in her theology and in her fiction. She shows no mercy to her characters, though she would argue that it is not her business but God’s to do so. She was a devout Catholic in a Protestant South. She lost her father, whom she loved, at an early age to the same disease that would later afflict her. Her mother Regina was, apparently, strict and difficult. When she contracted lupus and returned to Milledgeville to live out the remainder of her life, she did so in part because she knew she could depend on Regina for help and support. She worried about what might happen to her if her mother died before she did. But mother and daughter apparently did not always get along, and Regina did not understand or like her daughter’s writing. Various visitors to the O’Connor home at Andalusia commented on the tension in the household and on Regina’s occasional hostile or embarrassing comments. Of course, lupus itself was a major challenge during the last fifteen years of O’Connor’s life. She knew the diagnosis was a death sentence, and the main question was how long she would last before it took her. Amazingly, she continued to live a full life right up until her final illness and completed two of her best stories, “Parker’s Back” and “Judgment Day,” shortly before she died.

Gooch seems to have read every document and interviewed every conceivable living subject who knew O’Connor. His accounts of her early childhood and Catholic upbringing in Savannah are detailed and fascinating. He depicts a young Flannery who was a self-styled character from an early age, writing stories about her family, drawing satirical cartoons, training chickens to walk backwards, disdaining social occasions that for other Southern girls would have been command performances. It is to Regina’s credit that as much as she might have exerted authority in her household she gave her daughter ample space and opportunity to grow and develop, both before her illness and afterwards—although this may have been the result of O’Connor’s own strong personality.

One way the biography manages to depict a three-dimensional O’Connor is through the people she was friends with and, in a few cases, in whom she may have been romantically interested. The main example of the latter category was Erik Langkjaer, a young book salesman who visited her frequently during the early 1950s but who returned to Europe and became engaged to another woman while O’Connor apparently still believed a relationship might develop. Gooch portrays the failure of this relationship as one that was painful for the writer. O’Connor apparently later incorporated elements of this relationship into her story “Good Country People”— Langkjaer even recognized himself in the story. There has been some speculation over the years about O’Connor’s sexuality. She was friends with two women who professed their love for her—Maryat Lee and Betty Hester--but she did not reciprocate their affections except in a friendly way. She remained close with both women to the end of her life. The friendship with Hester was clearly an important one that produced a rich and revealing series of letters. Friendships with writers such as Robie McCauley, Robert Lowell, Caroline Gordon, Andrew Lytle, and others demonstrate that she did not lead a life of isolation and that she often traveled away from Milledgeville to visit friends such as Brainard and Frances Cheney in Nashville.

One flaw in the book, I think, is Gooch’s constant attempts to draw parallels between O’Connor’s life and her fiction. Obviously, there were links, and clearly O’Connor got much of her material not only from people she knew and events she experienced but also from stories told to her by family and friends. But imagination clearly played an important process in the invention of her stories, and Gooch doesn’t sufficiently credit it. He seems to believe that everything in her fiction has some connection or basis in her life, though he acknowledges the often dramatic ways in which she transformed life experiences into her art.

Gooch is especially effective at making clear the extent to which O’Connor’s devout Catholicism affected every aspect of her life and work. He makes clear that she read widely in Catholic theology and philosophy and that she was especially fond of the Catholic novelist Francois Mauriac. In literature she read fairly widely, including the literature of the American South, and she had strong opinions on the writers she admired (Faulkner) and those she disliked (Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote).

Gooch quotes generously from O’Connor’s letters, stories, and other writings, as well as from interviews and accounts by numerous other individuals. He brings O’Connor to life in part by allowing the reader to hear her own voice as often as possible in the biography, and by allowing us to see O’Connor through the opinions of the others who knew her.

I have often wondered (along with others) whether by the time of her death O’Connor had written herself out. Late in her life, she herself seemed troubled by this question. Would she have continued to write the same sort of fiction? The questions of whether and how her work would have evolved invite the kind of pointless speculation inevitably focused on writers who die at a relatively young age.

Doubt

The title of Doubt (2008, dir. and writer John Patrick Shanley) expresses the themes and concerns of the film in every possible way. The film is about political and cultural doubt, personal doubt about one’s motives and perceptions, theological doubt, ethical and moral doubt. In other words, the film is about those modes of thought that make us self-aware and thinking creatures, that give us a sentient self, that burden us with uncertainty. Doubt is a film that, despite its concern with faith and the Catholic Church, doesn’t take anything for granted, a film in which there are no absolutes and everything is up for interrogation, examination.

Doubt takes place in 1964, when the Civil Rights Movement was making major political and cultural inroads in America, the year following the assassination of John Kennedy, two years following the pronouncements of Vatican II. The placement of the film in 1964 thereby enables it to explore issues that remain pertinent today. Another issue that was not much spoken of, if at all, in 1964, was the concern that some priests might be molesting young members of their churches. The film examines this possibility; helps explain why the problem went for so long unacknowledged or addressed; yet at the same time does not make this issue its main subject. Instead, its mains subject is exactly what its title conveys: doubt.

I can think of few films with better acting. Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn provide some of the best acting I’ve seen in film in quite a while. Streep in particular so fully inhabits her role as the senior sister of the school, a stern disciplinarian both to students and to others, totally dedicated to her calling as a teacher and nun, devout in her faith, fully disapproving of the reforms of Vatican II beginning to make themselves felt. The film is worth seeing solely for the experience of watching the expressions on Streep’s face—she can say more with a grimace, a raised eyebrow, a clenched lip, than many actresses can manage in a career. In her public appearances on talk shows and other venues, Streep has always struck me as highly intelligent and without any kind of distinct personality. In her acting roles, she becomes the parts she plays.

Amy Adams is fresh and convincing in her role as the young nun and teacher Sister James.

The plot focuses on Sister Aloysius’s growing suspicion that Father Flynn is having an “inappropriate” relationship with the only black student at the school. Sister Aloysius does not like Father Flynn’s informal way with the parishioners and the students at the school. He’s too relaxed and familiar for her tastes. He’s willing to have a secular song as part of the Christmas pageant, and this bothers her as well. Flynn is apparently responsible for the admission to the school of its first black student, Donald Miller, and although the sister does not openly disagree with the student’s presence she feels he needs special attention because of how other students may treat him.

The film suggests, and Sister James and Father Flynn suggest, that Sister Aloysius’s suspicions of the priest are motivated by her dislike of his reformed ways. The film neither confirms nor denies this possibility, just as it neither confirms nor denies her accusations against the priest. In the end, those accusations seem confirmed circumstantially—Sister Aloysius is told something about Father Flynn by a teacher at another school, and when she threatens to go public with what she believes she knows, he decides to resign. Is this because he is guilty of her charges, or because he wants to avoid embarrassment? The film never gives an answer. It provides only possible explanations.

Gradually, Sister Aloysius collects evidence. Flynn held a special meeting with the boy, after which the boy appeared upset and may have had wine on his breath. Sister Aloysius sees Father Flynn put an undershirt in the boy’s locker. We see Flynn and the boy together only twice. The first time the boy is confessing his desire to enter the priesthood. The second time the priest is comforting the boy who has been jostled in the school hallway by another student. There is nothing untoward in these two scenes. Everything Sister Aloysius knows about the boy and about Flynn is circumstantial, assumed, inferred, implied. Nothing is certain. As members of the audience we are in the same position as the characters in the film. Only Sister Aloysius seems sure that she knows what is happening, and she vows to bring Father Flynn down.

The film makes a point of portraying the male-centered structure of the school and the church. Father Flynn is the final authority. The nuns live and eat together in relatively Spartan surroundings, while Father Flynn and other priests dine and joke together in a social, jovial way. If Sister Aloysius follows protocol, she will have to forward her concerns about the school and Father Flynn through Flynn himself. Father Flynn himself must answer to other priests, cardinals, bishops. It’s only when Sister Aloysius contacts a nun in another school and asks about Father Flynn’s past that she is able to make headway. Even when Father Flynn resigns his position in the church, he is reassigned by his superiors to another church and school, a better one, in fact.

The only person who does not have doubt about what she believes she knows is Sister Aloysius. In the end, even she is unsure.

Taken

It’s always been interesting to me how the American popular imagination is constantly on the lookout for people to identify as Enemy. In the 1950s, when I was growing up, Indians and Nazis and Communists were the enemy. As political attitudes evolved, Nazis remained a convenient enemy, but Indians (Native Americans) were replaced by other ethnic groups—Mexicans, South Africans, East Europeans, and (for the last several decades), Arabs. There was even a period in the 1980s and 90s when outer space aliens substituted for ethnic enemies. The events of September 11 and the ensuing war in Iraq focused the popular imagination not so much on Arabs as on people of the Muslim world.

East European Muslims—Albanians, to be exact—are the enemy in the film Taken (2008, dir. Pierre Morel). This well made, soulless, and intellectually vapid action film operates entirely on a visceral level. Liam Neeson plays a retired U. S. security agent whose 17-year-old daughter is visiting in Paris when she is kidnapped by Albanians who drug her and sell her into the slave trade. Neeson sets out to rescue her, vowing to her kidnapper in a cell phone that “I will find you, and I will kill you.” This he does, with grimly calculating efficiency. I did not count how many Albanian—and Muslims and ethnic individuals of other stripes—met their maker at Neeson’s hands, but the number was high.

Neeson functions in this film like a super hero. He’s relentless and unstoppable.  He uses skills acquired as a security agent to track down the kidnappers, the people they work for, the individuals to whom they sell their victims. He shoots, stabs, garrotes, throttles, and otherwise dispatches the bad guys in his quest to find his daughter. The film leaves little doubt that he’ll be successful. While the film is exciting and entertaining, there’s not much tension involved. I watched it with the curious sort of interest one would feel watching someone lining up the colors of a Rubik’s Cube, or putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

As a parent, I understood the obsessive dedication of Neeson’s character to finding and rescuing his child. One can easily imagine that he applied to his work as a national security agent the same single-minded ruthlessness with which he pursues his daughter’s kidnappers.

As if to make clear what the stakes are, the film makes clear that she is a virgin, that she is (as one of her kidnapper’s describes her to a potential buyer) “100% pure,” so she has to be rescued not only from kidnappers who want to drug her and sell her as a prostitute, but from dusky-skinned Arabic-speaking Muslims who want to deflower her.

Taken is a version of the myth of American indomitability and moral righteousness—a myth that events of the last several decades should have dispelled. In this 91-minute film, Neeson (who himself is Irish-born, not a native U. S. citizen) succeeds in defeating and killing the Muslim enemy in a way that the U. S. nation has not managed in various wars over the last two decades.

Waitress

Waitress (2006) instills a familiar plot with a fresh perspective, partially because of the particular approach the film takes to its subject, partially due to the excellent acting of Keri Russell and supporting cast. Russell plays Jenna Hunterson, a young waitress who works in a pie diner in a small Southern town. She expresses her emotional life through the pies she bakes—she names them after moods and situations she is in. She has no other emotional outlet. Early in the film Jenna discovers that she is pregnant by the husband whom she doesn’t like and whom she is plotting to leave. He is a controlling and self-centered bubba. She begins a hot affair with the obstetrician she goes to see about her pregnancy—he is new to town, married to a resident physician at the local hospital.

The film traces Jenna’s reaction to her developing pregnancy, the affair with her doctor, and the increasingly domineering behavior of her husband—he forbids her from traveling to a local town for a pie baking competition, requires that she turn over all her earnings, and forces her to swear that she will never love the baby as much as she loves him. Jenna narrates the film, and she makes clear that she does not love her husband and does not want the baby. She plans to have it anyway.

The freshness of the film comes partially through the perspective of director and writer Adrienne Shelly, who questions the traditional notions that a woman can find fulfillment through marriage and motherhood. Jenna’s dissatisfaction, her sense of entrapment in her marriage to Earl, is a constant focus. The pregnancy and the not-so-subtle urgings of her friends at the diner to embrace motherhood become another layer of entrapment. The two waitresses who work with her in the diner are themselves constantly on the lookout for men. One is married to an older man who is (apparently) an invalid—she is having an affair with the thoroughly distasteful manager of the diner. The other seeks companionship through a newspaper dating service. She becomes involved with a strange little man whose enthusiasm and poetry writing initially put her off.

The setting of a small Southern town helps focus Jenna’s struggle against a deeply entrenched Southern male power structure. We see this in a number of other films about the South, such as Jezebel (1938), Norma Rae (1979), and Places in the Heart (1984). (The power structure is Southern only because the film is set in the South—it exists everywhere, though the South’s reputation as a bastion of patriarchal traditions underlies the logic of the film).

Waitress pursues its concern with Jenna’s entrapment, with her need and the need of the other waitresses for release and fulfillment, through comic and satiric means. This is not a heavy-handed or doctrinaire film. But it makes its point.

Perhaps the most comical character in Waitress is Jenna’s husband Earl. He views Jenna solely in terms of how she serves his own well being. When they have sex (rarely) he is concerned only with his own satisfaction. He tells her that she has never been sexy and comments often on her increasing size. When he discovers the money she has been hiding around the house (money she has been saving to fund her escape from the marriage) she tells him she has been saving it to buy a crib and other things for the baby. He believes her, and uses the unspent portion of the money to buy himself a video camera to film the birth. Earl is the supreme example of a self-centered, wholly egotistical man who views his marriage and his wife solely as an enhancement to his own ego. Although he is an exaggerated parody, not a few men who watch the film should feel a wee bit uncomfortable with what they recognize of themselves in his character.

Jenna finds an alternative to Earl in her obstetrician Dr. Pomatter. He compliments her, enjoys her cooking, listens to her thoughts and concerns, and for much of the film she genuinely considers running away with him. In many ways, as she finally decides, he is just another version of Earl.

The small town in which Waitress occurs offers the director a venue for a comical cast of eccentric and quaint Southern characters. Foremost among them is Old Joe, played by Andy Griffith. He owns the pie bar and comes in each day with an exacting set of demands that only Jenna seems able to carry out to his satisfaction. Despite his crotchety exterior, the film gradually reveals an inner personality that at first we don’t see.

A fortuitous turn of events at the end of the film—not wholly a surprise—provides Jenna with an escape from her predicament. It is, unfortunately, not a solution available to most women in her predicament, a fact indicative of the basically romantic and fairy-tale character of the film.

Nonetheless, Waitress is thoroughly engaging.

Adrienne Shelley was murdered shortly before the film’s release.

The Innocents

In his short novel The Turn of the Screw Henry James through a gradual accretion of situations, details, hints, and improbable moments builds the case that his central character, a young governess charged with the care of two young children, isn’t really seeing the apparitions she thinks she is seeing. One can read the story as a straight tale of the supernatural, a story in which the ghosts are really there. Or one can read it as a study in psychological deviance in which the ghosts are the projections of a neurotic young woman. The genius of the story in part rests in the fact that you are never sure how to read it—though once you glimpse the outline of the psychological reading, it is difficult to put out of your mind.

The 1961 film adaptation The Innocents (dir. Jack Clayton) begins with a scene of the disturbed young governess, in distress and in prayer, agonizing over her desire to protect the children in her charge. She is clearly an upset and hysterical woman. From its first scene, this film leaves little doubt which reading it will undertake. From the start it strips away that layer of narrative subtlety in the novel. The film otherwise offers an effective and literal rendition of James’ novel, with Deborah Kerr portraying the governess in what may be one of her finest performances.

The film retains much of the uncertainty and nuance so important in the novel—the strange tales of the recent deaths of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, their love affair, the boy’s expulsion from school, the distant and indifferent uncle who is responsible for the children, but who doesn’t want to be bothered by them or by the governess in any way.

When the uncle implores the governess to take the position, he does so almost as a kind of marriage proposal, and she is clearly marked by the moment. The uncle is often in her mind.  The film is more explicit than the novel in suggesting the sexual undertones and overtones of the story—the governess’ dissatisfaction with her own life, her sexual inexperience and repression, her attraction to the uncle, the strangely adult way the boy interacts with her (including a lascivious kiss he plants on her), his self-conscious innocence that, with a different inflection or facial expression, becomes, at least in her mind, proof of his corruption.

While the novel is all subtlety and restraint, the film adds a strong note of hysteria to its portrayal of the governess. The fear the film inspires is not about supernatural occurrences but about what the governess thinks she is seeing, her deepening psychological disturbance, the dangers she poses to the children. The film is not so much an adaptation as it is a reading, and in that role it performs in an intelligent and interesting way that does no violence to the novel.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

The Robert Wise version of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) was simple and straightforward. Produced when special effects were primitive, it relies on ideas and characters to convey its message. The nuclear age and the Cold War had just begun. The Age of Science was in the ascendant. It was a time of fear, uncertainty, and hope. The film was set in Washington, DC, the center of political power in the Western World. The space ship, a conventional flying saucer-type craft, lands on a baseball diamond. A figure emerges from the ship, and when he raises his hand, he is shot and wounded by a nervous soldier. He is hospitalized but soon escapes and takes up residence in a boarding house where a young woman (Patricia Neal) lives with her son. They become friends, he reveals himself along with his desire to speak with world leaders, and complications ensue. The Bernard Herrmann score is a spectacular and original enhancement to the film.

The 2008 remake of the film (directed by Scott Derrickson) preserves the main plot outline but transfers the setting to New York City—the space ship lands in Central Park. Rather than a conventional flying saucer, the ship is a glowing, translucent globe. Keanu Reeves plays the alien, Klaatu. Reeves actually could have done well by the part had the rest of the film been something other than what it is. The new film dispenses with practically every admirable element in the older one. Whereas the earlier film shows people infused with fear and wonder as the space ship lands and the alien figure emerges, this new one mainly shows fear. Everyone assumes the spaceship has come to do harm, and the film complicates matters by having not just one spaceship but hundreds land on the earth. The menace they pose is clear. (The idea of subtlety in the 2008 film is a truly alien concept). In the older film we are told that the robot Gort can destroy the world, if called on to do so. We are shown only a few minor examples of his power. He is a frightening and imposing figure, and there is no doubt that he is formidable. But this is clear only because of implication. In the later film we are also told that Gort can destroy the world, and then in graphic and considerable detail for the last twenty or so minutes of the film we are shown how he can do so. The trouble is that I never believed in the robot of the newer film—he looked like a special effect from the beginning, and when he starts in on his destroy-the-world shtick, all I could think to myself was, "these are special effects." Gort in the newer movie lacks the mystique and reality of Gort in the older film. He is an abysmal failure.

Jennifer Connelly plays the Patricia Neal character in the new film. She is an exo-biologist. Federal agents drag her from her house to join a team of scientists supposed to advise and work with the government in deciding how to respond to the alien visit. The new film pays a lot of attention to how the government mobilizes the military to meet the challenge of the alien menace, and of course all their efforts are ineffective. In fact, the new film seems to exult in the notion of humankind's utter helplessness.

Whereas Klaatu in the first film comes to the planet to give a warning (he sees the human race as too warlike), in the second film he comes to destroy. Mankind has created such an environmental danger to the survival of the planet, one of the only planets in the galaxy that harbors complex life, that Klaatu decides the humans must be destroyed to save the planet. Whereas Klaatu in the earlier film shows no hostility and even seems interested in the humans that surround his spacecraft, in the latter film he shows indifference.

The second film relies heavily on special effects, and the human characters seem secondary. They merely follow the alien around and periodically try to convince him that the human race can change and that he shouldn't wipe it out.

Although the second film preserves the major characters of the original (including the robot Gort) and even the basic plot and many of the same scenes (often completely reenvisioned), it substitutes noise and explosions and spectacular effects for intelligence and human engagement with an extraordinary situation. The first film may seem dated, but the second film is simply dead.

The 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still was a visionary film, one that puts aside national boundaries and ideologies and addresses larger issues of peace and survival for the human race and the planet. It is one of the many reasons why I love films.

Places in the Heart

Places in the Heart (1984, dir. Robert Benton) is schizophrenic. The title suggests a warm, sentimental, somewhat addled encomium to the idyllic past. There is a degree of that past in the film. But it is also about the hard struggle a young wife and mother, Edna Spalding (Sally Field), must endure after her husband's unexpected death. On the night of his funeral she asks a friend to show her how to write a check—she has never written one. The next day the local banker shows up at her door to inform her about her husband's finances—he left barely half the money she will need to make the next payment on the farm. The banker is sure that Edna is incapable of understanding her plight and certainly lacking the skills required to save the farm. He advises her to sell the farm and move in with a relative. He suggests that she can farm her two children out to relatives in Oklahoma. At first she is incapable. But eventually she rises to the challenge, intent on disproving his certainty that she will not survive on her own.

The film shows the pervasive racism of the 1930s in Texas. The young black man who drunkenly and unintentionally shoots her husband, killing him, is lynched. A procession of cars drags his body through the town, stopping in front of her house long enough to ensure that she knows "justice" had been done. The Klan makes an appearance in the film as well.

But Places in the Heart also wants us to see Edna Spalding as an exception in this environment. An itinerant black man named Moze (Danny Glover) comes to her door, asking for work, and she turns him away. When she finds him chopping wood in her yard, she sends him away again, harshly, but not before he manages to steal some of her silverware. The local sheriff arrests the man and discovers the stolen silverware. In the meantime, she has had another meeting with the local banker and now understands her circumstances better than before. The sheriff brings the thief to her door with the silverware. Instead of confirming that the stolen goods are hers, she tells the sheriff that she had given the silverware to the man so he could clean them. She remembers his promise that he is an expert at growing cotton, his offer to help her, and her plan now is to take him up on that offer.

Soon after, the banker shows up at her door again with his blind brother-in-law (John Malcovich) in tow. He suggests that if she takes his brother-in-law as a border, the bank will think better of her when it comes time to consider another loan. She takes him in too.

In the course of the film, these three marginal people—the widow woman, the vagrant black man, the blind man—become allies and friends. It is certainly within the realm of possibility than such an alliance could form. There are more than a few examples of such alliances in the historical record. But they were rare exceptions. Many films about the Southern past avoid dealing with the historical reality by focusing on exceptions. This film focuses on an exceptional situation but also includes glimpses of racism and patriarchal prejudices. It shows murder, bigotry, adultery, yet in the final scene everyone—the dead and the betrayed—gather in church together to worship—this is apparently Edna's wish-fulfilling vision, the way she would want her life to be. It is also perhaps Robert Benton's way of showing (if indeed this wasn't merely a way of pandering to the audience and glossing over the negative elements) that everyone is washed in the Blood of the Lamb.

The film is more than a portrayal of Edna's struggle to save the farm. It portrays life in a small east Texas town during the Depression. We see Edna spending time with her children and with two couples to whom she is close. An adulterous affair between two of her friends provides melodramatic interest. The film shows that in the rural South of the Depression life was slow and difficult and different from what it is now, but it also shows similarities that link past and present.

In Moze, Benton gives us a positive portrayal of an African American male that both embraces and subverts racial stereotypes. Moze is itinerant. He needs a way to feed himself, to survive. He is wily, crafty, and not beyond stealing. He sees in Edna a vulnerable woman in need of assistance. So he attaches himself to her—out of self-interest at first, perhaps, but later out of loyalty to the friendship they develop. He is skilled at farming, gives good advice to Edna, and is protective of her children. The stereotype he embodies is of the virtuous black character (usually a man, sometimes a woman) who rescues white people in need—Sidney Poitier portrayed many such figures in films from the 1950s and 1960s. There is also an element here of the fond desire of some Southerners to believe that whatever one may say about the racist past there were strong bonds that held blacks and whites together.

In the end, the woman and her two new friends work together to save the farm. Moze plants and cultivates the cotton, and when it is ready for picking he talks other black folks in the area into working for Edna for a price, and he convinces her to hire them. When she takes the cotton to the gin, he makes sure that the gin owner doesn't cheat her, as of course he tries to do. She is able to make her payment to the bank. How she will make subsequent payments the film does not make clear and in fact does not even seem interested in the question.

Why during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s did Sallie Field appear in so many Southern films—Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Norma Rae (1979), Places in the Heart (1984), Steel Magnolias (1989), Forrest Gump (1994)? She first of all looked the part of the strait-laced and conventional Southern belle—attractive, pliant, and unthreatening. Someone who by her appearance one might think could not get along on her own. But in most of these films part of the interest in her character grows out of her struggle against the type she portrays--the bride who declines to marry, the farm owner who is determined to make the bank payment, the mill worker who resents exploitative policies by management. Without wholly moving outside the convention role of Southern womanhood that her appearance and demeanor suggest, she proves herself to be resourceful, resilient, feisty, and determined. When she perseveres, she does so against a Southern male power structure. She was, in this sense, an expression of the impact of the Feminist movement on the American South and on Southern women in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Norma Rae

Norma Rae (1979, dir. Martin Ritt) dramatizes the struggle of North Carolina mill workers to unionize. The film is effective at portraying the workers themselves. Most of them do not look like Hollywood extras, but more like the sort of folk you would expect to work in a textile mill. The exception, of course, is Norma Rae (Sally Field), who is strong-minded, rebellious, and independent and doesn't like being put upon or seeing her relatives and friends exploited. She also doesn't mind upsetting the conventions of the local community.

In the film, a union organizer from New York City. Reuben (Ron Leibman) arrives in town to try to interest mill workers in forming a union. At first he is treated with disdain and suspicion, and sometimes hostility. The development of his friendship with Norma Rae is nearly as interesting as the story of her efforts to convince the millworkers to listen to him and to support unionization. In a muted but sustained way, the cultural contrasts between Norma Rae and Reuben give this movie life and interest. Their friendship endangers her marriage, and she admits to her husband one evening that Reuben is "in my mind," but it never develops beyond that point. This is a point of strength in the film, which develops the tension of a growing potential attraction between the two characters without resorting to the Hollywood ending that audiences might want or expect—there is no affair, and Norma Rae and Reuben part when the film ends.

Through this contrast in cultures, the film suggests both that beyond and above the differences there are fundamental shared concerns that unite people from fundamentally different places. Yet it also suggests that those differences are great enough to prevent the rapprochement with which the film tantalizes us throughout. One of the connections between Norma Rae and Reuben is their insistence on pursuing causes that no one else believes they can accomplish. Against strong odds, Reuben wants to unionize the mill, even when his supervisors urge him to consider giving up (they disapprove of Norma Rae too—they know she is married and are suspicious of her relationship with Reuben).

Norma Rae dramatizes the difficulties a woman would experience when she moves outside the traditional modes of behavior expected for her time and place. Norma Rae's husband (Beau Bridges), who in general the film treats as a good man, is increasingly bothered by her involvement in union work and her friendship with Reuben. The factory bosses at first promote her in an effort to get her on their side, but when she is placed in the position of having to evaluate the work of her former friends, even of her own father, she demands to be returned to her former position.

Despite its attempts at realism, the film is not resistant to the stereotypical lures of the small southern town idyll. Reuben himself is attracted to that idyll, even though the town itself is not especially receptive to him—he manages to achieve unionization only through Norma Rae and her efforts. In one scene he and Norma Rae swim together nude in a creek. This is supposed to be what the small rural town offers, the idyllic immersion in nature, Edenic innocence, yet at the same time the scene titillates, gives the audience some small gratification through the possibility of a connection between Norma Rae and Reuben that never occurs.

Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch collaborated on the screenplay for this film. They produced several other screenplays for films about the South, in particular The Long Hot Summer (1958) and the execrable The Sound and the Fury (1959)—Martin Ritt directed these films as well. The Long Hot Summer is at least watchable, though it gives us Faulkner as filtered through the minds of writers who understand Tennessee Williams better than the writer from Oxford. In Norma Rae, Frank and Ravetch are less prone to invoke melodrama and stereotype. They labor admirably to tell a story loosely based on fact and clearly connected to the unionization of Southern textile mills in the 1970s. The historical focus of this film—grounded in Southern patriarchy and sexism, class conflict, the ever-present struggle between management and labor, and the deeply entrenched Southern antipathy to labor unions and to outsiders—that staves off melodrama and stereotype.

Pineapple Express

Pineapple Express (2008) is a stoner comedy/thriller several notches above the usual level of such films. Although there is much dope smoking, and many jokes and humor centered on dope (nothing is more tiring than two dopers rejoicing in the glories of weed), there is also a plot, a disturbing fusion of the comic and the horrific, and an array of wildly whacky characters—many of whom come to gruesome ends.

The film was co-written by Seth Rogen (one of the main actors) and Judd Apatow, who also produced the film. The illogicalities and plot holes that one finds in other Apatow films, such as Super Bad (2007) and Knocked Up (2007), where they don't matter much, do matter here. But there are numerous comic moments too—a raucous and hilarious fight in an apartment; the two main characters, doped-up (there are few moments in the film when they aren't), stumbling terror-stricken through the woods when something that we never sees frightens them; a dinner gone wrong at the home of the 18-year-old girlfriend of Rogen's character; two hit men who run as much against type as one can imagine; and so on—and together they make a highly amusing but pointless film. With its counter-intuitive fusion of comedy and grim violence it reminded me of True Romance (1993) and especially of Martin Scorcese's 1985 After Hours.

The main character is a process server, Dale Denton. He spends his life smoking dope and donning various disguises in order to serve subpoenas on people who have been trying to avoid them. He buys his weed from Saul (James Franco), who sits in his apartment all day watching TV and selling product. Saul offers Dale a sample of the best weed in LA; it's called "Pineapple Express." Dale gladly accepts and goes off to serve a subpoena on a man named Ted Jones (Gary Cole), who turns out to be the drug kingpin who gave Saul an exclusive on the Pineapple Express. When Dale accidentally sees Jones and a policeman (Rosie Perez) murder a member of a rival drug gang, he is horrified. He throws down the joint he is smoking and drives straight to Saul's apartment. Jones finds the joint, recognizes the brand of weed, and sends henchmen to kill Dale and Saul. In the meantime, Dale and Saul have figured out that Jones will be looking for them (how they figure out anything in their dope-addled states is unclear).

So the film is basically about Saul and Dale's attempts to elude the hit men and outwit Ted Jones. There are numerous diversions and side jaunts. There is an ongoing rivalry between competing drug gangs (one of them features Ninjas). Saul wants to be a civil engineer, but he sells drugs so his grandmother can live in a comfortable retirement home. And of course there is Dale's relationship with an 18-year-old high school student. Most of all, this is a buddy film in which the two main characters ultimately come to terms with the fact that they like and need each other. It's also a film about Dale's gradual recognition that he needs to grow up and stop smoking dope—but whether this ever happens is unclear. I was disappointed that Dale's recognition that he needs to sober up is in the film. Why? It seems almost a gratuitous acknowledgement by the filmmakers that their film is immature and addled, that their values are really down home and middle class, not drug culture values. Let me leave no doubt—the film IS immature and addled, and you can enjoy it on that level. To insert the possibility of adulthood and redemption is to create a film that doesn't have the strength of its profoundly deviant convictions.

David Gordon Greene directed this film—the director of four promising but commercially unsuccessful films including George Washington (2000), All the Real Girls (2003), Undertow (2004), and Snow Angels (2007)—one imagines that he realized he had to participate in some money-making ventures to be able to keep making the kinds of films he wants to make—Pineapple Express did make money. Greene's expertise is evident in a number of scenes, especially in pacing, characterization, and cinematography. Despite the virtues of Pineapple Express, one hopes that
Greene will not have to make this kind of film often.

Mekong First Light, by Joseph W. Callaway, Jr.

Mekong First Light (Presidio Press, 2004) is a memoir about Joseph W. Callaway's experience as a soldier in Vietnam during the late 1960s. Its strength is that it is not a literary memoir. Callaway is not a trained writer, a fact evident throughout his narrative. But his memoir is not at all clumsily written. It is simply not especially artful or elegant. It is intelligent and honest and devoid of pretense. It is what it is—straightforward and to the point. Callaway begins with a discussion of his childhood and adolescence. His family moved around fairly often as his father struggled to find a way to make an adequate living. Callaway came to think of himself as a failure, a kid who always seemed to mess up, who couldn't do well in academics or athletics. Part of the problem was, he later realized, a learning disability. He basically gave up on himself.

After several failed attempts at college, Callaway joined the army. In training school he discovers that he has a knack for leadership, that the men he leads trust him, and gradually a change begins to occur—a change evidenced in the memoir's title, Mekong First Light. In Vietnam he discovers the fullness of his capabilities. He becomes there the man that he thought he would never be. But the discovery comes at some price.

Callaway's account of his time in Vietnam is graphic and disturbing. On the one hand he continues to distinguish himself as a leader, though he resists receiving awards for his efforts. He describes the deaths of several close friends, men whom he respected, and their deaths had a profound impact on him. Although there were men in the command structure of the army whom he respected, there were others he did not respect. He points out serious mistakes—in the assignment of personnel, in tactics—that often led to a loss of life, or that might have. He makes no bones of his opinion that awards and honors given out for valor in battle were often given for false reasons and were often underserved.

Callaway also makes clear in his introduction his opinion that the nature of war is that it is fought by young men—too young and inexperienced to realize their own vulnerability and mortality—under the command of older men who have grown wise enough to realize that they might die in battle.

Callaway's is not a leftwing point of view. Though he was friends with some members of the activist movement following his departure from the military, though he had some sympathies with the movement, he was never wholly in support. As an older man, he describes himself as conservative and expresses misgivings, for instance, about John Kerry's use of his military record for political ends. His criticism of the war and of the U. S military therefore seems especially credible.

The Secret Life of Bees

In The Secret Life of Bees (2008) a young white girl, troubled by her cold and indifferent father and by her memory of having accidentally killed her mother when she was four, seeks shelter and solace from a group of black women in rural South Carolina in 1964. Based on the novel of the same title (which I have not read), the film reminded me especially of Toni Morrison's Paradise, also about a group of independent black women living on their own in a hostile setting (and to a lesser extent Song of Solomon). Whereas Morrison lets us know from an early point that her characters are headed for tragedy, The Secret Life of Bees makes clear from the start that amidst tragic memories and the unhappiness that is to occur there will be heartwarming moments, tenderness, sentimentality, a lack of realism, plot holes, and a story and characters that hold our interest and whom we come to care about.

This film reminded me of Eve's Bayou (1997), also about black women—some old and some young—trying to survive in a world of male betrayal.

The story is told through the eyes of the fourteen-year-old white girl Lily (Dakota Fanning). Although her own life is an interesting one—she wants to be a writer, she has a dream in which bees swarm into her room at night, and she is in the middle of puberty—she is mainly an observer through whom the more interesting story of the Boatwright women is told. They are three sisters, the oldest of whom inherited a farm from her grandmother, and they raise bees and manufacture highly prized honey, which makes them a comfortable living. The sisters are named for the months of the year. Their house is the color of Pepto-Bismol. It is nicely furnished, and their farm exists in a kind of isolation from the racist white South and the rest of the world.

The Boatwrights sell their honey in a bottle labeled with an image of a black Virgin Mary. It turns out the women worship an old wooden figure of a black Virgin, an old masthead that washed up on the beaches of Virginia a hundred years in the past, and which one of their ancestors found and brought home with him after (he believed) it spoke to him. The women believe that the figure gives them strength when they touch the image of the heart painted on her breast.

A number of interwoven plots keep this film going and also weigh it down. There is the story of Lily, of course. Each of the sisters has her own story. June (Alicia Keys) is in love with a man from the local town, but she doesn't for reasons that remain unclear want to marry him. She is active in the local NAACP and resents Lily's appearance. She's beautiful and distant and plays the cello. Another is May (Sophie Okonedo) , whose twin sister died some years before, leaving her in a constant state of mental distress—whenever anything bad happens to someone, she weeps uncontrollably. She has built a stone wall in the back of the house where she inserts pieces of paper on which she writes prayers or short inscriptions about bad events. And there is August, played by Queen Latifah, the oldest sister, who runs the farm and to whom Lily turns for advice. There is also Roseleen Daise (Jennifer Hudson), who worked as a servant for Lily's father. When she walks with Lily to town, she is accosted by a group of white men who yell insults, and when Roseleen pours snuff juice on the shoes of an especially hateful man, he beats her. Lily and Roseleen run away and make their way to Tiburon, a small town whose name Lily found on a memento of her mother's.

Very early in the film a connection between the bees of which Lily dreamed, her mother, and the bee farm of the Boatwrights becomes evident. The nature of this connection is made fairly clear well before the film explains it outright—whether this is intentional or not I don't know. Maybe we in the audience are supposed to recognize what Lily herself doesn't recognize so that we can watch with anticipation as she gradually makes the connections herself.

There is also a Civil Rights theme. Lily finds herself attracted to a young man who is friends of the Boatwrights. They work on the farm together, share a couple of kisses, and inexplicably he drives her into town to deliver honey and then invites her to go to a film in a theatre where whites and blacks still sit in separate sections. He is accosted and dragged off by a group of angry white men, and for a time it looks as if he is going to be found dead. This event leads to tragedy.

It is perhaps understandable why 14-year-old Lily would not recognize the danger of sitting in the black section of a segregated theater with her black friend. But he certainly should have realized the danger to himself—he is older than she and intelligent and well educated. When he is dragged away, we know Lily is going to blame herself for whatever is to happen.

The Civil Rights era theme and time period do create some problems for the film, however. Would black women such as the Boatwrights have been allowed to live unmolested in rural white South Carolina in 1964, especially given their relative affluence and forward thinking attitudes? Only a year later in Mississippi, three civil rights workers—two young white men and one young black man—would be murdered by white racists. Only three years before in Birmingham, Alabama, four young girls were killed in a church bombing carried out by white racists. Were things that different in rural South Carolina in 1954? It's also difficult to imagine that the young man hauled out of the segregated theater by white racists would be allowed to escape with only a beating for sitting with a young white girl in the balcony reserved for "coloreds." This film wants to make clear its awareness of the difficult times in which the action is taking place, but it wants to pretend that its main characters are less affected by those times than in reality they probably would have been.

It's also clear that, no matter how positive a figure August is as played by Queen Latifah, there is clearly a dimension of the stereotyped black Mammy about her, as she readily agrees to take care of the poor white girl in distress and offers various wise homilies and lessons to her, helping her, even in the midst of her own grief, to come to terms with her mother's death ten years before. It's worth pointing out the improbability of the situation the film portrays—a 14-year old white girl on her own in rural South Carolina in the company of a somewhat older black woman who shows clear signs of having been beaten up. Would they have been allowed to go on their way unmolested? Probably not. There is the slightest possibility that people such as the Boatwrights could have existed and made a living for themselves on their farm. That is one point of the film, the improbable nature of the story itself, and of Lily's managing to find the Boatwrights as she does. Improbability itself is part of the interest of the story.

(Roger Ebert aptly captures the film's implausibility in his review: "As a realistic portrayal of life in rural South Carolina in 1964, 'The Secret Life of Bees is dreaming. As a parable of hope and love, it is enchanting. Should it have been painful, or a parable?" Ebert settles for parable, admitting that if this had been a "bad" film then he would have willingly dissected it. A. O. Scott in the New York Times observes, "It would be wrong to say that the troubles of that time and place have been wished away — on the contrary, the movie begins with a scene of horrific domestic violence and includes child abuse, a racially motivated beating, suicide and the threat of a lynching — but from the opening voice-over to the final credits, every terror and sorrow is swaddled in warm, therapeutic comfort.")

The author of the novel on which the film is based is Sue Monk Kidd, a white woman who was growing up during the time period of the film. The screenplay author and director is Gina Prince-Bythewood, an African-American. Had a white director and screen writer made this film about black women and largely black situations, told mainly through the eyes of a white narrator, they would likely have been accused of stereotyping their subject. With an African American woman director and screen writer, the film has more credibility and is less vulnerable to accusations that it is just another film that patronizes African Americans.

One other influence on the film is To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), based on Harper Lee's novel. There are certain similarities between the character Scout in that film and the somewhat older Lily in this one. Both are narrators, both are struggling to come of age, in a certain sense, both are struggling to understand and to accept their mother's death, whom they hardly remember. A minor character in Bees is a white liberal lawyer who reminds us, fleetingly, of Atticus Finch.

In the Electric Mist

In the Electric Mist (2009) puts to the test William Faulkner's observation (from Requiem for a Nun) that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In the form of a long dead Confederate general, perhaps a ghost, perhaps a hallucination, General John Bell Hood advises the protagonist Dave Robichaux about his interest in two seemingly unrelated murders, one of which took place more than forty years before the time of the film.

Although this is a sloppy and often hackneyed film, two elements make it interesting. The first is Tommy Lee Jones, who plays ex-alcoholic police detective Robichaux. His performance is typically low-key but intense—as we saw In the Valley of Elah (2007) and No Country for Old Men (2007). It is always interesting to watch Tommy Lee Jones do what he does, and he does it well in this film. The second element of interest is the setting, mostly rural and small-town Louisiana. The film makes use of an array of local characters, none of whom -act particularly well, but all of whom give flavor to the film. Buddy Guy makes a brief appearance as a blues singer named Hogman, and though he cannot act either, it's interesting to see him in the film. John Sayles appears as the director of a film about the Civil War. He can act considerably less well than he can direct. Levon Helm, formerly of The Band, and the actor who played Loretta Lynn's father in A Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), plays General Hood here, in a casual, cryptic, offhand way.

Dave Robichaux grapples with the past in all sorts of ways in this film. He's a recovering alcoholic, a fact that has him often reacting to and resisting the habits of a past life. As a young boy, he saw a black man shot down by in the swamps. A drunken actor in the present time of the film discovers the chained bones of a dead man in the swamp, and Robichaux comes to believe they belonged to the man he saw killed. But what connection do they have to the murder he's investigating of a small-time prostitute? Robichaux feels guilty for having witnessed a crime he couldn't prevent, and guilty for being unable to solve the murder of the prostitute.

The production values in this film are only slightly better than what one would expect from a television crime drama. The characters are stereotyped—John Goodman as Julie "Baby Feet" Balboni, a crime boss turned film producer, Ned Beatty as Twinky LeMoyne, an aging cotton mill owner, Mary Steenbergen as Bootsie, a loving but long suffering wife to Robichaux. Their names suggest not only the stereotypes they embody but, in the case of Balboni and LeMoyne, that they are burlesques, parodies, broadly depicted types. As soon as we see Goodman surrounded by beautiful young woman and body guards, his grossly distended chest sagging out of and over the swim suit he wears at the pool, we know all we need to know—he's venal, corrupt, and probably guilty. We can stop thinking—his character pushes all the standard buttons. The plot of the film is circuitous and complex, and Robichaux figures things out mainly by managing in his own mind to recognize the links between past memories and more recent ones. The careful viewer will pick up on the clues well before Robichaux does.

Both Balboni and LeMoyne are particular Southern types—arrogant men whose power and money renders them immune to laws and moral codes that govern the rest of us. If violence needs to be committed, they get others to do it for them and then forget that they asked—they're absolved by forgetting. By struggling to remember and understand what he once saw and who he saw doing it, Robichaux achieves some kind of absolution—though LeMoyne and Balboni are apparently never tried for their crimes—Balboni at least goes to jail for tax evasion.

The most arbitrary and disparate element in the film is General Hood. Robichaux attends a party given by Balboni and drinks a glass of tea apparently spiked with LSD. He comes to when his car wrecks on a road in the swamp, and he follows a light to a gathering of camping Confederate soldiers, among whom is General Hood. Previously we've been told that sometimes strange lights—swamp gas—are seen in the swamp, and of course there's an association in Robichaux's mind between the Civil War film and the soldiers they encounter. Of course, the soldiers are not real, and General Hood is in one way or the other a figment of Robichaux's imagination. But he's also a relic of the past, the past that haunts Robichaux, and the past he must somehow reconcile to the facts of the present-day murder he's investigating.

The last image of the film, in which Robichaux's step-daughter is staring at an old photograph of General Hood with other Confederate soldiers, specifically recalls a similar photograph at the end of Kubrick's The Shining (1980).

The film is based on the James Lee Burke novel In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead. I have not read it but will soon do so. Certain aspects of the film and of Robichaux's character in particular remind me of Raymond Chandler and his protagonist Philip Marlowe.

The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell

In The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead, 2008) NPR commentator and humorist Sarah Vowell discusses the early history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans. At first in the book she comes off like a stand-up comic. Her style is chatty, self-referential, replete with ironic quips, allusions to contemporary issues, and so on. This is not the prose one expects in a book about Puritans. It irritated me for the first chapter or so. But it grew on me. After a while Vowell's intelligent mind, along with the considerable research and reading and her deep understanding of and appreciation for her subject, won me over. She confesses to fascination with the Puritans and their era. At its best, in The Wordy Shipmates, her enthusiasm is infectious and highly informative.

The main actors in her story are John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and others. These are familiar names, but Vowell manages to uncover the human stories beneath the legends. Whatever one may say about the rebellious integrity of Hutchinson and Williams, in their resistance to the rigid Puritan faith, they were equally extreme and rigid. Winthrop himself was capable of duplicity as well as self-deception. Although he participated willingly in the hearings that led to William's expulsion from the Colony, they remained correspondents long after Williams' departure. Winthrop relied on Williams for information about the local Indians.

In her discussion of Winthrop's "city on the hill" sermon, Vowell examines Ronald Reagan's appropriation of the term. She believes that by the time of the Reagan administration the nation had lost the meaning of the phrase and that Reagan himself had no idea of its significance—in fact, she believes his administration epitomized the opposite of what it means.

Vowell's main criticism of the Puritans, aside from their fanatical rigidity about certain issues and principles, concerns their treatment of the Indians. She gives a disturbing account of the annihilation of the Pequot tribe. The Puritans may have loved one another and God, but when it came to the Indians they didn't hesitate to abuse, mistreat, and murder—the annihilation of many of the Pequot tribe, 300 in all, including children, in an event where they were all herded into a tent that was set afire (anyone who tried to escape was shot) is Vowell's main case in point. The Puritans never wavered in their determination to wipe out or at least subjugate the Indians. They believed they were God's chosen people, on a sacred mission to create a new settlement, Winthrop's fabled "city on a hill." Vowell suggests that their belief in their own special and unique calling infiltrated American culture and that it continues to influence American foreign policy and our treatment of other nations and peoples, especially ones who do not share our lifestyles and values. This notion is hardly new—Vowell is only the most recent among a long line of historians and commentators who have made the argument.

From an intellectual as well as entertainment perspective, The Wordy Shipmates is a satisfying book and as good a way as any for the average reader to learn about the early Puritans.

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (2008), by Jon Meacham

In American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (2008), Jon Meacham portrays Jackson as the first "democratic president," by which he means the first president who was not one of the Founders and not of the upper-class, well educated stock that produced Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison. He also portrays Jackson as ambitious for power and sometimes ruthless and vindictive. Known as a hothead in his younger days, Jackson carried a bullet in his body from a duel that he did not have removed until he was in the White House. Jackson could not tolerate disagreement. When he could not persuade cabinet members to his point of view, he fired them—his secretary of the treasury, who opposed his campaign against the National Bank, is an example. When Emily Donelson, the wife of his close advisor and protégé Andrew Donelson, would not treat the wife of the secretary of war John Eaton (her name was Margaret) in a way that was agreeable to Jackson, he sent her home to Nashville with her husband, and although he later recalled Donelson it took him longer to recall Emily. Jackson spent much time, especially in his first term, trying to resolve this controversy, which affected his administration all the way to the vice presidency (Calhoun's wife Floride was a main opponent of Margaret Eaton). Jackson was sympathetic to Margaret because of the way in which his own wife Rachel had been criticized during the 1828 presidential campaign.

Jackson significantly consolidated and increased the powers of the presidency. Before Jackson, the president was constrained in what he could do. The veto was used sparingly, while Jackson used it often. The president could not act independently of Congress, while Jackson made a habit of doing so. The president was not supposed to speak directly to the people, while Jackson did so with the deliberate intention of securing support for his programs and plans.

The level of political rhetoric and factional bickering seems far worse in Jackson's presidency than it seems today. Personal issues were allowed to become factors in political campaigns. Rumors that Jackson had married his wife Rachel before she was legally divorced from her first husband, that she and Jackson had adulterously cohabited, played a major role in the campaign in 1828. Although he won the election, the strain and humiliation of the campaign wore heavily on Rachel. She died, perhaps as a result, before he was inaugurated. Because of his rustic background, and because he defeated John Quincy Adams and was widely regarded as intemperate and ambitious, because he changed the nature of the presidency and did not follow established ways of doing things, he was subject to constant attacks during his presidency. He was often accused of trying to destroy the presidency and wreck the nation.

The main controversy during Jackson's administration was the Nullification crisis. A number of slave-holding states, most notably South Carolina, opposed the authority of the federal government to pass laws that affected them. They contended that if a state did not like a federal law, it could simply nullify the law and not be governed by it. Slave-holding states feared the power of the federal government—they worried that one day the government might try to limit or prohibit slavery. South Carolina threatened to secede from the union. Troops began preparing for battle. Large rallies in favor of states' rights and of war took place. Jackson strongly favored preserving the union and the power of the federal government to pass laws that governed the states. What made this controversy especially difficult for him is that one of the main advocates for nullification was John C. Calhoun, Jackson's vice president. Calhoun resigned as vice president (before Jackson could announce his decision not to have him on the ticket for the second term) and returned to South Carolina, where he was elected to the Senate and then returned to Washington to oppose Jackson.

Jackson managed to defuse the Nullification furor by standing firm in his opposition to Nullification, and by engineering legislation that, although it preserved the government's right to enforce the tariff through military force, removed some of the offensive aspects of the tariff that South Carolina and other states opposed. Had South Carolina seceded, other states might have followed, and the Civil War could have taken place three decades earlier.

Among Jackson's main opponents during his presidency were Nicholas Biddle (president of the National Bank), Calhoun, and Henry Clay. What Jackson is primarily remembered for today is his engineering of legislation that removed Creek and Cherokee Indians from lands they had lived on for centuries in Georgia, Alabama, and other states. The Indian Removal Act passed in 1830, and Jackson made removal of the Indians an important element in his political campaigns. Jackson essentially regarded the Indians as obstacles to American expansionism. He worried that they might conspire with the British and Spanish to weaken or attack the American nation. Although his public statements to and about Indians claimed concern for their safety and welfare—one of the primary reasons he cited for their removal to western territories—it was clear that his primary motive was to ensure security and freedom for white settlers. When he addressed Indian leaders, he did so with a paternalistic and condescending rhetoric that from modern-day standards is difficult to swallow. Jackson's reputation as a military leader rested not only on his spectacular victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans, but also on his victories in the Creek and Seminole wars. It's possible that had the Indians not been removed, they would have assimilated and offered little resistance to white expansion. And it's possible they could have been wiped out in confrontations with white settlers. But the historical fact is that they were expelled from their native grounds, a sad and tragic episode in American history. Jackson never wavered in his determination to see the Indians removed.

Although slaveholding states saw federal power as a threat to slavery, Jackson himself, who owned slaves, believed in slavery as a foundational American institution. He viewed abolitionism as a threat to American prosperity and moved forcefully to deny abolitionists the right to distribute printed materials through the mails.

Meacham's biography is well written. Although it follows Jackson's life from his birth on to the point of his election as president, it is mainly about Jackson's presidency. It takes Meacham only 20 or so pages to cover the decade before Jackson's death following his departure from the White House. Although Meacham clearly acknowledges Jackson's ambition, his role in the Indian removal, and his support for slavery, the one major flaw in the biography is that he likes Jackson a little too much. The biography is not hagiographic, but it is written from a perspective favorable to Jackson, so that it lacks a certain objectivity. Perhaps I don't find the book sufficiently critical of Jackson's attitudes towards Indians and slavery and his own autocratic inclinations. Nonetheless, the book is interesting and readable.

Cadillac Records

Cadillac Records (2008, dir. Darnell Martin) is the somewhat fictionalized story of how Leonard Chess founded a Chicago record company devoted to recording the music of talented African American singers from the Deep South and elsewhere: Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Etta James, and others. Chess, played by Adrian Brody, is an ambiguous and problematic figure in the film. When we first meet him he is having money problems and vows to the woman he wants to marry that he will make money and buy her a Cadillac. He plans to open a night club for African American patrons. Money is a motive for Chess from the start, and it's never really clear in the film whether he's more interested in the talent and music of his artists than he is in their money-making potential. He rewards them for their success by giving them Cadillacs, or renting houses for them to live in, but he doesn't offer much in the way of regular pay, and this becomes an increasing issue of concern for the musicians.

Cadillac Records takes the position that talented black singers such as Muddy Waters and Etta James paved the way for the rock and roll revolution of the 1950s, but that because they lived in pre-Civil Rights America, their options were limited. Their music was marketed as "race music." They could perform only in venues reserved for black patrons. Even when Chuck Berry breaks through with music that isn't immediately categorizable as "race music"—some think it is country music—he is forced to perform to white and black audiences who are kept on separate sides of the room. Cadillac Records like other films about this era suggests that music became a way of dissolving racial barriers. But these singers often had to pay the price–Little Walter was beaten to death, Chuck Berry sent to prison. And none of these singers initially realized great financial rewards for their music.

Most troubling of all was that these singers didn't receive the rewards and respect their music should have earned them. The Beach Boys steal the melody of one of Berry's songs, and he sues them (successfully). Elvis Presley rises to fame performing music in the style that Waters and others popularized. So too do the Rolling Stones. The idea here is that white singers appropriated the music of African American singers. Undoubtedly, that contention is true. But what is arguable is the question of theft. Although there were clearly some instances of theft (see the Beach Boys above) most often, I'd contend, what was happening here was influence. Singers like Presley loved the music they heard on black radio stations. They loved and wanted to sing it themselves. And because American society in the 1950s was what it was, white singers had a better chance of succeeding in the music industry than black singers, who had a limited audience.

The actors in this film are effective. Beyoncé is outstanding as Etta James—her performance of James standards are remarkable (apparently, James herself is not happy with the praise Beyoncé has received for these performances, or for her performance of "At Last" at the Obama inaugural balls). Jeffrey Wright is good as Muddy Waters—in imitation of Waters, he mumbles many of his lines, and his acting is mannered. My favorite of all in the film is Eamonn Walker, who played Howlin' Wolf—there was not enough of him here.

As Harry Chess, Adrian Brody plays the character who becomes the symbol of white exploitation of black singers—more specifically, of white Jewish exploitation—in the film. It's difficult to know what to think of him, or of the view the film takes towards him. He appears to enjoy the music of the singers he discovers, but he never adequately compensates them for their records. What he is most interested in is a "crossover" singer, whose work can sell to and appeal to a white audience—he had found that in Chuck Berry before he went to prison--finally he discovers the crossover artist he dreamed of in Etta James, in whom he appears to be romantically interested. When he dies, she is the only one of the singers to whom he leaves anything—a house. Does Chess truly love Etta James, or is he simply deeply grateful to her for her success as a crossover singer?

Singers are often shown struggling for control over their music and how it's recorded. Muddy Waters, the first singer to sign with Chess, is relatively compliant. He's literally discovered in a cotton field, by folklorist Alan Lomax, and the image of a young Waters working away in the fields is repeated several times in the film, as if to suggest that in moving from the cotton fields of Mississippi to the studio of Leonard Chess in Chicago he is trading one life of subjugation for another. He's slow to develop resistance to Leonard's controlling influence, though ultimately he does, and in the end confronts him openly. Little Walter is clearly troubled when Chess tells him how to play the harmonica or turn off his amp. Howlin' Wolf, on the other hand, makes clear to Chess that he will control how music is played when he is recording it. In the end, when Chess has Etta James recording music to a lush string accompaniment, the suggestion is that he sacrifices the integrity of the music to the cause of profit. A similar issue is displayed in a quite different way in the film Ray (2004), when Ray Charles decides to record a country and western album, and when he records other tunes that are decidedly in a mainstream, easy-listening genre, rather than the rhythm and blues music from early in his career. Fellow black musicians, and his largely black audience, feel betrayed.

It's difficult to assess the arguments this film seeks to forward—the theft of the African American musical tradition by white producers and performers, and the exploitation of black musicians by white Jewish Americans. The film implies the latter argument but largely avoids examining it in any candid detail. This is unfortunate. The uneasy relationship between Jewish Americans and African Americans needs careful study. A problem with the film is the question of accuracy—it leaves out Leonard's brother Phil entirely, who helped run Chess Records. It also oversimplifies the recording history of some of the performers before they signed with Chess Records, and entirely omits their careers following Leonard Chess' death. Basically, this is a filmic treatment of historical characters and situations, but it is not a documentary—it is a fictionalization of facts. It works better as an entertainment, a film about music, than it does as a study of the popularization of the Chicago Blues, and of singers like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Woody Allen has always viewed human relationships as ephemeral, short lived, changeable. His early great films Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) are studies in shifting relationships, couples who pair up for a time and then go their separate ways, looking for other partners. The nostalgia of love lost drove these early films. Allen's view of such relationships darkened significantly in the 1980s and 1990s with such films as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), and Husbands and Wives (1992).

So we come to the question of why we should find interest in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). It is not a comedy. It is not really a romantic film either. Maybe the best way to describe it is as a character study.

The characters in Vicky Cristina Barcelona hold differing opinions about relationships, and they enact those views. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a middle-of-the-road art history graduate student who believes that love is forever and has chosen as her future husband a bland, corporate drone. Cristina (Scarlett Johanssen—one of Allen's favorite actresses) has a more conflicted attitude. Although she says she doesn't believe in monogamy, she does believe in the possibility of finding the perfect partner, but she also chafes at the confinement of long-term relationships. For Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz) relationships mean struggle—her long-term affair with the artist Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Javier Bardem) is a constant battle against and with a person she needs so much that she resents and resists him. Juan Antonio doesn't necessarily have a position on relationships. He goes with the flow. His easy attitude pays off for him. When Cristina tells him that she is not satisfied with their relationship and that she needs time to herself, he accepts her decision, while Maria Elena wants to attack her. One can view Juan Antonio's reaction as post-feminist male enlightenment, or as cynicism—I tend towards the latter view.

I suppose the interest of the film for Allen lies in the constantly shifting array of human connections. Cristina believes that in Juan Antonio she at last has found the perfect partner, but then she grows dissatisfied. Vicky resents and dislikes Juan Antonio but after sleeping with him discovers that she loves him—until Maria Elena tries to shoot her, whereupon she returns to her bland fiancé, who by the end of the film she has married. Even Vicky's aunt, who provides the house where Vicky and Cristina live while in Spain, is dissatisfied with her marriage. Nothing is fixed.

The setting—Barcelona—is beautiful, though it has no particular bearing on the plot. Maybe for the two young American women who go to Spain for a brief respite from their studies, it is an exotic place of adventure and romantic intrigue—they can dally there, experience freedom briefly—then leave. Are they changed? Does anything of importance really happen in this film? Are human destinies determined? The film ends in the middle of things. Nothing is resolved. No single character's point of view prevails. Rather, the film shows that people believe what they believe and that they tend to act on their beliefs, for better or worse. Life goes on.

There's a sort of clinical indifference in how this film treats Vicky and Christina and Maria Elena. Allen seems interested in what will happen to them, which choices they will make, how they will fare in their various entanglements—but there's no erotic or emotional or passionate engagement with his subject. Maybe for Allen, now in his 70s, romance is more a matter of clinical interest than of anything else.

Factory Girl

fFactory Girl (2006) depicts Edie Sedgwick as a plaintive victim of the 1960s and of exploitative males—Andy Warhol, her father, a well known but nameless (in the film) musician. She was definitely a victim, but a victim as much of her own noblesse oblige, her thirst for celebrity and fame, her self-destructive drug use, and her narcissistic self-absorption as of anything or anyone else.

Factory Girl at times seems made in the style of an avant garde documentary, but it is really little more than another biographical picture that never manages to explain or justify the importance of its subject. Edie herself (portrayed by Sienna Miller) narrates much of the film retrospectively, from the vantage point of a drug rehabilitation center in 1970, where she is being treated for addiction. (She died of an overdose in 1971). She is looking back at events, trying to assess her life and what might have gone wrong. The film focuses mostly on the year 1965, when Edie's star was in the ascendant, when she made her mark in Warhol's studio (known as the Factory), and when she had her love affair with Bob Dylan (known in the film as the "Musician"). Edie thinks of herself as an artist but the film shows little if any of her work, so that it is difficult to assess her artistic pretensions, if indeed they were pretensions to begin with. What we know is that Warhol was fascinated with her, gave her leading roles in his strange and aimless films, put her in his artwork, traveled with her to Paris, and then when he grew tired of her, especially after her romance with the Musician, rejected her, finding someone else to replace her, refusing to answer her phone calls or her increasingly desperate requests for money.

Warhol is the most interesting person in this film. Creepily and effectively played by Guy Pearce, he comes off as a narcissistic, self-absorbed poseur unable to comprehend the damage he causes Edie and others, especially after he casts them off. He is a man without guilt or a sense of human responsibility. The Dylan figure comes off better—he is not the one who rejects Edie, in this film—rather, he warns her of the empty nature of the Warhol enterprise and offers her an alternative to the Factory lifestyle, but she cannot bring herself to break away from what Warhol represents—celebrity, fame, stardom. Later, when she is in decline, the Musician tells his assistant to "give her what she needs," but he is not interested in further contact. Edie explains to her therapist in 1970 that her decision to stick with Warhol was the worst of her mistakes—the Musician, she says, was the only person who made her happy.

Factory Girl offers an interesting view of the Factory studio—it shows us an array of strange characters, creating extreme forms of art, but mostly it is interested in their eccentricities. We do see Warhol making films, creating paintings, and we see many of his works—the famous multi-portraits of celebrities, of soup cans, of commercial America—we hear from various characters that in America Warhol is undervalued and misunderstood—but the film makes little attempt to understand him or his achievements, whatever they might have been. From Factory Girl's perspective, Warhol was a conman—he conned Edie, he conned the American public—if there was more to him than that, this film offers no clue.

Traitor

Traitor (2008) focuses on an undercover Muslim operative for an American intelligence group. Early in the film American intelligence agents believe he has gone over to the other side, the enemy side, because he's been out of contact for five years. The question of which side he is really on is not resolved until relatively late in the film. Don Cheadle plays the main character, Samir Horn, and as usual he does a fine job of inhabiting the role. Cheadle does most of his acting through facial expressions. His inexpressiveness becomes a source of expression—though in other films, such as Hotel Rwanda (2004)—he plays expressive, emotional characters.

Part of the difficulty for the American security agents in Traitor is the fact that Samir is a Muslim. It's easier for them to assume that he has thrown in his lot with the terrorists than it would be if he were a Methodist or Episcopalian. Only gradually, as they follow his exploits, do the American agents begin to realize where his true allegiance lies. Samir is a deeply devout Muslim who believes he should avoid the sacrifice of human life at all costs. He is a pacifist. When his actions through no fault of his own lead to the deaths of several workmen, he is horrified.

Samir has moral and religious principles. As an undercover agent he finds himself in situations where he must compromise those principles in order to prevent carnage and loss of life. The compromises cost him deeply, and at the film's end he has broken off both with the Muslim terrorists he had infiltrated and with the American intelligence agents.

The trouble with this film is the almost complete absence of tension or suspense. It should matter to us that Samir may or may not have betrayed his country. It should matter to us that terrorists are plotting attacks on the United States. Will they succeed? Intellectually, the film makes us interested in what will happen. But it does not really make us care. Traitor is a film that operates within the parameters of a suspense thriller, so it is a problem that there is no suspense.

The film was directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who cowrote the screenplay with Steve Martin, among others. Martin also coproduced the film. It's too bad that a film focused on such an interesting main character, played by such a fine actor, exploring such crucial issues as extremism, racial profiling, religious prejudice, and terrorism, cannot arouse more interest or concern in its viewers, at least in this viewer.

Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock

Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? (2006) is an amusing documentary about a 72-year-old-truck driver named Teri Horton who buys for five dollars a large painting that may (or may not) be the work of Jackson Pollock. Much of the film takes place in a bar where Teri and her friends sit and drink and talk.

Human personalities are the main interest of this film. Teri and her conviction that she has discovered a work of art worth fifty million dollars (she turns down offers of $3 million and then $9 million dollars for the painting) versus art scholars and critics convinced that all the known Jackson Pollocks have been discovered and catalogued and that Teri's painting is a fraud.

The film interviews several experts on Pollock, all of whom for one reason or the other don't believe the painting is genuine. Yet a fingerprint on the back of the canvas, discovered by an investigator whom Teri hires, supposedly belongs to Pollock and matches his fingerprints on other paintings. Experts point out stylistic quirks in the painting that do not match Pollock's style. One notes that the presence of acrylics in the painting, supposedly created before acrylics were widely in use, means it is a forgery. But close-up images of the painting, as compared to other confirmed Pollock paintings, seem indistinguishable from the real thing.

Critics and scholars resist granting the painting status as a true Jackson Pollock because to do so would be to deny, to some extent, their own scholarly authority and expertise. How could a valuable Pollock painting escape their notice, especially one bought by an ignorant elderly truck driver at a flea market? One museum proprietor in particular is contemptuous both of Teri and of her painting. He comes off as an effete, over-stuffed, arrogant poseur, a fop.

The film resists taking sides on the question of whether the painting is genuine. Rather it highlights the controversy surrounding the painting along with Teri's efforts to confirm its identity and receive the money she thinks is due her. To represent her in her campaign to prove the painting's authenticity, she hires an art dealer who has recently been released from prison where he served time for art fraud. Asked why she would hire someone convicted of art fraud, she answers that everyone in the art world is a fraud, so what does it matter?

What is art? What makes one painting "great" and worth fifty million dollars and another an easily identified forgery worth $5? That's one of the big questions in the film. The more I looked at Teri's five-dollar painting, a huge and expansive canvas covered with whirling, dynamic colors, a flow of motion and image, the more convinced I became that, whatever its origins and whoever its creator, it was impressive. This film reminded me of The Moderns (1988), which investigated similar questions by focusing on young artist's involvement in art forgeries in 1920s Paris.

Watchmen (film)

The film Watchmen (2009) does an adequate job of translating the graphic novel to screen. As one would expect, it takes certain liberties with characters and the plot, and it alters the ending of the story, with a result that I think improves on the novel. The film accentuates the noirish elements of the novel, and the result is a kind of film noir for super heroes. (There are clear similarities with the ominous cityscapes and the pessimistic valuations of human nature in The Dark Knight). The film replicates many of the perspectives and visual angles used in individual frames of the novel. An example is the opening scene, which views the aftermath of the Comedian's murder from the perspective of Rorschach, high atop the roof of a building.

There came a point in the novel where the plot became so complex and overwrought that the author had to resort to a contrived device so cumbersome (even in this novel which by its very nature requires suspension of all usual forms of disbelief) that it nearly brought the story to a lumbering halt. The film substitutes another plot device that is also contrived, but it's easier to accept, and more logical.

There's little tension or suspense in this film. The characters are interesting, along with their interrelationships and their investigation of the murder of the costumed vigilante heroes. In ways the most interesting character is Dr. Manhattan, whose bizarre transformation in a scientific experiment gone awry gives him godlike powers but leaves him increasingly unable to identify with other human beings. He is so inhuman, in fact, that he speaks in portentous sentences that would come across as comic if any other character uttered them. He's interesting, but also one of the elements that marks the story as a science fantasy—this is not a novel about super heroes in our world—it's a novel about an alternative world where the one genuine super being interferes in human affairs in a way that the super heroes of DC Comics never did. The super heroes of Watchmen span the entire range of the political spectrum, and the novel raises the large question of whether the allure of super heroes represents a kind of fascism—are the pitiful humans they protect too weak and ignorant to understand what's good for them, to control their own destinies?

The most compelling character in the novel, and the film, is Rorschach, whose unwillingness to compromise costs him.

A number of historical figures appear in the film. Lee Iacocca, for one. Andy Warhol for another. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger make appearances—the actor portraying Nixon is so awkwardly made up that he seems artificial and grotesque. Most of the other actors impersonating historical figures bear a slight enough resemblance to the people they're portraying that the simulation works.

Like the novel, The Watchmen is more about talk than action. The graphic novel is about ideas, and the film follows suit. It's intelligent, engaging in certain ways, lifeless in others. But I much prefer it to the hollowness of any number of recent films that blunder across oft trod and well worn ground.

Vantage Point

The 1963 assassination of President Kennedy became a crucial touchstone date in American history. In a certain sense, it marked the advent of uncertainty as a popular cultural concept. Almost from the beginning, rumors, gossip, myths, and tales circulated about the killing. These gained such prominence that they eclipsed the official Warren Report account. In the early 1970s, a congressional committee conducted its own investigation of the assassination and voted to overturn the single-bullet theory of the Warren report. The Zapruder amateur footage of the killing in itself became a cultural fetish, to be watched with agonizing fascination over and over. The Zapruder footage became a sacred visual text for assassination theorists. It formed a crucial center of Don DeLillo's novel Libra and of Oliver Stone's film JFK (1991), which found virtually everyone but JFK responsible for the president's death. (JFK is a fascinating film about conspiracy and overwrought national paranoia. It convinced me--in spite of itself--that the single-bullet theory must be true).

Vantage Point (2008) at first seems to promise another variation on multiple point of view fascination with catastrophic public events. It suggests the television series 24 in its reliance on fast-paced, tightly edited scenes focused on real-time action, intrigue, and political mayhem. It also reminded me of a number of films that deconstruct conventional narrative time sequences as a way not only of telling a story but also of commenting on the very nature of narrative, of cause and effects, of reality. Think of the enormously entertaining Run Lola Run (1998) and of Timeline (2003) and many others.

Vantage Point pretends to be such a film. But in the end it is just another political thriller that uses disjunctive narrative strategies to camouflage a poorly conceived plot and stock characters. The film is set in a fictional Spanish city where Western leaders are meeting in a summit where they plan to present a united front against terrorism. The President of the United States is there, under heavy security, and when he steps up to the podium to speak, he is shot and crumples to the floor. Chaos, explosions, and chaos ensue. The film repeats this scene five or six times, each time from a different perspective, each time providing a slightly different slice of information, each time allowing the viewer to understand more of the story and the roles of various characters in the event. Some characters who at first seem unimportant turn out to be important; others who seem to be nominal bystanders turn out to be villains.

This is not a film about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. As the different versions of the event play themselves out, we do not challenged with contradictory accounts that prevent us from realizing what really happened. Instead, they add up to a complete story. The contending narratives do not cancel one another out. They add up to a conventional, mundane picture of a not-too-complex puzzle.

Forrest Whittaker is one of the only standouts in the film, and he is largely at a loss. With his large slovenly body and his distinctive facial features, he looks like a real human being rather than a slick Hollywood actor in a half-baked suspense thriller. He plays a tourist who for some reason has come to Spain to escape his collapsed marriage. He carries an HD video camera and obsessively films everything happening around him, to a point where he seems almost unreasonably intrusive. His camera becomes one of the main ways in which the film shows the action—as if it is not enough to tell the story from different characters' viewpoints, but as if it's somehow validating to have the ubiquitous video camera involved, the film's own convenient Zapruder home video.

Dennis Quaid is briefly interesting as a secret service agent back on his first assignment after taking a bullet for the president in an assassination attempt a year earlier. Has he lost his cool? Does he still have what it takes? Wasn't there a Clint Eastwood film—In the Line of Fire (1993) with a similar plot?

To ensure our attention, Vantage Point inserts a cute lost child into the equation. Will she find her mother? Will she be killed by a careening vehicle? Stay tuned!

Watchmen, by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, John Higgins

The scope of Watchmen (1986-87) is wide and ambitious. Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, it encompasses the history of comic books and super heroes, 20^th-century history and foreign policy, the Cold War, science, art, and popular culture. The world of Watchmen is an alternative America in the mid-1980s. Nixon is still president of the United States. U. S. defense policy depends on the powers of a super-hero named Jon (his super hero moniker is Dr. Manhattan), who is capable of destroying anyone anywhere in the world at any time.

Watchmen is clearly a product of the Reagan administration. Paranoia about increasing U. S.-Soviet hostilities, about nuclear war, and government repression are constant themes.

This graphic novel is composed of 12 illustrated episodes, interspersed with 12 narrative sections. The episodes were originally published as separate issues during 1986-87. The first few narrative sections contain histories of one sort or the other. Later in the novel they contain pertinent documents or excerpts from newspaper articles. Every narrative in the book is related to every other narrative. One sequence of scenes running throughout the book concerns a newspaper and magazine vendor on a street corner. He is fearful about the growing possibility of nuclear war. A young black man is usually present in these scenes, sitting on a street curb reading a comic book narrative about "The Black Freighter." Excerpts from what he is reading are mixed with the newspaper vendor scenes. (I realize that the term graphic novel is controversial. Even Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman object to it. But it is a generally accepted term designating a form of expression that is receiving increasing respect from readers and critics, and Watchmen is frequently included as a leading example of graphic novels).

The central plot of Watchmen involves a series of murders of former super heroes. In the alternative world of this novel, most of the super heroes are simply average citizens inspired by comic books to put on costumes and become vigilantes. A recently enacted law has made their activities illegal, and most of them have retired. Several characters become involved in trying to discover who is murdering the former heroes.

The characters of Watchmen clearly and dramatically distinguish it from most other comic book narratives. Character development is, I gather, an important element of graphic fiction. Many of the characters are relatively well developed. They have detailed histories, human problems, and complicated personalities. One is afflicted with impotence. Another has a difficult relationship with her controlling mother. They range all over the political spectrum. The most interesting character to me is Rorschach, whose difficult childhood left him psychologically scarred. When the other super heroes enter middle age and retire from vigilantism, he continues. Everyone fears him, regarding him as a psychotic criminal. But in the course of the narrative he proves to be the most interesting of all the super heroes, the most unwilling to compromise his principles, the most intent on discovering the mystery behind the murders. At a certain level, however, all these characters remain what they are: well developed, conflicted comic book characters.

The illustrations are detailed and full of visual information that advances the plot. They are intelligent and appropriate to the narrative itself. But they never rise above the level of standard DC Comics graphics.

"Who will watch the watchmen?" This question expresses a crucial theme of the novel. Watchmen explores the concept of a world where super heroes really do exist and considers what it would be like to live in a world where such beings have nearly limitless powers. Only two characters in the novel actually have such powers. One is Jon, a former nuclear scientist who was caught in an accident that essentially disintegrated him into atoms. He manages to reconstitute himself, and when he does, his powers are limitless. The other is Conrad Veidt, whose intellectual genius and limitless wealth allow him to build and do virtually anything he wants.

Readers must suspend disbelief throughout much of this novel. Of course, Watchmen is science fiction, which by nature requires one to accept the given premises and principles of the story. But science fiction also operates within the demonstrable laws of science. This novel sometimes expects you to accept facile explanations and justifications: for example, Dr. Manhattan's unlimited powers—nothing in the world of quantum physics remotely supports this notion. Another example is Veidt's ability to do many of the things he does, such as create an artificial life form that he teleports into the center of New York City. Limitless wealth will not allow one to do what science cannot accommodate. One might argue that Watchmen portrays an alternative world, a different America where such things are possible, but if the basic laws of biology and physics in such a world differ from those of our own, what relevance does that world have to this one? Or one can argue that Watchmen is fantasy or allegory, but either argument would seem to me a stretch. Or one might insist that in comic books anything is possible, but such an argument subverts if not refutes the links Watchmen draws with our own world, not to mention that this work clearly rises above conventional definitions of the term comic book.

There are slow moments in the narrative. Often very little happens from one frame to the next. Sometimes the effect seems to build tension, suspense. You have to put up with these. There's also a physical issue: the paperback edition of Watchmen that I read combines all 12 issues of the original series. To conserve space (I assume) many frames are crammed onto each page, and the print is small and sometimes difficult to read. (Maybe this is an old person's problem). The mere creation of all the frames that make up the illustrated portion of the novel is impressive to consider. The book itself is heavy. Watchmen devotes much time and space to giving us the histories of the costumed heroes, though in the end this really does not advance the plot—it's almost a kind of diversion. I suspect that the intensity and developing tension of the Watchmen episodes would have developed more effectively had I read the individual episodes as they were published, rather than all within a relatively short period of time.

Is Watchmen great literature?—Newsweek named it one of the 100 greatest novels of the 20^th century. The intricacy of the narrative, the interwoven subplots, the detailed, nuanced creation of the city of New York and of the heroes themselves—all of this is impressive. The novel has an encyclopedic quality, sometimes seeking to encompass everything—all science, all culture, all literature. Clearly the author is creative and intelligent. With a specifically dark and humorless vision he argues that in the end the only way to ensure world peace is to force it on humankind through tricks and deceptions that cost millions of lives.

I do not regard this novel as great literature. Certainly among comic books, among graphic novels, it may deserve iconic status. For me, despite the intricacies, there is a cold two-dimensional quality to its characters and plots and subplots. Despite their detailed lives, the characters in the end are comic book figures, lacking the substance and the grain that characters from real novels possess. We depend in Watchmen on the operating laws and limitations of the world it creates. It's separate from our own world, no matter how much like our world it may be. The fate of that world matters less outside the covers of the novel that contains it than it does within.

A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature, by Richard Gray

Richard Gray's A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature (Athens, GA: UGA Press, 2007) argues that Southern writers, rather than being influenced by previous generations, are in a dialogue with them—that their work is a reaction to, an argument with, in ways both explicit and hidden, the writers who came before. Gray brings to bear an impressive array of modern and fairly contemporary Southern writers, ranging from Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews, and Wendell Berry to many younger writers. Gray is intent on demonstrating the diversity of Southern literature. He also seems wary of the Nashville agrarians, who seemed so relevant thirty years ago but who now at least in this discussion seem considerably less so.

Gray views Southern literature not in terms of a common ideology among writers but instead in terms of a fluid and sometimes homogeneous set of themes and reactions to cultural conditions. To say that writers often dwell on common themes is not to say that they make similar treatments of them. This becomes most evident in Gray's long and excellent discussion of Toni Morrison's dialogue with William Faulkner, whom Gray regards as the greatest of Southern writers. Gray resists the notion that Morrison was influenced by Faulkner (even though she wrote her MA thesis on Faulkner and Proust) and instead contends that in Morrison's work there is a dialogue with the Mississippi writer. As his two main texts in this discussion he uses Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Morrison's Beloved, which he regards as the two greatest books the literary South has produced on race and slavery. (I think the distinction between influence and dialogue here is largely semantical).

The sense of the South as a distinctive entity derives from how others perceive it as "other" and marginal and on the extreme verges of existence. Gray writes: "'Region' and 'regional' are here applied to an area that seems to exist on the extremest margins. They are terms applied by 'us,' the members of a dominant cultural group, to 'them,' some unfortunate lesser breed or area that was and is interesting precisely because it is so far from the supposed center of things" (63). "Those writers who call or see themselves as southern may have very little in common sometimes. What they do have, though, and have had in the past, is an inclination to define their 'southernness' against a national 'other'" (64). "The South, in short, any South, tends to be named and identified against the historical tide—even more against than other spaces or places construed as marginal" (65).

Gray's view of the American South is not rigid or monolithic. He sees the South as constantly involved in a process of change and development. He takes issue late in the book with a statement Walker Percy made in the early 1970s to the effect that regional writing in the South was dead. He suggests that Percy's pronouncement is based on an assumption that comes from within Southern culture, one that sees the South as fixed and defined and in danger of collapse as a result of outside forces. Southern writers, he suggests, should not be defined "from within that monolith." The "culture that, as a matter of self-identification, has defined itself as regional and southern has always been more mixed and fluid than this argument allows" (243).

Gray's final discussion centers on a group of writers who reflect the presence of a large Vietnamese population in the South. Some of these writers are white Americans—Robert Olen Butler, for instance—and others are themselves first-generation Vietnamese southerners, or more recent immigrants. Gray's identification in their work of themes he regards as Southern raises the question of what a Southern theme is—why is a particular theme—a fixation on the past, for instance--essentially Southern? Why is it not simply a human theme? Could any group of writers be picked up and plopped down in the South, with a similar group of Southern themes then emerging? To some extent such themes are basic to the human condition. The South defines the geographical region and culture in which writers explore these themes and from which they borrow elements of lifestyle, politics, religion, and place to clothe them.

The dialogue among writers that is basic to Gray's discussion may well be a dialogue that occurs as much in the minds of readers as within the works and minds of the authors. The more we as readers absorb, the more readily able we are to recognize links and disjunctions between and among the writers we read. Our construction of those links creates the cognitive context in which we read.

In addition to the discussions of Berry, Faulkner, Morrison, there are excellent discussions as well of Eudora Welty, Bobby Ann Mason's In Country, Yusef Komunyakaa, The Bondswoman's Narrative (written some time between 1855 and 1869 by a woman who may or may not have been named Hannah Craft), as well as African American and Native American writers in the South.

Honeydripper

Written, directed, and produced by John Sayles, Honeydripper (2007) is set in 1950s rural Alabama. It begins as one of the slowest and least convincing films I've seen in a while, though gradually it gathers momentum. One issue I have with the film is historical accuracy—a question of representation. I do not know enough about rural African American life in Alabama in the mid-20^th century to judge the realism of this film. It does show that life was hard for rural blacks: they are always scrimping to get buy, many of them work in the cotton fields or other menial jobs, including domestic work for white people. The local sheriff (played by Stacy Keach) seems to have complete control of the county, especially of the African American inhabitants. He arrests them when it suits him and puts them to work in a local cotton field and in general asserts demagogic authority. Unfortunately, he looks and acts so much like the Buford T. Justice character portrayed by Jackie Gleason in Smokey and the Bandit that it is difficult to take him seriously. Other characters in the film are not so stereotypical. All the African American characters are individuals. The film in some way reminded me of Idlewild, a stylized and in some ways fantastical portrayal of rural African Americans in the South, but Honeydripper is not a musical and it is more deliberately realistic.

There are many melodramatic aspects to Honeydripper. The main character, Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) is struggling to keep his juke joint (the Honeydripper Lounge) afloat as he loses business to another juke joint nearby that features more contemporary music that appeals to young folks. Purvis' place features traditional music. We see in the film that Bertha Mae (Mabel John) is performing at the Honeydripper, but virtually no one is there to listen to her. She is a blues singer in the 1930s style of someone like Bessie Smith. Tyrone wants to be loyal to Bertha Mae, but he also wants to keep his business afloat, so he makes plans to replace her with a performer from New Orleans known as "Guitar Sam." He hopes Guitar Sam's popularity will help him pay off his debts. Tyrone is a former blues piano player himself who many years before engaged in a knife fight that apparently ended his performing career. He is married to a pious woman named Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton) who is on the verge of declaring her faith to the local preacher. Their daughter, China Doll, has a weak heart. And so on. Tyrone owes money to everyone and is on the verge of becoming desperate.

Danny Glover seems to be going through the motions in this film. He's flattened and depressed throughout most of the early scenes, weighed down by debt and a distanced relationship with his wife and worries about his business. He shows little energy until towards the end, when he concocts his scheme to save the Honeydripper. Does he have any other source of income? He's supposed to be a fiercely independent man. The sheriff recognizes the fact. Tyrone berates his wife for working for the white wife of the white mayor. Yet he doesn't hesitate to go to the white sheriff when he needs a favor, and even enters into a business arrangement with him when he believes it will save the business.

One of the problems with representation in this film is the apparently middle-class lifestyle of Tyrone and his family. Even though he is deeply in debt, his wife and daughter dress well, and they don't seem to be impoverished. Where does their money come from? Purvis doesn't make enough from the Honeydripper to pay his debts. His wife works as a maid and earns little income. Everyone in the film dresses in relatively clean and nice looking clothes, though they live in shacks and appear to have limited means. What am I missing here? Is the film inaccurate or idealistic in representing the lives of the characters in this way, or is it simply suggesting that what money they have goes to dressing suitably?

Tyrone's daughter China Doll is a glimmer of light in this film. So also is Sonny (Gary Clark, Jr.), a drifter who passes through town and is arrested by the sheriff as a vagrant and put to work in the cotton fields. Sonny and China Doll are drawn to each other right away. Sonny also claims to be a singer, and when Guitar Sam doesn't show up on the day he is supposed to play at the Honeydripper, Tyrone hires Sonny to impersonate him. Sonny plays an electric guitar with an old-fashioned amplifier and speaker. In a sense his music represents the passing away of old traditional musical forms represented by Bessie Mae (who actually dies in the course of the film) and the newer forms that replace them. In the final scene we discover how well Sonny can play and sing (the actor himself is a modern-day bluesman). What the scene seems to suggest is that newer musical forms—electric and modern though they may be—continue and revitalize the traditions they replace.

In the end, the film comes to life. But it takes quite a while to get there. The moment itself is a kind of stereotypical cliché: music solves all the problems of these happy African Americans down on the old Southern farm. Just start playing the piano and strumming the guitar and dancing and all those trials and tribulations fall away. If that seems offensive, perhaps it should. The logic of the scene, as much a relief as it is, is not entirely consistent with the rest of the film, or with reality, either.

Man on Wire

Man on Wire (directed by James Marsh, 2008) recalls Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between the World Trade Center towers in New York City in 1974.

One of the film's great achievements is how it portrays Petit—not as a stuntman, or a fanatic, or a demented man intent on destroying himself—but rather as a singular individual with an unusual talent and a unique ambition. Petit says in the film that as soon as he read about plans to construct the World Trade Center in New York City he conceived his dream of walking between the two towers. Petit is shown as obsessively and even monomaniacally devoted to the pursuit of this dream. He enlists friends as accomplices in his scheme. He trains on a wire suspended across a field. He draws diagrams. They argue over strategy. They sometimes seem to give up. They fly back and forth across the Atlantic and scout out the World Trade Center, its stairways and entrances. They plot as if they are going to rob a bank or a museum, but their true goal is something quite different, something loftier. (Where he got the funds to pay for this scheme the film never mentions).

Man on Wire is a study in the personality of the people involved in the event, a chronicle of the steps they took to achieve their goal. It's also a celebration of the improbable and wondrous feat Petit amazingly pulled off. The film treats that moment, the culmination of the film, as a miraculous instant in time. The film is specifically a celebration of Petit himself, the young Petit. Even the older Petit, thirty-five years later, seems to stand in awe of his younger self.

As Petit's collaborators talk about their role in the event, they are often overcome with emotion, especially as they talk about the walk on the wires itself. They often seem incredulous over what they did—how they eluded guards and policemen in the Twin Towers, posed as workers in the building, hid under a tarp on the top floor when a guard passed through, used a bow and arrow to shoot a leader line from one building to the other.

When he takes his walk, Petit is so high in the air that that he is barely visible from the ground. Several of the men who helped him rig the lines took still photographs, and these are prominently featured in the film. The motion photography is of a barely visible figure—standing balanced on the war, sitting, reclining—remote and untouchable.

The film is narrated in retrospect, from a vantage point thirty-five years after the event it chronicles. Many of the major participants in Petit's walk—his girlfriend, fellow companions, Americans who decided to help him—are interviewed, and the film shows them both as they were in 1974 and as they are today. A few reenacted scenes, using actors, depict preparations for the event. Everyone expresses awe over Petit’s walk—his conspirators, the policemen who took him into custody, the manager of the World Trade Center. For most of them, once the wire walk was done and Pettit and others were taken into custody, that was the end of their relationship. He soon broke up with his girlfriend and lost touch with the friends who helped him. Everyone seems to accept the change as an inevitable consequence of the celebrity the feat brought him.

Never in the film is the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center towers mentioned. But it is there nonetheless, always implied, a future memory. Occasional images summon it up—a wafting slip of paper blown through the air, an airplane passing behind one of the towers. And the consequence of a mistake by Petit would have brought him plummeting 1400 to the ground and his death, another disquieting reminder of that day in 2001.

Man on Wire won the 2009 Oscar for best documentary, as well as numerous other awards.

Young at Heart

From the first scene, in which a 92-year old woman enthusiastically croaks out the song "Do I stay or do I go," by the Clash, Young at Heart (2007) is enjoyable and charming. It's about a group of old people, ranging in age from 72 to 92, who meet together to sing popular music. They give public performances at various places, including a prison where their performance of Dylan's "Forever Young" (immediately following the deaths of two of their members) brings hardened inmates to genuine tears. They also tour Europe and the United States. The performances aren't remarkable, but the performers are. For the most part the members of the troupe are and always have been amateurs. The point of the film is not that once they get together and practice long hours they discover hidden talents. Instead, the point is that at an advanced age they still brim with enthusiasm, vigor, and passion. They're not ready to lie down and die either, though in the course of the film, several do so. The film is dedicated to the 92-year-old woman of the opening scene, who died shortly after the production was completed.

I am of a divided mind on this film. It did charm me. On the other hand, I wondered whether the laughter it often evoked was exploitative. Was the film asking me to recognize the humanity in these old people, or was it encouraging me to laugh at them because they are old and doddering? I'm not sure there is an easy answer.

Lessons of Darkness

Lessons of Darkness (1992) is a Werner Herzog documentary about the first U. S. invasion of Iraq. This film differs from two other Herzog documentaries I have seen—Grizzly Man and Encounters at the Edge of the World—in that the director's narration is not prominent. Instead Herzog relies on the weight of images of carnage and destructive, often presented in a repetitive way intended (apparently) to make and emphasize his point. One problem with this film is that you have nothing with which to compare the images of destruction—what were these scenes like before U. S. bombs began to fall? An occasional point of reference by which to measure the bombs' impact would help. (Admittedly, some of the images are self-evident: cratered landscapes, blasted, shredded tanks). In particular Herzog focuses on images of the Iraqi oil fields—in the opinions of many the reason for both U. S. invasions of that country. When the U. S. attacked Iraq in 1990, Saddam Hussein ordered oil field facilities blown up, so that thousands of gallons of oil poured out onto the desert or went up in flames. Often in Lessons of Darkness you believe that you are looking at the sky's reflection in a lake, and only gradually do you realize that the lake is full of oil, not water. There is, at times, a bloated portentousness to this film that Herzog usually manages to avoid in his best work.

The imagery in this film has a deadening effect. More narration might have helped. Too often I was reminded (with the encouragement of the musical soundtrack) of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982), but in that film repetitive, rhythmic motion synchronized with Phillip Glass music had a mesmerizing impact that this film lacks.

Burn after Reading

In Burn after Reading (2008) bumbling people get involved in situations more complex and dangerous than they can imagine, yet even these situations are not that complicated, compared to others. One of the reasons this film met with lukewarm reviews, I think, was that it was difficult to pigeonhole. Following directly on the heels of No Country for Old Men, it might have led critics to expect some sort of follow-up at least in tone and subject. Instead the Coens give us comical, inept characters played by George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Frances McDormand. On the surface, much of the film might seem like a comedy, yet it is hardly comedy. Burn after Reading is a tragedy masked as comedy. It's a movie about spies and the CIA that is in fact only indirectly about those subjects. It's a film in which horrible things happen to people too naïve and too dumb to merit their fates. It leaves us confused and uncertain how to react.

Frances McDormand plays a trainer in a physical fitness center obsessed with finding a life partner. She never says husband, but it's clear husband, or at least long-term partner, is what she wants. She believes that to make herself attractive to a man she needs extensive cosmetic surgery and much of her motivation in the film focuses on finding a way to fund the surgery. Brad Pitt plays a trainer in the same gym. He's wonderful at playing this character without much substance at all. When he discovers what he believes are secret documents lost by a C. I. A. agent, he and Frances decide to contact the owner and return them in hopes of a reward. Things develop from there.

It would be easy to discuss this film without any reference to spies and espionage. Two characters suffer failing marriages. George Clooney plays a Treasury Department agent who brags that although he carries a gun he's never had to shoot it, even though he's trained to shoot "without thinking." Clooney's character is obsessively dedicated to habit—in everything he does and says. He is vain, narcissistic, unscrupled, and wholly superficial. He is married to a successful children's book author but is constantly looking for ways to hook up with other women. He's building a most unusual present for his wife, whom he doesn't believe knows about his extramarital habits. John Malcovich plays the C. I. A. agent whose attempts to write a memoir are discovered in the gym by Brad Pitt. Malcovich doesn't leave them there—the secretary of the private detective hired by Malcovich's wife loses them—she's planning to divorce him. She's also sleeping with Clooney, who's also sleeping with McDormand.

Key scenes in the film occur on a tree-lined boulevard in Washington, D.C. This is where people go to meet the dates they have arranged via Internet social sites.

All the principal characters in Burn after Reading function in a state of relative ignorance and incompetence. They regard themselves as more savvy, more important, more significant than they really are. As they become increasingly caught in complicated entanglements, they never realize that they're in over their heads, until it is too late. Clooney's character has two such moments of realization. In one he discovers that the person who has been tracking him is a private detective hired by the lawyer whom his wife has employed to represent her in a divorce suit—he has no idea she plans to divorce him. In the second he realizes a connection between himself and a friend of Frances McDormand, with whom he is having an affair. The realization drives him batty—the paranoia he already seemed given to takes over, and he screams at McDormand "Who are you?" and runs in panic down the street away from her.

The most pathetic example of a person in over his head is the manager of the fitness center. He is a retired Greek Orthodox priest who is secretly in love with McDormand's character—she has no inkling of this fact and constantly confides in him about her desire to find the right man. The unrequited lover's attempt to aid McDormand goes fatally wrong.

Malcovich plays a C. I. A. operative with relatively low-level security clearance. His decision to write his memoirs, after being reassigned to a desk job for apparent alcoholism, is a sign of his own failure to recognize his unimportance. When a high-level C. I. A. supervisor learns that the memoir is being peddled to the Russians, he loses interest as soon as he learns Malcovich's security clearance level.

All the lead and secondary actors in this film are excellent, Pitt and Clooney in particular.

Rather than comedy or spy thriller, Burn after Reading is really film noir. No one comes to a good end. Even the C.I.A. supervisor is uninterested in the fates of these people who make the mistake of believing that their lives might mean something.

Encounters at the End of the World

Early in Encounters at the End of the World (2007) Werner Herzog explains that he agreed to make a film about Antarctica as long as it didn't have to be another film about penguins. Oddly, penguins figure significantly in several scenes. In one, Herzog is interviewing an expert on penguins well known for his reserve. Trying to get the man to open up, Herzog asks whether there are "gay" penguins and then whether penguins ever lose their minds, go insane. The man pauses and answers that although he has never seen an insane penguin he has seen penguins become disoriented and confused and wander off from the group. If you pick them up and try to turn them around, they persist walking in the wrong direction. They will walk for miles, and often this results in their deaths.

This reference to me formed an analogy to the main focus of this film on the odd and motley assemblage of researchers and workers who live at McMurdo Station near the South Pole. Philosophers, artists, scientists, all have their reasons for living threre, and all, in some way, are analogous to the penguins. Parts of the film reminded me of an earlier Herzog documentary, Grizzly Man (2005), about the young man who spends years living near grizzly bears, believing that he has achieved a harmonious rapprochement with these wild animals, until one day they attack and eat him. Herzog had little sympathy for the bear researcher, and although he has a clear interest in the people he meets in the Antarctic, he doesn't seem to have much real sympathy for them either.

Landscape photography plays only a minor role in this film. There are impressive sequences shot underneath the Antarctic ice cap, but they are not really beautiful or inspiring and instead are eerily creepy and weird. The world beneath the frozen ice cap is as strange a place on earth as one is likely to find.

What fascinates Herzog about the Antarctic is the desolate isolation and the contrast between the frozen wastes and the small and fragile human settlements. He spends much of the film interviewing people he meets there: a truck driver who was once a philosopher, a British scientist who dresses in tweeds and does research near an active volcano, two biologists who rejoice in their discovery of new single cell species, researchers who relax by playing rock music on the top of a building, and so on.

Herzog finds ecological significance in Antarctica—even in a small settlement of slightly more than 1000 residents there is commercial and chemical pollution. He addresses the subject of technology and explains his certain conviction that the human race will someday soon become extinct—though he never quite connects this conviction to the subject of his film.

Herzog's is the narrating voice of Encounters at the End of the World. The film is loose and wandering in structure as we follow the director from one subject to another. This is not a flaw but an attribute—the film seems structured in just the right way. Herzog often seems to have his perverse tongue in cheek as he asks researchers and other residents of McMurdo Station questions about their lives and what they do. It's clear that he finds these men and women living at the South Pole to be eccentric and odd, but in the context of the film Herzog himself seems equally odd.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Claustrophobia and entrapment are two dominating sensations in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007). The film is told almost exclusively from the viewpoint of Jean-Do, a man suffering from "locked-in" syndrome, the result of a severe stroke in the brain stem that leaves him entirely without control of his body, excepting one eye, which he can blink. With the eye he and a speech therapist devise a means he can use to communicate. She reads out the letters of the alphabet, and when she comes to a letter he wishes to use, he blinks. In this laborious fashion, he composes words, sentences, and then a book. This is his only way to communicate, although he can see the outside world, and observe everything and everyone around him.

One of the amazing achievements of this film is that it doesn't descend into maudlin despair and pity. On the other hand, it doesn't quite achieve what I think it means to—convincing us that through his imagination and capacity for thought Jean-Do can compensate for his physical limitations, freeing himself from the body that entraps him. His plight is never anything but horrible. But through his thoughts, his contemplative abilities, he achieves a kind of accommodation with his situation. This comes as the result of a plea whispered in his ear by a colleague, "Hold fast to the human inside of you, and you'll survive." The film argues that what makes us human is not our physical existence, but our sentient self, our mind. Yet it also demonstrates (perhaps this is not its intention) that without control of the physical dimension, our existence is significantly reduced and minimized.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is told almost entirely from Jean-Do's viewpoint, starting with the moment he awakens in the hospital after his stroke and slowly realizes that he cannot move or speak. We hear his thoughts, and they serve as the narrating voice of the film. The film tracks him as he struggles to deal with his dire situation, undergoes physical therapy, develops a relationship with his speech therapist, is visited by his wife and children, receives a phone call from his mistress (who can't bring herself to visit). The film occasionally departs from this perspective, mainly in flashbacks to Jean-Do's former life as a magazine editor.

In the course of the film we come to know Jean-Do both as he was before the stroke, and as he became afterwards. Mathieu Amalric portrays him. At first I thought all Amalric had to do was appear convincingly inert, but gradually we become aware of the subtle ways he uses facial tone and the movements of the one eye to convey the emotions of his character. His performance is impressive.

It would be wrong to describe The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as depressing, though depressing it is. Instead, it urges us to contemplate Jean-Do's entrapped existence. Director Julian Schnabel succeeds by refusing to sentimentalize his subject, by the use of a method that places the viewer in the locked-in mind of Jean-Do, and that allows us to understand both the limitations and potentialities of his plight.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

It has been years since I read the second volume of C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. Its title was Prince Caspian, and it was essentially a continuation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I never read the books as a child, but I did read them aloud to my oldest son. I remember being struck with the way in which Lewis was able to appeal to the fanciful imaginations of children, the narrative force of the early books in the series, the effectively camouflaged nature of the allegory, and the power of the lion Aslan as a character, a symbol, and a veritable deus ex machina. I also remember being struck by the failure of imagination in the later volumes, where the allegory became more pronounced, more dogmatic, more obviously flawed. But in Prince Caspian we had not reached that point.

I don't remember much of the novel Prince Caspian. What is clear about the film The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008), a sequel to the moderately successful The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, is that action and battle largely replace allegory. Aslan reappears, but for the most part he holds back and allows the children and their allies in Narnia to resolve their problems with the evil forces that have taken over the land. It's odd both in the film and the book that when the four children return to Narnia they find themselves in a time centuries later than the time of their first visit. The people and places they remember have disappeared or are in ruins. An evil power has taken over. The film illuminates this aspect of the children's return effectively. But it dispenses with much of the novel and turns into a fantasy battle film. In contrast to Lewis' novels, the girls take an equal roll to that of the boys, which is all for the good.

The film also preserves the perplexing element of the novel that prevents children who have entered adolescence, the onset of sexual maturity, from returning to Narnia or being able to "see" or "believe in" Aslan. I suppose the notion here is that when reason and logic overtake imagination and fancy, all is lost. For Lewis, the age of sexual maturity, especially for young girls, was the age of sin, of the fallen world, and he couldn't have sexually mature creatures running around in Narnia.

Prince Caspian is somewhat entertaining. The special effects are good. The action is fast-paced and unrelenting. The children are all charming, especially the younger girl. But for the most part Prince Caspian has little in common with the novel on which it is based, which is neither here nor there. It doesn't have to closely resemble the novel to be a successful film. But it manages to avoid and dispense with some of the narrative elements that made the novel a successful children's book, in so far as it was.

Sunshine

In Sunshine (2007), set at some point in the distant future, a desperate mission struggles to deliver a payload—a huge bomb—that will reignite the failing sun. The earth has become locked in a perpetual frozen state, and if the mission fails, life will fail with it. Never in the film are we given much of an explanation as to why the sun is failing and why or how the bomb—perpetually and consistently referred to by the crew of the Icarus as the "payload"--will set things right with old Sol.

Early parts of Sunshine seem promising—the isolation of the Icarus and its crew, their inability to communicate with earth, the perilous nature of their mission. But gradually, as systems begin failing on the vessel, the film transitions into one of those Agathie Christie-type plots that basically focuses on the question of who will die next. This is the standard plot of many a horror and science fiction film—Alien, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, et al, and this one is no different.

It also turns out that the Icarus is the second vessel sent to the Sun—the first one disappeared without explanation. Eventually it is discovered in orbit around the sun, and when the oxygen supply on Icarus dwindles to the point where the mission is endangered, a rendezvous with the derelict first vessel becomes necessary. Numerous complications ensue. The underlying premise of the film (and the underlying premise of many science fiction plots that depend on advanced technology) is that however advanced the technology may be, human error is the Achilles heel.

Sunshine is the sort of film where you can predict events before they occur. Some of the crew members are interesting. Some of the special effects are impressive (some are not). In the end, it just doesn't work.

Babylon A.D.

To know that a film is a Vin Diesel film is to know the following: explosions, fast cars, gunfire, mayhem, tattoos, monosyllables, thick monotone accents. There are scenes in Babylon A.D. (2008) that could be exchanged with scenes in Fast and Furious or The Chronicles of Riddick without anyone's noticing. There's a fundamentally generic and formulaic quality to these films. Diesel's brutal physicality gives him a certain exoticism that also suggests a vulnerability, a nobility, that sooner or later these films get around to discovering. In Babylon A.D. he's some kind of mercenary named Toorop who is hired to escort a young woman named Aurora (Mélanie Thierry) from a hidden convent somewhere in eastern Asia to New York City. It's unclear exactly when this film is set—somewhere in the not too distant future is good enough—but the world has declined into dystopian disorder and mayhem. It's a slightly more advanced world that that of the Mad Max films, a world strongly reminiscent of Los Angeles in Blade Runner, a film far superior to this one. For reasons never made quite clear (probably because no one who had anything to do with Babylon A.D. bothered to figure it out), the young woman in Diesel's charge (she is, of course, winsome and beautiful and possessed of certain powers) is being sent to New York so that she can either save the world or by giving birth to twin daughters who are the product of an immaculate conception help found a new religion. One thing leads to another—explosions, attacks, car chases, kung fu battles (courtesy of Sister Rebekah, played by Michelle Yeoh), an inevitable and unconsummated near love scene, incredible amounts of scientific and religious nonsense, painfully awkward plot twists, and so on. To travel from the hidden convent to New York City, we climb into a ragged sedan. A helicopter toting a giant magnet attaches to the car and hauls it aloft. I still have not figured out the logic of this particular means of transportation.

Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill

Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, is about the multicultural United States after September 11. Memories of that day are often present in the novel. The main character Hans lived with his wife and child near the World Trade Center. They were unable to move back to their apartment for six months after the disaster. His wife is so afraid of another attack, and so enraged at the war in Iraq, that she leaves her husband and moves with their son to England. The ruins where the towers once rose stand in some sort of deliberate relationship to the devastated life of the narrator following her departure.

I found it almost impossible to continue reading this novel when at an early point the narrator discussed the several million dollars he and his wife had squirreled away in investments and bank accounts. How normal and typical are these characters? Hans works in an investment firm. Rachel has some other sort of job. Their lives seem ordinary, typical enough, yet the fact that financial difficulties are not among the challenges they face does make it easier for the author of this novel to focus on personal and multicultural relationships. Life is considerably less complicated when finances are not an issue.

A major element that held my interest, nursed me past my irritation with the affluence of these typical characters, was the narrative voice itself. It's a fluid, natural, engaging voice. The prose style is strong and relaxed, descriptive, introspective, humorous, human. It is one of the main attributes of the novel.

The United States—specifically New York City--in Netherland is portrayed as a center of multicultural life, as the focus of international conflicts (the September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq). It's a life where everything is on the line. Hans' wife decides she cannot countenance living in a nation responsible for the war in Iraq, so she takes their child and moves to England. While the United States stands on the ragged cultural edge of things, England is a safer place. It is where one goes when the battle to survive in the contemporary world becomes too difficult. England is a place of retreat, personal surrender, prepackaged identities, a place where you go when you're old and no longer willing to live on the edge. Hans talks about how Americans move to England and quickly begin adopting British customs and traits, as if they cannot be done too quickly with their other national identity.

Implicit throughout Netherland is the meaning of personal, cultural, and national identity. Hans' friend Chuck Ramkissoon believes his mission is to start an American cricket league. He and the narrator are both cricket fans, and they see the sport as a way of bringing to America some of their own experience. Cricket is a means towards identity for them, especially for Chuck. He is a naturalized U. S. citizen, an avid patriot, a lover of all things American. He sees cricket as a contribution he can make. At the same time, he is a gangster of sorts who collects the proceeds of gaming wagers from various patrons and roughs up those unwilling to pay. Ultimately, he becomes the victim of his double life. This is not giving anything away, as the opening pages of the novel inform us that his body has been identified, washed up in the Hudson River.

Hans himself, along with Chuck Ramkissoon, is a prime expression of this theme of identity. He has moved to the United States from the Netherlands. He becomes a well established and respected financial advisor on Wall Street. He feels a strong kinship with the third world citizens who play cricket in New York. He flies back and forth between New York and London. Finally, he moves to England permanently. He's always shifting identities, nationalities. The game of cricket itself came to many of the countries whose former residents Hans plays it with by England, a colonial power. It's an expression of British colonialism, of the British imperial world. It's a point of irony that Chuck, from Trinidad, and Hans, from the Netherlands, want to bring cricket, a British sport, to the United States as a way of holding on to their own national and cultural pasts.

James Wood in the New York Times Book Review compared Netherland to The Great Gatsby. There are connections. Chuck Ramkissoon himself is much like Gatsby. When he moves to the United States and becomes a citizen, he becomes an American patriot and a protector of tradition. He is a connoisseur of trivial and meaningless information, which he is quick to share. He sees cricket as a service he can do for his adopted nation. Yet under his surface there is another corrupt self that is equally American. Chuck doesn't really see a contradiction between the two personalities he contains, and he expects Hans to accept those divergent selves, once he reveals them. In fact, it is almost as if Chuck reveals his gangster self as a way of threatening Hans after they have had a disagreement. England for Hans is like the Midwest for Nick Carraway, a place to retreat to, a place of surrender.

It's not really clear what this novel is about. After Hans and his wife separate, and their marriage is presumably over, he remains in New York, living at the Chelsea Hotel, continuing to work at his job with the brokerage firm, talking cricket with Chuck. Every second weekend he flies to London to visit his wife and son, but these visits accomplish little. One topic of the novel: what it means to be American. The answer is never clear, and that in itself is the answer—being American is what one understands that term to mean—it's a place to make one's fortune, to live one's life, to make an impact by starting cricket leagues or whatever.

The Chelsea Hotel, where Hans at first lives with his family and then by himself, still exists in the shadow of its famous past. Its tenants are a motley assemblage. Hans befriends a man there who always dresses as an angel. The Chelsea Hotel is a microcosm of the United States, a place where you can make your own identity, be the person you want to be, a place that exists in isolation and separateness from the rest of the world, that infects the world with its ideals and corruption.

Down by Law

In Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film Down by Law we follow the adventures of three down and out men in New Orleans. The black and white film falls neatly into three parts. In the first we meet the three main characters, Zack (played by Tom Waits), Jack (John Lurie), and Roberto (Roberto Benigni). Lurie and Waits we see in arguments with their girl friends, who find various ways to explain to their lovers what losers they are. Benigni is visiting from Italy. He can't speak English and keeps a notebook in which he writes down idiosyncratic English expressions, such as "not enough room to swing a cat in." The three men end up in prison, Lurie and Waits accused of doing things they didn't do. We don't see why Benigni ends up in prison, though he later tells Waits and Lurie that he is there for killing a man by hitting him with an eight ball. The middle section of the film takes place entirely in the New Orleans prison. Lurie and Waits are sharing a cell when Benigni is put in with them. They try to ignore him, but gradually he charms his way into their graces. This section for me was the most entertaining part of the film as we see the gradual chemistry developing between the cell mates. There are several comic scenes, including one in which Benigni incites everyone in the prison block to shout "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream." The prison cell scenes suggest the Marx Brothers or even the Three Stooges, though Jarmusch's characters are far more understated and subtle that these predecessors. In one scene the three cell mates hang on the bars of their cell, gazing outwards, as if there is something to see other than a cell on the other side of the walkway. The scene is as hilarious as it is confining and oppressive. The faces of the three cell mates, staring through the bars, tell the whole story.

Benigni tells Waits and Lurie that he knows a way to escape. We don't see exactly how the escape occurs—we simply see the three running down an underground culvert, laughing. The third section of the film follows the convicts as they flee their pursuers through the swamps and forests surrounding New Orleans.

There is no plot to this film, which simply follows the path of the three companions. Jack, Zack, and Roberto are introduced individually early in the film, and it's only in the prison section that we realize their fates will intertwine. Fates is not the best term to use. There is no fate per se in this film—nothing final happens to the three characters. They just make their way through the various situations that confront them, and we wait to see what happens. Despite the absence of conventional plot, the film is entertaining and Jarmusch wins our attention by his attention to the three characters and the excellent actors he has chosen to portray them. Waits plays a character that might have come straight out of one of his songs, while Benigni seems to play himself, or at least a character that incorporates many of the manic and comic elements of other roles he has played, such as the father in Life is Beautiful.

Jarmusch says in the commentary that accompanies the DVD version of the film that he had never been to New Orleans when he decided to write a script set in the city. He compares New Orleans to New York and says that both are like other countries separate from the United States. The film is shot in beautiful black and white, and images of architecture from some of the more weathered and run down districts of New Orleans predominate in the first part of the film. In the DVD commentary Jarmusch explains that he doesn't like to use the stock iconic images to characterize a place like New Orleans. He doesn't do that in Down By Law, but the buildings he does show are easily recognized as part of the city. I don't know exactly where Jarmusch managed to film the middle portion, but he contrives to present a run down and dreary prison. The film is not really about Louisiana or New Orleans—it's just set there—the film's real interest is in the three main characters. New Orleans and the sections of the city Jarmusch uses in the film provide a context of decay and hard times that are appropriate backdrops for the three down and out main characters.

Roberto talks constantly, even though he can hardly speak English. He manages to tell Jack and Zack that he likes the poetry of Walt Whitman, and later he mentions Robert Frost, whom Jack refers to as Bob Frost. The Frost reference provides a context of sorts for the closing image of the film, where Jack and Zack wander town two diverging roads, headed off towards separate future adventures.

The title would seem to suggest the film's interest in three characters who for various reasons have fallen on hard times because of real or fictional conflicts with the law. We would consider them "oppressed by the Law," as Jarmusch explains in the commentary. But he suggests that the real meaning of the title comes from its use as prison jargon that describes friends who are dependent on each other. The dependency of the three characters on each other in the film gradually grows and then wanes, as they go their separate ways.

One of the most unlikely elements in the film comes in the third section when the three convicts stumble on an Italian restaurant in the middle of nowhere in the Louisiana swamps. A young Italian woman lives and works there and takes the three men in, feeding and clothing them and giving them a place to sleep. Roberto ends up staying with her.

The film ends without warning, though given the logic it follows one can sense the ending coming at the fork in the road which the restaurant owner Nicoletta describes to Jack and Zack. Nothing is resolved, and everything is resolved.

Atonement

In Atonement (2007) a young girl's lie has consequences that reverberate throughout the entire film. Based on the novel by Ian McEwan, the film is a narrative about a narrative. Which narrative is the more important to you depends on how you view the story. The main character could be the young girl who tells the lie. Or the main characters could be two lovers separated by class, mischance, and war.

The film spans the years between 1935 and the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940. One could call Atonement a period piece, and it is certainly that, but it focuses our attention not on costumes or the artifacts of a particular era but on characters and the circumstances they find themselves in. Even so, the first half of the film is a brilliant evocation of the middle 1930s in England. You feel you are there, that what you are seeing is real. We see most of this part of the film through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl named Brionny Tallis, beautifully and creepily played by Saoirse Ronan. She wants to be a writer. She has written a play that she tries to get family members to rehearse for her. She is highly imaginative, always observing and thinking about what she observes, and herein lies the source of her error. She sees something she does not understand, a scene between her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the son of a servant whom the family has put through college. The film makes clear that some misunderstanding has occurred by repeating several key scenes, once from Brionny's point of view, and once from a more objective viewpoint. The scenes involve a tense encounter at a fountain and two instances of lovemaking. The differences between the two perspectives are subtle, but they are sufficient to let us know that perspective, context, and a child's limited understanding are crucial factors in the developing story.

As a result of Brionny's lie, Robbie is accused of a crime and sent to prison and later given the choice of remaining in prison or joining the British army. Cecilia is estranged from her family and goes to work as a nurse in London. She is apparently angry with her family for believing Brionny's story.

Atonement is beautifully photographed. The early portions, set on an estate in the English countryside, seem nearly flawless. Beauty is the film's downfall, at least in the later sections, which occur around 1940 on the battlefront in France as the British forces retreat in response to the German invasion and on the home front in London, where Cecilia and Brionny work as nurses.

The film follows Robbie and two other soldiers who have become separated from their unit and are wandering through the countryside, hoping to meet up with British forces before the invading Germans arrive. They sleep in the loft of a barn; they walk through immense expanses of landscape. In an orchard, Robbie comes across a group of young school girls, all shot to death in their school uniforms, lying placidly on the ground. When the three men at last are reunited with the British army on the beach at Dunkirk, total chaos reigns, and the effect is a strange mixture of carnival and nightmare and dream. Soldiers are drunk and milling around, singing in groups, wandering aimlessly. Horses that cannot be evacuated are shot. Equipment that cannot be taken back to England is destroyed. Chaos and disorder are rampant. One unbroken camera sequence moves for five minutes back and forth across the varied activities and events taking place on the beach. The result is impressive and often stunning. At the same time, it is too much a sensation—there's no point to it, except for the fact that Robbie and his mates are part of it all. The scene in which Robbie finds the slaughtered school girls leaves one numb. Robbie responds with a sort of mute horror, and the various elements of the scene certainly do contrast and contradict one another—the dead young girls in their neat uniforms, the holes in their heads or other parts of their body, the strange absence of blood. But to what end?

The later scenes in the film follow Brionny in her work as a nurse in a military hospital. She continues to write, late at night. She's come to realize the terrible error she committed five years before and attempts to contact her sister, who never responds to her letters. She wants to correct her mistake, to atone for her sin. We see one scene in which she does go to visit Cecilia and discovers her living with Robbie, who is briefly home from the battlefront.

In a final scene, many years later, Brionny is 77 years old and being interviewed about her 21st and what she describes as her last novel, which is about Cecilia and Robbie and the lie told at the start of the film.

As I said at the start, Atonement is a story about a story, and there are significant differences between the stories told. There is the story that Brionny is an actual part of, along with the other characters, and there is the story that she tells in her novel, the story that is, presumably, the substance of the film.

Brionny's novel is an attempt at atonement for her sin and the ruined lives it caused. But does it make for a successful film? Well, yes, on a certain level Atonement is well made, moving, intellectually engaging. Brionny herself is the most interesting of the characters, not only for how she imaginatively immerses herself in all aspects of the narrative, but also for the developing nature of her character. She is self-reflexive, hyper-conscious, in the extreme. She is the mind of the film, essentially, and in her we see how from strange and perverse admixtures of life and imagination and personal complications art is made.

But for me, the film's ultimate disposition of its story is a sentimental surrender—another lie, a distortion of truth and reality--rather than a real gesture of expiation. The film doesn't want us to see it that way, but I do nonetheless.

Atonement was directed by Joe Wright, who also directed Pride & Prejudice in 2005.

Jules et Jim

It's a delight to encounter in Jules et Jim (1962) the absence of the typical patterns and rhythms of American cinema. This early Truffaut traces the friendship of two men—one German and one French—starting before the first World War through the early 1930s. They become fast friends and spend much time together, so much so that some question the nature of their relationship. They meet a woman named Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), a free spirit in every sense of the word. They fall in love with her and Jules begins a relationship with her, but Jules remains friends with Jim. The film shows scene after scene of the idyllic times the three spend together. When war is declared, both Jules and Jim are called to duty by their countries. Catherine is pregnant and decides to marry Jules.

During the war, both Jules and Jim worry that one will kill the other. Jules is glad to be assigned to the Russian front, where he knows Jim is unlikely to be.

When the war ends, Jim and Jules resume their friendship. Catherine has given birth to a beautiful child, a girl. When Jim visits, both Jules and Catherine confide in him that their relationship has soured. Catherine says she can no longer be a wife to Jules, and Jules says he is resigned to the end of their relationship, and that he will do anything to avoid losing Catherine, who has had affairs with at least three other men. Jim finds himself attracted to Catherine, and she feels a similar attraction. Jules tells Jim that he can accept the possibility of a relationship between Jim and Catherine and even hopes that it may prevent him from losing her. Jim moves in, and the three begin a life together.

Jules et Jim chronicles the ups and downs of this unconventional relationship. The tone is casual and lighthearted. The sequence of events seems to build towards nothing. Catherine's changeable personality, her shifting relationship with Jules and then with Jim (as well as other men), determines the course of the film. Eventually, Jim decides that he cannot put up with Catherine and decides to marry a girl in the city. They all meet in a movie theater, which is playing newsreels of the 1933 book burning by the German Student Association. Jules and Catherine invite Jim to visit. Catherine asks to speak to Jim privately in her car. She drives it off a bridge and they both die.

What begins as a film about an unusual relationship ends in a tragedy caused by a woman who is probably a psychopath. Although Catherine's emotional problems deepen as the film progresses—Jules is afraid she will kill herself, and at one point she threatens Jim with a pistol—the carefree tone never really changes. Is Catherine simply a free spirit, a woman who doesn't feel restrained by conventional morality, who feels free to seek happiness and fulfillment without regard for the reactions of others, or is she mentally ill? The possibility that she has a psychopathic personality is never raised until the final scenes of the film, and even then it isn't clear that we are not supposed to think she has acted impulsively out of her desire not to lose someone she loves.

The ending seemed out of synch with the rest of the film.

Kung Fu Panda

The fun of Kung Fu Panda (2008) is the animation and the palette of colors used to depict the stylized Chinese landscape where the story takes place. There is nothing remarkable about the story itself, which involves a panda bear named Po (voiced by Jack Black) who has always dreamed of becoming a kung fu master. (His father, a duck, wants him to take over the family noodle business). Through an improbable series of events, Po is anointed as the next Master of the Golden Scroll, and he is trained for the role by Master Shifu (a red panda voiced by Dustin Hoffman). Five kung fu warriors—a tiger, snake, praying mantis, crane, and monkey—all trained by Master Shifu—also figure into the tale. Together with Po they must defeat an evil kung fu warrior, a leopard named Tai Lung who is intent on destroying the Valley of Peace in which the characters live. TaI Lung also wants to find the secret of the Dragon Scroll, which is supposed to give him universal powers.

The secret of the Dragon Scroll is simple: you have to believe in yourself. This seems to be the standard theme in many animated Dreamworks and Disney features—believe in yourself and everything will work out. The theme works well enough here.

Kung Fu Panda might be criticized for its appropriation of Chinese legend and its depiction of racial stereotypes. But the stereotypes are hardly there, and if anything the film pays tribute to the tradition it borrows from. The animation is beautiful and creative, and the film is a pleasure to watch.

Hancock

The two personalities of the schizophrenic Hancock (2008) prevent the film from being better than it is. But they don't prevent it from being entertaining, and from having at least some substance. One personality focuses on Will Smith, an alcoholic vagrant who also happens to have super powers. He can stop speeding trains, prevent bank robberies, foil disasters, but he's usually drunk when he does so, and as a result often leaves a wake of destruction behind. He's wanted for numerous crimes by local law enforcement. Hancock hates being a super hero. When he saves an idealistic publicist named Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) from being run over by a speeding locomotive, the publicist offers to help him change his image. This involves getting a spiffy costume, accepting a prison sentence for his misdeeds, thanking the local police for their good work, and not wreaking havoc. Hancock actually wants a better public image, and when the publicist's advice begins to pay off, he is happy.

What makes Hancock an interesting character is Will Smith's acting. Smith brings the character to life as a real individual rather than as a flat comic book stereotype. Hancock has a genuine personality, and he's more recognizable as an individual than most other cinematic superheroes.

Of course, there has to be an explanation for Hancock—where did he come from, where did he get his powers? All he can remember is waking up in a Miami hospital some eighty years before—with amnesia and super powers.

Here's where the film's second personality comes in. It turns out that when the publicist takes Hancock home for dinner and introduces his wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), strange things happen. She behaves in a cold and hostile manner towards Hancock. When they are alone in the kitchen, they're drawn to each other. They find themselves embracing. Suddenly, she throws Hancock through the kitchen wall. She too has super powers, unbeknownst to her husband. Now the film becomes a tad prosaic and literal. We get a long explanation of how, thousands of years before, teams of super heroes were created to protect the human race. (Who created them we are not told, but there's some suggestion that these super-hero teams might have been the basis of Greek mythology). Hancock and Mary are the last surviving pair, and they were engineered always to be drawn to each other. Unfortunately, as soon as they're together for any length of time, they begin to lose their powers.

The idea of a lonely and depressed super hero lost and isolated on a planet full of unremarkable humans is interesting. There's a strongly humanistic quality in the film's portrayal of Hancock. He suggests Prometheus or Milton's Satan in hell. Smith makes this part of the film interesting. But when Hancock and Mary begin wrestling with their attraction to each other and combating a criminal who wants to destroy them, the film takes on the quality of a comic book narrative and becomes less interesting. But it remains entertaining.

The coincidence that the film's second personality hinges on—that Ray Embrey happens to be married to Hancock's partner—does strain one's credulity.

Wanted

To appreciate Wanted (2008), one must first get past the opening scene, which violates in fundamental ways the basic laws of physics, especially ballistics. The scene is patently absurd and absolutely riveting. The entire film is absurd, and if you judge it by conventional standards there is no hope that you will enjoy it. A reviewer for Salon referred to it in a digest of the best films of 2008 as "unwatchable."

Wanted is eminently watchable. It is highly entertaining. The pace never flags. You just have to take it on its own terms.

A young accountant named Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), bullied by his supervisor and often ridiculed by co-workers, receives word that his father, whom he never knew and who abandoned him seven days after his birth, has been killed. Later that day, a beautiful young woman taps his shoulder in a grocery store and informs him that he's about to be killed. Wanted takes off from there. The young woman is named Fox, gamely played by Angelina Jolie.

Gibson discovers that his father belonged to a thousand-year-old cult of assassins whose mission is to eliminate evil men and women and to keep the world "in balance." The cult's leader is named Sloan (Morgan Freeman—is there a film out there in which Freeman doesn't appear?). Gibson is recruited to the cult so that he can assassinate the man who killed his father—we're told that only Gibson will be able to do this.

Gibson undergoes a brutal training session and learns the ways of the assassins' cult. Of course, there are numerous complications, especially as the film drives towards its conclusion. I make no claim for this film as a work of art. But it was certainly fun to watch.

Scent of a Woman

Scent of a Woman (1992) has never quite worked for me. First and foremost, Al Pacino overacts shamelessly throughout the whole film. His character, Colonel Frank Slade, is a loud braggart and vainglorious man who by nature needs to dominate every situation he is part of. Blind and alone, he is ready to end his life, and he is full of self-pity and obvious misery. For one last weekend of life, he hires a prep school student, Charlie Sims (Chris O'Donnell), who is on the verge of getting himself expelled from school because he will not give up the names of three students responsible for vandalism. Both individuals believe, for different reasons, that their lives have come to an end. Through the weekend they spend together, as Charlie guides Colonel Slade around the city, helping him enjoy fine food, dance the tango with a beautiful young girl, drive an expensive car at breakneck speed, and so on, they come to like and respect one another. Each saves the other's life. I have over-simplified, but it is important to make the essential pattern, the formula, clear.

Pacino's character doesn't make sense to me. He admits he has always made bad choices. He is quick to announce that he once served on Lyndon Johnson's staff. He alienates his relatives and has no real friends. He spends money as if he has a limitless supply—hiring limousines and prostitutes without regard for cost. He rants and bellows his way through the film, bullying everyone in sight. We are supposed to pity him for his isolation even as we are repulsed by his crude loudness. Why is he like this? The film and, more to the point, Pacino don't make the answer clear.

The film's title alludes to how Pacino's character in several scenes identifies the perfume that a woman is wearing. He is a connoisseur of women, as if they are bottles of fine wine. His love of beautiful women is part of his love of life. This is one of the archaic qualities of the film. Pacino's character is to women as Caesar Milan is to dogs.

There is in all this dross one scene of pure magic. It is the scene in which Pacino senses the presence of a beautiful young woman in a restaurant where he and Charlie are dining. He offers to teach her to tango. Pacino carries off this scene with power and grace. You're convinced for the moment that he is blind and also capable of leading a woman across the restaurant floor in an elegant, complicated dance with beauty and grace. The look of rapt concentration on Pacino's face in this scene is worth the entire film.

Point Break

In Point Break (1991) surfer dudes disguise themselves as ex-American presidents and rob banks. Their leader is played by Patrick Swayze. A young FBI agent, Johnny Utah, played by Keanu Reeves, is assigned to go undercover and infiltrate the group. In doing so, he falls in love with a girl who hangs with the surfers. He also bonds with the surfers. Swayze explains to his group at one point that they don't rob banks because they are greedy but because they are making a statement against the system—they're being individuals, rebels. Surfing is also a way they express their rebellious individualism.

Although the surfing sequences in the film aren't particularly exciting, two sequences involving sky diving are. In the second, Keanu dives from an airplane without a parachute, in pursuit of Swayze, who has kidnapped his girlfriend.

Just about everything in this movie is improbable. The main feature Swayze has going for him is his hair, and that isn't enough. Keanu Reeves shows more emotion in this film that in his later work, where catatonia seems to be his primary mode. When the surfer dudes discover he is an undercover FBI agent, instead of killing him or refusing to have anything to do with him they take him skydiving. Bad judgment on Reeves' part gets him into all sorts of trouble. The film doesn't intend that its audience apply firm rules of logic to the viewing experience.

The film wants us to admire the surfer dudes and their rebellious individualism, their revolt against the system, even at the same time it is careful to show the dudes getting their comeuppance.

Gary Busey plays a wild-eyed FBI agent to whom Reeves is assigned as his partner. Busey's character brings some life to an otherwise deadening film, though it is clear more or less from his first appearance that he will not survive.

Surfing, bank robberies, skydiving, the rubbery masks of ex-presidents, Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, lots of gunfire—what more can be said?