Newton

This good-natured satire of India’s democracy unfortunately has a wider pertinence. World-wide, the once ascendant democratic movement appears in possibly mortal retreat, eroded by the rise of right-wing tyrannies and oligarchs pretending to populism. This danger appears throughout the Third World, of course, now including the USA.

The hero is an idealistic but incompetent civil servant who against all odds strives to meet the literal requirements of an election poll in a small remote rural community, under threat from Maoist terrorists. He is often framed within the shot as if in a box or an isolated nook. He defines himself by the restrictions he accepts, in contrast to the other characters' assumption of license. 

When Nu Tan Kumar changed his name to Newton he unwittingly assumed the persona of democracy. As his senior manager informs him, the historic Isaac Newton proved the democracy of the physical laws of nature. In physics, he demonstrated, the same laws apply to everyone. 

But not so in the realities of the world’s largest democracy. The citizens are far from equal. Isolated communities are disconnected from the political debates. For knowledge of the voting conditions themselves they are susceptible to misdirection or disqualification by democracy’s enemies or abusers. The new tech stymies them.

The punctilious Newton is at constant odds with Aatma, the commander of his protective military unit. The general’s pragmatism makes Newton’s even modest success possible but falls short of the ideals and principles of the movement. 

Aatma himself is the victim of hierarchy when a senior officer steals his spotlight before the press. Aatma acknowledges his advantage that undermines the democratic ideal: “When spoken wearing a uniform, even a request seems like a big threat.” 

When Aatma fakes a terrorist attack in order to close the polls before night will endanger his troop, he acknowledges the vulnerability of the free and open government system. Equality may be a supreme value but it’s more an aspiration than any reality. 

Aatma’s men pay lip service to the democratic Newton. But frustrated with his simple-mindedness, they are driven to beat him up. Newton himself turned gun-wielding despot to enforce his principles. The scene demonstrates the fragility of the democratic ideal, even among its defenders.  

If Newton falls short on his official undertaking, at least his personal life retains some promise. The idealist offends his family by rejecting an arranged marriage to an uneducated minor. The film closes on a hopeful note. Newton is visited by the attractive, smart, resourceful woman who assisted him on his rural mission. They will go for coffee — but not until Newton spends another five minutes typing something, when his official coffee break formally begins. However vulnerable and doomed, bureaucracy reigns. 

Double Lover

Although this is a riveting, spectacular, wholly engaging thriller, upon reflection we can conclude that almost everything that happens is in heroine Chloe’s mind. 

One key pointer is the surreal museum in which she works as a guard. The ex-model — an object of vision — now watches people. The setting is where people read the art around them for improved understanding of themselves and life. The “Blood and Flesh” exhibition, the monstrous sculpture of overhead roots, the gallery’s vast white spaces, the sculptures that anticipate the fetus-like cysts later removed from Chloe’s womb, all point to the fantasy element in her psychodrama. 

In the pre-credit shot she is having her hair cut. She transforms herself into a more androgynous look. Her hair covers her eyes, then is trimmed to expose them. Her androgyny anticipates her later using a dildo on husband Paul.

The action opens on her medical exam, first with a shot of a vagina, then a close-up of her eye, registering pain, perhaps tears. The establishing shot shows Chloe in the stirrups, her doctor peering between Chloe’s legs. This establishes her central tensions: her sexuality and her vision of herself. When she goes to her first psychiatric appointment she climbs a vertiginous eye-like spiralling staircase. 

The stomach pains her doctor can’t explain turns out to be a psychological issue around her womb. Chloe is a divided psyche, harbouring a profound sense that she consumed the twin in the womb when she was born. For that she is driven to punish herself.The cause isn’t known until she herself is found to have a fetus-like cyst beside the fetus in her own womb.

Her relationship with therapist Paul operates on the level of event. But his twin brother, fellow shrink and more violent, effective and punishing lover Louis is Chloe’s projection. She imputes to Paul the divided and conflicted self she herself bears. That elaborates her admission that “When you look at me that way, I feel I exist.” 

So, too, her mother is doubled by the Madame Schenker she imagines visiting, who discloses the supposed twins’ ruin of her innocent daughter Sandra (whom Chloe also sees as herself).    

Minor doublings abound. The same actor plays Chloe’s gynaecologist and the therapist Dr Wexler she claims to visit. The imagined Madame Schenker is herself doubled by Chloe’s neighbour Rose, another woman with an invalid daughter, the girl’s bedroom frozen in time, with cats both stuffed and statues to echo Chloe’s missing Milo. Louis’ office is a glossier double of Paul’s, unrealistically opening into the bedroom for his advanced therapy. Chloe in particular is often shown with her doubling reflections off windows and mirrors. 

The Christmas party discussion of phantom twins explains Chloe’s sense of having absorbed a sibling in the womb. The background of American pop songs concludes with a particularly pointed lyric, sung by Elvis Presley. Presley himself admitted to a lifelong connection to his twin brother Aron, who died at birth. 
     The film itself has a doubled kind of twin. It’s adapted from a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which David Cronenberg filmed as Dead Ringers.   

20th Century Circuit Suspects

What a director frames out of his film often illuminates the reasons for what is included. This Iranian documentary about a gang of young thieves is a primary case in point.

Director Hesam Eslami traces six years in the collective life of the thieves he met when they stole his car. Instead of turning them in he befriended them, won their confidence then turned them into the subject of his film. 

We come to it with a firm set of expectations of “Iran.” You know Iran. It’s the corrupt, renegade theocracy that funds international terrorism, plots to become a nuclear threat to the world, vows to destroy Little Satan Israel and Great Satan America, oppresses its citizens, persecutes women and gays, and suppresses any independence.  

  Nothing of any of that appears in this film. There is no reference to religion, to theocratic or misogynous oppression, to sharia law, to anything specifically “Iran.” 

Instead, the story of life on those streets ignores that national context entirely. The gang-life in this Iran could be set anywhere in the world. This film averts the clash of cultures in which Iran is usually viewed and instead discovers the universality of the street-level life. 

Eslami confirms what I overheard an American tourist in Spain (around 1970) observe to her husband: “I tell you Sam, wherever you go, anywhere in the world, people are people.” Easy to say that, somewhat harder always to feel.

The film’s driving thesis is what the director does. Instead of punishing his offenders he wants to investigate their humanity. Instead of packing them off to jail he gets to know them. He keeps in touch with the ones who do get jailed. He follows the gang’s attempts to spring those. And in the case of Ehsan, Eslami gently promotes the young gangster’s shift into honest citizenship.

If there is any religion in this film it’s the Muslim director’s implicitly espousing the Judeo-Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, forgiveness and generosity towards the afflicted. The scarcity of this value in current American Christianity only amplifies the power of this director’s choice.

Of course we can’t ignore the forceful context of the film, even if it’s not cited. Eslami’s example — its character and its albeit limited success — is an instructive alternative to our customary response to “Iran.” Whatever the rhetoric and plotting conducted by our respective governments, their people are not just our enemies but part of our common brotherhood of mankind. This is a counter to our bellicose governments but also a corrective to the citizenry perhaps too eager to buy into their leaders’ prejudices. 

In this light the film’s details resonate meaning. The music embodies the interface between traditional Iranian and global pop. So too the premium placed on stolen car stereos confirms the society’s sire for cultural outreach. 

The film opens and closes on Ehsan’s new job, cutting and securing strips of veneer in construction. What’s the veneer here and what the substance? Is Eslami’s reminder of our brotherhood with Iranian gangsters a deceptive cover over our political gap, or is our leaders’ antagonism the disguise of our shared humanity? The film’s sentimental power supports the latter.

When Ehsan’s wife gives birth to a son she is surprised that Eslami would visit her. In her life, her husband’s friend is still an outsider, a social superior, and she is surprised and flattered by his attention. Perhaps that catches the Iranian citizen’s feeling of isolation from the populations their governments have forced upon them. As Willy Loman’s wife reminded us, too late, “Attention must be paid.”  

The Insult

   The original Lebanese title, “Case No. 23,” plays to the domestic audience because it emphasizes the courtroom drama. That's the personal story. 

      The English translation works better for the international audience. The broader reference suggests the film’s application to the whole of the warring Middle East. That society is so obsessed with honour that it is paralyzed by any “Insult,” real or perceived. The Palestinians’ shame at the Naqba, their failure to have prevented the creation of Israel, still prevents their negotiation of a peaceful coexistence.

     Israel hovers at the margin here, cited as the Arabs’ common demon. Ariel Sharon is a curse. The Palestinians’ ultimate insult is to declare the Christian Arab a Zionist — or at least, an enabler of Israel. The film’s central insults are exchanged by a Christian Arab mechanic, Tony, and a Palestinian refugee, construction foreman Yasser.   

     Their war starts small enough: Tony has an illegal pipe, which soaks Yasser. After insulting Tony Yasser repairs the pipe, which Tony smashes. Now they are on the eave of war.

     Both heroes win our understanding. The Palestinian may get the greater sympathy and he’s played as a more thoughtful, flexible figure. But the revelation of the Christian Tony’s past enhances his character too, by explaining him. Both men prove victims of their respective people’s history. For both, their history tempts them to blame all their own failures on that unfortunate history, on their old enemy.

     The two trial scenes are superb drama. In each the magistrate conducts an intensive, searching examination of the case. The first bogs down when neither the plaintiff nor the accused stoops to repeat the insult that prompted Yasser’s attack.

     The second trial reaches the same conclusion but with more satisfactory effect. Indeed, the losing side now seems as satisfied with the verdict as the winner. That’s because Tony has had his story told too, his anger and indignation explained in context. In the lawyers’ summary, each makes the other’s case. The antagonism turns into understanding.

     Apart from the trials, the principals’ true reconciliation happens in two scenes outside the court, before the verdict. In the first Tony casually helps his enemy restart his car. In the second, Yasser baits Tony into punching him, so he goes into the court with his own aching pair of ribs. An eye for an eye, a rib for a rib. At the end, after all the screaming, indignation and violence, the reconciliation is the men’s silent, long-distance lock of the eyes. There is the bare threat of a smile. 

     Both heroes — and their respective gangs of followers — carry the weight of history. Both have suffered violence, prejudice, victimization, which their self-respect challenges them to remember, to flaunt like a flag. Both men suffer  increasingly harsh consequences for their intransigence. 

     The film’s message is the need to acknowledge the historic conflict, to recognize the long period of inhumane abuse, but to find a way to make a mutually respectful peace. Again, the implication is that this message extends beyond the film’s conflict between Palestinian and Christian to include the Jewish state as well. 

     There’s an additional frisson when Yasser’s lawyer is revealed to be Tony’s more famous lawyer’s daughter. This generational tension replays the theme of moving on from the past. Both the woman lawyer and the woman chief judge tacitly personify the new Middle East, the emergence empowered woman in that archly patriarchal society. 

Hostiles

This classic Western dramatizes its opening quotation from D.H. Lawrence: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” 

Trump’s America shows no sign of its having melted yet. On the contrary, that racist, violent soul-less “soul” now holds sway. And yet, pockets of the true, great America, the land of equality, freedom and community, persist. And so does the nation’s hope for redemption. 

Writer/director Scott Cooper avoids any comfort of partisanship. If the racist, murderous rancher at the end represents the extreme of the Republicans, the simple-minded, cliched Harper’s journalist/photographer at the beginning represents — and equally diminishes — the naive “useful idiots” on the Left, aka the Democrats. The preferable idealist is the fort commander’s wife, who at the dinner table articulates her anger at the government’s abuse of the Native American — but even she is here insensitive to her guest Rosalie’s trauma.

The world-weary hero Captain Blocker has the bloodied hands and traumatized memory of the true soldier, but he reads Julius Caesar in Latin. With a leap of humanity and trust he bestows the book on the little Indian orphan about to start a new life in the paleface Chicago. 

Unusually for the genre, there are no religious figures. The Bible is read over the white people’s burials and the Native American rites are respected for theirs. But there are no church people. Without religious institutions, faith operates strictly on the personal level. Rosalie and Blocker both believe in God. As Rosalie, who moves from seeing her family slaughtered by Indians to being raped by white trappers, admits: “If I did not have faith, what would I have?”

Rosalie’s essential faith is not based on any church or God but in the recognition of common humanity. Her initial hatred of the “Redskins” (Washington NFL fans take note) grows from reflexive hysteria and hunger for revenge to her sense of shared vulnerability. She’s touched when the Indian woman gives her a dress. Ultimately Rosalie will pick up a rifle to defend the Apaches against the white landowner. 

This softening, this advent of empathy, grows out of life experience, either despite our through the suffering that drives people apart. After all, the title “Hostiles” refers to the entire rainbow of cultures in this film. Thus Rosalie: "Sometimes I envy the finality of death. The certainty. And I have to drive those thoughts away when I wake.” To carry on, we have to carry on, preferring the challenges and complexities of life over any relief from our mortality. 

Blocker is the central moral barometer. As a soldier he has had to suspend his moral conscience: "I've killed everything that's walked or crawled. If you do it enough, you get used to it.” He begins so full of hatred that he refuses the assignment to escort the murderous Apache chief home to die. As he  gets to know him, however, he comes to appreciate the old enemy’s character and dignity. 

It is possible to accept an enemy, by acknowledging his humanity. Difficult, but possible, in the face of our moral clashes. Blocker knows that the bigotry and violence inbred in our world preclude any easy freedom for anyone: “Understand this: When we lay our heads down here, we're all prisoners.” 

That grows ever clearer as the battles — mental as well as physical — shrink Blocker’s troupe. The last scene suggests Blocker might be the Cain figure, the cursed killer doomed to rootlessness, forbidden community. That’s the typical American outlaw hero — Shane, Ethan Edwards (of The Searchers), Tom Doniphan (the man who really shot Liberty Valance) and so on. Society needs that killer in order to survive but cannot accommodate or accept him if it is to claim to be civilized. 

As he bids Rosalie and the boy goodbye Blocker seems to feel disqualified from happiness, from love, from a normal family life. But as the train pulls away he leaps on. He has rejected the finality of damnation and death, has shucked the shackles of his murderous career, and in an act of true faith resolves to join Rosalie for Chicago. 
     As the film opens with Rosalie losing her first family, it ends with her assumption of a new one. Rosalie, Blocker and the boy now have a new love and self-respect forged in the heat of the brutality and savagery they have suffered, yet managed to keep their humanity intact. Both are freed from their horrible experiences by their power to forgive. 

Happy End

Hands down, Happy End wins the Most Ironic Title of the year award. (Runner-up: “President Trump.”)

  From Amour Haneke continues Trintignant’s role as the octogenarian who lovingly cared for his ailing wife and helped her out — with Huppert as their callous businesswoman daughter. 

But it’s from Cache that Haneke mainly draws, extending his anatomy of the privileged white business class cut off from emotional engagement, experiencing the world and relating primarily through media, and their insensitivity to the burgeoning immigrant underclass. 

The Callais setting is key.  It’s the bridge between France and England, both in starting the Chunnel and remarking England’s last foothold in France. It’s also the entry point for African immigrants hoping to continue on to England. 

Or to the French bourgeoisie? The dysfunctional Laurents represent the privileged society which the desperate immigrants aspire to join. The family’s concerns pale beside what we see of the their Moroccan servants (“our slave” Pierre publically calls cook Jamila), the street lads Georges assumes he can hire to kill him, the older immigrants Pierre exploits to embarrass his mother at her posh engagement dinner, the construction worker killed in an accident, his whose family the Laurents further affront.  

In addition to the immigrants, the family is viewed from the perspective of Eve, Thomas’s 12-year-old daughter who comes to live with the Laurents after her mother’s mysterious poisoning and death. For this Eve there is no Eden, only a family of anger and mutual abuse.

  The film’s central theme is the family’s detachment from each other. The film opens and closes with Eve’s cellphone films. This characterizes her as distanced, relating to her family indirectly, through media. The pre-title sequence records her mother’s nightly ablution rite before she turns the lights off, an augur of her suicide. Then a young boy cavorts in silly cheek, showing Eve as cool and detached from her friends as she is from her mother. The last shot is of her Aunt Anne and father Thomas rushing to save George from contentedly drowning in the sea. 

The thin column of cellphone film is a mediated experience. So, too, are the computer screen messages between Thomas and his mistress Claire. Several key scenes are kept in long shot, Pierre’s provoking of the accident victim’s son. That device keeps us in the characters’ detachment from the experience. Bent upon suicide, the grandfather wheels down the city street in the road, between the roaring traffic and the parked cars. We have a fixed distance from him. 

In one scene the foreground is dominated by a violently barking dog. In the background we barely see the key content of the scene: Georges brought home from the hospital, in his new wheelchair. The composition leaves us uncertain. Is the dog attacking the “stranger” or straining to greet his master? And whose dog is it? We never see a family member with the dog, and Annes ordering servant Rachid to control the dog could suggest the dog is their pet, not hers. But then he bites their little daughter at play. The dog may well be the Laurents’ pet, as neglected and antagonistic as the family members themselves. 

We’re not told which. Just as the narrative omits significant details, like the cause of Eve’s mother’s death, the details of the Laurents’ financial predicament, how the new father Thomas fell into another affair, etc.   

Perhaps the film’s most touching scene is the grandfather’s with Eve. To coax her into explaining her suicide attempt he confesses that he put his beloved wife out of her suffering. But, as her cellphone filing suggests, the girl is too dissociated from her own emotions and too remote from others to be as open and intimate as he is. 

  Whether in lethargy, resignation or obedience, she wheels him toward the water and eaves him there. Even his possible death does not shake her detachment.

Earlier Georges told her how disturbing he found the spectacle of a predatory bird tearing apart a smaller one, both then wiped away by a car.  His point is how reality is even more jolting than its mediated images are. But when she watches his suicide she again resists the direct emotional encounter — and films it.

The forgetful old man eager to die is the film’s emotional and moral center. His family is relentlessly abrasvive. His son Thomas left his first wife and seems poised to leave his second for Claire, his unseen email mistress. He struggles to be a father for Eve. Grandson Pierre is an incompetent misfit who blames his mother for his own failure. 

Nor is there much passion and fulfilment in Anne’s life. Her fiancé is the unappealing English lawyer who has been negotiating a large loan to rescue her company. This seems the traditional expedience rather than passion. 

Confirming this rotting and wasteful society, the dialogue abounds with references to urinating. Eve records her mother’s pissing and flush. The email love letters relish the memory of golden showers, the mutual debasement may confirm Eve’s sense that her father doesn’t love this Claire, didn’t love either wife and probably cannot love her either.

Perhaps the film’s central metaphor is the accident on their construction site. A worker is killed when he goes into a stored portable toilet to urinate and the ground crumbles under him. When a construction site provides such a bathetic destruction the company, the family, the society, seem of very unstable grounding,.

Perhaps “Happy End” isn’t so ironic after all. If Georges does manage to drown before his son and daughter save him, in this family he could ask for nothing better. In any case, Eve remains the continuing victim of a broken adult world she can neither understand nor enter with confidence or commitment. 

The Post

Spielberg opens with a Vietnam war scene, automatic rifles blazing to a CCR soundtrack. That not only sets the period but reminds us this is a war film. Publishing the Pentagon Papers was a wartime act — to stop America’s unnecessary wasting of lives in Vietnam. 

More to the point, we are still in that war — resisting a Republican president bent upon suppressing the free press and stifling his critics, especially those who expose his lies. Of course the Nam lies told by the governments of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon pale beside Trump’s 2,000 lies exposed in just his first year in office. The beat goes on.

Like the best history, this addresses the time the film is made as much as the time in which it is set. That is, its truth extends beyond its period and catches a continuing verity: US governments — and they are not alone —lie to advance their cause, to protect themselves, regardless of the cost in civilian lives and the violation of America’s famed democratic principles. In this respect the film is about 2018 as much as 1971. It makes Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee models for our time.
      So that opening battle scene is not Saving Private Ryan. It's saving America.

The film seems accurate in its general plot lines. Nixon tried to prosecute the NY Times for publishing the secret papers smuggled out by the idealist Daniel Ellsberg. The Times thus  silenced, the Washington Post stepped into the breach to publish more stories themselves. The Supreme Court supported the press 6-3, a split we can’t reasonably expect of today’s Right-biased Supremes. 

The major characters — Graham, Bradlee, Robert McNamara, Ellsberg — also ring true. Whether or not they made the speeches given them here, their deeds and their significance are consistent. 

Graham’s isolation — a widow standing against a Board of smug white men, indeed a government of white men — may be emphasized to advance the current assertion of women’s rights. That’s fair. So too the little girl’s initiative selling lemonade, the abused and admiring Latina intern, Bradlee’s wife’s separate life as an artist, and especially Kay’s triumphant stride away from the Supreme Court through a mob of reverent women, tacitly thankful for her liberating example. Graham’s valour justifies that elaboration. 

The film draws on two other popular genres, as well as the war film. Graham’s and Bradlee’s stubborn idealism harkens back to the James Stewart standards, Mr Smith, Mr Deeds, and all the other earnest heroes struggling through a morass of self-service and corruption to reaffirm America’s defining principles of freedom and equality. That’s the America that has to be recovered to make her “great again.” 

Spielberg also revives the great tradition of the newspaper film. The montage of newspaper front pages, the mechanics of the lino-typesetter, the literal lines of lead prose, the whirring monster presses and the trucks lighting up the dawn streets with bundles of the latest word — all that warms the cockles of any newsman’s heart. Papers may be dying, but their mythic heroism survives. Much like the theory of American democracy.
     Spielberg is a master director and here he’s working with a first-rate cast and story. Sure, it preaches to the converted. It won’t reform Trump or shoot a spine into any of his GOP enablers. But if it’s screened widely enough perhaps it will enlighten and embolden enough of the Republicans’ constituents to have some effect.