The Roads Not Taken

  The granite-jawed writer is a romantic cliche — that writer/director Sally Potter here incisively anatomizes with a view to freeing woman from that conventional enslavement. She exposes macho romance as helplessness.

Javier Bardem is usually the dynamic force of his film. Here his Leo (the ex-lion)  leaves his bedroom stupor either for a romantic reminiscence or to fumble through the unaccommodating reality of New York City. He takes roads into memories of past romance and failure, then in reality stumbles helpless through the streets.

        As his second wife observes, Leo chooses to live in a dump by the railway tracks. He's off the rails.

His first wife (Salma Hayak) lost him to their grief over a school-bound son killed in a traffic accident. In his trauma he sees his lost son in dogs. His second wife (Laura Linney) escaped when neither could handle her becoming the far more successful. Their detachment still leaves them friends, at least in her view, but he blurs their distance. 

The film centers on Leo’s relationship with their daughter Molly. In the present tense the film follows her laborious caring for him, as she struggles to get him to and through improbable dental and optometrist appointments, a replacement pants purchase, and his survival of a nocturnal wandering. Her attempts at normalcy fail.

When her attention to him costs her an important job she resolves finally to assert her independence. 

The title involves them all. Leo floats to and from fantasies or memories of his lost desires. His pathetic flirtation with a young girl in Greece could be a fantasy temptation or a reworking of his flight from his newborn daughter for a writing freedom in Greece, that he quickly abandoned.

The first wife could not follow him further through his insistent grief. They share road scenes literal and figurative.The second wife sees his present clutch as the road she did well to escape. 

The character who grows through the film is daughter Molly. She comes to realize the costs of her father’s grip and climactically walks away to independence, leaving him with the warmth of her care. And of course a hired caregiver. 

But Molly can’t walk that road away until her father finally recognizes her, finally speaks her name. That acknowledgment enables her split. Literally.  

        Finally, credit Potter with a rich work of technical excellence as well as imagination and commitment, with uniformly fine performances.

The Problem with People

  Christ Cottam’s film may pretend to be a bucolic Irish comedy — like Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, twice cited. But it takes a major, even controversial, political/philosophic turn. It examines how small familial differences can swell into a serious feud, even violence. Indeed, when the central point of contention becomes ownership of a small seaside strip of land, the film turns into a domestic miniature of the Gaza war.   

The Irish undertaker Ciaran (Colm Meaney) and the American builder Barry (Paul Reiser) are cousins who meet for the first time. Their grandfathers were once-close brothers, until one moved to New York and the other didn’t. Their separation grew into a feud, then fervid animosity. 

On Barry’s visit, Cieran’s initially warm welcome is soured when his father — who demanded the reunion — leaves Barry half his estate. Cieran tries to cheat him out of the property. Barry appears to concede, but then buys the waterfront strip of land beyond it and proceeds to build his obstruction of Cieran’s view. 

The cousins’ reunion had cheered the entire community. Barry is especially popular when he offers to buy everyone in the pub his favourite steak dinner if/when they visit New York. 

Their feud divides it, culminating in a violent donnybrook at their charity football match. 

The village’s burgeoning war subtly evokes Gaza. Co-writer Reiser makes one early joke about Jews. But his persona grows into his daughter’s very Jewish lesbian wedding to Ciaran’s ex-wife at the end. The broken glass and shared tallis seal the deal. The lesbian element affirms the need to transcend convention for personal and collective fulfilment. 

In its moderation, the film omits the extremity of jihadist Islam. Instead, the second historic faith is Cieran’s Catholicism, evoked by the Pope John and JFK photos on his walls and by the community’s young, flustered and ineffectual priest. 

In a lighter version of reviving old familial grievances, one of Cieran’s customers demands her relative be dug up after four years — to change his suit! Thus people would rewrite the past.

To appreciate the courage and ambition of this seemingly light comedy one has to remember the Irish government’s strong anti-Israel statements and the resurgence of antisemitism.  

Hence perhaps the balancing twist in the question of land ownership. Here Cieran has been living on the land that is newly given to his cousin. In the Holy Land, of course, the Jewish occupancy is the oldest. So, too, the violence is reduced from slaughters and the October 7 atrocities to verbal insults, some mischief with sheep, reciprocal slander — which proves very expensive for Barry — and finally that football game. 

Before the marital conclusion, the men reach peace when they’re stuck in the same hospital room with duelling curtain controls. Would that our larger war would be so easily resolved and the ancient Abrahamic brotherhood recovered. 

A Real Pain

    As writer, director and star Jessie Eisenberg has a real winner in this comedy about second-generation American Holocaust trauma.

    Honest. It is funny. 

    But it’s also trenchantly sad. The real pain is representatively borne by two (relatively) safe American cousins. They bear the burden of their grandparents’ generation’s suffering. And as contemporary Judaism only too well knows: the global antisemitism that propelled the first Holocaust looms again. That historic meaning in the title trumps its reference to the two cousins.

    Consider how we find and leave the central duo. Benji (Kieran Culkin) hangs out at the airport. He initially waits for cousin David (Eisenberg), who urgently streams phone messages about his arrival. At the end Benji spurns David’s home dinner to stay there. “You meet the craziest people here.” That’s the in-transit class, unsettled, uncentered, in between, having lost one’s tether..

    Benji is one. The last shot leaves him teary-eyed, alone, softened by the contagion of grief. After his harrowing exposure to the Holocaust site, Benji remains alone, of a persecuted people without the effective supports ceded the “normal.” Like the Beckett Unnameable: he must go on; he can’t go on; e hgoes on.

    Benji nakedly wears the moral compass that in post-Holocaust (or is it pre-Holocaust 2?) America is out of fashion. He skips out on the $12 Polish train ticket  because ”It’s the principle of paying. We shouldn't have to pay for train tickets in Poland. This is our country.” “No,” properly responds David: “it's not. It was our country. They kicked us out 'cause they thought we were cheap.” Since the Holocaust the old line between truth and falsehood has been blurred. 

    So too Benji’s wistful outlaw spirit: “We stay moving, we stay light, we stay agile.” But in life Benji carries the burden of the Survivor conscience. His grandmother lived through it, but both cousins remain branded by it.

Benji’s ethic seems contemporary cliche: ”Man, what's stupid is the corporatization of travel. Ensuring that the rich move around the world, propagate their elitist loins, while the poor stay cut off from society.” And to Marcia: “Money's like fucking heroin for boring people.”

But that formulaic morality is here validated by the shadow that still falls across our present culture: “We're on a fucking Holocaust tour. If now is not the time and place to grieve, to open up, I don't know what to tell you, man.” As the Somali Jew Eloge adds, “Ignoring the proverbial slaughterhouse to enjoy the steak, as it were.” Behind the smile still gleams the skull.

In disclosing Benji’s suicide attempt, David reveals a strength behind his apparent weakness: “our grandma survived by a thousand miracles when the entire world was trying to kill her, you know?... like, how did the product of a thousand fucking miracles overdose on a bottle of sleeping pills?” 

But as the ostensibly stabler David explains Benji’s climactic dinner explosion, he admits his own weakness: “I just, like, take a pill for my fuckin' OCD, you know, and I jog and I meditate and I go to work in the morning and I, like, come home at the end of the day, and I, like, move forward, you know, because I know that my pain is unexceptional, so I don't feel the need to, like, I don't know, burden everybody with it, you know?” Both modern young Jews still bear their grandparents' pain.

That scene ends with that same broken Benji very charmingly playing “Tea for Two” on the lounge piano. The tea is the cousins’ confession. 

Later Benji recalls David’s fragility: “You are, like, an awesome guy stuck inside the body of somebody who's always running late. And I gotta, like, fish that fuckin' guy outta ya every time I see ya.” Where once Benji “used to fucking cry about everything, man. Like…” now he is the modest modern American success story. Well, “survivor” story. He has a pretty wife and a beautiful baby son at home — and a successful career selling online banner advertising. Another salesman ripe for death.

The cousins are forbidden to leave their memorial stones on their grandmother’s front stoop. David has a home, with a stoop, where he can put his stone. Benji has none so, alone in the airport, he wears it inside. 

Despite Benji’s feeling neglected David does “give a shit about you. I just don't understand how you would ever do anything so fucking stupid to yourself.” The image of the suicidal Benji burns into David’s mind like the holocaust images, searing and immediate: ”I, like... I walk around with, like, this terrible fucking image of you in my head…’

The living remain frozen by their memory of their dead, themselves not fully alive either.