Mrs Bridge

From a review in the Guardian by Joshua Ferris of a great and neglected novel: 

No doubt much of what oppresses Mrs Bridge is an unsustainable domestic condition. The generation of women after hers – that of her two daughters – would have more freedom, more opportunity, and more perspicacity. But as Connell pursues this "carbuncular presence", and as it becomes the great preoccupation of the book, deepening and expanding, like the exhalations of a crouching beast, we come to know it as something universal, harrowing, and irremediable: an existential fear, the sour taste of wasted life, the wild desire to rectify that waste. How does one prosper against the threat that one might be skimming over the years, ignorant of how life should have been lived, might be lived, must be lived? What shall I do? What shall I do?

There is no certain answer, and in this uncertainty, the ironic distance between Mrs Bridge and the reader is closed. We no longer see her as victim of one or another comical shock, an object of pity or ridicule, or a hopeless case of repression and neuroses. She is Meursault without the epiphany of atheism, Molloy without the solace of scatology, Dr Rieux without the nobility of resistance. She is a reflection of you and me, an exemplar of our shared humanity and all the terror and opportunity it so briefly provides – so necessary to seize, and so easy to squander. 

The Tree of Life

Some experiences you pass over in silence.

On the one hand, it seems like laziness. I had a teacher who sternly told us that if you can’t talk about a subject, you don’t understand it. You can fall back on that position – it’s too big for words; language can’t capture that. And that is often the refuge of the inarticulate or the lazy, or the person who’s reluctant to think. Thinking’s hard work, after all.

But there are other occasions when talk does seem to cheapen a thing. You have the experience. Then you describe it. In the telling, the experience tends to become the telling of it. As you relate it, you unwittingly smooth out the rough edges, buff up the funny parts, exaggerate some of the events to make it more dramatic. Then what you described becomes its own description.

Or, there’s events that call for ecstatic speech. Anything less seems unworthy. Often, the most ecstatic experiences tend to be expressed in clichés, or words so worn they’ve lost their denotative meaning. I love you. I love you so much. It was so wonderful. Between the emotion and its expression lies a gap so vast, it shames the speaker.

Even poets have a hard time with the ecstatic or the holy or rendering awe. Shakespeare, certainly G.M. Hopkins. D. H. Lawrence. Whitman sometimes, but he tried for it so often that those great inventories of his don’t always work. Or the poets get cunning and try to suggest the emotion indirectly – “tell the truth, but tell it slant,” Miss Dickinson said, and so we should.

The Tree of Life is an ecstatic film. If that makes you roll your eyes, or sigh, or cringe, I can understand. But you would miss a profound experience. It’s hard to write about, though, and I don’t want to diminish my initial experience of the film. A lot of it lies beyond what you can, or should, reasonably reduce to language. In that way, it’s like great music, intrinsically beyond language.

Someone, I forget who, said that the only real criticism of a poem should be another poem. I’d say that’s true for this film as well.

And this one seems oddly personal, as if Terence Malick had somehow drilled into my own memory and imagination. My mother, like the mother does in the film, has red hair and blue eyes, and was once slim and pretty in the ethereal way redheads can be. My father took the same brutal approach to childrearing, with similar effects. The aluminum tumblers on the table, the Toscanini albums, the Converse sneakers/jeans/home-sewn shirts are all relics of my childhood, too, even though the setting’s maybe 15 or even 20 years earlier. Things change slowly in flyover country.

Beyond the specifics, the fascination with space, infinity, time, the soul, and, finally, wrestling with the problem of suffering and of the existence of a god preoccupied me almost as much as sex did when I was a teenager. It didn’t make me good company. But it does make me receptive to a move like this, that takes for a launching point the Book of Job. Job, after all,  is the only honest book in the Bible.

So I’m reluctant to break the spell of the movie and discuss, oh, the inheritance of Transcendentalism, the possibly Cabbalistic significance of the Tree, or the use of natural light or how the voice over works.

I’d just like as many people as possible to see it.

Malick's Tree of Life

Despite his reputation as a perfectionist, Mr. Malick by all accounts strove for a documentary-style spontaneity on “The Tree of Life.” “It’s more found than planned,” Mr. Lubezki said. “Terry would say, don’t worry about getting a piece of dialogue or an interaction of the actors, but try to get the feeling of the first time being in a room with them.”

The mood on the set matched the subject of the film: a heightened alertness to the world. “When you’re shooting with Terry, everybody’s very aware of their surroundings,” Mr. Lubezki said. With their birdsong soundtracks and their signature images of nature and the elements — light through treetops, windblown grass, flowing water — Mr. Malick’s movies are both more concrete and more abstract than most. They pay close attention to the sensual materiality of flora and fauna, places and things (“Tree of Life” locations include the California redwood forest and the Utah salt flats), but they also seek “to put emotions on film,” Mr. Lubezki said, “which is something there’s no manual for.”

It can be hard for actors to find their place within the willful, perpetual flux of a Malick production — some members of the large ensemble of "The Thin Red Line" were unexpectedly sidelined, or even eliminated.

“Actually, he’s an imperfectionist,” Mr. Pitt said of Mr. Malick, speaking in an interview at the Carlton Hotel here. “He finds perfection in imperfection, and he’s always trying to create the imperfection.” He added that working with Mr. Malick was “liberating but exhausting,” a rare opportunity to fulfill what he called “this actor’s quest of always trying to be in the moment, which is a bit precious but very true.”
Mr. Malick often calls for his actors not to create a character so much as embody a concept or a feeling. Ms. Chastain said that her audition consisted mainly of “acting out behaviors, like putting a baby to sleep or looking at someone with love and respect.”

via

Glenn Kenny's rave review here

À nos amours

Brutal and ultimately beautiful movie about a girl who uses sex as a way to rebel, to distance herself from her family, and, perhaps, from herself.


Now, as I read that sentence over it could be misconstrued to make the movie sound like some cheesy softporno flick. It's about as far removed from, say, Emmanuel, as you can get. Instead, it exposes the brutality and viciousness of family life and of the pleasures and imprisonment of being the object of male desire.


It goes deep. It's also one of the few films that shows or speaks not only what you may have thought, but also the thoughts you try to hide from yourself.


And Klaus Nomi is on the soundtrack, singing Purcell in a bizarre and exactly right juxtaposition.







And from the same film, the Cold Song written by Purcell and sung by Klaus Nomi

Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith

How do you feel watching the Ku Klux Klan?
Now, how do feel about cheering on the KKK as they rescue innocent whites from the depredations of rioting blacks?
You'd mostly feel the same way as before. But, in the context of Birth of a Nation, at the end of a series of humiliations and outrages committed upon the protagonists, when the Klan becomes the last hope. . . for a second, for maybe less than a second, you want to cheer them on. As that appalling revelation sinks in, you realize that bringing you to that emotion is the the achievement and the horror of Birth of a Nation.

It is a sprawling epic, covering the Civil War and the Reconstruction over 180 minutes. And those minutes fly by, filled as they are with events, passion, tragedy, and melodrama best sense. Lillian Gish, the star, is graceful as a Javanese dancer, winsome; early a hundred years later she's the incarnation of everything a movie star represents. Many of the sequences are still viscerally exciting. Other parts of the film are beautiful, both on their own terms and now, as an artifact of a style of filmmaking and a time that’s long gone. The lovers strolling in the cotton field. The way the light, from high and behind the actors, gives them silver nitrate halos.

The formal innovations are substantial. It's hard to imagine, for instance, the ingenuity involved in inventing parallel editing. It's such a basic part of film grammar now that creating it seems almost like inventing the paragraph.

Yet, Birth of a Nation is the most breathtakingly racist movie I’ve ever seen. Although it’s billed as a Civil War epic, that part of the movie only sets up the reason for the creation of the Klan and its ultimate triumph over the carpetbaggers and power-grabbing Negroes who defile the South during Reconstruction.
This is a film whose content completely overwhelms its formal qualities. You can't discuss the grand scale, the editing techniques, the genius level innovations of  D.W. Griffith without dealing with racism, which is at the core of the movie.

It's also very much a movie about social class. It often feels as if the aristocracy of the South is the thin, blue-blooded line between savagery and civilization. Lowly proles get the same treatment as the uppity negroes. And often, a sexual hysteria lurks under the surface when it's not in full lurid display. Really, all the blacks and the poorer whites seem to want to do is violate the flower of the well bred womenfolk.
These narratives still play out. They must be deeply embedded in our national psyche. For example, there's a series of scenes where the negroes have taken over the state legislature during Reconstruction. Griffith treats us to the site of uncouth blacks picking their toes -- on the very floor of the capitol! Yet, this sense of violation, of propriety savaged, must be what the tea party whack jobs must feel with Obama in the White House.
The racism, being overt, also offers a map to itself. Being expressed so freely, we can see that the main cause is fear and disgust. Fear that the whites will be robbed of their rightful place and property. And fear that the blacks will rape our women.

It was also strange to watch a movie where whiteness is presented as the embodiment of virtue. I don't want to get into whiteness in American culture, the whole Moby Dick, Gordon Pym, Invisible Man theme that's vast and deep. But more this: that "white people" is really now a set up for punch lines -- white has become to mean merely pale, uninteresting. While in the Birth of Nation, being white means owning chivalry, discipline, and grace. It's the same racist coin, but flipped.



I saw this commercial not long after viewing Birth of Nation. It represents progress, on one level. the punchline, or climax, depends on a black guy ogling a slim blonde with impunity and after a friendly smile. It's played for laughs, rather than outrage. But. If I'm honest, I can feel the slightest, merest flicker of the motivating forces of Griffiths' movie as I watch the ad. Or, check out the angry white guy video -- the one where an old guy smacks down a black dude on the bus. If you see it, and read the comments, you realize that the racial fear is still there, but now it's laced with fear of being robbed, killed or raped by a black guy. That clip would not have the same juice if it was a white kid getting straightened out.

So perhaps the movie is not as much a relic of the past as I'd like it to be for me.. And the unending racially based scorn of Obama signals that Birth of a Nation is not so far removed for the country, either.

Cinema knows no ideology. We love to see a cavalry charging to the rescue, whether in Union blue or Klan white. Depending on the point of view, we stand with Custer or attack with Sitting Bull, equally. We’re shoulder to shoulder with the sailors of the Potemkin or the brown shirts in Nuremberg. Our brain may protest, but our eyes and our gut have already run ahead of us.

Blue Valentine

Love can die.

Even the most passionate, romantic love between two beautiful infatuated people can slowly wither away. Blue Valentine's a delicate autopsy of that decay. With a compassionate -- but clear-eyed -- gaze, director Derek Cianfrance  probes into the lives of Dean and Cindy and the influences within and without them that break up their marriage.

The movie starts on a current Fourth of July weekend -- Independence Day. Dean wakes up on the chair, a few cans of beer around him, exiled, apparently, from the marital bed. He's great with their daughter, but also a bit too much of a big kid for Cindy, who's trying to get the girl out the door and herself to work. Their dog is missing, ominously. 

We learn how they met and fell in love six or seven years earlier, in a series flashbacks to the blossoming of their relationship. Those moments are as charming and lovely as the present is grinding and sad. Shot in warm and gritty 16mm, these scenes show us how they got there, filling us on details, explaining their reactions, helping us understand the flareups, rages and frustrations even as they offer some clues about what's going to break them up.

The director treats the two evenhandedly up to the end. Dean's trying hard, going the extra mile, being the good dad, trying to work it out with Cindy. But we can see that he seems stuck as an overgrown boy. Cindy, on the other hand: Cindy's cold -- cold with the chill of disappointment, with the hunger for achievement, bitter, wanting, like Emma Bovary, something. . . . more. Maybe it's the ex-boyfriend, the jock she bumps into. Maybe it's the doctor she works for. You can understand her: she wants something more, that indefinable "better" that tortures us. Maybe, she thinks, if her man did something different, picked up drawing or even music again. Did something beyond merely loving her.

But Cianfrance shows some wider forces at work, too. Their class differences that seem irrelevant when she's a student start to be a bigger deal as they cross the threshold into middle age. Their parent's failed marriages fuel a terrible irony. We see Cindy's father raging at her mother over meatloaf, the sad daily drama that makes children flinch and wish they were 10,000 miles away. 

So Cindy wants more than anything to avoid the bickering, the fights and the grinding conflict she grew up with.  Dean's mom, we hear, left his father, leaving him alone. He wants to make sure they stay together, no matter what. They each are fighting against that heritage, heartbreakingly, because we see that they're failing.

Confused gender politics plays its role, too. Cindy's the main provider. She's the authority figure, the responsible one, the person who's the foundation. Dean's the nurturer, kind, devoted, loyal, domestic. The final searing insults she hurls cut to to the heart of it: Dean's not a man. But the model of what masculinity constitutes is limited and brutal. And Cindy's not going back to full-time housewifery any time soon. They're stuck between lies, the lies of the past and the lies of the present.

Blue Valentine earns its comparisons to Cassavetes with raw performances and the gritty, bone-marrow deep emotions. Michelle Williams can age six or seven years, visibly but subtly. Its as if her soul itself gets worn down before our eyes. Gosling had some luxury in his externals: balding, slightly puffier, the smoked-lens glasses immediately telegraph his fall from winsome dude to That Guy on the Barcalounger. Gosling has no vanity, apparently. He can switch on the charm and radiate white-hot star charisma. But then he'll turn it off and be as vulnerable, repulsive or pathetic has he needs to be. Both of them are courageous, psychically naked, willing to be unappealing and yet owning great physical beauty and magnetism. When Dean breaks down and cries, it's ugly. You can feel the audience, particularly the women, recoil.

The script -- revised 66 times -- is well and subtly structured. The approach is so naturalistic that the art disappears. 

Maybe a larger issue is lurking here, as well: the limits of naturalism. Blue Valentine excels at delivering the daily life we share in, and that's a huge achievement in the degraded media culture we live in. But you feel the lack of another dimension, which, I think, is the fault of naturalism itself.

Still, Blue Valentine is one of those rare films that tries to tell the truth about its subject. It succeeds, often with painful and cringe-inducing moments --  moments we've all experienced to a degree but hardly ever see on a screen. While Blue Valentine doesn't quite transcend itself the way, say, Last Tango in Paris or In the Realm of the Senses do, it stays faithful, tough, compassionate, and honest.

Husbands, directed by John Cassavetes

To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone talks about independence, but no one does anything about it.

Well, almost no one. John Cassavetes makes so called film rebels look like kindergarten pansies. This movie is all about balls, in all senses. Balls in the guts it takes to let scenes take their own tempo, instead of working on Hollywood time. Balls in the courage to show all aspects of these guys: good, bad, ugly, vomiting, baffled, lost, home. Balls in one of the subjects of the movie -- the splendors and miseries of masculinity.

It starts with a photo montage of four guys clowning around, striking he-man poses, families in the background around a summertime swimming pool. Then, one of the four musketeers dies. The film starts moving with the funeral. The three friends who are left deal with their grief by going on a bender. They get monumentally drunk, hit the gym, smoke, lead an impromptu singing contest. and ride around on a subway. Sudden bursts of anger, exhilaration, grief and self-contempt erupt. Two controversial scenes in this sequence are particularly tough to watch: an extended bit in the men's room where two of them vomit. They're drunk, sure, but the real purgation is that of the grief that they can't deal with any other way. The other is when they bully a older lady in the bar, trying to get her to sing from the heart.

Including the men's room scene made sense to me. It works on many levels -- as an objective correlative of their anguish and their inability to articulate it, as an illustration of the relationships between the survivors, and as a piece of realism. You get smashed and go on a bender, you're gonna hurl. But this is existential hurling.

I haven't read much about the film. Some writers, though, seem to miss a major point: that these men are locked into their own wounds and their own grief. They don't have the formal rituals of grief to fall back on. So they use the ones we have at our hands -- the bar and the gym. The extremity of what they're feeling isn't expressed directly -- it pops out at weird, wrong, rude moments. Just as grief does in life, if not in movies.

Then Harry splits from his wife in a shattering scene, grabs his passport and heads to London, taking the pals with him. They hang out in a casino and pick up some women. But here again, we sense a certain cheapness and melancholy beneath the bravado and animal spirits.

At Harry's urging, they hit on some women and end up taking them to their rooms. The scenes that follow are some of the most acutely observed, awkward and truthful moments I've ever seen. In movieland, they'd just hump the girls, in and out slicko style and have a tearful goodbye or enjoy the dawn of a new love.

Instead, they fail. Harry suffers a bout of impotence. Archie -- Peter Falk's character -- literally can't communicate. The Asian woman he's with doesn't speak English, and Archie doesn't even know what language she uses. He tries and fails. He finally tries kissing her. She's unresponsive, he's insistent. When she starts kissing him back, suddenly passionate, he can't deal with her desire.  Gus, the Cassavetes character, horses around with a tall blonde. It's not clear whether they have sex or not. The next morning, the the pouring rain, she tries cajoling and manipulating him into saying something romantic. He refuses.

They meet with Harry, who's already lined up some fresh women -- but the two, still married, men decide to leave. It ends with their homecoming, the two dads wresting with ridiculous bags of toys they bought at the airport. Guilt offerings, bribes, and maybe an attempt to smooth things over with their wives.

It's rough and grinding. I read that Cassavetes had one version that was a crowd-pleaser -- funny, warm and accessible. He ditched that for the version we have now, with the acting so real it seems unlike acting at all, with all the excruciating moments left in, the random epiphanies and the sudden howls.