The Last Station

The Last Station was amazing. Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, James sMcAvoy, and Paul Giamatti all were wonderful. The storytelling was simple, with the focus on characters—Tolstoy, his wife, the writer’s assistant, and the influential Marxian organizer—and the deep tensions between the aristocracy and rising middle class.

Jarmusch's Dead Man still the best . . . Broken Flowers just OK

I missed the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers when it came out in 2005, finally saw it this past weekend. And it was OK but not his best. Mystery Train is still my second-best favorite. Maybe I’m just nostalgic for that peculiar mix of different cultural viewpoints―the Japanese couple wanting to experience the land of Elvis―and the mixture of genres―the mysterious gunfire repeating through the scenes, the layering of the quest for identity upon a murder mystery. But my favorite Jarmusch film is still Dead Man. And it’s not just Johnny Depp’s performance and the soundtrack by Neal Young . . . although both actor and musician are amazing. It’s that “vegetable soup” of the cultures: a man with William Blake’s name and a cynical Native American who is a member of the educated class, they running into a rough outlaw band that includes a cannibal. The film borders on farce, a farce of the profundity of the Western experience and Native American life. At the same time, the film really IS profound in its exploration of the randomness of human experience and the utter failure of stereotyping. Every character, right down to the monster played by Billy Bob Thorton, escapes the boundaries of the type depicted. The true individuality of the characters comes through.

This is true of the character Bill Murray plays in Broken Flowers. His sadness over a misspent life, his quest for a purpose in life, hoping to find out whether he is indeed a father, struggling with depression after his last of many girlfriends has left him, all of these add depth to the IDEA of the film. And the Jarmusch blackouts between scenes, hyperreal flashes of memory, and lack of soundtrack in most scenes are solid as usual. But the film didn’t deliver its idea fully. It was flat in the end, not drawing out the depths of the complex motives of the character, Don Johnston. The scene in the cemetery needed flashbacks, maybe even scenes of Johnston with the girl (or was it a woman?) he loved.

Evening and The Hours

I just saw Evening, based on Susan Minot’s novel but not following it closely. The script was revised down to a well focused story by The Hours novelist, Michael Cunningham. The scenes shift well from the dying mother’s memory of the lover, Harris, to the scenes focused on the daughter, Nina, played by Toni Collette. Nina is afraid of living, afraid of having a child, afraid of loving her significant other of three years. But she is surrounded by people who offer her advice and example, subtly or blatantly, that living is not to be seen as making mistakes or making wise choices, just a matter of giving oneself to the process of living. Her mother Ann, played by Vanessa Redgrave and Claire Danes in the younger scenes, as well as the night nurse, the sister (Natasha Richardson), the significant other/father of her unborn child, and Ann’s best friend all offer Nina ways of engaging in life. Even the earlier scenes of Ann at her best friend’s wedding and with her best friend’s brother bring unity to the theme that there are no mistakes in living, just living.

Nowhere in Africa and a plague of locusts

The “plague of locusts” scene in Nowhere in Africa (2001) took me back to a harvest grasshopper “plague” when I was a child. I don’t remember the exact year, just my parents reflecting on the level of destruction by the hoppers, the ruined fields, the question of whether it was worth getting the combine in working order that summer. The film’s depiction of the stark beauty of the area of Kenya where the story is set also reminds me of southwest Kansas . . . and the desert southwest. Sparse land, spare lifestyle, a world of deprivation and beauty. The film’s story is simply told by the Jewish child, Regina Redlich, uprooted from Germany in 1938 and finding how well she fit into the culture, not of European colonizers but the natives of the area. The cook, Owuor, was for me the heart of the film, the moral center of it, with the child’s mother, Jettel, learning to overcome racism against Blacks―a blatant irony to her fleeing Germany because of anti-Semitism―and the child’s father, Walter, learning to relax patriarchal expectations of wife and daughter. The director of this film version of Stefanie Zweig’s novel (autobiographical?) was Caroline Link. I will have to see what other films she has directed.

A Single Man and Colin Firth's performance

Colin Firth’s depiction of the character George Falconer in A Single Man was amazing, emotionally complex, and very artistic. The fashion designer Tom Ford directed the film and that may explain the almost impressionistic painting-like quality of some of the images and scenes: bodies falling through water juxtaposed against swimming scenes; the posed image of George’s lover Jim lying dead beside his car with George walking toward him juxtaposed against the final scene of George lying on the floor of his bedroom in a similar pose, and Jim walking toward him; the series of scenes showing the buildings and cars and clothing and social behaviors of 1961. These were the backdrop for a beautiful and sad story of a man who cannot come out of the closet because of the closed mindedness of the 1960s American culture. The references to prejudice against communism, fear of U.S.S.R. bombs, and general mistrust of individual, social, and political differences provide the historical context for George’s careful, quiet, “single” existence.

George is presented as a literature professor who, like many lit professors, has a strong appreciation for art and for the motions and behaviors of people. His character is gentle, ethical, and appreciative of others, and in a key scene as he talks to his students about the destructive capability of humans who are prejudiced, he is pleading for understanding and acceptance without being able to reveal his sexual orientation. His example is the Nazi hatred of the Jews. He tells his students that the Nazi hatred was “not without a cause . . . just that the cause wasn’t real . . . it was fear.” He says that there are “all sorts of minorities” and if a “minority is somehow visible, then the fear is much greater.” The professor’s discussion of prejudice is lost on most of his students . . . except for Kenny Potter, who both guesses his professor’s orientation and is himself either gay or bisexual. Kenny comes on to George in a shy and intellectual way, and George responds in an ethical and caring manner, as an older man who would never take advantage of a younger person, as a conscientious professor.

The lack of any sort of tawdry action or twisted characterization was refreshing and reminded me that good filmmaking can make great art of emotionally stable people interacting in emotionally healthy ways. Even the one character who is a bit on the edge, George’s friend Charlotte who has been in love with George for years, has moments of clarity about the depth of George and Jim’s love and George’s pain after Jim is killed in the auto accident.

And while it may seem impossible, the film contained one of the quirkiest, funniest scenes of an utterly failed suicide attempt I have ever seen. Fastidious and thoughtful George, not wanting to make a mess for his friend Charlotte to find, crawls inside a sleeping bag with his gun. The viewer sees the outside of the bag as George inside of it is obviously trying to get the gut to his head. He is twisting and turning in a farcical manner, and the phone rings just then. He unzips the bag, answers the phone, and puts the gun away in the drawer. The moment has passed. The scene elicits laughter and relief at the same time.

But it is finally the love between the two men, the depth of George’s grief, and his need to understand the process of Jim’s death, of any person’s death, that stays with me. Beautiful film, tender film, such an honest film about loving and being loved, of a marginalized person living life with grace and finally facing death with that same grace. And what an ending! Absolutely stunning, absolutely perfect line and perfect image when George says “and just like that, it came.”

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