Lance Mannion

Red Tails

“They fight! They fight!” Some of the young leads of the hokey and cliche-riddled but somehow still thrilling and inspiring Red Tails.

The dialog is horrendous.  Hokey, riddled with cliches, almost purely expository.  The characters are stock characters cut and pasted together out of a thousand movies and TV shows.  The situations are also cut and paste jobs although mostly limited to World War II Movies We Have Known and Loved, including, unexpectedly, considering this is a movie about the war in the air, Stalag 17  and The Great Escape.  And if the dogfights aren’t as obviously cgi-ed as the inevitable video game, they aren’t as well thought out or plotted either.  Planes appear out of nowhere and fly any old which way, without any strict attempt to place them in particular positions in relation to each other in the sky or to show how they got in those positions, and those planes, especially if they have stars on the wings and not crosses, are able to pull off maneuvers that only model airplanes being flown by the twelve year old boys who built them are capable of without stalling or tearing their own wings off.

It’s the kind of war movie in which all the main characters have personality-defining nicknames.  Easy, Lightning, Junior, Joker, Smokey, Deacon.

It’s the kind of war movie in which the hotshot pilot learns to be a team player just in time and the kid grows up and you know Death has it in for the guy we’ve just learned now has everything to live for.

It’s the kind of war movie in which every scene of our heroes pulling off a seemingly impossible feat of derring-do is preceded by a scene of someone predicting that our heroes won’t be able to pull off that feat because it’s impossible.

It’s the kind of war movie in which the Jerrys---although I don’t remember hearing them called Jerrys, which would make that one of the few cliches the script misses, but then there are no British characters---have only one ace and he manages to lead every German squadron our heroes encounter, no matter where over the whole of Italy the fight takes place and no matter what type of plane the Luftwaffe scrambles that day, and he’s a smirking sadist, an obvious NAZI motivated solely by arrogance and the pleasure of killing our good, God-fearing American boys who themselves are motivated by duty, honor, responsibility, and the desire to do what’s right by their friends and country.  And of course the last time the Nazi ace shows up it’s to go one on one in the air with our ace.

It’s that kind of war movie, and yet, somehow, Red Tails is still an exciting and inspiring film.

To start with, it’s based on a true story and that story is exciting and inspiring even just in outline.  Red Tails is a fictionalized but not fabulized account of the exploits of the 332nd Fighter Group---more famously known as the Tuskegee Airman, the African-American pilots who in the racially-segregated military of World War II became one of the most decorated units in the war.  History makes Red Tails a sequel to Glory and it’s depressing and infuriating to realize that eighty years after the men of the Massachusetts 54th left the beach before Fort Wagner red with their blood, black Americans still had their courage, their intelligence, their patriotism, and the personhood openly doubted and had to prove all over again, as if the 54th, the Buffalo Soldiers, the soldiers who fought in the integrated Army in World War I hadn’t proved it again and again that that not only would black men fight for their country, they could fight.

It’s satisfying and thrilling to watch these fictional pilots prove it, again and again, knowing they’re doing it as stand-ins for real-life heroes.

Director Anthony Hemingway and screenwriters John Ridely and Aaron McGruder celebrate and respect the history, giving it to us without too much sentimentality or bombast.  The upside of the characters being stock characters borrowed from other war movies is that like the characters in those other movies they are allowed to be themselves, their thoughts and their subplots taken up with issues and concerns apart from their places in history.  They are aware that they have to prove something to the bigots in the Army Air Corps and back home in the States, but they have more pressing worries at the moment---getting themselves and their planes and their friends back to base in one piece---and things they have to prove to themselves that aren’t all about race.  The ace has to prove he can look out for people other than himself.  The squad leader has to prove he can live up to expectations.  The kid has to prove he’s not a kid.  These are stock situations but they also happen to be realistic concerns individuals have had to face since forever, which leads into the next reason Red Tails is a better movie than it ought to be.  Its cast.

Terrence Howard’s and Cuba Gooding’s names appear above the title on the poster, but they really have supporting roles and are there mainly to provide weight and solidity to characters who are really walking pieces of exposition. The true stars are the members of the ensemble of younger actors playing the pilots and groundscrew of the 332nd, especially Nate Parker as Easy, the self-doubting, secretly self-loathing squadron leader---Easy is a description of the smooth path he’s had through life, thanks to his father the judge.  He is anything but easy in his mind and heart.---rapper Ne-Yo as the sleepy-eyed, slow-talking but wide-awake and wisecracking country boy, Smokey, Tristan Wilds as the kid desperate to shed his nickname, Junior, and replace it with one of his own devising, Ray Gun, and Andre Royo as the fussy, irritable, permanently worried, always complaining, and ultra-competent chief flight mechanic, Coffee as in, I think “Wake up, you goofballs, and smell the…”

But the real stand-out is David Oyelowo as the ace, Joe “Lightning” Little.

Oyelowo doesn’t exactly underplay a character who, a show-off himself, must have provided a temptation to show off.  But he suggests more than he emphasizes Lightning’s confidence, reckless self-regard, and swagger and he uses his other subplot to inform Lightning’s transformation from cocky lone wolf to team leader.  Lighting falls in love with a girl in the town near the 332nd’s Italian base.  She doesn’t speak English, he doesn’t speak Italian, so he has to find a way not just to talk to her but let her know who he is and in order to do that he has to ask himself who he is, what kind of man he is, and what kind of man he needs to be to be worthy of her love.  Junior needs to prove he’s not the kid others take him for, but it’s Lightning who needs to do the growing up.  Oyelowo shows how that shakes him and humbles him and, ultimately, opens his eyes and his heart.

And, then, Red Tails is helped by being that kind of war movie.  Producer George Lucas has said that in addition to wanting to tell the story of the 332nd he wanted to give a new generation the kind of rousing war movie he loved as a kid, a rip-roaring adventure yarn with heroes to cheer and villains to boo.  And Red Tails delivers.  Taking it to the Nazis is always as fun and satisfying to watch.

Finally, though, there are the planes themselves.  P-51s and Me109’s were beautiful machines, handsome on the ground, gorgeous in flight.  The dogfights in Red Tails may not be among the best ever filmed, but it’s still thrilling to watch the Mustangs and Messerschmitts swooping and diving and chasing each other through the skies.

When I was a twelve year old kid building model airplanes I assembled whole squadrons of P-38s, Hellcats, and Spitfires, but I don’t recall building a single P-51.  I can’t explain that oversight.  Maybe it was just the case that my local hobby shop never had one in stock when I showed up with my allowance burning a hole in my pocket.  I wonder,though, if I’d ever bought one, I’d have known to paint the tail red.

Do kids still build model airplanes?  If they do, then I expect that there are whole squadrons of P-40s and P-51s being put together and that the little pilots sitting bravely in the cockpits have had their faces painted brown.

Something important I have to note.  There were a lot of little kids in the theater where we saw Red Tails and you’ll know what I mean when I tell you that this was not Newt Gingrich’s crowd.  And the most thrilling and moving moment for me was when the final credits began to roll and these kids and their families broke into wild applause and cheers.

This is their story, Newt, not your disgusting whopper about the need for child janitors.  Almost eighty years after the Tuskegee Airmen helped clear the skies over Europe, it’s shameful that you’re still asking your fellow Americans to prove themselves worthy in your pig-squinty little eyes.

______________________

Reportedly, Lucas had been trying for twenty-eight years to get Red Tails made.  Got me thinking.  If he’d been able to get it done ten years ago, it might very well have still starred Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding…as Easy and Lightning.  Ten years before that Andre Braugher and Denzel Washington could have played the leads.  And ten years before that Paul Winfield and Billy Dee Williams, with Sidney Poitier, of course, in Howard’s role as the Old Man.

Red Tails, directed by Anthony Hemingway, produced by George Lucas, starring Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr, David Oyelowo, Nate Parker, and Gerald McRaney.  Now playing in theaters.

Bubble

Charles Murray, co-author of that foul blot on the American intellectual landscape, The Bell Curve, has a new book out.  It’s called Coming Apart and apparently it’s about how the majority of Americans are ruining the county by not letting the minority who are white, middle-aged, Midwestern and Southern suburban dwelling, Right Wing, Christianist yahoos persist in thinking they own the place.  Or something like that.  I should probably just ignore it, but…

There’s a quiz! 

It’s a really fun quiz mainly because it is so obvious in its intention, which is to try to convince those of us who aren’t white, middle-aged, Midwestern and Southern suburban-dwelling, Right Wing, Christianist yahoos we are somehow out of the American mainstream and get so mad about it we buy the book to argue with it…or at least post the quiz on our blogs to drum up outrage that in turn drums up publicity that causes other people to say, Hey, that sounds like a book that will make me mad.  I think I’ll go buy it to find out.

At any rate, I plan to write something over the weekend about the assumptions behind the questions but in the meantime I thought you might get a laugh out of taking the quiz.  I took it and found out that I have more in common with white, middle-aged, Midwestern and Southern suburban-dwelling yahoos than the authors of the quiz probably expected someone like me to have. 

So, have at it, then let us know what you scored (How thick is your bubble?) and what you found most risible in the questions.

How Thick Is Your Bubble? Guest Score » 12 out of 20  (60% )  Result  On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 13 and 16. In other words, you don't even have a bubble. Quiz School Take this quiz & get your score

How Thick Is Your Bubble? » Make Your Own Quiz

A little more fundraising

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Thanks to all of you who have already donated.  And thanks to you all for reading the blog. 

Mitt’s Office

I used to think Justin Long was the perfect choice to play Gilligan if they ever get around to making a movie version of Gilligan’s Island.  But now I think he’s found the part he was really born to play:

Not as inspired as Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin, but still on the money.  On the money?  Get it?  Mitt Romney?  Really rich guy?  On the money?  Oh, never mind.

By MoveOn.org. Via Greg Mitchell.

The cold winds that blow through The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo blow through the hearts of its main characters

The absolutely fearless Rooney Mara as the hard to like but easy to admire Lisbeth Salander, the more awesome than Batgirl heroine of the American movie version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

The wind blows throughout David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

It howls down the streets of Stockholm.  It roars across an island isolated in the icy waters of a fjord.  It rattles windows.  It defines the relative silence within even the coziest rooms.  It blows and blows until you think it will never stop and it will drive you crazy.  It gets into everything.  It is part of everything.  It’s the rush of trains pulling into and out of stations.  It’s the moaning of the doors on the cars in a subway.  It’s the collective voices of crowds.  It’s in the music on the soundtrack, which, when you notice that, tells you that it isn’t simply an effect, Fincher using sound to drive home that this is Sweden in WINTER and it’s COLD here.

We’re not just listening to the wind without.  We’re hearing the wind within.  This is the wind that blows through the holes in people’s hearts and souls.  It’s the noise inside their heads.  It’s the sound that keeps people from hearing their own thoughts, from listening to their hearts.  It’s the weather inside us too much of the time, the cold, steadily droning wind of  loneliness and alienation, the internal winteriness of lives lived cut off from the warming comfort of social and familial connections, either by accident (as in suffering an injury, physical or psychic) or by temperament or by choice.

We’re hearing the “thoughts” of the two main characters, both of whom are freezing emotionally inside. 

Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara, looking as white as snow, as if in fact glazed over with frost, and I’ll get to the visual poetry of the film shortly) is virtually alone in the world. For understandable and horrifying reasons, she’s cut off from the little family she has.  She’s been a ward of the state since she was twelve.  Apparently she’s had only one caregiver who actually cared for her and he’s suffered a severely debilitating stroke.  Her job is as a part-time researcher for an private investigation firm and the work, which is essentially to spy on people and steal their secrets using her incredible talents as a computer hacker, has confirmed her belief that people aren’t much good and certainly can’t be trusted.  Her boss admires her, as much for her resilience and ability to persevere as for her skills, but as far as she’s concerned their relationship is purely opportunistic.  He uses her as a tool to get a job done.  She uses him back to make money. 

When we meet the journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), he’s coming out of a courtroom where he’s just lost a libel case.  The verdict will potentially destroy him professionally and financially.  His confidence shaken, his pride shattered, his sense of shame and failure overwhelming, he starts looking for an excuse to run away and go hide from his troubles and he gets it in the form of a job offer from a very rich and powerful old industrialist who, brushing aside the implications of the libel verdict, wants Blomkvist to put his reportorial skills to investigate the disappearance of the man’s favorite niece in 1966!  Divorced, somewhat estranged from his teenage daughter, involved with a married woman who, although very fond of him, puts her family and her career well-above their affair on her list of priorities, Blomkvist’s emotional ties to the outside world are already tenuous, but he cuts himself off from friends, family, colleagues, and lover to go off to a remote island to spend time chasing another man’s ghosts.

It’s no wonder that a cold wind is the white noise inside both these characters’ heads.

Rooney Mara is fearless.  Not just because of the nude scenes.  Not just because most of those nude scenes are shot without eroticism in unflattering light.  Not because of the rape scene.  Not just for enduring the blows to the natural vanity of a young actress trying to get her career started in an industry that values young actresses mainly for how pretty they are.  And if she did her own stunts and drove that motorcycle herself, then not just because of that, although if she did she’s plain nuts as well. 

All that takes guts, but the bravest thing she does is resist the urge to make a single play for our sympathy.  Late in the film, Fincher gives her two scenes in which our hearts break for her, but that’s his doing, not hers.  Wherever it’s up to Mara, she delivers a performance that regularly raises a middle finger to the audience.  If we wind up liking Salander, it’s not because Mara’s made it easy for us.

We know Salander is damaged goods.  We know she’s been a victim.  We see her victimized horrifically again.  There are moments when we know she is hurting and in most of those moments Mara makes sure that we see that Salander deals with her wounds and her pain by being obnoxious and offensive.  The child welfare system that has more or less raised her since she was twelve has declared her insane and Salander takes that as permission to defy the rules of normal social behavior, especially the rules encouraging niceness, politeness, consideration, and at least the pretense of taking an interest in other people.  She refuses to show if she likes or even notices the very few people who like her.  We can guess that Salander has developed the habit of pushing away all offers of comfort and ministration as a defense because monsters and villains in her past (and one in her present) have gotten at her by offering sympathy and comfort, but Mara makes sure we get the feeling that Salander now enjoys being a thorn bush with no roses and gets a kick out of it when someone scratches themselves trying to reach out to her.

She doesn’t even let up with her lovers.  In a scene in which Salander seduces tonight’s chosen one-nighter, Mara lets us know with one swift and seemingly careless gesture that Salander is rough trade.

Mara’s bravery can be summed up as her willingness to let Fincher use her the way he uses scenery, props, light, camera angles, music, sound---as one of a number of tools to construct the images to tell his story with.  Mara doesn’t appear to care whether or not Fincher makes her look good.  She trusts that he’s using her to say something interesting.

Fincher is one of our most accomplished visual storytellers.  It’s more than that he uses pictures to tell his stories or even that every picture tells a story.  It’s that every picture is the story.  It’s practically the case that you could take any frame from one of his films and analyze like a painting in art class and find clue after to clue to what is going on with the characters and where they’ve gotten so far in their various progresses through the plot.

The images start with the characters themselves.  Fincher’s landscapes, streetscapes, roomscapes are built out from them with the effect that it’s as if they’re constructing the spaces they occupy while we watch.  It’s the pathetic fallacy intensified to an almost absurd degree.  Nature doesn’t merely reflect a person’s mood, it is reconfigured by it, as if our emotions have a gravitational pull. 

It works as simply as this:  Having moved into his guest house on the island where he’s been brought to investigate the forty year old mystery, Blomkvist has to run outside to find a cell phone signal and what happens visually is that Craig steps from a medium shot into a long shot and instantly shrinks before our eyes while a great empty expanse of snow-covered lawn spreads out around him.   The shrinking and the spreading are simply tricks of the eye, of course, as we’re slow to adjust to the quick change of point of view, but we still feel it happen and feel Blomkvist feeling it too, as he realizes that he is alone, cut off from help or comfort from anyone who cares about him, exposed, unequipped for the job he’s taken on, literally and emotionally and mentally, and completely without a plan or a clue or the slightest idea what to do next.

It’s not a profound or all that original a moment but it is powerful and arresting.  And it tells us an important part of the story.  Blomkvist is a man who needs rescuing.

In case we thought it was Salander who was the one who needed a hero to come save her.

This sort of visual exposition goes on throughout.  There’s something askew in the office of a seemingly well-intentioned and avuncular attorney.  An apparently minor character doesn’t quite fit the room in which we meet her.  The shadows don’t fall quite right around her.  Her coloring is too vivid against the dark background.  The rooms of a supposedly welcoming house are warmly lit but strangely empty and characterless and sterile, with big, blank windows that are rectangles of black blacker than the night outside. The offices of the magazine where Blomkvist works and from which he’s about to exile himself are warm, blond, sleek, modern, and inviting which happens also to be a good description of his lover (a very warm, blonde, sleek, and inviting Robin Wright) with whom he owns and edits the magazine and from whom he’s also about to cut himself off.  Salander is usually to be found in cramped, crooked, and shadowy rooms, hallways, basements, and alleys, when she’s not on her motorcycle roaring down the road in her leathers, an inky black blur tattooed against equally blurred gray backgrounds.  It’s not surprising, however, when we finally follow her back to her own apartment, that her private spaces are as cold and white as the snowy lawn outside Blomqvist’s cottage and the rooms he shivers in inside.

It should also be no surprise that when the two partner up at last (and it takes half the movie for this to happen) and they start to work together to solve the mystery, those rooms, hers and his, are warmed up by the images of the two of them together.

The “wind” stops blowing as well.

Mara’s performance makes the movie.  Her Salander may be hard to like but we see at once that the flip side of her isolation and alienation is independence and self-reliance.  Salander is active, intelligent---hyper-intelligent---brave, tough, and far more than merely competent.  We’re drawn to her because we suspect she’s deeply wounded, but well before we learn what her wounds are and what caused them, that is, before we can begin to pity her, we’re forced to admire her and cheer for her because of what she can do and how she does it, which is just about everything and very well.

As Blomkvist, Craig isn’t required to be as fearless as Mara, but he still has to put aside whatever leading man’s vanity he might possess.  Blomkvist is a talented journalist, but he’s an average man, not particularly strong, physically or emotionally, not particularly brave, and not anywhere as smart as he needs to be.  Craig has to play it vulnerable and scared, qualities he actually brings to his James Bond, but Blomqvist is far from being Bond in any other way except in looking like Daniel Craig, although a more tired and less handsome Daniel Craig.

It’s Mara’s Salander who is Bond-like, although when I was watching the movie Bond wasn’t the action-adventure hero who first came to mind.   I’ve joked online and around the house to anyone who will listen that Fincher has beaten Christopher Nolan to the screen with the next chapter in the Dark Knight saga.  But, seriously, Nolan’s goal has been to create a Batman who could plausibly exist and operate in the real world.  He’s had to do some fudging to pull it off.  Fincher fudges less to come up with a realistic character who is in her way Batgirl only more awesome, considering.

It’s one of Fincher’s best tricks he sneaks past us the fact that with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo he’s made a mostly conventional movie murder mystery that includes a villain who is a conventional movie murder mystery cliche and some standard-issue action-adventure movie stunts, chases, and fight scenes.

That’s not all he’s made, of course.  Among other things, he’s made Rooney Mara an Academy Award nominee, and frankly, if the world was just, she’d have made him one too.  It’s far from her fault, though, that he was robbed.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, directed by David Fincher, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson, starring Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Robin Wright, Stellan Skarsgard, Yorick van Wageningen, Geraldine James, and Joely Richardson. Now playing in theaters.

Stieg Larsson’s novel is available from Amazon in paperback and kindle editions.

Trivia that probably won’t win you any bar bets, but skoal anyway:  David Dencik appears in both this and the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, playing a different character in each.

Tinker…tailor…soldier…

In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Tomas Alfredson’s film adaptation of John le Carre’s novel, spy-catcher George Smiley (played by a shadow-seeking Gary Oldman) operates in a London that, worn down by a generation of cold war, has become as gray, cold, and uncomfortable and univiting as any city locked up behind the Iron Curtain.

Good God, the world was ugly in 1973.

Ugly cars. Ugly clothes. People uglying themselves up with ugly fashions, hair styles, attitudes, vanities.  The skies were still gray with the exhaust of cars burning leaded gas. Rooms were still foul, stale, and discolored from cigarette smoke.  The sun never shone.  The stars refused to come out. Nobody smiled with any real warmth.

It was a time when young men started thinking it was hip to look and act like little boys,  It was a time when middle-aged men tried to look like young men by adopting the fashions of their sons but somehow still came across as older than their own fathers, stodgy, fusty, clueless, stubbornly set in their ways and Blimpishly satisfied with ideas worn out by their grandfathers’ day.

It was time when there was a lot of sex, but not much love, and what little real romance there was seemed always to come at the expense of someone outside the affair, when betrayal itself was romantic.

At any rate, that’s how 1973 appears to have appeared in Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John le Carre’s classic spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

This is odd, considering that the London and the Europe in the background of the television miniseries based on the novel---which first aired in 1979, close enough to 1973 to be considered part of the same period, while the Cold War was still being “fought” and before the money that started flowing in the 1980s cleaned and livened things up---are warmer, cleaner, jollier, more cheerfully noisier places.

On the other hand, the movie’s London of 1973 looks very much like the London in the background of the earlier episodes of Rumpole of the Bailey, produced in the late 70s, dirty, decaying, charmless, soulless, grim and relatively silent. In the first couple of seasons, even Pomeroy’s Wine Bar, Rumpole’s retreat of choice, looked cold and unwelcoming.  The spies in the movie don’t even have a Pomeroy’s to retreat to.  They hold their office Christmas party in an institutionally characterless function room that looks like the cafeteria in a school for wayward boys and nobody looks like they’re having fun, especially the people who most act like they’re having fun.

I don’t know which is a more accurate rendering of the look of the period.  But it doesn’t matter.  The effect in both versions is thematic.

In the miniseries, the point is two-fold.  We’re meant to see that the world is going merrily on about its business, oblivious to the secret and dangerous work being done by George Smiley and his fellow spies and spy catchers and that that work is part of the world going on about its business.  Smiley and his people are like everybody around them, ordinary Englishmen and women doing their jobs with a veddy British lack of fuss and bother.  There’s a conscious de-romanticizing of the spies and their spy games.  The most Bond-like character, in his being the one with the license to kill and the one with the prolific sex life, is barely more than a street thug with an expense account. 

In the movie, as longtime reader C dropped a note to observe, “the year 1973 turns out to be a compelling character in own right.”  Nearly thirty years spent waging the Cold War hasn’t only exhausted the spies, it’s worn out the civilian population as well.  A generation has grown up and another grown old in the shadow of the Bomb.  All the ugliness and decay---of infrastructure and spirit --- is due to neglect.  No one wants to put money and effort into anything not directly related to defeating the Soviets, with the ironic consequence that the West has begun to look and feel like Eastern Europe in its gray decrepitude, lack of civil amenities, and general air of despondency and nihilism.  The fashions are distractions, as people try not to look like what they are or how they really feel, which is anxious, pointless, impotent, and futile.

The whole of society is not just morally but aesthetically compromised by the necessity of keeping secrets from enemies, from friends who might turn into enemies or might be co-opted by enemies, or who might think we’re enemies.  Paranoia and its yang self-doubt poison every relationship, with colleagues and friends, with society…with self.

In another movie, a good guy character looking searchingly into a mirror is a not liking what he sees moment.  Here it’s the case he doesn’t know what he’s looking at or for.

It’s inevitable that those who, like me admire the book and relished the miniseries and its sequel, Smiley’s People, will compare the movie to them, in general, and, in particular, Gary Oldman’s performance as George Smiley to Alec Guinness’ brilliant and I’d have thought definitive portrayal on TV.

But Alfredson quickly establishes that as a director he’s set standards and goals for his film that are different enough from the miniseries’ (and the book’s) that it can’t be judged easily through one to one comparisons.  The movie is more atmospheric, more indirect, and more allusive.  He employs a far more visual form of storytelling.  The miniseries and the novel are dialog driven.  You have to watch the movie more intensely than listen to it.  Not only are there long stretches of silence, it’s hard to remember that any character, with one notable exception, who is not George Smiley, ever says more than two words at a clip or that other characters say anything in reply.  Spies spy, that is, they watch, and the movie is about watching people watch each other, which sounds dull unless you keep in mind what they are watching for---weakness, dissimulation, the mistake that opens opportunities, threat, anything including virtues that can be turned against the person being watched.  Here, simply looking is an act of predation.

In this world, someone doesn’t have to fix you with a significant glare to put you on guard.  He just needs to glance casually in your direction.

Which explains the symbolism of Smiley’s oversized glasses.  Smiley’s main job is to look at people and his strength is that he sees everything when he does.

His best trick, however, is not being seen himself or for himself.

This is the opening Oldman exploits to differentiate his Smiley from Guinness’, with the smile-inducing effect of reminding us that Smiley didn’t have to be played by Gary Oldman or by Alec Guinness.  Oldman and Guinness are playing a character, interpreted in different ways, who, never mind who’s playing him, is still himself.  Like Hamlet, like Fagin, like Jane Eyre, Smiley’s a character of many qualities and actors can pick and choose what to emphasize.  The performances vary but the characters remain recognizable.

Guinness emphasizes Smiley’s wounded pride.

The story---book, miniseries, movie---opens with Smiley forcibly retired from his high-ranking position at MI6, the center of the British Intelligence Service.  There’s been a shake-up at the top, and Smiley, as the right-hand to the ousted chief, is told he has to go too.  It’s expected that he will understand and not kick up rough.  It’s taken for granted that George Smiley, loyal, self-effacing, modest, devoted to Queen and Country, will do what’s best for the service. 

It turns out, though, that Smiley is tired of being taken for granted, of being ignored, of having it expected that he will not mind or at least not show that he minds.  He minds.  He has always minded.  Suddenly, surprisingly---and he’s surprising himself---he’s going to show how much he’s minded.  Guinness makes Smiley irritable, querulous, impatient with anyone who expects him to act like his old self.  

But this is Smiley in retirement.  No longer required by his job or his professionalism to repress his feelings, he feels free to resent both past slights and hurts and present calls that he go back to being a cipher.  Even after he goes back to work to track down the Soviet mole who has burrowed his way to the heart of the secret service and has to re-adopt his old habits of reticence and diffidence, there’s the edge of complaint in his voice, as if he’s on the verge of exclaiming, “God damn it! I shouldn’t have to put up with this anymore!”  And Guinness lets us see Smiley’s vanity at stake. He’s determined to prove that firing him was a mistake.  He’s no longer willing to be taken for granted.

But being taken for granted, getting overlooked, having people forget he is there even while they’re looking right at him are among his chief skills as a spy.  He is an expert at fading into the background.  He’s there, but not there, seen but not really seen.  You look at him and you can’t quite pick him out from the scenery.  He’s deliberately blurry.

That’s what Oldman emphasizes, Smiley’s uncanny ability to take himself out of focus.

Oldman is constantly looking away, leaning back, turning his back on other characters and to the camera, and wandering off towards the edge of the frame.  Actors are taught from the beginning of their training to “find their light.”  Oldman finds his shadows.

In one of Oldman’s best scenes, Smiley recounts for his young assistant the time twenty years before when he met and interrogated Karla, Smiley’s Soviet counterpart and the spymaster assumed to be running the mole.  The recounting turns into a re-enactment, with Smiley taking on both parts, and as he gets into it, Oldman seems to wrap band after band of shadow around himself, blanking out more and more of himself until there are only jagged bits and pieces of himself left in any light at all.  This is where Smiley likes to work, in the near dark.  It’s also how he works.  So we’re not surprised to learn that while Smiley remembers Karla vividly, Karla remembers only one thing about Smiley. It happens to be a very important and damaging thing and a blow to Smiley’s pride.  Guinness let us see that pride.  Oldman lets us see it as he swallows it.

When he’s forced into the light and has to let others see him full on, Oldman’s face, his whole body, go perfectly still.  There’s not a twitch of a lip, not the barest raising of an eyebrow, not the slightest shrug to give even the keenest observer a clue to his thoughts or his feelings.  All there is to go on are his eyes, huge behind those glasses, wide-open, taking everything in.

Now, here’s the question, and I’m not in the position to answer it.  How much does having seen the miniseries or read the book matter to your enjoyment of the movie?  My feeling is that although Alfredson has made the story his own, he went into the project assuming, possibly even counting on, his prime audience being fans of one or the other or both.  I think he wants that audience to be able to appreciate the ways the movie is different.  I’m not saying that you won’t like the movie if you haven’t read the novel or watched the miniseries, but I wonder if you might have a little trouble following the plot.  You won’t, I think, have trouble with the mystery, because…

Alfredson hasn’t made a mystery.  In fact there is no mystery.  If you don’t already know who’s the mole, if you keep in mind your movie mystery conventions you’ll figure it out pretty quickly.  So if you haven’t read the book and decide to read it before you see the movie, you won’t be ruining it for yourself nor should you get mad if some blabbermouth gives it away before you get to the theater.  The suspense is not in Whodunnit? but in wondering if and how the mole will be caught and at what cost and to whom.

And there’s horror and more suspense along the way as the collateral costs mount.

One of the ways the movie’s version of 1973 is ugly is that it is populated mainly by men.  Women are literally pushed to the edge of the frame or forced into the background.  (Fans of the book and the miniseries will be surprised that a major character in both appears only twice in the film and then in glimpses, through half-open doors.)  They are only allowed center screen when they become victims of the men’s spy games.  The first casualty is a pretty young mother nursing her baby in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Another is a pretty young wife who makes the mistake of falling for the spy spying on the spy she’s married to.  The Cold War is destructive of new life and romance, not surprisingly, but it is destructive of all relationships based on affection and loyalty and we see that most in the victimization of Connie Sacks, the lone woman we meet with any real power, responsibility, and authority within MI6.

Played with an almost irritating open-heartedness by Kathy Burke, Connie is the only character who truly talks---to other characters and to us.  It’s not that she doesn’t know how to keep quiet like the rest of them.  It’s that she is wounded, psychically and spiritually by multiple betrayals and in gushing words she is showing us how much she is bleeding inside.

Besides Burke, the strong supporting cast includes Benedict Cumberbatch as Smiley’s suspiciously too boyish and dapper legman, Tom Hardy as a handsomer, more charismatic and intelligent version of the thug with a license to kill who is shocked to discover that instead of putting his life on the line, this time it’s his heart that’s in danger, and John Hurt, appearing mainly in flashbacks, as Smiley’s irascible and increasingly erratic friend and former boss, the head of MI6 who has discovered the existence of the mole just as illness has knocked the stuffing out of him and left him incapable of dealing with the threat physically, intellectually, and emotionally.

The stand-out, though, is Mark Strong, as the “scalphunter” Jim Prideaux, the one real secret agent in the group---that is, the one who, after Smiley, has come closest to leading an actually heroic life---who against his better judgment takes on one last assignment, ostensibly to get the name of the mole, but in his own mind hoping not to be told.  Prideaux becomes one of the mole’s victims.  He gets shot, he gets tortured, he gets shown the door when he’s finally returned home in an exchange with the Soviets that results in the deaths of several of Prideaux’s “assests.”  But none of that leaves as deep or as painful a mark on him as knowing he’s been betrayed and who by.  As Smiley, Oldman allows his eyes to reveal nothing.  They take everything in and let nothing out.  As Prideaux, Strong’s eyes reveal only one thing, heartbreak, and they let it all out.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, based on the novel by John le Carre, directed by Tomas Alfredson, screenplay by Bridget O’Conner and Peter Straughan, starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, John Hurt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, Kathy Burke, and Mark Strong.  Now playing in theaters, including, if you live in our neck of the woods, the Downing Film Center (through January 26).

Le Carre’s novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, is available from Amazon in paperback and a video and audio enhanced version for kindle.

The miniseries starring Alec Guinness and its sequel, Smiley's People, are available on DVD, also from Amazon.

Evil-eyed creatures

One or two of these evil-eyed creatures show up in our neighborhood every winter. They're just passing through but they use our lawn as a rest stop. The one that appeared this morning was just sitting on a low branch, studying the menu. Last one that visited was at the buffet table, with a sparrow under its claw. They really do have evil eyes, but they're gorgeous birds.

Sharp-shinned hawk. 

Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture, via Wikipedia.

The last of the fighting Dems

In the nearly ten years since we moved here, I’ve always been proud of our Congressman, Maurice Hinchey.  I call him the Last Fighting Democrat.  He isn’t.  Not the last. But…He’s a Democrat. He fights. Back in what you’d think the Republicans would call their glory days but which, judging by how eager they are to have them forgotten they seem to be as ashamed of as they should be, that is, back when they controlled both houses of Congress and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were the President everybody called George W. Bush, Mo seemed to be one of the few on our side of the aisle who wasn’t so cowed and demoralized he couldn’t get up out of his seat to stand up and fight back.  He’s not perfect but he’s been good, very good not just for Democrats but for his district.  And now he’s retiring.  He’s been at this a long time.  It’s far from a surrender.  He’d keep going if he could but he’s got something other than Republicans to fight.  He’s sick, he’s fighting cancer. But he’s emphatic.  That fight’s not why he’s leaving Congress.

Reporter for our still-vital local paper knocked on his door the other day to ask him about this and other things:

Reluctant at first to break the embargo on official comment his office had just issued, but gracious in the face of a request, Hinchey invited the visitor inside.

There, he spoke about the job he'll be leaving at the end of his term and his feelings about that decision.

Was the voice a bit softer than in his glory days on the stump? Yes. Was he more contained? Yes. Had the visitor ever seen him sit so still, or even sit at all if there was a hand to pump, a back to slap, a camera to be grinned into? No.

The lion was at rest in his den, his battles well behind him.

Was it safe to say that he was retiring for health reasons, after enduring surgery for colon cancer?

"No."

"No?"

"I'm leaving after 20 years. It's time."

You can read all of Jeremiah Horrigan’s story, Retiring Hinchey proud of legacy, at the Times Herald-Record. (Registration not required, but recommended.)

The photo above was taken by me in May 2009 at the dedication of our new bike trail which Hinchey helped get funded.  He worked with the Republican supervisor of our town and the Republican mayor of the next village over. There are still Republicans who like to build things.

Times Square, June 6, 1944 – D-Day

Photo from the Library of Congress’ American Memories collection.  View the whole set at Retronaut.

Thanks to Matthias Rascher.

Even for a seabird, that’s a long time at sea

Scientists have the DNA that shows the Bryan’s shearwater is a distinct species.  What they’re missing is a Bryan’s shearwater to go with it.  The last time anyone saw one was over a decade ago.

It’s a seabird.  “Seabirds have a habit of hiding,” says Rob Fleischer, head of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute's Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics in Washington, D.C., who co-authored the study identifying Bryan’s shearwater as its own species, “they're long-lived, so they can be out at sea for a long time”.

Read the whole story in this article, First New U.S. Bird Species in Decades—Already Extinct?, at National Geographic.

Photo via National Geographic, courtesy of Reginald David, Smithsonian Institution.

SOPA

This blog will not be going dark today to protest SOPA.  LanceMannion.com is not anyehere near up there with Wikipedia.   Congressmen and Senators do not read my blog.  They read letters.  I wrote mine.

They also answer phone calls.

Rooney Mara is who I want to be when I grow up

I’ll be getting around to writing a review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo as soon as I can think of a few more things to say besides, “Wow.”  But for now all I’ve got is this:  Rooney Mara is absolutely fearless.  She’s my new movie star hero.

There’s also this:  David Fincher has beaten Christopher Nolan to the screen with the next installment of the Dark Knight saga.

Elisabeth Salander?  Way more awesome than Batgirl.

Also: I am not moving to Sweden.

How children perceive the sadness of grown-ups

Last week, my friend the poet wrote:

Easy Wordsworth. Easy as flowers wild by the Oyster River. Anyone can be lonely but satisfied, like the old woman with the red face who they said had had a lobotomy but we were children and did not know what it meant, only that she lived by the water and was, as far as we could tell, perfectly alone. We were kids. We were respectful. She picked her flowers and we picked ours. Hoary Alyssum; White-wood Aster; Blue-stemmed Goldenrod; Spreading Jacob's Ladder...

Today I wrote back:

When I was a kid I thought we had no such sad characters in our neighborhood.  No one was poetically insane, either.  We had no Miss Flites.  No Boo Radleys.  There was a young mother and housewife we rarely saw.  She was said to be sick.  But no disease was ever named.  She never got well, but she never seemed to get sicker.  Now I know enough to suspect she was prone to depression.  Back then all we knew was that she wasn’t like all the other mothers, outside with the kids, running off on errands, visiting back and forth across the yards.  Her husband obsessed over his lawn.  Her two daughters were beautiful.  The elder and more beautiful ran a little wild, then she settled down, a student off to engineering school.  I don’t know what became of her other daughter.  Her son is a dentist. There’s a big carved wooden tooth on the sign outside his office.

A Tebow for Digby

A warm welcome to those of you coming over here because dibgy sent you, and thanks very much to digby for doing the sending.  The post she gave the nice shout out to, It was Patriots 45, Broncos 10 NOT Patriots 45, Tebow 10 is a couple of posts below.  Just scroll down a bit or click on the link.

Romney and Jobs

The next time Mitt Romney blithers about how all the criticism of his time as a vulture capitalist is motivated by envy of his wealth, will someone please ask him why so many of the people who “envy” him idolize Steve Jobs?

Huntsman

Jon Hutsman is the Republican Paul Tsongas of 2012.  The Political Press loves him, voters think he’s a bit of a nerd.

When it comes to economic policy, Huntsman is every bit as Republican, which means every bit as heartless and cruel and itching to punish the middle and working class and the poor for the greed of the plutocrats, as the man Charles Pierce calls the “zombie-eyed granny starver,” Paul Ryan.

On the whole, however, Huntsman is---was---the most intelligent, capable, accomplished, and sensible of the lot of them.  But the fact that he thought someone like him---reasonable, willing to put country ahead of ideology and partisan grudges, unwilling to hide his intellectual gifts, unwilling to pretend we live in some other, romanticized to the point of delusion century previous to the 21st, not motivated by hatred or fear himself and incapable of playing to the hatreds and fears of others, and, never mind Mormon, not a bible-thumping, Right Wing Christian would-be theocrat---stood a chance of winning the Republican nomination shows that he simply is not smart enough about the politics of the moment to be President.

In his own way, he is as dumb as the rest of them.

It was Patriots 45, Broncos 10, NOT Patriots 45, Tebow 10

I’d have been rooting for the Patriots last night even if they’d been playing Pittsburgh, and not because I think Big Ben is a creep of the first water.  I rooted for the Steelers against the Broncos, but not because I was rooting against Tim Tebow.  It’s a question of longstanding loyalties.  I went to college in Boston.  The Steelers drafted the first college player I was aware of as a great football player and I knew who he was because he played for Notre Dame, the only college team that mattered to me as a kid because I was Catholic and Irish and assumed that as such I was required to go there for college when I grew up. (Which would explain why this painting hung on the wall of my bedroom when I was growing up, even though I was a Colts fan first and then a Packers fan, because of Johnny Unitas and Bart Starr and Jerry Kramer.)  If the Pats had played the Steelers, the loyalties of the college kid I was would’ve trumped the loyalties of the college kid I outgrew wanting to be, that’s all.  In games the Steelers play against teams towards which I am indifferent, the latter’s loyalties win out.

I’ve never cared about the Broncos one way or another, except when they played the Giants in Super Bowl XXI and the 49ers in Super Bowl XXIV and then I cared about them only enough to root against them, although it’s more accurate to say I was rooting for the Giants and the 49ers because they were two of my favorite teams and still are and I wonder who I’ll be rooting for next week if the Giants beat the Packers this afternoon.  I expect it will be New York, but I don’t know.  When I see those red and gold uniforms, I can’t help it. I flashback twenty-five years and start rooting for Montana to throw long to Rice.

If the Packers win, the choice’ll be easy.  Green Bay.  As I mentioned, very longstanding loyalties there.

I’m taking the long way to say I didn’t root against Tim Tebow yesterday and I wouldn’t have rooted against Ben Roethlisberger.

I don’t think it’s fair to root against a whole team because of one player.  Big Ben may not deserve another Super Bowl ring in some “If the universe was just and God really exists” kind of way, but there are nearly fifty other guys on the team and a lot of them are deserving.  Even if I was inclined to want to see Tim Tebow smacked down for his unfortunate habit of praying in public, he has a lot of teammates who keep their faiths to themselves, some of whom are good guys, some of whom definitely aren’t.  Every pro football team’s roster includes more thugs than saints.

Well, except New Orleans’. 

Get it?

I crack myself up.

Tim Tebow strikes me as an amiable kid who might grow up to be an NFL-level quarterback some day, if his coaches let him.  He’s far from the only professional athlete who makes a show of his religion, but then, what do I care?  I have to admit to being reflexively annoyed whenever some baseball player points to heaven or kisses the cross around his neck as he crosses the plate.  But most of them think of what they’re doing as an act of humility.  They’re not boasting that God is on their side.  They’re not saying God hit the home run for them.  They’re thanking Him for the talent that put them in the position to enjoy a moment like this.  One thing I’ve read about Tebow that made me feel fondly towards him is that he gets a kick out of it when opposing players Tebow after sacking him.

Shows he has a sense of humor and a healthy dose of humility, qualities sadly lacking in a great many people, including a lot of the people who are annoyed by his religiosity.

I have to admit, though, I’ve made my share of jokes, in the analog world and on Twitter and Facebook, about which side God’s on.

But I don’t really mean the jokes to be at Tebow’s expense.

In fact, I think it’s the case for a lot of people who seem to have been rooting for Tebow to fail.  I’m sure there are plenty who plain don’t like the guy because of his praying in public.  But I think much of the animosity is actually directed towards the Right Wing Christians who have made Tebow their saint of the moment and towards the fawning media who hype him in order to attract that market.

These are people who believe that God takes sides, not just in football games, but everywhere, all the time, and the side He takes is their side.

In rooting for Tebow, they are rooting for themselves and against the rest of us.  They are declaring in another way what they’re always declaring, “God is on our side and not on yours.  God is with us and against you.”

Which of course provokes a reaction.

It’s not the case that we’re rooting against Denver or against Tim Tebow.  We are rooting against living in a country in which women are required to spend their youth either pregnant or nursing, in which gay people go back to being ashamed of themselves and hiding who they are in closets (For you Right Wing Christians: go back to hiding their lights under bushels.), in which brown-skinned and Spanish-speaking immigrants are worse than vermin, in which our children are taught that the earth is a few thousand years old and people were created by magic out of dust, in which the poor and the sick and weak and the oppressed are left to fend for themselves, and in which the ultimate goal of our foreign policy is all out war against the entire Muslim world so Jay-sus returns that much sooner.

And we’re rooting against a craven and opportunistic media that for the sake of a few more hits on their websites flatter and fawn over the Right, pretending they are just good old-fashioned God-fearin’ folk and refusing to acknowledge who they are, what kind of people they are, what they believe, and the kind of country they want to force the rest of us to live in.

If only it had been Stockhausen instead of Mahler

I keep my cell silenced almost all the time, but I just know the one time I forget…

“It was just awful to have any role in something like that, that is so disturbing and disrespectful not only to the conductor but to all the musicians and not least to the audience, which was so into this concert,” he said by telephone.

“I hope the people at that performance and members of the orchestra can certainly forgive me for this whole event. I apologize to the whole audience.”

Read all of Daniel J. Wakin’s story, Ringing Finally Ended, but There’s No Button to Stop Shame, at the New York Times.

Neville cheats death, twice

Besides the fact that I can’t imagine how you get a breathing tube down a horse’s windpipe, what astonishes me is that Neville was headed for the dog food factory before the fire.

AIKEN, S.C. — The horses’ straw beds were ablaze, with the rest of the barn, when two men rushed in against the flames and black smoke to try to save the 11 horses inside.

“It was horrific,” said Boyd Martin, the trainer. “Basically, you could see some of my horses burnt to death.”

Six were dead. Four others escaped. Neville Bardos, a chestnut gelding and the last living horse in the barn, was found in a corner. They heard him gurgling.

Neville’s throat and lungs were scorched from smoke inhalation, and other parts of his body were burned.

From that scene about seven months ago, Neville, who competes in the multidiscipline sport of eventing, has managed a competitive comeback that defied any prognosis from doctors, his owners and others in the equestrian world. He was the top American horse at a prestigious competition in England just three months after the fire, and has had strong showings in several other events.

Now Neville is among three finalists for international Horse of the Year…

Read all of Mary Pilon’s story, Fire Survivor and a Possible Olympian: A Horse Named Neville, at the New York Times.

Photo by Josh Haner, courtesy NYT.  View the slide show.

(Hat tip to the blonde. Her favorite newspaper story of the day.)

“He gets on base”

Tonight’s feature for Family Movie Night.

You can watch along with us but you'll have to bring your own pizza and wings.

My review: Brad Pitt’s field of broken dreams.