Friday, November 15, 2013

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.”

Friday, November 8, 2013

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.   

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

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.