Images Rising Archive...
Word and Image of Vermont
A Serious Man
November 6, 2009
I went to see a Serious Man, the latest film by Joel and Ethan Cohen, and then came home to read reviews which told me that it was either one of the most brilliantly imaginative movies ever made or that it was a disgusting depiction by self-hating Jews. I'm not sure about either of those conclusions, but I will say that it was very funny while, at the same time, being troubling and uncomfortable.
It's hard to know what was being most satirized -- Jewish society, suburban life, the 1960s, or America in general. Maybe they were all about equal in the queasiness they aroused.
The main character, Larry Gopnik, played exceedingly well by Michael Stuhlburg, is the ultimate nebbish, a math professor with a dysfunctional family and a sea of troubles. As the film moves along, things just get worse and worse for him, and he can never quite figure out why. Maybe God did it. Who knows? The Job theme seems to have been in play.
It's not easy to make a movie without a single sympathetic character but here the Cohen brothers have pulled it off. Gopnik comes the closest, but you can't say that even he makes it into the neutral zone. There are, though, varying degrees of creepiness. The person most likely to make your skin crawl is Sy Ableman, Judith Gopnik's platonic boyfriend, who will be platonic no longer once Judith is able to secure her religiously sanctioned divorce from Larry. Sy's the kind of guy who hugs people at cocktail parties.
Larry and Judith have two children. It's hard to recall offspring more obnoxious in any other film over the past twenty years. They are self-absorbed to a point well beyond insanity. It's a common thing in films for kids to start out being irritating but then to reveal that they're just hungry for love and understanding. That doesn't happen here.
We also have a trio of rabbis who rival the kids in self-satisfaction. Their counsel is sappiness unrestrained, seasoned with great dollops of nonsensical profundity. Why Larry seeks them out is not ever actually explained. He's not a religious person. The implication is that the rabbi is a kind of Hail Mary pass when you simply can't think of anything else to do.
What is one to make of this sea of human bathos? Is it a statement of the way things are? Is it designed to make you feel good about your own life no matter what horrors you're suffering? Does it disguise a glory that most of us can't discern?
I don't know. Evidently neither does anyone else. The Cohen brothers specialize in saying things that have no meaning but are interesting all the same.
I can't say why you should see this movie but, still, I recommend it to you.
Surrogates
October 20, 2009
Surrogates turned out to be a better movie than I expected it to be. I went just for the pleasure of sitting in the dim light of a movie theatre, and ended up having to exercise my brain -- at least a little.
The film employed a hoary science fiction conceit, that you can live your life in virtual reality and thereby be anyone you wish to be. Surely everyone has thought about the possibility at times. In this version, people can have machines called 'surrogates," which go out into the world and do what their "operators" wish them to do, and experience what their operators wish to experience. These surrogates look almost like people, invariably slim and attractive, between the ages of twenty-five and forty. But they are too airbrushed to be real human beings. One of the ironies, of course, is that real people play the surrogates in the film.
What it is we lose when we try to become something other than our flesh and blood selves is the motif of this movie. It doesn't answer, thoroughly, but the viewer gets a feeling for how it might be. The plot of the film fails to address directly the underlying idea. The story has to be fitted into the convention of good guys, bad guys, and the unintended consequences of fancy technology. These are all tired Hollywood constraints. Still, the question is there and it holds our interest.
Bruce Willis plays his character as surrogate for about a third of the film and as a grizzled, aging human being for the rest. One of the amusing questions is why in the world the actual man would have chosen the parody of himself the surrogate represents. The surrogate's hair is especially creepy. Nobody says anything about that.
Exactly how the human-surrogate relationship works is not explained completely. Presumably, the operator can feel what happens physically to the surrogate, that is until some real damage occurs, like getting an arm ripped off. At that point, a kind of anesthesia for the injury takes over. As you watch the movie, you wonder about things like that in the back of your mind, which doubtless gives pleasure to some people and irritates others. There has been some scuttlebutt that the movie can never be popular because it forces viewers to think too much.
If surrogates actually became possible would we use them as much as the inhabitants of this film do? In the film there are a few Luddites who refuse to have surrogates, but they are so rare and strange they live in separate compounds, where supposedly no surrogates are allowed. But guess what? They're there too.
I suspect most people would go for surrogates and thus opt out of humanity as we have known it. Perhaps the best part of this movie is that it forces you to ask yourself whether you would too.
Literary Clout in TV Land
October 16, 2009
I know that some might think this is a stretch, but I'm becoming ever more convinced that the crime, comedy melodrama Bones, is modeling itself on Jane Austen's Emma.
You'll recall that Emma is in many ways a bright young woman, and unfailingly charming, but who nonetheless can be perfectly unaware of what's going on around her. This is a near perfect description of the heroine of Bones, Temperance Brennan, the brilliant forensic anthropologist.
You'll also remember that Emma toys with the thought of linking with or admiring young men in her neighborhood, yet always turns away from them because she is, unknown to herself, always subconsciously comparing them to an old family friend, Mr. Knightley.
Temperance, having a more modern consciousness than Emma, actually does link up with some of her male acquaintances and speaks highly of their attributes. Yet, somehow, things never quite work out and the audience knows, though Temperance doesn't, that the relationships fade away because the liaisons are pale shadows compared to Temperance's relationship with her FBI partner, Agent Seeley Booth.
In the episode last night on Fox, the underlying but unacknowledged attraction between Bones and Booth almost burst through the psychological screen that's holding them apart. This, of course, is a common device in TV series. The two main characters are always on the verge, but they can't leap into one another's arms because, then, where would the plot be?
Emma, in a way, is the story of a marriage, in all but name, that precedes romance. And that's what Bones is too. When Temperance and Booth are driving together to some crime scene, they chatter away like the most securely married people in the world. But neither of them is aware that's what's happening.
I don't know if others besides myself have noticed the Jane Austen association. I haven't read about it anywhere. But if Emma is the model then Temperance and Booth have to get together. It's just a matter of how, and when.
Criminal Minds
October 15, 2009
Last night on the CBS series about the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit -- a euphemism for a team of profilers -- one of the major characters used a phrase I think I'm hearing more frequently on TV: "suicide by cop."
The premise behind the term is that some people, having decided they wish to depart this mode of existence, prefer to accomplish their purpose by employing -- so to speak -- lethal policemen. And the further premise is that practically everyone who chooses to use this process will be successful. In other words, the police are more than ready to be accommodating.
Often, the resulting drama is portrayed by tension between local police, who see themselves as society's revenge squad, and more scientific law enforcement officials, who try to maintain a dispassionate view of their work.
I don't know if that distinction actually exists in life, but it does seem to be the case that policemen will kill anybody who gives them a modest reason for doing it. Is this because they're nervous, or scared, or because there is a value system among police which confers prestige on anyone who kills in the line of duty? I can't say.
Yet, I wonder if the melodramatic depiction of conflict between lower-ranking, eager killers and highly trained, and moderately restrained officials has a place in reality. I hope it does or, at least, I hope there is somebody in the chain of command who takes a dubious view of suicide by cop. After all, why should society pay policemen to work for deranged criminals?
National sociology may have something to do with all this. A curious truth about American statistics is that we keep very careful account of law enforcement officers who are killed while they're doing their jobs, but there is no official counting of the number of people policemen kill while plying their trade. I'm not sure what that says about us, but whatever it is, it's fairly significant.
Montpelier policemen have killed no one in all the years I've lived here, and I take that as a reason to hope, plausibly, that we won't be visited by the Behavioral Analysis Unit anytime soon.
The Invention of Lying
October 8, 2009
I had decided not to write anything about The Invention of Lying until I read Anthony Lane's nasty review. But as soon as I did, I thought I ought to counter him (immediately after that I saw it was a naive idea because he has the New Yorker and I have nothing.) Yet once launched I determined to proceed.
Ricky Gervais's film is based on a premise. There is a society, somewhat like ours, but one in which no one has conceived the idea of falsehood or of imaginative construction. It is also one in which people habitually say exactly what's on their minds, regardless of how rude or wounding it might be.
Lane says this conceit is ripe with possibility. The trouble is, he doesn't like part of it. It's okay to project a society in which no one lies, but it is not okay to presume that people would regularly speak their minds. Why the latter is not okay Lane doesn't say; it's just offensive to him and therefore it has to be an element of a bad movie. In effect he's arguing that Gervais doesn't have the right to create a setting for the comedy he wishes to develop. That doesn't strike me as the prerogative of a critic.
When the main character, Mark Bellison, a nebbish played by Gervais, has a brainstorm and conceives the idea of saying something is, which isn't, he immediately gains immense powers. People believe him, no matter what he says, because they can't imagine anyone's making stuff up. But with power comes problems which Mark fumbles in trying to solve.
His mother is dying in a hospital, miserable because she is terrified of the idea of complete non being, of oblivion. So Mark tells her that there's a big guy in the sky who, after she dies, will provide her with a mansion and the company of all the people she has loved who have died before her. She has to believe him, of course, and so she dies happy.
The trouble is, other people heard the tale, and word of it spreads like wildfire. The entire population want Mark to tell them more about the big guy in the sky. He tries as best he can but, as you can imagine, it's difficult.
This feature of the plot offends Lane even more than people speaking their minds. He says it comes from "the default mode of British cultural life" (ugh!). It's an execration of Christianity. I'm not sure that's true, but so what if it is? Can't movie makers devise plots that poke fun at certain beliefs?
Actually, there's one scene in which people gather in front of Mark's house to demand details about the big guy in the sky, which I thought was quite funny, but which also is an interesting exploration of the problems of theodicy. Are we banned from asking questions about theodicy? Lane doesn't say anything about that but the temper of his review implies that we are.
The film is, among other things, a romantic comedy, in which Mark tries to get a girl, played by Jennifer Garner, who's as flat as a pancake because -- guess what? -- she's a product of a flat society. Still, she's pretty, and Mark adores her, which also seems to be forbidden.
Near the end of his review Lane takes another swipe at British culture, saying it is marked by a predilection to care about "no-hopers and their even sadder next of kin, the hopers." He appears to be obsessed by British culture's daring to affront American culture by being different from American culture. It's a grievous sin, I suppose, particularly to a patriot.
I thought The Invention of Lying was an amusing film with some very funny moments, and some ideas worth contemplation. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the prim outrage Lane directs towards it -- and I've seen similar sentiments in other reviews -- is both starchy and childish. It's as though Lane has been formed by a society similar to the one depicted by Gervais, and maybe that's why the reviewer is indignant.
Capitalism
October 7, 2009
Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story is heartfelt and makes many good points. It is not balanced, but then, we need to ask, why should we be balanced when we address what the money market plutocrats have done to the country over the past decade? They have been all out and unrestrained in their greed. Why should we not be all out in our disgust?
Moore says capitalism is evil, but lately I have heard him temper the judgment by remarking that he's speaking of capitalism as it has manifested itself recently. What he really should say is that setting moneymaking above all other activities, and giving it privileges no other activity enjoys, is inhuman.
In one of the episodes of the film he demonstrates that some companies have taken out large life insurance policies on their employees, and have made millions when an employee died while leaving the employee's family penniless and in debt. That is, indeed, inhuman.
The film shows how, when the markets began to crash last fall, the moneymakers rushed to save themselves under the cover of saving the economy. Moore fails to note that a case can be made for saving the economy, even though the way it was done gave undue rewards to big bankers. Henry Paulson comes off as the scummy guy he is, but Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers are painted in the same light. I'm willing to acknowledge that there's something scummy about them also, but I don't think they fall quite to the depths of Paulson. Moore is not interested in that sort of distinction and, perhaps, he should be.
Moore remains in mourning for the middle class decency he knew growing up in Flint, Michigan, where workers had sound union contracts and were able to support their families comfortably if not sumptuously. The loss of that condition is a thing to be regretted. Anyone who prefers vast wealth for a few over widespread prosperity is an immoral fool. Yet, the decline of the middle class in America is a complex phenomenon that arises from causes that Moore doesn't address. Maybe it does all come back, ultimately, to the worship of money and the desire to rake it up into piles larger than anyone should possess. Yet Moore doesn't really want to deal with the complexity of that process. His movie is an appeal to the heart and not to the head. Perhaps he's right in the emphasis. Maybe one has to feel the nastiness of plutocracy before he puts his mind to doing something about it.
Moore's simplicity, however, opens him to snide criticism which circulates more widely than is good for any of us. I have read reviews that say he hasn't made a good movie because it doesn't analyze the current situation carefully enough to offer solutions. That's actually not true. The solution, says Moore, is a democracy intelligent enough to stop being duped by the schemes of Wall Street. He's right, of course, but he doesn't tell us how such a democracy can be brought into being. Probably no movie could do that.
Another criticism I've seen is that the movie is not entertaining. This comes from people whose only concept of entertainment is mindlessness. There's plenty of entertainment in the film for viewers who are interested in achieving a more just society. But again, that raises a question Moore doesn't answer: how do we get more people like that?
Capitalism: A Love Story is worth seeing and worth thinking about. If it's not perfect it does, at least, suggest that we think about the supposed perfection of people who "understand" money.
Inglourious Basterds
August 25, 2009
Many reviews of Inglourious Basterds have concentrated on what the film is not. It's not about World War II, they say, or it's not about war in general, or it's not about the Holocaust, or it's not about human nature, or it's not about morality. The priggishness of these remarks is pretty well captured by David Denby's summary judgment in The New Yorker: "The film is skillfully made, but it's too silly to be enjoyed, even as a joke."
Why are these reviewers so amazingly wrong? It's because their minds are captured by notions of what can, and what cannot, go together. Anybody who violates their canons of juxtaposition has to be put down. I suspect that Quentin Tarentino cares not a whit for their opinions. And neither should you.
I won't go so far as to say that Inglourious Basterds is a work of genius -- though it may be. But it is certainly entertaining for anyone willing to be entertained. And, it's astoundingly funny. But, there's the problem. It's funny about subjects that aren't supposed to be amusing. Because, you see, it is about World War II; it is about the Holocaust; it is about war in general; it is about human nature and morality. And not only is it about these subjects, it offers fascinating insights into them.
Yes, people get scalped, and a man gets his head bashed in with a baseball bat; and an innocent family gets shot to pieces, and a woman gets a finger stuck in a bullet hole in her leg, and men get symbols carved into their foreheads, and a theatre full of, mostly, Germans gets burned up and then blown to bits. And all this is hilarious. It's not supposed to hilarious, is it? It makes the viewer uncomfortable. Poor viewer! To be made uncomfortable!
I have never seen a movie that offers a more uncompromising view of the nature of war than this film does. It tells us honestly what war is and tells us, also, why people love it so much. But it never descends to telling us there's nobility in it. The hero -- if you can speak of such a concept in a film like this -- is one of the most vicious, unmerciful, murderous characters ever depicted. And, you find yourself laughing with him and cheering him on. Does that make you uncomfortable about yourself, or about your fellow humans? That's too bad isn't it? One of the few honorable characters in the film is a German officer who believes completely in the aims of the Third Reich. How can we see him as honorable? That makes us a little uncomfortable too, doesn't it?
The mainstream critics give Tarentino credit for skill and for the quality of the acting he elicited. They can, at least, perceive those qualities. But they can't see why they are driven to be negative. Any film that can confuse them that wonderfully would be worthwhile even if it wasn't skillfully made and even if it didn't have such fine acting. But since the acting is fine, and the filming is gripping, and the critics are shown up, probably in just the way intended, then we have to say the movie actually is glourious.
If it were only glorious, there wouldn't be much to say about it.
Watchmen
March 9, 2009
Having Read A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times and Anthony Lane's in The New Yorker, I went to see Watchmen with considerable uncertainty, thinking I might be getting myself into almost three hours of boredom. The only thing that pushed me on into the theatre was remembering the reviews of 300, which was also directed by Zack Snyder. As you'll recall, almost all the reviews of it were scathing.
It's a curious thing how normally competent film critics can be so wrong about certain movies. The only explanation I can think of is that their professional activity drives them into a self-image as cooler than cool. Anytime a person starts thinking of himself as sophisticated, he's in deep trouble.
In any case, my experience in comparing reviews to actuality was just about the same for Watchmen as it was for 300.
I should explain that I am not a big fan of comic books, or graphic novels as they are now called. It was a serious ignorance, but I didn't even know about Watchmen until advertisements of the movie began to appear. I read that author Alan Moore had constructed a dark vision of the present, with little positive hope for the future. So I went to see the movie knowing no more about it than that abstraction and what I had learned from Scott and Lane.
It turned out to be a delight. I have to add that it's a delight as a comic book movie. Some people, evidently, can't project their imaginations into a comic book world -- or see no reason to do so. They are caught up in comparing comic books to something like Anna Karenina, and their sense that art should always be like the latter destroys any appreciation for the zany universe that comic books create. Leo Tolstoy was not the sort to find his way around in that realm.
What comic books provide, for those who are open to them, is the exhilaration of release. One comes out of Snyder's movie feeling strangely uplifted despite the dark plot and scenes of hideous violence (you need to remember, it's comic book violence). One has been treated to a world where there are no moral limits and no constraints of the sort that morality imposes. You wouldn't want to live there but it's liberating to poke your nose into it from time to time. It even offers a perspective on reality that has some potential for usefulness.
The film is set in 1985, though not the 1985 that we lived through. A set of former masked super heroes has now moved on into other aspects of life, with one exception. Jon Osterman, a former physicist, has been transformed by superdooper electronics into Dr. Manhattan, a blue naked guy with extraordinary powers. He works with the U.S. government to keep the Soviet Union in line.
Most of the heroes seem fairly content to have left their former line of work, but the murder of one of them, Edward Blake, the Comedian -- surely the most compromised super hero ever created -- drags them back into their old modes. There's no reason to detail the plot here. It works fairly well to bring out the underlying character of all the heroes and to show exactly what they can do when they get riled up.
My favorite among them is Rorschach, who wears a mask with constantly shifting patterns, and who decided early in life that he would not compromise. A guy who won't compromise is hard to live with and in actual life would be a horror, but in comic book world there's a deep integrity in him that raises a desire to cheer him on no matter what he does. And he does some pretty bad stuff.
The musical score, one of the features mocked by the critical sophisticates, is truly wonderful. It creates an atmosphere in which the movie rolls on in almost a timeless fashion. Watchmen is the only very long movie I have seen in which I wasn't aware of its being long. For me, there was not a single moment of wondering when it was going to get over.
I don't know whether to recommend Watchmen to you or not. It all depends on you and on the ways in which you're willing to let yourself go. But if you're able to get into the spirit of it, the movie will offer cheerful, even emboldening, escape, which, after all, is what comic books are supposed to be about.
Frost/Nixon
March 1, 2009
I finally got around to seeing Frost/Nixon and it was a better movie than I expected -- much better in fact. There was not a moment in it that didn't hold my attention.
One reason for my low expectations was the advertising clips I had seen on TV. They left me thinking that Frank Langella had badly overplayed the Nixon part and, based on them, I was surprised he had received an Academy Award nomination. But when I saw the whole thing, I realized he had created a fairly realistic portrait. Also, though I was not a Nixon lover when the former president was still around, I wasn't in the mood to see a monster. Langella surprised me there, also. His Nixon was a rather likable, witty man, who was tormented by his self-created demons.
The film turns on the drama of the interviews in 1977, and the difficulties David Frost had in getting anyone to promote or distribute them. The tension came from what was pretty close to history. Until the final day of the interviewing, Nixon toyed with Frost and gave him nothing that would produce interesting TV. Then, at the last session, Frost broke through, not as much because of his own talents as because of Nixon's growing need to reveal something of himself and his regret over what he had done.
Because of the focus, if a viewer didn't know much about Nixon's political career, he or she wouldn't have come out of the film knowing a lot about the presidency from Nixon's election in 1968 until his resignation on August 9, 1974. It was actually a tumultuous time and Nixon's performance was certainly not all bad. In the film Nixon's chief of staff during his retirement, played in a subdued but fierce manner by Kevin Bacon, said that 60% of what his boss had done while in office was good and 30% may have been not so good but was well-intentioned, leading Frost to retort that 10% was left over. A sober reading of history wouldn't be far off from those percentages.
The sad thing was that the 10% was completely unnecessary. The skullduggery that Nixon's people engaged in during the campaign against McGovern, leading to the coverup, which then led to the threat of impeachment and resignation, was useless. McGovern was no threat to Nixon's reelection. After all, the president carried 49 of the 50 states. But Nixon's drive to be always on attack against his enemies, even if they were weak, undermined his undoubted political skills. Nixon's problems were never intellectual; they were always psychological. The film was strong in showing that aspect of the ex-president's character.
One feature of the film I hadn't expected was its wit. There were actually some very funny lines, among both camps, as each was preparing itself for the interviews.
One wonders about the effect of a movie like this on people who don't really remember Nixon. It has been more than thirty-four years since he left office and almost fifteen since he died. He is very sharp and very real in my memory so I can fit that mental image together with the Hollywood version. I'm not sure what people who don't remember him would make of him from the movie. But, I don't suppose historical accuracy is the main point. Motion pictures are made to entertain, and in that respect we have to say that Frost/Nixon was a considerable success.
Lost
February 19, 2009
So now Jack, Kate, Hurley, Said, Sun, and Ben are back on the island. Or so we presume. We saw only three of them last night.
Exactly how they got there we don't know, and they don't know. They took an airplane to Guam which was going to fly near to where the island is now (it turns out the island is always moving around). Then, at a point in the flight, there was turbulence, flashing and blinding lights, and Jack found himself waking up in a forest of bamboo.
For me, this series is interesting not so much for finding out how the plot is going to evolve. The writers will come up with a conclusion they think will be passingly satisfying. It will fail to tie up a number of loose ends, which will irritate some viewers. There will be a flurry of talk. And, then, Lost will pass away into television history, unless, of course, there's a movie t be salvaged out of it. This is all fairly predictable.
The worth of the program -- if there is any worth outside passing time in a moderately pleasant way -- lies in the speculations it induces.
One, for me, is whether if I could be whisked away to another world with a set of companions I found reasonably bearable, a world in which the complexities and hardships of this world would be flushed away, would I do it?
I'm not sure, but I might. The world we live in right now has too many hungry mouths and too many raging egos. We don't know what to do about them. Everything we can imagine involves immense cruelty. Our problems are beyond managing. After a while, one gets tired of living in an unmanageable situation. That's why the world is becoming very wearisome for many of its inhabitants.
Even the difficulties on an island, with a population small enough that we could know every person there, might be better than what we have now. It could also be stultifying. But, if it were, it would be no more stultifying than the early times of humanity, because that's pretty much how they lived then.
The appeal of Lost is the appeal of going back, starting over again. That's what the character John Locke is supposed to show us. I presume he has the name he does because the philosopher Locke is associated with a blank slate, where we can write what we will.
I wonder if any of this is going to be made explicit as we proceed towards the conclusion. I don't think it matters. We have the power to make it explicit in our own minds.
The Reader
February 14, 2009
Reviews of director Stephen Daldry's The Reader have varied even more than they do for the average film, some critics regarding it as a great work of art and others seeing it as paltry or immoral. I haven't read any, however, that strike me as getting it right and I suspect that's because people are mostly uncomfortable with the starkness of truth.
Anyone who writes a story or makes a movie touching on the Nazi death camps runs a major risk of being severely misunderstood. Those institutions, though they have now been gone for more than sixty years, still strike such raw nerves that anything mentioning them is thought, automatically, to be mainly about them.
The Reader, however, is not primarily about Nazism or its genocidal thrust. It is about two lives and the difference their intersection made. The film is clearly sad. Yet the difference created by the coming together of the two principals is a symbol of how humanity can make something healthy out of the most dubious circumstances. One might say that, in the end, the circumstances prevail. But one might, also, be wrong.
The film takes place over thirty-eight years, from 1958 until 1995. Kate Winslet plays Hanna Schmitz over thirty of those years (her character dies in 1988), whereas the boy/man Michael Berg is divided between David Kross and Ralph Fiennes. The common assessment has been that Kross offers a much finer performance than Fiennes, but I don't think that's fair. It's just that the script gives the boy a much greater range of emotions than it does the man.
Before I saw the film, I had been led to believe that Ms. Winslet's acting was too wooden (even though she received an Academy Award nomination for it). Now, I think that judgment is goofy. When she was wooden, she was supposed to be wooden. She performed the role excellently and the nomination was deserved. If she wins, I think that will be deserved also.
The way the director chose to present the story in slices of time which weren't presented in temporal sequence has been criticized as too confusing. All I can say about that is that if viewers were confused it was because they weren't paying attention. The development of the plot was fairly clear throughout and perfectly clear by the end.
The film's central issue -- if you can call it that -- is the effect of a teen age boy's chance encounter with a woman twenty years older than himself. Was it ruinous? Did it propel him into depths of alienation? The answer to both questions is, "No." Already at age fifteen he was an empty vessel. The film doesn't explain, fully, why that was the case, though there are hints in scenes of him at home with his family. There is nothing to suggest that had he not met Hanna Schmitz he would have had a full, rich life. Rather, she brought to him the only vital moments he experienced and it is those very occasions that offer to him, at the end the film, some hope for a meaningful future.
The enormity of what Hanna did when she was a guard at Auschwitz during the war is revealed at a trial in 1968, which Michael attends without her knowing that he was there. She stands out from the five other defendants because of her honesty. They are trying to wriggle out of what they did. Hanna simply wants to explain what it was to have been in her position. The courtroom scenes have been viewed as some sort of exculpation of the lower level officials of the Nazi regime. They are nothing of the sort. They are simply a description of a twenty-two year old woman's mind in circumstances that no one should ever encounter. One might say that no person has ever been as Hanna was shown to be, but to do that would be to deny the entire premise of fiction. Hanna exists only within the story. She is not a figure of history. You can judge her as you wish and what you come up with says more about you than it does about her. But, then, that's the case with judgment always.
The place of literature within the film has not drawn the discussion it deserves. Literature does, after all, supply the title and it is the main force within the story. Hannah, though illiterate, loves literature. It is her means of living. Real life, as we tend to call it, has given her very little. Literature has given her all she has. Is this overly romantic? Perhaps. But it's a major ingredient of the story.
I have read that some find the film invalidated by its stance on the occurrence of sex between a teenage boy and a woman in her mid-thirties. If there are such persons, I can say of them only that they wish to slice away such vast realms of human experience as to make it a parody of itself.
I found The Reader to be engaging. It certainly held my attention. The acting was more than competent. There was nothing in it I could see to be overtly stupid. If we had more films of its quality I think they would leave us thinking more intelligently than we do. That's quite a bit to be said for a movie.
Taken
February 9, 2009
This is the only movie I remember where virtually every review has been right. Without Liam Neeson it would be simply a mediocre thriller. But somehow he lifts it to a higher level.
Exactly how he does it I'm not sure. Perhaps there's an inherent fascination in watching a gentle, loving man transformed into an astonishing killing machine. Not every actor can play both sides of that connection.
The ostensible explanation is that his character is an ex-CIA agent who has learned and done everything in the lexicon of desperate violence. That doesn't really make any sense, but in the context the film establishes, sensible realism simply doesn't matter.
The theme is that a father will do anything, to anybody, to rescue his daughter. And when the father happens to be a person who knows how to do anything, then the story takes on an added dimension.
The plot is more or less ridiculous. A seventeen year old girl, living with her mother and a very rich stepfather, talks her skeptical, partially estranged father into letting her travel to Paris with a slightly older friend. Supposedly, she's going to soak up the art galleries, but it turns out that she and her friend are going to follow U-2 all over Europe and attend every concert on their current tour. They don't, however, get to experience a single one because on their very first day in Paris, they are kidnapped by thugs who plan to sell them into sexual slavery. Fortunately, the daughter happens to be talking on the phone with her father when the gangsters arrive, and in the few minutes she has before she is found and snatched, he hears enough to get started on his quest.
I tried to keep count of how many people he killed. But it was impossible. The number was certainly in the dozens. There was a bit too much of reckless car-driving. I'm getting a little sick of that in movies, but, evidently, it appeals to some sort of destructive adolescent urge. Yet, most of the killing was fairly satisfying because the people he was doing in were not only bad guys; they were disgusting too.
There are lots of loose ends left dangling in the film. That's to show that the hero is concentrated on only one thing; getting his daughter back safely. The messy situations he finds himself in simply disappear once he walks away from them. We don't know what happens to the people he leaves behind -- that is the ones who aren't dead -- and I don't guess we're supposed to care.
The film plays satisfyingly to a current American myth. If a person's heart is in the right place, he can do anything, no matter how horrible it is, and once the need is past, return to placid life without his deeds having placed a single mark on his soul. In fact, I guess you could say that's the definition of an American hero -- a man with a Teflon psyche. I don't know why we're so taken with this fantastic notion, but it seems to be the case that we are.
It may be all right in melodrama, but in actual existence, you wouldn't want to have much to do with a character like the protagonist of Taken, not even at a quiet, summer afternoon picnic.
24
January 27, 2009
I suppose we can say the seventh season of 24 has got off to a good start. There has already been plenty of action. We are now six hours into the twenty-four and have reached two o'clock in the afternoon. Jack has joined with the FBI, broken with the FBI, helped terrorists kidnap a visiting African prime minister, almost killed an FBI agent who he then took measures to save, shot one of the terrorists with whom he was presumably allied, and is on the verge of a big shootout with people who have stolen a device that can disrupt all the electronic systems of the United States and can thus cause the deaths of tens of thousands. They have already killed more than two hundred innocent people, just as a little demonstration.
You wouldn't think you could get all that done in just six hours. But, remember, this is 24.
We still don't know who, within the government, is in cahoots with a murderous African dictator and is trying to undermine the policies of the president but we know somebody is because he has already tried to bump off the president's husband, and came pretty close to succeeding.
What a muddle!
In public discussions, there has been much debate about Jack as a symbol in the argument between those who want to use torture and those who don't. Torture, or at least very intense interrogation, has certainly been an aspect of the series. Yet, in my mind, other features of the show raise more vital questions than the torture issue does.
Why are they not being talked about?
As the series has progressed over the years, the government of the United States itself has become a more problematic entity. We have had numerous high-ranking conspirators and even one clearly criminal president. If life follows art, even melodramatic art, shouldn't we be asking ourselves if the government is a pit of civil strife and criminal behavior, where uprisings and coups are always on the verge of shifting American policy? Is the government itself a Mafia-type organization?
If it is, to whom or what should the citizen be loyal?
Jack continues to perceive a core of legitimacy in the government, which he tries to serve, even when officials think he has gone over to the dark side. But the series itself is raising the question, and not very subtly, whether there is such a core.
Maybe the genuine significance of the show is its introduction of the nature of civic loyalty. What is it, after all?
We should ask Jack about that.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
January 25, 2009
This Academy Award nominee, about a man born with physical characteristics of an eighty-six year old person who then ages backwards, is designed to pull on the strings of your heart. It carries out its purpose successfully, although the power of the pull is greater in the immediacy of the movie theatre than it is a few hours later in memory.
Making it was evidently a gigantic technical challenge. Getting an elderly man's head on a infant's body was just the beginning of the difficulties. Depicting the character at age seven, when he was seventy-nine -- so to speak -- and then onward to his death at about six months must have kept the filmmakers at the edge of distraction. They do it all well though. There are no scenes when Benjamin seems a made-up thing. I'm not sure they handle the chronology perfectly. Benjamin at twenty-six looks younger than a sixty year old man, but by that point in the film the process is established so firmly in the viewer's mind that the issue of perfect correlation has slipped away.
This is a love story. I'm not sure how old Benjamin is when he meets five-year-old Daisy, but from that point forward until she, as an elderly woman, holds the dying infant in her lap, their lives intersect at intervals, including one blissful five year span when they are together at about the same age.
The philosophy of the film -- if you can assign such a portentous term to a movie -- is that each moment of life has its integrity and its value. We tend to think of life as a whole, strung together in the normal way. We also tend to think that unless the whole thing turns out well, the parts are diminished and in some cases completely spoiled. Benjamin Button argues against that view of things. Each interval is what it is, and life is the bundle of all of them, each little part carrying its own meaning.
Since a large part of the film is set in a home for old people, there's lots of speculation about the meaning of time, and death. Different people have different perspectives, and each one appears to work reasonably well for the person who holds it.
I had not known that the story is told through the reading of a diary -- or a kind of autobiography -- by Benjamin's and Daisy's daughter while she sits in a New Orleans hospital room beside her dying mother. The daughter had not known she was Benjamin's daughter until that moment. Her emotions obviously are complex, but I thought more could have been done with them than was.
The two principal actors, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, carry their roles ably. Pitt insisted on playing his character all the way through, from the years immediately after birth until young manhood. He does it best as an elderly man moving towards middle age. By the time he reaches his early fifties, he is merely Brad Pitt, which is not all that bad, but not quite as much of Benjamin as you might wish.
An unexpected pleasure for me was the depiction of New Orleans, where Benjamin is born and raised, and to where he returns when he becomes a confused child. The flavor of the city before Katrina spreads an elegiac tone throughout the story, and Daisy's death just as the hurricane comes smashing through punctuates the message that all things pass.
It's certainly an enjoyable film. Whether it has the power to hold the memory and become a classic can't yet be told. I don't even want to speculate about it.
Lost
January 22, 2009
In the preview to the fifth season of Lost, the producers told us that this year questions will be answered rather than raised. But after watching the two hour premier, you couldn't prove it by me. The trouble is that once you get into time shifts, you really are lost so far as explanation is concerned. I'm sure the writers will cob something together but I doubt it will come across as seamless.
Lost has been a frustrating series, but fascinating also. The theory is that all people, characters as well as viewers, are searching for redemption and a fresh start. Being marooned on an island has, throughout literary history, offered those opportunities. When the island is not just an ordinary geographical feature but a land where the laws of physics don't work like they do everywhere else, the options are expanded.
There is a line, though, when fantasy becomes merely goofy, and the producers of this show have marched right up to it. Whether or not they'll step across the next two years will have to tell us.
One of the features that holds us, I think, is the concept of dealing with a manageable number of people -- about forty or so. In the backs of our minds, I suspect we're intimidated by the thought that we live on a planet with billions and billions of human beings. We can't grasp how to deal with them, and even with the best will imaginable, they clearly do present a threat to each of us. We wish most of them would go away, yet that thought spawns the question of why we have the right to stay.
If we were on an island with only forty people -- or even a hundred -- we could develop a sense of knowing something, even if the island itself were mysterious beyond knowing. It would be like when humanity began.
There have been a couple of times over the past four years when I've told myself I would stop watching Lost. I thought it had become too silly to be borne. Yet, I never did, which must mean the people who are making the series know a little something about human nature. Now, I'm committed to going all the way through with it. When it's over, I might not be glad I did. But, I'll do it nonetheless. That's really all the producers want.
Grand Torino
January 18, 2009
It's ironic that just as we're caught up in the inaugural excitement, with promises of a new beginning, the leading film in the movie houses should be about a relic of past times. Who would have thought that an aging man, full of prejudices, without an ounce of political sensitivity, could become the major film hero of the season?
It's worthwhile asking why that is. My best answer is that though we are sick of much of our past behavior, there are some things about it we would like to hold on to.
Clint Eastwood's character, Walter Kowalski, has only a few of the features we say we admire nowadays. But those he does have -- courage, toughness, a deep sense of fairness -- are things we know we can't do without. That's why the ending of the film is more likely to bring tears to viewers' eyes than anything else we've seen lately.
When I walked into the men's restroom after seeing Grand Torino, I noticed that no one referred to it by name. The common conversation went like this:
"Did you see Clint?"
"Yeah."
"How was it?"
"It was good."
Not subtle, but right. It was good.
Watching Grand Torino can't help but remind those of us who are old enough to remember what an extraordinary career Eastwood has had. It's easy to recall when virtually all artsy film viewers scorned him. I've been in rooms where the mere mention of his name brought forth howls of derision. He has simply outlived their superiority because there was never anything superior about it.
One of the surprises of the movie, for me, was its comedy. There are some extremely funny scenes, and if they push the bounds of realism, I think that's all right because the story needed something to balance its general bleakness. I suppose it wins us over because we know that behind Walter Kowalski is Clint Eastwood, still handsome, still arresting, grizzled as he is. It would be rare to find a real Kowalski in a rundown Detroit who's much like the character, but at least the movie teaches us that we hope he's there.
One of the major puzzles of modern life has been how a boy can become a man, without either emasculating himself or transforming himself into a ridiculous mannequin of macho. This story tries to answer that question, in the setting of modern urban squalor, and is at least passably persuasive.
The young actor Bee Vang does good work and helps the story along, but, let's face it, Grand Torino is Clint Eastwood's film. He gives it the only face we'll remember, and I would guess that it will stick with us for quite a while.
The Mentalist
January 7, 2009
A common device of detective series on TV is to have an overarching crime that is always lurking in the background while the heroes solve the individual cases week by week. It's not a technique I particularly like, and I'm not sure it adds much to the new CBS offering, The Mentalist, which has just aired the eleventh episode of its first season.
The tale here is that Patrick Jane (played by Simon Baker), a former "psychic" entertainer, had his family murdered by a figure known mysteriously as "Red John." Jane has now given up his show business career, admitted that his psychic powers were nothing of the sort but based simply on sharp observation, and joined the California Bureau of Investigation as an advisor to an investigative team. Though he is a very effective assistant in solving the crimes the team takes up, his primary goal remains to discover the identity of Red John and to bring him to justice.
On the surface, Jane is a breezy, cheery vivant, always furnished with a dazzling smile. But, underneath the persona, he remains a tortured soul because of what happened to him.
The creators of the show clearly wanted to do something to add depth to their character. After all, steadily brilliant happiness could turn stale after a while. But the stock device of a murdered family is a bit too much of a bromide to fit well with Jane's personality. If the writers had thought harder, they should have been able to devise something more distinctive to drive him, something surprisingly concealed in his psyche.
The difficulty with a figure like Red John is that he has to be preternaturally brilliant to outwit continually a team of intelligent investigators. And that, in turn, sets the viewers up for a letdown. When he finally is found, as he must be, he won't be as fascinating as people have led to believe. Furthermore, after Red John is out of the way, what's going to give Jane his depth?
Even so, Simon Baker is giving the role a better than average TV sheen, and he is ably boosted by his supporting cast, especially by the head of the team, Teresa Lisbon, a taskmaster played by Robin Tunney.
Given what else is available on TV this season, The Mentalist is worth an hour now and then.
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