Death by Lightning

 Cable and streaming services have an insatiable demand for "content".  This demand leads to the production of shows with eccentric subject matter.  Every nook and cranny of storytelling will ultimately be explored and embodied in programs for broadcast.  What would you think if someone told you that Netflix had produced, and was prepared to host, a four-part mini-series on the political adventures of James Garfield?  I presume you would express astonishment.  But, in fact, the Netflix four part show Death by Lightning, indeed, dramatizes James Garfield's ascent to the presidency, the first three-months of his administration, and, then, his death at the hands of the assassin Charles Guitreau.  Even more astonishing, I think, is that this unlikely subject matter has been adapted into an excellent and, even, inspiring program.  This is big budget, lavishly produced, period piece, featuring many well-known actors, the men most disguised by great tufts and blankets of facial hair -- Guitreau, in particular, sports a pointed spade of a beard that seems dense enough to dig a hole.  Michael Shannon plays the noble and courageous James Garfield.  Matthew Macfadyen has the part of the psychotic Charles Guitreau, and Nick Offerman, cursing majestically, plays Chester Anderson.  (If you research these Gilded Age politicians, you will observe that the show portrays their features with, more or less, accuracy -- Betty Gilpin who has the important part of "Crete" short for Lucretia Garfield also displays an uncanny resemblance to the woman she is impersonating.)  The show is probably a "hard-sell" for most viewers, but it's remarkably good, cogently scripted and impressively mounted, and I recommend it.

Charles Guitreau is a con-man, thief, and ne-er-do-well.  In one funny sequence, he joins the Oneida Commune, a community that espoused free love.  Everyone else in the commune is enjoying plenty of robust sex -- but not Guitreau; at a meeting for self-criticism of commune members, some of the women in the group admit that they are not attracted to Guitreau and that they have nicknamed him "Charles Get-out".  Thrown out of the Oneida community, Guitreau flees to Chicago where he lives with his sister, Florence.  There is some intimation that Guitreau was badly abused by his father and that this mistreatment has left permanent scars on the man's psyche.  But this doesn't excuse Guitreau's misdeeds -- he steals money from his sister's household and, ultimately, ends up in Washington D. C., hustling there and pestering people with utopian schemes and grandiose self-aggrandizing plots.  It is in Washington that Guitreau's path collides with that of the new President, James Garfield.

Garfield is an Ohio Senator.  He's not ambitious, portrayed in the film as more of a "home-body" (the real Garfield was a philanderer and much more obviously ambitious than his fictional counterpart). At the 1880 Republican Convention, Garfield makes a nominating speech for Blaine, a reform candidate for President and a dark horse.  The speech is received with immense enthusiasm -- Garfield is an excellent orator.  When the Convention deadlocks between the Reform candidates and the corrupt New York party entrenched in the Manhattan Custom house -- this is where Chester Arthur serves a thuggish boss named Conkling -- the delegates look to Garfield and, over the course, of 34 ballots, he's becomes the Republican candidate for the Presidency.  As a compromise measure, Chester Arthur is elected candidate for the VP position.  Garfield doesn't want the nomination and can hardly be persuaded to campaign. He runs his campaign from the front porch of his house back in Ohio. If anything Arthur is even worse -- he does nothing but carry on extra-marital affairs and drink.  Nonetheless, Garfield is narrowly elected president and has to return to Washington with his wife, daughter and two sons.  In the course of the election, Guitreau, who fancies himself an imposing political operative.  He demands the opportunity to speak at various rallies and, after a couple very brief meetings with Garfield and his wife, Crete, comes to believe that he is their good friend. 

Garfield, who is believer in civil rights for the freed slaves, has trouble appointing his cabinet.  He is being subverted by Chester Arthur's boss, Roscoe Conkling of the custom's house.  There's some political intrigue and, with the encouragement of Crete, who is a staunch  ally, Conkling is expelled from the Custom's House and loses his power base.  Chester Arthur invites Garfield to fire him because he has been part of Conkling's schemes to thwart the President's appointments.  But Garfield intuits that the cheerfully corrupt Arthur harbors a more decent and upright spirit than appears on first blush and keeps him as VP.  Guitreau seeks an appointment in the Garfield administration as an ambassador to France  (on account of his French Huguenot name).  Guitreau meets Garfield who is remote and preoccupied and, although civil, has no office for Guitreau. Other members of the administration are less civil and they forcefully eject Guitreau from the White House.  Guitreau seeks to exploit the tension between the Conkling and Garfield wings of the Republican party and he comes to imagine that he is an ally of Chester Arthur and that killing Garfield will elevate Arthur to the presidency.  At a train station, Guitreau shoots Garfield twice, a 45 caliber bullet lodging in his abdomen.  The doctors of the era know nothing about germ theory and they dig around in Garfield's entrails with dirty fingernails and bloody bare hands.  In the harrowing last episode, Garfield succumbs to sepsis brought on by this treatment.  Crete visits Guitreau in jail and denounces him -- she says that his book called Truth has been intercepted by him and will not be published.  (As it happens, the book was a plagiarized collection of sermons and speeches by Noyes, the leader of the Oneida cult.)  She tells Guitreau that he will be forgotten.  In the same breath, she admits that James Garfield's abbreviated three month term of office will pretty much insure that he's wholly forgotten too.  Guitreau, still megalomaniacal, is hanged, chanting some sort of little ditty that he has written.  Two autopsies end the show:  Garfield is autopsied and, it seems, evident that he has died of medical malpractice -- the bullet, "tucked behind his pancreas" didn't damage any organs.  Guitreau's brain is extracted from his skull and put in bottle.  (I saw the bottle and brain at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia where there is a rather brutal exhibit about Garfield's assassination and the medical misadventures attendant upon it -- for instance Alexander Graham Bell deployed an early version of a metal detector to try to find the bullet that had perforated Garfield; the iron springs in his bed confounded the instrument.)  The show begins with Citizen Kane-like moment in the vast archives of the Smithsonian Institution in which a worker in 1968 finds the jar containing Guitreaus's brain (or part of it) while rock-and-roll blares on the soundtrack.  The show is decidedly funky -- everyone, including Crete, uses the word "fuck" continuously and the program has a lurid little title sequence showing mechanical men executing one another -- someone bawls out a sort of folk song scored to electric guitar; it sounds like Jack White.  The irony of Crete's last speech to Guitreau is that, based on Stephen Sondheim's musical about assassins, most people remember Guitreau better than they do Garfield.  A title at the outset of the show tells us that the program is about two forgotten men, one of whom killed the other. Garfield is portrayed as noble, lacking in vulgar ambition, and kindly.  His death has a tragic cast and the program is generous enough to spend a little sympathy on the assassin.  The term "Death by Lighting" that titles the show derives from Garfield's remark that you can't guard against political assassination any more than you can prevent "death by lightning".  The show is brilliantly written by Mike Makowsky and adapts a bestselling history, Destiny of the Republic, about Guitreau and Garfield byCandice Millard.

Train Dreams

 Train Dreams  (2025, Clint Bentley) is an American art film.  It's solemn and gravid with beauty.  Here are three quotes from the memorable dialogue in the film:  "If the Lord was a redwood, would you try to cut him down?";"The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as it needs a preacher in a pulpit;" and "The forest is an intricate thing where you can't tell where one things ends and another thing begins."  This last description also characterizes the movie -- as the film progresses, it becomes ever more a collage of memories, epiphanies in the present moment, flashbacks, and fantasies so that, at one point, the protagonist confesses that he can't distinguish from reality.  The performances in the movie are wonderful in a predictable sort of way and the photography and staging is gorgeous -- all the shots seem to be made at the "magic hour"; the wilderness landscapes are suffused with the pinkish highlights and purple glow of twilight.  Many critics think this film is the best American picture of the year.  I'm not one of them.  Although the movie is appealing, it is all lazy, sloppy, and meretricious.  

Train Dreams involves a cipher, a man named Robert Grainier, who spends his life working as a logger and, then, living as reclusive hermit in the forest somewhere near Spokane, Washington.  The picture encompasses Grainier's entire life and ends with his peaceful death in 1968.  Living on the frontier, he survives to see it close.  Grainier is an orphan -- this is a convenience to the filmmakers because it's not necessary to give him any background, place him in any pioneer social milieu, or figure out a convincing socio-economic and family context for him.  We see him wandering around the woods as a handsome young man.  There's an extraordinary shot of people posing next to a giant fish plucked out of one of the swift rivers in the area.  The young man brings water to a fellow dying from an injury inflicted on him by some unknown assailant.  Grainier brings the water in his boot.  He finds himself working on a railway trestle over a deep gorge.  For some reason, several of the roustabouts seize a Chinese man and, although Robert tries to save the man (he gets incapacitated by a kick in the belly), the railroad workers hurl the man off the high trestle.  The movie counts on us being "woke" and interpreting the attack on the Chinese worker as evidence of brutal racism -- but like Robert Grainier's biography, there's no context supplied:  for all we know the Chinese worker is being lynched for theft, or murder, or pedophilia.  For the first half of the movie, Robert is haunted by the impassive ghost of the Chinese worker and blames his misfortunes on that specter -- it's guilt that he suffers for not aiding the worker.  (In the second half of the movie, the filmmakers more or less abandon this motif and the ghostly Chinese man vanishes from the story.) In a startling prolepsis or flash-forward, we see Robert riding on a train crossing the high trestle sometime in the 1960's.  The voiceover (Will Patton who read the audio book of Denis Johnson's novella of the same name) tells us that the trestle on which so much labor was expended was replaced by a highway bridge and ended up obsolete.  This is another sign that the movie is striving for effects that it hasn't earned.  Obviously, the trestle is still in use since Robert is riding on the train crossing it on the way to Spokane.  The highway bridge serves a completely different function that the train trestle -- so, in fact, the rather portentous narrative is a kind of cheat.  I understand the lyrical effect that the film is laboring to achieve, but you can't strain for poetry by dissembling.  

After the lynching of the Chinese laborer, Grainier walks away from working on the railroad and becomes a lumberjack.  One day when he goes to Church -- this seems decidedly unusual for the laconic frontiersman -- he runs into a beautiful girl named Gladys.  She's bold and aggressive and initiates a relationship with him.  There's some poetic shots of them courting by a stream and, then, they are said to be married -- at least, in the eyes of Gladys and the Lord.  Gladys picks out a site for a log cabin which they build with their own hands -- the cabin is located within forty or so feet of a beautiful mountain river and the structure is built so the couple can look out on the stream from their bed.  (This is a memorable part of the movie involving the couple placing big stones to outline the future building with the rippling river nearby.)  Every summer and autumn, Robert goes to work at the dangerous lumber camps.  Trees fall on men and a snag called a "widow-maker" drops out of the crown of the forest and deals a mortal injury to a loquacious old man played by William Macy -- it's a Walter Brennan role and some people might applaud the snag for knocking the talkative oldtimer out of the movie.  There's a scene in which a righteous Black man invades the camp and guns down another loudmouth, a fundamentalist Christian who is always citing the Bible.  This is also a lazy scene that is irritatingly "woke" -- of course, the fundamentalist turns out to be a racist who shot the avenger's brother in Gallup, New Mexico merely "because of the color of his skin."  Of course, Christian fundamentalism here is equated with virulent racism -- this is a very lazy approach to the script and irritating.  There's tension between Grainier and his wife.  The couple now have a child, Katy, and Robert misses milestones in her childhood because he's away chopping down giant trees.  Robert tries to find work near his cabin in the woods, but can't locate anything that pays enough.  So he returns to his labor as a lumber-jack.  He and his wife plan to build a sawmill on the conveniently located river and, when he's earned enough to begin this project, he returns to his homestead.  But a horrific forest fire is under way and, when Robert reaches the site of the cabin, it has been burned to silvery ashes and there's no sign of either Gladys or Kate, the little girl.  (The film seems heavily influenced by Terence Malick's Days of Heaven and there are a number of similarities, most notably the voice-over narration and the spectacular fire scenes.)  Overcome by grief, Robert goes back to the woodcutting business, but, when he sees, one of his old cronies disabled by what may be Alzheimer's disease, he decides he want to avoid that fate and returns to the ruined cabin.  He sleeps in the ashes in the rain.  A friendly Indian who runs a general store in town assists him and the two men kill a big buck with enormous antlers -- in this part of the movie everything that happens triggers a reprise of something occurring during the idyll with Gladys:  so when the Indian aims and fires his rifle, for instance, we see a flashback to Gladys firing her rifle at a deer.  Robert rebuilds the cabin.  Times change.  He meets a spunky former nurse whose husband died -- probably as a result of being gassed in World War I.  The movie implies a romance might blossom between Robert and the young woman who is forest ranger assigned a fire-watch on the mountain. But nothing happens and she vanishes from the movie.  Robert sometimes goes into Spokane to walk around and attends a freak show there -- the "monster" is just a boy in a costume.  In one puzzling scene, a girl with a broken leg appears at the cabin in the woods and Robert, who may be hallucinating, thinks she is his lost daughter, Katy.  In the morning, she's mysteriously gone and Robert doesn't know whether she was real or a fantasy generated by his grief.  At a county fair, Robert takes a ride in an airplane and gets a vantage not only on the great woods, but also on the shape of his life. On a TV in Spokane, he sees John Glenn riding in his space capsule.  He dies in his sleep and the last shot of movie is his corpse in the cabin more or less indistinguishable from the lush moss and vegetation sprouting out of his body.  

This is all poetic and gorgeously filmed.  But falsehoods accumulate.  Grainier acquires a pregnant stray dog and this allows the film to luxuriate in shots of puppies playing with the hero.  But when Grainier has to spend the season at the lumber camp, he just leaves the dogs to their own devices.  (Later, when he returns, the dogs greet him happily -- who was watching them when he was chopping down trees?)  The most grievous instance of this sloppy screenwriting is the river rippling away merrily right in front of the cabin.  In the last forty minutes of the film, we see the cabin repeatedly, but there's no sign of the river.  When Grainier staggers out to the cabin in the fire-storm, the river has mysteriously vanished.  What has happened?  Someone has figured out that Gladys and Katy could have survived the fire if they had gone to the river and stood in it.  There is not much brush around the cabin and surely it would have been an easy thing to escape the flames by hiding in the river only a few feet from the cabin's door.  But the plot requires us to believe that Gladys and Katy were burned alive in the forest fire and, even, shows us Gladys collapsing in the fiery woods with little Katy loyally standing next to her body. (This is likely a morbid fantasy experienced by Grainier.) To avoid the problem of Katy and Gladys being spared death by seeking out the river, the stream simply vanishes from the movie -- it has moved and is not where it was during the showy scenes in which Gladys and Robert lay out their dream house. This is a cheat.  When Robert goes for the ride with a daredevil pilot in a biplane, the aircraft dives and climbs steeply over the woods and does barrel-rolls.  I have been in small planes of this kind and the fact that Robert seems to enjoy the flight rather impassively is another cheat -- certainly, a pioneer like Robert who marvels at the height of fire ranger tower would spend the entire flight puking up his guts and terrified out of his mind.  These may seem trivial  cavils but they are illustrative of the sloppy way in which the movie is constructed and the fact that it aims for implausibly lyrical effects not really justified by the circumstances.   The movie wants to dazzle you with its beauty and hopes that you won't really pay much attention of the factual elements of the story.  (I read a summary Denis Johnson's novella Train Dreams and observe that the book does not contain the "cheats" that troubled me when I watched this movie on Netflix).  

The movie is so "woke' and virtuous that I expected a final title to say that "no trees were harmed during the making of the movie".  But there was nothing of the kind.   

Melo

 When he was ten or eleven, Alain Resnais longed to see Henri Bernstein's play, Melo, then all the rage in Paris.  His parents wouldn't take him to the show deeming the play's subject unsuitable for the boy -- it's about adultery among professional musicians.  His parents, themselves, attended and brought home a program over which the boy pored over.  A facsimile of the program appears in the title sequence of Resnais' 1988 film adapting the play to the screen.  A hand turns the pages introducing us the actors in the work and the characters they play.  The cover of the 1929 program bears a sleek art deco design.

Like many of his peers in the French "New Wave", Resnais brought an experimental sensibility to film-making -- he was an innovator and pioneer with respect to the technique that he brought to cinema.  In his early career, Resnais also stretched the boundaries of narrative, working with Alain Robbe-Grillet on his first feature film Last Year at Marienbad and experimenting with fractured, even dream-like mise-en-scene in his later films.  In Melo, and similar films adapting theater works, Resnais seems to be exploring a form of cinema that is self-consciously archaic -- the experiment underway in Melo seems to be an inquiry as to how far film can go in simulating the effects of the classical theater while remaining cinematic.  With a couple of exceptions, Resnais eschew montage in Melo and rarely moves the camera.  Effects changing the audience's focus on events, ordinarily achieved by editing, are achieved by subtle manipulation of light within theatrically staged scenes -- some shots embody as many as 10 to 11 different light cues to guide the viewer's eye through the sequence. Throughout the film, the sets are elaborate but obviously theatrical, painted flats, a night sky with a big silvery moon and twinkling stars stretched on canvas between generic courtyard walls and porches.  The acting style is histrionic and highly expressive.  The play itself is an effective, but antique, museum-piece, not the sort of material that you would expect Resnais to revive (although I think the film is tribute to the director's desire to see this play as a little boy).  Bernstein's play, although well-written and captivating in its own terms, certainly isn't innovative in any way either in form or subject matter or, even, style -- a kind of elevated discourse that reminds me of classic French theater, for instance, Racine or, even, Moliere.  Resnais' taste as a director is perfectly suited to the material -- the movie is a highly refined meditation on the theatrical, also an aspect of the piece's subject matter.  Romaine, the heroine, is always acting, always performing -- and, of course, adultery requires much deceit and strategy, also, I would maintain, a form of acting or performance art.  Illusions are created and sustained by lies or obsession until they are no longer viable -- at that point, tragedy ensues.  Pauses between acts are signified by a shot of a rather baroque curtain drawn across the stage:  the curtain never parts -- it's as much of a set as the other sets in the film.  The question that the closed curtain poses is simple:  what is going on back there?  This is the same question framed by the beautiful faces, particularly of Sabina Azema who plays the film's femme fatale -- what is going on behind that lovely facade?

Two men, Pierre and Marcel, are old friends.  They are both professional violinists.  Marcel is handsome and world-weary -- he is an internationally acclaimed soloist.  Pierre is the first violinist in a regional orchestra -- compared to his friend, he's not a great success.  But Pierre has been fortunate in love -- he is married to the seductive and beautiful Romaine, who plays piano.  Romaine is charming and flirtatious,  After Marcel tells an elaborate story of the collapse of a love affair in Havana (it's an eight minute monologue shot in a single take I believe), Romaine sets out to seduce her husband's friend.  When Pierre -- Romaine calls him "Pierrot", perhaps, an allusion to the morose and lovelorn character of that name in the commedia dell 'arte (recall the melancholy figure in Watteau's great painting) -- goes to the front door to speak with Christiane, Romaine's cousin who likes Pierre, Romaine makes an assignation with Marcel.  Romaine invites Marcel to play a duet with her at his house on the following day.  Uncertain as to Romaine's intent, Marcel invites Pierrot to his house as well.  Romaine, then, says that she isn't interested any more in the rendezvous but reminds Marcel to "keep his solemn promise" to her -- namely, that they will play Brahms' Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major together. The next day, Romaine comes alone to Marcel' elaborately furnished art deco apartment where they play together.  Throughout the film, duet-playing between and man and woman stands as an emblem for sexual intercourse.  At first, Marcel resists Romaine's flirtatious invitation and nobly asserts that he owes a duty to his friend, Pierre.  But, of course, he ends up in bed with Romaine and, in this way, their affair begins.  

It's unclear to what extent, Pierre is aware of the affair.  At one point, he encounters the couple at a rather lavishly appointed night club -- it's all velvet darkness and mirrors.  Pierre is very drunk and behaves in an amiable, if somewhat bemused manner -- he doesn't seem jealous and, perhaps, we are to think that he doesn't understand what he is seeing.  At least, outwardly, his marriage to Romaine is the very paragon of a warm and loving relationship -- although we learn that Pierre would like to have children but something is restraining the couple for fulfilling that wish.  When Marcel has to go on tour for a month, Romaine is distraught and, even, begins trembling uncontrollably as if having a sort of seizure. And as if by some sort of occult infection,Pierre also becomes very ill, sick to the point that he seems about to die. Marcel returns to Paris and Romaine leaves the dying man's bedside to hasten to Marcel's apartment. Christiane, who seems to be in love with Pierre, nurses the sick man and a doctor is called.  Romaine sits in a bar by the Seine writing a final letter to Pierre.  Then, she goes outside in the movie's only exterior shot, walks along the river lit with bright globes of radiance in the otherwise inky darkness, and, descending some stone steps, vanishes.  In the next scene, several years have passed.  Pierre, who has survived his onslaught of illness, is  now married to Christiane by whom he has a child. Pierre goes to Marcel's apartment and shares with him, Romaine's final letter -- it's full of endearments, apologies,, and baby-talk.  Pierre has found a rose-petal pressed between pages in a notebook and, since Marcel is associated with long-stem red roses, now understands that his friend has cuckolded him.  The two men reconcile, playing a violin duet together. 

At the center of the movie is the character of Romaine, who exudes a sort of hysterical sexuality. Although built of steel, she contrives to seem weak and dependent so that men can rescue her.  She's both girlish and mysterious -- at one point, she turns somersaults for desperately ill Pierre to amuse him, but then literally runs away to her lover, Marcel.  The film embodies a kind of typically gallic stance:  it is like Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Sentimental Education, both swooningly and ecstatically romantic while, at the same time, maintaining a sort of jaundiced and ironic perspective on all the swooning and ecstasy.  The film's speeches are all florid and precisely observed declamations in which the speaker exposes his or her debilitating passion while remaining sufficiently cool about the emotion to be able to carefully delineate its features and characteristics.  Resnais uses his camera to optimize the viewer's own emotional response to this material.  His direction is miracle of tact, reserve, decorum, and lavish passion. The film displays the utmost in emotion strictly constrained by the limitations of the theatrical experience.       

Hedda

 Hedda is a 2025 film adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.  The film is reasonably entertaining but tone-deaf to Ibsen's particular ambience of entrapment and anxiety.  The movie compresses Ibsen's script into a debauched all night party with about forty celebrants reveling in a huge Downton Abbey-like mansion complete with a hedge maze for convenient and discrete copulation.  Hedda's party is like something thrown by Jay Gatsby -- it has a wild, lavish aspect with formally dressed young people (and their elders as well) misbehaving in vast baronial halls or on the dark manicured lawns of the mansion or carousing in the aforementioned hedge-maze.  This is vastly different from the milieu characteristic of Ibsen's famous later plays -- in Ibsen, the characters might pretend to be rich but they aren't; everyone is impecunious, in debt, living off the diminishing profits of some half-forgotten and neglected sawmill somewhere in the north near the Arctic Circle.  The parties are generally squalid affairs in which cracks and bleeding fissures open in the landscape of shabby genteel aunts and widows and alcoholic young men.  By contrast, Hedda shows us handsome, self-assured aristocrats, performing for one another at a lavish feast with a dozen servants in evidence -- there's even an upstairs-downstairs aspect to the manor house.  At one point, a servant in the kitchen comments on the debauchery upstairs.  

Hedda Gabler is one of Ibsen's most diabolical and charismatic villains, a lethal narcissist bent on destruction for its own sake.  She flirts with a vicious judge who later tries to blackmail her  (she has blithely taken a shot at the judge with her revolver at the start of the play).  Hedda resurrects a dead sexual relationship with a brilliant, but fragile, alcoholic, snatches his manuscript that everyone proclaims as brilliant and burns the sole copy of the book.  (She claims to do this to support her sexually inert and dimwitted professorial husband -- he won't make tenure if he has to compete with the genius alcoholic.  She get the alcoholic to drink, destroying his sobriety, and, then, when he realizes that he has lost his book, she gives him her pistol so he can shoot himself.  After the alcoholic, Lovborg, is dead, the weapon falls into the hands of the corrupt Judge Brack.  Brack decides to coerce Hedda into sex with him -- if she will become his mistress again, he'll withhold the scandalous evidence that Hedda's gun was the instrument that killed the man. Hedda is not willing to be compelled by any man to do anything and, so, she escapes the trap by killing herself.  Hedda's feckless husband with Lovborg's mistress sets out to reconstruct the lost book, utterly ignoring poor Hedda -- an insult that is another basis for her killing herself.  Ibsen makes this all jump off the page, propelling the plot through a series of misdeeds by Hedda, ranging from the catty and trivial to the murderous.  The movie, more or less, follows this plot but makes a couple adjustments beyond the pretentiously lavish setting in the vast medieval-looking manor.  

Lovborg, the brilliant alcoholic and former lover is played by a woman.  This imparts a lesbian angle to the story.  It also mutes the competition between Lovborg and George Tesman, Hedda's hapless husband -- in the play, he is an authority on something like 14th century Flemish furniture, and portrayed as a weak, pedantic academic.  Lovborg's brilliant book and his second writing in the form of the manuscript that Hedda ultimately burns to ashes seems to sufficiently qualify her for the tenured professorship job that is necessary for George Tesman to survive.  Everyone agrees that Lovborg, if she is really rehabilitated from her alcoholism is a far superior candidate for employment at the University than Tesman. Hedda is a portrayed as a Black woman providing a racial component to the character's discomfiture and debilitating boredom -- her opportunities are severely limited by her race.  But this isn't consistent with the decision to make the libertine, Judge Brack, also a Black man.  If racial discrimination is operative in this environment (posited to be United States in the nineteen fifties) then how is it that Brack has such wealth and power.  The action takes place from dusk to dawn at the glittering party that Hedda hosts.  This gives the movie a unity of time and action that Ibsen doesn't insist upon in his source.  Lovborg wears a ludicrous costume; she's dressed like a milkmaid in the black halter; her breasts occupy separate white bags between the various straps and suspension apparatus holding up her peasant blouse. At times, her nipples are clearly visible through the white breast-bags.  It's garb that makes the actress look more naked and exposed that if she were, in fact, nude.  I don't think anyone would voluntary dress like this -- it's a vulgar and exhibitionistic display.

The movie is pretty good and most audiences will enjoy this steamy melodrama.  But there's nothing particularly distinctive about the picture.  Ibsen manages to make his Hedda a monstrous criminal but, also, a sort of feminist insurgent -- although we are appalled by the things she does (she threatens to light a female rival's hair on fire), we also admire her for her spunk, spirit, and bloodymindedness.  The film achieves the same general effect and, so, on its own terms seems successful.  

Nouvelle Vague

Richard Linklater is a very versatile director with astonishing range.  Most of his pictures have a nervous edge, exhibiting an anxiety that they will tip over into something frankly experimental or avant-garde.  The Texas-based filmmaker wants to please the public and has produced audience-pleasing popular films -- for instance, School of Rock.  But many of his pictures are so conceptual that they feel a bit abstract and dry:  theorems rather than movies -- this was my impression of Boyhood, for instance, a movie so true to life that it was shot over many years so that the actors could age naturally and without make-up or effects.  Even films by Linklater that are popular in design, for instance, Dazed and Confused, are often so strangely aimless that they feel like cinema verite or like movies made by a slacker Renoir. Nouvelle Vague is an example of a Linklater film that is so parametric -- that is, circumscribed by rules imposed on the movie -- that it feels like the working-out of a particularly abstract and schematic problem.  Shot in black-and-white, the movie feels like a documentary and many sequences have the effect of presenting reality in an austere, strangely inconclusive manner -- the style of a documentary without voice-over or, even, a perceptible point of view and that asks the audience to draw its own conclusions from the material presented.  The film's allegiance to the actual facts of events that it dramatizes is obsessive -- actors are cast so that they closely resemble the people actually involved in the material chronicled.  Nouvelle Vague is about Jean Luc Godard directing his first feature film, the iconic "New Wave" movie, Breathless (A bout souffle), released in 1959.  Raoul Coutard shot the movie for Godard and, as an example of Linklater's fidelity to the facts, the actor cast to play the cameraman looks remarkably like him -- you can check this on Wikipedia.  In fact, all the performers look very much like their counterparts in reality -- the actor playing Godard, always wearing sunglasses, is the "spitting image" of the young director.  Similarly, the guy who plays Belmondo has the same goofy face with cartoonishly thick lips; Zoey Deutch who impersonates Jean Seberg also looks remarkably similar to the Iowa-born actress.  Linklater introduces each person with a major role in the making of Breathless -- generally, he has the person stand motionlessly before the camera while a name is superimposed on the image.  Linklater's precision in calling out the names of those involved in the 1959 production extends to make-up artists, the film's editors, and other personnel, including a rogue's gallery for French hustlers involved in wrangling the money necessary for the low-budget feature.  Linklater names (and provides portraits of) those contributing to the picture even though they have no real role in his chronicle as to the film's making.

In summary, Godard with colleagues is writing criticism at Cahiers du Cinema.   His colleague, Francois Truffaut, has just released The 400 Blows to considerable fame. Godard is jealous and wants to make a feature film himself -- hitherto, he has made some animal documentaries and an industrial movie.  He steals money from the till at Cahiers and drives to Cannes to attend the screening of The 400 Blows.  Back in Paris, he peddles a script he has written -- this is the film that would turn out to be A Woman is a Woman.  No one is interested in his script but he has also written a cheap, little film noir with Truffaut.  Truffaut is now famous as a result of The 400 Blows and, therefore, bankable; similarly, Claude Chabrol, also a Cahiers critic, has released a New Wave film, also a hit with audiences, and he agrees to serve as adviser on the movie that will be a free adaptation of the crime script written by Truffaut.  A producer named Beauregarde (they call him "Beau - Beau") puts up some money and establishes a 20 day shooting schedule.  Linklater's film then shows Godard assembling his cast and crew and shooting the movie -- each day is marked by a title on the screen, that "Day One", "Day Two", and so on. Godard wants his actors to improvise and won't tell them their lines until the morning that their scenes will be shot.  (Seberg has just worked with the highly dictatorial Otto Preminger and she's horrified and uncomfortable with Godard's minimalist direction.)  Godard works casually, often calling a stop to production after only afew set-ups and, sometimes, not working at all.  Beau-Beau is afraid that his money will be lost and he and Godard get into a slapstick physical scuffle.  Despite the shambolic aspect of Godard's location-shooting, he is very much in control of the production and, in fact, finishes the movie on time and, apparently, within its budget.  Seberg, who is on the brink of an affair with Belmondo, departs from France to make a Hollywood movie, relieved to escape from the production.  (She despises Godard.)  Linklater's movie ends with Godard directing the police confrontation and shooting with which the movie begins -- this footage requires only Godard to direct and Belmondo with a couple of extras.  Godard sets Belmondo running across a huge field and neglects to yell "cut" so the actor just keeps running.  The movie is finished and screened for its crew and cast; some people are baffled by the film's raw quality, the jump cuts, and intentionally ugly mise-en-scene; others are proud dthat they have worked on what they think is a masterpiece.  Here the movie ends -- there's no payoff as to the film being acclaimed by audiences and critics although a title tells us that the world regarded the movie as the most pure form of the French New Wave, its most characteristic picture, and one of the most influential films in the cinema history. But none of this is dramatized.

The peculiarity of Linklater's picture is best measured but what is not in the movie.  There are no explicit backstage romances and, in fact, the implied attraction between Belmondo and Seberg is merely a hint.  (Seberg has her bossy husband with her to supervise her career activities.)  The film's production is without any real crises.  Everything goes according to Godard's sketchy but, apparently, adequate plans.  There is no backstory about any of the characters -- they are defined by their role in the making of the movie.  There's no suspense and no drama.  Godard is a complete enigma -- he seems to have no private life at all.  We see him steal some money from the Cahiers' cash drawer but the act has no consequences.  He gives some self-mythologizing interviews but it's seems evident that he's just making up the incidents from his past.  He eats, breathes and sweats cinema and his dialogue consists almost entirely of enigmatic aphorisms about film. We don't know where he lives or whether he has a girlfriend -- we never see his eyes; they are always hidden by dark glasses even when he attends movie screenings.  There is no conflict on the set -- people do what Godard tells them to do and, other than the Keystone Kops scuffle with Beau-Beau, everyone gets along professionally.  Seberg's loathing for Godard is expressed to her husband but no one else.  Godard proclaims that everything about a film should be astonishing and unexpected -- but Linklater's movie is very orderly and lucid; it's predictable to the point of perversity.  Linklater doesn't direct in the style of early Godard:  there are no sudden bursts of unmotivated music, no weird punning titles, very few jump cuts or sequences that are either way too short or way too long.  The sound track is diegetic, consisting of rather smarmy pop and rock and roll tunes played in bars or on the set.  Godard doesn't fear failure but is supremely confident that he will be able to complete the movie on-time.  The great puzzle about this movie, a very interesting film if you know Breathless and Godard, is why it was made in the first place.  I don't see that it adds anything to Breathless nor does it help us to better understand Godard.  I liked the movie because I'm interested in Godard.  I think that if you don't share my interest, you will be baffled by this picture.  Linklater puts in reel markers, although, of course, contemporary films so far as I know aren't projected in reels but somehow displayed digitally -- about every twenty minutes, a mark will flash on the screen signaling that the projectionist should get ready to change the reel -- this is a homage to the way movies were projected in the early 1960's and, of course, before.  I don't know the intent of this film and it haunts me that I can't account for why the picture should even exist.  

Black Rabbit

 Black Rabbit is a cathedral of heroic manly acting, it's an epic of quivering, fist-fighting masculine histrionics.  The two combatants in this eight episode agon on Netflix are Jason Bateman (Vince in the show) and Jude Law playing his younger brother, Jake.  The two principals howl abuse at one another, embrace, wrestle, butt heads, and emote to the point that the audiences is exhausted and, in fact, yearns to see one or the other rubbed out by the complex narrative involving loan sharking, gambling, sexual harassment, and every variety of greed, lust, and betrayal.  The mini-series -- it has eight episodes -- is at pains to show that the two brothers are in love with one another, have an impregnable bond, although each hates, despises, and loathes the other.  Law and Bateman chew up the scenery, foreheads furrowed and jaws set in virile defiance and rage.  In one particularly egregious scene, the two men find themselves stripped to their underpants and, nonetheless, engage in titanic name-calling and mutual denunciation -- it's turgid and ridiculous but, I suppose, if you have a hankering for this kind of thing its pretty good; the actors do a fine job but there's just too much of it.  In fact, the show is overlong by three hour-long episodes, all bloated with backstory and flashbacks and repetitive, melodramatic battles between Vince and Jake, but it's actually compelling, quite interesting, and, despite my reservations about the project (On the Waterfront with not one but two bellowing Marlon Brandos) good enough to sustain attention for eight hours.  It's a wildly ambitious mini-series and full of so much material that a lot of the stuff thrown up at the wall sticks and coheres into an exciting story.  

Apparently, the show is based on real-life scandals afflicting a trendy restaurant in NYC, the Spotted Pig, a sexual harassment venue featuring a so-called "rape room" and a celebrity chef, Mario Batali.  Jake is successfully running a popular restaurant on Water Street under the majestic arch of the Brooklyn Bridge.  This place called "The Black Rabbit" has a celebrity chef who is famous for her 50 dollar hamburgers, strange-looking victuals that seem to have a marrow bone stuck through the meat -- how do they apply the bun?  Unfortunately, a evil painter (no doubt based on some NYC celebrity artist) is raping the comely blonde waitresses in the bar, knocking them out with date-rape drugs and taking advantage of the poor girls.  (The painter has a vicious fixer who covers up all of his misdeeds.)  When one of the girls, Anna, is raped, she doesn't show up for work and Jake, who is seemingly unaware of the bad stuff happening in his establishment, fires her.  This leads to a complex series of developments that begin to unravel "the Black Rabbit".  Adding to the chaos is the sudden reappearance of the ne'er-do-well Vince, Jake's older brother, who is a degenerate gambler and petty, small-time criminal.  Vince as once a partner in the Black Rabbit and is bitter about being bought out and expelled from the lucrative venture.  There are various other partners, including a wealthy professional athlete and possibly also a rapper, named Wes.  Vince gets in trouble with a cruel loan shark, Mancuso, and, when he can't pay off the loan, Mancuso's son, Junior, with a beefy henchman, corners Vince in an elevator and cuts off his pinky finger as punishment for not timely paying his debt.  Ultimately, Vince and Jake burn down their deceased mother's house for insurance money but this cash is all lost by Vince who gambles it away.  For some reason, a famous jewelry producer decides to advertise a million dollars worth of gems, necklaces, diamond-encrusted wrist watches at the Black Rabbit.  Vince still looking for money ends up putting on a disguise and, with an accomplice, robbing his own brother's business.  Needless to say, the heist turns into a gunbattle in which several of the main characters are either killed or wounded.  Mancuso still wants his money and so he chases both Vince and Jake relentlessly for the last two episodes -- this sequence is like the breathless and lethal games of  tag that occupy almost all of One Battle After Another, and this sort of thing, if done well (and it's done well in Black Rabbit) is very exciting.  There are all sorts of baroque details:  the main gangster is a mute, who can't talk and communicates through sign language; there are parallel plots involving fathers and sons and, even, an unmistakable intimation that the loan shark is one of the boys' father himself.  There are flashy molls, car chases, dire threats, blackmail, attempted and successful murders, and a man killed by a child dropping a bowling ball on his head.  This is one of those shows that is so self-important, it can't bring itself to just end -- it has a long coda scored to a famous hit ("We'll make Manhattan an island of joy") from many years ago and lots of luminous imagery of the plot's survivors now doing well by doing good. 

The show is very strangely photographed. Every single shot uses focus to concentrate the viewer's attention on the part of the image significant to the story.  To accomplish this effect, characters often appear behind veils of blurry foreground objects.  In some shots, two-thirds or, even, three-fourths of the image is occluded by blurry obstructions in the foreground.  In other shots, both foreground and background are left unfocused so that only a sliver of space in the middle distance is clear.  The effect is subliminal -- although I noticed it after about 15 minutes. The entire picture uses this style of photography which is somewhat akin to the old iris effects in silent movies.  I don't like this way of making a picture because it fetters the viewer's eye and seems to me to be manipulative and coercive -- I want the visual freedom to roam with my eyes across the background and foreground as well.  Black Rabbit  has about four directors distributed among its episodes including Jason Bateman and Laura Linney -- but every single scene in the picture, no matter the director, is framed with big swaths of the image intentionally blurred.  The visual style of the series is dire and gloomy, handheld treks through steam baths and chaotic kitchens, labyrinths of skyscrapers filmed by drones silently whirring over the urban landscape -- it's mostly dark and the shots layered with blur around a sandwich slice of focus enforce an effect of monotonous claustrophobia on the viewer.  The series is interesting but overwrought and seriously flawed.

Cosi Fan Tutte

 After two world wars had soured western civilization, Mozart's opera buffa Cosi Fan Tutte was revived.  Before the middle of the 20th century, the opera was regarded as too indecent and immoral to be comfortably performed.  Certainly, the Cosi Fan Tutte's corrosive cynicism and misogyny poses problems even today.  For this reason, the Minnesota Opera Company's recent production of the show cheats a bit with respect to the ending, the conclusion to the work that is generally regarded as unsatisfactory and, even, so cheerfully amoral as to make modern audiences uncomfortable.  In the Minnesota Opera adaptation, the audience is invited to vote at the end of Act I, selecting one of three outcomes:  the two couples resume their relations as depicted in the first scene or the two couples switch partners or the two couples, realizing their amorous sport has irrevocably damaged their relationships, decide to part and go their separate ways.  (Mozart, it should be noted, is an advocate for forgiveness in amorous affairs -- he has the men and women forgive one another their transgressions and restores them to the status quo at the outset of the libretto.  Of course, Mozart and DaPonte's capricious and sexually promiscuous bagatelle is scored to some of the most beautiful music that the composer ever wrote and the texture of the opera is incredibly lush, voluptuous, and eerily logical.

Cosi Fan Tutte's plot is quite simple and, as I've suggested, worked out like a mathematical theorem.  The story turns on the ancient and implausible "test of love" premise -- this is a plot in which a man or several men perversely decide to test the faithfulness of their lovers.  This is always a bad idea.  The men generally discover that, as far as the women, are concerned one lover is as good as another -- love partners, at least, among the young and uncommitted are, more or less, completely fungible.  The plot can take a tragic turn if the jealous men, humiliated by the outcome of the trial of love, decide to murder or beat the women, or end of killing each other.  At minimum, the trial of love results in a disenchantment of the concept of romantic love -- despite sighs and pledges of devotion for eternity, human beings are fallible and, inevitably, they follow their desires to the disadvantage of their plighted troth.  

In the Minnesota Opera's show, two sisters, Fiodilige ("F") and Dorabella ("D") are said to be from Faribault and engaged respectivly to two dimwitted lovers Guglielmo ("G") and Ferrando ("F"), identified as coming from Anoka.  A philosopher says that women are all unfaithful and that he will propose a trial of their fidelity that will result in decisive proof of this proposition within one day.  (In this production's imagining, the women are corporate executive types who seem to be running some kind of PR firm.  The men are avid gamers and slackers, it seems.) The philosopher, Don Alfonso, tells the girls that their boyfriends, who are soldiers, have been deployed over seas.  After much sonorous lamenting, Male F and G depart, only to reappear a minute later as bearded rascals who look like the members of the band ZZ Top.  (Mozart described the men as being in disguise as bearded Albanians -- that seems a bit racist and politically incorrect for 2025 and so the boys in disguise are not provided with any ethnic identity.  The men lay siege to the women who remain steadfastly faithful.  Male F and G, then, up the ante, pretending to swallow arsenic in their despondency.  Despina, the women's office manager (she's a saucy maid in DaPonte's libretto), appears in disguise as a quack doctor and uses a static electricity magnet to shock the men, who are pretending to be comatose, into consciousness.  This is all very funny and, after a chorus, Act One ends with Don Alfonso's wager still outstanding:  the girls have proved their virtue and their lovers feel vindicated.

(Any vote on the plot taken at the opera's half-time would be based on inconclusive evidence:  for the first half of the three house opera, the women are true to their vows.)  

In the second half of the show, Male F easily woos and wins Fiodiligi -- Male F gloats over the ease with which he seduced G's girlfriend, attributing this to his erotic superiority.  In fact Despina, the office manager, has been cajoling the girls into commencing an "innocent" flirtation with the two hirsute lads. D holds out longer, but there's a full moon and the park is full of courting lovers and ultimately she succumbs to G's courting.  Despina, pretending to be a notary and squawking like a chicken, appears and draws up marriage contracts for Male F to wed F and G to wed D.  In other words, the couples have blithely switched romantic partners.  D sings several arias about her loneliness and withstands G's efforts to woo her, but, ultimately, consents to his blandishments.  At this point, the hairy-faced G  and male F shed their disguises and return from the fictional wars where they were supposedly deployed.  Mozart has Don Alfonso counsel forgiveness, Despina is silenced, and the couples revert to their original formation (F with G, D with male F).

The opera is blithe,funny, and tuneful.  The staging is a bit limp.  There are two thresholds on wheels on stage that look like nothing other than metal detectors at an airport.  People keeping passing through these two doorways, taking care to move through them, because there are notional walls enclosing the thresholds -- it's an irritating set and distracting to see the performers walk along strange pathways to always use the metal detector entries.  There are no sets to speak of other some office furniture of a particularly bland type.  Large blue and green colorfields close off the stage and the scenery and costumes have some of the whimsical brightly colored aspects of the sets famously used at Glyndebourne.  The lighting was clear and, also, largely bright.  The seduction of Dorabella is staged against a pale purplish night sky in which a big moon is projected.  I thought the singing was, by and large, serviceable, but, certainly, not on par with the performers appearing in the Summer Festival in Des Moines.

The audience, apparently, voted to vindicate the two women who are much put upon in this opera by their deceitful lovers.  At the end of the show, the women slap their lovers on the face and depart, apparently, rejecting their boyfriends and their grotesque trial of love that has led to all of this confusion.  This is, in keeping, with modern criticism that sides with the women against the men who mount this absurd and dangerous game.  Mozart has written the last scene with a number of reversals to that, it seems, that any of the three endings that the situation presages could be plausibly staged.  (I didn't vote because I couldn't find the amenity to cast my ballot; I  wonder how the other shows turned out.)  In other period performances of this show, the libretto seems exceptionally confusing and hard to follow.  In this production, the two lovers look very different -- one is tall and lanky, the other is short, stocky, and fat.   Therefore, it's easy to keep to lovers apart in your mind.  Likewise, the women are color-coded with respect to their garments and accessories and so we can distinguish between.them. Despite its length, the show was continuously amusing.  My daughter Angelica was enthralled by the whole thing and applauded enthusiastically.