Creed II

The new Rocky franchise movie doesn’t open on the Rocky world but in the Ukraine. It focuses on the defeated Russian Ivan Drago and his bigger-chip-off-the-old bloc son Viktor.  
     Coming to see a Rocky flick we’re jolted to start in Drago’s world. But then we’re not living in the original Rocky’s world either. America is no longer the America — Nam war America — in which Rocky first taught his lesson that sometimes you don’t need to win. It’s enough to survive.  

  Present America has nothing of the hope, integrity and purpose that marked even that fractured America.  As America seems outside “America” this chapter starts in Kiev.

The strain of being outside is arguably the film’s driving theme. We meet Adonis Creed as he’s winning the heavyweight boxing title. But he feels no security in that No.One ranking, because he’s immediately challenged by Viktor, son of the Drago who a few movies ago killed Creed’s father Apollo.

Rocky himself is always outside, hoping to come in. We hear him before he walks on camera. The three-step climb into the ring is momentous, he intones. He lives a solitary life in a plain Philly apartment, with only Adonis to care for him. He lives like he lived at the outset, a loner, tossing his ball, crumpled hat and slouch. He owns a restaurant (Adrian’s) but he comes in at night to punch the dough — that’s all he kneads. 

Rocky has three emotional climaxes in the film: (i) the birth of Adonis’s daughter, his god-daughter; (ii) Adonis beating (spoiler alert) Viktor; and (iii) his own, long-alienated son greeting him at his door with “You want to come inside?”

Here everyone wants to come inside. Adonis feels twice compelled to fight Viktor because he has no other connection to his dead dad. He takes Rocky’s initial refusal to train him for the ill-advised fight as a personal betrayal, a father’s expulsion. In the (yeah, maudlin but hey…) graveyard scenes Rocky and Adonis soliloquize a connection to a dear departed. They need to feel in their dead family member’s presence. 

As it happens, Adrian remains a stronger presence in Rocky’s life than Drago’s wife is. She deserted her husband on his loss and repeats that when son Viktor seems about to lose. 

Adonis’s sweetie Bianca is a partially deaf professional singer. Their born-deaf daughter starts another kind of outsiderhood. But her mother and — thanks to Rocky’s tutorial on fatherhood — her father will totally embrace and include her. 

  Bringing in the excluded extends to the actors as well as to the characters. In addition to Rocky and the Creed family, the resurrections include Dolph Lundgren as Drago dad, Brigitte Nielsen (Stallone’s Ex) as Drago’s Ex, and Milo Ventimiglia as again Rocky’s son Bobby. 
     Paradoxically, our climactic sight of Rocky has him contentedly on the outside. His boy Adonis is in the chaotic ring celebrating his triumph. Rocky sits in ringside, taking it all in from a lower distance, detached, his back to us with “Creed” emblazoned on his jacket. Not Rocky but Creed. His ego is content, His creed has won another. He’s not in the ring because he has nothing to prove. Except for his suspended fatherhood.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen Brothers revive the tradition of using the Western film genre to reflect upon contemporary America, especially its relationship to its core ideals and history. 

If one thing sets this work apart from the traditional Western it’s its wordiness. Against the reticent Westerner, here babblers abound — the poetic Buster, the crazed banker, the “dramatic reader,” the tediously compulsive prospector and trapper. This Western occupies a time of noise and verbal profusion. Like today. 

Also against the genre grain, the film opens on high comedy that unwinds into the tragic. The comic is the hero and the mortal doom the sidekick. 

Otherwise, the six episodes draw on the genre’s most familiar icons: the innocence of the white-garbed singing cowboy, the criminal individualist ennobled by vigilante “justice,” the American aspiration to and detachment from European “culture,” the settler’s (here miner’s) violation of his idealized Nature, the hazards -- and faith! -- of the wagon train’s spread of civilization through the savage wild, and finally the ambivalent “glories of civilization” revealed in a stagecoach trip to salvation. In the 1939 Stagecoach the journey went literally to Lordsburg. The new film’s parables start in America’s political Now but move toward the universal.

The eponymous opening story records the death of American innocence and power. That’s the meaning of the all-white dressed singing cowboy, freshness and innocence but preternaturally gifted both with lyric and with gun. This is the pure America that supposedly was. So this hero is just slightly off. His skills are unbelievable. His ears are too big, bending floppily under his 10-galloner.           
       But as the gunslinger myth always proves, “Can’t be top dog forever.” So here the invincible hero perforce trades his spurs for the angel’s harp and wings. The ghost of the innocence of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry — the ghost of the America that led the world in democracy, humanity and idealism —  gives way to a new, more pragmatic and corrupt power. Pause for reflection indeed, as Buster uses a mirror to take a backward shot, and again to discover his own mortality, despite his astonishing effectiveness in his world.

Buster’s nemesis, a black-garbed gunslinger, segues into the matching villain in the second story. In a setting of Beckettian simplicity and despair, he robs a crazed teller in an isolated bank on the creaking prairie. But for this model “hero” his destiny proves Absurd. His lynching is interrupted by an Indian attack, then by a bypasser, who only leads him to be lynched again for rustling. Anticipating the film’s last scene, the brief promise of a romantic salvation is curtly killed. That last black joke follows on the series of comic killings in the Indian attack and the irony of the stretched rope in the first lynching.

  The third story carries the film’s heart. It centers on a travelling entertainer, a promoter who tours the west with a pop-up show of “Dramatic Readings.” His “Meal Ticket” is a legless and armless young man who recites, rivettingly. His opening poem is Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” where a legless, armless torso discovered in the desert celebrates the global conquest of some lost king, now lost to time, obscurity and the dust. He ends on Prospero’s valedictory epilogue, “Our revels now are ended,” while his manager passes the hat — to a dramatically diminishing audience. In between come the story of Cain and Abel, Shakespeare’s sonnets 29 and 30, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg pledge that “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Right.

As Buster liked to call himself a singing bird, the reciter here is “Harrison, The Wingless Thrush.” As his Shelley bemoans “the decay of that colossal wreck,” the Shakespeare enables him to “beweep his outcast state,” yet still feel equal to the richest kings. The tour initially celebrates the frontier’s hunger for culture. But winter comes, the audiences dwindle, and that classic culture is supplanted by a conman who offers more sensational entertainment: a chicken -- "self-taught!" -- that purportedly does math. Fake Math? Harrison’s partner is gulled into paying big bucks for that chicken. He dumps the lad who embodies America’s highest aspirations, for which grasping and climbing limbs are unnecessary.

In a variation on that theme, in “All Gold Canyon” the film celebrates the glorious abundance of American nature — only to pock it with a prospector’s hunger for gold and a young criminal’s fatal attempt to rob him. The prospector switches between singing “Mother Macree” and apostrophizing “Mr Pocket,” the spirit of the gold he craves. The humans pass but the glorious nature persists, defiled but surviving its insentient plunderers. As the landscape speaks plaintive to us, a remonstrating owl amends the prospector. 

“The Girl Who Got Rattled” provides an alternative example. Here people reach out to each other. The two-man team of wagon train leaders become involved with a naive young woman when her brother, a dogmatic, headstrong failure, dies of cholera, leaving her helpless in the wild. The younger man Billy wins her hand, but the older man unwittingly leads to Alice’s death by handing her a desperation refuge from abduction and rape. Alice found her brother Gilbert’s “certainty” oppressive and inadequate to the times. She accepts Billy’s preference for “uncertainty,” the pragmatism and openness required to navigate the world’s dangers. Alice kills herself because of her premature certainty that her guardian is doomed. 

The final episode continues that moral dialectic. The stagecoach passengers exchange conflicting views of human nature. To the cynical trapper, people are all like ferrets. To the sermonizer’s wife, people can avert sin, exercise virtue and sustain selfless love., such as she expects to renew with her husband after a three-year separation. The French sophisticate takes a broader view, positing moral relativism against the others’ absolutism. 
     The audience for this debate are a couple of bounty hunters, the one a diverting storyteller (like the Coens) and the other the effective killer. The latter’s ballad of romantic betrayal makes poetic expression and storytelling instruments of justice. Significantly, it’s the cosmopolitan pragmatic who cockily closes the door on his fellows’ fate.
     Two last points about this marvellous film, released on Netflix. One is the selflessness off its cast. Stars like Liam Neeson, Tom Waites, Saul Rubinek, stud the film with persuasive performances in which the actors have disappeared entirely.
     Second, this is also a film of breathtaking beauty. Apart from the effulgence of nature, there's the Monument Valley horizon with one peak an insolent raised third finger. The canyon echoes provide the backup on the opening Roy classic, "Cool Water," itself a fantasy assurance in the parched setting. Several shots memorialize the lone rider on a vast dark plain. From the solitary silhouette to the white covered wagon train snaking through the wilderness, this Western take on existentialism starkly confronts what America has now become.

Marnie -- the opera at The Met

Nico Muhly’s opera Marnie, born at the English National Opera but now at the Met, invites a new consideration of Hitchcock’s 1964 classic film. The opera is not a response to the film but an alternative adaptation of Winston Graham’s 1961 novel. As a result, the opera’s choices invite a contrast to Hitchcock’s. 

But first, some full disclosure. I have sung at the Met. 

However, I have absolutely no qualification to write about opera or music. Nor, more to the point, the confidence. 

  But I have written about stories, analyzed narratives. So a libretto may not be entirely outside my range of interest if not authority. On this blog site you can find my two analyses of The Death of Klinghoffer — the irresponsible production of which prompted my four-year boycott of the Met “live” screenings. As the Met may not yet have noticed, their Marnie ended my boycott. 

All three versions  take Marnie’s perspective in recording her futile attempt to win her bitter mother’s affection. Marnie is a trustworthy office girl who over and over compulsively absconds with the companies’ money. All three Marnies marry the handsome executive Mark Rutland, who catches her in the act, blackmails her into marrying him, then tries to win her over by raping her. 

That fails. In all three versions, Marnie’s compulsive criminality, frigidity and constant self-recreations are traced back to a childhood incident. Marnie’s mother blamed Marnie for a murder the mother committed.

Beyond that core plot Nicholas Wright’s libretto hews closer to Graham than Hitchcock did. When Marnie visits her mother she finds a rival child serving her, a girl in Hitchcock instead of the lad in the other versions. Hitchcock’s change adds jealousy to Marnie’s emotional confusion. The surrogate son rather addresses the mother’s trauma. For she killed her illegitimate newborn son, then blamed Marnie. Hitchcock changed the murder victim to her drunken sailor john. 

He similarly eroticised the scene of Rutland’s rape, which in the novel is expressed with Marnie’s revulsion. (Hitchcock’s treatment is complicated by later revelations of his frustrated sexual obsession with the actress Tippi Hedren.) Wright’s Marnie speaks to our time with “Do you know what I mean when I say ‘No!?” The furious music amplifies her perspective. When she slips into the bathroom to slash her wrists the magnified shadow and red suffusion keep us in her perspective.  

Graham and Wright put Marnie through therapy but leave the unearthing of her trauma to her mother’s funeral scene. There the mother’s midwife friend reveals the lie that has fractured Marnie’s psyche. 

As the film played to a mass audience, however, with the dashing Sean Connery as the game hunter husband bent upon taming his wild wife, he has Rutland dig up the secret. Not for 007 to play second fiddle. Not even to the oboe that Muhly attaches to his Marnie. 

The cousin Graham assigns Rutland as a threat to Marnie takes some curious turns. Hitchcock turned him into a suspicious, jealous sister of Rutland’s late wife. Wright makes him Rutland’s delinquent younger brother Terry. His quarter-face strawberry birthmark makes him Marnie’s fellow Outsider, his facial scar a parallel to her psychological.    

Jealous of Rutland, Terry tries to seduce Marnie, fails, but continues to engage with her. When he brings the police to arrest her he fulfills his pledge to hunt her down. He claims his motive is to free her from her life of lies. 

The opera rejects the film’s last romantic promise. Marnie goes off to jail. In her handcuffs she exults “I’m free.” Rutland promises to wait and she may return to him but her freedom is not dependent upon having a husband. Just upon finally knowing herself and the source of her broken psyche. In the last scene her mother’s grave behind her provides a black horizontal that with her joyfully liberated self forms a cross. This sacrifice brings her to life.  

If Graham’s rape scene is what drew Hitchcock to the project, Marnie’s  extreme and complex emotions suggested the operatic possibilities to Muhly. The two versions find different forms of Expressionism.

The opera opens on a monochrome office hive. As we dive into the secretarial  pool Marnie is one of a battalion clattering and chattering away. There is not much emotional potential to such lyrics as “I enclose an invoice for our services” and “I like your nails.” And that is the point — the soulless mundanity of the life Marnie adopts, to exploit her exploitative male bosses, until in Rutland she meets her amoral match. 

Hitchcock’s opening shot made a similar point. Marnie walks through a scene of painstakingly concentrated greyness. The only relief is the bright yellow purse containing her loot — and reflecting her guilt. 

So, too, the different takes on Marnie’s fractured self. The opera gives her a chorus of four other Marnies, similarly dressed in bright pastels, all helmeted with her tightly-wound hair. They embody her uncertain hold on her self. In the therapy sessions they take turns on the couch. A group of shadowy Men in Grey Flannel Suits also dance around her, the demons that would abuse her but play into her strategies. They embody her energy when she rides her horse Forio, in her only scene of joyous abandon. 

Hitchcock found a different way to represent the heroine radically detached from herself, from her past. In several scenes he plays Marnie against palpably false backdrops. Her childhood home stands against an obvious painting of the dockside where her mother plied her trade. In her ecstatic escapes aboard Forio the obviously false backdrop confirmed Marnie’s detachment from herself. As it happens, Hitchcock was long criticized for these scenes, their obvious artifice considered lapses in his skill and judgment rather than expressionist rhetoric. 

The Marnie opera, finally, strikes this amateur viewer as a magnificent, wholly moving work, brilliantly staged, scored with intensity and discipline — indeed, as good in its medium as Hitchcock’s film is in his. “As good as Hitchcock” is as lavish a praise as I can accord anything. 

Oh, yes, that “full disclosure” thing. Thanks for asking. When and what did I sing at the Met? 

Several years ago my wife Anne and I did that wonderful backstage tour of the Met, ending up on the stage in the empty theatre. Apparently I was not the first to ask our guide if I might sing a bit, just to add that line to my resume. I burst out with the first verse of 
— all that came to mind — Johnny Horton’s “Well, I’m a honky tonk man.”
     I’ve sung at the Met.  

Transit

In adapting German author Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel, Christian Pertzold strips out all specific references to Naziism. The French setting is explicit but the time setting is left open. The clothing and buildings are contemporary but without our cell phones this could be anytime, anywhere. The “cleansing” of “illegals” here is fascism attacking humanity. It could be in Marseilles in 1942 — or Washington in 2022.

Against a backdrop of government raids, public murders, terrifying sirens, a citizenry bent upon or suspected of serial betrayals, honour consigned to whispers and the shadows, the narrative unfurls as a series of touching, intense personal relationships. For a suppressed and doomed society, there is a lot of love here. 

Despite being warned that his friend is “dragging you down,” Georg tries to smuggle out his stricken friend and doesn’t leave him till he’s dead. Georg drifts into a friendship with the dead friend’s young son, Driss. Their street soccer blossoms quickly into a surrogate fatherhood that leads to double heartbreak when they’re parted. 

Georg’s attempt to deliver two letters to the outlawed Communist writer Wiede opens into another complex of emotional connections. Wiede killed himself in despair at his wife Marie’s leaving him. But her abandonment may have been out of political necessity and selflessness. She still loves him and wants to reunite. She’s falsely encouraged by the embassy reports that Wiede is proceeding with their plans to emigrate to Mexico. They, of course, are deceived by Georg’s having found himself slipped into Wiede’s identity. 

Marie is involved in another love affair with the dedicated paediatrician Richard. Though he feels bound to emigrate to start a hospital, he can’t abandon Marie. But she can’t leave off her commitment to recover her husband. As she and Georg find themselves drawn to each other, she agrees to leave with him only because she believes she will find Wiede on board. Georg tells her he’s dead but can’t bring himself to explain that he is now the “Wiede” she’s confident of meeting.

That is a lot of love. In such a troubled time, a time of such brutish, unnatural assault upon human rights, normal conventions no longer apply. Richard, Marie and Georg form a romantic quadrangle that only confirms her commitment to Wiede. The writer’s suicide may have been out of despair, but Richard’s and Georg’s sacrifices of their love for Marie are heroically selfless.  

Of course even their virtue is doomed. If the evil of tyrants doesn’t get them, there is always their malevolent aid, Destiny.  

The ending is open. We don’t know if Driss and his mother Melissa made it over the mountains. Melissa being deaf and dumb means her young son has massive adult responsibilities. His doom is imaged in his face being constantly shot in shadow. In losing Georg Driss loses his last hope of ever being just a child.Their old room briefly filled with immigrants reveals another bunch of driven, doomed souls. 

Melissa being deprived of speech is a metaphor for the period’s political silencing of individual voices, the government’s poisoning of communication. Her antithesis is the range of story-telling in the film. The woman in the street and the hotel manager both “tell” on Georg. 

The film’s sudden introduction of a third-person narrator confirms that narrative is a theme of the film. Wiede’s last work becomes a relic of a lost culture, freedom and spirit of resistance. So, too, the refugees compulsively unload their own personal stories. They confirm their existence and erect stories of survival— for now. 

      Under such horrible political conditions we make up stories to hide ourselves, like Georg’s embassy claim — as “Wiede” —to retire from writing. Or a fiction is devised to impose some meaning on a broken life. Thus the dog-keeper gussies herself up and has one last splash, a luxury evening dinner with the possibility of romance around her — before mid-cigarette diving to death.    

      The narrator’s intervention may also suggest Georg did not make it over the Pyrenees either. He can’t tell his own story. 

But the film ends open. We don’t know what happened to any of the characters. We can assume the worst. But Marie’s last appearance could raise the hope of a miraculous saving — or it’s a manifestation of how Georg remains haunted by his thwarted generosity. 

In any case the film closes on a musical eruption consistent with the film’s refusal to be rooted in any one time period: the Talking Heads’ trip on “the road to nowhere.” 
     These characters’ lives reveal a reality distant from the security Georg recalls from his mother’s nursery song, in which a range of animals find their way to their homes. Here there is no home, no secure emotional roots, despite the proliferation of people needing and committing to emotional relationships. Here the fascist government has stripped all lives of security and warmth, leaving everyone in — transit. And indeed, it’s a pretty sick transit, Gloria.  

The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

A blessing — another Orson Welles feature (i.e., masterwork) to live with over the years, to re-experience at every opportunity and to grow into and along with over time. Sure, 50 years after Welles’s filming, other hands finally put it together — but those hands knew Welles, knew his aspirations and instincts and know the medium. We can read Welles in it.

On my first viewing, my first take is the bookend it forms with his titanic debut, Citizen Kane (1941). Welles’s curtain call plays off his bow, his valedictory off his arrival.

  Both films start with the death of a famous, powerful man. Both films explore that character’s enigma. In both the apparent power is revealed to conceal a vulnerability, a weakness. Kane’s aspirations ultimately fail his need to achieve any reconciling grace or satisfaction. Long after he lost everything, he loses everything. 

The film’s lesson is that we can never know Kane — or indeed anyone —  on the basis of biographic facts and experience. We’re all unfathomable enigmas — which we take pains to remain. 

So even when we “know” what “Rosebud” is — whether it’s the sleigh we see in the film, or the psychological implications we can still within the narrative impute to it, or the flower's place in our poetry ("Gather ye..."), or even that it was Hearst’s private term for Marion Davies’s pudendum, as outside research teaches us — we’re no closer to knowing Kane. Or anyone.  
     The fire that identifies the burning sled kicks up a thick obscuring smoke, not light. That is, the illumination is a deception. Our "knowledge" obscures. Similarly, in the earlier projection room scene the heads project dark shadows not light. (And similarly unsettlingly, Joseph Cotten appears in the scene and speaks but not as the character he portrays). The film closes on the same dark wire fence and sign that brought us into the film: “No Trespassing.” The film let us in only to remind us we’re left outside.

In this last film as in that first Welles deploys an unprecedented command over his own expansion of film rhetoric and devices. However expansive the medium’s growth the Maestro could still deploy it in inventive ways. As a newsreel triggers Kane, here Jake Hannaford’s unfinished contemporary feature triggers a documentary about its ambitions and disappearance. 

Some cast members evoke the Welles career, most notably Paul Stewart — the secret bearer in Kane, is a similarly wily Costello here —  and Mercedes McCambridge, still a forceful gangleader, promoted from Touch of Evil. Lilli Palmer evokes the latter’s Dietrich. 

Welles deploys the wide range of film stock, sound and colour resources, the narrative liberty (chaos?) even beyond what the new bloods of the ‘70s were doing. Some 30 years after his initial mastery and innovation, the old guy struts that swagger again. 

As the film world raved about the new maestro Antonioni’s ground-breaking Zabriskie Point (1970), King Orson would have reclaimed his throne with this fascinating pseudo-documentary around an obvious parody of that film. Welles resets that particular film — and its culture — into an exoskeleton that’s like the hall of mirrors in A Lady From Shanghai. We see everything clearly but the mystery of perspective and reflection denies us certainty.

In addition to the new technology, the ‘70s cinema also gave Welles unprecedented freedom to show nudity. The inner-film footage predominantly deploys the nude beauty Oja Kodar, Welles’s last companion. The cast credits identify her only as “The Actress,” but she’s also named as Welles’s co-writer, presumably of the inner film. She’s more than just a pretty bod. 

The abundant nudity plays in several ways. Welles clearly embraces its new freedom in film. But for all Welles’s creative energy here, the blatant sexuality makes it feel like an old man’s film. It recalls Picasso’s late period of urgent, graphic sexuality — like an old compulsion recollected furiously in tranquillity.  

The sexuality also defines Jake Hannaford’s central enigma. Motorcycle actor John Dale evokes the success of Easy Rider and the doom of James Dean. Hannaford is himself reputed to hide his homosexual desires by seducing his actors’ women. As played by the gruff John Huston, Hannaford is the Man’s Man director, the Hemingway of the screen. The insecurity in this character’s maleness appears in his outrageous humiliation of the homosexual. 

While that scene feeds the current condemnation of Hollywood’s sexual power stricture, the film remains an open-ended, spiralling mystery. All the hints and eruptions don’t settle anything. Another enigma survives.

Again, Kane’s signature metaphor was Susan’s giant jigsaw puzzles. Isolated in the mansion she spent her life piecing together little bits of a large picture. That represents the jumble of pieces the questing journalist came up with on Kane — and left us with in the “No Trespassing” concluding dark. 

Having reached The Other Side of the Wind we’ve again been blown through a tumult of resonating and conflicting reflections on life and illusion — no better in the knowing but richer by the mystery. 
      I’m already looking forward to next time.