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.  

Der Tiger (The Tank)

 Der Tiger, dubbed The Tank in English, is a morose and hopeless German horror film masquerading as a war picture.  It's claustrophobic and literally dark -- the titular tank rumbles through inky forests and hides submerged at the bottom of a river. The inside of the Panzer is a jumble of tight metal boxes that isolate the five-man crew into small metal coffins -- the photography is incoherent and the interior space within the tank although researched, I assume, with Teutonic thoroughness, makes no sense at all.  This is problematic since half of the movie is shot within the Tiger tank. The film has a M.Night Shymalan plot twist that an alert viewer will see as easily as we can visualize the huge specter of the tank lumbering forward a mile or two miles away.  The plot twist is a kind of warped theological variation on Ambrose Bierce's famous story, Zwischenfall auf Eulen-fluss Bruecke.  The movie represents an attempt to make a war film for German audiences.  Obviously, the picture has to be strenuously anti-war without any semblance of heroics, cold, morbid, utterly without the specious exhilaration famously implicit in the tracking shots in All Quiet on the Western Front or the helicopter assault in Apocalypse Now.  The movie must make industrialized warfare look drab and hellish as well as idiotic to boot.  If this is the film's objective The Tank succeeds; the picture seems influenced by Das Boot, the submarine epic made in Germany forty years ago or so -- it shows men in a can with bolts breaking, gouts of fire harassing them, and water drizzling all over their sweaty faces and heads.  And, in a surreal scene, the tank in this picture actually goes underwater and becomes a kind of U-Boat.  I understand that this movie is something of a success in Germany:  there's a hunger for war movies even when they are largely deemed politically incorrect -- but, if a film is made to strip every ounce of glamor or excitement or, even, suspense out of war, then, of course, this should make us question why the picture was even produced in the first place.  War doesn't have many defenders these days and, if the point is to show us, in a doggedly literal way that War is Hell, I think, everyone will likely agree with that proposition.  

A tank is retreating across a night-time battlefield lit like a Bosch hell-scape by innumerable little fires.  The Russians, viewed as shadows in the distance, are advancing and they intend to blow up the bridge over which the tank must drive to escape the sledge-hammer of the Russian attack.  The bridge is bombed and, also, mined by the Russians.  A whirling firestorm ensues and, as the tank crew see a sinister-looking deer on the bridge, the span appears to collapse.  The tank commander has some orders in a folio and, after a conspicuous lacuna during which the bridge over the Dnieper melts into the fire, the soldier rejoins his four member crew where they are repairing the Tiger tank in what looks like the ruins of a church or monastery. ) The tank commander has orders called "Operation Labyrinth" to drive the tank through No Man's Land and, then, behind enemy lines where he is supposed to liberate a general supposedly killed at Stalingrad but, now, thought to be alive and hiding in a bunker in Russian territory. This general is named von Hardenberg -- I have no idea why the name invokes Philip George Friederich Freiherr von Hardenberg, the German romantic who wrote under the pseudonym "Novalis".  (Go figure?) The tank with its five man crew sets out, rolling through a landscape that is a sort of oak savannah with stands of big trees, meadows, and dirt tracks running in all directions.  There are a bunch of adventures.  The tank wanders into a minefield and some big nasty-looking mines have to be defused -- the men are lying on their bellies and sweating profusely.  They pass some zombie-like soldiers rerouting road signs, presumably to confuse the enemy. On the radio, they can't get any signal but some priest solemnly intoning the Latin mass.  There's a tank battle filmed in a sober analytical manner that is devoid of any real interest.  One of the soldiers dies when his lungs are shredded by shrapnel.  We see lyrical shots of one of the commander reunited with his wife although this turns out to be a flashback.  A Concentration Camp light next to cyclone fence blinks on and off.  In a Russian village, a ghost general has his men round up all the women, and children in town, lock them in a factory or warehouse and, then, use a flamethrower to inundate the building in a sea of flames. (Lots of shrill screaming)  At long last, the tank reaches a prairie where there is a deep bunker filled with orangish flame, a spider-hole hide-out full of whores and carousing Nazi soldiers enjoying a last post-apocalyptic chug of Schnaps.  Friederich von Hardenberg, the general killed in Stalingrad, is there, whining about the battle and the evil orders given by Hitler and, of course, sans one of his hands.  It turns out that the tank commander and Hardenberg are not just old buddies, but that the scary-looking corpse-general introduced him to his wife in 1939.  We learn that these family members in Hamburg, for instance, have all been killed.by incendiary bombs.  There's a few more explosions and speeches about following orders and, then, the movie ends in s flashback to the bridge over the Dnieper, the firestorm there, and the malignant-looking stag glaring at the doomed tank and its crew.  I can give you a clue about the picture:  after the bridge collapses, the tank crew perishes and the movie is set in Hell.  The horror! The horror!

This movie is fairly well-made.  The acting consists of grunts and cursing.  It's completely superfluous and unpleasant and so, although I sort  of liked it as a guilty pleasure, I recommend staying away.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Blue Moon

 I like Blue Moon (Richard Linklater, 2025) and recommend it with reservations.  The movie has an unlikely subject, demise of the great lyricist Lorenz (Larry) Hart and observes the Aristotelian unities -- it takes place in what feels like real time in one location and with limited number of actors.  Obviously, the picture is a hobby-project, a movie made for the sheer love of the script and its subject, and the film is lovingly crafted, a work ripened over a dozen years.  (Linklater is patient and takes time on his projects; Boyhood was shot over a period 13 or 14 years.  The director wanted to use his favorite leading man in the lead role but didn't think the handsome actor, Ethan Hawke, looked sufficiently ravaged to play the role -- and, so, Linklater waited a decade for Hawke to age into the part.)  The movie has a claustrophobic aspect, shot on a single complex set in Dublin, a set that simulates the appearance of Sardi's, a famous restaurant and bar, popular with show-folk, in New York's theater district.  Essentially, the movie consists of a series of monologues interpolated between snatches of very witty and allusive dialogue.  The picture, therefore, will not be to many people's tastes.  A half hour of it put my wife to sleep.  It is more akin to Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre than to recent biopics about Johnny Cash, Dylan, and Springsteen.  The speeches and the clever repartee carry the movie.  Furthermore, the show has no real dramatic arc and has no place to go.  These defects, if they can be so characterized, are consistent with the film's subject matter --  the hero Lorenz Hart is washed-up, a self-destructive alcoholic and he has literally no place to go; his luck has run out.  As a man of the theater, it is appropriate that the film is also a very theatrical and stagy interpretation of events involving him that it portrays.  The burgundy red, lushly upholstered piano bar with its walls of framed caricatures, is a sort of "no exit" set, a portrait, as it were, of the inflamed interior of its protagonist's soul. 

Larry Hart has spent 25 years making highly acclaimed Broadway musicals with his partner Richard Rodgers.  Hart is tiny, about five feet, bald and unsightly.  He defends himself with his wit which is cutting, razor sharp, and self-deprecatory.  Alcoholism has limited his ability to work as Rodgers' partner.  While Larry was drying out in the Doctor's Hospital  (where he will die in a few months at 47), Rodgers composed the music for Oklahoma with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein III.  The show is a huge success, although Larry thinks it's simple-minded, conventional, and sentimental.  It's war-time and the show is defended by Rodgers and others as being an idealized work intended to raise spirits and morale during the fighting.  Larry, although he admires the musical more than he cares to admit, tends toward satire -- he mocks Hammerstein for always going for the easiest and most obvious rhyme ("grand" / "land" for instance).  Hart leaves the show early -- he's seen rehearsal productions in New Haven -- and goes to Sardi's  where an after-party is planned.  He engages  in banter with the bartender played by Bobby Carnavale.  The bartender is gruff but kindly and he hesitates to serve Hart since he doesn't want to jeopardize his sobriety.  The lyricist is waiting for a girl with whom he has fallen in love, Elizabeth Weidell -- this is a 20 year old that Hart theoretically desires.  In fact, he's probably gay and his passion for the young woman is a creepy blend of possessiveness, masochistic fawning, and voyeurism -- he wants her to regale him with stories of sexual encounters with fellow students at Yale where she is studying.  Hart, the piano-player, and the bartender quote lines to each other from Casablanca and imitatethe actors in the movie.  Hart mournfully cites Humphrey Bogart's line from the movie:  'I knew then that nobody would ever love me like that --" a key citation in the film.  Oscar Hammerstein III, a huge beefy walrus of a man, and Richard Rodgers come into Sardi's with their entourages and a mob of patrons and backers.  Elizabeth, whose mother is a backer, appears.  Rodgers has bought her flowers and some other gifts, some of them intended to commemorate a trip to a lake in Vermont which Hart remembers with great (and misguided) tenderness.  (Hart's infatuation with Elizabeth doesn't keep him from flirting with the boy who delivers the flowers -- he invites him to his party after the party, a big soiree for which he has retained the "Golden Gate Quartet".  Hart keeps inviting everyone that he meets to his party but it's obvious that no one is going to come -- success is a magnet and, after Sardi's, everyone (including Elizabeth) intends to attend the part of Rodgers' place; people seem embarrassed by Hart's invitations.  After some more monologues and dialogue, Hart makes his plea to the girl in the locked coatroom at Sardi's (he has prevailed on the coatroom attendant to let him importune Elizabeth in that place).  She tells him about a sexual encounter with a handsome boy with whom she is hopelessly in love.  After intercourse, the man has "ghosted her" -- he hasn't called for the four months since the interlude.  Larry is strangely excited by the story.  She says that although the man was impotent in their first encounter and has avoided her after their second interlude, she would, nonetheless, drive thirty hours across the country to see him again.  Larry remarks that no one will ever love him like that.  Elizabeth admits that she loves him but "not in that way."  Larry understands; he says that in every love affair there is someone who gives love and someone who, more or less, passively receives the love given to them.  The party at Sardi's is over.  Larry introduces Elizabeth to Richard Rodgers who seems a little too interested in her -- she leaves to go with him to his party.  The pianist plays "Blue Moon", Larry's most popular song, but a composition that he doesn't like because it is too simple and too sentimental.  In the opening shot, we have seen Larry collapse in an alleyway in a rainstorm.  A title tells us that Larry died at Doctor's Hospital four months later after being found in the gutter half-frozen to death.  He dies at 47.  Rodgers goes on to compose another 15 successful Broadway musicals with Hammerstein.  

The film is understated and laced with interesting allusions to World War Two era culture in New York City.  The characters are carefully drawn in depth:  Rodgers, for instance, who has jilted Hart is portrayed as a man driven to the limits of his patience by Hart's self-destructive drinking; he seems to wish Hart well and this is not merely a theoretical aspiration -- he actually agrees to hire Hart to write lyrics for a revival of a show that they co-authored years ago.  (It's a Connecticut Yankee and Hart did in fact scratch out five new songs for the revival, before his drinking killed him.)  We see a young Stephen Sondheim, apparently nine years old, sniffing dubiously at the rhymes in Oklahoma and pronouncing the prosody sloppy and simple-minded.  (Hammerstein has brought the boy to Oklahoma)\. George Roy Hill, the film maker from Minneapolis who made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, gets a brief cameo as a starstruck Yale theater student.  The great essayist E. B. White also appears in the film as a fellow alcoholic, writing notes as he sips on a martini and exchanging quips with Hart -- it's a fine, dignified part that grounds the movie and keeps it from spinning into the untethered fantasies in which Hart is trapped.  (Hart is given credit for the idea behind E. B. White's children's book, Stuart Little - spelled with a "u" as Hart insists; this is pure fantasy.)

If a movie leaves a lingering series of ambiguities and complications in the viewer's mind and if it is pleasing to contemplate those uncertainties -- the film's negative capacity as it were -- the day after watching the picture, then, I am willing to account the movie as very good, a successful enterprise.  If you are still sorting through the intricacies in the film several days later, then, the picture was, I think, excellent. Linklater is a softspoken director who works directly without any flash or spurious glitter -- it's easy to underestimate him.  But he is certainly one of our best contemporary film-makers.

The Worst Person in the World

 During a climactic argument in Chasing Amy, the heroine, challenged about her past sexual encounters, says:  "I was an experimental girl, for Christ's sake!  Maybe you knew early what track you were on from A to B but, unlike you, I wasn't given a map at birth and, so, I tried it all."  This snippet of dialogue captures some of the qualities of protagonist, Julie, of The Worst Person in the World.  (The film is a 2021 romantic comedy that slips into sobriety and, even, mourning at the end of the picture; directed by Joachim Trier and made in Norway the movie features the luminous Renate Reinsve as the picture's "experimental girl".)  The picture is an even-tempered and mild-mannered portrait of an attractive woman -- she sometimes seems very young and, at other times, appears to be almost middle-aged -- involved in a romantic triangle:  the film depicts her relationship with two men, Aksel, a writer of underground comix, who imagines himself a perpetual rebel and insurgent -- in fact, he's rather bourgeois -- and Eivind, a gawky guy who is also trapped in a fantasy of perpetual youth:  he's underemployed as a coffee barista in downtown Oslo.  The film is charming and, certainly, entertaining enough -- it starts in the Annie Hall mode as a character study of a fascinating young woman; at first, the tone is pure Woody Allen, blithe with brittle-seeming intellectuals, well-stocked book cases, and clever, funny repartee (making small talk at a party, Julie claims that she's a doctor and that "cuddling children" will turn them into drug addicts, an assertion that terrorizes the perfectionist Norwegian mothers with whom she is talking.).  In the last part of the film, mortality intervenes and the movie takes a considerably more somber turn when one of the characters is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and dies.  Parts of the movie are satiric and malicious -- the character of Julie is like a Jane Austen heroine if one of those characters had achieved some notoriety for posting on-line a short story about fellatio.  (The two male characters are fans of the story although one wonders to what extent self-interest plays a role in their approbation.)

Trier is consciously literary and he structures the film into 12 chapters, each neatly entitled and separated by some black frames from one another with both a prologue and an epilogue.  In the prologue, we see Julie in college and observe her flitting from one vocation to another:  first, she wants to be a doctor, then, a psychologist and counsel, and, finally, a photo-journalist, although she really doesn't achieve anything in photography until the end of the movie.  She enters a relationship with the underground comix guy Aksel -- he has made comic books about a feral and subversive bobcat ("Guape").At a party celebrating a new publication by Aksel, Julie gets bored, and wanders away.  Festive occasions in Oslo are celebrated on a high green hill overlooking the city where there is an elegant esplanade.  (In the film's first shot, we see Julie in a black party dress in profile against the backdrop of the bluff and harbor below on one of Oslo's endless pale summer nights.  The scene is repeated twenty minutes in the movie -- this is the image showing Julie's escape from Aksel.) Julie crashes a wedding party also in a house atop the bluff where she meets Eivind.  They are both drunk and they play a little game in which the objective is to see how intimate they can get with one another without actually having sex -- the answer, by the way, is "pretty intimate" since they take turns watching one another urinate.  There are several more parties in the film.  In one of them, Aksel takes Julie to meet his friends, most of whom have children.  He wants to have a child with Julie. The married couples fight, and both Aksel and Julie are embarrassed.  When Julie, drunkenly says, "let's make a baby", Aksel doesn't seem to take her encouragement to heart.  Julie has lied to Eivind about being a doctor.  She actually works as clerk in a bookstore.  She is upset to see Eivind come into the store.  We are later shown that he's with Sunniva, a woman who wants a book on "Green Yoga".  There's a flashback to Sunniva and Eivind camping on a desolate mountain in Finnmark.  Eivind has done a genetics test through Ancestry and discovered that she has 3.6% Sami blood.  This turns her into a Sami shaman and ritual practitioner as well as an environmentalist; Eivind struggles to keep up her with modish shamanic rituals, her yoga practice as a teacher and her environmental activism.  Ultimately, when Eivind breaks up with Sunniva to live with Julie, he condemns himself as a traitor to her and the climate -- that is, "the worst person in the world."  Julie is in love with Eivind -- who she imagines in a startling sequence as the only person in the whole world:  everyone else is paralyzed and motionless.  She breaks up with Aksel who worships her.  It's a sad and disturbing scene:  poor Aksel is left wearing a shirt but without pants or underpants when she walks out on him.  Julie doesn't have a gift for happiness.  She quarrels with Eivind whom she denounces as shiftless.  Then, she learns that Aksel has pancreatic cancer and is dying.  She visits him on several occasions.  He announces to her that she is the great love of his life.  He is morose and terrified and, later, we seem him enduring pain.  Julie gets Aksel to talk about his childhood -- they do a sort of nostagia tour of Oslo and Julie takes pictures of him with her large Canon camera.  Aksel dies and Julie is with Eivind. She's pregnant with Eivind's child and decides to have the child.  But she miscarries.  In the epilog, we see Julie taking publicity photos on the set of a movie that seems to echo some of the themes and aspects of the film we have been watching.  The actress in the movie goes outside where she meets Eivind who is holding their baby.  

This summary doesn't capture the pictorial ingenuity of the film or its complexity.  Julie's parents are divorced.  Her father seems to be a pathological liar -- he lies but it doesn't matter because no one believes him in the first instance.  There's a scene in which Julie with friends takes mushrooms and has vivid and frightening hallucinations -- she's in an old woman's body suckling an infant.  There are interesting and baffling visual motifs -- in an early scene, Aksel shows Julie a window in his apartment that has thick crazed glass; when he's dying, Aksel shows Julie tinted windows, stained glass, in a childhood flat.  We see Oslo through those red, blue, and yellow panes.  When Aksel says that Julie was the love of his life and the reason he wants to keep living, she's too honest to reciprocate -- he is obviously not the love of her life. (There's a painful detail:  Julie cuddles with Aksel in his hospital bed, but when he puts his hand on her breast, she nonchalantly brushes it aside.)  When Aksel asks her if she was faithful to him, she also wounds him with her honesty, admitting that she was involved with Eivind when they were together.  Aksel's comic is adapted into a Christmas movie called Guape ruins Christmas, obviously an atrocious corruption of his work.  The picture is beautifully shot.  It doesn't add up to a whole lot --  but it's an effectively mounted work and very compelling.  Julie isn't the worst person in the world, nor is she a "very good person" as Aksel says -- but she's vibrant with life and no better nor worse than most of us.  

The Rip

 "Rip", apparently, refers to law enforcement confiscating money earned through criminal activities.  Obviously, there is a strong moral risk associated with so-called "Rip" operations.  What's to keep the cops who have snatched money from bad guys from skimming some of the proceeds for themselves?  Cops are underpaid and, generally, have domestic expenses associated with divorce or child custody problems.  Therefore, strong temptations exist for police officers to expropriate for their own use some amount of the ill-gotten funds that they have seized.

This is the background for Joe Carnahan's very entertaining police thriller The Rip starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as Miami-Dade cops severely tempted by 20 million dollars discovered in a "stash house." Affleck's "Sarge" is involved in a love affair with a fellow police officer.  She gets shot, seemingly by corrupt cops, who are aware that she knows about a huge treasure at a cartel stash house in the suburb of Hialeah.  Sarge's brother, a G-man, is investigating corruption among the Miami-Dade cops.  (He and his brother have a contentious relationship which leads to a fist fight between them in the station house.)  Matt Damon, confusingly called both LT and Dane, is broke -- he is on the verge of losing everything due to a bad and destructive divorce.  Obviously, he's on the look-out for a score that will save him from financial ruin.  The cops seem to be morally flexible.  They sit around afterhours, watching their buddies drive recklessly doing doughnuts in the parking lot while all the officers chug down beers.  Dane has a message that there's a Hialeah stash house with money available for the taking.  With Sarge and an Asian cop called Mo who is a straight arrow, as well as two cocky female officers, the cops drive to the suburb and talk their way into the house where they think the money has been hidden.  They have a sort of terrier named Wilbur who has been trained to sniff out filthy lucre.  The neighborhood where the house is located is eerily empty.  The only person within blocks seems to Desi, a Columbian immigrant, who says that she is house-sitting while probate lawyers work out title to the premises which belonged to her abuela.  The house is full of junk and seems crumbling around Desi's ears.  The cops search the house and discover more than 20 million dollars of cartel cash, bills piled up in dry wall plaster buckets.  But there are other corrupt cops nosing around the neighborhood and the cartel, perhaps, is also engaged in surveillance of the strangely empty neighborhood.  Dane and Sarge bicker about the money and seem baffled as to what to do -- will they steal it all or merely a part or will they turn it in to the boss (who might steal the money for himself).  Meanwhile, an army of bad guys is converging on the house:  gang-members and crooked police out to score themselves,  Someone phones the cops guarding the money (and counting it) in the house telling them to vamoose or "in thirty minutes people will start to die."  Sarge and Dane, are baffled -- they are sorely tempted to steal money but have trouble figuring out a plan.  Desi, of course, the woman house-sitting, would have to be eliminated.  And if the money is stolen, how are Sarge and Dane going to split up the dough, particularly since the two female cops will have to be bought off and something will have to be done with the straight-arrow Mo.  There's another call saying that the cops need to leave right away or "in ten minutes, people will start to die."  The time passes and bad guys attack with machine guns, blasting the house, more or less, to pieces. And so it goes.

I can't provide more of the very complex plot without revealing lots of details as to surprising twists and turns in the story.  Suffice it to say that "things are not as they seem to be", an archetypal plot described in the excellent Ethan Hawke vehicle "The Low Down" a recent cable TV series. The Rip is not a serious movie but its very entertaining.  I was reminded of Walter Hill's Trespass (1992) in which firemen happen on a treasure in a burning building in East St. Louis and are besieged in an old foundry  and attacked by scores of bad guys.  The aspects of the movie involving greed and characters conniving to steal the treasure for which everyone is contending are similar as is the pressure-cooker environment of the foundry ruins under attack. John Carpenter's second or third movie, Assault of Precinct 13 (1976) is also closely parallel to the action in The Rip -- the cops are cut off, trapped while menacing thugs tighten their strangle hold about the precinct house.  The other picture which The Rip resembles is A Simple Plan (Sam Raimi, 1998) a variant on the primordial allegory about greed, Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale"; A Simple Plan involves a family man and small-town account who finds a treasure in a plane crashed in a wintry woods in rural Minnesota.  Two-thirds of The Rip are frightening and suspenseful, mostly confined to the shabby old house full of garbage and the spooky empty neighborhood.   The last third of the movie is less focused, involves two chases, and seems less dire and suspenseful -- there's a slackening of tension as the various conflicts and betrayals are worked out.  This part of the film is not as good as the middle section of the picture, but still exceedingly clever and interesting.  I'm tempted to say that "they don't make movies like this anymore" -- you will see that my comparisons and correlates are all more than 25 years old.  This is a very well-designed and exciting suspense film that I recommend.  

 

Pain and Glory

 A Spanish film director, perhaps in his sixties, is afflicted with many painful health conditions.  Something, possibly a cancerous tumor, is blocking his esophagus and he chokes when eating or, even, drinking water.  His knee is stiff and he walks with an antalgic gait.  Back pain keeps him up at night.  (Antonio Banderas who plays the film director named Salvador Gallo has obviously closely observed elderly people afflicted with pain -- the character seems stiff, limps, and backs carefully into his vehicle when he sits down since neither his knees nor his spine can be trusted to bend as they should; it's a fine physically astute performance.)  Gallo's pain has sidelined him for four years and he lives like a hermit in a voluptuously decorated apartment or condominium in Madrid.  His only associate is a middle-aged woman, Mercedes, who assists him and may be his business agent.  Pain and Glory is a film by Pedro Almodovar and, broadly speaking, it is formulaic and predictable -- something will disturb Gallo's withdrawal from the world and the film will document his painful return to creativity in his profession.  The film that we are watching is revealed, in the last shot, to be the vehicle by which Gallo restores himself as a moviemaker.  Almodovar began his career in the seventies as a cartoonist composing comic-strip telenovelas -- he's has never fully eschewed the esthetics of that form:  Pain and Glory turns on two outlandish coincidences, events which are "tamed" as it were by the relatively sober propriety with which Almodovar treats his subject matter.  We may recall that Fellini cut his teeth as a cartoonist; Pain and Glory resembles in many respect Fellini's autobiographical 8 1/2 -- the plight of the creatively blocked film maker is explored through flashbacks and allegorical emblems (in 8 1/2, the rocket stalled on the launchpad; in Pain and Glory, the mysterious ailments that afflict Gallo).  In both films, the director's love-life is at the center of the movie, suggesting that the dissolution of the hero's libido is part of his problem.  The films also explore various dreams and memories from the central characters' pasts.  Pain and Glory as the name implies is more optimistic than Fellini's visionary film, a movie that suggests that the hero's incapacity derives from pathologies in the film industry and society as a whole:  8 1/2 is vividly satirical -- I don't see much satire in Almodovar's film which has a more realistic tincture.  Like Fellini, Almodovar has a great eye and his images often carry an astonishing weight of flamboyant beauty -- "flamboyant "is the key word:  Gallo's apartment is comprised of great, eye-popping swaths of bright red, particularly in his kitchen which is as gory as an abattoir.  Also like Fellini, Almodovar is a collector of beautiful faces and bodies -- in the memory scenes, the young director as a boy is played by a luminously angelic child; the boy's mother is the radiant, ageless Penelope Cruz -- the boy's first crush, a mason who tiles the walls of the cave where the child lives, is also gorgeous.  And he traipses around totally nude.  The rural landscapes are resplendent -- women doing laundry drape brilliantly white sheets on riverside bushes in a spectacular display.  The past, as recalled by the director, is a strange country -- the little boy has his glamorous, beautiful mother all to himself and the little family lives in some kind of whitewashed cave cut into a hillside.  

The movie's opening shot shows us Gallo submerged in a pool.  The camera surveys a red ridge on his body, a surgical scar extending from "nave to the chops" as Shakespeare would have it.  Clearly, the insides of this fellow have been exposed.  So Pain and Glory begins with an emblematic shot of a wounded body, posing the question as to what is inside -- an inquiry that the film will answer.  A movie made by Gallo thirty years earlier has been revived and the director is asked to appear for a Q & A at some film society.  He is supposed to appear with his star, a handsome actor whose association with Gallo ended with this movie, called Sabor or "Flavor".  The picture was supposed to be about the ecstatic manic vibe connected with cocaine use.  But the star was a heroin addict and he literally brought the movie down with his acting -- apparently, glum, self-centered, and numb.  According to Gallo, this wrecked the movie, although the film has become a cult movie.  Gallo goes to see the co-star.  After an initially tense few minutes, the two men start "chasing the dragon" -- that is, smoking heroin together.  Because of his pain symptoms, Gallo becomes addicted to heroin and has to buy it on the street.  While he is passed-out one day in the actor's apartment, the performer reads a text on Gallo's laptop called the addictions -- it's a thinly veiled autobiographical story about a three-year gay love affair between Gallo and his boyfriend who was a heroin addict.  The actor is enchanted by the story and asks that Gallo let him have the text so that he can manufacture a theater piece, a monologue from it.  The monologue is premiered in an intimate theater and the actor observes a middle-aged man in the audience weeping.  It turns out that his man, who is only temporarily in town and on business (he lives in Buenos Aires),is the real-life figure with whom Gallo had the love affair that is depicted in "Addictions."  The actor tells the man where Gallo lives and he goes to his house.  The two men reminisce about the past, kiss, but don't have sex.  The man from Buenos Aires is now an upstanding citizen, not addicted to any drugs, and married with two children.  The happenstance encounter with the man from Buenos Aires is the first of the two remarkable coincidences on which Almodovar rests his story.

The second coincidence involves a childhood memory of his mother engaging an impoverished plaster-worker and mason to renovate part of their cave.  The tradesman is illiterate and the nine-year old Gallo is extremely precocious and kind -- he agrees to teach the man to read and write in exchange for his labor at the cave.  Gallo is preternaturally patient and succeeds in teaching the mason to read.  The mason is a talented artist and he makes a sketch of Gallo reading in his house.  Gallo, as a pain-tormented and famous director, sees an advertisement for a Barcelona art gallery in which the painting of the little boy reading made fifty years earlier is depicted as for sale.  With his assistant, Mercedes, he goes to the gallery and buys the painting.  There is writing on the back of the painting in which the artist praises Gallo for his patience and kindness in teaching him to read.  The painting was sent to Gallo but he had moved and the picture never reached him.  Gallo is greatly moved.  He consults with a doctor about the tumor in his esophagus.  It turns out not to be cancerous but, in fact, a spinal bone spur that is occluding his throat.  Surgery is planned.  The little painting opens Gallo to more memories and he recalls seeing the tradesman, naked in the cave, bathing after working on the picture.  Gallo is so smitten with the handsome tradesman that he faints dead away.  Gallo, after remembering this moment, is inspired to write a story (and, probably, the scenario of the movie we are watching) called "First Desire."  As he falls asleep under anesthesia, Gallo has a vivid dream of fireworks exploding and, then, realizes that he is with his beautiful young mother watching the night sky that is full of fire and color.  The camera pulls back and we understand that the scene with Gallo and his mother is part of the film we have been watching -- a girl is holding a sound boom over the woman and her son.  A few minutes earlier, Gallo has tried to reconcile with his elderly mother but only partially achieved his objective.  The old woman wants to die in her village but Gallo can't get her back there in time.  So she dies in the ICU and, in fact, alone.  We are given to believe that Gallo's creativity has returned to him.  

It's a complex film filled with weird dead ends and mirroring or parallel effects -- Gallo's estrangement from his mother mirrors his estrangement from the star of Sabor which continues after Gallo does a Q & A with the audience at the revival and acknowledges his anger at the man for turning his cocaine-inflected movie into a heroin addiction show.  The two coincidences both involve art works (the theater piece based on "Addictions" and the young plasterer's painting of the boy who has taught him to read.)  The partial reconciliation between Gallo and his heroin addicted lover (who is now a straight-as-an-arrow family man) is mirrored by partial reconciliation between Gallo and his very pious mother who has not been able to accept with equanimity Gallo's homosexuality.  Other parallel effects are obvious in the movie.  The idea seems to be that art can be a form of redemption and that the very existence of the autobiographical Pain and Glory has redeemed Gallo and, for that matter, Almodovar.