Jay Kelly

 Jay Kelly (2025) feels like a vanity project for George Clooney.  This is an implausible reaction to an interesting, and mostly charming, movie.  Why in the world would the gorgeous George Clooney need to pat himself on the back, or attest to his artistic integrity or, for that matter, cry mea culpa for his neglect of family or friends -- an ostentatious display that is just another aspect of pride albeit inverted?  Clearly, the movie is about George Clooney and revels in his presence -- he dominates just about every scene in the movie and, in fact, when he is off-camera, the picture's energy lags.  As evidence of Clooney's stardom, his supporting actor, Adam Sandler, is, more or less, eclipsed by the radiance emitted by the leading man, a fellow who compares himself to Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper while mournfully surveying his glamorous visage in the mirror.  Any actor who can eclipse Adam Sandler (who is also very good in this picture and even gets to shed a tear) is, indeed, a giant of the silver screen. 

Clooney plays a Hollywood star, now about sixty years old, and taking stock of his life and career. In an opening sequences, built from a lavish tracking steadi-cam sequence shot (with Orson Welles and Altman style overlapping dialogue), we see Jay Kelly, Clooney's character, "wrapping" a movie.  Evidently, it's some sort of neo-film noir because Kelly dies slowly from a gunshot wound while speaking a mournful soliloquy about the meaningless of it all -- a little pooch trots up and licks the dying man's hand. After the elaborate shot is completed, Kelly is disappointed with his performance and says to the director:  "Can I get another?," meaning "can we re-shoot and improve the scene."  (The director says "no" -- they already have eight takes.) Kelly is divorced, with two children (Jesse is 33 with another daughter about to leave home to tour Europe who is 18).  Kelly is melancholy between projects.  He has lunch with an old friend, a director, who begs Kelly to "lend his name" to his new project -- the man is obviously out-of-favor in Hollywood and no longer bankable. Kelly, rather coldly, refuses.  A few days later, the old director dies.  At his funeral, Kelly runs into a man who studied acting with him.  A flashback reveals that Kelly stole the young man's ideas at an audition, got the part that the young man was seeking and, for a good measure, stole his girlfriend as well.  Kelly and the old colleague from their method-acting class go out for a drink.  Things deteriorate when the man (he is now a child psychologist) gets drunk and begins to berate the movie star.  Kelly breaks the man's nose and gets a black eye in return.  This contretemps alarms Kelly and he decides impulsively to embark for Tuscany where he is supposed to be awarded some kind of "tribute" -- this part of the movie doesn't make a whole lot of sense:  do small rural towns in Tuscany routinely sponsor film-festivals for American movie stars so that they can award them bouquets of blown-glass roses?  Here you will have to suspend your disbelief.

Kelly with his entourage consisting of Adam Sandler (his agent) and about a dozen other people including a chef, make-up man, and a menacing-looking security guard, take the star's private jet to France.  Kelly wants to catch up with his daughter who is touring the Louvre with a new boyfriend and her friend Rio.  (Kelly can track the kids because they have access to charges put on Rio's credit card, actually her mother's card).  The young woman is appalled to see her famous father appear in Paris.  Everyone gets on a train to Tuscany where various adventures ensue -- at one point, Kelly chases a purse-snatcher running at an impressive sprint for a sixty-year old man and, then, wrestles the bad guy down to the ground.  In Tuscany, Kelly meets his own father -- he's about ninety and still fancies himself a womanizer.  (This sad, but memorable, sequence is extracted almost shot-for-shot from a similar scene in which Marcello encounters his father on Rome's Via Venuto in Fellini's La Dolce Vita.)  There's a big orgiastic dance scene ala Paolo Sorrentino in The Great Beauty.  Kelly's entourage, one by one, is leaving him -- his make-up lady and publicist go back to Paris; his father, flown to Italy, gets sick from too much excitement and departs, the security guy's foot gets broken which takes him out of the game, and, at last, even  Adam Sandler has doubts about his thirty-year long relationship with Kelly.  Kelly wanders around in a picturesque dark forest, lost, and grieving his past betrayals of friends and colleagues and his failures as a father. With Sandler weeping at this side, Kelly watches a montage from his pictures at the tribute -- with bittersweet irony, he says that he's dissatisfied with the image and himself and says:  "Can I get another?"  

The film is directed without ostentation by Noah Baumbach.  The script is good although heavily influenced by other, better films.  George Clooney seems hesitant to play the Hollywood star as ruthless and cold-hearted, although there is plenty of evidence of this aspect of his character.  Clooney is so ingratiating that you don't realize until the film is over that Jay Kelly is amoral and, even, capable of behaving viciously.  Kelly's fame is based upon stealing ideas from his best friend in acting school.  Although he is accommodating to his fans, pausing often to sign autographs, he bullies the people around him and turns a cold shoulder to the old man whose direction years earlier made him a star.  He whines about being alone when people in his entourage are constantly serving him -- his factotum gets him drinks without being asked to do so, gliding silently up to the protagonist from time to time with a cold beverage.  We see him skimming his pool in a brief scene and this seems a task too mundane for the glamorous movie star -- sure enough, a pool boy shows up and takes the skimmer from him with a sullen look as if he has caught Kelly in the midst of playacting.  Furthermore the resolution of one important plot point turns on Adam Sandler's character literally blackmailing someone -- this is all handled in a jocular manner.  Some of this is ugly stuff but Clooney is so pretty, we let him get away with it unscathed.  It's my contention that Clooney, who is indeed a charismatic movie star, had never been in a feature film that fully exploited his charm and intelligence.  He seems to dwarf that material in which he chooses to appear.

Frankenstein (2025)

 Recently, I read a review of a Netflix western called The Abandons.  This series is an upscale project starring some notable actors and featuring gorgeous scenery.  The script is rudimentary:  a motley crew of cattle ranchers defend their range against encroaching mining interests.  The two opposing clans are lead by headstrong matrons and the program tilts toward some kind of catfight between the two female protagonists.  The good guys are a rainbow coalition of Indians, feminists, and other disenfranchised people.  The villains are entrenched politically and their machine controls the organs of the law and commerce.  This is the kind of show in which the viewer has a sinking feeling when a cute and inoffensive dog is introduced -- you will win your wager if you bet that the villains will kill the poor canine before the end of the first episode.  In the essay on the show, the critic noted that the series is reasonably entertaining but, nonetheless, represents a MVC production with the initials standing for "Minimum Viable Content" -- The Abandons, the reviewer suggested, exemplifies what is wrong with contemporary cable and streaming TV, that is, shows structured to keep you watching with a sort of grim persistence but which are otherwise forgettable and meretricious.  Normally, I wouldn't put much stock into a dour opinion of this sort but perceived almost immediately what was meant by "minimum viable content" when I watched Guillermo del Toro's decidedly maximalist version of Frankenstein -- in the first ten minutes of the show, the Monster attacks a company of shipwrecked Danish sailors, clambering aboard the ice-bound vessel, hurling men into bonfires and pots of flaming oil, and sustaining about 20 mortal wounds, none of which slow him down,before plunging into icy water foaming up through slabs of ice shattered by a charge from a spectacularly lethal-looking blunderbuss.  The havoc is exquisitely choreographed; the tall ship trapped in the ice looks fabulous as does the steppe of snow extending to a horizon rimmed with colors like a gas chromatograph's output or a tequila sunrise.  The monster's roar is deep and resonant -- one can imagine what it sounded like on a theater audio system (an earthquake I presume).  The creature's pallid features and jigsaw-scarred face make him look like a saint or martyr in an El Greco painting, elongated and greyish mucous crowned with wounded and ecstatic eyes.  There is nothing minimalist about this spectacle -- everything is contrived to create the maximum impression on the viewer and del Toro manages to transform his film into a miraculous Wunderkabinet of odd and morbid sights:  there are ranges of mountains that stretch across the horizon like the menacing peaks glimpsed in the background of a Brueghel painting ("November: the Return of the Flock"); corpses are looted from a battlefield, bodysnatchers displacing sinister flocks of black ravens -- the battlefield looks like the aftermath of Waterloo, lit by flaming heaps of rubbish and freezing with snow, littered with dead bodies out to the horizon. Bodysnatchers seize hanged men who are sent to the gallows in platoons, three convicts hanged at a time and their bodies still spasming as Dr. Frankenstein inspects the teeth of unfortunates about to be executed.  Alleyways are full of butchered animals and pigs' heads line a corridor.  The mad doctor's laboratory is a pinnacle of masonry perched on the very edge of a turbulent ocean that seems to be about four-hundred feet high, a grim edifice that features a screaming stone gorgon or Medusa-head looming over the charnel house full of fragmentary corpses; ballrooms are a quarter-mile long and huge palatial mansions rise over foggy basins and autumnal trees.  There are masive explosions, vast pillars of fire, and still-life color shots that resemble some of the more grotesque visions of the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin -- a bouquet of flowers is clutched in a cadaver's hand severed from the body at the elbow, strange, glistening surgical instruments also on display.  The women look like Elizabeth Siddon, the famous pre-Raphaelite model with the flaming red hair and they wear outlandish bonnets with spirals of silk ribbon wrapped around their ice-white faces.  Corpses are carried to their graves in torpedo-shaped anthropomorphic caskets chiseled from alabaster; the dead face wrapped in lustrous scarlet is covered when the mask-lid of the sarcophagus is screwed down.  In one scene, the camera surveys a gloomy, brown alleyway in some reeking, smoky city.  A man walks down the alley with his hands clutched behind his back.  Both hands are covered by bright green gloves, the only color in the otherwise monochrome composition.  The costumes, sets, and palatial interiors are all ornate and grotesque.  Everything is immense and colossal.  (Sometimes, the extravagance of the set decorator goes awry -- in one scene, the monster shivers in the corner of a mill full of elaborate wooden gears and ratchets and flywheels; the place is infested with an army of rats, and is an exquisite creation -- there is only one problem, there's no water anywhere near this huge mill and, therefore, no way for the intricate contrivance of gears and pinions and rotating axles to be powered.)  The whole thing is colossal, vast, and teeming with elegant detail.  It's certainly the hallucinatory opposite of the idea of MVC.

I often find del Toro's films to be lavish, but empty.  (This was my impression of Pan's Labyrinth and Nightmare Alley as well as The Shape of Water which I thought was inert, overwhelmed by its design.)  Frankenstein is a better film, more powerful emotionally, and the performances of its actors fight the sets and decor to a draw -- the mere humans aren't overwhelmed by the spectacle but hold their own.  The film's narrative is clear enough and del Toro obviously admires Mary Shelley's novel because he incorporates much material from the book into his film.  The ardor with which the film was made is evident in every frame and the movie is wonderful in many ways.  I still sense something lacking in the picture and the fantastically beautiful set design, decor, and costumes seem to be compensating for a certain hollowness at the heart of the endeavor.  That said, this movie is clearly del Toro's labor of love and it is impressive in all respects.

Victor Frankenstein is abused by his fierce, atheistic father, a scientist who beats the boy with a cane (on his face no less) for failing to properly answer anatomical questions:  he won't cane the boy on his hands because a surgeon needs those instruments for his trade but the "face...that is for vanity."  Victor's mother adores her son but seems remote from her cruel husband.  When she dies in childbirth, Victor is bereft.  Shortly thereafter, the old doctor dies and is buried in the family crypt.  Victor figures out that galvanic charges can animate corpses and make them cry out, even enable them to catch balls pitched their way -- this is visualized in a macabre scene in which parts of a cadaver riveted to a board are displayed by Victor in a dissecting theater.  "It's not science, it's a crucifixion!" someone declares.  One of the curious attending the lecture with the animate corpse is a German named Heinrich Harlander; he's the scion of an arms manufacturing company.  Harlander finances Victor's experiments which take place at an immense, abandoned fortress on the cliffs above the sea. Harlander's niece, Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is betrothed to little William Frankenstein, Victor's brother whose birth resulted in the death of his mother.  Elizabeth is a spectral figure, herself enamored of elaborate dissection specimens and bugs -- she reads books on entomology and, although doomed to marry William, in fact, falls in love with Victor.  After much lurid carnage, including a visit to a European battlefield with the sardonic , Harlander, Victor animates his creature. (Harlander misses out on most of the fun; he has acquired syphilis and is perishing:  "devotees of Venus, become slaves to Mercury".) The tall, emaciated-looking figure is kept chained in a huge crypt where Victor, following in the footsteps of his abusive father, torments the creature.  Despairing of the creature's intelligence, Victor sets the laboratory on fire using not a few but a thousand or so red tins full of some sort of inflammatory accelerant.  The monster escapes and hides in a mill in the middle of nowhere -- it is here that the monster reads Milton, taught his letters by a blind shepherd and a little girl.  About ten huge wolves attack and rend the blind shepherd into pieces.  The monster escapes through the forest full of skeletons dumped there from the experiments in the nearby fortress tower. A year passes and the monster shows up on William's wedding day to embrace and threaten Elizabeth.  Confronting Victor, who remains in love with Elizabeth, the creature demands that the scientist alleviate his suffering by making him a mate.  Victor refuses.  When Victor sees the creature embracing Elizabeth, he recklessly fires his revolver.  The monster can be wounded but his damaged flesh regenerates.  Elizabeth lacks this miraculous ability and she is killed by a stray bullet.  The monster and creatures pursue one another toward the North Pole, locked in a duel to the death.  The duel ends at the Danish sea-captain's ice-breaker, locked in the snow and ice floes.  The Dane is like Ahab -- he is pursuing the fata morgana of sailing to the North Pole although his men are about to mutiny.  Victor is grievously wounded.  The monster demands that the seafarers surrender the dying man to him.  When they refuse, the creature again attacks the vessel and its crew.  He breaches the boat and confronts his creator where there is a weird sort of reconciliation.  Freed from the burden of vengeance, the Monster uses his titanic strength to shove the three-master out of its prison of ice.  The Dane now understands that his pursuit of the North Pole is obsessive and as megalomaniacal as Victor's promethean effort to overcome death.  He tells his men to set sail for home.  

The story is lucidly told and so spectacularly illustrated that its various plot holes are not really apparent.  The film is divided into a prologue (the monster's attack on the ship in the high Arctic), Victor's story, the Creature's story, and an epilogue (the final encounter on the ship, the reconciliation between Victor and his creation, and the Monster's generosity in freeing the ship from the ice.)  The writing, by del Toro, is crisp and excellent -- there are many great lines.  I have my reservations about this film, but can't exactly pinpoint them -- I'm afraid it's some kind Puritan instinct in me:  the movie is so lavishly beautiful that I attribute flaws to it, just on the basis of its visual splendor.  There's no doubt in my mind that the picture is often thrilling, majestic, and, even, intelligent.    

 

Tarr Bela I used to be a filmmaker

 The Hungarian director, Bela Tarr, is inextricably connected to the novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the author of the scripts for Tarr's most famous films.  Krasznahorkai was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and, so, there has been a brief flurry of interest both in books written by the novelist but, also, in the films adapting those novels to the screen, Tarr's Satantango, Damnation, The Werckmeister Harmonies, and other pictures that Krasznahorkai wrote specifically for Tarr:  The Man from London, that adapts a Georges Simenon crime novel and The Turin Horse, the director's last film.  Jean Marc Lemourne's film Tarr Bela I used to be a Filmmaker documents some aspects of the production of the monumentally grim The Turin Horse and tours some of the director's earlier works, most notably Satantango and The Werckmeister Harmonies.  None of these films are exactly a walk in the park -- Satantango is seven plus hours of unremitting misery, cat torture, mud, drunkenness and suicide; The Werckmeister Harmonies (an adaptation of part of Krasznahorkai's novel, The Melancholy of Resistance) concerns a village in rural Hungary destabilized and thrown into hysteria by a traveling sideshow exhibit featuring an enormous embalmed whale; the townspeople riot and end up destroying their own hospital. The Turin Horse is set on the windswept Hungarian steppes and remorselessly documents the poverty of a man and woman who live in a primitive stone hut in the middle of nowhere.  The wind blows ceaselessly and leaves swirl around in the air, an odd effect since the nearest tree is about two miles away crowning a hill in what looks like central North Dakota.  As a consequence, Tarr Bela is singularly morose, images of a group of elderly people staggering around in the mud as they film the long takes that comprise The Turin Horse.  (The title refers to the legend that Friedrich Nietzsche went mad when he saw a teamster beating an old horse in Turin; sobbing, Nietzsche is supposed to have thrown his arms around the long-suffering beast before proclaiming himself both the Crucified One and Dionysius -- so far as I can see, and I've sat through the movie, the film has nothing to do with this anecdote.)

The main character in The Turin Horse is the relentless gale-force wind.  The documentary shows the film crew using a helicopter to whip the lone tree on the horizon into a flailing frenzy.  Pushing wind machines on wheels, the grips move alongside the tracking camera while another worker throws out handfuls of dry leaves for the wind to whip about.  Tarr complains about shots through the hut window in which the tree is motionless and simulated gale not visible.  The hut itself, which seems like a primeval kind of grotto in the movie, was built from the ground up from field stone with a heavy gabled roof -- it's surprising to me that this set was laboriously constructed, downhill from the lone tree and beneath a bare grasscovered ridge.  (The characters set out for the edge of their world, the grassy ridge, reach the place, and see that there is nothing beyond the ridge but an endless, empty steppe -- so disappointed they come back to the stone hut where they eat roasted potatoes but nothing else.)  If transfer of information is the purpose of a documentary Lemourne's film is, more of less, a failure.  We don't really learn anything about Tarr except that he is a wizened curmudgeon with a three pack a day habit -- he isn't endearing or charismatic.  He boasts about this being his last film and, when he has his crew dig a pit to hold the enormously heavy camera for a low-angle shot, he says that they should delve the pit three meters deep and bury the camera.  The crew is polyglot and, sometimes, Tarr directs in Hungarian; at other times, he uses English.  The crew goes to the collective farm where Satantango was filmed for a special screening of the enormous movie -- the collective farm is in ruins, falling into the weeds on the Hungarian plain.  The water tower advertises in English "Industrial Park for Sale."  The female lead in The Turin Horse (she has about 6 lines) was the strange-looking girl with the cat who kills herself in Satantango.  She's now all grown up, but still pretty odd-looking and miserable.  (She was raised in an orphanage and felt that Tarr and his longstanding female editor, Agi, became her parents during the shoot.)  We see some rehearsals.  Two actors sit in a bar bathed in red light and talk about their work with Tarr.  One of them is named Jani, an actor who has appeared in a half-dozen films directed by the difficult Tarr.  Later, Tarr uses a cell phone to summon Jani to the location on the desolate plain.  He demands that Jani sober-up before coming on the set and that he not drink on location.  There are more scenes with the wind machine, more mud, more vantages through the rock hut's window showing dogs prancing around in the gloom.  Tarr says directing is "not a democracy" -- it's feudal he tells us.  The mob in The Werckmeister Harmonies has advanced through the rural hospital, looting and burning -- in the final room, at the center of the medical complex, they encounter a wrinkled, emaciated old man naked and standing in a bath.  This discomfits the mob and they sullenly leave the scene of the crime.  

At the beginning of the film, Tarr says that he has a repertoire company with whom he always works.  And he tells us that he has worked with Krasznahorkai for 23 years.  (The film was made in 2013).  Yet, mysteriously, Krasznahorkai is absent from the movie and doesn't appear in a single shot.  Nor is he ever mentioned except as aforesaid.  

The Beast in Me

 The Beast in Me is suspense thriller mini-series (eight episodes) on Netflix that is accomplished enough that you can watch 2 or three episodes in a row without tiring of the thing.  Most mini-series are repetitive and, because designed to be consumed an episode at a time, are repetitive, overly explicit as to plot points, and crammed with filler -- generally three or, even, four episodes too long in an 8-part mini-series.  This is not the case with The Beast in Me (2025), a show that is lean enough to be rewarding when watched a couple shows at a time.  Only one episode, an extended series of flashbacks providing backstory as the seventh episode seemed superfluous -- that show spells out subtexts that an alert viewer has already figured-out and feels, just a wee bit, like padding before the program's finale.  

The Beast in Me (2025) alludes to Trump's career as a Manhattan real estate developer, features a stand-in for Donald's grim father, Fred, in the form of the wonderful character actor Jonathan Banks who plays a variant on the omni-competent enforcer qua grandfatherly hoodlum, that is Mike Ehrmantraut in Better Call Saul;  there's a community organizer and alderwoman who stands in for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and agents provocateur at protests, and an FBI that seems cheerfully corrupt.  This colorful stuff is all background to a hard-edged duel between a female author, the Pulitzer prize-winning Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes) and a billionaire property developer, Niles Jarvis (the show's surrogate for Trump) who is widely reputed to have killed his first wife and got away with murder.  Jarvis lives next door to Aggie in an exclusive neighborhood on Long Island called Oyster Bay.  Aggie has an enormous empty mansion, a  hunted house as it were that is exploited for various chases, jump-scares, and long, lonely corridors pulsing with sinister shadows.  As in most shows of this sort, Aggie comes equipped with trauma --  her bratty eight-year old son was killed in a car crash for which Aggie is partly responsible.  The crash and resulting grief have made Aggie haggard and hollowed her out except for a core rotting with rage against the drunk driver, a teenage boy.  Aggie has mercilessly harassed the kid, criminal activity that makes her a chief suspect when the kid turns up dead, wrapped in clear plastic like a choice piece of meat, and tucked into a corner in her dead child's bedroom.  Aggie is proudly lesbian and has an aggrieved ex-wife who is in the art business and runs a gallery.  The sinister plutocrat, Niles Jarvis has built a jogging trail connecting some of the property through woods in the neighborhood.  He wants all the neighbors to agree to easements through the woods so the jogging path can be paved and rendered operable.  Everyone is intimidated by Niles and agrees except for Aggie who doesn't want the woods desecrated.  This sets up a couple of hostile encounters with the oligarch.  Jarvis admires Aggie's writing and, after some tense jockeying for position, agrees to Aggie writing his biography.  In the course of writing and researching the biography, Aggie interviews various witnesses about the mysterious disappearance of Nile's first wife, Madison.  On the basis of various clues, Aggie concludes that Niles did, in fact, murder Madison.  Niles discovers that Aggie knows that he killed Madison and has proof in the form of a suicide note opportunistically used to imply that the woman has killed herself.  Complicating the situation are several subplots -- an FBI agent is obsessed with proving Niles' guilt; he is having an affair with a fellow agent also tangled up in the nefarious activities of the Jarvis family; the AOC lookalike clashes with Jarvis and his formidable father about a big development project that will gut a working class neighborhood.  Further, Niles Jarvis, acting on Aggie's expressions of rage about the drunken teenager, abducts the boy, leaves a spurious suicide note, and keeps the kid in some hidden location (possibly a storage locker) where the boy is half-naked, fettered, and seemingly periodically tortured by the villain.  Jarvis has a bad temper and a propensity to beat his victims to death with blunt objects -- it becomes increasingly obvious that the villain did, in fact, kill Madison; he has apparently killed others.  When Niles Jarvis figures out that Aggie has evidence proving he killed Madison, his first wife, the writer becomes his target and, of course, he tries to intimidate her into silence, frame her for murder, and, otherwise, attempts to destroy her.  Jarvis has a "Stepford Wives" spouse with a typical over-made-up and botox-stretched Mar-a-Largo face.  She befriends Aggie and, slowly discovers herself, that Jarvis is a psychopathic killer.  This sets up a climax in which Aggie is suspected of murder and has to flee a dragnet that is closing in on her; at the same time, Jarvis' wife who is pregnant, understands that, for the sake of the unborn child, she must detach herself from the vicious  oligarch. Jarvis goes to prison and Aggie, who still admires his chutzpah and intelligence, visits him in the hoosegow, gathering additional materials that she incorporates into another bestseller.

There's a lot of stuff in the teleplay but it's all intelligently deployed and well-organized.  Until the last episode, the plot is mostly plausible -- some suspension of disbelief is required near the end, but his is acceptable.  Claire Danes is gaunt, unattractive, and seems perpetually harassed -- but she gets a scene in the middle of the show in which she parties with Jarvis, ends up very drunk, and some sparks of attraction flash between her and the villain.  This is an excellent scene that humanizes both of these rather stylized and schematic characters.  Matthew Rhys is suave, charismatic, and sinister in the role of the villain.  All of the supporting characters are imagined with great intelligence and are persuasive in their roles, including the bug-eyed figure who mimics Ocasio-Cortez and ends up as prone to corruption as everyone else in the cast.  The set design, lavishly decorated million dollar condominiums, Manhattan art galleries and huge buildings under construction.  A signal that the set design will be voluptuous and rhetorically exact occurs in an early scene.  Aggie Wiggs is urinating in her bathroom.  She gets up from the toilet and an overhead shot depicts a puddle of urine in the bowl -- a nice touch, I thought.   

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.