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. 

Sully

Clint Eastwood’s take on the Disaster film incidentally explains why he has endorsed Donald Trump for president.

The film has the usual air disaster film conventions: the cross-section passenger list, the heroic captain, the beautiful and helpful stewardi, the crash threat, experience and survival. But Eastwood makes four radical changes. As usual, the meaning lies in how the director inflects the genre conventions.

One, he puts the crash and survival at the beginning. The suspense is therefore not rooted in the passengers’ experience when Canada Geese choke and knock out both engines, necessitating an emergency landing. Instead the suspense lies in the government committee’s ensuing investigation into whether Captain Chesley Sullenberger made the right decision when he opted to land his 155 passengers on the chilly Hudson River instead of trying to get back to LaGuardia.

Two, instead of the usual tensions and even spats that usually erupt in a threatened flight film, this one depicts a harmonious community. It explicitly pays homage to New York City, its efficient and effective response teams, the community spirit not just on the plane but beyond, in the city-wide celebration of Captain Sully and his amazing landing. A bartender gives him the drink, The Sully, he invented: two shots of Grey Goose and a splash of water. 

Three, the central focus is not on any passenger but on the captain. The 2009 events are intercut with memories of Sully’s earlier experiences, nightmares of what might have happened on that fateful flight, and hallucinations of the plane shearing through Manhattan buildings. Instead of showing the passengers’ faith being tested here it’s the captain’s, as the  formal investigation into his conduct threatens his family’s security, his 40-year career, and his own faith in his judgment. The miracle worker becomes the chief suspect.

Four, the film revives the spirit of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry in a sanitized manner. As Clint’s Callahan tossed away the law book to operate on his own instincts, Tom Hanks’s Sully eschews the operations manual in the 206 seconds he has to make his decision. He instead “eyeballs” the problem and follows his instincts. 

And that’s where the film coheres with Eastwood’s endorsement of Donald Trump. The villains here are the government’s investigating committee that goes by the book, that uses fancy high falutin’ stuff like computer simulations, pilot re-enactments, estimations of lost machinery, and the la-dee-dah like to cast aspersions on the “hero” who simply followed his “instincts.” 
        In Eastwood’s (and little Donnie’s) book, government committees, checks and regulations only interfere in people’s lives and keep a Good Man from Doing the Right Thing by following his gut. Laws are for losers. That’s why Eastwood ran for mayor of Carmel — to get rid of all the red tape in municipal admin — and that’s why the ostensibly successful multiple bankruptcy blatantly lying Trump gets Eastwood’s vote for president of the Disunited States of America. As Trump “loves the uneducated” Eastwood bets on the man of instinct.
        To make that point the film seriously diverges from the historic event. It invents the enquiry board's suspicions about Sully's performance. As the real Sully has pointed out, the committee was not at all prosecutorial. Eastwood invents Sully's victimization by the safety committee to demonize government regulation.

It’s a very personal story for Clint. Hence his closing song: “You tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine.” It’s Sully’s but also Clint’s. But so to twist the facts, falsely to attribute malevolence to a real committee in order to support one's own political position, that is taking artistic license too far. If you have to lie to present a culpable government committee then you don't have a real case. Eastwood  has severely diminished himself -- and Sully, as an advisor on the film --  by distorting their story to make a dubious political point.
       History should matter. Facts should matter. The truth should matter. In a presidential campaign as in other narrative art. A film that so painstakingly recreates the well-known real incident -- the Miracle on the Hudson -- should not have lied to demonize government and the committee members involved. Alas, disregard for the truth and a cynic's disdain for his audience may be other bonds Eastwood finds with his Trump.
       Finally, let me say that I do not come to this position lightly. I used to lecture on the common necessity to inflect details of an event  in order to serve its larger meaning. In Aristotle's terms, history reports what happened only once but the superior fiction (his 'poetry') defines recurring patterns in life. A storyteller -- on page or on screen -- is working in fiction as soon as he starts telling his history. He's looking in the particular event for the recurring pattern.
      Eastwood does not have that defence here. In so dramatically misrepresenting the safety committee Eastwood is not serving the larger meaning but maligning the current government, the still living members of the committee (even if the real Sully insisted on their names being changed in the script) and refuelling the current fire in the presidential campaign that is already casting far too much heat and far too little light. Sully's story is dramatically narrowed by Eastwood's telling, not broadened, as he twisted it to serve his personal platform. His closing song admits but doesn't excuse that.

Hell or High Water

The last song articulates the film’s “spirit of the outlaw.” In this modern-age western the entire West Texas world is a bunch of outlaws: the banks whose usurious system would sweep the oil-rich ranch out from under the dead woman’s grandsons, the diners who don’t recognize the robbers, the trigger-happy customers who turn a heist into a slaughter, the waitress who resents losing the robber’s $200 tip that she needs to keep a roof over her daughter’s mortgaged head. America is now this small town were the common people can't make an honest living.

And so to the central quartet. Two brothers face off against two lawmen. 
      Toby is the good son determined to improve the lot of his two abandoned sons and ex-wife by robbing the Texas Midland branches to get the money to pay off the Texas Midland reverse mortgage and back taxes. He recruits his wilder ex-con brother Tanner. 
      Both brothers are scarred.Tanner was jailed for having murdered his abusive father. His service in Afghanistan left him the sniper skills to wage guerrilla warfare against the troopers. Toby hung back, failed his wife and sons when he served his mother. In the hotel scene Toby sleeps alone in the foreground while Tanner has loud sex with a call girl behind, having chased off Toby's prospect in the casino. Tanner's sacrifice at the end makes him again the crazy doer, Toby safer with his detached abstemiousness.

The brothers’ bond bristles with insults, parallelling that between Sheriff Marcus and his Indian/Mexican deputy Alberto. Exulting in political incorrectness, Marcus teases Alberto about his ethnic background. In return Alberto razzes his senior about his looming retirement. As even poetic justice is blind, the wilder outlaw and the tamer lawman are both killed.

Though Toby and Marcus survive, their success stays shadowed. In their last scene both appear dramatically cleaned-up, healthier versions of their earlier presentation. Marcus made it through a gun-happy society’s law system to retire. Toby has ensured his sons’ fortunes by saving and passing on the oil-rich farm. 

But neither man knows peace. As Marcus senses (or as a moral man, needs to believe), Toby is haunted by his brother’s death and the deaths of the bank-folk incidental to their robberies. He also remains an outsider in his own family, coldly dismissed by his ex-wife, kept at a proper distance by his more promising sons. 
     Marcus remains trapped by the incompletely solved case. How can he prove Toby was the second robber? How did Toby plan it all and get away with it? And why did the brothers score small bank heists when their family farm was oil-rich? The depths of widower Marcus’s grief and anger are suggested when he tells Toby of the large family Alberto left behind.

In the last scene Marcus gratefully accepts Toby’s invitation to continue their conversation at his home in town. There they may find “peace.” We’re not told what that “peace” means for each of them, if either will get it, or how. 

Perhaps Toby’s “peace” would be avenging Tanner’s death and dispatching the ex-sheriff’s implicit threat to his scheme — or it might be making the final sacrifice for his sons and going down in gunfire. Perhaps Marcus’s “peace” would be solving that last case and bringing the robber to justice — or it might be his last shoot-out heroically to escape the torpor of retirement. It’s a Mexican standoff.

In the last shot Marcus drives off, disappearing into the countryside as the camera drops into the wheat. That movement implies burial, as if an augur of the final shoot-out that even a modern-day Western sets us up to expect.  But that reading is inflected by the reflection of a triangle of light on the left side of the screen. The light changes that burial to resurrection. Perhaps the two heroes’ “peace” will therefore rather be putting the antagonistic past behind them and getting on with their lives. 
      That reading is supported by the film's opening shot -- the empty dusty town with Afghanistan graffiti on an outside wall. The two shots frame the film with a movement from a depressed and sterile town to a blowing field, with vegetation and perhaps hope.  The first shot leads into the brothers' bank robbery. The last leaves the ambiguity of its post-narrative conclusion, whether another assault or a truce.

The latter would make this a new age Western, which prefers a negotiated compromise over violence. That emphasizes Marcus' and Toby's sensitive, female side, coherent with their later cleaned-up, more civilized look. That would also balance the tough flatness of the film’s women, all consigned to the margin: Toby’s hardened wife, the fleshy single-mom waitress who’s drawn to him, his casino pickup, and the waitress who for forty years has been serving up only t-bone steaks, the only option being peas or corn. 

The title comes from the lawyer’s instruction: Come hell or high water the heroes have to get the cash to the bank to avoid the foreclosure. The absence of high water is evident in the arid Texas landscape and the tired bodies that move bent and broken and hopeless through it. Even the vegetation is a pallid yellow. Only an Eastern city slicker would order trout in these parts. 
     As for the hell, it’s what the people live, helpless before the banks, hopeless in their cycle of generations of poverty, with only the rare opportunity to make the one score that may be too late for them but just might spring free their kids.  Even Toby's happy ending may be limited. As the two pumps suck oil out of the desert we remember that even that prize has been drained of its old value in recent days. Oil is the earth's gift sans fertility, sans growth, sans cleanliness and even itself doomed to obsolescence.
     This circle of hell might well be the Trump supporters, on the fringe of the economy and the law, so hopeless they’ll bet it all on an irrational, even lunatic long-shot.