Thursday, December 31, 2015

Youth

The heart of Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth lies in the lead composer Fred Ballinger’s (Michael Caine) most famous work, Simple Songs. The queen will knight him if he conducts that number in a concert for her Prince Phillip. Ballinger refuses because he wrote it for his famous soprano wife Melanie to perform and she’s gone. Not dead, we eventually learn, but frozen into a silent scream.
Ballinger is embarrassed by his fame for that simple composition, instead of all his weightier works. Sinilarly, serious actor Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano) is regretfully best known for his heavily costumed role as a robot in some special effects trivia. By disappearing into the robot he disappeared his serious work. 
The film is woven out of such paradoxes. That is, it’s a stab at capturing our complex reality of life. Like Ballinger’s signature piece, the film is a simple story — a mixed bag of folks at holiday and rehab at a luxurious hotel/spa in Wiesel (i.e., “pointed”) in the Swiss Alps. But everything simple is complex. 
Ballinger feels that he can only relate to music and admits to having neglected his wife and daughter Lena. “You were right. Music is all I understand.” But he remembers his tremors when he fell into love at first sight of Melanie. His current detachment expresses his pain rather than the apparent lack of feeling. 
His buddy film director Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) is scripting his testament film but with his screenwriters is bogged down on the ending. In his Eureka moment he will allot the deathbed speech to the dying man’s wife, not him. But the film dies when that actress Brenda Morel (Jane Fonda) pulls out of the project, their 12th together over 53 years. She first explains she needs the money from a TV series she needs to prefer. But she goes on to declare his career dead, his last films crap, in a cruel candour all offered — of course — in the name of friendship. Love and hate bubble together there.
In a chillingly expressive shot, on the left side of the otherwise black screen Fonda’s old, veined hand talon-like caresses the side of Keitel's cheek. That’s Jane Fonda’s hand!?! The film is titled Youth but, paradoxically again, it’s about the old, the sere not the juicy. But here youth and age are the same telescope. Through one end it’s youth looking at the future in closeup. Through the other it’s the past, galloping further and further away.
With Pamela’s withdrawal, Boyle knows his project is dead but determines to start another. In his last scene with Ballinger he says “You say that emotions are overrated. But that's bullshit. Emotions are all we've got.” On that he strides out to the balcony and jumps to his death. Shattered in guilt, Pamela runs amok in the airplane and has to be bloodily subdued. With his gesture Boyle refuted Pamela’s disrespect: “C'mon, life goes on even without that cinema bullshit.” Another “simple song” here — bitterly comic but sombre.
Sorrentino gives the film’s last shot to the dead but beaming Boyle. That is, he gives the last silent word to Boyle’s faith in emotion. When Ballinger conducts his simple masterpiece for the queen he tears up over its emotional force. Against Melanie’s silent scream Ballinger proffers his musical articulation of his ardor. It speaks for as well as to everyone. As in the film’s last “simple song,” over the end titles, he’s fully content and out of control. 
So the composition that seems simple but beautiful turns out resonant and profound, especially in full orchestration. That’s the funny thing about life: the simple is so complex. Conversely, as the young girl compliments Tree about one off his serious films, he taught her that the big things in life are essentially simple. Everybody doesn’t have a clue what they’re about — so it doesn’t matter. As Ballinger early told Boyle, “Levity is also perverse.” Not here. Here the light is how we handle the heavy.
Hence too the tension between the intellect and the senses. The young masseuse speaks of the understanding that only touch can give. Ballinger is proud he never became an intellectual. The screenwriter scenes are a parody of literary creation. On the other hand, the sensually rich Miss Universe reveals an astonishing intelligence, dissolving that antithesis.  
     When Boyle hires the plain looking young hooker just to walk with him, he seems to be buying an emotion not a sensation. When we see the girl’s mother seeing her off to her “job,” Sorrentino seems to encapsulate the tradition of modern Italian cinema (as embodied by Fellini). The girl carries the neorealist exploration of poverty into the contemporary spa’s opulence.  
  Another moment of historical resonance involves Tree, who is at the spa studying the people for clues to his next role. We finally learn his role when he appears in costume, freezing all the white-clad diners — as Hitler. Tree pulls out of his project because “I have to choose what is really worth telling: horror or desire? And I choose desire. You, each one of you, you open my eyes, you made me see that I should not be wasting my time on the senseless fear….” Mutatis mutandis, that could be Pamela’s reason too.  As desire trumps horror both Boyle and Ballinger nurse charged memories of a childhood attraction to the same girl, unconsummated so ever fresh in their mind.
In several scenes the visitors are shot underwater, or part in, part out, whether in exuberant motion or in synchronized therapy. The film’s title image has “Youth” in the top half of a horizontal split image, lighter than age, unburdened by the subconscious of bubbling memories and experience, free to float (like Miss Universe nude in the pool). The imagery connotes the subconscious’s rise against the conscious.
     Hence the film’s abundant surrealism. Ballinger conducts a symphony of cows, cowbells and birds. A woman in the elevator slips in and out of a mask. Figures are isolated against vast expanses. A boy looms up on a bicycle ridden as if one wheel. Lena dreams her rival’s music video run amok. Boyle sees a field teeming with his films’ heroines, like restless spirits carrying his torments. Surrealism is another of those resonant “simple songs”  — simple in their random associations, complex in how they’re unpacked. Like youth, age and Youth.

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

The Big Short

I can’t think of another film like The Big Short. It explains the economic meltdown of 2008 with a rage at the fraudulent banking system and the government that coddles it. But this — in effect — lecture is presented as a satiric montage of cultural references woven through the stories of the five principals who bet on the mortgage bubble collapsing and taking the economy down with it. They bet their success on the economy’s failure. 
The five lead figures are variously outsiders who see past the industry’s smugness and are disturbed by the banks’ corruption and irresponsibility. Each has his own quirks and offbeat temperament — because only they can strike an outside perspective on the system. 
Paradoxically, the first to see through that system is the one-eyed maverick, Michael Burry, an MD turned investment broker. We’re not told what kind of doctor he is, but to through Wall Street like that he must be a proctologist. In the kingdom of the willfully blind the one-eyed man is king. 
In contrast, the Standard and Poor exec who reluctantly admits the bond ratings are sham wears dark wraparound shades, that express her inscrutability and compromised vision. 
At least three — Burry, Mark Baum and Ben Rickert — are idealists, with an earnest desire to see justice served on the corrupt banks.  Charlie Geller and Jaimie Shipley are spirited young hustlers itching to crack the closed game. 
Our interest in the five engaging men gives this economics lesson a real hook. The human drama brings the financial story to life. Adding to the film’s humour and wild spirit, director Adam McKay tosses in comic inserts. In a bubble bath a sexy champagne-sipping blonde explains one matter of high finance, a famous chef another.
     To distance itself from its corrupt characters, sometimes a character admits to the camera that a scene didn’t really happen the way it’s being played. Sometimes for emphasis he tells us that an outrageous scene actually happened that way. This reminds us we’re watching a story more truthful than the usual “based on…” fictionalization. This is our financial system and government at “work.”
The montage of shots from the media, from a tent city, from activities across the American social spectrum, make a key point about this bursting of the mortgage bubble. The drama didn’t happen in isolation, however detached the moneymen may be. As the retired Rickert reminds his two celebrating colleagues, the social collapse inherent in the short-sellers’ success means thousands will lose their jobs, their homes, their pensions, their futures, their families and lives. The mortgage bubble didn’t happen in a bubble but with wide-ranging and real, tragic consequences for thousands of innocents. The cultural references remind us that the cut-throat capitalism we see here is not a freakish exception but indeed an essential element of the capitalist culture.  
Indeed the film packages the dense information and historic reconstruction as a very human story, primarily through our engagement with the characters, but also through the comic play in the additional material. The sombre subject matter closes with the ominous warning that the same corrupt practice continues, with no reform to the economic system and virtually no punishment for the fraudulent bankers whose greed almost destroyed the world economy. But the human stories, the jokes, the rich vein of visual material, make this tragedy feel almost comic. The film doesn’t change the economic fraud or end the greed, but it makes the hard lesson not just palatable but a pleasure. 
Perhaps the film’s key justification is the quote from Mark Twain: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.“ Now we know how wrong our trust was in our economic system, in our banks and our brokers, and in the government that’s supposed to place the common weal ahead of its rich friends’. 
     From novelist Haruki Murakami comes the climactic resignation: “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.” Bernie Sanders must love this film.

Sunday, December 27, 2015

Carol

In the vote between convention and passion the eyes have it. Carol and Therese both express profound yearning and strength in their looks at each other. 
Therese in her innocence is wide-eyed, Carol powerful, drawn back and appraising. That difference catches the predatory element in Carol’s love and Therese’s various disadvantages in experience and power. 
In contrast to the two women’s emotional looks, a slammed door window frames husband Harge’s angry, violent eye. He has isolated himself, framed himself out of his wife’s emotions and in refusing to let her go imprisoned himself. 
Until Harge threatens to sue for sole custody of their daughter, Carol is confident, wealthy, assured. She dresses elegantly, in expensive style, asserting her blondness even in the fur she flaunts, against the more conventional dark mink of the era. Young Therese dresses trimly, in neat plaids and restrained colours and lines, except for the flourish of her bold,  ballooning tam, which anticipates the courage in her unconventional sexuality. The assigned Santa hat is a brief diminishment which wins her Carol’s first encouragement. By the way, in her gamin look Rooney Mara's Therese recalls Audrey Hepburn in The Children's Hour (1961), which restored playwright Lillian Hellman's original lesbian theme, discreetly changed to a heater premarital affair in the original adaptation, These Three(1936).
As in Far From Heaven Todd Haynes uses a 1950s setting, plot line, and characterization to address a  contemporary tension. Carol has the perfect ‘50s heroine response to life: “Just when it can’t get any worse, you run out of cigarettes.” But all the characters are frozen in the ‘50s confusion between love and desire and all live under the shadow of male-centered sexuality. 
The period setting reminds us that we’re still not entirely free from considering same-sex love a moral issue. Gay lovers have an easier time today but there remains a stubborn prejudice against following one’s heart “against the grain” of social convention.
When Carol accedes to Harge's custody demand she admits two motives. The primary is to give their daughter the best possible life, to minimize her damage by her parents’ conflict. But equally important, she can’t “go against the grain” of her own nature, neither as a mother nor as a sexual being.
That theme raises the film beyond “love story” and certainly beyond “a lesbian love story.” Love, after all, is a nebulous concept. Therese can’t get boyfriend Richard to explain what it is. It’s what he says makes her attraction to him different from the two women he’s already had sex with. (Did i mention that the film is set in the ‘50s?) 
Even when Carol tells Therese she loves her what do we know? Or they? Not much beyond the attraction they immediately had for each other — again, registered in their locked eyes across the enchanted department store. As Carol’s lifelong friend and ex-lover Abby notes, the passion erupts and then “things change.” The ardor once faded, what relationship survives? Confirming the ephemerality of ardor, Therese spots Richard dancing with his new girlfriend at the party.
The film’s main theme then is not lesbian love or even love in general but the related question: how can we determine what we want. As Therese admits, “I don't know what I want. How could I know what I want if I say yes to everything?” 
Of course always saying No is as restrictive as always saying Yes. When she recoils from the Times reporter, Therese says she doesn’t mind his premature kiss but clearly has to leave. From the yes she moves to her first tentative ‘no.’ Two exceptions result from Carol’s influence. The first is when Therese doesn’t wait to say Yes but takes the initiative to advance their relationship from friends to lovers. The second is when the “blossomed” Therese says no to Carol’s invitation to move into her new Manhattan flat. Otherwise Therese doesn’t know what she wants or needs and just goes with the drift. 
Finally Therese manages a yes and a no combined. When she declines another lesbian’s advance at the Village party she accepts her true nature and leaves to say yes to Carol. This time when they lock glances, Carol — at home amid her social and class peers — still finds another level of satisfaction when she sees Therese has returned. But it’s the ‘50s. She can only smile back.
     Both need what the other provides, including a rare intimacy. On the phone after their first break Therese says  “I wanna ask you things, but I’m… I’m not sure that you want that.” Carol, crying, says “Ask me things… Please.” For all her experience and power, Carol needs to be asked because she craves intimacy. She learns from Therese how to determine what she wants by determining, issue by issue, when to say yes and when no.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Joy

When Joy stands in the street in the snowfall at the end of the film the snow is obviously false — large hunks of blown bits of foam. But that’s the film: a real life soap opera about the mix of myth and reality that makes up the American Dream. That’s why the film opens on a soap opera scene as it occurs on the set, which we later see narrowed down and reframed for the TV screen. The film weaves together fiction and life, truth and lies, connections and betrayals, all tightly wound — like a self-wringing mop.
David Russell uses the real-life story of Joy Mangano to demonstrate the mix of ambition and failure, possibility and fiction, that makes up the myth that America is the land of opportunity where anyone can realize their dream.
For the bulk of the movie the title and the heroine’s name seem a bitterly ironic taunt. Joy knows no joy. The brightest kid at school, class valedictorian, a dreamy and creative fantasist and inventor, she leaves her brilliant future behind her when she abandons college to look after her just divorced mother. 
Mother Terry spends her life on her bed watching the soaps, leaving Joy to tend to her and Joy’s two tots. The soaps star real-life soap stars (e.g., Susan Lucci, Laura Wright) in an invented saga of the disasters and tribulations of a successful businesswoman. They are a retreat from reality for Terry but a bitter foreshadowing of Joy’s business life. Casting real-life soap stars as fictional soap stars is another variation on the mix of fiction and reality. So is casting Joan Rivers’ daughter as Joan Rivers. 
Joy’s husband Tony is a victim of the American Dream. The Portuguese immigrant dreams of becoming a successful singer. Two years after the divorce he’s still living in Joy’s basement rehearsing for his dead end local club gigs. He won’t be the next Tom Jones. He embodies the failure of the dream success. Still, he has the character to remain Joy’s friend and protector. He’s proved right to reject the advice forced on her by Joy’s financier and father.
In contrast to Tony is the Haitian plumber Toussaint, who comes in to fix a broken pipe under Terry’s floorboards but stays to break through her antagonistic shell into an apparent relationship. This is the American Dream working at a modest level, giving an immigrant the chance to live a modest success without unrealistic aspirations of glory. Toussaint has the character to live a realistic ambition that Tony lacks. 
Joy’s father Rudy is another modest American success story, a small auto body business owner. When he hooks up with a wealthy widow, Trudy, he succeeds her Morris whose hard work left her with a fortune. Joy turns to her to help fund her invention of an advanced mop, but Trudy keeps her in constant uncertainty and humiliation. Even after her success, Trudy and Rudy force her into premature bankruptcy, Rudy undermines Joy’s business strategy, and — as the narrator reveals at the end — lost an attempt to sue her for possession of her entire company. 
     This is not the Father Knows Best American family. To the contrary, Joy’s parents remain violently bitter even after their divorce. Rudy’s other daughter Peggy, by his first wife, is jealous of and antagonistic to Joy. She conspires with Rudy against Joy. At her lowest point, when it appears Joy will lose her mop patent and company to her fraudulent parts supplier, Rudy apologizes to her for having nourished her delusions of being special. 
The only positive figures in Joy’s life are her grandmother Mimi and her own little daughter. Joy isn’t presented as an American Dreamer but as a self-reliant, creative woman who, having been clobbered by life, resolves to pull herself out of the dump. The obstacles amass but she forges on. She doesn’t go on the shopping TV channel because she wants to become a star but because she thinks she can do a better job selling her mop than the channel’s star seller but hapless mopper could. Joy is a success because she knows her own abilities and does not accept either defeat or her family’s discouragement. 
Granny Mimi appreciates Joy’s qualities and encourages her. As the film moves between the reality and the fiction of American success Mimi continues as our narrator even after she dies. Fiction outlives reality.
That’s the thing about the American Dream. There is an element of truth to it — America is the land of opportunity. But there are no more guarantees about its rewards than there are about the prospects of a successful marriage — as Rudy drunkenly and viciously rails at his daughter’s wedding. America, like families and like life, offers opportunities but with it dangers, threats, betrayals, disappointments and terrible dishonesties. Ultimately there is no dream promise in America, only what you make and find in yourself.
     Perhaps the film’s central emblem is Joy’s mop. It’s a dense weaving of cotton strands that are far more absorbent than earlier mops. Like Joy it can simply take more. It can be wrung without touching the dirtied head, which can be removed and tossed into the washer. This film is a dense, complex, inventive twist of a story that comes clean on success and failure in American families and business.  

Friday, December 25, 2015

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The fun comes from the action-packed plot and the great special effects. The emotion comes from the reappearance of treasured old characters and their original actors. First comes Han Solo and Chewbacca (“Chewy, we’re home”). Then Han meets his old love Princess Leiea (“Your hair is different”). Ultimately the Resistance — and we —  reconnect with Luke Skywalker. The powerful Jedi is offered his old light sabre in the hope he will return from his retreat to assume the responsibilities of government. And yes, C3P0 and R2-D2 also return. 
  The film ends on Rey’s extending the light sabre to Luke. Does he accept it? A modest proposal: Perhaps a sequel might reveal his response?
But the core of the film rests on the growth and resourcefulness of the two unlikely heroes: the woman scavenger, Rey, and Finn, the black man of conscience who shucks his white Storm Trooper shell uniform to flee the vicious First Order. “Because it’s the right thing to do,” Finn helps the stranger Poe Dameron. Finn and Rey rise from their respective underclass. Finn knows Solo as “the Rebellion General” but to scavenger Rey he’s “The smuggler.” Each identifies with a different aspect of the hero.
That’s where we find the film’s primary reflection upon our times. Two resourceful underdogs bring new spirit and will to the side that would turn The Force back to the service of humanity — and all its mutant offshoots. It's a call to preserve civilization.
While Princess Leia rules the isolated Resistance, in hope her brother Luke will return to fulfil his destiny, the other woman, Rey, provides the real courage and technical savvy. “I’m no-one,” she identifies herself to Maz Kanata, another version of the power of woman. Phasma is the female power on the Dark side but is only a female version of the worst male values. She's more metallic than human. So asked what to do with her Han says: "Is there a garbage chute... or trash compactor?" The metaphor puts her in the material Rey dealt in before discovering her higher mission: saving humanity. Rey is utterly self-reliant. When she first connects to Finn she has to keep pushing away his helping hand; she runs ahead and ends up saving him more than he her. As she trumps even Solo, he almost offers her a job. She’s the hero of our times. 
As General Drux describes his plan, the situation may reflect our global political situation. The First Order is a heartless, vicious tyranny that seeks universal rule. As Drux relishes  “the end of the Republic. The end of a regime that acquiesces to disorder,” he can be read as proposing an end to the “disorder” of our freedoms. That evokes the sharia of ISIS. As the heroine is a Rey of light she is the antithesis to the radical Islamists' suppression and demeaning of woman.
To justify destroying the New Republic Drux charges it with lying to the galaxy while secretly supporting the “treachery of the rogues of the Resistance.” He sounds the ISIS charge to a global caliphate, or at least any fascist attempt at total power: “All remaining systems will bow to the First Order and will remember this as the last day of the Republic!” 
Supreme Ruler Snoke is less a man than a wisp of shrivelled evil that slips in and out of materialization, less a person than a malevolent idea. ISIS fits today, as the Nazis would have 80 years ago. 
In such an intergalactic plethora of humanoid forms, what god could possibly be made in man’s image. So the world of Star Wars is a world without religions. The First Order suggests an ISIS stripped of its religious pretence.
In antithesis to the Christian trinity, the new film doubles down on the father-son dynamic. This time the good father breeds a malevolent evil son. We long ago shared Luke Skywalker’s shock that monster Darth Vader was his father. Here the evil Kylo Ren is the son of Han and Leia, seduced to the Dark Side. He dedicates his command of The Force to evil. He has assumed Darth Vader’s helmet and sombre wheeze. But as he admits to Snoke, sometimes he “feels it, the call from the light.” In his showdown on the long narrow bridge with Solo he has to choose, as Snoke predicted, between his father Solo and false guide Snoke. He chooses the false father over the true, the Dark side over humanity. 
When Kylo Ren removes his helmet, shows his face and seems to submit to his emotional connection to his father, we have hope. “I'm being torn apart, “ he tells his father. “I want to be free of this pain. I know what I have to do but I don't know if I have the strength to do it. Will you help me?” Of course Han promises “Anything.” That flash of human vulnerability and feeling is what Adam Driver is brilliantly cast to deliver in that moment. Our hope is dashed. Solo draws near, till Kylo Ren impales him on his light saber. Solo still caresses his son’s cheek, forgivingly, before plunging to his death. 
When Kylo Ren ignominiously loses his climactic duel with Rey — not just to a woman but to a scavenger of junk — the evil empire he has served crumbles beneath him. The forces of humanity win out over the forces of night, characterized here as the dehumanized Storm Troopers and vicious Dark Side. 
The West’s current confusion before the cultural onslaught by radical Islamists seems to bear out Yeats’s prophecy in “The Second Coming: (1919):
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
         The best lack all conviction, while the worst
         Are full of passionate intensity.
The new Star Wars recovers the good guys’ conviction and passionate intensity. Hence Leia’s “Hope is not lost today. It’s found.”

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Seven Minutes in Heaven (2008)

Omari Givon’s Seven Minutes in Heaven is a modern study in survivor guilt. Instead of the Holocaust, here Galia survives a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Her fiancee, Oren, dies but Galia survives, scarred both psychologically and with serious burns on her body.
The film opens with Oren in his coma, Galia by his side, then he dies. It ends with Oren and Galia marrying. But instead of the wedding being a flashback the body of the film is a flash forward from the pre-narrative bomb scene. As one character explains, some souls are not ready to depart at their time. So they have a chance to see what their future lives would be. After that out of body experience they can make one change before they return to their bodies. 
In this case, Galia foresees her life without Oren and her seemingly accidental encounter with Boaz. This handsome engaging man turns out to have been the paramedic who kept her alive at the bombing. Though she and Boaz had been attracted to each other since the first time they met, at a Purim party, and though they make love now, she opts to recover Oren instead. Returning with Boaz to the scene of the bombing, she this time tells Boaz that Oren is still on the bus, so he’s recovered before the initial version’s second and fatal blast. 
The film brilliantly captures the psychology of a terrorist attack victim. The trauma haunts them. At the second Purim party Galia sees bleeding faces among the partiers. She imagines scenes with Oren. She spots a woman from the fatal bus on the street. 
The survivor can feel a crippling sense of unworthiness. Galia is withdrawn, standing apart even at Oren’s funeral. She is wary of any new relationship, even as her sister approves of Boaz. She feels guilty of Oren’s death because their quarrel made them late for their usual buses and put them on the fatal trip. She even feels guilty for not having responded to the suspicious young man on the bus, sweating as he revs himself up to suicide. Like so many Holocaust survivors, she feels guilt for having survived what so many didn’t.
Her burn undersuit is an emblem of her hypersensitivity. It’s like a protective shell she must wear to heal, protecting her both from the air and from her own compulsion to scrape her itchy skin. When she learns that her new lover was the paramedic she flees him and submits herself to harshly scratching her flesh, as if to mortify away guilt. Having embraced Boaz as a new life, learning his identity returned her to the bomb scene, her old life, her old guilt about Oren. Boaz doesn’t bring her a new life but a reminder of the old. After such an experience no forgetting is possible, nor any wholly new life free from the wounds of the experience. 
That may explain her decision to save Oren. She can’t leave him behind, nor presume to live a life as if that terrorist act had not occurred. Faced with lifelong guilt, loss and trauma she avails herself of the legend of the returning unready soul to save Oren. At their first meeting Boaz is dressed as Dracula. At first the costume seems paradoxical, because to Galia he is the purest giver, not drainer, of life. In context, however, he comes to represent her abandonment of her past life, her acceptance of her terrible loss, rather than the miracle of rewriting her life.
That soul story is obviously the stuff of legend not hard science. So this psychologically rich and politically attuned drama draws a happy ending out of a fiction. It’s like the miracle that saves the day in the otherwise hard-headed neorealist Miracle in Milan. So harsh is the life this film records that it takes an unbelievable miracle to find a happy ending. There is no completely happy ending without that fictional intervention.
The film does not get into the politics of Israeli life, who the suicide bombers were and what their intention was. Suffice it to expose the pervasive damage the terrorists did and the heroism of the Israelis who dealt with the murders and persisted to preserve their rich and remarkable society.
     The film implicitly raises an important reminder: Why Israel built that wall against the Palestinian terrorists. They needed it to stop the steady influx of suicide bombers, bent upon killing Jewish civilians in their buses, weddings, pizza bars, everywhere. It worked. Today, however, in their eagerness to condemn the Jewish state people often ignore the real cause of that wall and declare it proof of Israel’s supposed apartheid. This very moving, very insightful film reminds us of the terrible suffering that the wall was needed to end.   

Monday, December 14, 2015

The Ridiculous Six

Charging The Ridiculous Six with racism is the stupidest response to a film I’ve come across in years. It’s like complaining Gone With the Wind wasn’t a weather report.  
Adam Sandler wrote and stars in a satire of American racism, the current scene and its historic roots. Rejecting its use of Indian stereotypy is senseless. How can you expose America’s anti-Indian tradition without showing the anti-Indian tradition?
The first three shots establish that theme. Two signs read “No injuns allowed” and “Redskins keep out.” That reveals the white men’s inferior knowledge, humanity and spelling. His tradition of demeaning native Americans persists down to our own shamelessly stubborn Washington Redskins. 
Then the newspaper headline gloats “Cavalry Massacres Godless Apaches.” But as all the Sandler hero’s success is based on his “mystical shit” it’s clearly the Apaches who have a spiritual connection to the world and the whites who are the godless, driven by lust and greed.    
     Topping it off, the newspaper’s smug reader has only one functioning eye — which he eventually plucks out to join the ill-fated Left Eye Gang, only to find his colleagues in fact duped him and preserved the eyes under their patch. Can’t trust those whites, man. They’re not the men of vision. Indeed, this bigot can’t figure what five sacks of flour at 45 cents each should cost. (Clue: $2.25). And he’s the superior race? His physical repulsiveness should alert us to the film's disgust with his racism.
In this white world you can’t even trust your father. The most basic human responsibility has been lost. When the six’s vagrant dad (Nick Nolte) proves to have duped his son Tommy the betrayal works on both the personal and the social levels. Tommy leaves him to heaven, or at least to what in the cave will find him, preferring the superior ethic he learned as White Knife from his real father, the Apache chief who raised him. As the film's hero chooses the Apache way over the white, any charge of racism is blind to the film. You have heard the sound of one axe grinding. 
As the bad father betrays all his sons first by abandoning them and their mothers, then by exploiting them, the present finds itself betrayed by the past that created the mythology and values to which it adheres too long. The 19th century bred the 20th which begat our 21st. America’s present self-conception derives from the 19th Century with its highly suspect and dangerous myth that the whites brought a superior civilization to the ostensibly savage Indians. White America brought modernity to the desert but — far worse — an arid, sterile materialism, religiosity and fatal savagery to the spiritual people they conquered. And still suppress. That;'s what this spoof is saying.
The positive alternative is the titular collection of brothers who join forces to save their unknown dad. A village idiot, a Mexican, a guilt-riddled honky drunk, a mute monster, a black, the converted-to-Indian hero — this racial and class cross-section of unlikely brothers evokes the brotherhood of man that modern America continues to affront.  
To remind us that the western reflects our current culture the characters frequently slip into contemporary jargon and gestures. Hello: "That's way cool" is not classical Apache. Like any period drama, it seems to be about the Then but it’s really about the Now. If we didn’t still have a racist -- even savage -- America we wouldn’t need — or get — a film that traces its roots back to the white man’s conquest of the frontier and its prejudice against any non-whites. 
Hence the cliche Mexican with his beloved burro and the black piano-player who mercifully doesn’t know everyone knows he’s black so enjoys being used for music and sex. The Abner Doubleday scene offers exploited Chinese labourers for the opposing team, including one renamed Shortstop. As this scene dramatizes the beginning of modern baseball, the film embodies the roots of modern American racism. It’s a response to Sarah Palin’s brazen reaction to a black president — “Give us back our America.” — and the sad Donald Trump show that succeeded her. President Lincoln’s assassination also signifies the death of the Republican ethic.
     Like the classic comedy the film ends in a marriage. Here the motley brothers happily join the Apache community and the lovers overcome the usual obstacles to serve true love. Incidentally, one gang of villains convert to virtue, so there is hope for us. 
So that’s what the film is doing. It ridicules a current and historic evil. It shows racism in order to satirize and condemn racism. ”Just dumped some satire on you, General,” Mark Twain tells General (“Leave the Indians to me”) Custer. So the film is not brilliant. The Magnificent Seven it’s not — nor set out to be. Too many jokes are puerile, like naming native women Never Wears Bra and Beaver Breath, which stoops to the level of the vile man’s “Poca-hot-tits.” So it’s Mad Magazine humour, without the sophistication and elegance of Mel Brooks.
     But still, it’s a responsible, ambitious, serious reminder of how racist American culture has been — and worse — continues to be.  Hats off to Adam Sandler, and to his knee-jerk critics of his supposed racism: “You must be joking.”

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Room

The title is “Room” not “The Room.” The more general term makes the film about the space in our lives and in our selves and our need to escape whatever walls or restrictions that others — or we ourselves — have imposed on us. So our experience really is reflected in this freakish story. The film is about the vast room we have at our disposal not the small room to which we might accept restriction. 
Unlike most of us, this boy’s first five years are spent in a small enclosed shed with no other outside experience but a usually blank skylight sky and the confusion of realities on the wavering TV. No cable there, no proper connection. His Ma has nurtured his delusion that there is no real world out there, concealing their imprisonment until he is old enough to handle it — i.e., to escape. When they do get out she’s troubled by his slowness to make a “connection” to anything, but he does, first (of course) to Lego, which enables him to start building his own world, then to a neighbour pal. 
Unlike most of us, Ma, nee the lost Joy, had her high school joy and promise smashed by seven years of sexual enslavement. But as she was the anchor on her school relay team she’s the anchor in her Jack’s life. And he becomes her reason to survive. Their (non-umbilical) cord isn’t broken until well into their liberation. Only then does she stop breast-feeding him. 
The film ends with Jack and Ma going back to Room to say goodbye. Of course the past is not the same: the evidence has been removed but mainly, it’s not Room any more with the door removed. Its essence was restriction not space. The two leave restriction behind to embrace the expanse of freedom. 
But psychological restriction remains. Ma’s suicide attempt and the TV interviewer’s insensitive probing show her still scarred. Jack seems stable when he pulls out of his Ma’s embrace to go play with his new/first friend Aaron. This story is a bleak parody of Eden as a parable of our origin. Their captor “Old Nick” evokes Satan. 
Joy’s two “families” curiously contrast. Her relationship with her captor is a bleak parody of marriage. Jobless, Old Nick is a loser who asserts his false authority by enslaving and abusing Joy. Imprisoning Joy gives him a power and potency he lacks in real life. "Thinking is not your strong suit," he advises. Enough families, alas, live like that without the literal imprisonment. 
Joy’s one firm rule is to insist Old Nick will never touch or even see little Jack. She enforces that principle to the point of hysteria. She will save Jack from her contamination by Old Nick, later even denying his paternity. Once reunited, Joy’s father can’t bring himself even to look at Jack. For him, the boy embodies his daughter’s and therefore his shame. The boy’s father’s imposed restriction parallels the grandfather’s self-imposed containment.
In contrast, Joy’s mother Nancy’s new man embraces him in a sensitive, respectful manner. Jack opens up to him: “I had a dog once but he wasn’t real.” Luckily, Leo brings him a real dog, Shamus, a cozier creature than the big black lab who’s Jack’s first contact in the outside world.
     As Nancy admits, Joy’s was not the only life destroyed by her abduction. Obviously the parents’ marriage was another casualty. The father moved away and remains remote. But Nancy immediately accepts Jack. Her first words to him are thanks for saving “our little girl.” Jack saves her again by sending her his “strong” in the hair he lets Nancy cut off and bring her. In a touching irony, Joy’s horrific enslavement has not diminished her adolescent tensions with her mother. Bonding is like that, as restricting and yet as liberating as … the room through which we live. 

Monday, December 7, 2015

The Martian

The Martian centers on a triangulation. 
One point is the vastness of the cosmos. Hence the astronomical distances and calculations and the recurring shot of Mark Watney (Matt Damon) as a minuscule dot moving across the red landscape of Mars.  
The other immensity is the astonishing achievement of human technology. This works on two levels: (i) the science demonstrated in the mechanics of space travel and communication and (ii) the equally impressive scientific effects in the composition of the film itself. Cinema as well as science is celebrated in the film’s dramatic visuals. When Martinez jokes that Mark is “just a botanist, not a real scientist,” the gag makes all of science an index of  mankind’s achievement. Of course, it’s Watney’s savvy as a botanist that enables him to grow potatoes in his own excrement on Mars and thus to survive. Botany is the science of earth, here the balance against the science of space. 
The third pole, in tension with these two immensities, is the worth of the individual human life. However impressive the realization of space travel and man’s new technology, the film’s essential value is  one person’s life. The team members vote unanimously to risk their own lives to save their colleague. In the rescue’s climax two space-suited bodies float through space, clinging to a slender sash until they can clutch each other. 
That teamwork extends outward to the national community — when all America (i.e., CNN and Times Square) gathers to root for Watney’s rescue — and internationally, when China volunteers its advanced propulsion system to save him. For the latter to happen, humanity has to transcend politics. Both countries’ scientists have to do an end run around their respective governments. 
In the more conventional version of teamwork, two of the astronauts end up marrying and having a baby. All the examples of connection, teamwork, community, are based on the value of the individual life, which should — but does not always, or even often, ok, maybe ever — transcend considerations of the collective. Fiction reminds us what we should make our reality.
   The film draws on earlier fiction forms as well. Watney’s ingenuity recalls Robinson Crusoe and the Tom Hanks and Spalding affair. Pillaging the unclaimed seas, Watney styles himself Blondbeard the Pirate. The individual life is what traditional fiction has celebrated and it remains the primary value even amid the impressiveness of ultramodern science and the newly fathomed reaches of the universe. Watney recites his log as a reminder that all the splendours we’re seeing are at least balanced and usually trumped by the value of the individual consciousness. 

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Creed

Creed is about coming to terms with your ghosts. We find ourselves by dealing with our past and its formidable shadows. 
The film itself raises -- and deals with -- the shadow of the Rocky series. Adonis Johnson, nee Creed, retraces Rocky Balboa’s training methods, fight scenes, ambition and fortuitous championship offer. The huge champion Brit visually recalls Dolph Lundgren’s Russian brute Drago in Rocky IV, with the same conversion of the huge audience from hiss to cheer.  Creed has the same conclusion the Vietnam War-era first Rocky had: sometimes surviving is more important than winning. America keeps learning that anew.
Adonis Johnson doesn’t know he’s Apollo Creed’s son till Apollo’s widow comes to take him out of juvenile detention. The kid has the instincts and temper of a fighter, so discovering his father legitimizes the little bastard. 
Mary Ann Creed raises him in her posh Los Angeles home and he grows into a successful finance executive. That career he chucks to follow in his father’s footsteps. When he shadow boxes in front of a Youtube fight tape, Adonis slips into Rocky’s position to attack his absent father. 
Adonis takes on his father’s brutish profession to find himself, preferring to go by his mother’s name Johnson, to make his name on his own. For his big title match Mary Ann sends him Old Glory shorts with Creed on the front waistband and Johnson on the back. In fighting Adonis discovers his identity and defines his relationship to both his parents. 
Rocky also lives among his ghosts. Wife Adrian exists only as the name of his restaurant and the graveyard site where he goes every day to deposit a rose, talk about his life and read the paper. The young Creed’s request he train him revives Rocky’s feeling for Apollo and gives him a new life, back at the ring. Rocky initially refuses cancer treatment because it pained and failed Adrian. He feels he has nothing more to live for. But his new protege revives Rocky’s interest in life so they spur each other on to their respective fights. If Rocky’s own son fled the Balboa shadow, Apollo’s son gives Rocky the successor he never had — and Adonis the father he never knew.
Mary Ann works on a couple of levels of ghost-wrestling. In tracking and adopting her husband’s illegitimate son she comes to terms with Apollo’s betrayal. She fails to dissuade the gifted boy from pursuing his father’s more brutal career — though if the kid managed hedge funds, that’s a debatable point — but she remains a loving influence on him. On another level, Mary Ann is played by Phylicia Rashad. Her matriarchal screen image began with The Cosby Show, whose father figure has also been redefined by time. This mother redeems the myth of that one.
     Creed’s love interest Bianca provides a variation on that theme: living with the future. She’s a rock singer and musician who knows she will lose her hearing. She defines herself by how she handles that ghost of deafness future. She lives her music intensely and prepares for that loss with hearing aids, learning sign language, but mainly by asserting her will and not accepting premature defeat. In her own fight she’s going Creed’s 12 rounds too and will lose — but by going the distance, winning.