Their Finest

The title alludes to Britain’s Finest Hour, Churchill’s term for the nation’s valour and heroism in surviving the Nazis’ bombing during WW II. But the term applies to two other emerging forces as well.

One is The Movies, as the British government turned to film for the propagandist power the Nazis had already mobilized. This film shows the Brits developing an emotional feature film that will boost the besieged citizenry’s morale and also help to draw America out of its isolationism to support her. 

The second is the emergence of women as an assertive social and professional force. With the young men away at war or already killed, older men and women young and old got the opportunity to assume new responsibilities. They got the chance to prove themselves. As Phyl warns Catrin Cole, the men are ”afraid they won't be able to put us back in the box when this is over, and it makes them belligerent.” Modern feminism grew out of women’s emergence into the wartime labour market. Unsurprisingly, the film was scripted and directed by women. 

The film follows Catrin’s blossoming from secretary into excellent screenwriter and from a subservient position in her affair with a painter into independence. The typist grows into writer. The female characters’ incidental conversation, what the male writers call “slop,” develops into the work’s emotional heart, especially when Catrin provides the film’s close. Her new career sustains her in the face of both her romantic losses. So, too, Hilliard's agent's wife rises to take over her husband's business after his death -- without abandoning her old role as nurturer and woman. In contrast, Phyl seems to have assumed a tough shell -- but it cracks when she spurs Catrin back to Buckley. 

As her second love Buckley explains, people need films to bring a sense of order and coherence into their chaotic lives. Life is chaotic and senseless. Catrin loses both her lovers as a nod to the disorder in real life, for which films’ conventionally happy endings console us. So, too, the steady reports of the deaths of marginal characters. 

As the film intercuts scenes behind the making of the film with clips from that film itself we get a constant layering of reality and its simulations. Often a supposedly real-life scene appears staged, like the set in Hilliard’s visit to Catrin’s bare flat. Real-life dialogue breaks into script-like eruptions, like most of Hilliard’s and Buckley’s quips, life as spoken by an actor and a writer respectively. 

The emerging film’s liberties with the facts of the original story remind us that art presents general truths deeper than the facts of any particular case.  Of course art enhances reality. The twin sisters of the film are livelier, prettier and more successful than the shy girls whose failed adventure inspired the film. The handsome dashing American pilot imposed on the film for American interest is carefully trimmed and packaged, in effect disguised, to be effective.  

When Catrin finally goes to see her movie we see its audience — of course, a reflection of us as we watch the movie about their movie. Their emotions and engagement remind us of why we’re at that movie. Their shared experience reflects ours. 

In fact, evoking an emotional community is the function not just of films but of all the arts. (That’s why tyrants target the arts, to suppress alternative visions and to fragment their citizenry.) Hence the sentimental power when Hilliard sings his old folk ballad at the party. And the government official's stirring recitation of Hal's St Crispin's speech from Henry V. 
     Catrin’s first lover is an isolated artist, a painter, who does not work with a present audience and proves too selfish to sustain his relationship with Catrin. But he too succeeds by catching the spirit of the time, with paintings of the desolate British cityscapes and industrial scenes. The hopeful pop song Red Sails in the Sunset plays against the grey and ruins of the bombed city. The arts inflect our reality to make it bearable.   

It’s not surprising that this paean to England’s lost glory should be appearing now, on the eve of Brexit. What may surprise is that it’s directed not by a British super nationalist but by a Danish woman, Lone Scherfig. That could make this film an EU statement in appreciation of its departing member, perhaps a reminder that England can be its glorious self without leaving. But this might be pushing too far. Better to consign its politics to the vital social function of the arts and to the necessity of women’s self-realization. 

The Women's Balcony

The film opens on a bar mitzvah and ends on a wedding. In both the religious element is subordinated to the communal celebration. 

In the first ceremony the boy becomes a man. We don’t see his part in the service, though, just the parade of food and rain of candies.  In the second the older student betrays his rabbi master to serve his bride, again choosing community over the letter of religious law.  
In Jerusalem, of course, the daily life is suffused with the holy. It’s tempting to take the collapsed balcony as a sign of God’s wrath — if one assumes divine authority unto oneself, as the handsome young ultra-orthodox rabbi does. The film’s primary thrust is to prefer communal harmony and trust over the harshness of a literalist faith. 

The bar mitzvah boy feels responsible for the synagogue’s destruction because he’d prayed to be saved from embarrassment at being ill prepared for the ceremony. That’s a comic version of the young rabbi’s assumption of extraordinary power and authority, especially when he presumes to teach the old rabbi he plans to supplant. 

The film takes a clearly feminist position on orthodox Jewish life. Specifically the film valorizes the women who refuse to be marginalized by the young rabbi. They raise the money and campaign to restore the women’s balcony in the rebuilt synagogue. 

It’s not an easy fight, because the rabbi succeeds in shattering their friendships and cowing their men. Ironically, the women’s campaign is not for the Conservative or Reform Jew’s integration of women into the congregation but for the Orthodox insistence on their separate place. They are rebels for a conservative cause. 

For all the Jewish reference the film can be read as the universal tension between any religion’s orthodox fear of women and the modern liberalism. The film should play as pointedly to a Muslim or a Mormon audience as to a Jewish.

But the theme ranges even beyond religion. The central evil here is the young rabbi’s sophistry. His domination of the community is due to his ability to hijack an essential truth and twist it to his subversive purposes. His opening sermon to the men is about the superiority of women over men. They embody the scripture to a degree that men cannot achieve through a lifetime of study. But this ostensible respect serves only to diminish the women’s worth.

This strategy goes well beyond religion into politics and indeed any debate over values and truth. The devil can quote scripture. The tyrant can apparently espouse the argument for liberty, the most self-serving elitist populism. Though the film’s plot specifically deals with religion, its overall theme is the danger of false pretences and the abuse of logic and authority for dogmatic advantage.
     So too the fragmentation of the community — the disruption of friendships and marriages and neighbourhoods — is here attached specifically to a religious difference but can be read more widely as well, as a political drama or as a matter of philosophic dispute bringing more destruction than light. The power of the letter of any law — religious or otherwise — shrinks before the value of the love Zion and Etti exchange over his anonymous gift of a fruit salad and her return of his gleaming, empty bowl.      

Going in Style (2017)

This feel good fantasy comedy probably does more harm than good. 

As in Martin Brest’s 1979 original (which starred George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg),  here three desperate, down-at-the-heels seniors — Alan Arkin, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman — try to escape penury and their end-of-life humiliation by robbing a bank.

Spoiler alert: Despite their age, incompetence, inexperience, they pull it off. 

In fact the happy ending really piles it on. Their heist nets over $2million, but the film doesn’t stop with that good fortune. It rather constructs a tower of them.

Willie saves his life by getting a kidney transplant (from longtime room-mate Albert. Albert has an affair with, then marries, the zaftig Annie (Ann-Margaret). Joe saves his home from dispossession, provides for his daughter and grand-daughter and also converts his delinquent ex-son-in-law to assume the obligations and pleasures of fatherhood. 

Completing the joy, the lads’ steady waitress is tipped with a wad big enough to choke a rhino and lands a man at least to dance with. The other resurrected old-timer Milton (a shrunken Christopher Lloyd) is allowed to sail blissfully on in harmless dementia. Fun and games all round. 

Reality? Who cares. In the post-truth, alternative facts, world of Trumpery it’s better to laugh at our daily tragedies than to try to amend them.   

Two flirtations with disaster turn into even more joy. What seems like Albert’s funeral turns into his wedding. The cops’ last chance to bust our heroic trio is thwarted when the little black girl recognizes Willie from his wristwatch — with a portrait of his grand-daughter — but with the wisdom of Solomon helps him beat the rap. At its blackest, this film is only a tease.

Indeed, so much happiness, all those satisfying conclusions, ruin the film. Both versions are rooted in the serious predicament American seniors face, with increasing debility and dramatically diminishing health and financial support in the decaying American culture. As Joe observes, “These banks practically destroyed this country. They crushed a lot of people's dreams, and nothing ever happened to them. We three old guys, we hit a bank. We get away with it, we retire in dignity. Worst comes to the worst, we get caught, we get a bed, three meals a day, and better health care than we got now.”

American seniors have probably never faced such a bleak and hopeless situation as Trump’s budget reductions are inflicting upon them. But after the initial plot situation the film leaves that compelling social problem to wallow in magical happy resolution. This film doesn’t address the social situation in a serious way that would make it significant but slides away into fantasy. 

If the men go in style, the film goes without any substance. It provides no realistic means to address the social issue that is its raison d’etre. It does its audience and its culture a disservice by turning a national tragedy into a bunch of laughs and a resolution achieved by magic but not by any usable strategy. It prefers to numb the pain rather than to cure it.  

In fact, this film bears out Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s distinction between Russian and American films. American films, he observed some 80 years ago (!), give their heroes a happy ending through some unrealistic, magical twist of plot. Russian films provide a realistic demonstration of how to work to achieve that satisfaction. The Americans are satisfied with escapism.
     Poverty-stricken senior citizens in America can’t hope to save themselves through crime. Unless, of course, they’re in the White House. So what are they to do? And what might we do to honour our elderly (a principle articulated by the boys’ heist-instructor)? Serious questions, never more pertinent and urgent than under Trump’s regime. But this film laughs them away.

Great Day in the Morning (1956)

Jacques Tourneur brought a European intelligence, literacy and seriousness to his Hollywood westerns.

This 1956 Civil War film is strikingly set on the eve of the war, when the tensions rip apart early Denver but the cataclysm still hangs in the air. The film ends as the war begins, the Union civilians slip into uniform and the War shifts from words into killing. But Denver on the eve of the war catches the fear of division more familiar to 1950s Europe than to the American popular screen. 

Robert Stack’s Owen Pentecost is an unusual Western hero because he is completely selfish, an unheroic hero before the genre crawled with them. He’s a Southerner with none of the history, values or pretences of the Old South gentleman. He’s Rhett Butler without the charm. 

The few Southerners in this rabidly Unionist town plead for and expect his support but as he admits, he is only out for himself. “Sure, I'm loyal. I've got an undying loyalty to myself and no one else, nothing else.” In the climactic struggle for the gold to finance the rebels’ cause, he undertakes to help them only if they pay him $200,000.

The hero’s name is doubly suggestive. The Owen suggests a cypher, an O, zero, a man hollow at the core. He’s also someone incurring debts — he’s owing. He carries two debts in particular. 

After killing a miner in a duel over a contested claim he conceals his responsibility and informally adopts the miner’s young son, intending to raise him in his own values (self-preservation, gunplay, etc.). In the key gunfight Owen is wounded trying to secure the boy’s safety.

His other key debt is to the bar-girl Boston Grant (Ruth Roman), who betrays her corrupt boss/beau Jumbo Means (a swollen Raymond Burr) in a poker deal that gives Owen Jumbo’s gambling and mining empire. She loves Owen and he takes her but is drawn away to the more innocent blonde Ann Merry Alaine (Virginia Mayo). 

That romantic tension echoes that between Katy Jurado and Grace Kelly in High Noon (1952), the archetypal pull between Experience and Innocence. The parallel emphasizes Owen’s vacuity in contrast to the integrity of Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) in the earlier film. Where Jurado represents Mexico, though, Boston’s name represents the civilized East, which sets her above the crooked man of Means. But Boston is only her name; it’s Ann Merry (!) who comes from the East with her trunks of women's fashion to civilize the West — and to try to make Owen honest. Ann’s love for Owen is continually checked by her moral revulsion at him.

Owen holds back from Boston on the same principle of icy selfishness:

“I don't belong to anyone except myself. I'm not joining any parade - yours or theirs. I like walking alone - no ties. Don't ask questions; no one to answer to. Man's gotta be sentimental to fight a war; gotta have a lump in his throat about God and country and home and mother, all the pretty things.[Takes a drink, and looks at Boston] No lumps.” 

Their love will inevitably be a casualty of the war. Boston asks, “Owen, if there's a war, I'm North, a Yankee, you're South. What happens to us?” He replies “I shoot you, I guess.” But he doesn’t have to. After falsely claiming to bring her to the boy, Means murders Boston before she can learn Owen loves her. She dies, his debt to her unpaid. All he could tell her was “I'll remember you as long as I remember anything.”

Then there’s that Pentecost, as odd a surname/label as the silver screen sagebrush ever offered. The name evokes revivalist Protestantism. Christianity is what Owen essentially lacks, what the Zero and Owing of his name replace. In this respect the neutral Owen is like both sides of the Civil War boiling over in the town: the lynch-mob Unionists and the equally destructive Confederates. They all serve themselves and their strictly secular values at the cost of humanity. The Unionist’s vituperation abandons all sense of Christian brotherhood — and loses our sympathy: “I can smell a Southerner a mile off. Smell I don't like. Nor the breed. High and godly, slave-trading, slave-beating rebel secessionists. Not fit to live, none of you. Sorry we saved your worthless hide.”

The town’s other striking character is the Catholic priest, skirts and all. Father Murphy (of course, he has to be Irish) strikes a balance between his religion and the town’s secular needs. He’s killed when he steps between the town’s warring factions in the saloon. But as the priest falls and the war erupts, Owen is drawn out of his selfishness into more humanist values. 

Owen’s growth appears in three stages. He tells the boy he killed his father, disillusioning him to keep him out of the war. He helps his South compatriots and then suspends his fee as payment for the wagon he’ll use to escape. Finally, he asks the Union captain to tell Boston he loved her: “Love is never a word that came easy to me.”

This humanity prompts the captain to let him escape. As one hatred provokes the other, one humanity does as well. This double transcendence of the conflict explains the film’s Revivalist title, Great Day in the Morning, the new dawn of salvation. Captain Gibson provided a more domestic version of the overriding human community: “The North and South are natural enemies - like husband and wife.” The division conceals — but threatens — the deeper union.

T2: Trainspotting

Here’s where Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” kicks in. We have to believe the four “heroes” of Trainspotting survived for another 20 years. This film tells us they did so we have to accept that, however improbable that may be. If we don’t there’s no movie — and that would be a loss. 

The sequel is a rewarding, touching return to those four fascinating Scottish outsiders and their varying attempts to escape their drug addictions. T2 retains the original exuberant nihilism. Renton’s exhortation parallels his first film’s opening: 

"Choose life. Choose Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and hope that someone, somewhere cares. Choose looking up old flames, wishing you'd done it all differently. And choose watching history repeat itself. Choose your future. Choose reality TV, slut shaming, revenge porn. Choose a zero-hour contract, a two hour journey to work. And choose the same for your kids, only worse, and smother the pain with an unknown dose of an unknown drug made in somebody's kitchen. And then... take a deep breath. You're an addict. So be addicted, just be addicted to something else. Choose the ones you love. Choose your future. Choose life."

The plot centres on Renton’s return and his three mates’ response to him having run off with their drug deal money 20 years earlier. He had paid Spud, who blew it on heroin, but Sick Boy wants to score a deeper revenge than his cue-stick attack. Begbie escapes jail and tries to kill them all.  

Age has brought the three lads to hunger for a dignity that they don’t have much chance ever to get. Sick Boy tries to move up from his seedy pimp-and-blackmail career to running a classy sauna-cum-brothel on an EU urban development grant — until a powerful pimp elbows him out. Renton is squeezed out of his London financial job and succeeds as a real estate agent until his old mates sink him. 

They can’t leave their laddish ways easily. Begbie returns to his wife and grown son, who prefers his college ambitions over joining Dad in his work. Begbie’s hunger for vengeance gets him back in jail. 

Spud has lost his wife and son to his heroin habit but by the end of the film seems on some road back. Sick Boy’s woman Veronica encourages Spud to write out his colourful anecdotes in his speaking voice — which will turn into the successful Irvine Welsh novels on which the film were based.  Renton survives.

Memory is a key theme in the film. The past is an actual presence when Renton’s mother’s shadow appears behind the empty kitchen chair, on his return after her death. In another scene Spud moves unleashed from his shadow — or vice versa. The last shot turns Renton’s boyhood bedroom into a continuously expanding tunnel from which we hurl away as if on a train, like the engines that fill the transporting boy’s wallpaper. 

The flashbacks to the first film flesh out the characters’ root in their past and struggle to emerge from it. When the men return to the highlands in memory of the dead Tommy, Sick Boy rejects the nostalgia: “You're a tourist in your own youth. We were young; bad things happened.” Sick Boy can’t escape his infant daughter’s death any more than Spud his self-destructive addictions and Rentpn’s nagging dream of normalcy. 
     In contrast, the precocious schoolgirl of Renton’s one-night stand has matured into a still insightful, expensive lawyer. But the four men have sadly failed to outgrow their old selves, though Renton has made the best stab at it. As Spud articulates their failures, “First, there's an opportunity. Then... there's a betrayal.” Under Danny Boyle’s direction this sequel takes advantage of the opportunity the first film and its ardent following provided — without betraying its values, spirit and energy. If the excremental vision is toned down slightly it’s to salutary effect.