65 Revisited

The opening credits to 65 Revisited label the film as "Outtakes from Don't Look Back." The label doesn't accurately describe D. A. Pennebaker's new film. In the DVD commentary, Pennebaker talks about having made Don't Look Back without the benefit of notes or of knowing what was going to happen. He just followed Dylan around, filmed what interested him, what seemed important at the time. He got a lot right, but he missed some things too. Now, 40 years later, he has a different sense of what was important about that 1965 tour, and these newly recognized interests are apparent in 65 Revisited, constructed from footage not used in the 1967 film. As one of the commentators remarks, this was a transitional period as Dylan was moving from his acoustic period to his electric phase. The acoustic Dylan is much in evidence. In fact, this film is a kind of tribute to the acoustic Dylan. While Don't Look Back focused on the peripatetic Dylan, his incendiary and explosive personality, his way of challenging reporters and fans and anyone who threatened or irritated him or just happened to be in the way at the wrong or right time, 65 Revisited focuses on Dylan's music. It features a number of excellent performances, many of them complete, both on stage and in hotel rooms.

Film quality is grainy and often marred by imperfections, but this is part of the authenticity of the film. Someone did a good job of restoring the film and of bringing out as much of it visually as possible. The sound quality is usually excellent. No real plot or narrative is in evidence. The film follows Dylan from one British city to another. We see him riding in cars, talking with friends and fans, rehearsing, and mainly we see him performing. There is not an edge to this film as there was in Don't Look Back. We don't see Dylan ridiculing posers and reporters. We don't see much of the famous Dylan attitude. We see instead a performer who relishes his moment of fame and who truly enjoys performing. There are numerous glimpses of a shy and insecure and vulnerable Dylan. We see him more as a human being than as a distant pop icon. His nervousness before he goes on stage in the Royal Albert Hall on May 8, 1965, is surprising and amusing.

Other surprising aspects of Dylan emerge in 65 Revisited. In one scene he chats with a group of British fans. He is shy and somewhat diffident but not at all indifferent. He's flattered by their attention, and there are moments when you feel as if you're watching a group of young people chatting casually with one another, not a famous singer talking to fans. In another scene, Dylan and Bob Neuwirth sit on a train leaving the station, watching girls run alongside the tracks waving frantically. Dylan and Neuwirth don't know what to make of this. They laugh and seem astounded.

Howard Grossman comes off in the new film as more gentle and congenial that he seemed to be in Don't Look Back—what we did see of him there. Here he is much in evidence, and though he is clearly the manager in charge of arrangements, he is also the friend and companion, and his admiration for Dylan as a person and artist rather than merely as a commodity is clear.

Dylan the singer, songwriter, and musician is the focus of 65 Revisited. The film begins and ends with Dylan playing the piano. An unidentified black man (possibly Tom Wilson, producer of Highway 61 Revisited) sits next to the piano, rocking in pleasure as he listens. Elsewhere Dylan plays the usual guitar and harmonica. There are excellent performances of "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," "To Ramona," The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," "She Belongs to Me," and others. Dylan's singing and harmonica musicianship are amazing. He has been criticized over the years for sloppiness and indifference in his public performances. Those purported flaws are not evident here. Musically, he is superb in this film.

This film helps explain the rage many British fans expressed when Dylan went electric. He sings as well as he ever sang in these "outtakes"—his singing is heartfelt, artful, and beautiful. He had to evolve, he couldn't stand still, and the electric Dylan has its own many merits—it's another impressive dimension of his career—but 65 Revisited reminds us that a rich and important period of his career was culminating and indeed coming to an end in these performances in England. The Newport Folk Festival, and the recording of Highway 61 Revisited, were only two months away.

It's interesting to compare Dylan's performances in this film with those recorded in Eat the Document, filmed a year later. Dylan in 65 Revisited is relaxed, clear in his singing, very musical. A year later his singing has changed remarkably—he is still excellent, perhaps even better, but the music and singing have changed, the influence of heavy drug and alcohol use is clearly apparent. If we want to accept the evidence that the Scorsese documentary and other sources cite to suggest that Dylan in 1965 and 1966 was verging on burn out and self-immolation, the difference between the Dylan of 65 Revisited and Eat the Document tends to support the argument. After the final scene in Eat the Document, you can see the motorcycle wreck looming.

West Side Story

West Side Story (1961) seems so dated and irrelevant that portions are painful to watch. For me, the scene in which Maria dances around the room singing "I Feel Pretty" is ludicrous. And though the dancing is superb, the scene in which the Sharks dance to express their anger and frustration over the death of Bernardo is a patronizing, insipid moment. Is this how the young really express and feel grief? The Gap commercial based on this scene is as effective as the scene itself. The commercial strips away the issues of ethnic experience and violence and focuses only on the tight, firm bodies of the young as they dance and gyrate. The point is that the scene is only dance and music and physical bodies to begin with—its essence has nothing to do with the immigrant experience and violence—it is all spectacle, no substance.

How appropriate is it now in 2007 for a musical film to address the problems of Puerto Rican immigrants through song and dance, especially song and dance predicated on the assumption that assimilation is what these immigrants seek and need? As sympathetic and tender as the film seeks to be, it stereotypes, sentimentalizes, and condescends. On the one hand it suggests that the immigrants seek the apotheosis of the American Dream, but on the other hand with the deaths of the two lovers it suggests that Dream is forever out of reach. Violence and ethnic conflict stand in the way. Is this because the odds against the immigrants are too great, or is it because the Dream isn't for immigrants to begin with? Well, Sondheim and Bernstein would certainly not accept the latter opinion, and in fact I don't think the film makes this assumption either, but the film seems such an anachronism in 2007 that it's easy to imagine a young audience coming to that conclusion.

The scene where Tony and Maria sing "One Hand, One Love" to each other might have seemed genuine and heartfelt in 1961, but now it comes across as cornpone, like the scene in Blue Hawaii, when Elvis sings a love song to his fiancée's grandmother. Does anyone take either scene seriously?

The film's idealization and idolatry of the young seems dated as well. Did we ever feel like Tony and Maria feel at that age? Today the young seem either jaded and co-opted, or bitter and lost. How deeply would they identify with the gangs and the girls in this film? Both in its treatment of Puerto Rican immigrants and of the young in general, the perspective of this film betrays itself: produced and directed by men no longer young and who are not themselves Puerto Rican—what the film shows is what they believe the Sharks and the Jets feel, what they imagine the young characters of this film feel--not what they know, because they don't. The film is sympathetic to its characters, but also patronizing and at worst cloyingly sentimental.

I try to suspend my disbelief, my 2007 sensibilities, with this film. I want to like West Side Story. Bernstein's score is beautiful. "There's a Place for Us" is one of the wonderful iconic songs from the 1960s. "America" is a great song as well. The dancing is impressive. I enjoy musicals, and, technically, this should be one of the best. But I can't suspend the 2007 perspective. The social context and the date of this musical trump all. West Side Story is a perfect example of a film that many once would have claimed as a classic, but that today is better left dusty and forgotten on the shelf.

The Prestige

The Prestige (2006, directed by Christopher Nolan) is a more challenging, ambitious, and complex film than The Illusionist, to which it can naturally be compared, since both films are about illusionists, magicians, and both appeared around the same time. The Prestige narrates the competition of two magicians, Robert Angier (stage name: the Great Danton) played by Hugh Jackman and Alfred Borden by Christian Bales. The plot is somewhat convoluted and melodramatic. One magician is a better entertainer while the other is a better magician. Each is jealous of the other. Jackman resents Borden because early in their career he tied a knot that may have led to the death of Jackman's wife, an escape artist. He also resents Borden because he is the better magician. They steal secrets from each other, sabotage one another's acts, and become increasingly obsessed not only with success but with prevailing over the other. The story focuses on an ultimate illusion, where Christian Bale's character seems to transport himself across the stage instantaneously. Jackman becomes obsessed with learning how the illusion was performed. He performs his own version of the illusion and uses it to advance his career. Ultimately the film focuses on the corrosive effects of ambition and obsession.

As complex as the film's story line is (there are numerous flashbacks and jumps forward, false and real clues, and so on), it succumbs in the end to a conventional sort of ending, clues to which have been planted throughout. It also resorts to a device better suited for science fiction—the scientist Nicola Tesla appears in the film. His invention of a teleportation device figures into the story. Tesla never invented such a device, though hundreds of patents are attributed to his name. In the film Edison and Tesla are rivals, and Edison sends agents out to spy on his rival. Since the film is about illusionists—performers who seem to perform magic through tricks, sleights-of-hand, and deception—the introduction of a science fiction device into the plot seems contrived and artificial. The film even convinces us that it is sympathetic to one character who turns out to be the real villain—at the end we are convinced to switch our allegiances, though ultimately both the main characters are fairly reprehensible.

Excellent performances by a cast that includes, in addition to Bales and Jackman, Scarlett Johansson and Michael Caine, distinguish the film. David Bowie also appears (as Tesla), though his performance is mannered and affected.

Like The Illusionist, The Prestige is a period and costume piece. It's set in late-19^th century England (London) and America.

Whatever the inconsistencies and improbabilities, The Prestige is entertaining. It's a dark study, bitter and bleak in its assessment of its main characters, who do whatever is necessary to get what they want.

The New York Times review observed: "'The Prestige' is a triumph of gimmickry, a movie generous enough with its showmanship and sleight of hand to quiet the temptation to grumble about its lack of substance." In a sense, especially in the final unraveling of the plot, where everything comes clear, the film presents itself as an illusion—we relish the deceptions, are intrigued by the explanations, and are moved by the human consequences.

Thank You for Smoking

Thank You for Smoking (2006, directed by Jason Reitman, with a screenplay by Reitman and Christopher Buckley based on Buckley's novel) is a satire about a tobacco lobbyist, Nick Taylor, played by Aaron Eckhart. He is vice president and lobbyist for the "Academy of Tobacco Studies." His job is to oppose all arguments against the dangers of tobacco. The film scrupulously adheres to his point of view and presents him as a sympathetic character. Although his job is odious, Nick himself is likeable enough, if you can divorce him from his vocation. The film does not always allow you to do this. Nick's name is a pun—Nick for Nicotine, Nick for Old Scratch, Old Nick, Satan.

Nick is the best spin doctor in the business. He can talk his way out of a paper bag. He blithely argues that tobacco is harmless and that there is no evidence of its dangers. He can refute or at least obfuscate his way around every argument the anti-tobacco lobby mounts. But when he sleeps with an attractive young reporter (Katie Holmes), he spills out all his secrets and opinions, and she prints them in an op-ed piece. Nick loses his job and his self-confidence, and his relationship with his young son, who idolizes him, is endangered as well.

Thank You for Smoking is about Nick Taylor's rise and fall and rise. It's also about the power of lobbyists and spinmeisters and their ability to make hardcore facts and years of research seem like so much, uh, smoke. Beyond that, it's about the dangers such lobbyists and the industries they represent for the safety of the American public and of American democracy.

Nick's victory comes when he testifies before a Congressional panel, admitting that tobacco is harmful but at the same time attacking those who want to regulate it. He uses advocacy of free choice and individualism to diverft attention from the dangers of cigarettes. As a result he regains the respect of his son and of his former boss, who offers him his job back. Nick refuses. Instead he starts his own lobbyist firm. It's not that he's redeemed, not in any sense of the word. It's just that he now has the confidence to pick and choose among the nefarious companies that want him to represent the benefits of their odious products in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

Nick has no conscience. You keep wondering when at some point his conscience may rise and assert itself, but the moment never comes. Even when, after losing his job, he testifies before Congress and admits that he knows cigarettes are dangerous, he refuses to advocate that the tobacco industry be controlled or punished. He argues instead for an educated public's ability to choose whether to smoke. The irony, of course, is that with people like Nick arguing that there is no evidence of the dangers of tobacco and of smoking, the public will never be educated enough to make intelligent choices, or will be too confused. When a senator asks whether he wants his son to smoke cigarettes, he dodges the question and instead replies that if when his son turns 18 he chooses to smoke he will buy his first pack of cigarettes.

Humor in this film comes from how it refrains from any kind of editorializing. It takes its approach to its subject as far as it can possibly go. Thank You for Smoking depends on the ability of the audience to realize that the film is not actually sympathetic to the tobacco industry or tobacco lobbyists. It's risky for a film or an artist to rely on audience judgment in that way. I'm sure some audience members are outraged by the film and don't get the joke. And some who get the joke are outraged anyway because they lack a sense of humor. Thank You for Smoking is, in fact, fairly vicious in its attack on the tobacco industry and its willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve profits. It also bluntly attacks the American public for its ignorance and gullibility, which allow lobbyists and PR hacks like Nick Taylor to do their work.

Thank You for Smoking reminded me of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," which suggests that the Irish should earn money by selling their children for food. Swift's satire is an attack on how English landlords mistreat and abuse their tenants. It's a work of moral outrage. Every time I have taught it, some student in the class refuses to see anything but the surface of the essay—a student to whom irony and sarcasm and humor have no meaning. Some people are too obtuse for irony.

This modest film is distinguished by a fine soundtrack (with many songs about cigarette smoking—it's amazing how many of them there are ) and effective, colorful cinematography. It's entertaining, it makes you mad as it makes you laugh, and it's full of wit , satire, incisive political and cultural commentary, and memorable characters.

Two of Nick's best friends are lobbyists for the liquor and gun industries. He meets with them once a week. They jokingly refer to themselves as the M.O.D. Squad--"M.O.D. for "Merchants of Death").

300

300 suggests that in 500 BC Spartan soldiers fought pitched battles in BVDs and spandex. They bellowed and beat their chests.

300, one could argue, is a right-wing allegory about American involvement in the Middle East, about the culture wars between the West and the East, about the values of freedom and virtue vs. (as the film would have it) enslavement and paganism. The Spartan force consists of burly European men. The Persian army of Xerxes consists of Africans, Asians, and Arabs. Their self-proclaimed god-king Xerxes, an African, is adorned with jewelry and makeup and is decidedly effeminate. It's not difficult to identify the bad guys in this film.

“Freedom is not free” intones King Leonidas’s wife, echoing George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. As her husband leaves for war, she tells him, “Come back with your shield, or on it.” There is much talk of how the men of Sparta are fighting for freedom, even though Leonidas handpicked them to fight and they seem to have little choice in the matter. Freedom is a key word in this film, a hollow word.

Fighting for freedom in 300 means brutal and vicious battle. It is not enough to defeat your enemies—you must impale them on swords and spears, shoot them with arrows, throw them off cliffs and hurl them down dark holes. You use their bodies to build impenetrable walls of dead flesh.

300 tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae—the “Hot Gates”--in 480 BC, famous for the heroic resistance of 300 Spartan soldiers against a large Persian army. The film version of the story is decidedly Spartan-centric. In the real Battle of Thermopylae, several thousand soldiers from various armies joined with the Spartans to march against the Persians and to fight in the battle. When the Greek armies were betrayed and doom was certain, Leonidas dismissed and sent home all soldiers but the Spartan 300 and some 700 volunteers from Thebes, which like Sparta had refused to bow to Xerxes. In the film, Athens sends soldiers to fight alongside the Spartan 300, but the Spartans ridicule the Athenians as “boy lovers” and artists ill-suited for war—Leonidas scornfully tells them they are not real soldiers. The burly men of Sparta are full of contempt for the girly men from Athens. The 700 Thebans are omitted entirely. When the last battle is imminent in the film, the Athenian soldiers leave because they do not want to die—that is, they leave as cowards rather than being sent home by Leonidas, which is what happened in the actual battle. The film seems to find it important to portray the Spartans as the only real heroes.

Before the final battle, Xerxes promises Leonidas that, if he does not submit, all Spartans will be enslaved, all evidence of the battle will be destroyed, and anyone who mentions Thermopylae will be killed. To make sure the battle is not forgotten, Leonidas sends a wounded soldier home to Sparta to tell the story. In this way it is preserved for history. Yet the version of the battle enshrined in the film is not accurate. The true story of Thermopylae is still a great one, but the filmmakers felt that focusing on the 300 Spartans and leaving out everyone else would make it even better.

The film is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller. The visual presentation of the characters and landscape reminds me of a video game or comic strip where there are few colors, mainly shades of black and white and brown, and of course red-- red splashes and blotches and spouts and fountains and squirts of blood abound in this film.

There are numerous imaginative and innovative exercises in animation and cinematography in this film—perhaps emulating Wallace Stevens, the filmmakers want to contemplate 13 ways to kill a Persian soldier. Make that 35 different ways. We follow arrows high into the air in the arc of their flights down into the chest or the face of hapless Persians. We see limbs severed, heads whacked off, bodies eviscerated--all in an obscene balletic dance of gore. One scene is borrowed directly from the end of the Yimou Zhang film Hero, where thousands of arrows shot into the air fall towards the doomed hero.

300 doesn’t stop to tell us what happens to the people of Sparta after the defeat at Thermopylae. Thebes was sacked and burned for its support of Sparta. Presumably a similar fate befell Sparta. The battle at the hot gates did make it possible for a much larger Greek force to defeat the Persians two years later. 300 seems indifferent to those consequences, indifferent to any consequences. A glorious death in a gory and hideous spectacle of blood and violence is what matters. It's self-justifying. And of course there are the profits from the video game based on the film that is already on sale.

If 300 is a commentary on the current state of affairs internationally, it’s bigoted and small-minded and short-sighted. It’s a shallow spectacle and little else.

Also published at BlogCritics: Movie Review: 300

Breach

In Breach (2007) Robert Hanssen is the complex riddle that the film never quite manages to solve. This is the point, in a sense. The failure to solve the enigma is intentional. Outwardly, Hanssen is a conservative, quiet, long-term agent for the F.B.I. He is a devout Catholic who attends mass daily. He regards himself as a loyal public servant who has not risen in the ranks of the bureau because he has refused to "play the game." Inwardly, he's a different man. He is a purveyor of pornography (he sends films of himself and his wife having sex to unknown people overseas). He frequents strip clubs. And he is a counter intelligence agent for the remnants of the Soviet KGB who over a period of fifteen years has given over to the Russians more state secrets that any other double agent in American history. The information he provides leads to the deaths of American agents, and in time of war could have resulted in wholesale catastrophe for the United States—for instance, Hanssen tells the Russians where the American President, Vice President, cabinet officers, and members of congress would be sheltered in event of nuclear attack.

Hanssen is absolutely duplicitous. In the film we mainly see him as the pious conservative family man. This is partially because we see him through the eyes of a young F.B.I. agent, Eric O'Neill, who is assigned to work as his assistant and to track his actions. We see of Hanssen what he chooses to reveal to his "clerk"—the term Hanssen uses to describe O'Neill, whom Hanssen orders to address him as "boss" and "sir." Hanssen gradually comes to like his young protégé and begins to attempt to attract him into the folds of the Catholic Church. O'Neill never actually was a Catholic, though he attended a Jesuit school. He describes himself as a lapsed Protestant. Hanssen's attempts to draw O'Neill's wife, born in East Germany, into the church and to convince her to accept what he sees as her ordained role as a bearer of children, causes tension in O'Neill's marriage. She never understands what is going on, and her husband has been ordered by his superior not to tell her that he has been assigned to collect information on Hanssen.

To spy on Hanssen, O'Neill has to become like him and to live the kind of double life than Hanssen himself lives. As Hanssen opens up to O'Neill and begins to invite him to his home and to attend mass with him, O'Neill finds himself liking the man. He can't understand why the F.B.I. would suspect him of wrongdoing because he sees no evidence of it in Hanssen's character. He begins to accept Hanssen's view of the F.B.I. as an organization riven with political machinations and rivalries and incompetence. But when he expresses these concerns to his supervisor, a young woman somewhat older than he who readily admits that she has no private life of her own, she tells him the truth and shows him the evidence. This complicates O'Neill's position further, for now he must feign friendship and respect for this man who has betrayed his country and whose life is a complete deception. And he has to lie to his wife about what he is doing.

The relationship of Hanssen and O'Neill is in many ways the heart of Breach. As the film progresses, that relationship becomes increasingly uncomfortable. There are moments when Hanssen seems suspicious of O'Neill (he is suspicious of everyone), especially early in the film. And in one scene, when Hanssen is unable to reach O'Neill (who is meeting with the team that is gathering evidence on Hanssen), he comes to O'Neill's apartment uninvited, with dinner, and upbraids O'Neill for his absence when he does arrive home, almost as if his intention is to make O'Neill's wife suspicious.

Part of the interest of the film lies in the explanations it does and does not offer for Hanssen's character. He is a brilliant man, truly gifted in designing secure databases. The film portrays his sense of himself as an outsider, as someone whose loyalty and contributions have not been recognized, and revenge against the bureau and the government for his failure to rise in the bureaucracy is perhaps one motive for his betrayals. After he is arrested, Hanssen suggests that ego is a reason—implying that he enjoys attending the meetings where his colleagues wonder about the identity of the mole who is giving secrets away to the Russians. He suggests as well that perhaps he turned on his country to demonstrating the vulnerabilities of its security network (this is not convincing). Ultimately, the film doesn't offer an explanation—Hanssen remains inscrutable. Even as he breaks down at the end of the film, convinced that he is about to be caught, unable to resist dropping off a final batch of information, he remains obscure and complex.

Breach does seem to confirm Hanssen's view of the F.B.I. as an agency of politics and internal squabbling. When we first see O'Neill in the film he is bring chastised by two colleagues for circulating a proposal to update computer security. They see the proposal as his attempt to get ahead, to kiss ass and call attention to himself. O'Neill's supervisor (Laura Linney) tells O'Neill he has a reputation for arrogance. Hanssen himself suggests that an F.B.I. investigation into the presence of an inside informer will not take place because agents don't like investigating fellow agents. His accusation that one must "play the game" to get ahead in the F.B.I. may be true. But the film also portrays a group of F.B.I. agents working diligently to gather evidence that will allow Hanssen's arrest and indictment. Despite its own bloated bureaucracy, despite the betrayals of people like Hanssen, the system does its best to do its work. At what point does bureaucratic bloat or internal betrayal overwhelm the system and cause its collapse? The film argues for the system's weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

After the arrest, O'Neill's supervisor tells him that he will be promoted for his good work. O'Neill announces that he is resigning. Although his reason is not explicitly stated, we know that he does not want to work in a job that compels him to lie and deceive, even if he is doing so in the best interests of his country. The film portrays this decision, I think, as an admirable one, though it does not fully explore the consequences of this position: if someone doesn't take the necessary steps to stop people like Hanssen, the government will be compromised.

Chris Cooper is excellent as O'Neill—this is the best, most nuanced performance I've seen him give. Laura Linney is effective as Eric O'Neill's supervisor.

Breach does not make Hanssen out to be a villain—he's not demonized or stereotyped in a simple way—but it does not deny the seriousness of his treasonous betrayals. Because the film allows us to see past issues of national security and ideology to the complex contradictions of human character, in this case an extreme example of human character, it is successful.

Breach is based on the true story of Hanssen's career and of his arrest in 2001. The former F.B.I. agent O'Neill whose work helped bring about the arrest served as an advisor to the film.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) is difficult to characterize. It is a strangely entertaining film that flouts in its understated way numerous conventions. The loose plot has to do with a famous explorer and oceanographic naturalist Steve Zissou, vaguely similar to Jacques Cousteau. In the film he hires a film crew to chronicle his attempt to find and kill a jaguar shark that ate his partner. His quest for revenge is also an attempt to revive his flagging career and self-esteem. A son whom he has never acknowledged suddenly shows up to join the crew. Bill Murray in his usual ultra suppressed way plays Steve Zissou. Anjelica Huston is his sometimes estranged wife. Wilson plays Zissou's son Ned, while Cate Blanchett plays a reporter writing about the voyage.

Much of the film takes place on a bisected ocean vessel--as if the vessel has been sawed in half, vertically, from stem to stern, so that we get a cross-section view of what is going on in the ship and watch characters moving from one room or deck to another. I was reminded in a strange way of a Lars von Trier film. The Life Aquatic moves casually from one scene to the next. Every element is casual and underplayed and strange. The result is a wonderful sense of whimsy. Murray is the heart of the film's casual atmosphere. Huston, who appears in relatively few scenes, backs him up. She is as droll and dark as she was in the Addams family films.

The only real tension comes in the final climactic scene where Zissou and crew board a submarine and descend to the depths to view the fabled jaguar shark. (The rivalry between Zissou and his son over Blanchett's reporter generates no tension at all, just some weird comic moments). The scene in the sub is handled in a whimsical, off-handed fashion. As the submarine descends, we notice a sign on the inner wall announcing that the vessel can safely handle six passengers at a time, while at least twice that many are aboard. The passengers gaze casually out of the windows, watching the digitally rendered undersea life (the fish are cartoon-like animations). As the shark approaches, the reporter asks whether they are safe in the sub. Zissou answers, "I doubt it." The shark swims menacingly around the sub, then swims away. We see Zissou, surrounded by ex-wife and crew, gazing out into the blackness of the deep, moved by their encounter. For Zissou this moment seems a culmination of his career, but the emotion he displays, for the first time in the film--emotion still subdued and restrained, but clearly deep emotion--is not for the shark or his failure to take revenge on the animal but for the son he never had and never felt he needed until he was lost. Everyone in the sub leans over and hugs or comforts Zissou. The scene described seems absolutely ludicrous, but it is the warm heart of this wacky, strange, charming film from Wes Anderson.

The Sentinel

In The Sentinel (2006) a veteran secret service agent who is having an affair with the wife of the President finds himself framed for an assassination plot. The secret service agent who accuses him is his former best friend--former because the veteran agent had an affair ten years earlier with the younger agent's wife. Melodrama fever.

The Sentinel has the entertainment value of an episode of Law and Order. It is entertaining, but not very good. It moves along slowly, the plot twists are predictable, and it's full of holes and dead ends. Kiefer Sutherland strays a short distance away from his Jack Bauer persona to play the younger secret service agent, while Michael Douglas plays the veteran agent. If Douglas' character has gone unpromoted for 25 years, why he is so crafty and effective once he learns he's been falsely accused? Why does an old country store in the middle of rural Virginia have high-speed Internet? Why can the older Douglas outrun the younger Sutherland? Why is the suspect Douglas able to get past numerous secret service agents to reach and rescue the president from the real assassins? A subplot involving Sutherland's father goes nowhere.

This film portrays the White House as a prison for the President's wife—their marriage is a charade—perhaps this is a comment on the Clinton marriage. It's not clear whose fault the sham marriage is. The President himself is a hollow bag of mildly rhetorical air. The world of the film hardly seems to exist outside the main characters. The dramatic tension of the film comes out of the estrangement of the main characters and their reconciliation and, to a lesser extent, from the Michael Douglas affair with the President's wife, played by Kim Basinger. Towards the end, when the assassination plot unfolds, the film generates a small amount of interest and suspense.

Michael Douglas seems unenthusiastic and unconvinced. Kiefer Sutherland vacillates between loud rage and depressive indifference. Basinger seems bored. Everyone lacks conviction. The lackluster half-baked script, the poor direction, and sluggardly editing push this film along towards a conclusion that doesn't come soon enough

Nothing but a Man

Nothing but a Man is remarkable and unusual. Released in 1964, filmed in black and white, set in an unidentified part of the American South, it focuses on a black man named Duff Anderson. He works on a railroad gang laying rails. Nothing but a Man attempts to show what life is for a young black man in the small-town South in the 1960s. Ivan Dixon portrays Duff. He was a relative unknown when the film was made, and his role in this film was the outstanding role of his career.

A number of actors in this film later became significant figures in the American entertainment industry, primarily Yaphet Kotto, who plays Duff's friend Jocko, and Esther Rolle, who appears briefly in a church service. Abby Lincoln, already known by the time of this film for her beauty, her acting, and her jazz singing, plays Josie Dawson, a young schoolteacher to whom Duff is attracted.

This film is low key and seemingly objective. It displays Duff's life and problems without preaching about them. It has the style of a documentary, following Duff as he works on the rail line, sits in a bar, attends a church service, and flirts with a young woman selling food outside the church. Her name is Josie and she turns out to be the preacher's daughter. When Duff asks her to go out with him, she agrees.

The schoolteacher is one of a number of challenges Duff faces in the film. She is part of a respectable middle-class black family in the small Southern town. Her father and mother disapprove of her friendship with a manual laborer. She has gone to college and is a teacher. He lays rails for the railroad. The differences in social class between Josie and Duff pose a problem that he feels more than she does. While she has a stable job, he works as a laborer, and after he quits his job to settle down with Josie, stable employment is an issue for him throughout the film.

Josie as a character stands between Duff and her father the minister, Reverend Dawson. She speaks critically of her father on several occasions, blaming him for not standing up against the whites at crucial moments. Reverend Dawson himself tells Duff that it is difficult to know how to talk to white people—he apparently sees relations with white people as a matter of diplomacy and negotiation. He may have his own welfare and respectability in mind, but he also cares about the welfare of the black community as a whole—that welfare depends on peaceful relations with the whites, and in the community where Duff lives peaceful relations mean a subservient role for African Americans.

Duff contrasts with Reverend Dawson and other black men in the film as well. He is an individual who wants to live by his own terms. He is not comfortable being deferential to whites. He is also not religious, and this distances him from Josie's father. When he gets a job at a mill, he is bothered by the failure of other black workers to stand up for themselves. He tells them they should not accept mistreatment from the whites. They tell him that they have families to worry about, that they can't afford to make their employers angry. After one of them tells the white employees that Duff is trying to make trouble, Duff loses his job.

Duff is not insolent or disrespectful or aggressive towards white people. He is simply himself. He isn't particularly talkative, and his silences are taken for rudeness. He refuses to be subservient and deferential. He refuses to joke around with white men who try to talk down to him. His refusal to play the game causes problems.

After he loses the job at the mill, he tries unsuccessfully to find other work. He considers picking cotton, but refuses to accept the low wage of $2.50 a day. When his father-in-law helps him get a job at a service station owned by a white man, he loses the job after a carload of white boys threaten to burn the station down if the owner doesn't fire him—when one of them makes a lewd joke about his wife, Duff tells him to watch how he talks, and this leads to trouble. Duff feels that employment that allows him to earn a decent living wage is a key to his hopes for a successful life. It is certainly a key factor in the growing tension between Duff and Josie. He becomes increasingly worried about how he is going to care for her and the baby that is on the way.

A complicating factor is Duff's conflicted relationship with his father, whom he goes to visit at two important moments in the film—once when he is thinking about asking Josie to marry him and again when he has left Josie to look for work in another city. Duff's father is a bitter broken man, afflicted by alcoholism, chronic unemployment, depression, and high blood pressure. He hardly recognizes his son during the first visit, and although there are tentative efforts at friendly talk, he ultimately tells his son to leave. In the second visit, he is so drunk that he can hardly stand, and he suffers a stroke, dying in Duff's car on the way to the hospital. We can infer that Duff's father was afflicted by the same problems that Duff has encountered—difficulty in finding work, unhappiness with the narrow set of roles and behaviors allowed him in a predominantly white society, chafing at an environment of disrespect and oppression. Duff knows that his father represents one possible future for him.

The father-son issue is further complicated when Duff reveals to Josie that he has a son. He sends the boy's mother money each month but goes for two years without seeing the boy. When he finally does visit, he discovers that the mother has left town and left the child in a neighbor's care. He rebuffs Josie's suggestions that he bring the boy home to live with them. He is therefore replicating the same pattern of absent fatherhood that his own father followed.

Nothing but a Man displays all the reasons why Duff might feel beaten down and why he might turn out like his father—drunk, bitter, estranged. Finally, it is his father's death that convinces him not to follow the same path. His love for Josie and his desire not to follow that path lead him to return to Josie with his son in tow, intent on the struggle to make a life with her and to hold his head up, to be a black man in a white world, as difficult as that might be. The implication, as the film ends, is that he will try to set an example and stand up against the whites in the town where he and Josie live.

Nothing Bu a Man at moments is slow and awkward, and there are occasional pauses and plodding moments, a few melodramatic moments. But for the most part it is extremely effective in portraying the limiting forces that Duff faces, and that ultimately he refuses to allow to defeat him. Some might find the end of the film too optimistic, an obligatory happy ending. Instead, the conclusion strikes a necessary note of determination and resolve. Facing the problems he faces—of class divisions, broken family histories and difficult parental relationships, the constrictions of a society that refuses to accept him on his own terms—he is presented both as the representative American black man and as the example of hope and resolve that will lead black America forward. But the film is not a call to arms, by any means, but rather a call for understanding and compassion not just of the man of the film's title but of the society and the forces that oppress and hold him down.

The film makes excellent use of setting—landscapes, cityscapes—to depict the world in which Duff lives. It begins with images of Duff and colleagues driving spikes as they lay new railroad tracks. Several panoramas of junkyards superimposed against the skylines of a large city, further superimposed against Duff's face, help explain the forces that oppose him. The film never names the part of the South in which it is set. Characters mention the North, and it is clear that the action is taking place somewhere in the South. But the cinematography focuses us on the locations and the places where the characters work and live—the school where Josie works, the cotton field where Duff briefly considers picking cotton, the mill and the gas station and the pharmacy. It therefore evokes a vivid sense of place without specifying where the place is. The film's "place" is, ultimately, a generic South whose name does not matter. For a low budget black and white film, the cinematography in Nothing but a Man is impressive and highly effective. So too is the low-key soundtrack, drawn from 60s era Motown—it tells us what the characters are listening to, gives us a sense of their emotional states of mind and their musical interests, locates the film in a particular timeframe, but it does not dominate the film nor does it, as is the case with some later films about African Americans (Hustle and Flow is an example), in any way become a substitute for the problems the characters grapple with.

The setting of Nothing but a Man emphasizes the world of the industrial white man—of finance, industry, technology—that excludes and oppresses and ultimately challenges Duff to be the "man" that the movie shows him struggling to be.

Jesus Camp

The documentary Jesus Camp offers a minimum of instruction in how to view its subject. The film is framed by a radio talk show host who appears in an early scene, in a few subsequent scenes, and at the end. He is apparently a former evangelical, and as he talks to callers on his radio show, he rails against the dangers of right-wing evangelical Christianity. His admonitions and comments are the only self-conscious hints this film offers about its point of view.

Of course, there are other more subtle clues: what the filmmakers choose to film, how they edit, and so on. But in general Jesus Camp is a remarkable example of a objectivity in documentary filmmaking.

Jesus Camp focuses on a few individuals and their lives as evangelicals. One of the primary figures is an ardent and in ways charming older woman who ministers to children. She runs the summer camp that gives this film its title. One of the children is a boy of perhaps 13 or 14 years. He has a closely cropped haircut except for a swath of hair that hangs down his back. He is bright, eager, open eyed, and wholly brainwashed. We see much of him in the film. The woman teaches the boy and his friends to speak in tongues, to praise Jesus, to convert unbelievers. The world of reason and rationality, where people think and develop their own ideas, is alien to this woman and her students. They are taught to believe what they are told, to have faith, never to question. They are taught that the world of reason is evil and that those who think for themselves, who have an open mind, are damned.

Jesus Camp doesn't show evangelical Christians as oppressed and unhappy. To the contrary, through much of the film we see them full of joy, enjoying their lives, celebrating their faith, expressing love for their savior and for one another. Only gradually, as the film progresses, does it become obvious that theirs is an existence of benighted ignorance and prejudice.

I expected this film to be funny. In fact there was little humor in it. One of the only moments of humor comes when a group of evangelical children approach several black men sitting in a park. The children have been taught how to speak with the unconverted, and they try their new skills out on these men. One of the children asks the men, "Where do you think you'll go when you die?" One of the men answers, "Heaven." The children are not prepared for this answer, which floors them, and they turn and leave, walking rapidly across the street away from the park. One of them exclaims, after a pause, "They must be Muslims."

A few scenes concern a mother who is homeschooling her children. The film notes that two-thirds of the children home schooled in America are evangelical Christians. Her bias against science, reason, and open thought as she speaks to the interviewer and to her son is chilling.

In another scene, the evangelical teacher talks to the radio show host about the dangers of democracy.

Democracy depends on an enlightened, educated, intelligent electorate. If the people about whom this film is made ever get the upper hand, democracy and reason will vanish. Jesus Camp is a frightening film.

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, Jesus Camp was produced and directed by a group of women filmmakers who have mastered the art of expressing a point of view by allowing their subject to speak for itself.

The Sunset Limited, by Cormac McCarthy

In The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form (2006), a white man and black man (named in the text simply as "White" and "Black") argue about whether life has meaning. The white man is a college professor who has just been prevented from throwing himself in front of a subway train by the black man, a reformed ex-convict. The white man believes life has no meaning and wants to die. The black man is a converted Christian who says that Jesus often talks to him. He feels responsible for the white man he has rescued, responsible not only for preventing him from another suicide attempt but also for the salvation of his soul.

The train which the white man attempted to use as the means of his extinction is the Sunset Limited, and this name becomes in this dramatic debate a label for the end of all human life—human mortality, death. Does life mean anything in the face of inevitable extinction? Is death the end of things? These issues this play explores.

Racial considerations do not seem an issue here. Still, the two characters represent some uncomfortable distinctions. The white man is the voice of despair, nihilism, rationalism. The black man is the voice of hope, belief, faith. He also talks in an ungrammatical dialect that occasionally verges on a stereotype, though he is intelligent and articulate. The play refers to him as "the black." What are these distinctions supposed to imply? The play might not directly address issues of race and racism in the interplay of its two characters, but it does raise and suggest them. The true focus lies elsewhere.

These two men are like good and bad angels for the writer of this play which, though it has been staged, is more like a closet drama than a work intended for performance. Cormac McCarthy is the writer, of course, the author of such dark novels as Outer Dark, Child of God, Blood Meridian, and The Road. One of the central issues in The Road is whether, in a world that has essentially come to an end and that is doomed to darkness and lifelessness, there is any reason for the few survivors to struggle on. In that novel, a dying father's love for his young son is the sole justification for that struggle, and even then the father wonders whether killing his son would be more an act of love than dying and leaving him alone in a dead world.

McCarthy often verges on nihilism. In All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, he allows his leading characters to survive, though they must live with the knowledge of all they have lost—a stoic and highly compromised survival, such as the one allowed Harry Wilbourne at the end of Faulkner's novel The Wild Palms—"between grief and nothingness, I'll take grief."

The Sunset Limited comes to no real conclusion. The two men talk and argue and debate, and on several occasions one seems on the verge of winning over or at least of outtalking the other. This is especially true when the black man serves the white man food and they eat together. Finally, however, neither convinces the other. Although the black man rarely seems at a loss for words, at the end the white man explains to him how he is in love with the prospect of death and then walks out the door. The black man calls him back, but receives no response. The play ends. It would be the conventional ending to have the unbeliever tempted towards belief, but here the opposite seems the case—the believer shaken in his own certain convictions.

Why does this debate matter to McCarthy? He seems to have made his choice—for rationalism, darkness. He is in his 70s now, and in The Road he made clear how he was thinking about the prospects of death. Here, In the Sunset Limited, he offers further thoughts on the subject. It is tempting to see in the white character of this play McCarthy's own projection of himself, and in the black man a representation of the compulsions towards faith that, in the face of one's own inevitable end, may act more strongly than they have before. Yet he still rejects them.

One point this play makes clearly: though the voices of faith and rationalism may attempt to converse, in the end there is no possibility of agreement. They are divided by an irreconcilable difference of conviction, a gap that cannot be closed.

Despite the claim in the subtitle, The Sunset Limited is not a novel. It is a play and a philosophical debate. It is longer than it needs to be. McCarthy's tendency towards philosophizing has occasionally been a weakness in his novels—I think especially of The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, both of which contain overlong moments of philosophical discussion. Here the main points of the disagreement between the two characters are expressed repeatedly in a way that doesn't seem to advance the plot in any particular direction, leaving us at the end where we were at the beginning. Perhaps this is one of the points.

Pleasantville

Pleasantville is the New York town where, supposedly, the Reader’s Digest is published. I’ve always pictured the place as bland, unremarkable, and inoffensive. Pleasantville is also the title of a 1998 film starring Tobey McGuire, Reese Witherspoon, Joan Allen, Jeff Daniel, William H. Macy and others. The film uses the town’s bland name as an emblem of an equally bland American ideal: down home values, conformity, community cooperation, universal subscription to common political and moral principles, conservative lifestyles, and so on. It is the kind of life we like to think (incorrectly) characterized America during the 1950s.

Pleasantville uses the bland ideal of America in the 1950s as imposed on the public by such situation family comedies as Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show. The film begins with the following improbable premise: When two modern-day American teenagers fight over the remote control, it malfunctions and they are sucked into the world of 1950s black-and-white television—a world much like that of the sit-com they were watching, a sit-com named Pleasantville. The town they find themselves embodies the ideal described above. It is also a black and white world, devoid of color, characterized by blandness and conformity. Gradually, as the brother and sister upset the order of things, color comes to the small town.

The film wants the audience to equate color with life, with individualism and creativity and passion. In a very general way it uses as a framework the beginning of the shift in the late 1950s from black and white to color television. It relies on two historical movements of the 1950s to create a context in its depiction of the battle between conformity and individuals. One is McCarthyism, and the other is the Civil Rights movement. (As people gradually change from, black and white to natural colors in the film, the townspeople who have not changed yet refer to them as “colored.” Several stores in the town display signs that say “No Coloreds.”) The film doesn’t take this particular parallel very far, but it does make the point that the world depicted in the film (and the mythic ideal it embodies) depends on the suppression of anything that diverges from the norm. The parallel with the greatest force in the film is that of McCarthyism, but even this one is only generally present. The film doesn’t work in terms of specific political issues or struggles. It explores broad, abstract issues of free expression, individualism vs. conformity, repression vs. passion and freedom of thought, etc. In this way the film manages to make its point without offering controversy. Since the world of Pleasantville is an imagined fantasy world, one that we all know doesn’t exist, and one whose blandness virtually none of us would countenance, the film’s argument for free expression and individualism is one virtually none of us would disagree with. We all want to be like the “coloreds.”

Another way to look at the film is the fact that in many ways the divisions in the town are not merely between the “coloreds” and the “black and white” folks, but also between the young and the old. With some notable exceptions (the malt shop owner played by Jeff Daniels—an artist—and the oppressed house wife played by Joan Allen), the young people in the town revel in the openness and free expression of the dawning world of color while the older people favor colorless conformity. The notion here is that while the young are just beginning to discover life, the old are forgetting it. Exploiting generational divisions in this way, the film appeals to its mostly young audience, who believe that the adult world is repressive and dead to begin with.

Pleasantville is superficial in its treatment of such basic issues as individualism and conformity, the needs of the community balanced against the yearning urges of the self, and in its allegorical dramatization of movements at work in America during the 1950s and 60s. That being said, Pleasantville is diverting entertainment. It’s a true feel-good film, effectively directed and produced, with good acting and strong production values. It is easy to be caught up in the its celebration of art and openness and love and personal development. This film is eponymously self-confirming—pleasant.

North Toward Home, by Willie Morris

Willie Morris takes us through three stages of his early life in his memoir North Toward Home (1967). The title is ironic in a mild sense. Though it might seem to express a rejection of the South and the land of his youth, instead it recognizes that in his adult life the North where he works and lives is the modern world and his present time, whereas Yazoo City, the place of his birth and youth, is the past.

Three sections organize the book: Morris' memories of his early days and adolescence in Yazoo City; his days as a student at the University of Texas followed by his work as an editor for the Texas Observer and his take on Texas politics (including LBJ); and finally his work in New York City as an editor for Harpers Magazine. The last section of the book is the least detailed and specific, and the least satisfying, and in it Morris takes every opportunity to editorialize on the harsh impersonality of life in "the Cave," the Big Northern City.

A Southern defensiveness pervades the book. Partially the result of when it was written—the late 1960s—Morris is careful to insist that the old South he describes is one he no longer is a part of, that he has grown beyond. This is especially the case in his treatment of racism and racial issues. On occasion, on a New York commuter train, he assures the person sitting next to him that he is not only a Democrat but a liberal Democrat. If he admits he is a Southerner, he is careful to make clear the kind of Southerner he is.

The best part of the book is the first section, where he describes growing up in Yazoo City, the people he knew, life with his parents, girls he dated, teams he played for, a radio station he broadcast for, and the rise of the civil rights movement. It is difficult to know how to read this section. Morris clearly presents himself as a racial liberal, someone who embraces racial equality and civil rights, yet he writes about his early life--how he and other boys played tricks on black people, for instance, and his interactions with various black residents of the town--without apologizing for his actions. I think he feels the fact that he grew up, changed his ways and attitudes, makes the difference. Morris describes his early life the way it was, the way he lived it, so as to place his development as an adult, a white Southern liberal, in contrast.

Many modern Southerners have had no experience living in a small Southern town, and Morris's recollections of his youth in Yazoo City give a vivid picture of the life in the 1930s—the racial divisions, the social strata, those days before television and the advent of the modern. His account of how the town reacts when a group of African Americans circulates a petition is especially interesting—the townspeople meet together and decide to fire all the people who signed the petition. Most of the fired people leave town to find work elsewhere.

The most interesting elements of the middle section, which concerns Morris' college days at the University of Texas and his early experiences as a journalist, are his descriptions of Texas politics. This section is marked by humor and satire, and some of the descriptions of Texas legislators are outright hilarious.

Morris is at his best when he is describing rather than sermonizing. He is intent on demonstrating his own progressivism. This is not something a Southern journalist would feel a need to do in 2007, but perhaps Morris felt the need in 1967—to justify himself, to make clear his own position in contrast to the rest of the South. The defensiveness at times is a bit smug. Morris' ability to dredge up precise details and descriptions from his early days in Yazoo City provoked my skepticism—there may be some invention going on in this book. It is probably invention that leads to a treatment of his subject that is more or less true in spirit if not in the precise details.

Morris often mentions Thomas Wolfe in this book. He clearly admires the North Carolina writer, and the admiration shows in his prose, which, though not as florid as Wolfe's, does have an over-exuberance.

February 20, 1962

On February 20, 1962, I sat staring at the television screen in the 6^th grade classroom of Helen Babb Avery, a teacher at Longino Elementary School in College Park, Georgia. After ten false starts, John Glenn was going to become the first American to orbit the earth. The early days of the American space program involved many stops and starts, holds, scrubs, cancellations. But on this day it was going to happen, at last. We all waited to witness the historic moment of America's entry into orbit. Mrs. Avery was an excellent teacher, but I suspect she welcomed these times when she could put lessons aside and let the students watch history unfold on the television.

When Glenn was lifted aloft by the Atlas missile, we cheered and clapped. We were giddy with America's victory—no matter that Soviet cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov had already orbited the earth. Ours was a victory for the free world, broadcast as it was on national television, for all to watch. Thinking about it in this way, we could view Glenn's flight as a victory.

As a sixth grader I thought John Glenn was a great hero. At 39, he was the oldest of the original seven astronauts, and there was concern that his age would put him at risk. He ran 2 miles a day. His wife Annie did not like the public spotlight and avoided interviews. Glenn relished the role of hero, and according to Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff his insistence on proper behavior and all-American values caused the other astronauts to resent and make fun of him. After he left the space program, Glenn was often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, but at the 1976 Democratic convention he gave a keynote speech so dull that, along with other factors, it killed his chances in the national arena. As a senator from Ohio from 1974 to 1998, he served dutifully and well but not remarkably. He was only a man after all.

Walter Brennan was a professional old man. He played an old man in a number of films, and in the television series "The Real McCoys." His voice squeaked and cracked like an old man's. He recorded a song that enjoyed much air play in 1962 called "Old Rivers," about a man he remembered from his youth. He didn't sing the song. He just croaked it, in a plaintive, pathetic, and gruesomely sentimental way. On the opposite side of the single was a song entitled "The Epic Ride of John H. Glenn." It was corn and camp, and I listened to it over and over.

Infamous

Infamous is more a study of Truman Capote and his relationship with the two men who murdered the Clutter family than of his writing of In Cold Blood. The film Capote focused more narrowly on the character of the author and his deepening involvement in the writing of the book. It argued that Capote exploited the two murderers, and others, so that he could produce the book—the notion was that he ruthlessly used other people’s lives, and deaths, to feather his own fame and success as an author. Both films suggest that the experience of writing In Cold Blood transformed Capote and damaged him as well. Capote suggested a gradual corruptive transformation in the writer, while Infamous offers another explanation.

Infamous followed Capote by a year, though both films were made around the same time. This is unusual, to have two films made more or less simultaneously, on the same subject, with many of the same characters. The two films complement one another rather than cove the same precise territory. Capote offers a sometimes cold and clinical analysis of the author, while Infamous is more humane and compassionate in its treatment. It also seems to be more speculative.

Infamous begins and ends with Capote writing down the title of his novel Answered Prayers, which he was beginning to write before he learned of the Clutter murders, and which he struggled to finish through the remainder of his life after the publication of In Cold Blood. The title carries a certain irony—irony that Capote’s chance reading of the short newspaper article on the murders led to his discovery of the subject for his greatest work, irony that he never finished the book called Answered Prayers—not finishing the book was the price he paid for In Cold Blood.

Infamous begins by showing us the social gadfly Truman Capote and his circle of women friends in New York—Diana Vreeland, Babe Paley, Slim Keith, and others. We see how he loves hearing the details of their private lives and how he gleefully violates their confidences by passing on their secrets to others. He feeds on their love affairs and disappointments. He charms and insinuates himself into their lives. He begs them for news about scandals. Later, as he gathers information about the Clutter murders, he shares his discoveries with these same women—in a sense, another kind of gossip.

This same kind of charm ultimately enables Capote to win his way into the graces of the Dewey family and other residents of the small Kansas town with his gossipy stories about Humphey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra, Jennifer Jones, John Huston, and other actors.

Infamous hypothesizes that Perry Smith and Capote developed a close relationship, that Smith fell in love with Capote, who may have Capote reciprocated, at least emotionally. The film thereby sidesteps (though not entirely) the idea that Capote exploited Smith and Hitchcock in the writing of In Cold Blood. Capote is torn in Infamous by his realization that his great work cannot be published until the murderers are executed and by the fact that when the book is published, it will be at the price of Perry’s death. Both films show Capote distancing himself from the murderers, refusing to answer their calls and letters, though Infamous implies this is because he felt helpless rather than because he had finished with them, or at least finished with Perry.

The film emphasizes how Capote and Perry Miller felt of abandoned by their parents, especially their fathers. This draws them together. Similarly, Harper Lee and Capote are connected by their efforts to finish novels—Lee has already finished To Kill a Mockingbird by the time the film begins, and she is struggling to write another novel—one she never finished—throughout the film. She talks about how writing takes a lot out of a writer, quoting Frank Sinatra on how every time Judy Garland sang a part of her died. She suggests that the same can be true for writers and that when Smith and Hickock were executed, Capote in a sense died with them. There is an implication in some abstract sense that Lee’s inability to finish her book, which at one point she tells Capote “won’t come together,” is connected to Capote’s failure to finish Answered Prayers, or at least in some sense explained by it. It is Lee in Infamous, as it was Lee in Capote, who tries to reason with Capote about the difference between fact and fiction and who confronts him with the suggestion that he might be toying with the lives of his subjects. In Capote it is this exploitation that leads to Capote’s corruption—his purported indifference to the lives of the people he writes about; in Infamous this blurring of truth and fiction leads Capote to involve himself in the life of one of the murderers to such an extent that he becomes, in a sense, his own victim.

Capote tells his editor that he wants to write an article about the town where the murders occurred so that he can examine the loss of trust in a small town—a topic that ties him to the small town of the South where he lived and grew up.

Infamous makes good use of Kansas as a setting. There are numerous shots of people standing in relief against the Kansas sky, especially at sunset, and the film therefore gives a sense of what it is that Capote is learning about the town and the people who live in it. It’s surprising that a man as openly gap and effeminate as Capote—the film suggests that he reveled in his effeminacy, laughing when townspeople mistake him for a “strange woman.”

There is a documentary frame to the film, where a series of interviews apparently conducted after Capote’s death with the various people he knew—Vreeland, Lee, Alvin Dewey, and others—talk about him and the experience of writing In Cold Blood.

The actor who plays Capote is excellent. He captures the exuberance of the young and wild Capote, though at times he seems more of an caricature than an accurate portrait. I preferred the acting of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, whose study of the writer was less mannered and more insightful, but the main character in Infamous was nonetheless excellent, as was Daniel Craige as Perry Smith.

Eat the Document

Eat the Document is a rarely seen 1972 follow-up documentary to D. A. Pennebaker’s 1965 film Don’t Look Back. Pennebaker shot the footage for Eat the Document but Bob Dylan and associate Howard Alk did the editing. Pennebaker intended to direct the film, but when Dylan took over, Pennebaker backed away. Eat the Document records the frenetic, disjointed pace of Dylan’s controversial 1966 concert tour in England. It contains impressive excerpts from some of the performances, but only one or two complete performances. This is an irritation—most of the performances are cut short, interrupted. Someone should go through the footage used to make Don’t Look Back and Eat the Document and reconstruct the complete performances that are there. (According to The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan, Pennebaker owns unreleased footage of a number of complete performances). At no time in his career did Dylan perform more evocatively and powerfully than he did on this tour—his singing seems almost otherworldly. Look at the performance of “Desolation Row” in the Scorsese documentary as an example. There needs to be a more complete public record of these performances.

Eat the Document also contains a number of segments in which Dylan plays guitar or piano and sings in his hotel room and other private settings. These are some of the most interesting scenes in the film because, although this is the period when Dylan was outraging audiences with his rock and roll electronic performances, on his own he was often still playing acoustic folk music. Dylan’s skill as a guitarist has occasionally been disparaged, but in these scenes he plays guitar and piano with much ease.

This film has never been released in any format. The copy I managed to see was purchased on the web. I have no idea whether it actually is the Eat the Document film I have read about. The camerawork is choppy and full of jerky movement. It’s difficult to tell whether some of the amateurish moments in the film—the occasional frozen images, the scenes of static, the gaps--are the result of the haphazard way in which the copy I watched was recorded, or of how the film itself was made. Few scenes develop at much length. In general, based on descriptions I have read, I think I saw the fabled film. The film’s highlight is “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the best performance ever of this song by Dylan or anyone else.

While Pennebaker preferred a measure of coherence in Don’t Look Back, in Eat the Document coherence is not a particular goal. This may well be a reflection of how Dylan edited the film, and of its editor’s disdain for conventional narrative. He may have shaped the film in this way to illustrate how he experienced the constant movement, travel, unsettlement, uproar, confusion, and rare moments of quiet solitude during the 1966 tour. This was a period when the old Dylan was reconstructing a new Dylan, but what one mainly finds in this film is a process of self-deconstruction, with nothing left in the void of the old Dylan except the words and the music. What the new Dylan will be remains unresolved. The main focus seems not to be on telling the story of the 1966 tour, but instead on evoking in pastiche form what the tour was like, the ambience of the concerts, the sometimes hostile atmosphere, the disappointment and anger of fans who came to see one Dylan and got another, quite different person in his place.

The film also suggests, especially in the prolonged and painful sequence with Dylan and John Lennon in the backseat of a limousine, laughing and talking, Dylan so high on drugs and/or alcohol that he seems miserable and often unable to hold his head up, that this was a period in his career when Dylan was running so close to the edge that he could have easily fallen over and been lost forever. The danger, the risk, the willful momentum towards self-immolation and destruction we see in this film is probably why Dylan’s work from this period is so powerful and even haunting.

For Dylan fanatics the film is important as a document of a particular moment from his career, and for the sequences where Dylan sings. But Eat the Document is not a successful or effective film. Some have called it daring and experimental. To me it’s self-indulgent and clumsy. Still, it should be restored and released. And someone should compile and commercially release a video record of Dylan’s performances during the 1960s.

Hollywoodland

The central structural device in Hollywoodland involves the two characters played by Ben Affleck and Aiden Brody. Affleck plays the actor George Reeves, who in the 1950s became famous, briefly, as the lead in the Superman television series. Brody plays private detective Louis Simo. Reeves is dead, an apparent suicide, before Simo becomes interested in him. The lives of these characters are closely intertwined.

Reeves is portrayed as an ambitious but modestly talented actor. He has high aspirations but his career in the 1950s is faltering. He lands a role in From Here to Eternity, but his acting is so wooden that his scene is edited out of the film. When he lands the lead in the Superman television series, he is embarrassed and disdainful of the opportunity, but it does make him famous for three years. When the show is canceled, he tries to start his own production company, but this effort falters. Finally, after a small party in his house, he goes upstairs, a gunshot echoes, and he is found dead, apparently a suicide. His is the narrative of a disappointed life, someone who cannot live with the reality of his own limitations. Paralleled with Reeves is Louis Simo, whose marriage has collapsed and whose seven-year-old son has been so affected by the suicide of his television hero that he develops serious behavior problems. He sets his Superman costume afire on the family sofa. (Later we see Reeves doing the same on his outdoor grill, after the series is cancelled).

Just as Hollywoodland traces the gradual decline of Reeves’ hopes as an actor, so too does it trace Simo’s decline. When Simo is hired by George Reeves' mother to investigate her son’s death, he becomes fascinated with the event. At first he sees his investigation as an opportunity to get publicity. Later he becomes convinced that suicide was not the cause of Reeves’ death—that it was an accidental or intentional murder.

Like any good postmodern movie, Hollywoodland asks questions that it does not answer. It offers several plausible scenarios for Reeves’ death. Told largely from Brody’s point of view, the film switches back and forth from the present time of Brody to the past tense of George Reeves' life, beginning with the investigation of his death. While at first the film seems mainly concerned with Reeves, it increasingly focuses on Brody, his fascination with the actor’s death, his need to prove himself and gain publicity, his difficulty with his faltering family circumstances. His most significant moments in the film come when he stands outside Reeves' house and envisions how the death might have occurred. Finally, armed with the facts of Reeves' faltering career and disappointments, he seems to come to understand how suicide might be a reasonable explanation after all.

Hollywoodland is a faux film noir. It is preoccupied with its own sense of depression, moodiness, gloom, and corruption. Its premise is that in Hollywood only the strong survive, while the weak and ill-equipped are cannibalized, reviled, laughed at, and forgotten. This premise is not exactly novel. But Hollywoodland does a convincing job of exploring it by focusing on the specific characters of Reeves and Simo. Ultimately as a noir the film falters, for it leaves a glimmer of hope at the end for Brody.

A veneer of inauthenticity pervades the film. The setting is done up in what is probably more or less accurate 1950s Hollywood detail. The characters dress and act like people from the 50s. There is constant cigarette smoking—this little flourish, especially in Reeves' character (he smokes excessively) is supposed to mean a lot. But maybe the problem is that the clothes are too new and starched, the hairdos too perfect, the swagger and glamor of the characters too manufactured. Maybe the problem too is that my sense of Hollywood in the 50s comes from years of watching films that show in black and white what this one shows in color.

Affleck is excellent as George Reeves—an affable, hopeful, vacuous soul. Brody never struck me as an actor who could play a depressed, dissipated, sleazy private eye. But his performance as Louis Simo is Hollywoodland ’s darkly glowing heart.

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2006) is a tribute film featuring songs by Leonard Cohen performed by an array of singers who are known in folk and alternative adult music circles but not in the pop music world. The most prominent performers featured are Linda Thompson (former wife of Richard Thompson), Nick Cave, and Rufus Wainwright. Their performances are interspersed with interviews with Cohen, commentaries by others (especially Bono), film clips, and photographs from Cohen’s career.

For the most part, the performances are strong and highlight Cohen’s brilliance as a lyricist in particular but also as an accomplished melodist. Some of the most effective performances are “The Traitor,” by Martha Wainwright; “If I Be Your Will” by the brilliant and strange Anthony of Anthony and the Johnsons; “Sisters of Mercy,” by Beth Orton; and “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” about Cohen’s relationship with Janice Joplin, sung by Rufus Wainwright. I have admired this song for 35 years without knowing that it is about Joplin. Rufus Wainwright is especially good as an interpreter of Cohen’s songs. The musicians and singers are well rehearsed. The music is beautiful. My one complaint is that several of the singers kept looking down at a podium to read the words they are singing. This was a distraction. The weakest performances were by Nick Cave, who seemed mannered and distracted. The McGarrigle Sisters and Teddy Thompson were impressive. The film ends with Cohen himself performing “Tower of Song” with U2.

Cohen is a strange man who has lived long periods of his life in a Buddhist monastery and who portrays himself as a reticent and content iconoclast. The documentary portions of this film recall some of the 1965 film Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen, filmed in Montreal while Cohen was an aspiring poet and before his career as a singer began. In that film, as this one, there is much insistence on his genius, his unique character, and his art. Both films use some of the same images and film clips to illustrate his life. I am not sure that Cohen is or ever has been a great poet. His poems are certainly interesting. I did believe that his songs are so unusual and specific to his voice that only he can perform them properly. This film proves me wrong on that point. But I’m Your Man in general seems to overreach in its claims for Cohen as a universal genius. One commentator (was he a member of U2?) characterizes Cohen as a man who has come down from the mountain with golden tablets of wisdom. This seems a bit much.

As much as I admire Cohen as a lyricist, singer, and songwriter, I suspect he is a distant and unapproachable man. He always seems—both in the music and in the two films from different parts of his life—self-consumed and preoccupied, not as an egomaniac, but rather as a man whose thoughts always turn inward, in the form of contemplation, self-scrutiny. This would make sense given his devotion to Buddhism and (I assume) meditation of some form. He is able in the calmest and most articulate ways to express his own ideas, but how difficult would it be to break through that wall of self-absorption to get him to listen to others? This would be a challenge.

The inwardness of Leonard Cohen comes out in the intelligent beauty of his lyrics, his quiet manner of singing, his romanticism.

Despite the hagiographic exaggeration (for which Cohen should be embarrassed), this is a fine film of its type.

Flyboys

Flyboys (2006) is about young American men who go to France in 1916 to train and fly with the Lafayette Escadrille. The movie reeks of DGI even in scenes where digital effects aren’t needed—in wheat fields, for instance. The only parts of the film where it seems to work are the aerial battle scenes. These scenes bring welcome respite in this over long film from the pervasive and predictable drudgery that otherwise prevails.

This is not a very original or creative film. It begins with brief scenes showing young Americans preparing to travel to France—one goes because the town sheriff tells him to get out of town; another goes because his rich father shames him into going; a third goes for the fun and glory, and so on. There’s a black American prize fighter in Paris who decides to enlist in the Escadrille out of gratitude to France for its kind treatment of him.

Once the boys arrive at training camp, the inevitable conflicts and challenges occur. They form friendships. One of them asks not to room with the black man but later becomes his friend. They meet the grizzled and bitter pilot who has lost all his friends in battle. They are told that the average life of an Escadrille pilot is six weeks. Two go up in a plane to practice flying and crash land in a field and then wake up in a whorehouse. One falls in love with a French farm girl. We know that as soon as they have their first taste of battle, they will start dying, one by one. Who will die and who will survive?

One of the boys, a devout Christian who prays before each mission, sings “Onward Christian Soldiers” at the top of his lungs as he shoots at Germans. His piety doesn’t help him in the end.

In a highly unlikely scene, one of the pilots crashes his plane in the no-man’s land between French and German trenches. The plane overturns and he is trapped underneath. His friend lands his plans somewhere nearby and runs through heavy fusillades of artillery and gunfire to rescue him, sawing off his hand to free him from the plane. They run for the French trench and live. Later in the film, the handless pilot fits himself with a hook and continues flying. My guess is that this film stretches or ignores the historical facts often.

Some of the air battle scenes look impossible, though they are apparently modeled on actual films of World War I aerial combat.

Aerial combat in World War I is a natural subject for film, especially given the possibilities that modern special effects provide for portraying spectacular air battles. It’s surprising no one has thought to make a film on the subject for decades. Flyboys is long enough and dull enough to ensure that no one will do so again for at least another several decades.

Lady in the Water

The title Lady in the Water (2006) suggests the more allusive and poetic The Lady in the Lake, a Raymond Chandler novel as well as figure in Arthurian legend. But in the case of this film, the water is in a swimming pool with a hidden chamber that extends from its drainpipe deep into the ground.

To watch this film properly, you must accept that it has no connection to reality. It is not like M. Night Shyamalan’s earlier films, which toyed with the audience’s perceptions about what was real and what was not. In The Sixth Sense (1999) the character from whose viewpoint we see the entire film does not know that he is dead. In Unbreakable (2000), the main character does not realize he is a comic book super-hero. Our understanding of these stories depends on what these characters do and do not know, and how well we can read between the cinematic lines.

In his later films Shyamalan dispenses with these deceptive points of view. In Signs (2002) aliens really do invade the earth—no doubt about it. The film builds a semi-Christian set of metaphoric connections concerning love and family and loss of faith as a way of combating, after a certain fashion, those aliens who want to get into the house.

What The Village (2004) is about, frankly, I don’t know. It suggests Joseph McCarthy and Shirley Jackson and Rod Serling. It is a singularly lifeless film, though in it Shyamalan returns once again to his original ploy of toying with perceptions—our own in the audience, as well as those of the villagers.

Lady in the Water involves a number of characters, most especially a apartment complex custodian named Cleveland Heep, played by Paul Giamatti, and their gradual discovery that a mythic creature, a Narf, and not just any Narf, lives amongst them and has a destiny to fulfill, with their assistance. Names in the film have portentous significance. The Narf is named Story, and isn’t it surprising that a struggling writer who lives in the apartment building is suffering from writer’s block? The writer (played by Shyamalan) and Story are linked in a significant way, but so is Heep linked with Story, and with others.

Lady in the Water is a filmic comic book, and as a comic book one should experience it. Rules of logic are loosely applied. It has no link to the real world. It’s difficult to imagine the world of this film extending beyond the borders of the apartment complex. The people in it are flat, two-dimensional shapes, no ciphers or symbols, just flat characters in a flat story. A hidden story, unknown to the entire human race, but preserved in a children’s story that was told by a Japanese grandmother to her grandchildren, gradually becomes clear. (An short documentary on the DVD claims that this story is actually one that Shyamalan wrote and tells to his own children, and in fact his book of the same title for children has been published by Little Brown Young Readers.) If you take the film on these grounds, it is entertaining and it makes sense, though in the end the film lacks the skill and the artistry (or what we thought was artistry) in the earliest films by Shyamalan. There are the usual twists and turns in the plot of this film, but not very surprising ones.

Giamatti is effective in his part, though it lacks much depth. He is a medical doctor who has quit his practice following the deaths of his family several years in the past--just as Mel Gibson in Signs is the minister who has given up his calling after his wife’s death in an accident several years before. In Signs, the Gibson character recovers his sense of self and his faith and at the end of the film is, after a fashion, reborn. But Lady in the Water leaves us with the somewhat shocked and ashen face of Giamatti after the Narf meets her destiny. We assume he too is redeemed, able to cope in the real world and recover from the death of his family. But we don’t know that for sure. It’s difficult to imagine how he will go on, what life or reason for living is left to him. All we know is his numbed and shocked visage. And then the film ends.

But this is a comic book, after all.