The Trip to Italy

Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip to Italy advances his meditation on the — ostensible — maturing of modern males, begun with his actors/characters Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip (2010). Both films provide the initial charm of putting us in the company of very bright, witty men as they cruise through beautiful landscapes and enjoy gourmet restaurant meals. Despite the air of improvisation, however, these are structured, very serious films. 

Perhaps this one’s key theme is suggested in the recurring references to Fellini’s Le Dolce Vita. The men seem to be living “the sweet life.”   But as the woman photographer reminds us, that film purported to be about the glamour of Rome but was in fact an exposure of the shallowness of its characters. So is this.

As in the first film Rob and Steve seem to live through the films and TV shows they’ve seen. Rob is only authoritative and confident when he does his Michael Parkinson. Otherwise he sinks into Hugh Grant. Their comic strength in variously successful impersonations is actually their weakness as human beings. Their constant flow of impersonations suggests an inability or reluctance to speak as themselves, to reveal anything sincere or meaningful. Their conversations are all technique, no content. It's left to their pregnant assistant to draw life lessons from the movies they cite. In both her critical intelligence and pregnancy she represents a  maturity, fertility and fullness all the men lack. Rob tells her of his infidelity as if he needs her approval or criticism. She won't oblige. 

Moreover, for all the beauty of the settings and the charm of the food they only speak in film references. They seem unable to experience anything directly and intensely. Even Rob’s dream is a replay of the Godfather II revenge assassination. 

They hardly ever talk about their spectacular meals. This is surprising since their commission is to review the restaurants for (cue: another reference to vicarious living) The Observer. Moreover, their entire experience is restricted to luxury hotels and restaurants. That puts them into an impersonation of life. They live in a film and their life experiences are filtered through — i.e., restricted by — their vocabulary of films. Perhaps the petrified Vesuvian figures are their emblem, once living beings now frozen into a box/sculpture/film. 

In a typically resonant scene, when Rob’s wife is too busy to hear his news about his Hollywood film job — a Michael Mann-ly film! — he petulantly retreats into an ever-boyish Dustin Hoffman act. He then implicitly decides to resume his affair with the blonde deckhand. We see the realization of his first night with the woman, but only infer Steve’s resurrection with the photographer. The fling is more meaningful to the adulterous manchild Rob than to the older, divorced Steve.

That contrast runs through the film. Where Steve empathetically wonders about the human behind the petrified corpse, Rob turns it into a foil for a comic routine, using it to score points off Steve. Rob is the more free-wheeling and antic, Steve generally more tense and subdued. The new ending is a marked advance on the first film’s. There Steve returned to his posh, ultra-modern flat and seemed sapped by its vacuity. Here Steve brings over his bored teenage son, spends time with him, then announces he is selling his flat to buy a house near his ex’s, so his son will more easily come visit or even live with him. Steve is growing up.

One reason is both men’s growing sense of their mortality. In the first film they played at roguish blades. Here they’re aware the young beauties don’t see them anymore. Their Batman Caine, Bond and Brando impersonations echo aging, death and decay. Hence their graveyard scenes, especially the tombs of the ex-pat Brits and the long dead Romantics. Special attention is paid the freest-wheeling, Byron, whose near-acronym name is only a taunt to Brydon and his life. There is even an implication of sexual defensiveness and dread in their running line of homosexual jokes. They have no other way to express their mutual affection than by ritual insult.  

     In this series the broadly talented Winterbottom directs two very good actors as men whose media-ted lives have detached them from genuine experience and intimate relationships. As usual, the road trip dramatizes the heroes’ psychological journey. Steve advances; Rob is still running on the spot, though heavier. 

King Lear -- Stratford, Ontario, 2014

I think it was G. Wilson Knight who first pointed out that the Fool and Cordelia are never on stage together. They may have been played by the same actor. The Fool disappears in the storm scene. It’s an ill wind. He’s made redundant when Lear starts spouting the Fool’s kind of mad compulsive wisdom. Knight’s point is that when Lear, cradling Cordelia’s corpse, says “My poor fool is hanged,” he speaks from a higher understanding, perceiving the actor behind the role. 

It’s the birth of meta-theatre. It's a reminder that Shakespeare is still ahead of our avant garde and our theoreticians. Not that it didn’t happen before. When Thomas Nashe wrote Somer’s Last Will and Testament his speaker was both the season and the actor, Will Somers. In Elizabethan theatre prologues and epilogues often flirted with the boundary between actor and character. But out of such a casual frisson Shakespeare fashioned a major theme.

I didn’t realize — or as embarrassing, have forgotten — how many other times this happens in King Lear. Blind Gloucester remembers that the first time he saw mad Tom, he thought of his banished son Edgar (who was playing Tom). The post-mad Lear sees Kent in the servant Caius, whom he hadn’t recognized before. In a comic replay, the Fool pretends to see Lear’s vision of a daughter: “Cry you mercy, I took thee for a joint stool.” He sees only the “actor” stool  but now playfully pretends to see beyond to the imagined character. The rejected Cordelia’s suitors split on this: one sees the character beneath her new role of shame, but the other is stuck on her apparent reduction. There’s even a reversal. When Edgar in disguise refers to Gloucester with the generic honorific “father” Edgar’s role-playing conceals the fact he is indeed addressing his father. In these instances we are aware of our actor playing a character who is playing another role.

The awareness of the actor within the role parallels the layers of physical reality in the Edgar-Gloucester scene at Dover. As Peter Brook contended, the physical setting works on several layers simultaneously. The basic level is the stage floorboards. But that floor plays the role of the British landscape where the drama unfolds. On a third level Edgar as Tom persuades blind Gloucester that they are climbing to a cliff at Dover. The fourth is when Edgar as local rustic persuades Gloucester he has fallen a dramatic distance to a lower plane, and has been miraculously preserved. For all the imaginative overlays the basic reality — the “actor” — remains the unaccommodated floorboards. 

This device points to one of the play’s major themes. The wide range of roles individuals play — along whatever spectra of authority, power, wealth, station, favour, etc. — are but superficial overlays on the essential human, the bare forked animal, unaccommodated man. From this springs director Antoni Cimolino’s take on the play. He finds a contemporary compulsion in the play’s alertness to the predicament of the Toms whom Lear first encounters here: the homeless, the abandoned, the afflicted. He realizes: “I have ta’en/ Too little care of this.” When Gloucester gives his disowned son Edgar (as Tom) his purse he says “distribution should undo excess/And each man have enough.” 

With those prompts in the text Cimolino adds a new framework to the play. In a dumbshow before the first scene a few ragged peasants scuttle about the stage, one warms at a fire behind, two curl up for a cold sleep. When the play opens at the court, the royalty appear in the context of the neglected underclass. Lear’s ensuing division of his kingdom among his daughters seems a trivial Upstairs to the radical Downstairs of the kingdom’s division between royal Haves and peasant Have Nots. The peasants make a few silent appearances thereafter. In the last scene one puts his hand on the new king’s shoulder, both bracing him and reminding him of his responsibility for his lesser subjects. To the play’s compelling vision of the human condition Cimolino adds the — neither redundant nor insignificant — reminder to neglectful governments, whether America’s Tea Party, the Canadian and British Tories or the abundant Putins.

To this powerful production I had only two troubled responses. One was playing Kent/Caius as a younger man than the  references to his white beard would direct. The older man’s abuse in the stocks would set up the harsher treatment of Lear and Gloucester, as his physical strength would prepare us for Lear’s despatch of Cordelia’s hangman. An older Kent would more sensibly be preparing to follow his old master, as by implication the older Fool already did.

My second reservation was the spectacular storm opening after the interval. The fact that Stratford can stage a thundering realistic storm doesn’t mean it should. Indeed, given the play’s faith in reimagining the physical stage in the Dover scene, one might have trusted the poetry and the performance to convey the storm without all that thunder and smokescreen. Especially as the returning audience has to shift back into the poetry gear, drowning out the language in the noise and the performance in the smoke was unproductive. Some very pertinent passages were lost. Even the loud Lear was more dinned against than dinning.
     Though not as brilliantly nuanced as his Merchant of Venice last year (see my blog), Cimolino’s King Lear was still a remarkable, moving experience.

The Giver

     In both Lois Lowry’s book and Phillip Noyce’s movie, The Giver pulls a dystopian world view out of a basic adolescent frustration. Jonas and Fiona discover first stirrings of love — but any physical demonstration, or even the use of the word, not to mention respect for the emotion, is severely forbidden by the adult world. As any teen would understand, the grownups have forgotten what love means. 

That grey world is bereft of emotions, memories and humanity. Hence the film’s palette from the 40s, film grise. Jonas’s original assignment is — as Receiver — to receive the race’s memories from the Giver. In the latter role Jeff Bridges is the depository of all experience and wisdom — in other words, the Anti-Dude, a reversal of his persona. But when he spurs his young charge to break his fetters and the restraints that oppress the entire society, the Dude rises again. 

The film’s broader statement is our loss of humanity when we try to reduce life to the safe and the neutered. Without pain, grief, war, we miss the positive extensions of love and faith and hope. In the film’s ultimate endorsement of adolescent solipsism, Jonas has only to sled through a vaporous barrier and he will restore the entire community’s lost collective memory, recovering their lost emotional spectrum. One sentient kid can save mankind. This is Footloose on steroids. Rather than the teen having to bend to the world's will, the world here bends to his. No wonder this is such a popular YA narrative.

Fiona’s professional touch with infants and Jonas’s commitment to baby (angel) Gabriel contrast to all the other characters’ unfeeling treatment of babies. The heroes’ instincts emphasize the unnaturalness of the system (which derives from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, inter alia). Gabriel’s name echoes his Biblical forbear who heralded the new kingdom. His extraordinary patience through the arduous wintry trek suggests he already senses the seriousness of his mission, so he’s not going to act up. A worthy model for every infant seated behind me on any flight.

As the society’s head Meryl Streep’s capacity to teleport herself anywhere and to materialize and dematerialize there at will has the incidental effect of embodying the insubstantiality of her power and principles. In contrast, the Giver can rematerialize a scene from his past while remaining tangibly present. His powerful memory trumps her power of willful amnesia.
     The title suggests the Bridges character is the central one. No, it’s still Receiver Jonas, who grows into the title mantle when — after receiving the Giver’s range of instruction  — he breaks out to become a Giver himself, before his time. He gives Gabriel back his life, Fiona her first intimation of emotion, and his society their hearts and minds back.

Snowpiercer

South Korean director Joon-ho Bong’s first English film, Snowpiercer, spells out its political theme rather explicitly. Our world depends upon order. Its pragmatic rulers will use all means to sustain a rigid class structure, with everyone knowing their place. When the underclass revolts — as it does here — the derailment is catastrophic. The plot, then, is more reactionary than we might think of a film that celebrates a brave, gory revolution.

The film is a post-apocalyptic version of the 15th Century story of the ship of fools. Mankind is represented as a cross-section of human types on a voyage together. It’s one of our most recurrent plots. In Stagecoach it was a trip to Lordsburg.  The genre anticipates the ‘60s insight: Life is a trip. 

Here the Narrenshippe is a railway train circling the frozen wasted globe carrying the only survivors of a humanly effected ice age. (Take that, damn global warming advocates!) The deep-freeze is a more cinematic spectacle than a meltdown would be, but it mainly serves as a metaphor for the frigid heart that allows the inhumanity of an unyielding class structure.

The railroad owner Wilford (Ed Harris) has made his train a completely self-supporting eco-system. We don’t see how he replenishes the carcasses in the refrigerator car (!). We see the aquarium that produces his sushi, though, so we can extrapolate. Elsie and her herd must be in another car.

The train emblematizes our class structure. The elites inhabit the front section, with their disco, fine dining, tailors, dentists, greenhouse, etc. The tail end houses the nebbishes, kept in vile conditions, to produce children to feed into the machinery that drives the train. The advantaged children are pampered in a sprightly classroom where they are fed eggs and propaganda, both hard boiled.

To preserve the balance the rabble are periodically thinned, including by the odd rebellion such as this one, which our hero Curtis (Chris Evans) is under the illusion he is helping the caboose sage Gilliam (John Hurt) mount. The idealist is gobsmacked to find his hero Gilliam has been in cahoots with the arch-villain Wilford all along. We sensed that when Gilliam tried to stop the rebellion before it went all the way. In this film the system can’t be beat without bringing down the whole world.

Presumably for commercial purposes the film tacks on as happy an ending as it can imagine. An avalanche set off by a rebel’s bomb destroys the train. That rebel has sensed the beginning of a thaw so he wants to get off. But the only survivors are his train-born, constantly stoned daughter and a five-year-old black boy Curtis has rescued from the gears. 
     That pair don’t exactly promise the regeneration of the human race. Adam and Eve they are not. Especially not when a polar bear appears on the new horizon. We’re spared the really happy ending — i.e., the bear hands them a Coke — and the really depressing ending — i.e., the bear has a two-course meal. But those survivors are supposed to make us feel relieved that humanity wasn’t extinguished in that crash.The revolutionaries may have all died but their spirit lives on. Until the bear wipes its chops.

The One I Love

In The One I Love a therapist sends a married couple with problems off to a private country retreat. There each discovers their partner understands them perfectly and says and does everything the other needs and wants. This is obviously science fiction.

Here’s the sci fi element. The couple Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Elizabeth Moss) are perplexed when they encounter facsimiles of themselves (Elizabeth Moss, Mark Duplass) who embody everything each wants in their partner. For Ethan the New Improved Sophie makes bacon with his morning eggs. For Sophie the N.I. Ethan finally takes responsibility for his recent infidelity and begs her forgiveness. For both, the surrogate sex is great — as well as just being that long lost sex. 

It’s sci fi like A Midsummer Night’s Dream is sic fi — avant le lettre. Something supernatural irrupts the repressions and disguises to rearrange the way to love. It’s also like the recent Her (see blog) where a schmuck finds the perfect love in his cell phone voice. But she becomes so human she gives him all the problems he’d find in a real woman he tried to dominate. So the phenomenal doings here expose the current romantic reality. You get the erosion of love, mutual recriminations, the yearning for past selves and relationships, the impulse to betray, the distrust and anger — and this is a couple trying to make the marriage work. As they find in their anniversary dip in a stranger’s pool, it’s cold and disappointing because you can’t recreate the past. Nor recover the person you used to be or once married.

Joke One is the title. It’s a song phrase that doesn’t quite fit. The Two I Love would work, because Sophie finds herself also loving Ethan’s replica, who loves her. Knowing he can’t compete with that idealization of himself, Ethan tries to win back Sophie, even though he’d miss that bacon. But as the film — and our real life romantic and/or marital -- institutions remain phallocentric, against his intentions Ethan … spoiler alert … brings home the bacon. It’s a happy ending all around, because the false Ethan and real Sophie fell in love, so the real Ethan’s error gets the others what they want — and himself the ideal wife instead of the flawed he felt duty-bound to retrieve. The film doesn't settle for the heroine's loss of ideal lover in The Purple Rose of Cairo: ("Alright, so he's fictional. But nobody's perfect"). Here the couple both get to keep their fictional ideals.

Joke Two is the therapist. Casting Ted Danson — whose persona from Cheers on is of an amoral callous rake, despite his happy marriage to Mary Steenburgen (who’s heard as Ethan’s mom on a phone message) — alerts us to something shifty in the works. And sho nuff, he’s a mad genius running real couples through a cycle of lure and imprisonment. To be freed, a couple has to seduce another couple into staying there in their stead. It doesn’t make obvious sense but that’s sci fi.  Like marriage — or bachelorhood, for that matter — the idyllic retreat is a trap.
     This is a delightful debut by director Charlie McDowell, with eye-opening performances by Moss and Duplass. It brings the heft of modern psychology and counselling to the classic marriage/divorce comedy with if anything an increase in the fun.  

Are You There

There’s no question mark in the title Are You There because the question is the answer. Matthew Weiner’s black rom-com is about characters who try to discover their authentic selves. To ask if how you’re acting is the real you is to begin to discover who you are.

One striking scene visualizes characters living out of whack. TV weatherman Steve Dallas (Owen Wilson) lies sleeping on a sofa while all around him, at silent comedy speed, his best buddy Ben (Zach Galifianikis) races through a day or two of frenzied time killing. Combining a still and a fast-action within the frame is an emblem of living as a divided being. 

Each character has a wide range of potential selves. The apparent ideal is the beautiful free spirit Erin (Naomi Lavette). She was married to the much older man whose funeral calls son Ben and buddy Steve out to Amish country. If Erin seems the stereotypical hippy she’s a winning, warm embodiment. Though Steve once rails at her -- not entirely inaccurately -- for being a wispy tumbleweed, she brings Ben and Steve the stability they both need — in the conventional hippy free love kind of way. Her range is Mother Earth and Tumbling Tumbleweed.

Steve opens the film with an empty protestation of contentment. “Honest, every morning I wake up happy.” This turns out to be a set speech he delivers to his every pickup, explaining why he enjoys being single…yet he always senses he might be missing something. By leaving that last door ajar he wins them all — and even gets the girls to pick up the tab when his plastic always fails. He  is so locked in that routine he uses it on a call-girl, not the expected recourse of a swaggering local TV star. 

The most dramatic discovery is Ben’s. The family’s black sheep doofus, he’s a bipolar nut bar who indulges his every flush of impulsive egotism, however destructive. He ends up a sensible businessman with the integrity to fulfil his promise of giving Steve the huge farm he inherited and the courage to start a new, simple life, perhaps with the single mother Allie (Jenna Fisher) in his complex. Now his complex is a residence, something he can live in. The film closes on him musing on the connection between the Amish farmer with his one-horse wagon, and the plastic red horse Allie’s little son is riding. The animal and the plastic here bespeak a simple genuine pleasure.

In minor key rediscoveries, Ben’s sister Terri (Amy Poehler) mellows from litigious shrike, taking her sterility frustrations out on others, to a respectful sister, easing Ben back into the family. They tear down the past to build a more useful future. Sexy news anchor Victoria (Alana De La Garza) converts to off-camera wife and fidelity. Steve anoints his better qualified assistant Delia (Lauren Lapkus) as his TV successor. Although she’s a meteorologist she still needs a boob job to get on camera. TV requires fakery. There’s a telling moment when they slog through a remote hurricane story. Ben lolls in his chair, while Delia curls up asleep under the counter.

For all Steve’s initial swagger he’s clearly not at ease with himself. Erin diagnosis his veil of charm intended to prevent any real relationship. The old Steve plays cavalier at his job, arriving at the last minute, usually high. When to win Erin he goes straight, he abandons the fakery in his performance. Instead of losing his on-camera effectiveness he discovers he has an off-camera self. That works even better on-air and, more importantly, it sends him back to Erin and the farm. Reunited with Erin the ex-weatherman knows better than to come in out of the rain.

If the script went further perhaps the starstruck meteorologist Delia will some day see past her new boobs and look for her more authentic self. Self-discovery is a process, one misstep after another. 
     But that would be another movie. This one is quite rich and enjoyable enough. In fact, it doesn’t deserve the reviewers' tepid reception. I think had it not been written and directed by the Mad Men whiz Matthew Weiner, it would have been more warmly embraced. Because it’s so different, our expectations are disappointed and we conclude he went wrong. On the contrary, to his credit he slipped into a modern setting and a predominantly comic genre, and conceived a fine oddball cast of characters and some very funny lines and scenes. In its thematic concern with apparently gifted and successful people feeling hollow, craving more authenticity in themselves and in their lives, this film is clearly of a piece with his Mad Men. Weiner didn’t sell out. He moved on.

Night Moves (2014)

Night Moves is about unintended consequences. In the first scene an earnest filmmaker shows her earnest ecological documentary to an audience that worries the film may turn people off their environmental concerns. The enormity of the problem may breed despair. 

Not to make that mistake, Kelly Reichardt makes her film a breathtaking suspense thriller. In Oregon two brothers and a rich daddy’s girl blow up a dam. They intend this as an attack on the capitalist corporation that is sacrificing the salmon so people can talk on their cell phones. 

In the pure Hitchcock moment, just after they’ve left the bomb-boat stuck to the dam, they espy a distant cop studying the situation. They freeze, then decide to go back to arrest their plan. In that moment we make our commitment. We want them to let the bomb work. As we want Marion Crane’s car to take that last, gurgling drop in the Psycho swamp and Marnie not to get caught by that cleaning woman during her robbery. We get our way, though we only hear not see the dam get blown up real good. It’s a low budget — but artful — film.

The plan isn’t especially well thought out. Idealists are like that. Nobody reads it the way it was intended. Correctly, a colleague at hero Josh’s gardening co-op dismisses it as Theatre not Politics. Worse, a camper sleeping out is drowned by the flood. That throws both Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend Dena (Dakota Fanning) into conscience issues. When she starts blabbing he kills her at her spa job. How did Rabbie Burns put it? The best planned lays of mice and men gang …. Something like that.

Josh’s older brother Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) is the worldlier bro, an ex-con, pragmatic enough to bed Dena when Josh goes out for their pizza. As the rich girl provides the $10k to buy the doomed boat, Dena seems light as a revolutionary, acting out a thrilling role. They make Josh seem the purer idealist and his intended murder all the more disturbing. Killing the girl strips him of any virtue. He can properly call the drowning an accident but not this suffocation in the steam room.

Harmon advises Josh to get really lost, to disappear. The last shot pretends he has. Applying for a job in a camping goods store, he loses his confidence when confronted with a form to fill out. It asks what other names he’s worked under. As if it knows. The film closes on a shot of the store’s long aisle window. Josh isn’t in it, as if his old being evaporated in that steam room smother. The few people we see there are yapping on their cell phones, impervious to the initial environmental concerns, with no other function but — as any mirror scene does — give us pause for reflection.

My favourite line is Harmon’s “Cash, that’s the poor people’s money.” Rich people don’t need cash because they can charge everything down to the future, including the cost of tomorrow’s salmon for today’s energy. It’s the poor who don’t have a future, no credit, so have to pay as they go. It’s no longer the meek who will inherit the earth.

The title -- also the name of a fine Arthur Penn flick --  is the name the couple gives the boat they bought for the escapade. The thing about unintended consequences is that they make everything we do, however carefully planned out and executed, moves made in the night, the darkness, without any certainty or clarity. When you take your position you take your chances.

 

Calvary

In confessional, a parishioner tells Father James he will kill him in a fortnight because Father James is good man, an excellent priest,. His murder would be a shock to the church that countenanced the man’s boyhood sexual abuse.

Despite knowing who his threat is, Father James spends the time ministering to his parishioners — including his killer’s domestic issues, preserving the sacred privacy of the confessional. He gets a gun but at the last minute throws it into the sea. He plans to escape to Dublin but changes his mind as he boards the plane. 
     What prompts that change is seeing two airport employees idly chatting as they lean over a coffin. Inside is a good man who was killed in a car crash with drunken teenagers. Father James is strengthened by seeing the casual way in which that victimized innocence is treated. There is no respect there, no overall sense of holiness or decency, just two yobs leaning over a box. That revives Father James’s conscience and he returns to face his fate.

The dead man’s wife is the only character here who has no crisis of faith. She knows her husband was a good man. Though in pain, she accepts his — what we would think is Absurd — random death. She appreciates the kindness the strangers have shown her. Serenely she is flying him home. Father James’s daughter, who looks like her — thin, delicate, wan — grows through the film from her shaky recovery from a suicide attempt to her own serenity, when she goes to the prison to talk to her father’s killer. 

As Father James told his daughter, the most undervalued virtue is forgiveness. After a broken romance caused her to despair, now her father’s sacrifice brings her a surprising peace. She forgives the troubled killer and can then forgive herself the lesser failures she has magnified. So when Father James goes back to confront his killer he is performing his function. He learned that from the good man of abused acceptance in the coffin.

In performing that role he — like Jesus — expiates the other’s sin. He saves his killer’s soul by exorcising the abused boy’s rage and helplessness. For the killer to forgive his abuser, the church and ultimately himself for the murder, though, the butcher needs the model of the priest’s daughter’s forgiveness. That distinguishes this killer from the one Father James visits in prison, a cannibal who feels nothing.

The film opens with a Calvary quote from St Augustine that catches this pivot. Don’t despair; one thief was saved. Don’t presume: one thief was killed. Christs hang on the priests’ barren walls. The cross is imaged in the daughter’s failed wrist-slashing: she cut across instead of down. And Christ’s calvary echoes in Father James’s. 

In contrast, with the exception of the new widow, every character suffers from the wealthy landowner’s confessed “disassociation.” The daughter is adrift, unmoored by the loss of her father to the priesthood after she lost her mother to a lingering death. The campy male prostitute constantly plays a gangster grotesque to avoid making any human connection. He’s most comfortable crisply shooting pool. 

In a parody of forgiveness, the butcher plays chess with the African who’s cuckolding him. As the butcher challenges the tipsy priest over his belief in God, the doctor wields a black gallows humour and tells the priest a story of incomparable bleakness. Both men are detached from the flesh they deal in and impervious to anything beyond it.

The landowner at one point takes down a treasured painting from his wall and urinates on it. Abandoned by his family and even his servant — to whom he later admits he never felt attached anyway — his wealth is meaningless. His 100,000 Euro check to the church means nothing to him, neither as gesture nor as value.The painting is Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which famously shows two wealthy overdressed men, a display of secular opulence, with in the foreground an anamorphic image of a skull that can only be seen from the side. In this brilliant composition, the askew view from the side undermines the impressive secularity seen from the front. A Christ hangs obscured in a distant corner. “Calvary” of course means “the place of the skull” — the place where we confront our mortality, as Christ assumed his.

This painting is an emblem of the film — but with a twist. From the frontal view our impression is of a troubled, pained, helpless secular existence, where even a good priest is immediately suspect for chatting with a little girl, where the Catholic church stands condemned for its greed and its abandonment of its children, for its hypocrisy.  But viewed from a different angle, from Father James’s perspective, there survives the reminder of grace, of forgiveness, of connection. 

One more point about that painting. It famously hangs in London’s National Gallery. In no way could this character own it. So what he’s so proud of having spent so much meaningless money to buy, what he thinks he is so dramatically despoiling to demonstrate his power, is — a fake. He was had when he bought it and his every estimation of it is wrong. The fake is as dissociated from its original promise as the character is.

There are three priests here. The young colleague and the older bishop look the same: thin, bloodless, lifeless, with no spark or energy to suggest a calling. In contrast Father James has the physical bulk of a Falstaff and erupts into that rogue’s drunken violence on the eve of his mortal test. Father James is a man of flesh and passion. Having had a daughter before he became a priest, he knows the flesh. He knows love, so he doesn’t need a picture to remember his wife. He has been a drinker. Behind his adoration of the beyond is a full fathoming of the here. He can cry for his murdered dog the way he couldn’t cry for his church’s young victims, for he too knew disassociation.  
     The film also has an unsolved murder. We learn the butcher was the abused boy, now the abused husband, and he kills Father James. We knew he warmed up to that revenge by burning down the church. But he says he didn’t kill Father James’s dog. So who killed Bruno? We’ll never know. But we do know that among the troubled souls whom Father James has been serving, indeed for one of which he gave his life, some admire him, some think he needs “to be taken down a peg” (the rival seller in spirits, the bartender) and at least one other thinks the good priest needs to be dealt a death. Amid such teeming evil the occasional man of faith, however challenged, is validated all the more.  

Boyhood

Boyhood feels less like a film than like an experience. The 12-year document of a little boy growing up feels unstructured. There are almost no dramatic climaxes. Indeed many key scenes (the mother’s two divorces, the father’s second marriage) happen off-camera. Leaps to another time period are marked by hero Mason’s advance in age. Perhaps one speech captures this point: We don’t seize the moment, Mason tells his new girlfriend, the moment seizes us. We live in the grip of the now. 

The title is dramatized by the first two shots: a clouded blue sky, then a close up of six-year-old Mason’s face.The sky is the universe and it’s both clear and clouded, the boy an individual life, ditto. The large sky and small boy are antithetical. Conversely, the wide open sky is an emblem of the vast potential of the boy's future. 
      The film uses one boyhood to evoke Everyboy’s growing through the tribulations of life. Young Mason faces a range of options to determine what kind of a man he will be. The two stepfathers want to remake him into a more conventional macho image. The first cuts his hair off, the second tries to remake his manner. Both are as brutish as the older boys’ swagger in the indoor camping scene.

The adults pass through parallel self-realizations. The father (Ethan Hawke) starts out as an irresponsible man child who grows into an effective father and eventually into a second family, where he achieves the maturity he tried to avoid. He goes from cool GTO to suburban van. But when he offers to help pay for Mason’s grad party he still has an empty wallet. When his loser friend Jim ends up with a very good rock band, he too achieves his kind of fulfilment even if it falls short of his desired stardom. 

Mason’s mother has the most dramatic growth. The single parent mother of two goes back to school, does a Master’s in Psychology and ends up a Psych prof with both kids in college. She careens through two other marriages in which apparently mature men turn into abusive alcoholics. She survives the most dramatic adversity. In an ominous cycle, her second marriage is to her professor, the third to her student, a mature veteran. The Psych prof proves a nut case. The second in the monotony of civilian life forgets the lesson that served him well in Iraq: to respect the people he deals with. Both men redefine themselves as forms of Corrections Officer. 

When Mason goes off to college, despite her pride and love his mother feels dashed. “I thought here'd be more.” In life as in movies we’re raised to expect high drama, great achievements, some huge experience. Mason picks up this point when he discusses being jilted with his dad. “What’s the point?”  There is no point, he replies, it’s just life, one moment after the next. There this film mirrors as it follows life, a sequence of small joys, challenges, and the beauties and stimulations of the moment. Nothing is big but the small resonates.

Of course the film is much more structured than it seems. A few lines are repeated across the decades, e.g.,”Who are you going to be?” Some of the song lyrics hit metaphoric points: e.g., “Arrivals and Departures are side by side;” “The day I was born I began to die.” The music embodies the passage of time. Like the film’s re-creation of the past, Mason’s dad makes him a CD of post-breakup Beatles singles as a facsimile of the band’s reunion. 

Director Linklater also notes the changing social background. The new tech unfurls, from the kid’s video games through the cell phone to the computerized selection of college roommates. The political background is limned in the soldier’s return from Iraq and Obama’s election campaign against McCain. Mason’s Dad’s second wife comes from a Republican, Christian rifle-toting farm family, antithetic to his nature.

There are also thematically focused scenes. When Mason visits his mother’s lecture she’s discussing the history of John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory,  which was in the air when that section was being shot. Bowlby contended that evolution required that primates develop secure bonds with their first caregivers to sustain them through life. That refocuses Mason’s, his mother’s and his sister Samantha’s plot-lines. If the idea wasn’t in Linklater’s mind when he started filming it certainly emerged as his actors, characters and narrative developed.  
     The last shot suggests a happy ending but without the clear closure we expect of a conventional film. As soon as they meet, Mason, his new roommate, his girlfriend and her roommate go hiking to catch a spectacular sunset. Mason and the other roommate are obviously attracted to each other, as they chat comfortably and avoid catching each other’s glances. The film ends on them together, in a close-up, with the sky between them. The sky and closeup replay the opening but now the solitary kid is a man with a beautiful woman. They’re not touching but they're connected. Their attachment is another small moment in the flow of small moments we’ve witnessed.  We know what we want to happen between them but we don’t know that it will. But that’s the point. All we have is the moment. That’s how life goes — and movies usually don’t.

Magic in the Moonlight

Magic in the Moonlight may be a minor Allen but it’s a superbly accomplished work. It revisits the themes especially of A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. As Stanley, Colin Firth supplants Jose Ferrer as the hidebound believer in only the material reality. This Stanley is an upper class version of the Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (which Allen drew upon for his previous Blue Jasmine [see separate blogs]). As Sophie Emma Stone plays the Mia Farrow waif who evokes the magic of a higher reality and love. 

The film opens in 1928 Berlin, the heady cabaret days that will soon metastasize into the Nazi conflagration. The formally suited audience for Stanley’s faux-Orientalist magic show and the glittery ball later in France exemplify the flippant pleasures that distract us from our mortality — and in this case the imminent war. Since Annie Hall Allen has reminded us that everything we do is a reaction to our sense of our mortality. There the cited text was Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death; here it’s Nietszche. Hence the songs "I'll Get By" and "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows."

Stanley is an ironic exercise of Firth’s persona as a stuffy, egotistical Englishman (Mr Darcy, Bridget Jones’ boss) who needs a sparky young gal (Emma, Bridget) to wake him to the pleasures and sense in life. Allen emphasizes Firth’s advancing age, his sagging jowls, and even greater priggishness and temper, which make his ultimate realization of his love and need for Sophie all the more dramatic. 

Critics have complained that Firth and Stone have no chemistry, but I’m sure that’s Allen’s intention. They meet as false fronts, she faking spiritual communication with the dead, he disguising his intention to expose her. Though they spar in the usual Ro Com way (ever since Benedick and Beatrice) they still seem an unlikely couple. He’s too committed to the rational and to exposing the fake to recognize any attraction to her until he’s told about it. She is too dependent on the commercial success of her fakery and has far more to gain by wedding her besotted moneybags. But there's the song: "You call it madness, I call it love."  In the end both choose vulnerability over the delusion of security. Death makes all security delusional. Both also choose honesty. If she were to marry the lad she deceived, her life would be based on a lie. If Stanley rejects her he would deny his need for the emotional connection he has averted all his shallow life. Each discovers in the other a truth about themselves. The arrogant priggishness in his first proposal to her -- indeed, to anyone -- where he recites her needs for him, masks his urgent needs for her -- and expresses his pathetic inability to face his vulnerability.

Allen has long balanced the certain limits on life with the hopes for some fantasy or illusion that will transcend it. As he reiterates here, we need illusions to get us through life, to make our ineluctable mortality bearable. So Stanley makes a career out of being a magician, providing showbiz illusions, and the alliterative parallel Sophie makes her living — with sumptuous prospects now — out of bolstering her gulls with assuring lies from the dead. Stanley’s fakery is on stage, Sophie’s in life, but both are in the same business, selling illusions. 

Stanley exposes fraudulent spiritualists because he wants to assure himself there is no spiritual reality beyond our physical world — and to maintain his monopoly on illusionism. Paradoxically, in the last scene when the exposed Sophie reappears in order to give the film its happy romantic ending, her very appearance — in the face of his flat statement that his proposal “offer is off the table” — shows the kind of intuition and understanding that goes beyond the apparent — what she has been professionally faking. She uses the under the table seance knocks to announce her presence.

In the face of death we grab what small pleasures we can find. We attach meaning and importance to things that may not in themselves mean much.  Whatever gets us through the night. Stanley realizes his love for Sophie by warmly remembering her smile. In Manhattan Isaac counts young Tracy’s smile as one of the beauties that make life worth living. Allen replays the planetarium scene as a reminder of the vastness which shrinks our lives into specks — and grows our every fugitive pleasure monumental. Sure Allen replays the same themes, scenes, imagery, Dixieland and period pop, but every recombination rings fresh and true — and pleasurable. In fact, Beethoven used the same notes over and over again too and who complains?

In quiet observant ways each scene rings true. Stanley rather brusquely converts to believing in Sophie because for all his arch rationalism he has craved a more ethereal beyond, some magic of which his illusionism is a smug parody. He earnestly tries to pray for his aunt’s recovery — but can’t maintain the pretence. Perhaps the film’s most brilliant scene is Stanley’s conversation with his marvellous Aunt Vanessa (Eileen Atkins). Every line each speaks reaffirms his fiancee Olivia as his ideal mate, yet the conclusion is the reverse, his need for Sophie. Like the material world the words go one way, but like the spiritual life the meaning and the effect work the other.

     The illusionist Stanley is the Allen figure. As a filmmaker Allen fabricates illusory dramas, making characters and events appear as Stanley makes an elephant disappear and himself reappear. In the melding of reality and illusion Stanley’s car trip with Sophie retraces the Grant-Kelly drive in Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief. For the world of illusions has its own continuity, like the material world, but with more flex.  Obviously the age gap between Stanley and Sophie evokes Allen’s controversial gap with his wife (and Mia Farrow’s with her first two husbands, Frank Sinatra and Andre Previn), but the heart will have its way. And given that we’re all dying, why shouldn’t we let it?

Lucy

Luc Besson’s Lucy is like the 1960’s mythology of mind-expanding drugs — on steroids.  
Like Kubrick’s 2001 it elaborates a cosmic history on a simple plot. In yet another of Scarlett Johansson’s Otherworldly Woman roles, an unwitting drug mule ends up infused with a powerful new drug that raises her use of her brain capacity from our normal ten percent (wrong scientifically but not a bad sci-fi premise, or explanation of current politics) to 100%. By that time she has controlled other people and material objects, time travelled and turned herself into and back out of a computer. Women are good at multi-tasking, in contrast to the fatally obsessive guys here.

Besson has always liked strong, effective women at the centre of his plots. He confronts man’s primeval dread of woman’s power, the neurotic reason for her suppression. Lucy is both a feminization of auteur Luc and the name given a three million year old skeleton of a hominid, so she’s both a person and an anthropological myth.

Normally a loose, hip airhead, this Lucy’s drug dose is implanted in her lower belly, so she discovers it in an image of both defloration and periodic cleansing. The drug erupts when a rejected man kicks her in the belly. That — and its first usage — makes the power a physical projection of her feminist rage at powerful men’s abuse if women. No other woman has a significant role in the film — we meet only her airier head roomie and a tattooist — because Lucy is Woman. 
     Lucy opens the film saying “Life was given us a billion years ago. What have we done with it?” She ends it with “Life was given us a billion years ago. Now you know what you can do with it.” 
     The latter invites “Shove it!” because most of the humanity we see here is venal, vicious, corrupt. But we also get Morgan Freeman as the humanistic sage who offers such illuminating bromides as “We humans are more concerned with having than being.” He probably just missed Woodstock too. But Freeman’s scientist and an earnest Parisian cop are enough to give the film’s view of humanity an upbeat turn. What we can do with it is live as if knowledge and morality matter. We can try to be aware. That’s what the inserts of molecular and astronomical fireworks boil down to.

For No Good Reason

11 Ways to Look at For No Good Reason

1. Charlie Paul’s film is about the life and work of Gonzo cartoonist Ralph Steadman. To make his case as an artist the film cites Picasso and Bacon, but his real progenitors are Hogarth and Grosz. Maybe Paul didn’t trust his audience to know really old art history.
2. In his seminal partnership (see below) with Hunter S. Thompson Steadman pioneered the new style of journalism in which the reporter becomes the story. That begat today’s newspapers where personal opinion columns drown out hard investigation. The new extreme is the internet where everyone can air an opinion — however tenuously connected to fact or to history — with equal authority. Check the debates on Gaza to see how hopeless this miasma of bigotry, misinformation and righteousness has become. (That’s not in the film but neither am I.)
3. It’s a fascinating demonstration of the process of art making. Still cartoons become animated. We watch a complex work grow out of a few improv splatters. For Steadman, the artist shouldn’t know where the work will end up. He just starts something and follows it to its peculiar end. Making art is making a discovery. Or it should be.
4. It celebrates the freedom of art. Steadman violated every convention in the book, not just in art but in the manners of culture. Thus a gentle mild-mannered man could unfurl a massive attack upon bullying and the suppressive whims of authority. Nixon was a ripe subject.
5. That rebellion is specifically masculine here. For the splatter artist the ink is like the urine or semen the macho strut will spray at the world. Hunter and Ralph are the Butch and Sundance of especially the 70s countercultural scene. The couple are so tight we’re surprised to learn Thompson had a wife, who was on the phone when he shot himself. Talk about a hangup. The film celebrates the artist as dominantly male, an obsolete but continuing myth.
6. It’s incidentally about the nature of wildness or madness. Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner surprisingly concludes Steadman was wilder than Thompson. The former’s imagination took him to further out and darker places than the latter’s pranks could.
7. It’s an album of those heady 70s when William Burroughs wrote gonzo literature and presided like an Athenian god (of opiate dignity) over the counterculture. 
8. It’s about Johnny Depp’s friendship with Steadman. The film is structured as the two friends’ visit. Maybe pretty boy Depp will broaden this arcane documentary’s box office. But he’s a legitimate participant. Having played Thompson in a film his presence signifies Thompson’s mythic afterlife, as his arms full of tattoos embody Steadman’s ink paintings. In both senses Depp brings the idea into flesh. Well, into the image of the flesh.
9. It’s a reminder that the realism of a documentary is essentially a pretence. This is about Steadman but it’s very much a film with a point of view and with as many overlaid themes as any fictional drama would carry (see above). There is nothing objective or purely factual about this film, nor need there be. Just remember that in a documentary as in a fiction there is a calculated purpose, inferable from what is included and what is omitted. Also, some scenes are played with actors. In that spirit Steadman says his drawings distort the subject but remain true representations.
10. Does the explosive unconventional artist inevitably sell out? The master of violent indecorum lives on a posh country estate (that few cartoonists in real life could afford). How he got that pad is framed out. But the film has a suggestive narrative frame. It opens with a small image of a taped Steadman talking about the making of this film. The image swells to fill/become the whole screen. The last image is of a small cut-out Steadman standing in front of a picture of that estate. The image takes him from flat to 3-D but also from an image of the real to an image of the palpably artificial. This follows scenes of Steadman signing huge editions (over 800) of “prints” of his work. They are described as “originals” because they are individually signed and numbered. But that doesn’t make them “originals.” An original would be a work that is conceived and made specifically for its medium, e.g., lithography stone, silkscreen, woodcut, etching plate, etc. The vaguer “print” suggests these are photographic or digital reproductions of drawings, not originals at all. They are “after” an original, and consequently of reduced value. It’s disappointing to see our profound rebel cashing in so cheaply. Not that the “prints” sell cheaply. He’s charging for his signature not his art. In some distant cemetery I can hear Hunter S. Thompson spinning — but whether he’s complaining or applauding I can’t tell.
11. Then there’s the title. Thompson would invite Steadman on an assignment “for no good reason.” But there was a good reason — an offbeat adventure that might lead to experience and art and at the very least— as they played it — both men’s swaggering display. But art is made for no good reason, for itself not for any more practical beyond. Unless of course you start selling your signature on its copies for big bucks. That’s not a good enough reason.