Django Unchained

Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2012) is a spaghetti western about slavery. Set in Texas and Mississippi in 1858, it follows the trail of a German bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and his associate Django (Jamie Foxx) as they hunt wanted outlaws.  Dr. Schultz’s basic operating procedure is to identify the outlaws and then to shoot them dead, taking their bodies back to the local sheriff to claim the bounties.  To justify his methods, he always points to the wanted poster that says “Wanted Dead or Alive.”  After they dispense with a particularly nasty gang, he gives Foxx his freedom, and together they set out to find Foxx’s wife, who has been sold to a particularly nasty plantation owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) of the plantation Candieland.

This film has all the distinguishing marks of a Tarantino film--moments of comedy followed by scenes of extreme violence. The funniest scene (there aren’t many) comes when a band of hooded men headed to attack the bounty hunters stop to argue about their masks, which do not fit.  The man whose wife made the masks is offended by their discussion and rides off in a huff.  Shortly afterwards most of the masked men die in a bomb blast rigged by the bounty hunters.  Such scenes juxtaposing the comic or bizarre alongside violence are traits of the spaghetti westerns and B-level films Tarantino takes as his models.  Schultz himself drives a closed wagon with a large tooth mounted on a spring on its roof—it wobbles back and forth as he drives—he was once a dentist—the tooth is an ever-present mark of absurdity that would fit right into any number of Sergio Leone films.

Tarantino’s main method in Django and other films is to show horrible scenes of racism, brutality, and suffering that are followed by scenes in which those responsible for the racism, brutality, and suffering receive their violent comeuppance.  Moments of inhumanity followed by violent retribution.  “There is no remission of sins without the shedding of blood.” These scenes provide catharsis, or so I think Tarantino intends, that allow the viewer release from whatever the brutality might be.  This was his approach in Inglourious Basterds (2009).  I didn’t like that film’s heavy-handed distortion of history (all the high command of the Third Reich, including Hitler, are killed in a bomb blast and fire at a movie theater). But here it doesn’t bother me that much.  There is a deliberate broadness to this film’s portrayal of plantation owners, slaves, and lower class whites.  One reviewer noted that it is the broadness one finds in a comic book—there are few if any gradations between good and bad.  Only in the two main characters do we find complexity.

Christoph Waltz creates a truly unusual, distinctive character in Schultz.  He is affable, always calm and sociable, never out of sorts.  He seems to fear nothing.  In his cart with the wobbling tooth, he at first seems a foolish figure, but when he begins to shoot down people in his way we realize he is someone to take seriously.  He decides what he needs to do to achieve his goals, and he does it.  From the earliest moment he makes clear his aversion to slavery, although slavery is not his main concern.  Bounties are.  Moral compunctions don’t slow him down when it comes to killing wanted men.  Finding outlaws and bringing their bodies in for the bounty is what he does.  He agrees to help Django find his wife out of friendship. 

Django begins the film as a beaten-down man in a coffle of slaves being led towards auction.  When Schultz frees Django because he knows what several men Schultz is hunting look like.  The film shows Django’s gradual transformation from oppressed victim to agent of retribution.  Schultz lures him into the bounty hunting business both by the offer of freedom and by the opportunity to shoot white people.  Schultz asks him, after one successful episode, how he likes bounty hunting, and Django answers, “Kill white people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?” After Schultz frees him, they set out to find his missing wife.  But the search for his wife, and the desire to punish those who mistreated her, gradually becomes a quest to punish those who practice slavery.

The final scene in the film, in which Django slaughters every member and worker of Candieland and then blows the plantation house up in a tremendous explosion is the expected cathartic moment.  But what does it accomplish?  It does away with the bad guys (and woman).  It allows Django to ride away with his wife.  In reality, it’s not likely they would have survived long into the night, given the historical place and time of the action.  But the film doesn’t show reality.

Perhaps the most unsettling character in the film is Stephen, the head slave of Calvin Candie.  Played by an almost unrecognizable Samuel K. Jackson, the character seems to have been designed to resemble the bug-eyed stereotypes of slavery.  He shucks and jives, speaks in a heavy dialect (of the sort that whites would imagine for him), and is wholly devoted both to his master and to slavery in general.  Any challenge to that Institution enrages him.  Slavery gives him his position of power and influence as the head slave of Candie’s plantation.  He is the incarnation of what slavery in one sense sought to accomplish—the complete deformation of a human individual.  Stephen has no sense of himself as a slave, as a person of color, as someone who shares in common certain social and ethnic realities with other slaves on the plantation.  He embodies the stereotype Slave, the iron jockey figure that used to appear on so many Southern lawns. In fact, he seems to run the plantation on an equal basis with his owner.  When he recognizes that Django and his wife Broomhilda know each other, he summons Calvin into another room and informs him, speaking without dialect, sipping on a bourbon and sitting in a comfortable chair, in the iconography of the patriarch.  The racist type that he embodies is a conscious and voluntary identity he assumes for himself.

Even though the film attacks slavery and racism, it certainly uses racist stereotypes.  Stephen is an example.  The first time Schultz gives Django the chance to choose clothing, he dresses up like little Boy Blue.  Django’s wife is named Broomhilda.  Django loves to kill white people.  And of course the whites are stereotyped as well—no graduations of moral virtue at all.  It’s beyond Calvin Candie’s range to be anything other than the stereotyped slave owner that he is. 

The film’s final violent scene of retribution towards which everything has moved reminded me of any number of video games that allow the player to slaughter hordes of evildoers.  It reminded me of similar scenes in numerous films of the last fifty years, including many of the films that Tarantino is emulating here.  And it reminded me of nothing so much as the school house in Connecticut where a deranged killer with an automatic weapon slaughtered 20 little children.  Is there a connection—between the video games, the movie violence, and the savagely slaughtered children?

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

In Lucretius’ poem De Rerum Natura the “swerve” is an irregularity in the movement of atoms that compose the universe.  That small irregularity gives rise to the variety and shape of the universe as well as to free will in humans.  The swerve is analogous to the irregularities in the background radiation left over from the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago—the same irregularities that gave rise to galaxies, stars, plants, and us.  Lucretius had a somewhat different notion of atoms, and of universal laws, than do scientists today.  But the congruence between Lucretius and modern science on this and other points is remarkable.  There are plenty of differences, however. By modern terms, Lucretius was not a scientist.  He was an observer and Epicurean philosopher, and his poem is all the more remarkable as a result.

In his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Norton, 2012) Stephen Greenblatt narrates the history of the recovery of Lucretius’ poem, hidden away in a monastery library for eight hundred or so years, recovered by a scribe named Pollius Bracciolini, famous for his beautiful handwriting and for his recovery of ancient texts on the verge of being lost.  Greenblatt’s account of the world of Pollius, his involvement as a high-ranking official in the Vatican, as apostolic secretary to several Popes, and as someone who helped develop not only modern cursive script but also the concept of libraries, of the humanities in general, of the preservation of culture and history, is fascinating.  Greenblatt summarizes the important points in Lucretius poem and argues that its reintroduction to the intellectual world in the 14th century worked a major influence on the development of the Renaissance and of western world thinking.  It was a highly controversial poem when it was written, and even more so when it was recovered.  It argues that the Universe operates according to natural laws, that there is no life after death, that individuals should seek to enjoy their lives while they are able.  It undermined Roman and Christian religion by its insistence that, although allowing that the gods do exist, they had no interest or role in human affairs.  Greenblatt’s book is highly readable.  Its argument for the poem’s influence seems to be less compelling than the account of Pollius and the poem itself, but it’s fascinating nonetheless.

The Man from Earth

As a college professor, I’ve never felt that films get college professors right.  Sometimes we’re eccentric and quirky, or egotistical, or venal, or somehow out of touch with the world.  Often we’re shown having relationships with students, or as burned out, or as super-intelligent., or as excessively privileged, or as bitter failures.  In reality, college faculty vary widely in personality and type and basic characteristics. All of them are human beings.  It’s difficult to identify a stereotype.  We get an array of professor types in The Man from Earth (2009, dir. Richard Schenkman): one man is having an affair with a student, another is a burned out biologist, another a Bible-thumping literalist, another an anthropologist interested in the deeper questions of human existence, another a senior psychologist at the end of his career.  They all behave in a goofy, artificial way, not as I’ve seen my own colleagues behave (most of the time), but not necessarily in a way fundamentally unbelievable.

What I like about these professors is their interest in, and fascination with, ideas.  The whole film takes place in a rustic small cabin that belongs to a colleague, John Oldman, who has announced, unexpectedly, after ten years of teaching, that he is leaving for parts unknown.  His colleagues and friends come over to check on his well bring, to dissuade him from his decision.

He tells them an incredible story—he claims to be 14,000 years old, a surviving Cro-Magnon man, who by some quirk of biology and genetics has never aged beyond his 35^th year.  He spends much of the film convincing his friends of the truth of his story.  He recalls an astonishing number of historical details, claims to have studied with Buddha, and describes his wandering back and forth across Asia and Europe and finally to North America.  He makes one astonishing revelation.  His friends spend much of the film in varying stages of disbelief and outrage, but they also plunge into the discussion he invites them to have—on the implications of life and its meaning for a man who never grows old, on the possibility that he story he tells them may be true.

I enjoyed listening to the ideas and questions bandied about in this film.  They cover everything from the meaning of identity and memory and love to time and death and belief.  Unfortunately, these professors talk on the level of somewhat intelligent and extremely stoned college students.  The script is written on the same level.

This film interested me for its willingness to dramatize the exchange of ideas, for its concern with deeply profound questions, and for its failure to be more than it is.  

The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson

The Family Fang (Kevin Wilson, Ecco, 2012) is not a big book—a little over three hundred pages.  But it attempts to be something more than it what it is, and the basic conceit—of two parents who use and thereby damage their children in their performance art exhibitions—becomes repetitive and tiresome.  Halfway through, I was ready for it to end.  When it did end, I was irritated at its predictable outcome.

The Family Fang argues that the evil parents do lives after them. Whatever good there might have been is overridden by the damage.  For the Fang parents, Caleb and Camille, every real situation is one to be exploited, manipulated, and transformed into an artistic event by staging a stunt or a trick or a subterfuge of some sort that throws unwitting participants for a loop.  As a result, their two children, Annie and Buster, lose their grip on reality and their own respective identities.  When we encounter them in the novel, their lives are breaking down, and they return to live temporarily with their parents—a return that precipitates the central crisis of the novel.

So the message here is that you have to escape the influence of mater and paterfamilias, you have to grow up and live on your own.  You can’t live as if at any moment your parents might step in and alter things, as if they might step in and save you. 

The most interesting aspect of the book for me was its structure.  It is set in the present, when the grownup children’s lives are collapsing.  Alternating chapters are told from Annie’s and Buster’s point of view, followed by a chapter that returns to one of the parents’ “performances” at some time in the past.  Gradually these narratives coalesce.  But the thinness of the plot and the characters themselves hang weakly on that structure, flapping in the doo-diddledy-doo wind.

The Fangs reminded me of the family in John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire, one of his weaker novels.

The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2008) evoked a country menaced by social collapse and anarchy.  A film of the post-2001 era, when external conflicts and internal dissension challenged the nation’s stability, the film touched on concerns about security measures adopted by the U. S. Congress that, in the name of public safety, gave the government access to the private lives of individuals in a way more intrusive than before.  The film ended with a paradox: a public servant named Harvey Dent, heralded for his civic virtues, had gone over to the dark side.  He conspired with the Joker to kidnap Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend and the police commissioner’s son.  Batman rescues the boy, but the girlfriend dies.  The city is saved.  But because Batman believes the city needs someone positive to believe in, he allows the people to believe that Harvey Dent died a hero, and he is blamed for killing him.  The logic of that decision never quite made sense to me.

Eight years later crime has largely disappeared in Gotham City, owing mainly to the Harvey Dent law, which gave law enforcement new rights and powers to deal with lawbreakers.  In The Dark Knight Rises (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2012) we move beyond 2001 to the post-2008, Great Recession, Occupy Wallstreet period.  The conflict is defined in terms of the haves vs. have nots, those in power who clawed their way to positions of prominence by exploiting the weak and the dispossessed.  The villain is a man named Bain, who wears a metal mask over his jaw to reduce debilitating pain, who himself grew up in a Middle Eastern prison to which the weak and dispossessed are condemned by their oppressors. 

One would expect the numerous twists and turns in this sort of film, but director Nolan imbues the narrative with ambiguity from beginning to end.  The wealthy businessmen and company owners are among the villains too.  Wealthy philanthropist Bruce Wayne, who spends much of the film a recluse or prisoner, is himself one of those who hold power and money, and though he uses his position to support charities and philanthropic causes and serve the public good, there is no missing the fact that he is one of those whom Bain seeks to overturn.  Some of Bain’s allies, until he manages to kill them, are among the movers and shakers of America’s corporate and economic power structure (some of the movers and shakers oppose Bain too, so this is not a black and white treatment).  Wayne himself is a torn and conflicted character—grieving for eight years over a dead girlfriend, selfish, hell-bent on violent retribution, party to deception, self-destructive, interweaving his own personal torments with those of his world.  The film to its credit never resolves his character.

Despite all this, the film does side with Batman and with Bruce Wayne, with an orderly society even if it is one that includes social and economic inequities.  By making the point that some of Bain’s complaints may have validity, the film plants the notion that change is needed, that the problems of the nation can’t be reduced to binary distinctions of good and evil, of criminal and law-abiding behavior.  There’s no doubt about Bain, however.  He exploits and terrorizes and deceives everyone, kills without regard for his victims, unleashes anarchy and mayhem, seeks the total destruction of Gotham City by a nuclear blast, so that however you might feel about our problems there’s no doubt as to how you should feel about Bain, unless you are, like he, a psychopathic monster.

The film riffs on themes of sacrifice, of overcoming one’s moral failings to assert virtue, of truth vs. falsehood.  It shows a revolution in which the dispossessed overthrow the power structure and place former public servants, police officers, and corporate owners on trial and then execute them.  There are shades here of the French Revolution, and of more recent movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet.  As evil and misanthropic as Bain is, the wrongs of which he complains, or that at the least he uses as excuses for his misdeeds, are no doubt just complaints.  What is service to the public good, this film asks?  Who defines the meaning of right and wrong?  When does a government reach such a point of falsehood and corruption that it loses its right to govern, or to define what is good and right and what is not?

The film drags in its concluding scenes, and in the scenes that show Bruce Wayne in prison.  And it also, at the very end, blinks. But for the most part it’s a somber, bleak, fast-moving film that may be the best of the Dark Knight trilogy.  Anne Hathaway, despite all contrary expectations, is quite good as Catwoman, as is Michael Caine as the Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred, and Joseph Gordon Leavitt as a policeman and detective who becomes Batman’s close ally.

In general, Nolan in the Dark Knight trilogy offers us the most complex, nuanced, ambiguous, and morally compelling portrayal of a comic book hero that any of the super hero films have thus far managed.

One misstep: as Batman and Catwoman and the police commissioner rush to deactivate a nuclear bomb whose timer is ticking down towards detonation (less than five minutes to go), everyone suddenly stops and listens in a casual way to one of the villains (Marion Cotilliard) speak her dying words.  It’s as if time has stopped, and the bomb is no longer ticking down, but time moves on, and the timer counts down.

Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina (dir. Joe Wright, 2012) is too much enthralled by its stylistic premise: that of a play within a play, of an audience watching the story on a stage, as if the audience members are the bystanders who observe the actions of the characters working out their fates.  The film begins by showing us the story through the window of the stage, a proscenium.  Characters behave in stylized fashion, and the acting even seems stilted.  Gradually this melds into the real-time action of the story itself, but even then we frequently find ourselves limited to the physical location of the stage.  Characters go back stage and come on stage.  They climb up into the upper story, or they descend below stage.  Often we’re aware of the artificial appearance of a stage, and other times we seem to be in the real, unmediated world.

Tolstoy’s novel is some 1000 pages long.  Although the film for the most part seems to have the basic details of the plot right (it’s been 45 years since I read the novel, and I can’t remember anything other than the basic outline of the plot), it lacks depth of detail and feeling.  I never engaged emotionally with the film at all.  I understood what was going on, understood what Anna or her husband or Count Vronsky were feeling in a particular scene, but my emotions never engaged.  Is this because a film in 2 hours and 10 minutes cannot come close to achieving what a novel in 1000 pages can do?

Joe Wright gives us a passion play of sorts, a pantomime of Tolstoy’s great novel, one of the truly great novels of the western world. In fact there are tableau-like scenes, pantomime scenes, where the action seems to freeze, background characters are frozen in motion, while the principals continue to focus on one another.  Thus our attention is directed.

This film forces us to see the characters as characters, artificial constructs in an artificial narrative, when in fact we are supposed to see them as themselves, as real, not as artificial.  To see them otherwise is to destroy and violate the narrative illusion.  What we have in place of that illusion is an aesthetic construct.  We know we’re seeing something contrived, constructed, built.  We appreciate its artifice, its cleverness, its genius, perhaps, but not its art.  Because it isn’t art.  It’s artifice.

Certain symbols emerge early, especially that of the train, the massive steam engine that powers the train.  It’s a symbol of sexual passion, of male dominance, and also of the state that can crush individual citizens, especially laborers and powerless individuals, under its heels.  An early glimpse of the mangled body of a worker who has fallen under the wheels of a locomotive drives this point home.  Social gatherings at balls and at the opera show how upper-class society functions—casting judgment on what individual members do, valuing or devaluing their importance, ultimately casting them out when transgressions occur.  In one scene at the opera, the reactions of audience members to an individual who has transgressed function much like the crushing wheels of the locomotive. 

The masculine connotations of the locomotive imply that society is male dominated, that women occupy roles defined by that society, and that there is no place for them outside those roles.  It is thus better, according to one argument in the film, to remain in a bad marriage than to give up everything that marriage entitles one to: privilege, wealth, children, social position.  From another viewpoint marriage is a social pretense that gives one social definition but that also imprisons. Women are little better than serfs, personal property.  We see Count Vronsky caress his prized horse in the same way he caresses Anna, for instance.

I’m interested in rereading the novel to see whether it contains the feminist energy that drives the film and its definitions of the individual’s place in society.

Keira Knightley is effective as Karenina, but she often seems to do little more than hold a pose, with her lower lip prominently puffed out.  Jude Law as Alexy, her husband, is the most interesting and credible character in the film.  When he sees his wife falling into the affair that will ruin their marriage and her life in particular, he tries to save her.  But he recognizes finally that Anna is “irretrievably lost.”  From her point of view, she is at last a free soul, but she lives in a society that does not recognize her freedom.

Anna Karenina is consistently interesting, both the story itself and the means by which it is told.  But it holds its audience, or at least this audience member, at a distance.

Hitchcock

Hitchcock (2012; dir. Sacha Gervasi) proposes that the violence against women, the murder, and the obsessive fascination with the grotesque in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1961) are reflections of the director’s turmoil over fear that his career is over, that he has lost his touch as a director, that his wife is having an affair, that those whom he has befriended have betrayed him, and so on. The basic suggestion is that Hitchcock’s own near nervous breakdown helped form his most terrifying of films.  Hitchcock does a fine job of proving the proposition, at least speculatively.

Portions of the film are narrated from within Hitchcock’s mind, as if he is the protagonist of one of his own films, such as Spellbound or Vertigo.  His age is a constant concern, as is his weight—his wife Alma has him on a diet.  His fear that she may be on the verge of having an affair drives the rage he expresses when he demonstrates how Norman Bates would slash a woman to death in the famous shower scene.  It also drives him to eat prodigious amounts of food late one night in a frenzied binge of frustration and unhappiness. Alma herself is bothered by her husband’s fascination with the young blonde actresses he casts in his films..

The credits tell us that Hitchcock is based on a book about the making of Psycho—Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, by Stephen Rebello—but I suspect the filmmakers inserted some of their own inventive speculations into the story.  Hitchcock is obsessed with the real killer on whom Norman Bates was based—a serial killer who mutilated women and shared a bed with his mother, who had been dead for ten years.  Hitchcock fantasizes that the killer sometimes speaks to him and advises him about Alma. 

Hitchcock chooses his actors on the basis of their own psychological traits.  Anthony Perkins, for instance, he found suitable to play Norman Bates because of his obsession with his mother and guilt over his father’s death, which he felt he had caused by wishing for it to happen. James D’Arcy, who portrays Perkins, is good in the role.

One may say that Hitchcock is about the making of Psycho,  but it’s actually about the marriage and partnership of Hitchcock and Alma.  Although he is the credited director in all of his films, she is always deeply involved, providing ideas and suggestions that her husband frequently adapts.  She revises scripts, assists in the editing, and when her husband is ill, directs in his place.  They had a close and creative partnership.

Hitchcock is highly entertaining.  It’s a small film—its focus is narrow.  But each element fits.  Anthony Hopkins is so effective that he simply seemed to become Hitchcock.  Scarlet Johansson as Janet Leigh, Jennifer Biel as Vera Miles, and Helen Mirren as Alma are excellent.  Its psychological intrigue, suspense, mystery, and empathetic character portrayals make it a gripping and informative study in filmmaking.

A caveat: the film allowed Hitchcock’s own psychological issues to overshadow his deliberate intentions as a director.  It is not as if, even in his most stressed moments, he was not making choices, shaping the film, developing his original vision.  Undoubtedly trauma and personal crises helped direct those choices, but the making of Psycho was not an involuntary act.

Les Misérables

“You are a saint,” Marius tells Jean Valjean as he lies dying in the penultimate scene of the film Les Misérables (dir. Tom Hooper, 2012).  This is a tale about redemption and love, and Jean Valjean comes nearer to the definition of sainthood than most protagonists in literature and film I can think of.  Most saints are, I think, not particular interesting.  Goodness is not a virtue that makes for entertainment.  Jean Vanjean doesn’t aspire to be a saint, but he does struggle to be a good man.  After ninteen years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread, he seizes the chance to reinvent himself, to live a good life and to do good for others.  And he looks, as do others in the film, for love.  He finds it in the young daughter of a dying prostitute, whom he raises as his own, and whose wounded beloved he rescues from the barricades of the June Rebellion of 1832.

Les Misérables as a musical production, conceived in France, staged in English in London, then imported to the United States, has become its own cliché.  People speak with disdain of the music, the lyrics, the excessive passions.  The Irish film The Commitments made fun of it, in a short scene.  Whether one likes it or not is a matter of personal taste.  I have to admit I’ve always been seduced by the music, the story of Valjean, and the emotional excess of the play.  The film adaptation is faithful to the musical, reconfiguring many of the scenes on the broader stage of 19^th-century Paris, but leaving the story and music intact.  It’s long, but then so is the play.  The lead actors are all strong and effective, especially Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean, Anne Hathaway as Fantine, and, dare I say, Russell Crowe as Javert.  Crowe has been ridiculed for his singing in the film, but he sang well enough and I thought did a fine job as the villain of the piece.

Les Misérables honors the musical’s fusion of romance and redemption with a social message timely for today’s audience.  The oppressed and poverty-stricken are beaten down by the wealthy and powerful.  For a brief moment they seem to chafe against their bondage, but the June Rebellion is short-lived, and all the young revolutionaries are killed, with the exception of Marius.  If social movements fail, as the film suggests they will, it is the quest to live a life well, to love others, that brings one satisfaction.  “To love another person is to see the face of God,” Valjean sings at one point.

Most of the women in this musical and film are, in one way or the other, victims, while most of the men are victimizers.  Most of the women are important only in their roles as romantic partners, and in their longings for a partner.  Only Éponine, after she realizes that Marius does not love her, assumes some agency by joining the rebels at the barricade, where she dies with them.  Cosette achieves the happiness her mother never had when she marries Marius.  She is protected from the truth about her mother’s victimization, about her own disappointment in love.  The romantic subplots in this film, then, are highly conventional.  Women are weak romantic objects.  The story strays from convention in its portrayal of a world of predatory men preying on women.  Predation in a general sense, sexual predation, economic predation, predation on the lower classes by the upper class, is an important underlying theme.

Lincoln

To say that a film is reverent in its portrayal of a historical character is usually a criticism.  Stephen Spielberg’s great film Lincoln (2012) is reverent in its treatment of the nation’s 16^th president.  But its reverence is embedded in a relatively careful and accurate portrayal of Lincoln’s character and times, specifically in its depiction of his interactions with his family and with members of the House of Representatives as he campaigns for passage of the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery in the United States.

Lincoln is the great national hero.  One can find other great figures from our history worthy of regard, but Lincoln stands above all.  As a film Lincoln does what every other portrayal of Lincoln has attempted—to give a realistic, compelling portrayal of the man.  No representation of a historic figure such as Lincoln can be wholly or mostly accurate.  Who knows what the man was really like?  We have no recordings of his voice, no video records, only written descriptions of him, opinions, his writings, accounts of what he said and did.  Spielberg’s film, and Daniel Day Lewis’s portrayal of the title character, takes to heart descriptions of Lincoln’s voice as high-pitched.  Such a voice runs counter to what we typically expect of our heroes—we need them to speak in booming basso profundo.  But Spielberg’s and Lewis’ Lincoln is absolutely believable.  Cinematic and speculative portrayal though he may be, this Lincoln is the One. 

It is not so much what Lincoln actually was, what he actually believed and said, how he behaved.  It is what we project through him about ourselves and our nation.  Lincoln incorporates our own views of the ideals and virtues that animate the nation, at least the nation as we’d like it to be.  Spielberg and Lewis give us that Lincoln.

Spielberg at least twice in the film uses indirection to present several of the most famous events of Lincoln’s life.  One of these is the Gettysburg Address, which Lincoln gives more than two years before the time span of the film (January to April 1865).  We experience it through Union solders who recite the speech back to Lincoln while he’s visiting a battlefield.  Another such incident is the assassination.  Rather than dramatizing it directly, Spielberg shows us another theatre, where an opera is playing, attended by the young Lincoln son Tad.  A stage manager runs on stage to announce that the president has been shot, and we experience the announcement and its meaning through the reaction on the boy’s face, and through the reactions of the people in the audience.

As radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, Tommy Lee Jones is excellent as one of the film’s two best supporting actors.  I could never quite grow comfortable with him in the role, but his cranky version of the aging senator who was a master at invective and insult and who throughout his life was an ardent supporter of rights for American blacks—and who regarded Lincoln as too cautious and conservative—is very fine.  Sally Fields, as the depressive, sometimes histrionic Mary Todd, is good as well.  Her Mary Todd Lincoln understands how the public views her, and sometimes believes her husband feels that way as well.  On occasion she is completely irrational.  Despite her apparent illness and ill manners (she lambasts Stevens at a White House party for daring to investigate her spending habits), despite her excessive worry about the oldest son Robert’ desire to enlist in the Union Army, the film shows her as a devoted supporter of her husband, especially of his desire to pass the 13^th Amendment, which will, if passed, she believes justify placing her son at risk.

Spielberg gives us a Lincoln with blemishes.  He yells at his wife in one scene, slaps his son after an insulting remark in another, is willing to offer federal appointments to House members in return for their votes.  He is so fast to tell homespun tales during tense moments that sometimes the irritation on the faces of the people around him is clear.  But overriding these negatives is the figure of the man who believed in the nation, in the Union, in freedom for the slaves, who took upon himself the weight and suffering of the thousands who died in the Civil War, North and South, fighting for what they believed.  This is the Nation’s Lincoln, the man of national legend and myth, however true or not he may be, and this is the Lincoln at the heart of Spielberg’s film.  In our own time of crisis, when everything seems in danger of tumbling down, this is a compelling figure indeed.

Big Bad Love

 

A moody tone piece about a man mired in despair and alcohol over his failure as a writer, a husband, a father, and a friend, Big Bad Love is full of misery. Filmed in the purlieus of Oxford and Mt. Holly, Mississippi, it shows us the South through dirt roads, rundown gas stations, bars, crazy behavior, and eccentric characters.  Its main character, Leon, is drunk through much of the film, and so depressed that he can’t distinguish his own fantasies from reality. Ostensibly he is struggling to succeed as a writer, and we often watch him opening returned manuscript and reading rejection letters, which he posts on a bulletin board over the desk where he writes on his old manual typewriter.  He’s a lover of language and of writing.  He reads the dictionary, remembers strange words, mounts words on the wall above his writing desk.  He declaims poems aloud, when he’s sober enough to remember them.  He does write, some, but mostly he drinks and gets into trouble.

Big Bad Love gives us the South of Mississippi writer Larry Brown, whose 1990 story collection of the same title is its source.  The film is based mainly on the third section of that collection, a long story entitled “92 Days,” about an unpublished and struggling writer confronting the same problems Leon in the movie deals with.  Brown’s stories in Big Bad Love are mainly about working class alcoholic men in their 30s on the verge of divorce, or recently divorced.  They’re lonely for love after deserting, or being deserted by, aging and incentive wives.  They’re like country music songs of a certain type—the George Jones type—that visit and revisit the same self-pitying and self-destructive themes from different angles over and over and over.  The film is loosely faithful to the story, but considerably less woman-hating.  My guess is that there is much of Brown in Leon (well played by Arliss Howard). 

Leon is more a struggling man than a struggling writer, and much of the film is made up of his memories, or himself and his wife (Debra Winger) early in their failed marriage, of their children at a younger age, of his childhood and especially his mother, of his apparently dead father (played in brief appearances by Larry Brown himself).  Memories and dreams interweave with a hallucinatory reality.  The film sometimes verges on making fun of Leon’s drunkenness, and indeed a mild patina of romantic admiration for his excessive living and suffering suffuses the story.

As much as this film’s moody nostalgia (for what?) entranced, it did seem to be working the old cliché that you have to suffer to succeed as a writer, and you also have to make people around you suffer and nearly drink yourself to death and wreak havoc in many other ways.  Everything that could go wrong does.  His daughter dies, his ex-wife reminds him about her restraining order, and he discovers that the brain injury his brother suffered while they were out together on a drunken spree left him nearly a vegetable. He spends two weeks in prison, but when his first story is accepted, and his novel is solicited with the promise of publication, everything turns rosy.  This change seemed too easy.

All the actors, especially Arliss Howard, Debra Winger, Rosanna Arquette, and even Angie Dickinson are good.  My old teacher and friend Coleman Barks was moving and darkly funny as the preacher who gives the eulogy at the funeral.  The soundtrack, a collection of Mississippi blues and John Hiatt and Tom Waits and others, is finely tuned to the film.

 

Good-bye, My Lady

Good-bye, My Lady (dir. William A. Weltman, 1956) follows up on the formula of The Yearling (1946)—a boy moving towards adolescence bonds with an unusual pet, in this case a dog, a rare African Basenji that laughs, weeps, cleans itself like a cat, and hunts with unusual skill.  This film lacks the lyricism and subtlety of The Yearling.  It announces its themes ahead of time, through a deep-voiced singer announcing through song that it’s sad and hard when a boy grows up to be a man--with a harmonica wistfully making wistful music in the background.  (Both the man’s voice and the song are, for lack of a better word, creepy).  The twelve-year-old Skeeter (Brandon deWilde) and his Uncle Jesse Jackson (Walter Brennan) are the primary characters. I liked Brennan in Swamp Water (1941), but here he plays a bumbling, fairly inept, lazy, but kind old man we later came to know as Gramps in the TV series “The Real McCoys.”  One scene in particular is worth the entire film—Brennan’s character stopping and starting, trying to decide what to do, his feet dancing this way and that, as if he’s deep into some sort of country jig, except that he’s just supposed to be bumbling around in a comical way.  We typically see him dozing on the front porch of his shack when he is supposed to be cutting firewood.  His major virtue is his love for his nephew, entrusted to his care after his mother’s death.  (The father is nowhere to be seen, and Uncle Jesse refuses to talk about him, as if to suggest he was some sort of scoundrel who deserted mother and child).

The film purports to show us what life in the Southern backwoods swamps was like for people in the mid-20^th century and earlier.  Skeeter and his uncle live in a ramshackle one-room shack, deep in the woods at the end of a long dirt road.  They eke out an existence selling firewood, mainly to their friend Cash Evans, who owns a store in the nearby town and is something of a friend and rival to Uncle Jesse.  Jesse is illiterate, though the boy is learning to read.  In fact, the stylized depictions of the cabin and its inhabitants probably have a limited basis in reality.  Poverty and good-heartedness are the main qualities of the poor in this film, while the more affluent Cash lives in town (Phil Harris plays this role in a peculiarly loud and wooden way).

Suffice it to state that the film revolves around how Skeeter finds the Basenji dog, names it Lady, loves it and trains it to hunt, and then gives it up when Cash shows him a newspaper ad placed by the owner, looking for the lost dog.  Skeeter decides he must give up Lady, and this is supposed to mark his coming manhood, his recognition that he must give up the dog that isn’t his.  Unfortunately, this message, fairly blunt to begin with, is blunted even more when Skeeter takes great pleasure in $100 reward money the dog’s owner gives him.  The loss of the dog hardly seems to matter.

The boy and his uncle are friends with a kind, hardworking black man who lives nearby, Gates, played by Sidney Poitier.  His wife is played by Louise Beavers, who starred for two years in the first TV show centered on black characters. It aired in the early1950s.  Gates and his wife are good-hearted, hard-working, extremely blessed with progeny.  Although both Gates and his wife are portrayed in a positive way, the film can’t quite escape the stereotype of the wise and kindhearted black folks who give advice to the whites.

The film makes a few jokes, mainly through Uncle Jesse, about the character of Yankees.  He tells a tale about how after a visiting Yankee got snake-bit the snake died.  The kindness of the man sent by the dog’s owner convinces Jesse and his nephew that all Yankees might not be so bad after all.

A few scenes of Good-bye, My Lady seem to have been shot on location, but most of the film looks like it was shot on a set, in black and white, on a small budget.

If this film aspired to be another The Yearling, it didn’t succeed.

 

Paranorman

Norman, the boy at the center of this film, sees ghosts all around him.  He’s like the Haley Joel Osment character in The Sixth Sense, except here he’s animated and the film is about how he must save the world from a witch wrongly executed two hundred years before.  There’s nothing remarkable about Paranorman (dir. Chris Butler, Sam Fell, 2012), but it’s entertaining.  Norman has clueless parents—his father is particularly irritated about his son’s psychic abilities—a sister who can’t stand him, a clumsy pudgy friend, and he’s bullied at school.  Various hijinks and adventures, a buildup to the appearance of the witch, and her defeat (by Norman, of course).  It’s really just a hi-tech Scooby-Doo episode.

I’m not a child, of course.  But how do children feel about this little boy surrounded by the ghosts of dead people?  How do they feel about the implication—that ghosts surround them as well?  I don’t believe in ghosts.  Nonetheless, the idea of them bothers me, especially when I’m in a dark house late at night, or when the floors creak, or some uncanny sound comes out of the woods.  I can’t quite reason myself out of apprehensions of the unreal.  But at the age of 8 or so, the age towards which this film is aimed, I would have been traumatized by this film or its adult ancestors such as The Sixth Sense and the Paranormal Activities series. Such films both animated and live action inundate today’s entertainment industry, and numerous 8 year olds are watching.  Do films like these desensitize their viewers about the supernatural, death, and violence, or do they simply suggest that illogic and nonsense are not that foreign to begin with? Everything in Paranorman is intended for children—everything comes out right.  No dogs or people are harmed.  But the more adult versions of films like these—films that obsess over violence and horror and random suffering—what about them? 

Walkabout

Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971) is a loosely wrought and meandering (in the best sense of the word) fable about cultural interrelationships, mutual dependencies, and barriers.  It’s also about the initiation of three young individuals—a 17 year old girl, her little brother, and an aboriginal adolescent—into both the natural and human worlds.  The girl and her brother live in a posh apartment building in a large Australian city.  When they’re waylaid in the outback—their father takes them along when he goes to look at geological formations, he tries to shoot them, and then sets his car afire and shoots himself (the reasons are unclear)—they begin wandering in the desert. The aboriginal boy, on his walkabout, falls in with them and shows them how to find water, to kill prey for food, and to survive.  The film often contrasts the divergent backgrounds of the white children and the aboriginal boy.  He’s aware of the differences, as are they.  The plot is so loose that often consecutive scenes do not entirely follow logically on each other.  The children simply wander.  They develop a friendship.  They become more comfortable, more able to make their ways in the outback.  Then they stumble across a white settlement, and it’s over.  The white children survive.  The aboriginal boy does not. 

There’s little dialogue in this film, which relies mostly on visual images of the children wandering, of the aboriginal boy hunting animals, of their time together in the darkness.  A relationship seems to develop between the boy and the girl, but it ultimately goes nowhere.  When she fails to respond to his advances late in the film, he commits suicide.  The girl and her brother return to life in the city.  The cultural divide that seemed to have been bridged collapses.

I find Roeg’s style as a director in Walkabout self-indulgent.  Random shots of nature, of wilderness, of wildlife, signify the immersion of the city children in the natural world, suggesting a return to a primal environment where the distinctions of race and class and culture fall away.  The white children cross empty barren wastes, clamber up steep cliffs, stare off into the vast distances.  They are profoundly lost, isolated, these scenes suggest.  Cut-in shots of images from the city, or of their father’s burning car—remind us who they are.  The girl often listens to her radio, and the aboriginal boy learns to listen too.  Sometimes these moments seem random, and I can’t entirely say that they work.  They create a sense of disconnection, an unsettling rhythm that interferes with the otherwise pastoral tone.  But that may be their purpose.

My feeling that the film depends a bit too much on beautiful images culminates in a prolonged scene in which the girl swims naked in an isolated pool.  The aboriginal boy does not spy on her (though her brother does), and in fact the real voyeurs in the scene are those of us watching the film.  What does it accomplish?—it shows the girl’s comfort in an entirely natural setting, her symbolic immersion in the natural world, where she sheds all the trappings of her civilized background (her clothes, her modesty) but mostly it shows us her beautiful naked body, in a tasteful way, of course.

Walkabout almost seems to suggest that the white children are unaffected by their outback experience.  The aboriginal boy shows some signs of absorbing, adjusting to, white culture, while the white children seem to absorb very little of his culture.  The final scene, however, leaves us wondering how untouched the girl and her brother really were.

Cinematography is supposed to be one of the strengths of this film, but the colors seemed washed out in the version I watched.  I’d like to see a restored print.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics, by Nicholas Wapshott

Discussions of the economy, especially by all-knowing gurus like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, can be fascinating, or grimly unbearable.  The economy, the nation’s economic health, moves in ways that directly affect our lives, jobs, and national welfare, yet often the economy seems to function like some mystical force beyond the ken of mortal individuals.  Is it some globally based ecological force, like the weather, that moves with Nature’s intricate whims, or is it the manifestation of millions of individual wills that purchase, buy, sell, invest, save, earn, and squander, like a beehive?  Is the economy beyond the control of governments and economic experts, or can it be manipulated by controlling taxes and deficits and large-scale governmental surges of support?

Such questions have been debated for years, and they have certainly been at the fore since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008, and during the recent presidential election.

The economy is mystifying to me, and, frankly, not the most gripping of subjects, but the recent book Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics, by Nicholas Wapshott, on the career-long debate between two rival economists, John Maynard Keynes and Freidrich Hayek, undertakes to offer some insight.  Keynes, a British economist, came to believe that governments could direct the flow of the economy, while Hayek, of the Austrian economic school, believed that governments could do only damage by such efforts.  Keynes believed that governments could protect the lives of citizens through active economic manipulation of the economy while Hayek believed in minimal government controls.  Hayek believed in balanced budgets while Keynes believed that governments could live with deficit spending as long as they could afford to pay the interest on their loans.  For much of the mid-twentieth century, from Roosevelt through Carter, we lived in a Keynesian economy.  Under Reagan, the first Bush, Clinton, and well into years of the second Bush, Hayek was in the ascendant.  But when the Great Recession began, Bush fils became a Keynesian, along with Obama, pumping billions of federal dollars into the economy, significantly increasing the national deficit, and probably saving the nation from a major depression.  We’re living now under economic controls and principles that combine aspects of both Keynes and Hayek’s thinking. 

As a person who tends to think in humanistic terms, I found the accounts of Keynes and Hayek as human personalities fascinating, perhaps more so than their economic theories.  Bitter rivals throughout their careers, they became friends and colleagues in their later years.  Wapshott’s accounts of the last thirty years in American politics and economics were especially illuminating.  In explaining finer points of economic theory, Wapshott is not always clear, but who could be? 

 

It's a Wonderful Life

It’s a Wonderful Life (dir. Frank Capra, 1946) is full of post-World War II optimism, yet it’s dark too—dark in its portrayals of big landlord banking moguls such as Henry F. Potter (effusively overplayed by Lionel Barrymore), and dark in what it shows happening to George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) when he thinks his life is about to crash and burn in the worst of ways.

In films like this one and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), director Frank Capra dramatizes his belief that the virtues and essential goodness of the common man (or woman) will inevitably prevail against evil.  We see here the stereotypical but well intended portrayals of ethnic groups such as the Italians and Irish (as well as a few glimpses of African Americans).  Capra gives us his idealized and earnest views of young love, family life, and the American Dream.  The film almost overwhelms itself with ebullient views of human character. 

Although the film for me has aged very well, I wonder how younger generations view it.  Last night at a local showing at the local arts cinema, Cine, I saw many parents and grandparents escorting their not entirely unwilling but not necessarily overenthusiastic children and grandchildren to see the film.  How did they view its portrait of marriage, with Donna Reed’s character submitting willingly and without question to Georgie Bailey’s job and to his sour disposition when things go bad?  How do they react to the patronizing view of immigrants like the Italians, or its notion that banks can serve the poor by playing fast and loose with their money?  Do they take seriously George Bailey’s telling his customers that if they trust him with their money (which has temporarily disappeared) things will come out right in the end? 

How do they reconcile the spirit of the season with this venerated holiday film in which a man so depressed and horrified by the apparent failure of his life that he mistreats his wife and children, drinks himself into a stupor at a local bar, and then tries to commit suicide? 

These are interesting questions, but the possible answers don’t overwehelm the good-heartedness and innocence and wonderful human force of the film.  George Bailey is the American hero who fails to achieve his life’s ambitions (traveling the world, building magnificent projects, escaping the provincial and limiting confines of Bedford Falls) and who allows himself to be retained by the small town savings and loan founded by his father, by the love of Mary, and the admiration of his townspeople—they admire him because he is at the heart of it as good a man as one might find—and that is all one might ask for in what may well be the greatest American Christmas film of all.

When I first showed this film to my children some years ago, they were captivated not by George Bailey’s character or his rowdy household or the lively array of comic characters, but by the angels discoursing in the firmament about his life and fate.  In a way, this film that pivots on the notion that a man can view his world as it might have been had he never been born really does examine the most cosmic, nay, existential of issues.

Without Mr. Potter, we would never have had Montgomery Burns.

Men in Black 3

Here we are in Men in Black 3 (2012; dir. Barry Sonnenfeld) with two familiar partners back in action.  The chemistry surrounding Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, as Agents J and K, helped propel the first two installments of the Men in Black series. Even their chemistry, and the special insights afforded by what amounts to an origins story, can’t quite energize installment three.  We encounter the same familiar aliens. The same situations in sordid New York dives and shops and cafes, the same hi-tech gizmos and special effects.  It just don’t quite work.  The film resorts to a time-travel gimmick, wherein one of the agents travels back to 1969 to save the other’s life.  It just so happens that the first American moon landing is involved, and there are the expected scenes of people in 1969 with 60s hairdos and dress.  Andy Warhol makes an appearance, as does, briefly, Howard Stern.  The time travel plot has a special twist that is actually quite poignant, and that casts new light on the Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones partnership, but not enough to save the film.  The film is fun to watch, and does offer some ingenious moments, perhapos thinks to the script co-written by Etan Coen.

The Men in Black films are satirical and comic, so perhaps it is not fair to complain that many of the aliens are invested with certain recognizably ethnic features, or that when Will Smith travels back to 1969 there are predictable scenes involving his skin color and 1960s racism.  And the aliens themselves, many of them in gowns and armor and looking like refugees from a He-Man cartoon or a Battle of the Titans movie or a Lost in Space episode, are not convincing—they’re tired and hackneyed.  Should I expect them to be otherwise?

The funniest scene comes when the villain, Boris the Animal, travels back in time to commit mayhem and gets into an argument with his younger self about which of them is the meaner dude.  This is a hilarious parody of a so-called time-travel paradox that holds that if one could travel back (or forward) in time he couldn’t occupy the same space with his former or future self.  This is supposedly (I say supposedly because it’s never been tested) a physical impossibility.

The standout character is Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), an alien who can foresee and experience every possible permutation of events in the space-time continuum.  He’s essential to the plot, and the one true burst of imaginative and creative thinking in a film that needs both badly, despite the surprising moment of true human emotion in the penultimate scene.

And then there is Josh Brolin, wholly convincing as a younger version of the Tommy Lee Jones character.  He shares much the same chemistry with Agent J, and actually spends more time on screen than Jones.

The Yearling

The Yearling (dir. Clarence Brown, 1946) is a soft spot for me.  Maybe it’s the Technicolor Maxfield Parrish Florida landscapes, or Claude Jarman’s self-consciously joyous face, or Gregory Peck’s young and upright fatherly ways, or the occasionally wooden dialogue, or any combination of these and other reasons.

Based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ novel, The Yearling attends to an infrequently noticed part of the American South—the post-Civil War Florida swamps, where pioneers go to settle and struggle to make their lives after the Civil War.  With its attention to the difficulties of small time farmers, it reminds us of The Southerner, Swamp Water, and even God’s Little Acre.  We sense the influence especially of Renoir’s films about the South here, as well as a touch of John Ford.

The Yearling is an episodic narrative of a boy’s education in the challenges of adult life.  It’s also about a dirt farmer trying to get a hold in the swamplands of Florida, and about his wife, scarred by the deaths of three children.  She’s cold and apparently unloving to her son, but the film gradually reveals that her reserve is her way of protecting herself against further hurt should her living son die like the others. 

Claude Jarman plays Jody in this film.  He’s not really a very good actor, but he’s a wonderful presence.  The film is in love with his broad smiling face and never misses an opportunity to linger on it.  Jody brims with optimism and open spirit, he’s in love with the natural world and its creatures, in love with his fellow human beings and the possibilities of his life, as far as he can understand them.  The Yearling offers up a worshipful, almost reverent cult of boyhood and the innocence and joys of preadolescence.  His father tries to encourage him in his interests, while his mother, at least at first, tries to discourage them.  It’s tempting to see her as a kind of real-life Disney mother, cold and evil like Cruella Deville, or the haughty socially self-conscious mother of the boy in Song of the South.  But The Yearling resists such a reading.  She is human after all.

This film and Jarman’s character really take off in a scene in which Jody and his deer Flag are running through the countryside, alongside the edges of the lake, through the woods.  They startle wild deer that begin running alongside, on the border of the woods, accompanied by music from Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The result is a miraculous cinematic ballet that captures more than anything else in the film the joy that is the boy’s nature.

This film gives us both the frontier as a place of adventure and closeness to nature and also a place of cruelty.  The boy loves nature, stares for hours in reverie at running streams and forest creatures.  He has little awareness of the hard lives his parents live, or of the siblings he never met, who died before him.  Life for him is a long and ebullient romp.  This comes to a head when he finds and takes as a pet the little fawn of a doe his father killed for its liver—he’d been snake bit, and he wanted to use the liver to suck out the poison.  Even the way he came into possession of the fawn, which he names Flag, should have been a warning to the boy, but he is too young to recognize it.  He’s unaware that fawn will one day grow up into something much larger and difficult. Love of Flag, and responsibility to his family are the contending forces for the boy.  Up to a point his parents indulge his love for the deer, but when the animal repeatedly eats crops on which the family depends for survival, the decision is made.  His father orders the boy to shoot the door.  He obeys, in part because he knows his father is right, and then runs away for three days, floating on an old skiff through the swamp and down the river, until he’s found by a riverboat captain and returned home.  This is Jody’s dark night of the soul, and he returns from it, presumably, an older and wiser young man.

Because so much of the film comes to us from the boy’s view, it’s tempting to overlook the struggles of the parents—of the mother to deal with the loss of her children, her fear of losing another, of the father’s struggle to be a successful farmer and feed his family.  The fact that three children have died is evidence of the harshness of their lives.  Because we see her through the boy’s eyes, the mother may seem a cold and harsh person.  It becomes clear as the film moves along that the father understands the reasons for her apparent coldness. 

Frontier life in the film, especially once we’re off the farm, is a bit more hackneyed.  There are disputes with the neighboring Forresters, the death of the Forrester boy Fodderwing, Jody’s good friend, fights in town, rattlesnake bites, injuries, and so on.  The father trades one of the Forresters a worthless dog for a new rifle.  This leads to bad blood and the Forresters stealing from the boy’s family.  Such episodes come at us at an unrelenting pace, but they vary sufficiently so that the film retains its charm and never falters.  Fodderwing is especially interesting.  A frail boy of Jody’s age, he permanently injured himself in a fall while trying to fly off the top floor of his family’s house.  He speaks in poetic haunting phrases about animals and spirits and it’s clear from his earliest appearance that he is a fated lad.  His death is one more step in Jody’s cruel education.

All of these elements congeal in a vision of the Florida frontier and its past that is if not entirely realistic at least coherent and engaging.  Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman are excellent in their roles as Jody’s parents.  Both were nominated for Best Actor Oscars.  Director Clarence Brown won a nomination for directing.  The film won Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction Oscars.  Peck won a Best Acting Golden Globe award.  Acting, cinematography, the story itself, effective editing and appropriate music, all make this an entrancing and charming film of the sort we rarely see anymore.

In 1949 Brown directed Claude Jarman in another film about a boy’s initiation into adulthood: Intruder in the Dust, an adaptation of the novel by William Faulkner.

 

 

Moonrise Kingdom

Everyone in Moonrise Kingdom (2012; dir. Wes Anderson) wears clothes that are too small.  Their trousers ride up, and their skirts are tight.  The adults look foolish, especially the men, and the children, who are in transition anyway, look both young and older, two versions of themselves in single bodies.  Set in the 1960s in a small town near a lake always shrouded with fog and mist, the film presents us with a perpetual summer camp.

Moonrise Kingdom is a children’s romance, a romance in the sense that 12-year-olds would imagine for themselves, not one much aware of the world beyond their own circles of awareness, not one that will ever end.  This film treats its children as innocents.  You laugh at them and feel exasperated by them and love them.  (This is if you are watching the film as an adult.  Many younger viewers will identify with the children).  Most of all you remember and long for that same period of your life—the transitional phase of adolescence, when girls grow faster than boys, when boys resemble gangly and awkward buffoons, where everything lies ahead of you, where you’re not really aware of the constraints of your lives, where you have no real apprehension of mortal limits.   That point is where the two main characters of this film live. They are barely aware of the oncoming sexual transformation puberty is bringing them.  Because the film is set in the 1960s, before the sexual revolution impacts the small town where the characters live, even their budding sexual awareness seems innocent. 

The film takes its children with deadly seriousness.  The adults, on the other hand, are ineffectual and clueless.  We see them from the children’s viewpoint.  They are the Boy Scout leader (Edward Norton), the policeman (Bruce Willis), the mother with her bullhorn (Frances McDormand), the father (Bill Murray) wracked by his wife’s affair with the policeman.  They seem to have no real control over the children, but are committed to protecting them.  In some sense the children are hardly aware the adults love and care about them.  When the two main characters run away together, a major crisis ensues.  The Boy Scout leader musters his troops and sets out to find the lost ones.  The parents and policeman are constantly on the hunt.  Mostly their antics amount to chaos and confusion.  The children have little awareness of how their disappearance has affected the grown-ups.

Anderson has an interest in depressive young women with heavy dark eyeliner.  In this film, Suzy (Kara Hayward) is a 12-year-old version of Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) in Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).  One hopes Suzy doesn’t grow up to emulate her predecessor. 

Anderson relishes stereotypes: the over-zealous scout master, the Boy Scouts in general, the loud and brash mother, the nervous, earnest policeman.  Suzy’s beloved Sam (Jared Gilman) is an absolutely realistic embodiment of 12-year-old male nerdiness.  Anderson sees human beings as collections of foibles and failures and unsatisfied longings.  Neuroses is the human condition, even in the 12-year olds at the center of the film.  He seems to pity and to love all his characters.

Moonrise Kingdom is suffused with a perverse magic and discovery.  In another kind of film, missing 12-year-olds could spell tragedy.  Yet in this one their disappearance prompts almost a rote, tired response by the parents.  They are worried, but not excessively.  When the children are found, life returns to normal, almost.  There are small hints of more disorder, perhaps of darkness, ahead.

This film was charming and entertaining from first scene to last.

 

The Amazing Spider-Man

The great triad of American super-heroes—Batman, Spiderman, Superman—all have their origins in the loss of parents.  Batman/Bruce Wayne’s rich parents are killed by a robber, Superman’s parents die when the planet Krypton explodes, and Spider-Man/Peter Parker’s parents vanish under mysterious circumstances, and his guardian uncle is later killed by a hoodlum.  Each has an Everyman identity as Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, and Clark Kent.  All of them struggle with the difficulties and challenges that normal people grapple with, and at the same time they bear the burden of their super powers which in one way or the other oblige them to serve the human race.  (One might argue, with good reason, that Batman’s super powers develop not from extraordinary origins but from the high-tech devices that his extreme wealth enables him to develop.)

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012; dir. Marc Webb, a new version of the 2002 original directed by Sam Raimi) uses the orphan motif as the basis for its central question: “who am I?”  Peter Parker struggles with the question throughout the film as he wonders over his parents’ absence, decides how to use his super powers, and mourns his uncle’s death, for which he feels responsible.  He is a normal adolescent in many ways, but he also has his father’s brilliant intellect, and these help him after he’s bitten by the fateful spider and is adjusting to his new reality as a man who can climb walls and swing through the city on a thread of spider filament as strong as steel.  But his struggles as an adolescent, his developing love for Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), his reaction to the death of his uncle, his decision to serve others rather than to seek revenge for his uncle’s death—these make this film interesting.  Peter is bitten by the spider just at the time in his life when the adolescent question of identity looms most strongly, a fact signified perhaps by the hoodie he typically wears around his high school, hiding from himself and his friends.  Gwen drives this point home one day in class when she asks him, “Do you know your own name?” 

The special effects are great, and it’s exhilarating to see Spider-Man swing through the sky.  But, despite the updated high-techiness, and the high-minded intentions, one could argue that Lizardman in this new film is as ridiculous as Green Goblin in the original.  

Safety Not Guaranteed

A modest film that is just incidentally about time travel, Safety Not Guaranteed (2012; dir. Colin Trevorrow) is about characters in their 20s and 30s who are wandering, trying to discover what to do with their lives, coping with the sadness and disappointments of the years they’ve lived so far.  Set in Washington State, the film uses few special effects.  Two summer interns—one of them still in college with graduation in sight, the other at a loss over what to do with herself now that she has just graduated the previous spring—accompany a magazine writer in his 30s to a small town for research about a man who has placed a newspaper ad looking for someone interested in accompanying him in time travel.  They expect to find an eccentric individual and an unusual human interest story.  They find that, but more.

Everyone here has a story—of events they feel guilty for, of things they haven’t done yet, of lost romance, of uncertain futures, and so on.  The film explores the intersecting entanglements of their lives. 

Time travel for me is a fascinating and ultimately unsatisfying topic.  Because it is not possible in our age, because it is probably physically impossible in any sense that we humans could experience or appreciate, I am impatient with it.  I’d certainly like to time travel, undo mistakes, take different roads, relive my life with more intention and maturity than I originally lived it.  Everyone, probably, would like to time travel for such reasons.  But’s it’s not possible.  It doesn’t happen.  And time travel films such as Back to the Future (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1985) irritate me because they show such things happening.  (Field of Dreams, 1989, dir. Phil Alden Robinson, not a time travel film, irritated me for the same reason—who wouldn’t want the opportunity to make things right with a dead parent?). The worst time travel film in my mind is Somewhere in Time (1980, dir. Jeannot Szwarc), where, as I recall, Christopher Reeve managed to travel back in time simply by thinking hard about it.

Safety Not Guaranteed uses time travel as a pretext for exploring its characters, so it didn’t bother me in the same way.  It’s more about the reasons why one might want to go back in time, or undo an old mistake, or reunite with an old flame.  It’s about regret over the inevitability of time’s passage.  It’s also about the willingness to commit oneself to an unknown, uncertain future (hence the title).

This film concentrates on human stories and emotions, its major characters are played mostly by actors from TV comedies, and it never shows its low-budget origins.

The final scene is intentionally frustrating and indeterminate.  On the one hand it confirms what the film has been working to make us suspect all along.  On the other, it shows two characters committing to each other and to the uncertainty of the future (or the past) without allowing us to know the outcome of their gamble.  But the outcome, this ending seems to suggest, is less important than the willingness to put oneself at risk. 

 

True Grit

Voice is all in Charles Portis’ overlooked 1967 novel.  If the story were told by an uninvolved narrator, we would have an interesting tale of adventure and revenge.  With the voice of Mattie Ross, we have context, personality, human perspective, attitude, youth, naiveté, a sharply critical tongue, a dark sense of humor.  Mattie is the central character.  Rooster Cogburn may be the focus of much of her interest, but without the varying attitudes of surprise and consternation and anger and admiration she feels for him, he would just be another colorful figure in a book about the Old West.

I made the mistake of reading the novel, which I had not read before (despite the good advice of my friend Max Childers), just before I saw the Coen brothers’ 2010 adaptation.  I don’t like to spend much time thinking about how a particular film measures up to its source text.  In this case I couldn’t help myself.  My first reaction was to find a certain lack of warmth in the film.  It was good, I thought, but not as good as the novel.  Maybe in the case of this story, no film could ever quite measure up to the source simply because the language of the written story, the psychological insights, the inner life, make up so much of the tale.  But gradually I changed my mind about the film.  The most important decisions the Coens made were to use the voice of Mattie Ross to tell the story, and to cast Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie.  Steinfeld preserves much of the idiosyncratic nature and orneriness of the novel’s Mattie, yet she never seems limited by the role.  She occupies it.  Beau Bridges as Rooster is sometimes difficult to recognize as Beau Bridges.  He is gruff and mean and not especially friendly. He embodies Rooster in a way that is barely softer, imperceptibly more endearing, that the novel’s Rooster.

A film must have its own character and identity.  Too many adaptations of literature seem entranced by their source texts and never establish themselves as separate artistic works.  True Grit does not have this problem.  It takes its identity from the southwestern prairie, the small frontier town in Arkansas where Mattie’s father is shot, the fastidious horse trader whom Mattie outwits and out deals, the beautiful landscapes, the gothic and episodic plot (several episodes of which the film invents and embellishes, though there is more than enough of the source novel remaining). 

Although the Coens do not give the novel their characteristic treatment of irony and sarcasm, and satire of local color characteristics, it’s clear from their approach that they are the Coens after all.  The combination of crudeness, hard talking, and just plain oddness in Cogburn’s character is an example.  Camera angles, the attention to realistic details of time and place, the formal, archaic speech of the characters, repeated images of violence and grotesqueness—all of these are Coen traits.  Yet they’re perfectly fine for this adaptation of the Charles Portis novel.

True Grit is a border state film in several ways.  Arkansas stands on the eastern border of the Mississippi River, at the entrance to the Great Plains and to Texas.  It is, especially in this film, the state where the South gradually transitions into the West.  In most ways this film is a Coen brothers take on the classic American western, and a parody, or response at least, to the first adaptation of the film in 1969 starring John Wayne and Glen Campbell (dir. Henry Hathaway).  Wayne’s performance has been praised for its force and vigor, but Jeff Bridges’ Cogburn seems definitive for now.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln is the great American hero and legend: the original rags to riches tale, Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, rail splitter, martyr fallen in service to his country.  More books have been written about Lincoln than about all the other presidents combined, maybe excepting Jefferson. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (dir. Timur Bekmambetov, 2012) takes the barest outline of the Lincoln biography, accepts at face value the Great Man’s heroism and legendry, and creates a parallel history in which Lincoln sets out from boyhood intent on killing the vampire who killed his mother.  After meeting another man experienced with killing vampires, Lincoln decides to become a vampire hunter, learns the skills of this secret vocation, and swears to live his life in solitude—a vow he commences to violate throughout the entire film. As we learn, vampires have invaded the nation and marked out the Southern states as favored territory.  They prey especially on slaves, ally themselves with slave traders and slave holders, and in the Civil War, at least in the Battle of Gettysburg, they fight on the Southern side. 

Early in his career Lincoln wields a silver-tipped ax against vampires.  (He chooses the ax, rather than a rifle, because he is so adept at splitting logs).  At first his quest to kill his mother’s murderer is purely one of revenge, but as he becomes aware of how vampires are preying on people, especially slaves, he learns more about the issue of slavery.  Lincoln in the film has progressive views about slavery from an early age, and the film gives no hint of the struggles and ambiguities in the real Lincoln’s mind concerning slavery.  His only real struggle in the film is when to declare slaves free.  He goes into politics because he realizes that he can wage the battle he wants to wage with words and puts the ax in the closet.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter builds parallel connections between the historical situation leading up to the Civil War and the one in the film.  In the real South, white men exploited slaves for economic gain.  To this the film adds the fact that vampires see in slaves easy victims, so they ally themselves with the slaveholders who are also exploiting slaves.  In one scene Lincoln is captured and taken to a grand Southern mansion where the head vampire lives.  The iconography of the great Southern mansion with its columns and moss-draped trees makes clear the connection between slaves, slaveholders, vampires, and the South.  Interestingly, only one brief scene suggests that vampires should have rights like normal humans and be permitted to live in the open (presumably with a good supply of slave blood at hand).  The film doesn’t exploit the notion of vampires as a marginalized victims as the HBO series True Blood does.

We never see, for the most part, the Band of Rivals whom the historical Lincoln enlisted as advisors and members of his cabinet.  Instead Lincoln relies on two main counselors, his childhood black friend Will Johnson (Anthony Mackie) and Henry Sturges (Dominic Cooper), who is waging war against the head vampire who killed his fiancée many years ago in the past.  He warns Lincoln against seeking revenge, but revenge seems to be pretty much what he is after.  On the night that Lincolns rides off to the Ford Theater and its fateful play, he even offers to make Lincoln a vampire so that they can continue their battle as immortals.  Lincoln declines the offer, explaining that there are other ways to become immortal.

The film distorts, changes, or ignores virtually all the facts about Lincoln’s life and presidency.  In particular, it makes Mary Todd Lincoln (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) into the President’s sympathetic ally.  There’s not much of a hint of the sour, depressive Mary Todd who was Lincoln’s real wife.  She’s a flirtatious, attractive, heroic figure and in no ways the cypher that many find the historical Mary Todd to be.  In the film Lincoln vies with Stephen Douglass for Mary’s hand.  Later, she leads a band of escaped slaves through the woods towards Gettysburg, carrying loads of silver to be melted down into bullets.  You can guess what the silver bullets are for.

No doubt Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a silly film, in practically every way.  But I thought the lead actor Benjamin Walker impressive in his role as the Great Emancipator.  It will be interesting to compare his portrait of Lincoln to that of Daniel Day Lewis in the newly released Lincoln, directed by Stephen Spielberg.  But in this film Walker makes Lincoln an impressive comic book super hero.

The film is heavily laden with visual effects.  Often, scenes seem only partially rendered.  In others, film and digital effects seem to fuse in a visually confusing way.  The railroad trestle scene in which Lincoln and friends battle vampires on the top of a train speeding across a burning bridge that spans a deep gorge is over the top.

It makes little sense to complain about the historical inaccuracies in this film about a vampire hunting Abe Lincoln.  Its absurdity makes it worthwhile.