Nocturnal Animals

Three prominent works of art encapsulate the film’s major themes.

(1) Damien Hurst’s sculpture of a bull as Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows. Sebastian registers as tortured, martyred saintliness, which the bull here redefines as the masculine life force. 

As in his debut, A Single Man, writer/director Tom Ford examines the abuse of sensitivity in American men. Susan’s brother is disowned and banished from his family for being gay. Her mother dismisses the sensitive writer Edward as weak and unambitious. Susan has the courage to marry him anyway. But she weakens as her mother’s internalized blues take hold. When she “grows into” her mother’s bourgeois values Susan abandons art-making for art history and then running a commercial gallery. She leaves Edward in favour of slick, specious businessman Hutton who goes on to betray her. Hutton arranges her abortion of Edward’s child.  As Hutton seems successful but is warding off bankruptcy he personifies the fake status of his and her parents’ world.

Edward dedicates his novel to Susan and says she inspired it. The hero, which she visualizes as him, loses his wife and daughter to rape and murder when he lacks the brute force to oppose the three brutes.  Where in real life Edward watched Hutton drive Susan away after her abortion, in the  novel he watches his wife and daughter (who in Susan’s visualization resemble her and her daughter) driven away by the abductors. Edward lost Susan to her adoption of her mother’s values, i.e., to the shallow gloss of the stylish elitist life. In the novel he loses her to savages, evil night creatures, antithetical to the elegants but in effect equivalent. 

     (2) A Christopher Wool-like painting spells out three layered syllables of “Revenge.”  In the novel the hero avenges his wife and daughter by killing one of the assailants and identifying another for prosecution. He seems to kill himself in the process. As his character turns from civilized husband into illegal killer, he demonstrates the moral cost of abandoning the “weakness” of the civilized, honest citizen. So his novel is a form of revenge against Susan for having left him because of his softness. 

The novel’s power proves Susan was wrong to have lost faith in him as a writer. Her own dissatisfaction with her luxurious life (and husband) and her high-quality art gallery similarly proves she was wrong to have abandoned her initial calling, making art, which paralleled her leaving him. In her new life she can’t sleep because — despite her elegance, status, culture and material success — she is still the “nocturnal animal” Edward called her, a person of imagination and creativity. She can’t sleep because she denied both her own nature as an artist and her love for Edward. The film ends with her alone in the restaurant where she was to meet Edward. He’s standing her up, just when she seems set to take him back (witness her removal of her bright red lipstick and her plotted décolletage), is a second revenge. It’s not a vicious revenge, though, just a reminder of what he warned earlier. When you reject a true love  — or one’s essential self — it can’t simply be recovered. 

There’s yet another revenge here. As Edward’s novel avenges her abandoning him, Ford’s film takes a kind of revenge upon the society in which he has made his fame and fortune as a top-drawer fashion designer. Susan’s scene with her mother, the gallery scenes and her husband’s betrayal define Ford’s other, non-film professional world as shallow, materialistic, dishonest and vain. In fact, the scenes of Susan’s real life have such artificial performances and are so shot with the glossy colours and composition of  luxury product advertising, that her reality seems artificial. Her visualization of Edward’s novel, with its vulgarity, violence and vile characters, seems realistic. 

(3) John Currin’s painting of a large nude woman distorted by an oval lens is another version of the coarse fleshy life that elegant art tends to ignore. Hence — in shocking contrast — the very obese nudes dancing through the opening titles and on screens in Susan’s exhibition. That show combines the large screen images with the fleshy women themselves on platforms, either in person or in 3-D sculptures.The latter ambiguity parallels the film’s shift between Susan’s life scenes, now or in flashback, and her visualization of her ex-husband’s novel. Art and life continually collide and overlap, because art evades reality even as it confronts it. Hence the novel’s plot line which breaks away from Edward’s earlier writing about himself (Susan’s complaint) and yet works out a form of his self-realization and self-presentation. 

     The tension and confusion between art and life have often been treated in film, but rarely with such complexity and moral engagement. The gallery world is far from the novel’s vile hicks but it has a similar rapacity and abusive treatment of the vulnerable. The novel’s family is driving to the artists town of Marfa when they are run off the road and destroyed. 

     The three settings — the NYC college world, the LA gallery scene, the arid waste of West Texas — provide a geographical summary of America. In the current climate they are also a cross-section of Donald Trump’s support: Susan’s arch-Republican parents, the corrupt and corrupting wealth of the elitist gallery and fashion scene and the violent sexist and racist Texas villains. Tom Ford is one of the people making American film great again. 

Manchester by the Sea

Two water scenes frame the narrative and establish the central character’s fall from grace and failure of redemption. The water scenes — like the title — are significant because they provide the serenity and beauty in counterpoise to the characters’ roiling emotions, anger and guilt. Manchester is the troubled human community that abuts the supportive sea. 

In the opening scene Lee, happy and carefree, frolics with his young nephew Patrick on brother Joe’s boat. In their play Lee teases Patrick that he, Lee, should be the person Patrick should choose as best able to help them survive on a desert isle — not the boy’s father. 

But the bulk of the film demonstrates the increasing gap between the competent Joe and the self destructive Lee. The film gradually reveals how the carefree Lee fell into the violent despair of his later life. Lee is broken when his drunken binge turns into the fire that kills his three children. He retreats into a life of menial chores and drunken, belligerent evenings. 

On Joe’s death, Lee struggles to escape his brother’s assignment to be Patrick’s guardian and trustee. Yet that first scene establishes the memories and the relationship that would make Patrick want Lee to be his guardian, regardless of his present state.

Handyman Lee can fix anything but himself. Although he recovers something of his earlier relationship with Patrick, Lee can’t bring himself to accept responsibility for him. “I can’t beat it,” he says, “I can’t beat it.” The “it” is his guilt and self-loathing that linger from his childrens’ death. 

Lee can’t accept his ex-wife’s impassioned forgiveness, precluding any chance of his  own peace and self-acceptance as well as hers. His violent outbursts against others hide/reveal his inability to forgive himself. When the police interview him about his children’s death, he is as much disappointed as surprised that they will not be punishing him. “You mean I can go?” “It’s no crime to forget to put back the fire screen.”

In the last shot Lee and Patrick sit on the pier fishing. They are together but apart — as they are in every one of their conversations when the language that should connect them separates them instead. Their elliptical conversations should be bridges but they only widen the gaping gap. At the end the men have a new camaraderie and closeness — but it is only partial and late. It rests upon Lee having finalized his detachment from Patrick and arranged for another couple to adopt thim. 

Young Patrick’s cheeky but fond insults contrast to Lee’s inability to express sentiments at all. Instead of openly admitting he’s rented a flat with an extra room for Patrick to visit, Lee says it’s to provide more room “for my shit.” To his ex-wife’s desperate apologies Lee can only hide behind a shell of stammering. Patrick shows more aplomb in handling the nervous chatter of his mother, when she briefly flirts with the notion of having him come live with her and her new Christian fiance (played by Lonergan’s standby for flawed righteousness, Matthew Broderick).     

The water scenes — set in summer flashbacks, against Lee’s winter present — emblematize the grace from which Lee falls and which his failure to forgive himself prevents recovering. A gull at the end of the credits suggests the soaring spirit that Lee has lost. As the most poignant loss is played against a powerful theme from Handel’s Messiah, the later Lee’s only joyful scene in the present plays against a song that merges romantic and spiritual love, “I’m Beginning to See the Light.” 

  As usual Lonergan assumes an emblematic cameo himself. In You Can Count on Me (2000) he played the minister who posits the film’s central theme: “Can you believe that your life is important?” That question hangs over Lee here as it did over James Franco’s earlier hero. Here Lonergan plays the passer-by who hears Lee swearing at Patrick. “Good parenting,” he snaps, provoking Lee’s profane response. As it happens, Lee could be Patrick’s effective father-substitute, if only he could reset his life with self-acceptance.  

  This is a very brave film. It takes courage to unfold at such a languorous pace, with such spare and pointed music, with dialogue that leaves so much unspoken and such nuanced performances. This year we’ve had few scenes as rich as Casey Affleck’s performance after Joe’s funeral, especially the compound inflections of his glance when he meets his ex-wife’s new man. Affleck deserves the Oscar hype. 
     So does Lonergan for daring to tell a story of contemporary guilt and shame where no character finds an easy redemption and the hero a bare gesture towards one. Occasionally fishing with your nephew is a far cry from assuming the responsibility he wants and needs you to.    

L'Avenir

The Donovan song’s tension between seeking an impossible purity and living a deep peace establishes the film’s central theme and heroine Isabel’s primary virtue. She lives a life of immediate, accepting presence. She is not tempted by shallow rewards or depressed by disappointments. She embodies the strength and resilience of the examined life. 

As the Rousseau quote declares, desire is the enemy of happiness. Our failed satisfactions are based upon the desire for something new, more, bigger, better, younger — which, once achieved, no longer satisfies. 

Isabel has lived through the political temptations of her own time, from her three-year flirtation with communism through the ’68 revolution. So she’s not tempted by the current students’ strike for pensions or her star ex-student Fabien’s anarchism. In contrast, her husband stays stuck in the attitudes he held at 18. His rigidity and insensitivity tyrannize his students.   

Isabel finds true value and fulfilment in teaching philosophy, training her high school students to think for themselves and taking an interest in their lives. She has a stoic, bemused response to her publishers’ initial insistence on jazzing up her textbooks, then suspending their publication altogether. Her integrity won’t allow her to abandon her values. She maintains her dignity and self-respect. 

Those values also sustain her when her husband leaves her for a younger woman. He is so weak he doesn't make his break until his daughter tells him he has to make his choice. As briskly as Isabel cuts loose from him she ends her loving connection to his family’s country home, where they vacationed every summer and where she planned and cultivated her garden. In all their scenes together she conducts herself with strength and an absolute rejection of self-pity. He lets his craving for the new destroy the quiet value of their love. 

This self-sufficiency supports her when she visits Fabien’s mountain retreat and when her fragile yet demanding mother dies. An encounter with an importunate stranger at a cinema shows her refusal to seek carnal reaffirmation. Her grandson’s birth shows her instead embracing the role of grandmother, fully and warmly. 

In the last scene Isabel hosts a Christmas dinner for her children. To let her daughter eat, Isabel goes to tend to the crying baby, stilling him with yet another song. With the family dinner framed out of the shot on the left and Isabel and the infant framed out on the right, the shot focuses on the shelves of books between them. 

The film is about the use of those books, i.e., the traditional function of philosophy  — detached from the fashions of the day in pedagogy or politics —  to address the one essential question: How should we live our life? 

Aptly, the last song is “Unchained Melody,” which turns an exultation of freedom into a love song. It balances independence and connection.The Schubert song and the Woody Guthrie ballad both provide imagery of transcending the mundane reality by discovering the ethereal around it, on the water, in the sky.  

The other characters live to pursue new pleasures, which inevitably fail to satisfy them. The husband’s new woman has left him alone for Christmas, apparently not yet ready to introduce him to her family. The buyer's remorse may be mutual. Fabien and his German friends debate the political uses of anonymity or the collective authorship (i.e., the death of the author or the personal, a recently fashionable fiction). Isabel's mother buys new clothes she can't pay for and doesn't need. Once a lovely model, she says she's been cast as a corpse in a new movie.

Isabel’s daughter has wanted a baby but at the tension between her parents dissolves into tears and needs to hold him again. As if he will give her the stability she lost through her father’s infidelity. The funeral priest similarly cites Isabel’s career as a philosophy teacher to have justified or fulfilled her mother’s life of pain, isolation and abandonment.  

And then there is Pandora. This is the obese, willful, all-black cat that Isabel inherits from her mother, is allergic to and impatient with, and finally leaves at Fabien’s retreat. Far from the traditional Pandora, who unleashed the world’s evil winds, this one is a minor key replay of Isabel’s themes. Pampered by Isabel’s mother, Pandora hides from whoever else enters her mistress’s flat. She’s heavy to carry, like the unwanted burdens we all have periodically thrust upon us. But like Isabel she has a feral intelligence and instinct. This house cat takes off into the forest but has the instincts to survive, to find her way home in the morning, and to bring her new mistress back a dead mouse. In her instinctual survival and her integrity the cat is another reflection of our wise, warm and worldly philosopher. 
     The film is titled L’Avenir, “the future.” Written and directed by a woman, it offers a real rarity: a heroine of intellect, will and strength. That heralds a refreshing new kind of superhero. 

Bad Santa 2

Bad Santa 2 is as funny, raunchy, vulgar and Politically Incorrect as the first Bad Santa was. Translation: Add it to your list of Christmas season perennials, with Billy Bob Thornton as the bracing antidote to all that Jimmy Stewart and Bing Crosby crap. The films’ relentless profanity is a salutary balance to the smarmy sweets of the Yule. Their ambition, their driving motive, is to be as Politically Incorrect as possible. In art that’s funny. In life, as we will see, that’s dangerous.

The basic plot is repeated: the drunken obscene department store Santa connives with his black dwarf elf friend to pull off a major heist. Again the grown white man needs the black dwarf to help pull off the heist. Again the friend tries to rob and kill him. This time the department store is replaced by a large-scale charity, which broadens the satire from the season’s commercialism to its ostensible social concern.

The one major addition — Kathy Bates as Willie’s violent, vicious, conniving, tattooed mother— adds another dimension to the film’s radical rejection of knee jerk sentimentality. This mother not only betrays but robs and shoots her son. In their first meeting mummy responds to sonny’s slugging her with “You still hit like your fuckin’ father.” It’s not affection that runs like blood — or, for that matter, bile — in this family. The mother is so much like her son she’s named Sunny — in dramatic antithesis to her disposition.

In exulting in the profane these films evoke the tradition of the Saturnalia, the annual festival in which the medieval Christian church allowed its language and rites to be blasphemously parodied. The fathers intuited the need for their congregants to let off steam, briefly to exercise -- and exorcise -- what the rest of the year they had to suppress. In Shakespeare, Falstaff is the exultant Saturnalian opposite to the heroisms of Hotspur and Hal. 

Here when Willie seems to soften at hearing Thurman’s soprano carol, he’s briefly allowing the release of conventional sentiment and piety into his world of lust, greed, irreverence and rage. That’s the Saturnalian in reverse. It’s just a moment, though, not enough to ruffle the while film’s driving spirit of anger and indecorum.

The film’s entire human landscape is vile. The charity Santa initially honourable in reclaiming his spot is assailed as a pedophile (justly or not, no matter, the virtue is lost). The handsome couple running the huge charity is stripped of all virtue. The thief husband has abandoned his marriage for sex with his assistant. His wife is no innocent victim. 

She embraces Willie’s rough and dirty sex at every opportunity, with the same proviso: “This was a one-time thing. It never happened.” For all her present sophistication and gentility she has a working knowledge of outre sexual kinks: “I believe that’s ‘felching.’ Not that I’ve ever heard of it.” As she explains, “I’m a good girl but sometimes I have to be bad.” More precisely, she’s an essentially bad girl ( i.e., only human)who usually plays good.

The charity’s obese sexpot replays her boss’s hypocrisy. She leads on the black dwarf Marcus’s courtship for an expensive lobster and champagne dinner then dumps him — finally admitting it’s because of his “height.”  In leading him on she pretends to be liberal and colour/height blind, but in the clutch she won’t give him the chance to prove himself adequate. However repulsive, the full-size and white privileged Willie, of course, wins more sexual service than he can shake his stick at. in addition to the socialite, he scores Marcus’s rejector and the drink server at the wealthy soiree his mother is burgling.   

Marcus gives Willie and his mother constant opportunity to be unfashionably racist and bigoted:

Willie: Why are you even out of the joint anyway? You know, they used to sterilize guys like you, to keep the world from          becoming some negro Land of Oz.

Marcus: Early release, you racist moron fuck!

Thurman constantly inspires Willie’s refusal to show him support, affection, any form of encouragement. Even Willie’s sole service to him — hiring an obese black grandmother to “pop his cherry” — proves futile. 

Willie’s Santa persists in being unseasonal toward the children he’s supposed to encourage:

Boy: Why do you have two beards?

Willie: That's none of your fuckin' business.

So too the mendicant Santas invite their donors: “Spare some change. Think about somebody besides your fucking self.” "Well bless your heart. Cheap little fucker.”

Now, a funny — well, if a national catastrophe with global destructive implications can be considered in any sense “funny” — thing happened between the two Bad Santa films. I remind the reader of the election of Donald J. Trump to be America’s next (and quite possibly last) president. 

That election makes these Santa films profoundly symptomatic of their society. The frustration and rage that Willie articulates in both films inspired Trump’s supporters to buy into his promises of economic and social reform, despite his clear record of the very elitism, corruption, lying and criminal self-service that he promised to oppose.

Art can play out the tensions and themes of real life. But here’s the difference. The film ends and releases you back into the real world. There’s no such release from reality. 

We need films, among the other arts, to expose the problems in our real lives and to mobilize the humanity and values to address them. When the forces behind the exhilarating release of black comedy come together as a political force in real life, the black intensifies and the comedy evaporates.    
     The film ends with Willie tormenting the helpless dwarf by an adolescent sexual humiliation. What the new presidency threatens its minorities and marginalized is far more serious. 

Moonlight

Juan tells “Little” Chiron that a little old lady nicknamed him Blue when she saw him among other boys fishing in the moonlight: 

"Running around, fishing in a boat of light. In moonlight, black boys look blue. You're blue. That's what I'm gonna call you: ‘Blue'."

But Juan rejects that name. He won’t be Blue. “At some point, you gotta decide for yourself who you're going to be. Can't let nobody make that decision for you.” Ironically, Juan refuses to be identified with a colour. But his life leads him into a Black stereotype nonetheless: the flashy drug dealer. 

As the title suggests, the film is about the blues of the black in America. Chiron grows from Little into Black, the nickname bestowed by the boy Kevin before they make love, by the water, in the moonlight. This scene apart, there is nothing romantic or radiant — the usual implications of moonlight — about the characters’ experience here. Moonlight is what turns the black boys blue, so it’s a paradoxical emblem for the black experience in America.

The film’s focus on black alienation and disenfranchisement makes the film seem like a parallel universe that occasionally intersects with ours. White characters are few and emblematic: a cop, the obese customers in Kevin’s greasy spoon, where the American flags are the only sign of America’s ideals, and ineffectual at that. In that key restaurant scene where Chiron and Kevin reconnect, the white customers act as if the blacks were invisible. Kevin treats his customers graciously — with no response whatsoever. One white man sits alone as if in his own bubble, not responding to anything, as bleak an existence as the blacks’. 

The very setting of the restaurant evokes the civil rights struggle, where a black man at a counter was a challenge to the social “order.” When Chiron enters he checks out the scene, then sits at the counter. Kevin moves him to a booth for his personal service. As a barometer of the African American’s place today the film reveals the races in desolate isolation from each other.  

Chiron and Kevin both pass through prison. But vertical bars are a constant motif in all the interiors, the houses, the school. Even the outside world is the black man’s prison. 

Food is another motif that unites the three stages in Chiron’s growth — the community and love expressed in cooking: the meals Juan and Teresa give the boy starved for affection; the meal the adult Kevin makes for the grown Chiron, rekindling their lost and furtive intimacy and love. In the intervening food scene, set in the school cafeteria, Chiron is fragile and alone and the brute Terrell prepares young Kevin to assault Chiron.

In the cafe later the Chef’s Special Kevin prepares for Chiron moves from the cafe to the bed. Whether they have sex or not is irrelevant. The two men achieve a rare openness and intimacy. Kevin phoned Chiron out of the blue because he had come to terms with himself and his life and felt the need to reach out to the friend he had betrayed. Chiron drives out to him but is reluctant to admit his motives:

Kevin: What man? Come on, you just drove down here?

Black: Yeah.

Kevin: Like you was just, you was just on one, and you hit the highway?

Black: Yeah.

Kevin: So where you gonna stay tonight man?

Having healed himself Kevin can now heal Chiron. The first step is self-awareness and self-acceptance. 

Kevin: Where's you Chiron?

Chiron: I'm me man. I ain't trying to be nothing else.

But the reticent Chiron is not himself until he drops his pretence to casualness. He tells Kevin he hasn’t touched or been touched by any one other than Kevin. The touching is emotional as well as physical. Now the massively muscled Chiron and the warm, generous Kevin finally find grace in each other’s arms. This blues song ends happily.

Significantly, the two men’s tenderness happens in Kevin’s rental near the water. Water scenes mark key turning points in Chiron’s life, mobilizing its association with the subconscious and the origin of life. Juan slips into a fatherly role when he teaches young Chiron to swim, to keep his head above water and advance. His sexual initiation by Kevin happens over a joint at oceanside.

Perhaps the film’s dominant theme is the mystery of manliness. In his boyhood Chiron doesn’t have a father, just a druggie mom bringing in strangers. Juan becomes his surrogate father. Though Juan would determine his identity for himself, rejecting the Blue nickname, he breaks down when Little Chiron rejects him: “Do you sell drugs?” We don’t see Juan again after he weeps at Chiron’s rejection. The teenage Chiron finds refuge in Teresa’s house, not Juan’s. She only refers to him when she recalls him giving the boy gin. When he’s neither mentioned nor seen again we infer Juan is another of those disappearing dads, perhaps a casualty of his drug trade. Juan has broken his promise: “Never let you go.”

Juan’s influence is clear when we meet the adult Chiron as Black, his nickname an echo of Juan’s rejected Blue. Chiron has grown into a Juan lookalike with his powerful build, the result of his jail time, his drug dealing empire, the black bandana, the diamond ear-rings and golden chains and silver teeth. At that vulgar flash many whites tend to sneer — but it's not unlike Donald Trump’s golden furniture and guilt-edged estate. Chiron has to remove the silver teeth to eat Kevin’s meal. The flash fails to nourish. Chiron’s essential choice is between the Juan’s flash and Kevin’s tenderness.

Juan seems sensitive to Little Chiron’s nature when the boy asks what a faggot is and if he might be one. “A faggot is a word used to make gay people feel bad.” Chiron will only later learn he is one. In the school scenes Terrell and others bully Chiron mercilessly because they read his “softness” as a lack of manliness. Young Kevin has learned to play the game, so he flaunts his hetero success to explain a detention and however reluctantly obeys Terrell’s orders to beat up Chiron. This after they’ve had sex. The film’s  climactic manliness is the tenderness when Kevin and Chiron meet again.

The last shot is of the boy Chiron facing the sea. After the man has found his better self, the image reminds us of the hapless boy still inside. Having looked out at the sea he turns back to look at us. The shot evokes the famous lost shot in Truffaut’s 400 Blows. There young Antoine Doinel looked out in fear and uncertainty at the ocean of dangers ahead for him. Here the boy Chiron has the new courage to face us.

But after so much suffering. The film’s representation of black life in America has a texture, emotion, empathy and dignity that make it a swan song of pre-Trump America.The astonishing quality of this film — the script, the direction, every single performance — expresses a commitment to our disadvantaged and excluded that the new Trump government seems determined to eradicate. The powerful performances — performances so strong we forget they’re actors playing roles; they seem like real lives on which we are eavesdropping — suggests the wealth of African American talent that we have left unheard, unseen, unconsidered. Like their community’s lives.

It’s not that the film is arriving too late. In fact it may be coming just in time to remind us that the best of America is far from what the new president and his racist appointees represent, indeed their polar opposite. These blues are a rallying cry for the opposition. It’s a loyal opposition but one properly loyal not to the vicious government but to the people, especially the marginalized, the downtrodden, the persecuted. 

 

Arrival

Structure is theme in Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. The two interwoven plot lines embody the distinction between our linear time and the broader perspective that reveals the past and the future as well as the present. That’s the perspective we would get from outer space, from beyond our normal experience and apprehension. That's what we could perceive if only we could rise above our normal understanding. 

The space alien plot unwinds in simple linear story telling. It introduces creatures who have that greater perspective. The aliens have come to earth to provide the wisdom we need to survive. They have foreseen a disaster 3000 years from now in which they will need us. They now give Dr Louise Brooks the gift of their wisdom, their perception of the future and the past. With the latter she can win over the Chinese general by telling him (in Chinese) his wife’s dying words.  With the former she can foresee the heartbreak that awaits her — but she embarks on that journey even knowing its pain. Life and love are worth it. 

The more familiar story line, Louise’s marriage, her bearing, raising and loss of her daughter, is told in a non-linear mode, leaping forward and back, because of that greater perspective the aliens gave her. Hence her constant tension between memory and foresight. So too the daughter's name Hannah is a palindrome, a variation on that idea, because it reads the same backwards as forwards. 

This difference also distinguishes their two languages. We speak in linear sentences that unfold over time. The aliens communicate in whole circles, with instant complete structures. They apprehend a whole where we only see a part. The circle is our emblem of completeness and eternity, the never-ending. We live in arcs, blind to the higher wholeness. 

Because the film opens on the story of Louise and her daughter we initially think the alien plot happens after her divorce and her daughter’s death. In the first scene Louise tells her infant that they are at a beginning or an ending. That’s truer than we realize, because the film ends on the beginning of that family story. The film’s first scene actually happens after its last. 

The family narrative starts at the end of the film, when Louise has published her dictionary of the aliens’ world language and has had a child with scientist Ian. This plot-line is like the snake biting its tail — or the instant complete circle that is the basic form of the aliens’ language.  

        So there are two arrivals. One is the aliens' at the start of the narrative. The other is the arrival of Louise's future -- which the aliens have enabled her to foresee -- which includes the joys and heartbreaks of a marriage and a lost child.  

The aliens’ broader vision and understanding provide the genre’s familiar lesson — mankind has to overcome its delusions of difference and rivalries and its mortal competitions, to embrace a common humanity. That lesson is as old as The Tower of Babel, here replayed as the wall of TV screens on which the 12 nations visited by the aliens at first communicate and share knowledge, but then shut down out of mutual fear and suspicion.  The aliens have brought their message in 12 distant instalments because they need us to overcome our animosities and superficial differences to work together, to harmonize. Their circles are the antithesis to our fragmentation. 

       Louise's dictionary provides a global language that offers to overrule our fragmentation in languages and conflicting cultures. At its release the Chinese general appears in a suit, the civilian freed from the uniform, whispering in Louise's ear where he once transmitted bellicose threats. 

As in so many alien creature films, the military’s first impulse is to attack them. Here at least they make an attempt to learn to communicate with them first, but panic when the language difference kicks up the term ‘weapon’ instead of ‘tool.’ For the frightened any hint of danger can trigger aggression. Unfortunately, the unknown seems always to trigger our fear, whether our aliens are from outer space or another culture. Our aggression projects aggression upon the Other. 
     In this film the military impulse is fortunately checked by the linguist and the scientist. Seeing world governments embrace science over their old ideology is extremely heartening but — especially after The Election — not a very convincing assurance. 

Denial

The last shot of the David Hare/Mick Jackson Denial adds an important coda to the film. 

The narrative ends with Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall) losing his libel charge against historian Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz). She celebrates her win, warmly thanks her legal team for their diligence — and for the tactical wisdom that she earlier rejected. Then she goes on her morning run, her usual life restored in light and spirit with no more fear for her security. It’s a happy ending. 

But the last shot qualifies that cheer dramatically. It’s a black and white photo of the roof that the Germans collapsed to bury the gas chamber at Auschwitz. The camera draws in on the shot, finding and by nearing it enlarging a hole amid the materials of the roof. 

That hole recalls Irving’s first triumph in his trial. He contended that the absence of any visible holes in the roof’s remains debunked the claim that there were vents in the roof for the cyanide that had supposedly slaughtered the Jews within. “No holes, No Holocaust,” was his briefly successful summary. The last shot finds the holes Irving had denied. 

     It also ends the film with the bleakness of black and white, in contrast to the colours and brightness of Lipstadt’s morning renewal of her life. The hole swallows the screen. 

     As the screen turns black the film closes on a saddening, contemplative darkness. Why are we feeling happy? What has been won? The true historian’s record of the Holocaust has broken the credibility of the antisemitic self-styled “historian” who declared it a self-serving lie by the Jews. 

The closing darkness suggests even that happy ending may be yet another — denial. For the victory at the trial rebutted only one denier. And even he persists in his antisemitic slander, as we see when Spall is cut into a Jeremy Paxton TV interview with the indomitable racist Irving.  

As Irving persists so do other dangerous bigots. When Spall’s Irving tells reporters he’s not a racist, indeed he has had several foreign staff, all girls with beautiful breasts, denier Irving segues into a more current case of dangerous lies, sexism and bigotry, the American presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. 

The story of the racist liar David Irving resonates beyond his particular case to the more general danger of someone hungry for the power to promote his prejudice. The clips of Irving’s incendiary speeches harken back to Irving’s hero Hitler but also across to Trump’s feeding the furies of hatred and fear. In this wider resonance the film rises above Aristotle’s definition of “history” — what happened once — to his “poetry” — the patterns that replay over and over in human history.   

At least to this viewer, the victory over Irving’s denial of Jewish history is even in itself an unconcluded campaign. When major powers — including President Obama — primarily blame Israel for the failure of the “two-state solution” they ignore the main reason for its failure. Since 1922 the Arabs involved have refused any statehood that would have required them to coexist peacefully with the Jewish state. Every negotiation since has crashed against the Palestinians’ insistence (i) that Israel be forced to withdraw to the indefensible borders it held before the 1967 war and (ii) that millions of Palestinians — those who fled Israel in 1948 to escape the  slaughter of the Jews promised by the surrounding Arab states, plus all their supposed descendants — be allowed return with full Israeli citizenship. That would swamp the Jewish citizenry.

Both Palestinian governments are pledged to destroy Israel. Hamas includes the eradication of the Jews in its constitution. PA leader Abbas has promised that not one Jew would be allowed to live in the new Palestine, which by his people’s maps, textbooks, and banners would REPLACE, not join, Israel. That coheres with the fact that Abbas’s doctoral dissertation was a denial of the Holocaust, despite his claim to have recanted.

In short, the denial of the imperilment of the Jews is a continuing modern issue and shame. Irving’s defeat in court was one small victory but his impassioned evil and its pretence to principle and truth persist today. People, groups, even political parties, that support the BDS movement — boycotting the supposedly apartheid state of Israel — whether they know it or not are serving the intention of Berghouti, the movement’s founder, which from its outset was to destroy the Jewish state. 
When those lies and poison spread through Western political parties and when antisemitism in this new form pervades European and North American university campuses, taking the ending of Denial as a happy closure is itself a dangerous form of denial. The last shot tries to save us from that false confidence. The trial goes on.

Bob Dylan in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Going out on a limb here. The best performance by a Nobel prize-winner in an American Western film is — Bob Dylan. He played Alias in Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

Dylan’s function in the film resonates. The film starts with an intercut between the aged Pat Garrett being shot dead and the beginning of the end of the Pat-Billy relationship. This interweaving of future and past within the narrative raises the film to meta-cinema. This is not just the story of the two men’s relationship but a perspective upon the relationship’s significance.  It’s a perspective upon as well as an exercise in the genres of Western and Male Bonding.

As the two titular heroes operate both within the plot and outside it, as figures in the famous legend, Dylan operates within and outside the narrative. Within, he plays Alias, the top-hatted store clerk who shucks his apron at Billy’s escape from Pat’s jail. Alias then rides with Billy and between the two heroes. 

By the character’s name he has a fluid identity, now a clerk, now an outlaw, at home in town and on the range. He proves a dab hand at knife-throwing, as he skewers a gunsel’s throat from afar. In fact, he embodies the very question of identity. In the minor key, we’re teased to work out who Alias is. 

“Who are you?”

“That’s a good question.” 

That’s a very modern question and answer. Pat’s exchange with Alamosa Bill is a fuller demonstration of how an identity is accrued over time and experience. On the major level the film answers “Who are Garrett and Billy”? We know the names from lore; the film fills in the outline with their humanity, past, closeness and fatality. 

Both figures become existential heroes as they define themselves by the particular motives behind what they respectively do. Billy was a loyal ranch-hand when Pat was an outlaw. Now Pat is the ranchmen’s tool sheriff and Billy is the outlaw. Each man has his own complexity of motives in each key action. 

Dylan’s most interesting scene is in the Chill Wills general store/saloon. Garrett occupies Alias by demanding he read loudly the labels on the shelved canned goods. This is quintessential Dylan; the character embodies the actor. In a prosaic monotone Dylan recites: Beans. Spinach. Peas. Beans. Lima Beans. Beans with spinach. The monologue reflects the prosaic vocabulary Dylan brought into pop music and the prosaic, gravelly voice in which he sang. Here Dylan plays Alias but Alias in script and voice plays and summarizes the Dylan from the outside, from the other art, in our century. 

Like Pat and Billy, Alias lives as a figure in the old fiction but also as a figure in the modern mythology. As the modern persona he balances Peckilnpah’s casting of all the classic Western characters, like R.G. Armstrong, Chill Wills, Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Jack Elam, etc. So, too, James Coburn gives his Pat Garrett the detachment of the modern anti-hero, carried over from his classic Waterhole 3. Two other modern singers complete the central romantic triangle  — Kris Kristofferson as Billy and Rita Coolidge as his last lover.       
      Dylan also figures outside the narrative. He composed the entire score and sings throughout. His “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” over the Pickens character’s elegiac death is perhaps the film’s emotional peak — and among the genre’s. As Dylan performs within and around the narrative he makes the film not just an exercise in the classic genre and the familiar legend but a revitalizing strike of a modern perspective upon it.  

The Globe Merchant of Venice

Jonathan Munby’s Globe production, as telecast to the cinemas, takes Shylock’s side, preferring to emphasize the emotional force of the tragically wronged Jew over the satire of the trivial Italian merchant class. Several touches direct us toward that point.

The production amplifies Jessica’s significance. In contrast to the frivolity of her eloping with Lorenzo and the stories of her wastrel spending, she has several scenes of powerful pathos. The production stresses the costs of her betrayal of Shylock, the losses suffered in deracination. When she first meets Portia Lorenzo has to coax her in what nicety to speak. Out of Shylock’s world she is out of her element. She shows this again when Lorenzo tries to dance with her, then sweeps Portia off instead, leaving Jessica a self-conscious outsider, watching. To the latter end the production has Jessica and Shylock speaking yiddish in one scene, which sets them apart from the English dialogue — and most of the audience — as also does the added mix of Latin liturgy and Italian songs. 

The production dramatically undercuts the joy and romance of the last scene, which reunites the loving couples. While Antonio reads of the success of his merchant ventures and Bassanio reads about his Portia’s legal foray, Jessica in the left foreground reads of Shylock’s forced conversion. She falls to the floor wailing Oveenu Malkeinu, a hymn to God the Father. The resurgence of her Jewish roots reminds her of her loss and bars her sharing of the Christians’ trivial joy. Instead of the comedy of merchant Antonio we have the tragedy of the Jew Shylock.

The production then shows Shylock converting, the baptismal waters searing his bare head and face like acid.  In the last image the heavy doors of Portia’s mansion slam shut on Jessica, in contrast to her earlier escape from what she felt was her prison in Shylock’s house. The Christians’ ostensible triumph is through Jessica played as a tragedy, Shylock the wronged victim, his Jessica seduced to his ruin by the Venetian gloss.

The play’s separate plot lines are united by the contrast between the Christians’ playing fast, loose and florid with their words and the Jew’s insistence upon fidelity to the word, the Law. The Jews are the people of the Book — which in an early scene Antonio profanes. In contrast, the Christians are shallow creatures of play and betrayals. Antonio's generosity to his beloved friend Bassanio is undermined when Bassanio spurns his doomed mentor's kiss; the friends have a romantic tension. Antonio tries to buy his lover as Bassanio and Lorenzo both court and wed to solve their financial problems.
      Even after the nearly mortal consequence of Antonio’s idle oath, the Christians continue to make promises only to break them. Hence the business with the wives’ rings and their husbands’ betrayals, albeit to their male personae. "By this hand" becomes sinister after Shylock's resolve to claim his sworn "pound of flesh."

The emptiness of their language is also the point of the familiar servant wit of Launcelot Gobbo but also of the scenes of Gratiano’s compulsive verbal virtuosity. Portia’s famous speech about mercy is reduced to that level of shimmering rhetoric -- she will fail her own test of mercy as sorely as Shylock did -- as are her and Bassiano’s rhyming duel over “the ring” and her later lyrical “On such a night.” These are flashy interludes of language without substance or moral compass. 

In contrast stands the nobility of Shylock’s rigid faith in his word, an honour long since lost in the passage from the Biblical desert to corrupt and commercial Venice. As in Othello, Venice stands for modern civilization in all its gloss and moral vacuity, which resents and dooms the noble primitive that has strayed in.

That theme connects the three-casket marriage bond on Portia with the Shylock story. Portia is sworn to obey her father’s commands in marriage, but here she subtly compromises her required disengagement in order to help the handsome but vacuous Bassanio. When he comes in, the song in the background sets up the rhyme that would lead him to the lead casket. She interrupts his movement towards the gold.
     At this point there’s a brilliant touch in the costume design. The three caskets warn us off the allure of a shiny, costly surface, the gold and silver. The winning choice is humble lead. In this scene Portia wears gold and Bassanio silver, emblems of those characters’ — and indeed their whole gentile society’s — false allure and ersatz value. The opening scene, the elopers’ masque, and the later dance scene define the Christians in terms of play, complacent cruelty and triviality, in contrast to the Jew’s dignified difference and the relentless abuse that drives him to revenge and -- by their hatred -- the ultimate loss of his soul.    

Snowden

In perhaps the film’s most powerful scene Snowden has a phone chat with his old boss/mentor, who appears on a wall-size screen. 

The boss’s face dwarfs all of Snowden.  That is, the state power overwhelms even the most brilliant individual. The image tacitly visualizes Orwell’s “Big Brother is Watching You.” 

Snowden stands between us and that face of corrupt power, in that shot as he does in the film’s overall warning about a federal government violating all principles and laws to spy unrestrained on all its citizens. 

The face reveals he knows about Snowden’s furtive conversations with his colleagues and even his unspoken private concerns, not just about the legality of the program but about his girlfriend Lindsey’s fidelity. So complete is the government’s invasion of the lovers’ life that the face can assure Snowden that Lindsey hasn’t betrayed him. its intended reassurance about her dissolves before the chilling revelation of the extent of the government’s spying.

      A program designed to track possible terrorists has turned into an uncontrolled invasion of even its’ most trustworthy citizens’ most private lives. The face ends the chat with a friendly line now turned sinister: “I’ll be seeing you.”

A few curt lines carry the film’s gist. “Terrorism is just an excuse.” Americans want security more than freedom. The full-screen images of computer programming represent a world that has lost humanity and traditional logic, that prefers the abstractions of logarithms and total power over its citizens over democracy. 

Of course the current election figures in too. Trump is cited twice but looms implicitly in the threat of an elected tyrant who would exploit the total surveillance to consolidate his personal power. Hillary is heard twice condemning Snowden’s crime. 

That he committed a crime is undeniable. Where Obama’s government shows its unfortunate (lack of) character is in refusing to consider his action as a whistle-blowing — that is, a crime that serves the public good — and insists on charging him with treason, which precludes an open, fair trial. 

For once Oliver Stone’s material is so compelling he doesn’t have to juice it up with inventions and distortions. If he invented the Rubrik Cube ploy it’s still an excellent metaphor for the gaming going on in the intelligence world — like the spying, a small game opens out into a mammoth one — and Snowden’s particular genius. 
     Stone clearly intends to valourize Snowden. What he deliberately frames out of his discussion is his possible endangering of individual agents’ and citizens’ lives by his sweeping revelations.    

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz’s memoir of his mother’s enlivening imagination, disenchantment and mortal despair is a riveting human drama. But the film’s widest import may relate to its backdrop — the emergence of the new state of Israel from the violence of the last days of the British Mandate through the surrounding Arab nations’ determined attempt to eliminate her.

The two threads share a tragic theme, enunciated toward the end: the inevitable disappointment when a dream is realized. Both for the Oz family and for the Jewish people, having a dream enlivens them and gives them the hope and the spirit to continue in the face of terrible experiences. But when the dream comes true it can prove more complicated than expected, even compromised, possibly lost. 

Amos’s father Arieh is a librarian hoping to become a successful novelist. His first novel promises his dream may come true. The smell of the ink is an idea — publication — made material. But the only copies sold are, secretly, to his friend. 

When the Arabs’ attack drives everyone in the building into the Oz flat-turned-bomb shelter, when mother Fania’s best friend is killed, when daily life shrinks to fear and scrounging, the family suffers the real consequences of the Israeli dream of statehood. The dream that has sustained the suffering Jews for centuries has come painfully true. 

When Fania and her extremely privileged family were forced to flee to Israel, she married Arieh, seduced by his words and confident in his ambition. Her marriage dissipates the romance. Her only surviving ardor is her total love of her son.  

When Arieh comes home in his new National Guard uniform he seems a comic figure, mock heroic. Fania envisions a handsome young man driving a garden stake into the earth, in place of her bespectacled husband. The penetration is personal and political, fertilizing her and the land. He reappears in a flowing tallis amid the desert mountains, enveloping her in a vision both passionate and political. At the end, her ineluctable drive to suicide takes his form as an embracing lover. She kills herself because her romantic dream cannot accommodate her disappointing reality.

Arieh adjusts. When Fania turns him away he falls into a relationship with another woman. He lives the bathetic romantic alternative she heroically imagines. He can’t understand his wife and the forces that compel  her. “She punishes herself only to punish me.” 

He may be the writer but the inspired imagination lies in Fania. Her bedtime stories and life lessons teach Amos to deal with a dangerous reality by telling a story. Fiction sustains the dream even against real enemies, whether the schoolboy thugs who rob and beat him or the Arab nations bent upon another Jewish genocide.

Amos grows up as both parents’ son, their combination. As a child,  he shared his father’s love for fresh ink but initially recoiled from the suggestion he might become a writer. He saw the writer unable to help his wife. He’d prefer to be a firefighter or dog poisoner, a curious polarity of helping and killing. He leaves the family to join a kibbutz but he can’t escape his mother’s legacy, the imagination, the compulsion to tell a story, to sustain a dream. Bronzed like a kibbutznik he remains pale within, the librarian’s son, ever more comfortable riding a typewriter rather than a tractor.

Novelist Oz is a leading voice on the Israeli left. For all her register as his memory of his treasured mother, Fania’s political significance may embody Israel’s need to realize that a dream must be inflected and adjusted if its essential values are to be sustained in an unyielding real world. 

In a tragicomic replay of this theme, both mothers-in-law refuse to accept the marriage. Arieh stolidly sits by when his mother mercilessly snipes at his wife. In the face of Fania’s mother’s more vicious abuse Fania can only shrink, then release her frustrations and anger — by slapping herself. She hastily repairs to the washroom to hide her tears from Arieh and Amos. Some pains lie beyond the imagination to escape. Both older mothers are yiddische mommas — with fangs. Their common legacy is self-punishment.

So too the political resonance of Fania’s moral lessons to young Amos: “If you have to choose between telling a lie or insulting someone, choose to be generous…. It’s better to be sensitive than to be honest.” This coheres with Arieh’s optimism: “You can find hell and also heaven in every room. A little bit of evilness and men to men are hell. A little bit of mercifulness and men to men are heaven.”

That’s the point of the film’s single scene of Arab-Jewish community. “Lent” to a childless Jewish couple, little Amos is taken to an important Arab citizen’s soiree. In the garden he strikes up a conversation with a little Arab girl. They speak each other’s language; there is hope. In his comfort Amos climbs a tree and hangs on the chains of the swing, playing at the Tarzan he has read about and will deploy in his defensive stories.  

A link breaks. The swing falls, injuring the girl’s younger brother. It was an accident, only an accident, but it spreads into an unbridgeable abyss. Amos sees the little girl being severely scolded. For negligence? For befriending the Jew? Any difference between those reasons disappears. Arieh phones to reiterate his apology and regrets, to learn how the little boy is doing, to offer to pay the full costs of the lad’s treatment — but is brusquely rebuffed. 
     The imagination that can overcome gaps between people can also create them. Oz writes for the Israeli side in this historic cycle of hatred and suspicion. He warns against the possible contamination of their dream with evil and their abiding need for mercy. It will take much mercy if the dream of love is to survive the darkness.  
      As writer, director and star, this film is an astonishing triumph for Natalie Portman.

Captain Fantastic

Nothing seems to be happening in the last scene of Captain Fantastic. Ben and his last five kids seem to be sitting around the breakfast table. Nobody says, nobody does, very much.

This is a very quiet conclusion to a film in which we watched the family’s high-stress discussions, high-risk training sessions, emotional eruptions over the mother’s death, their staged supermarket theft, Ben’s disputes with his sister-in-law and father-in-law and his public explosion at his wife’s funeral, one daughter’s nearly fatal attempt to retrieve a brother, the grandfather’s “adopting” of the kids, their escape to dig up their mother’s corpse and give her the cremation she wanted, including her ashes being flushed down the toilet, and of course Ben shaving off his hippie wild man beard. After all that drama the last scene is a welcome but surprisingly quiet end.

But look at all that’s happening there. Reunited, the family is continuing the parents’ experiment to live in the wilds, in isolation, to ensure the children’s superior education and self-reliance. In each lesson they advance from rote learning into independent analysis and judgment, as in the daughter’s movement from plot to theme in Lolita. The kids have opted to stay with their father instead of enjoying life on their wealthy grandfather’s estate. 

There are only five kids there now, the oldest having with Ben’s agreement left for the outside world. Instead of going to one of the five top level universities (Harvard, etc.) who have accepted him, he has opted to go out on his own, having randomly chosen Namibia. He’s leaving the family’s retreat but for an open-ended adventure. He may or may not go to college, but for now he’s content to test his forest education lessons on his own in the outside, i.e., real, world. 

Ben has accepted his kids’ need to leave the nest. The other kids have the oldest’s example for themselves to follow when their time comes. If the film begins with one rite of passage, the killing of an animal, it ends with another: the journey. The boy loses his hair to make the trek, as in Ben’s shaving, casting off the primitive face-paint and wildness that marked the opening rite. Both men have internalized the strength they had worn as a front. The savage is now civilized.

Ben’s next oldest son is serving him breakfast. This is the kid who most openly revolted against Ben, blaming his insensitivity and stubbornness for their mother’s death and running away to live with their grandfather. Having seen Ben accept responsibility and complete “the mission” of their mothers’ cremation request, the boy embraces his father again, forgives him his extremism and brings their relationship a new warmth. Their new respect is mutual. 

Ben says they have fifteen minutes before the school bus comes. This is radical. However excellent the kids’ home education has been, Ben has acknowledged their need to experience the outside world, to go to a real school and learn how to deal with other children and their culture. From Adidas to sex, in the trailer camp flirtation scene and the scenes with the sister-in-law’s two brats, we’ve sampled the estrangement these isolated children have to learn to overcome. Book larnin’ ain’t enough.

But where’s the usual mad rush for the school bus? Instead the kids are sitting calmly reading and writing. They're doing school before going to school. This catches the family’s real virtue — discipline. The family may have compromised their initial objective of living isolated from the outside world, but they are bringing into their new life their old rigour, dedication and self-control. 

And that’s the film’s central value. While we watch Ben’s various lessons for his children we see his most valuable discovery — the dangers of extremism. He learns that his hippie idealism can be as dangerous, destructive and delimiting as his father-in-law’s capitalism. His wife was driven to escape both. She helped the oldest apply for university as his way out. Suicide was hers. 

Ben’s adult treatment of his children’s questions are clearly more enabling and constructive than the shelter his sister-in-law purports to give hers. Their shelter shades into ignorance on the Bill of Rights quiz. Their callousness is exposed when their computer games shock Ben’s children and when the boys give the departing family the raised third finger. Ben’s kids are getting the better education. But at the same time, their isolation will only impede and endanger them when they venture — as they must — into the outside world.    

The growth implicit in Ben’s change and in that last scene brings a new force to their favourite quote from Noam Chomsky, whom they celebrate instead of the fictional elf of Christmas: “If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”

Of course, Chomsky himself is an extremist, whose idealism — like the early Ben’s — ignores the exigencies and compromises necessary to survive in government, politics and business. That passage argues against extremism especially in any removal from the world. It’s more mature and constructive than the kids’ favourite exchange:

Nai: Power to the people!

Bo: Stick it to the man!

Slogans do not a fruitful approach to life make because slogans allow no space for subtlety, nuance, compromise. The last scene shows Ben as well as his children accepting the need to realize their values in the real world rather than in retreat from it.