Hostiles

This classic Western dramatizes its opening quotation from D.H. Lawrence: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” 

Trump’s America shows no sign of its having melted yet. On the contrary, that racist, violent soul-less “soul” now holds sway. And yet, pockets of the true, great America, the land of equality, freedom and community, persist. And so does the nation’s hope for redemption. 

Writer/director Scott Cooper avoids any comfort of partisanship. If the racist, murderous rancher at the end represents the extreme of the Republicans, the simple-minded, cliched Harper’s journalist/photographer at the beginning represents — and equally diminishes — the naive “useful idiots” on the Left, aka the Democrats. The preferable idealist is the fort commander’s wife, who at the dinner table articulates her anger at the government’s abuse of the Native American — but even she is here insensitive to her guest Rosalie’s trauma.

The world-weary hero Captain Blocker has the bloodied hands and traumatized memory of the true soldier, but he reads Julius Caesar in Latin. With a leap of humanity and trust he bestows the book on the little Indian orphan about to start a new life in the paleface Chicago. 

Unusually for the genre, there are no religious figures. The Bible is read over the white people’s burials and the Native American rites are respected for theirs. But there are no church people. Without religious institutions, faith operates strictly on the personal level. Rosalie and Blocker both believe in God. As Rosalie, who moves from seeing her family slaughtered by Indians to being raped by white trappers, admits: “If I did not have faith, what would I have?”

Rosalie’s essential faith is not based on any church or God but in the recognition of common humanity. Her initial hatred of the “Redskins” (Washington NFL fans take note) grows from reflexive hysteria and hunger for revenge to her sense of shared vulnerability. She’s touched when the Indian woman gives her a dress. Ultimately Rosalie will pick up a rifle to defend the Apaches against the white landowner. 

This softening, this advent of empathy, grows out of life experience, either despite our through the suffering that drives people apart. After all, the title “Hostiles” refers to the entire rainbow of cultures in this film. Thus Rosalie: "Sometimes I envy the finality of death. The certainty. And I have to drive those thoughts away when I wake.” To carry on, we have to carry on, preferring the challenges and complexities of life over any relief from our mortality. 

Blocker is the central moral barometer. As a soldier he has had to suspend his moral conscience: "I've killed everything that's walked or crawled. If you do it enough, you get used to it.” He begins so full of hatred that he refuses the assignment to escort the murderous Apache chief home to die. As he  gets to know him, however, he comes to appreciate the old enemy’s character and dignity. 

It is possible to accept an enemy, by acknowledging his humanity. Difficult, but possible, in the face of our moral clashes. Blocker knows that the bigotry and violence inbred in our world preclude any easy freedom for anyone: “Understand this: When we lay our heads down here, we're all prisoners.” 

That grows ever clearer as the battles — mental as well as physical — shrink Blocker’s troupe. The last scene suggests Blocker might be the Cain figure, the cursed killer doomed to rootlessness, forbidden community. That’s the typical American outlaw hero — Shane, Ethan Edwards (of The Searchers), Tom Doniphan (the man who really shot Liberty Valance) and so on. Society needs that killer in order to survive but cannot accommodate or accept him if it is to claim to be civilized. 

As he bids Rosalie and the boy goodbye Blocker seems to feel disqualified from happiness, from love, from a normal family life. But as the train pulls away he leaps on. He has rejected the finality of damnation and death, has shucked the shackles of his murderous career, and in an act of true faith resolves to join Rosalie for Chicago. 
     As the film opens with Rosalie losing her first family, it ends with her assumption of a new one. Rosalie, Blocker and the boy now have a new love and self-respect forged in the heat of the brutality and savagery they have suffered, yet managed to keep their humanity intact. Both are freed from their horrible experiences by their power to forgive. 

Happy End

Hands down, Happy End wins the Most Ironic Title of the year award. (Runner-up: “President Trump.”)

  From Amour Haneke continues Trintignant’s role as the octogenarian who lovingly cared for his ailing wife and helped her out — with Huppert as their callous businesswoman daughter. 

But it’s from Cache that Haneke mainly draws, extending his anatomy of the privileged white business class cut off from emotional engagement, experiencing the world and relating primarily through media, and their insensitivity to the burgeoning immigrant underclass. 

The Callais setting is key.  It’s the bridge between France and England, both in starting the Chunnel and remarking England’s last foothold in France. It’s also the entry point for African immigrants hoping to continue on to England. 

Or to the French bourgeoisie? The dysfunctional Laurents represent the privileged society which the desperate immigrants aspire to join. The family’s concerns pale beside what we see of the their Moroccan servants (“our slave” Pierre publically calls cook Jamila), the street lads Georges assumes he can hire to kill him, the older immigrants Pierre exploits to embarrass his mother at her posh engagement dinner, the construction worker killed in an accident, his whose family the Laurents further affront.  

In addition to the immigrants, the family is viewed from the perspective of Eve, Thomas’s 12-year-old daughter who comes to live with the Laurents after her mother’s mysterious poisoning and death. For this Eve there is no Eden, only a family of anger and mutual abuse.

  The film’s central theme is the family’s detachment from each other. The film opens and closes with Eve’s cellphone films. This characterizes her as distanced, relating to her family indirectly, through media. The pre-title sequence records her mother’s nightly ablution rite before she turns the lights off, an augur of her suicide. Then a young boy cavorts in silly cheek, showing Eve as cool and detached from her friends as she is from her mother. The last shot is of her Aunt Anne and father Thomas rushing to save George from contentedly drowning in the sea. 

The thin column of cellphone film is a mediated experience. So, too, are the computer screen messages between Thomas and his mistress Claire. Several key scenes are kept in long shot, Pierre’s provoking of the accident victim’s son. That device keeps us in the characters’ detachment from the experience. Bent upon suicide, the grandfather wheels down the city street in the road, between the roaring traffic and the parked cars. We have a fixed distance from him. 

In one scene the foreground is dominated by a violently barking dog. In the background we barely see the key content of the scene: Georges brought home from the hospital, in his new wheelchair. The composition leaves us uncertain. Is the dog attacking the “stranger” or straining to greet his master? And whose dog is it? We never see a family member with the dog, and Annes ordering servant Rachid to control the dog could suggest the dog is their pet, not hers. But then he bites their little daughter at play. The dog may well be the Laurents’ pet, as neglected and antagonistic as the family members themselves. 

We’re not told which. Just as the narrative omits significant details, like the cause of Eve’s mother’s death, the details of the Laurents’ financial predicament, how the new father Thomas fell into another affair, etc.   

Perhaps the film’s most touching scene is the grandfather’s with Eve. To coax her into explaining her suicide attempt he confesses that he put his beloved wife out of her suffering. But, as her cellphone filing suggests, the girl is too dissociated from her own emotions and too remote from others to be as open and intimate as he is. 

  Whether in lethargy, resignation or obedience, she wheels him toward the water and eaves him there. Even his possible death does not shake her detachment.

Earlier Georges told her how disturbing he found the spectacle of a predatory bird tearing apart a smaller one, both then wiped away by a car.  His point is how reality is even more jolting than its mediated images are. But when she watches his suicide she again resists the direct emotional encounter — and films it.

The forgetful old man eager to die is the film’s emotional and moral center. His family is relentlessly abrasvive. His son Thomas left his first wife and seems poised to leave his second for Claire, his unseen email mistress. He struggles to be a father for Eve. Grandson Pierre is an incompetent misfit who blames his mother for his own failure. 

Nor is there much passion and fulfilment in Anne’s life. Her fiancé is the unappealing English lawyer who has been negotiating a large loan to rescue her company. This seems the traditional expedience rather than passion. 

Confirming this rotting and wasteful society, the dialogue abounds with references to urinating. Eve records her mother’s pissing and flush. The email love letters relish the memory of golden showers, the mutual debasement may confirm Eve’s sense that her father doesn’t love this Claire, didn’t love either wife and probably cannot love her either.

Perhaps the film’s central metaphor is the accident on their construction site. A worker is killed when he goes into a stored portable toilet to urinate and the ground crumbles under him. When a construction site provides such a bathetic destruction the company, the family, the society, seem of very unstable grounding,.

Perhaps “Happy End” isn’t so ironic after all. If Georges does manage to drown before his son and daughter save him, in this family he could ask for nothing better. In any case, Eve remains the continuing victim of a broken adult world she can neither understand nor enter with confidence or commitment. 

The Post

Spielberg opens with a Vietnam war scene, automatic rifles blazing to a CCR soundtrack. That not only sets the period but reminds us this is a war film. Publishing the Pentagon Papers was a wartime act — to stop America’s unnecessary wasting of lives in Vietnam. 

More to the point, we are still in that war — resisting a Republican president bent upon suppressing the free press and stifling his critics, especially those who expose his lies. Of course the Nam lies told by the governments of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon pale beside Trump’s 2,000 lies exposed in just his first year in office. The beat goes on.

Like the best history, this addresses the time the film is made as much as the time in which it is set. That is, its truth extends beyond its period and catches a continuing verity: US governments — and they are not alone —lie to advance their cause, to protect themselves, regardless of the cost in civilian lives and the violation of America’s famed democratic principles. In this respect the film is about 2018 as much as 1971. It makes Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee models for our time.
      So that opening battle scene is not Saving Private Ryan. It's saving America.

The film seems accurate in its general plot lines. Nixon tried to prosecute the NY Times for publishing the secret papers smuggled out by the idealist Daniel Ellsberg. The Times thus  silenced, the Washington Post stepped into the breach to publish more stories themselves. The Supreme Court supported the press 6-3, a split we can’t reasonably expect of today’s Right-biased Supremes. 

The major characters — Graham, Bradlee, Robert McNamara, Ellsberg — also ring true. Whether or not they made the speeches given them here, their deeds and their significance are consistent. 

Graham’s isolation — a widow standing against a Board of smug white men, indeed a government of white men — may be emphasized to advance the current assertion of women’s rights. That’s fair. So too the little girl’s initiative selling lemonade, the abused and admiring Latina intern, Bradlee’s wife’s separate life as an artist, and especially Kay’s triumphant stride away from the Supreme Court through a mob of reverent women, tacitly thankful for her liberating example. Graham’s valour justifies that elaboration. 

The film draws on two other popular genres, as well as the war film. Graham’s and Bradlee’s stubborn idealism harkens back to the James Stewart standards, Mr Smith, Mr Deeds, and all the other earnest heroes struggling through a morass of self-service and corruption to reaffirm America’s defining principles of freedom and equality. That’s the America that has to be recovered to make her “great again.” 

Spielberg also revives the great tradition of the newspaper film. The montage of newspaper front pages, the mechanics of the lino-typesetter, the literal lines of lead prose, the whirring monster presses and the trucks lighting up the dawn streets with bundles of the latest word — all that warms the cockles of any newsman’s heart. Papers may be dying, but their mythic heroism survives. Much like the theory of American democracy.
     Spielberg is a master director and here he’s working with a first-rate cast and story. Sure, it preaches to the converted. It won’t reform Trump or shoot a spine into any of his GOP enablers. But if it’s screened widely enough perhaps it will enlighten and embolden enough of the Republicans’ constituents to have some effect. 

Phantom Thread

The title points three ways.

        (i) To the brilliant, eccentric dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock, the phantom thread alludes to the little secrets he hides inside his creations: his mother’s portrait under the canvas of his jacket, little messages, a talisman like the “never cursed” he plants in the Belgium princess’s wedding gown. These are ghostly presences. 

(ii) More broadly, it suggests the magic of his craft, his famous “touch” that pulls the superior materials together into an even more brilliant whole. It’s the genius he brings to the “trade” his mother taught him, the genius that makes him the dominant figure in 1950s London fashion (before the working class eruption of the Beatles, Carnaby Street, etc.). 

(iii) Then there’s the love story — the core of this lush drama. This phantom thread is the mysterious element that draws together the handsome rich designer and the awkward country inn waitress. Trying to define this explains the opening (and returned to) scene of Alma being interviewed by a reporter about their relationship.

In fact, the reporter is an intriguing ambiguity. Why is he interviewing her? Is he a fashion feature writer or a crime reporter” Is he sniffing out a new style trend or a mushroom snuff? Either explanation, i.e., either thread, is a phantom we need not pursue.

Suffice it that the film chronicles a fascinating, unusual and therefore probably quite representative anatomy of a love affair. 

It’s especially quirky in its general exclusion of sex. It avoids the obvious. Woodcock (the name admits a retreat from fleshy sex stuff) has a ravenous appetite — but it’s exclusively for food, as his breakfasts demonstrate. Alma’s first note to him addresses “the hungry boy,” an affectionate reduction. 

Alma’s initial appeal is to his designer aesthetic: he likes a model with no breasts and a bit of a belly. But when she moves in he gives her a separate room, next to his but not with him.

For he also has a ravenous hunger for complete control over his life. He doesn’t want his work or meals or emotional balance ever disturbed. Hence he’s a confirmed bachelor, though he explains that as his attempt to avoid the inevitable deceits of marriage. 

Alma loses him when — against his sister Cyril’s strong advice — she springs a surprise romantic dinner on him. Woodcock can’t abide surprises. Oddly, he handles having a sister named Cyril! But this is a story of irregular sexuality. 

Alma’s entrance ends his apparent career of serial mistresses, with whom he is early infatuated before he finds them irritating enough to let Cyril get rid of them. Alma brings new life: “Who is this lovely creature making the house smell so nice?”

Their romance traces the shift of power from the totally self-absorbed man to the plain woman who struggles to sustain her own identity. He doesn’t respect her taste, personality, her desires, preferring to treat her as if she were just another material from which he fashions his work. The model is a tool of the dress. If anything, he cedes her less respect than he does his antique lace. 

“Alma” of course means “soul.” Paradoxically, the woman who brings soul and warmth to the cold Woodcock can only do it by shattering his independence — here, through poisoned mushrooms. She makes him physically sick to heal him emotionally. 

The dressmaker becomes human, properly appreciative of his woman, only after she forces him into some dependence upon her. Then her tending him supplants his earlier exclusive commitment to his dead mother: “It's comforting to think the dead are watching over the living. I don't find that spooky at all.”  In his delirium her entrance drives out his vision of his dead mother.

The first poisoning has him fall and ruin the wedding gown he’s finishing. But his seamstress crew solves the problem without him. Here he achieves an identity and success outside his work. He marries Alma. So much for his “I’m a confirmed bachelor. Incurable.” Alma cures him of isolated bachelorhood as well as the poisoning. One poison drives out the other. 

But he lapses from their healthy independence, prompting him to want Cyril to despatch her as well. When Alma’s second dose confirms their union, she tells him what she is doing: 

"I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open with only me to help. And then I want you strong again. You're not going to die. You might wish you're going to die, but you're not going to. You need to settle down a little.”

Even without knowing what she has done to him, he accepts it: “Kiss me, my girl, before I'm sick.” In context, that’s as romantic as the opening sonnet of Romeo and Juliet. As Alma tells Dr. Hardy, “Reynolds has made my dreams come true. And I had given him what he desires most in return…. Every piece of me.”
     The park idyll, with Woodcock and Alma playful of a workday afternoon, sister Cyril happily tending the infant in its carriage, may give the film a conventional happy ending. Love conquers all, etc. Or it may be just another projection of Alma’s fantasy. Which it is may depend on what that journalist is writing. 

The Darkest Hour

British Director Joe Wright has admitted his replay of Churchill is relevant to current America: The director claims to be heartened by the growing resistance to the president’s increasing tyranny. 

But the connection is deeper and more troublesome. Wright’s Churchill is specifically inflected into a figure of Trump populism. The film is a defence of Trump. As no responsible person could say Trump is Churchillian, Gary Oldman’s — however brilliant — performance serves to reduce Churchill to Trump. 

The most serious malfeasance is the PM’s visit to the London Underground. On the brief trip to the next station, Westminster, Churchill meets a carload of Ordinary Citizens, overcomes their awe, learns their names, cracks a few jokes, finds out about them, and hears their full-throated rejection of any peace over war against Hitler. He learns the voiceless citizenry happen to agree with him!

The encounter reverses Churchill’s decision to join the freedom-sacrificing pacifiers. Instead he stands firm, rallies the government and — spoiler alert— five years later defeats the Nazis. 

The underground scene is not based in Churchill’s real life at all. Instead it derives from Shakespeare’s Henry V, when on the eve of Agincourt Hal walks incognito among his motley army connecting to his roots and drawing strength from them. 

Wright’s version is stilted and dangerous. Instead of poetry and sincerity it seems like an animated Communist poster, all the faces radiant and of one heart and mind to risk a nations’ population in an uncertain war. Indeed in this idealistic vision the one black man on the train — indeed, in the film, and possibly in the England of that time — can complete Churchill’s classic poetic quotation. This truly “fake” scene portrays Churchill as a populist, just like our Donnie! He alone knows what The People want, hears their needs and resolutely serves their purpose in the face of conventional politics and against the elite (the class he of course enjoys). 

Even the Churchill traits here that have historic basis are by that fake scene mobilized to present Churchill as the Trump kind of leader. As a serial flip-flopper, he’s rejected by his own party. He’s bullying, impatient and insulting to his staff. His career is pocked with spectacular failures, with Gallipoli standing in for Trump’s many — of course, personally profitable — bankruptcies.  He takes corrective advice from his First Lady, the fashionably done-up Clementine evoking the combo Melanka. Where others operate by knowledge and principle, he goes by his — here prosthetic — gut.

His daily 4 p.m. nap evokes Trump’s sliver of a work-day that punctuate his golf breaks. In fact, Churchill worked two full days every day by taking an extra sleep, shower and breakfast within each 24-hour period. This Churchill’s explanation — “I work late” — doesn’t cover that. It instead shows Churchill Trump-like in seeming to be lazy by grabbing an extra break.

In short, this Churchill serves to valourize a leader who in these surface particulars is like Trump: quirky, disliked, a political outsider, unpredictable (to the point of frightening the king), but with a preternatural dedication to and insight into The People. 

What’s omitted is the very essence of Churchill, everything that distinguishes him from Trump: his massive education and scholarship, his brilliant research, his idealistic, humane eloquence, his long and varied political experience and his rock-solid moral character. Sure, if you set aside all the ways Churchill was the antithesis to Trump, then you can make Trump seem like another Churchill, an outsider populist unfairly maligned by everyone with sense and responsibility, who are here played as treasonous cowards. 

Wright’s Churchill goes wrong in another scene. Churchill knew his Shakespeare. Churchill would NEVER say “Lead on, Macduff.” The verb is “lay on,” as in hand to hand (not Trump’s foot in mouth) combat.

This undercurrent may explain the film’s weird opening shots: the Nazi army and military equipment in massive uniform array. In bringing us into the action, the element Wright chooses to characterize the time is not landscape, city or characters, but the threat of a war. The images connote Little Rocket Man. 

The first reference to Churchill is the shot of his empty seat in parliament. Under the threat of war, the leadership is a vacancy into which the people’s saviour will by our good fortune slip. However unpopular, unconventional, unattractive, he will prove the right man at the right time and place. Really.

As the film opens on the Nazi threat, it closes on the Churchillian resolution. And of course it’s another distortion. “He mobilized the English language and sent it off to war” was not the wisdom of Lord Halifax but of Edward Murrow, later quoted by John Kennedy. But why quibble at misrepresentation and more egregious lies when it’s in service of a larger (or in this case, “fake”) truth?            Perhaps in one specific the film’s parallel offers hope: Five months after the war the public voted Churchill out of office.

The Shape of Water

So what is the shape of water anyway? 

  Water is a malleable element that assumes the shape of its container. It is a life-force, an  inner quality that can’t be read from its surface. It has no exclusive shape but is a sustaining presence.

The same can be said for humanity. Humanity is an essential quality that can be found in any number of forms. Here it propels the mute Eliza, the lost gay artist Giles and reluctant help Delilah, and it is embodied in the mysterious amphibian monster. But that natural humanity has been trapped by the US army which intends either his live dissection or his murder to serve the government’s political interests and paranoia. 

That merman seems godlike in his healing powers. That’s because he is a creature of nature, not the species man so long removed from it. He restores Giles’ hair, disappears his wound, cures his own bullet-holes — and ultimately brings eternal life via love to Eliza. 

As an orphan Eliza Esposito is cut off from any earthly roots, but she has an instinctual connection to the source of life, water. Hence her immediate attraction to and sympathy for the merman. She persuades Giles to help save him because of their common humanity, theirs and the merman’s.  

Her job reduces her to cleaning the masters’ piss, blood and excrement. But her humanity has profounder roots than anyone else here. In the opening scene she is asleep and so freed into her natural state — floating in an ocean that fills her room, all the furniture bobbing about, until she eases back down to her fish-shaped sofa and awakens into her lesser world, mundane reality. While her egg-timer ticks off her breakfast, she masturbates in her tub, exulting in her freedom, fullness and immersion.  

The film does have a fish out of water, but it’s not the merman. It’s the pie-clerk, a bigot from Ottawa who fakes the chain’s “Southern Hospitality.” The positive variation on this is the Russian spy who has been educated in America and is now to be reluctantly “extracted” back to Russia — and death.

The film also has a monster but it’s not the merman. It’s the obscene director Strickland. As he grinds his candies and scarfs painkillers he pretends to civilized order, discipline, virtue, righteous citizenship, potency, but he’s the film’s biggest loser. He tortures the merman monstrously, sexually threatens Eliza, demeans her and her partner Zelda, and so provokes the audience’s proper revulsion that we cheer when his new Cadillac gets crunched.  

Like water and humanity, manhood cannot be characterized by its outer appearance or shape. Zelda has bigger balls than husband Brewster. Despite his failure as an illustrator, the gay and lonely Giles proves manlier than Strickland when he helps free the merman. He drives the rescue laundry van, then knocks down Strickland to enable the escape. 

So, too, the merman’s flat groin unfurls a sexual potency that fulfills Eliza and brings them eternal love. This while macho Strickland loses his fingers, which even after reattachment turn black and putrid. He may have saved his “pussy finger” but he’s ultimately emasculated.

Guillermo del Toro pointedly sets the film in late 1950s America. That’s the America that the current Republican government aims to restore. Hence the pie-clerk’s racism and homophobia, and Strickland’s racism, sexism, classism and smug materialism. Strickland is sure “The Lord’s image” is his, not black Zelda’s and certainly not the merman’s. Indeed, he loses the trail when he snaps “What am I doing, interviewing the shit cleaners?” Strickland is so alienated from nature that his Caddy is pointedly “teal, not green.” This sterile military-industrial complex admits no green beyond the Stricklands’ gelatine dessert, the sickly key lime pies, and Giles’s ad drawing that loses out to a photograph. 

As the five-star General Hoyt admonishes him, “Decency is what we export. We don’t use it ourselves.”  Their attack on the merman evokes Trump’s evisceration of the EPA, his revival of the murderous coal industry and then plotting to pillage the national parks and to mine the entire seacoast with oil drilling. To Strickland the mysterious captive natural power is only “the asset” — as negative a positive as one could assign a living creature.  

Though the Russians are as murderous as the American’s, the Russian scientist spy Hofstetler sustains the human value: “I don't want an intricate, beautiful thing destroyed!” We don’t have to be restricted to our government’s inhumanity. 

Though the film is framed with shots of Eliza floating in a watery world, first during her dream, then liberated with her merman, the film has another frame, Giles’s narration. He tells the story. As he admits its mystery and his incomprehension it represents his blossoming into a fuller self as well as Eliza’s. 
     Initially he’s an ex-alcoholic failure struggling to get work drawing ad designs. That’s a very ‘50s profession, sustaining a false dream-life for American consumerism as false as the fantasies screened in the Orpheum under Giles’ and Eliza’s flats. “Make them happier,” he’s advised on his cartoon family. Encountering the merman liberates him too. Giles starts drawing emotional representations of the strange creature and his connection to our humanity. Giles switches his hand and his imagination from selling a false image of happiness to probing our wilder possibilities.