Top Five

Top Five (2014) is an ambitious film directed by the comedian, Chris Rock.  It's a big, vivid picture, chronicling one day in the life of its hero, a comedian and film maker named Andre Allen -- he's called "Dre" by his friends.  The film scrambles time, uses a complex series of flashbacks and flashforwards, all of this jump-cut for a ragged, jangly effect.  Dre's career is in trouble.  His fans are annoyed by his recent pictures, particularly an earnest film about a slave-uprising in Haiti called Uprize!  Interviewers plead with the director to return to making audience-pleasing "funny films" and Dre has to contend with a legion of admirers who want him to return to producing pictures in the "Hammy the Bear" series -- a raunchy violent comedy franchise featuring Dre dressed-up as a gun-toting Teddy Bear.  Dre's agent has arranged for the celebrity to be married on live TV to a reality show star, upcoming nuptials about which the protagonist seems understandably anxious.  Top Five follows Dre through a day and a night -- he grants interviews and promotes, unsuccessfully, Uprize!, a film that is tanking at the box-office, and, finally, attends a much-hyped bachelor party with fellow comedians (a sullen-looking Jerry Seinfeld and morose Adam Sandler, with a grim-looking Whoopie Goldberg), before jetting off to the West Coast, presumably to be married. An interview with a comely lady-journalist provides both an occasion for romance and a framework for autobiographical vignettes.  Dre's life is complicated by the fact that he is a recovering alcoholic, committed to the AA notion of "rigorous honesty," and on the verge of relapse.  The film's romantic interest, the lady journalist, is also a reformed drunk and committed to a doomed relationship with a homosexual man -- in the course of the film, she abandons journalistic objectivity (under a pseudonym she has previously panned Dre's Uprize!) and embarks on an affair with the comedian.  The film has a large and voluble supporting cast, including J.B. Smoove, as Dre's unctuous, chubby-chasing agent, Tracy Morgan and Cedric the Entertainer, as a Houston pimp and impresario.  The flashbacks involve lots of drinking and drug use together with graphically portrayed sexual encounters.  Somehow, the movie, although frantic and crammed with witty dialogue, doesn't quite succeed.  And the film doesn't successfully emerge from the shadow of two pictures on which it is modeled -- first, the movie is obviously a homage to Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (the film in which Allen is repeatedly berated for no longer making funny movies); indeed, Andre's surname, "Allen", makes the reference clear.  Top Five refers to the characters' penchant for making lists of their "top five" favorite comedians or musical acts -- also a reference to the list of things that make life worth living recited by Woody Allen in the one of the final scenes of Manhattan.  (Since, Allen's Stardust Memories was itself derived from Fellini's 8 1/2, Chris Rock's film has something of the pallid quality of a copy of a copy.)  Second, the film's structure is derived from Spike Lee's somber picture about a convicted Wall Street banker roaming the streets of Manhattan before turning himself in for a five-year prison sentence, The 25th Hour.  Both movies are largely set in the New York neighborhoods, use semi-documentary film making techniques, and seem to show a series of events unfolding in something approximating real time.  Unfortunately, Top Five can't quite compare with the pictures that it invokes -- it's good, but not as good as it should be.  Furthermore, Top Five is predictable -- references to Cinderella play out in the scenes final images more or less as we expect -- and the picture is compromised:  it's open-ended but not so open-ended as to be honestly ambiguous and the sequence in which Rock returns to his roots, performing some good raunchy stand-up comedy in a cellar club in the Village, is not as hilarious as the film represents it to be.  Comedy shouldn't rely on reaction shots to make its points and the stand-up routine, supposedly representing Dre's redemption and integrity, is riddled with close-ups telling us when to laugh and how hard. 

Gone Girl

In the opening shot of David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014), we see a beautiful woman, sleepy and, apparently, post-coital -- "What are you thinking?  Are you thinking of me?  What have we done to ourselves?" a voice questions.  Chaucer's Wife of Bath spoke of the "wo that is in mariage," and this seems to be the subject of Fincher's film, paranoid uncertainty with respect to the answer to these fundamental questions whispered in the first scene.  What if the companion of your bed were, indeed, not only thinking of you, but, also, deviously and assiduously plotting your doom?  What if your wife (or husband) was not only your adversary, a necessary condition of marriage, but, also, a monstrous nemesis, the embodiment of a catastrophe custom-designed for you, and only you?  This is the lurid premise of Gone Girl, a film featuring a femme fatale so completely calculating and lethal as to be almost comically absurd.  Gone Girl is about marriage, the way that de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom is about sex or the way that Euripides' Medea is about motherhood.  It's difficult to write about Gone Girl without revealing plot twists.  Normally, the fear of "spoilers" doesn't inhibit me -- but Gone Girl is primarily entertaining because of its melodramatic and shocking plot and, since I (reluctantly) recommend this movie, I don't want to deprive the viewer of the modest, but very real, pleasures of surprise that the film affords.  Therefore, my narrative summary is perforce a bit obtuse and abstract.  A dimwitted hunk played by Ben Affleck, a man a bit like John Heard in Body Heat, encounters a beautiful and highly accomplished woman.  This woman, Amy, is famous because her life has served as the model for a series of wildly popular children's books featuring a spunky character called "Amazing Amy."  The hunk marries the enigmatic woman, drawn to her by their sexual rapport.  When both characters are laid-off and the husband's mother is diagnosed with cancer, the couple move to a small town in rural Missouri.  Amy uses her trust fund to buy a bar in town that her husband manages with his loyal twin sister.  Then, as their marriage is deteriorating, Amy simply vanishes.  Forensic evidence in their home suggests that the woman has been killed, probably by her husband.  As evidence mounts that the husband is the murderer, cable news networks pick up the story and Affleck's character is tried and convicted in the media.  Supported by his twin sister, the husband hires an expensive lawyer who specializes in defending men accused of murdering their wives.  The defense team is convinced that Amy has fled the marriage and is hiding somewhere; their strategy is to flush her out into the open.  Amy seems to have engineered an extraordinarily complex and air-tight scheme to frame her husband for her murder.  As hysteria mounts in the community -- there are candle-light vigils and the streets are clogged with TV broadcasting trucks -- the story becomes increasingly bizarre and, indeed, grotesque.  A number of sequences are completely "over the top" -- that is, exaggerated to the point of becoming almost comic.  Fincher's little Missouri town features a subterranean ruin filled with sinister criminals and there is an immensely creepy rich man with a scary mansion that also serves as a kind of dungeon.  The film hints at all sorts of perversity including incest and sado-masochism and ends on a nightmarish note that is ludicrous but, certainly, horrific and frightening.  Ben Affleck is effective as the fly caught in the Black Widow's elaborate web and the femme fatale, played by Rosamunde Pike, who has the demeanor of a bruised Madonna, is eerily vacant, sometimes alarmingly plain and, in other shots, radiantly beautiful -- the actress embodies sheer malice, and, although her motives are apparently insane and possibly incommunicable, she is certainly a frightening figure.  Disrespected by a casual acquaintance, Amy waits until the girl goes into the bathroom and, then, calmly spits into her Big Gulp Mountain Dew.  Fincher uses muted colors and his direction of the minor characters is impeccable -- indeed, the supporting cast is more believable and compelling than the two principals, both of whom seem like the figures in a stormy Baroque canvas, trapped in histrionic postures that really don't make any sense in the real world.  A lady homicide detective embodies cool, skeptical intelligence and her yokel side-kick discloses a subtle, class-based animus against the unlucky husband.  Tyler Perry is charismatic as the cynical defense lawyer, the two actors portraying Amy's parents are unctuous and creepy, and Neil Patrick Harris is frighteningly intense as the monomaniacal rich man.  There is a vivid portrait of a white-trash couple, a hillbilly Bonnie and Clyde, hanging around a ramshackle resort in the Ozarks and a rogue's gallery of casually vicious media "talking heads" -- the parody of CNN's Nancy Grace is particularly vivid, cruel, and truthful, sophisticated satire of a high order.  Indeed, all the supporting roles in the large cast are exceptionally good, probably better than the rather improbable script deserves.  The soundtrack by Trent Reznor is suitably sinister and, sometimes, yields moments of quiet grandeur -- there is a haunting, triumphal theme that sometimes serves as a counterpoint to the action, underlying exterior scenes of processions of police cars and broadcasting trucks, and that music is very beautiful. a somber hymn.  The film is exquisitely crafted, exceptionally gripping, and, more or less, totally bonkers.  The last hour is wholly unbelievable but, nonetheless, has a sort of dream-like intensity.  When the resurrected Amy gives a press-conference covered from head to toe in gore, the image is completely absurd and, yet, also horribly compelling -- it's ghastly romanticism is like something from Brian De Palma's prime. 

Lifeboat

Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) is one of the great directors "gimmick" films:  the movie's action is confined to a thirty-foot long lifeboat tossed on the seas of the North Atlantic.  The challenge posed by the picture is whether a movie can be made in these straitened circumstances that is nonetheless "cinematic" -- a problem that Hitchcock seems to solve, more or less, effortlessly. (Rear Window and Rope are similarly limited in their setting.) In his iconic films made in the Fifties, Hitchcock was famously indifferent to special effects -- in fact, his rear projection mise-en-scene is generally so awful that it imparts a dream-like surrealistic ambience to films like Vertigo.  But in the forties, Hitchcock seems to have been more concerned with achieving realistic effects and the camerawork and staging of the storm scenes in Lifeboat is craftsmanslike and fairly effective -- the actors, pronouncing their didactic and preachy speeches (courtesy of John Steinbeck) do, in fact, seem to be trapped on a small vessel in the middle of an empty and menacing sea, although the setting (and situation) always remains more or less theoretical and abstract.  A jaded socialite (played by Tallulah Bankhead -- she's like a less campy version of the middle-aged Joan Crawford) finds herself alone on a lifeboat floating in a field of debris remaining after a German U-Boat has torpedoed the transatlantic liner on which she ws traveling.  Bankhead looks annoyed as if she's waiting for a train that has been delayed.  One by one, the other characters are fished out of the drink and assembled on board -- there is a Thurston Howell the 3rd millionaire, a couple of tough merchant marine sailors, a nurse (convenient for the improvised pen-knife amputation required by gangrene afflicting one of the seamen) and an African-American porter who seems surprised when the white folks on the boat grant him a vote during their various contentious debates. (A young mother whose baby has died imparts a jarring note of tragedy to the proceedings and so Hitchcock dispenses rapidly with her -- she jumps overboard in the middle of the night.) Suspense is supplied by a German sailor, who climbs aboard, and, then, commandeers the lifeboat.  The German is a suitably sinister exemplar of the Master Race -- he sings Schubert Lieder as he tirelessly rows the boat toward his colleagues in a supply ship located somewhere just over the horizon, conversing all the while in epigrams pronounced in perfectly accented, Oxford-inflected English.  In many respects, the movie is a nasty piece of propaganda -- the film climaxes with the passengers mobbing the German and beating him to death, a bit of savagery that the audience is meant to applaud.  (Although Hitchcock is characteristically evasive about the morality of this mob-inflicted sea-lynching -- he stages the death of the German as an ugly example of mob violence.)  The point of the film seems to be that in war time, the niceties of international law don't matter and that virtuous and brave people should take the law into their own hands, a dubious point because one that could be made with equal force in Nazi propaganda of the same general tenor.  The film's function is to support the war-effort and it is single-minded in this endeavor.  There's very little of Hitchcock's perverse humor on display and the film lacks the kinky sexual undertones present in most of the filmmaker's work.  Lifeboat is a civilized sort of entertainment -- other than the beating death of the German sailor, none of its effects are as savage as the material warrants.  The man who loses his leg doesn't seem to suffer too much and Hitchcock makes death by thirst and exposure look relatively glamorous -- the special effects of sea and wave are well-designed but we never lose the sense that this is a debate on political and social issues staged for our delectation in a comfortable movie studio in Los Angeles. 

Nightcrawler

Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler (2014) is an entertaining neo-noir, beautifully crafted and, indeed, machine-tooled to a high gloss.  The film is fundamentally divided:  on one level, the movie makers seem to have aimed for a raw blast of gritty urban melodrama.  This aspect of Nightcrawler conflicts with the extremely beautiful, even lyrical, photography of Los Angeles at night, the work of the great cameraman Frederick Elswit -- eerily empty lanes curve and arc under the shimmer of halogen lights, palm trees hover in the twilight, gas stations and convenience stores glisten in the night like gems on black velvet.  The curious dichotomy between raw immediacy and high-sheen glamor is reflected in the titular "nightcrawler" -- a sort of pirate with a camcorder and police scanner who trolls the night city recording images of murder and accidental death.  As played by Jake Gyllenhaal, the "stringer" Lewis Boom, is a homicidal psychopath who lectures his hapless employee ceaselessly on entrepreneurship, proper etiquette at work, and career building -- he's like Scorsese's infamous taxi driver, Travis Bickel crossed with Dale Carnegie.  Boom is a loner eking out a living by petty crime (he chops down cyclone fences and sells them to metal merchants).  One night, he happens on an accident scene and observes stringers with camcorders recording the gory action so that it can be peddled to local TV stations.  Boom steals a bicycle, converts it to cash, and buys the requisite camcorder and police scanner.  He acquires an "intern," played by Riz Ahmed, and using the "Maps" feature on his phone races to accidents and crime scenes. Boom is aggressive and fearless; he's also not afraid to trespass, entering apartments where shootings have occurred to get the gruesome goods that he markets to the local Tv-network affiliates.  A vestigial subplot involves a female news producer, down on her luck and desperate to enhance her show's ratings -- she haggles with Boom over footage that he produces and encourages him to focus on stories that can be used, Fox-news style, to terrorize White middle-class viewers:  home invasions and car-jackings in prosperous neighborhoods.  Boom is attracted to the lady-producer's faded glamor (she was probably once "on-air" talent) and, although she is twice his age, unctuously tries to seduce her.  All of the secondary characters are underwritten, basically caricatures that we have seen in other movies -- the lady news producer is similar, for instance, to the Faye Dunaway character in Network -- and the film seems stripped down to its essential outline.  It is like a fifties film noir but without the plot complications or wealth of effectively portrayed secondary characters. But the movie is exciting with a realistic and thrilling police chase for a climax and some of the satire has a cutting edge -- particularly effective is a scene showing how the news producer pruriently amps up the paranoia in the reporting to frighten her target-demographic.  As the film progresses, the amoral Boom begins to manipulate the scenes of the calamities that he films; like Matthew Arnold on a Civil War battlefield, he drags the corpses around to get better shots.  And from this sort of intervention, it's a short step from recording disasters to, in fact, designing and orchestrating the calamities that he films.  The movie is ice-cold and cynical; it projects a glacial sense of outrage, but, of course, the viewer is complicit in the crimes that the movie documents -- after all, we are the consumers for the gory news footage that Lewis Boom and his ilk produce.  Gyllenhaal is superlatively creepy in the title role; Rene Russo is effective as the callous news producer.  And, of course, LA stuns in its star turn as the sinister, glittering City of Night.     

A Million Ways to Die in the West

The DNA of one of America's noblest, and most classical, art forms, the Hollywood Western, runs completely contrary to juvenile, potty-mouthed humor.  For this reason, a comedy mashing together the two genres is likely to be either an ingenious masterpiece or a complete failure -- Seth McFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West is, lamentably, the latter.  McFarlane plays a hapless sheep farmer who despises the stunning, if arid, western territory where he is marooned -- it's too dangerous, he complains, with a million ways to die:  something illustrated by a number of garish and bloody accidental deaths throughout the film in the manner of the Final Destination franchise.  A fop steals the hero's girlfriend leading him to challenge the man to a duel.  A beautiful young woman, something of an Annie Oakley, teaches McFarlane to shoot a revolver and he humiliates his rival in the duel.  (His triumph involves laxative and results in several Stetson hats used as chamber pots and shown in close-up when filled with steaming diarrhea.)  By this time, the sheepherder has fallen in love with the comely lady shootist.  Unfortunately, she turns out to be married to the baddest of the bad hombres in the district, a gunfighter played by Liam Neeson, snarling and spitting like Jack Palance. There are some showdowns, horse chases, and a scene involving peyote, Indians, and levitating sheep.  In the end, McFarlane gets the girl.  The movie is mildly amusing and has a half-dozen halfway decent gags.  The conventions of the Western, the old tropes of barren landscape and figures on horseback, clearly interested the filmmaker and his crew far more than the perfunctory plot and its tepid jokes.  There are a couple of stirring scenes of men on horseback galloping across open country and a number of shots staged in Monument Valley are almost surrealistically beautiful.  Indeed, McFarlane lights his desert village and the sheepherder's homestead romantically, pools of golden, glowing firelight against vast starry skies.  The viewer has the sense that McFarlane, who thinks himself too laid-back and modern to make a Western, would, in fact, rather just succumb to temptations implicit in this material and produce a straight B-Western movie.  But no such luck.  A lot of talent has been assembled for this movie -- it features Bill Maher, Gilbert Gottfried, Sarah Silverman, and a number of other worthy performers, all of them wasted or given sophomoric obscenities to mouth. The two principals are completely miscast.  Seth McFarlane is completely wooden, uninspiring, and somnolent as the leading man -- he seems scarcely awake at times and he is not, by any reasonable standard, a handsome fellow:  unfortunately, McFarlane seems vain and, unlike Woody Allen, for instance, doesn't highlight his unprepossessing appearance for laughs.  In fact, he seems to think that he is another Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart.  Charlize Theron, the heroine, looks so tall, supernaturally skinny and long-legged, that she seems to be an entirely different species of human being, completely unreal in shape and appearance and totally unsuited for the film.  The love scenes between these two mismatched players are excruciating to behold. 

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

Alex Gibney's 2015 documentary (based on Lawrence Wright's book), Going Clear:  Scientology and the Prison of Belief is best approached as a black comedy, something like Erasmus' In Praise of Folly -- if you are going to see this film, you should be a jaded aficionado of folly.  Here is why I limit my recommendation of this movie to only those willing to view the whole thing as a joke:  the film's content, it's raw material, is so outrageous and displays a form of bullying stupidity that is so astoundingly overt, arrogant, and successful that watching this show will merely make you angry -- it will raise your blood pressure.  And unresolved anger is blood brother to depression.  In the end, unless taken cum grano salis, this documentary will, probably, just make you enraged, exhaust you, and leave you with a deposit of the deep melancholy.

That said, the film shows a train wreck of such proportions that you can't look away.  The story is probably well-known to most people but so remarkable as to deserve a brief reprise.  A successful science fiction writer, and accomplished liar, L. Ron Hubbard, wrote a self-help book called Dianetics.  The book triggered a fad and Hubbard toured the country lecturing on his doctrine.  As the fad faded, Hubbard decided to repackage his theories as a religion, something he called Scientology.  A devoted core of acolytes surrounded the increasingly paranoid Hubbard who ended up in permanent exile on the high seas for tax fraud.  Scientology has a simple premise:  simony.  You pay for enlightenment.  The more you pay, the more enlightened the Church declares you to be.  To increase the religion's revenues, the Church developed an enormous hierarchy of degrees of revelation, each higher level more expensive than the preceding (and lower/inferior) levels.  When a Scientologist reaches the highest level of understanding, he or she is revealed the ultimate truth of human existence -- this is handed to the adept in the form of a photocopy of a handwritten memo prepared by L. Ron Hubbard himself.  Paul Haggis, in an interview in the film, describes his reaction upon first reading this memo:  "I wondered -- Was it a sanity test?  Were they trying to figure out if I was so completely crazy as to believe the stuff written in the revelation?"  Hubbard's apocalypse tells his disciples that billions of years ago evil aliens, probably something like psychiatrists, the so-called Thetans, were banished to Earth; they were thrown in volcanos that were sealed with nuclear explosions.  But the spirits of the dead Thetans have escaped and occupy living human beings.  To be truly liberated -- that is, to "go clear" -- the Thetan ghosts must be clawed out of our personalities.  This is accomplished by the use of an electromagnetic device something like a lie-detector, the so-called E-Meter.  E-Metrics is the closest thing that Scientology has to a liturgy or religious practice:  members of the Church "audit" one another using the e-meter device and try to extract oppressive (or "suppressive" to use Scientology terminology) influences from the psyche.  (The regimen of "auditing" is obviously derived from Freudian psychoanalysis -- something L. Ron Hubbard, however, vehemently denied.) As this is accomplished, and, as the Scientologist becomes increasingly "clear" of Thetan control, that person reaps dividends that are apparently brazenly materialistic and, even , pecuniary -- you become handsome, self-confident, attractive to beautiful women, and, ultimately, wealthy beyond all dreams of avarice.  The two most famous Scientologists are Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

The belief system animating Scientology is not intrinsically more absurd than Mormonism.  Every religion, including Christianity, requires its adherents to believe something that is "folly to the Greeks" -- that is, something absurd.  What makes Scientology abhorrent is the element of coercive fraud that animates every aspect of its history and operations.  The entire institution is a vast, secretive instrument for committing theft on a massive scale.  Truly disturbing is the fact that the IRS capitulation to Scientology in 1993, it's recognition of this con-game as a religion, has placed the criminals at the helm of this operation effectively beyond the reach of the law.  Furthermore, Scientology, a cult that seems to be shrinking now that the "cat is out of the bag" as to its doctrine, merely grows more powerful and wealthy each day as it loses adherents but increases its investments and real estate portfolio. 

Gibney's film is just a series of talking heads intercut with some drone-type footage of the sinister-looking Church Headquarters in California.  The program is unbalanced -- no one from Scientology would offer an interview to the filmmakers.  The movie documents in nauseating detail Scientology's history of blackmail, extortion, and physically coercive violence -- people cleaning toilets with their tongues, beatings, strange forms of brainwashing, the use of child and slave labor at its compounds and so on.  Some of this material is undoubtedly exaggerated, but if a tenth of what the film alleges is true than most of Scientology's leading apostles should be serving long prison sentences.  Particularly hapless are Travolta and Cruise, both, apparently, closeted homosexuals, who seem to have made a Faustian deal with the Church -- money and fame in exchange for protection with respect to a personal secret that was a big deal five years ago, but that today, in an era of legally sanctioned same sex marriages, no one seems to care much about.  Archival footage of L. Ron Hubbard is fascinating, particularly with regard to Paul Thomas Anderson's great The Master -- the documentary lets us see how Hubbard looked and hear the cadences of his speech.  On screen, he's a roly-poly man dressed incongruously as the Admiral of the Ocean Sea with bad teeth and a sinister jack-o-lantern grin.  Although, in person, Hubbard was apparently a man of some charisma, none of this is perceptible in the film.  The great question that the film poses, and that remains a riddle is a simple one that has always vexed mankind:  Why do people chose to believe things that are so palpably wrong that any reasonably intelligent seven-year old would dismiss as ridiculous?  I can venture only one answer on the basis of this film and it is dispiriting -- I suppose if I have paid good money be told something that is ridiculous, the price-tag on that doctrine requires that I believe what I have been told.  Put a price-tag on a belief and that belief can become, at least for its adherents, unshakeable dogma. 

A heavy package came to my office the week the film was premiered on HBO.  The package contains a DVD about the abuses of psychiatry and extraordinarily glossy brochure and study package printed on high-grade paper.  The graphics in the brochure are brilliant and eye-catching.  The DVD and booklet are publications of the Citizens Commission for Human Rights (in Mental Health).  Needless to say, a quick search on Wikipedia shows that this organization is a front for Scientology and, I presume, the mass mailing, likely costing millions of dollars, was designed to counter the HBO documentary. 

Best to view the whole thing as fiction -- a blithe, Borgesian parable on the perils of faith. 

Two Midwestern Museums: Crystal Bridges Museum of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum

Bentonville, Arkansas is the fly-over country of the fly-over country, the middle of nowhere, a city on the road to no place.  Omaha is on the road to Denver.  Kansas City lies midway between Minneapolis and Dallas.  But Bentonville, in the extreme northwestern corner of Arkansas, is not a way station place leading to any place at all.  It's not even on the direct route to Little Rock, another backwater within a backwater.  For this reason, the presence of a world-class art museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville is disorienting, even, a bit surreal.  Of course, the museum showcases art collected by an heir to the Walmart fortune and so the museum's existence in the town also harboring Walmart's world headquarters is not merely serendipity.  Nonetheless, Bentonville is surrounded on all sides by so much rural outback -- it's three hours to Kansas City, the closest major metropolitan area -- that the museum's very existence seems insulting to those who correlate art with urban sophistication, that is, critics on the East and West coasts.  And, indeed, when the Walmart heiress set her sights on Philadelphia's shamefully neglected Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, and came within a hairsbreadth of acquiring that iconic artwork, possibly the greatest painting ever made by an American, the sense of insult and injury on the East Coast was almost palpable. 

Bentonville is a sprawling suburb that doesn't seem to have much of an urban core -- if there is a downtown, which I presume to exist, I never located it.  The town is designed for easy access in and out, for Walmart trucks and so Bentonville is built on a painfully flat plain, sunny open fields backing long, brand-new strip malls.  The city seems planted on a prairie-like plateau in the western Ozark mountains and so where the ground dips precipitously toward creeks or rises in wooded ridges, there are enclaves of expensive houses.  The town looks remarkably clean, prosperous, Caucasian and the imprint of Sam Walton's fortune (and benevolence) is evident everywhere -- about every block supports a Walmart Life and Fitness club or a Walmart-financed field house or soccer pitch or stadium.

Crystal Bridges occupies a deep hollow on the western edge of town, a wooded declivity that has steep sides and something of the character of a narrow, steep-walled valley formed when the ceiling of a limestone cave collapses.  In this country, hollows of this sort fill with murky green water; this kind of depression is a little like a cenote in the Yucatan.  The museum is built below the grade of the terrain overlooking the tight, swampy valley.  An arcade at the end of the parking lot accesses elevators in silver towers that drop the viewer into the hollow to a spacious lobby that opens into the galleries.  The galleries themselves consist of domed lobes, vaguely lung-shaped, that bridge the murky green lagoon.  Two or three of these lobes span the water where a fountain fitfully bubbles.  Several of these lobe-like structures are built into the side of the hill.  The whole complex has something of the character of an underground installation miraculously excavated and laid bare to the hot Arkansas sun.  There is nothing crystalline about the lobe-like galleries.  Rather, they are hard shell-like carapaces, round and domed like a turtle's shell, but textured a bit like the torso of an armadillo -- indeed, it's as if the designer was imitating an armadillo's scaly armor.  Viewed from above, or from terraces and decks extending out into the swampy water in the depression, the galleries look impassive, reptilian, horny shells extending like piers across the water.  At the south end of the complex, a big window opens to an impressive-looking wooded gorge, descending in ragged limestone slabs down to the water in the hollow -- the gorge looks like it should be running with water, a series of cascades but it was bone-dry when I visited the museum.

The galleries of the permanent collection are free and they are large and well-lit, big concourses with more narrow side passages.  There are many views toward the water and several barge-like decks, appendages to the galleries, that seem to float on the lake -- perhaps, these are venues for musical concerts.  The art displayed is principally on canvas, paintings that date from the colonial period (for instance, ten or so big portraits showing the members of an extended mercantile Jewish family made around 1750) to today.  There is no American Indian art, an omission that seemed puzzling to me.  The collection contains several iconic images:  there are two pictures of George Washington, one of them depicting a lean, skinny smirking libertine, and the other showing the Father of our Country toothless, with pursed lips, more the nation's grandmother than otherwise.  There is a resplendent Copley showing an elegantly dressed woman, her clothes rendered photorealistically, gazing contemplatively at a tiny lemur-eyed flying squirrel tethered to her wrist by a golden chain.  Like most museums of this kind, the majority of the paintings are landscapes, generally influenced by Claude Lorrain as adapted to American tastes by Thomas Cole, showing great wooded valleys that are mostly devoid of human beings.  These kinds of paintings are ubiquitous, pretty, and generally forgettable.  Some paintings seem to have been collected because of their historical interest -- there is an image of a chimpanzee holding a brochure about Darwin and a risible picture of a man fighting a black bear; the bear seems to salute the man and the man holds a bloody knife in his hand as if it were a tea-cup -- in the background. the fallen man's comrade aims his rifle but because the perspective is botched, he seems to be pointing the gun in the wrong direction entirely.  Somehow, Crystal Bridges acquired Asher Durand's archetypal Kindred Spirits, a wonderful picture showing William Cullen Bryant and Thomas Cole perched on a jutting stone in colloquy above a wild wooded ravine -- it is a central image in the Hudson Valley School of paintings.  A famous painting of men reading news of the war in Mexico while a sad-eyed slave sips whiskey, apparently, from a tin cup adorns one of the walls -- this picture has been on the cover of a dozen textbooks.  A painting by Benjamin West showing Cupid and Psyche demonstrates staggering incompetence -- the anatomy of the embracing figure is all wrong and their limp, slug-like bodies seem flabby and ill-proportioned:  it's like El Greco's mannerism, except as a result of poor draftsmanship and not expressionist emotion.  A huge painting by Audubon of two harried-looking wild turkeys is fantastically eloquent and poignant -- the turkeys have as much (or more) character than most of the portraits in the gallery.  The big clumsy-looking birds look like refugees, trudging toward an uncertain future:  there is something curiously Indian about them -- they are like Cherokees on the Trail of Tears that ran through this part of the South, melancholy, if brightly plumaged, exiles.  (Audubon's handling of the iridescence in their feathers is nothing short of miraculous).  Held hostage by the Walmart fortune is a huge painting by Eakins, a kind of consolation prize for losing The Gross Clinic -- it's a world-class canvas, a dark, brooding variant on Eakins' theme of the scientist as hero, in this case, a bearded, somewhat diabolical researcher peering out at us skeptically from his gloomy laboratory, beams of brilliant inexplicable light illumining his brass tools and calipers.  One painting by Elihu Vedder is certainly memorably bizarre -- it shows a naked, goat-footed Marysas playing a double-flute (not a lyre as would be customary); the satyr is serenading a group of eight or nine big jackrabbits and the animals are painted with extraordinary verve; each rabbit seems sentient and individualized, a group portrait such as Rembrandt might attempt, but showing rabbits and not men.  I have no idea what the picture is supposed to mean, but, once seen, it is indelible.  The modern works in the collection are generally mediocre -- there is a Rothko, a pretty Guston painted during the artist's abstract expressionist phase, a few big pictures by Georgia O'Keefe that I thought bombastic, and many very fine canvases by Marsden Hartley. (Hartley is the Picasso of American painting -- he produced fascinating and beautiful canvases in a variety of styles, seems to have been unerring in his color sense, and was remarkably versatile.)  There are some Warhols, a lackluster Pollock and DeKooning, and an uncanny sculpture by Duane Hansen of a tired old man sitting on a bench that is so realistic as to be frightening -- you can sense the flabby weight of the old man's forearm resting on his trousered leg. 

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is in the museum district in Kansas City, a sloping hillside overlooking a riverbed diverted into concrete channels that have always been dry during my visits to the area.  The building is a tawny handsome beaux arts temple, carved, it seems, from a soft stone the color of cheddar cheese -- the structure sits on the crown of a hill and looks a bit like the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  Annexed to the old museum is the so-called Bloch Wing, a subterranean gallery that is essentially invisible from outside the museum -- this part of the museum imposes on the viewer the curious sense of being inside a structure that has no outside.  The old museum has the traditional design of two floors of galleries enclosing a courtyard -- or, in this case, a double courtyard; the galleries are Italianate with beautiful floors and muted dark walls.  The Bloch wing is feather-shaped, a plume that seems, somehow, to simultaneously descend the slope of the hill, while also arching up to "lenses" -- that is, skylights opening upward on the lawn under which the museum is constructed. (The Bloch wing is immensely famous among architects and said to represent the ne plus ultra in unassuming but efficient museum design.  And, there is no doubt that the design is highly ingenious and the space easy to navigate -- but the modern wing is a little too coldly utilitarian for my taste.)  

In most respects, the art in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is superior to the works on display in Bentonville.  Crystal Bridges has a small idiosyncratic painting by John Singer Sargent; Nelson-Atkins possesses one of the artist's big society portraits of a woman so transcendentally beautiful that it is impossible to look away from her.  In the same vein, Nelson Atkins has a horrific but gorgeous and sinisterly glamorous DeKooning "Woman"; the DeKooning in Bentonville is an interesting abstraction but not on par with the picture in Kansas City.  The O'Keefe's in Kansas City are substantially better -- there is painting by O'Keefe of a big skyscraper in New York, atypical of the artist, but very vivid and cruel, an image of Moloch.  The Rothko canvases in Kansas City are more luminous and there are many fine paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, a native of the city (his studio is a dozen blocks away), including the artist's greatest image, his Proserpina, imagined as a farm girl resplendent in her nakedness in an idyllic Midwestern landscape, all summer and light, sunbathing beside a creek while a hideous old farmer leers at her.  Both museum's have genre works by Peto and Raphael Peale, images of things tacked up on walls, but the Kansas City pictures are better, more interesting and varied.  And Kansas City has a strangely flamboyant Poussin, Dionysius drawn in procession through a floral landscape, a grim and hyper-realistic Caravaggio (the Saint has filthy feet), and a lovely, gem-like image of the three graces by Cranach.  Whereas Crystal Bridges is crowded with second- and third-rate landscapes (it's painting by the underappreciated George Innes is dull and conventionally Victorian; by contrast, Nelson Atkins'  has a murky, late Innes with the remarkable enameled haze surface embodying the artist's Swedenborg-influenced theosophy), the Kansas City museum is replete with second- and third-rate Baroque religious images -- these pictures are showy but, ultimately, stultifying as well:  cotton candy angels and swooning Madonnas.  But there are many highlights in the Nelson - Atkins permanent collection, including a fierce Indian chief, red as ocher, by George Catlin and an interesting portrait by George Bellows of a retarded newsboy that has the curious effect of looking hideous and daunting from a distance, but becoming engaging (even endearing) when viewed from a few feet away.  The KC museum also has the most physically luscious and beautiful of all Rauschenberg's works, a glorious blue collage based on images appropriated from Velasquez (I think).  If you are going south on 35, I recommend that you spend your time in Nelson-Atkins museum and not make the detour to Bentonville.

That said, I note that Crystal Bridges, apparently, has the prestige and wherewithal to attract excellent traveling exhibitions.  When I was at Crystal Bridges in late March 2015, the museum featured four large gallery rooms of masterpieces from the Knox-Albright gallery in Buffalo, New York.  I was not familiar with this collection, a group of paintings that also seem to have been acquired by a wealthy industrialist or his heirs.  The traveling show is astounding -- almost every painting in the exhibition was extraordinary and many were very famous, for instance Arshile Gorky's very large The Liver is the Cock's Comb, a picture that I've never appreciated in reproduction, but which has a powerful presence when viewed in its actual colors and dimensions.  (The show also featured a transcendent rose-period Picasso and a beautiful, enigmatic Max Beckmann interior crowded with strange personages).  It is certainly possible that my muted reaction to many of the pictures in the Crystal Bridges permanent collection galleries was based upon unfair comparison with the astounding European post-impressionist paintings touring as part of the Knox-Albright show.  (On a Monday afternoon, March 30, both upper and lower parking lots at Crystal Bridges were full and the galleries were reasonably crowded -- the place is roomy and, certainly, not unpleasantly full of people, but there were a good number of museum-goers on hand.  In the Knox-Albright show, the people looked like retired truck drivers and elementary school teachers -- everyone was white and in their late sixties.  I eavesdropped on the people and noticed that no one made anything approaching an intelligent remark about the paintings on display.  But I hasten to add, that unlike an exhibit in New York, or Chicago, I didn't hear anyone say anything annoying or pretentious either.)