Wonder Wheel

Having visited Tennessee Williams territory in Blue Jasmine now Woody Allen takes on Eugene O’Neill, with a harsh vision of self-destructive characters doomed by fate and their own tragic flaw. Both tragedies show Allen at the peak of his craft, restoring his title of America’s most significant film director.

The titular Wonder Wheel is the gigantic, dramatically lit Ferris wheel that we don’t see until the end. The characters are rather emblematized by the earthbound merry go round, as they live locked in their sordid painful lives, unable to see any larger hopes. Humpty fixes and runs the merry go round, a losing proposition like his parenthood, marriage, current affair and battle with alcoholism. His name stamps him as the fallen, even beyond the wagon.

This Coney Island is a shrinking, garish fantasy that distracts its denizens from their tragic destiny. Ginny’s arsonist son has no specific explanation but seems a tragic version of little Alvy Singer, living under the Coney Island roller coaster and worrying about the end of the universe, over his bowl of quivering tomato soup. Without the knowledge and philosophy the kid is merely destructive. He’s the innocent as nihilist.

Allen pitches this drama as a piece of theatre rather than as life or naturalistic cinema. The garish brightness of the Coney Island exteriors, the painstakingly recreated atmosphere of the signs and period songs, the turgid shadows and gloom of the interiors, and the eruptive emotions especially of Ginny and Humpty all evoke the artifice and heightening of theatre. 

Jim Belushi plays the bathetic Humpty as an even coarser Stanley Kowalski. Ginny retreats to Blanche when, broken, her hopes dashed, she retreats to the fantasy of her old white gown. Both characters live theatrically, Humpty in the force of his rage and Ginny in pretending she is only playing the role of a waitress, not really being one. The real her is something else, a wispy memory of an alternative life she might have lived. Like Blanche, she bears the guilt of having driven a devoted lover to suicide.

In a brilliant piece of meta theatrical casting, the two mafiosi on Carolina’s trail are prominent survivors of Tony Soprano’s crew, Steve Schirripa and Tony Sorico, very much in character.

Hence the main character, Mickey, is an aspiring playwright who speaks to us in confidential asides. He is also a lifeguard, whose elevated perspective gives him an advantage over the merry go round lot but falls short of the Wonder Wheel’s sweeping perspective. 

Mickey may know his O’Neill but he doesn’t know life or how to navigate it responsibly. He leaves Ginny with unrealistic hopes he might save her, then delays his intended dismissal of her. Immediately upon resolving to keep her instead of young Carolina, he asks the latter out for her fatal pizza date. When he informs Carolina of his affair with her stepmother, his assumption of purity and honesty pales beside its unintended cruelty and her doom. His sending her off to walk home alone is as responsible for her demise as Ginny’s decision not to warn her.

Humpty, Carolina and Ginny suffer the consequences of their earlier decisions. Mickey has the book larnin’ but lacks the grit of their experience. The two women win him by their hard won experience and pain, but his writerly detachment leaves him hollow. 

This film is so rich and challenging that it’s silly to hang Allen’s old scandal on it, basing that narrow reading on the line “The heart has its own hieroglyph”—loosely, Allen’s early defence of his initially problematic relationship with his current wife. This modern exercise.of the classical tragic vision is a deliberate attempt to confront man’s largest predicament, far beyond our mundane news scandals. Early Allen would have been eviscerating Trump in a gleeful high dudgeon. Here Allen follows the great tragic writers into a far more sweeping examination of how we humanly fail in our lives.

Ex Libris: New York Public Library

At over three hours, this is an epic film. It has to be because it’s about an epic institution: the New York Public Library, its history, its management, its multiple branches, its global city mission, its changing nature. 

As usual, director Frederick Wiseman moves silently, invisibly, unobtrusively, through his subject institution. He doesn’t intrude, but lets what he finds in sound and image reveal his message. Of course, a documentary is still as calculated an arrangement of materials designed to make the director’s point as any fiction is. 

But Wiseman doesn’t interfere. He doesn’t even make cuts within a scene or a speech. He lets the material reveal itself — though he has chosen what material to show, what message will be revealed.

The frequent committee meetings make this film equally about the richness of the Library’s offerings and the challenges of its governance. The Board has to work for the public’s support, convince both its public and private funders to meet its needs, and balance the demands of the traditional needs with the new. 

Indeed, in this Library, a massive institute with responsibility for a dramatically diverse community, Wiseman finds a microcosm of America itself. Hardly any of the speakers are identified because the film is not really about them but about the institution they serve — and the national culture it represents. 

For the federal government has the same responsibilities of meeting the citizens’ needs and generating the income to do so. But where Trump “loves the poorly educated” — to the point of trying to convert all Americans to that — the Library loves all its citizens — to the point of wanting to improve all their lives. 

As the studies of the users’ faces reveals, the Library serves America’s diversity in culture, economic class, education level, and needs. The Chinatown branch provides materials in Chinese to serve that culture and English materials to ease their assimilation. The Braille branch tapes books and teaches the blind to read. 

In all the branches the Library works to bring the citizens into the computer age. The Westchester branch teach kids robotics. 

The Bronx audience at a modern wind quartet is largely working class or unemployed, street people. The programming is not what we’d expect. Some sleep, some are simply staying warm, one woman mimes a singalong, but for each person there the music is doing some service. 

  In the Harlem branch an impassioned poet’s recital is punctuated by a baby’s cries in the audience. That’s life, which the artist must accommodate. So does the Library; so should the government.

But the Republican government isn’t. Time and again the speakers express a tacit resistance to the Trump administration. At a job fair, a border guard reads a statement about his job and its importance. He lacks the sincerity and warmth of the others who speak from their heart. 

As one speaker asserts, the library is no longer about books; it’s about people. That’s what the government has forgotten: it thinks it’s about things, about securing personal profits, not about the citizens it is supposed to be serving.

In an implicit forceful correction to Trump's racism, the Muslim director of the Schomberg Centre cites the line, “The library is the pillar of democracy.” In fact Muslims appear throughout the film as helpful Library stuff or as citizens with the same earnest needs and care as the paler citizens. A Jewish author celebrates the Jewish immigrants and their deli tradition. This is melting pot America not our current racist paranoia.

Wiseman’s Library reminds us where America’s greatness lies — in welcoming citizens from around the world and enabling them to make the best lives for themselves that they can. Among the most powerful correctives to current America are the speeches about the African American experience, the revival of racism, and the failure of modern capitalism to provide a fair and equal distribution of wealth. 
     There’s a lot of talk here, but it’s important talk, the kind of thoughtful, articulate and constructive debate that’s beyond the skill and ethics of current politics. That the Library provides the arena and the thinkers and the audience for such discussion makes it of epic importance to our future. If this New York can’t save America what will?  

My Happy Family

Apart from the filth she has to clean up, Manana’s new apartment is characterized by its two balconies. Several shots observe the strong winds blowing outside the open doors. Some don’t show anyone, just the open space and the gusts. It’s a climb to get there but she finds her freedom and fresh air.

For that she has fled her marriage and her parents’ cramped apartment. There she lived with her two elderly parents, her husband Soso, their layabout computer nerd son Lasho, their daughter Nino and her unfaithful husband Vakho. Manana’s mother still rules that roost. The flat is so cramped two generations keep their clothes in a wardrobe in Lasho’s room, into which he now moves his pregnant new wife. 

Then there’s the music. Several scenes overflow with the beautiful harmonies, emotions and community of the family and friends singing. I guess that’s Georgia: a warm people always ready to burst into polished song. The men sing, the women work. 

These scenes warm us with the characters’ intense bonds — whether family or just friends — but to Manana that warmth is smothering. Like the intensity of her family’s dynamic, it only increases her need to escape, to live on her own, to be free, to enjoy her preferred ritual of the same classical music. And here she works for herself. 

Most of the film follows the mature teacher’s resolve to live her own life apart from her family and their demands upon her. The patriarchal culture — as expressed by her husband, her older brother, her son-in-law — can’t bend its mind to understand, leave alone to accept that. Her brother’s friends threaten Soso when they think he’s a stranger courting her. 

Manana’s escape takes new significance when she learns Soso had a long affair with another woman, who bore him a son. Soso loved her passionately but couldn’t bring himself to leave Manana for her. 

After learning of this betrayal, at her class reunion, the reluctant Manana is coaxed into singing. She chooses a ballad rueing a false love, so even here she’s expressing herself not submitting to the male coaxer. As in the solo she sings in her new home, she sings through her grief, now in a community but not bound by it. Her tremulous, poignant, personal solos contrast to the men’s chorales. 

The last shot is of Soso approaching her at her open window. He has inferred she knows of his compromised past. “Who are you?” she has asked. The film stops short of revealing their conversation, their future relationship. It’s enough that she is at her open window and he now has to come to her. Now he moves without the swagger or self-dramatizing with which he earlier responded to her escape. 

Despite the tensions in this drama of dysfunction, this actually is a happy family. The title seems ironic, but, ironically, it’s true. Everyone cares and is concerned for each other — to the point of intrusion. They also come to accept each other’s differences, as we see when the family embraces Lasho’s bride, Kitsi,. She spurned the name her family gave her but now accepts her new family and function. 

   

The Square

The Square is a piece of very contemporary art that is about very contemporary art and its ambivalent relationship to our social reality and responsibilities. “Relational aesthetics” is the interviewed artist’s term, i.e., exploring the relationship between art and our social reality. 

Does or should art confront our pressing issues of poverty, oppression, suppression, a heartless economic system, etc., or does it provide a comforting escape? Hence the very old, wealthy, white society that supports the contemporary art museum here but is discomfited by its challenges.

So this film is an artifact about itself. That’s why we can ignore such narrative gaps as what Anne is and why she has a pet ape in her flat, who is Christian’s ex, what did Christian’s assistant drive into, what happened to the little boy left helpless on the stairs and why we get the Tourette’s heckler and the little girls’ acrobatic competition. We note these enigmas but don’t need them explained because this is not a story of humdrum reality. 

We take them on trust, as the clear majority of the museum goers declare themselves trusting at the entrance poll. But of course the film reveals a human order not worthy of trust. Too much is selfish and false.

The film itself is a work of art called “The Square.” It situates itself in the events around the opening of a new exhibition called “The Square.” As Christian cites the artist, “The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.” This art proffers what our real world should be -- but what's lacking in the film’s real world, as in ours.

Squares abound outside that show. Christian is walking through a square when he becomes involved in a piece of street theatre that results in (i) his engagement with a screaming woman’s ostensible assailant, and (ii) the theft of his wallet and cell phone. 

The most dynamic square in the film is the shots down the apartment building stairwells, a spiral of squares within squares, both in Christian’s and in his boy victim’s buildings. That stairwell was a popular motif in Hitchcock, where — as here — it serves as an image of the layered consciousness, spiralling vertiginously into danger. 

In another square within the square, the Museum’s advertising agency releases a video in which a poverty-stricken little blonde beggar girl is exploded in that square. That depicts the opposite of the artist’s declared values. This commercial "art" animates what the original artist opposed. This square is released under Christian’s authority but without his input or approval. He's too distracted with his robbery and revenge to pay attention. The ad properly ends his sanctuary — his job and his power. 

In contrast to these dangerous squares in life, we get the squares framed and tamed in the Albers-like painting on Christian’s hallway wall. These squares within squares are totally abstract, firmly apart from the flesh, from nature, from “relational aesthetics.” They are pure form without outside reference beyond their own harmonies.   

Metaphorically, Christian tries to “square” himself when he and his aide seek “justice.” They track down the thief by leaving accusations in every mailbox in the tenement. That “justice” causes his own injustice towards the falsely accused little boy who pursues an apology, further exposing the ostensibly civilized hero’s cruelty and arrogance. As it happens, the boy's indignant demand for an apology, his perseverance and even his threat of "chaos" make him arguably the film's most substantial character. All the more poignant, then, his evaporation.  

As abundant as the square are the instances of performance, whether in art or in life. Christian’s first scene with his daughters show both sides “acting out.” This contrasts to the regimentation and discipline of the girls’ acrobatic show and to the gravitas of the little boy's just anger. 

Several scenes show interviews, which is a performance by artist and by questioner.  The Tourette’s Syndrome heckler violates the scene’s normal decorum — and exposes its irrelevance to the real problems of the time. Here the mental disturbance is in the audience not in the maker of the art. The performance of the event barely survives the impulsive intrusion of reality. The debate over whether the man should be allowed to speak anticipates Christian's firing over the embarrassing video -- and at his press conference one reporter's charge of suppressing free speech and the woman's allegation of silencing the voiceless.

The two ad-men (played by real Swedish ad-men) do a performance to pitch their ideas. This as the Museum staff perform an act of confused encouragement. One staff member performs his duties as dad there, too, bringing his whining infant to the meeting. 

The street robbery is an act of performance, with the two principles possibly partnered by the citizen who protects the “threatened” girl and draws in the mark, Christian. Indeed, the thief’s return of the wallet, money and cell phone suggests the robbery may itself have been a theatrical act, playing at being criminal. Christian’s “justice” is another performance, as he dons gloves and another’s jacket to play the avenger.

Christian’s presentation as a flat, closed figure, with little emotional or psychological rounding, makes him a figure of constant performance. He’s making speeches, whether to the public or to an aide. He “performs” charity when he begrudgingly buys the beggar woman  a sandwich -- but callously ignores her request of "no onions." His stolen money surprisingly returned, he rewards her again, but again “performs” as he peels off one bill after another. 

In bed with Anne, there is no connection or exchange between them. Christian fumbles alone to don the condom. Their intimacy segues into the tension of a literal tug-of-war over who gets to dump the safe. Neither seems to trust the other with it, for its possibly antagonistic use later. 

Christian performs his white male adult authority when he pushes away the insulted little boy. His video message to the lad is pure performance. His fear that he may have hurt or even killed the kid pushes Christian into an apology — which itself moves from personal admission into a practiced tract about our unjust society and our need for collective action. As if that excuses the lapse of the individual will.  

In short, this film seems the latest replay of Freud’s seminal Civilization and its Discontents. The ultra sophistication of the most advanced and theoretical contemporary art may represent the peak of our civilization, but it’s still just a hair away from man’s essential savagery. The disciplined acrobatics are a fragile attempt to rein in the wildness and selfishness of the child — and their parents. An art project theoretically intended to address our highest social conscience exploits the sensation of blowing up a little girl.

The theme is clearest at the Museum’s formal banquet for the wealthy (white) donors, where the evening’s entertainment is supposed to be the titillation of a performance artist, a muscular man playing ape. The audience clearly doesn’t know how to deal with the artistic license they fund and purport to understand. They support the life energy of art — but only in its most controlled, antiseptic and safe forms. 

So they smile and titter away the actor’s initial animalism. Breaking a glass shows him a threat to their fragile order. Then at his first direct aggression, the men run away. When he ignores Christian’s closing of his act, they all retreat into staring into their laps, as if discreetly ignoring the threat will make it disappear. Decorum uber alles. 
     But then the actor assails a pretty young woman, first poising above her in admiration, then caressing her, then dragging her off by the hair to rape her. This rouses the white old men into action. They erupt in her defence and proceed to beat and kick the actor into submission. The ape man actor has exposed the tribal savagery still alive in this ultra-civilized gathering. Mercifully. 

Lady Bird

The first shot packs the story. Mother and daughter sleep together in matching profiles. They face and reflect each other. The serenity of the shot catches their essential bond, which their respective prickliness does its best to fray in their waking hours.

      Lying there, they look alike. As the father later explains, both women have such strong personalities that their clashing is natural — but their underlying love remains. 

Both women move through trying times with men. Mother Marion works double shifts as a psych nurse. She has to guide the grief-stricken priest who was apparently not saved by directing his school production of Merrily We Roll Along. His “They didn’t get it” suggests the rollicking audience missed the depressing undercurrents to which he is attuned. His successor is made of sterner stuff: directing The Tempest with the blackboard strategies of his football coaching.

At home Marion has to deal with husband Larry’s long battle with depression and his loss of his job. This while dealing with emotional teen Christine and adopted older son Miguel with his live-in girlfriend. The latter explicitly confirms our sense of Marion’s “big heart,” as Christine ultimately realizes.

Christine grows through three boyfriends. The first turns out gay, the second an insensitive pretentious creep and her third — entering NYC — with their first kiss prompts her drunken puke. In consoling her gay friend she shows her mother’s heart. She also briefly abandons her closest girl friend in vain hope of befriending the class’s wealthy, snobbish beauty. As Christine grows through her tribulations Marion barely survives them.

The film closes on three notes of reconciliation. 

The first is Christine’s relationship with her Catholicism. Christine and her friend chafe at the school’s discipline, enjoying a truant snack on communion wafers as they discuss their shower orgasms. Christine is suspended for challenging the church's position on abortion. The nuns seem strict in their “Six inches for the Holy Spirit” rule at the school dance.  But one heartily laughs at Christine’s prank of decorating her car with a Just Married to Jesus. sign. In New York Christine challenges the fashionable young atheist: “People go by the names their parents give them, but they don't believe in God.” 

The solace she finds when she drops in on a Sunday service prompts her second reconciliation. On the long distance phone Christine tells her mother “Thanks” and “I love you.” That’s realizing the tacit harmony we saw in the first shot. Their unity is also the point of intercutting shots of mother and daughter driving through Sacramento. 

Equally important, Christine accepts herself — finally going by her given name Christine instead of yet again insisting on the “Lady Bird” with which has all along tried to romanticize herself. The daughter's and mother's closing harmony ends the film like the last line we hear from the audio-book Grapes of Wrath: Having survived adversity the true power, the woman, smiles. 

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The film is framed by different forms of blankness. The first shot is of the three shredded and dilapidated billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. Each is a fragmented ruin of a past life and meaning — like the characters we meet later. 

In the last the screen is filled with Mildred and Dixon driving to Idaho either to kill or not to kill the rapist who threatened Mildred in her shop, then later beat up Dixon in the bar. He has described having raped someone — presumably while  on duty in the Middle East — but it wasn’t her daughter. 

Their decision remains unknown, a blank, but it doesn’t matter. These former antagonists are at last united, despite her having started the fire that scarred him and his former brutality as a cop.

The subject of the film is how Mildred and the billboards bring each other back to life. She revives them as a ploy to pressure Sheriff Willoughby to move on her raped and killed daughter’s case. That initiative also returns her to a renewed purpose in life. 

Her moral revival spreads to Dixon, when Willoughby’s letter to him encourages a new self-respect and a check on his violent rage. 

It’s not just the town that’s Ebbing. Life, hope, community, self-respect, all seem sapped from the characters whether directly or indirectly affected by the young girl’s murder.

The four main women provide an interesting antithesis. Mildred’s ex’s 19-year old girlfriend and adman Red Wilby’s secretary are two perky ditzes edging into the world of experience. At the other extreme Mildred and Dixon’s mother are hard cases, forged by experience into an indomitable will. The unemphasized turtle in Dixon's mother's lap is an emblem of her son, slow, sheltered, who at the end will come out of his violent shell and leave her to go off with Mildred. 

In the middle stands Willoughby’s pretty young widow, blessed with a loving husband and two delightful daughters but dashed by her husband’s cancer and suicide. Her unintentionally cruel confrontation of Mildred shows her strain and insecurity. 

The Peter Dinklage character James is a dignified counterpoint to the variously swaggering ex and Dixon — and at its worst, the soldier rapist. James is a comic replay of the sheriff’s integrity and character.

This black, salty comedy is distinguished by the range of quirky characters, the brilliant offbeat dialogue and the complexity of characterization. Dixon’s first conversation with the sign-man is a Beckettian (or Abbott and Costello) piece of classic non-communication. Mildred may check her children’s obscenity but spews inspired herself.

And everyone has a backstory. Mildred’s ex may seem a pathetic wife-beater turned  cradle-robber but he’s also in his own way trying to come to terms with his daughter’s loss. Unable to cede Mildred any ground, he burns down her billboards. 

  Mildred seems driven by maternal devotion — but she’s haunted by guilt, after her quarrel with her daughter sent her off to her doom. Her son is twice torn — between needing to turn away from his sister’s loss and his mother’s obsession with it and between his warring parents. 

Even the buffoonish Dixon musters our sympathy when we learn his rage dates back to his father’s death. So does his dependence on his mother. To get his suspect’s DNA he invites a physical beating as if to atone for his own violence before. There’s a double redemption and reconciliation when his own victim Red brings him an orange juice in the hospital. 

Sheriff Willoughby is our first and presiding case of redemptive revelation. Foul-mouthed and angry at the interruption of his Easter dinner, he proves a loving father and husband. His suicide note to his wife turns the hellish world we’ve been watching into the heaven he has found in his family. 
     If we start with Mildred’s view of the incompetent lazy sheriff, we’re turned by his brave handling of his cancer, especially when Mildred comforts his bloody eruption. She moves from impatient anger to "It's okay, baby." He later embraces Mildred by paying the next month’s fee for the billboards embarrassing him. His note to Dixon confirms our sense of an honourable  man caught in a dilemma beyond his easy solution, but simply trying to do the best he can. For everyone. 

The Bloom of Yesterday

The blooms of yesterday? What blooms is the present: beautiful, fresh, alive — and doomed. Flowers die, beauties fade. Blooms are either now or preserved in our memories, what we remember of them, not as they survive pressed flat, dry and dead between pages or in a frame.

This film’s blooms of yesterday are what grew out of the seeds planted in the past. In this case the seeds in question are the Holocaust. The blooms that blossomed from them are the central romantic couple, Totila Blumen and Zazie Lindau. They have differing but connected blooms, outgrowths, of the Holocaust seed. His grandfather killed her grandmother. Indeed, he slaughtered all the Jews from his old class at school. 

This film sparks against earlier films. This Blumen in love evokes George Segal in Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love even if only in name. The madcap Zazie springs from Louis Malle’s eponymous film of an anarchist female spirit, here exploring a psychological version of the original’s Metro underground. 

As a couple they evoke Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the screwball comedy  Bringing Up Baby. (Spoiler alert: she indeed does end up bringing up his baby.) He is the dour, fumbling academic and she is the madcap force of nature. Inevitably, as opposites meet cute and attract, they fall in love. The “baby” in this film is not the living jungle animal but the dead eternal Holocaust. It can’t be tamed or sung to or leashed and it should not be forgotten. 

But the Holocaust that drew them together inevitably drives them apart. For in its aftermath, normal romance, normal fictions, normal relationships whether in life or in genre, cannot slip comfortably into any usual pattern. The characters have to find their own ways to deal with the monstrous past. The Holocaust makes normal normalcy inconceivable.   

Totie, a scholar of the Holocaust, struggles to stage a symposium that his just-dead mentor planned. Zazie is the French intern assigned to him. She loves him for his published work and as a model of the modern German breaking free from the nation’s antisemitism. 

She’s also having an affair with the married Balthazar, whom the mentor promoted over Totie because of Totie’s raging temper. Love and politics pointedly converge. 

Totie’s rage turns out to be directed as much against himself as against Balthazar. That may also be the cause of his impotence. Unable to satisfy the wife he loves, he encourages her to have sex with strangers. That only feeds his self-hatred.

Zazie snaps him out of his impotence. Despite their instinctive antagonism, they fall in love and plan to run away together. But learning that Totie was himself a Nazi drives Zazie away.

Their last meeting in the department store at Christmas is wrenching. Zazie says she has a a woman partner and introduces her five-year-old son “Maurice,” blond like Totie. But Totie’s adopted daughter heard her call him by another name, the pet name the lovers used when they joked about him impregnating her their one night together. Whatever his name, he is the bloom of that five-year-old seed — which Totie can now only futilely pursue. 

  Generation after generation has to confront the Holocaust, by themselves for themselves. Zazie moves on to her own new life and raising her son. Totie is reconnected to his wife and — edging away from his violent focus on the Holocaust — working on other, international issues of bigotry and the suppression of a people.  Like Canada and its Indians. 
     In the screwball comedies the quarrelling heroes fall in love and wed. But not here, not in the shadow of the Holocaust. Conventions don’t apply now. Totie and Zazie have to pass through each other to find themselves. 

The Testament

To some, setting any genre fiction against the background of the Holocaust diminishes that horrendous experience. This film manages that powerfully by presenting two complex investigations in one.

The very orthodox Jewish scholar Yoel doggedly searches for evidence of a massive slaughter of Jews in a small Austrian town in the last days of the war. Here Lansdorf stands in for the historic Rechnitz. 

The film uses actual interview clips from Austrian witnesses. Indeed their tapes carry the most colour in the film. Yoel’s real life plays out in scenes of black and white with occasional hues — books, the fruit bowl, some furniture — providing fleeting relief. That’s because, as we will see, this orthodox Jew lives in a black and white world. 

The Holocaust’s massive presence is imaged in the warehoused files and the shots where the characters shrink against the landscape and its buried memories.  

Yoel’s campaign is urgent because he’s trying to prevent the town’s paving over the graveyard site to expand the town. He wants the Jewish bodies found, identified and properly buried first. 

While the orthodox Jew feels compelled to remember the past, the modern city developers want to forget it and move forward with their development. The Austrians refuse to admit the slaughter happened. 

This narrative has a happier ending in the film than in reality: Yoel finds the grave and the list of the 200 victims. The Rechnitz grave has not been found. 

Equally compelling is Yoel’s personal discovery — that his mother was not Jewish. So — because of the maternal line of Judaism —he isn’t. She was the daughter of a Jewish family’s maid. When her mother ran off they raised her. Because she loved those Jews she went with them to the concentration camps. On the eve of her gas chamber death she married a Jew. Her new religion brought her peace and strength as she entered the chamber. Miraculously, the gas failed to work. Two days later the Americans came. Her new husband gave her Yoel.

This discovery rips Yoel’s identity apart. His entire sense of himself is based on his identity as an orthodox Jew. His Lansdorf campaign is based on his orthodox integrity and his commitment to uncovering the absolute truth. Not his truth or someone else’s, but The Truth. He admits no alternative “narrative.”

In fact this orthodox Jew is not that good a human being. Being orthodox does not always mean being a mensch, unfortunately. His broken marriage attests to his failure as a husband. His harsh criticism of his bar mitzvah son shows him not a sensitive father. And as a son? His mother dies from his brutal exposure of “the truth.” He is also callous towards his assistant and cruel toward the elderly woman who might know where the grave is. (She proves right.) 

But he’s an Orthodox Jew — until he discovers he’s not. 

He is so committed to orthodoxy that he cannot continue to live as an orthodox Jew. Hence his clip and shave and shuck of ID.          The discovery disturbs only him, not the others. The rabbi tells him not to change because of his mother’s true identity. His secular Israeli boss agrees, because his skills and service don’t depend on his faith. His sister is outraged because admitting their mother’s non-Jewishness would also disqualify her, her children and her grandchildren. His ex would never let him see their son again.

But Yoel’s integrity — shaped by his orthodoxy — also compels him to stop being what he has believed himself to be and now thinks he’s not. As it happens, as soon as he sheds his orthodox identity he finds the mass grave. Whether that’s God’s approval or a mark of his clearer thinking, once disencumbered of his rigid religiosity, or just coincidence, it doesn’t matter. He solves the case when he comes clean.

His integrity comes at a huge cost. In addition to his sister’s family, he himself is now deracinated. Having defined himself exclusively as an orthodox Jew, what is he now? His discovery has erased him. Where his mother warmly embraced Judaism on her own volition, without outside redefinition or confirmation, Yoel finds that accident of his birth disqualifies him from his lifelong self. 

His dilemma speaks volumes in the continuing Israeli debate over the qualifications for being a Jew. Indeed, despite his heroic achievements in research Israel’s orthodox can no longer accept him. So Yoel can't accept himself.

But you don’t have to be Jewish to find this film’s pertinence. Really, who are you? What you feel you are or what others say you are? And what purpose does religion serve if it is not to enhance the community of man instead of fragmenting it and causing bloody divisions?
     Note: the power and efficacy of the smuggled book of prayers lies in how it served man not God. It conveys the list of the victims' names. That's religion serving man.
     So here’s a film that manages to survey the horrors of the Holocaust, to address the modern age’s attempts to deny, to conceal, even to perhaps repeat it —as with the witness compelled to hide from today’s resurgent antisemitism. And yet the film reaches further, to challenge the impositions and constraints by which any religion — or any other system, social, political, economic, etc. — reduces our common humanity.  

Harmonia

  American-born Ori Sivan makes an honourable attempt to bridge the Arab-Jewish division by having Abraham, Sarah and Hagar relive their Biblical tension in modern Israel. Because Sivan’s objective is a new harmony he replays the triangle in the Jerusalem Philharmonic.  

Abraham is the brilliant, uncompromising patriarchal conductor. Sarah is the angelic harpist, who befriends the new horn player Hagar in the face of Abraham’s impatience with the latter’s independence. Sarah leads Abraham to accept Hagar first in the orchestra, then to bear his first son. She later takes the lead in banishing them. 

Abraham is the harsh father. He tries to impose the violin on both sons and stays coolly, callously, uninvolved in Sarah’s attempts to discipline the innately angry Ishmael, whom Hagar bore for Abraham and Sarah. They call him Ben (Hebrew for ‘son of’) but he reverts to Ismail when he and Hagar are banished to the Arab community. 

Abraham shows a promising flexibility when he assures Hagar that sometimes the orchestra should adjust to a single performer, instead of his usual insistence on the reverse. But in general he is too authoritarian to stoop to Sarah’s concerns or to let his sons define themselves.  

Despite his upbringing as Sarah’s and Abraham’s son, Ishmael shows Hagar’s independence. He compulsively chafes at restrictions and control. He destroys his first violin, uses the piano for fast, harsh rejections of the prescribed pianissimo, and is drawn to the trumpet Hagar plays. He senses a connection to her and a detachment from his adoptive parents. When he riotously pounds on the church organ and bells Hagar beams in pride. She has recovered her son. Mother and son reassert their value of unruliness over Abraham's order. 

In contrast, Sarah’s younger son Isaac conforms to his father’s expectations. Infant Isaac has long flowing blonde hair. As he grows under Abraham’s influence he turns into a subdued, tight-clipped, bespectacled nerd, his father’s instrument. But he too senses a lost connection to Ishmael. He discovers his half-brother’s photo hidden behind the symphony’s promotional shot of baby Isaac with Sarah. He refuses to perform his father’s composition for him and walks off to seek Ishmael.

The film’s purpose is to recover the intimate connection between the Jews and the Arabs, the brotherhood that dates back to Isaac and Ishmael. When Isaac sticks Ishmael’s photo on his jacket it echoes the Jews’ yellow star. Where the star identified the Jew as a target, this photo instead identifies the Jew’s connection to the Arab. Isaac in effect identifies himself as — and with — Ishmael, and thus finds him again for the film’s beautiful but sentimental conclusion. 

When the nerd is confronted by a rowdy group of bigger Arab boys we expect an assault. Instead they lead him to his brother. (For that matter, when Isaac fails to perform in the concert I expected Abraham to take him up some mountain to sacrifice him. I’m sometimes wrong).

In the climactic concert scene Ishmael has become an Arab rock guitarist. He recognizes his little half-brother and invites him onstage to perform. First Ishmael, then his band, pick up Isaac’s classical number. In response Isaac extemporizes with a jazzier version that pulls the Arab music into his father’s composition. In the audience Sarah and Hagar recover their lost harmony. Significantly, Abraham is absent, disqualified by his patriarchal rigidity. 

The narrative unfolds episodically, with gaps between the events. We’re not told whether Ishmael is conceived by artificial insemination or a sanctioned schtup, for example. We skip over long sections of the two sons’ lives. These ellipses, with the interweaving of Genesis texts, makes the story feel detached from real life, touching upon the mythic.
      The resolution is emotionally powerful but not entirely pertinent to the current situation. It’s a hopeful Leftie dream. The parallel doesn’t quite hold up, because this Ishmael is not determined to kill Isaac. The worst he does him is to drown out a lullaby with his horn. Recognizing and reestablishing the brotherhood of Arab and Jew is certainly necessary for peace in the region. But it’s a lesson that needs to come from the Arab community, more than from the Jewish. For the obstacle to those people’s peace is not Jewish intransigence but the Arab refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state. If a Palestinian made this film it would represent a constructive advance. Will Palestinians even watch this? Or will its idealism and political sugarcoat nourish their intransigence?   

The Foreigner

Jackie Chan’s Quan is the “foreigner” not just because he’s “the chinaman” (as it happens: the politically incorrect title of the source novel)  but because he is the only main character of principle and honour. All the other figures — whether in politics or in terrorism —eagerly betray each other. Ethics and loyalty are foreign to them all. 

In the initial contrast, Quan dedicates himself to avenging the bomb killing of his last daughter (his other two having been killed by Thai pirates). Meanwhile, the ex-IRA Hennessy, now the Deputy Minister for Ireland, betrays his wife and marriage with an affair. His mistress betrays him on behalf of the new Irish terrorists. As tit for tat, Hennessy’s wife betrays him both maritally and politically. When she seduces Hennessy’s nephew, blood runs thinner than betrayal. Unfaithful in love, Hennessy is unsurprisingly exposed as a political turncoat as well. On all sides. 

The film presents modern civilization as a snake pit. For Quan, the one person of integrity, “Politicians and terrorists, they are just two ends of the same snake.” Hennessy’s difference:  “One end bites and the other doesn’t.” As Hennessy ultimately learns, the politicians can be as destructive and dishonourable as the terrorists.

Here’s the interesting point. At a time when the West is hung up on radical Islamic terrorism, abandoning their principles in fear of coloured attackers, this film establishes an Asian as its hero and moral centre, while resurrecting the all-white terrorism the Irish inflicted upon the British. This film refutes with history and drama the hypocrisy of white supremacy.
     This excellent thriller smartly addresses our times. 

Churchill

Churchill’s anxieties about the looming D-Day invasion of France provides an insightful analysis of the elements of leadership, especially in war.

One key theme lies in his wavering between “valour” and “pride” as he plans to correct allies Eisenhower and Montgomery. He settles on “valour,” appending “pride” then dropping it. In the central thrust of this film Churchill needs sufficient pride to remain active but not so much as to imperil his wisdom and strategy. 

This Churchill is understandably roiled by his loss of stature over the years of the war, especially his eclipse by the late-comer Americans. His vanity threatens to undermine the mission, as he militates against the Allies’ invasion plans. The old soldier resents the loss of military authority in his political position. He’d rather wear the general’s uniform than the PM’s britches. 

Only the king’s change of mind prevents Churchill’s insistence on personally leading the invasion — with the king aboard as well— regardless of the dangers. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed. 

  And yet there is virtue even in that mad proposal. The old soldier wants to lead his young charges not send them, especially into such mortal danger. “Follow me” is a more virtuous and effective call than “Get out there!”  

  Churchill is also paralyzed by his personal depression. History tells us he had that under control by that time, but director Teplitzky finds a deeper truth in having his Churchill paralyzed by the prospect of sacrificing thousands of his young troops in the mission. Churchill remains haunted by the slaughter he witnessed at Gallipoli, which helps account for his fear of the Allies’ all-in plans for the invasion. His stubbornness is a matter of responsibility as much as vanity. 

The film is framed by two scenes of Churchill walking the beach. In the first the tide evokes the blood shed at Gallipoli and he envisions the mass of dead young soldiers left ashore. His bowler blowing off and away even suggests he’s flipped his lid. Not without cause. At the end his walk is cleared of that haunting guilt. He doffs his derby and hoists it high in salute of the Allied invaders. It still blows away on the tide, as all leaders — as we all — do in time.  

In one scene Churchill kneels and prays to God for a horrendous rain that would force the Allies to suspend the invasion Churchill fears will colossally fail. Under the gathering storm of his anger, the old man’s prayer evokes Lear’s rage in his own storm, another powerful leader reduced to the margins and hence to madness. The rain comes, as if to reward Churchill’s prayer, but tauntingly breaks to allow the invasion.

Two women significantly affect Churchill here. Wife Clemmie is a constant moderation and support, pulling him out of debilitating anger and egotism. But the new secretary rises from his scorn to rouse him out of his pessimism, in order to hearten his people. This scene is the most sentimental in a sentimental story but it’s a necessary reminder that the strong individualism that prompts one into leadership runs the risk of becoming a reductive vanity. 

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

It takes a Greek director — Yorgos Lanthimos — to revive the elemental power of Greek tragedy in a modern setting. 

Because this is such a primal story it could be the most powerful and disturbing film of the year. The characters speak in a kind of affectless tone, usually on banal matters (like how waterproof a watch is). The music alternates eerie silences with harsh nerve-wracking strings and drums. Shots of surgery and blood churn the stomach. The widescreen settings have an amphitheatrical stretch. Alone among recent films, it sends you out in catharsis — “calm of mind, all passion spent.” It finally releases you, drained. 

A man’s misdeed brings down a curse upon his entire house that only his own immense sacrifice can expiate. That’s the essence of Greek tragedy, beside which our mundane stories of simple guilt, rationalization, mercy, forgiveness, and even human justice — the business of cops and courts — dwindle into insignificance. This is man powerless against the gods. 

This primitive drama involves a heart surgeon Steven Murphy and his ophthalmologist wife Anna. That is, the elemental force erupts in the seat of modern science, rationalism, humanity. Specifically, it's the sciences of feeling and vision. When the dpctor fails in his basic mission “to do no harm,” the professional curers are themselves profoundly afflicted. Their reason is helpless, irrelevant, once the old pagan gods have been stirred to ire. Hence, too, the absence of police here and the human justice system.

Dr Murphy was at least tipsy when his bungled surgery cost a man’s life. Murphy has not openly accepted responsibility or expressed his guilt. But he did attend the man’s funeral and stop drinking altogether. He also befriended the man’s orphaned son Martin, for whom he buys gifts and offers friendship as a sop to confronting his own guilt on any deeper level. 

Now Martin swells from orphaned son into preternatural agent of justice. For his father’s death has proved a curse on his house too. He and his mother — in different ways — crave Dr Murphy as a replacement for the dead man in their lives: “My mom's attracted to you. She's got a great body.” As an emblem of a repeated life pattern, the "favourite film" they're watching on TV is Groundhog Day.

This apparently thuggish kid reveals an other-worldly understanding. He has become the seer, the oracle who alone fathoms the root cause of the Murphy curse and its resolution. If Murphy doesn’t kill one of his children, his entire family will die. First they are paralyzed, deprived of appetite and will, then their eyes erupt in Oedipusian bleed, then they die. 

Of course these modern sophisticates deny this savage myth. Murphy in particular blames Martin for the curse he has only reported. Daughter Kim understands, because she wrote a paper on Iphygenia, Agamemnon’s daughter whom he has to sacrifice to atone for having killed a sacred deer. 

Kim is attracted to Martin and offers herself to him. In him she senses a worldliness — whether sexual or Classical Greek — apart from the others. Having initially assumed kid brother Bob would go (“Can I have your MP3 when you die?) she then volunteers to be Dr Murphy’s sacrifice. She knows the story.

The Murphys’ life is characterized by a kind of torpor. No-one has any zest for anything. The conversations are banal and wary. They worry about motorcycle helmets not their profound human fate.  Murphy and then Kim report her first period as if it were a head cold. All sense of the primeval has been lost. Anna feigns total anesthesia for her sex with her husband. He needs his delusion of a doctor's power, even there. His friend and anesthesiologist charges Anna a hand job for info. 

Facing the curse Steven tries coaxing, coercion, threats, even physical violence and the threat of murder, to shake the seer off his vision. Clinically, Steven turns to a school counsellor for advice on which child to pick. Anna sees his refusal to understand their predicament: “Our children are dying, but yes. I can make you mashed potatoes.” She marshals the will to free Martin from her husband’s futile abuse. 

In this moral vacuum both the doctor and the anesthesiologist blame the other for any failures in the operating room. This is the modern world with advanced science and culture but with stupefied emotions and a shallow sense of responsibility. Dr Murphy forbids smoking in the house, but his wife and daughter smoke outside. Martin accepts his recent addiction with the same resignation he seems to have accepted his role of messenger from the gods, to bring Murphy to their harsh justice.  
     This elemental tragedy is the prophet director’s harsh judgment on a world that evades its guilt and responsibility by suspending all conscience, all sense of a higher purpose than the mundane and worldly. The modern news cycle allows no time for the eternal. 

Virginia City (1940)

The title gives no hint, but Virginia City (1940)  is an interesting attempt to impose a national unity upon the America fractured by the Civil War. The current public dispute over the Civil War — its causes, its observances, its simmering schisms — gives the film particular pertinence.

The title seems a nod to the 1939 Dodge City, in which Michael Curtis first directed Errol Flynn in his western debut. There Flynn played a Wyatt Earpy sheriff bringing lawn order to an anarchic cattle town. 

Here Flynn plays Union Captain Kerry Bradford. He and two buddies tunnel out of a notoriously cruel Confederate prison, run by the courtly Vance Irby (Randolph Scott). The two antagonists meet again in … Virginia City, which assumes a symbolic significance. 

To the Confederates, Virginia City is a Southern city now under unwelcome Union control. To the Northerners. the city teems with dangerous Rebels. It feels a threat to both sides. That is, the same reality has contradictory perspectives upon it — as did the Civil War and America itself. And not just then.

The city is also home to three major mining companies, including the Comstock lode, making it the South’s financial centre even under Union hold. As the South is losing the war, three Virginia City mining moguls offer $5,000,000 in gold to the Confederate cause. Captain Irby undertakes the challenge of leading the wagon train to deliver it through Union lines and uncompromising desert. Captain Bradford has intuited this danger and undertakes to thwart it.  

This being an American film, the political clash between the Union’s Bradford and the South’s Irby has to be made significant by adding a romantic tension. Both love Julia Hayne (Miriam Hopkins), a Southern belle whom the war has reduced to saloon singer. She arranges for that big donation, draws Irby into his mission and — after meeting and falling in love with Bradford — expedites it even at the cost of betraying her beloved. As both men place their political commitment ahead of their romantic interest the film anticipates the triangle in Curtiz’s more famous Casablanca (1942). In both films, too, the Hungarian immigrant Curtiz unites conflictied Americans against a foreign enemy. 

In the film’s spirit of reconciliation, there is no villain on either side of this version of the war. As the dying Irby passes command onto his rival, they agree that in different circumstances they might have been — friends. 

The function of evil is instead vested in the Mexican marauder John Murrell (a risible casting of Humphrey Bogart). The fight between North and South, between Bradford and Irby, dissolves before the outside threat from the (i)outlaw and (ii) Mexican Murrell. Bradford leads his small troop to help the overwhelmed Southern train fight off the outlaws. The timely arrival of the Union soldiers wipes them out.   

Similarly, the film sanitizes the South’s cause by ignoring the issue of slavery. Indeed, the only negro in the film is a black wagon-driver who has a genial exchange of jokes with a Southern officer. With both sides led by respectful good guys and slavery forgotten, the film allows no reason why the war was ever fought. 
      Could this film be the source of the current president’s chief of staff General John Kelly’s understanding that the war was caused by a failure to compromise? I digress.

To secure the gold from Murrell, Bradford buries it in an induced avalanche. To leave it for the South to use in its reconstruction, he refuses to turn it over to the Union. For this he is charged with treason, court-martialled and sentenced to death. 

This gives his betraying chantoosie the chance to save his life by appealing directly to President Lincoln. Lincoln tells her the war is just now over — but mentions nothing like a “surrender.” Both sides are just agreeing to terms. As the killing must cease, he pardons Bradford. His romantic union with Miss Hayne emblematizes the reunion of America, the burial of past differences. 

Done.