Friday, June 29, 2018

The Cakemaker

The film opens and closes on images of Thomas’s poignant mix of solitude and passion. In the first he’s kneading his dough — that’s the activity in which he finds both his self-realization and his antidote to loneliness. At the end he rides his bike away from his Berlin bakery job. He’s going home — as usual, he thinks — alone, but still warmed by the memory of his beloved Oren and Oren's widow Anat. 
But he’s not alone. Anat has tracked him down. She glows with anticipation of their reconnecting. The last image — the clouded skies — signify their challenging but promising future. The film stops before we know if and how they will recover their love. We may guess as we prefer. Or believe. 
Thomas doesn’t lock the front door when he leaves that cafe then. Maybe it locks itself upon closing. Or his leaving it unlocked may signify his openness to Anat’s return to his love.  
       This film’s metaphors work that naturally, like Anat’s radiance at eating Thomas’s cakes and bread — that’s love at first bite. So too the sensuality of Thomas’s baking, the comforting softness in his colour, fleshiness and overall nature. Thomas is doughy himself, and he kneads to be needed. He's malleable to the touch, nourishing. Here love is not romance but an openness to emotions and to life. 
This film abounds with scenes of such quiet suggestions, revelations, nuances in relationship. In the first scene the two men are already familiar with each other — Thomas remembers what pastry Oren doesn’t like. 
Arriving in Jerusalem, Thomas’s isolation is caught in one shot where he’s shrunk to the lower right of the screen, passed by two gesticulating orthodox Jews. The framing and extras define him as alien. In the shower room at Oren’s club Thomas looks at a handsome Jew, then down at his — we infer — uncut alternative.
After stealing a smoke outside after her shabbes dinner, we see Anat boxed in the window frame luxuriating in the verboten last crumbs of his Black Forest Cake. She licks her plate. That frame evokes the religious restriction Moti imposes that she must transcend to find fulfilment with Thomas — as, too, her later discovery that her present lover was her husband’s first. 
  Wordlessly Thomas warms Anat’s runaway son, then involves him in icing the cookies. As with Anat, Thomas slips into an easy bond with the boy, despite his uncle Moti’s impediments. 
In scene after scene the import is in a glance, a gesture, hardly ever verbalized. Thomas (and we) never learn how Oren’s mother twigged to his affair with her son. We just see her immediate warmth towards him, her generosity, and her tacit knowing. 
That understanding lies beyond Anat’s brother Moti, whose initial disdain for “the German” takes cover under the formal strictures of the kosher. Moti makes an effort to accept Thomas — as in his shabbes invitation. 
In contrast, Oren’s mother and son are instinctively drawn to Thomas — as is Anat. In their first sexual engagement Anat takes the initiative. Thomas’s intention has only been to help her. The passion is unexpected.
Perhaps the key to the film’s conception of love lies in the scenes where Thomas asks Oren to describe his most recent love-making with Anat. Initially we might read the scenes as simply erotic. But the context gives them rather more depth and characterization. There is no jealousy, no bitterness. 
Rather Thomas’s embrace of Oren is so complete that it can include the other objects of Oren’s love, his wife and his son. When Thomas makes love to Anat later it is with the memory, gestures and emotion he recalls from Oren. 
Here is a film where love might conquer all. Hence all the divisions that are set up against Thomas — German vs Jew, Berlin vs Jerusalem, Hebrew vs. German/English, bereaved Insider family vs embarrassing Outsider rival, gentile vs Jew, wife vs lover, heterosexual vs homosexual love, etc. 
Thomas’s and Anat’s love for Oren make their falling in love with each other seem entirely credible — however unconventional. How many lovers do have any such strong bond in common? Oren’s mother loved him enough to accept his lover Thomas; so Anat apparently grows to, too. 
      But that acceptance too takes faith. Maybe that’s why Thomas’s cafe is called Credence.  You have to believe.

P.S. A second viewing discovers other possibilities. First, a minor one. At the end Thomas doesn't just leave the cafe door unlocked; he leaves the sidewalk table and chairs out too. He's not locking up, just leaving early, the cafe presumably in the hands of whoever managed it during his sojourn in Jerusalem. More importantly, in Oren's locker Thomas discovers a couple of condoms among the towels. This redefines Oren as someone who has been playing around. Not for him the fidelity and focus Thomas displays when he doesn't respond to the stud in the locker room or the soldier who invitingly heads into the trees. This explains why Oren's last words to Thomas were his assurance that he would never tell Anat of their affair. Yet Anat reveals Oren had just moved out, planning to move to Berlin. Oren has betrayed both his wife and this lover. The capacity for and power of love is rooted in the lover not the beloved.

Monday, June 25, 2018

The City in Cinema (reprint)

City in cinema: impressions
Queen's Quarterly. 107.2 (Summer 2000): p272-85.
When the lights dim and the screen flickers, we see not just a story, but a vision of the urban world as conjured behind the eyes of a Hitchcock or a Scorsese. The way our eyes and ears take in everything from the hue of the city sky to the "tone" of its concrete has been carefully imagined and rendered by a team of hundreds of creative minds, each one an expert in some facet of the grand illusion -- the drift of evening fog, the sound of shoe leather on pavement, the ambience of an empty street. For over a hundred years the cinema has both reflected our vision of the metropolis and helped to shape that vision -- an inevitable process in a century when so much centred on the worlds of city and celluloid.
IN the beginning was the ward. The mental ward. Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) was far from the first movie, but it established a truth that cinema has tended to hide ever since -- that the setting, like every other component of a film, primarily serves the function of metaphor. It evokes more than it is. Wiene used grotesque painted backdrops to represent the city streets. These expressionist streets, with their jagged edges, violation of perspective, and ominous shadows, express the madness and chaos of the agonized mind. That is to say, the setting did not document a real physical space but expressed a mental state, an attitude, a theme. Although the more realistic cinema has eschewed the extremity of this eccentric film, cinema continues to use the city backdrop as a figure of speech. To hijack Minor White's observation on photography: in cinema the city is not just what's there but what else is there.
Though Wiene's superlative expressionism is rare in the history of film, it has not disappeared. Expressionism lives. When Alfred Hitchcock opens The Lady Vanishes (1938) with an obviously "false" set-up of a toy car wending its way across a Tyrolean tabletop, it's a rhetorical device, not a sign of laziness or economisering. It's one way to say "Once upon a time ..." before unwinding a fanciful tale of grandmotherly espionage and burgeoning love. Similarly, the blatant back projection and the obviously painted slum backdrop in Marnie (1964) are appropriate metaphors for the crippling disjunction between the heroine's present awareness and her suppressed past. More currently, in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997) and Sam Mendes' American Beauty (1999), the houses, streets, storms, and beflowered cheerleader reveal not just where the plots happen but what they mean.
CITIES have often inspired lyrical tributes. Walter Ruttman's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), a montage of images of that metropolis from dawn to dusk, finds both metaphor and the poeticized mundane in the minutiae of daily life. Observations of an excursion to the beach provide more satiric insights in Menschen am Sonntag (1929), directed by Robert Sidomak and Edgar Ulmer, and co-authored by Fred Zinnemann and Billy Wilder (inchoate masters all). Woody Allen opens Manhattan (1979) with an equivalent serenade to that city's splendours, his editing choreographed to Gershwin. Allen's city abounds with scenes and places of cultural richness and beauty, each one a refuge from storms and barbarism. This film was originally received as a social comedy of rigorous morality, but Allen's notoriety since has inflected it into the pretentious rationalization of a middle-aged man "dating a girl who does homework" (Mariel Hemingway). In this city of sophisticated corruption, the hero's moral high ground becomes the artist's evasion.
Allen's closing shot in Manhattan -- his hero in tragic close-up when apparently he has lost his beloved teenybopper -- specifically evokes Chaplin's City Lights (1931). There Chaplin's Tramp-with-No-Name falls in love with a blind, penurious flower-seller (Virginia Cherrill) and with great sacrifice funds the operation that restores her sight. In Chaplin's last shot the tramp is unreservedly joyful that his beloved can see -- even though her sight dispels forever her illusion that her benefactor is a handsome, wealthy man. After the tramp's sacrifice, what compounds his heroism is his total selflessness. His unmitigated joy reveals that he has harboured no expectation of winning her, so he has no hopes that will be dashed by her disenchanted vision of him. While her dream of a wealthy lover is ruined, Charlie's selfless dream is fulfilled.
This shot exemplifies Chaplin's dictum that tragedy is close-up, comedy long shot. That is, comedy views the human against his social landscape, in his material world, upon the surfaces where pratfalls happen. In contrast, tragedy explores the human in isolation with his fate, abstracted from his quotidian being (i.e., the close-up). The close-up at the end of City Lights is tragic because it expresses the selfless joy of a hero who is doomed to failure, loss, rejection, solitude. In this case, his loss is due to his virtue, his generosity. But this tragic shot concludes a film that is very much bound up with the particulars of life in the city, the comic vision.
For Chaplin the city usually emblematizes the society from which his poor tramp is excluded. His happy ending usually shows him walking away up a country road, typically alone, with his over-reaching shoes, ill-fitting posh suit and cocky bowler, and armed with his thin, bending cane -- the solitary figure indomitable. It's not just that -- as the proverb should have it -- "It's better to have loved and lost," Period, but that Chaplin places his faith in the figure whose self-sufficiency and pluck inure him to the rejections and defeats he inevitably experiences in the city.
In this film Chaplin's basic trope is that people who see by the "city lights" are blind to human worth. The suicidal, wealthy drunk can only recognize Charlie's worth when he's blind drunk. Sober, he doesn't recognize him. The flower-seller appreciates Charlie's worth only so long as she's blind to his social/economic station. When she finally sees him, she is first prompted to condescending amusement, as she witnesses his humiliation. She recognizes him only when she touches him to give him a coin. That is, he is properly identified by his touch and by generosity, not by his shabby, humiliated appearance. The theme of deceptive appearances coheres most of the visual gags in the film, such as a paper streamer mistaken for spaghetti, a bald head for aspic, and the woman's dance invitation he intercepts. Charlie mistakes a modern dance number in the nightclub to be a fight, then turns a prizefight into a dance when he tries to win the money for the girl's eye operation.
In the opening scene, the tramp is discovered sleeping in the lap of a public monument to "Peace and prosperity." The shabby figure in the lap of stone-cold luxury gives the lie to the city's complacent assumptions. As he struggles to extricate himself from the embarrassing situation, he is physically unable to stay on the level with the society's anthem. The gag is a metaphor for the cross-purposes of the tramp and the society. With the statue's help he thumbs his nose at the indignant, nonsensical society. The whole film satirizes the unfeeling veneer of the modern city, its illusions of progress and prosperity despite the plight of its poor and helpless. (Pray Adam Sandier doesn't think to do a contemporary remake!) It also traces the tramp's growth through love from the hypocritical manners of the urbane (e.g., his initial scolding of the newspaper boys, his covert appraisal of the nude sculpture) into a person of genuine and generous feeling.
Unlike Chaplin's suggestion of an Everycity for his Everyman, Hitchcock had a gift for "casting" cities. The titular unease of Vertigo (1958), with its hero's repeated falls from grace, in love as in life, cries out for the rollercoaster streets of San Francisco and the romantic/religious mysteries of its Spanish past. The themes of intrusive voyeurism and its corollary, frigid alienation, in Rear Window (1954) are uniquely served by the tenements of New York, where a wall of windows reveals a cross-section of private lives dubiously exposed in their varying stages of disintegration, like a wall of TV dramas.
In I Confess (1953) Hitchcock used Quebec City for his Manichean investigation of the vulnerability of virtue. A priest (Montgomery Clift) is charged with a blackmailer's murder but is bound to secrecy by the killer's having confessed to him, instead of the police. With few exceptions, the postlapsarian citizenry are malevolent, cruel, judgmental. The Quebec City setting lends a weighty religiosity to the drama, with its steep streets, mortally tempting gardens and gazebos, all those compelling "direction" (i.e., one-way) traffic signs, and the towering cathedra and Stations of the Cross. This city is shown to embody Catholicism -- or at least to express the rich complexity and guilt of a committed Catholic mind. In his signature appearance Hitchcock is the first character we see. He walks in dark silhouette across the high horizon, against the direction of the opening traffic signs that point us to the window of the murder scene. He moves against the mortal grain, aloof from the rules and tensions of ordinary mankind. This initiating spirit is the maker/Maker of the film, the human surrogate of The Creator (or "The Enforcer," to quote the Bogart poster the priest passes later). Like the killer, by walking away from the crime this god figure forces others to face up to it.
Of course, Hitchcock does not consider crime to be exclusively a city phenomenon. It's human nature. So he delights in discovering murderous propensities in that site of traditional American innocence, the small town. In Shadow of a Doubt (1943) an urbane merry widow killer (Joseph Cotten) comes to a small town, but the middle-aged men there already debate expeditious methods of gruesome murder. The sinister hardware store in Psycho (1960) and the demonic visionary in the coffee shop in The Birds (1963) also attach the terrors of life to small-town Americana. The Trouble with Harry (1955) provides the apotheosis of this theme. In gorgeous, autumnal Vermont, dead Harry is continually resurrected and reburied by the citizens who individually assume themselves guilty of having killed him. But hope, love, and the earnest and fertile imagination take root and blossom in such essential awareness. If murder and guilt happen anywhere there are human beings, some of Hitchcock's crimes seem characteristic of the crowded and busy city: the misidentification in The Wrong Man (1956), the aloof inhumanity of the penthouse killers in Rope (1948), and the general amoral smugness from which his heroes are shaken in Strangers on a Train (1951) and all his James Stewart and Cary Grant films.
As the Hitchcock canon suggests, the most popular genres of American film explore the paradoxes and ambivalence of the city. And why not? Arguably the single most important phenomenon in the history of the United States has been the development of its cities, the metamorphosis from wild frontier to urban jungle.
That change is also reflected in the culture's most mythic sports. The semiotics of baseball preserve the culture's pastoral past. The infield is the uniform course that, if the pitch is properly dealt with, invites one to run through safe bases and score by returning home. The outfield -- whose dimensions may vary from stadium to stadium -- is the unmeasured wilds beyond this skeleton of community, the reminder of the pre-suburban outland. In contrast, football is a game of steady grabbing of land, one ten-yard block at a time, against equally heroic resistance. Here the primary focus is on the immediate yard of embattled ground, not the ball. The culture's switch from baseball to football as the all-American game mirrors the nation's growth from a country of small towns to one dominated by the great city. "The boys of summer" remain icons of nostalgia, a remembrance of things past, an eternal adolescence manifest in the elderly managers still dressing in the boys' uniforms. But it's the behemoths of the fall -- whose coaches wear business suits -- that speak for the contemporary psyche in America. Baseball sustains the myth of small-town America, football the industry, violence, and pressure of the modern city. Of course, hockey is Canada's European play of finessing space for a goal, like soccer -- but on ice.
But I digress. Back to the popular genres -- the musical, crime film, and Western -- and their take on the city.
THE musical propagates the myth that the city is the paradise of opportunity, the community of generous spirits, the testing ground and validation of individualism (albeit harnessed to the harmonies of the troupe). Why, every town in Kansas must have a Mickey and a Judy ready to "put on a show" of Ziegfieldian pizzazz. Typically, the young, beautiful, talented heroes emerge from the farms and towns to become stars in the city. The City is New York -- which is so alluring it's a threat to the old-fashioned 1903 family of Vincent Minnelli's Meet Me in St Louis (1944). New York is where everyone -- even blustery fathers like Leon Ames -- must move to prove their advancement.
If one is to believe the Hollywood musical, such as Richard Quine's My Sister Eileen (1955), the stranger to New York has only to erupt into song and/or dance in the street and she is immediately supported by a horde of loving, dependable strangers (what we might call "Blanche Dubois Syndrome"). In Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins' West Side Story (1961) this aestheticizing of reality extends to turning gang warfare into jazz ballet -- as rape is in Stanley Donen's Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), but that's country folk.
New York is the high life, where champagne flows, everyone is elegant, and wealth, love, and fame await those who qualify -- not by birth (as in old, obsolete Europe) but by that most egalitarian qualification of the elect -- talent. This is the theme of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), where a pathetic housewife (Mia Farrow) wins the heart of a fictitious character -- and even, briefly, that of the actor who portrays him (Jeff Daniels both) -- by her virtue, sincerity, and her knack with a ukulele. Hollywood's fantasies of the glamorous city sustain the realistically deprived.
These same values propel the crime film. Nonentities grow into "stars" by exercising their individualism, transcending societal norms, scampering up the ladder of the city's nightlife, one rat-a-tat success at a time. In both genres the city represents opportunity, rivalry, the testing ground for individualist ambitions in tension with codes of restraining community. Both genres celebrate individuals' triumph of will, eccentric characters, and the happy blend of ambition and talent. Before the hoofer becomes a star and the gunsel transforms into head honcho, they have to pay their dues to the team, biding their time, whether holding up the chorus line or stepping to the boss's measure. Both genres show heroes espousing style and dash, whether the top hat and tails of the musical or the shiny new suit that always marks the start of a gangster's rise.
In both genres the city streets are paved with guilt -- and sometimes gold. Where the musical thrives on colour -- the opulence of wealth and glamour, even in the pre-Technicolor shimmering silvers of black and white Astaire-cases to paradise -- the crime film lives in and exposes the shadows. It's the post-psychoanalytic cinema, exposing the dark alleys behind the glamorous nightclubs. A Star is Born could be the title of any of those films named after a legend: Capone, Bugsy (Siegel or Malone), The Godfathers, Lepke, Machine Gun Kelly, Scarface, Lucky Luciano. With the exception of Bonny and Clyde all the major gangster epics are big city figures, because the challenge and rewards of the teeming urban society signify crime. A Legs Diamond could rise and fall in either genre.
But of all the genres, it is the Western that is primarily about the city. Paradoxically, true, for what we mainly see is the pre-city, the desert and at most the small towns from which the cities sprang. This is a classic case of the presence of absence. The Western chronicles the culture's transition from the wild to the settled, from the loner's range to community. As the Western details the beginnings of the city, it provides a nostalgic recollection of the pre-urban golden age, its lost Eden, its innocent infancy. That's why so many Westerns are titled after cities/states (Carson City, Santa Fe Trail, Dodge City, Virginia City, 3:10 to Yuma, Vera Cruz, San Francisco, Dallas, In Old Arizona, Tulsa, Dakota, In Old Oklahoma, Cheyenne, and of course the ever-popular Saskatchewan) or emblems of the country's settlement (Union Pacific, Western Union, Winchester 73, The Tin Star, The Covered Wagon, The Iron Horse, The Iron Mistress -- which incidentally refers to Jim Bowie's knife, not a rusty lover) or people from iconic places (The Man from Utah, The Man from Laramie, The Virginian, The Oklahoma Kid).
Some of the Western's most important scenes catch the turning point of frontier into civilization. In John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) the nomadic gunman Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) evolves into the model sheriff when he rides into the incipient town, gets a haircut and shave at the barbershop, puts on his Sunday suit and does a stiff, determined dance with the civilized Clementine (Cathy Downs) on the clean floorboards of the unfinished church -- before dispatching the villainous Clantons at the OK Corral. The city-culture woman here represents an advance upon the earthier Chihuahua (Linda Darnell) as Grace Kelly does to Katy Jurado in Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952). But the latter patrician pacifist learns from the rougher heroine the need to shoot a man in the back to save her husband.
The structure of Ford's The Man who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) can be called analytic nostalgia, specifically as it harkens back to the origins of the legalized community. Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife (Vera Miles) return to the old town for the funeral of the unknown Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). As a young lawyer Stoddard built his political reputation on the story that he killed the notorious outlaw, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Now Stoddard reveals that he never in fact performed the heroic feat. The real hero was Doniphon, who from the shadows shot Valance before the villain could kill the wounded lawyer. This film captures the ambivalence of the modern order. For the law to take its hold, there has to be a civilized outlaw, in the shadows, to support it. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it won't survive without a gun to protect it. When he spurns the credit for ridding the community of the lawless villain, Doniphon loses his girl (Miles), throws away his future, and watches his maladroit friend rise to fame -- and relative fatuity. As the villain's name subtly reminds us, liberty is ambivalent. At the same time, the corruption and the orchestrated chaos of the early political convention, which launches Stoddard's career, reminds us of the negative valence that persists in the world of the city.
Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1961) brilliantly calibrates that transition. Here the Western town already has sidewalks and a policeman (not a sheriff) to keep the pedestrians on them. Taking advantage of the community's cultural openness, someone has imported a camel to race against the horses of the locals -- an early form of urban con. As antiquated lawmen come upon hard times, the iconic Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea (Scott assuming McCrea's persona of Buffalo Bill) dig deep to reaffirm their unfashionable ethic and self-respect. Their elemental dignity transcends the savage brothers' marriage in a brothel and the inveigled bride's vicious Bible-thumping father. (The moral theme of this fable fades in the film's British release rifle, Guns in the Afternoon.)
In the Western film, the city is as ambivalent as progress -- because it represents progress. While the city brings new community it also brings the compromise of traditional values. In John Ford's seminal Stagecoach (1939), the eponymous ship of fools crosses the savage wilds between -- get this -- Apache Wells and Lordsburg. Not all the savages are those pesky redskins dispatched to bite the Monument Valley dust. The town is characterized by a larcenous banker and a vigilante committee of high sassiety women. Virtue resides in the outcasts, the drunken doctor, the noble gambler rejected by his Old South family, the golden-hearted whore, and the ex-con, the Ringo Kid (John Wayne). By sending Ringo and the ex-whore-elect (Claire Trevor) off to Ringo's homestead, the sheriff wants to "save them from the blessings of civilization." In the pastoralism of the Western the city is a mixed blessing indeed.
Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1972) is a surrealistic exorcism of the progressivist view of the Western town. Eastwood plays a ghostlike figure who emerges from a mist, disappears in another, and in between scourges the oceanside town of Lago. He renames it Hell and has it painted entirely red, a rather candid form of urban renewal. The good citizens of Lago dread the return of a trio of killers fresh out of prison. They give the spectral hero a community carte blanche -- whatever it takes to protect them. But the hero is none other than the shade of their former sheriff, whom none of the townfolk aided as he was bullwhipped to death by the very same villains. When this hero goes to the barber shop, instead of getting a simple clip and shave he kills three men and rapes the town tease. No Henry Fonda hero he. As the spineless new marshal explains, "the price of progress" is doing what has to be done for the good of the community, which includes seeing the previous sheriff killed so he won't reveal that the town's big mine is actually on government land. With its situational parallels and town-gunman tensions, this film plays Experience to the Innocence of High Noon (incidentally, as Eastwood's Pale Rider did to George Stevens' Shane).
Before Eastwood slipped out of his saddle to play his modern San Francisco detective, Harry Callahan, he rehearsed his urbanization with Coogan's Bluff (1968, director Don Siegel). This time the Westerner's savvy, skills, and intuition exceed the petty restraints and restrictions of the urbanites. Eastwood plays an Arizona deputy who has to track down an escaped killer through the exotic canyons of modern New York City, where the licentious savages are the hippies.
Films that depict a cowboy figure out of place in the modern world remind us of the Western's relationship to the city. In John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy(1969)Joe Buck (Jon Voigt) is an ambitious stud who comes up from the chorus line in Texas intending to become a star gigolo in Manhattan. Instead he discovers grace and camaraderie with the guttersnipe "Ratzo" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who dies as he nears his illusionary Nirvana: Florida. Far superior (and less known) is David Miller's Lonely are the Brave (1962), where Kirk Douglas plays an idealistic ex-con cowboy in search of frontier freedom. But he's pursued by the modern technocrat sheriff (Walter Matthau) and killed with his fine black steed on the freeway by a truck full of toilets (driven by Carroll O'Conner before he was Archie Bunker). The city kills the cowboy, but in urbanized America the cowboy spirit survives.
In the Canadian equivalent, Peter Pearson's classic Paperback Hero (1972), Keir Dullea plays a rural Saskatchewan hockey star who has bought into the American Western myth so completely that he's unaware he has become a parody. His inability to discriminate between himself and his delusion proves fatal. Perhaps his illusions of martyrdom save him from growing old and self-aware. Here the town has no real place for the delusions of a self-styled cowboy. Of course, the central distinction of this film is the additional theme of the Canadian killing himself with an American posture -- a point slightly mitigated by importing an American b-level "star" to play the Canadian playing at being the American hero. The Canadian serious film industry was young then.
SO which is the ream city -- the land of shimmering opportunity or the strangling jungle of shadows and corruption? My point is that there is no real city in the movies. For some Out-of-Towners (Arthur Hiller, 1970; Sam Weisman, 1999) it proves to be The Band Wagon (Vincent Minnelli, 1953), for others The Rat Race (Robert Mulligan, 1960). There are instead thousands of fantasies about the naked city. You pay your money and you see someone else's choice of fantasy. The city of film is a figure of speech, a poetic setting. It's what the artist chooses to make of it. Like life.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Yacowar, Maurice. "City in cinema: impressions." Queen's Quarterly, vol. 107, no. 2, 2000, pp. 272-85. Academic OneFilehttp://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A30033235/AONE?u=ucalgary&sid=AONE&xid=b77d592c. Accessed 25 June 2018.

Forms of History in Woody Allen (reprint)

Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
Copyright © 2011. Intellect Books Ltd. All rights reserved.
‘History will dissolve me’, Woody Allen declares in Bananas (1971), reprising Fidel Castro’s revolution. It still well may, but not before Woody gets in his own licks against the past time that refuses to stand still, to stay buried or to stop
fattening itself by gobbling down the future. On the contrary, he has managed to harness history. In the 43 very personal films he directed in 43 years his art draws both on his life and his earlier films.
In some ways Bananas is typical of the current history implicit in all Allen’s films. As he explores always current obsessions, hypocrisies and neuroses an Allen film provides a time capsule of the culture of its day. Bananas conveys the sexual insecurities, the student activism, the (pre-Bush) banana republic politics, the New York parking space shortage even for Christian martyrs, those rumours about J. Edgar Hoover, the politics of Miss America, Jewish neuroses, the dearly departed authority of Howard Cosell and his Wide World of Sports, etc. Every Allen film records its cultural moment for posterity.
To his further credit, though the surface is period-specific his themes continue to resonate. All those typewriters in Manhattan (1979) suggest a pre-computer world as remote as Mars, but Isaac Stern’s (Allen) moral lesson and questionable conduct challenge us still.
Marxist guerilla leader in Woody Allen’s Bananas (Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions, 1971).103
Historical Comedy On Screen : Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, Intellect Books Ltd, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711691.
Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2018-06-25 17:16:12.
page3image1756128
Copyright © 2011. Intellect Books Ltd. All rights reserved.
Boris: Father: Boris: Father: Boris:
He must have been Possessed.
Well, he was 
A Raw Youth.
Raw Youth
! He was an Idiot ... I hear he was a Gambler.You know, he could be your Double.
Really. How novel.
Historical Comedy on Screen
As well as writing history Allen quotes it, especially the past of his medium. Sometimes this takes the form of allusions. The mechanical tasting job in Bananas parodys Chaplin’sModern Times (1936). In Love and Death (1975) his coitally collapsing lions reverse the arousal of Eisenstein’s in Battleship Potemkin (1925). Allen ratchets up the brow for a dialogue based on Russian classic literature:
In Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) he engaged Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment on a more serious level, exploring the same themes of murder, guilt and retribution in a godless order.
In fact, Allen learned to make films by parodying popular genres, from What’s up, Tiger Lily (1966) and Take the Money and Run (1969) through his anthology, Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex (1972). He became a filmmaker by engaging with the films of the past. In his maturity he embraced the spirits of his major models, Ingmar Bergman – inInteriors (1978), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) – and Federico Fellini – in Zelig (1983), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Radio Days (1987) – with their dialectical synthesis in Stardust Memories (1980). Both in his experiments with the language of film and in his more ambitious later works Allen drew upon the film tradition, its history and its masterworks. This is rather more than the individual talent ransacking tradition. His continuing penchant for black and white and for classical jazz scoring confirms his classicism in form and in values.
When he made a period (historical) film, whether looking back – as in Love and Death,Radio Days and Zelig – or ahead – as in Sleeper (1973) – comedic anachronisms root the films in Allen’s present. ‘If God is testing us, why doesn’t He give us a written?’ A 200-year sleep is ‘like spending a weekend in Beverly Hills’. That is to say, the past – or the future – is not some other country or some other time but an organic part of our present. That concept validates the magical technology (aka gimmick) by which in Zelig Allen puts himself into a black jazz band of the 1920s, in the batting order behind Babe Ruth and on platform parties with Pope Pius XI (who swats him with a sacred text) and with Hitler (who oddly does not). History is not where we were but where we are. If we don’t understand that we can’t know ourselves or how we should live.
The sense of history becomes a persistent self-referentiality in Allen’s later films. For all the seriousness of Crimes and Misdemeanors – his monumental meditation upon faith, guilt, responsibility, moral blindness and our slippery slide from casual misdemeanour into a crime as serious as murder – Allen leavens his ostensibly comic subplot with self-references. His character, Cliff Stern, apparently a descendant of his Isaac Stern of Manhattan, is a
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Woody Allen’s period comedies: The Purple Rose of Cairo (Orion Pictures Corporation, 1985) and Radio Days (Orion Pictures Corporation, 1987).
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pretentious Lefty documentary filmmaker who loathes his brother-in-law Lester (Alan Alda), a brilliant but amoral TV producer. Stern is appalled when Lester wins and weds the kindred spirit Halley Reed (Mia Farrow), for whom Stern planned to leave his wife.
As his name confirms, Stern is the familiar Allen nebbish/idealist. But he hardly comes near the saintly Rabbi Ben (Sam Waterson) as the film’s moral centre. Stern’s moral blindness registers in his harshness toward his sister’s suffering, his insensitivity to his wife’s needs and his increasingly irresponsible instruction of his young teen niece. Encouraging her to play hooky to see old films may be bad enough, but worse is when he unloads his plan for an adulterous affair with Halley. His animosity towards Lester proves both unfair to the generous and accomplished man and destructive of his own career.
Allen studs this storyline with allusions to his earlier films. The collapse of the weddingkasatzky repeats a gag in Love and Death. He dresses his niece as a miniature Annie Hall. Halley departs for England with the same two-shot, dynamic and even reassuring phrasing as Mariel Hemingway’s in Manhattan. Allen’s ironic injection of film clips – like his Stern’s newsreel Mussolini footage in his biopic of Lester – recalls his characters living through films from What’s up Tiger Lily (1966) and Play It Again, Sam (1972) to Zelig and Hollywood Ending (2002).
So why does Allen resurrect his old gags? The answer lies in the film’s central scene, Judah Rosenthal’s (Martin Landau) memory of a childhood family seder. There the debate between rational scepticism and faith concludes that whatever our belief in a god we are defined by all the choices we make through our life. This explains Judah’s guilt over the murder of his mistress Dolores (Anjelica Huston).
In that light, Allen’s recycled jokes (aka self-referential allusions) are how the auteur defines himself by the specific choices he has made all his life/career. However heroic or ignoble our pretences or our self-conception, we are only what we have done. We are our history. Allen tempers his most sombre exercise in philosophy with these reminders of his comic past. This modesty plays against his Stern’s unearned superiority and Judah’s massive hypocrisy. It coheres with the blind rabbi’s humility and even the gangster Jack’s (Jerry Orbach) saving grace: Unlike successful brother Judah, Jack does not forget his obligations. As well, the reminders of Allen the film director encourage us to detach the director from the character actor Allen plays.
Of course, Allen’s film career was seriously disrupted by the scandal involving his private life with Mia Farrow and her allegations about his relationship with their children, especially her then twenty-one-year-old stepdaughter, Soon-Yi Previn, with whom he was having an affair. The famed moralist’s scandalous behaviour was as disillusioning and career-threatening as the notorious Fatty Arbuckle’s had been. It is difficult to read any Allen film of this period – from Husbands and Wives (1992) through Hollywood Ending (2002) – without taking that scandal into account, whether his statement seems a form of address – Deconstructing Harry(1997), Celebrity (1998) – or of avoidance – Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Small Time Crooks (2000).
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Indeed, when his personal scandal undercut the moral ambition of his films Allen turned to exercise the innocence of classic genre entertainments, as in Manhattan Murder Mystery, the superior Bullets over Broadway (1994) and the antique musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and the lesser Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). By turning to the film history he could set aside his own. His retreat included two zipless revivals for television, his own Don’t Drink the Water (1994) and Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys (1995).
In his nostalgic genre plots Allen dramatized the revival of a waning relationship – or converting an instinctive antagonism into love. In these simpler entertainments Allen considers the values required to regenerate a relationship. A character’s/artist’s fidelity to an old cultural form reflects a personal honour. This theme is reversed in his best film of this period, Sweet and Lowdown (1999), where the mechanics of the musical biopic anatomize a disintegrating psyche. Still, the public structure of a genre provides an apparently innocent, impersonal form for a fiction.
The Innocent Genre series ended with Hollywood Ending, where Allen mercifully reverted to his more acidic/Hasidic view of Lotus Land. The film still conveys Allen’s love for Old Hollywood movies and his loathing for the current Hollywood culture (an oxymoron, like ‘agent ethics’). The failed film director Val Waxman (Allen, striving against his waning career) directs a film despite mysteriously going blind. His terrible film proves a huge success in France – as Ending did at Cannes – and wins back Val’s ex-wife, Ellie (Tea Leoni). By sweeping her out of Hollywood to their ‘unfulfilled life dream’, Paris, Val effects the rescue Alvy Singer couldn’t in Annie Hall. In a satiric version of Allen reworking old themes, a Hollywood hack remakes a ‘stupid potboiler’.
Unlike Purple Rose of Cairo and Zelig films-within-films, we don’t see any footage from Val’s The City That Never Sleeps. But we hear symptomatic crashes. We don’t know how it’s bad or how it might be taken to be good. But auteurism – like other religions – requires faith
Between fiction and documentary: Zelig(Orion Pictures Corporation, 1983).
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in the maker. The blind Val may well have made ‘the best American film in 50 years’ (as the French critics claim), and Val may indeed be a genius who thrives on chaos, like Fellini.
Two acrid satires marked an ambitious recess from Allen’s sequence of genre entertainments and a return to his own history. In the first, Deconstructing Harry (1997), Harry Block (Allen) is a successful novelist who controversially mined his life for his fiction – like Philip Roth, who at the time was Mia Farrow’s love interest. Block’s representation in his novel is played by Richard Benjamin, who starred in the film of Roth’s Goodbye Columbus (1969). About to be honoured by the university that expelled him (‘I tried to give the dean’s wife an enema’), Harry is arrested for kidnapping his own son. He violated his visitation conditions so his son could share the experience. In Block Allen admits a view of himself as a goof more sinned against sinning. Something of his sense of injustice comes through a rejected mistress’s rage at ‘retarded talkshow hosts’ and even artists who take ‘everyone’s suffering and turn it into gold’.
The second recess is Celebrity (1998) which draws its meaning by its scene-by-scene parallels to and divergence from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). In this replay of a jaded celebrity journalist’s tour of the culture’s sordid glitz, several jokes involve the idea of history and film. One young actor is making ‘an adaptation of a sequel of a remake’. The new film leeches on the past, but sans discrimination. The Mastroianni figure Lee (Kenneth Branagh) has imagined one temptress as ‘the obscure object of desire’, a Buñuel film title (1977). The film producer plans to remake ‘Birth of a Nation – an all-black version’. As the original D.W. Griffith film is a classic of racism, valorizing the Ku Klux Klan, the improbable project exposes the producer’s ignorance of the very film he presumes to revive. Indeed, Celebrityitself mobilizes history. The theme of seductive celebrity is expressed in the classic song over the opening credits – ‘You Oughta Be in Pictures’. In context, that love song shrinks to an exhortation to join the shallow world of the Image. In the closing song Billie Holiday alludes to history: ‘Did I Remember?’ Like its characters, this film does not exist isolated in the present but is defined by its awareness of and response to its past.
Not having recovered his pre-scandal status, Allen left not just his haunting New York but America for three films set and shot in England – Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006) andCassandra’s Dream (2007) – and one in Gaudi’s wild Spain, Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). The films replayed Allen’s familiar themes of romantic quest, guilt and betrayal, in other cultural landscapes.
The entire weight of Allen’s troubled personal history comes to rest upon even the title of his Whatever Works (2009). In casting Larry David as the central nebbish/loser Allen engages the most prominent current figure in the vein of Jewish-American self-satirists that Allen effectively founded.
Boris Yelnikoff (David) is Allen’s most outrageous misanthrope. He leaves his perfect wife Jessica (Carolyn McCormick) because ‘On paper we’re ideal. But life isn’t on paper’. His consequent suicide leap leaves him limping. Having abandoned his physics professorship he ekes out a living ‘teaching chess to incompetent zombies’. His story insists ‘You’ve got to take what little pleasures you can find in this chamber of horrors’. History has taught Boris that people are essentially terrible. When he marries the very young vagrant Melodie St Ann
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Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), they are ‘two runaways from the vast, black, unspeakably violent and indifferent universe’. The theme song of Boris’s first two marriages is ‘If I Could Be with You (one hour tonight)’, an explicit gesture against the abyss of eternity.
At seventy-three Allen seems prompted to spell out as clearly and explicitly as he can his one most compelling theme and lesson. The song over the opening credits sets the valedictory tone: Groucho Marx’s ‘Hello I Must Be Going’. Not just the film but his whole career is boiled down to the title. In his world of accident, brutality, callousness, moral chaos and social conventions that however idealistic can strangle the individual spirit, people must do ‘whatever works’.
The misanthrope’s moral slogan catches on. Against Boris’s predictions for these ‘family values morons’, the whole Celestine family from the bathetic, post-lapsarian Eden, Mississippi, find fulfilment in New York. Melodie finds her true love – outside her marriage to Boris. Her mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) discovers her own creative powers – in photography, recalling Annie Hall – and finds fulfilment in an arty ménage-a-trois. Marietta’s wayward NRA husband John (Ed Begley Jr) frees his natural homosexuality and settles into an antique business with Howard Cummings nee Kaminsky (Christopher Evan Welch). Even Boris finds fulfilment in Helena (Jessica Hecht), the psychic on whom he fell on his second post-marital suicide leap. This takes him out of his neurotic insularity, as emblematized by his singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to himself when he washes his hands, to avoid germs.
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In the first scene Boris criticizes religion for having become corporate and for assuming people are essentially good. ‘People make life so much worse than it has to be.’ Against social conventions, the film justifies affairs December–June, adulterous, homosexual. Allen reiterates the overriding lesson of the Isaac-Tracy romance in Manhattan and the universal moral requirement of love in Crimes and Misdemeanors: Whatever works.
One joke fugitively alludes to Allen’s notorious affair with Soon-Yi Previn. Trying to persuade Melodie to return home to Mississippi, Boris warns ‘You’ll wind up a prostitute like those Asian girls who come here full of high hopes and wind up prostitutes, turning tricks to keep alive. And many of them are actually good looking’ – unlike Melodie, ‘a three’. But Melodie wins her shelter: ‘If you throw me out and I wind up an Asian prostitute, that’s gonna be on your conscience.’ While Allen’s scandal has been left in the dust by the success of that relationship, the reference confirms the confluence of Allen’s life and his art.
Like the film character’s address to the movie audience in Annie Hall and throughoutPurple Rose of Cairo, Boris from the first scene on addresses the film audience that he sees and that the other characters don’t. To Boris this proves he alone has ‘the big picture’. He alone knows he is living a fiction. His film-awareness redoubles Boris’s dismissal of moral absolutes as but fictional constructs. Hence his disdain for social convention – ‘Charm has never been a priority with me’ – as for religions and social restrictions upon relationships.
Allen’s history both on screen and off culminate in the bleak heartiness of this film’s resolution. In a heartless universe we can find meaning and love only in each other, so whatever the laws and conventions, go for ... whatever works. Otherwise history will dissolve us before our time has come.
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Les Guardiennes

The title is inadequately translated. The English “Guardians” is gender neutral. The French “Guardiennes” is explicitly feminine. 
That’s the point. This film, a noble return to the classic French narrative style, exalts the role women played during WW I, not just running the family farm but in preserving the family unit, the larger social structure and civilized values. 
As the first two shots explain, the men are off dead and dying on the battlefield. Meanwhile, back on the farm, it’s the matriarch Hortense pushing the plow behind the overworked mare.
The rural beauty of France stands in implicit contrast to the violent destruction wreaked in the war. 
While the school kids learn a poem about the inhumanity of the Bosch (translation: Krauts), a returning soldier shares his contrary wisdom: the enemy German soldiers were just like their enemy French, simple ordinary folk thrown into a conflict neither of their making nor of their will or understanding. But the deaths and dread and nightmares roll on. 
The film’s noblest soldier is Francine, the orphan girl Hortense hires to help in the harvest but who works her way into a permanent position with the family. That is, until their son Georges and she fall in love, threatening Hortense’s control. 
For being a responsible, even heroic guardian is not enough. What’s crucial is the values being guarded.  
Despite her affection and respect for Francine, Hortense lies about her virtue to dissuade son Georges from marrying her. She comes from nobody, she explains, with whoredom in her blood. Later Hortense refuses to tell Georges Francine is carrying his child. 
Thus Hortense meets what she sees her responsibility to maintain the family honour — letting Francine carry the guilt that daughter Solange has provoked — and  to consign George to marry his drab childhood friend Marguerite. That's a severely compromised "honour."
At this point the film’s domestic theme expands into French values, even European, indeed the entire Western Civilization that both World Wars ostensibly defended. Killing and dying for one’s values may be a fine virtue — but that depends on the values. And whether the values defended in war are sustained in peacetime.
The heroes’ martial valour is undercut by Hortense’s inhumanity both to her son and to his lover. She betrays her dutiful servant out of class snobbery, an exalted vanity and her need to keep control over her family. 
When she glimpses her unacknowledged grandchild, Hortense briefly realizes the horrible costs of her misdeed, even to herself. But she makes no amends. It’s too late or her strength has left her too weak to undo the damage she did the son she thought she was protecting and the woman who served her so faithfully..   
There’s a sting in the tail at the end of the narrative. The eldest son back from the war, the farm thriving and modernized thanks to the women’s initiative, the men fall to arguing over the division of the estate. The war briefly unified the men that can’t live in peace at home. 
The only harmony and cheer are provided by the triumphant and resourceful Francine. Raising her child on her own, she’s now also a locally successful singer, still brightening her world, though alone. 
       Poor Georges in the audience is still enchanted by her and will never understand his loss. He returned wounded from the war but emotionally crippled by his mother’s betrayal. He won the continental war but lost the domestic battle.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

First Reformed

Like Reverend Toller’s diary, this film is Paul Schrader’s form of prayer. It’s an attempt to find meaning, purpose and integrity in our fallen world. Our religion has been compromised by worldiness, our faith engulfed by despair. 
Its religious core is Thomas Merton’s insight: despair and hope are equally valid, indeed interdependent visions. Wisdom inheres in the ability to hold two such contrary ideas in the mind at the same time. Either without the other is incomplete, inadequate, futile.
Like the green activist Michael (an echo of the avenging angel), Reverend Toller’s idealism leads to paralysis by despair. Toller can’t rebut Michael’s arguments about man’s abandonment of nature, of God in His world. He can only repeat Michael’s question; “Can God forgive us for what we have done to His world?” 
Toller is himself guilt-ridden for having sent his son off to death in the Iraq war. That broke Toller’s marriage, his self-respect and his faith. Because of his feeling of futility, when Michael’s wife Mary comes for help Toller’s first impulse is to refer her to the more affluent super church nearby. Her persistence and Michael’s suicide reawaken Toller’s passion for God. But now it’s in the form of trying to protect His creation instead of the formalities of the church. Toller’s plan to blow himself up at the church’s reconsecration is his personal reconsecration to the proper service of God, to try saving His world from its corrupt abusers. 
The plot chronicles the reverend’s progression from mechanically serving his dying church to rediscovering the proper function of religion — compassion and love. 
His brief affair with (the faithful) Esther only stirred his lust, which he now admits he despises both in her and in himself. His feelings for Mary (the pure) grow slowly and more profoundly. Planning to sacrifice himself at his church’s reconsecration, he demands she stay away. Her appearance aborts his plan because he can’t inflict on her another sacrifice, his suicide after her husband’s.  
Toller’s and Mary’s love develops across two scenes of intense physical engagement There he assumes Michael’s mission both politically and personally, in environmentalism and in his relationship with Mary. That combination is religion. Toller becomes the avenger Michael.
In the first he obliges her request to replay her and Michael’s Magical Mystery Tour. She lies flat on him on the floor, arms and hands extended so their bodies touch as much as they can, their eyes locked and moving together as they breathe together. 
The sexual potential of that posture instead turns into a transcendental vision. They float off the floor, soar through the world into heaven (at least, the starry skies) — but then back into the sordid evidence of man’s ruin of God’s creation. That experience inspires Toller’s obsessive resolve to sacrifice himself in protest against the world’s corruption. 
Their full union occurs when she comes to him from the reconsecration ceremony he is missing. Their clench and kiss overwhelm both. He has just wrapped himself in barbed wire, to atone for his dashed resolve. He bleeds through his vestments. In that act he assumes the function of Jesus, suffering himself for the sins of mankind. But at the appearance of Mary he turns himself instead into Michael. in the woman for whom he first felt compassion and whose tragic loss he both shared and assuaged, Toller finds his full religious service — love. 
At that point the film just stops. The end is shocking. It seems incomplete — indeed like the end of the last episode of that other American epic of contemporary secular calvary, The Sopranos. Is there a technical problem here? we instinctively ask.
But of course that is Schrader’s point. The couple’s realized love is all either needs. The proper service to God is to mankind. The most compelling faith is human love. With that they can confront their despair, their faith and connection deepened, and stand to defend God’s world against corrupt and corrupting man. 
Schrader stops the film without the comfort of a standard ending because its proper ending lies in us. As Toller accepted Michael’s mission, his passes on to us. 
That’s the point of Michael’s funeral requests. Instead of the traditional hymn —such as the one Esther sings so archly, so unconnectedly — Toller grants Michael’s request for a Neil Young ecology hymn. Love and reverence need an active voice.
The film shares Toller’s asceticism. Like his stark, sparsely finished quarters, the film is stripped down. The classic square screen proportion is a harsh shrinkage of our more familiar widescreen. The buildings are flat, symmetrical, stern frames. Most scenes are stripped of colour and the relief of any music, other than what the characters bring the scene. 
Toller’s self-loathing leads to his Calvinist church’s self-denial. His breakfast is an apparent gruel, spiked with whiskey, scooped up in hunks of bread. A break into a sushi dinner proves a revelation of what life he is missing.  
For all the film’s asceticism, though, poetry abounds. Toller declines Michael’s offer of a drink, not because he’s not “a drinking man” but because he’s a drinking priest — and ”It doesn’t help.” Pouring Pepto into his scotch produces a shot of a swirl of pollution where the values of purity and survival seem mutually and inextricably compromised. 
Toller’s physical suffering fleshes out his spiritual. He has a cancer. His painful and bleeding urination evokes the constipated Martin Luther’s composed eruption. His plumbing is shot, as we learn from his leaking hot water faucet, his plugged toilet and his own vomiting. This motif confirms the tension in man’s amphibian nature, a troubled soul lumbered with a troubling body, the holy grounded in the secular.
The hero’s name evokes John Donne’s reflection on the bell announcing another death: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” This reverend is our toller. 
In its intelligence, high seriousness, emotional effect and quality of realization I’d call this the best American feature film of the year. Okay, so far. 
It is also disturbingly but bracingly timely. Released into the days of thousands of imprisoned children, slandered immigrants, betrayed asylum seekers, a burgeoning fascism, a corporate stranglehold on the government, the suicidal EPA and the tragically compromised religious Right, this film strikes straight to the heart.