Monday, February 24, 2014

In Secret

In Secret is a very faithful adaptation of the Zola novel, Therese Raquin, not just in plot, characters and theme, but in the overwhelming sense of darkness in and out and in the intense sexuality that doesn’t depend on nudity. The butcher scene particularly catches the harshness of 19th Century naturalism.
Perhaps the core of the film is the vapid husband Camille’s story of he zoo. Exhausted after a day’s work in his clerical cage he drifts to the zoo, where he watches the animals in their cages. One bear is maddened when a slice of honeyed bread lands on his back. His raging appetite for it leaves him having clawed his flesh raw. 
     The orphaned Therese is abandoned to an uncaring aunt who forces her to marry her ailing, dependent son. When Therese steps out of her wire petticoat she steps out of another literal cage into the metaphoric cage of her loveless marriage. Zola’s — and the film’s — point is that rather than escape our cages we only step from one into another. When Laurent frees Therese’s sexuality that becomes a cage that ensnares both. When they resolve to kill Camille so they can be together the shock and guilt prove a harsher, more debilitating cage than her marriage was. Laurent’s financial needs and Therese’s dependency are a further trap. When they finally wed — again at the manipulated aunt’s behest — there is no more love between them, just guilt and resentment. After a stroke Therese’s aunt is all rage trapped in a crippled body, until she manages to write her accusation of their guilt with her cane in ink on the floor. By then Laurent and Therese are eager to be discovered, arrested, guillotined, if only to escape their guilt. The law retarded, they take the aunt to the water’s edge for an ostensible picnic and kill themselves.
     This is not a feel good flick, so it hasn’t been scoring with the reviewers and audiences. Its warning against the unrestrained drive to satisfaction is hardly in keeping with the temper of our times. But it’s a well done reminder of a great novelist’s vision with a tone and message that are healthily disturbing.   

Saturday, February 22, 2014

3 Days to Kill

3 Days to Kill is directed by tv veteran McG but the real auteur is the scriptwriter Luc Besson. Besson specializes in slick noisy thrillers often with stilletoed hit-gals and the Eiffel Tower glistening behind.
The film seems a mishmash, with the spy thriller, road-chase and shoot-em-up elements cut with the comedy of domestic subplots. Ultimately the comic spirit rules.
In the non-comic, retired superagent Ethan (ubiquitous Kevin Costner) is dying of cancer, but the CIA will give him an experimental drug if he does one last spree for them. His meter running out, Ethan wants to win back his teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) and his beautiful wife Christine (Connie Nielsen). He has woefully neglected both for all his CIA years. How Ethan interweaves his agent and his father duties is good for laughs. But a massive suspension of disbelief is required when we watch the dying, weak, hallucinating hero summon the skills, stamina and ingenuity to do his dirty work.
Maybe we don’t have to believe it. The film reads as an attempt to bring family values into the global killer genre. But the heroism inevitably dissolves into comedy.
At the centre of the film Besson seems to be humanizing the CIA. However cold their operations, the undercover killers for democracy are really normal family men, nice guys. They try to maintain a front of normalcy while they scuttle the globe saving western civilization. Ethan uses his martial arts not just to stop the sale of a dirty bomb to the Syrians (which side we don ’t know, but who cares?) but to save his underage daughter from gang rape. We thank heavens our guys can do that. And if the agent has been living on lies, why, that's as normal as his teenage daughter's confession to lie all the time. 
The cherry on the Up the CIA Sundae is the black African family Ethan not only didn’t kill but let them live in his flat until their latest baby is born. That’s the CIA for you, a force for new life, defending the disadvantaged and helping restore world order, at least in two families’ home life. Like Ethan’s front, Besson seems here to be “in sales,” flacking for the CIA. Take that, Snowden! 
     On the other hand, the CIA is brought down a peg when Ethan’s first boss, a business-like woman, is replaced by the cartoon figure of a brassy broad. And again, when the villainous Albino’s driver and his accountant are redefined by their own domestic comedies, undercutting the evil that has drawn the CIA’s bloody effort. In the spirit of comedy the hero lets these two reformed villains live. This thriller is really a comedy at heart.  

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Robocop

As every generation needs its own Hamlet, perhaps every 20 years or so the advanced film technology needs its own Robocop. It exercises the state of the art, even as it yet again assumes the inevitable loss of compassion and emotion in modern humanity’s thirst for progress. The loss of humanity is imaged in the passage from the Francis Bacon twisted human triptych behind the villain's desk to three unrelated abstractions.
Certainly Jose Padilha’s version has impressive effects. The Samuel Jackson rabble-rousing TV show is amazing, as is the Robocop’s conversion from heart, lungs and brain into fully functioning super machine. Why, the cop hero’s kitchen even has one of those hangers to keep bananas fresh! The technology is, for once properly speaking, awesome. 
The film closes on two statements. One affirms the robot lawman’s ultimate triumph: the song over the end credits is “I fought the law and the law won.” The second is the Jackson character’s closing assertion: America is the greatest country in the world and always will be. That line is both American bravado and an ironic undercutting of itself. Coming from such a vainglorious fool, the line reads sarcastic.
For the film functions as a kind of national wish-fulfilment. The giveaway is the early scene where America patrols the streets and alleys of Teheran using drones and robots to keep order without risking US lives. This, of course, when Iran has been running circles around American diplomacy and has brazenly challenged the US on its nuclear monopoly. In another magical detente, the American company developing the man-in-a-machine is operating amid the rice-fields of a docile China. As if the US and not China held all the other’s IOUs. Then, too, the film imagines a crime-free and prosperous Detroit. Did I mention wish-fulfilment?
      And who is the US senator who pushes through a bill to prevent the deployment of human machines? To deploy robocops in America that bill has to be repealed. To the raving right wing he’s obviously pro-crime, anti-progress and therefore a traitor. But we’re supposed to know he’s a good guy because he’s named Dreyfuss. True, that was Inspector Clouseau's maddened boss, but the name mainly evokes the Jewish general falsely accused of being a traitor in 19th Century France. That allusion seems to undercut the TV commentator’s raw rah-rah jingoism. But the spectacle of the robocop’s impressive mass justice outweighs that liberal sentiment altogether. Amid such thrilling fireworks it's hard to stick to the quiet irony.  

Gloria

In Sebastian Lelio’s Gloria the heroine is a fiftyish Chilean divorcee who has an indomitable sense of life, self and joy. At first Gloria (Pauline Garcio) is out dancing, looking for a man, and she attracts a recent divorcee with her look of radiant joy. The film closes on her exuberant self-celebration at a friend’s wedding, where everyone sings and dances to the song “Gloria.” The difference is that here she declines a younger man’s invitation to dance and instead goes in to dance by herself in the crowd.  
What happens between those dances is her experience with a rather nice man who is quite her opposite. Where her grown children never call her, Rodolfo’s (Sergio Hernandez) two daughters constantly interrupt him with their demands. Yet they neglected him entirely when he had weight-reduction surgery. That surgery liberated Rodolfo physically but he lags behind Gloria in internal freedom. He wears a corset (heard but not seen) to hold his insides together. Where Gloria and her children are healthily independent, his ex-wife and their two daughters are completely dependent upon him financially and emotionally — and he seems dependent upon their dependency.  “Grow a pair,” Gloria sensibly admonishes him.
Rodolfo abandons Gloria at her son’s birthday party inexcusably but understandably: she focuses entirely on her family, not her guest, when she brings him, insensitive to his reliance on the only person there he knows. It’s as if she has no sense of such needs. His second abandonment — at an expensive hotel — introduces her to neediness, as she has to call on an older woman friend to bail her out.
Gloria is a remarkable heroine because of her her resilience, her resolve to enjoy herself and her life. Her solidity contrasts to the agonized younger man in the apartment upstairs. To his credit, as Gloria Lelio cast an actor who is not the usual film beauty; indeed she shows the increasing effects of age. The sex scenes are lyrical but clear-eyed, refusing to hide or romanticize the sagging sallow flesh. As an extension of this self-acceptance the film features two starkly white animals, a furless cat and an albino peacock. Gloria comes to accept the eerie cat and takes heart from contemplating the freakish peacock, finding in them a reflection of her own outsider’s nature. All three are suis generis.
Gloria’s prescription of daily eyedrops to ward off glaucoma provides a metaphor for her necessary adjustment in vision. The pleasure and pain Rodolfo provides shows her she is essentially on her own now and has to make her own dance through life, without hoping to be rescued by some man.  
     Gloria’s personal revolution plays against a political one in Chile. Post-Pinochet the young revolutionaries reject the new society’s materialism and greed. They find their country a simulacrum of a culture, not one based on valid values. In parallel liberations they reaffirm their national self and Gloria affirms her own.

Friday, February 14, 2014

Stranger by the Lake

We see the murder in Stranger by the Lake and we see Franck watch it. Instead of a whodunit, then, this film is a whydotheydoit?
The film never leaves the woodsy beach which the local gay men have made a cruising spot. Whatever lives the characters have elsewhere is irrelevant. All that counts is what happens here. Indeed the gay lovers make a point of not taking their relationships from here into the outside world. So why do all the men come here? 
As the straight logger Henri suggests, it’s a place for loners of either persuasion to come, find a little small talk with accepting strangers and enjoy the water and the sun. The lake serves the lonely. For most of them sex is usually part of the equation, though Henri bristles at the expectation you need to have sex to enjoy the comfort of sleeping with someone. Franck and Henri try to meet outside, for drinks, a dinner, but don’t make it. The anonymity allows escape from mundanity. Our dashing Franck sells vegetables in the market. Here he's prime meat.
Then, too, who is the stranger in the title? As the only straight habituĂ© Henri has some call on that ID. So does the dogged police inspector whose sniffing round the murder scene takes him there long after hours. And who is stranger than the polite wanker voyeur? Or the pudgy chappie who shakes hands after fellatio? Clearly the title points to the whole cast of strangers, isolates and the marginalized, who come together in the relative safety of this wilderness, who find comfort on the stony beach, intimacy in the woods and perhaps even harmony in the whistling trees. There is no music here, but the waves and the leaves perform a symphony of danger in the nature of things, even over the end credits.  That harmony is violated only by Franck’s old rattling Renault.
Finally, who is the stranger of the central couple? The moustachioed Michel is dashing and sinister, especially after we see him snuff his first lover. But despite that knowledge Franck seeks him out to fall in love with. With eyes wide open he enters into a possibly fatal affair. Even at the end, having seen Michel murder Henri and the inspector, Franck stops hiding from Michel and instead calls to him. As the despairing solitary Henri sought death at Michel’s hand, the helpless Michel calls out to his murderous lover. Without this refuge from the antipathetic world outside, death’s sting is welcomed. Especially if it’s veiled by the explosive ardor of these brief loves.
     The paradox is that for all the casual full frontal nudity, the graphic sexual activity, including even the un-traditional come shot, the characters’ impulses and emotions remain hidden. The real stranger here is the intimacy that does an end-run around sex.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

At Middleton

This “little film” is surprisingly ambitious — and effective. 
It subverts the college student rom-com by focusing on the parents at their nest emptying. For both generations this new liberation can be terrifying. As Edith tells another parent, the kids’ departure leaves the parents realizing how little they know or are connected to their 18-year partners. The theatrical scene Edith plays with George reveals how a marriage can hide lives of quiet desperation. In the crowning irony, the two college roommates cooly watch the two adults getting stoned and acting wacky, under their knowing eye. 
The film also replays the old Benedict/Beatrice device of characters who initially snipe at each other gradually discovering themselves simpatico. George and Edith begin and end as opposites, but they switch poles. At first he’s the rod-ass and she’s the bohemian free spirit. She cures his fear of heights, he her temptation to be totally carefree. By the end he’s loosened up enough to want to have an affair with her and she retreats to the safer ground of self-denial.
Their respective kids replay that shift. Conrad leaves the security of his  studly “million dollar smile” to pursue his disembodied, faceless role on campus radio. Wilder and more precocious Audrey takes to heart her idol’s distinction between healthy ambition and unhealthy obsession.
In both those relationships — and in the respective parents’ scenes with their kids — there is ample demonstration of what Audrey reads from her idol’s book: linguistics must deal with what is not said as much as with what is. Heard sentences are meaty but those unheard are meatier. Hence the really delicate work in facial expression and body language throughout, especially as the leads increasingly open up and connect. Hence the confessional Truth behind the two parents stage “performance.”
The campus name, Middleton, puts all its characters in some middle. The two teens are pivoting into adulthood. The two parents are turning from the stability of their unfulfilling marriages into self-realization — or not. Both turn passive at the moment of decision, as imaged in their letting their kids drive. When George prefers the long way home he’s taking more time to face the life he dreads, to put behind the happier alternative he has just encountered. Informed by the reflections on French films, we don’t get the usual American film’s happy ending. But the chance remains. We’re hoping this one-shot might lead to a Richard Linklater trilogy where we can follow these so very touching and appealing lovers into a happier afterlife.     
Finally the film is about what a college education should be. The two parents get a college education in one day when they meet new people, try out each other’s alien perspectives and experience, act out exploratory expressions of themselves, learn to breathe more freely and deeply, get new insight into themselves and each other, test experimental things they never would in their outside  (aka “real”) lives, and end up significantly altered, illuminated, broadened in understanding and emotion, whichever road they pursue. 

It’s an idyllic university, a slice of heaven, so the disciplines represented are literature, language, horticulture, the arts, and the pulse is in the library. The linguistics (!) professor's office is a jaw-dropper. The salutary absence of Business, High Tech, a football team, make the setting as Edenic as the two leads’ romantic discovery.  

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

The Past

Asghar Farhadi’s The Past is powerful and perfect.
In the last scene the comatose Celine shows her first signs of consciousness. Her husband Samir’s cologne sends a tear down her cheek and she squeezes his thumb; a freeze frame confirms the grip.The image signifies the grip that the past holds on us, however we try to put it behind and move on. We don’t know whether Celine will or will not recover, but those two signs of life will keep Samir from marrying his pregnant Marie and will extend his little son Fouad’s trauma. Her signs of life will paralyze Samir, Marie and their unborn child. 
In the first scene Marie seems bright, beautiful, lively, as she meets Ahmad at the airport. We think they’re lovers, but he’s her husband who’s returning from Tehran after four years, at her request to finalize their divorce. Their first exchange is telling because they speak through a glass partition without hearing each other. In several key scenes we don’t hear what the characters say. Often the characters don’t really hear what the other means. 
Here the past impedes understanding. The film exposes Marie as anything but poised and secure. She has not resolved Ahmad’s abandonment of her or her seething daughter Lucie’s anger about Samir. Even when Marie prepares to forgive Lucie for giving Celine Lucie’s and Samir’s love-letters she explodes in anger, driving her beloved daughter away.
As Lucie notes, Marie is attracted to Samir because he looks like Ahmad. She’s divorcing her foreign husband to marry his foreign lookalike. Ahmad fled four years ago in a brutal depression. He’s back now sensible, very sensitive in how he negotiates his way with Marie and Samir and in how he counsels Fouad and Lucie. For his part Samir begins as a nebbish — who tears up from his allergy to the paint he’s using for Marie’s flat — but grows more solid as he tries to stabilize his relationship with Marie and Lucie, keep Fouad level, and finally give Celine one last chance to show she’s still alive. The rhyming tears of Samir and Celine suggests their continuing bond.
The film ripples with telling detail. Fouad is disappointed when Ahmad gives him colouring pencils instead of a helicopter. Later we see him quite engrossed in his drawing with those pencils at his father’s dry-cleaning business. Later we see him playing with a helicopter, though we don’t know which “parent” provided it. Fouad instinctively makes do with what he gets. He seems to recover from Marie’s punishment for a tantrum and he struggles through the confusion of his mother’s death-in-life. Though the older daughter Lucie’s psychological torment is the most graphic, in the scenes involving the two younger children we see them living what will prove their traumatizing past down the road. 
The children’s scenes often parallel the adults. Both generations throw tantrums, make messes, divulge painful secrets, have to apologize, act with destructive irresponsibility and hope for forgiveness. That’s because even adults are so helplessly propelled by their unaccommodated pasts that they remain as helpless and vulnerable as children. While we can understand these driven adults, they can’t be as readily forgiven their irresponsibility as their children can. 
The traumatic power of the past picks up a political resonance through the illegal immigrant Naima. Samir fires her for having enabled Lucie to send Celine the love letters. Without papers, she feels vulnerable in her job, in her own way connected to an unaccommodated past. She acts to counter Celine’s anger at Samir’s supporting Naima not her in a customer’s complaint. We don’t know whether Celine read the letters, whether her suicide attempt was prompted by them or by her humiliation in front of the customer. Here too the past remains an unclear force that can’t be simply explained but that must somehow be dealt with. Not handling the past properly dooms her future.  As the doctor remarks, "In this situation every certainty is a doubtful."

Monday, February 10, 2014

Lone Survivor

     Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor is a well-made — and even more certainly well earned — tribute to the US navy’s SEALs. In June 2005 four men were sent into Afghanistan undercover to kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah. Their mission  compromised by the accidental appearance of some goat-herds, the men try to leave but face a concentrated Taliban assault. As the title subtlety suggests, only one, Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg) survives — and that only thanks to the valiant engagement by a town of Afghans who rate their ancient code of hospitality higher than the Taliban threat. 
The arrival of the goatherds raises the Seals’ crucial dilemma. Do they kill the unarmed civilians to preserve their mission or release them and flee? The scene is an important reminder of how complex a moral decision can become on the battlefield. Their decision may be right morally but it proves dead wrong strategically. For in these modern wars even children are soldiers, as the aged can be long-distance messengers.
The film is eloquent on the SEALs’ fraternity and tight bond. In the epigraph montage of the real SEALs behind the story it’s immensely satisfying to see that Luttrell named his son after his diehard killed comrade, Axe.
      The unforgiving harshness of the alien terrain is dramatized in the number of hard knocks the SEALs suffer when they have to jump and roll to evade their assailants. After all his suffering on desert and against hard rocks our survivor Seal is finally in his element when he tumbles into the waters of an oasis — where the villagers give him new life.
The graphic popping of blood confirms the film’s visceral experience of modern gunfire. Where The Monuments Men (see my separate blog) seems based on old war films, Lone Survivor feels like the real, agonizing experience. It’s loud and painfully disturbing — which should make it required viewing for the safe fat cats who so easily send their young men off to distant war. The film is also a timely reminder of what the nation owes its veterans — and how reprehensibly short their civilian treatment falls.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

The Monuments Men

George Clooney’s The Monuments Men is this year’s version of Ben Affleck’s Argo. A historic event is twisted into a celebration of American nobility and effectiveness. At a time when the US seems powerless in international diplomacy and warfare these films have an obvious appeal. In the long run, however, I wonder if Americans would be better served with accurate history instead of rosy myth making. At least theoretically, in a democracy an informed population should be able to make better decisions than a deluded one.
The script, music and structure seem pulled out of WW II films, despite the one original element — the Un-Soldierly Seven’s campaign to retrieve Western art classics stolen by the Nazis. The poster calls the yanks’ adventure “the greatest art heist in history.” Nope, that would be the Nazis’ huge theft of which the Americans — with of course merely token help from France, England and Canada’s contribution, Matt Damon’s French — managed to recover only a large portion. 
As Affleck did, Clooney’s script mixes humour, bristling character relations, and dollops of sentimentality, as if a spoonful of sugar is needed to make a fake history lesson go down. Like Affleck’s invented airport chase, here the yanks blow open a mine and retrieve and load 3,000 works of art, including a large Michelangelo marble and the Altar of Ghent, in the few hours before the Russkys take over.  
In one respect Clooney does America some service with this film. He represents the nation as committed to culture. At least his heroes here have that commitment, if the country at large — e.g., the Republican Right — does not. Perhaps these heroes’ valour might convert those in the audience who have the power to arrest the nation-wide underfunding of art museums, the closings of orchestras and the abandonment of arts education. Matt Damon declines Cate Blanchette so as not to offend the Tea Party folk. Besides, culture is no guarantee of humanity. Nazi leaders loved their Goethe and Beethoven. 
The Brit’s death trying to save the Michelangelo Madonna explicitly raises the question: Is even such a great work of art worth a person’s life? As that character managed to overcome a career shame and die with new dignity, he might think it was. No-one else has the right to answer for him. 
But that question opens up another issue, which the film carefully frames out. Clooney valorizes the Americans for sending out a brigade to save art. To preserve their purity he whitewashes out instances of America's thievery and impropriety. Worse, the film excludes the American government’s refusal to save the Jews from Nazi annihilation, denying not just refugees but even the urging to bomb out the railroad lines to Auschwitz. So the Clooney character has no claim to the moral high ground when he says: “The Germans took better care of the paintings than they did people.” On this the American record is no better.
The “Jewish issue” is mentioned. There’s the army driver Epstein, a German refugee from Newark; the shot of the warehouse of Jewish dispossessions, including gold teeth; the Cezanne theft from the Rothchild collection; and the Clooney character’s facile rejection of the German officer’s antisemitism. But applauding America’s rescue of the art without acknowledging its abandonment of the Jews undercuts this film’s moral authority. 
     Of course, that would be another movie. Would a culture committed to feel-good commercialism ever make it?

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit

After directing five Shakespeare films — and a dozen others — in Jack Ryan, Shadow Recruit Kenneth Brannagh proves his deft hand at the commercial thriller. It works. In fact, there are so many thriller set-pieces you don’t notice there aren’t any sex scenes.                           They include a war-time shelling, love blooming in dramatic rehab, a close-quarters surprise assassination attempt, a high-tension nocturnal office invasion, a lavish car chase, a sewer chase and fight, several hand-to-hand combats and shoot-outs, a high-tech office tower chase, and the hero’s rescue of his kidnapped lady just as she’s about to have a vapour lightbulb — energy efficient — rammed down her gullet. But the real thriller set-piece is more cerebral — the CIA uses a mass of computer-stored details about everyday citizens to track down the Russian sleeper in quiet Pennsylvania.
In this prequel to the Jack Ryan franchise young Jack (Chris Pine) is equally jock and genius. Both physically and mentally he shows amazing stamina and ingenuity. The evil Russians’ scheme involves the same combination of material and abstract, a terrorist bombing of Wall Street coupled with a massive sell-off of American money to destroy the economy. Aptly, the CIA saves the day by accessing a web of stored minutiae. 
There lies the film’s political thrust. When scads of massively irrelevant info are mined for patterns the happy ending proves the necessity for all that spying the government has been doing even on private citizens, in the US and beyond. This ultra-modern deployment of numbers contrasts to the old-fashioned secret meeting at the old film, Sorry, Wrong Number.
The American right wing will feel justified in its government’s snooping because here it works. Ryan’s mentor, the welcome back Kevin Costner, dissociates himself from his government’s water boarding but happily — and fruitfully — works the unchecked spying.
The liberals will enjoy seeing their lad Brannagh succeed in a popular genre. So Shakespeare doesn’t rot your mind and narrative skills after all. But it’s the right that will find this film most reassuring. 

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Dallas Buyers Club

I’m trying to keep a balance on Dallas Buyers Club
The plus side is packed. Exposing the corrupt stranglehold American big pharma and the FDA have on the health system — that would probably survive even a functioning Obamacare — is as vital a challenge as any artist — or, dare we dream, politician? — could take on nowadays. The transformative but deeply felt performances of Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto are strong enough to crack the David Russell team’s Oscar grip. McConaughey’s reforming redneck is so compelling yet nuanced he saves the film from sinking into an Aaron Brokovich. 
Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee does a superb job of exploring a social terrain possibly as remote to him as that of his The Young Victoria. One felicitous touch among many: the film’s last shot is of Woodroof on a bucking bronc. The film closes on a freeze. By hanging up there forever he’s an image of his last 30 days lasting seven years. But also—one life/death affecting the stretching future. Does our hero last the ride, score some points, maybe even win a few bucks? We’ll never know. Because it doesn’t matter.    Just as whether he managed to transform the FDA into compassionate sense doesn’t matter. All that counts is that he tried. He took on the irrational beast and did what he could.  
But then there’s a bit of a negative side. For such an important social issue, the film still seems oddly commercialized. Somebody’s judgment gland failed when police buddy Tucker crops up every time our boy gets into trouble. Is the Dallas cop shop so small that one guy will plausibly be so often there? Those happy accidents give the otherwise well oiled plot a creak.
More problematic is the film’s sentimentality. The film grabs every conceivable chance to wring our heart-strings. There’s the ubiquitous Tucker’s drama in the grocery aisle, the tension between the dewy-eyed Good Doctor and her Bad Doc boss, Woodroof’s obligatory eruption at the hospital after Rayon’s death, the gang’s cliche clap at his return from court. I know this vat of sugar makes the social comment pill go down, but it risks acid reflux. 
Why couldn’t we have been led to think some more rather than just emotionally to gush? For example, are there not any reasons to justify the FDA’s insistence on testing drugs before admitting them? Have there not been nightmare cases on the other side? Any criminal activity without the present rationalization perhaps? 
     While I enjoyed the ride as much as anyone, I soon found myself wondering what a European film on this subject might have been. Without the driving motive to leave its audience feeling good — catharsized, “calm of  mind, all passion spent” — we might have had a film that provided a more circumspect and comprehensive approach to its so very important subject matter.