Hell or High Water

The last song articulates the film’s “spirit of the outlaw.” In this modern-age western the entire West Texas world is a bunch of outlaws: the banks whose usurious system would sweep the oil-rich ranch out from under the dead woman’s grandsons, the diners who don’t recognize the robbers, the trigger-happy customers who turn a heist into a slaughter, the waitress who resents losing the robber’s $200 tip that she needs to keep a roof over her daughter’s mortgaged head. America is now this small town were the common people can't make an honest living.

And so to the central quartet. Two brothers face off against two lawmen. 
      Toby is the good son determined to improve the lot of his two abandoned sons and ex-wife by robbing the Texas Midland branches to get the money to pay off the Texas Midland reverse mortgage and back taxes. He recruits his wilder ex-con brother Tanner. 
      Both brothers are scarred.Tanner was jailed for having murdered his abusive father. His service in Afghanistan left him the sniper skills to wage guerrilla warfare against the troopers. Toby hung back, failed his wife and sons when he served his mother. In the hotel scene Toby sleeps alone in the foreground while Tanner has loud sex with a call girl behind, having chased off Toby's prospect in the casino. Tanner's sacrifice at the end makes him again the crazy doer, Toby safer with his detached abstemiousness.

The brothers’ bond bristles with insults, parallelling that between Sheriff Marcus and his Indian/Mexican deputy Alberto. Exulting in political incorrectness, Marcus teases Alberto about his ethnic background. In return Alberto razzes his senior about his looming retirement. As even poetic justice is blind, the wilder outlaw and the tamer lawman are both killed.

Though Toby and Marcus survive, their success stays shadowed. In their last scene both appear dramatically cleaned-up, healthier versions of their earlier presentation. Marcus made it through a gun-happy society’s law system to retire. Toby has ensured his sons’ fortunes by saving and passing on the oil-rich farm. 

But neither man knows peace. As Marcus senses (or as a moral man, needs to believe), Toby is haunted by his brother’s death and the deaths of the bank-folk incidental to their robberies. He also remains an outsider in his own family, coldly dismissed by his ex-wife, kept at a proper distance by his more promising sons. 
     Marcus remains trapped by the incompletely solved case. How can he prove Toby was the second robber? How did Toby plan it all and get away with it? And why did the brothers score small bank heists when their family farm was oil-rich? The depths of widower Marcus’s grief and anger are suggested when he tells Toby of the large family Alberto left behind.

In the last scene Marcus gratefully accepts Toby’s invitation to continue their conversation at his home in town. There they may find “peace.” We’re not told what that “peace” means for each of them, if either will get it, or how. 

Perhaps Toby’s “peace” would be avenging Tanner’s death and dispatching the ex-sheriff’s implicit threat to his scheme — or it might be making the final sacrifice for his sons and going down in gunfire. Perhaps Marcus’s “peace” would be solving that last case and bringing the robber to justice — or it might be his last shoot-out heroically to escape the torpor of retirement. It’s a Mexican standoff.

In the last shot Marcus drives off, disappearing into the countryside as the camera drops into the wheat. That movement implies burial, as if an augur of the final shoot-out that even a modern-day Western sets us up to expect.  But that reading is inflected by the reflection of a triangle of light on the left side of the screen. The light changes that burial to resurrection. Perhaps the two heroes’ “peace” will therefore rather be putting the antagonistic past behind them and getting on with their lives. 
      That reading is supported by the film's opening shot -- the empty dusty town with Afghanistan graffiti on an outside wall. The two shots frame the film with a movement from a depressed and sterile town to a blowing field, with vegetation and perhaps hope.  The first shot leads into the brothers' bank robbery. The last leaves the ambiguity of its post-narrative conclusion, whether another assault or a truce.

The latter would make this a new age Western, which prefers a negotiated compromise over violence. That emphasizes Marcus' and Toby's sensitive, female side, coherent with their later cleaned-up, more civilized look. That would also balance the tough flatness of the film’s women, all consigned to the margin: Toby’s hardened wife, the fleshy single-mom waitress who’s drawn to him, his casino pickup, and the waitress who for forty years has been serving up only t-bone steaks, the only option being peas or corn. 

The title comes from the lawyer’s instruction: Come hell or high water the heroes have to get the cash to the bank to avoid the foreclosure. The absence of high water is evident in the arid Texas landscape and the tired bodies that move bent and broken and hopeless through it. Even the vegetation is a pallid yellow. Only an Eastern city slicker would order trout in these parts. 
     As for the hell, it’s what the people live, helpless before the banks, hopeless in their cycle of generations of poverty, with only the rare opportunity to make the one score that may be too late for them but just might spring free their kids.  Even Toby's happy ending may be limited. As the two pumps suck oil out of the desert we remember that even that prize has been drained of its old value in recent days. Oil is the earth's gift sans fertility, sans growth, sans cleanliness and even itself doomed to obsolescence.
     This circle of hell might well be the Trump supporters, on the fringe of the economy and the law, so hopeless they’ll bet it all on an irrational, even lunatic long-shot. 

The Innocents

Anne Fontaine’s The Innocents packs such an emotional wallop that you don’t realize how many philosophical concerns can be unpacked in it.

French medical assistant Mathilde moves between two worlds that can be read as opposing arenas of human service. In the field hospital she helps Jewish doctor Samuel treat survivors in 1945 Poland. That grisly physical world — leavened by drinks, dance and sex —contrasts to the spiritual arena of the convent, where she is increasingly involved in serving the nuns of a meditational order. 

Several nuns were impregnated in three days of rape by Russian soldiers. When the nuns initially refuse her treatment they serve their literal commitment to a chastity in the face of their rape and pregnancy. Only in stages do they admit Mathilde to help one pregnant outcast, then for the nuns. Finally they have to admit the male doctor too — and he a Jew at that. 

The nuns strive to sustain their religious commands in the face of the profanity they have suffered. Reality doesn’t allow for such a delusion of perfection. To preserve the convent’s secret and protect the nuns from their dubious shame the Mother Superior has been abandoning the babies — with the pretence of leaving them at the foot of a cross in a snowy field, “for Providence” to protect them.

The soldiers have given the Mother Superior not a baby but syphilis. That is, she is poisoned physically as well as in her callous treatment of the innocent babies. Yet she is not exactly evil. She serves what she perceives to be a higher cause. She admits she accepted her own damnation in order to save the convent and the nuns in her charge. She as much as the sacrificed babies is the victim of a religiosity that would sacrifice innocent lives to preserve itself. In that light she evokes the Vatican’s collaboration with the Nazis and the failure to defend the Jews.    

Mother Superior is directly responsible for the one nun’s suicide, in despair at her loss of her baby and her superior’s conduct. As the nuns always refer to their boss as Mother this title suggests alternative values in maternity. By marrying Jesus the nuns avoid secular marriage and its offspring. It takes the Russian soldiers’ rapes to confront the nuns with the challenging experience of childbearing and motherhood. Their experience and the Mother Superior’s callous response to it make the Mother Superior a false mother, a Mother Inferior. She abuses and betrays both classes of “innocents,” the virgin nuns and the newborn babies. She is not so much evil as serving the wrong order, the institution not humanity. 

One nun so firmly denies her pregnancy that her body shows no signs of it and she later refuses even to acknowledge the actual birth. In the others, though, the birth stirs maternal emotions more natural and affecting than the cold rule of Mother Superior. In responding to their babies the nuns rise from their spiritual arenas to embrace the reality and the needs of real humanity. 

Mathilde solves the convent’s problem by rejecting theMother Superior’s imposition of secrecy, the convent’s original mission to close itself off from the world — as the heavy gate scenes impose—in favour of letting in the world and helping the needy. Mathilde suggests the convent take in the gaggle of street orphans and care for them. Then they can raise their babies among them. They will hide their secret in proper public works instead of in shame. Thus Mathilde serves both the spiritual and the secular orders by valuing humanity over old dictates.  

Before Mathilde intervenes the nuns are quite helpless, with only their prayers for help. Having sent away the first nun, Mathilde relents when she sees her later, kneeling in the snow, praying to no obvious avail. Unless, of course, we read Mathilde’s dedication as sent by God. It may well be, because Mathilde — having been raised by working class French Communists — adheres to no party or camp but is dedicated to human service. Whether or not there is a God such dedicated people are a godsend. So the religious person more properly serves humanity than any institution. In serving the nuns, Mathilde has to risk the same charges of disobedience and laxity from her superiors as the nuns do from theirs.  

Mathilde is herself briefly attracted to the convent life when she retreats there from her own near-rape by Russian soldiers. Their refuge is understandably appealing. She is also drawn to the beauty and serenity of their singing and the peace of their daily lives. All they do is maintain themselves, pray and sing. That’s the reward of their faith. 

  After the rape attempt Mathilde briefly finds security in the convent. She can feel like a child again, secure in her father’s protective grasp — until the dangers of reality and adulthood intrude. The nuns have felt that unnaturally prolonged security too — until the Russians’ orgy. Their babies can be a reminder of their shame or — as Mathilde delivers them — a realization of an emotional life and commitment from which the contemplative exclude themselves. Here that’s the superior motherhood.

Of course that reality will continue to intrude. The film stops in 1945. Ahead for the Poles lie the Russian occupation, the repression of religion, the political threat to the personal and to the national soul. 

Despite the heart-warming family photo at the end, the film eschews a sentimental conclusion. One nun flees both the convent and motherhood. The Mother Superior’s response to the womens’ suffering and the very question of their God’s allowing their abuse have cost her her calling, which admittedly had never been strong. She abandons both callings, mother and nun, to find a new life in the world.   

There’s a telling inflection in Mathilde’s rapist’s language. Despite her screams and resistance, he asserts “She really wants it.” When the other men bound out of their truck to join in he says “I think she really wants us all.” The line expresses both the man’s physical power over her and his arrogant assumption of her compliance, her desire — in the face of all evidence. When her doctor and her officer boss criticize her lateness and fatigue — unaware of her extra service to the convent — they provide a more civilized version of the rapist’s superiority, authority and disregard for the feminine. 
     But once they know, they respond with a proper respect — the officer invites her to dance. The Mother Superior hides in shame rather than admit mistake or apologize. 

Our Little Sister

So why does Our Little Sister open with a shot of a woman’s feet and pan up her bare legs to reveal her in bed with her lover, presumably naked under the blanket? This very sensual image is completely out of step with the film’s quiet, meditative story of three sisters adopting the 13-year-old half-sister they meet at their father’s funeral. 

The film pays a lot of attention to the women’s legs and feet. The woman in bed is Yoshino, 22, who gives money to her wastrel lover, drinks heavily and has slept around. Later she prominently strips off her black stockings in the right foreground. 

All four sisters flash their legs in all the long and medium shots, an openness that contrasts to the scenes in which the traditional kimonos conceal their legs entirely.  (In a culinary parallel to this movement away from tradition, all the chopstick eating scenes are joined by one scene where spoons are used for a curry.)

In a scene of girlish mischief Chika,19, paints 13-year-old Suzu’s toenails. Despite her youth, of the three senior sisters Chika has the healthiest and most stable affair, with the adventurous colleague at the sporting goods store. Despite having lost six toes to frostbite he is a full man, with the freest commitment both to his lover and life. 

The three sisters have been living in their grandmother’s house since their mother abandoned them, their father having run off with his mistress (Suzu’s mother). Nurse Sachi, 29, has been raising both sisters and takes the initiative in rescuing Suzu from having to live with her stepmother, their father’s third wife, after his funeral. 

The father’s death, Suzu’s arrival and the tensions raised by their mother’s callous visit force the sisters to confront their past and to take more conscious control over their lives. They become aware of how their parents’ abandonment has been influencing their behaviour. 

After her lover dumps Yoshino she controls her instinct to please men at all costs, as if pleasing them would salve her irrational guilt for not having better pleased her father. Her new bank job with a compassionate male boss leads her to a new self-respect and responsibility. 

Young Suzu slips easily into her life with the sisters, her school, the co-ed soccer team, but she is unable to talk to her sisters about their father. Drunk and unconscious she calls her father an idiot. but through the family’s experience is freed to express her suppressed anger at her mother’s neglect. She begins to ease into a relationship with a class- and team-mate, in whom she first confides her reticence. 

Similarly the sober eldest sister, Sachi, reminded of the destructiveness and folly of her father’s self-indulgence, refuses to join her paediatrician lover’s move to America, despite his promise to divorce his unstable wife for her. Sachi will stay with her doubled responsibilities of guiding her sisters and serving her dying patients in the new palliative care ward.

This cycle of life and death plays out against the seasons. There are shots of stunning autumnal glory. The harvesting of the plums and the mixed delights of plum swine recur in the narrative. In their make-up scene Sachi brings their mother a jug of their recent plum wine and the last jug of their grandmother’s. Suzu’s promising swain bicycles her through a tunnel of refulgent cherry blossoms. An old restaurant owner takes a dying woman for a last look at those blossoms —and offers to tell Suzu stories about her father. 

That dying woman is the sisters’ mother surrogate. They have patronized her diner since their infancy. Bankrupted by her own brother’s calling in a loan, the woman treasures the — now four — sisters as children she never had. Now dying, she finds ease in Sachi’s hospital care and the attentions of the man who ran his own diner — and continues to serve her recipes. The surrogate mother’s funeral provides an emotional climax in place of the complications their mother’s death and funeral would have raised.

In the last scene the four sisters leave that funeral to walk along the beach. They cavort together at the edge of the tide, still in their funeral blacks — but they don’t take off their shoes. From all the film beach frolics we’ve watched we expect they would. Keeping on their shoes — even their heels — becomes an indication of their new self-knowledge, self-control and discipline.  
     Legs, feet, they’re the emblem of our grounding, the base on which we stand and move. The framing shots — naked legs and heels kept on at the beach — encapsulate the women’s growth from the impulses of a sensual, unexamined life to the maturity of self-control and self-respect. The opening scene leads us to expect yet another story of sexual awakening. Instead we get what the sisters blossom into, the primacy of family connection and responsible, giving love.  

Sausage Party

This film’s unprecedented profanity points to its primary purpose — to reject and dispel the debilitating delusions of the supposed sacred. 

The Shopwell supermarket products here express the human faith in some unproved heaven that will justify their self-denials in this lifetime. But when a honey mustard returns from The Great Beyond he reports his discovery: the supposedly beneficent gods are really violent demons bent upon consuming and destroying these gullible humans/products. 

Hero Frank — the wiener who will take all — confirms that truth when he visits the liquor aisle and learns firsthand from Firewater that the Imperishables invented the myths that form the culture’s religions. 

Honey Mustard himself embodies the essential human conflict: Is he a honey or a mustard? The question doesn’t bother him, just the naive Brenda who prefers simplicity so resists the reality as long as she can. Honey Mustard was saved by his ambivalent nature, but is so maddened by his discovery he kills himself.

It’s a telling complexity.  Are we flesh or spirit? The religious would have us believe we are spirits who should shun our earthly natures. This film asserts our meathood, our substance, our materiality in an unyieldingly material world, whose only fulfilment and service must be found on earth.

The only human to discover the truth is the doomed druggie who shoots up on bath salts. Only then does reality come clean to him and he realizes the character of the peripheral life he has been mindlessly and compulsively consuming.

And excreting. The film’s first word is “Shit!” The abundant scatalogical humour provides Jonathan Swift’s excremental view of humanity that no airy pretences can conceal. (Remember the fond swain’s shattering discovery that “Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”). The behemoth tied down in candy strips is an homage to Swift’s Gulliver, overwhelmed by another freakish world. Hence Peanut Butter bemoans the death of his wife Butt Nutter and the Chinese take-out comes from Pu Ping. 

When Cookies and Sandwich call for the gods to stop eating them, Toilet Paper chimes in: “And when he stops using us!” To the Chips’ “What did they do to you?” Toilet Paper backs away nervously: “You don't wanna fuckin' know!”

In this excremental reality of course the arch-villain will be the Douche, the evil agent of a supposed cleanliness that is really antithetical to the proper, i.e., sexual, injection. Here’s Douche: “I'll tell you who eat shit, Gods do, bro! I'M A FUCKING GOD!” When the human Camille Toh (cp. her tight-pant crotch) reports dropping some stuff she denies she’d taken him: “Sorry. I accidenatly dropped a few things back there. Except for that douche, I don't know who's that is.” But flattered, she forgets her modesty:

Clerk Darren: Clean up on Aisle 2, this MILF dropped a douche.

Camille: Ah, MILF! Thank you so much.

As the narrative occurs on July 4 it points to America’s Independence Day, when all the wieners and the hot dog buns they yearn to pop into expect to be liberated. But Honey Mustard has learned what we already know: the Great Beyond they so eagerly anticipate is a cover for their death and destruction. 

The film’s celebration of a real independence is the independence from religion, specifically the delusions, divisions and self-denials promulgated in its name. The characters come fully alive when they cast off their superstitions, overthrow their murderous gods (i.e., the humans) and abandon themselves to an impassioned orgy. 

Even the Muslim pita, learning he won’t get those 72 Virgin Olive Oils on the other side, discovers a fraternal and sexual fulfilment with his mortal enemy Sammy Bagel Jr (Edward Norton as his pal Woody Allen).  So, too, the militarized sauerkraut is determined to eradicate The Juice. 

Opposing hymns frame the narrative. The film opens with the morning prayer to The Great Beyond, celebrating the supposed gods of kindness and salvation. But it ends on an alternative prayer, Three Dog Night’s Joy to the World. That hymn evokes the heady counterculture of the ‘60s, when OT prophet Jeremiah is replaced by a bullfrog, who was a good friend of mine, and salvation is to be found in this world, through wine, love, community, sex, and not delayed for some hypothetical afterlife.

In the spirit of that be-druggled understanding the figures also learn they are but cartoons. They exist amid a variety of realities, with no more absolutism in their existence than in their moral instruction. 

Hence the shimmering allusions to pop culture throughout the narrative. Meat Loaf plays Meat Loaf.  The Stephen Hawking figure Gum’s shooting and remorph parodies Terminator 2 , down to its theme music. Firewater’s “Fuck me, right?” comes out of Seth Rogan’s Superbad. Honey Mustard’s brand is Bickles, after the violently divided Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. 

Frank’s big illuminating speech is a parody of Shakespeare’s Marc Antony:

“Friends… Ramen... Country Club Lemonade... Lend me your ears of Corn. I'm Frank and I am a sausage... a little sausage with some pretty big news: Everything we've been led to relieve is a lie! When we get chosen by the Gods, they're choosing us for Death! Murder! Automatic expiration! The Great Beyond is bullshit!”

This rejection of religion allows no sentimentality. Potato is singing Danny Boy when his skin is peeled off and he’s popped into boiling water. “The pipes, the pipes are calling” is truer than he thought. 

Of course the film defines the spectrum of sex, from coarse Carl — “Look at these big ol' buns, waiting to get filled with my meat.” — to Frank and Brenda’s true love: “I'm so happy, the Gods put our packages together….It's like, we were made for each other.” 

The oppressive religion coarsens love by forbidding the union until the lovers’ end. The wieners sing “In here, we keep our wieners in our packages. That's how it is.” The buns agree: “It sucks, but that's the way our buns keep fresh in here. Baby, baby.” “But once we're out the doors, it's not a sin.” “For us to let you slip it in.” “In other words, we finally get to fuck!” “And love!” “And fuck!” “And hug!”“And fuck!” “And feel!””And fuck!” “And share!” The male wieners and female buns sing out the genders’ differing perspectives. 

Ashamed of her attraction to Brenda,Teresa retreats to religion: “Saint Chimichanga, I promise to be a good taco.”

This film’s wildness is itself a celebration of the sensual, the forbidden, the indulgent, in the face of religious and any other prissy decorum. Good stuff. 

Indignation

The film opens on a medical dose about to be given an old woman in a care home, then shifts to a soldier -- years earlier -- dying in the Korean war. The body of the narrative explains how the two characters got there. As the young man asserts from the beginning, the apparently random sequence of events in life determined the causality of our lives. That randomness diffuses any rational basis. 

In 1951 going to college was a bright young man’s way to avoid the Korean War. Negotiating the double standard in sex was how a young American girl would survive and perhaps even succeed. 

The beautiful blonde shicksa Olivia and the brilliant earnest Jewish scholar Marcus end up far from their promised destinies. The particular cause proves a radical reflection upon current America, with a rampant hypocrisy, anti-intellectualism, and conformism as dangerous and stifling today as in 1951.  

When Marcus is expelled an ROTC unit parades on the campus in the background. That is, the college is no longer an alternative to war and the army but their representative. The borders between scholarship and war, humanity and violence, compassion and destruction have dissolved.  

This narrative is a tragedy. Bright, sensitive Marcus is expelled from the small Ohio college and the assertive but fragile Olivia suffers another breakdown that consigns her first to a mental institution, finally to the care home. To ensure her son’s abandonment of his love, Marcus’s mother returns to suffer her hateful marriage. His father finds his irrational dread about his son’s fate fulfilled. Everybody loses. 

And why? The culprit dean embodies the righteousness that destroyed the central characters’ love and lives — and continues to undermine America.  He propounds the essential values of the current Republicans. (As we know, any period piece is about the time it’s made as well as the time in which it is set. Why else tell that story now?)

In categorizing Marcus by his Jewishness, in his intolerance of different perspectives, in his puritanical fear of sex, and in the anti-intellectualism reflected in his attack on Bertrand Russell, the college dean is the retrogressive American anti-liberal. Actor Tracy Letts even looks like Dick Cheney.

As we need to believe, love conquers all. Just before dying Marcus remembers his recent brief romance with Olivia and ardently wishes she could know that at least that once, by him, she was loved. In the heat of war he can finally stop rejecting her for having pleased him. And love is the emotion missing from both their parents’ marriages. 

      As if by magic telepathy, when Olivia decades later smiles at the bouquet on the institution’s wallpaper she seems to be remembering him, their intimacies in the hospital, with the very awareness he had hoped for. But when Marcus is killed and Olivia’s memory is but a flicker in her dementia, that love hardly triumphs against the hypocrisy, ignorance and self-righteousness that separated the young couple when they tentatively entered maturity.  
Novelist Phillip Roth’s setting, Winesburg, Ohio, evokes the American pith in Sherwood Anderson’s classic short story collection of that title. Again, small lives illuminate the major currents in the nation’s psyche.
      Then there's the title, carried over from Roth's 2005 novel. All the major characters get indignant set pieces: Marcus railing at the school's chapel requirement and the dean's arrogance, the dean at Marcus's irreverence, the mother at the father's rage and the father at the world's dangers, and most movingly, Olivia's at Marcus's rejection of her for satisfying him.
      The latter may be the most powerful. The frat president's disdain for "the blow-job queen" points to the woman's dilemma in this double-standard society. Girls are expected to satisfy their guys but condemned as sluts if they do. Olivia's dilemma seems to have started with her abusive father who pays for her services -- "You forgot your allowance." -- but keeps hiding her away in institutions so she won't be an embarrassment. He implanted her driven need to please men -- and never being able to.
       As she arranges the flowers in Marcus's room she tells him how vulnerable her sensitivity makes her, how pained her very existence. She is the most attractive character in the film, the most sensitive and also the most self-aware. As the time-leaping narrative frame stresses, she's the only survivor.
      Yet she's also the film's one irretrievably damaged character, abused and rejected despite her position of privilege, the golden gentile in Roth's Jewish-centered world. One shot eloquently captures Roth's sympathy for her. From Marcus's perspective at his hospital window we get the long shot down -- the god's eye view -- on his mother's parting from Olivia. It's a banishment as surely as her demand Marcus dump her. After his mother's rigid words and handshake Olivia hobbles away, broken again. That's our last sight of the girl.
      The overall indignation may be Roth's. How better to respond to a society that seems to be deliberately regressing to the prejudices, sexism, fears and inhumanity we supposedly outgrew since the frigid fifties.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

Two things struck me in my latest viewing of Robert Altman’s superb The Long Goodbye (1973). 

1. The ending includes a specific homage to Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949): that long road between lines of uniform trees. Here Marlowe walks down that road to find his supposedly dead friend Terry Lennox. After snuffing Lennox Marlowe walks back up that road, passing Lennox’s lover Mrs Wade as she drives to their thwarted reunion. They don’t look at each other, just as Valli ignored Joseph Cotten as she strode past him, her lover Harry Lime (Orson Welles) having been exposed and brought to justice. The connection goes further. In both films the hero pursues the supposed death of a good friend only to be disillusioned by finding him alive. Of course Altman includes another allusion to the film’s classic noir tradition. Mark Rydell’s smashing of a coke bottle into his paramour’s puss recalls Lee Marvin pouring hot coffee onto Gloria Graham’s face in The Big Heat. Tradition.
2. Before the plot gets going Altman spends a lot of time setting up the joke about Marlowe’s finicky cat. Though it may seem irrelevant, a red herring as it were, it embodies the central element of the plot — and Marlowe’s character — as the dumb-show plays out the imminent action in the play Hamlet presents to expose Uncle Claudius. This cat puts up with a lot, his master being the quirky loner that he is. But he has his limit. When Marlowe tries to fool his cat by putting a different cat food in his preferred brand can, the cat walks. For all we know he never returns. For his part, Elliott Gould’s Marlowe punctuates his mutterings with “That’s okay with me.” That’s the film’s most recurring phrase. In that mood Marlowe puts up with a lot. But when his old friend is accused of murder and suicide that’s not okay with him. He sets out to solve the mystery. And when he finds his friend suckered him, that’s his last straw — as bad as recanning a different cat food. So Marlowe whacks the friend whose reputation he'd set out to save. Everyone with integrity has his limits, cat or private eye. In the minor key: Marlowe will drink what Roger Wade is drinking — but he refuses to remove his J.C. Penney tie. Every cool cat has his limits.  

Jason Bourne

The American government is so free and open that its filmmakers can continually expose its crookedness and authoritarianism. It was true in Tricky Dickie’s reign and it remains true in these troubled days of the Snowden and Assange exposures of government spying and betrayal. 

Of course, all that will change when Donald Trump is elected pres. Trumplethinskin (not my coinage, alas) has pledged to suppress the critical press and judiciary along with his more specifically racist niceties. 

Matt Damon’s newest incarnation of the alienated and amnesiac former intelligence agent exercises the public’s fear of government surveillance and an uncontrolled tyranny. The arch villain is the CIA director Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones, profoundly and implacably wrinkled). We don’t know what happened to brothers Huey and Louie in our loss of Disney innocence. 

Innumerable lives are wasted and — perhaps worse — public and private automobiles demolished in the government’s ardor to protect itself by slashing away the individual’s rights, especially to privacy.  

In the spirit of the times — including our Hillary’s nomination — Bourne is abetted by two empowered women who play out the opposite themes of loyalty and betrayal. They also embody the hero’s alternative impulses — to return to the system or to remain a freer wheeling outsider. 

The film’s title sticks to the hero’s (assumed) name. The “Jason” is the heroic quester of the (non-Toronto) Argonauts and the (non-Trump) Fleece. And as Bourne means ‘journey’ the character unsure of his identity, history and purpose is on an endless quest to save himself, a journey without other purpose or clear destination. The trip is the thing. Expect sequels more. 

The word famously throbs in Hamlet:

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country from whose bourne

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,…

     No danger of the latter in this non-stop action flick. The cast of thought quite pales amid the smashing action and spectacular computer screens.