Sunday, October 7, 2018
Game Night
Game Night begins as a surprisingly amusing film about a group of young urban professionals who gather weekly to play board games, charades, and things like Pictionary. The group consists of three couples, all of them attractive, sophisticated (except for one hunky guy who is an idiot) and not overly invested in the mild, PG-rated entertainment in which they indulge. Lurking around the edges of "game night" are a couple of solitary males -- a sad, dorky policeman whose wife has just left him and the brother of one of the men, a sketchy dude with way more money than is seemly. Both of these men take the amusements too seriously with dire consequences -- for them, "game night" is not merely a diversion but a forum for competition that is intimately entwined with their fragile sense of self-worth. The film shows "game night" escalating into competition made vicious by higher stakes -- a Sting-Ray sports car is the prize. One of the group rents some actors from a "murder mystery" service and stages a kidnapping with the sports car as prize to the couple who solves the crime and rescues the ostensible kidnapping victim first. Of course, the kidnapping turns out to be committed in earnest and there are real bad guys -- shoot-outs and car chases ensue, pretty standard stuff I'm sorry to report and the film goes swiftly downhill once the murders and brawls cease being play-acted. In effect, there are two movies -- a witty and ingenious comedy about spoiled Yuppies idly amusing themselves with ironically retrograde board games and light sexual banter, and, then, an increasingly frenzied and brutal crime picture comprised of nothing but stupid caricatures. Before things turn serious and the dialogue stops cracking wise but instead is clogged with various moral precepts, the film is a solid B minus comedy -- not too brazen, but sufficiently clever and closely observed to be continuously amusing. When the movie takes a turn toward seriousness, it collapses and, in fact, ends up virtually unwatchable. (One defect is the screenwriter's use of dire situations to stage extended dialogue -- in one scene, characters whisper back and forth interminably while only a few feet away the other couples are being threatened with gangland-style execution. It's as if neither the criminals nor their victims are aware that the two brothers are conducting an Uncle Vanya style dialogue within ear-shot about ten feet away.) The film also retreats from what seems to be its premise -- that is, that increasing the prize from nothing at all to a late-model sports car will induce all sorts of wicked and irrevocably despicable behavior on the part of the Yuppies. In fact, the increasing violence and peril that the film heaps upon its protagonists don't affect them adversely at all -- they just become just more witty, fey, and sensitive; the notion is that adversity forges character, an idea I've always thought highly suspect. Accordingly, an interesting, if time-honored theme -- the beast lurking beneath the mask of gentility -- is suggested, even, framed for presentation, but, then, inexplicably rejected. All six members of the game night group remain pleasant, conventionally moral, and, in fact, are shown playing Pictionary once more at the end with the two sinister male isolates now redeemed by being welcomed into the group. For the first hour, the film seems about to take some significant risks, but it's handsome young actors don't want to look bad and aren't willing to engage in any behavior that's too reprehensible and, so, the implicit threat that the members of the group will turn on one another is softened by the injection of outsider and highly conventional bad guys into the plot. No one succumbs to temptation and becomes wicked -- the wicked men are outside of the group and, in fact, not even really Americans: they seem to be sinister Bulgarian mobsters. It's a shame that the film fails because, at least, one scene convincingly straddles the divide between horror and comedy: one of the protagonists played by Justin Bateman has been shot in the arm. Rachel McAdams playing Bateman's wife looks at You-Tube on her phone and uses that information to attempt to extract a bullet from the injured man's forearm. You Tube tells her to get some hard liquor as an anesthetic (and antiseptic) agent. She buys a bottle of "very drinkable Chardonnay" and, then, proceeds to hack open her husband's arm while both of them try to suppress their gag reflex. It's horrible and funny at the same time and a brief glimmer of a better, tougher movie lurking under the conventional date-night comedy here on offer. This 2018 release, directed by John Dale and Jonathon Goldstein, sit-com alumni, looks like a made-for TV movie and feels similar in form -- it's fundamentally mild-mannered and good-natured, a device for conveying certain truisms about family and relationships upon which everyone will most certainly agree.
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
The Massacre
The Massacre is a short two-reel Western directed by D. W. Griffith for Biograph Studios in 1912. For its day, the movie was a blockbuster, featuring top-notch actors, some of them already recognized as stars -- the film displays the talents of Blanche Sweet, the heroine of many early Griffith pictures, and a very young Lionel Barrymore. Further, the picture is almost entirely shot outdoors in impressive locations and deploys herds of horses and armies of extras in its battle scenes. Like many action films made today, the movie is almost all combat -- once, the characters are established, Griffith stages chases, ambushes, and two full-scale battles, all of this occurring in a picture that is less than 30 minutes long.
As with many Biograph pictures directed by Griffith, the movie's plot turns on two men, rival suitors, to the hand of the maiden who will be menaced at the film's climax. The rivalry for the girl's hand is perfunctory -- after a couple of establishing tableaux, the maiden selects a lanky village boy wearing a black string tie over the rowdy buckskin-clad scout who has been courting her. The scout returns to the army disconsolate. Later, the spurned suitor, the scout, is instrumental in saving the young woman and her baby from an attack by marauding Indians, although he dies in her defense. Many of the Biograph pictures still extant have this narrative framework -- rival suitors in which, perhaps, the braver and more worthy is rejected by the girl but, then, proves his mettle when the bad guys threaten. It's a primitive plot device, but actually one that works very well and Griffith's Biograph pictures from 1909 to 1913 exploit this scenario extensively. In some variants of this plot, the rejected swain becomes an alcoholic -- in other versions, the husband is afflicted with a mania for gambling or booze and becomes abusive toward his wife. In 1912, movies were young and everyone in them seems to be similarly young: Blanche Sweet is a buxom teen-ager and the men all seem to be adolescents as well -- everyone is fresh and enthusiastic and movies of this period exude a palpable youthful energy.(Some of the extras with long moustaches like Yosemite Sam are obviously wearing exuberant make-up -- usually, the old men are just boys wearing grey wigs. The Massacre perfects tableaux mise-en-scene: Griffith devises complex compositions exploiting the deep-focus lenses used in silent film -- the images contain action a few feet from the camera as well as incidental details, sometimes in the remote background. Each shot accomplishes one action or establishes one plot point generally without any analytical cutting (there are a few exceptions in The Massacre, a late example of the tableaux form evolving toward more analytical cutting). The image typically becomes tedious to the viewer who, then, searches the borders of the frame or the depths of the tableaux for additional, interesting details. Griffith devises his more complex compositions with multiple points of focus -- that is, groups of people arrayed across the screen at different locations so the viewer can sweep his eye to and fro within the frame. The concept is a bit like a Brueghel painting, many small figures organized into interrelated knots of activity with peripheral details visible around the edges of the action that overtly motivates the shot. In The Massacre, the two battle scenes are shot from a high, aerial perspective -- the combatants form different masses that sway back and forth, or attack (or retreat) in sinuous serpentine patterns. Different skirmishes form points of emphasis in the image that coalesce and, then, dissolve. Scenes of the wagon train crossing the prairie consist of enormous gondola-shaped wagons with billowing canvas tops in the foreground, horsemen and people on foot moving diagonally across the wilderness and, then, far in the background more horseman and a herd of cattle kicking up dust that sprays around in the wind. In the opening courtship scenes, the competing men gather around the heroine -- in the far distance, oblivious to the melodrama, chickens peck at the dust and dogs scamper around. As you lose interest in the maudlin stuff happening in the middle distance, your eye can rove about and see the wind from 106 years ago tugging at the trees -- for some reason, Biograph films often seem to have been shot in conditions approximating a gale -- domestic animal in the background and pioneer buildings that seem eerily authentic.
It is often alleged that Hollywood films were offensively racist in their depiction of Indians. This is not the case in The Massacre. In fact, the title of the film is ambiguous and, probably, refers to a massacre of Indians in their village, an unprovoked attack that compels the Chief to plot his revenge by launching a cavalry assault on the wagon train. Before the army attacks, the village we see an Indian woman with a small baby on her back. This shot links explicitly to the two close-ups in this movie -- both images of a small, fat little boy smiling at the camera. (The child is the heroine's infant). After the army attacks the Indians, Griffith shows us the battlefield -- a badly injured dog scuttles around in circles in the middle of the frame and it takes us a moment to notice that the Chief's wife and baby are sprawled in the shot's foreground, apparently dead and murdered by the United States cavalry. As the wagon train courses westward, we see the long line of wagons from a hilltop -- first a couple of scraggly looking wolves look down on the procession, then, a disoriented bear appears, and, at last, an Indian warrior dressed in bison fur and wearing a horned helmet creeps to overlook. After some business involving a rotund gambler (played by Barrymore) and a preacher, the Indians attack the wagon train. The heroine's husband is gone for some reason. The fight with the Indians evolves into a symbolic image that is fundamental to Griffith and his films -- barriers get knocked down, walls are smashed, and a little group of White Anglo-Saxons find themselves besieged, a mass of armed men protecting a pale maiden and a terrified infant at the exact center of a round, defensive formation. In this film, the aerial perspective gives the fighting an inhuman and abstract appearance -- it's like a clash between groups of insects, two hives in combat. The tangle of men surrounding the woman and infant are slaughtered one by one, until, at last, nothing remains but a matted, entwined heap of corpses. This globular pile of torn flesh conceals, the way fruit hides a seed, the woman and infant. When the last defender has perished, the cavalry appears and the Indians are driven away and someone plucks the woman and baby out of the heap of bodies. Griffith uses close-shots sparingly -- he really hasn't yet mastered their emotional significance. But in the battle scenes, his staging is grimly effective: we see the frenzied maiden and the baby with a smoking gun discharging only a few inches away from the child's nose -- the infant is shrieking and writhing and the child's distress is authentic (it's clearly not feigned). This sequence is Griffith's primal scene: the cross-cutting between mounted men riding to the rescue and the ever-diminishing band of defenders who form a human wall around the object of their defense, the white maiden and plump baby boy. In this greatest films, Intolerance, Birth of a Nation, and Orphans of the Storm, Griffith reprises this thematic material again and again. Even Broken Blossoms involves a brute smashing down walls that protect an increasingly hysterical teenage girl. What gives Griffith's films their electric charge is that we can't be sure that the cavalry will always ride to the rescue. In fact, some of the time, the rescuers arrive too late: Battling Burrows beats his daughter to death after he smashes down the walls protecting her. In a startling Biograph film, Death's Marathon, a man commandeers a car and hurtles to the rescue of a man who is grimacing at the camera, smiling in a sinister way as he flourishes a gun and threatens suicide. The hero knocks down a door and enters the man's room just in time to see a great plume of smoke vomited out of the suicide's mouth -- he has fired the gun and killed himself and Griffith's frenzied cross-cutting and the wild car chase is all in vain. Help arrives too late.
As with many Biograph pictures directed by Griffith, the movie's plot turns on two men, rival suitors, to the hand of the maiden who will be menaced at the film's climax. The rivalry for the girl's hand is perfunctory -- after a couple of establishing tableaux, the maiden selects a lanky village boy wearing a black string tie over the rowdy buckskin-clad scout who has been courting her. The scout returns to the army disconsolate. Later, the spurned suitor, the scout, is instrumental in saving the young woman and her baby from an attack by marauding Indians, although he dies in her defense. Many of the Biograph pictures still extant have this narrative framework -- rival suitors in which, perhaps, the braver and more worthy is rejected by the girl but, then, proves his mettle when the bad guys threaten. It's a primitive plot device, but actually one that works very well and Griffith's Biograph pictures from 1909 to 1913 exploit this scenario extensively. In some variants of this plot, the rejected swain becomes an alcoholic -- in other versions, the husband is afflicted with a mania for gambling or booze and becomes abusive toward his wife. In 1912, movies were young and everyone in them seems to be similarly young: Blanche Sweet is a buxom teen-ager and the men all seem to be adolescents as well -- everyone is fresh and enthusiastic and movies of this period exude a palpable youthful energy.(Some of the extras with long moustaches like Yosemite Sam are obviously wearing exuberant make-up -- usually, the old men are just boys wearing grey wigs. The Massacre perfects tableaux mise-en-scene: Griffith devises complex compositions exploiting the deep-focus lenses used in silent film -- the images contain action a few feet from the camera as well as incidental details, sometimes in the remote background. Each shot accomplishes one action or establishes one plot point generally without any analytical cutting (there are a few exceptions in The Massacre, a late example of the tableaux form evolving toward more analytical cutting). The image typically becomes tedious to the viewer who, then, searches the borders of the frame or the depths of the tableaux for additional, interesting details. Griffith devises his more complex compositions with multiple points of focus -- that is, groups of people arrayed across the screen at different locations so the viewer can sweep his eye to and fro within the frame. The concept is a bit like a Brueghel painting, many small figures organized into interrelated knots of activity with peripheral details visible around the edges of the action that overtly motivates the shot. In The Massacre, the two battle scenes are shot from a high, aerial perspective -- the combatants form different masses that sway back and forth, or attack (or retreat) in sinuous serpentine patterns. Different skirmishes form points of emphasis in the image that coalesce and, then, dissolve. Scenes of the wagon train crossing the prairie consist of enormous gondola-shaped wagons with billowing canvas tops in the foreground, horsemen and people on foot moving diagonally across the wilderness and, then, far in the background more horseman and a herd of cattle kicking up dust that sprays around in the wind. In the opening courtship scenes, the competing men gather around the heroine -- in the far distance, oblivious to the melodrama, chickens peck at the dust and dogs scamper around. As you lose interest in the maudlin stuff happening in the middle distance, your eye can rove about and see the wind from 106 years ago tugging at the trees -- for some reason, Biograph films often seem to have been shot in conditions approximating a gale -- domestic animal in the background and pioneer buildings that seem eerily authentic.
It is often alleged that Hollywood films were offensively racist in their depiction of Indians. This is not the case in The Massacre. In fact, the title of the film is ambiguous and, probably, refers to a massacre of Indians in their village, an unprovoked attack that compels the Chief to plot his revenge by launching a cavalry assault on the wagon train. Before the army attacks, the village we see an Indian woman with a small baby on her back. This shot links explicitly to the two close-ups in this movie -- both images of a small, fat little boy smiling at the camera. (The child is the heroine's infant). After the army attacks the Indians, Griffith shows us the battlefield -- a badly injured dog scuttles around in circles in the middle of the frame and it takes us a moment to notice that the Chief's wife and baby are sprawled in the shot's foreground, apparently dead and murdered by the United States cavalry. As the wagon train courses westward, we see the long line of wagons from a hilltop -- first a couple of scraggly looking wolves look down on the procession, then, a disoriented bear appears, and, at last, an Indian warrior dressed in bison fur and wearing a horned helmet creeps to overlook. After some business involving a rotund gambler (played by Barrymore) and a preacher, the Indians attack the wagon train. The heroine's husband is gone for some reason. The fight with the Indians evolves into a symbolic image that is fundamental to Griffith and his films -- barriers get knocked down, walls are smashed, and a little group of White Anglo-Saxons find themselves besieged, a mass of armed men protecting a pale maiden and a terrified infant at the exact center of a round, defensive formation. In this film, the aerial perspective gives the fighting an inhuman and abstract appearance -- it's like a clash between groups of insects, two hives in combat. The tangle of men surrounding the woman and infant are slaughtered one by one, until, at last, nothing remains but a matted, entwined heap of corpses. This globular pile of torn flesh conceals, the way fruit hides a seed, the woman and infant. When the last defender has perished, the cavalry appears and the Indians are driven away and someone plucks the woman and baby out of the heap of bodies. Griffith uses close-shots sparingly -- he really hasn't yet mastered their emotional significance. But in the battle scenes, his staging is grimly effective: we see the frenzied maiden and the baby with a smoking gun discharging only a few inches away from the child's nose -- the infant is shrieking and writhing and the child's distress is authentic (it's clearly not feigned). This sequence is Griffith's primal scene: the cross-cutting between mounted men riding to the rescue and the ever-diminishing band of defenders who form a human wall around the object of their defense, the white maiden and plump baby boy. In this greatest films, Intolerance, Birth of a Nation, and Orphans of the Storm, Griffith reprises this thematic material again and again. Even Broken Blossoms involves a brute smashing down walls that protect an increasingly hysterical teenage girl. What gives Griffith's films their electric charge is that we can't be sure that the cavalry will always ride to the rescue. In fact, some of the time, the rescuers arrive too late: Battling Burrows beats his daughter to death after he smashes down the walls protecting her. In a startling Biograph film, Death's Marathon, a man commandeers a car and hurtles to the rescue of a man who is grimacing at the camera, smiling in a sinister way as he flourishes a gun and threatens suicide. The hero knocks down a door and enters the man's room just in time to see a great plume of smoke vomited out of the suicide's mouth -- he has fired the gun and killed himself and Griffith's frenzied cross-cutting and the wild car chase is all in vain. Help arrives too late.
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Millers Crossing
I saw Millers Crossing (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991) years ago and didn't understand it. The film has recently emerged from the shadows in the context of Judge Brett Kavanaugh's petulant and tearful address to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the afternoon of September 27, 2018. Commenting on the sobbing that punctuated Kavanaugh's speech, Stephen King, the horror-novel writer, quoted the loathsome Bernie Birnbaum, a toxic thug in the Coen brother's movie. The film's hero moved by Bernie's crying is unable to murder him notwithstanding demands by the mobster with which he is (momentarily) affiliated. Later, Birnbaum arrogantly tells Tommy (the protagonist played by Gabriel Byrne): "(If you threaten to kill me) I'll just squirt out a few and, then, you'll let me go again." Such hubris can not go without punishment and, ultimately, Tommy kills only one person in this bloody film: Bernie Birnbaum, shot through the brain exactly as he is pleading for mercy and vigorously expelling tears.
Millers Crossing remains baffling to me. It has an intricately plotted narrative that is mostly an excuse for people to batter, punch, and torture the film's protagonist, Tommy. Clearly an exercise in neo film noir, the movie follows the convention that the hero is generally beaten up pretty thoroughly throughout the film and, even, periodically slugged unconscious. But the Coen brothers execution of this theme is so extravagant that the film assumes the aspect of masochist's reverie -- the hero is a poor schmuck, a schlemihl, whom everyone thrashes. In this regard, the story presages other films by the Coen brothers, particularly A Serious Man, The Man who wasn't There, and Inside Llewellyn Davis, movies that featured main characters who suffer one humiliation after another, the victims of the worst luck possible. (The secret source for this type of narrative is Jewish and revealed in A Serious Man -- the story of Job.) In Miller's Crossing, Tommy is a reasonable man, a criminal who serves as a kind of consiglieri to Leo, an impulsive Irish mob boss played by Albert Finney. Another gangster, Caspar, demands that Leo kill an associate, Bernie Birnbaum (John Turturro). Birnbaum is a reptilian homosexual and "degenerate". But Tommy is involved in an affair with Verna, a femme fatale who is also the "twist" (girlfriend) of his boss, Leo. Bernie is Verna's brother -- Bernie boasts that Verna tried to cure his homosexuality with her "bedroom tricks." For some reason that is unclear -- it's the enigma at the center of the film -- Tommy defends Bernie and won't allow him to be murdered; perhaps, his obstinacy on this point is due to his love for Verna (which he won't admit even to himself) or his rationality: he doesn't believe in violence for its own sake. Perhaps, Tommy even has a sense of justice and doesn't think that Bernie deserves slaughter. When Leo sends a "tail" to follow Verna, the man ends up dead and a little boy who finds the corpse in the alley snatches the man's "rug" or hairpiece. Verna, in fact, has shot the man, but the killing gets blamed on Bernie and is thought to be particularly appalling because the murderer is said to have seized the dead man's wig as a souvenir. This killing leads to an all-out gang war fought with Thompson machine guns and with the cops in the nameless city alternately supporting Leo and, then, his enemy Caspar. (The war is imagined as a fight to the death between Italian and Irish mobs.) The respective speakeasies of each mob are raided by the cops who enthusiastically join in the mayhem acting as murderers for first one side and the other -- the film's portrait of a wholly corrupt city is similar in many respects to Kurosawa's treatment of the same subject in Yojimbo. To save Bernie, Tommy admits to his affair with Verna and, thereby, receives a severe beating from Leo. Tommy has to switch sides and join Caspar's mob for a while. As a test of loyalty, Tommy is supposed to kill Bernie who has been captured by the Italian gangster. Tommy can't bring himself to commit the crime and lets Bernie loose. Bernie is supposed to leave town so that Tommy won't be condemned by Caspar for not implementing the murder. (People are taken into a woods to an intersection of paths called "Miller's Crossing" to be executed.) Bernie shows up in town, however, and blackmails Tommy, demanding money from him to stay out of sight. Tommy, who is a gambling addict, is deeply in debt to man named Lazar and he has no money at all. (Lazar's thugs periodically threaten poor Tommy and administer a vicious beating to him as well.) Ultimately, Tommy lures Bernie to an apartment where Caspar is also present. Bernie kills Caspar and, then, Tommy murders Bernie. Tommy has suffered innumerable beatings and torture because of Bernie, a man he was trying to protect and whom he ultimately kills himself. Verna goes back to Leo and, in fact, asks the Irish mobster to marry her. Tommy has lost everything, although he is able to pay back Lazar with greenbacks found on Caspar's corpse. In the last scene, he sits alone in his shabby and dark apartment, placing yet another bet on a horse. The film's morose conclusion is that everything Tommy has done is a failure: he doesn't protect Bernie and, in fact, finds out that Bernie isn't worth saving anyway. Bernie is an out-and-out vicious killer and he has to be put-down like a mad dog. Verna betrays Tommy and goes back to her well-heeled mobster boyfriend. Tommy gets nothing but beatings administered about every ten minutes throughout the film.
The picture is exquisitely designed and shot. (Barry Sonnenfeld is the D. P.) The Coens' edit the film on the violence: many shots begin with someone getting punched in the face or gut. Some of the big set-pieces built to spectacular mayhem and, then, just as our blood-thirst is aroused and we want to see more slaughter, abruptly cut away. A machine gun battle scored to "Danny Boy" is a highlight and the film has an absolutely beautiful theme -- it sounds like an Irish folk song -- played in lush orchestration, particularly when Verna enters the picture. The music is so lovely and overwhelming that it somehow undercuts the squalor of the proceedings. (It functions the way Morricone's themes work in Italian westerns and gangster movies). There is some horrific violence, but it doesn't overwhelm the film and everyone talks in a rat-a-tat delivery that simulates the characters cracking wise in a thirties' screwball comedy. The diction is spectacular and poetic and, often, very funny. At one point, when Verna meretriciously declares her affection for Tommy ("she's a grafter" everyone warns him), the hero replies: "If I had thought that we were casting our feelings into words, I would have memorized 'The Song of Solomon'." Tommy is a thinker, a reasonable man, and, in the corrupt world depicted in the film, he shows what passes for virtue. The film's dispiriting, if realistic, theme is that virtue is never rewarded except by betrayal and beatings. It's an alarming concept masterfully developed, but, ultimately, the film feels just slightly futile and schematic -- it's a little airless. I'm aware, however, that this movie's reputation has grown with the years and it's undoubtedly a cynical masterpiece more akin to the stoic, existentialist crime pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville than to anything produced in Hollywood.
Millers Crossing remains baffling to me. It has an intricately plotted narrative that is mostly an excuse for people to batter, punch, and torture the film's protagonist, Tommy. Clearly an exercise in neo film noir, the movie follows the convention that the hero is generally beaten up pretty thoroughly throughout the film and, even, periodically slugged unconscious. But the Coen brothers execution of this theme is so extravagant that the film assumes the aspect of masochist's reverie -- the hero is a poor schmuck, a schlemihl, whom everyone thrashes. In this regard, the story presages other films by the Coen brothers, particularly A Serious Man, The Man who wasn't There, and Inside Llewellyn Davis, movies that featured main characters who suffer one humiliation after another, the victims of the worst luck possible. (The secret source for this type of narrative is Jewish and revealed in A Serious Man -- the story of Job.) In Miller's Crossing, Tommy is a reasonable man, a criminal who serves as a kind of consiglieri to Leo, an impulsive Irish mob boss played by Albert Finney. Another gangster, Caspar, demands that Leo kill an associate, Bernie Birnbaum (John Turturro). Birnbaum is a reptilian homosexual and "degenerate". But Tommy is involved in an affair with Verna, a femme fatale who is also the "twist" (girlfriend) of his boss, Leo. Bernie is Verna's brother -- Bernie boasts that Verna tried to cure his homosexuality with her "bedroom tricks." For some reason that is unclear -- it's the enigma at the center of the film -- Tommy defends Bernie and won't allow him to be murdered; perhaps, his obstinacy on this point is due to his love for Verna (which he won't admit even to himself) or his rationality: he doesn't believe in violence for its own sake. Perhaps, Tommy even has a sense of justice and doesn't think that Bernie deserves slaughter. When Leo sends a "tail" to follow Verna, the man ends up dead and a little boy who finds the corpse in the alley snatches the man's "rug" or hairpiece. Verna, in fact, has shot the man, but the killing gets blamed on Bernie and is thought to be particularly appalling because the murderer is said to have seized the dead man's wig as a souvenir. This killing leads to an all-out gang war fought with Thompson machine guns and with the cops in the nameless city alternately supporting Leo and, then, his enemy Caspar. (The war is imagined as a fight to the death between Italian and Irish mobs.) The respective speakeasies of each mob are raided by the cops who enthusiastically join in the mayhem acting as murderers for first one side and the other -- the film's portrait of a wholly corrupt city is similar in many respects to Kurosawa's treatment of the same subject in Yojimbo. To save Bernie, Tommy admits to his affair with Verna and, thereby, receives a severe beating from Leo. Tommy has to switch sides and join Caspar's mob for a while. As a test of loyalty, Tommy is supposed to kill Bernie who has been captured by the Italian gangster. Tommy can't bring himself to commit the crime and lets Bernie loose. Bernie is supposed to leave town so that Tommy won't be condemned by Caspar for not implementing the murder. (People are taken into a woods to an intersection of paths called "Miller's Crossing" to be executed.) Bernie shows up in town, however, and blackmails Tommy, demanding money from him to stay out of sight. Tommy, who is a gambling addict, is deeply in debt to man named Lazar and he has no money at all. (Lazar's thugs periodically threaten poor Tommy and administer a vicious beating to him as well.) Ultimately, Tommy lures Bernie to an apartment where Caspar is also present. Bernie kills Caspar and, then, Tommy murders Bernie. Tommy has suffered innumerable beatings and torture because of Bernie, a man he was trying to protect and whom he ultimately kills himself. Verna goes back to Leo and, in fact, asks the Irish mobster to marry her. Tommy has lost everything, although he is able to pay back Lazar with greenbacks found on Caspar's corpse. In the last scene, he sits alone in his shabby and dark apartment, placing yet another bet on a horse. The film's morose conclusion is that everything Tommy has done is a failure: he doesn't protect Bernie and, in fact, finds out that Bernie isn't worth saving anyway. Bernie is an out-and-out vicious killer and he has to be put-down like a mad dog. Verna betrays Tommy and goes back to her well-heeled mobster boyfriend. Tommy gets nothing but beatings administered about every ten minutes throughout the film.
The picture is exquisitely designed and shot. (Barry Sonnenfeld is the D. P.) The Coens' edit the film on the violence: many shots begin with someone getting punched in the face or gut. Some of the big set-pieces built to spectacular mayhem and, then, just as our blood-thirst is aroused and we want to see more slaughter, abruptly cut away. A machine gun battle scored to "Danny Boy" is a highlight and the film has an absolutely beautiful theme -- it sounds like an Irish folk song -- played in lush orchestration, particularly when Verna enters the picture. The music is so lovely and overwhelming that it somehow undercuts the squalor of the proceedings. (It functions the way Morricone's themes work in Italian westerns and gangster movies). There is some horrific violence, but it doesn't overwhelm the film and everyone talks in a rat-a-tat delivery that simulates the characters cracking wise in a thirties' screwball comedy. The diction is spectacular and poetic and, often, very funny. At one point, when Verna meretriciously declares her affection for Tommy ("she's a grafter" everyone warns him), the hero replies: "If I had thought that we were casting our feelings into words, I would have memorized 'The Song of Solomon'." Tommy is a thinker, a reasonable man, and, in the corrupt world depicted in the film, he shows what passes for virtue. The film's dispiriting, if realistic, theme is that virtue is never rewarded except by betrayal and beatings. It's an alarming concept masterfully developed, but, ultimately, the film feels just slightly futile and schematic -- it's a little airless. I'm aware, however, that this movie's reputation has grown with the years and it's undoubtedly a cynical masterpiece more akin to the stoic, existentialist crime pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville than to anything produced in Hollywood.
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
My Winnipeg
Before I drove up to Winnipeg last week, I recall seeing Guy Maddin's eccentric film essay, My Winnipeg (2007) about his home town some years ago. I didn't remember much about the film and it didn't make an impression on me. I'm a great admirer of Maddin's films, but this picture was too idiosyncratic and solipsistic -- I don't think I understood the movie. But, now, that I have been to Winnipeg and seen many of the sights depicted in the film, I like it better and hold the film in higher regard. Maddin's sensibility is distinctly Canadian -- rueful, abashed, self-effacing, and too stoic to take any misfortune or hardship too seriously. For much of the world, the notion of being born and, then, living in Winnipeg, the place that Maddin calls "the world's coldest city," dubbed "a frozen hellhole" by other Canadians, would be misfortune enough. But, somehow, Maddin manages to make Winnipeg, an ugly, stolid, unassuming place, into one of Calvino's Invisible Cities, a place of strange and sinister enchantment.
Maddin's documentary, really an elaborate filmed essay, is a wild fantasia. This kind of picture can readily decline into undisciplined self-indulgence. Maddin uses sequences showing his surrogate riding on a phantom train through Winnipeg while tossing and turning in uneasy sleep as punctuation and connective tissue. "Winnipeg," Maddin claims, "has ten times more sleepwalkers than any other city." At the outset, he announces that the project of the film is make a movie that frees him from Winnipeg, that authorizes him to leave the city of his birth. To leave Winnipeg would be to become fully awake. But Maddin's film is mélange of delirium and nightmare -- instead of awakening the sleeper tormented on the moving train, Maddin's strategy is to plunge the character inexorably deeper into dreams and visions. This strategy is epitomized by a Kafkaesque parable announced early in the film -- I'll relate that story below. It suffices to say that the filmmaker, someone who has carved "dyslexically" his name as "YUG" ("Guy") has come to Winnipeg to undertake certain "experiments" in the house where he grew up. This home he describes as a "block", a square structure located at 800 W. Ellice in Winnipeg -- I saw his house when I was there and it is unchanged from what is shown in the movie. In this house, part of which was occupied by his mother's hair salon, Maddin was raised with three siblings, two brothers and a sister who is a Pan-Canada track star. Maddin's father was the manager of the Winnipeg hockey team, the Jets, I think. Maddin casts a faded blonde movie star, Ann Savage (she was the femme fatale in Edgar Ulmer's 1945 Detour) as his mother and, then, attempts to recreate certain key moments in his childhood, presumably to better appreciate as an adult what happened when he was a child. The incidents don't seem too consequential -- in one the family members try to adjust a perennially disarranged carpet runner; in other sequence, his mother interrogates Maddin's sister viciously implying that her account of hitting a deer on the highway to Kenora is a euphemism for sexual intercourse; in one scene, the children demand that their mother cook them some meatloaf (she has retired to her bed and says that she has forgotten all her recipes and will never cook again). We see the family gathered every noon to watch a TV show called "Ledge Man" -- in the show, a young man threatens to hurl himself to his death from the ledge of a building downtown; in each episode, his mother talks him out of suicide. (At the end of the film, we see the family sitting lying somnolently on couches watching TV and Maddin informs us that his brother, Curtis, killed himself when he was 16, information that casts a powerful light on the fantasy of the family watching "Ledge Man" every day.) These episodes involving autobiography are tied to larger currents in the city's history most of which are defined by absence and loss. Places that were important to Maddin when he was small are now gone, eradicated by the march of progress. He claims to have been born in the old hockey rink where his father worked -- and we see the building demolished after Maddin uses the trough urinal in the rink one last time. Eaton's, Winnipeg's most beloved department store, is also destroyed and replaced with a new hockey rink and event center. An old public baths said to have three separate pools each superimposed above the other is mostly closed -- the two most subterranean baths are now shuttered. An amusement park called Happy Land is dismantled and becomes a shanty-town occupied by First Nations squatters on the roofs of the downtown buildings. On the top floor of the Hudson Bay Company department store, a tavern called the Paddlewheel Lounge suffers from a lack of patrons and is threatened to be closed -- this is after we have seen the Lounge used for a decadent spectacle called "The Golden Boy" male beauty pageant. ("The Golden Boy" is the gilded figure atop Manitoba's unicameral legislature building -- a place that Maddin also characterizes as the "largest Masonic Lodge" in the world, an almost true statement, since the building was designed by high-degree freemasons and secretly incorporates much of their hermetic lore into the structure. When I was in Winnipeg, I saw a tour guide illumining the arcana in the legislature building and it was, in fact, mind-boggling.) Maddin likes secret maps imposed on existing public places -- he claims that the Cree believed that there were subterranean rivers flowing under the Forks where the Assiniboine and the Red River combine, thus creating a place of distinctive "magnetism". He imagines a grid of alleys that represent the real thoroughfares in Winnipeg concealed in the interstices of the actual roads. A séance in the capitol building, under the enormous bronze bison flanking the steps to the rotunda, results in sleepwalker's ballet using members of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet company -- vast amounts of ectoplasm are extruded and it becomes confused in the film's imagery with the never-ending snow fall, the dark streets like tunnels between ramparts of snow, the alleys between houses buried in the stuff, snowflakes always falling over the occult and unreal city.
Maddin uses a variety of styles to present this material. There are delirious point-of-view shots simulating toboggan runs and staggering through the gloomy streets. A lot of newsreel footage is intercut into the film, some of its exceedingly peculiar -- for instance, women chaining themselves to a tree to protect it from the axes of city utility workers. (When the women were persuaded to leave someone blew up the tree with dynamite.) Some of the footage is in color and contemporary -- but other parts of the film are shot on the distressed, murky film-stock that is Maddin's trademark, imagery from a badly damaged, but transcendentally gorgeous silent film known only to the director. At the film's conclusion, Maddin still can't quite awake from his slumbers. Shadows of sleepwalkers stumble through the frozen city. He imagines a "Citizen Girl" who will defend Winnipeg and restore the sites and buildings that it has lost and this is some comfort to him. The movie ends with actors simulating Maddin's parents and his brothers and sisters half asleep in the living room watching TV. An old lady sits with them -- she's sublet the building (it's now a drycleaners and tailor's business) and isn't willing to leave. Maddin recalls his dead brother and acknowledges that the city's magnetism and strange appeal are too great for him and that he is unable to leave. At the beginning of the film, Maddin tells this story: each year, the Winnipeg Free Press sponsored a treasure hunt, hiding a medallion somewhere in the city. The winner of the treasure hunt, the first person to find the medallion, is to be given an all expense paid train ticket to leave Winnipeg. But to find the medallion, one must walk all of Winnipeg's streets and pay close attention to everything in the city and, so, when the person finds the medallion, he or she is so invested in Winnipeg, knows it so well and is so fascinated by the place, that the person can not leave. "In the entire history of the treasure hunt," Maddin says, "not one of the winners ever actually left Winnipeg."
Maddin's esthetic combines curious, disjunctive elements. He uses damaged, scratched and scarred film stock to project images that are spectacularly lit and featuring faces that have the transcendent beauty of silent movie stars. Although he is avowedly heterosexual (the film features his girlfiend's dog, Spanky), Maddin's films are rife with smirking homo-erotic imagery -- in My Winnipeg, the male beauty pageant and a scene involving little boys showing each other their "boners." His documentary about Winnipeg is almost entirely an account of places and people that no longer exist. In the midst of whimsy, he often inserts shocking violence or hideous imagery of wounds and death -- in My Winnipeg, horses are frozen in the river, their heads rearing up out of the ice. (It's a reprise of a famous passage in Curzio Malaparte's memoir about the Russian front, Kaputt). The dead horses, extruded from the ice become a popular trysting place and people have sex on the frozen corpses resulting "in a baby boom, the following November."
Maddin's documentary, really an elaborate filmed essay, is a wild fantasia. This kind of picture can readily decline into undisciplined self-indulgence. Maddin uses sequences showing his surrogate riding on a phantom train through Winnipeg while tossing and turning in uneasy sleep as punctuation and connective tissue. "Winnipeg," Maddin claims, "has ten times more sleepwalkers than any other city." At the outset, he announces that the project of the film is make a movie that frees him from Winnipeg, that authorizes him to leave the city of his birth. To leave Winnipeg would be to become fully awake. But Maddin's film is mélange of delirium and nightmare -- instead of awakening the sleeper tormented on the moving train, Maddin's strategy is to plunge the character inexorably deeper into dreams and visions. This strategy is epitomized by a Kafkaesque parable announced early in the film -- I'll relate that story below. It suffices to say that the filmmaker, someone who has carved "dyslexically" his name as "YUG" ("Guy") has come to Winnipeg to undertake certain "experiments" in the house where he grew up. This home he describes as a "block", a square structure located at 800 W. Ellice in Winnipeg -- I saw his house when I was there and it is unchanged from what is shown in the movie. In this house, part of which was occupied by his mother's hair salon, Maddin was raised with three siblings, two brothers and a sister who is a Pan-Canada track star. Maddin's father was the manager of the Winnipeg hockey team, the Jets, I think. Maddin casts a faded blonde movie star, Ann Savage (she was the femme fatale in Edgar Ulmer's 1945 Detour) as his mother and, then, attempts to recreate certain key moments in his childhood, presumably to better appreciate as an adult what happened when he was a child. The incidents don't seem too consequential -- in one the family members try to adjust a perennially disarranged carpet runner; in other sequence, his mother interrogates Maddin's sister viciously implying that her account of hitting a deer on the highway to Kenora is a euphemism for sexual intercourse; in one scene, the children demand that their mother cook them some meatloaf (she has retired to her bed and says that she has forgotten all her recipes and will never cook again). We see the family gathered every noon to watch a TV show called "Ledge Man" -- in the show, a young man threatens to hurl himself to his death from the ledge of a building downtown; in each episode, his mother talks him out of suicide. (At the end of the film, we see the family sitting lying somnolently on couches watching TV and Maddin informs us that his brother, Curtis, killed himself when he was 16, information that casts a powerful light on the fantasy of the family watching "Ledge Man" every day.) These episodes involving autobiography are tied to larger currents in the city's history most of which are defined by absence and loss. Places that were important to Maddin when he was small are now gone, eradicated by the march of progress. He claims to have been born in the old hockey rink where his father worked -- and we see the building demolished after Maddin uses the trough urinal in the rink one last time. Eaton's, Winnipeg's most beloved department store, is also destroyed and replaced with a new hockey rink and event center. An old public baths said to have three separate pools each superimposed above the other is mostly closed -- the two most subterranean baths are now shuttered. An amusement park called Happy Land is dismantled and becomes a shanty-town occupied by First Nations squatters on the roofs of the downtown buildings. On the top floor of the Hudson Bay Company department store, a tavern called the Paddlewheel Lounge suffers from a lack of patrons and is threatened to be closed -- this is after we have seen the Lounge used for a decadent spectacle called "The Golden Boy" male beauty pageant. ("The Golden Boy" is the gilded figure atop Manitoba's unicameral legislature building -- a place that Maddin also characterizes as the "largest Masonic Lodge" in the world, an almost true statement, since the building was designed by high-degree freemasons and secretly incorporates much of their hermetic lore into the structure. When I was in Winnipeg, I saw a tour guide illumining the arcana in the legislature building and it was, in fact, mind-boggling.) Maddin likes secret maps imposed on existing public places -- he claims that the Cree believed that there were subterranean rivers flowing under the Forks where the Assiniboine and the Red River combine, thus creating a place of distinctive "magnetism". He imagines a grid of alleys that represent the real thoroughfares in Winnipeg concealed in the interstices of the actual roads. A séance in the capitol building, under the enormous bronze bison flanking the steps to the rotunda, results in sleepwalker's ballet using members of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet company -- vast amounts of ectoplasm are extruded and it becomes confused in the film's imagery with the never-ending snow fall, the dark streets like tunnels between ramparts of snow, the alleys between houses buried in the stuff, snowflakes always falling over the occult and unreal city.
Maddin uses a variety of styles to present this material. There are delirious point-of-view shots simulating toboggan runs and staggering through the gloomy streets. A lot of newsreel footage is intercut into the film, some of its exceedingly peculiar -- for instance, women chaining themselves to a tree to protect it from the axes of city utility workers. (When the women were persuaded to leave someone blew up the tree with dynamite.) Some of the footage is in color and contemporary -- but other parts of the film are shot on the distressed, murky film-stock that is Maddin's trademark, imagery from a badly damaged, but transcendentally gorgeous silent film known only to the director. At the film's conclusion, Maddin still can't quite awake from his slumbers. Shadows of sleepwalkers stumble through the frozen city. He imagines a "Citizen Girl" who will defend Winnipeg and restore the sites and buildings that it has lost and this is some comfort to him. The movie ends with actors simulating Maddin's parents and his brothers and sisters half asleep in the living room watching TV. An old lady sits with them -- she's sublet the building (it's now a drycleaners and tailor's business) and isn't willing to leave. Maddin recalls his dead brother and acknowledges that the city's magnetism and strange appeal are too great for him and that he is unable to leave. At the beginning of the film, Maddin tells this story: each year, the Winnipeg Free Press sponsored a treasure hunt, hiding a medallion somewhere in the city. The winner of the treasure hunt, the first person to find the medallion, is to be given an all expense paid train ticket to leave Winnipeg. But to find the medallion, one must walk all of Winnipeg's streets and pay close attention to everything in the city and, so, when the person finds the medallion, he or she is so invested in Winnipeg, knows it so well and is so fascinated by the place, that the person can not leave. "In the entire history of the treasure hunt," Maddin says, "not one of the winners ever actually left Winnipeg."
Maddin's esthetic combines curious, disjunctive elements. He uses damaged, scratched and scarred film stock to project images that are spectacularly lit and featuring faces that have the transcendent beauty of silent movie stars. Although he is avowedly heterosexual (the film features his girlfiend's dog, Spanky), Maddin's films are rife with smirking homo-erotic imagery -- in My Winnipeg, the male beauty pageant and a scene involving little boys showing each other their "boners." His documentary about Winnipeg is almost entirely an account of places and people that no longer exist. In the midst of whimsy, he often inserts shocking violence or hideous imagery of wounds and death -- in My Winnipeg, horses are frozen in the river, their heads rearing up out of the ice. (It's a reprise of a famous passage in Curzio Malaparte's memoir about the Russian front, Kaputt). The dead horses, extruded from the ice become a popular trysting place and people have sex on the frozen corpses resulting "in a baby boom, the following November."
Sunday, September 23, 2018
The Witch
Robert Eggers 2015 horror film, The Witch, baffled general audiences and was, more or less, derided by the people who are fans of the genre. In fact, the picture is excellent, although fundamentally pointless except as an exercise in ethnography. Nonetheless, I thought the film was scary in a grim, relentless way and contains images that can't be unseen. The picture is too subtle to appeal to fans of gore and slowly paced with most of the horror just off-screen. The audience to which this film would appeal is not likely to see it and, so, the entire venture seems a little quixotic.
An antinomian Puritan named Will, with his family, is banished from the tiny New England hamlet where they live. Will takes his family into the wilderness where they clear land and build a farm. Something supernatural lives in the autumnal woods. Thomasina, the family's teenage daughter, ventures into the forest with a small baby. The baby vanishes --it's thought a wolf stole the child. Thomasina has strange visions -- she imagines a shapeless crone grinding the baby in wooden churn and, then, applying the pulverized flesh and fat to her naked body. The family is riven by conflict: Will has taken his wife's silver chalice and pawned it, although Thomasina is blamed for the missing cup. Thomasina's brother, Caleb, lecherously eyes the young girl's swelling bosom. While hunting with his father in the woods, he encounters a strange black rabbit. The rabbit bears bad luck. When Will tries to shoot the animal, his fuse-lit musket explodes and half-blinds him. The corn in their fields is blighted. Caleb goes into the forest alone and encounters an alluring female apparition. He appears a day later, naked and feverish, and, after being bled, dies. Thomasina's little brother and sister, the twins, Jonas and Mercy, claim that the goat, Black Philip, has been talking to them. Terror seizes the family and Will uses an axe and nails to confine his the three surviving children in a shed. The witch comes and sucks blood from a white goat and, then, Black Philip gores Will, causing a huge stack of firewood that he has been obsessively chopping to collapse on him so that he also dies. After seeing the twins dead, Thomasina's mother, Katherine, goes mad and tries to strangle the teenage girl. Thomasina kills her and, then, speaks with Black Philip who, now, encourages her to "live deliciously". With the goat and stripped naked, she enters the forest and encounters a coven of naked witches -- they levitate around a bonfire and, in the film's final shot, we see Thomasina hovering at the summit of great, grey and barren tree lit by the leaping flames below. A final title reminds us that the film is based upon diaries, books, and engravings made during the early part of the 17th century.
The film is shot in long takes that emphasize the family's nightmarish isolation. In effect, the movie is silent, a bit like Sjostrom's terrifying Hollywood picture starring Lillian Gish, The Wind (1927). Nature is portrayed as demonic and the black rabbit and goat are familiars of the devil. The woods are ghastly with dark upturned trees and endless grey corridors of leafless ash and oak. Several shots, including one in which the father and mother dig a narrow pit in which to bury Caleb are spectacularly beautiful, misty with autumn and the little column of smoke rising from the small windowless cabin. Certain aspects of the film suggest that what happens to the family is a result of their dour, cheerless, Calvinist faith -- and the terrifying witches may be construed, at least in part, as Thomasina's hallucinations. But too many people encounter the witches and there are seemingly objective sequences involving direct supernatural intervention that can't be interpreted as delirium -- for instance, the scene in which Caleb encounters a voluptuous young witch in the woods. The sequence involving Caleb's death is extremely disturbing but, perhaps, could be interpreted as evidence of religious hysteria triggering hallucinations. But, ultimately, the film implies that the witches are real, perniciously malign, and, even, deadly. Thus, the film is not really a study in the psychological need to believe in evil forces. Rather, it seems an ethnography of New England witchcraft, something that is suggested by the movie's subtitle, "A New England Folktale". Before he dies Caleb experiences the caresses of Jesus as a lover and voluptuously rubs his arms over his pale torso proclaiming that he is in God's embrace. Then, his eyes roll up in his head and he dies. The twins are crumpled near the bed suffering seizures. Religious faith itself is shown to be unnatural, grotesque, and terrible. Everyone hallucinates. We see a shocking image of Caleb's mother, emaciated with the taut face of a starving animal, huddled in the little boy's narrow grave, clutching at the corpse. Later, she sees the boy and her lost baby sitting together in a corner of the cabin. She opens her blouse to suckle the baby and, then, the screen goes black -- in the next shot, the woman's breast is being ravaged by raven, flesh pecked away and blood on her white shift. The scenes of the great horned goat, black as midnight, goring Will are terrifying as is the sequence in the woods in which the voluptuous young witch leans forward to kiss Caleb while suddenly her hand extrudes from the edge of screen, lurching to seize the boy and shot in close-up so that we can see that the limb is ancient and horribly gnarled. Will's madness is expressed in obsessive hacking of wood into kindling. The great heap of wood that he has laid-away for the upcoming window collapse onto him like a dark avalanche so that only his gaunt head protrudes from the pile. Adding to the film's eerie ambience is the fact that I couldn't understand the actor's accents -- everyone speaks with a strong, impenetrable Yorkshire accent and Will, in particular, has a basso profundo voice that registers subliminally as a low earthquake rumbling; I understood less than one-fifth of what he said, although I don't think the dialogue, written in pidgin Jacobean English has any significance. I wonder about the point of the movie -- it seems an exceedingly accurate account of the way people acted and thought and their fears three-hundred years ago. But to what end? The interiors are all naturally lit with candles and the exterior woods are wild and vacant except for evil presences -- the movie was shot near Kiosk, Ontario -- and the actors all have pale, tightly pinched faces and wear strange shapeless garments. It looks like a deranged documentary -- in fact, much of the budget was expended on producing the home-spun clothing. I have the same reaction to Ingmar Bergman's sublime, but ultimately futile, The Virgin Spring. What, may I ask, is the point? Witches don't exist and so why do we need to know so much about them.
An antinomian Puritan named Will, with his family, is banished from the tiny New England hamlet where they live. Will takes his family into the wilderness where they clear land and build a farm. Something supernatural lives in the autumnal woods. Thomasina, the family's teenage daughter, ventures into the forest with a small baby. The baby vanishes --it's thought a wolf stole the child. Thomasina has strange visions -- she imagines a shapeless crone grinding the baby in wooden churn and, then, applying the pulverized flesh and fat to her naked body. The family is riven by conflict: Will has taken his wife's silver chalice and pawned it, although Thomasina is blamed for the missing cup. Thomasina's brother, Caleb, lecherously eyes the young girl's swelling bosom. While hunting with his father in the woods, he encounters a strange black rabbit. The rabbit bears bad luck. When Will tries to shoot the animal, his fuse-lit musket explodes and half-blinds him. The corn in their fields is blighted. Caleb goes into the forest alone and encounters an alluring female apparition. He appears a day later, naked and feverish, and, after being bled, dies. Thomasina's little brother and sister, the twins, Jonas and Mercy, claim that the goat, Black Philip, has been talking to them. Terror seizes the family and Will uses an axe and nails to confine his the three surviving children in a shed. The witch comes and sucks blood from a white goat and, then, Black Philip gores Will, causing a huge stack of firewood that he has been obsessively chopping to collapse on him so that he also dies. After seeing the twins dead, Thomasina's mother, Katherine, goes mad and tries to strangle the teenage girl. Thomasina kills her and, then, speaks with Black Philip who, now, encourages her to "live deliciously". With the goat and stripped naked, she enters the forest and encounters a coven of naked witches -- they levitate around a bonfire and, in the film's final shot, we see Thomasina hovering at the summit of great, grey and barren tree lit by the leaping flames below. A final title reminds us that the film is based upon diaries, books, and engravings made during the early part of the 17th century.
The film is shot in long takes that emphasize the family's nightmarish isolation. In effect, the movie is silent, a bit like Sjostrom's terrifying Hollywood picture starring Lillian Gish, The Wind (1927). Nature is portrayed as demonic and the black rabbit and goat are familiars of the devil. The woods are ghastly with dark upturned trees and endless grey corridors of leafless ash and oak. Several shots, including one in which the father and mother dig a narrow pit in which to bury Caleb are spectacularly beautiful, misty with autumn and the little column of smoke rising from the small windowless cabin. Certain aspects of the film suggest that what happens to the family is a result of their dour, cheerless, Calvinist faith -- and the terrifying witches may be construed, at least in part, as Thomasina's hallucinations. But too many people encounter the witches and there are seemingly objective sequences involving direct supernatural intervention that can't be interpreted as delirium -- for instance, the scene in which Caleb encounters a voluptuous young witch in the woods. The sequence involving Caleb's death is extremely disturbing but, perhaps, could be interpreted as evidence of religious hysteria triggering hallucinations. But, ultimately, the film implies that the witches are real, perniciously malign, and, even, deadly. Thus, the film is not really a study in the psychological need to believe in evil forces. Rather, it seems an ethnography of New England witchcraft, something that is suggested by the movie's subtitle, "A New England Folktale". Before he dies Caleb experiences the caresses of Jesus as a lover and voluptuously rubs his arms over his pale torso proclaiming that he is in God's embrace. Then, his eyes roll up in his head and he dies. The twins are crumpled near the bed suffering seizures. Religious faith itself is shown to be unnatural, grotesque, and terrible. Everyone hallucinates. We see a shocking image of Caleb's mother, emaciated with the taut face of a starving animal, huddled in the little boy's narrow grave, clutching at the corpse. Later, she sees the boy and her lost baby sitting together in a corner of the cabin. She opens her blouse to suckle the baby and, then, the screen goes black -- in the next shot, the woman's breast is being ravaged by raven, flesh pecked away and blood on her white shift. The scenes of the great horned goat, black as midnight, goring Will are terrifying as is the sequence in the woods in which the voluptuous young witch leans forward to kiss Caleb while suddenly her hand extrudes from the edge of screen, lurching to seize the boy and shot in close-up so that we can see that the limb is ancient and horribly gnarled. Will's madness is expressed in obsessive hacking of wood into kindling. The great heap of wood that he has laid-away for the upcoming window collapse onto him like a dark avalanche so that only his gaunt head protrudes from the pile. Adding to the film's eerie ambience is the fact that I couldn't understand the actor's accents -- everyone speaks with a strong, impenetrable Yorkshire accent and Will, in particular, has a basso profundo voice that registers subliminally as a low earthquake rumbling; I understood less than one-fifth of what he said, although I don't think the dialogue, written in pidgin Jacobean English has any significance. I wonder about the point of the movie -- it seems an exceedingly accurate account of the way people acted and thought and their fears three-hundred years ago. But to what end? The interiors are all naturally lit with candles and the exterior woods are wild and vacant except for evil presences -- the movie was shot near Kiosk, Ontario -- and the actors all have pale, tightly pinched faces and wear strange shapeless garments. It looks like a deranged documentary -- in fact, much of the budget was expended on producing the home-spun clothing. I have the same reaction to Ingmar Bergman's sublime, but ultimately futile, The Virgin Spring. What, may I ask, is the point? Witches don't exist and so why do we need to know so much about them.
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Ozark (Series Two)
Shot in nacreous bruise-green twilight, the Netflix crime series Ozark looks nasty. The show leaves the viewer with the impression that it is fantastically violent. In fact, this impression is misleading -- compared to an abattoir like Westworld, there is almost no violence at all: in the nine hours of the show's second series (2018) that I have watched, four murders have been shown on-screen -- that is, about one killing every two hours. So what is the source of the program's constant and menacing aura of hyperbolic violence? I think this impression stems from several characteristics: first, everyone curses all the time and exchange the most lurid and ghastly threats; second, there are usually a couple of beat-downs per episode -- although these sequences are staged in a matter-of-fact way and, often, so short as to seem, more or less, ephemeral. But the green shadows and the portentous rumbling of the soundtrack and the eerie horror-film tracking and gliding camera motions create an omnipresent atmosphere of threat -- if the camera tracks a car or slides sideways smoothly to follow a character, we always expect something awful to occur. Since, Ozark is a family melodrama involving the fortunes of a husband, wife, and their two children, we also fear that the children will be harmed -- in Ozark (second series), there's even a cheerful-looking baby on-screen for half of the episodes (the hero and heroine have killed his daddy) to ramp up the suspense.
The film's premise is pretty much exhausted and, although the show remains absolutely gripping, it's hard for me to imagine that there's much of this grim terrain remaining to be explored. Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) is a genius accountant and money-manager whose work for a Mexican cartel went horribly wrong. He's been forced into laundering immense amounts of money for the drug-runners. In this enterprise, he's joined by his wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and his two children, a pale, precocious son, and the family's rebellious teenage daughter. It's always one thing after the other for poor Marty. Either he's being gruesomely threatened by the drug cartel and its sinister lawyer, a tall skinny woman with a blonde Valkyrie hair-do or he's arguing with his wife about her past infidelity (she's cuckolded him with a business partner offed by the Mexicans), or attempting to reassure his two increasingly restive and cynical children that all will well when it's increasingly apparent that nothing will be well at all: his son is money-laundering himself and his daughter has hired a lawyer so that she can be "emancipated" from the family and its nightmarish business. When Mexican gangsters aren't trying to assassinate him, Marty and Wendy are relentlessly persecuted by local villains, including the horrific Snell's, a hillbilly couple that about the most terrifying thing on TV. Sometimes, corrupt local politicians try to shake them down. Everyone constantly blackmails and extorts everyone else. And, further, Marty and Wendy's proposal to build a casino on the Snell's land at the Lake of the Ozarks have run afoul of the Kansas city mob -- killers from that gang are also hovering around the edges of the action. The Snell's, Jacob and Darlene, are like Tom Bodett (of Motel 6 fame) or Roy Blount, Jr. crossed with Hannibal Lecter -- Darlene in particular is so ruthless and relentlessly menacing that she terrifies her poor husband, Jacob (and Jacob is a very scary good ole boy himself -- he and his wife are the local heroin kingpins.) Marty and Wendy are also in business with the Langmore's, another criminal clan, only marginally less intimidating than the lethal Snell family. The best thing in the show is Ruth, the petite blonde teenage girl who serves as the criminal mastermind for the Langmore family -- she's played by Julia Garne, taking a leaf from the role played by Jenifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, and, I think, she's one of the most compelling actresses on TV. Indeed, everyone in the show is excellent -- the menagerie of crooked cops and politicians are all indelibly nasty and there's a putrid gay FBI agent, a little like the fanatic zealot played by Michael Shannon in Boardwalk Empire. The show is a swim in a sewer and everyone is, more or less, corrupt and vicious. Jason Bateman's exceptionally involute and claustrophobically controlled performance is also key to the show's staying power -- Marty Byrde scarcely reacts to any of the horrific trouble in which he always finds himself. His cell-phone plays crickets when he gets a call, usually someone summoning him to a meeting in some miserable dive or remote country lane where he can be threatened, pushed around, and forced to participate, if reluctantly, in the torture of one or the other of his associates. When told by the Mexican cartel's lawyer that the gangster are planning to kidnap and torture his children to death, Marty gulps hard so that his throat bulges a little and his eyes seem to protrude only slightly -- a tiny vein in his temple dilates for a second, but otherwise he maintains his steely composure. A little of this goes a long way and Marty has to gulp down his terror about every half-hour in the film and, although the effect is always impressive, I don't think his muted, strangulated performance is really sustainable in the long run. On the other hand, if he were more demonstrative, I think the show might by unwatchably hysterical.
From beginning to end, the show is a guilty pleasure. The nature of this pleasure isn't pretty and it's not pleasant to describe: someone is bullying someone else, but, then, a bigger and more horribly effective bully knocks the wind out of the first bad guy. The entire show consists of ever more awful villains each strutting for their short period on screen and, then, being cowed and humiliated by even more vicious bad guys. In the opening episode, a rude teenage kid at a car-park won't even look up at the skinny lady lawyer who is trying to question him. We immediately sympathize with lady lawyer. The kid uses an expletive and tells her to get off the property. This kind of stupid and rude behavior deserves come-uppance and we get that in spades -- a Mexican gunman blows off the rude kid's hand and, as he pleads for mercy, pumps about eight shots into his face. It's satisfying in an awful kind of way because we know the logic of the show is, ultimately, to expose the cruel and importunate arrogance of the lady lawyer to some even more awful retribution -- although what this will be we don't know. In one scene, the bad guys are coming to kill a member of the Snell family who has crossed the Mexican mob. When the bad guys close in, the patriarch Jacob Snell takes things into his own hand by bludgeoning his own son to death -- the code demands a sacrifice and to save Darlene, who has a propensity for committing sudden, enraged murders, Jacob has to kill the boy. Darlene won't forgive him and, in fact, murders Jacob in episode nine (or nineteen, depending how you count). But before the murder, there is a flash-back and we see the first time that Jacob Snell laid eyes on his destiny -- he was Vietnam vet come back to the Ozarks and the young and beautiful Darlene seduces him, yanking him out of a small-town café to a cold-looking dark lake where they go skinny-dipping. To establish the year that this occurs, the soundtrack plays Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman". At the end of the episode when Darlene hugs the dying Jacob in a sort of awful, white-trash Liebestod, the camera swoons upward. Jacob's fading vision gives us a POV that shows Darlene as she looked when she first seduced him forty years earlier and, as the camera cranes upward, we hear "Wichita Lineman" again. There's a lot of wish fulfillment in this show -- people stalk around punching each other out while their pockets are literally lined with greenbacks. Millions of dollars are stashed in caskets and walls. So bad guys get their comeuppance, bullies are bullied, and, everyone is flush with cash.
The film's premise is pretty much exhausted and, although the show remains absolutely gripping, it's hard for me to imagine that there's much of this grim terrain remaining to be explored. Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) is a genius accountant and money-manager whose work for a Mexican cartel went horribly wrong. He's been forced into laundering immense amounts of money for the drug-runners. In this enterprise, he's joined by his wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and his two children, a pale, precocious son, and the family's rebellious teenage daughter. It's always one thing after the other for poor Marty. Either he's being gruesomely threatened by the drug cartel and its sinister lawyer, a tall skinny woman with a blonde Valkyrie hair-do or he's arguing with his wife about her past infidelity (she's cuckolded him with a business partner offed by the Mexicans), or attempting to reassure his two increasingly restive and cynical children that all will well when it's increasingly apparent that nothing will be well at all: his son is money-laundering himself and his daughter has hired a lawyer so that she can be "emancipated" from the family and its nightmarish business. When Mexican gangsters aren't trying to assassinate him, Marty and Wendy are relentlessly persecuted by local villains, including the horrific Snell's, a hillbilly couple that about the most terrifying thing on TV. Sometimes, corrupt local politicians try to shake them down. Everyone constantly blackmails and extorts everyone else. And, further, Marty and Wendy's proposal to build a casino on the Snell's land at the Lake of the Ozarks have run afoul of the Kansas city mob -- killers from that gang are also hovering around the edges of the action. The Snell's, Jacob and Darlene, are like Tom Bodett (of Motel 6 fame) or Roy Blount, Jr. crossed with Hannibal Lecter -- Darlene in particular is so ruthless and relentlessly menacing that she terrifies her poor husband, Jacob (and Jacob is a very scary good ole boy himself -- he and his wife are the local heroin kingpins.) Marty and Wendy are also in business with the Langmore's, another criminal clan, only marginally less intimidating than the lethal Snell family. The best thing in the show is Ruth, the petite blonde teenage girl who serves as the criminal mastermind for the Langmore family -- she's played by Julia Garne, taking a leaf from the role played by Jenifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, and, I think, she's one of the most compelling actresses on TV. Indeed, everyone in the show is excellent -- the menagerie of crooked cops and politicians are all indelibly nasty and there's a putrid gay FBI agent, a little like the fanatic zealot played by Michael Shannon in Boardwalk Empire. The show is a swim in a sewer and everyone is, more or less, corrupt and vicious. Jason Bateman's exceptionally involute and claustrophobically controlled performance is also key to the show's staying power -- Marty Byrde scarcely reacts to any of the horrific trouble in which he always finds himself. His cell-phone plays crickets when he gets a call, usually someone summoning him to a meeting in some miserable dive or remote country lane where he can be threatened, pushed around, and forced to participate, if reluctantly, in the torture of one or the other of his associates. When told by the Mexican cartel's lawyer that the gangster are planning to kidnap and torture his children to death, Marty gulps hard so that his throat bulges a little and his eyes seem to protrude only slightly -- a tiny vein in his temple dilates for a second, but otherwise he maintains his steely composure. A little of this goes a long way and Marty has to gulp down his terror about every half-hour in the film and, although the effect is always impressive, I don't think his muted, strangulated performance is really sustainable in the long run. On the other hand, if he were more demonstrative, I think the show might by unwatchably hysterical.
From beginning to end, the show is a guilty pleasure. The nature of this pleasure isn't pretty and it's not pleasant to describe: someone is bullying someone else, but, then, a bigger and more horribly effective bully knocks the wind out of the first bad guy. The entire show consists of ever more awful villains each strutting for their short period on screen and, then, being cowed and humiliated by even more vicious bad guys. In the opening episode, a rude teenage kid at a car-park won't even look up at the skinny lady lawyer who is trying to question him. We immediately sympathize with lady lawyer. The kid uses an expletive and tells her to get off the property. This kind of stupid and rude behavior deserves come-uppance and we get that in spades -- a Mexican gunman blows off the rude kid's hand and, as he pleads for mercy, pumps about eight shots into his face. It's satisfying in an awful kind of way because we know the logic of the show is, ultimately, to expose the cruel and importunate arrogance of the lady lawyer to some even more awful retribution -- although what this will be we don't know. In one scene, the bad guys are coming to kill a member of the Snell family who has crossed the Mexican mob. When the bad guys close in, the patriarch Jacob Snell takes things into his own hand by bludgeoning his own son to death -- the code demands a sacrifice and to save Darlene, who has a propensity for committing sudden, enraged murders, Jacob has to kill the boy. Darlene won't forgive him and, in fact, murders Jacob in episode nine (or nineteen, depending how you count). But before the murder, there is a flash-back and we see the first time that Jacob Snell laid eyes on his destiny -- he was Vietnam vet come back to the Ozarks and the young and beautiful Darlene seduces him, yanking him out of a small-town café to a cold-looking dark lake where they go skinny-dipping. To establish the year that this occurs, the soundtrack plays Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman". At the end of the episode when Darlene hugs the dying Jacob in a sort of awful, white-trash Liebestod, the camera swoons upward. Jacob's fading vision gives us a POV that shows Darlene as she looked when she first seduced him forty years earlier and, as the camera cranes upward, we hear "Wichita Lineman" again. There's a lot of wish fulfillment in this show -- people stalk around punching each other out while their pockets are literally lined with greenbacks. Millions of dollars are stashed in caskets and walls. So bad guys get their comeuppance, bullies are bullied, and, everyone is flush with cash.
Sunday, September 9, 2018
Ex Libris
Borges said: "I have always imagined paradise will be a kind of library." Ample justification for this vision may be found in Frederick Wiseman's remarkably cheerful and fascinating documentary Ex Libris (2017). This film, an institutional study of the New York Public Library, is built on an epic scale -- the movie is 197 minutes long. However, it wears its length well and, in fact, is sufficiently interesting, and, even, inspiring enough to avoid tedium. In fact, the activities of the library are so immense and variegated that, if anything, the film doesn't exactly seem to do them justice -- it could easily be another hour long without losing its peculiar charm. Some sequences, indeed, feel too short -- there is one scene in which a man in a wheelchair inserts some kind of card in a cassette box and, then, flings the cassettes into a big bin; the man works with astonishing speed and hurls the cassettes as if he is angry at them -- Wiseman eschews names, music, narration, and makes no use of explanatory titles: he is a purist and presents his images as if unmediated and, so, this sequence, an episode in the huge film that is very interesting and, in fact, departs a little from the idyllic tone of the rest of the movie, remains enigmatic: who is this man? what is his actual mood? and what the hell is he doing? Why is he working so fast? There is no explanation of this sequence and so we are left to our own imaginative devices, an interesting approach to documentary filmmaking, but one that is, sometimes, a little frustrating. Although Wiseman presents his movies, almost all of them institutional studies, as the simple, unvarnished truth, in fact, they are highly complex, and carefully contrived, artifices -- Wiseman spends much more time editing than shooting his films and, of course, carefully controls what we see. His vision of the institution that he documents is concealed, but, nonetheless, forcefully evident across the length of the film. In contrast with some of his subjects, for instance his film simply entitled High School, Wiseman has unalloyed affection for New York's vast public library system and this is on fulsome display in this movie.
One of the pleasures of watching Wiseman's films is that gradually, over hours, characters emerge. We see the same people, none of them ever identified, and, gradually, build up a sense for their personalities and quirks. Similarly, Wiseman tethers Ex Libris to a sort of loose structure by sequences that punctuate his material -- these are shots of the iconic façade and entrance hall to the main library facility that seems to be at 5th Avenue and 41st Street. Every fifteen minutes or so, the film reverts to this location, shot at all hours of the day, and we see tourists on the steps taking selfies of themselves in front of the library's famous portico. We also see tourists in Astor Hall, the entry way to the library, milling about, taking photographs, and sometimes attending noon time presentations by famous writers -- everyone, including the presenter, stands for these talks. At dawn, the camera shows street people sleeping in the shadow of the building. The famous lions flanking the entrance to the library first appear about two hours into the film although they are on ubiquitous in stylized forms on flags shown at the various branches of the library that the film explores -- the film tutors us to recognize the red and white flag as the sign for a branch library. As the film progresses, periodically, we see members of its governing body, people who perpetually proclaim that the library succeeds by its "public and private partnerships", a mantra for the notion that the more the library shows its benevolent public face, that is, the more people it serves, the more private philanthropists will donate to the library. The impulse in the film is to show that the library is a powerful, behemoth force for good and that it inspires good in others. To this end, we see a tired-looking blonde woman who seems to be one of the library's executives -- she presides over various meetings, including several in branches serving poor neighborhoods. A very dignified Black woman with a shaved head seems to have something to do with the Schomburg Center, a Harlem archive associated with the library -- she almost never speaks but is a powerful presence in the administrative scenes. A number of handsome younger men appear as well, more or less indistinguishable from one another -- they are up and coming administrators and hustlers. With one exception (an U.S. army recruiting officer), everyone in the film speaks with fantastic, unscripted eloquence -- there are many marvelous, hyper-literate speeches in the film including a marvelous Ph.d-level dissertation on Marxism and the criticism of bourgeois society from the right (the works of ... Slaves without Masters) delivered by a brilliantly eloquent American Indian woman -- she's chubby, wears gaudy silver jewelry, and seems to be speaking to a group of elderly Jewish and Chinese people at a Branch library and, I'm persuaded, that she's about the most intelligent person you and I will hear speak during the next dozen or so calendar months.
The movie is encyclopedic like the library that it documents. We see Richard Dawkins pontificating about science and religion, pointing out that the endeavor of knowledge is cooperative (and, therefore, establishing from the outset Wiseman's theme). A brilliant Black scholar speaks on the Koran and the Atlantic slave trade. There is a Job Fair, a half-dozen board meetings of the governors of the library (more talk of the public-private partnership),a sequence in which librarians at an after-school day care teach children how to read, images of micro-fiche being made and used, fifteen minutes in the archives of the world's largest copy-right free picture library, a Jewish scholar discussing delicatessens and the sexual symbolism of pastrami and salami. Elvis Costello in an interview, undercuts one of Greil Marcus' more elaborate theories and presents an image of his father on TV performing "If I had a Hammer," a highlight in the movie. An older Black poet speaks and we see several chamber ensembles performing in an auditorium associated with the library branch in Lincoln Center. Old Chinese men read Hong Kong newspapers in the Chinatown branch, old Jews discuss Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera in a book club, and librarians teach the blind how to read braille (Wiseman cuts away to a service dog licking its genitals). Ta-Nehisi Coates delivers a spectacular poetry reading and a sign language interpreter shows how she imports emotion into her "signing" at plays and musicals on Broadway. We see conveyor belts sorting books from the circulation library and snapping them into bins to be delivered to the various branches; a little girl tries to get a library card and the head of the custodians delivers a report on physical plant improvements. The library loans out hot spot electronics and lap tops and the administrators debate e-books and the role of bestsellers in the collection. Scholars study handwritten letters by Yeats and William Burroughs and a curator shows a group of old people wonderful woodcuts and engravings by Durer and Rembrandt. Administrators discuss policies toward the homeless -- the homeless are not allowed to sleep in the library, but the film, then, shows us a montage of all sorts of people napping in the reading rooms. At a lecture, Patti Smith says that history also includes dreams and visions and mistakes. Teenagers use a Branch as a hang-out and an actor recites Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark for an audio book. More old men are sleeping in a serene, silent branch near a green park. The great and wealthy gather in a banqueting hall lit by luminaria (brown paper bags with candles in them) for a fundraiser. The tired-looking blonde lady is dolled-up and looks about fifteen years younger.
Carnegie's bequest to America was that no one should live farther from a public library than they can walk -- this is the core of the so-called "public private" relationship to public services that the film espouses. At one point, a woman says that "the library must not fail" and, for a moment, the quotidian seems majestic and heroic. The head librarian, the tired-looking blonde woman, finds out that the most checked-out resource by local educators is the file on "Baby Animals" -- "everyone loves baby animals," a cheerful Black librarian says, but she points that both parents and children have made the second-most checked-out resource materials on fractions. There are patterns artfully woven into the film -- in the first five minutes someone asks an information librarian about the Gutenberg Bible. A half hour before the film ends, we see the Gutenberg Bible on display. I'm sure there are other motifs that reoccur, but on first watching the film is so long and complex that it is hard to appreciate the movie's structural underpinnings.
Wiseman is 89 now -- he was 87 when he directed this astonishingly youthful and optimistic film. Unlike Ken Burns, a filmmaker that I dislike, Wiseman is America's cinematic Whitman -- this film is a vast and inspiring catalogue of good things. Of course, it's not true -- Wiseman doesn't show homeless people being escorted out of toilets by security. The Board meetings that he films are preternaturally calm and harmonious. No one gets angry. There are no quarrels and no disputes as to the library's function, which, in effect, seems to be universal. The New York that Wiseman shows is sunny, clean, filled with ultra-articulate and super-smart people. There is no ethnic tension, no disputes between labor and management, no debate about objectives, nothing even approximating racism. This is a wonderful film that depicts an idealized version of the American community -- in the age of Trump, such a work is salubrious and it should be seen by everyone. The film is a fiction, but it's not a mean-spirited or bitter fiction. I hope that Wiseman's generosity of spirit is somehow contagious.
One of the pleasures of watching Wiseman's films is that gradually, over hours, characters emerge. We see the same people, none of them ever identified, and, gradually, build up a sense for their personalities and quirks. Similarly, Wiseman tethers Ex Libris to a sort of loose structure by sequences that punctuate his material -- these are shots of the iconic façade and entrance hall to the main library facility that seems to be at 5th Avenue and 41st Street. Every fifteen minutes or so, the film reverts to this location, shot at all hours of the day, and we see tourists on the steps taking selfies of themselves in front of the library's famous portico. We also see tourists in Astor Hall, the entry way to the library, milling about, taking photographs, and sometimes attending noon time presentations by famous writers -- everyone, including the presenter, stands for these talks. At dawn, the camera shows street people sleeping in the shadow of the building. The famous lions flanking the entrance to the library first appear about two hours into the film although they are on ubiquitous in stylized forms on flags shown at the various branches of the library that the film explores -- the film tutors us to recognize the red and white flag as the sign for a branch library. As the film progresses, periodically, we see members of its governing body, people who perpetually proclaim that the library succeeds by its "public and private partnerships", a mantra for the notion that the more the library shows its benevolent public face, that is, the more people it serves, the more private philanthropists will donate to the library. The impulse in the film is to show that the library is a powerful, behemoth force for good and that it inspires good in others. To this end, we see a tired-looking blonde woman who seems to be one of the library's executives -- she presides over various meetings, including several in branches serving poor neighborhoods. A very dignified Black woman with a shaved head seems to have something to do with the Schomburg Center, a Harlem archive associated with the library -- she almost never speaks but is a powerful presence in the administrative scenes. A number of handsome younger men appear as well, more or less indistinguishable from one another -- they are up and coming administrators and hustlers. With one exception (an U.S. army recruiting officer), everyone in the film speaks with fantastic, unscripted eloquence -- there are many marvelous, hyper-literate speeches in the film including a marvelous Ph.d-level dissertation on Marxism and the criticism of bourgeois society from the right (the works of ... Slaves without Masters) delivered by a brilliantly eloquent American Indian woman -- she's chubby, wears gaudy silver jewelry, and seems to be speaking to a group of elderly Jewish and Chinese people at a Branch library and, I'm persuaded, that she's about the most intelligent person you and I will hear speak during the next dozen or so calendar months.
The movie is encyclopedic like the library that it documents. We see Richard Dawkins pontificating about science and religion, pointing out that the endeavor of knowledge is cooperative (and, therefore, establishing from the outset Wiseman's theme). A brilliant Black scholar speaks on the Koran and the Atlantic slave trade. There is a Job Fair, a half-dozen board meetings of the governors of the library (more talk of the public-private partnership),a sequence in which librarians at an after-school day care teach children how to read, images of micro-fiche being made and used, fifteen minutes in the archives of the world's largest copy-right free picture library, a Jewish scholar discussing delicatessens and the sexual symbolism of pastrami and salami. Elvis Costello in an interview, undercuts one of Greil Marcus' more elaborate theories and presents an image of his father on TV performing "If I had a Hammer," a highlight in the movie. An older Black poet speaks and we see several chamber ensembles performing in an auditorium associated with the library branch in Lincoln Center. Old Chinese men read Hong Kong newspapers in the Chinatown branch, old Jews discuss Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera in a book club, and librarians teach the blind how to read braille (Wiseman cuts away to a service dog licking its genitals). Ta-Nehisi Coates delivers a spectacular poetry reading and a sign language interpreter shows how she imports emotion into her "signing" at plays and musicals on Broadway. We see conveyor belts sorting books from the circulation library and snapping them into bins to be delivered to the various branches; a little girl tries to get a library card and the head of the custodians delivers a report on physical plant improvements. The library loans out hot spot electronics and lap tops and the administrators debate e-books and the role of bestsellers in the collection. Scholars study handwritten letters by Yeats and William Burroughs and a curator shows a group of old people wonderful woodcuts and engravings by Durer and Rembrandt. Administrators discuss policies toward the homeless -- the homeless are not allowed to sleep in the library, but the film, then, shows us a montage of all sorts of people napping in the reading rooms. At a lecture, Patti Smith says that history also includes dreams and visions and mistakes. Teenagers use a Branch as a hang-out and an actor recites Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark for an audio book. More old men are sleeping in a serene, silent branch near a green park. The great and wealthy gather in a banqueting hall lit by luminaria (brown paper bags with candles in them) for a fundraiser. The tired-looking blonde lady is dolled-up and looks about fifteen years younger.
Carnegie's bequest to America was that no one should live farther from a public library than they can walk -- this is the core of the so-called "public private" relationship to public services that the film espouses. At one point, a woman says that "the library must not fail" and, for a moment, the quotidian seems majestic and heroic. The head librarian, the tired-looking blonde woman, finds out that the most checked-out resource by local educators is the file on "Baby Animals" -- "everyone loves baby animals," a cheerful Black librarian says, but she points that both parents and children have made the second-most checked-out resource materials on fractions. There are patterns artfully woven into the film -- in the first five minutes someone asks an information librarian about the Gutenberg Bible. A half hour before the film ends, we see the Gutenberg Bible on display. I'm sure there are other motifs that reoccur, but on first watching the film is so long and complex that it is hard to appreciate the movie's structural underpinnings.
Wiseman is 89 now -- he was 87 when he directed this astonishingly youthful and optimistic film. Unlike Ken Burns, a filmmaker that I dislike, Wiseman is America's cinematic Whitman -- this film is a vast and inspiring catalogue of good things. Of course, it's not true -- Wiseman doesn't show homeless people being escorted out of toilets by security. The Board meetings that he films are preternaturally calm and harmonious. No one gets angry. There are no quarrels and no disputes as to the library's function, which, in effect, seems to be universal. The New York that Wiseman shows is sunny, clean, filled with ultra-articulate and super-smart people. There is no ethnic tension, no disputes between labor and management, no debate about objectives, nothing even approximating racism. This is a wonderful film that depicts an idealized version of the American community -- in the age of Trump, such a work is salubrious and it should be seen by everyone. The film is a fiction, but it's not a mean-spirited or bitter fiction. I hope that Wiseman's generosity of spirit is somehow contagious.
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