You Hurt My Feelings

  Not often that a title so denies the thrust of a film. In this film’s therapy-speak, accusing someone of hurting your feelings evades the reality: You choose to feel hurt. Partners in a successful relationship will assume responsibility for their own responses instead of blaming the other. 

That’s the point of all the family tensions here. The compulsion to be candid is embodied in Beth’s title of her memoir: I Had to Tell It. She felt the compulsion to reveal her parents’ cruel lack of respect of her. “Shit for brains” was one of her daddy’s sobriquets for her. Her candid memoir enabled her escape from the diminution it made her feel. 

In her creative writing class Beth is properly over-enthusiastic about her students’ attempts. But she’s surprised and hurt that none have read or even heard of her book. They dutifully promise to correct that, but any insult is hers to take not what they gave.

Her response to her own son is diametrically opposed to her father’s but equally problematic. In over-praising his potential and accomplishments she undermines his self-acceptance as much as her father did hers. 

Beth’s key “betrayal” now is her husband Don’s praise of her new book, a novel. When she overhears his admission that he doesn’t like the book she feels he has been lying to her. 

But the husband’s defence is solid. He wanted to support her even if the work was not to his taste. The second agent’s sale of the book justifies Don’s support. But Beth is immediately tested again when the blurb on her cover is trumped by a better blurb on the book beside hers. Who says what doesn’t matter as much as how the subject chooses to respond.  

When the couple jocularly recall their false appreciation of each other’s gifts they are reminded that a close relationship may often depend upon such small tactful fibs. So, too, instead of declaring how ugly his facial surgery has left him Beth assures him he will look good when it heals. 

The film closes on a perfect shot. The couple is together in bed again, starting to read their respective copies of their son’s first play. We don’t know how good/bad it will be or how supportive/candid they will be in response. But now they know the balance that’s required and the understanding on both sides.    

In a minor replay of the theme, when Beth’s sister’s boyfriend is fired from his play he resolves to retire from acting. Instead he apparently auditioned for another and enjoys  success. Again, the firing isn’t as significant as how he chooses to respond to it. As the bard put it, Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.

Don’s counselling sessions work the same theme. Though he feels he is losing his skill and memory, the point again is that the responsibility to work lies with the client not the therapist. The longterm client who can’t afford him anymore attests to Don’s efficacy.

When the mutually hateful couple demand their $33,000 refund they indignantly reject his advice they separate. Their shared rejection of him saves their marriage when his patiently hearing them didn’t. What he says or doesn’t say is not as important as what they work out. 

Perhaps the domestic theme’s clearest exercise is in sister Sarah’s interior design work. When she goes by her own taste her proposed lighting fixtures leave her apparently sophisticated client cold. But her desperate offer of a phallic grotesquerie works immediately. Here as in the psychological issues we can nurse our own abused feelings or try to understand the offending other’s.   

I don’t know writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s work. After this extraordinarily fresh, sensitive, witty intro I must watch for her more.     

Golda (2023)

  This may appear to be the standard political drama. All the women are secretaries. All the leaders, bosses, even the panel of judges whose investigation frames the narrative are men. 

But there is one exception — the eponymous hero, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. 

Between radiation treatments for her eventually fatal lukemia, the chain-smoking, conscience-driven woman negotiates Israel’s skin-of-the-teeth survival of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. 

While the Jewish state’s survival drama predominates there is also a compelling faith in the power a woman can wield in high office. She may recoil from the threat of turning its attacker Egypt into an army of widows and orphans. But that effective possibility wins Israel’s fragile peace with Egypt 

Golda’s effectiveness counters her disclaimer: “I’m not a soldier. I’m a politician.”  Success in the latter requires at least the possibility of the former. For all her grit and sinew, she remains a character of sentiment, emotion, empathy — keynote requirements so often forgotten in leadership.

In contrast to Golda’s wisdom, with even her suppressed gut instincts validated over time, the nation’s vulnerability is as due to the masculine entity as its military successes are. In particular, the nation’s foremost military heroes are here demystified: Moshe Dayan and Arik  Sharon. Their vanity clouds their judgment. 

Unfortunately the film also rings true to Israel’s current predicament. Golda may coerce Egyptian President Sadat into recognizing the state of Israel. But to today’s arab world, especially to the genocidal Palestinian campaign with its global support, the target is “the Zionist entity.” Not even lip-service respect is paid any “Israel,” however legitimate and important an contributor to the world it has proved to be.

Finally, there is the issue of Jewface. Why wasn’t a Jewish actor cast as Golda? Is this an affront to the Jews?

As if casting Helen Mirren could possibly be considered an insult to her subject. Simply, Mirren is magnificent. Her physical transformation — not just the face but the body, the legs, the motion — is matched by the subtlest nuances in feeling, perception, posture, expression. There has not been a better performance this year.

I gather Mirren spent three hours each day at makeup. Sarah Silverman would have taken twelve. The persecution rests.

Arguably the most touching scene is the newsreel clip of the real Golda and Sadat chatting with easy warmth over their peace deal. As she jokes, they’re a grandmother and grandfather enjoying each other. They incarnate Golda’s most famous line: “We won’t have peace till the arabs decide they love their children more than they hate us.” The line is famous enough not to be articulated here. But it drives that newsreel warmth. 

As well, the Golda-Sadat harmony offers that illusory hope that the other arab nations might someday accept peaceful existence with the Jewish state. That, after all, has since 1948 been the crucial reason why the Palestinians have not accepted the statehood they have been offered. They want to replace the Jews not join them. And the world won’t rein them in. Today as in 1973, as in 1948, Israel cannot count on anyone but herself for defence.   

Private Life (2018)

  The last scene of Tamara Jenkins’ marvellous film is at once eloquent and taciturn.

Rachel and Richard — by now far less harmoniously matched than their names — sit in a diner. Their Edenic quest ends at Appleby’s. They’re waiting for — we know not whom. It could be another surrogate who has promised to bear a child for them but — as in their earlier experience — now welches out. Or it could be another candidate with an egg transplant. We don’t know which because we’re not told. 

And that’s because it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that this particular couple, despite all the disappointments and discouragements we have watched them brave, persist in their campaign to have a child. We’re not told whether their adoption plan worked out but we assume that either it didn’t or it wasn’t enough. 

Still, that apparently empty last scene is packed. The couple are continuing their fertility quest despite all the discouragements from their friends and from their own experiences. In their faces and deportment we read a tired hope and conviction, barely surviving their disappointments. 

In the one key action, Richard rises from his seat across from Rachel and moves to her side. That is, he remains committed to her desire despite his own weakened resolve for a child and despite their campaign’s cost to their marriage. They constantly argue. They haven’t had sex for a year. Their two surrogate children — massive mastiff dogs — seem marginal to their lives however fully they occupy the space and time. They are two large voids not fillers.

What’s Jenkins’ view of this indomitable resolve? Does it attest to their character or to their destructive obstinance? Who knows? We’re left to our own reading. To our own disposition. The film allows us to project our conclusion. It reads us by how we read it.  

Clearly Jenkins has a clear-eyed view of contemporary feminism — that is, not just the achievement of opportunity for women but its inevitable costs.

Rachel delayed pregnancy until her 40s because she was intent upon establishing her career as a writer. Now she pays the price for that delay — her own eggs having weakened and the couple’s options reduced. 

Rachel’s dilemma is replayed in Richard’s brother’s stepdaughter Sadie. Dropping out of her extended college career, she too wants to become a writer. But her offer to provide Rachel with an effective egg is defeated by her own weakness. When she’s admitted into a respected writers’ retreat she seems destined to repeat Rachel’s success/failure.

We rarely get such a trenchant film focused on a couple in decline. Even in their careers they are fading. Rachel has her new book appearing, but is outraged by its cover’s misrepresentation. She is helpless to protect that offspring too.

Richard has fallen from a successful off-Broadway theatre director to working in a pickle company.  That job, dealing with shrunken phallic emblems, coheres with his having only one testicle and the discovery his semen has no sperm. Fortunately, no-one calls him the shrunken Richard, “Dick.” But their swinging doctor is a Dordick. The couple’s decline coheres with Jenkins’ sense of the limitations of the success of feminism. However liberated, women remain in thrall to their biology.

After all, bearing children — whether, when, where, how, why — that is the most private of life.