 |
| Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others. |
Iconography is central to the rhetoric of Hillbilly Elegy, which now functions, as it seems to have known it would, as political promotion. Not that anyone escapes rhetoric: making films, writing, speaking, we’re all trying to win an argument.
Glenn Close has the role of her career as Mammy Yokum, and gets the only laughs in the film, as when she shows the finger: “Perch and swivel.”
“Wouldn’t spit on her ass if her guts were on fire.”
“You know what's interesting about the Poles? They bury their dead with their asses sticking out of the ground. That way they got a place to park their bikes.”
And like Ma Kettle and Granny Clampett, she runs the show, or at least is the court of final appeal. Somewhat more touching are the houses the hill people live in.
In the early shots those are of brick rather than clapboard, but they evoke Walker Evans’ photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Note the placement of things. Margaret Bourke-White took similar pictures (you may recall Evans’ and Bourke-White’s photos introducing Bonnie and Clyde, our hippy Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae), but Bourke-White’s husband Erskine Caldwell objected to her changing the position of objects in the cabins, and thus falsifying the implicit story.
Caldwell wrote hillbilly novels God’s Little Acre and Tobacco Road, and the latter was filmed by John Ford, who is incapable of not making a masterpiece. This is all protest material, made by Party members and fellow-travellers, but it had its place and time; it was like the sixties, everybody was doing it. (See below the review of Oppenheimer for American Marxism in the thirties.)
James Agee, for example, wrote the legendary prose in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and despised the usage “sharecropper” (over “tenant farmer”) as “one of the words a careful man will be watchful of, and by whose use and inflection he may take clear measurement of the nature, and the stature, and the causes, and the timbre, of the enemy.”
Near the beginning of Hillbilly Elegy J.D. shows a wounded turtle to “Cousin Nate,” who seems to live in the woods, and tells J.D. to see how far he can throw it. Nate disappears for the rest of the film but for that moment we are in the presence of Tom and Huck.
Not that those boys were hillbillies, strictly speaking. To qualify it helps to have roots in Appalachia, which includes Cape Breton, where my own people are from, or the Ozarks, or Washington state. As long as you’re on high ground you should be all right. Elvis was a Tupelo flatlander but he managed it.
My favorite hillbilly is Robert Mitchum’s moonshine-runner in Thunder Road. Per Bob Dylan, “We ain’t paid no whisky tax since 1792.” So American.
By this reckoning, J.D. Vance is Li’l Abner, a six-three heavyweight and, to quote Wikipedia, “a simple-minded, gullible, and sweet-natured country bumpkin.” That’s Abner, not Vance, though the latter’s adolescence implies a certain vulnerability to suggestion. But he doesn’t marry Daisy Mae; he marries “up,” to a schoolmarm, and gets country-boy bright real fast.
By this reckoning, J.D. Vance is Li’l Abner, a six-three heavyweight and, to quote Wikipedia, “a simple-minded, gullible, and sweet-natured country bumpkin.” That’s Abner, not Vance, though the latter’s adolescence implies a certain vulnerability to suggestion. But he doesn’t marry Daisy Mae; he marries “up,” to a schoolmarm, and gets country-boy bright real fast.
Are we ever going to hear the end of this legend? I doubt it. Too pat. Too saleable. Too American.
But, having located us in iconographical heaven, the film goes on too long. Amy Adams is an actor and a half—the screen belongs to her when she’s there—but the film hits me over the head with her long after I get the point. It has a commitment to unrelieved miserablism that rivals that of Joker; whereas Vance's book has humor.
But, having located us in iconographical heaven, the film goes on too long. Amy Adams is an actor and a half—the screen belongs to her when she’s there—but the film hits me over the head with her long after I get the point. It has a commitment to unrelieved miserablism that rivals that of Joker; whereas Vance's book has humor.
I wish J.D. well, at least for this July-2024 moment. But that doesn’t mean I have to like the movie.
Kinds of Kindness
The bumpkinry stand plucking at the seats of their pants before a magnificent work of art, but even we high intellectuals can have pause.
Kinds of Kindness presents itself as the authors’ (there are two of them) quarrel with life, and who can blame them? The whole thing is inconvenient.
The first of the three stories is about a man’s total submission to control, which in 2024 is belligerent satire.
The second is about a man who refuses to submit, whose psychotic resistance to a conspiracy of which he knows not the source, the method nor the reason, leads him to commit a brutal murder (as acts of faith both men commit brutal murders), that turns out to be the right choice. So it has sort of a happy ending.
In the third, a woman who prizes her membership in a water cult above her adoring husband and small daughter, and refuses to eat fish (where does she get her vitamin D?), is ejected for being impure after her husband drugs and rapes her. The cult members detect one’s impurity by applying the tongue.
Sex is OK within the cult, but not something you want to do. Choker closeups on intertwined tongues do nothing for the appetite, nor do the wide angles on Jesse Plemons’ pockmarks. The actors are without makeup except when, on Emma Stone, it’s pointedly garish.
Distortion of the human face is everywhere. This is not a world one wants to be in and it’s a horrible movie to watch, but then Psycho was a horrible movie to watch. And whereas Hitchcock’s world was of the time's psychiatric zeitgeist, Lanthimos’s world is of ours. I kept thinking of Poe and Faulkner, each with his own instantly recognizable strangeness.
The problem (and it’s my problem) is that the film doesn’t resolve. Ten years after the superb Kind of Blue Miles Davis did Bitches Brew, which everyone, self included, thought wonderful. But no one remembers it. It didn’t resolve. It achieves only the briefest and most elusive harmonies.
“So what!” you will shout, you and the post-Wagner music fanatics, “Harmony is dead!” Well, in the world, maybe, but not in the arts. Our period tears us into asymmetrical fragments such that we can no longer claim to know what’s going on, so Kinds of Kindness does beat us up with some propriety. But we want resolution. That’s why we make movies, to provide the marks with an albeit fleeting sense of order, a possibility of order, and I note that harmony reemerged in Mr. Davis’s work.
Sex is everywhere, and unpleasant. The lower-middle-class cops reminisce about the missing wife by watching a porn video of the four of them, though we’re set up to expect an ordinary home movie. This, if possible, is even more banal (it’s the kind of film where people wear underwear in bed)—a reversal on the postcard scene in Phantom of Liberty, husband and wife getting horny over pictures of the Eiffel Tower.
And death? In the third story the cultist is in search of a woman who can raise the dead, auditions the wrong one, and then the right one resurrects a corpse. We see him later eating at a fast-food place. Makes life worthwhile. T.S. Eliot: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.” This guy has nothing to say.
That other Greek, Alexander Payne, has taken Beckett as his model, and Beckett was clear that the afterlife may be even drearier than this one.
Kinds of Kindness is a horror movie, with commonplace scenes turned frightening by a gifted pianist, and you can’t keep the kids away from horror movies.
And it has moments of gorgeousness, the unconscious resurrectionist draped on her back over a veterinarian’s scale and slowly raised as her arms and legs, then her hands and feet, then her fingers and toes leave the floor.
When a car crash throws her through a windshield it gets a laugh, the only one I heard.
Coup de Chance
In Woody Allen’s comedy of accidents there are no laughs. There is however his familiar personality, present in the dialogue, if not the situations. I don’t always enjoy his movies, as you’ll see below, but I rarely miss them.
I want to like Coup de Chance more than I quite do because, though he is no doubt back in his beloved Manhattan, as a filmmaker he is in exile, both from the current cultural regime and from “American cinema,” which is not delivering product at all.
And in these violent days of May 2024, it is well to recall one’s warmth toward, and support for, the Chosen People, who are implicated in one's own bloodline, as who is not; and incidentally to despise those who worked with the man and proceeded to betray him.
He has gone through a number of inspirations since his Buster Keaton days in Sleeper and his Bergman days in Interiors. More recently he’s been looking over Hitchcock’s shoulder, as in Manhattan Murder Mystery, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match Point and the present Coup de Chance.
From Interiors on he has yearned toward the WASP haute bourgeoisie in New York. Now we have the Paris version—life with servants, a bit of shooting, you know, and friends who bore one. Luis Buñuel said of his magnificent Belle de Jour that it was his portrait of a Paris bourgeoise, and I was reminded of that movie. Perhaps it was the bright colors.
Allen’s Fanny finds it rather a dull business. Her rich husband plays with electric trains and is insanely jealous, and what develops owes something to Chabrol’s La Femme infidèle—the detectives, the corpse in the soft luggage—which itself was an open tribute to Hitchcock.
Hitchcock, however, often, if not usually, makes his villain more charismatic than his hero; whereas in Coup de Chance we have the usual pop-cinema beauty contest. Fanny is the gorgeous Lou de Laâge, her lover Alain, the handsome Niels Schneider, and we can tell by their looks that they deserve our sympathy, and each other.
Mr. Allen’s Paris is likewise a bit fantastic. In Deconstructing Harry he sums the French up as “sarcasm and orgasm,” not bad, but how pleasant in this film are the people who sell books and chestnuts! This is a betrayal of France!
Ditto the smoking. I didn’t see much of it the last time Iwas there, but Alain smokes continually. And Fanny knocks back an atypical amount of booze. Is that because she’s bored?
Among Allen’s problems is to convey a sense of marital intimacy that transcends the dialogue—“A marriage shouldn’t take work,” says Fanny—which becomes a lot easier when the relationship gets antagonistic. (Why is that?)
Allen may have made this in exile, but he still has his cinematographer, his editor and some of his sound people, and very competent they are.
But I miss the shot, that single shot that makes a movie for me.
In Deconstructing Harry (I think it was) he gives us a crash in which the car lurches out of screen and we hear it rather than see it. To indies like me these are inspirations.
In Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed Audrey boards a plane while her husband and her lover wait on the tarmac, and says a secret goodbye by putting her fingertips to the glass. Poetry.
The only such satisfaction in Coup de Chance is the the thugs going right to left (which always says wrong: Lawrence goes right to left, to almost certain death, to rescue a man in the desert, and left to right when he carries him out) planning a murder on the same Seine-side terrain where Cary and Audrey stroll and buy ice cream in Charade.
It’s not much but it’ll have to do.
Oppenheimer
I paid no attention to Christopher Nolan’s movies until I saw Dunkirk, after which I promised myself I’d never miss another. But I did. For superheroes I give not a shrug. Oppenheimer, however, is worthy of the writer-director of Dunkirk, though here the epic struggle is moral, which makes it harder to keep us watching for three hours, even with Baroque-derived tension music and flashbacks as fast as a chef chopping garlic.
1) Elon
Period movies are not about the past, any more than sci fi movies are about the future. They are about the present. Here we are watching our own legend build a village, coordinate his thinkers, engineer his equipment, fight his society, worship his hero, and change the world.
And we’re watching the director’s generalship. See Napoleon, below.
2) Communism
This is our issue even as it was the post-war world’s, and Mr. Nolan’s script is very very very careful where it puts its feet on that. Many among us (not me, of course, I’m a nice guy) would welcome a Joe McCarthy, who is dismissed in the film as a “self-promoter.”
3) Time out for anachronisms
But why on earth spend a hundred million dollars to recreate a period and then poison it with twenty-first-century jargon? “Self-promoter”? “Weapon of mass destruction”? “They need us,” says Oppie, to which Alvarez, “Until they don’t.” Farewell, illusion. See below the remarks on Carol.
4) Back to communism
It is clear to your reporter that no matter how self-promoting McCarthy was, the film yearns for such a deliverer. Would James Woods executive-produce something that didn’t lean away from the left? It handles communism by putting its feet everywhere, making otherwise sympathetic characters enthusiastic Marxists (“smiling the serene smile of perfect socialism,” as Nabokov puts it), and by portraying that, quite accurately, as a matter of zeitgeist.
In the thirties communism was in style. “Fellow travelers” were everywhere, and students and other fanatics went so far as to join the party and become, to use McCarthy's phrase, “card-carrying members,” just as flower children later endured a wretched existence on “communes” while the rest of us fellow-travelled.
Future right-wing Nixon-supporter John Ford made The Grapes of Wrath: “A fellow ain't got a soul of his own,” says Henry Fonda, “just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody.” Uh-huh.
Macho-man Howard Hawks made my beloved His Girl Friday. Ros to a guy who shot a cop:
“Now look, Earl, when you found yourself with that gun in your hand, and that policeman coming at you, what did you think about?...Could it have been ‘production for use’?”
“There's nothing crazy about that, is there?”
“Nope. Nothing at all.”
“You'll write about that in your paper, won't you?”
“You bet I will.”
In Scott Fitzgerald’s last unfinished novel the magnificent
Monroe Stahr gets into a drunken fight with a communist union organizer, but
his narrator Cecilia, who loves him, thinks he just doesn’t get it that collectivism
is here. Ah, the young!
And Hemingway joined the fashionistas who supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, commies, mostly, who slaughtered seven thousand priests, nuns and monks. (See Hemingway for Wimps.)
My hero Ernst Lubitsch steered well clear of that mania. Indeed Ninotchka’s Soviet Russia is a dreary impoverished
unLubitschian place. Who plays her commissar? Bela Lugosi. (See The Lubitsch Touch.)
So did Chaplin steer clear, whose tramp was a natural symbol for the Revolution. In Modern Times he mocks that idea: Charlie, out of jail and looking for work, sees a red flag fall from a long load, picks it up, calls to the driver and follows him, waving the flag as a hundred demonstrators come around the corner and fall in behind him. Back to jail. In the fifties, on the other hand, he defined himself as a “peace-monger,” his A King in New York savages McCarthy, and Chaplin had enough trouble with him, and with the FBI, that he moved to Switzerland.
Charles Foster Kane is a communist! Charles Foster Kane is a fascist! “I am, have been, and will be, only one thing—an American.”.
5) Pain and submission
Quick shot of Oppie, a poet and a literary man, reading The Wasteland, symbol of a dreary present and a drearier future. The kinky “Batter my heart, three-person'd God” needs a look. Even in his sacred phase Donne never quite shed his seducer’s mode, and invites God to hit him around: “Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”
6) Postmodernism
I don’t disagree with Jordan Peterson about much, but postmodernism was a movement in the arts before it was picked up by French polemicists jealous of Jean-Luc Godard’s poetry. (Godard reveled in Marxism but poetry is poetry, and his influence, which is how we measure a poet, on American, British and German filmmakers was enormous.)
The week after Nagasaki, James Agee wrote in Time Magazine:
All thoughts and things were split. The sudden achievement of victory was a mercy, to the Japanese no less than to the United Nations; but mercy born of a ruthless force beyond anything in human chronicle. The race had been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race. The rational mind had won the most Promethean of its conquests over nature, and had put into the hands of common man the fire and force of the sun itself.
John Clauser, who recently won the Nobel for proving Einstein’s quantum theory of particles (deplored by Einstein himself as “spooky action at a distance”), in his acceptance speech said, “I confess even to this day that I still don’t understand quantum mechanics.” Whew! Can you blame us, who tried to follow even those minimal, tangential, for-public-consumption explanations of nuclear fission and fusion in Nolan’s movie, for losing faith in reality? (See What We Know.)
“Semiology,” “deconstructionism,” “self-reflexiveness” (a phrase of the time), and the impossibility of “narrative” (that much-abused word) are relatively recent weapons in the hands of our French and otherwise sadistic oppressors. (See The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France.) Long before that, they characterized the work of distinctly non-leftists Jorge Luis Borges, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Billy Wilder, for a very few examples.
Wilder found himself no longer able to tell a story. Sunset Blvd., a semiotic analysis of Hollywood, almost entirely quotations of one sort or another, is narrated by a murdered screenwriter, A Portrait of the Artist (so a friend of mine put it) as a Dead Man. There is nothing in Godard, minus the politics, that is not already in Wilder. Here is his Holmes:
“Mrs Hudson! Mrs Hudson!”
“Yes? What is it? What have I done now?”
“There is something missing from my desk!”
“Missing?”
“Something very crucial!”
“What?”
“Dust! You have been tidying up against my explicit orders!”
“Oh look, I made sure I hadn't disturbed anything.”
“Dust, Mrs Hudson, is an essential part of my filing system. By the thickness of it I can date any document immediately.”
“Well, some of the dust was this thick!”
“That would be March 1883.”
7) A new era
Sure, but how new is the mushroom cloud? Whether it’s boiling oil or radiation dissolving your flesh, war is death and dismemberment. Always has been. What’s new is that we don’t understand anything. Well, wait a minute, that’s not exactly new. What’s new is that we used to have formulae that more or less worked, and now we don’t understand the formulae.
8) Bravo, the actors!
Pretty-boy Cillian Murphy disappears into his role. I was unable enjoy Matt Damon (something hey-let's-play-baseball about him that he seems finally to have dispensed with) until his Lieutenant General Groves. And Robert Downey shocked me with his power and versatility. (Kenneth Branagh I have still not forgiven for his Hamlet.)
Some didn’t care for Emily Blunt, which seems to me to be a response to her skillfully performed character. But then, in Oppenheimer as in Dunkirk, Nolan doesn’t have much time for women, and almost alone now is a maker of films about white men, though I did see a black physicist in a single Oscar-qualifying shot.
9) The ending
In our intensely political time we suffer visions of brutality, our own as much as anyone else’s. The online world has transformed us, like it or not, into a demanding rule-bound collectivity. The bomb and the internet: Oppie gave us the one, the Cold War gave us the other.
Toward the end of the film people keep asking him if he knows the good or the evil he has released upon the world. They accuse him of not knowing, until knowing becomes the theme of the third act. And though he has a moment of panic when he tries to warn the president, he doesn’t know. He ends not knowing.
Excellent.
Poor Things
In The Favourite and in Poor Things, Yorgos
Lanthimos is not listed as writer, so I shall consider him as a
director, which means looking at the influences I can detect.
When I saw the
CGI ship (the film is composed of salient artifice, which is fine),
I was reminded of the CGI ship in Fellini’s The
Ship Sails On.
When I saw the girl taken under the Paris madame’s wing I thought
of Belle de Jour, which I said to myself is far-fetched, but no, the young
lady’s name is Bella.
And her being held prisoner in turn by three men suggests,
to me anyway, Buñuel’s Tristana, though Lanthimos has had a
preoccupation with captivity since Dogtooth, which he is now remaking.
At the Golden Globes he claimed Bruce Springsteen as an
influence, but we can forgive him that because Springsteen was in the audience
and Lanthimos was, we can only hope, being polite.
But the clearest pictorial, not to say narrative influence
is James Whale’s Frankenstein, unmistakable in the
electro-shock shot. And here a trail opens up. I have not read Alisdair
Gray’s Poor Things,
a rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but Gray names the scientist
Godwin after Shelley’s father William Godwin, who attacked political
institutions, claimed to be an anarchist, and married feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft.
You see where we are.
And from this union, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Like all
English romantics she was intimate with Milton’s Paradise Lost, and her monster, more articulate than James Whale’s, argues that he is
Adam. No, says Frankenstein with some justice, you are Satan.
Godwin is a handy name, because it enables Bella to call her
creator “God”. The film is at its best when it’s being
funny, which it doesn't surrender to until Bella morphs into Candide, the wise innocent. The packed house in which I saw the film roared. Here in Greece Lanthimos, like Alexander Payne (search Payne) is regarded as a home-boy.
The comic archetypes—the mad scientist, the l’amour fou lover, the sadistic husband, a stock figure in women’s TV—persist into the melodrama. The film begins and
ends in melodrama.
And the name Godwin brings us closer to the pitch. Because there
is a pitch. You’re not getting off lightly. Nothing is ever light in a
Lanthimos film, though he does give us the delightful nudity of Emma Stone. I’m
trying to persuade one of my own actresses to
do nude. Maybe this will help.
A distinct pleasure in Poor Things is the acting. These
people know how, and they give themselves.
Lanthimos is welcome to his style, and there’s lots of it—the fisheye
lenses, the mini-frames, the vertical stretching, the snap cuts, the overhead streetcars (whose vision are they, hers? his?) the upsidedown credits—but it reminds me of
what Nabokov said about Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness: wonderful, but it
would be just as strong with commas and periods.
And it’s all in the service of a message, the most banal of messages. When
one smells a message one turns up one’s nose, does one not? The exaggerations
are comic, but they’re not self-mocking. The film asks us to take it seriously,
than which there is no more grotesque faux pas.
Napoleon
“You don’t reason with intellectuals. You shoot
them.”—Napoleon
So I’d better watch out.
Alas, Boney didn’t say that in the movie. He was a witty man—“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”
“In politics stupidity is not a handicap.”—but in Ridley Scott's film he doesn’t say much
that's amusing. He suffers. Bonaparte was not a sufferer.
In the
forefront are the battle scenes, which I think is why the reviews
are so tepid. Battle scenes bore women. But men, even at my age, take a
you-never-know attitude and watch anxiously.
The champion of
such scenes, seldom even approached, is in The Birth of a Nation. No CGI there. (Don’t try to show that to your students
today.) Then comes Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, which Scott seems to have glanced
at for his Austerltz sequence. And most of us know the opening of Saving Private Ryan, after which the movie dies and stumbles around like a zombie. (Of
course I’m skipping a wealth of expertly made such scenes.)
Nabokov remarked that in reading a novel one should identify,
not with a character, but with the author. Same for movies. Those back views of
Napoleon and/or his generals watching the action suggest Scott himself. You
have to be a general to manage that many people. Kubrick, as was typical of him, did it smoothly.
Jean Gabin appeared in no film without a train, it was in his contract. Dustin Hoffman until quite late made no movie in which he didn't run—or no deal. In The Master, Inherent Vice, Irrational Man and Joker (two hours of humorless punishing abrasion), Joaquin Phoenix plays a man upon whose intellect we look down, and he may never do otherwise. This is the stuff of comedy, but he doesn't make comedies. His appearance in the Woody Allen film is enough to turn it melodramatic. And now we have his Napoleon.
Josephine was an embarrassment for Boney (I assume their correspondence is being quoted, or at least guiding the film, as Mozart’s did Amadeus); but he had mistresses to console him—ten, twenty-two, the count varies. Life goes on.
The actress does not look unlike Josephine, except for her (Josephine’s) black teeth, which might explain why the film’s Napoleon takes her from behind, pumping away convulsively—so unsensuous, so unFrench, so ungorgeous. (See Gorgeousness.)
The food-and-drink scenes are too many to count. If you want to express disdain for someone, as several of these characters do, speak to him while eating; or as Josephine does, while drinking. She seems to be a tippler, perhaps to soften her distaste. Indeed, it’s a role only an Englishwoman could play.
This is the
administrative genius who inspired, guided and set in place the Napoleonic Code
of law, which influenced the entire world, and is still in force in France, a hundred and
twenty other countries, Quebec, and Louisiana.
“I love power,”
he said. “But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves
his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.”
“Music,” he
said, “is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.”
He’s said to have been a vulgarian but he sounds like a refined
one.
He was an
engineer. Here’s Emerson, perhaps closer to the subject: “‘There shall be no
Alps,’ he said; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by graded galleries
their steepest precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris as any town in
France.”
He was under no
illusions about the First Republic: “Among those who dislike oppression are
many who like to oppress.”
He was a shrewd
politician: “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand
bayonets.”
Of the horrible
stories that surround him Emerson says, “He must not therefore be set own as
cruel, but only as one who knew no impediment to his will; not bloodthirsty,
not cruel—but woe to that thing or person who stood in his way!”
According to Valéry,
also closer to the subject, he was a man of letters: “Napoleon, Caesar,
Frederick the Great: men of letters eminently gifted for manipulating
men and things—with words….Napoleon
was a victim of his mental gifts, whose power outran his own and wound up by
destroying it.”
Indeed, he
regrets that Napoleon wasted his mind: “It's sad to see a great brain like
Napoleon's devoting itself to such petty things as empires, events, the roar of
cannon, and the clamors of the mob; believing in history, in glory, in
posterity, in ‘Caesar’; concerning itself with the shifting masses and surfaces
of nations. Could he not feel that what really matters is something quite
different?”
As if anticipating
such objections Boney said, “The French complain of everything, and always.”
Of course no
man can be understood, even oneself, but please, he was not a fool. What is it about him that even French cinema reduces him to a cartoon? In this reluctance to give him his due I smell a symptom of wokeness.
Let us turn,
then, to the messages, because, though it straddles them awkwardly, this film is not above messages:
1) That it continually presents us with
dates suggests that it thinks of itself as a history lesson. Indeed, the colors
are so faint that I remember it, inaccurately, in documentary black and white,
so that the bursts of color—the coronation, the underwater shots in the
Austerlitz campaign—stand out as garish.
2) The mortality statistics at the end give
it an anti-war feel, for which I have small patience.
As Boney said, “Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world
than we generals.”
3) Josephine’s refusal to take him
seriously is a nod at feminism, very nice.
4) But its real message, muted almost to
imperceptibility, is that when you indulge in political correctness as the citizens
of the Republic did, and as we aging love-and-peace-niks do, when you “imagine
all the people living for today” (impossible—no one lives in the present), when
you lie spreadeagled in the grass revelling in Rousseau’s dream that humanity
is “good” (see The
Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France), a strong man appears and
jumps on you with both feet.
“The strong man,”
said Boney, “is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication
between the senses and the mind.”
The French were
lucky in their strong man. It doesn’t always turn out that way.
James Bond, James Bond, Where
Are You, James Bond?
I can’t find him.
Here in Greece, before the
outdoor cinemas closed for the winter, I sat in one for two hours and
forty-three minutes of No Time to Die, hunched against the wind, looking
for that womanizing wine-judging sportscar-driving take-it-all-lightly death’s-around-the-corner-anyway
showoff in Cary-Grant suits, that cavalier on a civil servant’s pay.
What I saw was an
unrelievedly serious man, a disappointed lover with emotional problems. And the
suit! For the opening sequence they gave him something cotton off-the-rack that
didn’t button up right. (Whatever happened to sportscars?)
Even in their prime Bond
films were changeable (go here
and search Bond), but they were essentially comedies, as most action films are,
sprinkled with puns, and one waited for the payoff laugh at the end. Smart-assery,
as I remark elsewhere, is the essence of art, including popular art. Where
did it go? Even his enemy is serious, and makes a quest of ruining Bond’s—oh,
God!—emotional life.
Mel Brooks was right;
political correctness killed comedy.
The combat scenes are like
watching five-year-olds play guns, a ceaseless unimaginative bang-bang-bang in
which there’s never any danger to the hero. (I hesitate to call him Bond.)
That is, until he decides to
give his life to save the world. Recognize the plot? For Bond saving the world
was an after-thought, part of the fun, a way to bed the girl.
Ah! There is one good
thing about the film: the girl. Ana de Armas. Of course he doesn’t get her. He doesn’t
even seem to want her. Wouldn’t be proper.
Speaking of proper, Ralph
Fiennes as M is at his most hemorrhoidal.
What we have here then is the
death of a nice guy, rated “T”—suitable only for people under twelve.
James Bond, James Bond, where
are you, James Bond?
Ah, here he is. I’ve
found him.
James Bond is dead. Long live
James Bond!
Cry Macho
“Poetry is not the expression
of personality, but an escape from personality,” said T.S. Eliot.
“Our selves, like Adam's,
still don't fit us exactly,” said W.H. Auden.
Clint Eastwood, in his last
several movies, has struggled to escape his personality, his mask, his obsolete
self.
(As a minor filmmaker myself
I don’t regard movies as anything but poems.)
Usually he models this
transformation for the benefit of a young man; in Million Dollar Baby
it’s for a young woman.
“But, of course,” says Eliot,
“only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to
escape from these things.”
Clint is loaded down. In
television’s Rawhide he was merely a rebel teen with the right haircut, but
that was perfect for Sergio Leone, who made him the god-like Man with No Name. Thus he became bankable, and Ted Post and Don Seigel made Westerns with him. But not
until Dirty Harry was Leone’s icon resurrected as an anodyne for hippy
politics. It was a time much like our own, though our hippies are geriatric.
John Huston invented Bogie (see The Real Meaning of Humphry Bogart), but never used him again as
Bogie until the satiric Beat the Devil, though everyone else did.
Leone’s Clint was portrayed
by Clint himself in his own series of productions, until it became a problem
for him, partly as a man nose to nose with Death—in Cry Macho he turns
away from a sick dog and says, “I don’t know how to cure old age” (see The
Doctor on The Aging Process)—but also in his quest to rethink himself, as who must
not?
What’s left when you take off
the printed T-shirt of your personality? “What is a tooth,” says Polanski in The
Tenant, “but a piece of a personality?” What about you isn’t your
personality?
Clint teases that question,
but mainly he’s concerned to unload the baggage of machismo, and groping for
what to keep. Unlike the hard-headed Siegel, for whom the only paradises are
lost ones, Clint is a pastoralist. Even Josey Wales has heaven in his sites.
And indeed, though one of the
shocks in Cry Macho is how bent he is by age, the old fart finds heaven
with the heavenly Natalia Traven. (See In Praise of Older Women.)
You get your bad woman, you
get your good woman. Oh, Clint!
The plot is held together
with staples and tape, but a poem is a poem, and Clint is Clint. We mustn’t look for irony here.
And he is a poet. The title sequence in Josey Wales is a movie in itself, a fast one, and a strong one—and that marvelous shot in Cry Macho where, bedding cowboy-style on the ground, he lies down into the darkness!
The kid asks him if he can
wear his hat, and your hat of course is your identity. When the wind from the
explosion in Closely Watched Trains blows the boy's hat into frame, you
know he’s dead. Clint won’t let the kid wear his hat—“You’re not a cowboy”—and then
he does, if only to take it off.
Who can be responsible for his own personality? Even from outer space the continents retain their shape. The personality is a vital
piece of equipment, a work of art, if you can manage it, but it’s a lot of
trouble. You’ve got to walk it, worm it, take it to the vet, consult over it,
get sued over it, disguise it, hide it, rework it—cuts down on your
staring-off-into-space time. What’s left for a working-class tough guy when he steps away from it?
I should know?
Here, to conclude, is
an act of homage, a shot of nostalgia with a slice, The Return of Dirty Harry.
Some Movies I More or Less Forgot
Joker, two hours of squirming agony at the mercy of the Lord of Misrule. Not a laugh in it, but a clear prophecy of the riots. Why do audiences like to be tortured this way?
The Green Book, a Frank Capra movie complete with Christmas-tears Capracorn ending.
Adults in the Room: Costa-Gavras came back here to Greece to make this lie about the former prime minister, may he die screaming, and his betrayal of the Greek people. The film uses some of my own actors, who are the best thing in it.
Dunkirk: Excellent.
Downsizing: My ex-friend Alexander Payne (go here and search Nebraska) had no idea what to do with all that money.
The Favourite: Episodic. Bleak. Disgusting. Was it really in black and white, or do I just remember it that way?
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: These Englishmen, when they get to America, they abbreviate the experience as if for their notebooks. Not as bad as American Beauty, but nothing is as bad as American Beauty. Woody Harrelson has never recovered from the disastrous Indecent Proposal, but I always feel him trying.
Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood: I have made my position on Tarrantino clear (see also Italian-AmericanFilmmakers), and watching Brad Pitt drive doesn't do it for me, but the climactic pool fight gives pleasure, as long as you're sitting there.
Something by Woody Allen, I can’t remember what. I like Woody Allen. He misses a few tricks, as you'll see below, but I always go to his movies. And my own works of cinemah are aimed at his audience. (See Mortal Coil.)
Darkest Hour: Winston Churchill did not take the Tube and exchange poetry quotations with a strange black man, and that’s final.
The Party: a perfect little film, and I mean little, seventy-one minutes, full of irony and laughs, and the so watchable Kristin Scott Thomas.
Roma: A student of mine once told me, “In a movie or a novel, everything is normal except one thing.” I watched this for an hour, waiting for that one thing.
The Lives of Others, which is too dull to get through, is frightening, not because East German communism is so alien to us, but because it’s so us.
Chéri, directed by Stephen Frears. Too apologetic. Not
enough daring. Not enough story.
La La Land, and some others—Jackie, Bridget Jones's Baby, Hail, Caesar, Doctor Strange, Café Society, Arrival, and Paterson—but mainly La La Land
Much has happened since I last came down the mountain, but nothing that could interrupt my self-contemplation until La La Land; which we all want opinions on so we can meet the intellectual challenge of Oscar night.
The dullest, the least consequential, the most asinine is Doctor Strange, in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton, from whom we have come to expect more (see my review of The Imitation Game), are reduced to punching and kicking their way through a New Age video-game fantasy that does nothing to enhance the evening, though as trash it achieves something like purity. But one can’t entirely blame the actors; I too am vulnerable to being offered large sums of money.
And very New Age. Why are space aliens always represented as either deeply good or so evil they must be annihilated? They are never, like ourselves, both. These, beneath their monstrous exteriors, are sweethearts. All they want is For Us All To Work Together, which does make them worthy of extermination.
My own woman, if I may so speak, loved it. To quote her (let us forgive her her accent), “Only a mother who lost her child could take off her suit. Women are much more big-hearted. They are contaminated with egotism and ambition, but these are temporary things. Women combine practicality with intuition and vision. Men are needed as drones, to open jars and plant seeds. Then the nature that women are, flowers. And many many more things. Women are more intuitive and have more endurance.”
Let’s go to our second women’s movie, Bridget Jones's Baby, which is funny, and a good evening’s entertainment—my critical standard for excellence. Still, there’s something sad about the Bridget Jones series. It began, and persists (I haven’t seen every instalment) as a satire of secretaries’ wishes, a Plain-Jane office girl fought over by rich and handsome men for whom she is somehow the summit of desire. This time they want to be the father of the baby they’re not even sure they’ve sired. Triumphant in her wedding dress, infant on hip, she walks off, not into the sunset but toward a reception on the broadest of lawns, leaving bridegroom and lover to reconcile as best they can.
Beauty is the unstated theme of Jackie, the most beautiful of women (on the trip to Texas Jack apologized for her lateness, “But Mrs. Kennedy,” he smiled, “is worth waiting for”) rising to the trauma. I had expected something more like The Greek Tycoon (which wasn’t bad), but Jackie held me.
Cutting back and forth is the style of the TV commercial and the documentary, and I find the one as rhetorical as the other. If journalism, as Malcolm Lowry said, “equals intellectual male prostitution of speech and writing,” documentary too is simple opinion-making. But here the style is in the service of portraying someone’s dawning strength—“someone’s,” not necessarily Jackie’s, but it makes a good movie; an actor’s movie, in fact, one legendary beauty portraying another.
In Kingsman and James Bond I waxed wistful about Jack’s sex life. “If I don’t have a woman for three days,” he told Harold Macmillan, “I get a terrible headache.” And Jackie avenged herself with movie stars. Ah, well. Absolvo te. Should cheer Melania up.
The heroic journalist Edward R. Murrow, speaking of documentary, is edited into the film as he accompanies Jackie on the White-House tour. Murrow’s broadcasts from London during the Blitz, the air-raid sirens in the background, had much to do with the US entering the war. (Joel McCrea in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent reprises that; see Hitch and Cary.) Then when Murrow got to TV he destroyed Joseph McCarthy, and interviewed absolutely everybody. I don’t remember Jackie being as nervous as the film made her out to be, but then even I don’t know everything.
OK, let’s calm way down with Paterson, based on, and updating, William Carlos Williams’ long poem that sought to do for Paterson, New Jersey, what Joyce did for Dublin. The film has its own Patersonians to commemorate, but what it's after is the meditative tone of the poem, and there are real pleasures here, mainly in the movement of the camera through a world that is deliberately banal.
It’s the first Jim Jarmusch movie I’ve ever sort of liked. He usually does kid stuff. When I was teaching film in Canada students would come to me and say “Hey, Bob, did you see the new Jarmusch film? Isn’t it great?” They were so enthusiastic. You can’t discourage them. I’d smile politely and wait for a chance to change the subject.
Paterson suggests what life must be like on diazepam. I am doing this, I am standing here doing this, there is nothing else, sort of thing. There’s a pleasing feeling of being on another planet. And the people on the bus are, you know, nice. In the poem the refrain is “No ideas but in things,” and here’s Williams’ most famous lyric:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Like Ezra Pound—“The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough” (see Senryu)—and like Allen Ginsberg, who idolized them both, Williams inclines to the oriental. (Three poets no one reads anymore; see Nobody Left to Read). And indeed, it’s a Japanese poet who concludes things by giving the bus driver the gift of the blank page.
In this yearning for the simple is something essentially American. “I hate American simplicity,” says the American in Henry James’s The American. “I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.”
So let’s get complicated. Here are three films about Hollywood, the first by the superb Coen brothers, though not their best, Hail, Caesar. George Clooney, as he usually does for the Coens, plays a buffoon. Can you think of a Coens film without a buffoon? (See The satisfactions of Inside Llewyn Davis). Clooney plays a movie star kidnapped and brainwashed by a communist cell of writers who slip Marxist messages into studio-movie dialogue. Herbert Marcuse himself is a member, not that he gets any respect.
The Coens’ take on Hollywood has always been ambivalent. In Barton Fink it’s a kind of elephants’ graveyard, a second-rate place where first-rate people wash up and lead inauthentic lives. Even Faulkner comes off as cheap. What the Coens bring to any project is distance—they are as ironic as Hamlet—but sometimes they’re so aloof that it gets cold.
What can be excessive in them is too rare in Woody Allen, and perhaps it’s facile to conflate irony with intelligence. I drub Mr. Allen for his missed chances and his high-school psychology (see Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight, and below, Weakness and Woody), but I can’t help but like him.
One of his recurrent themes is Hollywood as Phony-Land and New York as Where People Are Real (see what I mean?), and Café Society goes all out on this one. Apart from the anxiety of doomed love there isn’t much holding it together. There’s an interesting assassin—we all prefer Woody when he’s funny—but one finds oneself groping for more.
La La Land! A musical with dancing, what could be better? All that discipline for a few moments of joy—one is grateful. The script has no disappointing moments. I like especially, though I don’t understand it, Sebastian’s account of the origins of jazz as dialogue between people who don’t speak each other’s language (really?), which sets up the finale, when he communicates his thoughts to Mia with a piano in a crowded bar.
And we’re strangely back in the realm of courtly love, where the Astaire and Kelly musicals live: he lets her into the car first, rushes ahead to open the door for her. But we’re up to date in that this is a film about making it. In Busby Berkeley and the other pre-war musicals the characters are already where they want to be, or don’t care: it’s love, and in Berkeley sensuality, that drives them.
Every now and then, in La La Land, there’s a break in the action for some quick summaries of what happens in the meantime—they must have taken ages to shoot—which are the opposite of quick. They are merely story, not plot (see Fellini for the difference), and slow things down. Their very realism is heavy—this is a musical! Perhaps that’s why the final montage, the dream montage, full of stage effects and artificiality, works so beautifully.
The music? OK. A little too family-friendly. Jazz, like all art, should be insolent (see Smart-assery is the essence of art). But it’s not like when a combo plays a Beatle song, and you feel cheated.
And the joy is there. Fred wore white socks so we could follow his footwork; Ryan, white shoes. Emma Stone doesn’t need them:
Carol, Joy, and the “Women’s Movie”
“One situation,” said Patricia Highsmith, “maybe one alone—could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.”
Amen.
There’s a nice film-noir feel about the fur coat, the deep pockets, the revolver—and Ms Mara is very Audrey Hepburn.
And filter cigarettes, kids, weren’t manufactured until after Eisenhower’s inauguration, and became popular only in the early 60s. Recall Audrey, speaking of Audrey, tearing the filters off in Charade.
Oh well. But Carol is a smooth movie, and gives the feeling of passion—in fact I would suggest that passion is smoothness, in any form of entertainment, including life. And the object, if I may use the word, of Carol’s lust is nice and quiet. Withdrawn. Shy. These are enormous advantages. Anyone who’s been involved with very young ladies knows they can talk your ear off.
The director, Todd Haynes, doesn’t usually make the kind of thing I go out of my way to see, but he showed himself adept at the Women’s Movie in Far from Heaven. I suppose the most famous example of the genre is Gone with the Wind, the girl growing up, getting burned by love, by life, learning, taking over. Douglas Sirk is the master, though Joseph von Sternberg is in the running, and Sirk’s Imitation of Life may be the best of all Women’s Movies.
I don’t know why Mae West’s films aren’t regarded as Women’s Movies—certainly she has it all her own way. “Sex is like bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand.” Scarlet too flirts with carnality when her morning-after smile tells us she has enjoyed being raped by Rhett, and is annoyed to petulance that he’s leaving.
“I just had sex with them,” Therese’s boyfriend tells her; “I love you!” This may be the defining issue. Go ahead and draw the line.
(For more on this, see the review of Fifty Shades of Grey, below, and, overleaf, the review of Kingsman.)
Carol, however, is not a Women’s Movie. It’s a Men’s Movie. Men love lesbian films—I’m working on one myself—and Highsmith, who stood whenever a woman entered the room, felt herself a man.
Joy, we may say with confidence, is a Women’s Movie, though not in a league with the ones I've mentioned. It’s a remake (perhaps it doesn't know that) of the 1959 comedy It Happened to Jane, in which the delightful Doris Day is the businesswoman, young Jack Lemmon is the subservient male, and Ernie Kovaks is the creep who tries to ruin her business—all of them vivid performances.
Because you notice in Joy that you immediately know who the bad guys are—they just look bad. This is marvelous in the earlier film because it’s a comedy; but Joy takes itself seriously, and expects us to.
The grandmother, who tells the story after she dies (like Sunset Blvd. or the Anthony Perkins character in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean—and yet not like them at all), recalls all those people on Twitter who want to “coach” you. A frightening number of people on Twitter want to “coach” you. So does Granny. Don’t worry, you can do it. Very New Age.
(Don’t expect me to be fair to Joy—I have an allergy to Robert De Niro movies.)
Pleasure in such films depends on your heart being in the right place, as mine is not. Neither is Highsmith’s. That’s what I like about her.
The Big Short and Bertolt Brecht
Brecht was a committed communist. His “alienation effect”—designed to wake you from the trance of “art” that hides from you your socio-economic circumstances—was a device for the theatre, but it influenced a lot of movies. In America escaping the Nazis he worked for example with Fritz Lang, another escapee, and so we have Sylvia Sidney in You and Me setting up the blackboard and reforming some crooks by demonstrating the meager profits of stealing.
The A-effect really came to life in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, and in Contempt, which I consider his best (though my critical opinion is based on Brigitte Bardot’s, how shall I say, presence), Lang plays himself, making a film of the Odyssey for producer Jack Palance, at his demonic best, and Penelope/Brigitte is unfaithful.
And now we have The Big Short, in which characters interrupt the action to tell us what’s going on, a stripper’s breasts are less interesting than her mortgages, and we are meant to be sobered—though there are no surprises here—by our victimization.
Personally I don’t have a position. Garcia Lorca’s judgment on Wall Street is sufficient vengeance. Let them have it if they want it. Dip him in the river who loves water, sort of thing.
But The Big Short has Things To Say, and says them in a style that puts it in sync with the remarkable popularity, at the moment, of documentary film—a highly selective form of rhetoric designed to teach us something (the word comes from the Latin for “teach”). Implicitly, and invariably, it teaches morality.
The great documentaries, the models of all documentaries, were made by Leni Riefenstahl. If you’re a documentarist and you’re not looking at Riefenstahl, you’re looking at someone who’s looking at Riefenstahl. (If you’re looking at Capra, who’s looking at Eisenstein, who’s looking at Griffith, you’re on a lower cornice of Purgatory.) She teaches the morality of the god Hitler, and Triumph of the Will begins with his descent to earth. But she does it with extraordinary long takes and impossibly graceful camera movements. Cut-rate documentary thrives on quick cutting, a shot for every line in the voice-over, often having nothing to do with anything except that the phrase needs substantiation.
Guys. Guys and guys. One black female covers our PC needs. Margot Robbie in the bath gives a short lecture, but it's a film, mainly, without women. Boys together, and the machismo that drives their exploits. “That’s a nice shirt. Do they make it for men?”
Steve Carell is the manic moralist. What has befallen his voice? It’s become a tenor so high and thin he doesn’t have to imitate shrill; though he does.
Brad Pitt in a beard plays Earth Father to the garage-start-up kids. Why does he help them? “Well, you said you wanted to be rich.” Just to show you it’s not that great. Makes us all feel better. (Personally, I don’t want to be “rich”—couldn’t interest me less. I just want lots of money.) Pitt played the equally specious moral agent in 12 Years a Slave, which gets Canadian history wrong (see my review of same). What we’re watching here is a version of Walter Huston’s Father God in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but don’t get your hopes up.
The faster the editing, I have elsewhere remarked (in the review of The Wolf of Wall Street), the crasser the production. It becomes something you want to get over with.
Michael Grunwald, scarcely a man of the left, wrote in Politico that the makers of The Big Short didn’t know what they were talking about, that the financial giants did feel pain, that they were stupid, not criminal, that if they had broken the law eager prosecutors would gleefully have dragged them to court, that the rules did change, that we shouldn’t be bitter about the outcome.
Whether because I’m ignorant or because I’m insufficiently moral, I have nothing to say about that. What I’m concerned with is the aesthetic object, if I may so call it—the movie. And the kind of justice that interests me is what happened to “Mack the Knife”:
Brecht’s unglamorous moralistic Threepenny Opera is based on the glamorous eighteenth-century The Beggar’s Opera, but in Brecht the noble libertine Macheath becomes the murderous villain Mack the Knife, as in Kurt Weill’s song.
But when the film was made (edited by my friend Jean Oser—I knew the old man when we were teaching together at the University of Ottawa), Brecht denounced the performance of the song as unBrechtian. And if that wasn’t insult enough, it was taken up by Louis, Ella, Frank and other glamorizers. But it’s Bobby Darin’s version that lives in the memory and snaps the fingers.
Three thrillers: Mad Max, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Sicario
See, what happened was, I (me, myself) suggested that we go and see Mad Max. I thought it would be a laugh—something mindless and full of action.
Big mistake. I mentioned somewhere that nothing ever happens in a Hollywood movie that can’t be understood by a twelve-year-old child. Mad Max—I’m not exaggerating—is for six-year-olds. Bang-bang-you’re-dead sort of thing. I remember being six. You put your hands to your heart, mime the ecstasy of death and fall down. Then you get up—instant resurrection. This movie was a profoundly childish experience.
At intermission—they have intermissions in Greece so you can freshen your drink, which in this case was opportune. Here's the cinema we were in, though "in" is hardly the word:
The second half was exactly the same as the first—the trip out, the trip back. The same flexi-pole hovers over the retread Chevrolets. The lack of invention was catatonic. It did have one good line: "Who are you praying to?" "Whoever’s listening.” Me too. I was mortified, exposing a helpless woman to this spectacle!
I am not a Guy Ritchie fan. In my review, below, of Mr. Holmes I dispensed with his Robert Downey thing in a one-line sneer, and his work has never interested me before. But what I love about spy movies is how funny they are—much funnier than studio comedies—and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. had us laughing out loud.
Sicario on the other hand scored big, and with this one my stock fell again. My V withdrew her confidence. Another boneheaded suggestion from Y.T. (I’m going to get off thrillers. Spy movies or nothing. But that’s what I thought this was!)
It reminded me of the George-W-Bush-psychology TV series 24, with Kiefer Sutherland, which, despite the fact that it ran for ten years, I was lucky enough to catch only one of; and in which torture is something you just have to do, I mean Those Other Guys are bad!
This is a girls-can-play-too movie, and the central consciousness is meant to be ambivalent, but come on. In the showdown at Evil HQ the father-figure murders a mother and two kids, but the heroine can’t bring herself to shoot him. It had to be done.
But in Anglo-Saxon America that’s unlikely. We defend morality, because morality is us. (For more on that see Greece versus the Puritans.)
"After meeting a religious person," said Voltaire, "I always feel I must wash my hands." That’s how this film leaves you.
Weakness and Woody
At dinner last night after Irrational Man my Precious Other said, "Good or bad, Woody Allen attracts everyone."
"Well," I said, "not quite."
"In Europe he does," she said, and yes, the open-air cinema—common enough in Athens, but this one is the size of an American drive-in—had on a Monday night been packed. "But every time you see one of his films," she added, "you expect just a little more. This movie left us with nothing."
Mm.
I dumped on Mr Allen’s inadequacies in my review of Magic in the Moonlight. Irrational Man, to dispense with it quickly, is fall-forward-on-your-nose dull until well into the second act. The plot is based on Hitchcock’s Rope (which kind of thievery is fine), only there it’s the students who get up to the mischief, not the professor; and the ending is from Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (also OK, though here less gracefully handled).
"Honestly," said Patricia Highsmith, "I don't understand why people get so worked up about a little murder."
It’s a sloppy film, plagued by endless vapid voice-overs. Some of the shots strain towards Hitchcock (see Hitch and Cary), and would have been eloquent in themselves, but are poisoned by inane "philosophical" observations that would embarrass a high-school kid, and give no pleasure; and by inaner music, Ramsey Lewis’s 1965 version of "The In Crowd," as flat as Muzak, and just as irritating.
It is unnecessary, I suppose, to mention the unnecessary scenes, Professor Desperate saying good-bye to a husband we’ve never met, and the unnecessary Joaquin Phoenix, always determinedly weird, here a little too Brando. Even the belly is coming along.
Mm.
OK, enough. He’s not bright all the way around the block, but he’s a champion of weakness, and his icon is worth more than his work. As a stand-up comedian he reveled in his own humiliations, and was a relief from Hemingway Man (see Hemingway for Wimps)—he mocked Hemingway Man. Bob Hope had done this, as had Jerry Lewis, but they buddied with, and implicitly reaffirmed, tougher guys. In Woody Allen’s presence Hemingway Man became irrelevant. The Beats tried to do that, and the hippies, but Hemingway Man always re-emerged.
Hemingway himself says that when he drank with Joyce in Paris the latter would invariably stimulate a rancorous argument with someone, and when it got pushy would simply say, "Deal with him, Hemingway." And Woody Allen's preoccupation with him, from an early stand-up routine about the Paris scene, punctuated by the refrain, "And then Hemingway punched me in the mouth," to Midnight in Paris ("OK, who wants to fight?") suggests that he sees himself, with some justice, as the anti-Hemingway.
An ancient and alternate tradition has it that weakness is royal. Frazer and Graves tell us that pre-historic kings were sacrificed, and lamed to keep them from escaping—hence the high heels worn by tragic actors in more civilized times, to signify their helplessness. (Right, girls? See The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France.) Think of the kings on the chess board, almost as weak as their pawns. "High Life" columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, who wants to see King Constantine back on the Greek throne (and you never know), despises "the macho primitivism of Prince Harry." It just ain’t royal.
The great twentieth-century novelists—Joyce, Proust, James—and the poets—Lorca and Eliot—are obsessed by weakness. Look at Fellini’s self-portrait in 8½ as an impotent god. (See Fellini.)
But it’s not for the lower orders, you know. Let them eat Hemingway.
No, the only wholehearted intrusion of weakness into pop culture—weakness that approves of itself, not the weakness of a Stan Laurel that weeps and wishes to be otherwise—is Woody Allen. What was that fight movie in which he says he has, not an Achilles’ heel but an Achilles’ body? Even the jokes are weak.
My own hero, a womanizer and a gigolo (the two métiers don’t coalesce, of course, but life is contradictions; it’s nothing else), is a model of every sort of weakness—physical, moral, mental. But Toby enjoys it and, permit me to say, he’s funnier:
She’s Funny That Way: Having It All
The label I hung on Peter Bogdanovich when I was a student was "archival." Of all the directors we were watching at the time, he was the most meticulous in his references. And indeed his approach to film—and to life, it seems—is scholarly.
This would be unforgiveable if his work weren’t so funny. But it’s more than funny. It’s—how to say—liberating. Uplifting—not in the moral sense, and not in the "feel-good-movie" sense, a genre that can be singularly depressing.
When I was a young novelist wintering in India, bluffing it out and wondering what I could really actually write, I discovered Wodehouse—rediscovered him, I guess; I had looked at his books as a kid. The Indians, no matter what you may think, adore things British, and in India, like so many before me, I found my master. I remembered being the funny guy in high school, and realized that this was something I could do if I wanted to—and I wanted to.
Wodehouse’s only real match in movies was Ernst Lubitsch, who is Peter Bogdanivich’s master, and so I watch Bogdanovich’s career especially closely. Lubitsch’s spirits are invariably high (so enviable!), and with Wodehouse he shares a delight in stories about people who have it all—all the money, all the freedom, and in Lubitsch’s case all the sex. Suffer on your own time. His Trouble in Paradise, The Merry Widow and To Be or Not to Be are at the top of my list. (See Gorgeousness.)
Lubitsch’s nearest and most legitimate offspring was his scenarist Billy Wilder, also an incurable tease, who however made the occasional swoop into seriousness. "Memories," said Wodehouse, "are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them." But who can help it? We all commit the sin of seriousness, we dive like dolphins in our thoughts, and look back at the masters like exiles from Eden.
Bogdanovich, Lubitsch’s, what, grandson, has his own highs and lows, but he gave us an unforgettable Daisy Miller, rendering Winterbourne's silences as dialogue ("My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place." "Oh, I’m sorry." "He’s in Schenectady."). And in At Long Last Love the lady lead falls for the gentleman lead because he’s rich—which is fine with both of them. Big deal. Then the actors have a palpably good time singing songs by Cole Porter, who is the musical, and indeed the lyric-poet third in this gladsome trinity.
"Arnold" in She’s Funny That Way has the same yen for call girls Lubitsch had (I mean the actual Ernst, who died in bed with one, or wherever they were), though Arnold likes to rescue them with large sums of money to fund start-ups. OK, I’m not saying it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen, but here is a film in which Jennifer Aniston is actually acceptable—a milestone in The Cinemah. It’s on a level of intelligence that’s not easy to come by, there are laughs in it, and "a laugh," someone says in To Be or Not to Be, "is nothing to be sneezed at."
It’s all I ask.
Mr. Holmes and the Watson Problem
My favorite film Sherlock is Peter Cushing in The Hound of the Baskervilles—the aquiline nose, the intensity, the passionate commitment to being Holmes. His real partner in it is the marvelous Christopher Lee as Sir Henry, long paired with Cushing in the Dracula series, he as Drac, Cushing as the stake-pounder. Doctor Watson doesn’t have much of a presence in this one, except to fetch Holmes his tobacco. "This, I think, is a two-pipe problem."
In my favorite Holmes movie, Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Watson is reduced to a frantic clown, albehe admirably acted by Colin Blakely. This time Chistopher Lee plays Mycroft, who sneers at his brother’s powers of deduction, recalling that as a child, "by carefully observing a neighbor's house he deduced that babies were brought, not by the stork, but by the midwife in her satchel." "As good an explanation as any," smiles Watson.
(Let us not speak of the Guy Ritchie effort. My stomach won’t bear it.)
Because Watson, you see, is the two-pipe problem. In the movies he’s reduced to a faffling fool, a straight man to Holmes’s quips, someone to be said "elementary" to. In the books he tells the story. It’s through his uncomprehending eyes that we see the giant mind at work.
Conan Doyle didn’t invent this method, nor did he invent the detective story. Both were the gifts of Edgar Poe. There have been elaborate scholarly attempts to place the origins of the detective story in classical literature, etc., and for the man of modest intelligence reporting on a genius we might think of Boswell on Johnson; but as strategies of fiction they begin with Poe’s Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, who solves "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (in a Paris Poe had never seen) by the method of pure logic, as narrated by the awed friend who shares his lodgings.
(P. G. Wodehouse took the Holmes/Watson model for his Jeeves books, in which an upper-class twit narrates the successes of his brilliant valet. And in my stunted way I too am of this lineage: my series of comic novels is told by a no-good gigolo whose keeper’s nine-year-old daughter out-thinks him. Nor am I above lifting some of the Master’s phrases. We are none of us honest men.)
In Mr. Holmes (note the period—this is for American consumption; Brits don’t put dots after Mr), we have no Watson at all. Watson is the distorter, the builder of personae (only his hands appear onscreen), and to be dispensed with as Holmes backs away from his Holmes-ness toward something more, alas, human. Logic and deduction are not enough. The solitude of the individual is the thing. Pathos. Humanity. Well.
Mr. Holmes, however, has stepped out of myth to savor solitude and self-loathing. His old self might just have picked up his Stradivarius (in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes he plays a notoriously difficult Bach piece), or polished his monograph on cigar ash, or done some coke.
So much for the human. And after all one has such feelings. It has been suggested now and then that a more human Robert MacLean might be attempted. But one persists.
Fifty Shades of Grey, or Gidget Gets a Whipping
Here's a film that combines two genres. In my review of Kingsman I mentioned Women’s Movies, which can be good. Douglas Sirk was the master—Imitation of Life and older-woman-younger-man All That Heaven Allows. Fassbinder remade the latter as the spare and Brechtian Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, one of his best.
Hollywood has always had a problem mixing sex and sentiment (as who does not?), nor is it solved here. She gets drunk and he takes her home with vomit on her clothes, so there is a bit of kink in it. Then he flies her in his helicopter to exotic Seattle, the lights glimmering below like the Champs-Élysées, and walks her through his mansion past Things You Will Never Have. Servants, everything.
Thirty minutes in we find out she’s a virgin. Right? For her deflowering, which I take to be the theme and ambition of the Surfing Movie, the erotic spectacles are the unveiling of her nipples and his pale but determined behind. (Is he not a bit anemic to be a firm-handed maître? He looks like he’s got a hemhorroid.) The missionary position is subsumed into the movie kiss, and her emotion is articulated prettily by her feet.
But wait—the bondage he pursues now is legal—something many of us understand. No use squirming. Shout and no one will hear. There’s a ball strapped in your mouth anyway. For the next thirty minutes the goal is to get her to sign a contract. Only then can he hit her with the fly-swatter.
Like other such films—for they are a Hollywood tradition, and invariably embarrassing—this one implicitly invokes our experience of Internet porn, and tries to tame it, to domesticate the inhuman (let’s face it) sexual emotion by marrying it to more predictable ones.
One thinks also of Don Jon—did you see that? It begins by amusing us with imitation Net porn, then turns against it and gets teachy. Julianne Moore, in a most unpersuasive performance, balances her lust with an erupt-at-any-moment weepiness because she is, and this is essential, A Good Person. As Fernando Pessoa said, "Praise be to God I’m not good."
In perhaps the worst of them, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, every time the camera gets rolling Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks "make love" when they’re supposed to be having sex. If you’re feeling masochistic this one will make you cringe.
Contrast Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (see the review of The Two Faces of January), in which no such rapprochement is even considered. "Americans," Europeans like to say, "are such children."
I work that side of the street myself—see Beauty and the Beast—but I do comedy.
The end of Fifty Shades—are we at the end already? No, let’s mention the product placement. Only in movies do people use Apples. Have you ever seen a PC laptop in a movie? What are you on now?
Let’s mention the literacy: "My mother is on husband number four. She’s an incurable romantic." "Are you?" "Well, I study English lit. I kind of have to be." Unless you read Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or Pope, or Dryden, or Joyce, or Eliot, or James, or Nabokov. What are they teaching the kids these days?
No more surfing for the Gidge. For now. Tomorrow, as the lady said, is another day. But then as Nabokov said, "In my experience tomorrow is the same day." Watch this space.
Woman in Gold and Helen Mirren’s Body
Much has happened since I last came down the mountain, but nothing that could interrupt my self-contemplation until La La Land; which we all want opinions on so we can meet the intellectual challenge of Oscar night.
Three of these films are about Hollywood, two (but not Jackie) are women’s movies, and two have the same plot.
The dullest, the least consequential, the most asinine is Doctor Strange, in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton, from whom we have come to expect more (see my review of The Imitation Game), are reduced to punching and kicking their way through a New Age video-game fantasy that does nothing to enhance the evening, though as trash it achieves something like purity. But one can’t entirely blame the actors; I too am vulnerable to being offered large sums of money.
Slightly less onerous is Arrival, which apart from some CGI verticals is a flat experience. A lady professor who’s smarter than everybody else figures out the aliens’ script—by which I mean their scenario and their way of writing, both of which are based on circles. Everything is a circle. Time is a circle. Very female.
And very New Age. Why are space aliens always represented as either deeply good or so evil they must be annihilated? They are never, like ourselves, both. These, beneath their monstrous exteriors, are sweethearts. All they want is For Us All To Work Together, which does make them worthy of extermination.
My own woman, if I may so speak, loved it. To quote her (let us forgive her her accent), “Only a mother who lost her child could take off her suit. Women are much more big-hearted. They are contaminated with egotism and ambition, but these are temporary things. Women combine practicality with intuition and vision. Men are needed as drones, to open jars and plant seeds. Then the nature that women are, flowers. And many many more things. Women are more intuitive and have more endurance.”
At which I nod and eat my goat cheese. No, I love feminists. So civilizing. Alas that civilization floats on a sea of unsavory impulses, most of them mine. “I have cultivated my hysteria,” says Baudelaire, “with pleasure and terror.”
Let’s go to our second women’s movie, Bridget Jones's Baby, which is funny, and a good evening’s entertainment—my critical standard for excellence. Still, there’s something sad about the Bridget Jones series. It began, and persists (I haven’t seen every instalment) as a satire of secretaries’ wishes, a Plain-Jane office girl fought over by rich and handsome men for whom she is somehow the summit of desire. This time they want to be the father of the baby they’re not even sure they’ve sired. Triumphant in her wedding dress, infant on hip, she walks off, not into the sunset but toward a reception on the broadest of lawns, leaving bridegroom and lover to reconcile as best they can.
As satire it does seem harsh, especially since the actress has shocked everyone by having her face redone. The finale promises a sequel by resurrecting Hugh Grant’s character, but where’s our Plain Jane? (See What Does a Woman Want?)
Beauty is the unstated theme of Jackie, the most beautiful of women (on the trip to Texas Jack apologized for her lateness, “But Mrs. Kennedy,” he smiled, “is worth waiting for”) rising to the trauma. I had expected something more like The Greek Tycoon (which wasn’t bad), but Jackie held me.
Cutting back and forth is the style of the TV commercial and the documentary, and I find the one as rhetorical as the other. If journalism, as Malcolm Lowry said, “equals intellectual male prostitution of speech and writing,” documentary too is simple opinion-making. But here the style is in the service of portraying someone’s dawning strength—“someone’s,” not necessarily Jackie’s, but it makes a good movie; an actor’s movie, in fact, one legendary beauty portraying another.
Peter Sarsgaard is too tall for Bobby—LBJ called him “that little shitass,” “that grandstanding little runt”—but Saarsgaard carries the male lead like the pro he is. Jack, however, was the big guy; Caspar Phillipson has the face for him, and the voice and accent are evocative, but not the height. And here is a sunset performance by the great and elastic John Hurt, as one of his best Irishmen—there’ve been a few—and the most appealing apologist for the Christian approach since Friar Laurence.
In Kingsman and James Bond I waxed wistful about Jack’s sex life. “If I don’t have a woman for three days,” he told Harold Macmillan, “I get a terrible headache.” And Jackie avenged herself with movie stars. Ah, well. Absolvo te. Should cheer Melania up.
The heroic journalist Edward R. Murrow, speaking of documentary, is edited into the film as he accompanies Jackie on the White-House tour. Murrow’s broadcasts from London during the Blitz, the air-raid sirens in the background, had much to do with the US entering the war. (Joel McCrea in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent reprises that; see Hitch and Cary.) Then when Murrow got to TV he destroyed Joseph McCarthy, and interviewed absolutely everybody. I don’t remember Jackie being as nervous as the film made her out to be, but then even I don’t know everything.
I hadn’t known, for example, about the wanted poster hung up around Texas before the shooting.
OK, let’s calm way down with Paterson, based on, and updating, William Carlos Williams’ long poem that sought to do for Paterson, New Jersey, what Joyce did for Dublin. The film has its own Patersonians to commemorate, but what it's after is the meditative tone of the poem, and there are real pleasures here, mainly in the movement of the camera through a world that is deliberately banal.
It’s the first Jim Jarmusch movie I’ve ever sort of liked. He usually does kid stuff. When I was teaching film in Canada students would come to me and say “Hey, Bob, did you see the new Jarmusch film? Isn’t it great?” They were so enthusiastic. You can’t discourage them. I’d smile politely and wait for a chance to change the subject.
Paterson suggests what life must be like on diazepam. I am doing this, I am standing here doing this, there is nothing else, sort of thing. There’s a pleasing feeling of being on another planet. And the people on the bus are, you know, nice. In the poem the refrain is “No ideas but in things,” and here’s Williams’ most famous lyric:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Like Ezra Pound—“The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough” (see Senryu)—and like Allen Ginsberg, who idolized them both, Williams inclines to the oriental. (Three poets no one reads anymore; see Nobody Left to Read). And indeed, it’s a Japanese poet who concludes things by giving the bus driver the gift of the blank page.
The pointlessness of passion is portrayed in the subplot about a guy in love with a girl who wants no part of him. Thou shalt not be poisoned by passion, corrupted by concepts, nullified by nudity. So much depends upon a nude woman glazed with rain water. You can keep the chickens.
In this yearning for the simple is something essentially American. “I hate American simplicity,” says the American in Henry James’s The American. “I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.”
So let’s get complicated. Here are three films about Hollywood, the first by the superb Coen brothers, though not their best, Hail, Caesar. George Clooney, as he usually does for the Coens, plays a buffoon. Can you think of a Coens film without a buffoon? (See The satisfactions of Inside Llewyn Davis). Clooney plays a movie star kidnapped and brainwashed by a communist cell of writers who slip Marxist messages into studio-movie dialogue. Herbert Marcuse himself is a member, not that he gets any respect.
Religion, I like to say, is politics, and the Coens to some extent agree: here we have a Catholic studio head who’s at confession every day, but who seems to forget the Church when he convenes a priest, a minister and a rabbi—the old joke—to get their approval on a studio film about the Crucifixion, and all they can do is argue about whether Jesus was God. In the movie movie Roman soldier Clooney barges through a crowd to the feet of the crucified Jesus and someone calls time for lunch. Fun, sort of.
The Coens’ take on Hollywood has always been ambivalent. In Barton Fink it’s a kind of elephants’ graveyard, a second-rate place where first-rate people wash up and lead inauthentic lives. Even Faulkner comes off as cheap. What the Coens bring to any project is distance—they are as ironic as Hamlet—but sometimes they’re so aloof that it gets cold.
What can be excessive in them is too rare in Woody Allen, and perhaps it’s facile to conflate irony with intelligence. I drub Mr. Allen for his missed chances and his high-school psychology (see Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight, and below, Weakness and Woody), but I can’t help but like him.
One of his recurrent themes is Hollywood as Phony-Land and New York as Where People Are Real (see what I mean?), and Café Society goes all out on this one. Apart from the anxiety of doomed love there isn’t much holding it together. There’s an interesting assassin—we all prefer Woody when he’s funny—but one finds oneself groping for more.
It has the same plot as La La Land, the Umbrellas of Cherbourg plot, Romeo And Juliet Marry Somebody Else—great-grandchildren of the racier Così fan tutte and that most pagan of plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream. But let us leave Café Society without further insults and get to—
La La Land! A musical with dancing, what could be better? All that discipline for a few moments of joy—one is grateful. The script has no disappointing moments. I like especially, though I don’t understand it, Sebastian’s account of the origins of jazz as dialogue between people who don’t speak each other’s language (really?), which sets up the finale, when he communicates his thoughts to Mia with a piano in a crowded bar.
And we’re strangely back in the realm of courtly love, where the Astaire and Kelly musicals live: he lets her into the car first, rushes ahead to open the door for her. But we’re up to date in that this is a film about making it. In Busby Berkeley and the other pre-war musicals the characters are already where they want to be, or don’t care: it’s love, and in Berkeley sensuality, that drives them.
The opening sets this up, all those kids dancing on top of their cars—how can we but feel their desperate ambition? Which is the theme. You are what you do. A musical should delight in frivolity, in playfulness, in who-gives-a-damn. But this is the age of Moneyball and Joy (see below), in which the star is a business plan, and you have work-ethic sex.
Every now and then, in La La Land, there’s a break in the action for some quick summaries of what happens in the meantime—they must have taken ages to shoot—which are the opposite of quick. They are merely story, not plot (see Fellini for the difference), and slow things down. Their very realism is heavy—this is a musical! Perhaps that’s why the final montage, the dream montage, full of stage effects and artificiality, works so beautifully.
The music? OK. A little too family-friendly. Jazz, like all art, should be insolent (see Smart-assery is the essence of art). But it’s not like when a combo plays a Beatle song, and you feel cheated.
And the joy is there. Fred wore white socks so we could follow his footwork; Ryan, white shoes. Emma Stone doesn’t need them:
“One situation,” said Patricia Highsmith, “maybe one alone—could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.”
Amen.
No one gets murdered in Carol, but Cate Blanchett, whose menacing, almost hostile features are for once put to the right use, almost pulls the trigger on the spy whose been taping her sex with Rooney Mara.
There’s a nice film-noir feel about the fur coat, the deep pockets, the revolver—and Ms Mara is very Audrey Hepburn.
On the other hand, this is a bit too much of an introduce-the-bourgeoisie-to-lesbian-sex movie, an editor’s movie, jerking us around in time, and I so much prefer it when the style stays out of the way. But that’s what you get with a studio production, and baby, this is expensive! They did a superb job of evoking the early fifties, Eddie Fisher on the soundtrack, but why blow it with twenty-first-century linguistic currency? “These,” says a young man of Therese’s photographs, “are seriously good.” Ouch.
Oh well. But Carol is a smooth movie, and gives the feeling of passion—in fact I would suggest that passion is smoothness, in any form of entertainment, including life. And the object, if I may use the word, of Carol’s lust is nice and quiet. Withdrawn. Shy. These are enormous advantages. Anyone who’s been involved with very young ladies knows they can talk your ear off.
In the novel she’s nineteen, and a theatre set designer, not a photographer. In the novel she sends Carol a Christmas card; in the movie Carol forgets her gloves—which is better. In the novel the toy for Carol’s daughter is a doll; here it’s a train. In the novel it’s a toney British actress Therese almost goes home with at the end; here it’s someone whose voice we don’t hear. This is all Wikipedia stuff—I haven’t read the book, avid consumer of Highsmith though I am. (See my review of The Two Faces of January.)
“I just had sex with them,” Therese’s boyfriend tells her; “I love you!” This may be the defining issue. Go ahead and draw the line.
(For more on this, see the review of Fifty Shades of Grey, below, and, overleaf, the review of Kingsman.)
Joy, we may say with confidence, is a Women’s Movie, though not in a league with the ones I've mentioned. It’s a remake (perhaps it doesn't know that) of the 1959 comedy It Happened to Jane, in which the delightful Doris Day is the businesswoman, young Jack Lemmon is the subservient male, and Ernie Kovaks is the creep who tries to ruin her business—all of them vivid performances.
The grandmother, who tells the story after she dies (like Sunset Blvd. or the Anthony Perkins character in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean—and yet not like them at all), recalls all those people on Twitter who want to “coach” you. A frightening number of people on Twitter want to “coach” you. So does Granny. Don’t worry, you can do it. Very New Age.
And it’s a weepy. I teared up when the woman cried at the end. Makes you hate yourself.
(Don’t expect me to be fair to Joy—I have an allergy to Robert De Niro movies.)
Pleasure in such films depends on your heart being in the right place, as mine is not. Neither is Highsmith’s. That’s what I like about her.
The Big Short and Bertolt Brecht
Brecht was a committed communist. His “alienation effect”—designed to wake you from the trance of “art” that hides from you your socio-economic circumstances—was a device for the theatre, but it influenced a lot of movies. In America escaping the Nazis he worked for example with Fritz Lang, another escapee, and so we have Sylvia Sidney in You and Me setting up the blackboard and reforming some crooks by demonstrating the meager profits of stealing.
(In 1947 Brecht told the House Un-American Activities Committee what they wanted to hear and the next day was on a plane for east Berlin.)
The A-effect really came to life in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, and in Contempt, which I consider his best (though my critical opinion is based on Brigitte Bardot’s, how shall I say, presence), Lang plays himself, making a film of the Odyssey for producer Jack Palance, at his demonic best, and Penelope/Brigitte is unfaithful.
The whole Godard oeuvre, right down to the present, although it gives rarified pleasure, hates itself for that.
And now we have The Big Short, in which characters interrupt the action to tell us what’s going on, a stripper’s breasts are less interesting than her mortgages, and we are meant to be sobered—though there are no surprises here—by our victimization.
Personally I don’t have a position. Garcia Lorca’s judgment on Wall Street is sufficient vengeance. Let them have it if they want it. Dip him in the river who loves water, sort of thing.
But The Big Short has Things To Say, and says them in a style that puts it in sync with the remarkable popularity, at the moment, of documentary film—a highly selective form of rhetoric designed to teach us something (the word comes from the Latin for “teach”). Implicitly, and invariably, it teaches morality.
The great documentaries, the models of all documentaries, were made by Leni Riefenstahl. If you’re a documentarist and you’re not looking at Riefenstahl, you’re looking at someone who’s looking at Riefenstahl. (If you’re looking at Capra, who’s looking at Eisenstein, who’s looking at Griffith, you’re on a lower cornice of Purgatory.) She teaches the morality of the god Hitler, and Triumph of the Will begins with his descent to earth. But she does it with extraordinary long takes and impossibly graceful camera movements. Cut-rate documentary thrives on quick cutting, a shot for every line in the voice-over, often having nothing to do with anything except that the phrase needs substantiation.
And this is what we get in The Big Short. Pieces of scenes that don’t work with the actors are chopped apart at mid-sentence just to keep the thing moving, and the result, yes, is an abrasive nervous energy that must, one supposes, approximate the caffeine highs (meth is so last-week) these guys are on.
Guys. Guys and guys. One black female covers our PC needs. Margot Robbie in the bath gives a short lecture, but it's a film, mainly, without women. Boys together, and the machismo that drives their exploits. “That’s a nice shirt. Do they make it for men?”
And within those limits we have “characters”, which is, you know, nice. The one played by the admirably inventive Christian Bale is nevertheless a reprise of Alan Turing (see my review of The Imitation Game), a damaged man who is incapable of irony.
Steve Carell is the manic moralist. What has befallen his voice? It’s become a tenor so high and thin he doesn’t have to imitate shrill; though he does.
Brad Pitt in a beard plays Earth Father to the garage-start-up kids. Why does he help them? “Well, you said you wanted to be rich.” Just to show you it’s not that great. Makes us all feel better. (Personally, I don’t want to be “rich”—couldn’t interest me less. I just want lots of money.) Pitt played the equally specious moral agent in 12 Years a Slave, which gets Canadian history wrong (see my review of same). What we’re watching here is a version of Walter Huston’s Father God in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but don’t get your hopes up.
And one of the guys likes Nobu restaurants, which gives it a, I don't know, a human touch. Otherwise it’s regrettable music, men’s bare feet and other sorts of A-effect ugliness.
The faster the editing, I have elsewhere remarked (in the review of The Wolf of Wall Street), the crasser the production. It becomes something you want to get over with.
Michael Grunwald, scarcely a man of the left, wrote in Politico that the makers of The Big Short didn’t know what they were talking about, that the financial giants did feel pain, that they were stupid, not criminal, that if they had broken the law eager prosecutors would gleefully have dragged them to court, that the rules did change, that we shouldn’t be bitter about the outcome.
Whether because I’m ignorant or because I’m insufficiently moral, I have nothing to say about that. What I’m concerned with is the aesthetic object, if I may so call it—the movie. And the kind of justice that interests me is what happened to “Mack the Knife”:
Brecht’s unglamorous moralistic Threepenny Opera is based on the glamorous eighteenth-century The Beggar’s Opera, but in Brecht the noble libertine Macheath becomes the murderous villain Mack the Knife, as in Kurt Weill’s song.
But when the film was made (edited by my friend Jean Oser—I knew the old man when we were teaching together at the University of Ottawa), Brecht denounced the performance of the song as unBrechtian. And if that wasn’t insult enough, it was taken up by Louis, Ella, Frank and other glamorizers. But it’s Bobby Darin’s version that lives in the memory and snaps the fingers.
Ah, fate!
Three thrillers: Mad Max, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Sicario
See, what happened was, I (me, myself) suggested that we go and see Mad Max. I thought it would be a laugh—something mindless and full of action.
Big mistake. I mentioned somewhere that nothing ever happens in a Hollywood movie that can’t be understood by a twelve-year-old child. Mad Max—I’m not exaggerating—is for six-year-olds. Bang-bang-you’re-dead sort of thing. I remember being six. You put your hands to your heart, mime the ecstasy of death and fall down. Then you get up—instant resurrection. This movie was a profoundly childish experience.
At intermission—they have intermissions in Greece so you can freshen your drink, which in this case was opportune. Here's the cinema we were in, though "in" is hardly the word:
Where was I? I turned to my vooman (let us indulge for a moment the fantasy of ownership; it’s a cheap enough thrill) and said, "How are you doing?" "I’m surviving," she said. Very embarrassing.
The second half was exactly the same as the first—the trip out, the trip back. The same flexi-pole hovers over the retread Chevrolets. The lack of invention was catatonic. It did have one good line: "Who are you praying to?" "Whoever’s listening.” Me too. I was mortified, exposing a helpless woman to this spectacle!
With The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I redeemed myself. My V-word didn’t want any part of it, but we were four at this one, and the film put us in such a good mood! At dinner afterwards the conversation was lightsome.
I am not a Guy Ritchie fan. In my review, below, of Mr. Holmes I dispensed with his Robert Downey thing in a one-line sneer, and his work has never interested me before. But what I love about spy movies is how funny they are—much funnier than studio comedies—and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. had us laughing out loud.
Ritchie mitigates the obligatory spy-movie scenes—the showdown at Evil HQ, for example—by tossing them into split-screen a la The Thomas Crowne Affair (Jewison's). To that movie he also owes the dune buggy; to The Great Escape, the motorcycle chase; to the Bud Spencer/Terence Hill comedies, the no-mercy guy relationship—all honorable debts.
Most important, it was an adult film. Usually "adult" means pornographic; here it means uninfantile. It skips the predictable human-weapon stuff and keeps moving—in fact it makes a style of ellipsis, which I liked. That’s what cinema is. Good movies don’t show it all—it’s what they leave out that’s effective.
This, I take it, is why The Man from U.N.C.L.E. scored so much lower on Rotten Tomatoes than Mad Max: the kids want it graphic. (Ah, the inner life of a six-year-old.)
Sicario on the other hand scored big, and with this one my stock fell again. My V withdrew her confidence. Another boneheaded suggestion from Y.T. (I’m going to get off thrillers. Spy movies or nothing. But that’s what I thought this was!)
It reminded me of the George-W-Bush-psychology TV series 24, with Kiefer Sutherland, which, despite the fact that it ran for ten years, I was lucky enough to catch only one of; and in which torture is something you just have to do, I mean Those Other Guys are bad!
When Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is tortured by a former Nazi, no revenge is taken, at least not by Solo. Here torture is relished. It’s a film that takes itself 101% seriously—there isn’t a laugh in it. It’s us and them, baby, you just gotta learn.
This is a girls-can-play-too movie, and the central consciousness is meant to be ambivalent, but come on. In the showdown at Evil HQ the father-figure murders a mother and two kids, but the heroine can’t bring herself to shoot him. It had to be done.
James Brolin’s smug baggy-pants Good Guy says there would be no problem “if twenty percent of the people in this country would stop snorting that shit.” What if fifty-one percent of them made what they put in their noses their own legal business? The cartels, who deal in money, not in "drugs," would disappear.
But in Anglo-Saxon America that’s unlikely. We defend morality, because morality is us. (For more on that see Greece versus the Puritans.)
"After meeting a religious person," said Voltaire, "I always feel I must wash my hands." That’s how this film leaves you.
Weakness and Woody
At dinner last night after Irrational Man my Precious Other said, "Good or bad, Woody Allen attracts everyone."
"Well," I said, "not quite."
"In Europe he does," she said, and yes, the open-air cinema—common enough in Athens, but this one is the size of an American drive-in—had on a Monday night been packed. "But every time you see one of his films," she added, "you expect just a little more. This movie left us with nothing."
Mm.
I dumped on Mr Allen’s inadequacies in my review of Magic in the Moonlight. Irrational Man, to dispense with it quickly, is fall-forward-on-your-nose dull until well into the second act. The plot is based on Hitchcock’s Rope (which kind of thievery is fine), only there it’s the students who get up to the mischief, not the professor; and the ending is from Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (also OK, though here less gracefully handled).
"Honestly," said Patricia Highsmith, "I don't understand why people get so worked up about a little murder."
It’s a sloppy film, plagued by endless vapid voice-overs. Some of the shots strain towards Hitchcock (see Hitch and Cary), and would have been eloquent in themselves, but are poisoned by inane "philosophical" observations that would embarrass a high-school kid, and give no pleasure; and by inaner music, Ramsey Lewis’s 1965 version of "The In Crowd," as flat as Muzak, and just as irritating.
It is unnecessary, I suppose, to mention the unnecessary scenes, Professor Desperate saying good-bye to a husband we’ve never met, and the unnecessary Joaquin Phoenix, always determinedly weird, here a little too Brando. Even the belly is coming along.
My P.O. says not to be too hard on Woody. He doesn’t deserve that. "Let’s see what his next film is like."
Mm.
OK, enough. He’s not bright all the way around the block, but he’s a champion of weakness, and his icon is worth more than his work. As a stand-up comedian he reveled in his own humiliations, and was a relief from Hemingway Man (see Hemingway for Wimps)—he mocked Hemingway Man. Bob Hope had done this, as had Jerry Lewis, but they buddied with, and implicitly reaffirmed, tougher guys. In Woody Allen’s presence Hemingway Man became irrelevant. The Beats tried to do that, and the hippies, but Hemingway Man always re-emerged.
We associate machismo with Latin America, but Graham Greene once remarked that it was a Roman invention. I’d be glad if someone could point me to proof of that. Certainly it survives in former provinces of the Empire—which include, we may notice, North Africa and the Middle East. In India, China, Sub-Saharan Africa there is no such ethic. The Germans and the English have their own style of brutality—though the British were ruled by French-speaking Normans, Vikings infected with Latin macho. What a combination. (See My Racial Profile.) Anglo-Saxon America (and, one suspects, Australia and New Zealand) have Hemingway. Keeps the boys keen.
But whence Hemingway? Greek missionaries, the story goes, trekked north, taught the Russians their letters (some of which they got backwards), and left the Roman manner for Putin and Yul Brynner—and for Tolstoy, whose Hadji Murad was Hemingway's model, which closes the circle. From Bully-boy (Zelda said he always picked on somebody smaller) to stylist.
(The Russian model of weakness, on the other hand, is Tolstoy's darling Chekhov: "If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.")
But whence Hemingway? Greek missionaries, the story goes, trekked north, taught the Russians their letters (some of which they got backwards), and left the Roman manner for Putin and Yul Brynner—and for Tolstoy, whose Hadji Murad was Hemingway's model, which closes the circle. From Bully-boy (Zelda said he always picked on somebody smaller) to stylist.
(The Russian model of weakness, on the other hand, is Tolstoy's darling Chekhov: "If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.")
An ancient and alternate tradition has it that weakness is royal. Frazer and Graves tell us that pre-historic kings were sacrificed, and lamed to keep them from escaping—hence the high heels worn by tragic actors in more civilized times, to signify their helplessness. (Right, girls? See The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France.) Think of the kings on the chess board, almost as weak as their pawns. "High Life" columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, who wants to see King Constantine back on the Greek throne (and you never know), despises "the macho primitivism of Prince Harry." It just ain’t royal.
The great twentieth-century novelists—Joyce, Proust, James—and the poets—Lorca and Eliot—are obsessed by weakness. Look at Fellini’s self-portrait in 8½ as an impotent god. (See Fellini.)
Salvador Dalí told Mike Wallace, "I adore three things: weakness, because in modern physics everything is weak, is nothing; all physicists now talk about anti-matter: ten years ago I painted anti-matter angels. Old age, because the young are completely stupid. And luxury, because luxury is one product of monarchy, and I, more every day, am monarchic—not in the political sense—Dalí never touches politics; if there were a monarchy party I would have nothing to do with it."
But it’s not for the lower orders, you know. Let them eat Hemingway.
We did have Cary Grant, but as a younger man working with Howard Hawks he’d been Mr Macho. We had Louis Jourdan, but he was essentially disallowed—a decadent playboy in Gigi, and in The V.I.P.s a marvelously suave gigolo, but unworthy of Liz, you could see it right off.
No, the only wholehearted intrusion of weakness into pop culture—weakness that approves of itself, not the weakness of a Stan Laurel that weeps and wishes to be otherwise—is Woody Allen. What was that fight movie in which he says he has, not an Achilles’ heel but an Achilles’ body? Even the jokes are weak.
But an icon he is. For nine years, and perhaps with greater suppleness of imagination, that unbeautiful face featured in a syndicated comic strip. What could be more iconic? And always, whether in films or writing them, he consoles us for our cowardice, our neuroses, our ignobility. Saint Woody, pray for us.
Good! As that respected entomologist Vladimir Nabokov said, "Perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest."
My own hero, a womanizer and a gigolo (the two métiers don’t coalesce, of course, but life is contradictions; it’s nothing else), is a model of every sort of weakness—physical, moral, mental. But Toby enjoys it and, permit me to say, he’s funnier:
The label I hung on Peter Bogdanovich when I was a student was "archival." Of all the directors we were watching at the time, he was the most meticulous in his references. And indeed his approach to film—and to life, it seems—is scholarly.
This would be unforgiveable if his work weren’t so funny. But it’s more than funny. It’s—how to say—liberating. Uplifting—not in the moral sense, and not in the "feel-good-movie" sense, a genre that can be singularly depressing.
Graham Greene once confessed, with some embarrassment, that his own favorite writer was P. G. Wodehouse, because no one else got his mood so high. Precisely. And Wodehouse's insolence has nothing to do with feel-goodism: "Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse."
When I was a young novelist wintering in India, bluffing it out and wondering what I could really actually write, I discovered Wodehouse—rediscovered him, I guess; I had looked at his books as a kid. The Indians, no matter what you may think, adore things British, and in India, like so many before me, I found my master. I remembered being the funny guy in high school, and realized that this was something I could do if I wanted to—and I wanted to.
Wodehouse’s only real match in movies was Ernst Lubitsch, who is Peter Bogdanivich’s master, and so I watch Bogdanovich’s career especially closely. Lubitsch’s spirits are invariably high (so enviable!), and with Wodehouse he shares a delight in stories about people who have it all—all the money, all the freedom, and in Lubitsch’s case all the sex. Suffer on your own time. His Trouble in Paradise, The Merry Widow and To Be or Not to Be are at the top of my list. (See Gorgeousness.)
And his pleasure in sex was manifold—not just in representing it in the restrictive Will Haze era, not just in recommending open marriage, but in teasing America over its Puritanism, which gave him endless joy. In That Uncertain Feeling a man stands by while his wife has an affair—big deal—then throws the guy out of their bedroom and wins her back. (See The Lubitsch Touch.)
Lubitsch’s nearest and most legitimate offspring was his scenarist Billy Wilder, also an incurable tease, who however made the occasional swoop into seriousness. "Memories," said Wodehouse, "are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them." But who can help it? We all commit the sin of seriousness, we dive like dolphins in our thoughts, and look back at the masters like exiles from Eden.
Bogdanovich, Lubitsch’s, what, grandson, has his own highs and lows, but he gave us an unforgettable Daisy Miller, rendering Winterbourne's silences as dialogue ("My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place." "Oh, I’m sorry." "He’s in Schenectady."). And in At Long Last Love the lady lead falls for the gentleman lead because he’s rich—which is fine with both of them. Big deal. Then the actors have a palpably good time singing songs by Cole Porter, who is the musical, and indeed the lyric-poet third in this gladsome trinity.
The ancestor of She’s Funny That Way, despite the declared debt to Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown, is his Heaven Can Wait, in which a man recently dead recounts to the Devil his life of seductions, carried on during his marriage to a woman with whom he is deeply in love. When she leaves him over it he follows her to Kansas and re-elopes with her; and the Devil sends him up to Heaven for making so many women happy. He is a man, in short, who has it all, and Bogdanovich too loves to make films about people who have it all.
It’s all I ask.
Mr. Holmes and the Watson Problem
My favorite film Sherlock is Peter Cushing in The Hound of the Baskervilles—the aquiline nose, the intensity, the passionate commitment to being Holmes. His real partner in it is the marvelous Christopher Lee as Sir Henry, long paired with Cushing in the Dracula series, he as Drac, Cushing as the stake-pounder. Doctor Watson doesn’t have much of a presence in this one, except to fetch Holmes his tobacco. "This, I think, is a two-pipe problem."
My favorite film Watson is Nigel Bruce, who played him in a series of fourteen movies to Basil Rathbone’s Holmes. An actress who seems not to have liked Rathbone called him "two profiles pasted together," and "a folded umbrella taking elocution lessons," but I thought he was persuasive; and to his gimlet-eyed coldness Bruce supplied the toney fat-headed warmth for which he was invariably called upon.
In my favorite Holmes movie, Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Watson is reduced to a frantic clown, albehe admirably acted by Colin Blakely. This time Chistopher Lee plays Mycroft, who sneers at his brother’s powers of deduction, recalling that as a child, "by carefully observing a neighbor's house he deduced that babies were brought, not by the stork, but by the midwife in her satchel." "As good an explanation as any," smiles Watson.
In The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, an allusion to Holmes’s cocaine addiction, he teaches Freud his job—"You must learn, Doctor, not merely to see but to observe"—and Robert Duval’s Watson feels, quite rightly, de trop.
(Let us not speak of the Guy Ritchie effort. My stomach won’t bear it.)
Because Watson, you see, is the two-pipe problem. In the movies he’s reduced to a faffling fool, a straight man to Holmes’s quips, someone to be said "elementary" to. In the books he tells the story. It’s through his uncomprehending eyes that we see the giant mind at work.
Conan Doyle didn’t invent this method, nor did he invent the detective story. Both were the gifts of Edgar Poe. There have been elaborate scholarly attempts to place the origins of the detective story in classical literature, etc., and for the man of modest intelligence reporting on a genius we might think of Boswell on Johnson; but as strategies of fiction they begin with Poe’s Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, who solves "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (in a Paris Poe had never seen) by the method of pure logic, as narrated by the awed friend who shares his lodgings.
Poe is something of a phrase-maker (though his prose is—not inept, exactly, but without the merriment associated with dashing ability, like one’s own), and it’s a little embarrassing to read A Study in Scarlet and see how much, not just of Poe’s style but of his language Conan Doyle has appropriated.
(P. G. Wodehouse took the Holmes/Watson model for his Jeeves books, in which an upper-class twit narrates the successes of his brilliant valet. And in my stunted way I too am of this lineage: my series of comic novels is told by a no-good gigolo whose keeper’s nine-year-old daughter out-thinks him. Nor am I above lifting some of the Master’s phrases. We are none of us honest men.)
In Mr. Holmes (note the period—this is for American consumption; Brits don’t put dots after Mr), we have no Watson at all. Watson is the distorter, the builder of personae (only his hands appear onscreen), and to be dispensed with as Holmes backs away from his Holmes-ness toward something more, alas, human. Logic and deduction are not enough. The solitude of the individual is the thing. Pathos. Humanity. Well.
This film might have been about any superhero tired of being one (see the review of Birdman), and indeed Holmes, could he be time-machined into the present, would not be out of place on a team of Marvel Comics superheroes. (Marvel has done The Hound.) His powers of perception are tantamount to X-ray vision. They are beyond ours—not that he is a hero of consciousness, like Hamlet or Geoffrey Firmin, but that, like Einstein’s brain, pieces of which are held by museums in case we can ever peer into its corridors, he is what Roland Barthes called "a mythical object; paradoxically, the greatest intelligence of all provides an image of the most up-to-date machine, the man who is too powerful is removed from psychology and introduced into a world of robots; as is well known, the supermen of science-fiction always have something reified about them." (See What We Know for a little more on Einstein.)
Mr. Holmes, however, has stepped out of myth to savor solitude and self-loathing. His old self might just have picked up his Stradivarius (in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes he plays a notoriously difficult Bach piece), or polished his monograph on cigar ash, or done some coke.
In the review of Inherent Vice I said that the detective story differs from the murder mystery in that the detective is an outsider who can be as dangerous, or at least as eccentric as the bad guy. Dirty Harry is a detective: he and the serial killer share what Harry, in his sadistic whisper, calls “a certain style.” (See The Return of Dirty Harry. For that matter, see my "The Great Detective" for a comic take on all this.)
In the murder mystery the detective is One Of Us, and this is what Sherlock, in his bitter solitude, has become in Mr. Holmes—except that it's not a murder mystery. It is the "human" Holmes. Ian McKellen is wonderful, yes yes, and the kid is a joy, but the plot is stuck together with spit and envelope glue, and the whole thing doesn’t fly.
In the murder mystery the detective is One Of Us, and this is what Sherlock, in his bitter solitude, has become in Mr. Holmes—except that it's not a murder mystery. It is the "human" Holmes. Ian McKellen is wonderful, yes yes, and the kid is a joy, but the plot is stuck together with spit and envelope glue, and the whole thing doesn’t fly.
So much for the human. And after all one has such feelings. It has been suggested now and then that a more human Robert MacLean might be attempted. But one persists.
Fifty Shades of Grey, or Gidget Gets a Whipping
Here's a film that combines two genres. In my review of Kingsman I mentioned Women’s Movies, which can be good. Douglas Sirk was the master—Imitation of Life and older-woman-younger-man All That Heaven Allows. Fassbinder remade the latter as the spare and Brechtian Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, one of his best.
The other genre is the Surfing Movie. OK, there’s no sea in it, no surf boards, but Gidget is here as Sandra Dee substitute Dakota Johnson, who exudes the kind of wholesomeness and quiet maturity you know will triumph over such debauchery as the film offers.
Hollywood has always had a problem mixing sex and sentiment (as who does not?), nor is it solved here. She gets drunk and he takes her home with vomit on her clothes, so there is a bit of kink in it. Then he flies her in his helicopter to exotic Seattle, the lights glimmering below like the Champs-Élysées, and walks her through his mansion past Things You Will Never Have. Servants, everything.
Thirty minutes in we find out she’s a virgin. Right? For her deflowering, which I take to be the theme and ambition of the Surfing Movie, the erotic spectacles are the unveiling of her nipples and his pale but determined behind. (Is he not a bit anemic to be a firm-handed maître? He looks like he’s got a hemhorroid.) The missionary position is subsumed into the movie kiss, and her emotion is articulated prettily by her feet.
In the morning she makes pancakes and his mother drops in and approves of her. So now we know where we are, genre-wise. But he doesn’t. He has shown her his torture room and proceeds, Mom or no Mom, with his program.
But wait—the bondage he pursues now is legal—something many of us understand. No use squirming. Shout and no one will hear. There’s a ball strapped in your mouth anyway. For the next thirty minutes the goal is to get her to sign a contract. Only then can he hit her with the fly-swatter.
Like other such films—for they are a Hollywood tradition, and invariably embarrassing—this one implicitly invokes our experience of Internet porn, and tries to tame it, to domesticate the inhuman (let’s face it) sexual emotion by marrying it to more predictable ones.
Wild Orchid comes to mind, in which Mickey Rourke plays the Wounded Man. The Wounded Man is a specialty of the Woman’s Movie and, on the literary level, of the Harlequin Romance. (See On the Question Whether Women Have Souls for the Wounded Man in Jane Eyre.) He doesn’t really mean to be bad, but life has damaged him, and it’s the virgin’s job to fix him.
And so in Fifty Shades we have Christian (Christian, yet!—can The Lord be far away?) blurting that he's like this because he’s "fucked up!" Where is the robust whip-wielding mix-n-match Marquis? Self-pity has no place in his world. (See The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France.)
And so in Fifty Shades we have Christian (Christian, yet!—can The Lord be far away?) blurting that he's like this because he’s "fucked up!" Where is the robust whip-wielding mix-n-match Marquis? Self-pity has no place in his world. (See The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France.)
One thinks also of Don Jon—did you see that? It begins by amusing us with imitation Net porn, then turns against it and gets teachy. Julianne Moore, in a most unpersuasive performance, balances her lust with an erupt-at-any-moment weepiness because she is, and this is essential, A Good Person. As Fernando Pessoa said, "Praise be to God I’m not good."
In perhaps the worst of them, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, every time the camera gets rolling Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks "make love" when they’re supposed to be having sex. If you’re feeling masochistic this one will make you cringe.
Contrast Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (see the review of The Two Faces of January), in which no such rapprochement is even considered. "Americans," Europeans like to say, "are such children."
The end of Fifty Shades—are we at the end already? No, let’s mention the product placement. Only in movies do people use Apples. Have you ever seen a PC laptop in a movie? What are you on now?
Let’s mention the literacy: "My mother is on husband number four. She’s an incurable romantic." "Are you?" "Well, I study English lit. I kind of have to be." Unless you read Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or Pope, or Dryden, or Joyce, or Eliot, or James, or Nabokov. What are they teaching the kids these days?
To the end, then: "Why do you have to hurt me?" The obvious answer is, "Because I like to," but no, we get explanations. Seriousness. The Wounded Man. Scarcely The 120 Days of Sodom, but et voilà. She rebels, affords us the feminist parable, and the elevator door closes on their desperate faces as they call each other’s names.
No more surfing for the Gidge. For now. Tomorrow, as the lady said, is another day. But then as Nabokov said, "In my experience tomorrow is the same day." Watch this space.
Woman in Gold and Helen Mirren’s Body
Let me just do a few lines on the delicious Mirren because this movie is a bore, a reminder that American men wear T-shirts under their dress shirts under their suits, and display them like ascots. Keeps them a little warmer.
Those of us who relish our fantasies have followed the Dame from Age of Consent to her more recent je m'en fous poses, the implicit message of which is, “I'm still the most erotic thought you can have.”
Her uncompromising nude scene in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, in which she despairs over her loss of beauty, reminds me of Coleridge’s Dejection ode, where he says he’s had it as a poet, though it’s one of his great pieces, no pun intended. Artists. You can’t trust them.
She has an erotic quality that nags at you, but now and then she closes the door on it. The Queen is a statement of un-eros, as it must be (Philip had all the fun), and her Blairish prime minister comes off as someone very like Mr Bean. Mirren gets her walking toes-out like Henry VIII, which I presume is right. (I dealt with Stephen Frears in my review of Philomena.) She was wasted in The Madness of King George, a mother in Door to Door, and—good choice—Prospera in The Tempest, which has few worthy interpreters. But whereas Miranda was barefoot, Prospera was not. Bad choice.
In Woman in Gold she plays someone in her eighties, for which she sends her allure underground and surrenders to the cuteness and dignity the part requires. (One wonders what the Dame herself will be like at that age; we can only refuse to be surprised.) This plus Ryan Reynolds’ Disnified wholesomeness makes it a Women’s Movie, which is fine (my vooman loved it), but not perhaps on a level with Douglas Sirk. (The review of Kingsman has more on that.)
But I suppose the film did more than any merely political gesture to ease the rancor aroused in the world, especially in Europe, by Benjamin Netanyahu. European Jews haven’t had it easy lately. So it was probably worth doing. (God, I hate making moral statements.)
Will Dame Helen’s aphrodisiac self rise again from the sea on the half-shell? May one not hope?
On YouTube:
Boccaccio’s "The Husband"
Boccaccio's "The Horse Trade"
Boccaccio's "The Stupid Friar"
Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale"
Robert = EXcellent work! I laughed at your dry wit, and sometimes 'wet' wit, and have several movies I must see. Glad you mentioned 'Wild Orchid' and I still cannot forget the scene where Jack Nicholson in a hot tub in "All About Schmidt" and the full figured Kathy Bates comes to join him in all her naked splendor. The look on Jack's face had me howling. What would you recommend as an intro to Wodehouse? I'm interested in P.J.'s work now, and thank you for that. You have learned to write, very well, and as a critic, you are worthy of ANY publication, IMHO. Keep on with the great work - and, btw, love your research with links and pics - it serves a reader well. Thanks, Robert - and yes, I agree, when Hollywood today tries to mix 'real sex' into it's films, it usually results in something of a mess - like someone dropped the XXX film reel in the toilet and fished it out, then tried to play it. The mind can only imagine so much - as we men are visual creatures. All the best, and yes, I will be seeing the 'best' Sherlock, the 2-pipe one you mentioned. LOL.
ReplyDeleteStevee Crabtree
Thank you, Steve. That's a good-looking site you've got, https://www.reverbnation.com/kingcrab. I would start with The Code of the Woosters.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"Sex is politics." Gore Vidal, Playboy, 1979. You can find the link to that quote and the 1968 video of him pushing William F. Buckley's many repressed buttons here: http://bit.ly/2haZKOo Oh, yeah, and it's good to know you can still enjoy an old school kinda musical too. And you're right, Emma Stone doesn't need no stinkin "look at me" shoes.
ReplyDeleteAlways good to hear from you, Max.
Delete