We do not, as “cultural Americans,” tend to think of film actors as artists. As they do with pop singers, the studios and the media commoditize actors by turning them into celebrities. And celebrities are, in fact, brands that moviegoers, like buyers of the next version of an Apple product, will be unable to resist when their next movie is released or that TV watchers or magazine buyers will have to see or read about when the celebrity’s next peccadillo, real or alleged, becomes public.

So the artists get lumped together under the harsh light of celebrity with all the rest—the pretty faces that make box office millions, the sophomoric cretins, and the comic-book caricatures who become governors and even presidents. Perhaps it is time to shine a different-coloured light on those actors who time and again take on roles that test their skill and extend their range, who create, through thoughtful and thorough preparation and through courageous commitment, unique characters of great emotional and (sometimes intellectual) depth. Names like Philip Seymour Hoffman, the late Heath Ledger, Jessica Lange, and Cate Blanchett come to mind. But the epitome of such artistry is unquestionably Meryl Streep.

I have not seen every Streep movie and I am sure there are some I have seen and forgotten about, but in the thirty-year period from Sophie’s Choice to The Iron Lady I have experienced enough magnificent performances to convince me that she is the finest cinema actor in the English language. I love Katharine Hepburn and I believe that she was a wonderful actress, but when I see her in a film, I see Katharine Hepburn, no matter what role she is playing. The same can be said for Jack Nicholson and Julianne Moore. But when Streep plays Karen Blixen, I know I am watching the strong-willed Danish woman who seeks in Africa the life and the love she cannot have. When she plays Julia Child I see the woman who charmed millions of American television viewers with her loving but down-to-earth approach to French cooking. And in The Iron Lady there was hardly a scene in which I recognized Streep playing Margaret Thatcher; I saw only the Iron Lady herself.

In a June 4, 1989 review of the VHS release of A Cry in the Dark, New York Times critic Stephen Holden said of the actress, “Meryl Streep, unlike most film actresses, doesn’t bend her personality gently in the direction of a role. She invents her characters from scratch, creating an entirely different physical vocabulary for each part. One comes away from her performances with the sense of people who are much more than well-observed types. Each is a complex, quirky little universe.”

This “quirky little universe” that is a Streep character, with the accents, the facial expressions, the gestures that make the character both compelling and individual, is Streep’s trademark; it is what sets her apart from the crowd of good, even outstanding actors. In a television interview with Harry Smith after the release of One True Thing, Smith asked her: “Every time I see you on screen, whatever role it is you choose, the second I see you in it, you own it. Your voice is different, you physically may be different. How do you do that?” Streep replied, “Oh well,” and then in an Eastern European accent, “that’s acting.” And she laughed. “I mean it is. That’s what I like to do. That’s total immersion into possibility, a life I could imagine I lived, and that’s infinitely interesting to me.”

While Streep is invariably casual or offhand in remarks about her craft, perhaps disguising a reluctance to talk about this aspect of her work for fear of it being trivialized or misinterpreted by media that focus on the titillations of celebrity, there is no question that a great deal of hard work goes into the creation and the portrayal of each of her characters. She allegedly spent four and a half months studying Polish and German for her role in Sophie’s Choice. For Music of the Heart she practised the violin five or six hours a day for two months. One can only imagine the hours of reading, research, and rehearsal that went into her roles in Out of Africa, Julie and Julia, and The Iron Lady.

But there is something beyond great talent and diligence that informs the cinematic performances of Meryl Streep. A clue to the nature of this artistic alchemy may be found in the words of John Patrick Shanley, director and screenwriter of Doubt, in which Streep plays the fearsome but ultimately very human Sister Aloysius. In the director’s commentary on the DVD version of the movie Shanley describes the filming of the last scene, in which Sister Aloysius breaks down in front of the younger nun, Sister James.

“The amazing thing is that we did the first take in a wider shot and when we got to that point in the scene, Meryl completely broke down. I was very concerned because I knew I wasn’t going to want to be that wide…and I wondered if she could ever do it again. So I immediately abandoned that size and went into a close-up for the second take. Uh…she broke down again, and she broke down with an equal ferocity and genuineness over and over again, take after take, in different sizes, when the camera was on her and when it wasn’t. I remember Amy Adams [Sister James] walking away after this scene and just saying, ‘Meryl Streep. Wow! Now I know why she is Meryl Streep.’”

Streep herself, in a word of advice to younger actors, says that, “if you want [a career] that feeds your soul, I do think you have to go to the limit of experience.” In film after film we see her doing just that. And you only have to watch Sophie’s Choice or The Bridges of Madison County—I mean really watch—to understand that she takes us with her to the limit of experience and through that journey she feeds our soul.

Let us take a look at three Meryl Streep films, from three different decades, paying particular attention to the nuances of her performance in each, with the aim of perhaps teasing out a fuller understanding of the art of this great actor. The films are Sophie’s Choice (1982), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), and Doubt (2008).

Sophie’s Choice

In William Styron’s novel the least fully developed character is Sophie Zawistowski, the beautiful, troubled Polish refugee who lives in the Pink Palace, a Brooklyn rooming house. The narrator, called Stingo, a callow writer from the South who has come to New York to pen his first novel, is far more sharply delineated, as is Nathan Landau, Sophie’s lover, a fiercely intelligent, pathologically mercurial man who exercises a frightening degree of control the other two; both are also denizens of the Pink Palace.

I do think that, in a sense, Styron over-wrote the character of Sophie by providing in the novel such extensive detail of Auschwitz and of the horrors she experienced in the camp. The reader is overwhelmed by the author’s and Sophie’s recounting of the nightmare of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the soul-destroying guilt over the choice that she was forced to make when she arrived there on the train from Warsaw. It is as if all nuances of Sophie’s character have been scared away by the demons and the ghosts that followed her to America and are with her always. Moreover, she is utterly under the spell of Nathan’s powerful and dangerous personality. In the novel, then, it is Stingo who emerges, almost by default but also perhaps through the author’s unconscious choice, as the most interesting character.

In the film Streep gives us a Sophie who is still entirely defined by the searing tragedy she has endured, but with the mass of detail necessarily removed and our gaze fixed on the person of Sophie herself, her pain becomes a fully realized character of its own. And Streep mines every facet of this character, bringing out, sometimes in a dizzying succession of soft and loud notes, the guilt, the anger, the fear, the humiliation, the physical torment and deprivation brought upon her by the Nazi occupation of her homeland and by the eighteen months she spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz.

The opening sequences of scenes in the film, which take place in the Pink Palace and in the amusement park at Coney Island, are a breathtaking overture to Sophie’s and Nathan’s reckless race toward doom and a virtuosic display of Streep’s range and depth as an actor. One of these sequences will serve admirably as an example.

But first a note about accents. Streep’s skill in this area is such that following the inevitable few seconds of surprise when we first hear “Meryl Streep” speaking with a Polish accent, the accent merges with the character and Streep-with-an-accent disappears for the rest of the film. I have found this to be true with every character requiring an accent or a particular tone or timbre that she plays. Moreover, in Sophie’s Choice, in the scenes set in Auschwitz, she actually speaks flawless Polish and German.

The sequence takes place on Sunday morning in Sophie’s room at the Pink Palace. Stingo has been invited to breakfast after a disastrous first meeting with Nathan and Sophie the night before, in which Nathan raged at Sophie, insulted Stingo, and stormed out of the house. The couple has made up and apologies have been offered to Stingo. As Stingo comes into the room, Nathan and Sophie, dressed in outlandish clothing of the twenties, are frenetically dancing the Charleston to music playing on the phonograph. From her expression and the stiffness of her dancing, it is clear that she is not enjoying the dance but is going along with the impulsive Nathan.

In the subsequent scenes, Streep reveals to us, through facial expressions ranging from a varied assortment of smiles—forced, coquettish, self-deprecating, nostalgic, loving—to a sneer, to looks of haughtiness, irritation, hatred, and sadness, and through an entire lexicon of utterly unaffected gestures, a substantial chunk of the character of Sophie Zawistowski. She does this, in her broken English that is at once charming and heart-breaking, in less than eight minutes of screen time. What is more astonishing is that later on in the film, we discover that half of what she said in this sequence was a lie! It is simply impossible for me to imagine any other actress able to so completely inhabit the psyche of a woman from a radically different culture, era, and experience and with such a burden of pain and guilt.

It must be acknowledged here that Kevin Kline and Peter MacNicol are magnificent as Nathan and Stingo, respectively. Kline perfectly captures the schizophrenia that drives Nathan from one extreme of frenzied enthusiasm or rapturous adoration to the other of raging paranoia. MacNicol is equally compelling as the love-starved, idol-worshiping writer who is swept up in the tumultuous lives of the couple upstairs. But in the end it is Streep who holds us in her spell with a performance that must be rated as one of the finest in modern cinema.

It is possible to see on YouTube, the last recorded performance of Vladimir Horowitz playing the Concerto No. 3 in D Minor by Rachmaninoff, with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1978. The concerto is technically demanding for the pianist; it is, in fact, nothing less than the devil Himself. The piece is filled with pain and pathos and tragedy, expressed in a panoply of musical register. Evoked through the heart and mind and hands of a maestro like Horowitz, it is a work of exquisite sublimity. If the story of Sophie Zawistowski is the Third Concerto, Meryl Streep is indeed Vladimir Horowitz, calling upon her considerable range of technical resources and reaching into her very soul to deliver a performance whose success in moving us to our core merits nothing less than the thunderous ovation of the audience and the beautiful smile on the face of Zubin Mehta we see at the end of the Rachmaninoff.

The Bridges of Madison County

Here again, we observe a shift in emphasis between the book and the movie. Robert James Waller’s novel is as much about Robert Kincaid, a rugged loner who takes photographs for a living, as it is about Francesca Johnson, the middle-aged Italian émigré who is spiritually languishing on an Iowa farm. Thanks to a fine screenplay by Richard LaGravanese (Waller’s novel is mediocre at best) and to the acting of Meryl Streep, the film focuses, as it should, on Francesca; the conflict in the story is hers.

I have heard people say that they consider Streep’s performance in this film to be over the top; I do not find it so. Francesca Johnson is a subtler role for Streep (even the accent is subtler), one that she may not have been able to pull off in 1982 when she was thirty-three. The rural housewife’s pain is less intense, less raw than Sophie Zawistowski’s; it is mitigated by the quiet joys of a close-knit family, by the comforting simplicity of a country life. Francesca suffers from no great emotional or psychological affliction; her husband is not a dangerous paranoid schizophrenic and she does not live with the guilt of having had to select one of her children for death so that the other might live. Francesca suffers merely from a longing for what could have been, from the disappointment of dreams not realized; she listens to opera on the kitchen radio—when her children don’t change the station to rock and roll—instead of sitting in the audience at the Metropolitan in New York.

As I have stated elsewhere on this site, The Bridges of Madison County is a “small story.” There is no great war, no Holocaust looming darkly in the background. It is just a story of two lonely people whom cruel destiny brings together and whom duty, convention, and a different kind of love quickly tear apart leaving only the searing memory and the artefacts of four days of bliss. Much of the story unfolds in a farmhouse kitchen—no romantic landscapes, no lavish hotels, no stirring violins—so it is up to Streep to keep us interested.

A word about Clint Eastwood: fine director, wooden actor; he has the range of a party favour. In this film, his rugged looks suit the role of the National Geographic photographer perfectly, but he is simply incapable of revealing the nuances of Waller’s sensitive, mystical, talented loner. For this reason, Streep’s job is even more challenging as she must compensate for the unfortunate distraction.

In a single scene, almost entirely through gesture and facial expression, Streep tells us the story of Francesca’s life on the farm and gives us a clue to the nature of the agonizing dilemma she will soon face. It is dinnertime at the Johnsons: Francesca is putting the meal on the table as the radio plays opera; it must be a piece she likes because she has just turned up the volume. She calls the children and her husband (in that order) and each of them allows the screen door to slam as they come in and sit at the table, jarring her nerves; she looks up in resigned exasperation as her daughter changes the radio station. There is no dinner conversation and Francesca is bored to the point that she has no interest in eating the meal she has prepared; yet she looks at her silent and insensitive family with the eyes of love, a faint smile gracing her lips, then disappearing, then appearing again and finally dissolving as she absently pulls at a strand of hair and looks into the distance.

The early scenes with Eastwood/Kincaid are masterful. At first Francesca is intrigued by his un-Iowan spontaneity; he has actually been to Bari, her home town in Italy (“You just got off the train because it looked pretty?”). And she is physically attracted to him; she watches him with a kind of growing erotic interest as he preps his shoot of Roseman Bridge. The dialogue is terse; all is told through expression and subtle shifts in posture. And there is a tension between attraction and circumspection which Streep expresses through brusqueness and avoidance of direct looks until Francesca and Robert are actually sitting across from each other at the Johnsons’ kitchen table. When she finally begins to let herself go with him, we are allowed to see the years of frustration and loneliness rise to the surface along with the joy of being near a man who thinks deeply, takes risks, and expresses himself with wit and articulation.

As the emotional intensity quickly builds, Streep does not just move forward with the passion of the affair; she brings along all of the baggage—the disappointment, the spiritual inertia, the traditional beliefs about family—that has been accumulated by Francesca over a lifetime and invites us to peek into that baggage in order to better understand the terrible dilemma she faces. As Oprah Winfrey would say: “Layers!”

Doubt

At the beginning of the film we see Sister Aloysius at morning Mass. As the priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is giving his sermon, she is walking down the side aisle of the church, quietly but deliberately smacking and barking at inattentive students from St. Nicholas School. Later, as students line up outside the school in preparation to begin their day, Sister Aloysius is watching from a window above, and when a boy touches the young nun, Sister James, who is in charge of the line-up, we suddenly hear, “Boy! William London! Come up here.” And there is silence on the ground as all young eyes turn upward. After Sister has dragged William off to her lair, Father Flynn, who has been mingling with the students, says to the young nun, “The dragon is hungry.” Sister James smiles in spite of herself.

Sister Aloysius is a scary creature, and it is easy for those of us who remember such creatures from our elementary school days—the movie is set in 1964—to project those memories on to Sister Aloysius. For she is stern, strict, eternally vigilant, intolerant, and sometimes even mean, and the students are afraid of her. Sister Aloysius is a far different role for Streep from Sophie Zawistowski and Francesca Johnson—the actress is now 59, after all—but again she fully inhabits the character and fully humanizes her. The angst is still there but it is now cleverly hidden behind a no-nonsense façade.

Screenwriter-director Shanley has a more positive view of Sister Aloysius than we the viewers might have. He believes that she is “a real defender of good against evil, and she knows which is which.” And he calls her stance Victorian in that she believes there is a clear line between the two. Aloysius also reflects some of Shanley’s own views about education, that the nun “represents a major strand of what I believe about what is good in education, and the separation between adults and children: that in fact some of things that were encouraged in terms of education in the Church in the early sixties, which were “Be friends with the kid,” sort of blurred the line between adulthood and childhood and had people who had been very proscribed—these priests and these nuns—cross a certain invisible line and put them in territory that they didn’t completely understand. And I think some of these priests got in big trouble because of that.”

Thus Shanley makes Sister Aloysius a considerably more nuanced character than the viewer might at first see. She was once married (her husband died in the war); she possesses a wry sense of humour; she has accepted a black boy into her school and is concerned for his welfare; she cares for the older and frailer nuns at St. Nicholas, protecting them from the cold calculation of the male-dominated clerical culture. Streep brings out these nuances brilliantly in her portrayal of the nun. Throughout the film she dangles before us this human side of Sister Aloysius as a counterpoint to her natural dislike and her general suspicion of Father Flynn and ultimately her unshakable certainty of his guilt and her determination to destroy him even in the absence of clear proof. What she is doing is clearly monstrous but we cannot possibly hate her for it; this is where the magic of Streep’s art lies.

In the final scene (in which Streep/Sister Aloysius breaks down so convincingly), Sister James has returned to St. Nicholas from visiting her ill brother to find Father Flynn gone from the parish. Sister Aloysius coldly and causally explains how she effected his removal, even lying to achieve her aim. John Patrick Shanley: “It’s interesting how, even leading up to such a great breakdown, she can be this casual, so relaxed, showing no evidence of where she’s about to go, almost jovial. She’s seconds way from it. I really don’t know how she did it. She’s a natural wonder; it’s like watching the Aurora Borealis.”

Meryl Streep is indeed a natural wonder. But all prodigies risk squandering their gift if they do not recognize that the gift is merely a lump of clay, albeit magic clay, whose properties must be carefully studied in order to fathom its potential, then the clay meticulously and painstakingly shaped and reshaped, again and again, out of an acute awareness of the momentary but divine connection between the clay and the artist. The process has nothing to do with celebrity, it has nothing to do with awards, it has nothing to do with contracts and money. It has everything to do with preparation, commitment, courage—and love.

Just ask the Aurora Borealis.

Photo Credits

Sophie’s Choice Poster, from Wikipedia

Main Gate Auschwitz II, by Sue Bowen

covered bridge, by jon.hayes

Farmhouse, by Lydiat

“It’s like watching the Aurora Borealis”: A Profile of Meryl Streep is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

The film Doubt, set in the Bronx in 1964, is the story of a Catholic priest, Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the pastor of St. Nicholas parish, and a nun, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), principal of the parish school. Sister Aloysius believes that Father Flynn has sexually molested a young black student from the school; the priest vehemently proclaims his innocence, but his protestations do nothing to move the nun from her certainty. In the end, Father Flynn is transferred to another parish, where he is also the pastor.

The film is based on Shanley’s award-winning Broadway play Doubt: A Parable.

After seeing Shanley’s play, many people wanted him to reveal whether Father Flynn was guilty of what Sister Aloysius was accusing him. Audience members would come out at the end of the performance with wildly opposing opinions, like “Well, he is obviously guilty” or “Come on, there is no way he is guilty. The nun is just jealous of his power.” While he knew the answer to the question, Shanley only ever told the actors playing Father Flynn whether or not their character was guilty.

The play—and the movie—is not about child molestation, it is not about guilt or innocence, it is not about the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s, it is not a mystery story. Nor is it a “theological drama,” as the CBC called it. Doubt is about doubt. When Shanley wrote the play, he had already been thinking about the issues of doubt and certainty for some time. Much of the motivation for writing the play arose from the invasion of Iraq and the seemingly intransigent views of both sides of the issue. Emotions were running high after 9/11 and there were those who were absolutely certain that there were WMD’s in Iraq despite credible claims to the contrary; they were convinced beyond any doubt that invading the country was the right thing to do. The naysayers were unpatriotic and posed a threat to the security of the United States. Observing all of this, the playwright began to wonder about the ability of men to step back from their emotions—because for Shanley, doubt is an emotion—and look at the issue in all its complexity and uncertainty. In a March 2004 interview with Charlie Rose, he says the following:

“I think that art describes the vacuum. Art describes what isn’t there, the thing that needs to be said, the missing element of the current dialogue that’s going on in the world. And for me, the thing that was missing in the society that I’m living in now was the ability for strong men to say, ‘Gee. I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer to that is. I’m going to have to sit here for a while and contemplate that and talk that over with you.’”

And this from an interview in 2008, when the movie was released:

Charlie Rose: And you want all of us…to come away with some sense that…there’s danger in believing that…you’re always right, or coming to some place that makes you think you have to say that.

Shanley: I want the audience to walk in, feel comfortable, have their assumptions working and working very well in confirming for instance what nuns are like or what black mothers are like, and I want their assumptions to be overturned, to not be sufficient to carry them through the story and then to have to go, “You know what? I have to rethink this. I have to look at this person with new eyes.” And maybe have it happen so often in the course of this story that by the time they walk out of the theatre they start to look at maybe other people that they will talk to after the film with new eyes and make a little more room to hear what other people are saying rather than fill in so much about who that person is.

The back-and-forth between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn, in which neither is listening to the other in any sense, reflects Shanley’s belief that this lack of honest dialogue is a symptom of the dysfunction of our society at this time in history. Society has become polarized on most issues, especially in the political arena, and neither side is willing to move even slightly off its position. He hopes that the film will help people to see that there is an urgent need for all of us to return to reasoned discourse, in which one side does not believe it has a monopoly on Truth.

I saw both the play—at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Theatre in Vancouver— and the film. While I enjoyed the play very much, I preferred the movie, both because of the calibre of the acting and because the movie provides a much more satisfying context for the story. John Patrick Shanley and Charlie Rose again:

Charlie Rose: For those who saw the play and wonder how the movie could be different, what would you tell them?

Shanley: I think you see now the story in a larger context of what the community was like that fed this situation, and you get to see what the clergy…how they lived in private and the differences in the way that the men and women of the clergy were treated. And you get to see the children and the struggle over the children and the boy in question in particular, and I think that adds an enormous emotional power to it and stakes for the actors to play.

John Patrick Shanley grew up in the Bronx in the 1960s, among families of Italian and Irish descent. He attended Catholic school and was taught by nuns, members of the order of the Sisters of Charity. In 1964, teachers in Catholic schools passed on a “code of beliefs” to their students, and “there really was no questioning of these beliefs.” But this time and this place and the characters in the film are for Shanley merely the specificity he needs to present the larger issue at work in the play and in the film. And the larger issue is this:

“We can never know what’s inside the heart or soul of another human being. We can have our assumptions or our theories; sometimes they may be very solid, but we can never know. An adult has to learn to live with that, to live with doubt as a natural part of the equation of life, to never give it up and to recognize that it’s an asset to leave a place in yourself open for further discussion, for further thought, for further conclusions.”

So while Doubt is not essentially a story about Roman Catholicism, it seems to me that members of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church—in fact, of any religious denomination that believes it holds a monopoly on Truth—might learn a valuable lesson from a thoughtful viewing of this film. They would benefit from paying particularly close attention to one of film’s most powerful and touching scenes, the scene in which Sister Aloysius expresses to the mother of the black student her concerns about the relationship between Father Flynn and her son. But the boy’s mother, Mrs. Muller, lives in the real world with a gay son who is vulnerable to abuse by both his schoolmates and her husband, who does not like the boy. She loves her son and accepts his “nature.” She understands very well that her first duty is to protect him and to do everything she can to offer him a future. She understands that in the world there is no line that clearly divides good from evil and that in the evil that Sister Aloysius claims to be in the relationship between Father Flynn and her son, there may also be good because the priest may be able to provide the love that the boy’s father, who has beat him because he is gay, is unwilling to give. Tears streaming down her face, her nose running, Mrs. Muller desperately tries to make Sister Aloysius see that evil is a matter of degree and that destroying one evil may cause an even greater evil:

“My boy came to your school ‘cause they were gonna kill him in the public school. His father don’t like ‘im. He come to your school, kids don’ like ‘im. One man is good to him—this priest. And does the man have his reasons? Yes. Everybody does. You have your reasons, but do I ask the man why he’s good to my son? No. I don’t care why! My son needs some man to care about him and to see him through the way he wants to go, and thank God this educated man with some kindness in him wants to do just that.”

Because she knows that her husband may very well kill her son, she is willing to overlook what may be sexual abuse by the priest in order to gain even a small amount of ground in the battle to protect him. Sister Aloysius is at first shocked by this and asks Mrs. Muller, “What kind of mother are you?” But the woman’s powerful love for her son and her instinct to protect him soon defeats Sister Aloysius, and she retreats. The tilted camera angle as she walks down the school hallway in one of the following scenes shows that the nun’s certainty has, for the moment at least, been shaken.

The purpose of this scene is not to condone sexual abuse by priests. Mrs. Muller knows very well that what Father Flynn may be doing with her son is wrong. It shows us rather that the moral absolutism professed by Sister Aloysius is inconsequential, even ridiculous, as a factor in the daily struggles of the lives of ordinary people. That message is what the moral absolutists of institutional religion need to derive from this scene and from this film.

So we leave the last word to John Patrick Shanley, who says of this brilliant film:

“Of course that character that’s always in the room and that you never see is doubt itself. Who do I believe? What is the truth of this moment or that moment? Will I ever be able to judge these people? Will I ever be able to put this to rest, with a verdict? But of course, life isn’t like that. We can never know what’s inside the heart or soul of another human being. We can have our assumptions or our theories; sometimes they may be very solid, but we can never know. An adult has to learn to live with that, to live with doubt as a natural part of the equation of life, to never give it up and to recognize that it’s an asset to leave a place in yourself open for further discussion, for further thought, for further conclusions.”

This article appeared on my blog, Confessions of a Liturgy Queen, on April 25, 2010.

Image Credit

Movie Poster @ Wikipedia

“Doubt” is about Doubt is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Seeing Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life was in a sense a return, because I had my film debut about ten years ago prior in the same lower east side New York City neighborhood where I wound up seeing Tree of Life this past week. Since both Malick and I seem to be inspired by a similar vision of film, and since both of us (apparently) trace much of that back to Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, it was almost as if I was watching an extension of Antonioni – as if Malick’s film was indeed another branch of an ever-growing tree. While I’m not sure if Malick has ever seen my own Antonioni-inspired Clouds, I found it striking that we came to similar conclusions about life and the expression of life through art, albeit via completely different paths.

As such, seeing Tree of Life was deeply personal and made me feel somewhat vindicated about the artistic choices in my own work – whether that be in film or the criticism thereof. With Tree of Life, Malick is expressing very much what I propose as an alternative direction in film style in an essay titled Peace As Style, where I discuss Antonioni as being the precursor to such a style.

In but one example, Malick effectively uses the ambiguity of sound and then later unveils the source of that sound in a kind of slow reveal that links the sound to a particular feeling or motif in such a way that he evokes mystery and awe, not the hyperventilating stimulation so often the norm today in film. Antonioni was extremely effective at the clever use of ambiguity to create a sense of mystery, and Malick, apparently inspired by Antonioni’s Zabriski Point, uses wind chimes to allude to the mystery of sex to which the young boy (played by Hunter McCracken) is slowly being revealed and later shamefully tries to rid himself by throwing the nightgown in the river. Once the source of the sound is seen (the wind chimes), and the boy steals the night-gown from his fantasy woman’s house, we don’t hear the sound again.

[As a side note, the nightgown scene has prompted more internet searches than any other I know of for this film, and apparently evokes deep, unresolved emotions. Suffice it to say many people are captured by the mystery of the scene and don't understand the boy's subsequent reaction. To me, he is clearly ashamed of creating a sexual fetish of the nightgown. He tries to hide the gown at first, then washes it down the river -- an attempt to dissolve his guilt and shame into an overwhelming nature that washes away all sins and purifies his conscience as a result. I believe the scene essentially depicts the boy's baptism into sexually-aware manhood. As such, the nightgown evolves from a fetish to a sacred baptismal shroud.]

Ambiguity, used sparingly by most filmmakers today, becomes the central stylistic choice in Malick’s Tree of Life. While most directors and producers are so afraid to alienate or offend an audience who, according to conventional wisdom, can only take things if spelled out literally, Malick assumes his audience is intelligent, and can follow his meandering, poetic connections.

Another example of the effective use of sound is the peaceful and alluring sound the ocean, which bookends the film – beginning with the ‘spirit image’ the beach scene at the end, where the various characters meet to reconcile in a timeless, meditative state. All of this stuff is so counter to the normal fodder we are fed on television and film that it is extremely gratifying to find the critical response to Tree of Life to be so favorable, although the film apparently did receive some booing at its Cannes premiere (as did Antonioni with some of his films). The film did win the top prize at Cannes, which also helped assuage the critics. My challenge to Fox Searchlight is to go as wide as possible with this film; they might be surprised by the outcome, particularly among a Christian audience.

Tree of Life is built on the use of motifs, used brilliantly with sound and source slowly revealed, cyclic re-occurrence, the grand scale of time being interleaved with the present moment. Malick’s particular approach, at least in this film, is more akin to music than the Hollywood style that traces its roots back to D. W. Griffith, kinetic editing and The Great Train Robbery. Instead, Malick seems to draw his inspiration from the Bible, surrealists (Bunuel and Dali), Italian neo-realist filmmakers (Fellini and Antonioni), existential science fiction films (Tarkovsky and Kubrick) and the literature of William Faulkner and James Joyce. Tree of Life is a grand amalgam of sometimes contradictory influences, including an effusive orchestration from Smetana’s The Moldau, and yet reaching beyond these influences even while honoring their undeniable presence.

It is a testament to the encyclopedic scope of the film, one can find various critics not only responding in completely different ways, but referring to completely different sets of (assumed) influences that Malick brought to his film. As such, the film is a Rorschach test of sorts, and one can take from it multiple readings, which I’m sure is Malick’s intent, and shows how powerful his multi-layered ambiguity can be as a storytelling device.

To turn to the thematic elements of Tree of Life, I have written in the SolPix webzine and blog about the need for a more ‘humanistic’ media and film and even elaborated further to use the term ‘spiritual humanism.’ Malick’s film is, I would say, a spiritually humanistic film for several reasons. First, he deals with the subject of the origins and nature of violence and compassion and their relationship to human choice. Second, he seeks a balance between nature and mankind’s desire to control nature. Third, he sees reconciliation as the answer to questions of meaning and happiness. Finally, he sees something binding all these threads, or branches, of life together (even an extra-human aspect): love. And this love compels the tree to grow ever outward from its branches. From a biblical perspective, the tree is also a source of knowledge. But the overall energy and essence that drives this movement of life is a love that Malick sees shimmering through the light of his images and characters, of nature, of far-flung galaxies, of the extra-dimensional ‘non-physical’ – in short, the entirety of life itself. While it is generally uncomfortable to discuss an extra-human love in a culture where our obligatory ‘love you’s’ are generally restricted to our close familial ties, if we are to believe Malick, the force of love is quite large and behind everything we see in the natural world and beyond. Call this force ‘God’ or whatever name you will, it is tangible as long as we make it so. It is this existential choice to, in essence, choose and create an alternative to a cold universe, that takes Mr. Malick beyond Antonioni, who generally only saw despair in his landscapes, and very little hope. From a philosophical perspective, this probably puts Malick closer to the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard and further from the absurdism and alienation of Camus, who would find better company with Antonioni.

In terms of compassion, it is apparent that Malick sees compassion as one choice among many. This is why the dinosaur scene was so pivotal and important. He is showing us that there is a primal, non-rational (or proto-rational) choice involved in treating others compassionately; that this choice in a sense comes from beyond us, yet does nonetheless express itself in daily human decisions. It is the same choice Mr. Obrien’s children make when deciding not to hit their father (played in a tour de force performance by Brad Pitt), even as he chides them to do so while he teaches them to box and defend themselves.

As for nature, the imposition of the (male) architecture over the (feminine) natural world is, apparently, the wider tragedy of human existence to date, and a theme clearly traceable to Antonioni’s early works. It is the exploration of this ‘architectural’ theme that makes Sean Penn’s scenes are so important (some critics have suggested they should have been cut). It is the dwarfing of the natural landscape when compared to mankind’s architected space – seen through the modern scenes – through which something is lost. This pattern happens as one chooses the path of ‘nature’ (in the negative sense of the will to dominate) over ‘grace’, according to the preamble of the film. The grown son (moodily played by Sean Penn) finds himself dwarfed by his own creation, but he is unhappy because there is no love in his architecture, only utility. He longs for the love of the natural world and of his mother (delicately played by Jessica Chastain) for which he has destroyed in an egoistic attempt at control as he attempts to overcome the (perceived) failings of his father.

Thus the decidedly ‘male’ perspective finds its limits; for on a grander, larger scale, it is mystery – one might say the feminine – still reigns supreme. We cannot ‘know’ reality by the rational mind, just as the natural world cannot ultimately be ‘tamed’ by architecture and science. In truth, we live by grace, or the force of will, depending on your perspective and your choice. But clearly the individual will cannot control the larger, herculean forces of nature. We could, for example, be wiped out in an instant by an errant asteroid. And even if we controlled all the asteroids, some other, larger calamity would rear its head. Thus the great winds of time and space, of galaxies and stars, which provide the context for mankind’s ‘will’ – a will that in an attempt to impose itself on nature does so only with a certain folly and arrogance, for nature is, and always has been, the wider context through which we live. Any attempt to control nature in the broadest sense is futile, and if some semblance of this does happen only occurs through the mastery achieved through the reconciling power of love — a process Malick refers to as ‘grace.’ Further, Malick seems to argue that love is the natural evolutionary path for mankind. Mankind, stubborn to prove otherwise, continually tries to control through his will (and the proxy servants of science and technology) what cannot ultimately be controlled, but rather must be surrendered to and accepted in order to find peace. Without this surrendering there is only conflict, only suffering. So it is the binding nature of love and reconciliation, as seen at the end of the film as the characters reconcile in timelessness on the beach, returning to the ocean from which they arose – it is here that Malick beckons us toward a path that is separate from the continuousness of domination and control and toward a more ‘New Testament’ vision of acceptance, surrender and compassion, and it is through that path that Malick asserts we will find happiness. And again, we are compelled in this direction by the life force itself.

As a bit of personal background, Malick had just released Days of Heaven when I was in film school in the early eighties. At that time I was studying European film, with a focus on Antonioni. Zabriski Point, Blow Up, The Passenger – all of these films by Antonioni were fresh on my mind. It was nearly twenty years later (in 1998) before Malick would return to film, and nearly twenty years later (in 2000) before I would return to film after a long stint on a different career path outside of film and the arts. Now, decades after the French and American New Wave, Malick returns to re-assert the power of those film artists who apparently impacted many of us so deeply, and pay homage to the artistic territory they staked out — to extend the branches of the tree they and his life represent. Malick, as a cinophile and philosophy teacher of a certain age, was certainly impressed in his youth by many of the same directors I was: Kubrick, Antonioni, Godard, Fellini, and so on. It was these (mostly) Europeans, who also had such an impact on the likes of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who molded my own opinions about the potential for film and film language, and, moreover, how to create a uniquely American aesthetic that nonetheless pays homage to these great European masters who offered us an alternative to the studio film and style. Malick continues that tradition with Tree of Life. It’s not that all films must conform and be like Tree of Life, but certainly our cultural palette must and should include many more films of a similar aesthetic.

Malick, who began his career in the early seventies (with Badlands) at roughly the same time as Martin Scorsese, became in a sense our lost master. Again, after Days of Heaven he wasn’t seen again for 20 years. Thankfully, he has returned to us in full glory. This is a glory that he himself would eschew; for the glory he sees is not so much in himself as an artist, but as a vessel of the beauty of life that he sees around him, and a translator and messenger to us of that beauty. While many of our most financially successful filmmakers are more architects than artists – technicians under the employ and influence of more utilitarian forces – Mr. Malick is an artist and a teacher, and, miraculously, one now allowed to express himself in a fairly unrestricted way. Malick may have given us more if he had the chance, but fortunately what we wind up with is his best, for that is what he seems to demand of himself.

We may look back on Mr. Malick’s recent work and see it as the beginning of a re-invigorated American art cinema. Suffice it to say that Mr. Malick sees the world through a different, more compassionate lens than the (currently) dominant forces in society and in film. He is leading us toward a new sensibility, and we should follow.

Photo Credits

Tree of Life Movie Poster – Fair Use
Photo of Jessica Chastain, Laramie Eppler, Brad Pitt and Tye Sheridan – Merie Wallace/Fox Searchlight

This Review Was First Posted At SolPix Blog

Guest Author Bio

Don Thompson
Don Thompson founded nextPix (www.nextpix.com) in 2000 with partner Diana Takata and entrepreneur E. Ted Prince. Since then, the company has produced or co-produced both feature films and documentaries. In addition, the company’s firstPix grant program has provided finishing funds to a variety of (mostly documentary) filmmakers. Films produced or co-produced by Thompson have been international success stories, winning awards and special recognition at over 20 film festivals. The documentary TIBET IN SONG, co-produced by Thompson with director Ngawang Choephel, won over 10 US and International Film Festival awards, including a Special Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and the International Human Rights Film Award given by Cinema for Peace. As a playwright, Thompson’s plays have been produced numerous times coast-to-coast New York, Los Angeles, and the Metro DC area. Don can be reached at info@nextpix.com.

You can help support SolPix and nextPix so they can keep doing more of the same.  Click here to find out about their ‘World Without War’ campaign.

Follow NextPix On Facebook

Blog / Website: SolPix

Deconstructing Malick’s ‘Tree of Life’ by D.R. Thompson is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

A few weeks ago I wrote about two groundbreaking 1967 films starring Sidney Poitier in which Poitier portrays a black man who insists upon sharing equal ground with the white people who inhabit his world. In that review I said that while I did not consider either of the movies or Poitier’s acting to be outstanding, I believed that the three were true cultural icons with enduring relevance. At the end of the article I wondered if Philadelphia might also be such an icon.

Well, the other day I watched Philadelphia again.

Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) is a bright young lawyer with a future in one of the top law firms in Philadelphia. The firm’s partners have just given him a very delicate and important case to handle, a case which will be the making of his career.

Andrew is also gay. And he has AIDS: the KS lesions are beginning to show and Andrew is getting sicker. One day when he is receiving hospital treatment for an AIDS-related episode, he learns that a time-sensitive document vital to the case has suddenly and mysteriously gone missing. At the last possible moment the document is located in the completed cases file. Andrew is fired, ostensibly for incompetence.

Convinced that he has been wrongfully dismissed, Beckett seeks a lawyer who is willing to represent a gay man with full-blown AIDS in a suit against a powerful law firm. After he is turned down by everyone he has approached, his last hope is Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), an ambulance chasing independent attorney who happens to be both black and decidedly homophobic. Miller refuses to take the case, leaving Andrew with no choice but to represent himself. He proceeds to prepare his case while dealing with the increasingly debilitating effects of the disease.

One evening, Beckett, clearly very ill, is working at a table in the public library; the librarian approaches him and rather unsubtly suggests that Andrew might be more comfortable in a private research room. The other people at the table quickly catch his drift and just as quickly begin moving away. Miller happens to be at a nearby table and observes this scenario; perhaps thinking that less than forty years earlier, he could have been sitting in Andrew’s chair, he approaches the young lawyer and agrees to take the case.

The rest of the film sees Miller slowly ratcheting down his homophobia (although it is clear that he never loses it entirely) as he comes to know Andrew as a human being who has suffered from blatant discrimination as well as from a disease that will soon end his life, but who still has the capacity to love and is very much loved by his partner, his family, and his coworkers.

The courtroom scenes are powerful and riveting; Miller is at turns shocking, tender, witty, and passionate as he argues Andrew’s case. The scenes of Andrew’s personal life and the struggle he is enduring are often deeply touching. And the film’s ending is satisfying.

Philadelphia was released in 1993. It was the first major Hollywood dramatic motion picture to feature openly gay characters and to portray them in a positive light. While there is very little physical contact in the film between Andrew and his partner Miguel (Antonio Banderas), the Spanish actor’s fine performance leaves no doubt that the love between these two gay men is as powerful as the love between Joe Miller and his beautiful wife.

The making of this movie was an act of great courage.

Yet if Mr. Hanks deserved to win the Academy Award for best actor for his performance as Andrew Beckett (and win he did), Sidney Poitier should have won it for In the Heat of the Night in 1967. Neither Hanks nor Denzel Washington is a great actor (like Poitier, they just don’t have much range), nor is Philadelphia a great film. But just as African Americans thanked Sidney Poitier and Norman Jewison for creating Virgil Tibbs, the first black man in cinema with dignity and courage and intelligence, so must we thank—Come on now, people—director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) and Mr. Hanks for doing the same with Andrew Beckett.

Will Philadelphia endure? Perhaps it is still too early to tell. But after twenty years and several viewings, the movie still moved me. I’ll check in again in another twenty years.

Image Credits

Philadelphia Movie Poster @ Wikipedia

A Brave First for Hollywood and Hanks: A Review of “Philadelphia” is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Two weeks ago I reviewed Sidney Lumet’s first feature film 12 Angry Men, a dramatic tour de force characterized by outstanding ensemble acting. Lumet went on to direct many more excellent films, including The Pawnbroker, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network, Equus, and The Verdict. His last movie, released in 2007, was Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a gripping little drama that starred Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney. Lumet died in 2011 at the age of 86.

Around 1973, British producer Richard Goodwin noticed his daughter’s utter enthralment with Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Intrigued, he read the novel again himself and decided it would make a fine movie. Unfortunately, Christie was not in the habit of granting film rights for her books and her agent told the producers that there wasn’t a hope in hell of the film being made. But the distinguished and wildly popular author had seen Goodwin’s The Tales of Beatrix Potter and liked his faithfulness to Potter’s stories, and she gave permission for the rights to Murder to be sold. Lumet was hired as director.

“I’ve always been worried about the fact that I could never do a movie that was gay in spirit, that was lively, that needed to be….a soufflé! Every time I’d tried it in the past it turned into a—what we say in Yiddish is a—latke, a flat pancake. When I first read the script and read that ending…I was absolutely bowled over by the cleverness of her plot. So between a wonderful plot, lovely dialogue by Paul Dehn, and the fact that it met a real need for me in my own work in terms of where I was going with the work, it was the perfect movie for that time.”

In agreeing to direct Murder, Lumet insisted that the film be “glamorous,” a kind of homage to the glory days of filmmaking in the 1930s rather than “a small little realistic British mystery movie.” In order to achieve this glamour, he wanted to have a cast of the biggest stars of the day and in this he succeeded in a very big way, snagging Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud, Lauren Bacall, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Perkins, and Martin Balsam. For the lead role of the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, Lumet wanted “a brilliant actor”; Alec Guinness was his first choice, but Guinness was unavailable, as was his second choice, Paul Scofield. He finally settled on another great talent, albeit one who was much too young and had to be heavily made up for the role: Albert Finney.

The movie begins in 1930 with an intriguing re-enactment of the “Armstrong case” in which the young child of a famous couple is kidnapped, held for ransom, and murdered after the ransom is paid. This crime is meant to recall in the mind of the viewer the Lindbergh case, in which the son of aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped and murdered. The perpetrator was caught, tried, and executed. In the film, he has an accomplice, actually the mastermind of the crime, who manages to avoid arrest and flee the country.

We cut to 1935 and a ferry on the Asian side of Istanbul, in which we meet Poirot, who has just successfully solved a case for the British Army and is planning to journey to London via the Orient Express. We are soon introduced to Poriot’s fellow passengers, including a British colonel in the Indian army, a wealthy American and his secretary and butler, a princess from Central Europe, with her two dogs and her German maid, a Hungarian diplomat and his German wife, a loquacious American widow, a Swedish missionary. The passengers are elegant, the appointments of the train are elegant, the food is elegant (all thanks to wonderful production and costume designer Tony Walton). But before long the elegance is marred by trouble on the Orient Express: on the second morning of the journey the wealthy American is found murdered in his bed. It is soon discovered that he was the fugitive in the Armstrong case.

Naturally, Poirot is called upon to solve the murder, which he does while the train is stuck behind a snowdrift and awaiting rescue in the mountains of Yugoslavia. Once he has reached his conclusion he calls all the passengers to the dining car and presents to them an ingenious denouement, which of course I will not reveal here.

As Poirot, Finney is indeed sublime. The abundant eccentricities, the elegant, accented English, the biting wit, and the enigmatically brilliant mind are combined to create a character that is interesting and charming enough to remain slightly beyond caricature. The speech he delivers in the dining car, which lasts for several minutes, is unforgettable.

The other members of the cast are deliciously—and glamorously—over the top but in the melodrama of the mystery utterly compelling and believable.

Once again, director Lumet has set his drama mostly in the confines of a small enclosed area—in this case the dining and sleeping cars of a train from the 1930s—overcoming the challenges that creating this deliberately claustrophobic atmosphere presents. Lumet’s skill as an actor’s director, his mastery of the technical craft of filmmaking, his ability to assemble the best of crews, and his unfailing sense of style have come together here to whip up the tastiest of cinematic bonbons.

Photo Credit

Movie Poster @ Wikipedia

Lumet’s Soufflé: A Review of “Murder on the Orient Express” is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

This 1957 black-and-white gem, director Sidney Lumet’s cinematic debut (he had worked for some years in television), has lost none of its riveting intensity in the half century since it first appeared on screen. The movie features, along with Henry Fonda, some of the finest character actors of the day (and any other day, for that matter): Lee J. Cobb, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Ed Begley, Jack Klugman, E.G. Marshall. In 12 Angry Men, these actors offer as fine an ensemble performance as can be seen in the movies.

On just about the hottest day of the year, twelve men—all of them white—retire to the jury room to deliberate the fate of a young Hispanic man who has been accused in the stabbing death of his father in their New York City slum apartment. Shortly after the jurors assemble to deliberate the fate of the defendant a “preliminary” vote is taken; the result is 11 votes for guilty and one (from Juror #8, played by Fonda) for not guilty. Juror #8 does not claim that the boy is innocent; he simply believes that “It’s not easy to send a boy off to die without talking about it first.” His vote provokes derision, indignation, and disbelief from his fellow jurors.

What unfolds over the next eighty minutes is an intriguing murder mystery, a character study—times twelve—and a display of virtuoso film directing.

The so-called facts of the case are revealed by the jury members when they are asked to convince Juror #8 to change his mind. The prosecution’s argument rested upon the testimony of several witnesses, the uniqueness of the murder weapon, the boy’s criminal and arrest record, and the apparent flimsiness of his alibi. Juror #8 immediately begins to pick holes in the case and to raise doubts in the minds of some of the other jurors. The second vote is 10-2, and the dismantling of the case continues, to the increasing frustration of several of the jurors. More and more of them are beginning to be convinced, however, and join #8 in the questioning of the evidence.

When the final major piece of evidence is cast into serious doubt the vote stands at 11-1 in favour of acquittal. And in a powerfully dramatic ending the last holdout tearfully yields.

As the evidence of the prosecution is refuted piece by piece, the character of each juror is revealed. Those who appear the weakest—a very old man and a milquetoast banker——are the first to display their inner strength; they grow increasingly confident as others join their ranks. The loudest and most adamant in their insistence on the young man’s guilt reveal their racial prejudice and their personal bias, their protests growing increasingly strident as the vote swings against them. Each man is a unique individual and each actor gives an acting lesson in rendering his character.

The greatest of these, in my view, is Lee J. Cobb, Juror #3 and the last to change his vote. When asked to give his reasons for voting guilty, he says calmly, “Here’s what I think, and I have no personal feelings about this; I just want to talk about facts.” He lists, from notes he has taken, some of the major evidence in the case. But gradually, brilliantly, he shows us that indeed he does have very personal feelings about the case: he is angry and grieving over his estrangement with his own son and he wishes to punish him—and perhaps all young people—vicariously by sending teenager to the electric chair. His anger intensifies, along with his anguish, as he is increasingly isolated.

The film essentially takes place in a single location: the jury room. Director Lumet brilliantly sidesteps the danger of boring the audience by creating an immense variety of shots and by keeping the actors in motion throughout the film. In one 30-second sequence, in which the camera does not move, one man leaves the frame, another stands up, then another, another enters the frame, then another, and one man crosses the frame from left to right; throughout the scene the argument continues, with one man even speaking outside the frame.

Lumet continually increases the tension through camera work, by making the atmosphere “more and more confined.” He says, “As the picture progressed, I used longer and longer lenses; in other words, brought the walls in closer, brought the ceiling in closer, just to make it even more claustrophobic. And I also kept dropping the eye level: in the beginning I was above eye level, middle third of the movie at eye level, last third of the movie below eye level.” Extreme close-ups also contribute to the dramatic effect as do changes in the light, from natural daylight, to the dark of the storm, to the artificial electric light of the room itself.

In his book Making Movies, Lumet explains how he saves money on a shoot. In the jury room, he divided the four walls into Wall A, Wall B, etc. Because “whenever the camera has to change its angle more than 15 degrees, it’s necessary to relight…” a very time-consuming and therefore expensive process. So all the scenes in which the camera faced Wall A, for example, were shot before the lighting was moved to Wall B, and so forth. Using this process means that “the actors are shooting completely out of sequence.” In 12 Angry Men, “Lee Cobb arguing with Henry Fonda [they were on opposite sides of the table in the film] would obviously have shots of Fonda (against Wall C) and shots of Cobb (against Wall A). They were shot seven or eight days apart. It meant, of course, that I had to have a perfect emotional memory of the intensity reached by Lee Cobb seven days earlier. But that’s where rehearsals were invaluable. After two weeks of rehearsal I had a complete graph in my head of where I wanted each level of emotion in the movie to be. We finished in nineteen days (a day under schedule) and were $1,000 dollars under budget.” The budget for 12 Angry Men was $350,000, a miniscule amount even in 1957.

It is a testament to the skill of this first-time director and to the skill of the actors that 12 Angry Men, a miserable flop at the box office, turned out to be a timeless masterpiece.

Image Credit

12 Angry Men poster @ Wikipedia

Intriguing Murder Mystery, Brilliant Character Study: A Review of “12 Angry Men” is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

‎”I hear America singing…” Walt Whitman. Equally, ” I hear you singin’ in the wires…” Jimmy Webb.
I love the color of the fog this morning, the temperature of the light transforms morning in the valley into a sacred moment, a pause at the end of something. Up here in the land of ancient trees and dreams to last a lifetime we celebrate winter where we find it, in bare branches and surprising blue skies, in pearling fog and quiet, sunlit, wet, electric, mornings after the heavy rains and howling winds.Inside it all, a belief in the good times to come. Got some miles this morning, came home to a sharp right in the wire haiku outside the house. All the best of everything to all of you for 2012-it is time, past time, to let the good times roll.

Tarmac Meditations-New Years Part 2 is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Two seminal American films were released in 1967; each dealt with the issue of racism and each featured one of the biggest stars in Hollywood at the time. Both were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture; one of them won the award.

The films were In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The big star was Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field, To Sir with Love). In the Heat of the Night won Best Picture at the 1968 Academy Awards ceremony, which had been delayed two days because of the assassination of Martin Luther King less than a week before.

In the Heat of the Night is the story of Virgil Tibbs, a young black police officer from Philadelphia who is arrested for murder as he waits for a train in the fictional town of Sparta, Mississippi. Once his identity, and innocence, are established, his boss asks him to assist the town’s sheriff (Rod Steiger, who won the Oscar for Best Actor) in solving the murder. During the course of the investigation, Tibbs is subjected to all kinds of racist attacks, verbal and physical, not to mention the utter ineptitude and stupidity of the local police force (who arrest at least three people who could not have committed the crime). But Virgil is a proud and stubborn man and one damn smart cop, so he sees the investigation through to the arrest of the real murderer.

Steiger is brilliant as Sheriff Gillespie, a lonely outsider himself, who struggles with the conflict between his racist upbringing and environment and his growing respect, admiration, and even fondness for Virgil Tibbs.

Because the murdered man was the head of a team sent to build a new factory in the town, an enterprise that would employ a significant number of black people at wages equal to those of white workers, the local plantation owner, a dyed-in-the-wool racist, is vehemently opposed to the project. His opposition makes him a suspect in Tibbs’s view, and in an unforgettable scene, when he questions the plantation owner about his possible involvement, the man slaps Virgil in the face; Virgil immediately slaps him back. In a short documentary entitled “The Slap Heard around the World,” one of the special features on the DVD, a number of African-American entertainment celebrities and academics talk about the significance of that scene and its powerful effect on the African-American community in 1967.

In the featurette, Reginald Hudlin, president of entertainment at BET, says of that historic cinematic moment: “…it got down to ‘You will respect me on a fundamental physical level’ and that is unprecedented in cinema history. It is a complete game changer and it’s one of those things where you suddenly…there’s this ocean of pride that hits you and fills you up. And we will be forever in debt to everyone associated with that film for that moment. So thank you to [Director] Norman Jewison, thank you to Sidney Poitier, thank you to everyone who made that moment happen….”

The behind-the-scenes drama of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was nearly equal to what ultimately appeared on screen. One of its stars, Spencer Tracy, was dying of cancer; it was uncertain if he would even be able to finish the movie. His co-star, Katharine Hepburn, had also been his lover for a quarter of a century (Tracy, who was Catholic, never divorced his wife). There was also a power struggle on the set between Hepburn and director Stanley Kramer. And Columbia Pictures decided to cancel the film a few days into production, ostensibly because they could not get insurance on Tracy; Kramer and Hepburn put their salaries up as collateral, effectively calling the studio’s bluff.

Spencer Tracy died, at the age of 67, two weeks after completing the movie.

In the movie, Poitier is Dr. John Prentice, a highly respected specialist in tropical medicine, who happens to fall in love with Joey Drayton, the daughter of liberal San Francisco newspaper publisher Matt (Tracy) and art dealer Christina (Hepburn, who won the Oscar for Best Actress). The couple plan to marry, very soon, so Joey brings the doctor home to meet her parents so that the couple can inform them of their plans and get their blessing, which she breezily assures him will be a matter of mere formality, given the strong liberal views of Matt and Christina Drayton.

Powerful and stubborn opposition to John and Joey’s plans comes from unexpected quarters: the Draytons’ black maid (“I don’t care to see a member of my own race getting’ above hisself!”), Matt Drayton himself, and John’s working-class father. The tension is heightened by the fact that Dr. Prentice is leaving for Geneva on the evening plane and has quietly informed Matt that unless he gives his blessing there will be no wedding. But Drayton is convinced that John and Joey are rushing into marriage without having given sufficient thought to the tremendous difficulties they will face as an interracial couple in the 1960s. Mr. Prentice is even more adamant in his opposition. It takes John’s mother (the wonderful Beah Richards, who also appears briefly in In the Heat of the Night) to convince Matt to change his mind. The movie ends with Matt’s stirring and powerful speech of love and support.

These are iconic films and Sidney Poitier was, in the 1960s, an iconic actor. Handsome, intelligent, articulate, he was perhaps the ideal figure to represent the newly and proudly liberated African-American, a man who could stand his own against a bigoted white plantation owner and match him slap for slap, who could speak with a white newspaper publisher as an equal in intelligence and social and professional status. Poitier was an inspiring replacement for the stereotypical step-‘n-fetchit or I-got-rhythm black man that had been relegated to the back seat of the cinematic bus for decades.

Katharine Houghton, who played Joey in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, spoke with Poitier at length on the set. Poitier told her that “he was extremely aware of the role that he played, that he chose to play above-average people, noble, heroic figures. And he told me that he was being criticized by the black community for doing that, and that it was very, very hard for him because he felt to a certain extent—and I don’t know if this would have been his word—that it was unjustified, that he, in his lifetime and his career, had created a certain niche for a black man in cinema.” Poitier also told Houghton that he planned to curtail his acting career and become a director. While he did continue to act into the 1970s, it is the four big films of the sixties—Lilies of the Field, To Sir with Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—for which he will be remembered as an actor.

His iconic status notwithstanding, was Sidney Poitier a great actor? In my humble estimation, he was not. Perhaps he would have developed into one had he given himself permission to step out of his self-appointed role and explore the potential of his range. But it was a cultural icon, not an outstanding actor, that slapped the bigoted plantation owner and delivered the classic line to the cracker sheriff (“They call me Mister Tibbs!”). Nevertheless, by making himself the image of the new African-American, equal in every way to a white man, Sidney Poitier earned a place of honour in cinematic history.

Are In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner great movies, as well as iconic ones? Again in my humble opinion, not when compared on overall artistic merit with certain other films of the era—Lawrence of Arabia, Midnight Cowboy, The Lion in Winter, To Kill a Mockingbird. But they are good films, with compelling stories and some outstanding performances. And their iconic status, the important historical position they rightly lay claim to, and the memories they summon of a particular era lend them a cachet that will keep these two films alive, interesting, and relevant to audiences for generations to come.

I wonder if the same might be said for Philadelphia.

Image Credits

In The Heat Of The Night poster @ Wikipedia

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner poster @ Wikipedia

Three Icons of American Cinema in 1967 is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

The DVD of this film was given to us as a gift by a departing homestay student; it was one of several movies he gave us, all of which he had seen and loved, and which he thought we would enjoy as well. The very large difference in age and character between us should have rung my “sceptical” bell, but I suppose we were touched enough by his gesture to have cast aside any doubt about the appropriateness of his selections.

My first impression of The Pursuit of Happyness was that it was one of the most agonizingly suspenseful movies I have ever seen, and I don’t mean this in any positive sense. The relentless parade of increasingly unfortunate events suffered by the main character, Chris Gardner (Will Smith), and his young son had me squirming in my seat for much of the picture. I kept hoping—in vain as it turned out—that the next incident would signal an upturn in Mr. Gardner’s fortunes. Only in about the last three minutes of the film were we rewarded for our positively saintly patience with some kind of redemption.

The story goes something like this: Chris Gardner is a salesman with big dreams, as in dreams of $$$$$$$$$$$. He and his wife use all of their savings to buy a whole bunch of bone scanning machines, which Gardner then tries to hawk to doctors, clinics, hospitals. As the movie opens, sales are not going well, the rent and bills are not being paid and the Gardners, who have a very young son, are not getting along. Gardner desperately tries to hold everything together with his salesman-like bravado but the family’s life continues to unravel. The wife leaves, Gardner and the son get kicked out of their apartment and then out of the motel they are living in and end up sleeping in shelters, and he loses a couple of bone scanners and has his bank account cleaned out by the IRS.

One day, in the midst of these trials, Gardner spots an expensive red imported sports car parked by the curb; the owner turns out to be a stockbroker. Chris decides then and there that he is going to become a stockbroker. The odds against his success in this endeavour are ridiculously high: First he must be selected as one of twenty interns who will work for Dean Winter and learn the trade; then he has to beat out the other nineteen for the one job that is waiting at the end of six-month internship.

Chris Gardner is a smart, witty, and determined man, and at the very end of the film he is chosen out of the twenty to become a broker at Dean Winter. At the end of the film, we learn that he goes on to found his own brokerage firm and eventually sells a minority share in that company for a very large sum of money.

Happy ending. Well, if happy ending means I was glad the movie was over, then yes, The Pursuit of Happyness ended happily. But if this film, which was “inspired by a true story,” was meant to in turn inspire viewers to do whatever it takes (including putting a son or daughter through virtual hell) to get a job that is going to put enough money in their pocket to give them financial security (and bolster their already significant ego at the same time), I am not sure if this is a message I would want to be giving.

I did not feel sorry for Chris Garner, nor did I cheer him on (except in the sense that I wanted him to achieve sufficient success—really quickly—to put me out of my misery). He is an egotistical, irresponsible jerk who cares only about himself. I could not help but feel that his determination to keep his son when his wife was leaving him and his gritty resolve to succeed at Dean Winter were also manifestations of an ego out of control. I wonder what lessons the son took away from the experience his father put him through.

This is not a movie I would ever watch again, nor would I encourage a young person to buy into its message.

This is a slightly revised version of a review posted on my blog, “Confessions of a Liturgy Queen” on March 10, 2011.

Photo Credit

Wikipedia

Big Ego Chases American Dream: A Review of “The Pursuit of Happyness” is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

As with Another Year in 2010, my favourite movie of 2008 was one that was for the most part overlooked, in this case Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon.

In 1977 brash and ambitious British talk-show host David Frost (played by Michael Sheen) managed to convince disgraced former president Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) to grant a series of television interviews. To lure Nixon to the cameras Frost used $600,000 he did not have and a reputation as a soft-pedaling interviewer who would not pose difficult questions, particularly about Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate cover-up. Frost was confident that the U.S. networks would be falling over each other to purchase the interviews.

But he had miscalculated: his reputation, and his perceived pretentiousness in out-scooping them, turned the networks off and they refused to have anything to do with the project. Frost was now forced into a desperate scramble for sponsors, which, along with the constant need to reassure investors—and in fact to squeeze even more funding out of them—makes up part of the drama of the movie.

But the real drama is in the interviews themselves. The fear on the side of the Frost team and the general consensus among the media savvy is that Nixon will control the interviews and use them in an attempt to exonerate himself. In fact, the former president hopes they will springboard him back into political life.

The taping, conducted in the home of a “Republican businessman,” starts out just as everyone had expected. Despite being blindsided by Frost’s opening question in the first interview (“Why didn’t you burn the tapes?”), the wily Nixon quickly seizes control of the sessions with labyrinthine explanations of White House internal procedure, lengthy anecdotes, and clever self-justification. Frost lacks the experience and the journalistic ruthlessness to go on the attack. His team is frantic.

Nixon again trumps the British interviewer in the second taping session, on Vietnam. The third session, on foreign policy, looms as disaster. Frost overhears one if his American political advisors comment, “So if he beats him up like that on Vietnam, imagine what he’s going to do with his real achievements.” The third interview is in fact so bad that two members of the crew are overheard to say “they never voted for him when they had the chance, but if he ran for office again today, he’d get their support.” Frost’s team is furious but the talk-show host remains relentlessly upbeat and challenges anyone “who thinks we’re going to fail” to leave the project. No one does.

The turning point comes when Frost, alone his hotel room despairing over his failure to secure sponsors, receives a call from Nixon, who has obviously had a few drinks. Nixon delivers an angry, self-pitying monologue in which he compares his humble background, his current plight and his hunger for exoneration and the limelight to Frost’s. Frost recognizes how desperate Nixon is to “win” the final contest—over Watergate—and the fate of the “loser,” a fate that each of them dreads: obscurity.

While the outcome of the final interview is well known to those of my generation, I will not reveal it here. Suffice it to say that the Watergate session is the dramatic high-point of the movie. The contest between Frost and Nixon and the interviewer’s attempt to steer Nixon into an apology for the Watergate cover-up are deeply engaging.

The performances of the two principals in this film are nothing short of brilliant. Sheen’s portrayal of a man whose oversized ego may have finally gotten the better of him but whose steely nerve and unbreakable will push him out of despair is nuanced and convincing.

Langella’s turn as Nixon is in my opinion the best acting performance of 2008. A few years ago, I attended a live HD broadcast of the New York Metropolitan Opera production of Madama Butterfly. The female lead, Cio Cio San, a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl, was played by a corpulent white soprano who had to be at least 45 years old. I believe I even laughed out loud when she first came on stage. By the second act, however, her acting and singing had me convinced that she was Cio Cio San. While the disparity in appearance between Langella and Nixon is not nearly as great, it took several scenes for the actor to be transformed in my mind to his subject; the transformation, once it was made, was complete. Even in the close-up scenes of the interviews, I believed I was watching Richard Nixon. The drunken monologue prior to interview four is equalled in its magic only by Viola Davis’s heart-breaking encounter with Sister Aloysius in Doubt.

Frost/Nixon is no more a political film than Doubt is religious or theological. It is a very human story, a story of self-delusion, disappointed ambition, and wasted talent beautifully rendered by the acting of Sheen and Langella and by the cinematography of Salvatore Totino and the editing of Dan Hanley, Mike Hill, and Robert Komatsu.

Photo Credit

Movie Poster @ Wikipedia

Nixon’s Final Humiliation: A Review of “Frost/Nixon” is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN