Saving Mr Banks

Because Saving Mr Banks is a Disney production, Walt is played by Tom Hanks instead of Joe Pesci. And very well too, continuing from Captain Phillips Hanks’s personification of decency under duress.

Peel back the layers. 

(i) The film is about how the Mary Poppins film came to be made, how Disney had to overcome the arch prejudices of the source novelist Pamela Travers (marvelous Emma Thompson). We also get a glimpse into the creation process, as a team concocts a musical one tune at a time, bar by bar, yet the team still purveys a very personal vision.

(ii) The film is about how the novel came to be composed, how the story — much bleaker both in plot and heroine than the original film — grew out of the author’s life and needs. Flashbacks to Travers’ childhood and her bittersweet relationship with her drunken irresponsible and doomed dreamer father discover the sources of the adult woman’s aversions to red and to pears. More importantly, it reveals her unconscious need to redeem her father and to forgive her own childhood failure to save him. As we’ve often been told, art is how the artist works out personal neuroses. As Disney teaches Travers, art enables us too change our story, to see our past influences whole rather than in a limited, specific part, and to learn to forgive, ourselves as well as others. Disney’s clue into Travers’ fictionalizing of herself lies in discovering her pen-name. She is a story as much as she tells one. Thus this plot broadens from saving the children to saving Mr Banks — to saving Pamela Travers.

(iii) That represents Disney too, as he reveals his own harsh and traumatic childhood and a cruel father he has learned to respect and love. So this film is a justification of the Disney canon, saving it from charges of unreal cheer. From the beginning the Disney classics were far from the escapist romances we dismiss them as. Rather like the profound fairy tales  on which they often drew, they took on the eternal realities of death, loss, helplessness, even the first stirrings of sexuality and adult experience. That’s the spoonful of medicine that makes the sugar go up. The best primer on classic Disney remains Bruno Bettelheim The Uses of Enchantment.

If the film is a Disneyfication of the Walt-Pamela clash of wills, it’s also a reminder of the psychological depth and serious purpose of the best Disney films (among which this should be securely numbered). When Disney seats Travers on the merry-go-round he unwittingly connects to her childhood memories of her romanticizing father’s white nag and its harness of his fantasies. Disney’s genius lay in his intuitive ability to treat weighty themes in tones both bright and light. Against all odds, by getting a proper read on Ms Travers’ persona Mr Disney does manage to turn the curmudgeon into the “cavorting and twinkling” into which she dreaded he would convert her Mary Poppins. Hollywood, after all, is jasmine as much as it is her “chlorine, and sweat.”   

American Hustle

With American Hustle David Russell counters F. Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that in America there are no second acts. His major characters live out the American Dream that people can reinvent themselves, sometimes over and over, to the point that deceiving others can lead to their self-deception. This fictionalized version of the Abscam sting reveals a world of Sammy Glicks. This is America as hustler.

The opening scene establishes the theme of deceptive appearance. Irving Rosenfeld (an himself transformed Christian Bale) laboriously engineers a pathetic comb-over. After this ridiculous introduction he grows into a very sympathetic character. Despite the range of his criminal enterprises, he cares for his adopted son, he’s smart enough to fall for the smart con-woman Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and he has the conscience to try to save his new friend, the mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner). The film redefines Irving from ridiculous to admirable — albeit within the parameters of self-serving fraud. Even at his worst — preying on the desperate by commanding a five grand fee for the futile attempt to secure them a much larger loan — he remains more sympathetic than the greed-driven and impersonal banks of America. (For that egregious sterility there is no comb-over.)
      And the amoral but righteous FBI agent who exploits him. Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) is a working class loser with violent tendencies who goes manic trying to advance his career. Where Irving and Sydney remember who they are DiMaso fools himself through the schemes and deceptions he tries to command. His vanity and ambition are baser than Irving’s and Sydney’s desire to rise out of their limited origins. As Irving says, “Did you ever have to find a way to survive and you knew your choices were bad, but you had to survive?” We’re satisfied that the lovers win and DiMaso loses. Irving and Sydney meet and first connect over their shared love of a blues song, but one without words, Ellington’s Jeep’s Blues. In the con’s world words are less reliable than music.

DiMaso’s vanity and superficiality (as in his curling his hair) align with Irving’s wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence, reinventing herself a world away from her Hunger Games competence). Where Irving and Sydney remake themselves “from the feet up,” i.e., intensely and completely, Rosalyn only remakes her image. She spends all her time doing her hair and her nails and frying under the sunlamp. Her rationalization of her betrayal of Irving is a transparent self-deception. At the end she achieves what she had refused — divorcing Irving — and settles in with a supposedly more devoted lover, the second-line mafiosa. At the end Irving and Sydney rewrite themselves again, as a couple, as parents of Rosalyn’s son, and professionally legitimated as owners of — an art gallery, where the themes of crooked dealing, exploitation and the sale of an image over reality are likely to be renewed.

Russell’s interest is as usual primarily in his characters. The complexities of the snaking plot work to     reveal the characters’ depths and discoveries. As in Silver Linings Playbook he uncovers love in the most unlikely characters, who find a mutual refuge against a dangerous cold world. In a comic replay of the major characters’ self-reinvention, the fake wealthy sheik is a Mexican who as it happens learned enough Arabic to get by the scrutiny of the Mafia head Tellegio (Robert DeNiro, reinventing himself as his earlier gangster invention).

Like the intriguing characters in their various stings, Mayor Polito has made a political career out of hustling -- albeit for his constituents. The FBI here is itself implicated in the crooked hustle when DiMaso coerces our two chief cons into working for him, to con for the government. In the FBI there is one solid man of conscience and principle, played by the inveterate schnook Louis CK, when all his colleagues and superiors espouse the con. In an America that is all hustle, it is still possible for an honest person to survive, however beaten and betrayed — and for hustlers to define their own integrity.

Nebraska

As you may (or may not) infer, the subject of Nebraska may well be Nebraska. In particular, the collision between the two connotations of the state that make it a useful emblem for current America as a whole.

Or as a hole. The black and white wide screen photography expresses the state’s openness. The space isolates its inhabitants and embodies the bleakness of its mundane lives — but director Alexander Payne finds a remnant beauty there still. There’s a tension between the vastness of the space and the narrowness of its characters’ lives. Hence the Hawthorne, Nebraska, Grant family scenes, glued brain-dead to the TV, their terse conversations proof that these still waters run shallow. 

Despite all that emptiness Nebraska is also known for the remarkable volume and variety of celebrities it has produced. Not just dolts like L. Ron Hubbard, Dick Cheney and Gerald Ford but national icons like Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, the Astaires, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Henry Fonda, Hoot Gibson, Harold Lloyd, Nick Nolte, Robert Taylor, Darryl Zanuck  — and yes, that brilliant film director Alexander Payne. Not to mention the jocks like Grover Cleveland Alexander, Max Baer, Bob Gibson, Frank Leahy, Andy Roddick, Gale Sayers and of course especially Gorgeous George. That’s an impressive — and disproportionate — amount of stardom for a state defined by emptiness. 

From such an unpromising landscape, such success has arisen. That, in a nutshell, is the American Dream, which promises that a magnificent life can be achieved there through hard work and freedom. As wife Kate (June Squibb) contends, 

I never knew the son of a bitch even wanted to be a millionaire! He should have thought about that years ago and worked                         for it!.

But he didn’t. Instead a Publishers House Clearance-type of come-on seduces him into another surviving myth, American exceptionalism. Without any effort on his part, for no reason, Woody believes he has won a million dollars. His certainty wards off everyone else’s logic and argument. Woody’s stubbornness, Alzheimerian obliviousness to reality, and sense of personal due effectively represents the Tea Party Republican’s delusion of a long-past power and authority. The bar-room losers want to believe his delusion because they have no meaning in their own lives. Note the total absence of children in this film -- except for the Hawthorne photographer.  

The film also satirizes that party’s ostensible support of traditional family values. The Grants are not especially close. They bristle with envy, dislike, resentment. The two hick cousins gloat over how long it took the fancy pants David (Will Forte) to drive in from Billings, Montana. They will later mug Woody and David to steal the winning ticket. Yet they sustain the pretence of closeness and pleasure at Woody’s supposed windfall. His old partner Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach) shows that a longtime business partner and close friend can be as mean, destructive and untrustworthy as family. He stole Woody’s air compressor and tried to get into Kate’s bloomers.

Woody finally does realize his dream, a new truck and an air compressor. But they come from the filial generosity of David, not from some miraculous lottery. David is the less successful son, just now losing his girl friend, selling home theatres for a living, where the married Ross (Bob Odenkirk) is being promoted to anchor on the local TV news show. Woody’s dream is realized by his more modest, realistic son, not the one with the better image. This contrast is implicit when Woody urges the on-the-wagon David to “Have a drink with your old man. Be somebody!” It’s David who stands by Woody, attends his humiliation in the bar and punches out Pegram. Even more generous than trading his Subaru for a truck in Woody’s name, David ducks out of sight for Woody’s triumphant last drive out of Lincoln.

We share David’s gradual discovery that there is more value in Woody than meets the judgmental eye. This jaw-droppingly stupid old alkie used to be a very good man, capable, attractive, whose generous nature was constantly exploited by his family and friends. As now they all try to again. Down in his luck and out of his mind, all he can do is doggedly plod on towards his delusion. As David learns at the lottery office, Woody is not unique. There are other mad old dreamers like him, possibly some in higher places.   

David gains some insight into his father from Woody’s old girlfriend Peg (Angela McEwan), who now runs her dead husband’s newspaper. Clearly an attractive, sensible woman, she was attracted to Woody and cares for him still. There’s a distinct wistfulness when she sees him driving away. But she lost him to Kate by refusing to let him round the bases with her. Kate was not so restrained so won the husband she now suffers and berates. But her love is evidenced when she tenderly kisses the comatose man in the hospital.    

What makes Kate the film’s most compelling and positive character is her earthy realism.  There are no airs or delusions about her. She did what she had to to win Woody and she does what she must to preserve him. That no-nonsense realism is confirmed when she flashes at a suitor’s grave “what you could have had if you hadn’t kept talking about grain” and when she gives her inlaws her climactic instruction (“Go — yourselves”). She liked Woody’s little sister Rose, “but my god, she was a slut.” Kate refuses to honey coat reality. Indeed David is often embarrassed by his mother’s earthy candour:

— Jesus Mom! Was the whole town trying to seduce you?

— These boys grow up staring at the rear ends of cows and pigs, it's only natural that a real woman will get them chafing their pants. 

     Not just a real woman, Kate is a real Nebraskan, a real American. She is the honest and positive alternative to the Republicans’ moral pretensions.  The couple who congratulate Woody in the restaurant, the one friendly friend he meets in the street and the couple from whom the sons steal the first compressor have a generosity of spirit but they lack Kate's candour. Her realism is the bracing model for her corrupt inlaws and her country in its present state.

On Our Merry Way (1948)

You never know what gems the vaults will deliver. The 1948 musical comedy On Our Merry Way has a self-reflexivity 60 years ahead of its time.

Coproducer Burgess Meredith stars as Oliver Pease, who writes the lost pet want ads in the city daily. But he has told lovely wife Martha (Paulette Godard) that he’s the paper’s star Roving Reporter, who canvases the citizenry for responses to inane questions. Impatient, she urges him to seek a raise by posing a more adventurous question: “Has a little child ever changed your life?” To rise to her expectations Oliver has to evade a thug bent on bashing him over gambling debts and fool the editor into letting him write the column on Martha’s question.

That plot string ties the three subplots together, on various forms of a “baby.” In one two roving conmen (Fred Macmurray, William Demarest) are trapped by the evil 10-year-old they hope to return home for a cash reward.  Shades of O. Henry’s “Ransom of Red Chief.” The brat’s older sister is the only sane, competent member of the family, including the crazed bank manager uncle. 

In another a spoiled rotten child star is shown her selfish ways and atones by boosting the careers of a washed-up old actor (Victor Moore) and a pretty starlet who blossoms when she dons a sarong. The starlet is Dorothy Lamour, who performs a spirited parody of her usual musical (and saronged) numbers.

In the best episode (directed by uncredited John Huston and George Stevens) Henry Fonda and James Stewart star as broke swing bandleaders who set up a rigged talent contest to get the money to fix their bus. Their plan is torpedoed when their mechanic’s daughter, Baby, turns out to be a hot beauty who blows every mean horn, impressing judge Harry James. The two leads have a charming ease together that supports the very broad comedy. In their happy ending the Babe takes over their band, the bus mobile again, but she invites them to stay.

The main plot works round to a happy ending too. The editor brings Pease a job offer just as their furniture is being repossessed. Martha reveals the reason behind her suggested question: She’s expecting a baby. As it turns out, the looming baby — through its mother’s initiative — has transformed the daddy from a duplicitous loser into a sensitive, effective reporter. More than a child affecting the plots, that other secondary type, the woman, is the motive force that in each story is responsible for the success. Martha has been on to Oliver all along.
     In addition to that irony and the recurring parody, the film also provides that rarity, the actor’s direct address to the viewer. Meredith’s Oliver confides to the audience that he has lied to his wife, that he’s going to come clean even if her loses her, and defines us as companions on his adventure. This is not a great movie but it is a knowing one, enjoying the liberties it takes with the studio film conventions. John Ohara and Arch Oboler had a hand in the stories.
     Of course the film is not unique in its self-referentiality, just fresh. Groucho's indiscreet asides, the Crosby/Hope Road flicks (saronged Lamour obligatory), the larks of Olsen and Johnson, all enjoyed this frisk with conventions. In fact that goes back to Thomas Nashe writing Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592) for the frisson of Will Somer's performance, The invention long preceded the theory. 

Philomena: CALL Discussion Notes

Philomena 

Directed by Stephen Frears

The film is based on a true story and the book about it. Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) is a former British journalist who has been scapegoated in a scandal in the Tony Blair government, for whom he was a spin doctor. At loose ends, he thinks of retreating into Russian history until he becomes engaged in an elderly Irish woman’s personal history. Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) has after a 50-year silence told her daughter that as a girl she bore an illegitimate son, whom the convent forced her to give up for adoption. She now wants to find him. As he condescendingly tracks down this “human interest” story Sixsmith discovers that the convent itself burned its records in a bonfire, that it used to sell its children to American adopters at $1,000 a head, and that while the convent and British adoption agencies won’t/can’t help her, American agencies can. On his publisher’s shilling Martin and Philomena go to Washington where Martin discovers her son Anthony lived under a new name, that he became a prominent counsel in both the Reagan and Bush administrations, and that he dies of AIDS. They interview Anthony’s adoptive sister Mary (Mare Winningham) and eventually overcome the resistance of Anthony’s lover Pete (Peter Hermann). Pete tells them he took the stricken Anthony back to Ireland and the convent hoping to find his mother but the Church prevented the reunion. Pete honoured Anthony’s deathbed request and had him buried on the convent grounds.

Questions:

1. The film opens on Martin’s medical examination, where he is found physically sound but depressed. How does the ensuing plot diagnose and treat his mental, emotional or spiritual state? How is Philomena’s quest also his?

2. How does the doctor compare/contrast to the priests?

3. What’s the point of Martin’s “I’ve been running”?

4. The fact that the woman’s name actually is Philomena doesn’t preclude its thematic reading. What does the name connote? (Hint: ‘philo’ means love, not just a mis-spelled flaky pastry shell.) There’s also the potential of “mean.” And what is her antithesis, Sister Hildy, on "guard" against?

5. What does the film say about the Catholic church? Don’t ignore the kindness of Sister Annunciata (the sympathetic photographer). Does Philomena’s faith or Martin’s doubt provide the better life support?

6. In the confessional scene how does the priest’s “God will forgive you” reflect on the convent?

7. Why does Philomena flee that scene?

8. Compare what we see of Philomena’s current family with what we see of Martin’s. How do we read the difference?

9. Why does sister Mary look so much like the aged Sister Hildegarde? Thin lips, anemic complexion, bitterness, anger — in context, what does that tell us?

10. As old Hildegarde, Barbara Jefford delivers a harsh explanation for the church’s cruelty towards its young mothers and their children. Jefford’s first great screen monologue was Molly Bloom’s famous Yes monologue in Joseph Strick’s film of 11. Joyce’s Ulysses (1967). What is the thematic effect of that echo in the casting?

12. Why is our last view of the convent grounds a shot of evergreens covered in frost/snow?

13. In their confrontation scene how is old Hildegarde a reflection of Martin and/or a contrast to Philomena? How does the sputtering priest there contrast to the priest in the confessional scene?

14. How does Frears treat the changes in the convent — the modern manager in mufti, (Sister Claire), the black woman, the new apparent openness?

15. What’s the point in Martin’s changing perspective on Philomena? Consider his disdain for her literary tastes, for example.

16. In Martin we see a political issue turn into a personal one. How does the personal story turn into different political issues for (i) Philomena, and (ii) Anthony?

13. Why are Martin and Philomena so often at odds, e.g., whether to stay in the US, whether to publish or not, whether to badger/quit Peter?

14. How does Martin’s “Evil is good” work to reflect his differences from Philomena? His relation to Hildegarde? The relationship between politics/journalism and the church?

15. Are there any thematic possibilities in the doctor’s “Your stool is outstanding”?

16. Why would someone (e.g., I) say Martin “retreated” into Russian history?

17. Why do they fly business class and stay in a fancy hotel buffet breakfast included?

18. What’s the point of the duo’s visit to the Lincoln memorial?
19. Why does Martin fumble over Janes Russell and Mansfield and "both their really big ones" in his scene with Sister Clare? 

20. The faithful Philomena waits for a sign. The skeptic Martin finds one: the Celtic harp on the Guinness glass and on Anthony’s lapel. So? Does this argue for the religious or the secular?

21. In the slavery in the convent's laundry, how does the rigorous cleanliness end up expressing the sordid? Again, a fact can be a metaphor.

About Time: CALL Discussion Notes

After another bad New Year’s Eve party, 21-year old Tim (Domhnail Gleeson) is informed by his father (Bill Nighy) that their family’s male line has always been able to move back in time. They can’t change history but they can alter their own life. Tim moves from Cornwall to London to train as a lawyer. He meets the insecure Mary (Rachel McAdams), they fall in love, but their meeting is erased when he travels back to save his playwright landlord’s opening night. Tim manages to meet her again, using his time travel to make things work out. They wed, have children, save his wayward sister Kit Kat’s life, and get through Tim’s father’s death. The lessons Tim’s father taught him lead to a happy ending. Because of some complicated quirk Tim’s posthumous visits to his dad end when Tim agrees to have a third child. 

Consider the following questions:

     For what is time travel here perhaps a metaphor? Otherwise, why would we bother watching a film about time travel when presumably some of us can’t do it? What’s the film’s message (delivered  by the character who introduces the time travel, of course)?
     The film plays out our not uncommon desire to be able to "take back" or redo our failing or error or embarrassment. Does the film show how we might succeed without that skill?

     Rory reads a book called Trash, which is the title of director Richard Curtis’s next script and film. So?  Might he identify with Rory in some way?

     How does the film relate to other films Curtis directed (Love Actually, Pirate Radio) or produced (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Mr Bean’s Holiday) or wrote (two Bridget Jones films, after TV shows as Blackadder, Mr Bean, Spitting Image, Not the Nine O’Clock News)?

     In 2008 the Telegraph named Curtis #12 on its list of “the 100 most powerful people in Bitish Culture.” Really? That was just post-Bean/Bridget.

     The Calgary Herald dismissed this film as “an entertaining whimsy with no real point except to watch an expert cast at work.” Is this really a“whimsy”? Can whimsey carry weight?

     How do errors and timing mess up the other characters? e.g., totally undercooked hotdogs, Rory saying his name is Roger, Kit Kat falling for the wrong guy, Harry missing his ex-wife who was sarcastic but the best person who ever lived, Charlotte’s blessedness.

     How does Charlotte relate to the film’s themes? Note she plays tennis in slow motion.

     What are the contrasts/connections between the two most striking fringe characters, Uncle Desmond and playwright Harry? 

     What thematic functions are served by the lovers first meeting in a darkened restaurant, with blind waiters?

     Why let the wedding continue through the monsoon but correct the bad best man speeches?

What might these quotes signify:

     All the time traveling in the world can’t make someone love you.

     I’ve never run into a genuinely happy rich person.

     I’m going to go into the bedroom and put on my new pyjamas, and in a minute you can come in and take them off if you want to.

     I can’t kill Hitler or shag Helen of Troy unfortunately. (Hint: In Britain shag is not a carpet.)

     “It’s just a flesh wound.” (cp Monty Python and the Holy Grail)

     Don’ t call too often. Your mother doesn’t like to be disturbed.

     Kate Moss’s magic lies in her history.

     Some people make a mess of it the first time.

     I’m so good without the ball.

     If it’s got to be fixed maybe she has to fix it herself.

     Life is a mixed bag.

     You finally got good.

     The songs: — “How long will I love you?” — “I don’t believe in an interventionist god.” — “I don’t get many things right the first time.”

     We are all travelling through time together…. All we can do is do our best and relish our remarkable ride.

     The film’s last words: “See you later.”

The Stratford Ontario 2013 Merchant of Venice

Antoni Cimolini’s production of The Merchant of Venice at Stratford (2013, Ontario) this summer was a masterpiece of tact and sensitivity.  The ambivalence of the Jewish moneylender Shylock has made the play challenging to produce in modern times. As Harry Golden observed, the play has the distinction of having been banned both in Nazi Germany and in Israel for, respectively, its sympathetic and its venomous depiction of the Jew. Staging the play today — when there is a resurgence of anti-Semitism throughout the world, including North American college campuses — is especially risky. 

In his program notes Cimolino noted the historic background to the play’s “usurer.” Christians like Antonio — who is the titular merchant of Venice — needs to borrow the financial resources he risks in order to rise, or here even to survive, in his society — or in this case, to help his wastrel friend Bassanio woo and wed the spectacularly wealthy Belmont heiress Portia. As Christianity forbade Christians to charge interest on loans the ambitious merchants had to turn to non-Christians to fund their gambles. That made the Jews, already banned from the respectable professions, the money-lenders, whom the Christians needed — and hated all the more because they needed them. 

Cimolino sets the play in 1930s Venice, which historically reflected Shylock’s situation. Jews had been accepted in Italian society and allowed their well-earned prominence in the arts, culture and even government, until Mussolini and his National Fascist  in 1938 introduced the race laws that inter alia betrayed the Jews’ earlier acceptance and security. As a result we watch Shylock’s drama knowing the conflagration that will for European Jewry ensue. 

The production takes several subtle steps to address the charge that the play is anti-Semitic. For one thing, it distinguishes Shylock from personifying The Jew. He is A Jew here. The first Jewish character we see is Tubal (Robert King), in full Hassidic garb, as he tries to play with Venetian children until the antagonistic adults, particularly a priest, “save” them and chase him off. When Shylock (Scott Wentworth) first appears he is in a business suit, set apart only by his small black yarmulke. Tubal reads “Jew,” Shylock “Jewish businessman.” When Shylock later insists on his contracted pound of Antonio’s (Tom McCamus) flesh, Tubal silently walks away, dissociating himself — and thus Judaism — from Shylock’s bloody vengeance. 
     The children with whom Tubal played return to harass Shylock, apparently having learned their hateful prejudice from their parents. It is to those children that Shylock here delivers the famous “When you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech. Here he is not just defending the humanity of his people but trying to counteract the prejudice these children have been taught. This touch heightens the other moments in the play where children betray their parents: the servant Gobbo’s (Ron Pederson) cruel abuse of his blind father, Jessica’s (Sara Farb) increasingly destructive betrayal of Shylock, and even Portia’s (Michelle Giroux) attempt by a commissioned song to direct the suitor she desires to pick the right casket, in the rite her father ordained to protect her. The song’s rhymes  —

Tell me where is Fancy bred,

Or in the heart, or in the head?

How begot or nourish-ed?

— subtlely directs Bassanio (Tyrrell Crews) to the casket of -- lead. 
     So Portia, who in her judicial pretence will insist upon the letter of the contract, here by deployment of language subverts her father’s command to serve her will. She and her maid will later trick their suitors into violating their oaths to them, proving yet again that the ostensibly superior Christians cannot be trusted to keep their word, while Shylock, of the people of The Book, maintains the integrity of his contracts, his word. That Portia makes the petard on which he is hoist. Perhaps the drama spins out of its opening lines of ennui — Antonio’s “In sooth I know not why I am so sad, It wearies me, you say it wearies you” — because the play’s Christian society, devoted to investments, business risks, and romantic deceptions and stratagems, seems airily empty in contrast to the passions of Shylock.
     The aggregate effect is to place Shylock and Tubal in a world teeming with anti-Semitism. In the play Antonio admits to having spat on Shylock and promises to do so again after Shylock has served him with his loan. With the hatred so blatant early we are prepared for the extremity of Shylock's punishment at the end -- and we can sense some reason for his rigid adherence to his contract earlier.
     Cimolino also grants Portia a moment of saving grace. The text leaves her an uncertainly virtuous figure. She wields a legal authority beyond what she can properly claim. While her speech on the unstrained quality of mercy may seem virtuous, to Shylock she delivers rather a lumpy justice that renders that speech hypocritical. She goes beyond seizing his property and rewarding his treacherous daughter to stealing his soul with the requirement he convert to Christianity. Where Shakespeare gives Portia no moments of redeeming conscience, Cimolino gives her two. After the “trial” dismisses Shylock a line of Mussolini’s brownshirts file past judge Portia, heartily saluting “him” for his treatment of the Jew. That gives her a moment of second thought. She stands alone, wondering at the implications of her judgment. We who remember history know. At play’s end, when Jessica leaves to enjoy her new marriage into the prized Christian community, along with Shylock’s wealth that she has been given, Portia gives her something else: the red yarmulke Shylock wore to the trial that he dropped in his beaten departure. If it then signified his bloody-minded insistence on the word of his contract, it now augurs the blood of the Holocaust. Portia’s last gesture casts a shadow across this ostensible comedy’s ostensibly happy ending.   

The Counselor: CALL Discussion Notes

The Counselor (Michael Fassbender) lives a stylish, affluent life, with a beautiful fiancee, Laura (Penelope Cruz), until his apparent greed leads him into a one shot foray into financing a drug deal. When the courier is beheaded and the drugs hijacked, his unknown partners turn against him. The two men who made the contact for him but advised him against the enterprise, Reiner (Javier Bardem) and Westray (Brad Pitt), are killed, as is the Counselor’s Laura, left in a rubbish heap. The heist and killings were masterminded by Reiner’s mysterious girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz), who is a car lover. The Counselor, whose life has been a matter of law and order, suffers a tightening noose of tension and danger. 

Written by novelist Cormac McCarthy, the dialogue seems more novelish than filmic. At times the film feels like a classic noir, only with the philosophic subtext spelled out on the surface and the nuances of the plot left buried below. The classic pulp noir spun out the characters and actors but left only implicit the existential currents below.

Questions

How/why does this film shift from noir to horror? What does it say about our times?

Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s script has been widely criticized for being wordy, unrealistic, literary. How might those apparent problems be justified?

Why does the Counselor go unnamed?

What do “Malkina,” “Reiner” and “Westray” signify?

How does the film relate to screenwriter Cormac McCarthy’s other work, e.g., No Country for Old Men and The Road?

How does it relate to British director Ridley Scott’s major films, e.g., Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven, American Gangster?

How does the film draw on our associations with the main actors’ other roles? The DEA brother-in-law from Breaking Bad appears when the drugs are retrieved from the sewage vats.

None of the characters get any back-story, any outline of their previous lives. Why? Hint: “You are the life you created. When you die your world is no more.”

What do Reiner’s leopards signify? How do they connect to Malkina’s spot tattoos? To her scene in the confessional? To her hood in the last scene? To the film’s last words, Malkina’s “I’m famished”?

There are two decapitations, the cyclist’s and Westray’s. What do they connect to in the film?

How are the septic tank trucks a metaphor? How do they relate to the diamonds and the rubbish heap and the parties?

What do these quotes signify:

1.The truth has no temperature.

2. — I don't want to give her a diamond so big she'd be afraid to wear it.

   —She is probably more courageous than you imagine.

3. I suspect that we are ill-formed for the path we have chosen. Ill-formed and ill-prepared. We would like to draw a veil over all the blood and terror that have brought us to this place. It is our faintness of heart that would close our eyes to all of that, but in so doing it makes of it our destiny... But nothing is crueler than a coward, and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.

4. In a diamond we look for the flaws. The perfect diamond would be light.

5. You don’t know someone till you know what they want.

6. You can’t live in this world and not be a part of it.

7. It’s not that you’re going down, counselor. It’s about who you’re taking down with you.

9. What’s wrong with Boise?

10. Nothing is unforgivable.

11. To partake of the stone's endless destiny, is that not the meaning of adornment? To enhance the beauty of the beloved is to acknowledge both her frailty and the nobility of that frailty. At our noblest, we announce to the darkness that we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives.

12.—Have you ever seen a snuff film?

    — No. Have you?

    — No. Would you?

     —I would not.

     —You might want to think about that the next time you do a line.

13. — I can see you're blushing. OK, we'll change the subject.

    — Good.

    — We’ll talk about MY sex life.

    — You’re teasing.

     — Just rattling your cage. What a world.

     — You think the world is strange?

     — I meant yours.

14. — Greed really ames you to the edge.

      — That’s not what greed does. It what greed is.

15. There is no choosing. There is only accepting. The choosing was done long ago.

16. Grief transcends value. But you can’t buy anything with grief because grief is valueless.

17. If I had time I think I’d take a small nut.

18. Westray: I’m pretty skeptical about the goodness of the good. I think that if you ransacked the archives of the redeemed you would uncover tales of moral squalor quite beyond the merely appalling. I've pretty much seen it all, Counselor, and it's all shit. I could live in a monastery, scrub the steps, wash the pots, maybe do a little gardening. Why not?

      Counselor: Why don't you?

      Westray: In a word, women.

18. — I fell asleep. I’m sorry.

     — It is no harm.

     — No harm. What a lovely thought.

19. — Death has no meaning.

      — All my family is dead. I am the one who has no meaning.

20. The quarry killed with elegance is very moving.

21. The slaughter to come is beyond comprehension.

Captain Phillips -- CALL discussion Notes

Captain Phillips -- director Paul Greengrass

In 2009 four Somali pirates led by Muse (Barkhad Abdi) hijack the unarmed container ship Maersk Alabama, commanded by Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks). The two men lock wills 145 miles off the Somali coast, until the US marines sail in for the rescue. The greater suspense kicks in during the navy’s rescue of Phillips, when they pit three large ships, a drone and the famous air-dropped Seals against the lifeboat where the pirates still have Phillips hostage.  

Questions to consider:

1. Do the Americans keep their promises? Does it matter?

2. Why was this film made now? That is, how is it about Now instead of Then, or in Aristotle’s terms, fiction not history.

3. The real Richard Phillips’ crew members have rejected this film for its inaccurate glorification of their captain, who did not offer himself up and rather blundered them into that mess. The film is based on the captain’s book. Does that matter?

4. How is the film different/fresh/suggestive in its characterization of the villain, Muse? Why is he named Muse? Alas, it’s pronounced Musey.

5. On the thematic level, why does Muse call Phillips “Irish”?

6. What’s the point in the references to the professions (e.g., fisherman, captain, businessman), especially the fisherman? Is identity perhaps a larger issue here?

7. How does the film play on our shifting sympathies? How does the Underdog status change?

8. Compare the two  captains’ body types and images. No points for “One of them’s black.”

9. What metaphors lurk here:

-- we first see Muse asleep

-- Muse and Phillips first lock eyes through their dueling binoculars

--the implausibly resourceful Phillips survives drenched in the pirates’ blood 

10.How are Muse and Phillips parallel in their strategies? Different?

11. What’s the purpose of the opening family scenes?

12. How does the film fit into director Paul Greengrass’s canon? He directed Bloody Sunday (about the Irish civil rights protest) and  United 93 (about the 9/11 hijacked plane) between The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum.

13. What -- other than our nausea -- is the point of the handheld camera? 
14. The $30,000 taken from the safe seems to have disappeared. The pirates had it, one was captured, the others killed. So where did the cash go? Does it matter? Why is this question omitted from the film?

Consider the significance of the following quotes:

1.Captain Phillips: Listen up, we have been boarded by armed pirates. If they find you, remember, you know this ship, they don't. Stick together and we'll be alright. Good luck.

2.Captain P: There's got to be something other than being a fisherman or kidnapping people. 

Muse: Maybe in America, Irish, maybe in America. 

3.Captain P: You're not just a fisherman! You're not just a fisherman!.... You said you were a business man! Is this how you do business?

4.Muse: Look at me.

Phillips: Sure.

Muse: Look at me.

Phillips: Sure.

Muse: I'm the captain now.

5. “The world is changing.”

6. “I’ll have two beer and a bucket full of sin, please.”

7. “I may be skinny but I’m not a coward. The coward is the first one in the grave.”

8. “What am I? Do I look like a beggar?”

9. “America! Yes!”

10. “This game isn‘t for the weak.”

11. “Rich countries like to help Somalia. They come and take all our fish so we have nothing.”

12. “It was supposed to be easy.”

13. “You think you have the power here?”

14.“We all have bosses.”
15.“You’re going to America.”

Don Jon

In Don Jon writer/director/star Joseph Gordon-Levitt evades the shallows of both romantic comedy and hardcore porn by moving from isolating artifice to a genuine human engagement. His opening clip of a cartoon announces the silliness, flatness and artificiality of hero Jon’s (Gordon-Levitt) life. At the end he and a mature woman have started “to get lost together.” 

Initially Jon and his two buddies indulge adolescent rankings of the women they see and lust after and that Jon has the unfortunate luck to enjoy seriatim. But the other characters are also locked into mechanical behaviour. His father, Jon Sr (Tony Danza), shows where Jon Jr gets his anger, profanity and fear of human connection. Where Junior retreats to porn for fulfillment Dad invests his -- preferred fantasy -- life in his large-screen NFL coverage. He’s too Old School for Tivo. Jon’s mother (Glenne Headly) is locked into her reflex role, submissive housewife yearning to become a submissive granny. In her ultimate revolt she shuts off the macho TV.

Two women shake Jon Jr out of his reliance on porn to complete his hyper-successful but failed sex life. The first, emblematically named Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), manipulates his randiness to bring him to heel. She’s so perverse she wants him to give up cleaning his (and future their) flat: “Because it’s not sexy, that’s why!” Her submission to romantic fantasies parallels his to porn. To his “You’re the most beautiful thing [sic] I’ve ever seen in my life,” she eagerly responds: “Do you like movies?” Both kinds of movies, like the TV ads, exploit a shallow sexuality to desensitizing effect. When she finds he’s still dependent on porn she dumps him. 

Jon’s sister -- who spends every other scene devoted to her iphone -- suddenly springs from her ritual isolation to tell Jon he’s well rid of the woman whose agenda was to control him. 

Jon stumbles into a genuine relationship when he connects to Esther (Julianne Moore), at the night school business class Barbara compelled him to take. Older and both more vulnerable and knowing than Jon, Esther opens him up to exploring someone else, caring for her and trying to make sensitive connections where formerly he performed only ritual responses. Where Barbara’s surname evokes indulgence, the Biblical Esther connotes devotion and care. 

A series of mechanical confessions at church leads Jon finally to question who is hearing his confessions and on what criteria his penances are determined. In his own way the priest is as robotic as the porn stars and addicts. Neither admits a personal connection.

     We’re spared the slapstick of Jon’s family ever meeting Esther. That’s because this relationship is too personal, too serious, too deep to move into conventional labelling. Esther’s husband and son were recently killed in a  car accident -- presumably by someone else who drives with Jon’s rage and danger -- which he also now outgrows. As she brings Jon what he needs to learn he  brings her the joy of life that she needs to recover. They may or may not have a future together. The film refuses us the conventional happy ending, whether the gauzy wedding of Barbara’s genre or the money shot of Jon’s. The point is that each has  brought the other the open honest connection they need now. 
      This is a wonderful, humanizing, thoughtful film -- with some great porn clips.

A Touch of Sin

Jia Zhang-ke’s A Touch of Sin is a magnificent, dense, moving, poetic -- okay, bloody heroic -- film about four individuals who revolt against their oppressive lives in contemporary China.  It’s one of those films whose backdrop is so rarely seen and fascinating we’re tempted to ignore the narrative for it. But the stories are too strong to  miss.

In a small northern town a loner in a green coat campaigns against the local politicos who have grown obscenely rich by skimming off the money from their sale of the collectively owned mine. The two main symbols are the Mao statue in the town square, all but ignored now, and the Maserati the boss bought and leaves outside his factory. The hero snaps and guns down everyone in his way to the boss, whom he kills at the Buddhist temple.

The second hero returns home on his motorcycle in a Chicago Bulls cap, to find the region scarred by high rises and the Three Gorges hydroelectric plant. The scenes seem like the usual awkward homecoming, till we learn he’s just killed three men.

In the fourth story a young man leaves his factory job when he’s expected to give his salary to a co-worker who badly injured his hand in a work accident. The boy works as a waiter in a high-priced brothel, where he’s attracted to a young whore who reveals she’s working to provide for her little daughter. Seeing no escape from the web of poverty and corruption the lad kills himself. 

In the third story a sauna receptionist has broken off with her married lover. When a wealthy man flogs her with his bankroll to bully her into sex she kills him and wanders off bloodied and distracted. She returns in an epilogue, rehabilitated, applying for a job in different part of the country. When she watches a street theatre company the lead peers out at the audience and asks: “Do you understand your sin?” But the camera holds on the audience, everyday faces, not the ones whose stories we have stumbled into. The implication is that while we have watched characters driven by ideals and desperation into sin perhaps there is a heavier sin among those prosaic citizens who have quietly put up with everything. If our four heroes have committed “a touch of sin,”  the collective sins of omission weigh heavier still.    

A recurring theme is the distinction between man and animal. Apparently even animals commit suicide. The first hero wraps his rifle in a tiger cloth -- to the roar of the cat -- when he sets out on his vigilante mission. Supposedly holy snakes attend the sauna hostess’s suffering and escape. The waiter and prostitute free a few goldfish in a liberation they are unable to achieve. But the sinners by omission may be like the workhorse the first hero passes, being mercilessly beaten by his master. When the hero kills the tyrant the horse trots off with his load. Unlike workhorses, man has to fight his oppressors himself. Or escape one way or another. 

12 Years a Slave

Like the whipping scenes we uncomfortably witness, in 12 Years a Slave the sting comes in the tail. The end titles tell us neither the slave pen manager nor Solomon Northup’s kidnappers were punished. Solomon is saved, but that individual justice does not redefine the terrible system. Racism, slavery and savage injustice persist at film’s end. Of course, the point is that even after the Civil War, the freeing of the slaves, the Civil Rights Movement and its legal and societal successes, racism and injustice persist.  Hardly a major daily newspaper passes without a reminder, whether it’s a regressive change in the voters’ rights laws or a Florida bully legally justified in mortally “standing his ground” against the unarmed black kid he hunted. 12 Years a Slave reminds us what contemporary America grew out of and where too much of its roots remain. Slavery, after all, was not limited to the antebellum south. An early shot of the new slaves has the White House righteous in the background.

As Solomon is driven away to his freedom he leaves the slavery a blur behind him. That doesn’t mean it ends. It has embedded its scars on his back and in his mind. When he sees his family, children grown and married, he rues what life he wasted. Slavery remains a campaign he fought until he died -- and even that was in obscurity. The point of British visual artist Steve McQueen’s film is that America has not escaped its racist past. That remains a continuing process. It does not always advance. Electing a black president established not a post-racist America but rather a neo-racist America. Hence Sarah Palin’s coded demand:  “Give us back our America.” That’s why the Republicans just now paralyzed the country in their ostensible attempt to stop Obamacare. Call it Reagancare and they would have fallen all over themselves to register.

McQueen’s film deploys an uncompromising visceral violence that rejects the sentimentality and softened focus of American treatments of that period. It is chilling to see how little control the slaves had in their lives. In that perverse order a black would be punished or even killed if he was found to be literate, not to say uppity. Give him a Harvard degree and there would be screams of outrage and disbelief. There is such violence in the air that steamboat paddles churn up a riot of raucous white water and the boat’s furnaces roar infernal. The Southern swamps have an eerie other-worldliness that sets up the ghosts of slavery past as a still haunting presence. 

Apparently it takes an outsider to cast such an unflinching eye on the subject. To his credit, the physical world and the language seem perfectly realized. No trace of the outsider there, but the work of a director steeped in his subject’s world. Perhaps the only false note is producer Brad Pitt appearing as the Canadian who brings Northup salvation. His performance is fine but he can’t stop registering as Brad Pitt, who gets to make the film’s wisest and most humane and modern speeches. Whether his casting was his or McQueen’s idea, it shivers the film’s verisimilitude and seems self-congratulatory. Pitt's character brings Northup’s story to the North as outside the narrative Pitt helps bring it to the screen.     

But that is a minor cavil about a film that’s courageous, brilliantly written, scored, directed and performed, and as important a statement to America and the world as we have seen this year. 

Muscle Shoals

  Greg Camalier’s Muscle Shoals is a documentary about Rick Hall, who founded Fame recording studios in the quiet Tennessee River town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which inspired an incredible host of classic pop singers and songs. The film is a fascinating collection of music clips, stars‘ testimonials and memories, against the background of the turbulent culture and politics of the late 50s-‘70s.

The film’s explicit homage is to the magic of that location. Something in the air, in the murmuring river, in the wailing clack of the railroad, inspired the musicians who made the place legendary. The footage tries to catch that magic. If we believe it we see it.

The main subtext is the surprising fact that the black R’n’B sound behind all those hits was produced by an all-white rhythm section, who became known as the Swampers. We know that white producers propelled much of that black music but the role played by Hall’s young white musicians, all as hip as Wonderbread, is an eye-opener. The film rescues those principals from an unwarranted obscurity. The drama derives from the Swampers’ split from Hall to set up their own studio, his partnership and split from Atlantic honcho Jerry Wexler, and Hall’s brief warm reunion with the Swampers at the end.

Of course, even documentaries open out into metaphor. The singularity the film presents has a wider resonance, which moves it towards Aristotle’s fiction (what happens all the time) and makes it superior to history (which just happened to happen once).

The film represents the power that America used to have and could have. In this America blacks and whites slip into easy friendship and collaboration to make soulful harmonies together. Amid the vicious artifice of segregation whites and blacks connect and grow together. In this America the young and the imaginative get a chance to make something of themselves. This America breaks down barriers -- rockers Lynryd Skynryd even bring in a roadie who’s a classical pianist -- instead of raising and exploiting them (Hello, Tea Party!). The idyllic Muscle Shoals is idyllic America, its frontier wilds and wisdom intact, a past we should look forward to.

Watermark

Edward Burtynsky’s and Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Watermark is a celebration of human stupidity. 

The film’s explicit theme is the interdependence of man and water. It shapes us and we shape it. As an organism we’re born in water and we can’t survive without it. It’s the essential bond not just between man and nature but between people. Burtynsky’s whole career has centered on the world we found and how we are changing it. 

But the implicit theme is our folly. In the Vegas desert Bellagio’s stages a magnificent exhibition of dancing, orchestrated fountains. With water. Brilliant that they have the imagination and technology to do that. Gob-smacking idiocy that they so wastefully do so. So too the aerial view of a private swimming pool in a backyard, that draws back to reveal a city full of separate homes with separate pools and separate marinas.

Every twelve years 35,000,000 Indians make a pilgrimage to the Ganges, where they wash away their sins by washing their clothes, bathing, and filling their plastic water bottles in the -- may we surmise ‘unclean’ ? -- river. That they survive until the next festival measures out their imperviousness to logic and to care. We cut to the Western equivalent: a massive crowd gathered on the shore for the US Open surfboard competition. So many cultures, so many gods. 

To Burtynsky’s credit he doesn’t explicitly comment on these follies. They speak for themselves. 

Of course water gives us a chance to show our worth. A community of abalone-fishers link their nets and operations to help each other. They confirm their interdependence (unlike the community with as many pools as families). But the fishermen know their plenteous preserve is only for the while before it dies. As will their community. 
     In Greenland scientists plunge down through millennia of ice to draw up analyses of historic climate readings. But having fine scientists doesn’t mean we’re not stupid enough to ignore them. As the filmmakers doubtless know, the Canadian government of Stephen Harper has been systematically throttling its scientists, both physical and social, reducing funds and freedom for their research, suppressing their findings, preventing any possibility of their science countering the government’s ideology. 

Perhaps the film’s signature shot is the massive dam. It embodies man’s ability to build something so much larger than himself, with the arrogance of presuming thereby to conquer nature. The dam shrinks the human workers to ants, but when it serves its purpose it only damages nature further. The American irrigation system accesses nine Lake Hurons of underground water but has already sapped a third of it, irreplaceably. Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness because it keeps us from respecting and serving the nature that preceded but may not survive us.

The film is framed by two sequences of water flowing. The first seems to be a tumultuous avalanche until we zoom in on a huge eruption of water, released from a dam. That will be defined as the violence done nature by our exploitation. The film ends by sailing along a curving clear river, the energy and velocity all being natural and we’re just following its lines, drawing closer until we’re finally immersed in it. But even this optimistic end, this serenity, is shadowed by the fact that on the banks it’s autumn. The colours are radiant but the season says the deep freeze is nigh.

Like Burtynsky’s epic still photographs the film’s images abound with explicit poetry. The Mexican woman’s face is as brown and carved as the parched desert around her, the old once fish-full river now dead and gone. A sickly green dead river with its dry tributaries spreading along the ground paradoxically evokes the Tree of Life. In wishful thinking a reverse action time lapse sequence shows a dried land recovering the life and waters it lost. The reversal makes the effects of time feel bearable, hiding the death in a pretense to resurrection. 

Bastards

Claire Denis’ Bastards is about bastards, alright, specifically bastards who sexually abuse those who are dependent upon them. The theme obviously reflects upon  dysfunctional family relationships and the tacit complicity that allows sexual exploitation to flourish. But in the context of Denis’ other work the domestic sexual dynamic points to a larger, political issue: the victim’s complicity in his/her/their victimization. At a time where there are political uprisings everywhere, where the longtime colonized cry out for their independence, integrity and freedom, Ms Denis‘ point is this: We still need more rebellions. Too many colonizers are clinging to power because their victims let them.

In the film the hero Marco (Vincent Lindon) moves between two mothers and their domineering masters. His sister, to whom he ceded the family’s thriving women’s sexy shoe manufacturing company, watched her husband run the business into bankruptcy. She has also watched him turn their daughter Justine (Lola Creton), whose very name evokes a Sadean symphonic, into a druggie, sex object and suicide. This mother pleads helplessness, blaming everyone -- her brother, her husband, the doctor, the cops, her daughter -- for Justine’s horrid fate, without ever acknowledging her own abdication of parental responsibility. She especially blames her husband’s wealthy powerful partner Laporte (Michel Subor) both for her husband’s suicide and their daughter’s seduction. The latter charge proves imprecise, as the home movies ultimately reveal Laporte only a witness to Justine’s abuse by her father. 

Laporte figures more prominently in the other relationship. He has fathered a son with the beautiful Raphaelle (Chiara Mastroianni), who lives in a lavish apartment Laporte funds in Marco’s apartment building. Whatever his initial motives, Marco finds a genuine passion in his relationship with Raphaelle and affection in her son. In a fugitive hint of incest his lover looks just like his sister but for the former's odd mole.

Marco abandons his seafaring career -- the happy life of the loner, a captain who from his family’s perspective has fled his responsibilities -- in order to save his sister and niece.His involvement with Raphaelle brings him closer to the evil magnate Laporte but at the cost of Raphaelle keeping her son. To serve her vile master she opts to kill her lover Marco instead of him. Thus the colonized kiss the hand that stifles them, or caress the rod that rules them.

The sex scenes run the gamut of abuse, from Laporte ordering Raphaelle’s manual service to his slimy envelop of his son’s small hand, from Justine’s terrible violation in the rustic brothel -- where some dried ears of corn give new meaning to the term ‘kernel knowledge’ -- to her abuse by the pander she loves. Certainly the sexual politics is pertinent enough to our day and age. But so too is its reflection upon the broader authoritarian victimization in world politics. 

Enough Said

Nicole Holofcener is the woman’s answer to the manboy genre that dominates American film comedy. Judd Apatow represents that cycle at its best, bawdy macho tales about men who haven’t grown up. Where these films respect women by sympathetically marginalizing them, Holofcener makes women her central characters, their psychology her primary interest and their self-realization her main objective. Of course, that makes her films vital viewing for men -- at least, those who want to have a shot at understanding women. Yeah, I guess it’s also good for women to have a voice and a reflection

Enough Said is enough of an improvement over her previous feature Friends with Money (2006) that we can talk about her as a significant auteur. She writes brilliant, offbeat scripts, with prickly, funny dialogue, centered on a circle of close women friends that witness the central woman’s descent and resurrection. Her new heroine, masseuse Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) is an elaboration of Jennifer Aniston’s teacher-turned-maid in Friends with Money, a smart, plucky woman who hasn’t a strong enough sense of herself to take control of her life. The first film would have been stronger had Aniston and Francis McDormand switched roles, ignoring Aniston’s box office clout. Now Holofcener didn’t have to make such compromises. Her blue chip cast is perfectly cast.

In Enough Said the three central women are all in healing professions, but they are not healing themselves. In fact they’re ignoring their own major issues by focusing on the trivial. In addition to masseuse Eva, who heals the body, Sarah (Toni Collette) is a therapist -- healing the mind -- who ignores her marital issues by constantly rearranging the furniture. Marianne (Catherine Keener) is a poet -- healer of the soul -- whose poems speak to the afflicted but she has no interest in the readers who thank her for saving them. Eva is so bored by her self-absorbed clients that she’s jolted when one asks about her Thanksgiving plans. Patients and healers are all self-absorbed.

Eva’s reluctance to grow up is manifest in several ways. She is so dependent on her daughter that even before she loses her to college she tries to replace her with her daughter’s friend Chloe (Tavi Gevinson). Eva tries to cultivate a girl-friend relationship with Chloe, even advising her to give up her virginity. Only at the end does Eva marshall the self-respect to ask a strapping young male client to help her carry her heavy massage table up his steep stairs. 

Primarily, Eva lets her new friend/client Marianne poison her relationship with her new lover Albert (James Gandolfini). Eva lets her ramble on about what a terrible husband her ex was, without admitting that he’s Eva’s current lover. Unable to accept her own feelings for Albert, Eva lets Marianne unwittingly poison her perception of him. Eva buys Marianne’s criticisms of him, however trivial. He swirled the onions out of his guacamole, he was fat, he was messy around the house. When Eva sets up a dinner date to get Sarah’s professional perspective, she gets tipsy and critical and leaves Albert feeling he’s just been on a date with his ex-wife.

Marianne ended her marriage and Eva suspends her affection for Albert for the silliest of reasons. Little peccadillos are ballooned into problems. Like Sarah rearranging the furniture, both woman reject Albert because they demand perfection at the cost of a perfectly fine reality. That’s Holofcener’s message to women: Don’t buy the popular culture’s delusion that you can have a perfect life by getting the material details right and holding out for some dream man. It keeps Desperate Housewives running but it won’t give you a happy life. 

At first Gandolfini’s character seems to have stumbled in from one of those Apatow comedies. But he doesn’t have buddies, he has a strong healthy sense of himself, he is happy with his work as a custodian of culture (working in an archive of classical TV, where Holofcener learned her craft) and he appreciates and understands Eva. He admits he was heart-broken when she let his ex distort her sense of him. Though he seems a boy slob Albert is a sensitive, generous man who quickly dedicates himself to Eva. That’s as ideal as reality can provide. In fact, Albert's self-awareness is what all the women lack. 

When we see the exes -- Marianne’s Albert, Eva’s ex -- it becomes apparent that those marriages could have survived if the women had been open to making genuine compromises. Both men are of decent character. Their lovers could have preferred the character over surface flaws. (Except for Albert’s loud “whispering” at the movies, for which he should of course be shot.) The illusion that a better relationship may lie around the corner drove both women out of their marriages, and almost drove Eva out of Albert. The dinner scene shows Sarah on the verge of similarly casting off her husband, not because he’s bad or inappropriate but because she lets small things about him irritate her. She may have been saved by her maid’s storming out after her mistaken abuse. Like Eva, perhaps Sarah will learn to accept her man’s imperfections when she realizes her own.

But Enough Said. All three healers know what to do, what to advise, what to say. It’s the doing, the putting of those words into sensible, practical action that spoils their contentment and undermines their lives. Perhaps the two freshman daughters will learn better -- be more realistic -- and do better for themselves by accepting that in others less may well be more.     

Gandolfini -- to whom the film is dedicated -- is wonderful. This film shows we have lost much more than Tony Soprano.