Lance Mannion

George Segal in "California Split": Addicted to hope

Posted Friday night, March 26, 2021.

Portrait of two gamblers. One does it for the company. The other does it to be left alone. Both are addicted to hope: Charlie and Bill at the track (Elliot Gould and George Segal, second and third from the left) in Robert Altman's "California Split". 1974.

You know George Segal’s gone, right? Died Tuesday, the 23rd. Eighty-seven. One of my favorite actors. Going by the outpouring of emotion on Twitter, he was one of everybody’s favorite actors. The people who worked with him at any point in his long career in the movies and on TV especially. I should be able to write up a retrospective without having to think, just drawing from the movies through which I first got to know and like him when I was a kid---”No Way to Treat a Lady”, “The Bridge at Remagen”, “Where’s Poppa?”, and “The Hot Rock”, which I remember as having seen all at once, “The Hot Rock” being the only one I saw in a theater. Mom and Pop Mannion must have just gotten cable at that time---but I have a hard time writing up anything these days. But I want to show my appreciation. So I hope you don’t mind if I cheat and re-post the review of “California Split” I wrote in 2010 for a series of reviews of films directed by Robert Altman. I think it’s one of Altman’s best and it was Segal’s performance that made it so. 

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I’m assuming you know that calling this series of discussions the I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival is a joke.  I don’t hate Robert Altman. 

Altman’s one of my favorite directors.

He’s one of my favorite American artists.

I don’t know how I’d have felt about the man. Probably what George Segal, the star of tonight’s feature, “California Split”, felt when he was working with Altman.

Our relationship was warm, mutually respectful, and a little distant.  I wasn’t in his rhythms…I guess I was more middle-class than he would have liked.  Different sensibilities. He was living a seventies lifestyle and I was little bit behind in that area.  He’s Kansas City and living by the seat of your pants and making this totally innovative movie, M*A*S*H, changing the rules, and I’m a rule player.  Elliott [Gould, Segal’s co-star on California Split] was also an antirules guy and a freewheeling guy…I brought an innocence, and he didn’t have time for that.  Risk was not a part of my persona and it was part of his.

That distance Segal felt, Altman used it in the movie. He made the movie about it. I think Segal’s wrong about Altman not having time for that innocence. Maybe he didn’t off the set. It’s in the movie. It’s in every close-up of Segal and I’m not going to swear to this but I think there are more close-ups of George Segal in “California Split” than there are of any other actor in any of Altman’s other great movies from the 1970s, which is to say, the movies he made in his prime.

Altman’s movies were about people in groups, as members of societies.  He worked mainly in long shots and medium shots because he wanted to fit as many people into every shot as clowns want to fit in a circus car.  The difference is that the clowns want you to see them one at a time as the climb out of the car. If Altman had been a ringmaster he’d have had the car made entirely of glass and not let the clowns out so the audience could see them all crammed in there together and trying to get along or get away.  Every contorted face and body is interesting and important because of the pressures put on the person they belong to by the owners of the other faces and bodies rubbing up against them and for the pressures they put on them.

“M*A*S*H”, “Brewster McCloud”, “McCabe and Mrs Miller”, “Buffalo Bill and the Indians”, and “A Wedding” are all about people crammed into small spaces and forced to get along. The 4077th, the Astrodome, a haphazard collection of buildings hemmed in by wilderness that hardly deserves to be called a town, the tents and performance space of a travelling Wild West show, a single house. In “Nashville”, Nashville is a small, company town and in “The Long Goodbye”, Los Angeles might as well be a single street and a short strip of beachfront for all the room the characters have to escape each other’s company and problems.

In “California Split” the cramped and closed in space is the mental and spiritual one of shared addiction. The addiction isn’t to gambling. It’s to expectation.

All the characters, except Segal’s Bill Denny, but including the call girls, Barbara and Susan (Ann Prentice and Gwen Welles), who do not literally gamble, do what they do, take the risks they take with their money, their happiness, their jobs, their lives, for the joyful feeling of being on the edge of something wonderful.

That’s why Segal gets his close-ups. Close-ups are isolating and Bill is isolated within the community of hope addicts.

Bill’s the literal gambling addict. At least, he’s the one who knows what he’s doing when he gambling. He’s past hope. His addiction has lost whatever thrill it used to give him.  At the point we meet him gambling has cut him off from everything meaningful in his life, from the small, crowded communities he is supposed to be part of, his family, his office. He is alone, a cramped, closed society of one, and he hates the company.  Even sitting shoulder to shoulder with the people he’s playing poker with, he’s all by himself. He latches onto Charlie [Gould] because Charlie is involved.  Charlie lives on risk and hope, like all the other gamblers. But for him gambling is social. He can’t do it without conversation. Bill flinches from the people close to him.  Charlie reaches out to them. He has to bump, nudge, nuzzle, rub up against all around him. He loves the company. The attention of other people make him happy, even when the attention comes in the form of a beating or a stick-up.

Not that he’s a good guy, necessarily. In many ways, he’s a supreme asshole. He’s as addicted to expectation as the others, but he doesn’t expect happiness as much as he expects excitement, and so he gambles with other people’s emotions. He rubs shoulders in order to rub people the wrong way. He wants them to get angry with him because anger makes people unpredictable. It makes them reckless. It makes them interesting.

It makes them fun.

Bill wants to be like Charlie. He wants to be having fun. He wants to have friends. He wants to feel like part of the crowd.  He wants to think that what he’s doing at the poker table, at the track, at the casino is something nicer, happier, better than gambling.

The good feelings and good times only come in bursts, and in Charlie’s company, and even with Charlie there Bill can’t always sustain the mood, or the illusion of the mood. He falls back in on himself. He shuts himself off and up, and that’s how the camera often finds him.

Charlie is able to enjoy his life because he is corrupt and dishonest.  It isn’t right to call him a rule breaker or an antirules guy because he doesn’t seem to know that there are rules (not counting the rules of the games he plays and bets on) or why there are or need to be rules.

Bill, however, is a rules player. He even has rules by which he conducts his gambling. And he’s an innocent. At any rate, he remembers what it was like to be innocent. Bill is stuck in the middle of two opposing desires, although both would allow him to join in a society and shake his loneliness. Either way, he would belong again. He could give in, give up, and become like Charlie, and at least enjoy his self-destruction. Or he could give up gambling and go home. He can’t make up his mind, so he sits and broods and hates himself for both impulses.

Altman caught that.

Once an actress asked Altman how she would know when the camera was on her in a crowd scene so that she would know when to do her acting.  Altman told her to do her acting when she felt the moment was right, the camera would find her.

One of the many risks Altman ran when he made a movie was that the camera wouldn’t find an actress or an actor at a crucial moment, that it would get there too late or at the wrong angle.  And that probably happened many times. But those times didn’t matter because of all the other times when Altman had the camera right there.

He trusted that there would be lots of those times because he made sure that there was always something for the camera to catch.  If one character in a shot wasn’t doing something worth paying a lot of attention to, not just one other but several others were. He chose his actors to make sure of this.  And he kept track.

His eyes and ears were open in a way more disciplined, more exacting, more rules playing directors aren’t.  They pay attention to their plans. Altman paid attention to what was happening and paid so close attention that he could see what was about to happen because of it.  He could get the camera there a beat ahead.

He saw and he heard George Segal. And he made his movie about what he saw and heard.

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“California Split” is available to stream at VUDU.

A nation of main-chancers: The ironic tragedy beneath the black comedy of "The Big Short"

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Friday night, February 14, 2020. Posted Wednesday night, February 26.

“Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal and I’ll have my wife’s brother arrested.”: Ryan Gosling in “The Big Short” as a top securities trader at Deutsche Bank gleefully looking forward to profiting off the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008 and with it the U.S. economy, a man so nakedly self-interested that, as another character says of him, you have to respect the guy.

Watched "The Big Short" for family movie night. Hadn't seen it in four years. You Know Who wasn't president when it came out in 2015 and didn't seem likely to be. So his name probably didn't cross my mind when I saw it the 1st time, except maybe toward the end when Ryan Gosling's character tells us how "they" will blame immigrants and the poor for the bubble and its bursting. Maybe not even then. Lots of people were at work doing that blame-shifting before he descended his golden elevator. He was just repeating what they were saying, doing what he always does, stealing other people’s ideas and claiming them for his own.

But tonight his name was running through my head almost from the opening title card to the final credits, because the name Deutsche Bank kept showing up from start to finish. Gosling's character works for Deutsche. And I had a thought.

Keep in mind I know less than nothing about these things. But my thought was: What if the reason Trump is hiding his tax returns is he's hiding something else?

Along with just about everyone else I’ve taken it for granted that what he's hiding is how deep into debt with the Russians he is, and the money's been laundered through Deutsche Bank.

And he doesn't want his adoring fans who love him for his money---they equate making money with intelligence, talent, strength, and God's favor---to find out he's not the billionaire he played on TV.

Plus I think he's doing it out of perversity. He does things just to make people mad. He does things just to prove he can. He does things just because it gets him into trouble. He does things to get attention, even, maybe especially, negative attention

So there doesn't have to be anything rational or cunning or advantageous about it. He is, after all, a lunatic

But here's my thought. What else doesn't he want them to know about him that his tax returns would show?

That he's honest?

Trump thinks everybody is as corrupt and crooked as he is. And, because of the worlds he's traveled in---show business, New York City politics, the business of making money by playing with other people's money---he has reason to think so.

And his base believes the same thing---that everybody in those worlds are as corrupt and crooked as he is. That's one of the reasons they love him. They believe he's their crook, pulling fast ones on the other crooks on their behalf.

What I was thinking, then, is that the returns would show that he wasn't working on their behalf. He was working against them.

He was in on it.

He made money off their losing their jobs and their homes and their pensions. He made money off their pain.

Again, keep in mind I know less than nothing about these things. And that's with my having read the book. I don't kid myself that I learned anything from Margot Robie in her bathtub and Anthony Bourdain and his fish stew.

I wouldn't put it past him though. He has the soul of a house flipper. So I was wondering, has anyone looked into it?

Well, I’m anyone.

So I looked.

There’s this thing called Google.

I Googled “Trump mortgage crisis”.

And I found...Trump Mortgage.

And I found that CNN had looked into it in 2016.

And they’d found that he at least tried to get in on it.

"I met my wife on match.com. My profile said that I'm a medical student with only one eye, an awkward social manner, and 145 thousand dollars in student loans. She wrote back, "You're just what I've been looking for!" She meant honest."

In 2006, the year after the real-life counterpart of Christian Bale’s character in “The Big Short” saw the housing market bubble for the bubble it was and predicted its coming collapse, Trump started a mortgage brokerage and began to lay the groundwork for a mortgage bank.

It was the most Trumpian business enterprise you can imagine.

He saw other people making money, the suckers lining up to buy in, and rushed to the head of the line to set up his own booth, without doing any real homework or preparation, hired the “best people”---

E.J. Ridings was tapped to run Trump Mortgage, but his business credentials raised some red flags.

A 2006 report by Money Magazine claimed Ridings made "false or misleading claims" about his professional background. The article called into question his claims of being a top Wall Street executive and his experience in the mortgage world....

---launched with a creatively hyperbolic sales pitch---”creative hyperbole” is his term for lying---that was mostly all talk, hot air, and self-promotion---

Despite the warning signs, Trump was still upbeat about the real estate market.

During an April 2006 interview on CNBC, Trump said he thought it was "a great time to start a mortgage company," according to a transcript of the interview.

"I've been hearing about this bubble for so many years from you and everybody else in your world, but I haven't seen it. I will let you know when I see it."

He also said during the interview that the company was "swamped" with customers seeking out financing and that "the real estate market is going to be very strong for a long time to come."

---quickly lost interest and focus when he didn’t make a pile of dough right away, got out while the getting was good, blaming the failure on others on his way out the door and at the same time implying his bailing on his own failure was proof of his business acumen---

Today, Trump's presidential campaign calls the failed business a "tiny deal."

"[That] was a tiny deal that Mr. Trump looked at, but never ultimately moved forward with because Mr. Trump decided he didn't want to be in this business foreseeing the market crash," Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks told CNNMoney via email.

When asked for further clarification, Hicks repeated that the company was "just a look."

"Mr. Trump has over 500 companies. This was just a look, but he decided he didn't like the market."

Of course this news failed to sink in, just like all the other news showing him up as a charlatan, mountebank, and business incompetent. In fact, his voters were inclined to see things as Trump wanted them to: that his record of botched schemes and failed enterprises of unmatched success and proved how smart and savvy a businessman he was and how fit he was to run the country.

"If we're right, people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings, people lose pensions. You know what I hate about fucking banking? It reduces people to numbers. Here's a number - every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?"

Here’s the thing.

The trouble is that in order to get people to see Trump for the fraud and con man he is you have to get them to see themselves as the fools and suckers they’ve been.

No one wants to admit they’re that dumb and greedy.

What’s more, you have to get them to see themselves as complicit in their own defrauding and that the people they have most to blame are themselves.

It must be someone else’s fault. There must be someone else to blame.

That’s Trump’s base in a nutshell. That’s populism, right and left.

"I don't get it. Why are they confessing?"

"They're not confessing.""                       

"They're bragging."                                 

"We’re a nation of main-chancers, lookers-out-for-Number One, and What’s-in-it-for-mes. Rules are made to be broken is our motto. They’re not rules, so much, anyway. More like guidelines. There are exceptions to every rule anyway, loopholes in every contract, and all laws are subject to interpretation with us as the interpreters. Laws are to keep other people in line, anyway, and shouldn’t apply to us because we’re good guys and good gals and whatever we good guys and good gals need to get done for our own good must be good and for the good. If there isn’t a cop around and we can’t see how it will hurt anyone, laws and rules that get in the way of our doing what’s best for us can be ignored, circumvented, or straight up defied and broken.

Fundamental to “The Big Short’s” effectiveness as a satire is the way it starts out making us see it as a comedy, even a farce, then changes almost imperceptibly to an ironic tragedy as it goes, and when it finally gets there makes us realize it’s been one all along.

"You think I'm a parasite, don't you, Mr Baum? But apparently society values me, very much."

When they set out to short the mortgage industry, in essence betting against the housing market and with it the U.S. economy of which it’s a mainstay, our three teams of protagonists---the doctor turned hedge fund manager, Michael Burry (Bale); the naive neophytes Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley (John Magaro and Finn Witrock), reluctantly advised and assisted by the disillusioned and paranoid Wall Street veteran in self-imposed exile in California; and the wiliest and most aggressive group led by star hedge fund broker Mark Baum (Jeremy Strong, Rafe Spall, Hamish Linklater, and Steve Carell as Baum), in an easy alliance with the nakedly greedy, ultra-cynical, and amoral securities trader Jared Vennett (Gosling)--- “I can't hate him,” Baum says of him, “He is so transparent in his self interest that I kind of respect him.”--- see themselves as good guys out to bring about a kind of rough justice by wresting a big chunk of the ill-gotten gains of the corrupt bankers, hedge fund managers, and mortgage brokers who have turned a system that’s supposed to help people realize their dreams of home ownership into a vast conspiracy to defraud them, the government, and honest investors. Baum, especially, sees himself as an agent of vengeance. But the closer they come to their goal, the less certain of their own virtue they become.The bad guys they confront are clowns, self-deluded fools, and cartoon villains. And they encounter few true victims. The characters they meet who have been taken advantage of made themselves easy marks through their own vanity, greed, and willful ignorance. Eventually it dawns, to varying degrees, on all of them that they themselves are among the bad guys they’ve been out to beat at their own game: their game is their game. Winning means benefiting from the corruption of the system and the collapse of the United States economy that follows from the system’s inevitable failure. Winning, then, means benefiting from millions of people’s pain, heartbreak, and misfortune.

What’s worse is the realization that they’re not going to refuse to accept the benefits. The realization is hardest on Baum. It breaks his heart to admit that he’s not the moral hero he thought he was and he’s going to take the money and and kill a piece of his soul as he puts it in his pocket.

"Saints don't live on Park Avenue."

In the end, only the cynic Vennett seems happy. But his happiness is not just with the money he pockets. He’s pleased that his belief in other people’s stupidity and greed has been validated and that no one appears to have learned a lesson. The greed and stupidity will continue. Vennett is the movie’s fourth-wall breaking narrator and he has the last spoken words in the movie:

In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating-agency executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivative industries. Just kidding! Banks took the money the American people gave them, and used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform. And then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers! And when all was said and done, only one single banker went to jail…

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“The Big Short”, directed by Adam McKay, written by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay, and based on the book by Michael Lewis, "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine", and starring Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Marisa Tomei, John Magaro, Finn Wittrock, Jeremy Strong, Rafe Spall, Hamish Linklater, and Tracy Letts, with Brad Pitt and Melissa Leo, is available to watch instantly at Amazon.

Filed under Best Pictures of the 2010s according to Lance.

I’m an Amazon associate and earn a (very small) commission for books etc. bought through the links on the blog.

"The Departed," revisited

Hoisted from the archives, Thursday, February 15, 2007. Posted Wednesday night, October 23, 2019.

Doubles. Matt Damon as a crooked cop pretending to be a good cop about to meet his moral reverse image, a good cop pretending to be a bad cop, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed”.

One thing leading to another, as it does on the internet, I haven’t gotten to writing about Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola’s feud with superheroes. But in the course of doing my homework I turned up my review of “The Departed”, a movie I remember in much more detail than I do “The Good Shepherd”. What I don’t remember is why in writing the review I didn’t mention the film’s Boston setting, none of which matched my own memories of Boston, or how I missed the fact that Matt Damon’s bad cop pretending to be a good cop and Leonardo DiCaprio’s good cop pretending to be a bad cop aren’t simply conventional storytelling doubles---they are the same character. Scorsese was going the same route as Poe, Dostoevsky, and Stevenson in telling a story of a self divided against itself. I forgot that Scorsese, while being one of the most cinematic of directors is also one of the most literary ones. “Raging Bull”, “Goodfellas”, “The Last Temptation of Christ”, “Casino”, “The Age of Innocence”, “Hugo”, “The Wolf of Wall Street”, “Silence”, “The Irishman”, and coming up, a TV miniseries,”The Devil in the White City”---he’s a loving and incisive adapter of books.

Here's the review, very slightly revised and copyedited, with pictures added...

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Thursday, February 15, 2007.

Saw “The Departed” the other night.

It's good. I liked it. Scorsese should finally get his Oscar, though he's made better. The movie has no real ending. The catastrophe that brings about the violent climax depends on several characters suddenly getting far more stupid than we've seen them being to that point, and the level of violence and the body count are almost laughable. Makes me think Scorsese has seen too many of his own movies and traumatized himself---he can no longer judge how to effectively dole it out. Same with the profanity.

I don't know why people said Jack Nicholson's performance as Francis Costello was hammy and over the top, unless they missed the fact that Costello himself is a ham. A self-made made in the sense of being invented out of nothing, Costello is always playing the part of Costello.   He's not real to himself, other people aren't real to him either, and the only way he knows to make his life seem like anything to himself is to force himself and the people around him to act out a script he's writing for them on the spot.

He's not a movie gangster, but he plays one in real life.

His counterpart among the cops Mark Wahlberg's Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Sean Dignam.  Dignam is a more self-conscious, more self-aware self-creation. He hands people a script he's written and then judges them by how adept they are at resisting type-casting.

 Wahlberg is good, but his part is over written.

I'm talking about the part Scorsese gave Wahlberg to play, not the part Dignam's cast himself in.

The writing's sloppy.

Vera Farmiga as Madolyn Madden the police psychologist who falls for both Matt Damon's and Leonardo DiCaprio's characters is one of the oddest looking romantic leads I've seen in a movie in a long, long time. Skinny, ungraceful, with a long face and a habit of smiling like Stan Laurel.  Nice eyes though. She's one of the sexiest too. She quivers with desire in all of her scenes. It might all be acting. It explains the character.

Madolyn is always open to seduction. When Madolyn's asked why with her superior education, her impressive resume, and obvious talent and intelligence she's working at a thankless job that pays her less than a guidance counselor makes, she brushes off the question with a platitude about public service, as if this is her way of being a police officer and protecting and serving the public. It's the lamest of lies. She's taken the job so she can be around big, strong, dangerous men who might sweep her off her feet and carry her off to bed at any moment.

She allows every professional conversation she has to become very quickly about her. Private conversations have no other purpose at all. Her first date with Matt Damon's character isn't going well, she seems to have made up her mind that he's not her type at all, but when he jokes that she isn't his type and he doesn't think he'll call her again, she's absolutely crushed.

Needless to say, she comes across as entirely a creation of male fantasies.  A beautiful, sexy, intelligent woman who wants to sleep with you just because you're a man and she's a woman and so you don't have to bring anything to the table. But that's not why her character is a complete drag on the movie.

All her scenes stop the movie in its tracks because she is so obviously a device to help Scorsese avoid having to introduce another female character for DiCaprio's character to meet and fall for. Madolyn is, creatively speaking, an act of artistic economizing. I could spend a couple paragraphs justifying the character's double life thematically, but in the end, that turns out to be the only justification for the character's presence in the movie.

When you get right down to it, all characters are plot devices. But characters who have no purpose in a story except to help move the plot along should not be given much screen time, no matter how idiosyncratically beautiful and sexy the actresses playing them are.

It makes sense that DeCaprio's undercover cop Billy Costigan would need to see a psychologist, makes sense that he would fall for one with eyes like Farmiga's, and makes sense that she would be attracted to him strongly enough to forget her professional responsibilities. There is no reason that the same character should turn up as the girlfriend of Matt Damon's dirty cop, Colin Sullivan. The only dramatic reasons he needs a woman in his life is for her to be there to be lied to and as the main piece of furniture in yet another compartment of his insanely compartmentalized life.

Funnily enough, it's in the scenes with Damon, when she's most obviously just a plot device, that Farmiga does her best work and her character is at her most convincing. This is because in her scenes with DiCaprio she's tonally and emotionally and conceptually out of sync.

DiCaprio plays Costigan as being at the very end of his tether. He's operating at just this side of screaming hysteria. Farmiga can't match him twitch for twitch or strip herself down to his level of emotional rawness. It might have been interesting if Scorsese had let Madolyn become infected with Costigan's paranoia and hysteria, but he and Farmiga don't go there.

Their other option, for her to be his comforter, to bring him back to some, at least temporary, form of calm sanity, isn't available either, for the same reason, the limited conception of the character.

All Madolyn can do for Costigan is what she does for all the men who stray into her office, offer herself to him. She continues her trick of being desirable by desiring. The last thing Costigan needs right now is an emotional attachment to yet someone else he can't trust, but that's what she's there for, despite her better judgment. In other words, she fails him and herself professionally. This would make a whole movie in its own right, but it's too much for a subplot, particularly a subplot the director doesn't really care about. Scorsese leaves DiCaprio and Farmiga acting at cross-purposes.

You could say this is partly DiCaprio's fault for being too into character. He offers her nothing to connect to. He plays Costigan as repelling all intimacy. There's never any give to him, except, ironically, in his scenes with Nicholson.---

---But this walled-off quality about him is meant to be his tragic flaw. The psychological quirks that make him apparently the perfect choice for an undercover cop are also what make him finally incapable of surviving undercover. Costigan belongs nowhere and to no one except himself. When he reaches the edge, though, he has no one to reach out to and even if someone comes along offering to pull him back he can't bring himself to take their hand.

Given Costigan's situation, it would be dangerous for him to trust anyone too easily, and it's no wonder that the only other character he seems to like and trust to any degree is Nicholson's Francis Costello, the man Costigan's meant to destroy. Because Costello's playing out the script he's written for himself, he's predictable and he's in a perverse way honest. He is always true to his own conception of himself as the gangster's gangster. 

DiCaprio does a brilliant job of placing Billy Costigan in a line of movie detectives whose neuroses and self-deceptions almost overwhelm their heroism and practically make them the chief villain in their own story---Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon”, Jimmy Stewart in “Vertigo”, Gene Hackman in “The French Connection” and “The Conversation”, and now DiCaprio played their parts entirely without a leading man's vanity, risking losing the audience's sympathy at the outset in order to win us over in the end with a more psychologically compelling and, ultimately, more sympathetic, if not particularly likable, characterization.

But as much as I admired what DiCaprio does in “The Departed”, I was more impressed by Matt Damon.

Damon's Colin Sullivan is a man divided against himself six ways from Sunday. He's not just living a double life.  He's living multiple lives. He's carefully walled each life off from all the others, but in doing so he's walled pieces of himself up inside each compartment.  His is a disintegrated personality. Each piece is a lot like the others, and all are like him, but no one piece is him or even a clue to him. The pieces don't fit together like pieces in a puzzle. They’re like circles of glass cut from the same pane.  Damon's job in “The Departed” is to play each separate Colin as distinct and yet the same. He has to come across as different, without acting different.

He does this mainly through his smile and his sense of humor. The different Colins smile with different degrees of broadness and sincerity and while they all talk about the same things using the same vocabularies they find different things about what they say funny. What's a joke to one Colin is the occasion of morbid self-pity for another. What one Colin thinks of as the most stern and earnest of businesses, another Colin treats with cynical contempt.

The trickiest part for Damon is that none of the Colins can contain an insight into any of the others, because if you could see any part of one while dealing with another you might accidentally see your way to the crooked cop Colin and that would be the end of all of them.

The telling scene is when Madolyn is moving some of her stuff into his apartment and he refuses to let her put any pictures of herself in the living room.  He points out to her that he has no signs of his own past anywhere about. The living room is the one room where the people who know the different Colins would be allowed into and therefore it has to be a room in which any of the different Colins might live. It's a room, then, that offers nothing to look at.  It's all surface, highly polished, gleaming, and resistant to the eye. You get tired of looking at it before you've begun to take it all in.

This is the quality that all the different Colins have in common. They are all surface, polished and gleaming, but not anything you want to look at for long. You can take them all in at a glance, convinced that you've seen all there is to see, and are eager and willing when Colin directs your attention to something else, to the view of the gleaming dome of the State House outside the window, for instance.

He can do this redirection so smoothly and charmingly that most people can be tricked into mistaking the beautiful view for the person pointing it out to them.

But he can't trick himself to see himself out there, stare as long and hard as he likes. And he can't see himself when he looks inward either, because it turns out to be a case of a reflection in a mirror looking at itself.

Damon has done a fine job of creating a perfectly hollow man.

It's a neat complement to DiCaprio's characterization of Costigan as a man trapped inside himself. Damon makes Colin Sullivan a man locked outside his own life, and one of the several Colins Damon manages to create is the one who can only stand apart and watch all the others. That's the real Colin, of course. But that's the Colin that's lost to himself. That's the Colin that's the departed of the title, the departed self.

Filed under Second Run Movie Reviews. Related re-reviewing: "The Good Shepherd:": Notes on notes for a review that still hasn't been written thirteen years later.

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“The Departed”. Directed by Martin Scosese. Screenplay by William Monahan. Starring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Vera Farmiga, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, and Alec Baldwin. Warner Brothers. 2006. Available to watch instantly at Amazon.

Solo: In which Han begins to make it up as he goes

Mined from the notebooks, October 6, 2018. Posted Saturday morning, October 27.

They’ve got a good feeling about this: Chewie (Joonas Suatano) and Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) together again for the first time in “Solo: A Star Wars Story” pieced together more than it was directed by Ron Howard.

I thought “Solo” was fun. Fun enough. More fun than I expected, at any rate. I’d have enjoyed it more if it had been in color.

Seriously. For at least the first two-thirds of the movie, all the incessant fights and chases take place in the dark or against backgrounds of smoke and fog, the scenes illuminated in flashes by flashes from explosions, headlights on crashing and wildly careening flying cars and trucks, and random shots of windows and other sources of ambient light. Made me wonder if director Ron Howard had watched “Dawn of Justice” too many times and learned the wrong lessons from Zack Snyder’s aesthetic aversion to light and color. But maybe it was symbolic. The closer Han got to “Episode IV”---and Luke and Leia---the brighter and more colorful Howard’s palette became. The first burst of vivid color I took note of came in the first scene aboard the Millennium Falcon.

It’s kind of like “The Wizard of Oz”, except that most of the movie’s set in a dark, dreary, gloomy, cheerless Kansas. This might have been more visually interesting---or at least less annoying---if the plot was as clear as the atmosphere isn’t and so much of the movie---the parts in color and the parts in mud, ash, soot, storm cloud gray and dust cloud brown, and exhaust-blackened snow white---wasn’t a relentless series of chases in which randomly appearing villains, monsters, and hostile forces of nature threaten to shoot, crush, burn, shred, beat up, blow up, and devour our heroes as they run about willy-nilly in frantic pursuit of various MacGuffins while managing to avoid becoming characters trapped in an actual story.

The fact is Howard was probably doing the best he could with what was already on hand when he was brought in to direct in place of the original co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller who were fired by LucasFilm producer Kathleen Kennedy for...reasons, with the movie close to completion, and his task was to tighten things up and brighten them up, in tone and in spirit as well as in imagery. I don’t know the particulars, and I’m not really interested, but I’d bet that whatever’s light-hearted, amusing, and visible is Howard’s doing and that he’s most responsible for the last third of the movie which takes place in parts of the galaxy where the suns shine. After wrapping up that, he went back and pasted into the doom and gloom tinged first two thirds moments of humor, passages of dialog, and a few characters that were more consistent with if not the original Star Wars trilogy then at least “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi”.

This would explain why two of the most interesting supporting characters are suddenly just there with no exposition explaining how they got there or who they are, and why when they’re arbitrarily killed off, victims of their having no more place in the plot, such as it is, nobody mourns them or misses them or even refers to them except as sticks that helped beat the plot along.

I’ve said we don’t need a young Han Solo story because we already have one. It’s called “Episode IV”. And we don’t need his backstory because he doesn’t have one. Not one that matters. The one he’s given in “Solo” is pretty much the same one he had in the old expanded universe---learned to fly at the Academy, helped Chewie escape from slavery, went to work for Jabba the Hutt---and it’s not very deep, complex, or compelling. I never liked the bit about his having learned his piloting skills at the Academy anyway. It seems more fitting that he had have learned how to fly on the fly and became a great pilot the way Junior Johnson became a great driver, running from the Revenooers. He didn’t need some instructor at the Academy to teach him. He taught himself the tricks he needed to escape pursuit as he needed them. Whatever and amazing maneuvers he’s able to pull off are due to his having to pull them off. He says as much to Rey in “The Force Awakens.” She asks him if the trick he’s about to try is possible and he says that he never asks himself that question until after he’s done it.

So his having gone to the Academy isn’t needed to explain anything. The thing it does explain or, rather, shows, is something that doesn’t need to be shown---he has a rebellious streak.

But what I really didn’t like about it was that I suspected it was meant to show he was a closet idealist.

He left the Academy---or got himself thrown out---not just because he hated following orders and obeying the rules, but also because he came to hate the Empire on principle.

I like to think that Han is what he appears to be when we first meet him. A totally self-interested and self-serving cynic. When he asks Obi-wan “What’s in it for me?” he’s asking the first question he asks anyone who’s looking to hire him, and it’s the only question whose answer carries real weight with him. He is the pirate Lando affectionately greets him as. And never mind Captains Blood and Jack Sparrow, pirates are not good guys or good guys.

Han’s story, then---the chain of events that will change him, which is what stories do to their main characters---doesn’t begin until he starts to get to know Luke and fall in love with Leia. He changes because of them and for them. His story is the story of a not necessarily bad but definitely not a good man, an anti-hero if not a villain, who becomes a hero through love, friendship, and commitment to a noble cause.

Before that story begins, he hasn’t had a story. He’s just had adventures, all of which repeat the same plot---Han sees a way to make money, events or people get in the way of his making money, things get complicated, he gets into trouble, he gets into more trouble, he tries to talk his way out of it, he fails, so he blasts his way out of it. We didn’t need a movie to show that, although a TV series might have been fun.

Pretty much, though, that’s all that happens in “Solo”, several times over. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t show him to be a closet idealist. But it does show him to be a romantic. Which would be fine if he stayed the same age he is at the beginning of “Solo”----I think about seventeen---but he doesn’t. Years pass. I’m not sure how many but enough that he’s not a kid anymore by the end. So we’re left with Han as a full-fledged adult, who’s still as chipper and optimistic----”I’ve got a good feeling about this,” he says at a point where his future self would say the opposite.---as he was when he was a teenager. This means that the sequels have to be about how he became the hard-bitten and selfish cynic Luke and Obi-wan meet in the Mos Eisley cantina. I have a bad feeling it’s going to involve a girl and a broken-heart.

If there are sequels. Disney seems to have put the kibosh on there being a Solo series.

At any rate, in the original trilogy Han’s story is his learning how to be a good person. If “Solo” becomes canon, then that changes to his learning that he has always been a good person, he was just looking for the right cause to champion and the love of a good woman to inspire him.

So “Solo” isn’t a movie Star Wars fans or moviegoers in general needed. But no movie is truly needed. A movie justifies its own making by being good, and there are many ways for a movie to do that and several ways “Solo” doesn’t. One of the most effective ways is for the movie to tell an interesting story, either visually or narratively, usually both.

Another way is to have good actors making their characters compelling.

I became a fan of Alden Ehrenreich when I saw him in “Hail, Caesar!” and I’ve been rooting for him to become a star. “Solo” won’t hurt his progress to stardom, but I’m not sure it will help him all that much. He’s not bad in the part. In fact, he’s pretty good, but he’s not Harrison Ford, which isn’t his fault, of course, but the comparison is unavoidable. (Actually, at Ehrenreich’s age, Ford wasn’t yet Harrison Ford. He was just a gangly juvenile nobody except Francis Ford Coppola knew what to do with, and Coppola used him as a villain’s prissy henchman. Ford came into his own with his cameo in “American Graffiti”. So Ehrenreich’s got time.) Through much of Ehrenreich’s time on screen, I amused myself imagining a young Harrison Ford delivering Ehrenreich’s lines.

Ehrenreich was most enjoyable in the part when I ignored that that part was Han Solo and imagined he was playing a new Star Wars character, a cocky, wisecracking, young adventurer who happened to be a lot like Han Solo but not as irritable or doomed to tragedy. As a matter of fact, I wish somebody at Disney had thought of that and said “You know, this character is more like Han’s kid brother or, better yet, one of the dozens of bastards Han probably fathered in his buccaneer days! Let’s make that movie!”

Woody Harrelson is good too as Han’s mentor in crime, but his part’s terribly underwritten and he isn’t given much vital to do until the end. Up to then, he and Ehrenreich seem to be having fun cosplaying their own improvised Star Wars adventure without caring if their characters or performances are truly integral to the Star Wars saga.

But if this was Chewie’s movie, the tag line would be “Joonas Suatano is Chewbacca!”

Emilia Clarke as Han’s love interest and “Solo’s” femme fatale---she has to be a femme fatale. There can only be one good woman in Han Solo’s life---seems lost without her white hair and dragons. Paul Bettany probably made a mistake, underplaying the villain instead of hamming it up in a way that would have saved the character as a character as opposed to a plot device and movie trope, a stock “civilized” villain out of a lesser Bond film.

Thandie Newton is fine in the little time she’s on screen but the quality of her performance is a continual reminder she doesn’t have a real character to play or a place in the plot that matters.

Erin Kellyman is onscreen too short a time too, but her character, some sort of vaguely defined warrior princess, seems like it would be integral to the story if “Solo” had a coherent one and like she belongs in the Star Wars canon. I’d like to see her make a return, perhaps as Rey’s early mentor and role model---as Rey’s mother, even, if Kylo Ren is lying in “The Last Jedi” about Rey’s parents having been nobodies---or, if Disney makes the prequels to “Rogue One” I think should be made, as the hero whose example and teaching saves Jyn Urso from following in the path of the mad terrorist Saw Gerrera

Jon Favreau and Linda Hunt do some funny voice work, but both of them disappear quickly and without a trace. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, however, as the droid who’s developed a tender heart and set of revolutionary political ideals, is another example of why voice acting and motion capture performances are Oscar-worthy displays of talent.

And then there’s Donald Glover as the young Lando Calrissian.

In the trailer for “Solo”, Glover’s shown only briefly, but he jumps off the screen at me, pretty much the way Harrison Ford did in “American Graffiti”.

He was the main---actually only---reason I looked forward to “Solo”. I wanted to see what he was going to do with Lando.

Turns out, not much, but because he’s not given much to do. “Solo” uses him mainly as comic relief and to show how Han became the owner of the Millennium Falcon, something else we didn’t need to see---Han and Lando’s short exchange in “The Empire Strikes Back” takes care of everything we need to know and does a better job of it because the scene’s left to our imagination and it’s easily and vividly imagined. When you feel like doing more, said W.C. Fields used to say, do less.

But there’s a Star Wars Story that “needs” to be told.

“Calrissian”!

Han makes it up as he goes. (Yes, I know. That’s Indy’s line. But it’s Lucas’s. It’s Ford’s. So it’s Han’s too, even if, as far as I recall, he never says it in those words.) Lando is someone else who makes it up as he goes. But he does it more intelligently and more successfully. He doesn’t just talk himself out of trouble. He talks himself into clover. We don’t have to guess how Han happened to be in Mos Eisley. But how the devil did Lando end up running Cloud City?

It happened because Lando is someone who always fails upward.

That’s his movie or TV series. Like Han’s, his adventures would have the same plot but with the difference that at the end of each adventure his situation changes for the better if not necessarily to his liking.

Ok. I’m done making this up as I go. To sum up: “Solo” is a visual and narrative mess that doesn’t justify itself as a Star Wars Story mainly because it fails to tell a story, Alden Ehrenreich isn’t Harrison Ford but he’s a likeable rogue and is most convincing as Han Solo when you forget that he’s supposed to be Han Solo. Donald Glover’s in it and he’s on the brink of becoming one of those actors who makes movies better just by his being in them. (See “Spider-Man: Homecoming”.) I don’t know what Ron Howard was given to work with when he signed on, but he had what must have been the maddening job of un-making his predecessor’s Star Wars story while at the same time making a Star Wars story more to his employers’ liking and in keeping with their probably cliched vision, the result being that he couldn’t make his own Star Wars story or anybody’s Star Wars story or any story at all. Still, I had fun watching it. I just wouldn’t watch it again.

One final note.

“Solo” is “needed” in one way.

It answers the question once and for all whether or not Han shoots first.

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“Solo: A Star Wars Story” directed by Ron Howard, written by Jonathan Kasdan and Lawrence Kasdan. Starring Alden Ehrenreich, Emilia Clarke, Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, Paul Bettany, Erin Kellyman, Joonas Suatano, and Donald Glover. Rated PG-13. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

Jackie: Mrs. Kennedy against Death

Posted Sunday, February 26, 2017.

“My wife’s a shy, quiet girl, but when things get rough, she can handle herself pretty well.”

Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy aboard Air Force One on the flight home from Dallas the night of November 22, 1963 in one of the moments of extreme stillness that mark her Academy Award nominated performance in Jackie.

We catch him only in glimpses. In the little time he’s there he’s often off to the side of the frame and already moving out of it. The few times we do see him clearly, it’s at a distance or through a lens. When we finally get an extended look, when we get to see him being not the President but himself, relaxed, having fun, he’s moving too fast and through a crowd, and then...he turns his back on us and that’s the last we see of him. His back, and her face as she holds onto him but afraid to hold on tight, wondering just who it is, just what it is, she’s holding on to.

It’s her movie, of course. It’s her grief being observed. The movie opens with that fact.  The first image we’re given is of her in close up and although we recognize her immediately it’s not “Jackie” we focus on. It’s the harrowing sadness in this woman’s face. And the rage.

We see it all at once, the heartbreak, the loneliness---we can’t yet see if she’s all by herself but we feel it, how she’s isolated in her grief---we see---feel---the almost unendurable sense of not just loss but being lost. And we see that she’s angry but at what? At what happened? At the people---the strangers, the enemies---who did it or who wished it? At the people---the friends, the family---who don’t understand, who don’t feel it the way she feels it. At him? Why? What for? For the things he did to her and didn’t do for her and with her and what he left unsaid and unfinished.? For leaving her! As if it was his choice, as if he’d done it deliberately. At herself for…for what? At...Death. At all of it. But what good is that? What can she do with that? There. That’s the rest of the movie. What is she angry at? Who is she angry with? Where does she put her anger? What can she do with it? What can she do about it?

She’s a Kennedy, even if they never really accepted her. And Kennedys do things.

Meticulously directed by Pablo Larrain, with an insightful and thought-provoking script by Noah Openheim, and featuring an inspired performance by Natalie Portman, Jackie is one of the two best of the retellings of the Kennedy legend brought to either the big or small screen. The other is the TV play The Missiles of October starring William Devane and a shockingly young Martin Sheen. Third on my list is Thirteen Days, a good movie with fine performances of the Kennedy brothers by Bruce Greenwood and Stephen Culp but it feels a little too romanticized and suffers, for me, in comparison to The Missiles of October.  (I haven’t seen PT-109 since I was kid.) The many, many---too many---TV movies and miniseries tried to cover too much ground and wound up being mostly about our getting to watch the Kennedys being Kennedys either as characters in a real-life soap opera or figures in a historical pageant. They’ve all also suffered from miscasting of one or both of the Kennedy Brothers. Sheen, for example, made an almost perfect Bobby. He was far from perfect as Jack. And it’s seemed to me that every other actress who’s played Jackie has tried to find the essence of the part in dressing like her, turning her into First Lady Barbie. By focusing on single events, The Missiles of October and Jackie are able to show the Kennedys doing things rather than just living through their times. Jackie is about Jacqueline Kennedy’s actively dealing with her grief and Portman finds the essence of the person in what she does to deal with her grief. The character of Jackie is defined by her actions and therefore in action and not by her pillbox hat.

In action is the right word but it’s maybe misleading since much of what Portman does requires her to be very, very still. But maintaining her stillness is an action, especially when we know that what Jackie wants to do is run screaming from the scene. Or start throwing things.

When I say it’s her movie, of course I mean Jacqueline Kennedy’s. But I also mean it’s Portman’s. Jackie is about her portrayal of Jackie Kennedy the way Spielberg’s Lincoln is about Daniel Day Lewis’ portrayal of Abraham Lincoln. It’s not that in either case that there’s no story there without the lead actors. It’s that the story is told through them. There’s more to the similarity than that. Both Lewis’ Lincoln and Portman’s Jackie are aware of themselves as characters in a story and seem to be watching themselves act out their parts with sharply critical eyes. Actually, in Jackie’s case there’s no “seems” to it. Her watching herself---seeing herself as playing a part---is explicitly shown and it’s treated as one of her acts of heroism. She knows who she has to be and what she has to do for the people who are watching her. One of those people happens to be herself and her acting is for her own benefit. She has to make herself see herself being the person she needs to be to survive her ordeal.

She’s not entirely alone---nor is Portman left to carry the movie entirely by herself. Jackie has her brother-in-law Robert and her longtime friend and assistant Nancy Tuckerman, and Portman has Peter Sarsgaard and Greta Gerwig.

Bobby is the only one around her whose grief come close to her own, which brings them together and gives them both comfort and hope, but it goes only so far. For one thing, they’re in a profound way mourning different men. The fact that they’re the two who knew him best yet they knew him differently makes them wonder if they really did know him, increasing the sense of loss for both while calling into question their sense of knowing each other and their own selves? Their shared grief paradoxically makes them strangers to each other.

For another thing, Bobby is having an existential crisis of his own---the crisis, the one that turned the ruthless political hatchet man into the social justice warrior the nation’s poor and dispossessed loved as one of their own and ecstatic crowds sometimes seemed to be about to tear apart in their need to touch him as if reaching for his blessing. That’s implied in one bitter line. Jackie is never not her story.

Nancy is a more cheering and comforting presence---for us. Even before the assassination, her role is Jackie’s hopeful conscience, and none of us is truly at ease in the company of our conscience. Nancy’s job as Jackie’s friend and social secretary is to remind her it’s her---Jackie’s---job to be cheerful and upbeat. Her signature gesture is signaling for Jackie to smile. It’s in one way a hug and a kiss. In another a scolding.

Sarsgaard may be my favorite of all the screen Bobbys. He doesn’t do an impersonation but he conveys the essence of the man, at least as I know him through biographies and film clips. Gerwig warms the screen every time she appears. But their real jobs are to make us feel Jackie’s isolation---how lonely she must have been if she couldn’t find comfort in the company of these two good and caring people!---and to keep us liking Jackie when she’s at her most difficult, and that’s something the movie doesn’t shy away from.

Dealing with loss and grief can bring out the best in someone while at the same time bringing out the worst.

Portman isn’t the least bit afraid of letting her Jackie be unlikable for stretches of times. She’s capricious. She’s self-indulgent. She’s demanding and unfair. She’s deliberately difficult. She lets her anger get the better of her. She can be ruthless in getting what she wants, one of her most Kennedyesque traits. The moments she seems to be giving in to self-pity and despair are understandable and forgivable but Portman doesn’t play them for sympathy. In fact, she makes them unattractive. But Portman folds it all into what turns out to be a stunningly life-like portrait of a complicated individual who managed to be heroic in getting herself through the worst days of her life and the nation through one of the most traumatic moments in its history.

Portman doesn’t really look like Jackie Kennedy. The hair, the voice, the costumes by Madeline Fontaine contribute to the illusion but it’s Portman herself making us believe we’re watching a real person who must be Jackie Kennedy because who else could it be living through this horror?

But, actually, she could be any young wife and mother suddenly widowed, forced by circumstance and expectation to be everybody else’s source of solace and strength and wondering if she’s up to it all and then knocked for another loop by having it revealed to her that we’re living in a universe ruled by an indifferent God who has no special use for any single one of us.

The story is centered around the planning of President Kennedy’s funeral which for dramatic and thematic reasons Larrain and Oppenheim have Jackie seem to be handling down to last detail on her own,

As if she was just any widow who has to take care of everything herself. In reality, if she’d done nothing, if she’d let her grief overtake her and withdrawn the funeral would have come off practically as it did. There were protocols in place. There were many people whose jobs were to plan and stage large-scale state affairs, like Presidents’ funerals. Political and diplomatic considerations she wasn’t aware of worked out by people she didn’t even know existed figured into things. The Military had a say. The Catholic Church had its say. In reality, she was able to leave most of things in the hands of others while she kept herself busy with what in comparison looks almost like minutiae but were in fact the most personal and human and compassionate details. Deciding what guests to put in which bedrooms in the White House. Writing thank you notes to friends and close acquaintances who’d sent their condolences, writing notes to herself reminding herself whom to write to next as soon as she had time---at the top of that list, most heartbreakingly to learn, was the widow of the other husband and father Lee Harvey Oswald murdered that day, Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit.  But the movie puts it all in her hands. Every decision’s hers. And she’s making the decisions almost whimsically, in accord with her confused and ever-changing feelings and in defiance of her own better judgment and against the advice of friends and the wishes of the other Kennedys. It’s half-suggested that if she had left it to anyone else it would have been a small private affair for friends and family back in Massachusetts.

It also seems from what we’re shown that her only model was Lincoln’s funeral, even though FDR had died less than 20 years before. Someone remarks on the ridiculousness of her putting JFK on the level of the President who ended slavery and won the Civil War when he couldn’t get his Civil Rights bill through Congress and had very little else to show for his efforts in other areas. Even Bobby expresses disappointment---angry, self-accusing, self-disgusted disappointment---at how few achievements his brother's presidency had worth boasting of. The Cuban Missile Crisis is all he can think of that’s worth history's notice and he wonders if his brother really deserves credit for solving a crisis he created himself. The funeral she has planned is too grandiose for a minor and unsuccessful president, never even mind the comparisons to Lincoln. On top of that, it’s not like him.

“He drove cars, he didn’t ride horses,” says the journalist whose interview with her provides the film’s framing device. He’s referring to the horse-drawn gun carriage that bore the coffin and the riderless black stallion with the empty boots reversed in the stirrups following behind. What was the point of that? Horses were her passion? Was it all about her, really? Was she laying claim to a husband she didn’t really have, didn’t really know?

The spectacle wasn’t befitting of the man. The President wasn’t worthy of the spectacle.

And she recognizes the absurdity of it all. The pointlessness not only of the funeral itself in its particulars. Of life and death in general. What was the point of acting as if it or he or any of us matter? And that’s all she or any of us are doing, isn’t it, acting as if we matter?

Here she turns to a priest for comfort and guidance, and his only comfort is to tell her he has no comfort to give. God himself provides no answers. “His ways are not our ways,” he says, which doesn’t sound fatuous coming as it does from John Hurt in a beautiful, heartfelt not quite final performance---he completed four more not yet released films before he died, but this one’s about as wonderful a last curtain any actor can hope for. We’re left to find comfort and meaning in life by ourselves, in ourselves. All we can do is get up in the morning and start the day as if it’s going to matter that we are here. This existential view strikes me as a very Catholic as well as a very Kennedy-esque philosophy, almost certainly because it’s an idea I was first introduced to in something I read about Robert Kennedy when I was young. The writer called him a Catholic existentialist which I took to mean someone who found meaning in the act of doing good in the world.

This, of course, is what she is or trying to be. She just can’t articulate it to herself. She tells the priest---confesses---that she doesn’t want to get up in the morning. He rightly takes her to mean she’s contemplating suicide. Her tries to remind her she still has things to live for, two children to care for first and foremost. She reminds him that she has two other children in the grave, a shocking reminder to us that her first child, a daughter, was stillborn, and her fourth child, another son, died shortly after birth only three months before the assassination---she was still grieving his death when they went to Dallas.

So what was she doing? Was it all a vanity? She herself wonders, comparing it to her famous restoration and redecoration of the White House which JFK, with the casual and unintentional cruelty of a husband taking his wife’s feelings for granted, called her “vanity project”. But it turns out there is a comparison and a thematic connection. In the televised tour she gave of the White House---cleverly recreated early in Jackie---she explains what she wanted to do with the place she called “the people’s house.” She wanted visitors to feel at home there because it was a home. It wasn’t just the president’s office with a museum attached.  People had lived there, families had been raised there, life had gone in inside. The White House matters because the men and women and children who lived---and died---there mattered. And this, Jackie implies, is the same point of the funeral.

She was staging a people’s funeral. A real man died. A real family was suffering. That’s why she insisted on walking behind the carriage. She wanted people to see his wife and children so they saw him as a man and not just a symbol. But that man was their president. His family was their family. We were all sharing in her grief. She was sharing it with us. That was her message of condolence to America and the whole world:

We matter not because of what God thinks of us but because we matter to each other. Death isn’t just the end of a life. It’s the end of meaning unless those left behind treat that lost life as having had meaning.

Perhaps it was a vanity project, after all, but it’s the vanity of Ecclesiastes. Yes, it is all vanity and seeking after wind, but what else can we do?

Jackie doesn’t end triumphantly. There is no triumphing over Death. There is only defiance. In Jackie, Mrs Kennedy defies Death and its attendant, Meaninglessness. The final image of her we’re left with is of her alone again, except this time alone in a crowd, alone even in his arms, her face full of sadness and unanswerable questions.

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Jackie, directed by Pablo Larrain, written by Noah Oppenheim. Starring Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, John Hurt, and Billy Crudup. Rated R. Still in some theaters but available to watch instantly at Amazon. Available on DVD and Blu-ray March 7.

Thanks for stopping by. If you enjoyed this post and would like to help keep this blog running strong, a good way to do it is to buy books. The editors here at the Mannionville Daily Gazette and Almanac recommend William Manchester's classic The Death of a President which might be an unacknowledged source for Jackie. It's available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

Rogue One: A pointless Star Wars story whose pointlessness might be the point

Posted Tuesday afternoon, December 27, 2016.

“The Jedi are extinct, their fire has gone out of the universe. You, my friend, are all that's left of their religion.”---Grand Moff Tarkin to Darth Vader in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope.

They have a bad feeling about this: Rebel commandos Cassian Andor (Diego Luna, left), Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones, center), and the droid K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk), making it up as they go along, attempt to sneak into an Imperial base to steal the plans for the Death Star in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the new prequel to the original Star Wars story.

It took a while but I got caught up in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, even though I didn’t like the main characters, felt the violence wasn’t simply thematic but an aesthetic, and missed everything that was entertaining and fun about the original Star Wars story, which Rogue One seemed perversely designed to remind us of without either equaling or even trying to approach it. The excitement and fun, I mean. Obviously it was intended to remind us of Episode IV since it’s a prequel. But fun and entertainment weren’t high on director Gareth Edwards’ to-do list, and at the end, all those factors I was able to push aside while watching, allowing myself to if not enjoy the movie at least take a rooting interest, came back in a rush and I was left feeling let down, somewhat depressed, and thinking, “Well, that was pointless.”

I was focusing on the pointlessness of making a Star Wars movie that adds nothing new to the Star Wars saga either in the form of new and interesting characters, crucial incidents, or backstory that deepens our understanding of anything that we know has happened or is going to happen. The plot of this Star Wars story is summed up in the crawl at the beginning of Episode IV. There’s a Rebellion against the Evil Empire. The Evil Empire has a terrible new weapon that can wipe out the Rebellion. Rebel spies have stolen the plans for the weapon, which they’ve somehow gotten into the hands of Princess Leia, who is taking them to Rebel headquarters with Darth Vader hot on her trail.

And that’s all there is to it and all there really needs to be to it. Deciding to make a movie about those Rebel spies and how they stole the plans is a bit like deciding forty years later to make a prequel to Casablanca focusing on the couriers carrying the letters of transit. It’s not that such a movie couldn’t be interesting. It’s that it couldn’t include most of the characters we love from Casablanca. If it did, they couldn’t be played by Bogart, Bergman, Paul Henrid, Claude Rains, or Peter Lorre. I suppose Renault and Ugarti could be in it, and that might have worked, if the director resisted the temptation to have Raines’ and Lorre’s faces CGI-ed over the actors playing them so they didn’t come across as exhibitions in a technological freak show.

But what would we have learned about Rick and Ilsa and the story we really care about?

Rogue One did tell me something I didn’t know about the stealing of the plans to the Death Star, by replacing what I thought was the story, as slight as it was, with a new version.

I thought the story was a spy story, that the plans were stolen by a few Rebel agents sneaking into some top secret Imperial facility and attempting to sneak back out. Darth Vader’s chasing after them was either the result of a mistake on their part, a betrayal, or Vader’s own Force-enhanced skills in counter-espionage. Spy vs Spy, in other words.

Nope.

Turns out the plans are stolen in a commando raid.

Our plucky band of heroes aren’t spies. They’re special ops, and they shoot their way in and attempt to shoot their way out. It doesn’t go according to plan, there not being much of a plan---Nobody that I recall echoes Harrison Ford’s “I’m making this up as I go along,” which I know is Indiana Jones’ line, but Indy is Ford and Ford is Han Solo, so it would have made an amusing verbal Easter Egg. There is, however, a good joke on George Lucas’ “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” signature line.---and the Rebel fleet including squadrons of X-Wing and Y-Wing fighters have to come to the rescue. Which leads to a climactic battle sequence that’s a rehash of the climactic battle sequences of all the other Star Wars movies made after Episode IV, except Revenge of the Sith and The Empire Strikes Back, a back and forth between shootouts on the ground and shootouts in space, ending, like The Phantom Menace and The Force Awakens, with a clumsy variation of blowing up the Death Star---again---without another actual Death Star.

This time, though, there isn’t one heroic pilot to focus on in the dogfight. So we don’t know what we’re supposed to be looking at except for the too busy visuals of swooping and exploding spaceships.

One sort of useful thing Rouge One does do, if you're an obsessive fan: it explains how the Death Star could be destroyed by a single torpedo fired down what’s essentially an air vent and why that vent happened to be left open at a crucial moment. But I don’t think we needed a two-hour movie devoted to filling in a plot hole that’s been open with nobody much minding for forty years.

Rogue One could have had more of a point if it had added new characters to the saga for us to root for or root against or care about at least a little bit or used old characters in new and interesting ways besides as gimmicks.

As is, Darth Vader is almost literally a mere shadow of his former and future selves (although it’s great to hear James Earl Jones back as the voice behind the heavy breathing) and Grand Moff Tarkin is through the wizardry of CGI reduced to what amounts to a Disney Animatronic version of the late Peter Cushing who played Tarkin with such delicious malice in Episode IV, which is too bad and I think a big mistake.

Guy Henry, the actor onto which Cushing’s image is drawn looks and sounds the part in his own right and has established a reputation for playing charmingly sinister villains. (See Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Parts I and II.) It would have been easier, and more fun, for us to make the quick adjustment to accepting a different actor in the part than having to spend the whole movie telling ourselves every time Tarkin appears, “Well, it’s almost as if Cushing’s still alive, I guess.”

The third important character from Episode IV who appears is another freak of CGI and shouldn’t be in the movie at all. You probably know what character I’m talking about but I’m going to pretend I’m withholding a spoiler. The character wouldn’t be on the scene at that moment and besides that character’s connection to this story is taken care of quite nicely in a wry and oblique reference by a character from Revenge of the Sith played by the actual actor reprising the role without computer enhancement.

The new characters include a villain who’s a junior grade Tarkin or a senior grade General Hux from The Force Awakens named Director Krennick and played by Ben Mendelshon as if he’s a corporate lawyer who somehow got himself a military posting and is discovering that the ability to write a contract doesn’t translate into the ability to lead stormtroopers into battle and that ambition and intelligence don’t compensate for sheer ruthlessness; Galen Erso, a genius scientist and engineer of questionable motives---or whose motives are questioned by all sides---played by Mads Mikkelson, whose job is to make his underwritten and under-used character important in our minds mainly because he must be important if he’s played by Mads Mikkelson; and Saw Gerrara, a militant separatist leading his own private rebellion against the Empire, played by Forest Whittaker for the same reason Erso is played by Mikkelson---to make the character seem more important and interesting than the script actually makes him.

Then there are the heroes.

Chief among them in popularity---with good reason---is a hulking, physically expressionless robot called K-2SO and voiced with wonderfully droll matter of factness by Alan Tudyk. K-2SO doesn’t just have most of the best one-liners and jokes, he has just about all of them, and Tudyk makes them all killers. Which calls attention to how grim and humorless the rest of the movie is, but never mind.

Donnie Yen as the monk-like worshipper of the Force Chirrut Îmwe who seems to draw Jedi-like fighting skills from his slightly mad belief that he’s tapped into the Force and Wen Jiang as his big, hand cannon-wielding bruiser of a friend and routinely exasperated protector Baze Malbus aren’t so much characters as a trope. A Don Quixote with real giants and armies and wizards to do battle with and his strong, brave, and resourceful Sancho Panza. They’re an amusing pair but they’re given no subplot or sidestory of their own and the only chances we get to really know them are in the fight sequences when our attention is somewhat divided.

The last member of the Rogue One team is a type not a trope. Played by Riz Ahmed, Bodhi Rook is the nervous and timid nerd in way over his head who finds his courage at the crucial moment. His story seems over by the time he appears, because it is. He’s really more of a part of the Galen Erso subplot and everything he needs to have done he’s already done offscreen before we meet him. Which brings up this:

A better and more interesting story could have been told about Krennick, Eso, Gerrara, and Bodhi, a story that would have been full of intrigue, double-dealing, questionable loyalties, friendships betrayed, a love triangle, and real spy story suspense as we wonder, “Will he get away with it and how will he manage it if he does?” Again, never mind.

That movie would have had Galen Erso as the main character. Rogue One has his daughter Jyn as its main character.

You might remember that when the first trailer was released back in the spring revealing that the  main character was female there was some online fanboy temper tantrum throwing over the fact that they were having their childhoods ruined---yet again---by a second Star Wars movie in a row featuring an icky old girl as the hero. This was countered by some feminist-lite crowing over there finally being a female lead as badass as Obi-wan, Luke, and Han, as if Leia and Rey were merely routine damsels in distress.

The problem is Jyn isn’t very heroic. That is, she is not a commanding and independent figure. She’s basically a little girl lost with good aim and wicked martial arts skills. Leia is a full-fledged adult from the first. Rey. although a teenager, is on the brink of adulthood, having had to be essentially a grown-up since she was a kid. Jyn is an adolescent defined by her relationship with her absent father. Which is ironic, considering Carrie Fisher was nineteen when she was cast in Episode IV, Daisy Ridley was twenty-three when The Force Awakens was released last year, and Felicity Jones, who plays Jyn, is thirty-three.

And then Jyn is to the plot of the movie what she is to the agents of the Rebellion who use her in their plot to obtain the Death Star plans, a device to take things where they need to go. Once the movie’s plot and the Rebellion’s plotters are done using her for that, she’s pretty much done as a character. Since this happens only a little more than halfway through, she has to be rewritten on the spot to justify her continuation in the story as its main character. It’s a hasty and sloppy rewrite, and she goes from angry and petulant teenager in rebellion against everything to angry and petulant Rebel with a cause.

This doesn’t give Jones, who I thought was terrific as Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything, much to work with. She manages about a half dozen facial expressions, all of them variations on a frown or a pout, and as many changes of tone of voice. And she’s given no good jokes.

Meanwhile, as the what’s by default the male romantic lead, Diego Luna seems demoralized, sapped of energy, and barely able to hold himself up---whatever he’s doing, he looks like he’d rather be crawling back into bed and pulling the covers over his head. That’s his character. He’s playing the part as written. I just wish he could have found a way to bring more passion and energy to his performance even so, that he’d done a better job of suggesting what Cassian Andor was like once upon a time.

Andor is supposedly the Rebel leader Mon Motha’s chief intelligence operative but he’s been so worn down by years of war and going on violent and dangerous missions that, as far as he’s aware, have produced practically no good results that now he’s practically just going through the motions, pushed onward by a vestigial sense of duty and responsibility and a half-hearted loyalty to his fading ideals. In short, he’s a character who needs to be reinvigorated and redeemed, and in movies that usually means by the love of a good woman. Consequently, something of a romance develops between him and Jyn, but it’s perfunctory and while Jones and Luna make an attractive couple, Jyn and Andor are no Leia and Han or even Padme and Anakin. There’s nothing about either one that suggests that what they need is each other. They’re just two lost souls who latch onto each other in their mutual hopelessness and desperation.

In other words, their falling in love is pointless.

But it’s a different kind of pointlessness than I’ve been complaining about. It’s thematic.

Mulling it over, I’ve come to think that Rogue One’s pointlessness might be the point.

Nothing much happens in Rogue One to advance the saga because nothing much was happening in the time immediately before Episode IV and the arrival of its title character, the New Hope.

That would be Luke Skywalker, of course.

What we’re seeing in Rogue One is the Rebellion on the brink of failure. The battle against the Empire has stalled. The Rebel Alliance is coming apart. Factionalism, defeatism, and a lack of inspired military and political leadership have taken a toll all around. Andor’s demoralization is representative of a general collapse of will and resolve. People are carrying on just to carry on. They don’t know what else to do. All they seem to be fighting for anymore is to live to fight another day.

“Rebellions are built on hope,” they tell each other, but the Rebels are out of hope.

The long ago, far away galaxy of Rogue One is the one Tarkin describes to Darth Vader in Episode IV, a place no longer lit by the Jedi’s flame. The Force is out of balance, but it’s not just that the Dark Side has clouded everything. It’s that without the Light Side, that’s all it can do. The Force is a whole, a yin and yang, and without one side or the other it can’t do its work:

“The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”

Things are coming apart. All the bonds are breaking. The Force must be brought back into balance. Light must be restored. And, just as the way to the Dark Side is through anger, hate, and fear, the way to the Light is through Hope, and hope is what Luke has in abundance. It’s what he is.

And that’s what gives Rogue One its point. That’s why Luke, even though he’s never seen or even mentioned, is its actual hero. He’s the hero of all the movies, the prequels, the sequels, and the original trilogy, the way Arthur is the hero of all the stories of the Knights of the Round Table. Those stories are all parts of Arthur’s story. Rogue One is a Star Wars story and all the Star Wars stories are parts Luke’s story. Which makes sense.

After all, he is King Arthur.

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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, directed by Gareth Edwards, screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy. Starring Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Alan Tudyk, Ben Mendelsohn, Mads Mikkelson, Forest Whitaker, Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang, Riz Ahmed, Guy Henry, and James Earl Jones. Rated PG-13. Now in theaters.

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Recent reviews from the Mannionville Daily Gazette:

Hacksaw Ridge: Private Desmond Doss' Agony in the Garden.

Moana: Adventuring for Adventure's Sake.

 

Hacksaw Ridge: Private Desmond Doss' Agony in the Garden

Posted Friday morning, December 2, 2016.

“Lord, help me get one more”: Andrew Garfield as Army medic Desmond Doss, the first conscientious objector to earn the Medal of Honor, prepares to help to safety one of the seventy-five wounded soldiers he rescued during the battle of Okinawa in Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge.

I could have done without the Ascension into Heaven at the end, but overall Hacksaw Ridge is one of the best-made and most moving religious movie I can recall ever seeing.

It’s also a pretty good war movie. A little corny and hackneyed but on the whole exciting, chilling, heart-sickening, and compelling, realistic not just in its depictions of the horrors of war but in suggesting what it was like to have to fight in that particular war.

But the fighting in the Pacific Theater in World War II is the background to a story about one soldier’s religious convictions and provides the circumstances under which the faith of that soldier, Private Desmond Doss, a US Army medic (played magnificently by Andrew Garfield) who was the first conscientious objector awarded the Medal of Honor, is revealed and tested.

I said Hacksaw Ridge is one of the best religious movies I can recall seeing, but I might not have ever seen one like it to recall. Hollywood doesn’t specialize in movies about people’s religious faith---there have been countless religious epics, saints’ biographies, and domestic dramas, melodramas, and tragedies in which main characters happen to be priests, nuns, ministers, and rabbis, but in all the ones I can think of, the existence of God is taken as given and so the characters’ faith isn’t really at issue---and I haven’t seen enough foreign films to know how often filmmakers in other countries have tackled the subject.

The only movies I know of that deal with religion and faith seriously are those sentimental "Christian" movies that all seem to star Kirk Cameron and tell the same old story about one sinner, backslider, or non-believer finding his or her way to Jesus, and I’ve never watched one of those all the way through. From what I’ve been able to tell, they’re mostly empty of thought, empty of heart, and when you get down to it empty of real religion and faith because they’re empty of doubt---as in the Hollywood religious epics, the existence of God is a given and only the characters in need of redemption doubt and since there’s no doubt on the audience’s part that they will be learn the error of their ways doubt is simply a plot device.

Hacksaw Ridge is not empty of thought or of heart or of doubt---World War II is still one of the strongest arguments against there being a God worth believing in. 

No one outright asks “Why have the heavens not darkened?” They don't need to. We can see that several good characters have already asked and answered it for themselves: “Because there’s no one there to get angry.” And the question is obviously at the back of Doss’s mind as he wrestles with his own doubts and fears.

Doss would have a different answer than that of his fellow soldiers and his father, a World War I veteran who’s still traumatized by watching his best friends slaughtered in Belleau Wood and lost all his faith right there on the battlefield: “He must have his reasons.” But he’s not sure that if God revealed those reasons to him he’d find them persuasive.

Doss doubts. Not the existence of God or even the righteousness of his pacifism. He doubts his own strength to be true to his beliefs. When, trying to explain to the officer presiding at his court martial why he wants to stay in the army, go to war, but then go into battle with nothing but his medical kit, he says, “With the world so set on tearing itself apart, it don’t seem like such a bad thing to me to want to put a little bit of it back together,” his idealism along with his humility shine through, but there’s a quaver that suggests he’s trying to convince himself as well as explain himself.

The look on his face that follows tells us he’s not sure he’s convinced.

Like Jesus in Gethsemane, he would like the cup to pass him by.

Most of the movie takes place back in the United States, in scenes of Doss’ growing up in the Virginia lowlands, his courtship of the girl who became his wife, and his basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, in which his faith and courage and integrity are revealed and then tested. The outcome is never really in doubt. We know the history. But it often feels in doubt. There are many moments when we think, “He can’t do this! He can’t carry on!” This is due partly to the deftness of director Mel Gibson’s storytelling, but it’s mainly due to Andrew Garfield’s brilliant acting.

I’ve had people tell me they won’t see Hacksaw Ridge because of Gibson. I think some of them are put off by memories of The Passion of the Christ and its sado-masochism and (debatable) anti-Semitism. Most, however, are repulsed by Gibson’s personal repulsiveness. To say Gibson was an alcoholic during the worst period of his repulsive---and criminal---behavior seems an understatement and it certainly doesn’t excuse him. But friends and critics say he’s sobered up and has been trying to make amends. Jodi Foster believes in him, for what that’s worth.

My feeling is that movies aren’t the work of one person, not even if that person is Alfred Hitchcock, and by refusing to see a movie because of its director or one of its stars means you are in a way holding someone else’s bad behavior against a bunch of artists who aren’t responsible for that behavior. Plus, given how many people it takes to make a movie, odds are, whatever movie you go to, there are more than a few members of the cast and crew who are guilty of as bad or worse behavior than any of Gibson’s. You have to make your own judgment calls, but if you don’t see Hacksaw Ridge because of Gibson, you’ll be missing out on a terrific performance by Garfield.  And as far as I’m concerned Hacksaw Ridge is much more of an Andrew Garfield movie than it is a Mel Gibson film.

Hacksaw Ridge could not work without Garfield as Doss. As was the case with Daniel Day Lewis in Spielberg’s Lincoln and Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty, this is a movie about its star’s performance. Garfield has to convince us not that Doss was a saint but that if there are saints they’re ordinary human beings very much like Desmond Doss. We have to believe that he believes, that his faith is pure and simple but he is not simple-minded. We have to believe that his faith never flags even at his darkest and most despairing moments when his faith in himself is shaken. And we have to believe that his faith sustains him and gives him strength but it does not give him supernatural powers or let him walk (run, crawl, scramble on hands and knees) through the valley of the shadow of death without fear. There are no miracles in Hacksaw Ridge and we’re allowed to see that Doss was lucky not divinely protected. If his faith saved him in battle, it was because it gave him the courage he needed to keep moving. And in that way, his faith helped him save seventy-five wounded men during the worst of the fighting on Okinawa.

If there was a miracle, the miracle was Doss himself.

On top of it all, Garfield also has the very tough job of convincing us his character is a truly nice and likable guy.

Again, he doesn’t play Doss as a saint or a simpleton. He gives him an aw shucks, bashful country boy charm, to be sure, but adds a sly sense of humor and a touch of mischief and an undercurrent of anger. Doss could kill.  He just refuses to.

He’s also sexy.

Sexy enough to cause Dorothy Shutte, the self-controlled, wary, church-going nurse he falls in love with before he joins the army, to act like what she’d have called a “brazen hussy” in his company, surprising the devil out of herself but not him---Doss is not without self-confidence. 

As attracted as she is, Dorothy, played by Teresa Palmer, who’s Australian but looks and sounds as though she couldn’t have come out of any other time and place but the rural South in 1943---and that’s not all due to make up, hair styling, costume, and a good dialect coach. Palmer seems to understand the spirit of the place that shaped Dorothy’s character---could not and would not fall in love with Doss if she didn’t believe he was as good and sincere and devout as he appears to be. And her believing in him---Dorothy’s in Doss and Palmer’s in Garfield as Doss---goes a long way towards helping us believe in Doss and in Garfield.

The same goes for the other main supporting actors. Much of the success of Garfield’s performance is due to the ways they portray first their doubt---in Doss---and then their growing faith---again, in Doss.

This is important. Doss doesn’t convert anyone to religion. He converts them to believers in his belief.

MOst of the members of the rifle company Doss is assigned to despite the Army’s being officially aware of his conscientious objector status and his requesting to be sent to a medical unit don’t know what to make of Doss to begin with. Some suspect him of being a coward. Some think he’s a nut. On the whole though their resentment has a practical basis. As far as they’re concerned, soldier who won’t carry a gun is for all intents and purposes not a soldier and there not someone other soldiers can rely on in battle. Even the ones who are believers themselves think his religious convictions are dangerous. Few of them, though, resent Doss personally. They actually like him and---grudgingly---respect him for his tenacity. Some develop sincere affection for him. That includes the company captain, played by Sam Worthington, himself a religious man, and the sergeant---I’m not going to tell you who plays him because, in case like me, you don’t recognize him right away. I don’t want to spoil any surprise, except to say that it was a fun moment when I finally realized who it was and said to myself, “That’s right! I remember! He’s a good actor!”

Only one of Doss’ fellow soldiers is outright hostile. Smitty. Of course, there’s a Smitty. The company also includes Teach, Tex, Lucky, Chief, Hollywood, and Ghoul. The nicknaming is true to life which is why it’s a cliche in just about every World War II movie. But Gibson is obviously fond of old war movie tropes. Smitty is sure from the first that Doss is a shirker trying to pull a fast one to get out fighting. But the deeper root of his resentment seems to be Doss’ belief that there is a God and life has meaning and purpose. This goes against what Smitty knows from experience to be true and he takes it as a personal affront.

Smitty would rather live than die and he thinks Doss’ supposed religious principles increase the odds of the latter. But it infuriates him that anyone thinks he should think it matters one way or the other.

It’s not a surprise, then, that Smitty’s is the only soul Doss saves.

Ultimately, it’s the bodies Doss saves that are important---seventy-five according to the citation that went with his Medal of Honor. His commanding officer put the number at nearer 100. Doss himself thought it was more like fifty. Seventy-five was their compromise.  The only soul whose salvation Hacksaw Ridge is concerned with is Doss’. And we don’t have to believe he has a soul in the religious sense. We just have to believe that he believes and that his being true to his beliefs is crucial. What the other characters think of him is a reflection of what Doss thinks of himself.

Hacksaw Ridge is something of a contemporary Pilgrim’s Progress, and there’s an appropriately allegorical feel to the story. Gibson is the right director for the material since as a storyteller he’s always been drawn to the stuff of legend, fable, and myth.

The odd thing is how true to the actual history much of the movie is. Poetic license is taken, naturally, for narrative convenience and thematic effect. Events are compressed and rearranged. Some characters are composites. Incidents that in real life played out haphazardly and over the course of weeks and months are concentrated into dramatic action and dialog that never took place. The entire two and a half months long battle for Okinawa is condensed into what seems like twenty-four hours. The real Desmond Doss had a sister and a brother. His sister isn’t in the movie in order to point up the Cain and Abel parallels that frighten the very young Desmond about his own violent urges and set him on his pacifistic path. But most of what happens happened and, in fact, Gibson decided to leave some of Doss’ heroics out of the final cut because he thought audiences wouldn’t believe it.

Smitty, by the way, is played by Luke Bracey, another Aussie who makes a more convincing American than many American actors, and if there’s any justice he’ll be star in his own right soon.

Hugo Weaving plays Doss’ father, looking dissolute and dissipated but with enough of the young hero he once was still rising to the surface if only to express his unending grief to make us hope for his redemption. When he shows up at his son’s court martial wearing his old doughboy uniform, its tightness seems to be holding him together, and while the conceit is contrived and hokey the image of Weaving mustering the last of his pride to save his son is heartbreaking.

Rachel Griffiths is a quiet and soothing presence as Doss’ patient and forgiving mother. I mentioned how impressive Palmer is as Dorothy and the importance of the job she does helping us believe Garfield’s Doss is as every bit as good a man as he’s supposed to be.

But still this is Garfield’s movie to carry. And he rarely stumbles under the weight. In his best scene, he’s essentially alone and has no dialog except for a one-line prayer he recites over and over as, his exhaustion growing, he drags one wounded soldier after another from the battlefield: “Lord, please help me get one more.”

It’s in that scene that the war movie rises to the level of the religious movie and the two become one movie.

Hacksaw Ridge is about a Christian’s faith but it’s not a “Christian” movie. But it did call to this former altar boy’s mind a lesson from my Catholic school days that also informs one of my favorite episodes of M*A*S*H.

The nuns taught us that we should try to live our lives in imitation of Jesus’. We are more than Christ’s children, they said. He lives on in all our hearts and that makes all of us him. This is what’s behind “Whatever you do for the least of my brothers and sisters…”

In the M*A*S*H episode, “Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?”, a bomber pilot has cracked under the pressure of his guilt and killing his brothers and sisters. He believes he’s Jesus Christ. When asked by a psychiatrist what he’s doing in an army hospital in the middle of the war, he seems baffled that the answer isn’t obvious.

“I’m Christ. Where should I be?”

Doss is too humble to say it, or even to think it, but that’s his answer to the army and to himself when his superiors ask and he doubts himself. And if Garfield had actually had to say it, we’d believe it whole-heartedly.

What is he doing in the army? What is he doing on top of Hacksaw Ridge?

“Where should I be?”

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Hacksaw Ridge, directed by Mel Gibson, written by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight. Starring Andrew Garfield, Teresa Palmer, Sam Worthington, Vince Vaughn, Hugo Weaving, Luke Bracey, and Rachel Griffiths. Rated R for graphic depictions of battlefield violence. Now in theaters.

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Recent reviews from the Mannionville Daily Gazette:

Moana: Adventuring for Adventure's Sake.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Our story so far is our story so far doesn't get very far.

Moana: Adventuring for adventure's sake

Friday, November 25, 2016.

Trickster versus Adventurer: Much as he'd like to and try as he might, the Polynesian demi-god hero Maui (voiced by Dwayne Johnson) can’t get away from Moana (Auli'i Cravalho), a very determined young heroine in Disney’s lively work of comic mythmaking, Moana.

Watched Kubo and the Two Strings Wednesday night. Saw Moana this afternoon. Both very good and recommended. But…

I don't recommend seeing them so close together. I think I might have enjoyed Moana more if I wasn't comparing it in my head to Kubo

Kubo is beautifully simple visually, like the Japanese paintings that inspired the designers. (I happen to have a special fondness for Japanese painting. YMMV.) Moana has a lot more going on to look at.

After Kubo, Moana struck me---struck my eye---as a little too busy.

Too much at motion in every scene. Too many details in the background and foreground. Faces were too expressive. Bodies too active.

I had to keep looking away from the screen to let my eyes rest.

Whenever I did, I didn’t always like what I was left listening to. Except for Dwayne Johnson’s and Jemaine Clement’s lines, the dialog is mostly generic and insipid “Follow your heart” arguments and lectures or variations on “Look out!”, “Duck!”, “Take that!”, and “Run for your lives!” The songs---again, except for Johnson’s and Clement’s signature numbers, “You’re Welcome” and “Shiny”, both songs written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, "Shiny" along with Mark Mancina.---are at best pretty tunes sung prettily by pretty but undistinguished voices. Still young, Auli'i Cravalho, who voices Moana, will probably grow stronger, but right now she sings like the college ingenue who gets cast as Laurey in Oklahoma while everybody knows it’s the character actress playing Ado Annie who’s going to go on to be a star. It doesn’t help that her solos aren’t expressions of Moana’s particular character only of longings, disappointments, and resentments all teenagers struggle with: “I wish” and “I will” and “If only…”

Taken in as if as a series of paintings and drawings, it’s gorgeous to behold, with a bold, sunshiny color palette and a great travel photographer’s sense of how to frame a landscape, a seascape, a bodyscape, or a face.

And Moana is more broadly comedic. The Rock and Clement are both hoots. So the two movies have different strengths.

One of Moana’s strengths is the energy of its storytelling---that is, once its story get underway. This takes a while. Another weakness. But once Moana sets out on her adventure on the high seas things move along with vigor and verve and high spirits befitting what’s essentially a pirate movie with a female Jim Hawkins and a Long John Silver who’s a shape-shifter and talks to his tattoos instead of a parrot.

Maybe Treasure Island isn’t the most apt comparison, lacking, as it does, magic and monsters. Something out of the Star Wars movies works better. Think of Rey from The Force Awakens paired not with the older, grandfatherly Han but with a younger, more selfish, less trustworthy version of himself from the original movie who bickers with his tattoos instead of Chewbacca. Or, better yet, think of the original pirate adventure with Odysseus having to put up with a strong-willed, feisty, annoyingly innocent and conscientious nymph determinedly keeping him focused on the business of getting back home to Ithaca to resume his life of husbandly and kingly responsibility.

After we watched Kubo, I stayed up late looking at Japanese paintings online. When the last of the credits rolled at the end of Moana, I couldn’t wait to get home to re-read passages from The Odyssey.

I think of it as one of Moana’s strengths that it constantly put me in mind of Homer. And not just Homer.

Moana is a cheerful, enthusiastic, and unabashed exercise in mythmaking, and all myths are to some degree retellings of other myths. Moana incorporates elements from Polynesian myths and legends. Johnson’s character, the trickster hero Maui, is as regular a recurring character in those ancients stories as Hercules, Thor, Krishna, Sinbad, Raven, the Monkey King, and their many counterparts are in the myths and folktales of other cultures, and he has as much in common with any one and all of them as they all have with each other. He’s just as Protean,  too, changing character, shape, origin, and history, depending on who’s telling the story. In Moana, he’s more like Hercules and Thor (the Thor from the Eddas not the Thor from the comic books and Avengers movies), a big, blustering, good-humored brawler, more brawn than brain, but still clever and capable of outwitting his antagonists.

His chief antagonist in Moana is Moana.

Her job is to keep him in check and on task, and self-control and singleness of purpose are not among the dominant traits of his personality.

A mysterious blight has poisoned the crops and emptied the fishing grounds of Moana’s home island, where she is the chief’s daughter and in training to take his place as leader of their people---this makes Moana a princess, a title she rejects when Maui teases her with the fact---and Moana, at the urging of her half-mad but wily and wise grandmother, takes it upon herself to save the day.

The blight, which snakes its way across the ocean in the form of a crawling black fog, is the longtime coming fallout from one of Maui's less noble adventures. As punishment, the ocean itself has kept him marooned for a thousand years on an uncharted island without his magic fishhook, a combination of Excalibur, Thor's Hammer, and Dumbledore's wand, with no one for company but his animated tattoos that act as his conscience.  Moana's task is to find Maui, help him recover his fishhook, convince him to return what he stolen, and make sure he does it.

Little while back, inspired by the trailer for Disney’s live-action version of Beauty and the Beast, I wrote about how all the best Disney heroines are nerd girls. Princess or not, each one, they’re each intellectually-minded, curious about the nature of things, and, until swept up by their adventure, motivated by their desire to understand how the world works.

Moana isn’t a nerd girl.

She’s an adventurer.

She’s meant to re-embody the spirit of her ancient ancestors, who were explorers before they were forced---as a result of Maui’s misdeed---to haul their ships ashore for good and become unadventurous fisherfolk and gardeners. But as she’s written, Moana isn’t an explorer. She’s not interested in seeing what’s out there. She just wants to be out there and on the move. She dreams of adventure for adventure’s sake. This is a way of saying that she’s unlike all the other Disney heroines in that she’s a heroine by temperament and not by necessity.

Her heroic nature is a given of her status as a princess. She’s braver, tougher, and purer of heart than everyone around her in an assumed way that’s not really demonstrated or tested. She was born a heroine. Never anything else first.

And her character is defined by her role as heroine. Her heroism isn’t an individual expression of her unique personality. Her heroism is her.

Maui is what we expect Moana wishes she could be, an adventurer for adventure’s sake, not bound by rules, unfettered by responsibilities, free of expectations to be good, noble, self-sacrificing, grown-up. But she’s never forced by the script to acknowledge this (or by her animators. In a live-action movie, the actress playing Moana could express this herself with looks and gestures.) so she’s never tempted to be like him. Her temptation is to give up and go home not to keep going.

Instead of Maui being what she’d like to be, she’s what Maui ought to be. Which puts the emphasis on his development as a character. He’s the one who needs to change. She only has to be what she’s already established as being. In the seesawing of their partnership, he gets the better of her simply by outweighing her---I mean figuratively, although his doing so literally as a figure means he dominates the frame whenever they share it) and whenever he’s got her up in the air, she has no way to get down except by jumping off.

In other words, the writers usual way of having Moana get the better of Maui is to get her away him. 

This is a problem, having a second lead who thanks to plot contrivances, the writing, and the actor’s performance, is much more interesting than the lead. But it’s not an unusual problem for filmmakers to create for themselves. So there are a number of tried and true solutions.

One is to give the lead something else to do in addition to completing the main adventure, something that for one reason or another the second lead can’t help with. Often, that’s a romance.

There’s no romance in Moana for Moana.

Not that that’s a bad thing. She might be too young for one anyway. I don’t think her age is ever made clear. I took her to be about fourteen but Oliver Mannion has read she’s sixteen, which is still too young for any happily ever aftering. At any rate, this makes her the second Disney princess who’s given no love interest. Elsa from Frozen is the first and it’s arguable whether she’s a heroine. She’s close to being the villain but she’s also the damsel in distress. Her sister Anna is the one who comes to everybody’s rescue and Anna has not one but two suitors. This means Moana is the first Disney heroine whose adventure tale isn’t also a love story. Which would be fine, except that she’s not given another subplot in place of it to take the focus away from Maui and put it on her.

Another solution would have been to add weight to Moana’s end of the seesaw in the form of a sympathetic supporting character. That is: a sidekick. Or sidekicks.

No sidekicks for Moana, unless you count Heihei, the world’s dumbest chicken (clucks provided by Alan Tudyk), but he and Maui have more interaction. Maui’s tattoo mini-me takes Moana’s side in their arguments but he is, after all, a version of Maui and, besides, can only appear on screen with Maui.

As it happens, there are almost no supporting characters in Moana and the few there are aren’t very well-defined. Moana’s father is an official scold. Her mother is one broad beatific smile. Her grandmother is a cliche. And the people of Moana’s island are an unindividuated crowd as dreamily happy with their lot as the lotus-eaters.

Once Moana and Maui put to sea, they encounter only one other character who talks. Maui’s nemesis, Tamatoa, the giant crab-god, voiced by Jemaine Clement, and he’s not a supporting character but an extended cameo of the sort usually given to a major star. Clement isn’t a major star but he does a brilliant job of playing Tamatoa as a star would have played him. I’m not sure which star. It’s either Tim Curry or David Bowie. But it might be both and he’s either doing Bowie by way of Curry or Curry by way of Bowie. Whatever and whomever he’s doing, it’s hilarious, but it’s also a one-scene wonder. Well, one and a half. Make sure you stay through the credits.

The effect of all this is that Moana is more Maui’s movie than Moana’s. Moana isn’t relegated to second lead, let alone sidekick, but she is in the role of responsible child taking care of wayward parent and in that dynamic the parent is always the main focus because everything depends on his shaping up and acting like a responsible adult before it’s too late.

It doesn’t help that Maui’s given all the best lines or that he’s voiced by the Rock who it turns out is a terrific verbal comedian. I don’t know how much of his dialog he made up himself but there’s an improvisational quality to his performance that’s inspired---and I think the inspiration was Robin Williams.

Maui could be a cousin to Aladdin’s Genie, anyway. But his mouth is always going, his mind always working. His personality is a work of verbal construction. He makes himself up as he goes along, and the words come tumbling out of him in jokes, puns, allusions, creative anachronisms, and little bursts of found poetry. Nothing exists to Maui, not even himself, until he describes it, and Johnson delivers every manic line with exuberance, joy, and precision.

There’s nothing hit or miss in his handling of the word play.

The difference between Johnson and Williams is that Williams was brilliant at playing off himself and off the fictional situation of his character. He was always both inside and outside the fourth wall.

Johnson---Maui---could have used someone to talk back to him. He’s an actor who can do comedy, not a comic genius who could also act, and actors need other actors.

This isn’t criticism but description. I’m just trying to tell you what to expect if you’re thinking about going to see it, and I really think you should see it. You don’t need to have the excuse of taking the kids. Or bring a copy of The Odyssey. Although both might help increase your enjoyment.

I can’t remember when or how I was introduced to the story of Odysseus’ journey home from the Trojan War. I’m sure it was when I was very young. (And I would have thought of it as the story of Ulysses’ journey home.) I have a vague recollection of one of my grade school readers including an illustrated retelling of Odysseus and the Cyclops. Whenever and however it was, by the time we had to read the Odyssey in ninth grade I knew all the key adventures---the Cyclops, Circe’s island, the Sirens, the lotus-eaters, Scylla and Charybdis, Penelope and her suitors---but I think I had to keep reminding myself Odysseus was Ulysses’ real name.

So there are probably many members of Moana’s target audience who are going to say to themselves, “Hey, that’s like what happened to Odysseus!”...or Ulysses. Thinking about that makes me smile.

But it makes me smile wider to think that in a few years a lot of ninth graders are going to be reading The Odyssey and saying to themselves or, better yet, to their teachers, “Hey, that’s like what happened to Maui and Moana!”

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I meant it. Never mind that they're princesses, the best Disney heroines are nerd girls.

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Recent reviews from the Mannionville Daily Gazette:

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Our story so far is are story so far doesn't get very far.

Doctor Strange: It doesn't make any sense, but as the Ancient One would say, not everything has to.

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Moana, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker. Screenplay by Taika Waititi. Pamela Ribon, Ron Clements, and John Musker. Music by Mark Mancina, Opetaia Foaʻi, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.  Featuring the voices of Auli'i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Jemaine Clement, Rachel House, Temuera Morrison, Nicole Scherzinger, and Alan Tudyk. Rated PG. Now in theaters.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Our story so far is our story so far doesn't get very far

Posted Thursday morning, November 24, 2016. Happy Thanksgiving!

Eddie Redmanye as fantastic beast wrangler and wizard Newt Scamander in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the first in a series of movies intended to be to the Harry Potter series what Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy is to his Lord of the Rings: prequels that deepen and expand our understanding of the originals, provide enlightening if not necessary background, but stand on their own and tell exciting and involving adventure tales of their own.

But, although played with his now trademark charming quirkiness and brilliant self-torturing physical dexterity by Eddie Redmayne, as likable underdog heroes go, fantastic beast wrangler Newt Scamender is no Bilbo Baggins and Fantastic Beasts doesn’t have a story of its own to tell.

And the most fantastic beast in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is of the human variety: A fervent Prohibitionist United States Senator from the state of New York.

Fantastic Beasts is set in New York City in 1926 and the idea that in 1926 New York would be sending a Dry to the Senate---back to the Senate. He’s the incumbent.--- is pretty much a matter of pure fantasy. Beside the fact that Prohibition was never popular (or diligently enforced) in New York, it was growing increasingly unpopular across the whole country. So much so that Al Smith, the Irish Catholic Democratic incumbent governor of New York, felt he could run for President in 1928 as Wet. 

Smith lost, but his loss is generally attributed to anti-Catholicism (although Prohibition was implicitly anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant in effect and intent, so there’s a possible relation). Meanwhile, back home in New York, in the actual Senate election of 1926, liberal Democrat Robert Wagner, who would become one of the strongest champions of the New Deal in Congress, was on his way to defeating the Republican incumbent, James W. Wadsworth, conservative who opposed Prohibition (on good conservative grounds: it was federal government intrusion into decisions best left to the states and individuals.) There’s no evidence that dark forces affected the outcome of the election.

You’re probably asking what any of this has to do with the movie? I’ll tell you. Pretty much nothing. But then neither does the character of the Prohibitionist senator. Nor does his doting newspaper publisher father. Nor his jealous younger brother.

The senator’s murder by mysterious magical forces serves the plot in it might be the flashpoint setting of a war between the wizard and human worlds. But for that purpose the victim could have been any generic prominent public figure whose gruesome death before a large crowd wouldn’t be easy to cover up. His particular politics or his personality or his backstory don’t matter to that end.

But director David Yates and J.K. Rowling, who wrote the screenplay, give us all three before they kill him off.They spend what seems like an inordinate amount of screen time developing him and his father and brother as characters and laying out their dysfunctional family dynamic only to put their subplot aside just about as soon as he’s dead. They forget about the dead senator and push his father and brother so far into the background that they become just faces in the crowd at the end. Which raises a serious question.

What’s the point of their being in the movie at all?

And it looks like the answer to that will be given in the next movie.

And that’s one of the things wrong with this movie.

An awful lot of screen time is devoted to setting up Fantastic Beasts 2. Which makes most of Fantastic Beasts 1’s storyline exposition. That’s really a way of saying there is no storyline. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them doesn’t tell a story. It sets us up to hear one.

What it has instead of a story is a string of comic mini-adventures in which Newt tracks down and tries to re-capture the fantastically mischief-making fantastic beasts that have escaped from his Tardis-like magic suitcase and a mystery involving the senator’s death for him and his new human friends to solve. Which is a fun but doesn’t get him or us anywhere in the end.

It’s as if Peter Jackson had decided to devote most of An Unexpected Journey to just getting Bilbo out of Bag’s End, interspersing the antics in the Shire with scenes of the elves at Rivendell talking ominously about what the Necromancer might be up to, with a pointless side-trip to Dale for a scene detailing the internal politics of Lake-town thrown in.

Now, however you feel about The Hobbit movies---I liked all three, but each one could have used some tightening and I really think Jackson made a hash of the scenes with Smaug---An Unexpected Journey did get right down to the business of establishing Bilbo as a hero and included the scene most important in leading us into The Lord of the Rings.

“Filthy hobbitses!”

Despite his awkwardness, Newt has heroic qualities and can even look the part, when he stands up straight and looks people as directly in the eye as he does his fantastic beasts. In the heat of a chase, he can even be a bit of a swashbuckler. And we suspect his special studies have given him the type of surprising powers that all misfits, weirdos, and easily underestimated characters in movies and fairy tales can call on in moments of dire distress. No doubt his knowledge of supernatural history and his skill as a fantastic beast whisperer will come into play down the line. But in Fantastic Beasts, Newt is a hero on a small scale. He’s the hero of his own little misadventure, and it’s hard to see how he can be the hero of the larger and grander adventure to come. In fact, we know he won’t be. We know who will be.

Dumbledore is only mentioned in Fantastic Beasts but his presence looms large because the presence of his antagonist and the adventure’s main villain also looms large.

Although Fantastic Beasts doesn’t get that story underway on screen, there are enough hints and allusions and foreshadowings to let us know that it is underway off screen and Gellert Grindelwald is hard at work---somewhere---on his plan to bring the whole non-magic world and that part of the wizarding world that isn’t made up of pure-bloods like himself under his tyrannical sway.

As fans know, Grindelwald is the terrifyingly powerful dark wizard who, when they were both young, enchanted, possibly seduced, and came close to corrupting Albus Dumbledore. So we know where this new series is headed. It’s going to be about the battle of wills and wits between Grindelwald and Dumbledore that climaxes in their epic three-hour duel.

This means that there’s a possibility that Tom Riddle’s transformation into Voldemort will be incorporated into the coming sequels, either as a part of the main story arc or as a major subplot. So there are going to be three characters more important than Newt to the overall saga.

Newt’s misadventure in New York is pretty much an aside to that larger story, but he’s not necessarily an ancillary character. I just can’t see him as a main character. What I see him as in the romantic hero of the tragic love story that’s a subplot to the larger story, and that romance at least gets a bit more of a start in Fantastic Beasts.

That explains Newt’s mopiness and diffidence when he’s around the character we’d expect to be his love interest in this one, a former auror demoted to a minor clerkship in the basement of the offices of the Magical Congress of the United States of America for her overzealousness in pursuit of practitioners of dark magic named Tina Goldstein and played by Katherine Waterston. Newt is still carrying a torch for his Hogwarts sweetheart, Leta Lestrange.

Yep. Of that Lestrange family.

Newt has landed in New York on his way to Arizona to release one of his fantastic beasts back into the wild. The escape of some of the other beasts and his attempts to round them back up have gotten him in deep trouble with the Magical Congress. He and Tina have to team up to solve the mystery of the senator’s murder and the expected romance...does not ensue.

Theirs is a love that cannot be. Not yet. It would get in the way of whatever is in store for Newt and Leta in the next movie. (Leta will be played by Zoe Kravitz. Is played. She appears in Fantastic Beasts but in almost literally a cameo, in the moving photograph Newt carries in his magic suitcase.) So Newt resists his growing feelings for Tina out of loyalty to Leta and Tina resists her growing feelings for Newt out of a sense of duty. They do too good a job of resisting. Which leaves us with a pair of romantic leads who don’t get to be particularly romantic.

No snogging.

Fortunately, for those of us who like a bit of romance with our action and adventure, we have Tina’s flapper with a heart of gold sister Queenie and a canning factory worker named Jacob Kowalski whose dreams of owning his own bakery have caused him to fall into cahoots with Newt. (A bank and one of Newt’s fantastic beasts, a little kleptomanic with a special fondness for shiny objects like coins and jewelry, are involved.) Jacob is a Muggle or, as muggles are known in the good old US of A a No-Maj, short for “No Magic”---we Yanks are brusque and to the point and have no poetry in our souls, donchewknow---but he and Queenie are drawn together by their mutual appreciation of pastry. Queenie is a witch like her sister but her favorite way to put her magic to use is to help her with her baking.

Jacob is played Dan Fogler. Queenie by Alison Sudol. Fogler is one of those chubby clowns in the tradition of Oliver Hardy, Lou Costello, Jackie Gleason, and Kevin James whose physical genius is their ability to move with a grace and agility their bodies don’t seem built to achieve. The comedy is not at the expense of their being fat but in their being able to move like Errol Flynn or Gene Kelly when they need to and like Charlie Chaplin at most other times. Fogler gives Jacob a self-deprecating soulfulness but also the confident toughness of a working man an former soldier who knows his limitations, mental and physical, but also knows that he’s overcome them in the past and so it’s worth a shot to try to overcome them again. Studol, channeling Marilyn Monroe as Sugar in Some Like It Hot, takes what’s in outline a stereotype---the airheaded sexpot who’s smarter than she looks---and turns her into a comic heroine, resourceful, courageous, quick witted, without letting go of the stereotype. Queenie’s intelligence isn’t meant to come as a surprise. It’s the natural extension of her good heart and sensitive nature. Queenie is funny because she’s not funny. Sudol and Folger are matched in that way. They’re both able to pull off what their outward appearances say they shouldn’t be able to pull off. He moves like a hero, she thinks like one. Individually, each is a delight to watch. Together they’re a joy.

The only real joy in the movie, as it turns out, except for the antics of Newt’s mischievous beasts.

Fantastic Beasts is actually pretty grim. Not surprising considering the story it’s setting up.

Apparently things are as dire in the wizarding world of 1926 as they will be in the 1970s in the years just before Harry’s to be born. (In the books Harry’s birthday is July 31, 1980), and David Yates has directed accordingly. In look, tone, and mood, Yates has tied Fantastic Beasts in with the four Potter films he directed, the last four of the series. That means, among other things, don’t expect a bright color palette.

But even within the limits of its own plot, Fantastic Beasts is a dark and somber film. Just about every moment, including the ones featuring Newt’s menagerie on the loose, is shadowed by gloom and dread. The American wizarding world is nowhere near as homey, warm, and cheering as what we've seen of its British counterpart in the Harry Potter films.  Even in the later movies there were still snug little islands of comfort and some semblance of security. At the end of Diagon Alley was a bright and welcoming pub. Fantastic Beasts takes us to a speakeasy, the lowest of low dives, presided over by a cigar chomping goblin gangster played by a CGI-ed over Ron Perlman with no mitigation of the goblin's malice, cynicism, or the sadistic amusement he gets from being a criminal with the power to hurt and disappoint people who come to him for help.

New York City in 1926 is dreary, gray, empty, and listless, as if the Depression has arrived three years early. The Congress of Magic seems to function more like the Kremlin than like the Ministry of Magic. The President is imperious and humorless and has no problems sentencing people to death without a trial and no matter the extenuating circumstances of their alleged crimes. And the mystery Newt and Tina set out to solve, besides centering around a hideous murder, involves a case of child abuse. But at least the villain is intriguing.

Grim and sinister, of course, but intriguing.

He's played by Colin Farrell with saturnine charm and a seductiveness that suggests Farrell had recently seen Frank Langella's Dracula and decided to turn the part into an audition for a remake.

I hope somebody does it, makes the remake.

It’s probably clear I was disappointed by Fantastic Beasts. But I still recommend it, to Potter fans, at any rate.

Like I said, it doesn’t do the job of getting the series main story arc underway. But it does lay important groundwork. And while I can’t say what role Newt is going to play, he’s a fun and interesting character, thanks to Redmayne, and Redmayne is always worth the price of admission. And some of Newt’s fantastic beasts are truly fantastic.

Then there’s Studol and Fogler.

It needs to be mentioned that in the United States, wizards and witches are not allowed to marry no-majes.  Newt considers this a barbaric policy and I expect it will figure in the future movies.

At least, it had better.

They’d better be planning to bring Queenie and Jacob back.

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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, directed by David Yates, written by J.K. Rowling. Starring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Colin Farrell, Dan Fogler, Alison Studol, Samantha Morton, Ezra Miller, Ron Perlman, Jon Voight, and Carmen Ejogo. Rated PG-13. Now in theaters.

Doctor Strange: It doesn't make any sense, but as the Ancient One would say, not everything has to

Posted Saturday afternoon, November 19, 2016.

Among other things, he wears the cape well, although sometimes it seems to be the case that the cape is wearing him. Benedict Cumberbatch in the role he seems to have been born to play, Doctor Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, in the latest Marvel Studio’s Avengers franchise, Doctor Strange.

Doctor Strange opens with a dazzling fight scene that raises a question.

Why do they need Doctor Strange?

They being a brother and sisterhood of sorcerers who protect the earth from the depredations of evil invaders from other dimensions. At the moment though, their fight is with a band of renegade sorcerers known as the Zealots who have gone over to the dark side and are putting their considerable magic powers to work towards bringing about world destruction. They’re led by a Luciferian fallen angel called Kaecilius whose evil plan is to deliver earth to a world-devouring monster named Dormammu in exchange for eternal life.

This makes the Zealots sound like shades of the Sith and Kaecilius like Darth Vader...or Voldemort or Saurumon. But stories of magicians seduced by their own power or by the temptation to increase it and of heroes who through pride or some other tragic flaw turn into villains go back centuries, past Vader and Voldemort and Saurumon, past Faust, past Lucifer himself. Kaecilius, however, played with grim and sardonic charm by Mads Mikkelson, is in a way more formidable than the once and future Anakin Skywalker and the former Tom Riddle, in still showing more than vestiges of the hero he once was or at any rate could have been, and he and his followers put up quite a fight.

They don’t win but they get away with the a page they’ve stolen from a book in the good sorcerers’ library that---if they’re able to decipher it---will give Kaecelius the spell he needs to conjure up Dormammu.

Getting away is no easy matter because the good sorcerers are led by a millennia-old Celtic priestess known as the Ancient One and when she shows up the Zealots are immediately over-matched. At one point in the fight, the Ancient One finds herself confronting Kaecelius and his most dangerous henchpersons all by herself and that almost even things up for the Zealots.

The Ancient One is played by Tilda Swinton but we can’t see it’s her at first because she appears in a hooded green and gold robe that pretty much swaddles the stunt double handling most of the fighting, leaping, in the air spinning, and magical swordplay. But we know it’s her. We can imagine her inside the robes and cheer Swinton for her imagined awesomeness.That awesomeness informs the rest of her performance in which she mostly plays the Ancient One as mild-mannered, modest, restrained, cheerful, and at time even winsome, easily flustered, with an almost girlish bashfulness. The steel inside, however, is never in doubt, of course. But something else is and it gives her a sinisterness despite her simplicity.

That comes later. In the opening, she’s all steel. And that’s part of what raises the question, why do they---why does she---need Doctor Strange?

After the Zealots get away, it’s clear the Ancient One and her order can use a bit of help. So that seems to answer the question for now.

But when we meet Stephen Strange, the question is brought up with a new emphasis. Why do they need Stephen Strange to be that help? Because he’s nobody’s idea of a hero, let alone a savior. Nobody’s but his own, that is.

Strange is arrogant, self-centered, vain, self-indulgent---but everything he indulges in is an indulgence of his vanity. Whatever he does, including saving lives on the operating table, he does to show off to himself. “I’m so wonderful. No wonder I enjoy being me.” He’s not a bad person in the sense that he doesn’t go out of his way to hurt others. In fact, by some measures, he’s not just a good guy, he’s a great guy. Fun to be around, fun and satisfying to work for and with---provided you don’t get the idea you’re anywhere near his equal in the operating room---and a world champion neurosurgeon who routinely saves lives other doctors have despaired of.  People admire and celebrate him. Actually, they’re bedazzled by him, although not everyone falls under his spell, and it appears that only one person has managed to actually love him.

Strange is by most measures obnoxious, but in the person of Benedict Cumberbatch he’s more than charming enough to distract us from his obnoxiousness, he is bedazzling. He makes us like him for it, it being both being so charming in his obnoxiousness and bedazzling us into not caring he’s obnoxious. We know he has to change. We expect that he will change or there’ll probably be no movie---although this a Marvel movie and the hero’s spiritual growth isn’t a given. Tony Stark becomes a hero but, as Oliver Mannion has observed, he doesn’t change. That’s the point of the Iron Man chapters of The Avengers franchise and the root of the tragedy at its center. Tony decides he’s Iron Man but Iron Man is the heroic character. Tony Stark remains the same vain, flip, egotistical, self-centered showoff he always was. So it’s possible Stephen Strange can go right on being Stephen Strange only with actual magical powers instead of seemingly magical surgical skills. Doesn’t matter while we’re waiting for it to go either way, though. While we’re waiting, it’s just plain fun to watch Cumberbatch having fun being Strange having fun being Strange, obnoxious as he is.

But the difference between Tony Stark and Stephen Strange  is that Tony has a conscience. If Strange has one, he’s very, very good at ignoring it.

Of course change does come and it’s practically instantaneous. It’s not, however, immediately for the better.

Indulging himself on his way to another evening of self-indulgence, Strange has a car accident in which both his hands are crushed. The resulting nerve damage is so extensive that there’s no chance he’ll ever be able to wield a scalpel again.

His career as a world champion neurosurgeon is over and with it, he thinks, not just his professional life but his whole life. With the loss of his hands as instruments of his profession comes a loss of his sense of himself. He stops being Stephen Strange. He becomes...nobody.

Suddenly there’s no one there.

All that’s left of him is the vanity and the self-doubt and insecurity that were always behind it with the addition of a very unattractive dose of self-pity.

In effect, less than a third of the way in, the movie kills off its main character. The next step of the story is to show us who---what new character---is going to replace him. This takes a little while.

In his desperation after the accident, it doesn’t cross his mind that he’s still a doctor and there other specialties than neurosurgery where he could put his knowledge and other skills to work. Only one kind of doctor matters to him and there’s only one of that kind. Stephen Strange, the world’s most brilliant, successful, and famous practitioner of the world’s most difficult profession. His sense of self is tied up in being not doing. When he can’t be that Stephen Strange, he can’t do anything because he doesn’t think there’s anything else worth doing, and so he might as well not exist. He ceases to exist.

He becomes a lost soul wandering his own private Purgatory.

Of course, Purgatory is a mountain to ascend, and eventually Strange literally climbs a mountain or up into the mountains at any rate: The Himalayas where he arrives on the unimposing doorstep of the Ancient One.

What follows from this point in the origin story of Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts are some rather standard scenes of the education of an apprentice hero. Standard except for the humor. Most of the scenes of Strange learning to become a hero and to develop and master his new superpowers are played for laughs or, played with laughs, with plenty of jokes, verbal and visual, and delightfully comic touches by Cumberbatch---who if you’re a fan of Sherlock you’ll know is terrific at tossing off one-liners as if that’s the way geniuses naturally converse---Swinton, whose delivery is wry and droll and, like I said, somewhat bashful---she makes herself blush at her own wit---and the hilariously dead-pan Benedict Wong as the order’s head librarian whose name is, as it happens, Wong.

Head librarian, by the way, is akin to being chief enforcer.

Something else makes this origin story different from the standard. Origin stories generally don’t focus on the hero’s needing a personality transplant.

They're usually all business: Here’s how so and so got his or her powers. Now on with our story. 

Just sticking with the other origin stories within the Avengers series, the hero’s psychological and spiritual growth isn’t as much of an issue in the first Iron Man, the first Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, or Ant-Man. Scott Lang has had his change of heart before Ant-Man begins, that’s part of why Hank Pym recruits him to be Ant-Man, and his psychological and spiritual challenge is to prove he’s up to the task of being a superhero. Steve Rogers is already Captain America in his heart, head, and soul, which is why the super-soldier serum works on him. Thor simply needs a lesson in humility. Tony Stark, like I said Oliver Mannion says, doesn’t really change at all.

Doctor Strange’s origin story serves the plot not by simply introducing us to the superhero but by helping to answer that question I posited at the top of the post: why this particular hero is needed at this particular moment. He can only save the day by being who he is, which isn’t only a matter of acquiring his powers. That he’ll get his powers is a given. So much so that  the filmmakers feel free to treat that part of the origin mostly as comedy, like I said. He has to become who he is. And whether Strange will change psychologically is the serious matter.

Of course, he does.

But there’s no one special moment when he sees the light. There’s a moment when he realizes he has changed but it’s in the middle of other things that are claiming his attention and the moment passes quickly.  Doctor Strange and Doctor Strange go on as if the transformation is not worth remarking on, and to Strange, it wouldn’t be. He is not that Doctor Strange and doesn’t miss being him in the least. Except that part of him that was in love with a fellow doctor, played by Rachel McAdams, and I’ll get to her in a little bit.

As if you haven’t guessed, I think Cumberbatch is terrific as Doctor Strange. It’s a part he was born to play and he’s been rehearsing it for the past several years on Sherlock. He manages the complete personality change with aplomb, naturally, but it includes a physical change that comes without anything more than a slight change of expression---unless you count the touches of white hair at his temples. All the boyishness that’s the basis of his charm at the beginning simply vanishes and with it that Stephen Strange. The Doctor Strange who takes his place is imposingly adult, no longer self-involved and self-indulgent but self-contained and totally self-controlled, dashing rather than merely charming, much more handsome, and...slightly sinister, as you would expect a good master of the occult would be.

He’s also supremely self-confident, which is why when he meets another superhero late into the movie, one in whose company even other superheroes might feel daunted, he’s coolly unimpressed. That other hero is equally unimpressed by Strange which seems to be why they hit it off.

[Editor's note: I said that meeting occurs late in the movie. Technically, it comes after the movie proper. It's the now Marvel movies standard mid-credits scene, so as fans don't have to be told, stay for the credits. All of them. There's another one at the very end.]

Swinton, too, I think is terrific. She’s always come across on screen as a being from another planet if not another dimension, which of course helps in playing a sorcerer supreme. Benedict Wong, as I mentioned, is hilarious but not in any way that undercuts his formidability as the character who will go on to be Doctor Strange’s right hand man.

Mads Mikkelson is given limited scope as Kaecilius, showing up now and again mainly either to remind us that there’s an evil plot unfolding or to get into another fight with our heroes. In either case, he’s in a grim mood, as you’d expect of a villain who’s gone over to the dark side and is now bent on world destruction. But his grimness has shadings and nuances, and in addition to being grimly charming he gets to be grimly funny.

There’s a funny scene in which Kaecelius and Strange face off for the first time and Strange’s introducing himself leads into an Abbott and Costello-esque exchange with Mikkelson playing it so straight that it’s hard to tell if Kaecilius is deliberately being a wiseguy or is genuinely without a clue. Mikkelson give Kaecilus a slight and enigmatic smile that makes him hard to read throughout. He may be enjoying playing around with magic or being evil or he may simply be enjoying the thrill of being on an adventure and it doesn’t matter what side he’s on or what his goals are, at the moment he’s just having fun. Whatever the reason for it, the smile and the note of humor in his voice humanize him. That is, they let us see that he was once humane if not good. It’s the vestige of the hero he once was or might have been.

Now as for McAdams…

It’s interesting that even though Marvel Studios has yet to introduce a female superhero, their leading ladies are all heroines in their own rights, not to mention independent, highly competent, highly intelligent people who don’t need their superheroic love interests to do their jobs for them. Pepper Potts, Peggy Carter, Jane Foster, and Hope Van Dyne can get along fine without Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and Ant-Man, thank you. Most of the time, at any rate. Pepper Potts does fall into the role of Damsel in Distress in Iron Man 3. McAdams’ Christine Palmer is even less defined by her relationship with the male hero than the others.

To be fair to them, though, Christine’s relationship with Stephen Strange---the heroic Stephen Strange---is yet to be defined. Her romantic entanglement was with the first version of Strange and that ended before the movie begins. So she’s not the love interest so much as the former and maybe future love but right now very good but not uncritical friend interest.

Consequently, McAdams mostly has to play concerned, exasperated, and infuriated but she does get to be funny in an extended sequence in which she has to perform emergency surgery on Strange’s wounded and dying body while his astral form keeps popping in and out of sight as he alternates between giving her surgical advice she doesn’t need and fights off Kaecilius’ strongest and deadliest henchman who is also popping in and out of sight as he astral projects himself too.

McAdams is a delight as she has Christine, who has no idea what is going on, determinedly keeping her focus on the job of keeping her patient alive and trying not to lose her temper at Strange’s constant interruptions while barely holding herself together instead of freaking out at the weirdnesses flying and swooping in and out of view around her.

The only one of the movie’s leads who doesn’t have much of a chance to be funny is Chiwetel Ejiofor who plays Mordo, the Ancient One’s chief lieutenant and eventually Strange’s strong right arm. Ejiofr’s primary job here is to be questioning and over-earnest as the story sets things up for Mordo’s likely more prominent role in the expected sequels and other movies in the Avengers franchise. But he does get to toss off a witty line or two now and again.

Doctor Strange is a comedy. Not exactly in the same vein as Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy. Ant-Man is a comic heist movie and Guardians a comic pirate movie. Doctor Strange is a fairly straight-forward sword and sorcery adventure in the tradition of Lord of the Rings and, actually, Star Wars. There’s just more emphasis on the sorcery. But it’s like Ant-Man and Guardians in having a comic as opposed to a tragic hero. The comic hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Comic heroes are redemptive figures. They don’t just save the day. They put things back together. Cap and Tony are tragic heroes, not least because their fates are tied together in a way that pulls Cap down more than it lifts Tony up. His friendship with Cap makes Tony a better man. But not enough better. And Tony only exacerbates Cap’s central problem. He’s a hero out of his time. All that he stood for in 1943 has become corny, simplistic, more the target for irony than the source of inspiration. On top of his loneliness, this has crippled him with self-doubt that at times on crosses the spiritual boundary into self-loathing and led him to the brink of despair. That, in turn, limits his ability to put things back together on a personal, intimate scale.

He can’t bring about happy endings for others. And he’s never had the physical power to put things back together on a larger scale.

Tony has that power. We’ve seen him use it time and again. But he’s nearly as useless bringing about personal happy endings. In fact, he goes Cap one better---or one worse. He’s destructive on the personal level. Cap has at least helped Nat and Falcon heal their wounded psyches a little bit.

Merlin uses Arthur. Gandalf uses Bilbo and Frodo. Dumbledore uses Harry to an unconscionable degree. The Ancient One uses Strange. We have to wait to see if he uses someone in his turn and who that will be and how and to what end.

Like I said, there’s a long tradition of users of magic giving into the temptation to go over to the dark side.

All heroes fail in the end, even the comic ones.

Something to keep in mind maybe when thinking about the election.

________________________________________________________

Doctor Strange, directed by Scott Derrickson, written by Joe Spaights, Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofer, Rachel McAdams, Mads Mikkelson, Benedict Wong, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Benjamin Bratt. Rated PG-13. Now in theaters.

Snowden, a love story

Posted Sunday morning, October 23, 2016.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as Ed Snowden, the computer analyst and programmer who exposed the U.S. government's mass surveillance of American citzens , wearing an expression as blank and unreadable as the movie he’s starring in often is itself, Oliver Stone’s untypically understated Snowden.

I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Snowden. With apologies to Matt Zoller Seitz, I’ve never been much of an Oliver Stone fan. I find his movies too...loud. And insistent. And he's too much of a believer in the idea of the Last Honest Man. I feel like all his movies tend to be about how one noble and innocent man, after temporarily losing his way, redeems himself by taking on and defeating the SYSTEM or in being defeated by it.

Of course that’s not entirely true. At any rate, it’s not true of Nixon.

But Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Any Given Sunday, even Talk Radio fit the pattern. I probably could make the case that Natural Born Killers is his own dark parody of the same theme.

And hand in glove with the Last Honest Man theme is Stone’s vision of America as a generally dark and sinister place ruled by a shadowy and corrupt elite made up of ruthless and power-hungry schemers, thieves, mass murderers, and madmen, and in that Nixon does fit the pattern. Richard Nixon and Nixon’s America are the implicit or explicit evils at work in all those other movies.

There are too many days when I agree with Stone on this and it’s one of the things I go to the movies to escape, that grim, cynical, despairing sense that Nixon won.

So I was expecting more of the same from Snowden. But it wasn’t just the existential dread I was dreading.

I was dreading that Stone would try to make a hero of Edward Snowden, and I just can’t bring myself to think of Snowden as a hero.

This says more about my own orneriness than about anything else. I think a lot of liberals need to see Edward Snowden as a hero the way a lot of conservatives needed to see Chris Kyle as a hero. And I want no part of that. They’re both too complicated, flawed, and all too human. I’ve always seen Snowden as an idealistic and well-meaning but naive young man who tried to do a good thing, by his lights, and did it badly in a way that ended up screwing himself and tainting his cause.

I’ve also never been sure exactly what good he hoped to do or how much good he actually accomplished.

I don’t know which side in the debate to trust either. The government’s argument has been we need to do what we’re doing in order to stop the terrorists but don’t worry we’re not overstepping, which is not the kind of reassurance the government should expect people to just accept. What government has ever not overstepped? And they've released no evidence that spying on everybody has worked or that it's necessary. It didn’t help get bin Laden and the major terrorist threats that we know failed---the shoe bomb that didn’t go off, the underwear bomb that didn’t go off, the Times Square bomb that didn’t go off---were thwarted mainly by accident and the terrorists’ own incompetence.

On the other side, the argument seems to be that nothing the government does to protect us is worth the assault on our civil rights and privacy---brave words, but seem to me to come out of a sense that there's nothing to protect us from.

I figured I’d sit through the movie feeling as frustrated and manipulated and pulled in too many directions by the story Stone was telling as I’d felt by the real story as I heard it told in the news and online all along.

Didn’t seem like a fun way to spend a couple hours.

In the end I felt I had to go so I could write about it in order to maintain my standing as a dutiful liberal blogger. In other words, I went as homework. Not the best reason to go to a movie.

Turned out it wasn’t the kind of Oliver Stone movie I was dreading.  It wasn’t loud. It wasn't insistent. It didn't beat me over the head with its arguments. It was even nuanced. And parts of it were quite...sweet.

A nice surprise, at the beginning. By the midway point, though, I was wishing it was that kind of Oliver Stone movie simply because it would have been more exciting and fun. As it is, Snowden is as low-key, reticent, unforthcoming, emotionally reserved to the point of repressed, and monotone as its portrayal of Edward Snowden himself.

But...while in certain ways it's still a typical Oliver Stone movie, including its being about another Last Honest Man, whether or not it’s a typical Oliver Stone movie and whether or not I’m an Oliver Stone fan doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m a Joseph Gordon-Levitt fan and Snowden features what’s becoming a typically excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt performance.

An excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt performance doesn’t mean an excellent movie. It just means a movie that’s at least worth watching for Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance.

Gordon-Levitt’s Snowden is watchful, self-contained, maybe not emotionally repressed but definitely willfully undemonstrative. He rarely seems to smile on his own volition. A smile is a reflexive reaction he should have controlled. When he’s made to smile---and it’s always as if he's been made to, against his will and better judgment---there’s a look in his eye that’s partly regret and partly amused admiration for whatever or whoever’s forced him to smile, as if he’s been fooled by a card trick he should have known better than to fall for but he still can’t help enjoying the trick and having been tricked in spite of himself. And he talks openly only a little more often than he smiles. He says only what he has to say. He has vibrant inner life but he’s determined to keep it to himself. He’s an intellectual and a voracious reader. He thinks deeply and philosophically about what he reads. But you have to work hard to get him to talk about it. You have to work hard to get him to talk, period. When he does speak it’s with a slight, barely perceptible hesitation, and with a studying look in his eyes, as if he’s scouting the path a sentence is going to take for holes to avoid stepping in and roots to avoid tripping over.  It’s as if he’s hooked himself up to an inner lie detector test to ensure that everything he’s about to say---and feel---is truthful and accurate. A conversation style that cuts down on small talk. That’s the point. Talking just for the sake of talking is when you’re likely to give yourself away.

Not that Snowden has anything to hide---when we first meet him, at any rate. He’s not deceitful. He’s not particularly shy, either, and not naturally taciturn. His reticence is more like a point of principle. His business is his business, and yours is yours. He’s the living embodiment of the principle he’s ultimately going to ruin his life defending. No one gets to pry into anyone else’s life without explicit, specific, and limited permission.

Conversations should be about practical matters at hand, and he’s not just willing but eager to talk about those. He’ll gladly go into detail about what he’s working on---if you have the security clearance and he’s judged you smart enough and competent enough to follow him. He just won’t tell you why he’s working on it and for whom he’s doing the work.

Temperamentally, intellectually, emotionally, and, as it turns out, politically and ideologically he’s suited for working for the NSA and the CIA, which is to say essentially as a spy and an eager volunteer in the cyberwar on terror. Edward Snowden, I was surprised to learn, was a Republican and a libertarian when he started out in the intelligence business.

The problem, he learns to his own dismay, is that the nature of the work he has to do, and wants to do, and is proud to do and be able to do, is in conflict with his own nature.

As it happens, at this critical point in his life he falls in love with someone who in her own way is as all wrong for him as it’s becoming clear his job is all wrong for him.

His job requires him to treat everyone else’s business--and it’s literally everyone else’s business---as his business. Being in love with the politically liberal artist and professional free-spirit Lindsay Mills, played charmingly, exuberantly, and winsomely---but not too---winsomely by Shailene Woodley, means allowing his business to become her business and through her the business of everyone else or, at any rate, anyone else she whimsically decides to share it with it and, given her nature, that could mean literally everyone else.

If Snowden’s motto is “Nothing about me is your business”, hers is “Everything about me is not only your business but something I expect you’ll find totally fascinating.”

Good liberal though she might be, she isn’t the least bit worried about the government’s spying on her or on anybody because she not only doesn’t have anything to hide, she doesn’t hide anything. Puts her whole life online, practically uploading her soul and personality, a virtual her who’s even more open and free-spirited and uninhibited as the analog her.

She’s an exhibitionist. Her whole life is a work of performance art. Multi-talented, her art of the moment is photography and she’s using her camera to chronicle her life. Snowden, as an important part of her life, is an important part of the chronicle. He must be photographed. Continually. Her favorite model. She adores him as a person so she adores him as a subject. He has to perform for her.  For her camera, at any rate. He has to smile. And despite himself, he does. He even begins to enjoy it, both smiling and performing for her.

So, even though at first glance in one way she’s all wrong for him, she’s in this way just right for him. She frees him up to be more himself. She brings him out of himself, gets him out and about in the world, shows him how to have fun and enjoy what life offers beyond work. It’s the old, old story going back to Pride and Prejudice. Creative and intelligent and passionate free-spirited young woman finds true love and happiness by saving a dour, emotionally repressed, all work and no play from himself and the stodgy, conventional boring life he’s headed for. It’s an old story but a good story.

Trouble is it’s usually a funny story.

Pride and Prejudice is a comedy. Bringing Up Baby, another version the old, old story, is a farce. Buried in Snowden is a comedy called When Eddie Met Lindsay or Pride and Prejudice and Programming. Edward Snowden is a Mister Darcy who’s a genius computer programmer addicted to his work. Lindsay Mills is an Elizabeth Bennett who takes nude selfies and posts them on the internet. They get together, despite themselves, and live happily if somewhat complicatedly ever after.

This would be fine if only the story around them had also been a comedy. It could have been one too, if Stone had chosen to see it that way. There is something farcical about the government’s “Let’s spy on everybody!” plan to combat terror. And the character who serves as the movie’s central villain, a CIA operative named O’Brian and Snowden’s suave and sophisticated but sinister mentor, brilliantly played by Rhys Ifans, is in his essentials a comic villain.

With his long lupine face topped off by snow white hair combed boyishly forward, he looks like Draco Malfoy whom no one has told is now middle-aged and a lot less pretty than he was when he and Harry Potter last crossed wands---an effect probably emphasized in my mind by Gordon-Levitt’s looking as though the part of Snowden was between him and Daniel Radcliffe and Stone told him he’d only cast him if he played it as a grown-up and grown Severus Snape-grim Harry. The improbable hair cut hints at the man’s vanity as well as his phoniness.

Feeling professionally obligated to keep his true self hidden and to appear in the world in disguise, he’s chosen for his primary false identity to disguise himself as someone twenty years younger. In another of his guises, he’s a Hemingwayesque outdoorsman and hunter. (For this one he wears a Stetson that looks as improbable on him as the haircut.) He’s also, at various times, a bon vivant and man of the world and a country club-style hale fellow well met type of 19th hole regular as gregarious and sycophantic as if he’s congratulating business contacts he’s let beat him at golf. (This one seems to be real in that it’s something he really does as part of his spy craft.)

The role he plays most often with Snowden is that of wise to the ways of the world and magic wizard instructing an apprentice, Merlin to Snowden’s Arthur, Dumbledore to Harry, Obi-wan---the haircut is also reminiscent of Alec Guinness’s wig in the original Star Wars movies---to his Luke.

All of these disguises are self-flattering and self-aggrandizing and there’s comedy to be found in his inflated view of himself. But it’s also a wonder that he can keep them all straight and doesn’t occasionally play the wrong part at the wrong time for the wrong audience and that could have been funny, his getting mixed up from time to time. A few more good jokes and with Stone pushing him to ham it up a bit more---or giving him permission to. Ifans probably wouldn’t have needed much prodding or direction. He is British, after all, (Well, Welsh, technically, but so was Burton) and the Brits are taught how to be hams as part of their basic training as actors.---and O’Brian would have been a funny bad guy.

But even though there are funny moments in Snowden, Stone doesn’t find any of the larger story amusing. That’s one of the reasons I’m not a fan. There’s never much he finds amusing. That’s ok, though. Not all love stories are comedies. Young lovers who would have had happy endings if only the grown-ups had stayed out of it are regularly in story and song brought to sorrow and grief. (See Romeo and Juliet.) For stretches of the movie, it looks as though that’s what’s going to happen to Snowden and Mills. His work is going to break them up, break their spirits, and break their hearts. There’s even a tragic flaw within their love for each other that would have helped that to happen.

As good as she is for him in one way, she’s bad for him in another, because, despite her being a liberal hippie in comparison to him, she’s a spoiled rich girl used to living well and traveling in the “right” social circles. His job allows for both and she likes that.

As O’Brian’s protégé he’s invited into the homes of the Beltway elite where he meets and is taken a shine to by important and Very Serious People who are happy to boost his career. When he gives up government work only to go back to work for the government as a consultant, his salary jumps and he and Mills are suddenly very flush with money. At first, Snowden’s not impressed by either the money or the social advancement. But he is impressed by how it makes her happy. And, under her influence, he begins to like it too, both the money and the social success.

On top of this, Mills is a bit of a vicarious thrill-seeker and she pushes him to go out into the field and do some actual spying.

This leads to what I think is the best section of Snowden, almost a movie within the movie that could have been expanded into the plot of an entire Hitchcockian thriller focused wholly Snowden and Mills as a pair of innocents caught up in intrigue and adventure.

Snowden is sent to Austria---setting of The Third  Man---where he teams up with a charming but oily, hedonistic, and morally bankrupt operative, played by a leering and cheerfully dissolute Timothy Olyphant to manipulate an innocent banker into giving them information about a would-be terrorist. The banker isn’t connected to the terrorist himself. He has family connections who have connections to people who have connections to people who...you get the picture. He himself has no idea how he’s connected at such a remove, but Snowden and his partner get to those connections through his daughter. This leads to tragedy and Snowden’s first serious crisis of conscience.

There Stone had, a story, if he’d wanted to tell it, about a pair of lovers who are tempted by money, status, and the pure thrill of behaving amorally and either fall into corruption or are saved from it by their own innate decency or the intervention of angels in human form, a tragedy or a comedy, whichever way he chose. He chose to go back to his main story about Snowden standing up to the System. That could have been a tragedy or a comedy too. Except for one hitch. Neither the tragedy nor the comedy happen because neither did happen.

You’d think that wouldn’t have been a problem for him since what really happened has never stopped him before from telling the story he wanted to tell and making the points he was determined to make.

But this time it did. Stone let himself be blocked by reality.

The real Snowden and Mills seem to be living out a romantic comedy. Who knows if they’ll live happily ever after, but from all appearances they’re living pretty happily in the here and now, despite the inconvenience of their Russian exile. The System gets taken down and Snowden and Mills survive as individuals and as a couple, leaving Stone with a love story that’s neither comic nor tragic just kind of sweet, interrupted too often by a not particularly dramatic historical drama.

Again, there’s a way he could have dealt with this. The one I suggested earlier. He could have the plot that surrounds the romance a comedy too or, at least, comedic.

For reasons I can only guess at, he didn’t do that. But then he didn’t do what I’d actually expected him to do. Treat the whole thing as a typical Oliver Stone overwrought melodrama.

There’s a surprising matter-of-factness to his storytelling in Snowden. A this happened, then this happened, then that happened straight-forwardness that not only cuts down on the suspense but causes the movie to resist emotional involvement.

How are we supposed to feel about all of this?

The answer seems to be a bit of a shrug.

Feel?

Ok. Then how about think? What are we supposed to think?

Another shrug.

I was dreading going to Snowden because I expected Stone would try to be as emotionally manipulative and intellectually dishonest---in the cause of dragging the audience to the right side---as he’s often been. I didn’t want to be imaginatively wrestled into taking Snowden’s side and cheering him on as a hero. But I think I would have enjoyed that better.

Stone seems to be way too willing to let the facts speak for themselves for once. In truth, he seems barely interested in presenting the facts at all. At any rate, he doesn’t do much to dramatize them, let alone over-dramatize them in keeping with what I’ve always thought is his idiom. He appears to take it for granted we know all we need to know about the government’s massive data gathering enterprises and that we disapprove on intellectual, constitutional, and moral grounds, and he doesn’t have to work to make us disapprove.

The result is some rather desultory storytelling with many confusing and lazy plot twists and turns. Details and events have to be left out, compressed, or elided in all historical movies for the sake of time and in order not to overwhelm the audience with facts as if in a well-meaning but counterproductive effort to help us cram for a final exam. But in Snowden those left-out details and events aren’t compensated for either imagistically or through poetic license. This happened, then that happened, then...this happened. Wait? What? How did we get to that last this happened?  What happened during the ellipses?

We’ll have to go back and read the books.

As for Snowden himself and what good he did...or harm…

On this point, as with the other, Stone seems to take it for granted that since we already agree that what the government was doing was wrong on principle, then we already agree that what Snowden did to put a stop to it was right on principle, and therefore Ed Snowden is a champion of truth, justice, and the American way on principle and we will cheer for him in the end on principle.

I don’t like to go to movies on principle. I went to this one on the principle I needed to do my homework for the blog and I wasn’t looking forward to being manipulated. But I would rather be manipulated into cheering for the hero than being expected to do it on principle. And that’s what I missed watching Snowden, Stone’s old manipulative tricks.

I missed his special pleadings. I missed his tampering with history and the histrionics that usually go with it. I missed his very dark view of America. The government as presented in Snowden is generally incompetent while being too competent at the wrong things, corrupt but only routinely so and mainly because individual actors are corrupt, and generally wrongheaded to the point of stupidity. Which is why I think it could have been treated comically. But it isn’t actively evil. And it isn’t anybody, really. President Obama appears in clips that show him saying things we now know were official lies. But that’s all they are, official lies of the sort any and all political leaders engage in as a matter of course. There’s no George W. Bush here, no Dick Cheney. I didn’t miss them, particularly. But I missed there being real villains.

Especially the chief villain of Stone’s dark vision.

I missed Nixon.

_________________________________________________________________________

Snowden, directed by Oliver Stone. Screenplay by Kieran Fitzgerald and Oliver Stone, based on the books The Snowden Files by Luke Harding and The Time of the Octopus by Anatoly Kucherena. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkerson, Rhys Ifans, Timothy Olyphant, and Nicolas Cage. Rated R. Now in theaters.

Matt Zoller Seitz's The Oliver Stone Experience is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon.

The Magnificent Seven...and the not as magnificent but still pretty darn good The Magnificent Seven

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, October 2, 2016. Posted Wednesday night, October 5.

Denzel Washington (center), magnificent as the kind of western movie hero he should have had a chance to play a long time ago, in Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the 1960 western classic The Magnificent Seven.

Saw the new version of The Magnificent Seven last weekend. Not as magnificent as the original, but how could it be? The original has had fifty-six years to burrow itself deep into the culture and our popular imagination. It’s practically not a movie anymore. It’s part of the collective unconscious. But the new one’s pretty darn good. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that while I was on my way out of the theater I was thinking it might be better than the original.

Took about two minutes of rewatching the original last night to disabuse me of that lunatic notion.

By the way, before we go any further, when I refer to the “original”, anyone who says, “Oh, you mean The Seven Samurai?” is just showing off.

The Seven Samurai is a whole higher level of art and it’s unfair to it and to The Magnificent Seven to think of the latter as a remake. Beside that, the changes, in time, place, language, and genre, along with the resulting differences in cultural references and resonances, set the two movies so far apart from each other in effect that to point out Kurosawa’s name in the credits of The Magnificent Seven is practically just to point out an interesting bit of movie trivia. Calling The Seven Samurai the original Magnificent Seven is like calling Macbeth the original Throne of Blood.

The original Magnificent Seven---director John Sturges’ 1960 shoot-em-up starring Yul Brenner, Steve McQueen, Brad Dexter, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, and Horst Bucholz, with Eli Wallach absolutely wonderful as the villain---is a re-telling of the old story re-told in The Seven Samurai. Almost all stories going back to Gilgamesh are re-tellings of old stories. The questions at work are how good a job did the new storyteller do re-telling the story and how good a job did they do in making the story their own in the re-telling? And, of course, if the story’s being told as a movie, how good a movie is it?

Time has proven that Sturges did an excellent job on all three scores, although no one would argue that on the third he made as great a film as Kurosawa made with the original original. Still, as westerns go, The Magnificent Seven is a classic piece of moviemaking.

Antoine Fuqua, director of the new version starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Byung-hun Lee, Martin Sensmeier, Manual Garcia-Rulfo, and Vincent D’Onforio as the Seven, with Peter Sarsgaard as the lip-curling, capitalist villain and Haley Bennett as the female lead the original conspicuously lacks, settling for a generic love interest instead, succeeds well on the first score. His version is a rousing tale of good old-fashioned western adventure and derring-do.

On the second, he hasn’t done as well. This Magnificent Seven never escapes the shadow of the original. But then Fuqua deliberately didn’t try too hard to do that. In fact, as he told New York Magazine, he saw it as an important part of his job not to.

From directing 2004’s King Arthur, Antoine Fuqua learned a key lesson about building new movies out of old material. “Make it your own, but be conscious of the things that mean a lot to people,” he says. “When you bend it too far, it gets hard for people to wrap their heads around.”

But while Fuqua didn’t feel free to depart too far from the original, he freed himself up in other ways. He gave himself room to pay homage not just to the original but to other classic westerns. Not just pay homage but in places to subvert and even mock the conventions of the entire genre. And Denzel Washington’s character owes more to Clint Eastwood than to Yul Brenner and pieces of the plot seem lifted from Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales---with the uniforms reversed---and Pale Rider.

This goes a long way towards Fuqua's making the movie if not the story his own and that brings me to the answer to the third question.

Fuqua’s Magnificent Seven is a rip-roaring, exciting, suspenseful, and at times moving western. It may take fifty years to decide if he’s made a classic on par with the original, but it’s good enough that, like I said, I almost had myself convinced it’s better than than the original.

And there are things about it that are better, starting with the leading man.

It’s a good bet people will be watching this Magnificent Seven fifty years from now as one of Denzel Washington’s best movies. Yul Brenner is better in the original than I remembered and more plausible. But mainly his job was to fill a space that should have been filled by the likes of Glenn Ford, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, or Jimmy Stewart---the angry, un-amiable, dangerous Stewart of the Anthony Mann westerns. Denzel is the more ferocious presence those stars would have been.

As Sam Chisolm, the leader of the Seven, he burns holes in the screen. Unlike Brenner’s Chris Adams, Chisolm is a lawman not a hired gun, though he's not opposed to doing a bit of freelancing on the side. That allows Washington to play Chisolm with an anger and air of menace that, while daunting, never threaten to define his personality for us. They’re professional qualities. Tools of the trade and part of what passes for a uniform. He puts them on like he puts on his gunbelt and his big, broad-brimmed black hat, to go to work.

First order of business, though, is to make plain an important change from the original to the new Magnificent Seven. In outline, the plots are the same. Bad guys threaten simple townsfolk. Simple townsfolk hire a band of gunslingers to drive away the bad guys. But the original is set mainly in Mexico and the simple townsfolk are simple peasants leading simple movie peasant lives. The remake is set somewhere in the United States---possibly California but that’s not made clear---and the simple townsfolk are farmers and not all that simple in their ways and their personalities. In fact, on the whole, they’re an angsty and emotionally conflicted lot and not all that likable. I think the change in location was made not just to make this a different movie or even to avoid the kind of well-meaning but unfortunate ethnic stereotyping the original fell into. I think it was done in order to give the designers permission to make things in the town more “realistic'---that is, gritty, dirty, ugly, and drab---and to give the actors parts to play more “realistically'---that is, they get to emote more.

Whatever the reasons, I think the change is one of the things that work to make it a lesser movie than the original, as I’ll explain in a bit.

The other obvious change is in the characters of the seven heroes.

There are no one-to-one correspondences between Fuqua’s leads and Sturges’. The closet, I think, after Washington in the role of leader played by Brenner in the original---They both wear black. But Brenner smiles a whole lot more.---is Chris Pratt as Josh Faraday, Chisolm’s sidekick and lieutenant, the role McQueen filled in the original.

But, good as he is, Pratt is no Steve McQueen and Faraday is no Vin Tanner.

Tanner is good-natured and easy-going. Faraday is good-natured and easy-going but careless. Tanner has a sense of mischief. Faraday has learned to enjoy being in trouble, a useful adaptation to circumstance since he gets himself into it so often. Tanner has avoided being tied down by responsibilities on a kind of principle. Faraday is just plain irresponsible. Tanner is drifting, going the way the wind blows just to see where it takes him. Faraday is adrift. He’s letting the wind take him because he has no idea what else to do with his life. Tanner is shrewd and observant. He picks his fights and takes no chances without first figuring out the odds. Faraday is impulsive and self-indulgent.  He’s been getting by on his wits and his luck and we get the sense that his luck has been running low and he’s afraid, with good reason, it’s about to run out.

That I can write that much about Faraday tells you something else Fuqua has done differently. His seven leads are played by stars or known up-and-comers and he’s given them characters to play.

McQueen, Bronson, Coburn, and even Robert Vaughn have achieved icon status, but in 1960 only McQueen could have been considered a star and he was a television star, the star of the TV western Wanted: Dead or Alive. Horst Bucholz was a star in Germany, but The Magnificent Seven was his first American film. The rest were known, as well as they were known, as regular guest stars on television. It’s hard but if you try, you can see them as what they were to the audiences at the time, talented, young---McQueen was thirty, Coburn thirty-two, Vaughn only twenty-eight. Bronson was an old man of thirty-nine.---journeymen actors getting a lucky break and making the most of it.

But there wasn’t much for any one of them to make of their parts. When you get down to it, they were each playing an attitude more than a character. The leader, the cheerful one, the greedy one, the arrogant one, the sentimental one, the coward, and the kid. Their characters barely even have names.

The new Seven have all been given extensive backstories and come with enough to be the leads in their own movies or, at any rate, regulars on Deadwood, if David Milch ever gets around to resurrecting it. In some ways, the movie is about them as characters rather than about them as heroes of an adventure story we’re meant to be paying the closer attention to.

In the original, the villagers, even with the stereotyping, are individualized. We feel we know them. What’s more, we like them. We’re rooting for them, which is why we root for the Seven. And they save the Seven as much as they are saved by them. Sturges never lets us forget that these are not good men. They’re not altogether bad but they’re killers for hire. They’re in the business for the money and the thrill.  What happens is they draw strength and learn virtue from the villagers.

(This is especially true of Bronson’s character, Bernardo O’Reilly, who is adopted by a group of boys from the village. As they cheerfully and proudly tell him, it’ll be their job to mourn him when he’s killed and make sure there are always flowers on his grave. O’Reilly sardonically asks if that means they’ll be happy if he’s killed.

Oh no, they assure him. They’ll be just as happy if he survives.

“Maybe happier,” says one.

“Maybe,” adds another.)

This new group of heroes come across more as a collection of loveable rogues and scoundrels. Their violent pasts and deadly occupations are taken as givens of the time period and more or less forgiven or excused or explained away.  And while they’re not in it for the money---because there’s hardly any money in it---they’re not in it for any principle either. They’re mostly just along for the fun of the adventure and, it looks like, the fun of playing off each other, and I mean the characters as well as the actors.

They get interested in saving the town when the plot requires them to but for the most part their minds are on other things and their hearts are elsewhere. So are Fuqua’s. He doesn’t seem to care that much for the townsfolk except in that they’re victims menaced by his villain. And for all the realism of the make-up and costuming and the actors' acting, it’s often hard to tell them apart. This is particularly true of the men whose faces are lost behind too much “realistic” facial hair.

We don’t even get to see these farmers’ farms. So we don't get to know except as an abstraction what they keep telling us they're willing to die fighting for.

So in this, it has less human feeling than the original.

But I have to admit, I got caught up in the acting of the leading men. Denzel first and foremost, but the others are all charming and charismatic and make their characters compelling. My favorites were Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio.

D’Onofrio plays an old bible-quoting mountain man and renowned Indian fighter named Jack Horne (No doubt in honor of Tom Horn, played in the movie by that name by Steve McQueen.) who says his prayers, recites scripture, and threatens bloody vengeance in a high-pitched hoarse voice that is either the result of his having had his throat cut and his vocal cords severed in a fight some time back or spending too much time alone singing hymns to the trees and hills at the top of his lungs.

Hawke plays Goodnight Robicheaux. a crack rifleman and Confederate Civil War hero whose guilt and PSTD have, fifteen years after the war, finally caught up with him. Robicheaux’s days as a killer are secretly over, but he needs people to be afraid of him in order to make his living. He’s been getting by on his reputation and by a pretense of bravado and cavalier charm that we can see is a parody of his once brave and noble self.

Lee and Sensmeier are fine in lesser roles, but I was particularly taken with Manuel Garcia-Rulfo who really doesn’t have much to do as the gentleman bandit Vasquez except adopt an attitude of raffish charm. Oddly---or maybe not---he reminded me more of McQueen in the original than Pratt did.

And then there’s the villain.

Peter Sarsgaard looks like he’s having a high old time playing the grasping, monomaniacal Bartholomew Bogue as practically a mustache-twirler out of an old-time melodrama. He doesn’t actually twirl his mustache, but he makes it clear that if the mood struck him, he would, and he'd get away with it.

But that brings me to another significant difference between Fuqua’s Magnificent Seven and Sturges’, and it’s epitomized in the differences between the two movies’ villains.

Eli Wallach is great of course and is obviously having his own great good fun as Calvera, the leader of the gang of bandits terrorizing the village the Seven have been hired to protect. But the key point is that Calvera’s gang is just that, a gang. It’s a big gang but still just a collection of thugs, drifters, ne’er-do-wells, bums, and other types of life’s losers and minor villains. In short, they’re just outlaws. Bank robbers, horse thieves, and cattle rustlers. They’re formidable only because there are forty of them and they’re led by Calvera. Which is why they stay loyal to him. They know they’re nothing without him. He in turn is loyal to them for pretty much the same reason. And that’s pretty much the whole of his motivation. His evil plan is to keep his gang together for as long as he can. That means keeping them fed through the coming winter. So the only thing he wants out of the villagers is food. Right now that’s all he’s interested in.

Not land. Not money. Not power. Not wine, women, or song. Not that he’s averse to any of these. But they’re not his immediate concern.

Bogue, on the other hand, is obsessed with money and power. He’s a robber baron intent on increasing his empire, which is based on land grabbing where the land being grabbed is rich in minerals and shiny metal. He doesn’t want anything out of the town his private army is terrorizing. He wants the town. There’s gold in them thar hills and he’s going to have it.  All of it. And he doesn’t have a gang to help him with this. He has an army. He’s rich enough to hire mercenaries by the hundreds.

I think the conception of Bogue owes something to Deadwood’s version of George Hearst who is meant to embody the evils of capitalism and serve the theme that money corrupts everyone and everything. But in execution Bogue is essentially a Wild West Bond villain. Come to think of it, he could be a character out of The Wild Wild West, which was a Bond movie re-imagined as a TV western. Dr Miguelito Loveless didn’t have anything on Bogue in his lust for power and world domination or in melodramatic over-the-topness. It’s just that Bogue, if he was in the need, would hire his own mad scientist rather than having to bother with being one himself.

One of the beauties of Sturges’ Magnificent Seven is that in its plot and characterizations it has the simplicity of a fable. It is a fable. But like all good fables it’s about something real. It’s a fable about the closing of the western frontier.

That is, it’s about the end of the Wild West.

Calvera and his gang have to resort to robbing the villagers of their food because they can’t earn their keep the usual way, robbing banks and rustling cattle, anymore. Civilization, and with it law and order, is closing in on them. There is an army in the movie, although it’s offscreen, and it belongs to the United States’ government. At one point, Calvera expresses his dismay and his surprise that the last time he and his gang crossed the border into Texas to rob a bank, the United States sent the army after them.

“A whole army!”

That narrow escape taught him a lesson. His days as an outlaw are numbered.

Now, here’s the critical point.

The days of the Seven are numbered too, if they’re not already over and done with it. At least in the United States, their services are no longer required.  No more hired gunslingers need apply. 

Oh, here and there, patches of the Old West where questions of right and wrong have to be settled with guns in the hands of men quick on the draw still exist. But the incident that introduces us to Chris and Vin and that catches the attention of the trio of villagers who have come looking for men like them to hire to come save their village---Chris and Vin driving the hearse carrying the coffin of an Indian up to Boot Hill where it’s met by a small band of bigots with their guns drawn, looking to keep the Indian from being buried in the same ground as whites, and isn’t that a metaphor for the settling of the West?---is instigated by a pair of traveling salesmen who have simply taken it for granted that common decency, fair-mindedness, a degree of tolerance, and the rule of law are the order of the day. This is how the country now works. The reason Chris and Vin have to take over is that the salesmen have to catch the next stage and don’t have time to go looking for the legal authorities.

In other words, although I don’t believe any exact date is given, the movie starts in the 20th Century or at least with the 20th Century well on its way.

Fuqua’s movie is set in 1879. But that’s just a date to explain the fashions and the guns. It’s not a true historical marker. And, as far as it matters, the United States doesn’t exist. Bogue operates as free of legal and political constraint as if there are no laws and no politics because there is no government. In reality, the settling of the west was almost entirely a political enterprise, sponsored by, encouraged, defended, and to a great degree financed by the federal government. Violence was rife but it was mostly a matter of the United States Army killing Indians as they drove them from their land and duly-sworn lawmen taking guns away from drunken cowboys.

Bowe wants to take their land away from a bunch of farmers. But to give you an idea of what life was like for real farmers in the West, at around the time the movie is set, the Ingalls family had already left their little house on the Kansas prairie, and they’d left it not because they were driven out by evil capitalist warlords with their own private armies. They had to leave because their homestead turned out to be on the Osage Indian reservation and for once the government was honoring a treaty with the Indians.

What I’m getting at is that the original Magnificent Seven is a fable with resonances with actual history and the remake is basically a fantasy whose main resonances are with other Western movie fantasies.

Still, it’s a lot of fun. Fuqua did what he says he wanted to do, make his own movie while remaining true to the spirit of the original. It isn’t as magnificent as the original but while you’re watching it you won’t care. Like I said, it’s a rip-roaring adventure with some terrific old-fashioned western action scenes and stunts and some excellent acting. And...it’s a great Denzel Washington movie.

He is, as usual, magnificent and, man, does he wear that big black hat well.

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The Magnificent Seven, directed by Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by Richard Wenk and Nick Pizzolatto. Based on The Magnificent Seven directed by John Sturges and The Seven Samurai directed by Akira Kurosawa. Starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Peter Sarsgaard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, and Haley Bennett. Rated PG-13. (I know. I’m surprised too. It’s pretty violent.) Now in theaters.

Hell or High Water: "I never met nobody who ever got away with anything."

Sunday morning, September 11, 2016.

Toby Howard: “How have you managed to stay out of prison for a year?” Tanner Howard: “It’s been difficult.”

The Howard brothers, Tanner (Ben Foster, left) and Toby (Chris Pine, right) rest up and reflect after their most recent bank robbery in director David Mackenzie’s sad, ironic, and political contemporary western Hell or High Water.

Hell or High Water’s one of the best westerns I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s also one of the saddest.

And one of the most overtly political.

If I had world enough and time I might make the case that it does a better job of examining the causes of the economic collapse of 2008 and its subsequent devastations than The Big Short. In The Big Short the victims are mostly invisible and the few villains we see are mainly clowns. The evil being perpetrated’s an abstraction that needs constant cinematic tricks and stunts to keep it in focus.

There’s nothing abstract in Hell or High Water and the victims and their sufferings are almost never off screen.

To be clear right way, Hell or High Water is a contemporary western. Like the TV series Justified, it transplants themes, tropes, conventions, and stock characters established in classic westerns to the 21st Century United States. Hell or High Water is even set in the west. West Texas, to be exact. But unlike Justified, Hell or High Water’s western-ness isn’t a matter of the filmmakers’ taking poetic license.

Justified turns Kentucky coal country into a modern day Tombstone in order to give Marshal Raylan Givens an excuse to act like Wyatt Earp and get away with racking up a body count that would fill several movie Boot Hills to capacity. It really isn’t much of a stretch but it’s a stretch to have Boyd Crowder and the rest of the criminal Crowders and Bennetts behaving like the Clanton Gang and the Cowboys who ran Tombstone before the Earps came to town. But it takes a good deal of our willingness to suspend disbelief to accept every other episode including a version of the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

I wouldn’t call Hell or High Water a model of cinematic realism. But the picture it presents of economically blasted West Texas as the the Wild West or, rather, not as far removed from the days when it was the Wild West, has an essential realism.

The historical fact is that once upon a time the Wild West began just a short walk up from the beach at Plymouth, Massachusetts. A better name for the Wild West would be the western frontier and the story of the Taming of the West is the story of white settlement pushing the boundaries of the frontier farther and farther west.

The stuff of the legends, myths, and tall tales and the characters and exploits of the pioneers, immigrants, frontiersmen and women, heroes, folk heroes, and villains that have become in our collective imagination the story of the Taming of the West as we know it mainly from movies and TV began with the settlement of the wildnernesses of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

It’s not unrealistic or at all ahistorical to see George Washington as one of our first frontiersmen heroes. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which are set in what are now some of the more touristy spots of upstate New York, are literature’s first Westerns. The second part of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, which focuses on the second generation of Puritan settlers in New England and their part in King Philip’s War, reads like a prequel to Cooper---written by a smart writer who took to heart Mark Twain’s furious contempt for Cooper’s writing---and includes a heroic Indian fighter who rivals Hawkeye in derring-do, fighting and tracking skill, and luck in surviving dangerous and bloody adventures and it’s all true. Mayflower is non-fiction. And what I’m saying is that much of what we think of as legend, tall tale, and myth is part of the true history of the of the often bloody “civilizing” of the frontier.

At one point, the West Texas of Hell or High Water was one of the farthest reaches of the frontier and it remained on the frontier for a longer time than other places on the continent where civilization took hold faster and more deeply. Basically, West Texas was what we think of as the Wild West long after the rest of the west was won and in defining economic ways it stayed the Wild West right up until the beginning of the 21st Century.

And what we see in the movie is that for many people West Texas as they’ve always known it is reverting back to the frontier it was when their ancestors arrived.

It’s important to keep in mind that a key part of the history of the taming of the West is white, English-speaking people stealing land from other people who were there ahead of them, people who in most places were Native Americans. But the English and their descendants also stole land from the French, Dutch, and Spanish while they were at it.

That the land we’re all living on today is mostly stolen land is a theme of Hell or High Water.

A Texas Ranger, who’s part Mexican and part-Comanche while without question being all Texan and all American, observes that the land the economically hard-pressed white people of West Texas feel being stolen out from under them by the banks and oil companies was stolen by their ancestors from his Mexican ancestors who in turn had stolen it from his Comanche ancestors who in their turn had stolen it from other Native American tribes.

This makes Hell or High Water an ironic tragedy. There’s a poetic justice in the people we’re rooting for, represented by the failed rancher turned bank robber, having their land stolen from them.

There’s another irony at work too, and that’s our recognizing that while we’re aware that their ancestors stole the land, in other movies we’re meant to root for those ancestors to get away with the theft.

This makes it hard to know who and what to root for in Hell or High Water.

Toby Howard (Chris Pine) is a divorced father of two sons he very much doesn’t want following in his footsteps. He’s been a sometime roughneck in the oil fields, a sometime ranch hand on his mother’s small and far from prospering ranch, and pretty much a full-time failure. Up until recently, he took a life full of hardship, money woes, and disappointment for granted. But his mother has died, leaving behind nothing but a pile of medical bills and the ranch and the ranch is facing foreclosure. His mother had fallen behind paying off the loan she been talked into taking predatory terms by unscrupulous bankers. The ranch itself isn’t worth much as a ranch. Toby’d only worked it to help out his mother and he’s not attached to it. He’d just as soon let it go except...oil’s been discovered on the property.

This is Toby’s big chance, but he sees as not a chance for himself but for his sons. Problem is the oil company won’t start drilling and paying out unless he owns the place free and clear. He has to pay off the bank---forty-three thousand dollars in a matter of a couple of weeks.

He comes up with a plan to raise the money by robbing the very chain of banks looking to foreclose. Looking forward to foreclosing. The banks want that oil money too.

Toby, who has always been an honest man if not a successful one, enlists his ex-convict brother in the scheme. Tanner Howard (Ben Foster) has just finished doing a stretch in prison for killing a man in a bar fight. This was his second murder. He was never charged for the first one he’d committed. He’d shot his the brothers’ abusive father. That one got passed off as a hunting accident. Point is, Tanner is a man of uncertain temper, violent impulses, a live for the moment and to hell with the consequences philosophy, and a guilty conscience.  He’s the type who tends to maximize trouble by way of solving a problem.

But he’s brave as all get-out---mainly because he doesn’t care if he lives or dies---and he’s fiercely loyal to Toby. He’s the older brother and he killed their father to protect his little brother.

Toby’s plan is to rob a string of the bank’s branches, taking only relatively small scores in small bills so they can’t be traced, until they’ve raised the required forty-three grand which he’s figured out how to launder. It’s a clever plan but it gives the Texas Rangers who are soon on their trail time to figure out more or less what they’re up to and start anticipating their next moves.

The two Rangers after the Howards are Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges), a cynical and worn-down days away from retirement but still almost as brilliant and fearless an investigator as he was in his prime, and his longtime---and longsuffering. Hamilton is deliberately difficult to get along with.---partner, Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham), the Ranger I mentioned above who voices and embodies the movie’s central irony. He’s a man of two worlds. In his Mexican and Indian heritages, he represents both West Texas’ frontier past and its diverse, post-agricultural, knowledge-based white-collar future.

Hamilton, too, is a man of two worlds. In temperament and by virtue of his own history as a Ranger, he’s a throwback to the old-fashioned lawman of classic Westerns. But on principle and through dint of intelligence, education, professional training, and common sense, he’s very much a modern police officer and detective. He knows what the future’s bringing and he’d be looking forward to it, if only he could be part of it. Forced retirement’s getting in the way of that. But it still makes him someone whose heart is divided between two worlds he can’t be part of, the lingering Wild West of his glory days and the bright civilized future he fatalistically figures he won’t live long enough to enjoy witnessing let alone be an active part of. Retirement, as a consequence, is looking to him like a state of death in life.

No surprise then that he’s clinging hard to the present moment and enjoying maybe a little too much the chase they’re on after the bank robbers. It’s his last hurrah. Alberto, though, worries that Hamilton’s looking to go out in a blaze of glory.

Hell or High Water, then, is the story of three desperately unhappy men, Hamilton and the two Howards, at the ends of their ropes, with only one of them, Toby, feeling he has anything left to lose.

Hamilton and Tanner seem to be having a high old time playing out a real life western, Tanner seeing it as a game of cowboy and Indian, with himself as the Indian. But at bottom both are as sad and sick at heart as Toby, and the three men’s different sadnesses are part of what makes Hell or High Water that saddest of westerns I described it as up top.

But that sadness doesn’t stop it from being an exciting western or a fun one.

Finally cutting to the chase, which is the opposite of what director David Mackenzie has done. Mackenzie smartly opens with the chase and takes some time to let the action settle down before laying out his themes and giving us the backstory.

We meet the Tanners in the middle of their pulling off their first robbery. And we’re told anything about them except that they’re not particularly experienced bank robbers. Terror, exuberance, affectionate squabbling puts us on the Howards’ side before we know who they are or what their longterm plans are. All we know is that they are in more trouble and immediate danger than the people in the banks they rob.

The teller at the first bank (Dale Dickey), although scared, is annoyed at them as much as frightened. She recognizes at once that they’re amateurs who haven’t come to work prepared. Her practical, no-nonsense reaction is indicative of most of the characters we’re going to meet along the way.

The regular folks of West Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle---a casino there figures at the center of Toby’s scheme to beat the banks with their own money---are like her, practical-minded, common-sensical, stoical, and even good-humored in their determination to make the best of bad situations. But that’s one of their problems. They’re resigned to hard times.

The teller is different in that we can see at once she’s someone who will survive and thrive whatever comes her way and not just because she works for a bank, one of the few prospering businesses around. She’s the type who thinks and plans ahead, who can think and plan ahead because she can imagine a different and better future for herself. (At the exact present moment that means coming out of this robbery alive.) But others can only see more hardship and sorrow ahead of them and their only solace is a kind of retreat into memories of a glorified past or dreams of improbably rosy future brought about not by hard work or careful planning but sheer good luck.

In counterpoint to the bank teller is a waitress at a diner where Toby and Tanner happen to stop in for breakfast on their way to their next hold-up. She’s a single mother who sees her only hope for a better life for herself as attracting the romantic interest of a customer with a good job. She is consequently overtly and too obviously and desperately flirtatious. We can easily guess that far more often than she’s come close to landing a husband and father for her child, she’s essentially prostituted herself for very little money, most likely usually not much more than a too generous tip.

What’s more important, though, is that we see through Kelly Mixon’s heartbreaking performance the waitress’ self-awareness and self-disgust and at the same time her resolve to keep her pride despite her sense that she’s humiliating herself and that her belief that her situation is hopeless.

This mix of courage and shame makes her more typical than the teller of the characters who populate the movie’s West Texas, and that includes Toby.

Toby is forward thinking and he’s a careful planner, but both are new to him and they’re reactions to the sheer dumb luck of oil being found on his mother’s ranch and his mother’s dying when she did---had she lasted a few more days, he might not have had time to put his plan into action before the bank took possession of the ranch. And his careful plan requires him to debase himself. An honest, considerate, and gentle man, he has to turn himself into a thief and point guns at innocent people’s heads. Already ashamed of himself for a lifetime of failure, he’s now disgusted with himself for having become a criminal and a threat and danger to people who’ve never done him any harm.

Jeff Bridges as Ranger Marcus Hamilton is unsurprisingly terrific, and I could go on and on about him and his performance; however, I think it’s best to leave things to Bilge Elbiri who writes about Bridges' remarkable career as one of Hollywood's best leading men of the past two generations in a article at the Village Voice. Chris Pine, though, does a to me gratifyingly excellent job as Toby. I’ve been rooting for him to become a major star since the first movie in J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the Star Trek franchise.

It was fun to see Hell or High Water not too long after Star Trek: Beyond. Abrams reconceived Jim Kirk as the popular jock who makes the class nerds feel good about themselves and inspires them to be heroes. But Pine never lets us lose track of the fact that Kirk is the son of a pair of brilliant scientists and takes after them in important ways. The driving quality of his life is an intelligent curiosity---what he wants most in life is to know. He’s every bit as smart as the nerds who look up to him and is, at heart, a nerd himself. In Star Trek: Beyond, Pine takes his Kirk a step closer to that Kirk, which is to say the Kirk we know and love from the original series. And that Kirk, besides being very smart, is a comic character. Although he has a melancholy streak, he’s essentially a happy man who takes great joy in life and in being himself.

Toby Howard is not a happy man nor does he take much joy in anything, especially not in being himself. He’s not stupid, by any measure, he is in fact quite smart. But he doesn’t really know how to be smart. He’s never had to be. He’s gotten by up until now by going along. He knows objectively that his plan is a smart one but he lacks faith in it because he lacks faith in himself. And more than he’s impressed by his own plan’s brilliance, he’s oppressed and depressed by its necessary criminality. That he has to break the law in order to save his sons' lives is proof to him that as smart as the plan is, it mean he's smart. A smart man wouldn’t have to resort to robbing banks, even if those banks deserve to be robbed.

Pine lets us see Toby’s heartbroken shame and self-doubt as clearly as Kirk’s exuberant and inspiring and good-humored self-confidence.

But as good as Bridges and Pine are, I think it’s Ben Foster who steals the show. While never letting us forget that Tanner has an awful mean streak, that he’s dangerously lacking in self-control, and that as much as he’s driven by loyalty to Toby, he’s driven by a desire to break things, he also never lets us forget that Tanner is large-hearted, brave, and in his way noble. He’s also very smart, in his own way. He doesn’t think before he leaps, but once in the air his mind sharpens and his thinking becomes focused and practical. In other circumstances---in another kind of movie---he’d be a hero. He’s practically the hero of this movie. A tragic hero, however and of course, because unlike all the other characters in Hell or High Water, including Toby and Hamilton, he’s not simply a victim of circumstance. He’s a victim of his own nature. It wouldn’t matter, when and where he found himself, he would eventually find himself on a path to self-destruction.

Hard times are what they are, is one of the messages of Hell or High Water, and to a great degree we’re all at the mercy of economic forces beyond our control, and that’s not just a tragedy it’s a crime, because there are people who can control those forces and who choose to use their control to serve their own narrow interests and destroy other people’s lives in the process.

But along with not having enough of a say in what happens to us, unless like Toby we strike oil in one way or another, that is, we get very lucky, we don’t have a lot of say in who we are either.

Mackenzie doesn’t push it, but it’s key to our understanding what’s going on that we keep in mind that Tanner and Toby are the sons of an abusive father and a cold and withdrawn mother who enabled the abuse.

The problem for other characters in the movie is that they too readily accept what’s happening to them.

Tanner’s heroism may lie in his too readily accepting who he is.

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As if you don't have enough to read, here's my review of Star Trek: Beyond: Kirk's Odyssey Begins.

And over at the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri's article The Searcher: On the Enduring Appeal of Jeff Bridges, All-American Loser.

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Hell or High Water, directed by David Mackenzie. Screenplay by Taylor Sheridan. Starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham, Kelly Mixon, Dale Dickey, Buck Howard, and Kevin Rankin. Rated R. Still in theaters.

X-Men: Apocalypse: No new gods need apply

Sunday. June 5, 2016. Revised Tuesday, June 7, with the editorial advice of Oliver Mannion.

Oscar Isaac in an all too typical moment of mighty frowning as the supervillain Apocalypse with Jennifer Lawrence in an untypical moment of blueness as the heroic shape-shifting mutant Mystique in Bryan Singer’s disappointing X-Men: Apocalypse.

I hadn’t heard promising things about X-Men: Apocalypse going in, but I didn’t expect to spend time watching it thinking, “You know, Batman v Superman wasn’t so bad.”

Hold your four horsemen! I’m not about to make the case that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice wasn’t bad or that X-Men: Apocalypse is anywhere near as bad. X-Men: Apocalypse isn’t bad, but it isn’t very good either. And it was more of a disappointment not just because I expected far more of it going in than I did of Batman v Superman.

Batman v Superman is what it was going to be and about all it could have been given that Zack Snyder was directing it and given Snyder’s ambivalence towards superheroes in general and Batman and Superman in particular. Snyder’s not interested in his characters except as symbols of his own problematic relationship with the whole idea of heroism and the story he wants to tell is an allegory of his feelings on the matter, and his movie is unremittingly grim, gloomy, and dull. But that results in a kind of perverse aesthetic and narrative consistency. It’s not fun movie storytelling but it is storytelling.

X-Men: Apocalypse’s director Bryan Singer is interested in his heroes as characters and treats them with real affection. He just keeps losing track of them.

And it’s not clear what story he’s interested in telling or that he even has one in mind to tell. There are a number of interesting storylines he starts and lets drop in order to focus on his plot: the world’s first mutant (played by Oscar Isaac), an immortal and nearly all-powerful supervillain who’s named En Sabah Nur but who’s known by what’s essentially his job description, Apocalypse, is resurrected after five and a half millennia of suspended animation under the collapsed ruins of an unearthed pyramid in Egypt. Apocalypse, eager to make up lost time as a self-proclaimed god, immediately sets out to destroy the world and remake it in his own image, a task that doesn’t require him to break a sweat but does involve lots of screen time devoted to images of buildings disintegrating, bridges collapsing, holes opening up in the earth, crowds of people staring bug-eyed and open-mouthed at the sky, and dust and debris flying around and about everywhere and obscuring the views of building disintegrating, bridges collapsing, holes opening up, people screaming, and, oh, by the way, the X-Men coming to the rescue.

None of that is interesting or makes for good movie storytelling.

X-Men: Apocalypse is the third installment in a series that I guess is serving both as a set of prequels to the X-Men trilogy of the last decade and a reboot of the franchise. It’s set in 1983, ten years after X-Men: Days of Future Past, which was set ten years after X-Men: First Class.

One of my disappointments with X-Men: Apocalypse, besides its not being as good as either Days of Future Past or First Class, is that while many references and allusions to events and pop culture highlights of the 1980s are scattered throughout the movie---for instance, there's a way too short scene of the teenaged Scott Summers, the future Cyclops, leading his School for the Gifted classmates Jean Gray, Nightcrawler, and Jubilee on a young X-men apprentices’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which unfortunately doesn’t include a cutaway to one of the teachers back at the school calling the roll and repeating “Summers? Summers?”---none of them figure significantly in the plot or even make it in as fully-developed jokes.

The Cold War undergirds the plot of X-Men: First Class and the 60s are invoked stylistically and thematically throughout the movie. The 70s matter in Days of Future Past as the target of commentary on the nightmare that was Nixon’s America and as an annoyance to Wolverine who’s forced to relive his least-favorite decade of his long life. In X-Men: Apocalypse the 80s are just background noise. Singer doesn’t even pause for a second to highlight the irony of Apocalypse setting out to make himself a god in the eyes of 20th Century humans by ending the Cold War at the moment the Cold War was actually ending.

Or maybe he does and I just missed it amid all the noise and computer-generated visual chaos and confusion. I think there was a muddled line or two in which Apocalypse suggests that one of the things he really doesn’t like about the 21st Century is that humans seem to have created a world in which gods like him are unnecessary.

Not just unnecessary but basically a nuisance.

The storylines and subplots featuring Singer’s other stars beside Oscar Isaac---Michael Fassbender as Eric Lehnsherr/Magneto, James McAvoy as Charles Xavier/Professor X, Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique, Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy/Beast, Evan Peters as Quicksilver, all returning from the previous installments of the series, along with Tye Sheridan, Sophie Turner, and Alexandra Shipp making their first appearances as Scott Summers, Jean Gray, and Ororo Munroe, the future leaders of the real X-Men, Cyclops, Phoenix, and Storm---are interesting but like I said, Singer keeps dropping their storylines and losing track of their characters.

Eric Lehnsherr/Mangeto is working as a steelworker in Poland where he’s established a life as a normal family man with a wife and daughter, a good neighbor, and friend to all, secretly using his superpowers to do small good deeds, but mainly enjoying being an ordinary man and learning not just to tolerate non-mutants but to like them. That’s interesting. And since he’s essentially living out a subplot of Man of Iron, the 1982 Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language film, which is set in the shipyards of Gdansk during the rise Solidarity’s challenge to Poland’s Soviet-puppet regime, the possibility is there that he’s taking part in the movement and has met Lech Walesa and that’s very interesting.

Charles Xavier/Professor X is happily running his school for “gifted” students---that is, for young mutants who need to be educated on how to control their superpowers and use them for good because with great power etc---which isn’t all that interesting, it’s simply required exposition. What is interesting and funny is watching him making a lovable goof of himself as he awkwardly tries to rekindle his romance with CIA Agent Moira Mactaggert without resorting to restoring the memories of their love affair he took from her at the end of X-Men: First Class for the usual stupid superhero’s reason for sabotaging his personal happiness, to protect her.

Mystique seems to be running an underground railroad for mutants, rescuing them from various troubles and perils and putting them on the route to someplace where mutants can live unthreatened and unexploited by humans. Mystique needs to keep a low profile so she has to go around continually shape-shifted into looking like Jennifer Lawrence which means Lawrence gets to spend less time naked and blue and more time in a black motorcycle jacket and Doc Martens, looking like she’s just finished a late-night gig at CGBGs. That’s neither interesting nor uninteresting but was probably a relief to Lawrence. The Doc Martens website, by the way, boasts of their boots’ popularity among punk rockers and skinheads and that’s interesting as in WTF? but beside the point here. Mystique’s adventures bring her into contact with a fixer and mutant mafiosi of sorts named Caliban, a strange and unnerving character who looks more like an extraterrestrial than he does like any mutant we’ve seen so far. He’s interesting.

Storm is a street rat in Cairo using her still far from developed weather controlling powers to help her steal food from street vendors, and that’s interesting.

Quicksilver is still living in his mom’s basement ten years after we last saw him in Days of Future Past but apparently, having gotten a taste of being a superhero, he’s been zipping out from time to time to fight crime on the QT, and that’s interesting.

Just as he did in Days of Future Past, Evan Peters runs away with the movie. That’s not a bad joke. Well, it is, but it’s also an accurate description of what happens.

Jean Gray/Phoenix and Scott Summers/Cyclops are introduced to us and each other, finally bringing together the core of the original X-Men from the comic books and the rebooted storyline near to the point where the first set of X-Men movies began way back in 2000. That’s probably interesting to fans of the comics and those movies. I’m not among either. But I recognize that’s me. The X-men left me cold when I was a comic-book reading kid in the 60s and when I got interested in them later, for a brief time in the late 70s, it was the group centered around Storm, Banshee, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Wolverine. Cyclops was just sort of there, the nominal leader, but really along for the ride, and Jean Gray was mostly offstage busy being sort of dead. But Nightcrawler is in X-Men:Apocalypse and that’s interesting because he’s interesting as a character and as he’s played by Kodi Smit-McPhee. I’m not interested in any more X-Men movies but I would be interested in a stand-alone that featured Nightcrawler and Quicksilver teaming up as a pair of not typically heroic superheroes who are essentially invisible when at work for secret and comedic crime-fighting adventures.

All that is interesting and could have been more interesting if Singer had given his supervillain an interesting story of his own and used it to weave his superheroes’ storylines together or, even better, been content to tell those stories without a superpowered villain and instead come up with a villain like Bolivar Trask in Days of Future Past who actually had to do things to demonstrate his evil genius beside wreak computer-generated havoc. But Apocalypse’s part of the movie is only plot and special effects and those storylines are just devices to bring the X-Men into that plot and then beat them up with the special effects. And Apocalypse himself isn’t the least bit interesting.

Unlike Lawrence, Oscar Isaac spends the whole movie not naked but blue. I couldn’t tell how much of what we see of him is makeup and prosthetics and costume and how much is CGI, but for all the acting he has to do and for all it matters that it’s Isaac doing the acting, Apocalypse might as well be entirely computer generated.

Isaac isn’t called upon to do much more than frown mightily or grin malevolently as he watches buildings disintegrate, bridges collapse, holes open up, etc.  His dialog is mainly variations on the theme that it’s time for humans to learn their place and bow to him or die and he has to deliver most of his lines at the top of his voice in order to be heard over the din of buildings disintegrating etc. Apocalypse has no wit, charm, no verbal style. He doesn’t talk intelligently or even coherently about what he’s up to or what motivates him, probably because, as far as we can tell, he possesses no intelligence, not even of the movie evil genius kind, and doesn’t think at all, never mind think coherently. He fumes, rages, and sneers, but he doesn’t monologue like a good movie villain. He says that the power he wants most of all is the power to look into the minds of every human being at once but the one he really needs is the power to hold a simple conversation. In short, he’s boring.

In the comic books, Apocalypse has been continuously active interfering destructively in human affairs and trying to bring about the end of the world since he came into existence centuries upon centuries ago. This could have given Isaac something interesting to work with. Apocalypse could have amused himself and us monologuing about how much fun he had bringing about the Fall of Rome and guiding Cortes to Tenochtitlan and about his frustration at seeing his last chance to ignite a nuclear Armageddon slip away as the Soviet Union collapses.

Not having gone that way, however, Singer then could have spent time showing us an Apocalypse who, having gone to sleep in Pharaohic Egypt and woken up in an automobile traffic-snarled Cairo where the street vendors listen to Metallica on their boom boxes, struggles to figure out how to make himself a god relevant to life in the 20th Century.

But Singer has Apocalypse solve that problem for himself in a single quick scene. While visiting Storm’s apartment, Apocalypse picks up all the information he thinks he needs to navigate life in 1983 by absorbing everything being broadcast on her portable TV, which includes a rerun of an episode of the original Star Trek. The episode happens to be “Who Mourns for Adonais” in which Kirk and his crew are captured by the Greek god Apollo who is feeling lonely and bored after centuries of self-imposed exile on an uncharted planet the Enterprise bumps into while seeking out new life and new civilizations. Like Apocalypse, Apollo is looking to get back to work at that divine job of being worshipped by all of humanity. Apocalypse learns how to speak perfect 20th Century American English from that episode but he fails to pick up on its lesson: that the most powerful deities are no match for plucky humans who don’t need gods to rule them anymore, not even benevolent gods like Apollo, never mind malevolent ones like Apocalypse.

What Singer fails to pick up from his own inside-joke is what could have been a good plot for his movie that allowed for the development of his villain’s character in a way that might have made him interesting and even sympathetic.

Apollo is defeated when he’s forced to face the fact of his irrelevance. The realization and the implicit rejection by the humans he genuinely loves as his children breaks his heart.

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X-Men: Apocalypse, directed by Bryan Singer, screenplay by Simon Kinberg. Starring Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, and Oscar Isaac. With Nicholas Hoult, Rose Byrne, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Evan Peters, Olivia Munn, Alexandra Shipp, and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Rated PG-13. Now in theaters.

Comic Book Movie Review Re-Issues: Click on the links to read my reviews of X-Men: First Class, The Superhero as the only adult in the room, and X-Men: Days of Future Past, No mere nostalgia trip.

Kipling in Iowa or Why The Jungle Book Had Me Dreaming of Cornfields

Tuesday morning. May 31, 2016.

Mowgli (Neel Sethi) and his panther mentor Bagheera (voiced by Ben Kingsley) prepare to meet the elephants in The Jungle Book, director Jon Favreau’s reimagining of the Walt Disney cartoon classic as a heroic action-adventure tale in the spirit of Rudyard Kipling’s novel and stories.

Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All round it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the threshing-floors. Looking across the valley, the eye was deceived by the size of things, and could not at first realise that what seemed to be low scrub, on the opposite mountain-flank, was in truth a forest of hundred-foot pines. Purun Bhagat saw an eagle swoop across the gigantic hollow, but the great bird dwindled to a dot ere it was half-way over. A few bands of scattered clouds strung up and down the valley, catching on a shoulder of the hills, or rising up and dying out when they were level with the head of the pass. And “Here shall I find peace,” said Purun Bhagat.

---from “The Miracle of Puran Bhagat” in The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.

James Alan McPherson turned out to be a very shy man. Jim, the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction---he won it in 1978 for his short story collection Elbow Room---wasn’t a reason I chose to go to the Iowa Writers Workshop, but he was a reason I was glad to be going there. I looked forward to having him as a teacher. I was hoping some of the Pulitzer luck would rub off.  I was relieved when he turned out to be kind, patient, tolerant, and encouraging. Writers don’t always make the best teachers. I’d heard stories about other writers who’d made life hell for their students. John Cheever had taught at the Workshop. It didn’t go well. Jim was not like John Cheever. He did have one serious drawback as a teacher, however. He didn’t talk.

Not much, at any rate. Not in class. Less outside class. In class he let us do most of the yakking and kept discussions on track and arguments from getting out of hand with judicious nods and shakes of his head, wry smiles and doubtful frowns, and the occasional joke, muttered quietly, so quietly that if you were at the far end of the table you only knew he’s said anything, let alone something funny, by the laughter of the two people sitting on either side of him. He kept his opinion of whatever student work was being workshopped that week to himself, and you only found out what he thought of your story or novel chapter in the one on one meetings he held in his office later. And then it was indirectly. He let you know where he thought your story needed work but he didn’t tell you how he thought you should go about fixing it. Instead, he’d suggest something to read. “So and so has a scene like this in his/her short story/novel,” he’d say.  Then you’d have to go puzzle out for yourself how whatever he’d had you read could help you fix whatever it was he thought needed fixing. It was a bit like having to solve a zen koan. At any rate, that’s how I got to reading Isaac Babel’s short stories...without ever quite understanding what particular lesson I was supposed to learn from them.

Jim thought I should read "The Story of My Dovecot."

I left our meeting heading straight for the library where I checked out Babel’s Red Cavalry and The Odessa Tales, determined to have all the stories in both read by next week’s class.

I also left disappointed that we hadn’t gotten around to talking about---or, really, that I hadn’t managed to steer the discussion around to talking about---a writer I assumed was a mutual favorite, Rudyard Kipling.

At our first class meeting, after introducing himself and his goals for the class and letting each of us do the same, and with no stories ready yet for us to workshop, rather than sending us on our way early, Jim had surprised me and I expect the whole class by reading us “The Rout of the White Hussars”. In all likelihood, I was the only one in the room beside Jim to whom the story wasn’t new. Students at the Workshop then weren’t a particularly widely-read bunch. My friend Ann took an informal poll once and discovered that out of the fifty students in the fiction writing program only a handful had read Moby-Dick. And I’m pretty sure I was the only one at the table (Ann was in a different workshop that semester) who didn’t think it was strange that Jim had chosen to read us a story by Kipling.

But it was strange.

Not going to get deep into why it was strange that a writer teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the mid-1980s was reading Rudyard Kipling to his students. It simply was and it shouldn’t have been.

Kipling is a problematic figure in the history of English literature and there’s no use in pretending he wrote only The Jungle Book and the Just-so Stories. But it’s also mistake to read him as if all he wrote were variations on “The White Man’s Burden.”

Kipling is a terrific poet and one of the greatest prose stylists and storytellers in English literature. Mark Twain rated Kipling among his favorite writers. Kipling is who Hemingway wanted to be when he grew up and learned how to tell a joke.

But most of us at the Workshop at the time were writing with the ambition of getting published in The New Yorker and that meant most of us were diligently imitating the likes of Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, and Bobbie Ann Mason. Quirky, minimalist, domestic realism was the fashion.

I say most of us, but I really wasn’t one of us, yet. Jim’s reading Kipling meant a great deal to because it made me feel at home.

I’d come to Iowa more than half-convinced I was going to be out of my league and when Jim started reading those old, familiar, beloved words I suddenly thought, Hey, maybe I’ll be all right here.

I wouldn’t have said Kipling was one of my major influences. But Twain sure was, and Twain was a major influence on Kipling and I’ll bet I picked up on it.  And I arrived at Iowa after at least a year’s worth of immersion in Kipling’s direct literary descendants Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene---the line of succession goes, I think, Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, Maugham, Greene, le Carre---so if I’d become the famous writer I thought I was going to be, there’d have been someone’s Ph.D dissertation in teasing that out.

More to the point here is that Kipling was one of my favorite writers back in junior high when my reading was mostly boy’s own adventure stories and I read as much of his work I could squeeze in between Stevenson’s, Twain’s, Melville’s, Conan Doyle’s, Jules Verne’s, and Alexander Dumas’. “Gunga Din” was one of the first poems I memorized on my own. In fact, I didn’t find my way into Kipling’s world through the Just-So Stories or The Jungle Book as I suspect a lot of young readers do. Gunga Din was my guide. And in that world Mowgli and Baloo and Bagheera weren’t my brothers as much as Mulvaney, Learoyd, and Ortheris were my mates.

Fact is, if there was one work by Kipling I didn’t love, it was The Jungle Book.

It may just have been that I came to it a little too late and I thought it was too much of a little kid’s book. But I think it was more Kipling’s own fault. He’d taught me to expect one sort of thing from him and The Jungle Book didn’t deliver it. There was nothing in it I wanted. No soldiers. No Soldiers Three. No Mulvaney, Learoyd, or Ortheris. No battles with guns and cannon blazing. No men who would be kings. No captains courageous. No Tommy this and Tommy that. No Din! Din! Din! Where the mischief ‘ave you been? No villages, towns, or temples. No crowds. Herds and packs but no crowds. Kipling was good with crowds. No romance. No ghosts. And no good jokes. At least none that I understood as jokes.

Just animals talking, and talking pompously, thou-ing and thy-ing at each other like characters in a biblical epic.

Of course you know why I’m bringing all this up.

We finally got around to seeing Disney’s new movie version of The Jungle Book the other day.

Because it wasn’t among my favorites, I can’t say it bothered me that there’s not a whole lot of Kipling’s Jungle Book in it. There’s more of it than I expected, however, and more of the spirit of Kipling than that. There are scenes and images that reminded me of Gunga Din---the movie not the poem, but the spirit of Kipling is very much alive in that---and others that reminded me, more obliquely, of The Man Who Would Be King---again, the movie, but still.

Of course the artist whose spirit this Jungle Book’s meant to conjure up isn’t Kipling’s. It’s Walt Disney’s.

This Jungle Book is a re-imagining of Disney’s Jungle Book, famously the last full-length cartoon Walt himself steered through to completion. And here’s something I can’t tell you. How good a job it does at that. I’ve never seen the original in order from start to finish. I’m not sure I’ve seen all of it. I refused to go see it with the family when I was a kid on the grounds that it was a little kids’ movie and it wasn’t on the Mannion guys’ To Be Watched Over and Over Again Until Mom and Dad Run Screaming From the House List when they were little kids. They both claim to have seen it more than once but I can’t recall ever having been forced to sit through it with them.

As far as I’m concerned, that Jungle Book is a cartoon short consisting of just its two great musical numbers, “The Bare Necessities” and “I Wanna Be Like You”.

Both songs are in this Jungle Book. I’d be inclined to say it would have been better if director Jon Favreau had left them out (although I’m sure the powers that be at Disney didn’t give him the choice, even if he’d wanted it), because they come across as breakings of the fourth wall and actually take you out of the onscreen story. But Christopher Walken does such a surprisingly delightful job with “I Wanna Be Like You” that I’m glad Favreau didn’t have the choice, if he didn’t, or chose to leave the songs in if he did.

I can tell you, with pleasure, that Favreau does an excellent job working in homages and parallels to at least two other but more recent Disney classics. Tarzan and The Lion King. There are nods as well to some non-Disney movies. Raiders of the Lost Ark, the second Hobbit, the most recent Planet of the Apes, and The Wizard of Oz. But those two, Tarzan and The Lion King figure most prominently. At several points, Favreau includes extended visual quotes from The Lion King and even restages the stampede in the ravine, and he’s almost made Mowgli’s story into another retelling of Tarzan’s origin story.

Favreau knows how to tell an origin story. He directed Iron Man, which I still rank as the second best of the Avengers movie franchise. (Guess which one I think is the best.) He also knows how to direct what’s essentially a live-action cartoon---and all superhero movies are essentially live action cartoons. He takes the material and the characters seriously but isn’t over-serious in going about it. He has a light comic touch and is skilled at mixing comedy with drama.  He hasn’t directed all that many films, but you have to admire a career that includes Made, Elf, Iron Man, Chef, and now The Jungle Book.

Kipling’s Jungle Book isn’t the little kids book about talking animals I took it for when I was a kid myself. It’s a Boy’s Own Adventure Story. I probably don’t need to say that I don’t think it’s Kipling’s best of the form---although it’s been a long time since I last read Kim and Captains Courageous and both pale in my memory compared to their obvious inspirations, The Prince and the Pauper and Treasure Island. I told you. Kipling was one of my favorites. But he wasn’t one of my very favorites. ---but that’s what it is, the epitome of a boy’s own adventure story and that’s what Favreau’s Jungle Book is. In fact, based on my unreliable sense of the cartoon---a lighthearted musical comedy about about a boy playing with his stuffed animals come to life, with Mowgli as a Christopher Robin free from all adult supervision and able to join in the hijinks and share in the danger---I’d say that’s the main point of departure for Favreau’s movie. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why Favreau wanted to direct The Jungle Book: to make an adventure movie.

He’s made a rousing one.

The many chases, fights, perils, and escapes are genuinely thrilling and surprising, the dangers and violence are shocking and terrifying. Favreau keeps it all moving briskly without the characters and story getting lost in the action. He varies the tempo and the scale and mixes things up so that the movie isn’t just one, extended action scene. And his Mowgli isn’t just a lucky boy who grows up and learns a lesson. He’s a true young hero.

Thirteen year-old Neel Sethi stars as Mowgli. Stars is the right word. It’s very much his movie. His movie-star voiced animal co-stars are his supporting players and sidekicks.  His Mowgli is brave and curious, of course, but he’s smart, active, energetic, clever, and competent, without his becoming a miniature adult in a kid suit. He has a wide-eyed look of astonishment that comes over him in the dangerous moments that lets you know he’s still a little boy making it all up as he goes along and regularly surprised that there’s more to the world than he has even begun to know.

What he does know, however, he knows. This Jungle Book isn’t about a young innocent learning lessons. It’s about a young hero putting to work lessons he’s already learned and teaching himself new lessons on the run...and the climb.

One thing I can say for sure about the cartoon Jungle Book. The voice work of the four main animal stars was excellent. It would have been hard to top Phil Harris as Baloo, Sebastian Cabot as Bagheera the panther, George Sanders as Shere Khan the tiger, and Louis Prima as King Louie the orangutan. But Walken, as I said, is a delight as Louie, doing a bit of Robert De Niro. Idris Elbla as Shere Khan scared me. Ben Kingsley is Obi-wan-esque as Bagheera. Imagine the younger, post-Revenge of the Sith Obi-wan, getting to know Luke as a little boy, which happens, and maybe we’ll get a movie that shows that.

Bill Murray is Baloo because who else?

Add to this, Scarlett Johansson as an unnervingly seductive, gender-bent Kaa the python.

The CGI work on the animal characters is exquisite. There were very few moments when I noticed those aren’t real animals up on the screen. 

And Favreau doesn’t forget that the jungle and all the terrain through which Mowgli travels are as intrinsic to the spirit of the story and the formation of Mowgli’s character as the animals. The sense of place is as important here as it is in all Kipling’s fiction. Favreau pauses from time to time---but never for too long---to give us the visual equivalent of passages like this from “The Miracle of Puran Bhagat,” one of the stories in Kipling’s Second Jungle Book:

There was a sigh in the air that grew to a mutter, and a mutter that grew to a roar, and a roar that passed all sense of hearing, and the hillside on which the villagers stood was hit in the darkness, and rocked to the blow. Then a note as steady, deep, and true as the deep C of the organ drowned everything for perhaps five minutes, while the very roots of the pines quivered to it. It died away, and the sound of the rain falling on miles of hard ground and grass changed to the muffled drum of water on soft earth. That told its own tale.

Never a villager — not even the priest — was bold enough to speak to the Bhagat who had saved their lives. They crouched under the pines and waited till the day. When it came they looked across the valley and saw that what had been forest, and terraced field, and track-threaded grazing-ground was one raw, red, fan-shaped smear, with a few trees flung head-down on the scarp. That red ran high up the hill of their refuge, damming back the little river, which had begun to spread into a brick-coloured lake. Of the village, of the road to the shrine, of the shrine itself, and the forest behind, there was no trace. For one mile in width and two thousand feet in sheer depth the mountain-side had come away bodily, planed clean from head to heel.

At the end of my two years at Iowa, I asked Jim McPherson to be on my thesis committee.  He declined. Politely but reticently, with no more explanation than was absolutely necessary. He had already agreed to serve on too many other students’ committees and simply couldn’t take on even one more. This was almost certainly the truth. There were twenty-five of us with essentially whole books that needed reading, and, although there were three other members of the faculty, each of the four of them had to serve on five or six committees. Jim would have been the first choice of almost of us and had probably already turned down at least ten requests by the time I asked him. Assuming I wasn’t one of the first five to ask him. Which I tried to assume.

I tried not to take it personally. Jim was in fact my third choice. I’d already nabbed Ron Hanson and I’d had the bright idea to ask one of the poets teaching in the Poetry Workshop, James Galvin, and in going over my thesis (a pair of novellas) Galvin gave me one of the best pieces of advice I got while I was at Iowa: boiled down it was “Make it sound like you talking.”

That, by the way, as Galvin explained, not permission for lazy, “colloquial” writing. Read some of his poetry and you’ll see what he meant.

Anyway, I was happy with my committee, they seemed happy with me, and I was able to tell myself that Jim’s---the first Jim, McPherson---begging off was not a judgment on my writing.

I told myself that. I still tell myself that. I’m telling myself that right now.

It nagged at me and still nags at me. There’s some insecure part of me, which is to say the whole writer part of me, that can’t help suspecting that whatever else he might have thought, he was certain of one thing.

I was no Rudyard Kipling.

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The Jungle Book, directed by Jon Favreau. Screenplay by Justin Marks, based on the novels by Rudyard Kipling. Starring Neel Sethi. With the voices of Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Scarlett Johansson, Christopher Walken, Lupita Nyong'o, Giancarlo Espisito, and Gary Shandling. Rated PG. Still in theaters.

The Nice Guys: Too nice for the 70s

Saturday. May 21, 2016.

Assiduously ignoring they’re stuck in the 1970s: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, and Angourie Rice in The Nice Guys.

The Nice Guys is set in L.A. in 1977 and there are moments when it looks like it was filmed in L.A. in 1977.

It looks more like it was filmed in L.A. in 1977 than some movies actually filmed in L.A. in 1977.

It looks more like it was filmed in L.A. in 1977 than The Rockford Files, and nothing looks more like it was filmed in L.A in 1977 than The Rockford Files.

And the movie doesn’t seem to notice this about itself. That is, Shane Black directs The Nice Guys as if he doesn’t notice this about his own movie or expect us to notice.

That’s the joke. The joke behind the jokes, at any rate. Black and his designers have meticulously recreated the look, feel, and sounds of that kidney stone of a decade and then Black’s proceeded as if he’s shooting a movie about the here and now in the here and now.

The effect is that The Nice Guys, for all its period detail, isn’t a period piece. It isn’t about the 1970s.

It’s less about the 70s than, well, some movies made in the 70s. The Nice Guys had me fondly recalling a trio of serio-comic detective movies from the time, The Long Goodbye, The Late Show, and The Big Fix. But not because The Nice Guys contains any specific allusions to them that I caught or that like them it satirizes life in L.A. in the 70s. In fact, I didn’t catch many specific allusions to any movies or TV shows from the 70s. Very little of the humor is based on observations of the fashions, politics, technology, or pop culture. There’s little commentary on the times at all. If anyone mentions Jimmy Carter I missed it. I don’t remember any obvious gags like the “science oven” in American Hustle. poking fun at the the now quaintly old-fashionedness of things that were avant-garde or cutting edge back then. The Waltons gets referenced in the darkest, most un-Waltonesque way imaginable in the person of a hitman who goes by the name John-Boy and looks eerily like Richard Thomas down to the mole.  

The point of this lack of history is that the 70s were to people living then what 2016 is to us. Just the present. And they took their present for granted the way we take ours for granted. It was just the way things were or, rather, are.

The bad hair, the ugly clothes, the ridiculous posturing of so many supposed adults trying to be with-it like the kids. The banalities and absurdities of pop psychology and the nihilism and narcissism passing as an individualistic politics of embraced alienation that was hard to distinguish from sulking self-pity. The decadence that was sold as liberation. Disco.

At one point, people accepted all this as normal.

Most people. Some didn’t. At least two.

The heroes of this movie.

Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is a freelance legbreaker and enforcer. Someone needs a debt collected or a blackmailer scared off, they call Healy and Healy pays a call that usually begins with the debtor or blackmailer getting punched in the face. After that, things get violent. Lately, though, he seems to be specializing in protecting young women from various kinds of sexual predators. Which is a way of saying he rescues damsels in distress.

Holland March (Ryan Gosling) is a licensed private detective who may once have been as brilliant a detective as he thinks he is but who when we meet him seems to be specializing in easy missing persons cases that he pretends are taking a long time to solve in order to gouge his unquestioning clients out of money for “expenses.”

Healy and March meet up while working the same case but from different ends and at cross-purposes. Both are out to rescue the same damsel in distress, but they have different understandings of from whom and from what sort of distress.

The initial misunderstanding results in Healy paying a call on March with the usual introduction. However good a detective March was or is, he has a real talent for getting himself hurt.

The misunderstanding gets cleared up, although not without March’s experiencing a little more pain and humiliation, when Healy realizes his damsel client is in a lot more distress than she’d led him to believe and he doesn’t have the detective skills and experience he needs to help her. With no other option, he hires March to help him help her.

The two men are both good at what they do or at least good enough. But neither is particularly successful  They’re not exactly hardship cases but they’re just getting by. The problem for both is lack of focus. Both are adrift.

Healy has recently had an experience that made him reassess his life and decide he wants to do something good with it but he has no idea how to change direction or what exactly to change it to. 

March’s situation is sadder and more desperate, although he doesn’t seem to be aware that either’s the case. But then he’s in denial. His wife has recently died in an accident he blames himself for and he’s struggling to raise their junior high school age daughter Holly on his own, something he has no clue as to how to do. Meanwhile, Holly needs him to be twice the parent he was and twice the hero she’s always believed him to be, which means being twice as good a detective, and the trouble there is that in his grief March has lost interest in his work. He’s going through the motions with not just a lack of focus but a lack of emotion which leads to a lack of sympathy for his clients and that leads to a less than solid commitment to principle. He’s become a fraud and Holly is beginning to realize it.

What both of them need from Healy then is for him to turn March back into a good detective, and to do that Healy has to become a good detective himself.

Together they become a comedic, down-market, middle to working class version of Holmes and Watson, with March providing the detective’s deductive reasoning and Healy the good doctor’s emotional intelligence and physical muscle---Conan Doyle downplays it but don’t forget, Holmes is dangerous but Watson the ex-military man suffering from PTSD is deadly. The Benedict Cumberbatch-Martin Freeman BBC TV series keeps that fact in the foreground. Watson can and will kill you. Healy can and does kill. What he gets from March, though, is almost the opposite of what Watson gets from Holmes.

Through Holmes, Watson has opportunities for the action and adventure he craves and that give him channels for the pent up angers and energies left over from his service in the Afghan war. Through March, Healy is given the responsibility to think before swinging or shooting and to express his more domestic and tender feelings.

Both March and Healy are at odds with the times. Each in his way too nice to fit in. Despite the sloppiness of their personal lives and the grubbiness of their professions, they’re both rather strait-laced to the point of being prim, even prudish. In another age, when the role played by private eyes was taken by knights, they’d have been described as chaste. As loyal to their lost ladies-faire as Lancelot to Guinevere. March is devoted to the memory of his wife. Healy is bitter about marriage, his wife having left him for his father! But he’s faithful to the ideal of marriage and building a family together he thought they shared and by that he’s faithful to the ideal of the girl he thought he married.  Which turns out to be the basis for his growing fondness for March. Healy’s quest isn’t self-redemption. It’s to save the March family and in doing that complete the adventure he thought he’d begun with his ex-wfe. In other words, he’s out to restore the fortunes of the wounded king and his princess.

I’m probably making too much of the knight-errant theme. But that’s what private eyes are. Knights-errant on quests to rescue people, particularly damsels in distress, ideal and idealistic heroes who are above and apart from the general sinfulness of their place and time. Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Travis McGee, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser---sometimes Parker made too much of this---Jim Rockford, all tough guys with rigid moral codes although with holes in them ---bullet holes---out to right wrongs and slay dragons.

March and Healy are more scattered in their thinking than their literary and cinematic forebears. Distracted might be the more apt description. And they’re not as smart.  Not as sharp-witted or quick-minded, at any rate. And while the typical hard-boiled private eye is often temporarily deluded by a usually female client into thinking the world might be better than it is and finishes his story like Sam Spade, cruelly disillusioned, Healy and March are self-deluded, living in a dream world in which they are as stalwart, stoic, resourceful, and brave as Marlowe or Magee. They’re more like a pair of Quixotes than Lancelots or Galahads.

As usual for me, I’m making too much of the literary and not enough of the cinematic, which in the case of The Nice Guys means overstating the romance and ignoring the comedy.

I should have mentioned it before although you’ve probably heard. The Nice Guys is a funny movie.

There isn’t much of a plot. In fact, there’s barely a plot at all. What there is instead is a series of comic set pieces, action sequences, and incidents contrived to make it look as though Healy and March are actually investigating, following leads, gathering clues, and making deductions just like movie detectives are supposed to do. Not all of this is played for laughs. Most of the humor is due to the partnering of Gosling and Crowe as a pair of complementary incompetents in over their heads and at a loss as to what to do next.

After a nearly decade-long string of dark and darker movies that he seems to have chosen in order to shake free of typecasting as a romantic juvenile and establish himself as an anti-hero if not an out and out villain, (He worked Crazy, Stupid, Love in there but in that one he didn’t play a particularly, um, nice guy.) Gosling now seems set on reminding us of what he was up to ten years ago in Lars and the Real Girl, proving himself a talented comedic character actor. He was mordantly funny in The Big Short playing a wiseguy cynic with the gift of disingenuous gab. In The Nice Guys he shows off his considerable talents as a physical comedian.

In one of his best scenes, which you can watch in the trailers without its being spoiled because it’s a moment worth watching over and over, he does what amounts to a dance with a bathroom stall door. In another hilarious moment he channels the ghost of Lou Costello at his double-taking, scared speechless best. And I lost track of the number of ways he contrived to fall down, fall over, and fall into things.

Crowe is the straight man in the teaming and he more than Gosling retains some of his romantic leading man authority so Healy never becomes as clownish a character as March. But that doesn’t mean Crowe isn’t funny. What can be forgotten is that the straight man can get big laughs of his own by playing it straight. Without ever mugging it up, Crowe makes visual one-liners out of Healy’s expressions of bafflement, bemusement, exasperation, frustration, impatience, and resignation in response to the craziness around him

And it’s a generous performance. (The mark of good actors is their generosity to their co-stars and supporting players.) Crowe and Gosling are equally the leads in the sense of shared screen time, but Healy is the supporting character in that he subordinates himself to the goal of making March a success as a detective and consequently as a father and family man, and Crowe subordinates his performance to Gosling’s, content to play the lead in the scenes in which Healy’s going it alone.

The damsel in distress at the center of the story isn’t as much a character as she is a plot device---she’s Hitchcock’s McGuffin---and unlike typical hardboiled detective stories there’s no femme fatale, and since both Healy and March are, like I said, devoted to idealized women from their past, there’s no love interest for either hero. But that doesn’t mean The Nice Guys is without a female lead.

She just happens to be thirteen years old.

March’s daughter Holly, played by the now fifteen year old Angourie Rice, is her father’s Girl Friday, legman, driver (and, no, she doesn’t have a license. She’s too young. What’s your point?), nurse, and conscience. She latches onto Healy because she senses right away that he has the qualities her disappointing father needs to shape up and then finds that she has to keep Healy on the straight and narrow in order for him to do what she needs him to do. Rice gives Holly a perfect mix of enforced maturity and precious competence and a still young girl’s innocence and need to be taken care of herself. But while Holly thinks that all she wants is to have a father she can trust and rely on again, she also wants to be like him in being able to live a life of adventure and mystery. Rice makes Holly plucky, resourceful, independent, and self-assertive without a trace of brattiness. And it’s not just the case that she holds the screen with Gosling and Crowe. She’s clearly inspired them to step back and let her take over her scenes.

And she’s got terrific comic timing of her own.

One thing about The Nice Guys disappointed me. Although, like I said, the movie looks like it was filmed in L.A. in 1977, L.A. is actually pretty much missing from the story.

Timelessness can be a virtue. Placelessness usually is not. Los Angeles is not quite as there on the screen as the 70s but it’s there, vividly there, but it’s subject to the same treatment by Black. He doesn’t pay it any particular attention. The effect, though, is different.

Black calls attention to the 70s by not paying them particular attention and that’s the joke. But his not paying particular attention to L.A. just seems like an oversight.

March’s stated intimate knowledge of the city and its natives and their ways is a key to solving the mystery, whatever intimate knowledge of L.A. and its natives Black and his screenwriting partner Anthony Bagarozzi possess themselves hardly shows up in their writing

One of the jobs of fictional detectives is to be explorers and observers on our behalf. They’re our guides into strange new worlds populated by interesting and up till now unmet characters with personalities and behaviors shaped---or warped---by the way they’re forced to live to survive in the their peculiar world.

In the course of their investigation, Healy and March do a lot of running around town but they never seem to arrive anywhere that’s identifiably and unmistakably in L.A. From just about every place Healy and March lead us into L.A. seems to disappear as soon as they walk in and the setting becomes generic. We might as well be in Kansas City or Minsk as Southern California. (Inexplicably they never even get to the beach. I thought a scene at the beach was a requirement for every detective story set in L.A.)  And the characters they introduce us to are mainly stock characters who could have been drawn from any run of the mill TV or movie detective story. And there aren’t that many of them either. L.A. comes across as strangely underpopulated.

Still, it’s a fun night out at the movies and I’m looking forward to the inevitable sequel. And it got me thinking about some other movies I haven’t seen in a long time and now want to see again, like The Late Show and The Long Goodbye. It also got me thinking about what The Nice Guys would have been like if it actually had been filmed in L.A. in 1977.

Who’d have played March and Healy?

Buddy cop comedies weren’t a staple of the 1970s. Offhand I can only think of two, Freebie and the Bean and Cotton Comes to Harlem.

The more usual detective movie featured an alienated, angry, and conflicted hero operating on his own and that’s what Healy is to start. Clint Eastwood. Steve McQueen. Charles Bronson. Sean Connery. Burt Reynolds. James Caan. Richard Roundtree. They each played that sort of character and would have been fine as Healy.

But I’m thinking that Gene Hackman would have been the best choice because of the basic Everyman decency he brought---and still brings---to every role even his villains, which is what makes them so villainous, the fact that there’s a decent guy in there somewhere who’s decided to be evil and is enjoying it.  And Crowe seems to me to be at the point where he could leave his romantic leading man past entirely behind and from here on out work steadily as admirably as his generation’s Gene Hackman.

Finding a March would have been tougher. It would have had to be someone who could play against his own image as a romantic leading man and handle the physical comedy. And I know just the guy.

Ryan O’Neal.

He did it back then, in fact. In What’s Up, Doc? And there’s another movie from the 70s it’s time for me to see again.

As for Holly. There were two obvious choices, weren’t there?

Jodi Foster might have been the better choice because she was the better actress, but I’d have to go with the sentimental favorite. If we’re casting Ryan O’Neal to play March than who better to play Holly than his real life daughter?

And now Paper Moon just landed in the queue for a Mannion Family Movie Night.

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The Nice Guys, directed by Shane Black, written by Shane Black and Anthony Bagarozzi. Starring Ryan Gosling, Russell Crowe, Angourie Rice, Kim Basinger, Amelia Kutner, Matt Bomer, Yaya DaCosta, Keith David, Beau Knapp, and Jack Kilmer.  Rated R. Still in some theaters.

"Spotlight" and the last serious conversation I had with a priest

Sunday morning. December 20, 2015.

Rachel McAdams as Boston Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer realizes that a “retired” priest who’s admitted to molesting children lives unsupervised down the street from a school in Spotlight, the movie about the Globe’s investigation of the sex abuse scandal that should have brought about the collapse of the Catholic Church.

The last serious conversation I had with a priest was nearly fifteen years ago and it ended with him calling Mrs M and me bad parents and me telling him to go to hell.

That was the day I was done with the Catholic Church forever. And it broke my heart.

By that point in my life I wasn’t much of a Catholic. I was barely a believer. But I had been both whole-heartedly when I was young. I was proud of having been raised Catholic. I was grateful for my Catholic grade school education. I had nothing but fond memories of being an altar boy. The priests I served with were great guys. The nuns who taught me were smart, progressive, demanding, and kind. Over the years, my faith and the practice of it brought me mostly joy. I was a lazy CAPE Catholic by the time we became parents, but when Mrs M decided she wanted to raise the boys Catholic, I was glad. And when the time came I was happy and proud to send them off to Catholic school. Which is where the trouble began.

In first grade, Ken’s physical and emotional development problems started to show themselves, his several learning disabilities and blocks began to take their toll. And we had no idea what was happening to him. All we knew was that a very bright, imaginative, creative, happy, and kind little boy who wanted nothing so much as to please his parents and teachers and other kids suddenly couldn’t do anything right. With his friends and in class, it seemed to be always the case that whenever he should have turned left, he turned right, whenever he should have pushed the on button, he pushed off. He was constantly annoying the other kids, exasperating his teachers, and frustrating himself.  He became anxious, fretful, lonely, and desperately unhappy. Predictably and understandably, he acted out by misbehaving. Not by being naughty and disobedient, exactly, at least not usually. By either refusing to participate, getting silly, or by melting down in tears.

Having no idea what was wrong and therefore no ideas about how to help him, Mrs M and I turned for guidance and advice to the people whose job, we thought, was to look out for the children in their professional care, his teachers, the principal, the pastor, and eventually the head of the diocesan schools.

That last person was the priest who called us bad parents and I told to go to hell.

We got no help or guidance. The pastor and the principal made it increasingly clear that Ken was our problem to solve and the way they thought we should solve it was by taking him off their hands. We should have done it right then. We might have if we weren’t afraid he’d get lost in the public schools---the public elementary school in our neighborhood was one of the most chaotic in the city, with a reputation for a lack of order and discipline, and one thing we knew was that Ken did best in quiet, structured, predictable situations---and if we weren’t such still-loyal Catholics. We thought it was important that he get a Catholic education because almost unconsciously we believed that was the only kind of real and complete education there was.

Mrs M and I weren’t helpless. We didn’t throw our hands up in despair. We sought out specialists and counselors on our own.  But it was slow going and led to many dead ends. Eventually, our family doctor got Ken in to see the top child neuropsychologist in town and he made the diagnoses of Asperger’s, ADD, and dyscalculia that got Ken the IEP and the special education he needed and essentially saved his life.  But by then he was in fourth grade and well and good out of Catholic school.

Two-thirds of his way through second grade, in the spring of 2001, our pastor told us Ken would not be welcomed back for third grade. Not only that, he would have to finish second grade at home or somewhere else.

That’s when we made one last appeal to the head of the diocesan schools. That’s when he called us bad parents. That’s when it finally dawned on me.

While Ken’s situation was coming to a head, the molestation scandal was breaking.  The Boston Globe’s investigative series that’s at the center of the movie Spotlight hadn’t yet begun to run but there’d been enough stories in the news in the Globe and elsewhere and over a long enough period to realize, if you thought about it, something even more heinous was going on than that a few bad priests here and there were sexual predators.

There were too many for the church higher ups not to have known. There were too many who weren’t defrocked for it not to be a policy not to punish them as they deserved. There were too many put back into regular parish work after a year or so of “counseling” and “therapy” for it not to be the case that pastors and bishops cared more about the deviant priests than about their past and future victims. There were too many of these predator-priests and too much official looking the other way for all the other priests who weren’t idiots or predators themselves not to know what was going on and too few of them on record as having tried to put a stop to it even by complaining to church authorities, never mind going to the police, for it not to be the truth that just about every priest was to some degree complicit.

Even the rare bishops who policed their own dioceses and punished the predators and protected their flocks were guilty of not doing more to stop what they knew was going on in other dioceses.

The Church was rotten from top to bottom, and while it was desperately protecting and enabling child molesters, it was throwing our child to the wolves.

It was hand-feeding other people’s children to monsters.

That was it. I was done. It didn’t feel like a momentous decision at the time. For the past few years, I’d only been going through the motions of being a Catholic anyway, and I’d only been going through those motions for the sakes of Mrs M and Ken and his little brother. But something else had happened it took me a while to notice, something more wrenching when I finally realized it.

In going through the motions, I’d been keeping what residual faith I had alive. When I stopped going through the motions, that last bit of faith died.

Sadder to me than that, though, was that all my joyful memories of my life as a Catholic were tainted and made suspect. I couldn’t go back to church physically in the present and I couldn’t go back in the past by remembering without anger and without mourning. There were priests in the background and foreground of all my memories and I had to wonder. Those great guys I served with, was one of them…? The priest who married Mrs M and M, was he…? How about the priests who baptized Ken and Oliver and gave them their first communions? And what about all the other children, my fellow altar boys, my classmates, Ken and Oliver’s friends…?

And then all around them and through them was the Church itself and weren’t all of us foolish and to an extent complicit too by turning our lives over to an institution that demanded obedience and loyalty but didn’t care about us even enough to protect our children in return?

This is one of the reasons I was so impressed and moved by Spotlight. It’s a terrific film, beautifully directed by Tom McCarthy working in a minor key and with a muted palette to create a world that is somber and sad and fallen but lovely for the warmth of the good hearts beating at its center, and brilliantly acted by a cast led by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Brian d’Arcy James, Liev Schreiber, and Stanley Tucci. But it’s the screenplay, by McCarthy and Josh Singer, I want to talk about here.

The dialog isn’t packed with snappy one-liners. There are few big and meaningful speeches. No angry confrontations. No pithy back and forths. It’s realistically conversational. Characters simply talk to each other. And they reveal themselves, their personalities, feelings, thoughts, experiences as people tend to do in conversations in real life, indirectly, off-handedly, often unintentionally, in asides, in lead ups to making a point, or in expressing a concern or working out an idea or asking a question, or wrapped up in their points, concerns, ideas, and questions so that nothing they say doesn’t tell us who and what they are. And who and what the four journalists working on the story---the movie’s four lead characters, editor Robby Robinson and his team of reporters, Mike Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Matt Carroll, played by Keaton, Ruffalo, McAdams, and James---are all lifelong Catholics

All of them were raised Catholic and to varying degrees they’re believers, but none of them think of themselves as that connected to the Church anymore. Carroll attends his wife’s Protestant church. Pfeiffer regularly goes to mass but only as a favor to her grandmother who needs the ride and likes the company. Rezendes hasn’t been in years. And Robinson is more or less a social Catholic---he’s most Catholic when in the company of other Catholics and his ties to the Church are based on friendships, social connections, professional obligations, and nostalgia. And while of course as they investigate the story and uncover the breadth and depth of the scandal they are shocked, angered, and outraged, they are also...wounded.

To different degrees and in different ways they are shaken. Things they thought knew, things they thought they believed, their sense of who and what they are are called into question, become subject to doubt and rejection. Whatever pleasure, comfort, and joy they had gotten out of being Catholic is tainted, even lost, and it breaks their hearts.

Just as it did mine.

And Mrs M’s.

And millions of other Catholics’.

I can’t believe the scandal didn’t bring about the collapse of the Church.

Spotlight might not have been the best movie to see the weekend before Christmas. 

I’m glad I did, though. I was forgetting how angry I was.

Am.

We’d never told our sons the story of my conversation with that priest.  I finally did before we went to see the movie.

They wanted to know if I’d really said go to hell to a priest.

I told them no.

“I said, ‘Go to hell, Father.””

Once an altar boy...

A Walk in the Woods: Redford and Nolte take a cheerful hike with Death

Two old friends hiking the Appalachian Trail find they have more to contemplate than the pretty scenery: their own mortality, for starters. Robert Redford and Nick Nolte in the movie adaptation of Bill Bryson’s travel book, A Walk in the Woods.

The walk in the woods Robert Redford as the real-life writer Bill Bryson takes in the movie A Walk in the Woods doesn’t begin outdoors when Bryson and his old boyhood friend Katz (Nick Nolte) step onto the Appalachian Trail to start their planned twenty-one hundred mile hike from Georgia to Maine. It begins in a funeral home when Bryson walks out on a friend’s wake. The symbolism is a little too pat, but this is what Bryson’s trying to do for the whole rest of the movie: walk away from death.

Of course this can’t be done, and in truth, Bryson is doing the opposite. A walk into the woods, in myth and fairy tale, is a walk into the the underworld. From the Grail legends to Dante to Hansel and Gretel to Hawthorne to Harry Potter, the woods are where heroes and heroines go to meet Death face to face.

To put it more psychoanalytically, the woods are where characters symbolically confront the fact of their own mortality and come to terms with it.

A Walk in the Woods is a rather cheerful movie considering it’s carrying the weight of that morbid theme in its pack.

You might think it’s also a rather too ordinarily realistic movie to be burdened with such heavy symbolism.

How, you might ask, did King Arthur and Young Goodman Brown get into a movie about a pair of irascible old coots walking themselves in and out of comedic mishaps and misadventures, the worst of which leaves them with some bumps and bruises?

Well, it’s a good bet they got in there by virtue of the movie’s being watched by a pretentious college instructor with a habit of letting his mind wander during the slow spots. But I don’t think that’s it.

The thing about myths is that they resonate with us because so many moments of our lives recapitulate them.

At one time or another, we all take that walk in the woods.

Going in, I was worried A Walk in the Woods would be a tedious series of “We’re too old for this” gags at Redford and Nolte’s expense. But there’s very little of that. That they are too old for this is a given. We know it. They know it. They don’t need that proved to them.

Bryson and Katz go into the woods to confront the fact of their mortality and come to terms with it. But they don’t do it by tumbling into ice cold streams and rolling off cliffs and facing down hungry black bears or running from irate jealous husbands and turning down offers of a night of romance with hotel operators who look like Mary Steenburgen.

They do it by unavoidably talking about it. All of their conversations along the trail are, one way or another, about aging and death. This is done matter of factly, often with humor, occasionally with sentimentality, now and again with accidental poetry. They don’t talk about it to dwell on it or to philosophize or to feel sorry for themselves (although that naturally happens, the dwelling, philosophizing, and self-pity). They talk about it because they talk about what’s going on and what’s going on is that two old men who used to be best friends are taking on an adventure that they’re both, well, too old for.

They also do it by slowly, and almost unconsciously forgiving each other for not having turned out to be the heroes they once thought themselves to be, each to himself and each to the other.

Redford and Nolte have a great time working together and it’s fun to watch them at it. They have the instinctive, easy-going camaraderie of old friends and play off each other beautifully. It’ll make you wish they’d made at least one other movie together back when both were in their primes. In fact, they make such a good team it’s hard to believe they haven’t made more movies together and not just one other, 2012’s The Company You Keep. (In that one, they established a lifelong friendship between their two characters in one, short nearly wordless scene at a counter in a diner.) Watching the two together is a good reason to see A Walk in the Woods. It’s not the only reason. Unfortunately, there aren’t many others.

Katz becomes Bryson hiking companion by a sad process of elimination. One by one, Bryson’s current friends turn down his invitation to join him on the trail, all of them because they don’t feel up to it. Katz isn’t up to it either, but he has nothing better to do except wait around at home for the police to come by to pick him up for a couple of outstanding warrants for drinking and drug related offenses. The two have more or less have lost touch since their one big adventure together back in their twenties when they backpacked around Europe. Something happened on that trip that convinced Bryson he needed to break off their friendship. We’re not told exactly what---and it may not have been one, single thing---but it probably involved Katz’s tendency to let his youthful indulgences get out of hand.

In the forty-odd years since, Katz hasn’t changed and Bryson has and one of the first things they discover on the trail, after it’s too late to turn back, is that neither one likes that fact about the other. But it’s also the case, to their own surprise, that neither likes that fact about himself. Bryson gets to wondering if he gave up his life of wild nights, wild nights too soon, while Katz begins to face the sad truth that he held onto his far too long.

What this means is that both Bryson and Katz have committed to spending months in the woods in the company of the ghosts of their young selves and the specters of the selves they might have been, each seeing in the other the path not chosen and the life he could have had.

Unavoidably, then, as the two get to know each other again and, inevitably, become friends again, their conversation includes outbursts of recrimination, resentment, regret, and relief of the “Thank God I’m not like you!” variety.

Again, this sounds awfully heavy and profound for what's really a lighthearted and pleasant little diversion of a movie whose main point of enjoyment is watching these two old stars having fun playing off each other. But comedy always implies tragedy and the film’s weakness isn’t its inclusion of such dark and gloomy themes but its failure to be funny enough about them.

There aren’t many good jokes in A Walk in the Woods. There aren’t many bad ones, either, which is a relief. But a lack of good jokes is a problem for a comedy. Not an unsolvable one. Wit and humor can be expressed in ways besides wisecracks. But it requires writers to be inventive and playful in their use of language and incident, and A Walk in the Wood’s screenwriters, Michael Arndt and Bill Holderman, aren’t notably either.

Bryson and Katz do a lot of talking---from Nolte’s entrance to his exit, the movie is pretty much a one long conversation interrupted now and then by bad weather and bears, and it could be titled A Talk in the Woods---and they say a lot of interesting things. They just don’t say it in interesting ways. They use a great many words but the words don’t sing.

This is true not just for Bryson and Katz but for just about every character.

None of them comes alive through the words they use.

The dialog is natural, conversational, occasionally witty, but never surprising. None of it is particularly revealing. Nobody tells us anything about themselves in a non-expository way. Nothing anyone says about who they are or what they think is news to us or to the characters saying it themselves. They're never carried away by a thought or forced to follow one in an unexpected direction. They don't find themselves forced to think back on something that just popped out. We don't get a sense of who they are by how they use words or how words use them.

The exception is Bryson’s wife Catherine who is played by the delightful and surprising as usual Emma Thompson. Catherine does seem to be making it up as she talks, possibly because Thompson was making it up as she went. You never can be sure with her. She can make Shakespeare sound like inspired improvisation. No other character, not even Bryson, and he’s a writer, uses words as creatively. Words just tumble out of her, playfully, intelligently, with true wit and purpose, and to telling effect.

Meanwhile, Arndt and Holderman don’t make up for what the dialog lacks by being creative and inventive with incident. Most of what they make happen is all too predictable.

These aren't really spoilers coming up because Bryson and Katz don’t make a move you can’t see coming a mile away. But...

If there's a stream to cross, they'll fall in. If there's mud to step in, they'll sink in up to their knees. If they hitch a ride, the driver of the car that picks them up will be a menace behind the wheel. If there's a storm warning, they'll ignore it to their immediate regret in the very next shot. If there’s a bunk bed they have to share, then the overweight Katz will heave himself into the top bunk and you can guess what happens next. And if someone joins them on their way, that someone will be someone they don't want with them for good reason and who will have to be ditched in a desperate, comedic gambit.

The predictability of incident isn't compensated for by an unpredictability of characters coming and going.

Bryson and Katz aren’t alone in the woods. The foot traffic on the trail is busy. But they don’t get to know many of the people they meet. In fact, most of the characters they encounter aren’t characters as much as they are messengers from the screenwriters. They show up to pass on information necessary to moving the story along and then quickly disappear. The very few who have stories of their own don’t add much to the main story or to our sense of what the character and culture of the community of hikers who populate the trail is like. The movie doesn’t try to answer the question “What eccentric cross-section of America is out there and why?” Ardnt and Holderman and director Ken Kwapis don’t even to seem to notice it’s a question to ask.

Which is a strange lapse of attention considering the real Bill Bryson has made his name visiting various places and reporting back on who’s out there and why.

Nick Offerman shows up too briefly as the sales clerk in the hiking and camping supply store to exhibit the kind of competence, knowledge, and obsessiveness Bryson should have if he’s serious about making the hike but also to exhibit it in a pompous and overbearing way that makes him hard to take seriously. Mary Steenburgen appears, also too briefly, as the lonely proprietress of a trailside motel mainly to exude and elicit longings that can’t be fulfilled. And Kristen Schaal comes along, unfortunately not briefly enough, to annoy the hell out of Bryson and Katz and us as a self-absorbed know-it-all and nonstop talker meant to be amusingly maddening but who is un-comedically pathetic---it’s actually a rather cruel piece of writing and Schaal plays it for all it’s worth, gleefully collaborating with the screenwriters to make a monster of vanity and obliviousness out of a type of person whom if we met in real life we’d feel sorry for, even if we couldn’t wait to escape her company.

Thompson isn’t met on the trail. She doesn’t come along. She’s left behind, too soon and for too long. But, as I said, she’s delightful and surprising as always and she’s given much more to do with her too brief screen time than stand around and be the wifely voice of doom, although that is part of her role. Which is fine, because that gives her the most opportunity to play with words.

Pauline Kael, who had an inexplicable bee in her bonnet when it came to writing about Redford, thought his characters were always too much in love with themselves to be in love with anyone else. I think it’s been more the case that he’s needed leading ladies who could draw him out and force him to pay attention. The only two of his past leading ladies who were better at this than Thompson is in A Walk in the Woods were Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand.

Some fans would argue to put Meryl Streep at the top of that short list but that whole movie left me cold.

Never mind.

Thompson and Redford work beautifully together to paint as near a perfect portrait of a happy marriage as I can remember seeing in a movie. The Brysons are one of those old married couples it’s impossible to imagine as a young couple in love because it’s impossible to imagine them as having been any different than they are now. They have been so good at working together to deal with whatever life’s thrown at them and adapting to changes in their situation and in each other that whatever they are at any given moment in time is just the right way for them to be. And it’s inadequate or somehow off the mark to say that after all this time they’re still in love. What they are more than anything is still in like.

The problem is that Bill has suddenly and inexplicably become hard to like. And that’s Thompson’s job in A Walk in the Woods, to make us see that as a problem needing a two hour movie to solve.

One of the better things about Arndt and Holderman’s script is that it doesn’t include long speeches filling us in on the backstory. It’s left to Thompson to make us realize that there’s been something wrong and that there’s been a change in Bryson. He’s not responding to her and to other people and situations the way he should and normally would have. This is a husband and wife who have always understood each other and with the slightest of passing frowns and startled glances Thompson conveys Catherine’s consternation at his suddenly not being understandable, which to her is as indicative and worrisome as a persistent cough. Her concern follows him out onto the trail where it becomes our concern and makes his progress through the landscape more than the landscape itself the thing to keep an eye on. We’re watching him and watching out for him on behalf of Catherine.

The landscape is worth keeping an eye on, though.

A Walk in the Woods is as pretty to look at as you'd expect. To their credit, director Ken Kwapis and his director of photography John Bailey don't overdo on the nature and landscape photography. The scenery is there to be looked at and admired because it's there and it's beautiful. But there are only a few moments when the storytelling pauses in its tracks so Kwapis and Bailey can send us a cinematic postcard with the note "Some view, huh?"

On the other hand, they don't make much use of the landscape to bring the Trail itself alive in the way director Jean-Marc Vallée and his cinematographer Yves Bélanger brought the Pacific Crest Trail to life in last year’s Academy Award nominee Reese Witherspoon vehicle Wild.

In Wild, the story of another writer taking on a grueling adventure of self-discovery, the PCT is practically the second main character, the some of the time antagonist, some of the time friend (a demanding friend) to Witherspoon’s character, author Cheryl Strayed. We’re made to consider the trail as a constant series of problems for Strayed to solve. We see and feel the changes in the terrain and the challenges they present and are made to think along with Strayed as she deals with them.

In A Walk in the Woods, the Appalachian Trail is just the setting. It’s there to provide obstacles for our heroes to get up, get over, get around, or get through in not particularly creative, surprising, suspenseful, thrilling, or funny ways.

Despite all this, A Walk in the Woods is an enjoyable movie, if you like Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, and Emma Thompson, and I happen to like Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, and Emma Thompson. Some movies are really only about watching their stars do their usual good jobs.

And Nolte, I think, does more than his usual good job.

Redford, who produced the film, originally intended direct it himself with the plan being he would star alongside his old friend Paul Newman. It was to be a last ride for Butch and Sundance, a final big score for Hooker and Gondorf. Sadly, Newman became too sick and frail before they could get the project got underway.

But while Newman would have had a grand time playing Katz and we’d have had a grand time watching him having a grand time, he would have been acting and his Katz would have been a character.

Nolte’s Katz is a self-portrait.

I’ve always thought of Nolte and Redford have had something more than parallel careers. Nolte’s screen persona has seemed to me to be an extension of Redford’s. It’s almost as if Nolte was invented to take on roles Redford could easily have played but was too busy as an actor, director, producer, or environmental and political activist to handle himself at the time. In fact, at one point Redford held the rights to the novel The Prince of Tides and was going to re-team with Streisand in the movie adaptation. Go through the list of Nolte’s credits from the late 70s through the 90s and it’s easy to pick out role after role you can imagine Redford fitting and handling just as well. The Deep, Cannery Row, Teachers, Weeds, Under Fire, Cape Fear (I really would have like to have seen that one), The Prince of Tides. Not North Dallas Forty, though. Redford’s too small to have played a professional football player. And not Down and Out in Beverly Hills, because he’d never have seen himself as that down and out. And that’s just it.

There’s a reason there’s nothing on the order of Affliction on Redford’s acting resume.

He was always a little too cool, too cautious, too calculated in his choice of parts and in his approach to playing them.

Nolte was edgier, more daring, more willing to take risks as an actor and with his image as a leading man. The result is that there is something on the order of Affliction on his acting resume.

But, by the same token, the result has been a career that’s added up to that of a great character actor. He’s never been the star and icon that Redford has. It’s not at all that next to Redford he’s a failure. It’s simply that as a star he’s far outshined.

And the risk-taking and reckless side of his nature that has served him well as an actor, if not as a star, has come close to ruining him as a person. And next to Redford, he is, if not a failure as a human being, he is a near complete wreck of one.

But Nolte’s willingness to put that wreck on display next to Redford, who, one year shy of eighty, is anything but a wreck, is not just admirable, it makes A Walk in the Woods worth taking seriously despite its mainly flaws and lapses.

Nolte lets his wild life and hard times inform his portrayal of Katz to the point that it’s impossible to tell where Nolte leaves off and Katz begins. His Katz is practically his infamous mug shot animated. And when Katz talks honestly about his many mistakes and misadventures, there’s a sense that it’s Nolte not Katz who is delivering an act of confession.

All those dark and heavy themes I mentioned at the top of this post are carried by Nolte, weighing him down more than all his extra poundage, but not stopping him or even seeming to slow him down. He’s red-faced, out of breath, hurting in every joint and limb, but he’s still exuberant, lustful, gluttonous, and determined to deny old age, time, and death have any claim on him.

Katz is Nolte’s Falstaff. And the thing to remember about Falstaff is that, even though he’s one of the greatest comic characters in the history of literature, he’s one of the greatest tragic characters, as well.

_____________________________________________________________

For further reading around the campfire:

Redford and Nolte together again for the first time in The Company You Keep.

Not that it's a crowded field, but here's my review of the best movie about an old coot on a hike, The Way: Martin Sheen hits his stride.

And my review of Wild: A very small person alone in a great big indifferent world.

____________________________________________________

A Walk in the Woods, directed by Ken Kwapis, screenplay by Michael Arndt and Bill Holderman. Starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, Emma Thompson, Mary Steenburgen, Nick Offerman, and Kristen Schaal. Rated R. Still in theaters.

The real Bill Bryson's excellent book, A Walk in the Woods, is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

Spectre: Double-naught spies never get to have any fun

November 19, 2015.

Q: License to Geek. Ben Whishaw (left) as the techno-wizard Q is forced out of the lab and into the field to help James Bond (Daniel Craig) on a mission shows off his talent to think clearly and carefully at top-speed when in danger in one of the most traditionally Bond movie like moments in the often disconcertingly un-Bond-like new Bond movie, Spectre.

Plan for Sunday afternoon was to take Mrs M to see the new Bond film for her birthday. But we goofed, I guess, and wound up seeing a movie called Spectre instead.

It was a lot like a Bond film. Definitely had moments, lines of dialog, jokes and gags, and characters that could have fit right into a Bond film.

But something was off.

The tone wasn’t quite right. The pacing too. And it didn’t have that look.

There was a recurring sourness, in the dialog, in the actors’ performances, especially Daniel Craig’s, and in the attitude director Sam Mendes seemed to be taking towards the story he was telling. And it was not as if anybody was expressing distaste or contempt or boredom for the film they were making. It was more as though the film they were making was meant to be a critique of the whole Bond saga, expressing distaste, contempt, and boredom for the spy movie subgenre.

Meanwhile, there was a perfunctoriness to the fights, stunts, and chases. They went on too long and didn’t build. In traditional Bond films, the action sequences increase towards intensity but they also increase in their absurdity. But there’s an internal logic to the best of them. What Bond does to escape or triumph makes sense given the realistic impossibilities of the situation. Here, however, the justifying logic seems to be, “This is the kind of thing that just happens in Bond movies. Roll with it.”

Then, for the most part, they have no pay off. When they do, Mendes doesn’t linger long enough for us to enjoy it or, sometimes, to even take it in.

This applies to the overall plot, as well.

Bond is on a mission of vengeance. For some convoluted but not really explained reason he has to go it alone, as if going it alone isn’t what Bond does---the whole point of being a double-naught spy, as Jethro Bodine styled it when he decided to pursue a career as a secret agent, and having a license to kill is that Bond and the other eight double-naughts exist to go it alone. They're sent in when MI-6’s usual chain-of-command based spy craft has failed and they need someone expendable to go in and wing it. And in Spectre Bond does a lot of just winging it but that results in many scenes that make no sense except as allusions to past Bond movies, as if we’re meant to react by saying, “Oh yeah, this is like what happened in Goldfinger.” and “I recognize that! It’s the fight on the train from Live and Let Die. No, wait, maybe it’s the one from From Russia With Love.”

This is different from what Mendes did in Skyfall where the allusions and references to past Bonds were used to drive home the point that Craig was now our Bond, James Bond.

As for the look of the movie, it’s as if Mendes and his cinematographer and production designers decided upon an anti-Bond movie aesthetic. Past Bond movies doled out plenty of eye candy, and I’m not talking about the Bond Girls or only the Bond Girls. The cinematography, sets, costumes, and people, including the villains and especially the female villains, were glossy, colorful, sensual, and seductive, even in the more “realistic” and “gritty” Timothy Dalton Bonds and Craig’s first two. This was especially true when it came to photographing the exotic locales. There was a travelogue aspect to the Bond films, particularly the Connery and Moore Bonds, that was part of their charm and the point of Bond himself: “Look at what beautiful places Bond visits (and what beautiful women he sleeps with)! Don’t you wish you were him?”

But in Spectre, Mendes seems to have set out to make us glad we’re stuck at home. He and his cinematographer find the essential ugliness, tawdriness, and dystopian dreariness in even the most beautiful and traditionally longed-for destinations.

Mexico City is washed out, grainy, browned over, as if shot through a dust cloud blowing in from the desert. Rome is cold and gray and almost empty of people and any signs anybody lives and works there---and it’s presented as something even more dreary than a collection of ruins. It’s one, big mausoleum. The Alps are just cold and snowy. The Sahara is rocks, sand, dust, and glaring sun. As for London, Dickens’ London was cheerier.

The sense of things being not quite Bondian, though, is most evident in the conception of Spectre’s villain.

He’s dull.

What Mendes does with Bond's iconic nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld is in a way a worse mistake than what J.J.Abrams made with Jim Kirk's iconic nemesis Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek Into Darkness, although Mendes is so offhand and blase about it I wonder if many people watching the movie even notice the character Christoph Waltzis playing is Blofeld.

A lot of people left the theater after watching Into Darkness muttering, “What was the point of that? That wasn’t Khan!” But if Abrams hadn't named the character Khan and then disappointed fans' expectations by giving them a character nothing like the Khan we knew and loved and loved to root against from the original TV series and Star Trek II, Cumberbatch's Khan would have been cheered as formidable adversary and charismatic foil for Kirk and Spock and a memorable villain in his own right.

But Waltz's Blofeld seems barely engaged by his own evil plots and schemes and bored by the fact of Bond. Again, Mendes appears to have deliberately chosen an anti-Bond aesthetic. Traditionally, the Bond movies' evil megalomaniacs are bloviating hams who inspire the actors playing them to over the top performances. Javier Bardem in Skyfall, for example. But with Blofeld, it's as if Mendes said to himself, "Some people thought I let Javier take it a little too far. What if this time I keep my bad guy a lot more reined in? Christoph, how shallow and banal can you make this creep? Can you play him as a sort of technocratic corporate executive type with a hobby that got out of hand? "

Then there’s the matter of sex.

There is some.

It’s not very sexy.

And Bond doesn’t seem to enjoy it much.

But it’s a feature of all Craig’s Bond movies, not just Spectre, that Bond isn’t having a lot of fun in life even when he’s not on a mission. We get glimpses and hints that there are things he takes pleasure in---fast cars, for example.---but we’re not given the chance to take pleasure in his taking pleasure. In the old Bonds, part of the fun of the movies was the vicarious hedonism they encouraged.

Léa Seydoux is the good girl Bond girl. And that pretty much defines her role. Her character, Madeleine Swann, is in the story, ostensibly, for some complicated reason not worth explaining, but, really, she’s there because Bond movies are expected to include a good girl Bond Girl for Bond to develop tender feelings for so we know he’s not a complete cad. Sometimes those tender feelings turn into true love and we’re told that’s what happens here. Actually, the tender feelings Bond has for Madeleine come across as more...fatherly.

Craig is seventeen years older than Seydoux, practically old enough to be her father. Typical Hollywood double-standard when it comes to the aging of leading men and women, right? But usually, it’s the case that when a middle-aged leading man is paired with a much younger leading lady, he looks too old next to her. But with Craig and Seydoux, she looks too young. It’s not as if Bond’s running around with someone young enough to be his daughter. It’s as if he’s running around with his daughter. I don’t mean that salaciously. I mean it’s as if he’s forcing her to come along on a family vacation she doesn’t want to take and she’s letting him know she resents it every minute. It’s not just that Seydoux looks as if she could still play a college freshman. She plays Madeleine like a spoiled teenager, pouty and petulant because she’s not getting her way. Nothing Mendes has given her character to say and do makes her a convincing doctor, which Madeleine supposedly is, a psychiatrist in charge of her own exclusive clinic, no less, but much of what she’s given to say and do makes her a convincing overgrown child with serious daddy issues, which she has and transfers to Bond.

There isn’t a bad girl Bond Girl in Spectre. (There wasn’t a good girl Bond Girl in Skyfall, unless you count Harris’ Moneypenny but then she wouldn’t have been Moneypenny. Moneypenny may have feelings for Bond, but she has her pride and would never let herself stoop to being a mere Bond Girl.) Monica Bellucci plays the third type of Bond Girl, the aristocrat who may be good, may be bad, but most likely is neither, whose role is essentially that of the wife of the ogre in a fairy tale: she betrays her lord and master to let the hero into the castle to steal the treasure. It happens that Bellucci’s lord and master is dead before Bond arrives at the castle. Bond made him dead. So of course she is immediately drawn to him out of a mixture gratitude and hate.

There’s nothing daughterly or fatherly in their less than tender but intensely passionate feelings towards one another. But in keeping with the general sourness of things, neither is allowed more than a passing and regretted-in-the-moment pleasure in their anger-fueled up against a door uncomfortably close to rape coupling, and in keeping with Mendes’ approach to the chases, fights, and stunts, there’s no payoff or follow-up to their encounter. It’s a sad waste of Bellucci, and a missed opportunity. It would have been fun to have had at least one scene between Seydoux and Bellucci, who is very nearly Craig’s age, two years older, in fact. The subtext of that scene could have been Bellucci’s character silently saying to Madeline, This is how an adult deals with sexual desire.

For all this, though, Spectre is not a bad spy movie. It’s not one of the best Bond movies. And it’s not a good movie apart from its genre---Skyfall was both a very good Bond movie and a good movie. But it’s the second best Daniel Craig movie and not just by default. I liked Casino Royale. (Quantum of Solace, not so much.) But Spectre has some things going for it Casino Royale didn’t.

Well, some people.

Q, Moneypenny, and the new M.

Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, and Ralph Fiennes.

It’s easy---and fun---to imagine that when Fiennes’ M was in the field, things on his end of an operation rarely got to the point where a double-aught needed to be called in to save the day. Now that he’s running the show, it’s even less likely that a blunt instrument like Bond is required. Fiennes’ exudes that air of ultra competence that got so many fictional British officers through war movies. But he also has a slight touch of madness that suggests a kinship with Alec Guinness’ Colonel Nicholson from The Bridge on the River Kwai---one reason Bond might have been sent to clean up an M run operation was to save M from his own Bond-ian tendencies. Fienne’s M has slowed down, grown wiser, learned to place his trust in experience over instinct, but there’s still a side of him that’s itching for the chance to go wild on his own and start winging it.

Like I said, Moneypenny is not a Bond Girl. As Harris plays her, however, she is the most formidable Bond woman since Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore. She’s dangerous and deadly, of course, but she’s dangerous and deadly because she’s in control. She may have tender feelings for Bond but she has them in control as she does everything else she needs to do deal with to do her job, including guns, fast cars, bureaucratic rules and red tape, and Bond’s libido.

But it’s Whishaw who anchors and drives the most Bond-ian moments in Spectre. It’s possible the film’s team of writers---John Logan, Neil Purvis, Robert Wade, and Jez Butterworth----found they couldn’t write a convincing Q without putting him into convincing Bond movie scenes. But Whishaw makes those scenes convincing, delivering his lines with an essential Q-ness that lets us know no matter the situation or movie Q is always Q. It’s not that he plays his Q as a younger version of Desmond Llewelyn’s iconic Q. It’s that to be a Q, you have to have to have that essential Q-ness. It’s a job requirement.

And when the plot forces Q out of his lab and into the field and become part of Bond’s adventure, Whishaw plays things with just the right mix of panic and fortitude. If Bond’s great talent is the ability to improvise recklessly under pressure, Q’s is the ability to think clearly and carefully but at high speed when in danger.

Individually, the three are fun to watch. When the plot brings them together to come to Bond’s aid, they make a terrific team, especially as they’re joined by Rory Kinnear back again as M’s assistant Tanner, but with a new take on the role. Going back to the last couple of Pierce Brosnan’s Bonds, Tanner was simply a factotum for Judi Dench’s M. In Spectre, he’s been rebooted as M’s first field lieutenant, legman, and, when the need arises, extra muscle.

There’s one more traditionally Bond-ian element in Spectre: Dave Bautista as the perpetually smiling assassin of very few words Mr Hinx, whom Bautista plays with a mixture of humor and menace that makes him a direct spiritual descendant of Red Grant, Odd Job, and Jaws. Whatever Bautista did on the set, it worked to enliven Daniel Craig who seems to be having as much fun in their fight scenes as Sean Connery and Roger Moore ever had in any martini-sipping, fast car driving, Bond Girl undressing moment in all their movies.

Too bad Sam Mendes doesn’t read the old blog. If he did, maybe he’d have seen my review of Skyfall and instead of making Spectre he’d have done like I suggested and followed Skyfall with the reboot of From Russia With Love he’d actually set up with Skyfall.

After that, Daniel Craig could have finished his run with Goldfinger and a new, younger, prettier Bond, someone who looks good in a bathing suit and would not be implausible next to the young, pretty actresses playing Domino and Honey Ryder, looking spectacular in their bathing suits, in Thunderball and Doctor No.

Then they could have moved on through the rest of the novels in sequence---with someone having figured out how to remove the racism from You Only Live Twice and Live and Let Die---and that would have take 007 through the next fifty years with at least five more actors introducing themselves as Bond, James Bond. Then in 2065, people could decide if they want James Bond to keep his license to kill another 100 years. Why not? Think how many Sherlock Holmeses, Tarzans, Batmen, and Doctor Whos there’ll have been by then.

As for the near future…

Craig has said some things that have been interpreted as his declaring he’s done with Bond. Sam Mendes, who swears he is done with directing Bond movies, thinks Craig only meant he wasn’t in the mood to jump right back into another Bond film. He’d just finished Spectre when he was asked about his plans and Mendes’ feeling is that the question came too soon:

[M]y analogy is, you’re running your first marathon, and 200 yards from the finish line, some guy shouts, ‘Are you going to run another one straight away?’” I get why Daniel responded the way he did. Again, a two-word answer is what springs to mind.

Craig’s signed to make at least one more and has said he would like to do five like Connery. (Apparently nobody counts Never Say Never Again.) But if he needs a break, I have a suggestion, if anyone who has the power to decide these things is reading.

The next Bond movie doesn’t need to have Bond in it.

Bond can be offscreen, either on a mission or in need of rescue, and M, Moneypenny, Tanner, and Q can come to his aid. They can handle it.

Of course, Mr Hinx should show up to make things difficult. I’d like to see him go head to head with Moneypenny. I suspect she’d wind up in control.

The producers don’t have to use my suggested title, though.

SMERSH.

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James Bond Movie Reviews Will Return: My review of Skyfall, Tinker Tailor Soldier Bond

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Spectre, directed by Sam Mendes, screenplay by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth. Starring Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw, Naomi Harris, Monica Bellucci, Dave Bautista, Andrew Scott, Rory Kinnear, and Jesper Christensen. Rated PG-13. Now in theaters.

Truth: She had spunk. He liked spunk. That turned out to be a problem for both of them.

Cate Blanchett as 60 Minutes II producer Mary Mapes and Robert Redford as Mapes’ boss, mentor, and too-indulgent surrogate dad, Dan Rather in Truth, a movie that has more in common with a certain workplace sitcom than with great films about real-life journalists taking on a big story.

Every other year or so, CBS news should gather all its reporters, producers, and editors together to show them a movie double-feature.

Good Night, and Good Luck and Truth.

The point would be a humbling lesson in institutional history:

"This is how we started, and this is what we sank to: We betrayed Ed Murrow's legacy in order to curry favor with a President who turned out to be a mendacious incompetent whose henchmen were using McCarthyite tactics to cower the press and shut down dissent so they could continue a disastrous war that had no purpose and no justification and which they'd started by lying to the American people and exploiting their fear of another 9/11."

Problem here is that one of the movies is a lot better than the other.

Truth is emotionally engaging and features an excellent cast brilliantly led by Cate Blanchett who delivers a performance that might have earned her an Oscar nomination if she wasn't almost certainly going to nominated for her role in Carol. But Truth might have been a more compelling film if it had included that lesson above more explicitly.

Instead, it stops short, leaving it to be inferred, while focusing on its main character’s professional martyrdom in the cause of her own integrity as a journalist. 

Good Night, and Good Luck is about how one of the greatest TV journalists of all time stood up for the country against a life-destroying demagogue who was doing his best to tear apart the nation in order to maintain his own worthless political career.

Truth is about how one plucky journalist tried to stand up for herself against an all too typical act of corporate weaseling in the quest for profit.

Which happened.

But it happened because of something else much larger that was going on around her at the time.

The War in Iraq isn’t entirely left out of Truth, but it’s taken as such a given that it’s barely mentioned and really only shows up in the background as an issue in the 2004 Presidential campaign.

But it wasn’t an issue. It was the issue. The reason the story of Bush’s National Guard days mattered was that Bush was running for re-election as our War President. After 9/11, his whole Presidency was based on the idea that he was some kind of hero-king. That’s what the Mission Accomplished stunt was designed to do, sell that idea. And the thing that made it salable was that Bush had been a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War.

Except that he wasn’t.

He was a pilot training program washout who’d joined the Guard in the first place to avoid being drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam.

In short, he was a despicable fraud, and he made himself even more despicable by allowing his minions to orchestrate the smearing of his Democratic opponent, John Kerry, who had avoided the draft by enlisting in the Navy and going voluntarily to fight in Vietnam where he’d been wounded in action.

To recap, I hope you don’t mind if I crib from Wikipedia, with interpolations:

60 Minutes II [a weekday counterpart to the Sunday edition of 60 Minutes and intended to give evening news anchor Dan Rather more opportunities to do what he liked to do best, investigate and report stories himself] ran into controversy in September 2004 when the program staff received a set of documents which alleged that, while in the service of the Texas Air National Guard,United States President George W. Bush was declared unfit for duty and suspended from service. [They also appeared to show that Bush’s father’s friends used their influence to protect him from further disciplinary action.] On September 8, 2004, in the middle of the 2004 Presidential election, Dan Rather went on the air on 60 Minutes II with the documents. The authenticity of these documents was quickly called into question by experts and critics. [Right Wing bloggers led the attack. But CBS’ competitors quickly joined in.]…

For about two weeks, Rather and his team stood by the story, but CBS later announced it could not vouch for the authenticity of the memos. The network stated that using the memos was a "mistake" and Rather apologized for the incident.^[3][4] Their source, former Texas Army National Guard officer Bill Burkett, had misled a CBS producer about the source of the documents. The senior producer on the story, Mary Mapes, was fired, and three other producers involved in the story were asked to resign. It is often implied^{[by whom?]} that Rather's subsequent retirement was tied to this incident. [Implied? I think it’s pretty well universally agreed on. At any rate, those Right Wing bloggers and many conservative pundits still congratulate themselves on their role in getting Rather essentially fired.]

The campaign was still close. Kerry even appeared to be on his way to victory. Bush’s continuation in office as the War President was at stake. Which meant that what was also at stake was the continuation of the war or at least its continuation as it was being ineptly and corruptly and---thanks to “enhanced interrogation”---immorally prosecuted.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, we now know that what was also at stake was the fate of New Orleans and the entire nation’s economy.

By leaving all that for us to remember, director James Vanderbilt, who also wrote the screenplay fails to make it a dramatic fact of his movie.

For long stretches, dramatically, what seems most at stake are Mary Mapes’ career and her personal happiness.

Good as she is as Mapes, Cate Blanchett can’t make us care about Mapes enough for her problems to amount to a big enough hill of beans to carry the movie.

And Blanchett is good.

Tousled, outwardly relaxed but cheerfully humming with pent up energy, eyes wide open as she takes it all in, a good journalist on the watch but letting most of it register with only the wryest of smiles or most fleeting of frowns, calm and level-headed but still managing to convey whatever she’s feeling---anger, anxiety, dismay, joy, despair---Blanchett’s Mapes is the best kind of boss, someone you want to work hard for because she’s someone you want to work with.

We can see why the determinedly anti-social, reflexively irritating, compulsively self-sabotaging freelancer Mike Smith (Topher Grace) would settle down under her command and do his damnedest for her.

And we can see why the legendary Dan Rather (Robert Redford) would trust her, rely on her, and defer to her to the point of taking instructions from her.

And yet we can see, when the pressure starts to get to her and cracks appear in her seemingly unbreakable calm and personal demons start flying out, that those demons have been there and at work from within all along, sawing at the bars, scratching at the walls, requiring some key part of herself constantly turned inward to keep watch against their escape and so not available to help keep an eye out for trouble coming at her from without and trouble she’s rushing into headlong.

Something else is left out of Truth. The whole wider world. It’s not vitally present visually or dramatically. We don’t get accidental glimpses of it. It doesn’t enter in the form of props or pieces of the set or activity in the background.  We don’t hear about it in snatches of dialog as characters talk about their lives apart from their roles in the plot. It isn’t brought in by ancillary characters. Characters who aren’t directly connected to Mapes and her investigation enter as if from nowhere and exit on their way to nowhere except out of the scene. Truth takes place almost entirely within the cozy work world of Mapes’ relatively small circle of friends and colleagues, which means it often feels and looks like a television workplace drama…

...or comedy. It reminded me of one of those in particular.

Watching Truth didn’t put me in mind of other movies about journalists at work on big stories. I didn’t reflect back on All the President’s Men or look forward to Spotlight.

I kept thinking about The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I think it was the critic Northrop Frye who said Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are two sides of the same dramatic coin.

In one we can see the comedy behind the tragedy and in the other the tragedy lurking in the comedy. Taken together, they show us how a little change in circumstance can mean the difference between a stage strewn with corpses and one full of pairs of lovers happily married and ready to live happily ever after.

To put it less grandly: it doesn’t take much for laughter to turn to tears.

That’s how I feel about Truth and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

The comparison would make Redford’s Rather a mirror image of Ed Asner’s Lou Grant, and, without making too much of it, he is. He’s a surrogate father to Mapes, but not a grouchy one like Lou was with his Mary. He’s easy-going and more likely to react to her with amusement than with exasperation.

Mary Mapes has spunk.

Dan Rather doesn’t hate spunk.

He can’t get enough of it.

Which turns out to be a problem for both of them.

Rather is an indulgent father, one of those dads so proud of his kid that, even when he knows she’s goofing up, he can’t bring himself to get mad or make her go back and correct her mistakes. In fact, he’s more likely to trust her judgment than his own. There are key moments when we can see him resisting her enthusiastic push to get the story done as she’s sure it can be done and then deciding that she’s probably right and he’s wrong. He lets her have her way, and of course we cringe, knowing what’s coming from that.

One of the things Truth does well is show how very smart, well-intentioned, dedicated and talented people can put their heads together to come up with a way to screw up royally. And that’s another thing. Truth might have been better if it had been about that.

Truth is honest about the mistakes Mapes and Rather and their team made. And it does raise the question as to whether the whole project was a mistake from start to finish. But in the end its answer is a resounding but not completely convincing no.

The reason it’s not convincing is that the answer maybe should have been yes.

It’s not that the story wasn’t true---it was. The mistake stemmed from Mapes’ being so sure of the story that she didn’t stop to ask exactly what the story was or---and this is key---if it really was a story, one worth telling and that needed to be told now.

I think it was all three things, a story, a story worth telling, and a story that needed to be told right then. But that’s a political opinion. It’s not a professional’s judgment. And what we see again and again in Truth is a professional who lets not her politics but her pride get the better of her professional judgment.

That’s a potentially tragic situation. Unfortunately, in the end Vanderbilt decides Mapes is more of a heroic victim than a tragic heroine.

She was a victim. She and Rather and their team were victimized the same way the Dixie Chicks and anybody of note who publicly opposed the war and criticized our war-hero President were victimized. But, as I’ve been saying, that isn’t an explicit theme in Truth.

At any rate, one of the pleasures of watching Truth is like one of the great pleasures of watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which was the interplay between Moore and Asner. Blanchett and Redford make a good team. Blanchett takes complete command of their scenes together while still making clear Mapes’ deep affection and respect for Rather---and her own for Redford---and he gives way, never pulling rank, following her lead, and trusting that by doing so, his own performance will be improved.

Redford, by the way, doesn’t try to do Dan Rather. He makes almost no attempt at an impersonation. Doesn’t even darken his hair or affect the folksiness or add a trace of a drawl. The only touch is the way he holds himself when Rather is on camera. But it works.

Redford presents himself as Rather and we accept it.

Good as they are together, Redford’s best moment comes when he’s all alone on screen, talking on the phone to Mapes from the terrace of his apartment. It’s a soliloquy not a conversation. Rather’s slightly drunk and he’s feeling confessional and apologetic. He feels that he’s let her down, let himself down, and let his profession down. Without being named, the ghost of Murrow haunts the scene. It’s the most open and vulnerable I’ve seen Redford play a scene, although he’s directed many other actors in scenes as emotionally revealing.

Blanchett, of course, has many such moments, on her own, with Redford, and with the other members of the cast. She gets some terrific support.

Grace is alternately and simultaneously irritating, loveable, pathetic, admirable, and funny as Smith, unsure of where he is least at home, in the wide world or inside his own skin and finding comfort only in the company of Mapes. As Vietnam veteran, retired Marine Corps Lt Colonel Roger Charles, Mapes’ team’s military expert, Dennis Quaid plays a very cheerful yin to Grace’s Smith’s yang, philosophical where Smith is outraged, ironic where Smith is driven to moralizing, cool and self-controlled but just as idealistic and committed to the job of investigative journalism, and confident---it’s the calm certainty Quaid imbues Charles with that persuades us that the story is true and that Mapes is right to keep digging and pushing.

Elisabeth Moss’ role is mainly to make her luminous presence felt so that her character, journalism professor and associate-producer Lucy Smith, isn’t lost in her co-stars' shadows. Bruce Greenwood, David Lyons, Rachael Blake, and Natalie Saleeba as higher-ups at CBS News do fine jobs presenting various mixes of professional concern and careerist cravenness. John Benjamin Hickey as Mapes’ supportive and understanding husband gives strength to a character who is mainly there to be a shoulder to cry on. He keeps his and Blanchett’s scenes together from turning into mere soliloquies in which Blanchett gets to show her tender side. And Dermot Mulroney is a formidable devil’s advocate for the case that Maples really did screw up.

But it’s Stacy Keach as Mapes’ team’s infuriatingly unreliable main source Bill Burkett who steals scenes right and left. Keach makes Burkett’s every gesture and inflection a tell. Burkett isn’t just a liar, he’s a bad liar. At least, that’s one way to see him. Another is to see him as a bad actor. He’s playing the lead in a melodramatic movie version of his own life he’s making in his own head. The story he’s telling is true but true in the way most movies based on real life are true. We just can’t tell, Keach is just that slippery in his portrayal. Plus, he makes Burkett’s self-pity his most persuasive trait. You can see how people would just feel so sorry for the brave semi-invalid forced to tow an oxygen tank everywhere he goes that they’d just want everything he says to be true so they didn’t have to hurt his feelings by calling him a liar.

Thinking it over, maybe my idea to show Truth to the staff of CBS News isn’t such a good one. They should watch Redford’s rooftop news as a public trust speech but in its failure to tie Mapes’ troubles to the larger political story, Truth is too much a personal story. Mapes is reduced to a wronged heroine in a workplace melodrama bravely but barely holding up in the face of severe emotional distress in Oscar-baiting fashion. What happens to her and Rather is too bad for them, but many people have had it a lot worse.

Starting with the tens and tens of thousands of people who were killed and wounded in the war and continuing to this day with the victims of the mess our one-time War President, the Decider, George W. Bush and his team of incompetents made in Iraq.

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Truth, written and directed by James Vanderbilt. Based on the book Truth: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes. Starring Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Dennis Quaid, Topher Gracer, Elisabeth Moss, and Stacy Keach. Rated R. In select theaters.