The Brave One

A moody faux noir, The Brave One (2007; dir. Neil Jordan) pays homage to revenge films of the 1970s, films with Charles Bronson and Bruce Dern and others where everyday citizens suffer horrible tragedies and take revenge on the criminals responsible. These films, along with the Dirty Harry and Billy Jack and Walking Tall series, and others, reflected a white middle-class belief in the breakdown of law and order in American society. In particular, they showed law enforcement agencies as ineffective if not corrupt, a justification for vigilante justice.

In The Brave One a couple soon to be married is attacked by thugs in a city park. The man is killed while the woman is gravely wounded. When she recovers, she finds that she is afraid in places and situations where she had never felt uncomfortable before. She buys a black-market gun for protection. One evening she walks into a grocery store and witnesses a murder. When the killer realizes she is watching, he moves to shoot her, but she kills him first. When hoodlums threaten her on the subway, she shoots them. She sees a man sitting in his car with a prostitute. He invites her to get in. The prostitute is barely conscious, heavily drugged. When the woman tries to help the prostitute out of the car, the man locks her in. She shoots him.

The woman increasingly chooses to walk isolated parts of the city at night, to expose herself to risk and to menacing people. Ultimately, she begins seeking those people out.

Her name is Erica Bain. She is a late-night radio show host who specializes in recording city background noises and on-the-air monologues about urban life. Her recovery from the tragedy she suffered is a gradual descent into murder and near madness. Jody Foster as Erica Bain is excellent. She plays the role in a flat, mute, depressed way. Terrence Howard as the police detective Sean Mercer investigating the murders plays his role in a similarly restrained and affectless manner that suggests deep emotions within.

This film's moodiness stems not only from the performances of the lead actors but also from the music and the cinematography. Most of the film takes place at night, in shadow or darkness, on streets hemmed in by towering buildings. The film is deliberately claustrophobic. The urban landscape is hostile and threatening. People avoid glancing at one another on the streets. The places Bain frequents are seedy and run down. There is little that is swank or high-toned about the New York of this film.

Unlike the vigilante films, the focus in this one is not on revenge but on the changes that occur in Bain's character and her developing friendship with detective Mercer.

Why in 2008 should a vigilante film fueled by the breakdown of law and order be relevant? Erica Bain early on asks herself why the police, who are investigating her fiancé's murder, seem like the enemy. Other than an unhelpful and impersonal desk detective, the police are sympathetic to her, although they do not manage to identify the people who attacked her. The breakdown of law and order in the United States is not a major issue these days. What is an issue is the breakdown of international law and order, the threat of terrorism in the United States, the fact that military and law enforcement agencies no longer seem able to protect individuals such as Erica Bain from threats and menaces that arise, whether this means thugs in a public park or men with bombs beneath their clothing. Erica's response to the violence in the city may be the film's way of expressing the unsettled state of world affairs in general.

The Brave One is well made, but it has its flaws. It's difficult to believe that Bain could get away with the murders she commits. She does not seek out most of her victims—but most of the time she kills, coincidentally or not, when no one is around to watch. Detective Mercer's gradual realization about who is committing the crimes is not credible. Arbitrary clues and guesses and a significant dose of intuition lead him to the discovery too soon. He himself is recovering from a difficult divorce, and his own traumatic experience allows him to sympathize to an extent with what is happening to Bain.

The Brave One ends in a resolution that betrays the basic principles of film noir. But it is the kind of ending that popular cinema must deliver. It is also, ironically, the kind of ending that confirms the underlying assumptions of 1970s vigilante films about law enforcement. Of course, numerous events in the last several decades seem to confirm those assumptions.

Harlan County USA

Harlan County USA is a 1976 documentary directed by Barbara Kopple about a 1973 strike at the Brookside Mines in Harlan County, Kentucky. There is no narration. Only a few on-screen messages provide basic information about the strike or about national developments in cold mining labor relations. Instead Kopple organizes the film so that the words and faces of the coal miners and coal mine owners and others tell the story. (Her voice is often heard in the background of the film, asking questions of the miners). This approach works extremely well. It is a small and focused story. But it becomes a microcosm for a study of labor relations in the American coal mining industry in the 20th century.

The film documents a strike against the Duke Power Company in a small Kentucky coal mining community. The people who live there are for the most part not especially educated. They live in shacks and rundown shanties. They live hard lives in general, both in and out of the mines. Harlan County has a long history of difficult coal mining labor relations going back into the 1930s. Several of the older miners and their wives reminisce about that era.

The personalities and voices of the miners and their wives make this film memorable. They speak with simple eloquence. They may not be highly educated, but there is nothing unintelligent or ignorant about them. The film is shot in color, but the black-and-white hues you would expect in a coal mining community dominate the film. For the most part the miners and their families are lower-class whites. Only a few black coal miners appear, but they seem to get along well with the other miners even though this is a 1973 rural Appalachian Kentucky community.

The film highlights the role of women as part of the Brookside Mine strike. They support their husbands and often stand on the front lines, opposing the goons and thugs hired by the coal mining company to intimidate and threaten the striking miners. When the men seem to be losing interest in the strike, the women upbraid and encourage them to press on. During a meeting that follows a particularly violent attack on the striking miners, one woman pulls a pistol from her blouse and announces that she is ready to answer violence with violence. The women are a fundamental part of the struggle against Duke Power.

Folk and mountain songs about coal mining provide background music for the film. Some of the miners are shown performing music, singing and playing banjo or guitar.

The film is about the exploitation of the coal miners. It makes clear that the exploitation is not only the fault of the local managers of the Brookside Mine and the Duke Power Company but also that of the upper administration of the UMW. The film implies, or at least the coal miners believe, that deals have been cut between the coal mining owners and the UMW bosses and that the coal miners themselves are powerless to negotiate agreements that will change their working and living conditions. When this film was being made a major transition was taking place in the UMW. New individuals were challenging the UMW leadership. In 1969 reform-minded Joseph A. Yablonski ran to unseat the long-entrenched Tony Boyle as president of the UMW. In December of that year, Yablonski and his wife and daughter were found murdered in their home. Boyle himself was convicted in 1974 of commissioning the crimes. These events are all covered in the film.

Harlan County USA is a wonderful example of how a documentary can illustrate and explain history through the voices of people who themselves are making history. This is an eloquent, extremely well made film. It's moving and sometimes emotionally draining. But it's also uplifting and inspiring. When the strike is over, the coal miners get their contract. It's not exactly what they wanted, but it's better than what they had. The national UMW succeeds in negotiating a contract for the national coal mining industry and even that is imperfect (it denies miners the right to strike on the local level). At the end of the film the miners return to the mines for the first time in thirteen months, resolved to continue with the only occupation they know, resolved to continue struggling to improve their circumstances.

Harlan County USA is widely respected as one of the best examples of documentary filmmaking in America. It deserves that reputation. It won the 1976 Academy Award for Best Documentary film.

Sarah Palin

John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate is an example of pure and transparent political cynicism. You can understand why he would have leaned towards a woman or a person of color as his vice presidential choice. Such a candidate provides an ideal way of deflating the Barack Obama bandwagon. It's also an ideal way of countering the notion that a vote for Obama is a vote for making history by electing the first African-American president of the United States. Now you can vote for a Republican woman as vice president and also make history though not quite as dramatically. What's so disturbing about the choice of Sarah Palin is the fact of her profound inexperience. Yes, she combated corruption in Alaskan politics. Yes, she opposed some of the biggest and most long-established moguls in the Alaskan government. But when you look at her qualifications and when you consider her position on fundamental political issues, she's not at all impressive. In fact, she's frightening. She is right wing in the extreme in a way that contrasts markedly with John McCain's self-styled moderation. She's taken a right-wing position on practically every issue you can name, from her opposition to abortion rights to her enthusiastic endorsement of and membership in the National Rifle Association to her belief that polar bears should be removed from the endangered species list to her advocacy for drilling for oil in one of the most pristine and beautiful natural habitats in the world. She's a right-wing evangelical. She favors the teaching of creationism in public schools. There are some who say she hasn't hesitated to use her position as governor of Alaska against people she dislikes--currently she is under investigation for trying to have her sister's ex-husband removed from his position as a state patrolman. Of course, the facts are not all out on this issue, but it is certainly worth keeping in mind. Sarah Palin has a profound lack of experience not only in Alaskan politics--she has been governor for only two years--but also on the national and international stages, where she has no experience whatsoever. The notion that this wholly unproven individual could suddenly be thrust into leadership of the free world is most disturbing.

McCain's choice of Sarah Palin is perhaps the most disappointing choice he has made in this presidential campaign. I don't support John McCain's candidacy for President and will not vote for him. I don't agree with him on many basic issues. But he has over the years acted and spoken in a way that suggested he has his own mind and that he has a streak of independence and integrity. He has consistently attacked Barack Obama for his purported inexperience in government. Now he chooses as his vice presidential running mate a considerably less experienced person who has never served in national government and who has served only two years in state government and whose positions are so far to the extreme right that we have to believe that McCain is not only pandering for the votes of disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters but that he is also pandering to the far right. Television newscasters and pundits have suggested that this appointment by McCain is a Hail Mary pass, the kind of gamble a candidate would take when he recognizes that his campaign and his prospects for the presidency are foundering. Yet McCain has been faring fairly well in the polls of late, and just before the Democratic convention he had pulled almost even with Obama. Of course Obama is now experiencing the kind of bounce in the polls that presidential candidates experience right after the conventions. But McCain is not out of the running. At least he wasn't out of the running until now. Surely Hillary Clinton supporters will not be deceived by this ploy. Surely no intelligent person who supported Hillary Clinton and all of her important positions on women's rights, on the war in Iraq, on healthcare, on the role of government in servng the welfare of American citizens would even consider for a moment voting for McCain because of the gender of the candidate he has chosen as his running mate. The choice of Sarah Palin should mark the realistic end of John McCain's hopes to be president of the United States.

Thunder and Lightning

Thunder and Lightning (1977) seems like a half-hearted Hollywood effort to jump on the 1970s-decade films-about-the-South band wagon. Produced by Roger Corman, directed by Corey Allen (mainly a director of television episodes), it tries to make David Carradine into a Southern ring-tailed roarer in the vein of Burt Reynolds' Gator McCluskey. The action is intense but without much excitement, the hijinks are forced and unsurprising, the story-line is shallow and punctuated with seemingly endless dune buggy races and car chases. There's a fight in what appears to be a hog trough. There's a protracted scene where Carradine and his girlfriend throw cartons of soft drinks from the back of a delivery truck. There's plenty of moonshine and a range of bucolic good-ol'-boy types along with a few Mafioso enforcers trying to conduct a hit on a golf course thrown in for good measure.

The basic plot concerns moonshiners in the Florida swamps. There are the "good" moonshiners who make high-quality shine and sell it to the locals, and there are "bad" moonshiners who use radiators and car batteries to make tainted shine which they force local vendors to buy. The bad moonshiners spend a lot of time colluding with the mob up North and with the local senator, and with breaking down the stills of the good moonshiners whom they try to put out of business.

Carradine plays Harley Thomas, the hero, who delivers whiskey made by the good moonshiners. His girlfriend is the smoothly coiffed Nancy Sue Hunnicutt (Kate Jackson), whose father heads up the local bad moonshine operation. Harley is the fool killer in this film. He drives fast and furiously, always outwits the bad guys, speaks with the same accent he used in the Kung Fu television series. Kate Jackson at least manages a mild accent. We see a possum in one scene and an alligator in another. In one faintly amusing scene Harley meets Nancy at a church service where the reverend delivers his sermon while wrestling an alligator. Other than them critters, there's nothing authentic or mildly stimulating in this dull and bland production.

The South in Thunder and Lightning is dirt roads, hicks, illegal whiskey, trucks, cars, dune buggies, grizzled old men, dimwits, fistfights, corrupt politicos and businessmen, swamps, and rusty radiators.

CSNY: Déjà Vu

CSNY: Déjà Vu (2008) is Neil Young's documentary about his 2006 tour with Crosby, Stills, and Nash. During that tour the band played many of the songs from Young's Living with War album—an album that is virulently opposed to the ongoing war in Iraq. Thus we have a film that is about a rock band and also about a war protest. It examines varying crowd reactions to the political agenda of the tour. It also focuses on the aging band members, all of whom are in their 60s (only Stills seems subdued by age—he speaks and sings with a slur that perhaps reflects damage from drugs and alcohol abuse). The issues here include the nation's response to the war in Iraq, the impact a rock band can have on political issues, whether the current political climate is analogous to the 1960s and the Vietnam War. Neil Young correctly observes during the film that the absence of a draft has prevented widespread protests among America's youth because they do not feel at risk. Another question the film considers is whether CSNY can still play together, whether they can play well.

Undoubtedly, CSNY: Déjà Vu seeks to portray the band in a positive light, yet there is a surprising balance here. We see the band members in all their aged glory, especially Stephen Stills. We listen to their ragged playing early in the tour. We are shown varying crowd reactions to their music: the concert in Atlanta provokes walkouts from audience members unhappy with the song "Let's Impeach the President." For the most part the walk-outs were middle-aged adults, and it's difficult to know how representative they were of the audience as a whole. An interview with libertarian radio talk-show host Neal Boortz is interesting—Boortz doesn't condemn the band's tour appearance in Atlanta or its subject matter--he sees it as a matter of free speech, though he notes that the band has to be prepared to deal with the consequences of their attitudes.

One way the film achieves whatever measure of balance it has is the use of ABC news correspondent Michael Cerre as an "embedded" participant in the tour. Cerre spent two tours of duty as an embedded reporter in the Iraq war prior to the CSNY tour, and returned to Iraq after the documentary was made. He wrote and narrates much of the film, offering his own perspectives, which are frequently distinctive from those of the band members. Young apparently asked Cerre to compile news clips and footage from the war for the film. It is Cerre who brings into the film interviews with disgruntled fans and with commentators such as Neal Boortz. He thereby helps the film avoid hagiography, though there are undeniably a few hagiographic elements.

What's most interesting about the film is how it shows the continuing commitment of the band to an anti-war point of view and to music as a form of communication after more than forty years. By the end of the tour, the band is performing better than it has performed in years. One of the band members comments that the tour has enabled the group to rediscover itself.

Neil Young directed this film under the moniker of Bernard Shakey, a name he has used in other directing efforts. The only other Neil Young film I have seen is the film version of his album Greendale (2004). Although that film had its interesting moments, it was more a series of loosely conceived rock videos, based on the album, than a coherent film. In CSNY: Déjà Vu there are moments of deeply felt emotion, of raw political anger, and of transcendence. The film never argues that the band has any effect on the opinions of its audience or on US participation in the Iraqi conflict itself. What it does argue for is the character and persistence of the band, and its commitment to peace and good music.

Fried Green Tomatoes

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) portrays a small town in the rural South of the 1920s and 1930s that tolerates and supports a relationship between two women whom today we would describe as lesbians. That statement needs scrutiny: what would such a community know of a lesbian relationship, which would take place behind closed doors? Would it necessarily be seen as unusual, by prevailing standards of the day? Or would it simply be seen as a matter of two unmarried women living and working together for the sake of convenience, like a Boston marriage? Because no one names their relationship, no one has to react or pass judgment.

At any rate, the two women at the center of this film, and their family, tolerate individuality and eccentricity. They are not what the film presents as the prevailing Southern norm. The norm is Ruth Jamison's abusive husband. The norm is the Klan, which attacks the Whistle Stop Café for its too tolerant attitude towards a black employee. But mostly, it seems, the community simply ignores or doesn't think about or doesn't understand Idgie and Ruth's private life. The town simply accepts them. When Idgie is put on trial for killing Ruth's husband, Ruth is asked why she left her husband to go live with Idgie: she answers that Idgie "is the best friend I've ever had. I love her." The townspeople see the relationship as a friendship, and the film portrays it that way, although there is enough information to allow us to infer a deeper bond.

Like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Intruder in the Dust (1949), and other films, Fried Green Tomatoes examines the South through characters and situations that are exceptional rather than representative. Yet it argues that exceptions such as Ruth and Idgie are part of the community because of a fundamental tolerance for variation and eccentricity. The South is, after all, according to a fundamental stereotype, full of eccentrics and individuals. Shouldn't it be accepting of them? As the film makes clear, such tolerance extends within but not across racial boundaries.

The film has a double-plot structure. A modern housewife named Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates) is unhappy with her marriage and her life in general and is suffering a personal crisis. She meets an elderly woman living in a nursing home named Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy) who tells her stories from her earlier days in a nearby town called Whistle Stop. These stories mainly concern Idgie and Ruth. They inspire Evelyn to get her life in order, to be more assertive, and to stand up to her husband. I found the Evelyn Couch scenes deadly dull and uninteresting. Kathy Bates overplays her character and is more a cartoon than a realistic figure. The Ruth and Idgie story is far more interesting. Evelyn's life provides a frame that enables Ruth and Idgie's story to be told (a frame similar to what we find in Princess Bride, 1987, and Edward Scissorhands, 1990).

This film is often grouped pejoratively with other films about Southern women such as Steel Magnolias (1989). The grouping isn't accurate—Fried Green Tomatoes is a better film primarily because of the writing, the narrative coherence, the characters, and the actors. Mary Stuart Masterson (Idgie) and Mary-Louise Parker (Julie) are excellent in their roles, though there is, admittedly, a Hallmark Hallof Fame sheen to both of them. As much as it is a kind of fairy tale about an idyllic Southern past, Fried Green Tomatoes is not (unlike Steel Magnolias) a conglomeration of stereotypes and parodies. It is a portrait of a close and deep friendship and the community around it. Interestingly, both films use the death of a main character as a dramatic focus. Julie's death seems a way by which the film evades long-term issues about her relationship with Idgie.

Fried Green Tomatoes is also, like many Southern films, a nostalgic excursion, told from a future vantage point in time, looking back towards a past that some might prefer to the present day. In the old days, the film implies, Ninny would not have been left in a nursing home. Friends and relatives would have taken Ninny in, as Evelyn seems ready to do at the end of the film. The past is clearly past—times have changed. This is an underlying premise of Ninny's stories about the old days in Whistle Stop. The café closes, and Whistle Stop withers away after the train no longer stops there. This signifies the passage of the old order.

Ironically, the train is the source of the town's economic life, yet it is also a threat from the beginning. Idgie's brother Buddy is killed in an early scene when a train kills him after his shoe becomes stuck between the tracks.

Fried Green Tomatoes depends on notions of Southern local color and quaintness for much of its secondary interest. It is about a former time and place, an enclave of isolation from modernity and all of its inhospitable elements.

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight (2008) is the best of the Batman films and maybe the best film in general based on a comic book hero. Dark, brooding, and suffused with repressed energy that breaks out at predictable and unpredictable moments, the film is exciting and disturbing. It is disturbing in its refusal to adopt pure moral positions and in its insistence on portraying a world where good and evil are confusingly and increasingly intertwined, where truth and fiction cancel one another out.

The Dark Knight is clearly a post-September 11 statement. The Joker in this film is the agent of chaos, anarchy. He repeatedly insists that he has only one purpose—to cause chaos. He does that effectively. His misdeeds increase and multiply. A corps of supporters and assistants out there in Gotham City aid him in his evil doings, and as the film progresses the crises he causes deepen and darken. There is a moment in the film when, after things at last seemed under control, all hell breaks loose, and we see for an instant a panic-stricken look on Commissioner Gordon's face. All the institutions of government are failing, breaking down. His cold rational commitment to law and order is challenged to an extreme he has never experienced. This moment reminded me, emotionally, of that day when the towers fell in New York, when as things seem to have descended to a profound nadir they kept getting even worse. These moments in the film were actually frightening.

Another post 9-11 reference comes in a surveillance system that Batman's colleague Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) develops to allow him to listen in on the words and doings of every inhabitant in Gotham. The system, which exploits cell phone networks, is so insidious that Fox vows to resign when he finishes designing it. This is, of course, an implied reference to the Homeland Security Act of the Bush administration. It is also a sign of how Batman's obsession with defeating the Joker has led him to compromise fundamental principles.

The film ends with an agreement between Commissioner Gordon and Batman that the citizens of Gotham need to be protected from the truth of what happened to the young district attorney who had vowed to purge crime from the streets of the city. The truth would be too dark, Batman insists, and the citizens need someone to believe in, as well as someone to hold up as a villain. This agreement reminded me of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where Marlow protects Kurtz's Intended from the truth of how he died by telling her that his dying words were her name. (There is a Kurtz-like character in the film who is wholly corrupted by how the Joker preys on his pride and ambition). It reminded me as well of Freud's observation in Civilization and its Discontents that civilization is a network of laws and restraints that protect humanity from its essential savagery. Ironically, a certain truth is withheld from Batman at a crucial moment in the film.

Heath Ledger is excellent as the Joker. One can imagine, and be tempted to believe, that the power of the character he was playing lured him into madness and drug abuse, leading to his death from an overdose of prescription medicine. I don't believe that, but whatever demons he may have been wrestling with energize his performance. One of the most disturbing aspects of the film is how the Joker keeps insisting to Batman, to the new district attorney, and to others that they all have much in common, that they all are alike. The film insists on a fundamental moral ambiguity in all human beings, a state of perpetual compromise.

As the Joker in the 1983 film Batman Jack Nicholson improvised on the role played by Caesar Romero in the 1960s Batman television series. Nicholson was excellent, but his character was never more than a comic book parody. Ledger gives the Joker depth and three-dimensionality without ever really hinting at the events that made the Joker what he became. In his ability to prey on the deepest psychological vulnerabilities of his opponents and victims, Ledger's Joker is more the descendent of Hannibal Lecter than of any character in the comic book series.

The Dark Knight is not perfect, by any means. For me, the sudden emergence late in the film of a second arch-villain is a weakness and a flaw. Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman is effective, but he growl too often when in costume. His flickering romance with Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is confusing and frustrating. It is also not a film with a happy ending—this is not a weakness.

The Dark Knight offers some wonderful visually operatic moments. Better than any of its predecessors (and some of them were successful on their own terms), it illuminates and inhabits and magnifies the mythology of the hero it brings to life. Director Christopher Nolan, both in this film and its predecessor Batman Begins (2005), brings true vision and power to his subject.

Macon County Line

Macon County Line (1974) was a primary entry in a genre of films that emphasized the South as a place of violence, vigilante justice, and hostility to people from outside the region. In such films as Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) and 2001 Maniacs (2005) and in such more reputable films as Easy Rider (1969) and Deliverance (1972) down-home Southerners were portrayed as depraved and vicious.

In Macon County Line two hipsters on their way to enlist in the army pick up a Southern girl on her way to Dallas. The hipsters—college-age boys—the girl is 20—have little money. Their car breaks down in a small town that is apparently Macon, Georgia. While it is being repaired, they meet the local deputy sheriff, Reed Morgan (Max Baer), who is hostile but who after some intimidation lets them go their way. Later, their car breaks down again—ironically—just in front of Deputy Morgan's house. His wife has just been raped and murdered by two hoodlums. When Deputy Morgan discovers the crime and sees the car, he assumes the boys and their female friend committed the crime. With his ten-year-old son in tow, he chases them down. Murders ensue.

Though this is a poorly made low-grade film, Deputy Morgan is not as simple as one would think. He wears a Confederate flag shoulder patch on his uniform. He is pretty much a product of his times. He loves his wife and is kind to her. He buys an expensive gun (a 12-gauge shotgun) for his son, Luke, whom he loves. He imagines giving the shotgun to his son and then going hunting with him. When his son explains that he would rather play baseball with friends, Deputy Morgan finally agrees to delay their hunting trip until later. Morgan sees his son talking to some black kids and explains that the roles of society dictate that blacks and whites do not spend time together—they live and go to school separately.

What the film seeks to demonstrate—above and beyond the fact of the South's savage violence—is that a violent heritage breeds violence. The deputy sends his son to a military school and wants to instill in him the same racial values and love of hunting that he holds. His idea of an expression of love is a 12-gauge shotgun. At the end of the film, as he hunts the people he believes have killed his wife, his son makes good on that heritage by shooting and killing the girl and one of the boys. At the beginning of the film, an ominous message on the screen suggests that the story about to be told is based on true events. At the end, a similar message informs us that Luke at the age of 29 still resides in a mental institution, where he will remain for the rest of his life. It is as if the supposedly factual basis of the film is somehow meant to justify the exploitative nature of the violence in the film.

There is little suspense or pacing in the film, which fundamentally lacks excitement. The best scene involves a romantic tryst in a watering trough.

Despite the deputy sheriff's lecture to his son about race relations, and despite the incompetence and corruption that pervades local law enforcement, the film curiously avoids any commentary on contemporary Southern affairs—it is set back in the early 1950s--1954, to be exact. We see the deputy's wife watching the Joe McCarthy hearings shortly before she is raped and murdered. McCarthy himself was a public official who like Deputy Reed ran amuck and became besotted with power. I doubt Max Baer intended this film to be a commentary on McCarthyism.

Max Baer, of course, played Jethro Bodine for a decade on the popular 1960s The Beverly Hillbillies television series.

Once

Once (2007) is a simple, charming, enchanting film, a musical in which all the singing occurs in an entirely natural way. One of the main characters is a street singer (and a vacuum cleaner repairman) who is trying to break into the recording business. The main character, referred to in the credits merely as the "boy," is an Irishman who sings on the street for coins. He is played by Glen Hansard. One night a young woman, the "girl" (Marketa Irglova), stops and strikes up a conversation. When she learns that he repairs "Hoovers," she asks him to repair her malfunctioning vacuum cleaner, and they strike up a friendship. Early on, he suggests they spend the night together, but she refuses him. For the most part their friendship is platonic, but you sense something subterranean going on. Both of them are on the apparent down sides of relationships. The boy's girlfriend has moved to London, and he says that he will not see her again—though all the songs he writes are about her. The girl has left her husband in Czechoslovakia. She tells the boy that their relationship is over, but she never admits to not loving her husband.

In a music store, the boy discovers that the girl can play the piano and sing. They sing one of his songs together. Later he asks her to help him record some of his songs so that he can take them to London, where he has decided to go to unite with his girlfriend and to try to get a recording contract. The girl helps him negotiate a fee for use of the recording studio and helps him find other musicians to play with.

The night before he is to leave, the boy is about to say goodbye to the girl but then suggests that they spend the rest of the evening together, hanging out. She hesitates and asks him whether this might involve hanky-panky. He admits that it might. She agrees to come over to his apartment. But she never shows up. They never meet again. He does leave her a parting gift.

This is a film about what might have been. The boy and girl discover one another through their mutual love of music, through the experience of creating music together. Though many of the songs may be inspired by the boy's loss of his former girlfriend, you realize as the film progresses that the way the boy and girl perform the songs together is an expression of their developing feelings for one another. Hansard and Irglova co-wrote a number of the songs in the film. Hansard wrote several others, and Irglova's own composition "The Hill" is also featured.

This was a low-budget film with a budget of $150,000. There is nothing glitzy or slick about it. The interior shots seem to take place in real music stores and pubs and recording studios and apartments. The clothes the characters wear look like clothes they really own. The camerawork is often jittery and unbalanced. The music the boy and girl sing together sounds like what it is—improvised, poorly rehearsed but real music.

The end of Once is bittersweet, but mainly sweet. The boy and the girl proceed with their lives, without each other. This is a small film with a modest focus. It is almost like a documentary. But it is full of life and quiet passion and joy. The characters and their music make it much larger than it aspires to be. With limited resources and inexperienced actors, director John Carney has made one of the best little films I've seen in a long time.

The Astronaut Farmer

The Astronaut Farmer (2006) is one of those American fairy tales about dreams and individualism and traditional values. The basic plot: Charles Farmer, a former astronaut in training who bailed out of the program when his father committed suicide, has never abandoned his dream of travel into space. He's a farmer somewhere in the middle of nowhere Texas. He's haunted by his father's death and believes that by killing himself his father accepted failure. By repeated borrowings from the local bank and credit extensions, he's found enough money to build a rocket that he plans to ride into space. He's $600,000 in debt, the local bank is about to foreclose, his wife doesn't realize that they may lose their farm.

The film's title reflects how the film joins together the farming crisis, disappearing American individualism, and Farmer's dream of becoming an astronaut. When he tries to buy fuel for his rocket, the bank refuses to give him another credit extension and threatens foreclosure. The government sends FBI and FAA and NASA security agents of one sort or another to investigate his plans and to threaten him. His wife threatens to leave him when she discovers the full extent of his indebtedness.

Charles Farmer is crazy. Only a crazy man would try to do what he does in the film. But the film argues that there needs to be room for crazy people and their dreams in our world. It also argues in a way that is more convenient to the story than purposeful that the modern world threatens the traditional values embodied by nuclear families and farms and small towns and individual dreams. At one point Charlie talks about how he used to remember being told as a boy that he could be anything in the world that he wanted to be. He remarks that "Somewhere along the line we stopped believing we could do anything. And if we don't have our dreams, we have nothing." Sappy, yes, but true to the spirit of the film. The film does suggest that government, corporations, agencies, institutionalized groups in general conspire against individuals and individualism. At one point, Charlie launches his rocket and it malfunctions, shooting across the landscape a few feet above the ground, endangering lives and property. The film doesn't really consider whether we are supposed to be accepting of such expressions of old-time American individuality.

This film reminded me of Field of Dreams (1989) and The World's Fastest Indian (2005). In ways it seems underwritten, sketched out rather than fully developed. This is perhaps part of its fairy tale quality

Billy Bob Thornton plays astronaut farmer Charles Farmer. Billy Bob basically plays the same Billy Bob in almost every film he's appeared in (with the exception of Sling Blade, 1996). His demeanor is always calm and irritable and reserved, and only the nuances and intonations differ from role to role. This is OK with me. He's effective in most of the roles he chooses. No one else could have played Bad Santa (2003).

Although there are unexpected twists and turns here, The Astronaut Farmer basically adheres to the formula that most films follow about loners and individuals intent on realizing their dreams. It also depends on your unwillingness to pursue certain questions to their conclusions—such as how could one man with limited resources know enough to build an operating rocket from junked spare parts and $600,000. However, we are not supposed to ask such questions, and if you care too much about the answers this film is not for you.

With a supporting cast of such folks as Virginia Marsden, Bruce Dern, Tim Blake Nelson, and others, the film offers solid acting. Director Michael Polish, who also co-wrote the film, apparently believes like Charlie in making the pursuit of dreams a family effort—a number of his relatives appears in bit parts in the film.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

For any fan of the television series, The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008) should be a satisfying experience. More like an extended episode from the series than a feature-length film, it builds on and embellishes the themes and character relationships of the series, specifically Fox Mulder's compulsion to believe that "something is out there" and Scully's conflicted struggle between rationality and faith. It also builds on the romantic relationship between the two that was increasingly implied in the television series and made explicit only in the final episodes. There is an allusion to the child Scully had with Fox, and which she gave up. There is an allusion to Mulder's lost sister, supposedly abducted by aliens during his childhood—the primal event of his life. The most satisfying aspect of the film is the fact that the essential characters of Fox and Scully remain intact, and that we take them up some six years after we last saw them.

Aliens have nothing to do with the plot of this film, which concerns a series of grisly killings and a psychic priest with a pedophilic past who keeps leading investigators to body parts buried in a snow-covered field. (Visually, snow is everywhere in this film). The priest's supposed psychic abilities lead the FBI to summon Mulder and Scully out of retirement. One agent, an admirer of Mulder, believes the priest is truly psychic. Other FBI agents are skeptics (the main skeptic is played by Xzibit, of Pimp My Ride fame—he is effective in his role). The film follows the efforts of the agents and of Fox and Scully to discover the killer. It also follows Scully's efforts to treat a boy suffering an apparently incurable illness, and to deal with her increasingly complicated relationship with Mulder. The film occasionally bogs down, but where it succeeds it succeeds because of its fidelity to the two main characters, Mulder and Scully.

Father Joseph Crissman, played by Billy Connolly, is in many ways the center of interest. His visions and psychic insights enable the investigators to move closer to the truth. But how does he know what he knows? Scully believes he is a fraud. The FBI agents think he is connected to the killers. Mulder, of course, wants to believe him. Does Crissman speak for God, for Satan, for the killers, for himself? This is the question the film examines. When he tells Scully "Don't give up," and when he claims he didn't know what he meant when he made the statement, she suffers a crisis concerning the sick boy she is treating, her relationship with Mulder, and with her faith. Scully for me was always the most interesting character in the series. She was seriously conflicted in her role as a medical doctor, an FBI agent, as a professional woman with a private life of her own, a medical pathologist who is also a devout Catholic. The film develops these competing aspects of her character to good effect.

Given the failure of this film at the box office, this is probably the last we will see of the X-Files. I'm sorry for that.

Mama Mia

It is OK to enjoy Mama Mia (2008).

Mindless and full of the music of ABBA, a 1980s musical sensation that never quite made sense to me, Mama Mia takes the music of this Scandinavian group that sang but could not speak English and transplants it to the isles of Greece, under the auspices of an Italian title. The result comes close to being Americanized Bollywood, and I don't mean that as criticism. Mama Mia is full of music, energy, color, song, and dance. The scenery is beautiful, and it is fun to watch Meryl Streep shamelessly dance and sing and emote.

I did not see the Broadway musical that is the film's source, but the film works well enough. Donna (Meryl Streep) plays the beleaguered American proprietor of a hotel on a remote Greek isle. Twenty years before the time of the film, she had three summer affairs, one of them with a man whom she loved, two with men she turned to when the first lover abandoned her. The result was a daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). Donna doesn't know which of the men was Sophie's father. In the film's present time, Sophie is about to be married. She has always wondered who her father was, and she learns about the three affairs while reading her mother's diary. She invites each of the three men to her wedding, thinking she will instantly know her father when she sees him. Of course, things aren't that simple. All three men come to the island, Donna is thrown into crisis and consternation when she sees them, and Sophie is confused when she can't recognize her father and when her mother is upset at the arrival of three former flames.

Such is the film's thin plot. But its thinness doesn't matter. It's a sufficient skeleton to hang the songs on. My favorite was "Dancing Queen," a wonderful and colorful number in which all the women on the island participate, reliving their past memories of lost romanticism and youth. The title song sequence "Mama Mia" is also good, as were "Does Your Mother Know" (sung by Christine Baranski) and "Take a Chance on Me" (sung by Julie Waters) and "SOS" (song by Pierce Brosnan).

The film suggests that Donna and her three lovers were children of the 60s, a decade that in fact occurred forty years earlier than the time of the film. But that discrepancy is not worth fretting over.

As Sam, the man Donna loved, Pierce Brosnan sings a number of songs. Am I mistaken about the pained look on his face? Anyway, everyone seems to be having fun.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) is the kind of film that happens when creative imagination proves less important than the desire to resurrect a successful and popular character. This film is tired and hackneyed. Apparently Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas and Harrison Ford and others dickered for years over the plot of this film. Finally they came to a compromise. It shows. This is the worst of the four films in the Indiana Jones series.

The opening scenes are promising. The film seems shot in a hazy afternoon light, and the effect is pleasing, as if we are gazing back into the golden, halcyon days of the 1950s. Markers of the 1950s abound. For a while they keep the film interesting. Students at the university where Indiana teaches look as if they are straight out of American Graffiti. There are hot rods and long skirts and pony tails and anti-communist demonstrations. The young man Mutt Williams played by Shia LaBeouf has a motorcycle and a leather jacket, is constantly combing his hair (like the Fonz from Happy Days, like Kookie from '77 Sunset Strip, like the original James Dean). Shia doesn't look particularly tough, though he thinks he is. Mainly he looks foolish and narcissistic. But the main way the film references the 1950s is through an A-bomb test and McCarthyism (the villains are Russians, and Indy is suspended from his teaching position because it's discovered that he once worked with a character suspicious enough that the F. B. I. placed him on their list of suspicious characters).

Harrison Ford plays his part with an acceptable simulation of enthusiasm. He's an old man to be pulling many of the stunts he pulls in the film (assuming he did them himself), and there are only rare hints of awkwardness.

In an early scene Indy finds himself in a town built by the U. S. government to test the effects of a nuclear blast on a suburban neighborhood. Loudspeakers announce that a nuclear blast is only seconds away. There's no escape, but at the last minute he finds a place to hide. The whole scene is carried off in an impressive, credible, witty way, even though it's the obvious product of digital manipulation. It's also, I think, not original. Consider this scene alongside The Atomic Kid, a 1954 Mickey Rooney vehicle in which the main character finds himself in a similar town. Other scenes seem borrowed: the penultimate scene in South America seems taken directly from the climax of The X-Files movie (1998). Of course, the Indiana Jones series is a wonderful example of cinematic intertextuality—of borrowings from H. Rider Haggard novels and comic books and numerous Saturday afternoon movie serials and so on. These sources are all part of the fun. There's a lot of intertextuality in this fourth film. But the vitality of the first and third installments, the energy and good humor, is missing.

Things clearly begin to implode when the Russians have taken Indy and Mutt prisoner in South America, where they have gone to search for a strage crystal skull and Mutt's mother, who has been kidnapped by the Commies. To force Indy and Mutt to lead them to the secret kingdom of the crystal skull, the Russians trot out Mutt's mother. She's Marion Ravenwood, played by Karen Allen, Indy's love interest in the first of the films. All of a sudden a film that was plodding along as a passably amusing and fantastic adventure becomes a family reunion. Not only does Indy see Marion for the first time in 20 years—she slugs him for deserting her—but she also tells him that Mutt is his son. Indy spends the remainder of the film trying to reacquaint himself with Marion and to adjust to the fact that he has a son. Mutt can't believe this old professor is his father, so we have an ongoing struggle by Indy to win the boy over. Marion herself seems goofy and tired, and once she's part of the action Indy starts behaving that way too. Everyone is trying to impress everyone else. When Mutt pulls off an impressive stunt, Indy winks and grins—a "that's my boy" reaction. The corniest dialogue in the film comes when Indy and Marion are discussing their long separation. He's surprised to learn that she married a colleague after he disappeared:

Marion: I'm sure I wasn't the only one to go on with my life. There must have been plenty of women for you over the years.

Indy: There were a few. But they all had the same problem.

Marion: Yeah, what's that?

Indy: They weren't you, honey.

This kind of schlock continues throughout the film: Indy's pleased that Marion can drive a car and shoot a gun and that his son can swing on a rope. These warm expressions of family unity compete with the main plot—battles with the Russians and giant carnivorous ants and zombie-like natives, and the discovery of the hidden kingdom deep within the Amazonian jungle. It's all ultimately preposterous and unbelievable. I like stories about aliens as much as anyone else, but the way the aliens with their psychically potent crystal skulls blend into this story of Father Knows Best in Amazonia suggests desperation among the screenwriters.

I remember distinctly an episode from a television program from the late 1950s or early 1960s—I saw it twice, and it made an impression. Explorers of old Aztec ruins in South America discover a strangely shaped skull—the skull of a deceased being from outer space who has visited the earth years before and left strange legends behind him. I can't remember the name of the show. But it's another example of the lack of originality in this film, the sodden derivativeness, which draws heavily from the nutty book by Erich von Däniken, The Chariot of the Gods.

I did not enjoy and was not entertained by this film. It's a cheesy recycling of a beloved character from two decades and more in the past—it would have been nice to encounter him again in a film conceived with imagination and vigor, in the spirit of the original installment. It's incredible to me that Stephen Spielberg directed this film. He's directed some impressive films. Consider Schindler's List (1993) and Munich (2005), or even E. T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Jaws (1975). Why would he associate his name with this mess? Presumably he did so out of loyalty to his friends George Lucas and Harrison Ford, and also because he directed the first three films in the series.

In the closing scene, we see Marion and Indiana getting married. This is, I suppose, one way to end the series, Indy and Marion shuffling off into geriatric domesticity, with their cats and their girdles and their goiters and their false teeth. Where are the keys, honey? Where are my glasses?

The Green Pastures

The Green Pastures (1936) is based on the 1930 Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same title by Marc Connelly, which itself is adapted from Roark Bradford's Ol' Man Adam and His Chillun (1928), a series of Bible stories told from an unlettered African American viewpoint. Connelly and William Keighley co-directed the film. From the 1936 perspective, the film was intended to be appreciative and sympathetic to African American culture. But it achieves sympathy at the cost of paternalism, condescension, and racial stereotypes. Undoubtedly Connelly thought he was presenting an authentic portrait of African Americans and their religion. What he was really doing was portraying a white man's view of African American religion—how whites liked to think that African Americans conceived of their religion. Although there may be elements of truth in the film—children in particular would have responded to the film's images of African American angels flying around in heaven (the Green Pastures), singing, playing chase, fishing, having picnics—as a whole it is a well intended but misinformed and misguided effort.

Despite its pious subject, one purpose of Green Pastures is comedy—to elicit the laughter of a mainly white audience in response to images of African Americans dressed as angels cavorting in heaven and acting out Bible stories.

The Green Pastures was the first major motion picture with an all-black cast. Rex Ingram portrays "de Lawd," with Oscar Polk as Gabriel and Eddie Anderson as Noah. The film shows a Sunday school teacher explaining God and the Bible to a group of young children. He describes "de Lawd" as someone vaguely resembling Dr. Du Bois—is this W. E. B. Du Bois? The teacher's talk with the children and their rapt faces segues into a series of scenes portraying black angels in heaven. When "de Lawd" arrives on the scene, he complains that the pudding lacks something of substance and decides that it doesn't have enough "firmament," which he thereby creates. A sequence of scenes shows the creation of the earth, of Adam and Eve, the story of Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood (one of the central scenes in the film), and the fall of Babylon, after which de Lawd decides not to try to help the human race anymore and retreats to heaven.

The portrait of God in this film is deeply humanistic and anthropomorphic. De Lawd is shown agonizing over the sins and tribulations of the human race. He is constantly disappointed at how humans manage to sin after he intervenes to help them or to clean things up. Even after he retreats to heaven, he is shown suffering over his decision, struggling to discover a way to help the human race without violating his decision. This leads him to an understanding of mercy, suffering, and finally the meaning of faith. The crucial moment comes when de Lawd realizes that though he may have lost faith in mankind, mankind (some of them at least) have kept their faith in him. With these discoveries de Lawd decides to send Christ to the earth as his representative, though this decision is only indirectly implied.

Much of this film is quite watchable. It has its charms. Ingram in particular as de Lawd is impressive. The excellent traditional spirituals sung by the Hall Johnson Choir are used throughout the film to highlight and accompany the Biblical dramatizations. The best scenes are the earliest ones, and as the film moves past the creation of Adam and Eve towards Noah and the flood and the fall of Babylon it becomes too literal and begins to drag.

The Green Pastures exemplifies a view of African Americans that was pervasive in the 1930s, not merely in the South but throughout much of America—a view that regarded them as pious, simple, and primitive—as the bearers of a folk and racial tradition that merited preservation mainly as a form of racial local color.

American Pastoral, by Philip Roth

Philip Roth's famous persona Zuckerman narrates the first third or so of his 1996 novel American Pastoral. He talks about his childhood friendship with Jerry Levov and of his idolatry of Levov's older brother, nicknamed the Swede because of his blond hair, handsome appearance, and athletic build. The Swede was the envy of other boys and the dream of girls. His real name is Seymour Levov. His father is an Italian immigrant, a wealthy manufacturer of gloves. Despite his nickname and his physical appearance, the Swede is Jewish. American Pastoral explores the irony of a man who seems the embodiment of the standard young American hero but who is also Jewish. Is this an irony, a contradiction? Is it possible to be an American hero and a Jew at the same time? Is it possible to be a Jew and an American hero at the same time? Who defines the categories?

The Swede's ambiguous embrace of his ethnic identity is only the surface of the many subjects the novel examines. The Swede lives an idyllic life. He is married to the former Miss New Jersey. He runs his father's business and is wealthy. He is widely admired for his looks and athletic prowess. But gradually his life begins to break down. The collapse begins when his daughter Merry starts to stutter. This formerly charming and idyllic girl puts on weight, grows distant from her parents, embraces radical causes. Finally, at the age of 16, she plants a bomb that blows up a local post office and kills the post master. She disappears.

American Pastoral explores an idyllic life that proves to be not so idyllic. (The novel's title implies this exploration). On the surface the Swede is the American ideal: successful in business and athletics and marriage, an attentive and involved father, a good citizen. Beneath the surface, darkness lurks—or does it? Zuckerman at first hypothesizes that a somewhat too passionate kiss between the Swede and his daughter when she was 11 may have been the source of the problem (the idea of the kiss is Zuckerman's surmise—based only on his suspicion that there must have been some buried event that caused the family's problems). In Zuckerman's imagined account of the Swede's life, the Swede considers this possibility but then discounts it—it was only one kiss.

In the 1990s, when he is in his sixties, Zuckerman receives a letter from the Swede, whom he was never close to, asking to meet with him. They meet for lunch and chat but the Swede says nothing that could have been reason for the meeting. Zuckerman doesn't understand why the Swede wanted to meet with him. A year later, at a high school reunion, the Swede's brother Jerry tells Zuckerman about the trauma caused by the Swede's daughter's involvement in the post office bombing. Zuckerman, a writer, is interested in the story that Jerry tells him, but he learns only the bare details, and he wants to know more. Unfortunately, he cannot call the Swede for further discussion because, as it turns out, the Swede has died of prostate cancer. He must have been ill with the disease when they met for lunch.

Zuckerman speculates and surmises. Suddenly the book changes from a story narrated by Zuckerman to a story focused on the Swede, told by a third-person narrator—these latter sections of the novel may be Zuckerman's fictional speculations about the Swede's life, narrated from an omniscient viewpoint. The story covers the years from the 1960s to the 1990s, though the main episodes occur in the late 60s and early 70s, ending around the time of the Watergate scandal.

A key to the Swede's character may be his desire to make others happy, his willing acquiescence to whatever demand or request comes his way, his unwillingness to assert himself or his own point of view. His entire life has been one of compromise and acquiescence. When he calls his brother to tell him that he has found his daughter and to ask for advice, Jerry angrily attacks him and tells him that if he had not tried to make everyone else happy, his life would not have become such a disaster. This trait extends from his athletic career to his job to his family life. The Swede has always been concerned with trying to give those around him what they want. His father convinces him to join the glove business. A friend convinces him to play football, a game he thought he wouldn't enjoy. When his father opposes his marriage to a gentile woman, he relies on the woman to argue with his father rather than doing so himself. Perhaps the main example of this unassertive nature comes when the Swede discovers his daughter, missing for five years, living in a broken-down hovel of an apartment building, a flop house. She is emaciated, in bad shape, and has embraced Jainism. Instead of forcing her to leave and taking her home or to a doctor, he talks to her and tries to understand her actions. Then he leaves her and goes home. In his defense, however, he knows that if he takes her home she will eventually be arrested and tried for her crimes, which include the murder of four people in various bombings. Should a parent be expected to expose his child to arrest? The question is not easy to answer.

American Pastoral also considers the damaging consequences of the 1960s. Conflicts over Vietnam, Civil Rights, feminism, the sexual revolution, drugs tore the nation apart, and extended down to the level of families across the nation. The Swede is part of the post-World War II generation, the generation of so-called complacency and affluence, the generation of the 1950s, while his daughter is a child of the 60s, with its basic rejection of the parents' generation and its attacks on everything conventional, traditional, and of the past.

Roth's portrait of the Swede Levov is powerful and engaging. He is a latter-day version of the Great Gatsby, yet Gatsby sought wealth and American affluence, while the Swede merely acquiesces to it. The Swede is a good man who tries to do right by his family, yet who falls victim to his own goodness, his own lack of will. Does American affluence condition him not to assert his will, his identity? Does it deny him a moral conscience, an ability to see beneath and beyond the surface of his own situation, of his character and his life?

Roth's powerful prose style is a major attribute of the novel, but the novel is overwritten. It could be two-thirds as long. Conversations or scenes that should have run for two or three pages run for ten or twelve. Roth's immersion of his readers in the milieu and thinking of the Swede becomes overkill. I found myself impatient for a scenes and chapters to end. The novel does not end in a satisfying way—it ends with a question.

It's possible I misread this novel. I read it late at night and became impatient with the long chapters when I grew tired. I should reread it.

Clearly one of Roth's interests here is the conflict between the Swede's Jewish upbringing and the "American" identity he adopts. This is not Roth's main issue, but it is an important one. The Swede can stand for any individual with a heritage, a tradition, that is part of his identity. To what extent does pursuit of the American dream of success and prestige compel one to give up his or her individual essence and be absorbed in the national faceless void of predefined values and identity?

Southern Comfort

Southern Comfort (1983) is about cultural imperialism—about how one culture reacts when another encroaches on its territory. A squad of Louisiana National Guardsmen is assigned as part of a training exercise to make a cross-country hike through the swamps. This is a weekend jaunt for most of the men, who have other jobs. Soon into the hike one of them finds and cuts through a net line belonging to local residents of the swamp, whom we assume are Cajuns. Later they find carcasses hung out to dry. Then they take two boats belonging to the swamp residents and use them to cross a river. (They do leave a note explaining that they will return the boats). When the guardsmen look back and see the owners of the boats watching them, they try to explain their actions, but there is a language barrier—the Cajuns speak French, and they are too far away to hear. As a joke, one of the men in the squad fires his automatic weapon at the men on the riverbank—it's filled with blanks, but the Cajuns don't know that and duck for cover. One of them returns fire that kills the lieutenant in charge. The plot of the film is thus set in motion. The guardsmen try to make their way across the swamp and are picked off, one-by-one, by the local residents.

For most of the film the Cajuns are portrayed as violent and murderous swamp dwellers who resort to all sorts of devices—booby-traps, quicksand, raging dogs, fear tactics—to work revenge on the guardsmen. At the end of the film, the surviving two guardsmen leave the swamp and catch a ride into a nearby Cajun settlement where a celebration of some sort is occurring. Now the Cajuns are portrayed as joyous and fun-loving people who invite the guardsmen to dance and join the celebration. The residents of the settlement are dancing, playing music, cooking. Then the men who had one by one killed the other guardsmen come into the town and try to kill the two survivors. It's not clear whether the townspeople know this is going on and use the noise of the celebration to cover it up, or whether they're unaware. This final scene, with all its ambiguity, exemplifies the guardsmen's essential lack of understanding of the Cajuns—and, since we are viewing the action from the guardsmen's perspective, our own lack of understanding as well.

During the film the guardsmen capture a Cajun man who they believe is responsible for killing their lieutenant. Some of the men abuse the prisoner either for purposes of revenge or to get information out of him. The prisoner watches the guardsmen and recognizes that they are all individuals and that not all of them are to blame for the abuse. As a result, perhaps, he later helps the survivors find their way out of the swamp.

What the film does make clear is that the guardsmen set in motion the events that cause their problems in the film. The swamp dwelling Cajuns interpret the guardsmen's lack of respect for them and their property as an attack. Despite the fact that the Cajuns are the initial victims, however, they are portrayed as murderous and violent, more than up to the task of exacting revenge on the invaders of their territory. Ultimately the film portrays the guardsmen as the victims. Are the Cajuns as a group portrayed as murderous and violent, or does the film place blame only on the men tracking the guardsmen in the swamp? Are the guardsmen as a group responsible for their actions, or are only certain individuals to blame. It's difficult to weed out the guilty from the innocent, and the Cajuns in this film in general are shown as primitive, violent, and dangerous.

Yet this is not purely a film about cultural misunderstandings. It is fundamentally a film about men trying to escape a threat to their lives. Suspense and action, with no small emphasis on violence—are the point—the unpreparedness of so-called civilized men when they are plunged into a life-threatening situation in an alien environment. The commanding officer of the squad dies early in the film, and the officer who takes over for him proves wholly unprepared to lead the men or prevent them from falling into complete disorder and disarray. One can make comparisons with Deliverance (1972) and Lord of the Flies (1963, 1990), and one can draw comparisons, as I believe some reviewers did, of the men in this film with American soldiers in Vietnam. In Deliverance as well as Southern Comfort, we must ask who the real victims are. Both films, moreover, consider what happens to morality and respect for human life when the restraints of civilization are stripped away. In Deliverance these questions were clearly and overtly at the film's center. In Southern Comfort they may be more of a pretext for the action and violence than they are the real subject.

The plot of Southern Comfort, in which the guardsmen are killed off one by one by an unseen enemy, is the typical plot of many a horror and suspense film—think of Halloween (1978) or Alien (1979) or Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), for instance, or even the Agatha Christie film And Then There Were None (1945). It's a too often used, hackneyed device, and it doesn't provide an effective way of exploring the collision of the two cultural perspectives in this film.

The Battleship Potemkin

The Battleship Potemkin (1925) is one of the great silent films. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein, it is notable for its highly dramatic portrayal of a mutiny on a Russian battleship in 1905, early in the Russian revolution. The film is relatively short (75 minutes) and is divided into five sections. One focuses on the mutiny and the death of its leader, another on how news of the mutineer's death provokes citizens of Odessa into a massive reaction, still another on how government troops massacre hundreds of citizens on the famous Odessa Steps, and another on a showdown between the Potemkin and the Russian navy. The massacre on the Odessa Steps is one of the great scenes in cinema—primarily for the balletic way in which it depicts the massacre, and for how it focuses on individual victims. It draws a stunning contrast between the inexorable and robotic march of the soldiers conducting the massacre and the deaths of various victims. The most famous image in the scene is of a baby carriage plummeting down the steps, baby still inside. Another image shows a mother clutching her wounded son, pleading to the oncoming troops to let her pass. They shoot her down.

I do not know enough about early film history to know exactly why this film is so admired, but I can speculate. First is Eisenstein's highly dramatic, sometimes epical, way of presenting the events of the film, connecting them to history, specifically the Russian revolution. Another is his use of unusual perspectives. On the Potemkin he uses a lot of overhead shots showing the sailors moiling back and forth on the deck of the ship. Another is simply his use of numerous distinctive human faces—peasants, aristocrats, the young and old, mothers with their children. There is a Hogarthian quality to the film, but these individual faces are meant to represent the individual faces of an uprising, of a national movement that will lead to revolution against the czar. Still another device is his ability to evoke suspense. This is most apparent in the final segment of the film, where the sailors of the Potemkin are waiting in suspense for the showdown with the squadron that is coming to confront them. Will the squadron attack, or will it join the Potemkin in rebellion? Eisenstein shows the crew of the Potemkin waiting—sleeping, talking, eating—always looking concerned—waiting to learn what will happen. By delaying the final showdown, he invests the film with suspense. The effect is highly successful.

The restored version of the film I watched used music by Dmitri Shostakovich to accompany the silent action. Shostakovich wrote the music well after the film was made, but it was extremely effective and only with difficulty can I imagine the film without that music in accompaniment. However, another restoration of the film is available with music by a different composer.

Film is a technological medium, and The Battleship Potemkin was made when film technology was still early in its development. The film is dated as a result, but it's easy to understand why it has had such an impact and reputation.

WALL-E

WALL-E (2008), the newest Pixar production, disappointed me. While it tackled a number of serious issues—the future of our species, our increasing reliance on technology, our environmental impact on the world—it did so in the context of a children's cartoon that relies on the tired old cartoon clichés of stock characters, a love affair, a battle with the bad guys. The effect is somewhat schizophrenic and self-defeating, even if the movie itself is diverting enough. The need of this film to enchant and charm its audience waters down its handling of the serious issues. As an animated character, WALL-E owes much to the extraterrestrial from E. T. (1982) and the Short Circuit robot (1986). WALL-E is cute, he has a heart, he's sentimental , he's self-conscious, and so on. He's fascinated with an old musical, Hello, Dolly (1969), from which he sings or thinks about two songs incessantly, "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" and "It Only Takes a Moment." He's just what we humans would like a robot to be (except for his fondness for Hello, Dolly). So is his futuristic partner, Eve, sent to earth to scout out any signs of plant life, which would mean the planet is livable.

The best parts of WALL-E come early in the film as the robot wanders around what used to be New York, collecting garbage and compressing it into cubes that he stacks methodically. (His name is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class). He also collects little artifacts of the vanished human culture, along with spare parts from other robots like himself so that he can self-repair when necessary. We humans would find WALL-E's life a lonely one, but it's the only one he has ever known, and he's not programmed to be lonely. Eve's arrival on the earth throws him into confusion. She's sleek and smooth and high-tech—and robotically feminine—WALL-E falls for her.

If this film had used WALL-E and Eve to examine a speculative version of our future, to tell a parabolic tale of fabulous admonition, we might have something more than what we actually get. What we get is the story of two robots in love, set in the context of a future 700 years after humans have left the earth because it has grown too polluted with garbage and smog. The humans and their descendants live on a huge cruise-type ship far out in the galaxy, their every whim catered to by robots. They have grown lazy, stupid, and fat. (Is this the ultimate outcome of what Blade Runner (1982) predicts, when all the humans who can afford it have left the earth to live in space?) What matters in this film are the robots, not the future. In spite of everything, the robots do manage to bring humans back to the planet, where they are set to lose weight, raise vegetables, and repopulate the earth.

There are numerous allusions to previous Sci-Fi films with robots and other marvelous creatures—Auto, the robot who oversees the interstellar cruise ship, and who disobeys the captain's orders, is directly reminiscent of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with his glaring red eye. There's E. T. (one scene in particular is replicated), Short Circuit, Blade Runner, the various Star Wars films. Regrettably, the robots of the 1950s—from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Forbidden Planet (1956)-- seem beyond the memories of the makers of this film--they were perhaps too ominous for the purposes of WALL-E.

WALL-E is modest fun and entertainment. The animation is excellent, though it's held back by the premises of the film and the need to satisfy the dictates of a cartoon universe that will sell tickets. Such Japanese films about the future and saving the environment as Akira (1988) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Princess Mononoke (1997) and Howl's Moving Castle (2004) are imaginatively superior. The director of the latter two films--Hayao Miyazaki—manages to make films that appeal to adults and children without pandering to the conventions of commercial animation in the way that WALL-E does.

Still, WALL-E is entertaining.

Cool Hand Luke

Cool Hand Luke (1967) is a major entry in the American tradition of chain gang films, a tradition that extends back to Mervyn Leroy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). The American South provides a logical setting for the film, since chain gangs are associated with the South, though in fact they were used all over the nation. The South is also a suitable setting for this story because of its reputation for strict enforcement of law and order and its purported lack of sympathy for lawbreakers and the down and out. Race is not an issue in Cool Hand Luke, in part because in the 1960s most Southern chain gangs were segregated. The absence of race as an overt theme simplifies matters for the filmmakers, perhaps. Yet race can be viewed as a subtle theme in how the film portrays the struggle of individuals, specifically Luke himself, against a system that does not favor people who do not fit neatly into a predetermined, predefined place.

The real theme of Cool Hand Luke is the individual against the system. The opening shots of the film show repeated images of a garish red sign reading "VIOLATION." We next see a drunken Luke struggling to twist the head off a parking meter. He's arrested for this small act of vandalism, for "defacing public property." The film doesn't argue that he should not have faced arrest. Instead it argues that the degree of his punishment is extreme, and that society's insistence on conformity, its intolerance of individuals, is extreme as well.

Luke is the son of a lower-class family. We briefly meet his dying mother when she comes to visit him at the prison farm. Clearly, whatever progress he makes in life has been of his own doing. We learn that he has always had difficulty fitting in, especially since his traumatic experiences in war. He apparently suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, an affliction for which there was no name when the film was made. He is, in effect, a psychically wounded war veteran.

Cool Hand Luke has much in common with other films about men imprisoned or trapped or confined in an oppressive environment. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Stalag 17 (1953) are examples. It is also linked in this sense to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. In such works, the prison or the hospital ward, and the individual's struggle with the institutional structures and authority they embody, become an emblem of society at large.

Cool Hand Luke is an episodic film that follows Luke's entry into the prison camp, his adjustment there, his growing conflict with prison authorities, and three escape attempts. The inmates who accept their confinement are portrayed as content with their lot. They are shown having parties, dancing, gambling, and engaged in other activities with prison personnel standing nearby, nodding approval. The main representative of this group is Dragline, played by George Kennedy. He's been in the camp longer than most of the prisoners, and he sees the way to survival through complying with prison rules. He's worried by Luke's rebelliousness, and in various ways he urges Luke to go along with the rules. Dragline is not a coward, but he clearly has a different attitude towards life, towards survival, than Luke. The men like Dragline may be more likely to survive the prison camp, but they do so at the cost of their individuality, their identity. Luke may ultimately retain his identity, but it comes at the cost of his life.

Contrasted against scenes of prisoner camaraderie are those in which Luke wages his struggle against the prison authorities, against authority in general. Perhaps the most famous scene in the film is the egg-eating wager: where inmates bet on whether Luke can eat fifty hard-boiled eggs in a sitting. Paul Newman as Luke is the center of the film, which is built around his character rather than around some coherent central narrative that moves the film forward. The distinction between a film of character and a film of narrative may be minor. But the film is memorable because of Luke's character and because of his struggles against authority, rather than because of any narrative involving other characters in the film. We could imagine the film with a different slate of secondary characters, with a significantly different narrative, but we could not imagine it without the character of Luke or even without Paul Newman himself. Cool Hand Luke is not a groundbreaking film, but Newman's performance as Luke is one of the best of his career.

One motif in the film concerns how the inmates live vicariously through Luke's rebelliousness. They enjoy talking about his exploits and they clearly feed off his resistance to prison authorities. They compensate for their own lack of resolve and strength by drawing on the example he provides. When he escapes from prison, they talk about him while he is away, and when he is captured and brought back they enjoying hearing about his exploits. After the egg-eating contest, Luke lies prone on a sheet of plywood, his arms stretched out to either side. The symbolic posture suggests crucifixion, and there is clearly a sense in Luke's character of the savior who suffers for those who believe in him.

After his second escape attempt, Luke is returned to the camp severely beaten. His entire demeanor has changed. He shouts at the other inmates when they brag about him: "Oh come on. Stop beatin' it. Get out there yourself. Stop feedin' off me. Get out of here. I can't breathe. Give me some air." When he's forced repeatedly by the prison guards to dig a ditch and then fill it in, he finally breaks down and tearfully begs the guards not to beat him. In anger, the inmates turn against him, refuse to help him when he collapses to the floor, and tear up souvenirs of him they have saved.

The prison guard who wears opaque sun glasses—"the man with no eyes"—is the source of the sheriff who tracks the three convicts in O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000). The two characters are fairly similar—associated with the devil, or at least with fate, with an impersonal and indifferent Authority that exacts punishment when transgression occurs.

A Time to Kill

In A Time to Kill a contemporary (1996) trial provokes events (cross burnings, physical attacks, arson, riots, a kidnapping) that seem temporally out of place. It is not that such events could not have happened in 1996 or that they even could not happen today. It is rather that all of the events taken together seem an unlikely pastiche constructed from the past seventy years—a collection of the worst possible examples of racial hatred. I liked this film for the acting and the narrative. However, the historical details concern me. I am not sure the film is historically as accurate as it could be. I worry that extreme manifestations of racial terrorism and hysteria have been appropriated by the film to enhance its sensationalist and entertainment value. I may be wrong about this—further research into Klan activities in Mississippi during the 1990s will support or refute my point.

All historical films are inaccurate to some extent—some more than others. Often the inaccuracy may not matter. The point of the film may be simply to entertain, to divert the audience. But when a film has as its intent to deliver a message about the state of American race relations, the stakes are higher, and the need for accuracy more pressing.

A Time to Kill means to examine an ethical paradox or allegory. It concerns a black man named Carl Lee Hailey whose 10-year-old daughter is attacked, brutally beaten, and raped by young white hoodlums. The young men are quickly arrested by the local sheriff, who himself happens to be black. Convinced that the young men will be found innocent by a local jury, the girl's father sneaks into the court house and shoots the two men to death as they enter to stand for their indictment.

Everyone sympathizes with Carl Lee. There is little doubt that the two young men attacked his daughter. They're toothless rednecks who drive a pickup, swig beer, shout racial epithets, and behave in a menacing way to black citizens of the community. There is nothing redeeming about them. Other than the fact that they're shot down without benefit of a trial, there's nothing to find in their defense. And it's true as well (at least according to the film) that a white jury in this particular Mississippi county might find these hooligans innocent, or at least not issue a sentence appropriate to their crimes. On the other hand, Carl Lee has committed a vigilante murder. He's violated the law and denied these men justice.

The point of this arrangement of events in the film is to portray a crime and an accused man who might be found innocent and who might be found guilty, with no disputation of the facts, only of their significance and their interpretation. As one disbarred lawyer in the film remarks to Carl Lee's defense attorney, "If you win this case, justice will prevail, and if you lose, justice will also prevail. Now that is a strange case." It's ironic, of course, in a pointed way, that the man accused of vigilante justice is a black man, and that his victims are white—a reversal of the usual circumstances that led to numerous lynchings in the American South and elsewhere through the seven or so decades of the 20^th century.

A Time to Kill doesn't investigate this legal dilemma very thoroughly. Any film about theoretical interpretations of the law faces a challenge. How do you make such a film entertaining? Here, however, the film clearly sides with the accused and with his lawyer, Jake Tyler Brigance (Matthew McConaughey), especially with the various problems encountered by Jake and his colleagues and family as the local chapter of the Klan begins to flex its muscle.

About the Klan: this film gives it too much credit. One of the murdered men has a brother with Klan associations, and he meets with the leader of a Klan chapter elsewhere in the state. He is encouraged to recruit members to join a local chapter of the Klan (one of them a police officer) to take action on behalf of the white victims and against those defending Carl Lee. They effectively wage a campaign of terror—they issue numerous threats, beat up the husband of Jake's secretary (he dies), kidnap a law student who is assisting him (Sandra Bullock), burn down Jake's house, attempt to shoot him as he leaves the courthouse (instead seriously wounding a police officer), and in general wage a war of terror.

The Klan's presence in the film makes clear that despite all the superficial signs of a changed Mississippi, beneath the surface there is still racism. Yet the film does a good job of making clear that white racism is still an issue even without the Klan. The mostly white jury seems headed towards a guilty verdict against Carl Lee—white juries do tend to convict black defendants more often than white defendants. The film shows several scenes in which the jury deliberates Carl Lee's guilt or innocence—it's clear that his fate is in danger. Jake's final presentation to the jury hinges on his asking the jurors to imagine the victim of the crime for which Carl Lee took revenge as a white girl rather than a black girl. "How would you feel," he in as much says, if this girl were white? He plays on the jurors' racism to make them see the case from Carl Lee's perspective.

The Klan is an unnecessary additional means of making these points clear. In 1996, the Klan might have appeared to demonstrate at such a trial, and its members might have made various folks uncomfortable, but they probably could not have waged the kind of terror campaign the film portrays. A fundamental paucity of Klan members and of intelligence, and a lack of community support, would probably not have allowed the Klan to do in reality what it does in the film. If the film had been set in 1925 or even 1965, we would have a different situation perhaps. But not in 1996.

A more successful film that demonstrates how racially charged incidents can provoke a community to erupt into riot and discord is Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989). I'd be surprised if Lee's film were not in the back of director Joel Schumacher's mind as he worked on A Time to Kill. Schumacher seeks to show how the killing of the white murderers provokes a situation that makes clear the hidden racial divisions in the town. One scene in particular, shot from overhead, shows a face-off between members of the Klan and their supporters and members of the black community and their supporters. There are similar scenes in Do the Right Thing. Such scenes seek to historicize the event the film portrays—to make it an emblem of the racial struggles and themes that characterize so much of American history. Thus it is no surprise that Roger Ebert, in his Chicago Sun-Times review of the film, calls it "a skillfully constructed morality play" (July 26, 1996).

Time to Kill illuminates racial struggle through the perspective of white participants who are sympathetic to the cause of civil rights, but who have never been called to put their reputations and lives on the line for that cause. When they do that, they discover both the risks involved in the position they have taken, and the ambiguities and uncertainties in their own attitudes. Ebert rightly points out that the film doesn't do much with presenting the view of the black characters. On the other hand, one film can't do everything.

Perhaps the main defect in this generally well made and entertaining film is that although it seeks to portray a legally and perhaps morally ambiguous situation (a vigilante killing) as a way of uncovering the fundamentals of American race relations, it is in itself not ambiguous. It's easy to determine what the film's point of view is. There's no doubt about the sympathy it expresses for Carl Lee and his feelings as the father of a brutally beaten and raped girl. The film doesn't take the kinds of risks this topic might have led it to.

Oddly, and ironically (given American history), the film does seem to suggest that a finding of innocent for a man who without hesitation admits to killing two other men to avenge their crimes against his daughter is just. It sides with a vigilante murder, a position that raises all sorts of moral and legal issues that the film seems aware of but that it largely evades. Clearly this is a post 1960s, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate film.

Matthew McConaughey as the defense attorney in this film does a fine job. His accent is authentic. The film was made in Corinth, Mississippi, and the buildings and scenes in the countryside lend authentic local color and detail that give this film a clear and convincing sense of place. Patrick McGoohan as the ominously named presiding judge Omar Noose is cranky and full of character but somewhat out of place. So too is Donald Sutherland as Jake's alcoholic disbarred mentor, Lucien Wilbanks. Samuel L. Jackson is effective as Carl Lee Hailey—no surprise there.