The Fountain and Knowing

Two movies that seem similar in their apocalyptic vision are The Fountain, which should have been called The Tree of Life or First Father, and Knowing. Both had those scenes of transformation. In The Fountain the transformations are the 16th-century man drinking the sap of the tree and turning into the grass and flowers, the journey of First Father to the star/galaxy far away, the Rachel Weisz character dying and being given an green burial so that she may fertilize a tree.

In Knowing the obvious transformation is of the children being carried off in spaceships to another planet as the earth burns up, but the Nicholas Cage character and his family are also metamorphosed as they are killed in the flash of the sun flare. They come together, father mother son daughter, united after years of discord between father and son, and hold each other in the face of the burning wind, declaring their belief in the Afterlife. A beautiful “biblical” scene, a metamorphosis of the spirit. Amazing films both of them.

The Book of Eli and The Road

Watching The Book of Eli just after watching The Road caused the Washington film to be a disappointment. It had gratuitous violence in it, did not develop the Washington character beyond the suggestion of a man who struggles to do good in the world but is so focused on keeping the book in his head. The Mortensen character of The Road is equally focused: making sure his son is safe, with food, away from the marauding bands of cannibals. But the moments in the film when the child functions as the voice of human decency and reminds his father that being the good guys means they need to share with others opens up the complexity of the father. With Eli, the fault is not the acting. It’s the script, or maybe the directing.

Mortensen was given an amazing role, following well the texture of the Cormac McCarthy novel, and he played it so sensitively, so darkly, softly, subtly. And the boy who played the boy was also wonderful, as was Duvall, always a stand-out however large or small the role.

Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian

I could not put down The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. A really good summer read. Fun especially in the letters linked to other letters, stories linked to stories, even to the playful frame of the stories having been told to the unnamed narrator . . . and the dedication to Kostova’s father as having told her some of the stories seems to be part of the framing of stories as part of the real world. Very smart layering of letters and stories. Nice play between the vampire tale and the “danger” of being a historian. Shelly would really like this story. Liz did. A good recommendation from her.

Something about The Historian reminds me of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, another good summer read it was. And both deal with researchers and storytellers.

Shadow Tag, Erdrich, and Hamilton

Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich, another rich story, this and The Painted Drum. Both of them develop the complex relationships that Erdrich has in her other novels, but the essay I’m writing won’t include them. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse won’t be included either even though it is one of my Erdrich favorites, that and The Antelope Wife, which I am using in the essay.

While I was at the SSML conference, Jane Hamilton was given the fiction award. The characters of her novel The Book of Ruth remind me of some of Erdrich’s characters: their struggle to simply get through life after having been raised in an environment of scarcity, abuse, and the like.

Women in Art on YouTube

The metamorphosis of the female face is captured beautifully in the "Women in Art" YouTube video by Philip Scott Johnson:

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=nUDIoN-_Hxs&feature=email

Color Me Kubrick

As usual, I truly enjoyed John Malkovich's performance, this time his portrayal of Alan Conway, the man who passed himself off as Stanley Kubrickfor a few years in the late 90s. Malkovich seemed to have such fun changing accents/personae through Color Me Kubrick, and Brian W. Cook, the director, filed the sets with the clutter, the "kibble," of the celebrity world. A feast of a contemporary rogue's tale.

Stranger than Fiction

Another film I have enjoyed this fall, Stranger than Fiction, follows a writer character named Kay Eiffel, played by Emma Thompson, as she attempts to write the tragedy of a Will Ferrell character named Harold Crick. But Crick inadvertently gains self awareness as a character being manipulated by a writer with a death wish. This self-reflexive film reminds me of At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien's tour-de-force on the "opposite and equal reaction" of characters upon their authors. Dustin Hoffman plays a very funny, very satiric, English professor who attempts to help Crick identify the type of story he is in. It is only when Crick accepts that he is in a tragedy that Eiffel wakes up to the possibility of a story not ending in the death of the main character. The playfulness with genres is delightful. And the implications of what makes for more profound literature--tragedy or comedy--and more profound living are truly . . . well . . . profound.

Existenz and Color Me Kubrick

No time to respond in depth, but I need to keep track of good films.

Existenz, with Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Ian Holm, and Willem Dafoe, Dir. David Cronenberg. I liked this one much better than The Matrix. The relationship between physical reality and cyber reality is much more complicated. The central characters are implicated in violence to humans, with no clear lines between good and evil. Very complex, very subtle.

Color Me Kubrick was great fun, with smart references to Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Barry Lyndon, and other Kubrick films. John Malkovich was wonderful as Alan Conway, the man who passed himself off as Kubrick in London for several years. Dir. Brian Cook.

Winter Passing, the film, the desire on this winter's day

So cold and blustery this February day, with winds here in Ohio to compete with the gales that chill my family to the bone in Southwest Kansas. A fitting movie for such a day, Winter Passing (2006). I wasn’t sure I would like it as it opened on the central character, Reese Holden (played by Zooey Deschanel, an actor who looks and sounds like Debra Winger), because the focus seemed to be on her self-involvement. I am not impressed by that film genre that presents self-involvement favorably, as in the film with “Eternal Sunshine” and “Spotless Mind” in the title. I couldn’t finish that one, even though I typically like the acting of Jim Carrey and thought Kate Winslet did a fine job in Sense and Sensibility.

But to its credit Winter Passing did not glorify characters with arrested emotional development. In the storyline the self-involvement of Reese was presented in a studied manner . . . as was the self-involvement of her father, Don Holden, a character played very sensitively by Ed Harris. Instead of glorifying self-involvement or depicting it as a mere quirk of personality, these two characters were presented as deeply pained in part by that very state. Their excesses of “self focus” kept these characters from understanding and supporting each other. They were isolated from each other, unable to discuss the suicide of the wife (to Don)/mother (to Reese), unable to comfort one another. Reese was trapped in an angry state of arrested emotional development, her father caught in an alcoholic haze. His grief and guilt over his wife’s suicide was turned inward as he drank his way through each day. Reese’s anger turned both outward—toward her father and the two people who lived with him and functioned as his caretakers—and inward as she snorted cocaine to numb the pain.

Besides the film exposing the self destructive qualities of self-involvement, it set this state in the context of the “artist’s life,” for all three members of the Holden family (the dead mother, Mary, and Don and Reese) are some type of artist. Don and Mary fiction writers, Reese an actor in NYC. The relationship between creativity and madness is explored, especially in scenes with Don and one of his caretaker friends, played by Will Ferrell, hitting golf balls around in a cleared-out bedroom of the Holden house. Don and the Will Ferrell character, Corbit, are outfitted in “body armor” of sorts: the chest and leg padding of an ice hockey goalie and a makeshift “shield” from the lid of a forty-gallon metal trash can. They wield drivers with full force in the room, adding an element of the surreal to an otherwise realist film. The madness, or surreality, are heightened by Don’s choice to move to a new bedroom. He has moved out of the house altogether, leaving the care of it to Corbit and another character, Shelly, played by Amelia Warner. Don is ensconced in his very run-down garage, and all the furniture from his and his wife’s bedroom is situated in the back yard, open to the winter wind and snow. His ramshackle garage and the bedroom furniture in the yard seem expressionistic, revealing the decay of Don’s mental faculties and his inability to face his grief and guilt.

But the surreality is not presented as a mere quirk. It is totally in keeping with a psychologically realist exploration of the artist’s way of coping with the sudden, traumatic loss of a loved one. The realist confluence of artistic temperament, trauma and grief, self-involved guilt, and a writerly interest in every idea ever written about extends to the depiction of the Holden house, for its rooms and hallways are stacked high with books of all sorts. It is the house of people who treasure books and the words and ideas they contain, who can’t throw anything away, who make their very lives out of words.

That theme of being compelled to live in words, especially words of the past, is evidenced by the old books that Don surrounds himself with but also by the collection of love letters that his wife and he exchanged. The collection is the only organized thing in the house, having been paper clipped into sequential sets by Mary some time before she committed suicide. Mary has left the collection to her daughter, and the film’s plot opens as Reese is approached by an editor who wants to publish these very private, very candid letters. Reese’s intention is to go to her parents’ home in the Upper Peninsula, get the letters, and turn them over to the editor for a sizeable sum of money.

Of course she comes to treasure the letters as she reads her parents’ correspondence. And as she comes to understand the complexity of her parents’ relationship, she also begins to work through the grief over her mother’s death. Looking over the plot, I recognize that it is not groundbreaking. The strength of the film comes from its well-developed symbology: scenes of digging up and burying packages of “words,” the Corbit character unable to play his guitar and sing at the same time, the Shelly character remembering Mary’s letters verbatim and caught up in the dead woman’s existence, Reese rummaging through her mother’s dresser drawers for her father’s necktie, the tie used in the suicide.

The strength of the film also comes from the subtlety of the actors. Ed Harris always develops interesting, believable, compelling characters. His range of characters is amazing. And two of the other three matched his performance with their own subtlety of depiction. Zooey Deschanel and Amelia Warner both underplayed their emotional turmoil but it was evident at moments in the face and shoulders. And Will Ferrell, who is better known for comedic roles, decently played a troubled musician, using that flat-affect technique that often works for someone unskilled in subtlety of expression.

The settings of closed-in cluttered rooms of the Holden house are contrasted with the house and outbuildings set in an isolated and fairly open area of the Michigan UP. This exposed rural setting was further contrasted with the closed-in, cluttered New York City apartment rooms, bars, and streets. This textural contrast I liked very much. I don’t know the writer/director, Adam Rapp. I’ll have to see what else he has written, directed.

On Atonement

What is that very disturbing idea behind Atonement (2008), that those prone to fictionalize may fall prey to their own insecurities, their grudges? The child Briiony holds a grudge against Robbie, the worker on the family estate, and lets that grudge influence her interpretation of the scene at the fountain, in the library, and in the “sexual attack” scene. Not having the nerve to seek forgiveness, she atones for her crime (for it is criminal) through her fiction. She is delighted to write before the accusation . . . but she is obsessed with writing as a young adult. And the hand washing. Is she washing away the guilt? Or the blood of the soldiers she tends. Maybe both. She has no stomach for the mangled condition of some of the men. She has more “stomach” for the guilt she carries inside. Otherwise she would have sought forgiveness. It is as if her writing assuages her guilt too, too much. Writing offers respite from her guilt . . . and in the process, aids her refusal of remorse, she stuffing remorse down inside, away from her daily consciousness, she never having to feel the full impact of what she’s done, not just to her sister and sister’s lover but to her own self. She is never compelled to go in person to her sister’s hovel and beg forgiveness . . . because she writes.

The film is intriguing to me because of that idea. The acting by the three females (Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave) playing Briony Tallis was quite good, and James McAvoy, playing Robbie Turner, gave a solid performance. Keira Knightley’s depiction of Cecilia Tallis was weaker than the others, but solid enough, for playing an ingénue cannot be that easy. But it is the writing concept and the way in which the concept of writing is presented—with the constant clicking of the typewriter keys, the omnipresent rhythm of it, overwhelming the musical score in several places, the relentlessness of it—that is so striking. And the fictionality of the two lovers is strong, they being in love “just like in a book,” madly in love, the one repeating “come back to me” over and over, the literary trope flowing through the story line. The story line, also, plays into the idea of the force of writing, for the timing of scenes is perfect, just the right length, never dragging, never moving too quickly, pressing forward but not running, never dawdling, And the settings, too, very clearly filled with the sense of the past, “just like in an old book,” alive with the colors and objects of the past, and especially striking in the clutter of objects in the rooms of the hospital, the dormitory, Cecilia’s apartment, the Dunkirk beach and resort buildings. Joe Wright is masterful in shaping Ian McEwan’s story. The film works on me because of that but also because it speaks to the poet in me. So many of us fill our lives with fiction, with characters, with poetic personae, with the music and décor and ideas of the past . . . just like in a book.