Beowulf

The screenwriters of Beowulf (3-D)—Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary--certainly understood the plot of the epic Anglo-Saxon poem on which the film is based. They understood that the basic theme was one of heroism, that the poem was a study in character and kingship, that it had possible Christian sub-texts, that the fabled monsters had psychological implications. In making extensive changes to both the plot and themes of the story, they did so in a studied way with the intent of both modernizing the poem and making the story more palatable and interesting to contemporary audiences.

There is no rule against making changes to a story when it is adapted from text to film. Some of the worst adaptations have been faithful to their sources (and some have been equally unfaithful). Film is a commercial medium as well as an artistic one. If you don't sell tickets and attract an audience, you fail, at least by one definition of film.

Beowulf the poem is basically a narrative about an epic hero. The poem lacks much self-consciousness. It's artful, but the artistry to me seems more the result of the story being told and the culture in which it occurs. Beowulf the poem is largely unaware of itself as artifice, as art, and its purpose is the telling of history, the forging of legend to be grafted on to a developing cultural and national consciousness.

Beowulf the film is highly self-conscious. It is torn by a desire to do right by the poem and the desire to be commercial. All the changes made in the conversion of the source text to film appear to have been made with these contending desires in mind. By changing the poem and by failing to provide in the changed narrative a unified logic equally compelling to that in the source, the film falls short.

The film preserves most of the basic events of the original story, although it sometimes reconceives and embellishes them. The three monsters—Grendel, his mother, and the dragon—are all there. Beowulf continues as the hero of the Geats who hears of the monster that is threatening Hrothgar's people and comes to the land of the Geats to vanquish it. He does so because he wants fame and the power that fame brings. This is not so different from the poem. But the film makes Beowulf a flawed hero, and in the poem few if any flaws are evident. Beowulf in the film (played by Ray Winstone) is arrogant and proud, and in his quest for victory he is willing to compromise himself—he lies to Hrothgar about killing Grendel's mother and about losing the treasured golden horn Hrothgar had given him; he does not reveal that he had sex with her. The film views anyone with power as corrupt by nature. Hrothgar himself (played by a miscast Anthony Hopkins) is an aged and bloated version of Beowulf—vain, loud, boastful. When Hrothgar commits suicide, Beowulf wins his kingdom and his queen Wealthow (Robin Wright Penn)—although she had virtually no role in the poem she is a major character in the film—she becomes Beowulf's wife, whom he betrays by taking at least one lover. In the poem, Hrothgar lives on while Beowulf returns home to the Geats and later becomes their king. We know nothing about Beowulf's wife and less about his exploits with other women.

In the poem, Beowulf is a great and flawless hero, and for this reason he is a major point in the argument for the poem's Christian sub-text. Beowulf is a Christ-like hero, and his battle against evil—embodied in the two monsters as well as the dragon—is a Christian battle of good against evil. In the film the battle that Beowulf undertakes is a battle against his own duplicity, the sins he has committed, the deceptions he has carried out. The film uses this quest for redemption to weave the two largely unrelated parts of the poem (the battles against Grendel and his mother and the battle against the dragon) into a more seamless but ultimately less satisfying narrative.

The flawed heroism of Beowulf is a specifically modern heroism. Its basis lies in the Aristotelian concept of the flawed tragic hero and even more in modern skepticism about heroes—no individual can be wholly good and unblemished, every hero must be flawed in some way. In making the story one of Beowulf's quest to redeem himself from the sins and errors of his life, the film fundamentally reconceives the story in the poem. In the poem, when the dragon begins its rampage Beowulf acts out of heroic goodness to confront evil and protect a suffering people. He does this even though he recognizes that his death may result. The poem's concern is with heroism and the character of a hero, not with tragedy. In the film he seeks personal redemption and expiation of his own sins of deceit and lust. His motive is selfish, not altruistic.

The film also gives us an Oedipal story. Grendel's mother is an evil demon who can take on the form of a beautiful sexual temptress. She seduces Hrothgar, and from this union comes Grendel. Later she seduces Beowulf, and from this union comes the dragon. Both sons seek to slay their fathers, partially from jealousy and partially out of revenge against the fathers whose duplicity and corruption are at the root of their progeny's being. This is course is a twist to the story largely absent from the poem.

The world of the poem Beowulf is a pagan world. Christianity, if it is there at all, is present in faint hints and presentiments. Beowulf's character and heroism contain the values and virtues that are the basis of the Christian sub-text. But in the film the world of the Danes is a world in transition. Christianity is explicitly mentioned as a religion that may succeed the pagan faith of the Danes and Geats. It is mentioned as a religion in which there are no monsters—monsters belong to paganism. As the film presents it, the battle of Beowulf against the monsters is a battle of Christianity vs. paganism, even though Beowulf himself is still pagan. In the film's final image, after Beowulf's death, Wiglaf (Brendan Gleeson), who has accompanied Beowulf throughout his life and who has succeeded him as king of the Danes, looks out to the sea at the sinking funeral ship that carries the vanquished hero's body—he sees Grendel's mother rise out of the water-- they stare at one another. She is the pagan world—he is the Christian. The film leaves this face off unresolved, as if to suggest that Grendel's mother is not vanquished--she is with us today, whatever we might think to the contrary. We live in a world that is the opposite of the one in the poem—we live in a post-Christian world of rationality and skepticism, but the subterranean context is one in which monsters, in whatever modern forms they may take, still dwell. Even so, in its explicit acknowledgement of Christianity as a religion soon to replace the pagan religions of the Danes and Geats, the film seems confused and does not make anything particularly significant or meaningful out of the transition that it shows to be taking place. Maybe the point is that in the new Christian age without monsters, heroes like Beowulf won't be needed, but the film still can't refrain from denying the title character the full measure of heroism that the poem allows him.

The special effects in the film detract from the story. The entire film is digitally reconceived—the result of motion-capture technology. The characters move in a stiff, unnatural way. As many have pointed out, their eyes lack life. In face-on shots, they often seem to stare off to the side of the camera, to avoid a direct glance that would make their empty eyes more obvious. Their faces lack skin and muscle tone; the nuanced play of light and shadow that we see when we look at a living human face is missing. The digital effects exaggerate the unreality of the story. The filmmakers should have reserved digital effects for the obvious moments when they are needed—the monsters, the heroic exploits of various characters, especially Beowulf. For a story about human character, we need portrayals that are more human and less virtual. At this point in the development of DGI animation, the technology and those who wield it are simply not capable of presenting convincing recreations of human beings—at least not in this film. Do we blame director Robert Zemeckis, who in Forrest Gump, Contact, and Castaway showed himself more than capable of dealing with human characters and situations, or do we place blame elsewhere? Was this just a hire-for-pay effort by Zemeckis, Gaiman, and others?

Beowulf is a far more successful and nuanced film that 300, which also used extensive digital effects. Many of the reviews have overlooked the intelligence of the Beowulf script, dwelling instead on its many defects. Even so, the decision to craft the story for a modern audience, rather than to attempt a genuine adaptation of the epic poem, led to a significant missed opportunity. The poem has great power—its pagan world, alien to our own, so like it in ways—that would translate into a compelling film, if only someone had the courage to make it.

I saw the 3-D version of this film. 3-D technology has vastly improved since its first introduction to American audiences in the 1950s. I remember as a kid watching the film 13 Ghosts in 3-D at a theatre in East Point, Georgia. In Beowulf 3-D technology becomes another dimension of the film's insistence on spectacle. It is noticeable at first as a kind of novelty, but after a few minutes it ceases to be of much interest. In general, it lends little to the film.

Originally published in Blogcritics: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/11/30/211425.php

Tongues of Flame, by Mary Ward Brown

The slight, carefully wrought stories in Mary Ward Brown's Tongues of Flame (1986) remind us not so much of Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty as of such earlier writers such as Chekhov or Joyce or de Maupassant. Broiwn's stories are so casually and economically written, with an unassuming and concise prose style, that one is not immediately aware of how seamlessly crafted they are. Set in rural Alabama between the 1950s and 1980s, Brown's stories focus mostly on middle-aged and older women coming to terms with the shrinking limitations of their lives. Many if not most of the stories turn on a concluding epiphany in which a sudden insight changes a character's perception of the world. Brown renders these moments so subtly that sometimes one must read and reread the stories before "getting" them. The best story in the volume is the first one, "New Dresses," in which a daughter-in-law who has always remained distant from her mother-in-law takes the ailing woman shopping. She does so out of guilt. She has always resented her husband's devotion to his mother and has never spent much time with her as a result, especially during the older woman's gradual decline. She leaves her ailing mother-in-law at a dress shop she wanted to visit and goes elsewhere. When she returns, she finds the woman exhausted, and in possession of a type of dress she had not expected her to buy. On the dress itself, and the awareness it brings, the conclusion of the story turns. The word exquisite can virtually never be appropriately applied, but for this story it is the proper adjective.

These stories are often narrow in scope. They do not move outside the world of the author and of the people she knows. Yet within that world, in a restrained and careful way, they delve deeply. Some of them indirectly and inferentially concern the coming of the civil rights movement to rural Alabama (it had come much earlier to other parts of the nation). Older whites react with surprise and concern to a new generation of African Americans who do not show the expected subservience of their predecessors. Brown does not seem to mourn or regret these changes in behavior, but she does mark them. In "Let Him Live," the black and white citizens of the town pray for the recovery of a respected town lawyer from brain surgery. He has suffered complications and lies near death. He is known for his ability to mediate crises, to bring groups in disagreement together, to fend off conflict. He may have been what people used to term in the South a racial moderate. If he dies, the town's last source of stability will be gone, and the uncertainty of modern times will descend. In a sense, the white citizens see the lawyer as their protection against sudden change, against the demands of more extreme black citizens in the town, against upsetting the racial balance that has prevailed for years.

Another story, "The Cure," an elderly black woman, on the brink of death, and surrounded by her daughters, demands that an elderly white doctor be summoned to treat her. She is certain he can cure her. The daughters are unwilling because the doctor, retired for years, is widely known for his alcoholism and is suspected of senility as well. But they relent and summon him. He is not a particularly sympathetic character, and he has no special feelings for the dying woman. But he examines her, diagnoses her illness as old age, which he admits to suffering from himself, and in the final scene they both are dozing in her room while the daughters stand outside talking about who will be responsible for taking care of their mother .

The final story, "Beyond New Forks," concerns the relationship of a white woman in her sixties to an elderly black woman named Queen Esther who worked for her for decades. Esther lives near the woman's house but works for her no longer—she is too old. The narrator needs a housekeeper. She is past the point of keeping her own house and worries that without someone to keep house for her she will lose her independence. Esther agrees to take her to the house of her granddaughter, who lives far out in the country, in hopes that the girl will agree to work for her. Here again the narrator encounters an individual and a situation that she didn't expect, that upsets her sense of equilibrium and forces her to think about her own vulnerable place in the world. Although she and Queen have an uneasy alliance—however much she may think of Esther as an old friend, the story makes clear that the older woman does not return the feeling—it is clear that Esther too has her own difficulties with the modern world and old age. This story explores an intricately complicated set of relationships that tie the women to each other and at the same time separate them.

Some of these stories describe characters that may at first seem of little substance or significance, but Brown is able to uncover their significance and illuminate essential elements of their human condition. The best of her stories are very fine indeed.

Originally published in Blogcritics: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/11/30/111253.php

Fracture

Fracture (2007) is a crime and courtroom drama featuring Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling in the lead roles. There is nothing particularly new or original about the screenplay, but the film is interesting throughout, mainly because of the acting. Hopkins fully inhabits the character of Ted Crawford, a jealous old man who shoots his young wife (out of jealousy) and then weasels his way out of the crime by revealing in court that the officer who took down his confession was having an affair with his now comatose wife. Gosling plays a young lawyer on the make, Willy Beachum. He has served his time in the district attorney's office as a prosecuting attorney and at the start of the film has just taken a job with a high-paying private legal firm. The head district attorney tells him that he belongs in the DA's office, but Gosling is focused on the high salary and especially on the beautiful blonde lawyer whom he learns will be his supervisor. They are soon sleeping together. This film is not particularly meaningful or profound, but it does pit the district attorney's office and its service to justice and the law against the corporate legal firm, where self-interest is the byword. Gosling carries the brunt of this tension. His carelessness in court allowed Crawford to outwit him (Crawford is serving as his own attorney). Willy recognizes that he was careless, that he wasn't paying attention, and as a result he asks to be kept on the case, even though if he loses he will forfeit both his job in the DA's office and in the cushy law firm. He does lose the case because the murder weapon is nowhere to be found—the pistol found in Crawford's possession does not match the bullet in his wife's skull (this is an interesting plot twist). Will Willy find a way to outwit Crawford and redeem himself?

This film develops as one would expect, but Hopkins and Gosling make the often trod path of the narrative interesting and gripping. Hopkins seems able to handle such roles effortlessly. Arrogant, self-assured, soullessly ruthless, as Ted Crawford he is very convincing.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), nothing is ever what it seems, at least not for long. This is the longest and least satisfying of the novels I have read by Haruki Murakami. By least satisfying, I do not mean to suggest that the novel was not absorbing, interesting, or stimulating. It was all of these. But after a while, after 500 pages, it began to drag. And its meandering plot turns and twists ultimately began to seem self-justifying.

The main character is Toru Okada. He is married to Kumiko, a magazine editor. Some months before the start of the narrative, he quit his job as a legal assistant ,and when the novel begins he is basically a house husband who does much of nothing. Kumiko tells him not to worry about his unemployment—eventually something may come along that interests him. Toru is strangely passive, strangely accepting of the various happenings that befall him, beginning with the disappearance of a cat that Kumiko loves because she associates it with the early days of their marriage. Kumiko spends many late nights at her job. Toru doesn't mind. One morning he notices she is wearing a scent he does not recognize, and after she leaves the house he finds a strange bottle of cologne in her bedroom—he wonders where she got it—she wouldn't buy such an expensive item for herself. He seems strangely clueless. On this day Kumiko goes to work and never comes back. Toru has no idea where she has gone. A representative of Kumiko's brother, Noboru Wataya—a brilliant but ruthless businessman and intellectual in the early stages of a political career—comes to tell Toru that Kumiko no longer loves him and that her family wants him to agree to a divorce. Later Toru receives a letter from Kumiko telling him that she has had a torrid affair with another man and that, although she doesn't love the man and has broken off with him by the time she writes the letter, she has shamed herself and asks Toru to forget her. She adds that she never enjoyed having sex with Toru. He seems strangely unresponsive to this revelation too, though as the novel progresses he becomes increasingly committed to finding Kumiko.

Events move strangely and mysteriously forward. Toru meets an obsessively chatty sixteen-year-old girl who lives near his house. She is fascinated with him, and they strike up a friendship. She ultimately seems to fall in love with Toru. He doesn't reciprocate, though the possibility is there. Toru spends days at the bottom of a well near his house. He has a visitation from a phantom-like woman who has sex with him and suggests they travel to Crete. He learns to move through walls. He learns to relieve the stress of women by making strange psychic "adjustments" to their bodies. He meets a former fashion designer and her son, who chooses never to speak. He communicates with someone claiming to be Kumiko through a computer. He meets and has conversations with a World War II veteran who worked in espionage activities and saw his commanding office skinned alive by Russian soldiers—this veteran also spent a significant time at the bottom of a well.

These bits and pieces from the novel do not represent the total experience of the book. The narrative itself comes to an end that suggests a resolution without really providing it in concrete terms. If events work out as Toru is told, then things will come to a satisfying end, but then nothing in this novel really works out as it is supposed to. Everything is bent and slightly askew and reality as a whole is fundamentally shifting, uncertain, unreliable. I would appreciate and understand this novel better if I knew more about the tradition of the novel in Japan, as well as the cultural and folk traditions that Murakami uses in his story.

Zodiac

Zodiac (2007) reminds me of All the President's Men (1976). It can be seen almost as a kind of semi-documentary. It dramatizes the Zodiac killings in Southern California in the late 1960s and the subsequent police and journalistic investigations that ensued. Much of the film takes place in a newspaper office. In the first half a reporter and editorial cartoonist become a "team" that investigates the murders. Newspaper headlines mark the progress of the investigation. Dates and locations label the time and place where scenes occur. While All the President's Men moved forward with a kind of inexorable momentum, partially the result of the fact that any audience would have been familiar with the events it chronicles, Zodiac is more casual if not lugubrious.

Zodiac is oddly structured. It moves forward in chronological order. It's devoted mainly to detailing the investigations of the murders, rather than the murders themselves, though it does show several of the killings. It has several protagonists who vary in importance as the film develops. For much of the film the cartoonist is merely an interested observer. In the film's second half, as the newspapers and law enforcement agencies lose interest, he becomes the primary investigator. Several of the investigators suffer for their involvement—a reporter becomes so obsessed that he loses perspective and quits his job; a detective is accused of faking a letter purportedly written by the murderer; the cartoonist stops drawing cartoons and begins writing a book about the murders, and his marriage is ruined as a result (the Zodiac murderer apparently calls the house once a week and breathes heavily into the phone—this doesn't make his wife happy, and her husband's gradually intensifying obsession with the case causes him to neglect her and their children. He is based on the cartoonist Robert Graysmith, whose book about the Zodiac killings is the basis of the film).

The film continually reminds us that we are in the late 60s by using iconic music of the period as a soundtrack. For some reason, this seems a bit contrived and forced.

In All the President's Men there was a clear endpoint to the reporters' investigations: the resignation of Richard Nixon. Zodiac ends with speculation, but not with certainty. Much circumstantial evidence and some physical evidence points to one suspect, but he dies of a heart attack before he can be indicted. Partial DNA evidence (the result of an analysis conducted long after the murders ended) does not support his involvement. When the film ends, all that is clear is that a lot of lives have been damaged if not destroyed.

Much of the interest in the film centers on the personalities of the reporters and detectives involved in the investigations, not to mention the Zodiac murderer himself—whoever he might be. His use of codes, the ways in which he chooses, stalks, and kills his victims, his manner of communicating with the police and newspapers, his occasional phone calls and his love of publicity—not to mention the question of why he does what he does and why he stops—make him a fascinating subject, even though who he is never becomes clear. Even some of the investigators of the murders are occasionally mentioned as possible suspects.

Murky, moody nighttime cinematography proliferates through the film. One is reminded of the X-Files. Some of the scenes are unsettling—in style and especially tone they reminded me of some of the best essays in Joan Didion's Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968). In one such scene the cartoonist goes to visit someone who he believes once might have worked with the murderer—during the scene the cartoonist asks a series of questions, the answers to which make him begin to suspect that the man himself could be the killer. He becomes desperate to escape the house—this is the most frightening scene in the film. Acting by Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey, Anthony Edwards, is good but low key, consistent with the overall style of the film.

There's no real resolution. The film just comes to an end and with a few messages before the credits start to roll tells us a bit about what happens to the various investigators and to the main suspect.

There's no deep philosophical message here. Some murders simply go unsolved. Not all mysteries can be explained. The Sixties were a disturbing, increasingly mysterious and perplexing time (especially as they grow more distant). The Zodiac killings were a bizarre and dark reflection of the decade that produced them. As an entertainment, a crime drama, a psychological study of the murders and the men investigating them, Zodiac is a satisfying if frustrating experience.

Read a Slate essay on this film: http://www.slate.com/id/2181343.

Charlotte’s Web

In the State Capitol Museum of Georgia, there used to be an exhibit that depicted stuffed animals—raccoons, squirrels, foxes, birds—playing poker. It may still be there, for all I know, though the last time I saw it was probably in the 1960s. Hopefully, the museum has been renovated since then. I remember as a child thinking how corny the exhibit was, even while at the same time I found it funny.

Why do we love to see animals engaged in human activities like playing poker? The answer must be rooted in the humor we find in depictions of animals acting like ourselves. It's a way of laughing at our own behavior. It's probably rooted also in ancient myths and legends, in Ovid's Metamorphosis, Chaucer's animal tales, and Aesop's fables, not to mention all those cartoons from the 30s and 40s I used to watch on television with dancing beasts of one sort or another.

The new film Charlotte's Web (2006) makes use of all the latest special effects technology in bringing to life talking animals—pigs, spiders, horses, geese, sheep—who are the main characters in the story. The film is as charming as the book. Julia Roberts voices Charlotte, the spider, while various other known and not so known actors voice the other animals in the story—Robert Redford, John Cleese, Cedric the Entertainer, Oprah Winfrey, Reba McIntire, Kathy Bates. They all do a creditable job. Steve Buscemi is outstanding as the rat Templeton. The film seems relatively true to the E. B. White story. This film was full of charm, whimsy, and life. I liked it but cannot wax too enthusiastic. The 1973 animated version holds more charm for me, probably because it was the one I watched repeatedly with my sons when they were younger.

Lil Abner

The musical film Lil Abner (1959) is a version of the Broadway musical which was in turn a version of Al Capp's comic strip which itself parodied and satirized Southern mountain folk. Capp actually used Southern mountain folk to parody and satirize American culture and politics. Capp's comic strip was idiosyncratic, distinctive, and often wrong-headed. But it had at its best originality and intelligence. The film strips away from its source the controversy and provocativeness and most of the wrong-headedness and gives us in their place dancing Broadway actors pretending to be hillbillies.

I have not seen the musical, but there is little merit in the film, with the exception of a couple of memorable musical numbers, especially Stubby Kay as Marryin' Sam singing about the revered town hero, General Jubiliation T. Cornpone, whose ineptness allowed (according to town tradition and an inscription on his statue written by Abraham Lincoln) the North to win the Civil War.

The plot of this film focuses on the decision of the federal government to move atomic bomb testing site from Nevada (where it is a nuisance to Las Vegas) to the "most unnecessary place in the world," which turns out to be Dogpatch, the home of all the characters in the film. Because the first A-bomb test will prevent the annual Sadie Hawkins Day Race, wherein unmarried women of Dogpatch get to chase and try to catch the men they love, the citizenry begins looking for a way to prove their town really is necessary. An equally important plot is Daisy Mae Yokum's desire to get Lil Abner to propose to her. She's also being courted by Earthquake McGoon, a wrestler whom no one likes.

Folks break into song at a moment's notice in this film. Those moments don't come often enough. As bad as most of the songs are, they're better than the non-singing portions of the film. Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics for the songs. The dance sequence surrounding the Sadie Hawkins Day Race brings a little life to the film, but the race runs on too long.

Some of Al Capp's themes filter through into the film: the bureaucracy of the federal government, the corruption and incompetence of politicians, suspicion of science and technology, the complexity and pretense of the modern civilized world in comparison to the innocence and simplicity of the people of Dogpatch. These people are, according to the film, ignorant, uneducated, licentious, and full of life. They talk with cartoon accents that seem, ironically, taken directly from the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris. There are no African Americans in the film, though there is one Indian, a dancing Indian. Few if any African Americans would have lived in the mountains where Dogpatch might have been located, and that makes it easy for this film to evade any awareness of the civil rights movement in progress at the time of its release. There's a lot of talk about the Civil War and several obvious flaunting of the Confederate battle flag.

It's difficult to bridge the gap of fifty years between the present time and 1959 when this film appeared. It's difficult to imagine an audience liking this film—its manufactured and accidental cornpone, its fundamental inauthenticity. The film was made entirely on a stylized set. Everything is stylized, brightly colored, as if in homage to the story's comic strip origins. Some of the characters do a respectable job of embodying their characters, especially Billie Hayes and Joey Marks as Ma and Pa Yokum. Leslie Parrish is fine as Daisy Mae—she at least looks the part. It's easy to see in Lil Abner the precursor of Jethro Bodine in the Beverly Hillbillies television series, which borrowed liberally from the comic strip and was more lively than this film ever manages to be.

The closest most of the actors in this film ever came to mountain folk was probably through reading the comic strip.

Wild Strawberries

The brilliance of Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) stems from the acting by Victor Sjöström, Ingrid Thulin, and Bibi Andersson, the use of memory and dreams as a way of exposing and unraveling Dr. Isak Borg's life, the various characters who pass in and out of the film, the use of landscape, and (of course), the directing. When Bergman died, several articles called Wild Strawberries his greatest film. I had never seen it all the way through, so I put it on my list. When I finally began to watch it, I did so with trepidation--dread of watching a long and tedious exercise in self-reflection and ponderous symbolism. Wild Strawberries was neither tedious nor ponderous.

As an old man playing an old man (no artificial makeup), Sjöström merely plays himself, or a version of himself, Dr. Borg, a retired medical doctor and professor, on the day that he is traveling to receive an honorary doctorate at a national university. His wife is long dead, and his son lives in another part of the country. His only companion is his housekeeper. His decision to drive to the university upsets her. She was looking forward to accompanying him to the ceremony on an airplane. She has served him for many years, and they sometimes interact as if they are husband and wife, though neither would agree to the label, and at the end of the film when the professor asks her to call him by his first name, she refuses, saying that she is content with the current nature of their relationship.

Through a series of dreams and memories, Borg revisits past events of his life: his idyllic childhood with his family, his love for a young woman who ended up marrying someone else, his less than happy marriage to another woman. The dream sequences are full of symbolic images and psychological portents. In the first one, he wanders the streets of a city that seems familiar to him, but it is deserted, and when he does manage to find someone, the person has no face-- only a blank visage. Is this Borg's own face, devoid of the details and accomplishments of his own life?

Along the way to the university Borg visits the family summer vacation home of his youth. Here the wild strawberries that he used to pick with the woman he loved become the symbol of lost youth and precious memories. During the drive he talks with his daughter-in-law Sara, who has been visiting with him. During their talk she reveals that she does not like him, that she finds him self-absorbed, egotistical, and cold. He receives this revelation in a matter-of-fact way, as if it is not a surprise, though it clearly is a surprise. The tenor of many of the revelations of the day drive home the fact that he has led a cold and self-absorbed life that has left him with few if any friends, an embittered son (Sara tells the professor that his son hates him).

The portrait is not entirely bleak. When Borg visits the town where he lived as a young man, residents come up to him to pay respects and express gratitude for all his service. He has worked for many years as a doctor, and his inventions and research have been of great use to the country. So while he has led a career as a venerated doctor and professor, his inner, private life has been cold.

In the course of the drive, Borg gives a ride to a group of traveling college students (two of them have a fist-fight over the question of God's existence) and a quarreling husband and wife. These temporary passengers are a source of comedy in the film, but they also help advance Borg's progressing assessment of his life. The husband and wife quarrel so fiercely that Borg finally puts them out of the car. He says he did so for the same of the college students, whom he does not want to expose to such bitterness, but it becomes clear that they remind him of his own unhappy marriage. The college students are silly and carefree, full of enthusiasm. They admire Borg and before they leave him sing to him from below his window. They remind Borg of his brothers and sisters, of that time in his early life of hope and possibility.

As Sara and Izak talk, her attitude towards him softens. She reveals her estrangement from her husband, who in ways is cold and distant like his father. She wants to have a child, and he does not.

This film is about how Izak Borg comes to terms with this life. He looks back over all that he has done and said, all the people he has known, and comes to an essential point of loneliness. Even his housekeeper declines to be his friend. She is content to be his servant--nothing more. (Borg's unawareness of how she really feels about him is evidence, perhaps, of his self-absorption). Yet in the reconciliation of his son and his wife, and in his deep and precious memories of his life with his parents and his brothers and sisters, he finds solace and redemption. Memory is redemption, in this film.

Mississippi Marsala

In Mississippi Marsala (1991) director Mira Nair examines racism, both in the American South and elsewhere, through a different lens. The South in this film provides a landscape known for a history of difficult racial relations. We see elements of this racism in the film, mere hints, really. The primary focus is on relations between African Americans and South Asian Indians. By focusing on these groups, Nair views race in a new and unfamiliar context that sheds light on more familiar discussions of the subject.

Nair parallels the experiences of an Indian family in Uganda and in Mississippi. The family regarded Uganda as its home. Meena, the daughter, has never even visited India. She knows no other country but Uganda. When Idi Amin foments racial discord in Uganda, and when Meena's father Roshan Seth makes comments critical of Amin in a BBC interview, the family is forced to leave, along with all other non-Africans. As Roshan Seth's African friend explains to him, "Africa is only for Africans now, black Africans." As a result the family moves to Greenwood, Mississippi, to run a hotel while Roshan Seth pursues law suits against the Ugandan government, seeking the return of confiscated property. Part of the reason why Roshan Seth and others like him were expelled is that they had become wealthy and had been accused of a certain clannishness—Indian families did not, for example, allow their children to marry Africans.

In Greenwood, Meena grows up. At the time of the story, she is 24. Her parents expect her to marry an Indian. In a minor car accident, Meena runs into the van of a carpet cleaner named Demetrius Williams, played by Denzel Washington. Demetrius, with the assistance of some white citizens in the town, has secured a bank loan to start a carpet cleaning company. He has been successful with the company and always pays his bank notes on time. After the accident, he and Meena begin to see each other and fall in love. When their relationship is discovered (they are found sleeping together in a hotel room by one of Meena's relatives), there are extreme reactions in the community from both sides of the racial fence. Meena's father forbids the relationship, though he rationalizes his opposition by saying that he does not want his daughter to suffer racism in the same way he did.

In a scene shortly after the car accident, one of Meena's relatives, a successful businessman in Greenwood, urges Demetrius not to file suit against his family because of the collision. He tells Demetrius that all non-white people are "colored" people, the point being that they all suffer racism and therefore share a common bond. On the basis of this common plight, he appeals to Demetrius, who assures him he has no plans to sue.

After Demetrius' relationship with Meena is discovered, however, the common bond disappears. The Indians unanimously oppose her relationship with a black man. The same relative who appealed to Demetrius not to sue in turn goes to white business owners in town and asks them not to do business with Demetrius' carpet cleaning company. He quickly loses all his clients and the bank threatens to repossess his van. White citizens of the town complain and joke about Demetrius' relationship with Meena. Meena's father decides to move back to Africa to prevent his daughter from involvement with Demetrius.

Demetrius receives criticism from family and friends, from the African American community in general, for his relationship with Meena. His sister accuses him of rejecting black women. His father accuses him of causing trouble. His father, whom Demetrius loves, has spent his life working in subservient roles. He appears to believe in the necessity of playing it safe, of not antagonizing the white power structure by any action or word that would seem to offend prevailing racial codes. In a sense, Demetrius by developing his carpet cleaning business has done the same—it is a service-oriented business, one involving manual labor, not one that threatens to upset the racial order in Greenwood.

Both sides—the Indians and the African Americans—reveal their racial clannishness and their own racist attitudes in reacting to Meena and Demetrius' relationship. Several short scenes show white citizens in Greenwood reacting to the fracas. One old man gleefully remarks on the problems that the Indian family is experiencing with the African American Demetrius.

The parallels that Nair has set up in the film—between Uganda and Greenwood, Mississippi, and between the Indians who have never been to India and the African Americans who have never been to Africa—work well. Both groups feel that where they are—Greenwood—is their home. Yet both groups experience conflict with other groups who see a specific racial identity associated with their citizenship in Uganda or in Greenwood--Uganda is for black Africans; Greenwood is for African-Americans, or for whites, but not for Indians.

Meena and Demetrius ultimately resolve their problems by breaking with their families and with Greenwood. They decide to move away and to work the carpet cleaning business together. The suggestion is that, given the racism both of Greenwood and of their families, this is the only way they can find satisfaction and happiness. This film therefore seems to argue that the solution to racial conflict does not lie in adherence to past traditions and beliefs but rather in living in the present, in accommodating oneself to present-day circumstances and situations.

In a sense this film is not so much about the South as it is about two groups of people who live in the South—Indians and African Americans—and specifically about Mira and Demetrius' families.

Mira Nair has an incisive sense of comedy and satire that comes through especially in her portrayal of various Indian characters in the film, especially one character in particular who covets his car and dresses and acts like a 1950s style Memphis hipster, with greased back hair, in the Elvis style. She's more careful not to satirize African American characters—perhaps she feels her identity as an Indian woman allows her a certain license in satirizing Indians, but not in satirizing other races. Yet she also has a genuine fondness for the humanity of all her characters —African, African American, Indian, or white. She recognizes the comic as well as tragic consequences that can arise from human conflict rooted in racial divisions.

Sharky’s Machine

In 1981, Burt Reynolds was approaching the end of the most significant decade of his career. It began in 1972 with the release of Deliverance, in which Reynolds played a straight role, one of the two most important roles in the film. It was a role that many thought could be his breakthrough into film—previously he had been mostly a television actor. Numerous films followed Deliverance, such as White Lightening (1973), W. W. and the Dixie Dance Kings (1974), At Long Last Love (1975), Gator (1975), Semi-Tough (1977), Hooper (1978), The End (1978), and of course Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and its first sequel (1980). In these films we see Reynolds in a number of roles--as an action hero, a comedian, a romantic lead, even a musical star. But the roles for which he is best known are those in which he plays a boisterous comic Southern prankster—a fool-killer with a moralistic desire to upend corrupt authority and in general to run amuck. Reynolds has been trying to live down this persona, and at the same time to take advantage of it, for much of the rest of his career. He's shown an impressive flexibility in the kinds of roles he is willing to take, and at the same time a resilient energy that led to the renovation of his career beginning with Boogie Nights and more recent films. He's even been willing to parody roles that made him famous—see Without a Paddle (2004) and The Dukes of Hazzard (2005). Although everyone knows his name, he did not ever become the great actor and star he aspired to become—there is a difference, of course, between acting and being a star. Reynolds was a competent actor and for a time a big-name star but in neither case a name for the ages.

Sharky's Machine (1981) may be the film in which Reynolds sought to alter the stakes of his career. Not only does he play a big city detective, but he also directs the film, based on the novel of the same title by Georgia writer William Diehl. I haven't read the novel and so cannot consider the film in relation to its source. The film on its own grounds is a mess, wavering back and forth between gritty police drama, character study, and romantic potboiler. Demoted to the vice squad at the beginning of the film because of a shooting that killed a civilian—Sharky is a highly skilled detective who wants to redeem himself and who is naturally disposed to rebel against authority. He and other members of the vice squad (all of them suffer from an inferiority complex because the vice squad is the least desirable assignment for a police officer) become involved in investigating a high-class prostitute who is murdered before their eyes. She is having an affair with a candidate for governor, and also with an Italian crime boss (played by Vittorio Gassman) who controls the city's power structure, and much of the police station. The plot grows increasingly dense and complex, and the film is not up to the complexity. There is a moment in the film when two Ninja assassins attack a police informant—you know at this moment that the film is floundering. Ninja assassins have little to do with the rest of the film--except for a final encounter with Sharky on a boat in the middle of (presumably) Lake Lanier. Ultimately, as Gassman's hitman brother kills off Sharky's colleagues, the film resolves all these complexities by transmogrifying into a film about Sharky's love for (some might say voyeuristic obsession with) the high-class prostitute apparently killed before his eyes.

The film has the quality of a 1970s era TV crime drama. Kojak comes specifically to mind. The cast includes actors who often appeared in such dramas (Charles Durning, Earl Holliman, Henry Silva, Brian Keith).

Sharky's Machine is set in Atlanta. Reynold's choice of this film based on a Georgia book, the name of his production company (Deliverance Productions), and his use of Atlanta seems a deliberate effort to capitalize on his regional connections. Oddly, the film seems almost a deliberate attempt to reconceive Atlanta as a big national city with no regional distinctiveness. There is, of course, no reason why a film would need to adhere to preconceptions about how a regional city should be portrayed. What the film does for the most part is treat Atlanta as if it is just another version of Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. The music is decidedly non-regional—the brassy sort of music you would expect to hear in a film set on the strip of Las Vegas. Few characters speak with Southern accents, and the few who do are glaring, almost awkward exceptions. Reynolds himself underplays his accent—it's hardly apparent. One reason may be that many of the characters in the film may have moved to Atlanta from somewhere else. Even in 1981 Atlanta was beginning to take on its current character as a city of national and international dimensions (hence the Ninja assassins), but few people in 1981 would have thought of the city in that way, though many complained that it was losing, or had lost, its regional character. A few scenes are specifically tied to Atlanta—one in a night club where a blues band is playing (Atlanta is not known as a center of the blues, but at least the scene ties the film to the South), another set in the infield of Atlanta Stadium, where the Braves play. For the most part, Atlanta is presented as simply another big American city. The film as a whole is bland and without distinctive character. This may be a result of the director's failure to take advantage of the regional aspects of the city where the story takes place—doing so would at least have given the film a sense of place and a specific geographical identity. It might also have helped to emphasize what may be a theme of the film, with its Italian henchmen and Ninja assassins and police officers and bad men who seem to come from all over the nation—that the world is coming to Atlanta and one thing the world brings with it is big-time crime and corruption. (This is not to suggest that Atlanta did not already have enough crime and corruption of its own).

In 1982, Reynolds starred with Dolly Parton in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It marked, in my mind, the end of his great decade. The South that provided the location for his most successful films had lost its commercial and cultural appeal (Ronald Reagan had whipped Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential elections), and Reynolds had demonstrated the extent and limits of his talents. He was at his best as the Southern prankster and good ol' boy, and neither Hollywood nor (apparently) Reynolds himself was interested in further incarnations of that role. The nation moved forward. Better romantic character actors made their way onto the scene, and Reynolds as a comic hero was no longer fashionable—a later generation of comedians replaced him. He would struggle for another fifteen years until appearances in such films as Boogie Nights (1997) and Mystery, Alaska (1999) brought about a resurrection of his career, though probably on the basis of terms he would not have chosen for himself.

A Tiny Ship upon the Sea, by Robert Cooperman

Robert Cooperman's new collection of poems A Tiny Ship upon the Sea (Greensboro, NC: March Street Press, 2007) tells the tale of two brothers, Sean and Liam O'Flynn, who become highwaymen after killing two British officers that try to impress them into the British army to fight the French. Written in a mild Irish dialect, the poems follow the usual pattern of a Cooperman narrative cycle: tracing through the voices of characters events that lead towards some important conclusion. Suffused with references to Irish history and folklore, and with hostility to priests (a familiar theme for Cooperman) and to the British, the poems relate how Sean and Liam hide out with prostitutes after killing the officers. When they quarrel, Sean leaves, taking their money with him. Liam, without money or food, seeks shelter and help from a woman names Mary living alone in the countryside. She takes him in, they become lovers, and she becomes pregnant. When she has a difficult time delivering their child, Liam goes for help and is stopped by another group of British soldiers looking for recruits. When they try to impress him, Liam shoots one of them, is imprisoned and condemned to hang.

Much of the book relates Liam's thoughts, impressions, and memories as he waits in his cell for death. These are the most interesting poems in the book. In them Liam remembers the first girl he loved, his career with his brother as a highwayman, his love for the woman in the cottage, his memory of his drunken father and of the mute sister who has incestuous designs on him. Several poems recount in minute but telling detail Liam's thoughts on the day he is to be hanged, on the scaffold as he feels the rope placed around his neck. When Liam is hanged, the rope (improbably) breaks and the man who was ministering to him as a priest reveals himself as Sean. They escape on a stolen horse. Although Liam has been told that Mary and her child died, he goes to see the cottage where she lived and discovers them both alive. They all flee, escaping the soldiers once again, and steal a boat to sail to a remote island off the Irish shores where they meet Gaelic speaking countrymen. Once islanders learn that Liam and Sean are fugitives, they send them away. In the last poem Liam, Sean, Mary, and the child are sailing out into an empty ocean, hoping to find a place to put safely in.

The collection ends abruptly. The purpose may be to give the collection an air of uncertainty, mystery, and irresolution—we don't know what happens: Liam and crew may die or live. The conclusion suggests that Cooperman is following the outline of an Irish folktale or poem, or that he is trying to end the collection with a sense of suspension (cf. "The Eve of St. Agnes"), but the real effect is abruptness and disappointment—the collection prepared us for something more tangible in the way of an ending, and it is not Cooperman's habit to leave matters unresolved in this manner.

A sub-current in the poems is Sean's desire to sail to the American colonies. He believes he can be free in America, even though the colonists like the Irish are subject to the rule of the British. This motif of escape and the desire for a life in a distant land underlies many of the poems. The collection is set during the early days of the American Revolution, and even though Ireland is the location of the story the poems tell, the principles for which the Revolution is fought—freedom, opportunity, independence from the British—are ones that mean something to Sean and Liam. This motif is more an unrealized potential in the collection, a series of hints and inferences, than a fully realized theme.

As with Cooperman's other narrative cycles—stories about the Colorado gold mine country, about Byron and Keats, about the story of the long black veil—Liam speaks with a passionate and rhetorically urgent intensity. He must tell his story. It is his very nature to do so, though we don't know to whom he speaks or where he is when he tells the tale. He is like the narrators of some of the poems of E. L. Masters and E. A. Robinson—an inveterate and essential teller of his own experience.

Despite the ending, these poems in a minor key attest to Cooperman's skill with narrative poetry. Above all else, the increasingly desperate and plaintive voice of Liam O'Flynn, as he approaches what he believes will be his death on the gallows, dominates the book.

Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami

In Norwegian Wood (1987) by Haruki Murakami men and women talk endlessly about the most trivial and ponderous subjects. One character obsesses over the mushrooms she cooked for a folk music group that were found unsatisfactory. The main character Watanabe goes to visit the apartment of a girl he met in one of his classes. Since they are going to her apartment alone, there is suspense—will something happen, will they sleep together? They talk endlessly, especially the girl, of the most trivial matters. At the end, they kiss, and the girl tells our hero that she has a boyfriend. That's it. There are several more such prolonged encounters, one of them in the hospital room of the girl's dying father. The highpoint comes when Watanabe and then the girl's father eat a cucumber. It is as if such talk is an entrée to some deep knowledge about these characters and their lives.

Watanabe's conversations with the girl he loves, Nakao, are different, but the novel brims with what seems to be shallow conversation. In addition to the long passages of trivial description and apparently shallow talk, the novel uses letters written between Watanabe and Nakao to trace the progress of their relationship.

The title, an allusion to the Beatles song, is evoked when Nakao's roommate Reiko plays the tune on her guitar during Watanabe's visit to the sanitarium where they are living. It's also a more general allusion to Watanabe's enthrallment to Nakao. The novel is an enactment of the song, in a sense, and of the Keats poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" on which the song is at least partially based. Nakao is a beautiful girl unable to recover from her boyfriend's suicide. Gripped by depression and deep psychotic trauma, she asks Watanabe to wait for her recovery. She gives him glimpses of her beautiful naked body, which she promises to him when she recovers, and he does wait.

The present time of the story is twenty years after the main events of the novel. We first meet Watanabe as a man of 37 remembering a girl whom he once loved deeply. In fact, the novel begins with Watanabe at an older age remembering himself at the age of 37, sitting in a 747 preparing to land, hearing the song "Norwegian Wood" and being prompted by it to recall his love for Nakao and his friendship with another young woman, Michiko: "I . . . looked out the plane window at the dark clouds hanging over the North Sea, thinking of what I had lost in my life: times gone by, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again." (These words recapitulate another Beatles song, "In My Life.") Thus as is the case with this kind of retrospective novel, tension builds as we move towards the climactic revelatory events that will reveal why Watanabe lost the girl, what happened to her, what sent him to his current state of affairs in the modern world. At other points the narrative seems merely to be marking time, moving nowhere, mired in trivialities and endless talk, putting us off until those revelatory events occur.

While he waits for Nakao to recover, Watanabe meets Michiko, a student in one of his classes. Gradually a relationship develops, but it's complicated by Watanabe's love for the ailing Nakao. Will she recover? Will he realize that he really does love Michiko? Will he decide to commit himself to Michiko before she decides she can't wait any longer?

There are at least four suicides in this novel. Two characters have major nervous breakdowns. Mizuki's father and mother both die from brain tumors. This is more than melodrama—it is a way of suggesting the dissatisfaction, the inner angst, the alienation of these lives that in this novel express themselves faintly through banal and trivial talk and flirtation.

Watanabe is a remarkably passive soul. Things happen to him, but he rarely has a role in making them happen. He does seek friends out, on occasion. Be he is so caught up in waiting for resolution of Nakao emotional problems that everything happens around him.

This novel was a best seller that gave national fame in Japan to its author, Haruki Murakami. It is decidedly unlike the other Murakami novel I read, Kafka on the Shore (2006), though the layered retrospective narrative of Norwegian Wood, the unusually high incidence of depression and suicide (which creates an almost otherworldly sense of unreality in the novel), Nakao's elusive, ultimately disappearing character, and the final paragraph are of a piece with the style and method of the later novel.

Eragon

The novel Eragon (2006) is quite an achievement for a seventeen or eighteen-year-old author—an achievement of persistence, talent, ingenuity, and even vision. But these do not add up to genius. Nor does the film based on the book succeed in any way other than one of derivativeness. For me one of the main entertainments the film offered was in being able to identify potential influences and sources. In Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy human beings are linked from birth to their daemons. When the human dies, so does the daemon. In Eragon, when the dragon rider dies, his dragon always dies with him. The
Lord of the Rings has Aragorn and Gandolf, Star Wars has Ben Kenobi, Aragon has Brom, the former dragon rider. Along with the Harry Potter novels, all these sources have young protagonists who find themselves suddenly called to serve a noble purpose, one they didn't choose for themselves. They have to face down dark villains, difficult challenges and physical obstacles, terrible monsters. There is always a young girl, somewhere. Some of the scenes in Eragon, especially several that show the hero silhouetted against a beautiful sunset sky, specifically recall scenes in the first Star Wars film. Like Luke Skywalker, Eragon is an orphan of mysterious parentage who lives with his uncle. Both Luke and Eragon long to escape their dull lives on the farm. The uncles of both heroes are slain when evil forces come looking for their nephews. All of this is to say that there is not much original about the film Eragon.

There's not much tension or uncertainty in this film either. Instead there is a kind of random arbitrariness in the various turns of plot. We move from one scene to another. Once one challenge is overcome, another, often unrelated one, presents itself. The digital effects are good if not groundbreaking. The dragon Saphira is probably the best character in the film, if only for the voice of Rachel Weisz.

The film is flat. It lacks depth. It's like an empty box enclosed in saran wrap. Ed Speleers as Eragon is winning, but he can't act, in a profound way. Jeremy Irons as Brom is mysterious and dark, but he pretty much stays that way and dies too soon. Sienna Guillory as Arya is a welcome breath of sensuality and life. John Malkovich as the evil king Galbatorix has little to work with. Most of all the film lacks the mythic resonances of The Lord of the Rings and even the Philip Pullman and Harry Potter novels. It's a flat comic book story.

The end of Eragon clearly sets us up for a sequel, but judging from reviews and ticket sales, there won't be one.

The Dark Materials Trilogy, by Phillip Pullman

The Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman is a series of fantasy novels, ostensibly for children. They are well written, with a polish and a sense of narrative form lacking in the Harry Potter novels. In his New York Times review of the last Harry Potter novel, Christopher Hitchens recommended this trilogy, which I subsequently discovered on my son's bookshelf. The central character is a young girl named Lyra, ostensibly an orphan who lives under the supervision of the master of one of the colleges at Oxford University. Lyra begins the novel as a deceptively normal orphan—though adventurous and rebellious. She is constantly hiding in closets and running across the roofs of the college buildings with her daemon. Oh, yes, her daemon. The world Lyra inhabits is not exactly our world, but one parallel to it, similar in many respects to our own, but different in other ways. The inhabitants of this world all have a daemon, an animal of some sort that is linked to them through a special bond that the novels never quite explain. In childhood, the daemon can change shape at will—from cat to hawk to fish—but when its owner reaches puberty the daemon settles into one shape that is set for life. When the owner dies, so does the daemon. The daemon is akin to the soul. In some worlds, a person's daemon is invisible.

Lyra's simple life at Oxford soon begins to grow more complex. She secretly watches as the headmaster of the College tries to poison a visiting dignitary, Lord Asriel, a scientist of sorts. She overhears a conversation about a special child, who she realizes is herself. A beautiful woman, Mrs. Coulter, appears at the College and decides to adopt her. Lyra becomes aware that children in the town are disappearing, never to be seen again, and there are ominous rumors about their fate. She learns that Mrs. Coulter is involved in the disappearances. She also learns that she does have, after all, a mother and father. She runs away to live with the gypsies, becomes friends with a balloon pilot and a talking polar bear named Iorek Byrnison (with his own set of armor), travels to the frozen North, learns about the possible existence of other universes, and so on and so forth.

Pullman imaginatively populates these novels with all sorts of fantastic creatures and parallel worlds. The first novel, The Golden Compass, is full of surprises and is ingeniously put together. The latter two novels, The Subtle Knife and The Ambler Spyglass are quite readable and usually entertaining but also less satisfying, in part because Pullman forces them to serve a particular agenda and framework involving quantum mechanics, parallel worlds, anti-Catholicism and anti-institutionalized religion of any kind, and Paradise Lost. As the novel develops, and we learn of the roles that Lyra and her friend Will are fated to enact, events seem increasingly prescribed and limited.

Still, there are delights, such as the elephant-like mulefa that appear in the third novel. They have evolved to ride on wheels fashioned from the seedpods of a particular tree. The mulefa are highly intelligent, possessed of their own language, and have as enemies large swan-like birds that occasionally attack from the nearby sea. Less successful is the world of the dead, where Lyra and friends travel. It's too imprecise and unbelievable, with harpies and an emaciated boatman and millions on millions of ghosts. The afterlife in this novel, reminiscent of the afterlife in Homer's The Iliad, and also of a prison camp, is not a happy place.

As the books progress, the fantasy grows more forced, less plausible, less convincing. Lyra's character loses her distinctiveness, as she compliantly adheres to the role the novels create for her, and finally, in the third book, the climactic events are described with an imprecise, abstract, faintly eroticized language that is sentimental and ineffective.

A key component of the novels is Dust, an indefinable substance that is generated when a species becomes sentient, self-conscious. It's a kind of dark matter. It goes by various names, depending on which world you are in: in our world, Dust is Shadow Particles. Dust gives human life its joy and vigor. It animates the universe. Children don't have it, but as they grow older and mature they become covered with it. The novels revolve around the efforts of various characters in the novels to destroy Dust as well as to save it. Lyra's life is in danger as a result of the struggle.

The Dark Materials trilogy is well written and often highly imaginative. Much more literary and intellectualized than the Harry Potter novels, it is, in the end, less engaging. The Harry Potter novels are full of bad writing and rough edges, contrived plot turns, and other sorts of baggage, but Harry Potter and his friends, even at the height of the crisis in the final book, remain interesting and real as human beings, while Lyra and Will become more and more like pieces of an edifice that Pullman struggles too diligently to force into place. The smooth edges of his seamless trilogy are what bring it down.

Monterey Pop

What Monterey Pop (1968) lacks in sound quality it makes up for in high-power, classic performances. Four performances are the heart of this concert film, produced a year before the more famous Woodstock (1970). First is Janis Joplin, performing "Ball and Chain" with Big Brother and the Holding Company. She reinvents this song. It's doubtful one could recognize her version of the song next to more conventional performances of "Ball and Chain." She croons, screeches, screams, contorts, murmurs. She wholly possesses the song. It's a career-making performance, and the best in the film. Then is Otis Redding with "I've Been Loving You"—this performance less than a year before his death in a plane crash. Redding sings this song straight, pretty much as he does in the recorded version, but in this live performance reminds us of what a powerful and distinctive performer Redding was. Third is Jimi Hendrix and "Wild Thing," a performance that ends with the incineration of his guitar. Although this isn't the best performance of his career, it is a good one, and visually it is hard to exceed—Hendrix is all over the stage, and in complete control of his guitar, which he treats in more ways than one might imagine a guitar could be treated. Finally, there is Ravi Shankar, playing a raga so frenetic, controlled, and powerful that you want to take a cold shower. His music is distinctively different from, and at odds with, the music in the rest of the film, but on some level it's of a piece with the other great performances, all of which show that performing and listening to music is a spiritual exercise.

There are other good performances in the film, especially by Jefferson Airplane and Canned Heat. The Mama and Papas, whose guiding spirit John Phillips had much to do with the staging of the festival, performs twice, and their singing, along with their appearance, reminds us of what a limited phenomenon, locked in a specific cultural time frame, they were.

It's interesting and sad to watch the young people in this film—both in the audience and on stage—and to think that forty years have passed since the 1967 Monterey Pop Festial. Many who appear on stage are dead—Mama Cass, John Phillips, Redding, Joplin, Hendrix—others have simply faded away—some brain damaged by alcoholic or narcotic self-abuse, others simply faded. The people in the audience are now in their 50s and 60s, and if they're anything like me they don't walk with the lightness we see in this film, their faces don't glow with joy and optimism.

Woodstock captured the spirit and self-promoting frenzy of the three-day rock festival that remains the most famous and self-defining moment of the late 60s. It's a much clicker film than this one, and the sound quality is excellent. It's an entertaining film, but it shows us how some of the great acts of the day were already becoming self-parodies—how could anyone see anything but self-parody in Joe Cocker's wonderful performance of "I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends." Perhaps we see notes of self-parody in Monterey Pop too (why it's necessary for both The Who and Jimi Hendrix to destroy their guitars, I don't know), but it offers four great performances the equal of the best in Woodstock. The success of the film owes partially to its director and pop music documentarian D. A. Pennebaker and the excellent photographers with whom he worked.

Stranger than Fiction

Stranger than Fiction (2006) is another in a succession films and novels that explore, sometimes in highly fanciful ways, the relationship to reality of literature, art, and the human imagination. Such films as The Truman Show, Adaptation, Tristram Shandy, Pleasantville, The Fountain, and Being John Malkovich are examples, and there are others. In Stranger than Fiction a man named Harold Crick gradually becomes aware that he is a character in a novel being written by a famous reclusive novelist, Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson). Crick is an IRS auditor who lives a life of carefully observed routine that never veers outside established boundaries. He is what we call a "flat" character. He becomes aware that he is bring written about when he begins hearing a voice that is narrating his life. (He is brushing his teeth when the voice first speaks). The voice turns out to belong to a writer who always brings her main characters to a bad end—as she puts it, she "kills them off." As Crick begins to fall in love with a bohemian cookie store owner, Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal), we see him begin to develop a three-dimensional personality. We also see a developing relationship between the demands and value of art as embodied in the novel in progress and the value of an individual human life. Eiffel is experiencing the worst writer's block of her career and cannot decide how to end her novel in progress. Her publisher appoints a literary agent, nicely played by Queen Latifah, to assist her. Harold consults a literature professor, Jules Hilbert, played by Dustin Hoffman, for advice. Hoffman's character is an expert on Eiffel's work, though he has never met her. Just at the moment when Eiffel has resolved how to finish her novel, Harold tracks her down and confronts her with his situation, and his desire to live. She in turn takes her manuscript to Hoffman. He reads it, judges it her best work, and concludes that she should not change a word, that Crick must die, that not to let him die would destroy a great literature. He advises Crick that there is nothing he can or should do, that he should accept his pending demise as a necessary sacrifice for the cause of great art.

The point of the film boils down to the question of what Eiffel will do—will she complete her novel as she planned it, or will she change it?

This film is a fantasy. If you try to see it as anything more, you become aware of numerous points of illogic and narrative errancy, not to mention the impossible premise of the film. But if you view it as the story of a man in the process of discovering himself, of accepting a fate over which he may have no control, of having perhaps to die not just for literature but to preserve someone else's life, and if you view it as the story of a writer suddenly confronted with the notion that her stories may possibly have a life-and-death impact on a man's existence, it's an entertaining and moving film.

It's also a film built around a false conceit—the notion that imaginative literature, art in general, directly and forcefully affects reality. Imaginative literature usually does not have a bearing on the physical fates of actual human beings. Writers can determine the fates of their fictional fabrications, their characters, but not of real people. Only when a Mark Wayne Chapman or John Hinckley becomes obsessed with an author and a literary work do we have the rare and disruptive intrusion of art, of literature, into the realm of human life. Yet one may argue that both these men are extreme and unrepresentative examples of the impact that literature, in far more subtle and moderate ways, actually does have on the lives of individuals and thus of nations. It may not determine whether we live or die, but it does help develop our character, our views of the world. At least this is true for those of us who read.

A Little Salvation: Poems Old and New, by Judson Mitcham

A Little Salvation: Poems Old and New (2007), by Judson Mitcham, has recently been published by the University of Georgia Press. The value of the poems previously collected in Somewhere in Ecclesiastes and This April Morning are reflected in reviews and awards they received. The first book won both the Devins Award and recognition for Mitcham as Georgia Author of the Year. Mitcham has received two Townsend awards for his novels, The Sweet Everlasting and Sabbacth Creek. He's the only author to win two Townsend awards, both for fiction.

Mitcham is a very fine poet. The work collected in his first two volumes of poems tends towards the narrative and the philosophical, though not in an abstract way. Instead Mitcham approaches philosophical matters—such matters as the passage of time, human mortality, memory, for example—through illustrating them with examples from his own life or from people he has known. Philosophy for Mitcham is always tied up with the personal. There is a strongly spiritual tone to his poetry. It is not precisely correct to describe his work as religious, but he is definitely concerned with many issues of religion, such as redemption, sin, contrition, and so on.

Somewhere in Ecclesiastes (1991) offers a moving sequence of poems, written throughout the 1980s, about youth, family, mortality, and the southern cultural scene. They especially concern themes of personal loss, such as the death of Mitcham's father and memories of friends from his youth. This intensely felt, elegiac sense of loss is the central feeling in many of Mitcham's poems. The later poems, many collected in the 2003 volume This April Day, are tinged with a deepening pessimism and despair over the disappearance of the people who played a crucial role in his early life and in the formation of his identity as a person and a poet.

The new poems in A Little Salvation presented under the title "Oblique Lexicon," are something of a departure for Mitcham in style, although he continues to visit many of the themes and concerns that characterize his earlier work. In line with the lexicographic title, the poems are arranged alphabetically by title. One could object to this ordering of poems as a kind of gimmick, and that it may be, but the lexicographic model is how Mitcham chose to write and organize these poems, and whether it works or not, or whether it contributes in a constructive way to the overall effect of the poems, it is what we have. I became convinced after reading through these new poems that even if the model doesn't enhance the poems it certainly doesn't detract from them. I found only a few poems that could have been written for the sake of providing poems whose titles begin with a needed letter of the alphabet.

Beyond the matter of alphabetic unity, Mitcham in these new poems employs several new poetic styles, or at least styles he did not use frequently before. Along with the narrative poems he favored earlier in his career, he writes a number of shorter poems, some of them in the lyric mode (e.g., "Lyric," not surprisingly). The opening poem "Art" is written entirely in couplets, with the exception of the final single line. "Epilogue," about memories provokes by photographs, employs three-line stanzas, again concluding with a single line. There are several dialect poems: "Dream" and "Ignorance" are examples. Several poems employ poetry in prose form, such as the very effective "Understanding," in part about the murderer Charles Whitman who shot down numerous students at the University of Texas in 1966. The poem, "Body," employs an approach that at first seems whimsical, as Mitcham muses over the kinds of items we inadvertently ingest ("the rat hair and roach wing") when eating hot dogs at ball games, though ultimately he links this concern with the discovery of a tumor growing in his mother's brain. Mitcham often uses this approach of tying together events, people, or memories seemingly unrelated in time, place, or nature.

Some of these poems pay tribute to literary forebears: "Grace" is for Flannery O'Connor; "Tennessee" for William Carlos Williams and his poem "The Jar"; "Village" is for Stanley Kunitz; while "Villanelle" (which, as far as I can tell, is not a villanelle) apparently pays homage to Mississippi writer Larry Brown.

Flushed Away

When Flushed Away (2006) appeared in the theaters I decided not to see it. The appeal of the story about the adventures of rats after they are flushed down the toilet was nil. But here I was last weekend, lolling on the sofa, talking to my son. Flushed Away was on. We watched.

Flushed Away is a moderately charming and entertaining animated film. It was written by the screenwriter who produced Wallace & Gromit
in
The Curse of the Were Rabbit. The humor is British—wry, ironic, funny. There is ample slapstick. There is a budding romance between two initially antagonistic characters—the pet rat Roddy (voiced by Hugh Jackman), who has lived his entire life in a cage, and the independent, feisty female rat Rita (Kate Winslett), who confronts him soon after he is so villainously flushed by another rat who has invaded his apartment. There is an impressive array of whacky animated characters. Notable among them is the evil Toad (Ian McKellen), who once belonged to Prince Charles and still nurses resentment over how the crown prince rejected him. He bears only a slight ancestral resemblance to the infamous Mr. Toad of The Wind in the Willows, a 1949 Disney production.
There is a plot of sorts involving a ruby supposedly fallen from Queen Elizabeth's crown. There is also a plot focused on Roddy's struggle to return to the comforts of his cage only to discover that life in the outside world can be more exciting and adventurous than anything the cage can offer.

Not as fun or bent as The Curse of the Were Rabbit, Flushed Away is nonetheless a pleasant surprise.

Disturbia

This fairly well done 2007 remake of the 1950 Alfred Hitchcock classic Rear Window has all the basic elements of the original: a protagonist temporarily trapped in his house, a mad murderer of women, voyeurism, temperate eroticism, detective work, suspense. The main difference between this remake and the original (aside from the 57 years that have passed, the contemporary suburban world of the remake vs. the same world circa 1950 of the original) is that the remake is of and for teenagers. Shia LeBoeuf plays a disaffected young man named Kale Brecht who feels responsible for his father's death in an auto accident. After he slugs his mathematics teacher, he is sentenced to three months house arrest and is saddled with an ankle bracelet that notifies the police if he strays more than 100 feet from his house. Add to that the fact that the policeman assigned to his neighborhood is the cousin of the teacher he slugged. Add to that the beautiful teenage girl, Ashley (Sarah Roemer) who has just moved in next door. Add to that Shia'a sometimes inattentive and imperceptive mother (Carrie Ann Moss). Add to that Shia's best friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo), an Asian teenager with a love of jokes, pranks, and cameras. Add to that the predominantly night-time scenes and the murky subterranean pool beneath the basement of the next door neighbor's house. All of these play into the relatively predictable plot. What really made the 1950 film Rear Window was the interplay between Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart. Kelly infused the film with an incredible eroticism solely by inference, by subtle suggestion. Although there is no sex per se in the remake, there much thinking about it by the two teenage boys, who spend much time staring at Ashley sunbathing in her bikini or her cut-off shorts or undressing in her bedroom, as well as at the ominous movements of the neighbor on the other side of the house. Whereas in Rear Window Stewart's character is watching his neighbors in a desultory way, to pass the time, in Disturbia (be sure to get the interplay with "Surburbia"—hardly the sort of playful, subtle linguistic bawdry possibly implied by the title of the 1950 film) the teenage boys are deeply engaged in voyeuristic fascination with the girl. Their interest in the man who lives on the other side of the house, and who might be a notorious serial killer of women, is at first incidental. Only gradually does it become more central. This is an entertaining film, but the fact that it is presented as a teenage film, with all the usual trappings of teenage films intended to lure and hold a teenage audience (our hero has to rescue his girl, rescue his mother, rescue his best friend, and then he has to kiss kiss kiss his girl), and with no real attempt to transcend those limitations, prevents it from rising very far above the mundane average. A friend of mine observed that what most irritated him about this film was that he had to watch the young hero and his girlfriend kissing: "I'm too old to enjoy that." Well, perhaps, in the spirit of the voyeurism of both the original and the remake, I won't go that far. But kissing was not the focus of the original, and the fact that, in the remake, it is the focus pretty much explains the difference between the two.

The Night of the Hunter

Towards the top of my list of favorite films about the American South is the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, based on the Davis Grubbs novel of the same name. This is the only film ever directed by stage and screen actor Charles Laughton, and its commercial and critical failure following its release convinced Laughton and his producers that he should not direct again. When the film was released, critical reaction was mixed and reflected confusion on the part of reviewers and probably also on the part of audiences. The film was an unusual combination of crime drama, film noir, children's fantasy, and stylized, expressionist motifs. It combined scenes of comedy and tragedy, of violence and religion. Parts of the film were conventional; parts seemed almost amateurish. It is not surprising given the kinds of films being made in the 1950s that The Night of the Hunter sank from view soon after its release. It ran counter to established trends. It took 20 years for critics and viewers to recover this film and to begin to recognize its considerable merits.

Admittedly, the inclusion of The Night of the Hunter in a course about Southern films may seem problematic for some. In fact, the more I researched the background of this film, the more problematic its inclusion became. It is first of all not set in the South, or at least not in the deep South. It apparently takes place on or near the banks of the Ohio River, probably where it borders West Virginia. The film certainly looks and feels Southern, set in a rural region during the time of the Depression. A number of scenes show rolling farmland landscapes, with barns such as one would expect to find in the tobacco lands of Tennessee and Kentucky. A number of characters have Southern accents. It has many of the elements we expect to find in Southern literature—for examples, concern with religion and a gothic interest in violence and murder. It also expresses an agrarian skepticism towards cities, progress, technology, and the modern world and the general decay of values in the modern world. So for these reasons I've felt justified including The Night of the Hunter on my list.

But there are further complications. The traditional conception of Southern literature is that it is written by people who have spent all or most of their lives in the American South and that it expresses attitudes and deals with subjects generally associated with the South. We know that this view is being supplanted with other views, and that Southern literature is more diverse than traditional definitions would allow, but I will let tradition suffice for the purpose of this paper. I must further add that I tend to view films in the same way I view literature, that is, as texts suitable for interpretation. I am not a film scholar. My training has been that of a literary critic and teacher. Film has all the basic elements of fiction—narrative, plot, characters, themes, images, setting, and so on. So I treat it as literature. But in thinking about certain films as Southern films, there is a major difference between literature and film. Literature is usually the product of single authors. Film is collaborative. The director is often credited as the auteur, but others, such as screenwriters, cinematographers, editors, and actors, also have a major role in the final product. There is also not a major film industry in the American South. Films are made here, of course, but the people who make them are not typically Southern. Thus in a simplistic way it may be possible to argue that while Southern literature in its traditional definition is by Southerners and about the South, and reflective of attitudes one might associate with the South, Southern films are largely made by non-Southerners who use the South as a landscape on which to explore attitudes that may be Southern or that may not be.

This is certainly the case with The Night of the Hunter. It was filmed on a Hollywood set. Most of the principal actors were not Southerners. Laughton was British. Laughton convinced James Agee, the Tennessee writer who had written the screenplay for John Huston's The African Queen, to write the screenplay for this new film, but the evidence seems to suggest that Laughton did not like Agee's screenplay and partially or largely rewrote it. It is possible that Laughton saw Davis Grubbs' novel The Night of the Hunter as a "Southern" work and that in hiring a Southern writer such as James Agee to write the screenplay he was reflecting this fact. There is conflicting evidence as to how much of the Agee screenplay was actually used in the film. The best discussion of this question that I have read, based on close study of extant drafts of the screenplay, is by Jeffrey J. Folks, "James Agee's Filmscript for The Night of the Hunter," in The Southern Quarterly (1995). Folks suggests, contrary to what others have said, that much of Agee's screenplay appears in the film. Whatever the case might be, the film does reflect his influence.

A number of reasons explain Laughton's desire to make a film of Davis Grubb's novel. He first of all liked the novel, which he read before it was published. He set out to make a faithful adaptation and worked closely with Grubbs in developing the film. The themes that he emphasized in the film were religious extremism, the dire economic conditions of the Depression and the suffering of the rural poor as a result, the victimization of women and of children, and the loss of values in the modern world. His emphasis on the rural landscapes, on the religious extremism and misogyny of his main character Harry Powell, and on the clash of modern values and the modern world against more traditional values—these are emphases he accepted from the novel—are ones that are characteristic of much modern Southern writing. They make it convenient as well as logical to view this film as a Southern work, and at the least as a work which in tone and content is consanguine with other Southern literature.

For those of you unfamiliar with this film, here is a barebones summary. A man named Ben Harper robs a bank and kills two men in the process. He gives the money he has stolen to his son John and directs him to hide and protect the money at all costs. Harper is captured by police, sent to prison, and executed, but before his death he tells his cellmate, an itinerant preacher named Harry Powell, about the hidden money—but does not say where the money is. Powell, who is in prison for stealing a car but who in fact has been traveling through the countryside romancing and marrying vulnerable widows, killing them, and taking their money, decides to find the widow of his executed cellmate and marry her. Soon after this, Powell finds and marries the widow, he realizes that she does not know where the money is and that the children do, so he kills her and begins pressuring John and his sister Pearl to give up the money. They refuse and flee, escaping down the river in a small boat. They are taken in by an elderly woman, played by Lillian Gish, who befriends orphans. She is a pious, virtuous woman who protects parentless children from the evil of modern times, and from people like Harry Powell, whom she wounds with her rifle when he tries to break into her house, and who at the end of the film has been captured and is headed for trial and execution.

Three characteristics make this film remarkable. One is the character of Harry Powell as portrayed by Robert Mitcham. He is an evil and psychopathic serial killer who believes that he is carrying out God's word. His hatred of women, his animalistic greed, and his willingness to kill the children in order to get what he wants make him one a truly chilling character. Mitcham never surpassed or equaled this performance during the remainder of his career. You can't put out of your mind his singing of "leaning on the everlasting arms"—it's not comforting. The second memorable element involves the visual qualities of the film. In cinematography the film ranges from ultra realism to stylized expressionism to fanciful lyricism. One thinks of this film in terms of the visual images that characterize it: the hands of Harry Powell tattooed with the words Love and Hate, the church-like bedroom where Harry kills his wife; the gruesome image of a dead woman sitting in an old jalopy on the bottom of the river, her throat cut; the lyrical images of the children fleeing downriver from their pursuer, and so on. Cinematographer Stanley Cortez deserves much of the credit for this aspect of the film. The third characteristic involves the film's narratives, which fuse the plights of children and widows in the Depression and a young boy's determination to carry out his promise to his father with an elemental battle between virtue and evil.

This is not a perfect film, and from the technical standards of 2007 it may seem dated in ways, especially in several scenes involving special effects. Parts of it are contrived or overstated. My students were particularly put off by a series of scenes in the film's central section where the fleeing children are juxtaposed with images of wild animals that are supposed to suggest that the children live in a world where the strong victimize the weak, where there are predators and their victims. The Night of the Hunter is clearly a "made" film that seeks to create its own world with its own set of standards, not one that seems to emulate the world we inhabit. I like to think of it as a nightmarish fairy tale, the kind that keeps you awake at night. Yet the imperfections, the utter distinctiveness of this film as compared to most American films of the 1950s, or of any other decade for that matter, make this film what it is.