1984

 Director Michael Radford's 1984 is grim, grey sarcophagus of a movie.  Made between April and June in 1984, the film replicates in its production the period of time depicted in the novel (the action seems to occur in that time frame.)  The movie is excruciatingly faithful to George Orwell's novel published in June of 1949.  Big Brother says it is your duty to see this film, but you will suffer.

I have always found Orwell's novel 1984 highly unpleasant and a real trial to read.  The novel is so humorless and unrelievedly depressing that it's actually left scars on my imagination.  I recall with pain the scene in which some thug casually smashes Winston Smith's elbow, inducing horrible pain; Smith finds it particularly degrading to be writhing on the floor and screaming over an insult to his elbow.  (The movie with its commitment to literal adaptation of the book reproduces this scene.) There's another moment at the end of the book in the Chestnut Cafe, a sort of junkyard for enemies of the regime who have been reduced to skeletal zombies, when Winston meets his former lover Julie.  Julie earlier told Winston that she didn't like children, was afraid of childbirth, and didn't ever want to be pregnant.  Winston notices that she's somewhat "thickened around the middle" (I'm approximating) -- apparently, this is due to the fact that she's been raped and impregnated and seems to have borne a child.  There are some horrible suggestions made as to how she's been tortured by a regime that she now loves (as a result of brainwashing) far more than she ever loved Winston.  Winston also stares at the telescreen on which Big Brother is shown and swoons with love for the autocrat.  Orwell imagined 1984 to be a satire, but there's not a shred of comedy in the book (and movie) except ironies that are too dark to be funny.  1984 is one of the 20th centuries greatest novels and an abiding presence in our culture -- but, as far as I'm concerned, the book is too profoundly disheartening to be entertaining and here, unlike many other writings by Orwell, the author takes himself with brutish seriousness.  The severity of the book carries over into the movie and makes some of it well-nigh unwatchable.

The film begins with a two minute "Hate Session" in which the lower ranking members of the Party shriek and howl at the great nemesis to Big Brother, the evil spy and reactionary Emmanuel Goldstein.  Winston,  whose job is erasing apparatchiks who have fallen out of favor from the historical record -- he covers their faces with the pictures of other party functionaries and throws all evidence of the erased figures into a "memory hole" where flames instantly flare to burn the proof into ashes.  Winston who is secretly guilty of thought-crime (he has procured a notebook and writes subversive things in it) despises Julie for her compliance with the regime -- it's not that she does what she is ordered to do, but that she does so enthusiastically.  Julie, wears the red sash of the anti-Sex league around her belly, and manages machines (some kind of AI) that writes porn for the proles.  Everyone swills Victory gin.  War is perpetual and sometimes buzz bombs shred parts of the gloomy, half wrecked city.  There are painful flashbacks in which Winston sees his mother devoured by fat, black rats.  In one flashback, he steals food from his dying little sister.  When he returns to the squalid apartment after eating the chocolate bar, his mother and sister have simply vanished.  A man named Charrington runs a second-hand store and sells Winston a bit of coral that is enclosed in a sort of snow-globe.  Charrington has a furnished bedroom above the shop and, later, for four dollars a week rents the place to Winston and Julie for their romantic trysts.  (The movie doesn't acknowledge that Winston is already married when he has the affair with Julie, a detail from the novel that is elided.)  For some reason that is inexplicable to me, Julie, who seems a frisky damsel, passes Winston (played by John Hurt in an utterly morose and tediously sorrowful part) a "mash note."  No sooner is the note handed to Winston than he and Julie are having sex in the country, writhing on the floor of a forest, near a vista of trees and bare hills that looks exactly like a screensaver on a computer -- a bit like the rolling Dublin, California hills famously used as an image of a restful green world on a million million monitors.  (For some reason that I couldn't fathom, the screensaver shot, which re-occurs every ten minutes or so, is located behind the door to Room 101, the infamous torture chamber where victims are forced to confront whatever they most fear in all the world.  Winston's love affair with Julie features a lot of nudity -- this is an intentional strategy to make the lovers look horribly vulnerable against the ruins of the shattered city, the thugs in black leather garments and the hovering helicopters.  Richard Burton, who was dying when he performed in the movie, plays the part of the Grand Inquisitor and torturer, O'Brien.  Briefly, O'Brien seems to treat Winston as his protegee, explaining that the bureaucrat isn't using Newspeak correctly and that he needs to master new words in the vocabulary.  O'Brien insists that when the language is perfected (that is Newspeak), the revolution will have achieved its objectives.  A few minutes later, goons arrest Julie and Winston, who are both naked, and beat them up.  Winston is, then, tortured for about a half-hour, an episode that is hard to watch and that is singularly unpleasant.  Winston is reduced to an emaciated figure who looks like a concentration camp inmate.  The objective of the torture is torture; there's no purpose to it.  The idea is to destroy Winston so thoroughly that he can believe that 2 + 2 = 5 or 3 or whatever the party says the sum should be.  Winston is tortured with electric shots to the point that he doesn't know what the 2 + 2 sum is -- when he tries to avoid the crippling jolts of electricity by saying "five", he's accused of lying and the electrical charge is increased.  This goes on and on.  At one point, O'Brien says that Winston thinks he is upholding the dignity of man -- O'Brien, then, drags him to a mirror and shows him his reflection, a hideous, scabby, lice-infested scarecrow; then, he rips one of Winston's teeth from his gums -- starvation has made this an easy thing to do.  This spectacle is followed by the infamous episode in Room 101 involving hungry rats.  Winston screams that O'Brien should torture Julie with the rats and spare him.  Finally, O'Brien is convinced that Winston loves Big Brother -- the whole exercise is without meaning or practical effect; the Party will require Winston to confess all manner of ridiculous crimes ("I went to prostitutes to intentionally infect myself with syphilis so I could spread the disease to party members") since the plan is to put a bullet through his brain at some point after his abject humiliation has been sufficiently shown to the world.

Clearly, the movie is about Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Union.  Orwell's novel is bitter, a result of the dissolution of his early idealism that led him to fight for the Communists in the Spanish Civil War -- all his idealism was reduced to a mouthful of ashes when he saw that the Party was corrupt and rife with betrayal.  This experience seems to have led to the book and, therefore, to the movie.  The film's bitterness is pathological and the form of the movie is utterly consistent with its subject -- the picture is shot in color reduced to a grey, concrete-colored monochrome; the editing is quick, sometimes suggesting Soviet style montage and the movie is comprised of big hideous close-ups:  everyone looks terrible in the sweaty close-ups that the movie features.  Even Julie is decidedly plain and Richard Burton looks wan, chalky, and bloated, like someone who has spent too much time boozing in a wretched pub.  During the movie's 110 minutes run time, I yearned for escape.  In my imagination, the escape was Terry Gilliam's Brazil which is the same movie  on the same subject but far more entertaining, it's surreal humor not blunted by all the misery and torture.  Everyone should see 1984 --it's your duty.  But cleanse your palate with the much more engaging if equally savage satire you will find in Gilliam's great Brazil.  

The Chase (1946)

 After World War Two and Citizen Kane, Hollywood experimented with different and, sometimes, radical approaches to narration.  Films featured false (or badly remembered) flashbacks, narration delivered by a corpse floating in a swimming pool at a mansion off Sunset Boulevard, and stories nested within stories.  The late David Bordwell has written a book on this subject, characterizing it as Hollywood's reinvention of narrative.  Godard said that his pictures had a proper beginning, middle, and end but just not in that order.  The same can be said for many post-war film noir.  Arthur Ripley's 1946 noir, The Chase (adapting Cornell Woolrich's The Black Path of Fear) is a noteworthy example of the sometimes hallucinatory innovations in narration characterizing that period.

A troubled war veteran is starving on the streets.  While ravenously watching a cook making eggs and bacon through a glass window, the vet, Scotty, finds a wallet on the street.  Fundamentally an honest man, Scotty treats himself to a meal, buys a cigar, and, then, sets off to find the owner of the wallet.  In a lavish marble mansion, Scotty encounters a smarmy and sadistic gangster named Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran).  The mansion is filled with Greek and Roman statuary; there's an obsequious butler, a henchman played by a lithe and serpentine Peter Lorre, and, of course, a blonde moll as cool and marmoreal as the statures strewn about the place.  Roman admires Scotty's sangfroid and honesty and hires him to be his chauffeur.  First, he tests Scotty's driving ability by making him steer the limousine while Roman operates a floor accelerator in the backseat, goosing the big car so that it roars toward a train on a railway track at over a hundred miles an hour.  Roman and Scotty narrowly avert a crash.  Peter Lorre wipes sweat off his face.  Scotty gets the job.

Scotty is played by Robert Cummings who purses his lips and spends most of the movie looking baffled.  He gulps down pills by the score, apparently some kind of tranquilizer since he has PTSD from his service in the Navy in the War.  Scotty's main assignment is carting Roman's moll, Lorna, around southern Florida.  Needless to say a romance ensues between Lorna and Scotty.  Scotty buys tickets planning to elope with Lorna to Havana.  They cross the sea on a steamer and, in Havana, someone knifes Lorna and plants the murder weapon on Scotty.  He flees through the shadows of Havana and takes refuge in a curio shop.  A Chinese merchant, an old woman, appears as a figure of doom.  Ultimately, the bad guys, including Lorre, pursue Scotty through the blackness of the curio shop, having gunned down the old woman.  Scotty is shot and falls down some stairs.  But it's revealed that this has all been a dream.  Scotty has fallen asleep in his room, waiting for nine pm when he intends to abscond to the port with Lorna.  Now, Scotty is completely amnesiac and can't even recall who he is, let alone his plot to elope with his fearsome boss's girlfriend.  He finds the number of his psychiatrist, possibly on the pill bottle and calls.  The two men meet and, then, adjourn to a glitzy nightclub  - how this could be construed as therapeutic is hard for me to see.  Eddie Roman and his gun-thug, Peter Lorre also come into the same glittering and overlit night club.  Scotty sees Roman and, then, remembers his mission for the night.  He darts away in a hurry to pickup Lorna.  Roman and Lorre chase after him, Lorre holding the steering wheel and Roman manning the accelerator from the backseat.  The limousine races to beat a speeding locomotive but slams into the train crossing at the same time that the locomotive has reached that point.  There's a big, fiery wreck.  Meanwhile, Scotty and Lorna sail for Havana.  They reach Cuba and the film repeats previous shots of them in front of a nightclub --  images we saw in the first half of the film.  Lorna embraces Scotty and ostensibly the film ends happily ever after.

The plot is barely serviceable and compromised by the use of dream to rewrite the fatal history of Lorna and Scotty's elopement.  But it's flamboyantly made achieving surreal effects on what must have been a very low budget.  Cochran, who plays Eddie Roman, was a bad guy in real life, "pretty much a douche" as Guy Maddin characterizes him on the commentary -- in the film, he viciously slaps a girl giving him a manicure, taunts his wife, and makes strange quasi-homosexual remarks.  In feeds a business rival to his mastiff in one memorable scene; Ripley accomplishes the murder with just shadows, darkness, a broken bottle of Napoleon cognac, and the sound of a growling dog.  Havana is filmed like a von Sternberg location -- it's all shimmering moire patterns of light and dark, shadowy grillwork, steps and ladders lit to cast huge shadows, a tropical pattern of dark lattices and roving points of light; no one's face is ever visibile.  There are odd dreamlike kinds of interference and paralysis.  When Scotty tries to leave the crowd in front of the night club, the hack driver suddenly starts speaking impenetrable Spanish and no one can understand him or communicate their destination.  It seems that the man would refuse to go where they want anyway.  Some early love scenes are shot with rear projection of the stormy sea, a tropical pier, and someone with a bucket of water simulating surf by sometimes tossing white handfuls of water into the range of the camera. Oddy enough it's very effective in a turbulent, Emily Bronte-style  a kind of demotic Gothic.  After the dream we have a sense of fatality, events repeat themselves in a strange way.  Everything has more or less already happened and now is coming back as farce or delirium.  The editing seems slightly agitated, disjunct, shots don't exactly fit together right leading to a sense that the space in which the movie happens is full of fractures, gaps, parts that don't mesh right.  The climactic scenes with the speeding train and the limousine in its pursuit are filmed with obvious miniatures -- it looks completely phony, but the hero is the plaything of fate and the spectacle of a tiny car and locomotive colliding somehow seems symbolic of the movie's dreamlike aura.  

I bought the DVD primarily for the self-effacing commentary of the great Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin.  His narration is primarily biographical, sketching outlines of the careers of the principal figures in the movie, including a memorable and hair-raising account of Steve Cochran's death.  Maddin is fanatical about dates and film titles and presents a queer perspective that is simultaneously hard-boiled and fey.  At one point, he says of Cochran:  "you wouldn't want to be his cell-mate", then, pauses and murmurs "Or, maybe, you would."   The leading lady, Michele Morgan, was a French actress who had fled to the United States during the war years; she died in 2016 at the chronological age of 96 but technically was only 24 -- she was born on February 29, 1920.

 

The Stunt Man

 Released in 1980, director Richard Rush's The Stunt Man is a vibrant example of seventies' counter-culture film-making at its best.  There's plenty of casual sex, nudity, and grind-house style violence.  The picture has a loose, "anything goes" atmosphere.  At the same time, there are pot-head profundities on display:  the movie is about the ubiquity of betrayal in Hollywood, about the effects of the Vietnam war, and, even, a meditation on the nature of reality:  since the picture is the backstage chronicle of an ambitious director shooting a World War One epic, we are invited to deliberate on what is real and what is fictional.  The director is played by Peter O'Toole, probably a caricature of Francis Ford Coppola on t location for Apocalypse Now.  O'Toole as Eli Cross, a narcissistic director, never has his feet on the ground -- he is literally suspended on his crane, hanging in midair, generally with no obvious means of support, or zooming around in a small helicopter, the so-called "chopper" as it is called in the movie.  I said the movie features pot-head profundities, a comment that is not intended to be derogatory, and the film insists, I think, that Cross is not only a flamboyant film maker but, also, "the grand inventor" of all things, God himself.  (O'Toole is more convincing in this role than the deity that appears in the Bible.)  The picture is a peculiar and unstable mixture of serious subject matter, high-flown eloquence, and down-and-dirty pulp fiction with gratuitous sex, tits and ass, and lots of elaborately staged explosions and chases.  The director, Richard Rush, is an enigma -- he cut his teeth on low-budget exploitation films, made The Stunt Man, which was highly regarded in its time, and, then, slipped back into audience-pleasing genre pictures. Critics determined that Rush was neither 'fish nor fowl", not exactly Francis Coppola but, also, considerably superior to the exploitation films that he ended up making.  Hollywood likes type-casting not only in its actors but also directors and, since no one could really assimilate The Stunt Man (famously praised by Pauline Kael as one of the best pictures of the year) Rush wasn't given the right material for his talent and ended-up slipping out of view.

The Stunt Man was one of two novels written by the New Yorker investigative reporter Paul Brodeur.  It was published in 1970 before Brodeur became well-known for his crusading journalism -- he was one of the investigators that exposed the carcinogenic effects of asbestos and was, generally a specialist in pollution and toxic tort exposes.  My suspicion is that the unique qualities of The Stunt Man derive from what were probably literate and, even, high-toned aspects of the source novel.  The picture involves a Vietnam war veteran on the run from the cops and probably suffering from what we would call today "PTSD."  The veteran stumbles onto a film set involving a classic car crashing off an old bridge into a river.  The car is driven eccentrically and the vet believes that it is trying to run him down.  He interferes with the car and, then, sees it plunge off the bridge and into the river.  (Although the car crash is an effect in the film that Cross is making, the vet interprets it as occurring because of his efforts to avert the vehicle from running over him.)  A stuntman drowns in the crash.  The vet continues his escape and ends up at a beach where a battle is being filmed "with five cameras", a big spectacle involving many showy explosions, fragmentary corpses (they turn out to be men in make-up half buried in the sand) and bi-planes strafing the advancing troops.  A cop is investigating the disappearance of the stuntman whom we know to have drowned in the river.  He harasses the director and his crew and, under pressure, they claim the scruffy fugitive is, in fact, the missing stunt man.  The cop smells a rat but he can't get to the bottom of the ruse.  Cross hires the vet who is impersonating a stunt man to perform real stunts in the movie.  They call the vet "Lucky."  Lucky turns out to have genuine gift for "hell for leather" stunts involving significant danger.  He has sex with a make-up girl and, then, is seduced by the film's leading lady played by an angelic-looking Barbara Hershey.  After some amusing chases filmed in Keystone Kop manner by Cross -- Lucky evades an army of inept German troops wearing comical Pickelhaube (that is, Prussian helmets with spear-point tops) by clambering all over the complicated gables and eaves of the Coronado Hotel (a landmark on the beach in San Diego).  Some of the stunts seem lethal and are increasingly dangerous and Lucky comes to believe that Cross is trying to engineer his death -- probably to conceal the actual death of the stunt man in the river.  In the course of his love affair with the film's leading lady, Lucky learns that the character is also sleeping with Eli Cross.  This leads to some quarrels.  Hershey is puzzled by Lucky's naivety -- she says that actresses having sex with directors is just the way the industry works.  Lucky and the actress get drunk and have a slapstick love scene involving a set that they partially destroy and about forty gallons of paint.  (There's a fantastic purely seventies' line in this scene -- Barbara Hershey who is half-naked and covered in paint, cries out:  "We gotta get organized!")  Lucky acts out the offense for which the cops are chasing him -- he beat up his wife's boyfriend  (she was unfaithful when he was in 'Nam) in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop -- and persuades Hershey that he is fundamentally harmless.  (As a Vietnam vet everyone has suspected him of rape, murder, and various war crimes.)  Cross persuades Lucky to perform the stunt that killed the other stunt man.  He and the leading lady plot to flee the film set and avoid the potentially deadly stunt in the river.  This sets up the climax of the movie.  

Pauline Kael commended the movie as "kinetic" and film's mise-en-scene is, indeed, a triumph of controlled, vivid chaos.  In the opening scene, a buzzard snatches an apple as two line-men look on and, then, are confronted by the fleeing vet.  The sequence involving the first river stunt features a picture perfect stream running in a narrow gorge -- there's a tree off-balance and about to topple into the water, a memorably strange image.  Much of the film is staged like a silent comedy, in particular, the scene in which the vet clambers all over the facade of the Coronado Hotel as dozens, if not hundreds, of German soldiers pursue him firing guns and dodging bullets blasted down on the crumbling structure by a pesky bi-plane -- this is a triumph of action film-making both comical and scary and it's as good as anything Steven Spielberg has done.  Even dialogue sequences jerk and spastically dance around -- huge waves batter a sea-wall splashing thirty feet in the sky in one scene.  The camera placement is exemplary and the editing is sharp as a razor.  Pennants whip in boil in the wind.  Surf pounds the beach and, overhead, the helicopter banks and turns and spirals.  Peter O'Toole's Eli Cross seems sometimes to underplay and act down to earth, but, most of the time, his British diction is perfect and rotund and he declaims his speeches as if they were Shakespeare.  O'Toole's dramatic delivery if offset by the grungy appeal of Steve Railsbeck who plays Lucky -- the contrast between the two acting styles is one the pleasures offered by this movie.  Expensively made and brilliantly acted, The Stunt Man is as fun as a cult movie, but better, I think.  

Sentimental Value

 Joachim Trier's 2025 Sentimental Value is an ambitious picture that explores, among other things, intergenerational trauma, art as therapy, self-destructiveness, and intricate family dynamics.  Trier is painting with a broad brush and freights his film with too much material -- there is too much neurosis, guilt, and reconciliation in the movie; I found it exhausting and, after ninety minutes, was longing for the thing to be over -- I think its two hours and 13 minutes long.  This is an estimable movie by an important director but it's excessive in the sense that the viewer can't quite keep the various patterns devised by the director in mind -- presented in short sequences that end with the screen suddenly dark, the movie has a staccato rhythm and, despite its potentially lugubrious subject matter, the film has a light touch -- it's like one of Woody Allen's pictures from the eighties without the one-liners and Borscht belt gags; in fact, the movie has a role that seems tailor-made for Woody Allen -- this is the part of Gustav, the manipulative director, who seems brazenly willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of his art.  With a little spin, the movie's rather Gothic subject matter could be presented as a black comedy -- Trier doesn't opt for comedy but, I admire him, for not shaping his material into some sort of tragedy or melodrama either.  He's a realist, at least in this movie and most of what we see and hear is plausible on the level of quotidian observation -- these seem to be real people and their interactions aren't heightened, nor do they veer into Bergman's metaphysical darkness.  In its odd way, it's a companionable movie.

The intergenerational trauma underlying the movie is socio-historical and, also, personal.  Gustav's mother was a psycho-therapist, practicing in the family's wonderful-looking early Victorian house.  During World War Two, she was betrayed by neighbors as a member of the Resistance, sent to a camp, and severely tortured.  When Gustav was eight, his mother hanged herself, an enigmatic and catastrophic act that is either over-motivated or under-motivated depending upon how you view things.  Gustav is a film-maker and has achieved international fame.  He's also seventy and hasn't made a movie for fifteen years.  But he has written a script about his mother which he regards as his magnum opus.  Netflix is interested in financing the movie and Gustav is engaged in machinations to cast the film, hire a director of photography and a technical crew, to get the picture made.

Gustav has two daughters by his wife whom he has divorced.  The movie begins at the family home where people are gathered after the funeral of Gustav's ex-wife.  No one seems particularly griefstricken -- these are Norwegians and they are masters at maintaining a stiff upper lip.  Nora, the eldest sister, is an actress who has appeared in a TV series but is mostly active in Oslo's theater.  She suffers from severe stage-fright.  In an early scene, we see her refusing to go on-stage during the premiere of some classical drama -- it may be Chekhov's The Sea Gull or some other work in the classical repertoire.  Nora flees through the backstage area, fights people trying to drag her on stage, and, then, summons her married boyfriend and demands a lightning sexual encounter with him.  He says there's not enough time and, so, Nora replies that he should hit her hard in the face to knock her out of her hysteria.  He slaps her and, after some more struggles, she goes on-stage and, apparently, amazes everyone with her performance.  Later, Nora says that she's only 20% functional and 80% fucked-up.  Her dysfunction consists of anger and loneliness with depression.  By contrast, Agnes, Nora's little sister, is successful -- she seems to be happily married, has an eight-year old son on whom she dotes, and works as an "academic historian" as she says.  Gustav's flamboyant and belated appearance at the family Leichenschmaus or funeral buffet destabilizes the situation and knocks the sisters back into memories of their childhood.  Agnes starred as a child in one of Gustav's movies, indeed, probably his last movie before the fifteen years dry period.  The movie, a fragment of which we see, harkens back to the Occupation of Norway and involves Nazi soldiers snatching a young boy while his sister, played by Agnes, watches from a nearby train.  Since that movie was shot, neither of the sisters has had much to do with Gustav -- he's selfish and has been an absent father.  Gustav approaches the older sister, Nora, and asks her to play the role of the mother in his new play.  Nora refuses angrily and won't even read the script.  At a retrospective of his films at Deauville, Gustav meets a Hollywood starlet, Rachel (played by Elle Fanning) and, after a night drinking with her on the beach, casts her in the role of his mother. Rachel comes to Norway where Gustav is planning to shoot the movie in the family home (where Agnes is living).  He intimidates Rachel by showing her the footstool that his mother used to climb up to a noose to hang herself in one of the rooms in the house -- this is a lie:  everyone in the family knows the footstool came from Ikea.  It turns that Rachel is a bad fit for the part.  The plan is to shoot the movie in English which seems problematic.  Gustav has Rachel cut her hair and change its color so she looks more like Nora.  Finally, Rachel, recognizing that she is miscast, graciously withdraws from the movie.  Gustav has written the role for Nora, whom he recognizes as sharing traits with his mother.  He hopes her performance in the film will free her from the burden of the past.  At first, Nora refuses to even read the script.  But, then, at last, Agnes prevails upon her to study the script.  (This is in the context of Gustav trying to cast Agnes' son, Erick, as the little boy in the movie -- that is, as Gustav himself as a child; Agnes refuses and accuses her father of egoism and being opportunistic and malevolently manipulative.)  Gustav has a heart attack but is too mean and tough to die.  He directs the movie with Nora playing the part of his suicidal mother and, in fact, Erick as the child.  There's an intentionally confusing sequence near the end in which we don't know whether we're watching the movie or a film within the film.  (This echoes an earlier scene in which Nora begins crying and curls into a fetal posture by her bed -- a scene that turns out to be a part in a play in which she is acting; we can see the audience in the long shot of her on the floor.)

This summary omits many interesting things in the movie.  There's a bitter and moving meditation on old age:  Gustav's long time cameraman is not sufficiently spry to manage the hand-held camera shots in the proposed film and his old friend, at first, seems to reject him for the project.  Nora's married boyfriend gives up on her -- now that his wife has divorced him, Nora thinks that they can expose their love affair, but the boyfriend isn't interested in committing.  There's biographical scenes from Gustav's youth and middle-age and a long sequence in which Agnes, the historian, researches her grandmother's capture and torture by the Occupation forces. Trier films family squabbling about the dead mother's possessions and there's conversation about the status of the old house -- Gustav's wife was granted the house in the divorce but the papers were never filed and Gustav expects the home to revert to him.  Much of this material, broadly speaking, is superfluous.to the main plot which involves Gustav persuading Nora to act in the role of his mother.  The staging of the final scenes suggests that, perhaps, Gustav has re-written history so that his mother does not commit suicide -- but this is very unclear.  (The clue is whether we hear the Ikea foot stool knocked over when the act occurs -- Gustav's mother has shut the door on the chamber where she commits the act.,)  Another curiosity in the film is narration, seemingly by the old house itself.  The house has a crack running from its foundation up to the attic -- it's like the fatally flawed House of Usher.  

Sentimental Value is never less than highly cultured, subtle, and beautifully made and acted.  It's a little too diffuse for my taste and I prefer Trier's earlier The Worst Person in the World which seems more focused and coherent to me.  But it's probably important for those interested in cinema to see this movie and the time spent watching the film is certainly not wasted.  

Macbeth (Guthrie Theater on February 8, 2026)

 It pains me to say that culture in the United States is slowly, but inexorably, renouncing Shakespeare.  The urgency, it seems, that once underwrote prestige productions of Shakespeare has leaked away and, somehow, dissipated.  You won't see evidence of this tendency anywhere but in the repertoire theater companies that once regarded Shakespeare as central to their project -- elsewhere Shakespeare's theater is so far from the mainstream as to be invisible, a tissue of misinterpreted legends buried under detritus like Grand Theft Hamlet.  However, this trend is most obvious at the regional festivals once mostly dedicated to Shakespeare but now slumming with musical comedies and politically correct and virtuous shows about oppression, abuse, and fortitude in facing hardship.  In the little town of Lanesboro, picturesquely nestled under the pale cliffs looming over the Root River bridge and the old grain elevator, an Ibsen festival flourished for about twenty years.  The sponsors of the festival produced all of Ibsen's major plays, including a heavily redacted version of Pillars of Society, but, then, energy flagged and audiences diminished and, two years ago, I think, the Ibsen festival announced that it was pleased to continue is summer repertory productions except without any Ibsen at all -- the shows on offer now are versions of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, British farces, and other audience-pleasing fare.  What is the cause for Shakespeare's shrinking importance?  (Ibsen has already been forgotten.)  I think this has something to do with the notion that post-George Floyd and post-me-too feminism, the works of the Bard have become increasingly irrelevant -- when a play needs apologies and contorted justifications to be presented, the work seems unnecessary.  Color-blind and gender-blind casting can supply some rationale for a new look at Shakespeare's plays, but, ultimately, those measures create more havoc and trouble than they are worth; in Elizabethan theater largely concerned with dynastic issues, the tyrannical power of fathers, and intricate family melodrama, gender- and color-blind casting is a distraction on which many progressive directorial ambitions have foundered. There are no queer subtexts in Shakespeare, although this sort of emphasis can be provided from outside (and, indeed, far outside) of the Shakespearian canon.  But just because you can distort a text to support a currently fashionable thesis or interest doesn't mean that it should be done.  I'm wounded to say that Shakespeare, with his peculiarly impenetrable diction and surfeit of plotting, hasn't got a lot to say to audiences in 2025.  And, so, I can feel the Bard of Avon slipping away, his plays drifting toward the status of artifacts in a museum.  This process has been continuing all my life -- people older than me will recall Lawrence Olivier's versions of Hamlet and Henry V; I recall Peter Brooks mounting a Midsummer Night's Dream that featured Diana Rigg in a state of (mostly) undress.  But, as Shakespeare became more and more culturally remote, the plays began to seem less and less important, perfunctory exercises in tongue-twisting diction.  They say that a frog will sit in water with the heat gradually increasing until it is boiled to death.  (This is a myth).  The new Guthrie production of Macbeth, however, is the performance for me that has made this particular frog leap far and wide away from the water in which it is immersed.  Shakespeare, I'm afraid, is no longer persuasive of anything.

A famous man of the theater, Joe Dowling, has directed this Macbeth.  Everything seems hastily contrived and slipshod.  The play is cut to an hour and fifty minutes, which, in itself, is not a problem.  Macbeth has to move at lightning speed to dramatize the sudden and lethal destruction of its two main characters.  There should be a sort of ritualized frenzy about the play.  In this production, the violence is downplayed -- the bloody soldier who announces Macbeth's berserker courage and ferocious slaughter of the King's enemies is scarcely wounded at all.  He was not bloody, in fact, as far as I could see.  Modern sensibilities in polite theater-going have banished the gore (beheadings and so on) to an offstage status.  There's a bow to horror fans -- and Macbeth is more akin to a modern horror movie than a well-made play -- in the show's final moments in which dead Macbeth is hoisted by his ankles above the stage, to dangle head downward at the curtain.  But this effect is spoiled by the time it takes to engineer this effect -- supernumeraries are busy attaching bondage-style cuffs to dead Macbeth's ankles and this labor seems contrived.  (Better to just sever Macbeth's head off-stage and have MacDuff brandish the thing by its gory locks at the final blackout -- again, confident velocity is everything in the staging of this show.)  The play looks like it's done on the cheap -- when Macbeth tells his servant to strap on his armor for the final showdown, the harness looks like a poorly made leather vest; it's not armor at all.  The only elaborate effect is saved for the penultimate scene when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane -- six or seven soldiers stand behind neon-lights configured like straight 30 foot tall pine trees; it's showy but, also, tone-deaf:  a glitzy Las Vegas effect imported onto the dour, grim Wurtele Thrust Stage.  The show's is badly cast.  Macbeth is played by a handsome pipsqueak of a boy -- he has absolutely no charisma and no gravitas.  Lady Macbeth is better and she seems palpable older than her youthful husband.  The witches aren't frightening.  They prance around a hole in the stage from which some fog emerges, chanting in unison, an effect that doesn't ever work successfully in the theater.  Mercifully, the dramaturge has cut the two scenes intended to cater to King James' morbid interest in witchcraft and demonology -- these are the scenes in which Hecate makes a completely redundant appearance.  The idiotic scene in which Malcolm claims all sorts of damnable vices to test MacDuff (I think -- the whole thing makes no sense) is inexplicably retained.  "I'm a really bad, bad guy," says Malcolm and, then, tells the baffled MacDuff that he's exceedingly temperate and virtuous -- this is awful stuff and really should be omitted from any reasonable performance of the play.  Otherwise the cuts are mostly local, inconspicuous, and scattered -- of course, the witches aren't going to be allowed to put boiled Jew in their potion.  The Scottish troops wear black jumpsuits and have little red berets like Curtis Sliwa's subway vigilantes.  The final duel between MacDuff and Macbeth is staged as a knife-fight -- it looks tawdry and unconvincing, a couple of slender pretty boys pretending to be bar-toughs in a tavern scuffle.  Ultimately, this production by the much-vaunted Guthrie Theater smells like a High School show featuring a precocious, but callow, cast.  It's not the Guthrie's fault -- it's the Zeitgeist.

La Grazia

 Paolo Sorrentino's new film, La Grazia (2025) concerns a man on the brink of old age taking stock of his life.  This situation (it doesn't amount to a narrative) is amplified into consequence by the fact that the movie's protagonist is the President of Italy.  The irony explored by the film is that its famous and successful hero, who seems almost universally beloved, has come to doubt his achievements -- in fact, he wonders whether he has accomplished anything useful at all.  Some elderly men afflicted by this doubt might arrange to sit down with their pastors for a philosophical chat; President de Santis, the film's hero, has a collegial conversation with the Pope, an African with grey dreadlocks and a snazzy motorcycle.  The Pope turns out to be not much help:  "You have no future," Pope bluntly tells the President.  The Pope also diagnoses the President's problem:  "You must make yourself light."  The President has only a few months left in his regime -- he has been in the lavish Quirinal Palace (the President's residency) for seven years. But there are a number of things weighing him down, resisting the Pope's injunction to be more "light":  among the affairs of State, there are two pardons testing the limits of the criminal law -- an abused woman has stabbed her husband while he was sleeping 18 times but claims his mistreatment justified the act; a high school teacher who has resigned his position to care for his wife with Alzheimer's is the subject of a pardon petition made by his ex-students:  the teacher suffocated his wife claiming that this was euthanasia justified by the woman's violent rages and anger.  Adding to his burdens, the President is considering a law authorizing euthanasia in certain circumstances, a politically risky enactment that is strongly opposed by the Pope and his Church.  The President's relationship with his daughter, herself a renowned jurist, is suffering due to his vacillation as to the euthanasia bill -- she acts as the President's closest advisor and is one of the drafters of the bill. (If I sign the bill, the protagonists says, I'm a murderer; if I don't, I'm a torturer./ The President's son lives in Montreal where he produces pop music, neglecting his vocation as a classical composer.  To add to his misery, the President's horse, Elvis, is slowly dying -- and the President is unable to give the order to put the horse out of its misery; this reluctance mirrors his hesitation at signing the euthanasia bill into law.  Further, the President is mourning the loss of his wife, the love of his life, eight years earlier.  Complicating his mourning is his knowledge to an absolute certainty that his wife was unfaithful to him at the start of their forty year marriage.  The President who declares himself as a famous Judge to be an absolute advocate of the truth wants to know the identity of the man who cuckolded him -- he's still prone to undignified jealous rages.  And the poor fellow is hungry all the time:  his daughter has put him on a diet of quinoa and broiled chicken breast -- no pasta for him.  Cigarettes have been banned but he bums them off the cuirassier, his bodyguard and confidante.  President de Santis has written a two-thousand plus page treatise on the criminal law (no one can get through the text which is apparently incredibly detailed and exhaustive.)  The only thing he seems to like is rap music -- he listens on ear-buds and memorizes some of the lyrics.

The film, although visually extravagant, is simple enough.  In the course of the two hour picture, the President will issue a pardon to one of the two convicts serving time, his horse dies, his daughter leaves Rome to visit her brother in Montreal and is off-stage when the President's term ends; the President will sign the bill authorizing euthanasia, and will discover the secret about his wife's affair.  He will take the advice of the Pope and imagine himself as very light, as weightless in fact.  Most of the movie's principle conflicts will be resolved and, in effect, all will be well -- it's all somewhat predictable and sentimental but moving as well:  despite his unhealthy obsession with his wife's adultery, President de Santis is a decent man, a good and fair judge, and a politician whose self-sacrifice has saved the Republic -- at least, this is what people claim when de Santis goes to La Scala and is acclaimed by the other operagoers as a hero.  Sorrentino's picture is quiet and self-restrained -- it's a rare thing, an attempt to explore the life of a man who is virtuous and, what's more, a politician.  The movie contains a number of spectacular images and set pieces; it's lush with interiors full of ancient books and huge marble statues.  It's Rome and everything is outsized, larger than life including the lavish rooms in the Quirinale Palace.  All of the episodes are discrete, chapters in a book that seem set off from one another, but they are carefully configured to echo and resonate with one another.  The President's fear of aging and the feebleness of old age is embodied in a scene in which the Prime Minister of Portugal comes for a state visit -- they've rolled out the red carpet but a sudden squall with rain uproots the carpet and blows it around so that the old, feeble ruler ends up on the ground.  Rain falls in torrents. The imagery is slowed to a nightmare stagger:  "Am I as old as he is?" the President wonders.  In another scene that develops the idea of the "lightness of being" (to quote the Milan Kundera novel), the President watches an astronaut at a space station -- the sound is disabled and video has failed so the astronaut can not see the President.  He sheds a tear  and, then, laughs at the tear which floats in the air like a small quicksilver planet.  The President's daughter goes to visit Isa Rocca who stabbed her husband while he was asleep.  The woman is beautiful and transfixes the lawyer with a steely intimidating stare -- her eyes seem to spark with electricity.  Later the President goes out to the same prison where he insists on sitting in the waiting room with the hard-bitten family members of convicts.  He interviews the ascetic school teacher whom he concludes to be fundamentally dishonest about his own motives. After bidding farewell to his staff (his social calendar secretary, a handsome woman, seems to be in love with him), the President walks back to his apartment overlooking the Spanish Stairs -- since his daughter is gone to Montreal and not controlling his diet, he orders a pizza for his first night at home alone.  In a video face-time session, he talks to his son and daughter.  It's a warm conversation but I don't think it restores the rift between parent and child.  The president finds out who cuckolded him but, as one would expect, that information doesn't make any sense.  Make sure, you stay for a final scene embedded in the credits.  The President has an old friend, Coco, who is fashionista and art collector -- although paradoxically she's proclaimed that she wants to burn all the museums.  Coca is a plump matron who wears huge round glasses and she is impulsive, outspoken, and amusing; she's flamboyantly selfish -- when she sees what is on offer at a dinner party with the President (it's quinoa and broiled  white fish served in tiny portions) she excuses herself and says that she will go out to some place for a better meal.  In the last scene, Coco is slurping her soup while the President, seated before his own bowl of soup, glares at her with disturbing and utter hatred.  "Get off my fucking back!" Coco says, an imprecation that seems to soothe the ex-President.  

I liked this movie and, of course, enjoyed its stunning photography and locations, as well as the dense, aphoristic chatter.  But, I think, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts.  It's a jigsaw and a movie that is ceaselessly clever in articulating its themes and crafting episodes that embody and challenge those themes.  But it also feels somewhat inorganic and schematic -- Sorrentino can exhaust you with all the heavy lifting required to stitch this non-narrative into a discourse on old age, suffering,and friendship -- these are worthy subjects but, also, a bit confining.  The movie never really opens up to let the fresh air in.  Toni Servillo, Sorrentino's surrogate as an actor, is astonishing as the President.  There's a sleek and inquisitive-looking robot dog that leads the procession from the Quirinal Palace to the Spanish Stairs - it's some kind of anti-terrorism weapon but elegant as whippet or Norwegian elkhound. 

The Grapes of Wrath

 During the Battle of Minneapolis in January 2026, Bruce Springsteen accompanied by Tom Morello played a concert at First Avenue on the stage made famous by Prince.  The concert was in support of the armies of protestors who openly opposed and, in some instances, impeded ICE personnel brutalizing people on the streets of Minneapolis.  The concert's motto was "ICE out!", a phrase chanted by the people in the room and balcony overlooking the stage.  Springsteen played his protest song written for the occasion, an anthem called "The Streets of Minneapolis" in which the singer calls out the authoritarian violence occurring on Nicollet Avenue and declares resistance to the goons who killed the American citizens Rebecca Good and Alex Pretti.  Springsteen also sang "The Ghost of Tom Joad", another anthem about poverty in the United States and the progressive forces arrayed against that poverty.  In this song, the symbol for resistance to the corrupt "New World Order" is the protagonist of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad.  The song cites some of Joad's famous promise to his mother that he will be present in spirit any time the forces of injustice oppress the poor and, also, anytime the poor rise to express their joyous resistance..  Morello unleashes a savage guitar attack on the evils identified in the song -- he uses every possible virtuosic technique to dramatize the ingenuity, rage, and hurricane-level force with which people will oppose tyrants:  at one point in the concert, he plays his guitar with his teeth (after the manner of Jimi Hendrix) turning the instrument over to reveal a placard that reads "Arrest the President!"; the front side of his guitar is emblazoned "ARM THE HOMELESS!"   The idea seems to be that the storm is coming, wrath is at hand, and the righteous will trample out the "vintage of the grapes of wrath" in an irrepressible uprising, a sonic storm of steel.

Inspired by this concert (you can see it on You-Tube), I decided to take another look at John Ford's 1940 Grapes of Wrath.  The movie is made with fierce urgency and feels like a documentary.  (It's somewhat like Guzman's The Battle of Chile or Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers.)  In a hundred years, people will understand the Great Depression through Ford's film -- it's imagery, I expect, will replace actual footage from the Depression in the imaginations of Americans; I think this is a phenomenon similar to what will occur with Spielberg's Schindler's List -- the Hollywood movie that will likely come to stand in for the horrors that it presents.  (Something similar has a;ready happened with regard to Eisenstein's films -- footage from Eisenstein's pictures about the Russian Revolution have actually come to signify the Revolution to the extent that the tentative and very uncommunicative real pictures and film are mostly banished to the outer darkness.  

Ford's documentary effects are achieved by a variety of means.  First, there is the bleak but spectacular photography by Gregg Toland -- images that have an iconic force;  lone figures striding through desolate landscapes, night shots full of shadow and light that look like George la Tour (for instance, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad delivers his famous speech by the light of a cigarette -- his sharp features are sculpted in an acid-bath of shadow; the crowd scenes in shanty towns or near fence-lines mobbed by striking workers have a singular power and immediacy without surrendering the authority of single faces and contorted bodies to choreographed group motion:  German expressionism and the Russians reduce crowds to abstract vectors, diagrams of force.  Ford's crowds, whether brawling or dancing, display a unity of motion highlighting, however, individuals within the group. The protagonist, Tom Joad, is no saint -- he's a walking hair trigger of anger and bitterness.  When his mother says that she prayed that prison would not make her son "mean", you can see that it has been "touch and go" with Tom -- his rage is explosive and when he strikes, he kills.  Tom constantly makes cynical and bitter comments even to those helping him (he taunts a truckdriver who gives him a ride) -- he's a highly flawed and, even, frightening protagonist.  Midway through the movie, my wife said that the people "all looked so weird" and asked why the extras and, even, some of the main figures in the movie were so eccentric in appearance -- in fact, downright ugly.  Clearly Ford is simulating the austere and stark portraits of victims of Depression as portrayed by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans -- the people in the film, look gaunt, haggard, they have bulging eyes and, often, move in a shaky way; clearly these are people who have been starved.  The young girls are bony and there are big-eyed skeletal children and wretched old ladies trying to uphold their dignity in frayed sun-bonnets and threadbare dresses.  Everything is vividly imagined and clearly shown - the farm trucks weighted down with  immigrants seem impossibly frail and overloaded; the small impoverished towns look suitably unwelcoming, the ruined farms squashed by caterpillars, the pointless gestures of defiance:  men brandishing guns that they are too beaten and crestfallen to fire, meaningless brawls, a preacher defiantly holding out his arms to be cuffed at the wrist.  There's four-fifths of a work of genius on screen.  The last ten minutes declines a little into sermonizing and the sermons are delivered in bad faith -- obviously, the only answer to the misery that we see is some form of Communist Revolution, but John Ford (and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson) aren't willing to endorse the logic of that solution and, so, the movie glides into a kind of mysticism about the omnipresence of Tom Joad and the resilience of the People. (with a Sandbergian capitol "P").  In the film's last shots, we see Tom Joad striding alone against a barren horizon.  Then, Ford shows us a great procession of  rattle-trap trucks, crowded as floats in a May Day parade, crossing the desolate land -- it's supposed to be a sign of the ever-enduring power of the people.  But, ghosts don't lead flesh-and-blood revolutions and Bruce Springsteen's song is about "the ghost of Tom Joad."  But the picture's delirious, half-baked ending is also filmmaking of a high order just not as powerful as the genius stuff of the first 4/5ths of the picture.

The excellence of the movie lies in its innumerable, powerful details.  When a gun is discharged in a Hooverville, an old lady is hit by the bullet and lies dying in the dirt street.  Two other old ladies cradle her body in their arms and cry out:  "She's bleeding to death."  A sheriff's officer shrugs and says "those 45's do sure make a mess."  The matriarch of the Joad clan tries to feed a crowd of starving childrn.  One of the kids sniffs that he's had a chicken recently and doesn't want hand-outs -- another little kid says the boy and his dad are lying and that they are just as hungry as rest of them.  Ma sends the mob of urchins to "get flat sticks" so they can scrape out the bottom of her stew pot.  But the kids run to a mountain of empty cans and pick them up so they will have something to put their booty in.  The cop in a small California town says that he came from Oklahoma only two years earlier and, then, warmly greets the Joad family -- a breath later, he tells them to get out of town before sundown.  In a work-camp built like a KZ Lager, management systematically cheats the workers, unilaterally reducing their wages to less than starvation pay.  People protesting this injustice get beaten with ax-handles.  The half-crazed former preacher, played with wild-eyed enthusiasm by John Cassavetes is killed for advocating "mutual assistance" and collective action.  In the final scene, the migrant workers have left a WPA camp where they are treated kindly, provided medical care, and protected by the Federal Government.  What has enticed them to leave this safe harbor?  I guess it's Ford's desire to end with a spectacular image, that is,  to show us a panorama of old and battered trucks stretching to the horizon and rolling down the highway into the sunset.