A Million Ways to Die in the West

As the narrator intones, some people are born into the wrong times. That’s Albert Stark (Seth Macfarlane), a sensitive, psychology-aware sheep farmer who finds himself in Arizona in 1888. His modernity inflects everything else in this splendid parody of the classic western, especially the profanity, the historic awareness, the struggle to sustain moral codes, and the surprise cameos (e.g., Bill Maher as a frontier standup comedian, etc.). Stephen Foster meets Freud in the barn dance valorizing of the moustache.
The situations are everywhere informed by modern understanding. “Why are the Indians so mad?” one character asks, “We’re splitting the country with them 50-50, aren’t we?” A shyster’s magic elixir contains cocaine and red flannel. The hero discovers The Way through an Indian drug.
The film’s basic premise is the essential absurdity of the human condition, seen most clearly in the short but constantly threatened life span on the 19th century frontier. The film draws laughs from the variety of deaths to which our flesh is heir. Hence our nobility in carrying on, whether in the adjustments we make to our romantic failures or in marshalling courage under pressure.
On the romantic side, Stark suffers from being dumped by his unworthy girlfriend Louise (Armanda Seifried) but finds true love in the unlikely arms-training of Anna (Charlize Theron), the wife of the vicious gunslinger Clinch (Liam Neeson). She married at nine to avoid being a spinster at 15. So too the pragmatic propriety (aka hypocrisy) in the Christian relationship between the whore Ruth (Sarah Silverman) and her fiancé Edward (Giovanni Ribisi)  from whom she initially withholds all sex until marriage.
On the courage side, the sheep farmer tries modern negotiation strategies to make up for his inabilities in the classic macho skills. Those having failed, he succeeds through the arcane knowledge he collects both as a nerd and as a friend of the natives. 
The film is very clever in its comic invention and in its replication of the classic Western’s tone. The music evokes the Dmitri Tiomkin scores. The Monument Valley setting recalls John Ford, with the further hint of a raised third finger here and there on the horizon. Alan Jackson’s rousing ballad at the end articulates the film’s theme with the spirit of Frankie Laine in Blazing Saddles, this film’s true muse. 
     I expect that for some viewers Seth Macfarlane is, like Mel Brooks, an acquired tastelessness. For me he, like Brooks, epitomizes sophisticated wit. Here as in Ted Macfarlane’s project is to let his well-meaning, put upon hero make it as a man by sustaining his sensitivity in the face of overwhelming coarseness (the West here, like the teddy bear in Ted). Finally, it’s fun.

Time of Favour (2000)

Perhaps the dominant theme in Joseph Cedar’s Time of Favor is the need for doubt, i.e., the folly, often fatal, of absolute certainty of one’s righteousness. In Israeli politics that lesson has only grown more compelling.

In Michal’s first conversation with Menachem she notes how the Israeli men see everything in black and white, untroubled by nuances. He takes pride in quickly overcoming doubts, which serves him well as a military commander but troubles his attraction to her. Their lyrical shadowplay shows them too doubtful about their feelings to touch so they intertwine by their shadows. In a close later scene the Mossad men discuss their concern over Rabbi Meltzer's lack of doubt.

In both closed male systems, the IDF and Rabbi Meltzer’s militant yeshiva, the men are too absolutely certain of their righteousness to achieve justice. Indeed Meltzer insists that a warrior needs to forget his family, lover, emotions, to succeed. When the soldiers target Menachem in the tunnels at the end, as in his violent interrogation earlier, their unfounded certainty about his guilt threatens a profound injustice.

When Menachem declares that Rabbi Meltzer has stolen his soul he realizes that Meltzer’s domination threatens Menachem's and Michal’s happiness, not to mention the general peace.  Menachem resolves to leave the army and his command of the rabbi’s military unit. He wants to live a more sensible, human life. In contrast, the rejected suitor, the brilliant Torah scholar Pini, launches a suicide bombing mission to impress the rabbi and Michal,
     As Michal notes, the rabbi’s blind vision cost her mother’s life. If a terrorist were to kill Michal, he would dismiss it as the pain on which Israel is built. Where Pini loves Michal for the Rabbi Meltzer he sees in her, Menachem’s love for her exposes his mentor’s dangerous folly. Michal has her father's strong will and strong sense of self but is mercifully free of his arrogance. We last see the rabbi walk off alone, having lost his daughter, his best student, his stature, and his delusions about his mission and its worth. We can't be sure the experience has shaken his confidence.

Here’s the film’s crowning paradox. The plot shows the development of a suicide bomber in a West Bank settlement, targeting the Temple Mount, but it has nothing to do with the Palestinians. Cedar’s point is that Jewish religious fanaticism and messianic fervour are as dangerous and irrational as the Palestinians’. Hence Menachem’s rousing speech to his troops: in war you don’t fight the enemy, you fight yourself. As it happens, that’s the original meaning of the Islamic word jihad. Menachem’s term to fire up his troops’ dedication to Jehovah also parallels the Arabs’ bloody service to Allah. To the secular Mookie, it’s like a stick of dynamite up the soldier’s ass. That’s religious fervour for you. It fires you up — fatally and alone.
     Cedar frequently parallels scenes to pointed effect. In one, he cuts from Michal’s solitary sabbath devotion to the barracks men rowdily and brutishly celebrating. Her modest reverence contrasts to their loutish service. Among the men Menachem sits quietly contemplative, as if already decided he must choose her life over theirs.    

Under the Skin

From darkness comes vision. The pre-title sequence is an abstraction of galactic travel, with a total eclipse culminating in an eye. The narrative details the similar intersection of aliens and earthlings.

The aliens have taken the shape of male motorcyclists, but make one of their team a woman (Scarlett Johansson) as bait to seduce human males for the harvest of their skins. One reading of the title is that under the skin people can prove as different as (i) humans and aliens, or (ii) the innocents the heroine seduces and the vicious logger who tries to rape her and destroys her (and as a logger, plunders the natural world in which she seeks refuge). People on this globe live as if on different planets.

Where we expect a sex scene we usually get something metaphysical. The naked bodies operate stripped of any physical background. The first time, the woman found by the roadside is being slowly stripped — we expect by the motorcyclist who will rape her.  But it’s the naked Scarlett (unnamed in the film, Laura in the novel), plundering the body for her woman’s outfit. Having donned a woman’s skin and face she now dons the clothing. When she leads men to their doom they follow her into the dark pool she strides across. Led by their erections they literally go in over their heads and are trapped as in aspic, while she treads the surface. Eventually the men implode leaving their emptied skins to be harvested, presumably for the next UFO of aliens. 

The setting is Glasgow in 2014, when Scottish independence is coming to a vote and where the representative society are famously binge-drinking young women and lecherous brutish lads. Those are contrary attempts to find the comfort of a community, an identity. With their incomprehensible dialect, the Glaswegians seem more alien than Scarlett. They help us to identify with her. 

In one of the film’s many twists, though, the laddish brutality is represented only in the intersection lout who taunts the heroine and the group that attack her van. Her victims are rather charming innocents. They are not the aggressive drunks on whom we expect extraterrestrial justice to be wreaked. Indeed in most cases Scarlett has to be the aggressor not just in the initial engagement but in the sexual invitation. 

The alien Scarlett also works as a human allegory. Initially she functions without any moral compass. So she kills the Czech visitor who tried to save the drowning father. She feels no compunction about abandoning the crying baby. And again, the men she kills are nice guys, not lechers. 

When she picks up the misshapen solitary, the heartless alien discovers human feelings. Though she leads him to his appointed doom she changes her mind and releases him. What prompts her change is her sight of herself in a mirror, where she sees how alien to herself she looks. Then she can feel for him. The freed victim wanders home naked, where her colleague finishes him off. But Scarlett has discovered human emotion, especially the feeling of being alienated and vulnerable. The other aliens, sensing she is AWOL, hunt for her.

This new sensibility is so foreign it discombobulates her. Human emotions are as strange and unmanageable to her as the black forest cake she chokes on. She has no human appetites, so can’t eat even dessert. She ends up confused and alone in the rain, on a bus, helpless and cold, until a man offers her help, warmth, comfort, a meal of fried egg and beans that she -- understandably -- doesn’t touch, and an equally alien cultural experience in the gibberish TV clown. 

When the generous, unselfish man leaves her in her room, with a heater, she for the first time discovers and enjoys the beauty of her body. Under the skin she is the alien but her experience with the misshapen man has opened her to the warmth of the helpful stranger. Not just acting but now feeling human, she welcomes his kisses and sexual approach. But their intercourse is thwarted by her lack of vagina. She looks for it with a lamp, uncomprehending. She can't let him in. Her humanity is skin-deep.

Under the skin she remains the alien, as the rapist logger discovers when he claws her skin off with her pants. As she has discovered human warmth and feeling, though, it’s apt that the logger destroys her in a gas-lit fire on the snow. In the last shot, low angle up through the falling snowflakes, her smoke seems to be rising toward a white-framed portal (unless that’s a flaw in the Cineplex screen). 

For all its sci-fi trappings, then, this is a very human and immediate story about the vulnerability of the emotional, the inhumanity of the selfish and destructive, and — in human and alien alike — our quest for completion, to connect with someone both on and underneath the skin.  

The Lunchbox

From different  contexts two characters cite the same adage: “Sometimes the wrong train gets you to the right station.” The duplication confirms the implication of the saying: A larger  harmony may overlay the apparent chaos and insularity of our lives.

The food delivery error finds the right recipient: not the neglectful, unfaithful husband Rajeev (for whom it’s intended) but the genuinely appreciative and needy widower Saajan. In the days of cellphones and email the two strangers’ connection by paper notes smuggled in the food-tins speaks of older traditions and values. Even if all the paper files and manual accounting in Saajan’s claims department are curiously archaic. 

Since losing his wife Saajan is tight, silent, unexpressive. His colleagues warn his trainee Shaikh that he won’t get anything out of Saajan. He’s removed from his colleagues and alienated from his neighbors. Ila is almost equally isolated, despite being married, with a delightful daughter and a cheery advisor in the upstairs “Auntie.” Ila can’t get any affection or notice from Rajeev and finds another’s perfume on his shirts. Because we don’t see Auntie she doesn’t register as an actual relief from Ila’s isolation. So the stranger’s notes appreciating her cooking and sharing his observations and feelings — and attending to hers — are enough to excite Ila, even to give her hope that she may find an alternative more fulfilling relationship. At both ends of the meal’s transmission the two fantasize a relationship. This meal provides multiple nourishment. It’s enough to prompt Saajan to forgo early retirement and Ila to leave her husband. 

A key motif is the faint register of an individual in a mass. This is most clear in the montage that follows Ila’s food-cans through the daily delivery, one bundle barely discerned amid the mass. Her fertile green case stands out in the drab crowd. So, too, the noisy teeming crowd — in First-Class, yet — on Saajan’s commute to/from work. In the last photo at Sheikh’s wedding his sole representative Saajan is almost framed out as the camera shifts to include the bride’s extending family.  

But the film stays open-ended. If we prefer the pre-couple’s romantic hopes we can infer that Saajan, back from his retirement spot and traveling with the food-deliverers, will get to Ila before her daughter returns from school and the three will depart together. 

But if our experience rather tends toward the tragic expectation, they won’t meet. Her alienation deepened by her mother’s relief at her lately disgusting husband’s death, and by learning Saajan has moved away, Ila may well commit suicide. The shot of her removing her jewellery replays her visualization of the news story of the mother who jumped with her child to death. As Ila thinks the letter she may or may not send Saajan (p.s., How?) her morbid emotions might drive her off before her daughter returns from school. Hence her wistful look as the girl left. This ending would recall the near-misses that fatally thwart the romance of Romeo and Juliet. 

The comic subplot of Shaikh and his beloved, who ran away from home to be with him, could support either reading. These lovers’ perseverance ends in family acceptance and success. So it could parallel the romantic union of Ila and Saaja. Equally, though, it could be cited as a dramatic counterpoint to the older lovers’ tragedy.
If we’re not given one certain ending the director is suggesting that the ending doesn’t matter.  Whether or not the lovers meet and settle in together, both have grown from the experience. Warmed by the idea of having a girlfriend, Saajan has opened out to Shaikh and to his neighbours’ children. He is already living a happier life, his emotions reawakened. And whether or not Saajan gets to her in time, Ila has worked up the courage to escape her stifling marriage. Whether it’s romance or death, the wrong train could still find the right station — if only by leaving the wrong one.