Comparatively speaking, on an entertainment level, The Help succeeds handily. It's only to the extent that it aspires to loftier levels of social conscience that it fails to hit the mark.
Skeeter, a budding writer has just graduated from Old Miss. She returns to her home town in Mississippi to find that she doesn't fit in with her old friends, all young junior league wives who are more concerned with their hemline and social status than in sincere interaction. To them appearance is everything and rightly so, because very little seems to lie beneath it. We don't know exactly who Skeeter was before heading off to college. She has girlhood pictures of herself with these other women still on display in her room. She must have prized their company at one time. But today, she is a sharp contrast to them, even on the outside, in her simple clothes, and fresh, uncovered freckles standing out under a mass of untamed curls.
Skeeter's mother, Charlotte, weakened by cancer along with the social clique chicks are both eager to bring Skeeter in line and to buff away her unconventional edges by marrying her off to the nearest eligible bachelor. Charlotte's motive is probably just to see to ensure Skeeter's security before she dies. But Skeeter's peers probably feel threatened by her independence, as people like that don't just fear challenge, they're afraid of contrast. They don't feel safe in their own shoes unless everyone else has a pair. Their beliefs aren't stable unless they see them reflected and amplified in everything and everyone around them.
All of the women have domestic help. These black workers are not slaves, but they're still treated very much like property. They're paid. Aibileen, for example, makes $182 a month to clean Elizabeth Leefolt's house, cook her meals and care for her child. But it's not an employer/employee relationship. Complete deference is required. As maid, Aibileen's job description requires that she either be ignored or demoralized by her employers. There's little in between.
Of course, Skeeter's relationship with "the help" is different. She relates to them as friends, acknowledging not only their presence, but every service they bestow with quick appreciation, much to the annoyance of her peers.
At a luncheon, Skeeter notices how dismissively the maids are treated and decides to write a book from their perspective. Though Skeeter may never have been like the women she grew up with, she's known them all of her life. As an inquisitive, intelligent person, she certainly must have grown up with an awareness of racism and developed views against it in her 20-some years, but that's not apparent at the start of the movie.
When she crosses the heavily marked social lines, she seems surprised that everyone seems to mind. In fact, she is so oblivious as to what a difficult situation she is placing Aibileen in when she repeatedly seeks her out for information that I began to be irritated with her. Skeeter was not only compromising Aibileen's livelihood, but perhaps her life. Skeeter does not seem to fully realize that just being seen in the kitchen chatting with Aibileen sparks disapproval from everyone around (white and black, actually), let alone when she seeks her out on public streets.
Thirty minutes into the movie, Skeeter finally does some research and learns there are laws on the Mississippi books about races intermingling. Not only are they not suppose to socialize or use the same facilities, they can't even use the same books. Even inanimate objects must be segregated. Books that have been used by black students can never be passed on to whites and vice versa. After Skeeter finds this out, she becomes a little less discreet in contacting Aibileen, but having grown up in that society all of her life, it's not clear that this was something she had to learn.
In several cliched scenes we learn that Skeeter had a beloved maid of her own. Constantine raised her. Casting Cicely Tyson in this predictable role served only to pile on the hackneyed. She automatically brings all the pathos of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman into the story with her and more, because real time has taken the place of the make up needed to age her for that movie. We see a flashback where Constantine, face worn and elegant like fine-carved wood, comforts and counsels an awkward young Skeeter and gives her faith in herself when no one else understands. In college, Skeeter is told that Constantine left the Phelan family to go live in Chicago with her daughter. Once home, Skeeter quickly figures out this is a lie, but everyone withholds the truth about Constantine's disappearance. Being an intrepid reporter who loved Constantine dearly, you'd think she'd probe further and demand to know what happened to the woman, but meeting avoidance, she inexplicably drops her questions, 'til the movie's convenient conclusion.
At the outset of the film, the maid characterizations were so broad and their employers nastiness, so over-the-top that I felt only a comedy could survive such unrealistic handling. But as consequences became more serious, it felt more like the real world, as Skeeter and the maids eventually seemed more human and less caricature.
The movie places an uneven focus on matters I felt were mere stunts. Clearly, it would have been a deeper story, if Bryce Howard had been given a less "Mean Girls" role to play. There were comic book aspects which would have been fine -- if I'd thought them intended. But I don't believe they were. The creators probably feel they have a more substantive product on their hands than they actually presented. There's a way to weave humor into serious subject matter without making it petty and The Help does not completely succeed in finding it. Still, I was ultimately sucked in.
For one thing, when Viola Davis cried, so did I. Davis is about 20 years younger than Aibileen is said to be, but that does not detract from the performance. Initially, Aibileen is the only maid willing to speak with Skeeter, then her best friend Minnie starts to contribute to the book as well. But no one else comes forward.
Desperate for tuition money to send her twin sons to college, a fellow maid steals a ring from Hilly. Hilly has her arrested and, when the woman struggles, she is beaten by the police in front of her neighborhood. Later, Skeeter is at a soda shop and the black attendant whispers to her that she should get over to Aibileen's home immediately. When Skeeter opens Aibileen's door she is greeted by a room full of black women, all having put their personal fear aside to speak out, make a difference and protest in the least risky way they can find. The emotion of that door opening gave me chills.
I realize the movie was about working as a Southern maid in that era, not about the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. I understand why we had to stay in the characters' homes and I really didn't want to leave the homes, the small world of their lives, anyway. Still, I think the film attempts to mix apples and raisins. I related more when the characters reacted to social injustice on the broader scale (like being afraid they'd be targeted after Medgar Evers' murder) than I could when they were all upset because Minnie couldn't use her employer's toilet.
Of course, if a maid raises your child, cooks your food and cleans every inch of your home, she should be able to use your bathroom, but in the great scheme of things . . . I care about segregation in schools and restaurants and park water fountains, the bathroom at Woolworth's not the one in Mrs. Holbrook's home.
Of course, it was more than Minnie not being able to use the bathroom, it was the humiliating way that the subject was raised in the maids' presence, as if they were non-entities. We can all react to the hurt they endured, verbally disparaged on a daily basis. The forced silence, repressed anger and pain that must cut deeper, because it is unacknowledged and unexpressed. But I think the movie spotlighted the trivial once too often. There's a running gag about "the terrible awful" sin Minnie committed to avenge herself against Hilly that goes on so long that instead of offering us refreshing levity, it lowers the movie's overall tone. In related vein, a charity auction devolves into slapstick. It might be fun to see Hilly get her comeuppance, but not at the expense of believability.
For the climax, we finally learn what really happened to Constantine. Why Skeeter couldn't have tried to contact her beloved maid, her family or -- better yet, simply asked her good friend Aibileen to uncover the truth, I'll never know. But as she finishes up her book, she leaves the family and goes to her own mother for the final story. It turns out that Charlotte was being honored by a lady's circle, given an accolade she'd been seeking for years. As she serves them a celebratory dinner at her home, she is frustrated by how slow and clumsy Constantine has become with age. There's a knock at the front door and Constantine's daughter Rachael has returned home after a long absence, eager to see her mother. Embarassed by the interruption in the presence of her disapproving social set, Charlotte rebuffs Rachael, tells her to enter by the service entrance and wait in the kitchen and closes the door in her face. Rachael angrily slams open the door, enters the room and insists that she will speak to her mother now.
Constantine tries to calm Rachael and remain respectful. It's not that Charlotte deserved that respect. What's more important is that the scene was more painful for Constantine than it was embarassing for Charlotte. Standing up to the uppity women was fine, but distressing her elderly and gentle mother was unforgivable. Charlotte takes a stand and orders Rachael out. Rachael says if she leaves she's taking Constantine with her. Charlotte replies by ordering them both out of her house. Constantine is devastated. Rachael pulls her away, as she tries to hold on, her arthritic fingers scratching at the closed screen door, but Charlotte turns away from them. It's as manipulative as it is heartbreaking.
We see Constantine packing her clothes, stopping to finger the closet door where she's charted Skeeter's growth in pencil from year to year. Each line gets higher until the tall Skeeter was over Constantine's head and she has to reach up to touch the last mark. It's the only goodbye she and Skeeter will ever have. Charlotte reveals that when she sent Skeeter's brother to look for Constantine at Rachael's home in Chicago they found she had died. Of sadness, no doubt.
Like it or not, Charlotte Phelan and her children were as much a part of Constantine's family as Rachael was. We don't know anything about Rachael and can only speculate as to what made her do that? Was it jealousy? The movie starts by asking Aibileen what it was like raising other people's children when she couldn't be home with her own? Who was combing Rachael's hair when Constantine was at work lovingly brushing Skeeter's? Did a sense of rejection spur Rachael? If so, it might have been Charlotte's rejection, as much as Constantine's. Skeeter points out that she knows Charlotte loved Rachael and can't understand why she acted as she did.
Rachael must have felt spurned by the woman she'd known all of her life. She was used to racism, but it packs the most punch when it comes at you unexpectedly. It's not open bigotry that surprises most. The kind that lurks and hides causes the most damage, because it's less easily defended.
Whatever prompted Rachael, she placed her pride over her mother's well-being. I gasped at her betrayal, along with Charlotte's.
With Constantine's chapter concluded, Skeeter publishes her book, to great acclaim. Even though it is written by "anonymous" every one in town quickly deduces who the author is and identifies each thinly disguised person lambasted in its pages.
Skeeter shares her royalties with the maids. Sub-plots are tied up, some happily, some not. Aibileen is fired, not by Leefolt, her own employer, but by Hilly, Leefolt's friend and dictator. Having lost her own son, it's wrenching for Aibileen to be separated from the Leefolt's young daughter. Everything she'd worked for for decades was taken away in 10 minutes. Yet walking away from the Leefolt home, her step quickens, the tears dry and her head is filled with thought, not mourning. She knows: everyone has a story.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Horrible Bosses (2011)
Had to make a choice between seeing this movie and The Change-Up, but in the end how much difference does it make? Jason Bateman is in both -- and seemingly in five other movies currently out now.
As far as raunchy guy comedies go, I found Horrible Bosses more amusing and coherent than The Hangover. That's probably because at least half of the humor is derived from smart dialogue and its delivery rather than crazy sight gags.
Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis play men who have been friends since high school, who all find themselves saddled with unbearable bosses at the same time. While Bateman and Sudeikis make credible friends, it seems incredible that they would still hang out on an almost daily basis with Day's (Dale). Dale starts off as sweet and mild-mannered, but then becomes increasingly dumb and aggressive in perpetuating his stupidity. It's not that the movie was ever realistic from the beginning, but as Dale becomes less of a character and more of a plot driver, the story does suffer some. However, Bateman's straight-faced, unresponsive demeanor heightens almost every scene. Each deadpan line and expression enhance the other characters' funny turns.
The movie is much more fun to listen to than most of the Apatow-inspired fare out there. It was the most extraneous comments (as in a slightly contemptuous reference to Ethan Hawke, followed by Kurt defensively denying familiarity with Snow Falling on Cedars) that had me chuckling hardest.
Bosses also brims with entertaining cameos, Jamie Foxx, Donald Sutherland, Bob Newhart and supporting performances by Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Spacey as two of the three "horrible bosses," but the star turn that most surprised me was Colin Farrell as accountant Kurt (Sudeikis') boss. With a potbelly and greasy combover, even though he was in several scenes, I did not realize that it was Farrell in the role until the very end credits. Amazing transformation.
Most of the ridiculous stunts left me cold, but I did find enjoyment in the small exchanges, as when Bateman tries to explain away his speeding away from a crime by telling the police he was drag-racing. In a Prius. The more disbelieving the cops are, the more placid indifference Bateman displays. Having someone underacting when every one else is over the top gives the action more punch. Perhaps this was Bateman's speciality on Arrested Development. I never watched the popular show and now I'm interested in doing so.
In the end, this movie was not a masterpiece, but it provided more genuine fun than most of the comedy box office hits that have been released lately.
I was left with one burning story question: Why did Dale think a classified ad for "wet work" was really offering hit man services? I've never known "wet work" to be a euphemism for assassination. Ah well, the confusion is resolved in a manner that's not quite as uproarious as the movie thinks. It's also much funnier when the disillusioned leads learn their would be assassin still uses a Sidekick telephone than when they get high vacuuming a cloud of fallen cocaine from the floor.
Still, overall the punchlines delivered more hits than misses.
As far as raunchy guy comedies go, I found Horrible Bosses more amusing and coherent than The Hangover. That's probably because at least half of the humor is derived from smart dialogue and its delivery rather than crazy sight gags.
Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis play men who have been friends since high school, who all find themselves saddled with unbearable bosses at the same time. While Bateman and Sudeikis make credible friends, it seems incredible that they would still hang out on an almost daily basis with Day's (Dale). Dale starts off as sweet and mild-mannered, but then becomes increasingly dumb and aggressive in perpetuating his stupidity. It's not that the movie was ever realistic from the beginning, but as Dale becomes less of a character and more of a plot driver, the story does suffer some. However, Bateman's straight-faced, unresponsive demeanor heightens almost every scene. Each deadpan line and expression enhance the other characters' funny turns.
The movie is much more fun to listen to than most of the Apatow-inspired fare out there. It was the most extraneous comments (as in a slightly contemptuous reference to Ethan Hawke, followed by Kurt defensively denying familiarity with Snow Falling on Cedars) that had me chuckling hardest.
Bosses also brims with entertaining cameos, Jamie Foxx, Donald Sutherland, Bob Newhart and supporting performances by Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Spacey as two of the three "horrible bosses," but the star turn that most surprised me was Colin Farrell as accountant Kurt (Sudeikis') boss. With a potbelly and greasy combover, even though he was in several scenes, I did not realize that it was Farrell in the role until the very end credits. Amazing transformation.
Most of the ridiculous stunts left me cold, but I did find enjoyment in the small exchanges, as when Bateman tries to explain away his speeding away from a crime by telling the police he was drag-racing. In a Prius. The more disbelieving the cops are, the more placid indifference Bateman displays. Having someone underacting when every one else is over the top gives the action more punch. Perhaps this was Bateman's speciality on Arrested Development. I never watched the popular show and now I'm interested in doing so.
In the end, this movie was not a masterpiece, but it provided more genuine fun than most of the comedy box office hits that have been released lately.
I was left with one burning story question: Why did Dale think a classified ad for "wet work" was really offering hit man services? I've never known "wet work" to be a euphemism for assassination. Ah well, the confusion is resolved in a manner that's not quite as uproarious as the movie thinks. It's also much funnier when the disillusioned leads learn their would be assassin still uses a Sidekick telephone than when they get high vacuuming a cloud of fallen cocaine from the floor.
Still, overall the punchlines delivered more hits than misses.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows #2 (2011)
In the end it all comes down to the acting. Not the battles, not the flying creatures, not the magical effects and certainly not the 3D! No, it's the compassion and fire in Maggie Smith's watery eyes, the way Helena Bonham Carter distinguishes the wacky Bellatrix from Hermione's impersonation of same. it's Alan Rickman bringing seven years of nuanced villainy to a truly touching climax. It's our years of familiarity with these characters that brings meaning and memories to every undeveloped moment and leads you to the inexorable conclusion that yes: this finale does live up to its promise.
Even having read all the books and seen each movie, the specifics of Hallows II's plot was still impossible to follow. So, overlook the details and just concentrate on the general showdown between good and evil, Voldemort and our heroes.
If you're looking to relive the drama of subplots in the book, fergeddaboutit. Details have largely been ditched. We don't linger on Fred's death, Albus' youth or the riddle of Riddle. Action drives the movie and we're left to relate to our trio's feelings, without truly sharing the experiences that invoked them.
The first 20 movie minutes sailed past without much involvement on my part. Harry, Hermione and Ron breaking into Bellatrix's vault provides the most extended bits of humor in the film. The rest is dark, but more substantive. It's when the story returns to Hogwarts that the emotion ratchets up.
The battle for control of the wizard world becomes centered at the great school, as students, teachers and warriors from both sides fight for dominance. Voldemort and his Death Eaters have put a price on Harry's head and tell the other students that if they turn Potter in, they will escape torture and destruction themselves. One by one, people sacrifice their own life, not only to save Harry but to save the principles they believe in, choosing to die for good rather than to live under rules that are evil, unethical and cruel.
It was when Professor Minerva McGonagall threw herself in front of Harry and showed that you don't have to carry a "big" stick, if it wielded with wisdom, experience and strength of character, that I felt myself first bubbling over. After that, the tissues were out until the closing credits.
In truth, with my HP history, I brought more to the movie than the script brought out of it. For instance, when we see the mighty Hagrid in chains, then watch him carry a "dead" Harry back to his friends, I project all the pain into such scenes that the film would gloss over.
Yet, I think Harry's struggle is adequately conveyed. His guilt so heavy and so long-suffered that he doesn't bother expressing it any longer. It's something he always wears, just like his spectacles. He walks through the ruins of Hogwarts, past the dead and those who mourn them, without tears, just the weariness of one who's learned that being sorry never changes anything.
If he were only thinking of himself, he would have been glad to let Voldemort kill him long ago. He's fought this long, not because he believes his own press or thinks he alone has the power to defeat the Death Eaters. It's because after all this time, he's realized that sometimes accepting help is the best way to give it. In many ways, being a lone gun is the most selfish choice of all, when there are those whose lot is intertwined with yours, when you've become as much a movement, as a man. In that situation, if you die so others may live, you just might be betraying them in the worst way possible. That is the main reason why Harry put off a suicide trip to Voldemort for as long as he did. But the question "how many people have to lose their life protecting mine?" was always with him.
The white light minutes that Harry spends at King's Cross following his "fight to the death" with Voldemort seems a bit corny and cliched. Once he returns to Hogwarts and the final showdown plays out (Harry vs. Voldemort, while Ron and Hermione square off separately with Nagini, the deadly snake who holds the last piece of Voledmort's soul), it feels less triumphant than expected. But the fact that the characters themselves seem to feel the same is actually thought-provoking. Once Voldemort is dead, there is no rejoicing. Harry walks through the ruined school without exchanging calls of victory with his fellow students. They all thought him dead just a bit earlier, but aren't celebrating his his resurrection. Unlike in the past, this time no one lauds him as a hero and he's never had the bearing of a conqueror. Tired, bruised, all are as cognizant of what they've lost as of what has been preserved. Wordlessly, Harry keeps walking, even past his beloved Ginny and we don't know what he's looking for until Hermione and Ron appear. Hermione is smiling shyly, but the three don't share a reunion. Instead, they simply regroup, as one body that's never really separated in the first place.
The epilogue is not as compelling as the book's. Perhaps, because one is too focused on the cosmetic "aging" of Ron, Hermione and Harry than on the years and adventures that made them adults and parents. Though, I am touched when Harry gives a pep talk to his son, who is named after both Dumbledore and Snape, with the latter being recalled as the bravest man Harry has known. Brave? I'd say selfless. Indeed, if I could choose only one moment in the movie to keep with me, it was when a dying Severus demanded that Harry look at him. "You have her eyes." Yes, there's love after death, even (or especially) for those who never loved us back.
So, we leave the new generation of Potters and Weasley/Graingers after seven books and eight movies. The highest compliment I can give the franchise is that it left me longing for more. Rowling's lessons of love, loss, friendship and loyalty cast a spell, as enchanting and enduring as any wand's.
Even having read all the books and seen each movie, the specifics of Hallows II's plot was still impossible to follow. So, overlook the details and just concentrate on the general showdown between good and evil, Voldemort and our heroes.
If you're looking to relive the drama of subplots in the book, fergeddaboutit. Details have largely been ditched. We don't linger on Fred's death, Albus' youth or the riddle of Riddle. Action drives the movie and we're left to relate to our trio's feelings, without truly sharing the experiences that invoked them.
The first 20 movie minutes sailed past without much involvement on my part. Harry, Hermione and Ron breaking into Bellatrix's vault provides the most extended bits of humor in the film. The rest is dark, but more substantive. It's when the story returns to Hogwarts that the emotion ratchets up.
The battle for control of the wizard world becomes centered at the great school, as students, teachers and warriors from both sides fight for dominance. Voldemort and his Death Eaters have put a price on Harry's head and tell the other students that if they turn Potter in, they will escape torture and destruction themselves. One by one, people sacrifice their own life, not only to save Harry but to save the principles they believe in, choosing to die for good rather than to live under rules that are evil, unethical and cruel.
It was when Professor Minerva McGonagall threw herself in front of Harry and showed that you don't have to carry a "big" stick, if it wielded with wisdom, experience and strength of character, that I felt myself first bubbling over. After that, the tissues were out until the closing credits.
In truth, with my HP history, I brought more to the movie than the script brought out of it. For instance, when we see the mighty Hagrid in chains, then watch him carry a "dead" Harry back to his friends, I project all the pain into such scenes that the film would gloss over.
Yet, I think Harry's struggle is adequately conveyed. His guilt so heavy and so long-suffered that he doesn't bother expressing it any longer. It's something he always wears, just like his spectacles. He walks through the ruins of Hogwarts, past the dead and those who mourn them, without tears, just the weariness of one who's learned that being sorry never changes anything.
If he were only thinking of himself, he would have been glad to let Voldemort kill him long ago. He's fought this long, not because he believes his own press or thinks he alone has the power to defeat the Death Eaters. It's because after all this time, he's realized that sometimes accepting help is the best way to give it. In many ways, being a lone gun is the most selfish choice of all, when there are those whose lot is intertwined with yours, when you've become as much a movement, as a man. In that situation, if you die so others may live, you just might be betraying them in the worst way possible. That is the main reason why Harry put off a suicide trip to Voldemort for as long as he did. But the question "how many people have to lose their life protecting mine?" was always with him.
The white light minutes that Harry spends at King's Cross following his "fight to the death" with Voldemort seems a bit corny and cliched. Once he returns to Hogwarts and the final showdown plays out (Harry vs. Voldemort, while Ron and Hermione square off separately with Nagini, the deadly snake who holds the last piece of Voledmort's soul), it feels less triumphant than expected. But the fact that the characters themselves seem to feel the same is actually thought-provoking. Once Voldemort is dead, there is no rejoicing. Harry walks through the ruined school without exchanging calls of victory with his fellow students. They all thought him dead just a bit earlier, but aren't celebrating his his resurrection. Unlike in the past, this time no one lauds him as a hero and he's never had the bearing of a conqueror. Tired, bruised, all are as cognizant of what they've lost as of what has been preserved. Wordlessly, Harry keeps walking, even past his beloved Ginny and we don't know what he's looking for until Hermione and Ron appear. Hermione is smiling shyly, but the three don't share a reunion. Instead, they simply regroup, as one body that's never really separated in the first place.
The epilogue is not as compelling as the book's. Perhaps, because one is too focused on the cosmetic "aging" of Ron, Hermione and Harry than on the years and adventures that made them adults and parents. Though, I am touched when Harry gives a pep talk to his son, who is named after both Dumbledore and Snape, with the latter being recalled as the bravest man Harry has known. Brave? I'd say selfless. Indeed, if I could choose only one moment in the movie to keep with me, it was when a dying Severus demanded that Harry look at him. "You have her eyes." Yes, there's love after death, even (or especially) for those who never loved us back.
So, we leave the new generation of Potters and Weasley/Graingers after seven books and eight movies. The highest compliment I can give the franchise is that it left me longing for more. Rowling's lessons of love, loss, friendship and loyalty cast a spell, as enchanting and enduring as any wand's.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Midnight in Paris (2011)
I was pleased to find that, unlike this review (SPOILER ALERT) the trailers for the movie did not give away it's most charming aspects. Going in, I thought it would be a simple romantic comedy, with Owen Wilson cheating in Paris. It was much more whimsical than that and the unexpected fantasy made the movie for me.
Writer Gil is visiting Gay Paree with his petulant fiance Inez and her parents. He's charmed and inspired by their surroundings and they are perenially unimpressed, complaining so much that you'd think they were vacationing in the slums of North Paris, rather than eating, shopping and relaxing in the city's most expensive, exclusive environs. For Inez and her folks, the only thing french worth noting is ennui.
It's not unusual to wonder how a couple ever got together in a movie, but usually as the pairing dissolves, one of the partner's evolves and outgrows the relationship before your eyes. For instance, Captain Von Trapp was snooty and rigid himself. When we first meet him, he and The Baroness aren't actually that ill-suited. Maria changes father and children alike, creating the widening chasm between him and his intended, as we watch. Here, Gil doesn't change or grow much. He's a fairly reasonable person to begin with and is never unaware that Inez and is never unaware of the conflict between him and Inez's social set. He's just too indifferent about the clash to see any reason not to spend the rest of his life with them.
He needles and insults her right wing father and takes occasional pleasure in contradicting her know-it-all friend Paul, but ultimately seems content to have his life ruled and ridiculed by people who neither like nor respect him, just to preserve his engagement to Inez, which he never seems all that passionate about. He's the one with the money, so he's not with her for fortune or status. He finds her sexy, but surely he could find an attractive woman more in tune with his personality, if he cared enough to bother. The fact that he doesn't makes it hard for the audience to care. If he finds his own happiness a negligible commodity, I'm certainly not going to root for him find it.
During their trip, Inez runs into friends Paul and Carol who are as eager to disdain Gil as she and her parents are. They spend their at wine-tastings and museums, making Gil's flaws and Paul's superiority the chief subject of their conversations. Gil is a hack Hollywood writer, who's become rich penning mindless comedies, but longs to produce something of literary value, walking the historic streets of Paris only inspire him more.
Inez finds his aspirations foolish. She can imagine nothing more worthless than a great, but non-commercial, author and can't wait to return home to start shopping for a new home in Malibu. She's not unintelligent, just uninterested.
Over Gil's objections, Inez insists on discussing the plot of Gil's nascent novel with her friends. It's about a guy who runs a nostalgia shop. Nostalgia? Paul scoffs. People who love nostalgia are only trying to escape their present day inadequacies. They delude themselves into thinking that the Golden Era was better only because they have trouble coping in today's world. Inez promptly agrees with Paul's condescending assessment of both Gil's book and his interests, happy she's found someone as erudite as Paul to join in her dismissal of Gil's dreams.
Had Gil and Inez been married, the way she mocks and patronizes him in front of others would be grounds for divorce. Yet, her scathing manner never causes Gil to question the relationship. Had he been intimidated or insecure, perhaps we would see his complacency as a form of fear and self-doubt. But though malleable, Gil is not particularly meek or uncertain. Apparently, he stays with Inez and her gang just because he's lazy. Still, even sloth has its strong points.
One evening out with Inez, Paul and Carol, Gil declares himself too tired and tipsy to go dancing with them. He stays behind and attempts to stumble his way back to the hotel on foot. As he rests against a stoop, a vintage Peugeot turns in front of him and beckons him to get in. As the car hurtles down the street, I find myself wishing that it would carry Gil right into the past that he so often dreams about -- to my surprise, that's exactly what happens.
As Gil's new, lively friends pull him into a whirlwind party they're attending, we soon discover that they are none other than Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. That cool piano player who somehow knows all of the forgotten verses to Let's Do It turns out to be none other than Cole Porter himself. As he meets one legend after the other, Gil is mesmerized, but he's not just thrilled to be mingling with the great. These people embrace him with an effortless acceptance that he's never received from present day peers. It's not long before, buddy Ernest Hemingway is offering to have Gertrude Stein read and critique Gil's novel for him.
When a heady Gil stumples back into his own life, he's anxious to have Inez meet his new friends. He concludes that the place where he hopped aboard the Peugeot is a time portal and takes Inez there the following evening. When nothing happens, Inez grows impatient and leaves. As the Paris clock strikes midnight, Gil realizes that, as in all fairy tales, that's the hour when magic happens. Now that he knows the trick of getting there, Gil returns regularly, night after night, rubbing elbows with Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, T. S. Eliot and finally falling for Adriana, a young model who is chased by Picasso and Hemingway but is herself enchanted by Gil.
Reading between the lines of his novel, Gertrude Stein uncovers a truth that has been eluding Gil: the Inez character in his book is having an obvious affair with the pedantic professor (Paul's counterpart). Eureka! Upon making this discovery, Gil is even more eager to pursue Adriana.
As Gil and Adriana explore their romance and enjoy a night on the town in the roaring twenties, a horse and carriage trundles towards them, beckoning. Once they climb in, they are whisked off into Paris in the gay nineties. By this time, the voyage back is passe for Gil and he wants to spend more time talking to Adriana than watching original Moulin Rouge performances. But she's awestruck and declares she wants to stay in the past. That's when life was wonderful, the 1890s -- even though the people they meet from that era declare it to be a disappointing generation. Gil is also unenthused. He insists that the 1920s, Adriana's time, was the true renaissance. Adriana finds this view absurd. The 20s are positively dull and uninspiring. She tells Gil she refuses to return to them. In that case . . . they bid adieu.
Gil comes to the realization that Paul was right. People fantasize about the past and project their own desires onto it to compensate for their unhappiness in the present. Having faced this realization, Gil returns to his own time, determined to fulfill his dreams there, not chasing the past. A new man, he breaks it off with Inez, a move that comes too late and for the wrong reasons. If he needed time travel to realize that they were incompatible, then he's too much of a dunce for me to have just wasted 100 minutes with him.
In the end, I loved the film's flights of fancy. Whenever I am in a historic setting, I always have this secret wish that I can close my eyes and awake in the past. Any movie that touches upon this fantasy will capture me today, just as Cinderella's ball gown did when I was small. Dreams that come true at midnight are as fun now as spells that end at the stroke of midnight once were. But a glance at Aesop's work will tell you there was nothing particularly original about Allen's script.
I found it fairly light on wit and it's whimsy, though lovely, could not entirely make up for the unabsorbing characters -- or character types -- the movie presented. Gil was the least unpleasant, but not the least frustrating. Moreover, I don't agree with the premise that we chase the past because we're unhappy with the present. Gil never expressed an unhealthy obsession with the past. Rather he expressed curiousity stemming from an appreciation of literature. By setting his own novel in a nostalgia shop, he in no way hinted at a single-minded infatuation with dead generations. He was not a man out of touch with reality and, therefore, Paul's diagnosis of Gil's innocent interest seemed mere folderol, not a viewpoint that Woody's narrative, and Gil himself, would eventually adopt as their own.
I think the past shapes, informs and haunts the present. When we investigate it, we study ourselves and give the present deeper meaning. It would be unwise to get lost in the past. Yet, we're lost without it. Those who have no interest in what came before are, like Inez, bringing little to the future. While the love Gil had for Adriana may have been illusion or delusion, his kinship with the artists of yore was real -- or should have been.
Writer Gil is visiting Gay Paree with his petulant fiance Inez and her parents. He's charmed and inspired by their surroundings and they are perenially unimpressed, complaining so much that you'd think they were vacationing in the slums of North Paris, rather than eating, shopping and relaxing in the city's most expensive, exclusive environs. For Inez and her folks, the only thing french worth noting is ennui.
It's not unusual to wonder how a couple ever got together in a movie, but usually as the pairing dissolves, one of the partner's evolves and outgrows the relationship before your eyes. For instance, Captain Von Trapp was snooty and rigid himself. When we first meet him, he and The Baroness aren't actually that ill-suited. Maria changes father and children alike, creating the widening chasm between him and his intended, as we watch. Here, Gil doesn't change or grow much. He's a fairly reasonable person to begin with and is never unaware that Inez and is never unaware of the conflict between him and Inez's social set. He's just too indifferent about the clash to see any reason not to spend the rest of his life with them.
He needles and insults her right wing father and takes occasional pleasure in contradicting her know-it-all friend Paul, but ultimately seems content to have his life ruled and ridiculed by people who neither like nor respect him, just to preserve his engagement to Inez, which he never seems all that passionate about. He's the one with the money, so he's not with her for fortune or status. He finds her sexy, but surely he could find an attractive woman more in tune with his personality, if he cared enough to bother. The fact that he doesn't makes it hard for the audience to care. If he finds his own happiness a negligible commodity, I'm certainly not going to root for him find it.
During their trip, Inez runs into friends Paul and Carol who are as eager to disdain Gil as she and her parents are. They spend their at wine-tastings and museums, making Gil's flaws and Paul's superiority the chief subject of their conversations. Gil is a hack Hollywood writer, who's become rich penning mindless comedies, but longs to produce something of literary value, walking the historic streets of Paris only inspire him more.
Inez finds his aspirations foolish. She can imagine nothing more worthless than a great, but non-commercial, author and can't wait to return home to start shopping for a new home in Malibu. She's not unintelligent, just uninterested.
Over Gil's objections, Inez insists on discussing the plot of Gil's nascent novel with her friends. It's about a guy who runs a nostalgia shop. Nostalgia? Paul scoffs. People who love nostalgia are only trying to escape their present day inadequacies. They delude themselves into thinking that the Golden Era was better only because they have trouble coping in today's world. Inez promptly agrees with Paul's condescending assessment of both Gil's book and his interests, happy she's found someone as erudite as Paul to join in her dismissal of Gil's dreams.
Had Gil and Inez been married, the way she mocks and patronizes him in front of others would be grounds for divorce. Yet, her scathing manner never causes Gil to question the relationship. Had he been intimidated or insecure, perhaps we would see his complacency as a form of fear and self-doubt. But though malleable, Gil is not particularly meek or uncertain. Apparently, he stays with Inez and her gang just because he's lazy. Still, even sloth has its strong points.
One evening out with Inez, Paul and Carol, Gil declares himself too tired and tipsy to go dancing with them. He stays behind and attempts to stumble his way back to the hotel on foot. As he rests against a stoop, a vintage Peugeot turns in front of him and beckons him to get in. As the car hurtles down the street, I find myself wishing that it would carry Gil right into the past that he so often dreams about -- to my surprise, that's exactly what happens.
As Gil's new, lively friends pull him into a whirlwind party they're attending, we soon discover that they are none other than Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. That cool piano player who somehow knows all of the forgotten verses to Let's Do It turns out to be none other than Cole Porter himself. As he meets one legend after the other, Gil is mesmerized, but he's not just thrilled to be mingling with the great. These people embrace him with an effortless acceptance that he's never received from present day peers. It's not long before, buddy Ernest Hemingway is offering to have Gertrude Stein read and critique Gil's novel for him.
When a heady Gil stumples back into his own life, he's anxious to have Inez meet his new friends. He concludes that the place where he hopped aboard the Peugeot is a time portal and takes Inez there the following evening. When nothing happens, Inez grows impatient and leaves. As the Paris clock strikes midnight, Gil realizes that, as in all fairy tales, that's the hour when magic happens. Now that he knows the trick of getting there, Gil returns regularly, night after night, rubbing elbows with Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, T. S. Eliot and finally falling for Adriana, a young model who is chased by Picasso and Hemingway but is herself enchanted by Gil.
Reading between the lines of his novel, Gertrude Stein uncovers a truth that has been eluding Gil: the Inez character in his book is having an obvious affair with the pedantic professor (Paul's counterpart). Eureka! Upon making this discovery, Gil is even more eager to pursue Adriana.
As Gil and Adriana explore their romance and enjoy a night on the town in the roaring twenties, a horse and carriage trundles towards them, beckoning. Once they climb in, they are whisked off into Paris in the gay nineties. By this time, the voyage back is passe for Gil and he wants to spend more time talking to Adriana than watching original Moulin Rouge performances. But she's awestruck and declares she wants to stay in the past. That's when life was wonderful, the 1890s -- even though the people they meet from that era declare it to be a disappointing generation. Gil is also unenthused. He insists that the 1920s, Adriana's time, was the true renaissance. Adriana finds this view absurd. The 20s are positively dull and uninspiring. She tells Gil she refuses to return to them. In that case . . . they bid adieu.
Gil comes to the realization that Paul was right. People fantasize about the past and project their own desires onto it to compensate for their unhappiness in the present. Having faced this realization, Gil returns to his own time, determined to fulfill his dreams there, not chasing the past. A new man, he breaks it off with Inez, a move that comes too late and for the wrong reasons. If he needed time travel to realize that they were incompatible, then he's too much of a dunce for me to have just wasted 100 minutes with him.
In the end, I loved the film's flights of fancy. Whenever I am in a historic setting, I always have this secret wish that I can close my eyes and awake in the past. Any movie that touches upon this fantasy will capture me today, just as Cinderella's ball gown did when I was small. Dreams that come true at midnight are as fun now as spells that end at the stroke of midnight once were. But a glance at Aesop's work will tell you there was nothing particularly original about Allen's script.
I found it fairly light on wit and it's whimsy, though lovely, could not entirely make up for the unabsorbing characters -- or character types -- the movie presented. Gil was the least unpleasant, but not the least frustrating. Moreover, I don't agree with the premise that we chase the past because we're unhappy with the present. Gil never expressed an unhealthy obsession with the past. Rather he expressed curiousity stemming from an appreciation of literature. By setting his own novel in a nostalgia shop, he in no way hinted at a single-minded infatuation with dead generations. He was not a man out of touch with reality and, therefore, Paul's diagnosis of Gil's innocent interest seemed mere folderol, not a viewpoint that Woody's narrative, and Gil himself, would eventually adopt as their own.
I think the past shapes, informs and haunts the present. When we investigate it, we study ourselves and give the present deeper meaning. It would be unwise to get lost in the past. Yet, we're lost without it. Those who have no interest in what came before are, like Inez, bringing little to the future. While the love Gil had for Adriana may have been illusion or delusion, his kinship with the artists of yore was real -- or should have been.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Whatever Works (2009)
Why is that when comic writers (i.e. David and Ricky Gervais) appear in someone else's work, the result is always so much less inspiring than their own creations? I suppose the lesson is that while they can write for others, they shouldn't try to act for others. As a performer, Woody Allen possesses a whimsy and stature that give a gentle edge to even his most pointed barbs. David, on the other hand, specializes in a callous perspective that only works so well because his favorite subject matter is quite frothy (golf balls in whale blowholes, for instance). When dealing with more realistic events, David's bluster can be more brittle than amusing.
The first 15 minutes of this movie were almost unbearable, playing more like a stale stage production than a film. I was convinced it was yet another Larry David take on The Producers' scheme to make an intentionally awful Broadway production.
We're awkwardly introduced to the crochety Boris a middle-aged divorcee whose only pleasure in life is to remind everyone of his superior intellect, while decrying their stupidity. His day is spent berating his juvenile chess students and then insulting their parents who complain. As neurotic as he is disdainful, Boris constantly frets about his health, even after an unsuccessful attempt to end the life he works so hard to preserve.
The movie fails as an allegory when its fantasy plot neglects to convey anything meaningful, funny or original. Boris is such a cliched, literal "type" that his tale isn't really worthy of whimsical telling.
As the simple, Southern runaway that Boris takes in, Evan Rachel Wood's Melody is lovely, but never layered. You know as much about the character 5 seconds after she appears onscreen as you'll learn in the next 90 minutes. We're told that she's drawn to Boris because he's smart. Yet, she seemed just as impressed with him when she believed him to be a baseball player, as when she learns of his purported genius. Maybe, like Marilyn Monroe, she's drawn to both geniuses and baseball players. We never learn enough about her or her needs to find out.
For these reasons, the movie feels slow-going at first, but picks up considerably when Patricia Clarkson arrives as Melody's mother. At that point, Boris becomes more of an observer than a lead character and the movie is, thankfully, transformed into a conventional (albeit mild) comedy.
Watching Melody's parents lose their southern baptist inhibitions is pleasant, but makes no real commentary on the life they led or the amoral one they find in the Big City. Their sexual awakenings are never as wry or wacky as one could hope and feel more like a subplot on 30 Rock than a Woody Allen script.
In the end, when Melody finds a young lover and leaves Boris, he heaps more insults on her than usual and she takes that as a sign he is hurt. He treated his first wife in the same fashion and he's the one who left her. Ironically, he married the first wife because she was smart. We can theorize that Boris, who never realized his full potential, was attempting to validate his own intellect, by hitching himself to the first wife's academic star and then ultimately finding himself superior to her. In a similar way Melody may have tried vicariously to overcome her own limited upbringing, by attaching herself to Boris who had experienced more of the world than she and rejected it all, only to finally be the one rejected.
Of course, the movie never made me feel that Boris' pessimism and scorn were really masking vulnerability. His insensitivity would have had more depth, played as a defense, rather than a mere personality trait.
In the clumsily wrapped loose endings, the movie tells us that you should take love however and from whomever you can get it: whatever works. But the plot really wasn't about love, or luck, fate or coincidence. It was a sketch that should have been more fully drawn. Better than Melinda and Melinda, because the characters were more likable. Still, it contained nothing half as entertaining as an improvised episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Keep that day job, Larry.
The first 15 minutes of this movie were almost unbearable, playing more like a stale stage production than a film. I was convinced it was yet another Larry David take on The Producers' scheme to make an intentionally awful Broadway production.
We're awkwardly introduced to the crochety Boris a middle-aged divorcee whose only pleasure in life is to remind everyone of his superior intellect, while decrying their stupidity. His day is spent berating his juvenile chess students and then insulting their parents who complain. As neurotic as he is disdainful, Boris constantly frets about his health, even after an unsuccessful attempt to end the life he works so hard to preserve.
The movie fails as an allegory when its fantasy plot neglects to convey anything meaningful, funny or original. Boris is such a cliched, literal "type" that his tale isn't really worthy of whimsical telling.
As the simple, Southern runaway that Boris takes in, Evan Rachel Wood's Melody is lovely, but never layered. You know as much about the character 5 seconds after she appears onscreen as you'll learn in the next 90 minutes. We're told that she's drawn to Boris because he's smart. Yet, she seemed just as impressed with him when she believed him to be a baseball player, as when she learns of his purported genius. Maybe, like Marilyn Monroe, she's drawn to both geniuses and baseball players. We never learn enough about her or her needs to find out.
For these reasons, the movie feels slow-going at first, but picks up considerably when Patricia Clarkson arrives as Melody's mother. At that point, Boris becomes more of an observer than a lead character and the movie is, thankfully, transformed into a conventional (albeit mild) comedy.
Watching Melody's parents lose their southern baptist inhibitions is pleasant, but makes no real commentary on the life they led or the amoral one they find in the Big City. Their sexual awakenings are never as wry or wacky as one could hope and feel more like a subplot on 30 Rock than a Woody Allen script.
In the end, when Melody finds a young lover and leaves Boris, he heaps more insults on her than usual and she takes that as a sign he is hurt. He treated his first wife in the same fashion and he's the one who left her. Ironically, he married the first wife because she was smart. We can theorize that Boris, who never realized his full potential, was attempting to validate his own intellect, by hitching himself to the first wife's academic star and then ultimately finding himself superior to her. In a similar way Melody may have tried vicariously to overcome her own limited upbringing, by attaching herself to Boris who had experienced more of the world than she and rejected it all, only to finally be the one rejected.
Of course, the movie never made me feel that Boris' pessimism and scorn were really masking vulnerability. His insensitivity would have had more depth, played as a defense, rather than a mere personality trait.
In the clumsily wrapped loose endings, the movie tells us that you should take love however and from whomever you can get it: whatever works. But the plot really wasn't about love, or luck, fate or coincidence. It was a sketch that should have been more fully drawn. Better than Melinda and Melinda, because the characters were more likable. Still, it contained nothing half as entertaining as an improvised episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Keep that day job, Larry.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Make Way For Tomorrow (1937)
Sometimes, I get confused about the title of this movie. Is it, Make Way for Tomorrow or Make Room for Tomorrow. It's easy to verify the answer, because the story isn't about making room or accommodating. It's about pushing things that are inconvenient or not primary to your lifestyle out of the way. The current generation is a bulldozer coming through. Make way, clear a path, you're going down.
I'd never seen the movie until recently. Because an air of soft, droll humor wafted through every scene (a signature wave from director Leo McCarey) and it aired during the holiday season, when a miracle rounds every corner -- whether you're on 34th Street or not -- I was expecting a happy ending. Boy was I surprised. It's heartbreaking really. I don't know if the humor softens the blow, so much as conducts it.
Uncannily, this movie felt more timely today than it would have even five years ago. An elderly couple Barkley and Lucy Cooper, lose their home to foreclosure. They wait until the last minute to tell their children, always hoping that something improbable will happen to correct everything. And that's how the movie really hits home, portraying the denial we often live in, refusing to face facts and accept (or proactively change) the worse, preferring instead to hope we'll win the lottery and all our problems will be solved. As a viewer, I wasn't the only one expecting a happy ending, Lucy and Barkley were waiting for one too. Lucy is ditched at a movie by her granddaughter and later recounts the plot, where just as everything seems blackest, the lovers are reunited. That's the false hope of life.
They call a family meeting just days before they're about to be thrown out onto the street. They have five adult children, but none are willing to take both parents in, so they separate. Barkley goes to one son's home and Lucy to another's. Neither are welcome additions. Barkley is cantankerous and difficult and would try anyone's patience. Lucy, on the other hand, is merely inconvenient and passive-aggressively needy. But the kids promise that within 3 months the parents will be back together. The rich daughter says she will take them in, then. But the truth is, she can't even be bothered to sit her mother for one night, much less the rest of the woman's days. So, inevitably the 3 month promise, the one Lucy and Barkley repeated constantly to ease the pain of being apart, is broken to be replaced by other assurances of reunion that are weaker than the first. It's a great metaphor of an entire life cycle. You start out with expectation and dreams. Then comes disappointment. Then you settle again and again, accepting less every time. A prospect that was once unthinkable eventually becomes desperate refuge. Death is the final betrayal. But you, Lucy and Barkley lie to yourselves and each other, pretending that you don't see it coming.
Taking up residence with her eldest son, Lucy annoys her daughter-in-law, Anita, and granddaughter, Rhoda, simply because she joins in any gatherings they have at the home and distracts the guests. At worst, her comments and remembrances are boring. Generally speaking, they're quaint, perhaps even charming. Yet, the daughter and granddaughter are deeply annoyed by Lucy's intrusion into the social functions where they are accustomed to presiding.
But as bothersome as they are, when strangers are moved by Lucy and Barkley's plight, you'd think there own children would be as well. George's wife teaches bridge and though her pupils were initially irritated by Lucy, when they overhear a (loud) telephone conversation between Lucy and the husband who misses her. She is overcome by their brief exchange, but chides Barkley that he shouldn't have spent money for the call. He could have used it on a warm scarf. Her listeners bow their heads in empathy and compassion fills the room as she totters off to bed earlier than expected. In the heart swell, I half expected the card players to take up a collection for her. Barkley too captures the heart of a shopkeeper who becomes choked up just reading a letter that Lucy wrote to her husband (300 miles away). Touched, the shopkeeper calls to his own wife after Barkley leaves, just wanting to make sure the woman is still there.
I feel that strangers would do more to keep the elderly Coopers together than their family does, but is that how life is? If you live with a nuisance, however small, day in and out does it numb. Do you only feel sympathy at a distance and in big, isolated waves, because up close and ongoing tragedy becomes mundane and less important than the every day grind of living? Young people (and the Cooper children are themselves middle aged) are too caught up in their own comforts to care -- or care enough -- about their parents heartrending plight. It's significant that the movie does not paint the kids as helpless. Not all of them are rich, like daughter Nellie, but three are middle-classed. If they made an attempt, they could devise a plan to pool their resources and support the elder Coopers, if that was a priority for them. But it would take time, attention and concerted effort among the five and they can't spare that. Their suffering matters less than the next generation's ease, a philosophy that can also be more generally applied to the present day fight between those that want the government fund Medicare, health care and social security and those who don't. An unfortunate problem, but it shouldn't be mine to fix.
When Bark's shopkeeper friend suggests that he and Lucy become caretakers of an inn, Barkley scoffs, as if the position would be beneath them. But we see him looking for work. He passes a help wanted sign and asks, because he's lost his glasses, if there's an opening for a bookkeeper. "No," a stranger mutters. "Were you a bookkeeper?" "I am a bookkeeper," Bark declares as he shuffles past in the snow. And this is the seed from which Death of a Salesman might have grown.
This 75 year old movie establishes that the Me Generation wasn't just born. It's always been there, is perhaps endemic to human nature. The self-centered and callous attitude of youth is not new to our era.
Another sign that the more things change the more they stay the same is an exchange between Lucy and granddaughter Rhoda (not yet in college): Rhoda is sneaking out behind her parents' back to date a 35 year old man. Grandma thinks she should meet beaus her own age, plus she says that dating too much will taint Rhoda's image. No man wants a girl who has dated many. Rhoda disagrees: the more you date the more men who wait in line to date you. Lucy says that they don't marry those women. Rhodas counter that she's seen plenty of women who marry after having done everything but commit murder!
Still deeply in love, Barkley and Lucy communicate by letter and phone, but long distance is expensive, so calls must be rationed. Barkley assures Lucy that they will be reunited as soon as he gets a job and can support them again. To a present day audience, his hopes are not entirely delusional. As the Coopers, Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore are made up to look older than they actually are. Even so, considering that both Barkley and Lucy are still spry enough to walk all over the city and keen enough to understand everything that their ungrateful children don't say, it's not hard to believe that Barkley could still be a productive member of any workforce. But everyone, including Lucy, knows it will never be. She simply humors him. Employers don't want him any more than his offspring do. Thus, Bark's optimistic job hunting becomes a more painful prick, each time it is revisited in the script.
Interestingly, this movie was released the very year that Social Security went into effect. United States workers began paying into the system in 1937, but no one received their first monthly check until 1940. I wonder if this movie was made as a bit of propoganda in support of the legislation. Following the depression, many Americans lost their homes to the banks, like Lucy and Barkley did. The unemployment rate was high, as it is today. The brunt of the financial hardships fell on senior citizens who had the least hope of recouping their losses with new jobs, which is why the Old-Age, Survivor and Disability Insurance program came into being, giving birth to the Social Security Act of 1935. Barkley and Lucy seem like poster children for its passage.
At her son's house, Lucy's welcome is wearing even thinner. The granddaughter, Rhoda, is so mortified when Lucy interacts with her guests, that she stops entertaining at home. She eventually ends up staying out all night, much to her mother's horror. Apparently, this gal would rather compromise her virtue and all standing in their cliquish community, than expose her friends to Nana's yammering. It's evident that Rhoda and her mother had few true values to begin with and faced with the slightest imposition, they soon throw the remainder out the window. They are shallow and uncaring and their patriarch George (Lucy's son) is too weak to challenge them. When his wife tells him that Lucy has to go, for Rhoda's sake, George concedes with shame, but little opposition.
I'm not saying that the children's reactions are outrageous. There are many compassionate families that would buckle under the strain of bringing loved but trying relatives into their household. But Lucy faces cruel words that make a painful situation devastating, as when Rhoda angrily tells her to stop indulging Barkley's pipe dream about someday finding a job. The cold barb's rob Lucy of dignity in a way that mere homelessness could not.
When George approaches his mother, to tell her that she is being sent to a nursing home, he can't find the words. Anticipating what he wants to impart, Lucy preemptively tells him that it is she who wants to leave, claiming that she'll actually enjoy the elegant facility. She only asks that Barkley never be told where she is going. He wouldn't understand. Let Barkley think she is still with George, who can forward letters from his mother to father from his home address. Hating his own cowardice, George agrees to this plan, later telling his insensitive wife that she should be very proud of him that day.
Meanwhile, Barkley's daughter is just as tired of having him as a border (though her irritation is more justified than George's family's is) and arranges to have him shipped off to her sister in California. He will be able to have one brief meeting with his beloved wife, during a short interruption in his train trip across the country.
The reunited Coopers get to spend one day together, 5 whole hours, before it's time to part. They make an odyssey of it, revisiting places they went on their honeymoon and recalling moments from the half century they spent together. Lucy says that happiness comes at different times for different people. Some get it all in the end, some get it in the beginning, but theirs was spread across the many decades, so they shouldn't complain if it's over now -- after all they've had so much. As they look in shop windows, Barkley sees a "help wanted" sign and darts in to look for work, trying not to left his wife know and smoothly providing a cover store when he is rejected yet again. One last ditch effort to avoid the inevitable.
At the same hotel they stayed at when their marriage was young, Barkley and Lucy both enjoy a drink, though Lucy does so only hesitantly. After all, in her day women didn't imbibe in public! They share a dance, with the other patrons politely deferring when the band strikes up "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" in the Coopers' honor. The hotel manager graciously listens to the Coopers reminisce. Upon learning that they have 5 children, he says that they must have given Lucy and Barkley much pleasure. Bark dryly notes that the man must never have had children of his own, if he thinks that!
The hours pass, almost as quickly as their life together did. The children are waiting for the elder Coopers at George's apartment, where they were to share one last dinner as a family. Barkley stands them up, closing the door of the phone booth so that Lucy (and the audience) can't hear him telling his son off. Back at the house, the guilty children have no defense. They knew they were miserable wretches for the way they were treating their parents. They just didn't know that Lucy and Barkley knew!
Lucy and Barkley go to the train station alone, having cut the time so short that the children are (thankfully) unable to serenade Barkley before he makes the long journey to California. There is only Lucy to say goodbye. He tells her that he will find a job in California and send for her. They will be together again before she knows it. She pretends to believe him. But just in case -- in case they don't meet again -- perish the silly thought, Lucy wants to know that there is no other man on earth she'd rather have spent her life with. Barkley answers in kind. He cherished every minute they had.
He boards the locomotive and Lucy waves him goodbye, running to catch every last glimpse of him in the moving windows, until he's gone from sight. End credits.
I was stunned. I kept expecting a last minute reprieve. Surely the remorseful children would devise a way to keep Lucy and Barkley together at the last minute. But this isn't the fanciful type of movie where remorse trumps self-interest. There's no happy ending, giving this movie a realism that seems current, no matter how dated the scenery or dialogue. And the lack of melodrama in Lucy and Barkley's parting made it all the more heartbreaking. So often, the most cataclysmic breaches come with a whisper, not a whimper, much less a bang. Your world ends, but the train wheels never brake.
Side notes: I'm not surprised at the number of times Louise Beavers has played a maid, but I had no idea some of them were named Mamie. Here, Mamie, George's housekeeper, resented Lucy's inclusion in the household as much as her mistress did, because it meant she sometimes had to stay late. When it's time for Lucy to leave for the nursing home, Mamie regrets her past behavior, in the face of Lucy's graciousness.
I laughed when George avoided kissing his unpleasant sister by claiming he had a bad cold -- directly after kissing the other one. Somehow, I didn't think they were as aware of the passage of germs through kissing 70 years ago as we are today. I guess bacteria has always proven a pretty handy excuse, for avoiding the undesirable.
After watching Make Way my thoughts were plagued with ideas on how Lucy and Bark could have stayed together, but that would have defeated the writers' purpose. He parted them to drive the hurt home. The point was not to save the characters, but to prompt audience members to go out and make the world better for their real life parents.
I'd never seen the movie until recently. Because an air of soft, droll humor wafted through every scene (a signature wave from director Leo McCarey) and it aired during the holiday season, when a miracle rounds every corner -- whether you're on 34th Street or not -- I was expecting a happy ending. Boy was I surprised. It's heartbreaking really. I don't know if the humor softens the blow, so much as conducts it.
Uncannily, this movie felt more timely today than it would have even five years ago. An elderly couple Barkley and Lucy Cooper, lose their home to foreclosure. They wait until the last minute to tell their children, always hoping that something improbable will happen to correct everything. And that's how the movie really hits home, portraying the denial we often live in, refusing to face facts and accept (or proactively change) the worse, preferring instead to hope we'll win the lottery and all our problems will be solved. As a viewer, I wasn't the only one expecting a happy ending, Lucy and Barkley were waiting for one too. Lucy is ditched at a movie by her granddaughter and later recounts the plot, where just as everything seems blackest, the lovers are reunited. That's the false hope of life.
They call a family meeting just days before they're about to be thrown out onto the street. They have five adult children, but none are willing to take both parents in, so they separate. Barkley goes to one son's home and Lucy to another's. Neither are welcome additions. Barkley is cantankerous and difficult and would try anyone's patience. Lucy, on the other hand, is merely inconvenient and passive-aggressively needy. But the kids promise that within 3 months the parents will be back together. The rich daughter says she will take them in, then. But the truth is, she can't even be bothered to sit her mother for one night, much less the rest of the woman's days. So, inevitably the 3 month promise, the one Lucy and Barkley repeated constantly to ease the pain of being apart, is broken to be replaced by other assurances of reunion that are weaker than the first. It's a great metaphor of an entire life cycle. You start out with expectation and dreams. Then comes disappointment. Then you settle again and again, accepting less every time. A prospect that was once unthinkable eventually becomes desperate refuge. Death is the final betrayal. But you, Lucy and Barkley lie to yourselves and each other, pretending that you don't see it coming.
Taking up residence with her eldest son, Lucy annoys her daughter-in-law, Anita, and granddaughter, Rhoda, simply because she joins in any gatherings they have at the home and distracts the guests. At worst, her comments and remembrances are boring. Generally speaking, they're quaint, perhaps even charming. Yet, the daughter and granddaughter are deeply annoyed by Lucy's intrusion into the social functions where they are accustomed to presiding.
But as bothersome as they are, when strangers are moved by Lucy and Barkley's plight, you'd think there own children would be as well. George's wife teaches bridge and though her pupils were initially irritated by Lucy, when they overhear a (loud) telephone conversation between Lucy and the husband who misses her. She is overcome by their brief exchange, but chides Barkley that he shouldn't have spent money for the call. He could have used it on a warm scarf. Her listeners bow their heads in empathy and compassion fills the room as she totters off to bed earlier than expected. In the heart swell, I half expected the card players to take up a collection for her. Barkley too captures the heart of a shopkeeper who becomes choked up just reading a letter that Lucy wrote to her husband (300 miles away). Touched, the shopkeeper calls to his own wife after Barkley leaves, just wanting to make sure the woman is still there.
I feel that strangers would do more to keep the elderly Coopers together than their family does, but is that how life is? If you live with a nuisance, however small, day in and out does it numb. Do you only feel sympathy at a distance and in big, isolated waves, because up close and ongoing tragedy becomes mundane and less important than the every day grind of living? Young people (and the Cooper children are themselves middle aged) are too caught up in their own comforts to care -- or care enough -- about their parents heartrending plight. It's significant that the movie does not paint the kids as helpless. Not all of them are rich, like daughter Nellie, but three are middle-classed. If they made an attempt, they could devise a plan to pool their resources and support the elder Coopers, if that was a priority for them. But it would take time, attention and concerted effort among the five and they can't spare that. Their suffering matters less than the next generation's ease, a philosophy that can also be more generally applied to the present day fight between those that want the government fund Medicare, health care and social security and those who don't. An unfortunate problem, but it shouldn't be mine to fix.
When Bark's shopkeeper friend suggests that he and Lucy become caretakers of an inn, Barkley scoffs, as if the position would be beneath them. But we see him looking for work. He passes a help wanted sign and asks, because he's lost his glasses, if there's an opening for a bookkeeper. "No," a stranger mutters. "Were you a bookkeeper?" "I am a bookkeeper," Bark declares as he shuffles past in the snow. And this is the seed from which Death of a Salesman might have grown.
This 75 year old movie establishes that the Me Generation wasn't just born. It's always been there, is perhaps endemic to human nature. The self-centered and callous attitude of youth is not new to our era.
Another sign that the more things change the more they stay the same is an exchange between Lucy and granddaughter Rhoda (not yet in college): Rhoda is sneaking out behind her parents' back to date a 35 year old man. Grandma thinks she should meet beaus her own age, plus she says that dating too much will taint Rhoda's image. No man wants a girl who has dated many. Rhoda disagrees: the more you date the more men who wait in line to date you. Lucy says that they don't marry those women. Rhodas counter that she's seen plenty of women who marry after having done everything but commit murder!
Still deeply in love, Barkley and Lucy communicate by letter and phone, but long distance is expensive, so calls must be rationed. Barkley assures Lucy that they will be reunited as soon as he gets a job and can support them again. To a present day audience, his hopes are not entirely delusional. As the Coopers, Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore are made up to look older than they actually are. Even so, considering that both Barkley and Lucy are still spry enough to walk all over the city and keen enough to understand everything that their ungrateful children don't say, it's not hard to believe that Barkley could still be a productive member of any workforce. But everyone, including Lucy, knows it will never be. She simply humors him. Employers don't want him any more than his offspring do. Thus, Bark's optimistic job hunting becomes a more painful prick, each time it is revisited in the script.
Interestingly, this movie was released the very year that Social Security went into effect. United States workers began paying into the system in 1937, but no one received their first monthly check until 1940. I wonder if this movie was made as a bit of propoganda in support of the legislation. Following the depression, many Americans lost their homes to the banks, like Lucy and Barkley did. The unemployment rate was high, as it is today. The brunt of the financial hardships fell on senior citizens who had the least hope of recouping their losses with new jobs, which is why the Old-Age, Survivor and Disability Insurance program came into being, giving birth to the Social Security Act of 1935. Barkley and Lucy seem like poster children for its passage.
At her son's house, Lucy's welcome is wearing even thinner. The granddaughter, Rhoda, is so mortified when Lucy interacts with her guests, that she stops entertaining at home. She eventually ends up staying out all night, much to her mother's horror. Apparently, this gal would rather compromise her virtue and all standing in their cliquish community, than expose her friends to Nana's yammering. It's evident that Rhoda and her mother had few true values to begin with and faced with the slightest imposition, they soon throw the remainder out the window. They are shallow and uncaring and their patriarch George (Lucy's son) is too weak to challenge them. When his wife tells him that Lucy has to go, for Rhoda's sake, George concedes with shame, but little opposition.
I'm not saying that the children's reactions are outrageous. There are many compassionate families that would buckle under the strain of bringing loved but trying relatives into their household. But Lucy faces cruel words that make a painful situation devastating, as when Rhoda angrily tells her to stop indulging Barkley's pipe dream about someday finding a job. The cold barb's rob Lucy of dignity in a way that mere homelessness could not.
When George approaches his mother, to tell her that she is being sent to a nursing home, he can't find the words. Anticipating what he wants to impart, Lucy preemptively tells him that it is she who wants to leave, claiming that she'll actually enjoy the elegant facility. She only asks that Barkley never be told where she is going. He wouldn't understand. Let Barkley think she is still with George, who can forward letters from his mother to father from his home address. Hating his own cowardice, George agrees to this plan, later telling his insensitive wife that she should be very proud of him that day.
Meanwhile, Barkley's daughter is just as tired of having him as a border (though her irritation is more justified than George's family's is) and arranges to have him shipped off to her sister in California. He will be able to have one brief meeting with his beloved wife, during a short interruption in his train trip across the country.
The reunited Coopers get to spend one day together, 5 whole hours, before it's time to part. They make an odyssey of it, revisiting places they went on their honeymoon and recalling moments from the half century they spent together. Lucy says that happiness comes at different times for different people. Some get it all in the end, some get it in the beginning, but theirs was spread across the many decades, so they shouldn't complain if it's over now -- after all they've had so much. As they look in shop windows, Barkley sees a "help wanted" sign and darts in to look for work, trying not to left his wife know and smoothly providing a cover store when he is rejected yet again. One last ditch effort to avoid the inevitable.
At the same hotel they stayed at when their marriage was young, Barkley and Lucy both enjoy a drink, though Lucy does so only hesitantly. After all, in her day women didn't imbibe in public! They share a dance, with the other patrons politely deferring when the band strikes up "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" in the Coopers' honor. The hotel manager graciously listens to the Coopers reminisce. Upon learning that they have 5 children, he says that they must have given Lucy and Barkley much pleasure. Bark dryly notes that the man must never have had children of his own, if he thinks that!
The hours pass, almost as quickly as their life together did. The children are waiting for the elder Coopers at George's apartment, where they were to share one last dinner as a family. Barkley stands them up, closing the door of the phone booth so that Lucy (and the audience) can't hear him telling his son off. Back at the house, the guilty children have no defense. They knew they were miserable wretches for the way they were treating their parents. They just didn't know that Lucy and Barkley knew!
Lucy and Barkley go to the train station alone, having cut the time so short that the children are (thankfully) unable to serenade Barkley before he makes the long journey to California. There is only Lucy to say goodbye. He tells her that he will find a job in California and send for her. They will be together again before she knows it. She pretends to believe him. But just in case -- in case they don't meet again -- perish the silly thought, Lucy wants to know that there is no other man on earth she'd rather have spent her life with. Barkley answers in kind. He cherished every minute they had.
He boards the locomotive and Lucy waves him goodbye, running to catch every last glimpse of him in the moving windows, until he's gone from sight. End credits.
I was stunned. I kept expecting a last minute reprieve. Surely the remorseful children would devise a way to keep Lucy and Barkley together at the last minute. But this isn't the fanciful type of movie where remorse trumps self-interest. There's no happy ending, giving this movie a realism that seems current, no matter how dated the scenery or dialogue. And the lack of melodrama in Lucy and Barkley's parting made it all the more heartbreaking. So often, the most cataclysmic breaches come with a whisper, not a whimper, much less a bang. Your world ends, but the train wheels never brake.
Side notes: I'm not surprised at the number of times Louise Beavers has played a maid, but I had no idea some of them were named Mamie. Here, Mamie, George's housekeeper, resented Lucy's inclusion in the household as much as her mistress did, because it meant she sometimes had to stay late. When it's time for Lucy to leave for the nursing home, Mamie regrets her past behavior, in the face of Lucy's graciousness.
I laughed when George avoided kissing his unpleasant sister by claiming he had a bad cold -- directly after kissing the other one. Somehow, I didn't think they were as aware of the passage of germs through kissing 70 years ago as we are today. I guess bacteria has always proven a pretty handy excuse, for avoiding the undesirable.
After watching Make Way my thoughts were plagued with ideas on how Lucy and Bark could have stayed together, but that would have defeated the writers' purpose. He parted them to drive the hurt home. The point was not to save the characters, but to prompt audience members to go out and make the world better for their real life parents.
Friday, December 10, 2010
The King's Speech (2010)
Charming film with all of the excellent actors at their pinnacle.
With these fictionalized biographies, it's hard to guess what's been purely fictionalized and what moments hold a glimmer of truth. If there was anything real in the relationships depicted in this film, I hope it's not the bond between George VI and his speech therapist Lionel Logue, so much as it is the loving marriage to which is paid quiet tribute in all of Helena Bonham Carter's scenes. As Queen Elizabeth, the unconditional support and love she offers Bertie is enviable. The unwavering affection these two share is more romantic than any passion. I hope it existed in life the way its portrayed on screen.
By the time I was born, the Queen Mother was already a kindly dowager. I never cared to look beyond the sweet grandmother she appeared to be in public appearances. However, due to Carter's handling of the role, I want more "Cake" and look forward to learning if she was as determined and delightful as this movie presents her.
Lionel Logue is an Australian speech therapist and failed actor, called upon to help Prince Albert who has been afflicted with stuttering since childhood. As King George the Fifth's health begins to decline, he looks towards his sons (Albert is second in line to the throne and David is first) to play a greater role in the monarchy.
While volumes have been written regarding the selfish (and hidden) motives behind David's inevitable abdication of the throne, I've seldom seen him portrayed as flip and flighty as he appears here. Guy Pearce is ever-skilled, but the role shallow. To give the leads more depth, Pearce's was left to work with a facile depiction of a complicated historic event.
Logue and Bertie, Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, however, were inspiring. Yet, ever since seeing The Miracle Worker as a kid, I've found journeys such as the one they share rather predictable. The haughty defiant pupil, who ultimately gains even more in friendship than he does from the invaluable education he receives. John Brown, Lionel Logue, Anna Leonowens . . . how would the royals ever achieve joy, humanity or enduring success without the guidance of feisty commoners?
However, the fact that George VI's transformation is familiar, does not make it less enjoyable. There were moments that seemed laughably artificial -- such as Guy Pearce's entire performance as King Edward VIII or Logue's suggestion that Bertie use the "F-word". I don't think they actually started calling it that until the 1990s after OJ Simpson's trial made the term "n-word" famous.
Then, there was the needless exposition surrounding Prince John. It was phony to have Bertie explain that his youngest brother suffered from epilepsy and died at the age of 13 when clearly Lionel Logue would have known that already, about the death at least, if not the epilepsy. Indeed, the reason that Logue asks about Johnny is because he knew the kid was dead. So, how very obliging of Bertie to explain that fact to the audience!
Certainly, there are not many psychiatrists who have witnessed the kind of break through that Logue was treated to when, in a single conversation, Bertie illuminates every shadow in his past (mean nanny, domineering father, forced right-handedness to painful leg braces), so that Logue can handily get to the root of his stammering in one fell and simplistic swoop. It would have been better if these factoids had been revealed in more staggered, subtle stages.
Then there's the big dance number -- or dramatic equivalent -- near the end when Bertie discovers that Logue is not a real doctor. After everything the two have forged and accomplished by that point, the threatened fissure seems contrived for Oscar goodness.
Which is not really to say the movie is heavy handed. The characters are rendered with enough deft realism to gloss over any glitches in the script.
My favorite moment was one of the most understated. Logue is at home, glued to the radio with his wife and three sons when it is announced that Britain is at war with Germany. The vast fear that must immobilize the parents of boys (one of military age) in such a moment is fully expressed in just a glance.
Bertie's battle with an obsequious Archbishop is also played with humor that's finer, for its delicacy.
All in all, the King's Speech is a regal offering. I wanted to spend more time with these characters and their real-life counterparts. It left me curious to re-discover all the facts I promptly forgot after finishing my history tests at school (i.e. when did Neville Chamberlain die). Seeing worried citizens gathered around their radios, as nations coalesce to squelch Hitler's rise to power, a universal sense of patriotism swells. We had FDR and this movie suggests that Britain had a man whose stutter was, in the end, inconsequential.
With these fictionalized biographies, it's hard to guess what's been purely fictionalized and what moments hold a glimmer of truth. If there was anything real in the relationships depicted in this film, I hope it's not the bond between George VI and his speech therapist Lionel Logue, so much as it is the loving marriage to which is paid quiet tribute in all of Helena Bonham Carter's scenes. As Queen Elizabeth, the unconditional support and love she offers Bertie is enviable. The unwavering affection these two share is more romantic than any passion. I hope it existed in life the way its portrayed on screen.
By the time I was born, the Queen Mother was already a kindly dowager. I never cared to look beyond the sweet grandmother she appeared to be in public appearances. However, due to Carter's handling of the role, I want more "Cake" and look forward to learning if she was as determined and delightful as this movie presents her.
Lionel Logue is an Australian speech therapist and failed actor, called upon to help Prince Albert who has been afflicted with stuttering since childhood. As King George the Fifth's health begins to decline, he looks towards his sons (Albert is second in line to the throne and David is first) to play a greater role in the monarchy.
While volumes have been written regarding the selfish (and hidden) motives behind David's inevitable abdication of the throne, I've seldom seen him portrayed as flip and flighty as he appears here. Guy Pearce is ever-skilled, but the role shallow. To give the leads more depth, Pearce's was left to work with a facile depiction of a complicated historic event.
Logue and Bertie, Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, however, were inspiring. Yet, ever since seeing The Miracle Worker as a kid, I've found journeys such as the one they share rather predictable. The haughty defiant pupil, who ultimately gains even more in friendship than he does from the invaluable education he receives. John Brown, Lionel Logue, Anna Leonowens . . . how would the royals ever achieve joy, humanity or enduring success without the guidance of feisty commoners?
However, the fact that George VI's transformation is familiar, does not make it less enjoyable. There were moments that seemed laughably artificial -- such as Guy Pearce's entire performance as King Edward VIII or Logue's suggestion that Bertie use the "F-word". I don't think they actually started calling it that until the 1990s after OJ Simpson's trial made the term "n-word" famous.
Then, there was the needless exposition surrounding Prince John. It was phony to have Bertie explain that his youngest brother suffered from epilepsy and died at the age of 13 when clearly Lionel Logue would have known that already, about the death at least, if not the epilepsy. Indeed, the reason that Logue asks about Johnny is because he knew the kid was dead. So, how very obliging of Bertie to explain that fact to the audience!
Certainly, there are not many psychiatrists who have witnessed the kind of break through that Logue was treated to when, in a single conversation, Bertie illuminates every shadow in his past (mean nanny, domineering father, forced right-handedness to painful leg braces), so that Logue can handily get to the root of his stammering in one fell and simplistic swoop. It would have been better if these factoids had been revealed in more staggered, subtle stages.
Then there's the big dance number -- or dramatic equivalent -- near the end when Bertie discovers that Logue is not a real doctor. After everything the two have forged and accomplished by that point, the threatened fissure seems contrived for Oscar goodness.
Which is not really to say the movie is heavy handed. The characters are rendered with enough deft realism to gloss over any glitches in the script.
My favorite moment was one of the most understated. Logue is at home, glued to the radio with his wife and three sons when it is announced that Britain is at war with Germany. The vast fear that must immobilize the parents of boys (one of military age) in such a moment is fully expressed in just a glance.
Bertie's battle with an obsequious Archbishop is also played with humor that's finer, for its delicacy.
All in all, the King's Speech is a regal offering. I wanted to spend more time with these characters and their real-life counterparts. It left me curious to re-discover all the facts I promptly forgot after finishing my history tests at school (i.e. when did Neville Chamberlain die). Seeing worried citizens gathered around their radios, as nations coalesce to squelch Hitler's rise to power, a universal sense of patriotism swells. We had FDR and this movie suggests that Britain had a man whose stutter was, in the end, inconsequential.
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