When Comedy Went to School

Despite its considerable nostalgic charm, When Comedy Went to School (Melvin Akkaya, Ron Frank) seems a wasted opportunity. 

It makes two points well. One is what the Catskills resorts meant to the new Jewish immigrant community as an escape from their European suffering and the strictures of tenement life. The other is that the generation of comics that shaped our comic world got their basic training and devotion to comedy at those resorts. The repetition of that latter shows the film’s wasted opportunity. It often seems to be running on the spot (which might work for a tummler but not for a documentary).

The film drops a nod at why Jews were attracted to and adept at standup comedy and how the genre later drew African Americans in the same way. But these questions have been so much more fully explored elsewhere (in critical writing and in the documentary The Jews Who Invented Hollywood) that this film’s material seems perfunctory. Mixing the sentimental Catskills reminiscence with the nature of Jewish comedy makes the film neither gefilte fish nor overboiled fowl.

There are rewards: briefly catching Woody Allen’s standup act, seeing and hearing the aged king Sid Caesar, catching snatches of the routines by Youngman, King, Hackett, Cohen, Sahl, Dick Gregory, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers. By far the best -- in  wit and in insight -- is Jackie Mason. An hour of Mason on these topics would have made a richer film.

There are a few embarrassments. Why drag in the ubiquitous Larry King? Why run Bob Hope as an instance of “topical humour”? Why let emcee Robert Klein get away with calling the Seinfeld show “parodies”? SCTV, Mel Brooks, Mad Magazine, they did "parodies." All in all, this film collected good material but failed to find a fertile focus. It shows more memory than mind.

Frances Ha

Noah Baumbach’s new heroine, Frances Halliday (Greta Gerwig) is a spirit too big for the spaces she finds herself in. So her mailbox slot reduced her to Frances Ha. The film’s structure is episodic, titled with each new geographical site she busts into then out of. She wants a home but flits from one free or subsidized friend’s place to the next.

She wants to be a dancer but can’t quite get beyond apprentice. She has a flair for choreography but she has boxed herself into that dancing ambition. She’s apparently heterosexual but is fixated on recovering her BGF relationship  with Sophie (Mickey Sumner), who leaves their co-rental for a new roomie who has found an apartment on Sophie’s favourite street and who then moves to Japan with her new fiance. The film’s last scene gives Frances and Sophie that sweeping intense feeling of tacit understanding that Frances blurted out at a dinner party was what she craved as love.So, all plot twists and character moans notwithstanding, the film has a happy ending.  

So this is a love story.  Between women. Who may joke about lesbians but aren’t. It’s a girls’ bromance. And because it’s so chaste and wingy it’s shot in the glimmering and stark black and white of those first ‘50s NYC street friskies, like Pull My Daisy and Shadows.

In their inspired collaboration Gerwig and Baumbach make Frances Ha a disturbingly enigmatic figure. Like her name she has reduced herself. Why can’t such a spirited, privileged beauty get a life? She has no tensions with her parents, whose coddling of their dog suggest how they treated her when she was that size. She comes from a secure, confident middle class -- our parents’, that is, not the endangered species of USA today. 

Why are all the other characters around her similarly unsettled, despite their -- in some significant cases considerable-- wealth? Lev (Adam Driver) has a large flat with a vynyl collection he could base a Village store around, but he’s content to run a revolving door to his bedroom. Lev predicts roommate Dan (Michael Esper) and Frances will  marry but both laugh that off. Sure, Dan’s shorter than Frances, but in PWA cinema (that’s Post Woody Allen) that counts for bupkes. Frances and Dan are close friends who insulate themselves against love by their recurrent tagline “Undatable.” That humorous self-deprecation wards off any advance of their affection. 

With the characters’ drifts, privilege, literacy, wisdom, spontaneous chatter, and their self-restrictive if not -destructive reflexes, this film chronicles another Lost Generation. It’s a generation lost to irony. The incantation of  “undatable” puts the couple’s emotions into quotation marks. At first sign of feeling they step outside them for a knowing look and the label. Penniless but with a new credit card Frances splurges on a weekend in Paris just to use a new friend’s flat. Ironically, she makes no connections there either but en route room gets an invitation to a party there where she would have met a new Jean Pierre Leaud type. This whole silly extravagance is another form of Frances’s irony, as she makes huge moves solely on impulse. Burying yourself with your plastic is spending money ironically, spending it but not quite spending it because it’s not there.  

For fill-in work she returns to her old college to waitress a fundraiser. That seems an attempt to restart herself, to recover a sense of belonging she hasn’t felt since. That’s where her recovery of Sophie begins. That grows out of another disenchantment. Frances watches her charge, an honoured guest congresswoman whom she reveres, pathetically seduce a much younger artist alumnus. Fresh starts, old ruts, 

The film is obviously the Big Mother Screen version of tv’s Girls, especially with the casting of Adam Driver as an upscale version of his Girls stud. So it’s very much a diagnosis of our time. How are we going to find meaningful lives, fulfilling careers, and substantial love after we have studied postmodernism? It was easier to keep ‘em back on the farm. 

Frances ends with a Ha about everything. The Ha can be resignation, despair, detachment, fear, as well as humour, acceptance, and dare I say hope? Irony, as we know from Kierkegaard’s thesis, is not just a literary form but a way of living. 

       

Blue Jasmine

The eponymous heroine of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine is both a study in even the postfeminist woman’s vulnerability and an anatomy of American amorality. 

Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) and Ginger (Sally Hawkins) are sisters, but even more distant than Blanche and Stella in the Tennessee Williams classic, A Streetcar Named Desire, that Allen often echoes here. Both were adopted, i.e., both are deracinated, with no genetic link, no knowledge of their roots and no proper bearing. Both lack the confidence to live free from male protection and support. Jasmine especially lacks any moral grounding. Indeed “Jasmine” is an adopted name, because her real “Jeanette” lacked flair. From her name on, nothing about her is genuine. Certainly not her putative concern for her long disdained sister. As Jasmine is an ornamental flower, Ginger is a useful root.

Ginger ran away from home feeling their mother preferred Jasmine. She was content with her marriage to the rough-hewn handyman Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) until they won a $200,000 lottery. Augie was saving to set up his own construction firm but Ginger, sensing a chance to match Jasmine’s success, persuades him to invest all his money with Jasmine’s husband Hal (Alec Baldwin). For “doing [her] duty” Hal gives his bathing wife an expensive bracelet. That stills her hope that Hal will make her sister some money. Stealing her sister’s money thwarts Ginger’s one chance to escape a life of failure and poverty -- and Jasmine’s chance to save her own soul. 

Despite their gap in social status and achievement, Ginger is the moral superior. She lives her modest life and is about to marry her devoted grease monkey Chili (Bobby Cannavale), until Jasmine again interferes. As a result of Jasmine’s own neediness, Ginger slips into a promising affair with the “sweet” Al (Louis C.K.), an unsound “sound engineer.” She abandons the crushed Chili, until she learns Al is married. Ginger lives gingerly, spirited, modestly, with two unappealing sons who may or may not amount to anything but at least she has given them life and supports them. Until her seduction by Al, abetted by Jasmine, Ginger has lived her modest life honestly and with the self-respect that does not need ambition.

Jasmine accuses her of accepting losers because she doesn’t respect herself enough. This classic projection from the woman so abysmal in self-esteem she abandoned college to marry the slick businessman, who abetted his ponzi scheme, and who -- humiliated to learn he has been a serial adulterer -- in revenge turns him in to the FBI, prompting his imprisonment and suicide. That shocking revelation trumps the betrayal by which Allen parallels the Williams play. Jasmine like Blanche is robbed of her last romantic salvation when the rough Pole Augie, like Stanley Kowalski, exposes her lies and her past to her suitor. 

Yet Jasmine’s betrayal of Hal is itself surpassed, when she regrets -- not abetting the ponzi schemer -- but having turned him in. “The moment I did what I did I regretted it.” Even as she sees what her fraud cost her sister, in the flashbacks Jasmine regrets her one act of honest citizenship. Her large matching set of Vuittons is an emblem of her far heavier psychological baggage.

Her new hope Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), a diplomat and wouldbe politician, dumps her because he’s appalled less by the fraud than because she lied to him. He like Hal was wowed by her shallow elegance -- which is as fake as her name. Like Hal -- and like the even seedier dentist Dr Flicker (Michael Stuhlbarg)-- he wants her ornamental support for his career. As Allen intercuts Ginger’s optimistic affair with sweet Al and Jasmine’s with Dwight, both women are exposed as desperate, deluded and prey to false, self-serving men. Given all these a-holes, no wonder a woman’s colonoscopy prep-day “is always very special.”

The flashback structure shows Jasmine craving the shallow status and luxury -- however foully based -- that she lost. She futilely tries to start afresh, working as dentist’s receptionist in order to learn computers so she can do an online course in -- that emblem of superficial grace -- interior design. While her interior crumbles under her humiliation, shock therapy, and lack of any moral grounding and self-respect, she aspires to relive the design that failed her. However she tries she remains victim of her ungrounded life -- so Allen and Blanchett show sympathy for her. The interior design metaphor harkens back to Allen’s first foray into the sombre, Interiors (1978). He’s come a long way, baby. 

The helpless dependency of even this beautiful contemporary woman is only one of Jasmine’s resonances. As an anthropology student she would have traced our social structures back to its primeval roots. Her dentist boss, Dr Flicker, similarly claims to read peoples’ characters from his perspective, i.e., their mouths. The part embodies the whole. The whole can be read from its part.

In that context Jasmine is a metaphor for the current American mainstream. The echoes of the fraud Bernie Madoff, his humiliated wife and his alienated sons, make Jasmine’s lack of moral awareness, self-respect and integrity a summary of American business/politics. She has no sense of justice beyond self-service and no values beyond the materialistic. When she buttonholes strangers or lectures her two nephews her self-obsession admits no awareness of others. She talks to herself, even when addressing others. As the causers of the financial meltdown go unpunished, Allen exposes the culture of “looking the other way,” denying one’s own responsibility. But “Some people can’t put things behind so easily.” Certainly not the victims.

In a tacit note of the society’s degeneration Allen contrasts his shallow heroine and current America to the energy and integrity of its lost music. Especially the honest blues of the underclass, like “A good man is hard to find” and “My man rocks me with a steady roll.” In the film’s last phrase Jasmine admits she doesn’t remember the words to the upperclass song that played when she met Hal, the Rogers and Hart Blue Moon. We hear the music but not the words:

You saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own

Blue Moon

You know just what I was there for

You heard me saying a prayer for

Someone I really could care for

In not remembering the words Jasmine reminds us she doesn’t have what she pretends to -- the understanding beneath the sentiment of the song -- and the morality and language she needs. Both in her marriage to Hal and in her current affair with Dwight, she sought a powerful man she could adorn -- in return for being spoiled -- rotten. As if any of that were love. She’s living by her old tune but she has forgotten the words, the truth. She suppresses the lyrics' insight into her situation. Jasmine is blue not because she has the insight of the blues but because she’s dying cold. Check the blue buildings behind her when the film ends on her desolate isolation on a bench, homeless, alone, no resources left. Her flashbacks to a lost wealth and the illusion of social authority could reflect upon post-Bush America. As a weakened, marginalized America aches to recover a lost power, its focus on the exterior trappings only feeds its interior decay. 
     Blue Jasmine is not Allen's first politically oriented film. See my blog on his 1972 mock-documentary, The Harvey Wallinger Story, which PBS commissioned then declined to run. I have also added another on the current film's specific use of A Streetcar Named Desire, Streetcar Named Blue Jasmine: Reading Woody's Williams.

Watch on the Rhine (1943)

It’s easy to watch Watch on the Rhine (1943) as a call to America to acknowledge the danger of Naziism. That’s loud and clear -- and very moving. But it functions as a historic document in its astonishing limitation, as well. Even as it extolls America’s embrace of freedom on the world stage it portrays without irony or questioning America’s own moral problem, the inheritance of slavery and its inherent dehumanization of its own people. While the heroes fight fascism abroad the film implicitly countenances the fascism of racism in America. 

Dashiell Hammett wrote the screenplay, based on his romantic and writing partner Lillian Hellman’s Broadway success, with her additional scenes and dialogue. Both were bright, liberal minds, sensitive writers, committed to the ideals of American democracy and militant defenders of humanity against the Nazis. 

Yet for all those credentials, they set the Bette Davis’s family home on a plush plantation a drive away from Washington. The family has black servants whom the matriarch orders around imperiously. If there’s any liberalism in the writers’ view of these blacks it’s restricted to a bit of eye-rolling sass. Otherwise the blacks here are simply the plantation stereotype -- especially the two wide-eyed mutes brought from the garden to shuffle the sofa. The servants have no exchange with the Davis heroine or the Paul Lucas saintly hero. They're kept in their place.  

The film has some other problems. The three children seem terribly wooden today and the early dialogue is arch and artificial, surprisingly so given Hammett’s dab hand at the vernacular. The fact the children have been raised in Europe may preclude their having the innocence of American energy, but they weaken the film. And often the dialogue is a snowball of speeches. But it’s 1943 wartime and its heart is in the right place.

But is it? When this film was made America’s liberal intelligentsia had apparently not yet recognized the injustice of its racism. That’s this film’s real statement to us now. Like Hellman and Hammett we may think we’ve achieved a state of moral awareness and courage -- but what blinkers might we be wearing unawares today? For that we have to wake for future artists and critics to expose us. 

***

If you watch the film on the Warner Night at the Movies DVD there’s another hidden bonus. In the Ozzie Nelson musical short, the soldier who tries to roust Ozzie out of bed is a pre-stardom, uncredited Clark Gable. We recognize the voice -- and the ears. 

Much Ado About Nothing

Josh Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing is distinguished by the cast’s superb delivery of Shakespeare’s lines, the speed and imagination of its staging and shooting, and the resonance of its surprises.

For example, it’s a Technicolour movie shot entirely in black and white. Whatever its intentions, its effects include a form of distancing for an audience as accustomed to colour photography as it is unaccustomed to Elizabethan English.  Also, the lack of colour in the image allows us to invest more attention to the colour in the language. It also reminds us that the play’s moral landscape is in lifelike black and white, however we may rationalize our lapses from sense and virtue. 

Consistent with the draining of colour is the relative lack of individuation in the cast. A more naturalistic production would make Hero’s old uncle an older man. It would have put the returning soldiers in bemedaled uniforms and the constables in cop suits. Instead the court and the respectable citizenry look the same. The police play the visual colloquialism of a TV series detective team. Only two actors stand apart, the priest and the obligatory Ethiope (whose sole function is to expose even the reformed Claudio’s insensitivity when he atones for his gullibility).

The play shares with Othello and so much other Shakespeare the comedy and the tragedy of our essential inability to apprehend truth. Our very instruments of understanding are our points of vulnerability. After all, Claudio and governor Leonato are given (Othello’s) “ocular proof” of the virtuous woman’s infidelity. Their perception betrays them because they see a falsehood they believe to be reality. Our senses mislead us. Our confidence undermines us.  

Our vulnerability in perception is redoubled by our vulnerability in language.  The malapropism-prone constable Dogberry embodies the theme of confusion. His every statement is the reverse of what he intends to say. When the suspect calls him an ass he wants it recorded that he is an ass. That is, he posits her statement as the truth -- which, as it happens, is true in this instance if not in the larger ones. But because his flaw is at the heart of the human condition the play’s justice and redemption stumble out despite his misunderstanding. 

Whedon pushes this point when he explicitly implicates us in the drama. All these  points serve to complicate our reading of the film. We are often confused or uncertain. At several points the blonde court photographer aims her large black lensed camera out at us. (A black lens is unlikely to enlighten.) We’re as much a helpless, misled witness as each major character in the fiction, whether in the triangle of Hero’s betrayal or in the self-discovery to which the tricks upon Benedick and Beatrice fortunately lead them. 

In Elizabethan English pronunciation the title would also have been read as Much Ado About Noting. Much of the action involves overhearing, but that device for stolen knowledge is here turned to deception, negative in Claudio’s case, positive in Beatrice and Benedick’s. The advantage of overhearing -- or spying -- proves a disadvantage. Claudio is a special clod for being tricked twice into believing Don John’s poison, once in the snorkel scene, then outside Hero’s window. Of course we as the audience are eavesdropping on the film. We’re outside witnesses so Whedon plays on us all the deception and confusion the play imposes on its characters.

Perhaps the most dramatic instance of this is Beatrice’s lovemaking. The pre-title scene shows a lover leaving her bedroom at dawn. Later a montage of sex scenes flash through her mind. If we read these shots as evidence of her sexual activity then we commit the very folly for which we readily condemn Claudio. However worldlier and wittier, Beatrice is no less pure than the virginal Hero. Perhaps like Jimmy Carter she has experienced lust in her mind -- dutifully visualized in the film -- but we can infer nothing more serious than that. 

Except that we’re human. So we’re always ready to accepts the worst, the most salacious, so we so often make fools of ourselves by making much ado about -- nothing more than deceptive perceptions.

One more trap awaits the film’s potential audience. That’s the auteur theory. Shakespeareans will eagerly travel to see an Olivier Shakespeare, a Welles, a Kozintsev, a Branagh.  So who’s this guy Whedon? He’s the well-known director of TV episodes of Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Dollhouse. His major film credit is The Avengers. Again, people who read Whedon on the basis of that record will miss this excellent rethinking of a rare Shakespeare -- to their loss.  

56 Up

Since 1964 Michael Apted has followed the lives of 14 British children. He has interviewed them for a new film every seven years. Apted was a researcher on the first film, which was directed by Canadian Paul Almond, but he has directed the last seven. With 56 Up Apted confirms the series’ status as a remarkably insightful, moving, often poetic, chronicle of the times.

The stated intention is to prove the Jesuit adage, “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” But as the upper class John here claims, the show set out to prove that England is “still in the grasp of a Dickensian class system,” which he claims was not true in ’64 and is even less true now. His friend Andrew’s view is borne out by most of the stories here. A harsh stratification remains in force, but it is primarily economic, not social.  

The most heartening stories involve the two boys from the children’s home. At 7 Paul was a heartrending victim of bullying, inexperience, and hopelessness. His wife Sue was attracted by his “helplessness” and the relationship survives, leading to two successful children. Now Paul joins Sue in running an old folks’ home. The mixed race Symon seemed more confident than Paul as a child. He gave up his dream of being a film star and his plan to be an accountant, ending up a forklift operator near Heathrow. Symon has two children from his first wife, five from his second, two from his current. Symon is immensely proud that his son has won an apprenticeship with Proctor and Gamble. But his real achievement derives from the close relationship he and his Vienetta have with the more than 65 young people they have taken on as foster parents, some brought straight from the airport. Paul and Symon have found familial success. As if foreseeing the two boys’ need for their own home, when the seven-year-olds were taken to an adventure playground in the first film, while the others frolicked Paul and Symon built a house. Now they’ve built homes.

The need for family security permeates the chronicle. The several East Enders have grown into lives of primarily domestic satisfaction despite their financial insecurity, especially the three girl-friends. Sue never went to college but now administers the university’s graduate law studies program. Lynne has found some social mobility in becoming first a mobile librarian, then a special needs librarian at Bethnell Green. Jackie has four kids from three relationships and enjoys a support from her three sons, in the face of her ex’s death in an accident and his mother’s fatal cancer. In contrast to Sue’s career success, Lynne and Jackie are paralyzed by the economic collapse. For Jackie, “If David Cameron can get me a job, I’ll do it!”: With Lynne and a daughter laid off, husband Ross has to continue well past retirement age. For Lynne, the government “hasn’t a clue what they’re doing,” not since Tony Blair moved Labour to the Right. There is no justice or logic when the cutbacks end her inspired work with the afflicted. 

The spirited mischievous Tony, who yearned to be a jockey, finds contentment driving a cab -- and pride in bringing his son into that service. Despite some errant ways Tony was saved by his marriage to Debby, with whom he enjoys three successful children, some grandchildren and a holiday home in Spain. Having foreseen Britain’s economic collapse in the last episode, Tony is now concerned about the changing social landscape in London. When he revisits his boyhood settings he is disturbed by the influx of immigrants -- though he denies any racism. His delight in the new Olympics facilities closes the film on an optimistic note, for London as the family scenes have for the most part done for the characters. 

The driven farmboy Nick and the laid back landed gentry Suzy both survived boarding school to make full lives. Nick left his one-room country schoolhouse to read Physics at Oxford, then enjoyed an exceptional academic career in the States. As an Oxford classmate remarked, “I don’t associate intelligence with your accent.” That would have encouraged his flight to America if Prime Minister Thatcher’s strangulation of the British university system had not. Nick was left by his first wife but found a successful marriage with his second, though her academic post takes her five hours away. Suzy lost her cynicism when she married Rupert and is pleased to provide her children with the warm family life she lacked. 

She and Nick reject the film series for shallowness, passing off brief snippets and soundbites in place of circumspect analysis. But as Nick remarks, “It’s not an accurate picture of me. But it’s a picture of someone.”  The truth of these characters is not a matter of their actual minds and lives but of their type in their times. Though real people are filmed they function as characters in a fiction, as metaphors, representative of a wider significance. “It’s a picture of Everymen,” Nick adds, “how they change.”  

The two boyhood chums from Liverpool represent a geographic underclass, with opposite results. Both are outsiders who accordingly developed political and social awareness. Peter read History at London, became a teacher, then dropped out of teaching and the Seven Up series after his criticism of Thatcher in 28 Up provoked scabrous personal attacks in the press. Now Peter returns, to promote his folk music band, The Good Intentions. 

Less in harmony is the doomed Neil, who dreamt of Oxford, dropped out of Aberdeen and has drifted through a life of mental illness, homelessness, penury and solitude. Apted repeats an old shot of the seven-year-old Neil dancing carefree in his undershirt with his dorm lads. In 49 Up Apted used that shot as a visual for Neil’s reflection on the profound beauty of a butterfly exercising its wings. (Continually this series reminds us that in its shooting and selection, its planning and its discovery, documentary has the capacity to soar off into poetry.)  Alas, though Neil now serves as a Liberal Democrat councillor and as a lay minister, he has been unable to establish a paying job -- or maintain a relationship. If he feels anger at his situation it’s only as proof of a wider issue, that so many doors have been closed against so many.    

Now to the series’ privileged characters. Bruce is yet another boarding school victim, dramatically isolated from his father, who in his mature years overcomes his emotional stultification to find a wife, colleague Penny, with whom he has two spirited and close sons, without foregoing his amateur cricket. As a child Bruce repeated the arrogant mantra of the missionary. He began as a common school math teacher but grows into a venerable Independent school, where he teaches the gifted rather than the disadvantaged. Earlier he argued that the public school system perpetuates the social inequality. Bruce abandoned that principle and has brought his family into Quakerism, which emphasizes social equality and eschews the uniform. 

The issue of class privilege is concentrated in the appearances of the three young elitists. At 7 John reads The Observer and The Financial Times, expects to attend Westminster and Cambridge and to read law.  Andrew reads the Financial Times and expects to attend Charterhouse, then Cambridge for law. Both realize those paths. (Their colleague, the handsome young man on the right, seems apart from the others, shifts into jeans and sweaters, and dropped out of the series immediately.) 

Andrew marries a less wealthy country lass, Andrea, who gives him a stable family life with two sons, a 200-year-old empty barn converted into a manor, and a quiet home. Only now does she reveal some evidence she has been held back in her marriage. It’s too late for her to find something to do outside the home; she suffers what Andrew calls a lack of self-confidence. There was a personal price when she married “up.” 

The film’s richest irony derives from QC John, who oddly is the only family person in the group without children. Even at 7, he and Andrew spoke with the plumiest aristocratic mien, both in vocabulary and in attitude. If schools didn’t charge, why, they’d be overrun with the... masses. But now John turns upon director Apted, accusing him of fraudulently misrepresenting him. Far from being the privileged aristocrat he appeared, John lost his father at 9, had a hardworking mother, and only got to Oxford on a scholarship. But he was thus characterized not by that omission so much as by his own words and positions. John made himself seem born into privilege. So, too, his belief in consensus politics and his fear for the industrialization of the countryside bracket a shot of his foxhunt.  

But there’s another twist. Our Reluctant Aristocrat married Claire, the daughter of a former ambassador to Bulgaria. And for all John’s plummy Britishness, his great great grandfather was the freed Bulgaria’s first prime minister. John speaks Bulgarian. Moreover, he has devoted himself to campaigns for medical and educational aid for that country. He excuses Apted’s “fraud” because an American director was so moved by 49 Up that he made a huge contribution to the Bulgarian project. Now, is that kind of social responsibility and such use of one’s wealth and station not precisely the redeeming value of the aristocracy? John’s personal background may not have borne out the class to which he pretended, but his adult dedication does -- and redeems him. 

Apted is 72. We hope he has been cultivating a successor who will -- if necessary -- carry on to  bring these fascinating stories of contemporary Everymen to fulfillment. Next, if memory serves, would be 63 Up....   

The Lone Ranger

First off, Johnny Depp doesn’t play Tonto. Johnny Depp plays Dustin Hoffman’s Jack Crabbe (Little Big Man, director Arthur Penn, Irving’s younger brother, but that’s another story) playing Tonto. That’s Gore Verbinski’s new take on The Lone Ranger in a nutshell -- where apparently most reviewers think it belongs. But as Sam Goldwyn would say, include me out. (Ever notice how contagious tangents and allusiveness can be?) 

In other words, Verbinski uses the old Lone Ranger story as a prism through which to survey the whole range of themes and conventions that made the perennially defunct classic Western not just America’s most popular genre (on screens large and small) but (in part as a consequence) the outside world’s favourite metaphor for America. Proof of its obsolescence: it’s still the Republicans‘ favourite persona, from the venerable Marshall Reagan on to Cowboy Dubya and the Tea Party revivalists. But here the titular hero John Reid (Arnie Hammer) switches from lawyer to ranger ultimately to outlaw because the industrial-military complex has hopelessly corrupted the law. As Tonto explains, “There come a time, when good man must wear mask.”  

In other words, almost every scene alludes to some old western. I’m tempted to come out of retirement -- so I could teach a survey course on the classic westerns -- so I could use this as the Final Exam film. (“Gore Verbinski’s allusions to classic westerns are not ornamental or kneejerk Convention Association but a nuanced vocabulary with which to address his issues. Discuss.”) 

For openers, the opener. In San Francisco in 1933 -- the year The Lone Ranger introduced the William Tell Overture to American radio -- a wouldbe cowboy kid wanders into a Wild West fair where -- along with a stuffed buffalo and bear -- he sees a mannequin of The Noble Savage that comes to life. The furrowed raspy old relic tells his story of the old west. Instead of Jack Crabbe -- the white man who was volleyed back and forth between the warring paleface and native cultures -- the film’s focus is on the honky hero’s stoic sidekick, Tonto. The film's first irony is in the title, which pretends to the tradition of the white hero but centers the virtues and values on the indian. Depp, who claims Cherokee ancestry, plays Tonto as a similar arena of conflict, mainly between the historic pretense of the period piece and the modern awareness. This Tonto invents the legend he’s living, to atone for a childhood guilt. His strong belief makes it true. Confirming the connection to the Penn classic, Tonto draws the Ranger back with “Is this a good day to die?” Hence too the spirit walker who can’t be killed in battle.

His Jay Silverheels phrasings keep sinking into modern lingo. The anachronism signifies artifice, the unreality of the “history.” Just giving the Indian the central role and voice respects the modern recognition of the racist genre’s historic bias and imbalance. His dead eagle headgear is the perfect emblem of the Indian’s mythic power. (If one eagle feather is such a powerful force imagine....). Because this Tonto revises the white man’s myth of the Indian Depp plays him in a cracked clay whiteface, as if he’s literally a man of the soil. The falseness of legends figures in the early argument over exactly what human part the arch-villain is said to have eaten. So too the carnivorous rabbits.

The film draws especially on the comic tradition. Tonto has the ironic diffidence of James Coburn in Waterhole 3, The Lone Ranger the bumbling effectiveness of Bob Hope’s Paleface hero. Traitorous Collins (Leon Rippy) evokes the Lee Marvin of Cat Ballou (supported by the plucky heroine on the train and a booze-swigging Silver). The several spectacular railroad chases/smashes draw on Buster Keaton, specifically The General and The Railrodder. 

So this film is not about its characters and its narrative but about the fiction or mythology that the western genre created. The plot doesn’t unspool in 1869 Texas but in the Western of never never land. Barry Pepper’s flowing blond cavalry officer is the symbol of white army vanity and arrogance that the fictionalized and real General Custer came to signify. One bit player is a Jack Elam lookalike. (Elam joked about being hired as "a Jack Elam type.") William Fichtner’s “Butch Cavendish” is equidistant to the historic and to the Paul Newman Butch Cassidy (who had implausibly better teeth). Tom Wilkinson’s venal railroad tycoon is every corruption from the East that ruined the noble savage’s West with “the blessings of civilization” from which the John Wayne hero in Stagecoach had to be saved. The railroad theme is a staple of the genre from before Ford’s The Iron Horse and later admitted to the exploitation of the Chinese builders.  Casting John Ford’s signature Monument Valley -- which is on the Arizona-Utah border -- to play Texas is just another demonstration of the non-historical -- or is it meta-historical? --  nature of the genre. When the myth becomes history analyze the myth.  

John Reid, the idealistic lawyer packing lawbooks and Locke agin the six-guns, recalls Rance Stoddart (Jimmy Stewart) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. John’s suppressed ardor for his brother Dan’s wife (Ruth Wilson) evokes the suppressed love triangle that triggers The Searchers. (When the Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton gruffly espies Martha Edwards privately burying her face in bro-in-law Ethan’s greatcoat, that’s one of the most touching scenes in all of cinema.) Where the “real” Lone Ranger avenged the slaughter of his unit, here John Reid avenges his brother’s loss as Ethan Edwards did his. Here the killers aren’t the Commanches but the white gangsters who pretended to be Commanches to provoke their extermination in order to secure the vast silver mine for the boss capitalist. Hi yo silver indeed. 

At the end the little boy for the first time understands why he was wearing an eye mask so he puts it back on. For all its implausibility and narrative gaps, Tonto’s story has radicalized him. Where his first response to the animated Tonto was to fire a round of pistol caps at him, now he calls him Mr Tonto. His job as political educator done, Mr Tonto can don his suit, pack his satchel and leave the stage. His dead eagle flies after him. The idea of animating the inanimate goes beyond these resurrections. Many of the film’s most exciting scenes work like animation sequences. For when the subject is mythopeia, even the living characters are effectively two-dimensional fictions. Some scenes come out of the Road Runner cartoons.

This encyclopedia of the genre, with its socio-political analysis, still manages to be a constantly entertaining and exciting film. It provides the pleasures of the genre conventions even while anatomizing them. In short, I think this film is one of the all time great westerns. The scene with the two heroes talking, buried up to their heads, reminds us that this popular genre could rise to high art, as high as Beckett. I should do that course.

Richard Linklater's Before Sunset Trilogy

Richard Linklater’s three-film collaboration with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy turns into a trenchant analysis of the compromises by which contemporary spirits negotiate the minefields of romantic hopes and disenchantment. If it’s hard to find true love it’s harder to sustain it. The development of the two lead characters across three feature films and eighteen years (in the making) allows for a scope and intensity rarely achieved in North American cinema. (Since The Sopranos and Breaking Bad it has become more familiar on cable TV.) The trilogy examines the consistency characters maintain across decades of change, growth and circumstance, and whether a relationship can survive all that. Its arc is from the ultra-romantic to reality.

***

In the launch film, Before Sunrise (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) meet on the rebound. Her lover dumped her six months earlier; his resented his visit to Madrid. So they both temper their attraction with reservations. Celine expects romantic disillusionment: “But then the morning comes, and we turn back into pumpkins, right?” For Jesse, “people have these romantic projections they put on everything. That's not based on any kind of reality..... Uh, yeah, sure. I know happy couples. But I think they lie to each other.” From their first game of questioning each other our couple undertake to be truthful. (These exchanges will assume new heft in the third film.)

Their initial meeting is caused by Celine’s retreat from a quarreling German couple on the train. That frictional marriage casts a pall over the young couple’s potential romance. They check their every advance with their agreement they won’t meet again -- until their urgent, last-minute plan to reunite in six months. As Celine initially proposed, "maybe we should try something different. I mean, it's not so bad if tonight is our only night, right? People always exchange phone numbers, addresses, they end up writing once, calling each other once or twice...

Jesse: Right. Fizzles out. Yeah, I mean, I don't want that. I hate that."

Before that, to coax Celine into coming with him for the day in Vienna Jesse asks her to anticipate her inevitable disenchantment with her future marriage. Then she might regret having missed his proposed lark. She should come with him now if only to prove he would not have been a preferable mate: "See, what this really could be is a gigantic favor to both you and your future husband to find out that you're not missing out on anything. I'm just as big a loser as he is, totally unmotivated, totally boring, and, uh, you made the right choice, and you're really happy.

Celine: Let me get my bag."
In the record shop listening booth their peeking and evasion make for a choreographed dance of glances. Celine later admits, “I like to feel his eyes on me when I look away.” Even their avoidance connects them. Their skeptical detachment ends up a bond. Celine places great faith in a relationship overcoming the barriers of separate personality: "I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something."

The film’s devotion to chronicling their conversation defines their relationship as a spritely exchange between sharp minds -- both emotions and wit -- that is a bracing relief from the physical gratification that characterize the period cinema and that supports Celine’s dismissal of feminism as the male’s convenience. Celine resists her desire to bed Jesse because she doesn’t want to become part of a familiar story, the une-nuit stand. It’s their deepening connection that precludes their having sex:

"Actually, I think I had decided I wanted to sleep with you when we got off the train. But now that we've talked so much, I don't know anymore." 
     Their increasing openness to each other raises their guards against commitment. They most openly express their feelings to each other by pretending to be phoning their best friends. With their candour and playfulness they are paradoxically at once most receptive to and guarded against each other. This the street poet catches:

I'm a delusion angel

I'm a fantasy parade

I want you to know what I think

Don't want you to guess anymore

You have no idea where I came from

We have no idea where we're going

Lodged in life

Like branches in a river

Flowing downstream

Caught in the current

I carry you

You'll carry me

That's how it could be

Don't you know me?

Our would-be lovers connect across opposite views of love. Jesse views it as an “escape for two people who don't know how to be alone. People always talk about how love is this totally unselfish, giving thing, but if you think about it, there's nothing more selfish.” For Celine, despite the pressure to be "a strong and independent icon of womanhood, and without making it look my whole life is revolving around some guy.... loving someone, and being loved means so much to me. We always make fun of it and stuff. But isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?"

     Celine also differs from Jesse’s expectation of fatal irritations: "When you talked earlier about after a few years how a couple would begin to hate each other by anticipating their reactions or getting tired of their mannerisms,I think it would be the opposite for me. I think I can really fall in love when I know everything about someone-- the way he's going to part his hair, which shirt he's going to wear that day, knowing the exact story he'd tell in a given situation. I'm sure that's when I know I'm really in love."

Despite both characters’ wariness and hard won skepticism, their mutual attraction grows, bolstered by their withdrawal apparently first from sex, then from their pledge never to meet again. It becomes an extraordinary romance, eyes wide open albeit yearning and tentative.

***

Before Sunset (2004) picks up the story nine years later. Jesse is in Paris on a book tour promoting his bestselling novel, This Time, based on that first meeting with Celine. Three journalists expose themselves in their response to the novel’s after-story. The romantic is sure the lovers make their date, the cynic that they don’t. The realist hopes they would but doubts they will. When Celine appears we learn she missed their planned meeting because of her grandmother’s death. We also learn later that on that first date Jesse and Celine did make love. An editing ellipsis left us at her resolve to avoid the pain of missing him all the more for that intimacy. 

Now again Jesse invites Celine to share his time before his flight home. Their wanderings through Paris rekindle their conversational intimacy and their love. They discuss desires, dreams, living with losses, and their new lives. Both express dissatisfaction. Environmentalist Celine has a mercifully roving photojournalist boyfriend. The photojournalist is a prosaic alternative to the novelist.  “Even being alone it's better than sitting next to your lover and feeling lonely.” Jesse has a wife, son and low octane marriage. 

Both have lived in the shadow of their missed romance. He dreams of Celine; she rues his loss. On his drive to his wedding Jesse thought he saw her entering a deli on 13th and Broadway. She was living at 11th and Broadway at the time. In their last drive Celine resents having lost all her romance on that first night with Jesse and having lived hollow since.

Again they are united by their differences. Jesse bristles at Celine’s naming her “Commie” cat Che. For Celine, “Memories are wonderful things, if you don't have to deal with the past.” Jesse bases his fiction on the assumption everything is autobiographical. He thinks it’s true that he wrote the book hoping it would find Celine. He has his own jocular take on her global concerns: “I don't even have one publisher in the whole Asian market.” Jesse thinks he has grown “more equipped to handle” his problems. For Celine “It's amazing what perverts we've become in the past nine years.” They tease each other about their presumed promiscuity since their first date.

The constraints of time in their relationship figure in the titles of Jesse’s novel and of Nina Simone’s Just in Time to which Celine dances for him in her apartment. But they were thwarted not just by the timing of the grandmother’s death but by their youthful folly in having failed to exchange addresses and phone numbers. As Celine realizes, “I guess when you're young, you just believe there'll be many people with whom you'll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.” And “You can never replace anyone because everyone is made up of such beautiful specific details.” So too her faith in her fellow activists: ”I see it in the people that do the real work, and what's sad in a way is that the people that are the most giving, hardworking, and capable of making this world better, usually don't have the ego and ambition to be a leader.”

Where in the first film Celine looked for “any kind of God” not “in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between,” here she focuses on their individual beings: "Well, you know, the world might be less free than we think.... Yeah, when given these exact circumstances, that's what will happen every time: two part hydrogen, one part oxygen, you get water every time." Later she hugs Jesse because “I want to see if you stay together or if you dissolve into molecules.” To his relief she feels him “still there.” On their first date Celine had more faith in her emerging bond with the new man. On the second she is more focused on the individual than on the space between them. 

  As the Sunset lovers expressed their true feelings through imaginary phone conversations with a friend, here Celine seduces Jesse through Simone.  Jesse has returned “just in time.” At the film’s close we expect he will overcome the wedding ring he fingers and will miss his flight home, in order to make love to Celine. Before her Simone dance, in a parallel to the first film’s street poet, Celine sings her waltz to their “lovely one night stand”: 

  I don't care what they say

I know what you meant for me that day

I just want another try, I just want another night

Even if it doesn't seem quite right

You meant for me much more than anyone I've met before

One single night with you, little Jesse, is worth a thousand with anybody

I have no bitterness, my sweet

I'll never forget this one night thing

Even tomorrow in other arms, my heart will stay yours until I die.

As with the first poet’s use of “milkshakes,” Jesse jocularly asks if Celine just slipped his name into the set song. But his cynicism veils his emotion. 

Conversely, Celine’s denial of “bitterness” in her song is belied by her anger in the limo ride. However painful, Celine protects her memory and her emotional connection to Jesse with the fervour of a true environmentalist. The heart is its own landscape. The writer may play a variation on his past but the environmentalist will preserve it against all the antipathetic and destructive currents of nature, including the pathetic human.

As her song recalls the poet, another exchange evokes the fortune teller in the first film. When Jesse wonders at “the chances of us ever meeting again” Celine replies "After that [missed] December, I'd say almost zero. But we're not real anyway, right? We're just, uh, characters in that old lady's dream. She's on her deathbed, fantasizing about her youth. So of course we had to meet again."

As Hawke and Delpy collaborated with Linklater on the second (and third) script, the film assumes a kind of metafiction. Matured by time, loss, experience, the characters sense they are characters.

***

When we resume that relationship in Before Midnight (2013), nine years later, Jesse has divorced his wife and is living in Paris with Celine. They have twin daughters, realizing Celine’s Sunset joke about having two children she forgot having locked in a car somewhere. Jesse has a second novel out, That Time, based on the Sunset chapter in their relationship. They spend a summer at a writer’s retreat in rural Greece. This setting suggests a return to more pagan emotions -- e.g., the motherhood of Medea -- as opposed to the civilization of their Vienna and Paris.

  An outside dinner at their writer host’s presents a spectrum of  relationships: a widow, a senior in an open marriage, an exuberant middle-aged couple, two beautiful romantics in their first year of love. The narrative reflects on where Celine and Jesse align on that range. Jesse considers their moving to Chicago so he could be a stronger presence in his 12-year-old son’s life. This as Celine contemplates an offer of her “dream job.” Celine takes Jesse’s idea as the clear beginning of their end. 

On an easy walk they resume the witty, thoughtful, loving conversation of the earlier films. There’s a comfort in her quip, “But sometimes, I don't know? I feel like you're breathing helium and I'm breathing oxygen.” But when they enjoy a romantic hotel gift stay they spin out of sexual ardour into anger. Jesse is irritated by Celine’s cellphone chat with his son. They explode. Now Cellne has a visceral experience of the feminism she rejected earlier.  She resents all she gave up for him and their daughters, including her singing. Of course Jesse appreciates her talent:  “I fucked up my whole life because of your singing.” She erupts in frustration and anger, stomping out, returning only to stomp out again, finally declaring she does not love him anymore. To even our disappointment our lovers have turned into the German couple from whom they recoiled on that initial train to Vienna. To Jesse his dream girl is now “the fucking mayor of Crazytown,” her French quirkiness gone sour. 

Their break was anticipated when the couple watched the sun set. Celine remarks “Still there. Still there. Still there. It’s gone.” Saddened, she glances across at the unsuspecting Jesse, as if she already realizes -- by that phrase’s echo of Sunset -- that the Jesse she loved and hugged is gone, his molecules dissipated. 

Ultimately Jesse wins her back -- at least for the moment -- with another echo, this time his Sunrise invitation to leave the train to spend the day with him in Vienna. He originally said she owed it to her future, married self to check out the possibility of their relationship. This time he again plays that time machine, reading off a bare napkin her advice as an 82-year-old to her present self. The old charm, the wit and games and loving exuberance, work again. This time. 
        Celine’s last line returns to metafiction: “Well it must have been a hell of a night we’re about to have.” The third film ends on the same uncertainty as the first. But we have seen a crucial difference emerge between the two lovers. The man has grown, succeeded, matured but he has remained the same. He still plays the old games. He stays a boy at heart, as when he playfully kicks his departing son in the rear. The woman may seem the more recessive, because of her domestic obligations, but she has changed and grown in her awareness and emotional range. If she stays with her juvenile man it's out of fatigue not passion. He hasn't grown with her.
      On the other hand, Jesse remains the more realistic. He accepts Celine in all her craziness (read:dissatisfaction, change). He realizes that love is what's left when the magic is gone. She yearns for the lost magic. She refuses to let him use her or their children in his fiction, as if he had his own trilogy in the works. But he won't let her colonize and command his imagination. So their conversational differences have hardened into an abyss.

As the finale draws on our memory of the earlier films the implication is that however our characters have changed, however advanced or hardened their circumstance and understanding, they sustain a consistent core. There is a bedrock in each character and a bedrock to their relationship upon which both can draw, if they choose. But a common growth is as important as that bedrock.

***

The lovers in this trilogy are a winning combination of beauty, ribald wit and energy, intelligence, thoughtfulness and unguarded love. Most of us are not like that, though we would like to be. To highjack Kenneth Tynan on Garbo, they sober talk like we drunk think we do. Or, their combination of sensuality and intellect harkens back to the wit of John Donne and the Metaphysical poets, before -- as T.S. Eliot contended -- our emotions and our mind were separated, our sensibilities dissociated. Hence in all three films, amid the fluent intellectualizing the lovers’ profane teasing, a hairbreadth short of insult. If the final hotel battle evokes late Bergman, the trilogy’s overall intelligence and fine observation are as close as American cinema has come to Eric Rohmer.

All three titles place their film’s action on a turning point, one of the infinite number of axes on which our life and emotions turn. Each film chronicles a day of adventurous conversation that ends on the title’s close. It’s Before sunset, Before sunrise, Before midnight. We’re always on the verge of something, which denotes both a loss and an advance. But whatever the passage we retain a consistent core and so can our dearest relationships. We accrue experience and connections to which we can cling, against the tide. The titles promise a snatch of life bracketed off from the characters’ respective flows. The constraints that time imposes on both figures in each film is an emblem of all the other constraints, repressions, fears, timidities, that life has seared into them, that we can transcend if -- as Jesse finally urges Celine -- we grow with the flow but must acknowledge the limitations of reality. 

         Now that the trilogy is complete, here's a suggestion. Watch them in reverse order. Knowing where the lovers end up, trace the route -- or roots -- that got them there. As in Pinter's Betrayal, the weight of romantic confidence and delusion is best exposed when the hopeful beginnings are checked against their conclusion.

Man of Steel

Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is a tale told by a -- bunch of special effects wizards, full of sound and fury, signifying -- well, perhaps a few things:

1. Superman’s experience comprises less exultation than pain. From his mother’s excruciating birthing, through his own Kansas boyhood alienation, to the loss of his earthly father (Kevin Costner), this Kal-El (Brit Henry Cavill, you know, the guy with my bod) measures out the pain in the human condition. He sure gets beaten up a lot, too. 
2. By his Krypton father Jor-El (Russell Crowe), Superman’s mission is not just to save Earth but to be a bridge between two cultures, the dead Krypton and our humanity. This may allude to the burgeoning tension between radical Islam and Western civilization.
3. This is a post-feminist exercise. This Lois Lane (Amy Adams) very quickly twigs to Superman’s nature and identity, shares his Clark Kent pose and is such an active agent that she enables Superman’s conquest of the villain General Zod (Michael Shannon). She even has some deft gunplay. For his part Zod’s second in command is the sultry invincible Faora-Il (Antje Traue). She gives even Superman a hard fight in hand to hand. Unlike our women, though, Faora claims the historic advantage of not being impeded by any sense of morality. In a dramatic break with tradition, neither heroine breaks a heel when fleeing. But both still need to be saved by their respective superstuds.
4. This is a post-9/ll exorcism, an exercise in apocalypse. As the Japanese scraped at their Hiroshima scab with all those radiation mutant monster disasters, American citybusters (that’s a block buster blown up to exceed Manhattan) amplify the urban cataclysm of 9/11. Whole skylines of towers crumble. Even a two guy punchup rips through buildings, leaving a landscape of smoldering ruin -- as a sign the good guy won. This doesn’t just remind us of 9/11. It flatly says that America’s fight for its values would be worth a geometrical progression of 9/11s. It also addresses the vicarious pleasure of witnessing an apocalypse, even our own. As both villainess and good guy claim, “A good death is its own reward.” Here there are no promises of posthumous virgins. 
5. The villains are impervious to traditional warfare. Bullets and bombs don’t hurt them. This may align them with the new enemy -- which supplanted the traditional army of the national state -- the terrorist. The villains are a small band of superpowered outlaws who are completely dedicated to serving their “people.” In this case, their land destroyed, they seek to reestablish Krypton on Earth, preferably with the genocide of Earthlings (that’s us). 
6. Despite the colossal destruction, the film pretends to environmentalism. Krypton imploded because its core had been irresponsibly mined away. Take that, Keystone Pipeline!!
7. Like any superhero film, from Nietzsche through Austin Powers, this one flirts with fascism. The people are supposed to embrace the strong leader who has offered to save them and to adhere uncritically, whatever his actions and their consequences. Indeed, there’s something implicitly wrong, undeveloped, in a people who refuse to accept a super-gifted leader in their midst. In this case the hero happens to be a good guy, but history abounds with evil leaders who similarly required and received mindless faith and obedience. In fact, Superman could share Zod’s line: “No matter how violent, every action I take is for the greater good of my people.”
8. It’s an American film, so it has to pay lip service to that inconvenient ideal, Individualism. Jor-El runs afoul of the Krypton folk by arranging for the first natural (hence so painful) birth on that planet in a century. Superman will supposedly be able to choose his own life, aims, nature -- though in fact his special gifts and mission are as proscriptive as the Krypton babies, engineered in pods to serve particular roles in life, with no personal choice. Indeed perhaps the primary conformist impulse in American society -- from the cheerleading corps to the boardroom and the Tea Party -- is to pretend to believe in individualism. They will find this film nourishing.
9. It manages to be oh so current. At the end Superman shoots down a $50 million drone because the friendly US government keeps trying to figure out where he lives. That catches both the drones-against-civilians lobby and the myth that the government spies on its innocent citizens.