Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Luce

This is an astonishingly challenging, literate, open-ended drama — quite rare for the American screen. The plot centers on the struggle between a liberal black high school Government teacher, Harriet Wilson, and Luce, a black Eritrean chiid soldier raised into a model student by his white middle-class white foster parents, Amy and Peter Edgar. 
But the film’s broader arena is the vulnerability of liberal values to self-deception and to amoral guile. The Left can be played as simply as the Right (US election, anyone?). It’s also how idealists on the Left turn into Lenin’s “useful idiots.”  Their emotional ideals blind them to the contradictory, harsh reality.  
Consider the narrative frame. The first shot is of a high school locker, a private space within the public, where even dangerous secrets can be stashed, and where an innocent may — or may not — be framed.  In a debating club prep Luce and Wilson debate the degree of privacy and civil rights allowed a high school student. 
In the last shot, hero Luce is running full-speed at us, a force of strength and rage, all traces of civility and decorum sunk in his visceral rush. If race is the theme he’s winning his race without his teammates and without an opponent. As he’s not running against anyone he’s running against everything.
  That last shot follows his speech in the high school auditorium, where he projects his smiling Model Citizen persona, an Uncle Tom ruling the plantation. 
But we’ve seen the contradictory truth. We’ve seen him carry on a secret affair with a vulnerable Asian girl Stephanie, set off a fireworks explosion at that teacher’s desk and indeed ruin her career by mobilizing his girl-friend and his foster mother to lie against her. He also appears likely to have defaced the teacher’s window with a racist slur and brought her troubled daughter to the school for a disastrous meltdown.
     Why the family name Edgar? In King Lear he’s the blind Gloucester’s legitimate, honest son, whom the illegitimate and vile Edmund abuses and betrays to his own advantage. The family changed their adopted son’s name to Luce (“light”) but thy couldn’t convert him from the dark, closed, dishonest and cunning Edmund into an open Edgar. They are made vulnerable by their own blind virtue.
     And why is it set in Arlington, Virginia? That's where America has buried its military heroes since the Civil War. The old ideals are here implicitly eulogized.

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