First Man

On the level of plot the title refers to subject Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon. The level of theme points elsewhere: The man precedes and predominates over the astronaut. 

From beginning to end the film puts us into Armstrong’s life, his experience. First as a father, his heart broken by the cancer death of his little daughter, then living a dedicated, stoic model for his young sons. The older son’s handshake shows the promise of his manhood., Then as a husband — sorely testing and relying upon his oak-strong wife. Finally, as the professional, disciplined, dedicated, steady even as his friends die on their parts of their mission.   

Ryan Gosling gives Armstrong a profoundly sunken emotional life, feeling deeply but all expression virtually buried. But for one outbreak, he keeps his head about him privately as well as professionally. His job interview for the Apollo mission is the most revealing since Judge Kavanaugh’s.

The film reminds us how human our real heroes are. Their losses, suffering and demands upon them and theirs make their successes so much more impressive than those of the superheroes. That makes this film so much more engaging and emotionally illuminating than the abstractions of Kubrick’s 2001. 

      Finally, this film very much addresses the American moment. That was the Kennedy future. There’s a sad nostalgia in harkening back to an American government that respected science, that propounded lofty ideals and that embraced America’s responsibility of giving the world political, scientific and moral leadership.

For me three moments stand out. One is the repeated scenes of the capsule spinning wildly out of control, Armstrong manfully trying to recover its stability. That’s the true American, of the great America, trying to bring stability to chaos, in the lab as on the globe and beyond. The good old days.

  Then there’s Armstrong’s rationale for the space exploration program: “I don't know what space exploration will uncover, but I don't think it'll be exploration just for the sake of exploration. I think it'll be more the fact that it, allows us to see things. That maybe we should have seen a long time ago. But, just haven't been able to until now.” His craving for the fullest possible perspective upon mankind and the universe is so at odds with today’s willful ignorance and tribalism.
     And the last shot. Armstrong and his wife have been through so much that separated them — even beyond the shattering loss of their child — that their reunion still carries a chill. They have so much gap to cross. In the quarantine room they can only play at a touch, through a glass darkly, a gathered pain between them. It’s the perfect end to a story of heroism so dearly bought. And an America so sadly lost.

The Sisters Brothers

A Canadian novel, filmed in Spain and Romania, co-scripted and directed by a French director, not surprisingly casts an acerbic eye on an American cultural tradition. Here it’s the toxic masculinity mythologized in the American Western mythology. 

The theme starts in the title. The brothers begin as their family name, Sisters, but are driven by their abusive father into a patricide, then into the hired guns’ violent cycle of deaths in life. Their colleague John Morris is similarly driven from gentleman to outlaw by his abusive father. The Commodore is the visible father figure, despatching his young men to kill until they are killed. 

Extending the theme of brutalized sensitivity, the town of Mayfield is owned and tyrannized by a gruff-voiced, masculine woman, Mayfield. If we didn’t know the actor is named Rebecca we’d take her as a man in drag. 

The Sisters’ mother has also done very well running the family homestead on her own, ready to blast away any attacker and even her own sons if they are coming only to hide from the law. For all her firmness, her home preserves the woman's touch.

The sons’ homecoming is an explicit homage to the opening and closing shots of Ford’s The Searchers. But unlike John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, these gunslingers can come in from the cold frontier desert; they can recover their civilized roots. 

Her sons personify delicacy abused, a feminine nature struggling to survive their violent pattern of life. Eli is the more obviously sensitive, as he treasures a woman’s gift shawl, chafes at his murderous career, and reaches out to others — the prostitute, the scientist, brother Charlie — with a reflexive tenderness.

But Charlie may still be the more sensitive. After all, he carries the burden of patricide. He finds an outlet in the bravado of his drinking and killing, but he still whimpers in his sleep, even after pretending to, to trick Eli. He also pays the greater price, limb wise.  

The dark-skinned scientist Herman Warm is the most feminine male character here. The utopian society he plans to establish — in (of all places) Dallas — is sensitive, generous, caring, free of profiteering and power systems. Its appeal not only converts Morris from his mission but drives him to accept his father’s inheritance, to dedicate to that cause.   

Morris and Eli share another sign of the creeping civilizing of the wild macho west. They are both introduced to the toothbrush, a radical encroachment upon their macho strut and breath.

Is “toxic” too strong a term for the Western’s macho spirit, under attack here? Not when you attend to the most dramatic metaphor in the film. Herman Warm’s system is to pour a corrosive acid into the water, then stir it, to expose the gold nuggets beneath. But that acid also eats away the flesh, if the men aren’t fast enough to wash it away. Charlie loses an arm and a hand to it, Warm the flesh on his legs and finally his life. 

America’s macho swagger may have delivered it some fortune, but only at the cast of flesh, blood, humanity.The lesson sticks.           
      There are no African Americans in this film’s wild west, though there’s a possibly racist sneer in citing one “Sanchez.”  The delicate Warm is played by a Pakistani rapper, Riz Ahmed, possibly evoking contemporary Islam. Director Jacques Audriard frames his vision of contemporary America very specifically here. His subject isn’t the racial divide but the high cost of violent male privilege — to the nation as well as to the trapped individual soul. 

Return of the Hero

This comic romance is set in the early years of Napoleon’s heyday. The First Empire asserted France’s new authority against Europe and promoted a new aristocracy, however seediy it seemed compared to the past. 

Against that heroic backdrop Captain Neuville plays a cowardly fraud who abandons his unit in war, abandons his fiancee, then returns to pretend to a false heroism. How rotten is he? The other stagecoach passengers can’t bear him. Yet the entire society succumbs to his ridiculous bragging. The hard headed businessmen beg to be conned by him.

His moral antithesis is his fiancee’s older sister, Elizabeth Beaugrand. She and her family seem straight out of Jane Austen. The heroine stands apart in wisdom, insight and character against a family and society of silly, greedy fops. Even her sister’s naive innocence betrays a sordid appetite. 

 Elizabeth too has indulged in fraud. To spare her sister’s despair Elizabeth writes her loving letters in Neuville’s name, maintaining his pretence to care and creating a heroic, widely successful version of the cowardly failure. Later she unleashes a series of schemes to defeat him, stopping only when his danger threatens death.

Like so many Benedicks and Beatrices before them, the sprightly snipers end up together. For all the film’s putative reference to its historical particularity, its satiric target ranges far more widely, of course, beyond 19th Century France, even beyond contemporary Europe. For, alas, the rampant spread of false honour, the seduction of the gullible, the grab for power by individuals or by states on the basis of false pretences — that is all quite too common in the current world. And that — not 19th Century France — is this satire’s target.
     Fake heroes. 

Private Life

  This wonderful, intense domestic drama has topics, conversations, relationships perhaps never shown before in American cinema. As it traces a fractious couple’s arguments and struggles trying to get a baby, it provides rare insights into tensions in a marriage and in its larger community.

  The couple’s dilemma is embodied in gynaecologist Dr. Dordick: Will the conception be by doctor or dick? The latter having failed, a range of alternatives are suggested, rejected, then tried, then lost. (Happily, the film is far too sensitive and tasteful ever to stoop to that level of vulgarity or silliness.) 

Professionally as well as conceptually, the couple have been disappointed in their lives. They live in a small flat in a pre-gentrified NYC neighbourhood. 

Richard (Dick, for long) was a brilliant off-Broadway theatre director until his company expired. Now he sells pickles in a market. He keeps an old Village Voice rave review at hand. (He has only one testicle.) 

Rachel is a writer between books, long obsessed with having a child. This is American brilliance, defeated. The intellectually rich, down at its heels and its mouth. 

And yet they end up representing American entitlement.  For all their inabilities, failures and disappointments, the couple persists unbowed in their quest for parenthood. They feel entitled to become parents, no matter their limitations, their failures.

Indeed, that quest seems to have become their only bond. Their quarrels and their compromises circle around that subject. They seem to have no other connections. They’ve had sex only once in the last year. They alternately erupt, then retreat. 

That obsession makes this modest couple a possible personification of American exceptionalism. This makes the intimate family drama a microcosm of America. Its confidence sapped, its limitations overwhelming, its promised solutions futile and illusory, it stumbles along in dream after dream, defeat after defeat, unable to acknowledge and to accept that some successes are simply not theirs to have. Their deluded quest for their Eden leaves them suspended at Appleby’s.  

A Star is Born (2018)

The key line comes early: “A Jon Peters Production.” Bradley Cooper’s new film closely adheres to the previous Jon Peters version, the one with Barbra and Kris. Very closely. Only out of discretion was this not titled Another Jon Peters Production, Another Star is Born.

Ally’s leggy version of  “La vie en rose” evokes Judy Garland sufficiently for Cooper to have cut her “Over the Rainbow” from the film (it’s still in the credits). His Jackson Maine replaces Norman Maine. But apart from these homages the ’76 version weighs more heavily than the ’54 on this update. (The March/Gaynor nonmusical is out of it altogether). Bradley looks and sounds like and plays Kristofferson. Ally has Barbra’s nose-concern. The score is updated but kindred.

The plot still works. That’s the nature of art, recombining familiar, basic elements, as Jack explains the elemental power of the 12-note core of music: “Music is essentially 12 notes between any octave - 12 notes and the octave repeat. It's the same story told over and over, forever. All any artist can offer this world is how they see those 12 notes. That's it.”

   The songs, lyrics, music and overall production deserve their warm reception. 

But I find the acting plaudits overhyped. If there are any proper Oscar performance nominations here they are Andrew Rice Clay as All’s father and Dave Chappelle as Jack’s friend. They feel real and new to them. The others make only marginal departures from their familiar personae. 

Lady Gaga is a pleasant and impressive surprise, but she remains an image not a fully-rounded new character. To remember what an Oscar-worthy “performance” might be, check out Glenn Close in The Wife. That is a nuanced, intense, deep apprehension of a character on another level altogether. That’s “acting.” Lady Gaga was excellent, but more as a surprising presence than as a fully realized new “being.” 

In my favourite irony, when Ally — in Jack’s view — sells out and accepts her new manager’s showbiz glitz over her simple sincerity, she lets herself be remade into — Lady Gaga. On that SNL show she perfectly matches Alec Baldwin’s persuasive “performance” of himself.

Cooper makes his Jack the centre of this film more than James Mason or Kristofferson were. He gives himself the more fully detailed backstory, with his problematic dad, sibling rivalry and debilitating afflictions. 

When his addictions are described as a “disease” the film is more attuned to our understanding than the 1950s. But the old puritanism persists when brother Bobby assures Ally it was all Jack’s fault. A disease isn’t the victim’s fault, remember? There’s more balance in Jack’s tinnitis, the other physical affliction that he fails to address and treat. 
     I show my age here, but this fine film doesn’t supplant the Garland-Mason one. I hope it encourages younger audiences to check that one out. It may be time “to let the old ways die,” but it’s also the time to revive the best old art. 

The Bookshop

“No-one ever feels alone in a bookshop.” This film revives literature and the literary culture/business as an agent of community. That makes it a bracing alternative to our current world’s creeping tribalism.

When widow Florence Green revives an abandoned, decrepit heritage building to serve as her home and bookshop, she attempts to bring both the old and the current culture to the isolated East Anglian fishing village. As she is welcomed by even the non-readers, the community shows a general decency. 

But that is in effect outweighed by what Coleridge ascribed to Iago: “a motiveless malignity.”  The primary villain is social leader Violet Gamert (the Violet feeling displaced by the Green), the ineffectual lawyer and banker, the traitorous Londoner Milo North and the unseen nastiness that drove Edmund Brundish to become a recluse. We don’t know what drives all that malice; it’s just there, an ineluctable element in the social fabric in that village as in nations.   

Brundish and Florence are drawn together specifically by Ray Bradbury’s dystopian vision of a world that forbids books, Fahrenheit 451, and Nabokov’s controversial Lolita, which at that time fired up the book-banners. The first valorizes the old culture and the second heralds the new. Indeed, just the bookstore scenes recall the vanishing species of … bookstores!

  This film aspires to the condition of the novel. There is a voice-over narrator, unidentified until the end. At least one sequence revives specifically the epistolary novel, advancing the plot through an exchange of letters. 

Some scenes evoke literature, like the pseudo-Edwardian party that Florence enters ill-fitted in her — not red but “deep maroon” — dress. Marooned she feels. The school scene evokes Dickensian cruelty. There are even interludes of novel-like landscape shots, that establish the setting, their metaphors of natural beauty and strength left unverbalized: the trees, the ocean, the blowing tides of a wheat field.

Florence's emotional beach scene with Brundish seems straight out of the Bronte tradition he loathes. Here he comes out of his isolated self to try to help his new friend resist Mrs Gamert’s high-level political machinations.  

  The angry politics may win here, but our defeated bibliophile leaves an impressive legacy. Little Christine — the wild-haired precocious little schoolgirl — picks up her mentor’s mission. Her first action may be destructive. But she outgrows her impulsive violence to advance Florence’s legacy: a large, successful bookstore run by the wild-haired woman she converted to read. One last irony: Will this magnificent woman survive the Amazon attack on independent bookstores?

So Lolita works beyond recalling the prominent literary scandal of the day. The allusion establishes a contrast between the two girls. Christine may have Lolita’s precocity in understanding and appeal. But where Humbert leaves Lolita as a prosaic defeated housewife, all her allure lost, Christine emerges as a strong, self-assured, competent woman of the world, reviving her mentor’s empire of literature, continuing her campaign. 
     Our reflex assumption that this film is yet another of the Brits’ attempt to relive their lost glory takes another shock. This film is written and directed by the Spanish Isabell Coixet. But that’s what literature does: it bridges cultures as it could the classes.