by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie was a documentary on Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his star-crossed (as in stars-and-stripes-crossed) tenures as president of Haiti from 1990-1991 and 2000-2004, before he was overthrown both times in military coups clearly sponsored, or at least signed off on, by the United States. Rather pretentiously called Aristide and the Endless Revolution, this film, directed by Nicolas Rossier and co-written by him and Cameron Clendaniel, is basically your standard-issue Left-wing documentary attacking U.S. imperialism in a Third World country and answering the rather obvious question — just why on earth would the U.S. imperialists in general and the Bush family in particular (Aristide, interviewed from his exile in South Africa, didn’t fail to note the commonality that George H, W. Bush was president during his initial ouster from power and his son George W. Bush was president during his second one) give a damn about a basket-case country like Haiti?
It turns out that the reason had to do with the 40,000 or so Haitians employed in sweatshop conditions turning out products for American companies like Disney and Wal-Mart (it seems that Wal-Mart is to the early 21st century what Standard Oil and the Southern Pacific were to the early 20th century: the company whose footprints you always seem to find when you’re looking at the abuses of capitalism at their worst; Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story tagged Wal-Mart as the principal company involved in the so-called “dead peasant” life-insurance policies taken out on their employees with the company as beneficiary, with the grim result Moore chronicled in his movie of the widows and families of dead employees left destitute while their late relative’s former employer adds to the bottom line at the expense of the insurance company), and beyond that the determination of the U.S. to make sure that nobody in the Third World thinks they have a political alternative to capitalist domination of their economies and the exploitation of both their labor forces and their natural resources (assuming they have any, which Haiti doesn’t to speak of) by the U.S. and the rest of the First World. (One of the most interesting points made by this movie is the complicity of Canada and Europe — especially Haiti’s former colonizer, France — in the economic boycott and denial of foreign aid that made it impossible for Haiti under Aristide 2.0 to govern itself or feed its people: the same technique the U.S. had used to quarantine Chile and bring down its socialist government 31 years earlier.)
Aristide and the Endless Revolution is generally a good movie — a little tendentious, especially when Noam Chomsky makes his obligatory appearance (a Left-wing documentarian doing a movie about the exploitation of a Third World country today can no more leave out Chomsky than a director of a disaster movie in the early 1970’s could leave out Shelley Winters), but decently grounded in the history (though anyone interested in the origins of the Haitian revolution would get a better view of them from the 2009 TV documentary Égalité for All: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution) and in particular making a big deal of the $9 million ransom France demanded — and got — from Haiti in 1825 as reparations for losing their colony. One of Aristide’s big demands — and what might have been the turning point that determined both the U.S. and Europe that it was time to get rid of him — was that the French government refund that sum, which a U.S. attorney representing the Haitian government had calculated was now worth over $21 billion, what with inflation and interest (indeed, the attorney, who was interviewed in the film, literally calculated it to the penny, and the number appeared on Haitian TV and was sung in advertising jingles promoting the reparations demand as one thing Aristide was doing for the Haitian people), which Aristide and many of his supporters both inside and outside Haiti claim was what undid the Haitian economy in the first place and transformed the island from the agricultural powerhouse it had been under French colonization to the basket case, unable even to feed itself much less produce for export, it’s been ever since.
(Pat Robertson, you’ll recall, recently blamed both Haiti’s chronic poverty and the devastating earthquake that struck the country in 2009 on a “pact with the devil” allegedly made by L’Ouverture and his fellow revolutionaries back at the end of the 18th century to free the island from French domination — leading a New Yorker writer to point out that Robertson had solved the problem of “theodicy” — the question religious people are often asked: why, if God loves all people, does he allow so many of them to be killed in both natural and man-made disasters — by saying there’s no problem: any time large numbers of people die, according to Robertson, God is allowing it to happen because they did something evil to deserve it.)
Surprisingly, the film did not mention (except via a passing reference by one of the interviewees) the U.S. history of direct intervention in Haiti (including the period of nearly 20 years, from 1915 to 1934, during which the U.S. declared the Haitian people unfit for self-government and sent in the Marines to run a military government, as well as the U.S.’s support of the Duvalier dictatorship, in power from 1959 to 1986, with both money and military force), but other than that Aristide and the Endless Revolution makes a good case against the U.S. for having not only been directly involved in Aristide’s second overthrow (he was kidnapped by members of the Haitian military — which he had formally disbanded in an attempt to neutralize them as a threat to his power, only — as with the U.S.’s ill-advised decision to dissolve the Iraqi military after ousting Saddam Hussein’s regime — that left a lack of any armed power to maintain domestic security and left a lot of unemployed people with guns ready to mount a resistance to regain the power and income they thought they were owed — flown out of the country on a U.S. military plane and not told where he was going until it landed in Bangui in the Central African Republic, a place he’d never visited before and had no connection to) but overall in maintaining the continued impoverishment of Haiti by supporting kleptocratic dictatorships like the Duvaliers and directly intervening whenever the Haitian people came too close to seizing power.
A film that engaged and answered some of the anti-Aristide propaganda put out in the U.S. (particularly the accusation that Aristide’s Lavalas party maintained a militia that murdered his political enemies, often by beheading or “necklacing” — placing tires around their bodies and setting them on fire — and the argument that the 2000 election that returned Aristide to power was rigged) instead of either sloughing them off or ignoring them would have been even more powerful, but Aristide and the Endless Revolution is a pretty good movie and a nice crash course for American viewers in Haiti 101.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Gossip (Warner Bros./Village Roadshow, 2000)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent a good chunk of time running a 2000 movie I recorded yesterday from Lifetime, Gossip, which like a lot of the stuff I’ve been watching from Lifetime lately wasn’t made for TV but was actually a theatrical release (the studio credits included such prestigious company names as Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow). It turned out to be a surprisingly good dark thriller centered around three college roommates who are barely hanging on with their studies because they like to do the club scene. As in Noël Coward’s play Design for Living (and the 1933 “pre-Code” Paramount film made from it), one of them is a woman and two of them are men but — at least at first — none of them are involved sexually with each other. The woman, Cathy Jones (played by an odd-looking actress named Lena Headey — she’s easy enough on the eyes one can imagine the male characters being attracted to her even though she looks oddly like the young Bob Dylan in drag), kicks off the film with a voice-over narration in which she says, “I’m a girl with a problem. It’s not like I don’t know better. But I seem to have gotten myself involved a very tempting situation.”
Since we hear this over a shot of her doffing the plain-Jane shirt and jeans she wears to class and donning a provocative top, short dress and high heels, at first we think this is going to be a movie about a female student working her way through college by being a hooker, but no-o-o-o-o, her situation isn’t that bad. The men are avant-garde artist Travis (played by a real avant-garde artist named Norman Reedus) and rich kid Derrick Webb (James Marsden, whom I’d never heard of before even though he apparently had a major role in the X-Men series — which shows how unfamiliar I am with films based on the comic-book Zeitgeist). Derrick’s money has rented them a fabulous, well-appointed loft that practically becomes a character in the film itself. The three are in a class on modern communications being taught by professor Goodwin (Eric Bogosian), and looking for a project that will impress him they decide to start a real-life rumor on campus and see how fast it spreads and how distorted it gets in the telling.
They see their chance at a party when they witness a famously virginal student named Naomi Preston (Kate Hudson) resisting the back-room advances of her boyfriend Beau Edson (Joshua Jackson) — and the rumor they start is that she actually did have sex with her. From the campus grapevine this morphs into a story that Naomi is a slut, that she wears rubber underwear and carries whips to do S/M scenes with her partners, that she likes gang-bangs and — the one that gets the principals into the most trouble — that Naomi passed out at the party but Beau had sex with her anyway, essentially raping her. That one gets taken so seriously that Beau is actually investigated by the cops and arrested. Naomi is persuaded by the cops who interrogate her that since she was drunk and passed out she can’t say for sure that she wasn’t raped, and eventually she comes to believe that she was. When Cathy thinks better of the whole thing and tells the police that it was all a rumor they started on purpose as a class project, she’s told to get the hell out of there and stop impeding the investigation by trying to lie to get a friend off the hook.
Cathy investigates on her own and learns that Naomi was indeed raped — not by Beau, though, and not in college; her actual rape occurred in high school and the rapist was Derrick, whose family’s money got him out of any legal jeopardy but whose social standing at the high school he and Naomi both attended was ruined by the allegation. Derrick, it turns out, never forgave Naomi for ruining his social life at high school, and concocted the rumor plot as a way of ruining her life in revenge — and the writing by Gregory Poirer and Theresa Rebeck and direction by Davis Guggenheim manages to create Derrick as a believably self-centered psycho who dances away from any responsibility and manages to maintain a permanent sense of himself as the aggrieved party. He also believes that he doesn’t have to rape anybody because he can get any woman he wants to yield to him willingly — as he does with Cathy in one sequence as well as with a brunette at the party where he sees Naomi with Beau and decides to set them up.
Naomi is eventually found dead in her apartment, an apparent suicide, after Derrick visited her and had a violent confrontation; the police don’t buy the suicide angle and investigate Derrick as a murderer, and after a last-ditch attempt to frame Travis for Naomi’s killing, Derrick blurts out a confession to the rape but insists he hasn’t killed anybody — and in a dramatic reversal that’s so unbelievable it weakens but doesn’t entirely destroy the credibility of the entire movie, it turns out that Naomi is still alive and she. Cathy, Travis and Goodwin have all been part of a plot to get Derrick to confess to Naomi’s rape, which gets exposed when Derrick supposedly shoots Cathy (he and Travis were struggling and they both reached for the gun … Maurine Watkins, call your plagiarism attorney again!) and Curtis (Edward James Olmos), the detective in charge of the case, arrests him.
Gossip is a well-done movie, scored with wall-to-wall dance music of just the sort of trendy awfulness these people would listen to (there’s a shock in one scene in which we actually hear a great singer perform a great song — Dusty Springfield’s 1967 recording of “The Look of Love” from the film Casino Royale) and with occasional flashes of overdirection by Guggenheim, who for the most part manages to create a marvelous sense of atmosphere that takes us on a walk through an updated version of the 1940’s noir underworld. The actors are quite well cast; Marsden in particular wears his sense of entitlement the way he wears his clothes, though frankly Norman Reedus did more for me aesthetically and the two even looked rather alike (especially in the scenes in which Marsden was shown with his usually well-coiffed hair disheveled), and Gossip is a literate thriller that — despite that final Sixth Sense-like twist — manages not only to entertain but to make some interesting points about communication and how “truth” is socially constructed; indeed, the film is well-made enough in that department that a real-life equivalent of professor Goodwin might well show it in his class to illustrate his point about how stories spread and how seemingly innocuous rumors can snowball into forms that destroy people’s lives.
I spent a good chunk of time running a 2000 movie I recorded yesterday from Lifetime, Gossip, which like a lot of the stuff I’ve been watching from Lifetime lately wasn’t made for TV but was actually a theatrical release (the studio credits included such prestigious company names as Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow). It turned out to be a surprisingly good dark thriller centered around three college roommates who are barely hanging on with their studies because they like to do the club scene. As in Noël Coward’s play Design for Living (and the 1933 “pre-Code” Paramount film made from it), one of them is a woman and two of them are men but — at least at first — none of them are involved sexually with each other. The woman, Cathy Jones (played by an odd-looking actress named Lena Headey — she’s easy enough on the eyes one can imagine the male characters being attracted to her even though she looks oddly like the young Bob Dylan in drag), kicks off the film with a voice-over narration in which she says, “I’m a girl with a problem. It’s not like I don’t know better. But I seem to have gotten myself involved a very tempting situation.”
Since we hear this over a shot of her doffing the plain-Jane shirt and jeans she wears to class and donning a provocative top, short dress and high heels, at first we think this is going to be a movie about a female student working her way through college by being a hooker, but no-o-o-o-o, her situation isn’t that bad. The men are avant-garde artist Travis (played by a real avant-garde artist named Norman Reedus) and rich kid Derrick Webb (James Marsden, whom I’d never heard of before even though he apparently had a major role in the X-Men series — which shows how unfamiliar I am with films based on the comic-book Zeitgeist). Derrick’s money has rented them a fabulous, well-appointed loft that practically becomes a character in the film itself. The three are in a class on modern communications being taught by professor Goodwin (Eric Bogosian), and looking for a project that will impress him they decide to start a real-life rumor on campus and see how fast it spreads and how distorted it gets in the telling.
They see their chance at a party when they witness a famously virginal student named Naomi Preston (Kate Hudson) resisting the back-room advances of her boyfriend Beau Edson (Joshua Jackson) — and the rumor they start is that she actually did have sex with her. From the campus grapevine this morphs into a story that Naomi is a slut, that she wears rubber underwear and carries whips to do S/M scenes with her partners, that she likes gang-bangs and — the one that gets the principals into the most trouble — that Naomi passed out at the party but Beau had sex with her anyway, essentially raping her. That one gets taken so seriously that Beau is actually investigated by the cops and arrested. Naomi is persuaded by the cops who interrogate her that since she was drunk and passed out she can’t say for sure that she wasn’t raped, and eventually she comes to believe that she was. When Cathy thinks better of the whole thing and tells the police that it was all a rumor they started on purpose as a class project, she’s told to get the hell out of there and stop impeding the investigation by trying to lie to get a friend off the hook.
Cathy investigates on her own and learns that Naomi was indeed raped — not by Beau, though, and not in college; her actual rape occurred in high school and the rapist was Derrick, whose family’s money got him out of any legal jeopardy but whose social standing at the high school he and Naomi both attended was ruined by the allegation. Derrick, it turns out, never forgave Naomi for ruining his social life at high school, and concocted the rumor plot as a way of ruining her life in revenge — and the writing by Gregory Poirer and Theresa Rebeck and direction by Davis Guggenheim manages to create Derrick as a believably self-centered psycho who dances away from any responsibility and manages to maintain a permanent sense of himself as the aggrieved party. He also believes that he doesn’t have to rape anybody because he can get any woman he wants to yield to him willingly — as he does with Cathy in one sequence as well as with a brunette at the party where he sees Naomi with Beau and decides to set them up.
Naomi is eventually found dead in her apartment, an apparent suicide, after Derrick visited her and had a violent confrontation; the police don’t buy the suicide angle and investigate Derrick as a murderer, and after a last-ditch attempt to frame Travis for Naomi’s killing, Derrick blurts out a confession to the rape but insists he hasn’t killed anybody — and in a dramatic reversal that’s so unbelievable it weakens but doesn’t entirely destroy the credibility of the entire movie, it turns out that Naomi is still alive and she. Cathy, Travis and Goodwin have all been part of a plot to get Derrick to confess to Naomi’s rape, which gets exposed when Derrick supposedly shoots Cathy (he and Travis were struggling and they both reached for the gun … Maurine Watkins, call your plagiarism attorney again!) and Curtis (Edward James Olmos), the detective in charge of the case, arrests him.
Gossip is a well-done movie, scored with wall-to-wall dance music of just the sort of trendy awfulness these people would listen to (there’s a shock in one scene in which we actually hear a great singer perform a great song — Dusty Springfield’s 1967 recording of “The Look of Love” from the film Casino Royale) and with occasional flashes of overdirection by Guggenheim, who for the most part manages to create a marvelous sense of atmosphere that takes us on a walk through an updated version of the 1940’s noir underworld. The actors are quite well cast; Marsden in particular wears his sense of entitlement the way he wears his clothes, though frankly Norman Reedus did more for me aesthetically and the two even looked rather alike (especially in the scenes in which Marsden was shown with his usually well-coiffed hair disheveled), and Gossip is a literate thriller that — despite that final Sixth Sense-like twist — manages not only to entertain but to make some interesting points about communication and how “truth” is socially constructed; indeed, the film is well-made enough in that department that a real-life equivalent of professor Goodwin might well show it in his class to illustrate his point about how stories spread and how seemingly innocuous rumors can snowball into forms that destroy people’s lives.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Sherlock Holmes on 1950’s TV: Two Episodes
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I came home at 10 last night and we ended up watching dueling 1950’s versions of Sherlock Holmes stories. His was a 26-minute adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Man with the Twisted Lip” filmed in Britain in 1951 as the pilot for a proposed Holmes TV series that was never made. Retitled “The Man Who Disappeared” for TV, the show was an estimable try even though the uncredited screenwriter made some small but crucial alterations in the story line that actually weakened it. In the original, Neville St. Clair (played in the film by Hector Ross) turns out to have been an aspiring journalist who was assigned by his editor to write an article about London beggars. To learn about them he decided to become a beggar himself, adopting a disguise that made him look suitably pathetic and pitiable so people would give him money — and in fact so many people gave him money that he realized he could make more money as a beggar than as a reporter, so he quit his job at the paper, rented a room above an opium den (making its proprietor his confidante), went out to work every weekday and changed into the disguise that would allow him to collect from passers-by big-time.
He kept this up so long that he was even able to marry, telling his fiancée that he had a job as a stockbroker in The City (London’s financial district) and somehow convincing her that she should never inquire any more than that about where he worked or how he made his living. The film, directed by Richard M. Grey, follows the story fairly closely for the first half but changes St. Clair's motivation for begging — in this version he sells matchboxes and he’s been blackmailed by the opium-den proprietor into using this business as a cover for drug dealing (the drugs are concealed inside the matchboxes) — and ends in a big fight scene quite different from the quieter and more effective conclusion of the story. The show is surprisingly well cast: Holmes is played by John Longden, and though he was a bit long in the tooth for the part (this was 22 years after he made the only film on his résumé anyone is likely to have seen today, as the detective in Hitchcock’s Blackmail) he’s effective in this virtually impossible role. His Watson is Campbell Singer, a bit overbearing but at least not Nigel Bruce-level stupid, thank goodness, and the rest of the cast and Grey’s direction are effective within the limits of the script.
Afterwards I trotted out mine, an archive.org download of episode 6 in the much more famous 1954 Holmes series featuring Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford (the "H." stands for "Howard," in case you were wondering — which is probably why they went with just the initial: a TV series cast list in which the second-billed actor had the same first name as the first-billed actor’s last name might have got confusing) as Watson. The episode we were watching was number six out of 39 (the show was apparently a success but lasted only one season) and was called “The Case of the Shy Ballerina.” It suffered from the fact that, like all the other episodes in this series, it did not take its storyline from one of the original Conan Doyle Holmes tales. Instead it told a seriocomic story of Watson and another man accidentally leaving their club with each other’s hats and coats, and when Watson traces the man whose coat he has on instead of his own he goes out to his home to retrieve it — only to find that the man, an aspiring ballet composer, is dead.
Holmes and Watson take the case on behalf of the widow, Elaine Chelton (Natalie Schaefer, who later played the wife of Jim Backus’s millionaire character on Gilligan’s Island), who accuses her husband of having had an affair with ballerina Olga Yaclanoff (Martine Alexis), whom he met in St. Petersburg and took up with again when the Royal Ballet of Russia appeared in London as part of a tour. It turns out that the real adulterer in the Chelton marriage was the Mrs., and her paramour was the ballet’s director, Serge Smernoff (Eugene Deckers, outfitted with one of the most ridiculous arrangements of false facial hair an actor has ever been cursed with having to wear) — and she killed her husband to eliminate him and clear the way between her and Smernoff. Oddly, I didn’t find this one as well cast as the failed pilot with John Longden: Ronald Howard is a good Holmes but he’s a bit too overbearing and nasty to be a great one, and H. Marion Crawford is more or less just there as Watson, with Archie Duncan as a sleazier and nastier Inspector Lestrade than usual, Still, both shows were fun to watch, indications of how well half-hour crime dramas could work with strong enough plots and actors to pull them off.
Charles and I came home at 10 last night and we ended up watching dueling 1950’s versions of Sherlock Holmes stories. His was a 26-minute adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Man with the Twisted Lip” filmed in Britain in 1951 as the pilot for a proposed Holmes TV series that was never made. Retitled “The Man Who Disappeared” for TV, the show was an estimable try even though the uncredited screenwriter made some small but crucial alterations in the story line that actually weakened it. In the original, Neville St. Clair (played in the film by Hector Ross) turns out to have been an aspiring journalist who was assigned by his editor to write an article about London beggars. To learn about them he decided to become a beggar himself, adopting a disguise that made him look suitably pathetic and pitiable so people would give him money — and in fact so many people gave him money that he realized he could make more money as a beggar than as a reporter, so he quit his job at the paper, rented a room above an opium den (making its proprietor his confidante), went out to work every weekday and changed into the disguise that would allow him to collect from passers-by big-time.
He kept this up so long that he was even able to marry, telling his fiancée that he had a job as a stockbroker in The City (London’s financial district) and somehow convincing her that she should never inquire any more than that about where he worked or how he made his living. The film, directed by Richard M. Grey, follows the story fairly closely for the first half but changes St. Clair's motivation for begging — in this version he sells matchboxes and he’s been blackmailed by the opium-den proprietor into using this business as a cover for drug dealing (the drugs are concealed inside the matchboxes) — and ends in a big fight scene quite different from the quieter and more effective conclusion of the story. The show is surprisingly well cast: Holmes is played by John Longden, and though he was a bit long in the tooth for the part (this was 22 years after he made the only film on his résumé anyone is likely to have seen today, as the detective in Hitchcock’s Blackmail) he’s effective in this virtually impossible role. His Watson is Campbell Singer, a bit overbearing but at least not Nigel Bruce-level stupid, thank goodness, and the rest of the cast and Grey’s direction are effective within the limits of the script.
Afterwards I trotted out mine, an archive.org download of episode 6 in the much more famous 1954 Holmes series featuring Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford (the "H." stands for "Howard," in case you were wondering — which is probably why they went with just the initial: a TV series cast list in which the second-billed actor had the same first name as the first-billed actor’s last name might have got confusing) as Watson. The episode we were watching was number six out of 39 (the show was apparently a success but lasted only one season) and was called “The Case of the Shy Ballerina.” It suffered from the fact that, like all the other episodes in this series, it did not take its storyline from one of the original Conan Doyle Holmes tales. Instead it told a seriocomic story of Watson and another man accidentally leaving their club with each other’s hats and coats, and when Watson traces the man whose coat he has on instead of his own he goes out to his home to retrieve it — only to find that the man, an aspiring ballet composer, is dead.
Holmes and Watson take the case on behalf of the widow, Elaine Chelton (Natalie Schaefer, who later played the wife of Jim Backus’s millionaire character on Gilligan’s Island), who accuses her husband of having had an affair with ballerina Olga Yaclanoff (Martine Alexis), whom he met in St. Petersburg and took up with again when the Royal Ballet of Russia appeared in London as part of a tour. It turns out that the real adulterer in the Chelton marriage was the Mrs., and her paramour was the ballet’s director, Serge Smernoff (Eugene Deckers, outfitted with one of the most ridiculous arrangements of false facial hair an actor has ever been cursed with having to wear) — and she killed her husband to eliminate him and clear the way between her and Smernoff. Oddly, I didn’t find this one as well cast as the failed pilot with John Longden: Ronald Howard is a good Holmes but he’s a bit too overbearing and nasty to be a great one, and H. Marion Crawford is more or less just there as Watson, with Archie Duncan as a sleazier and nastier Inspector Lestrade than usual, Still, both shows were fun to watch, indications of how well half-hour crime dramas could work with strong enough plots and actors to pull them off.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Reservation Road (Focus Features, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was Reservation Road, which I’d recorded last weekend off Lifetime and which, like The Good Girl — the film that immediately preceded it on their schedule — was originally a theatrical release rather than one of Lifetime’s made-for-TV specials. Unfortunately, Reservation Road was nowhere near as good as The Good Girl, not because the basic concept didn’t have potential but because it was badly bobbled in the execution. The title “Reservation Road” is the name of a back road in Connecticut, where all the principals live, and the film opens at a nighttime gas station where the two families at the heart of the story come together in a violent and tragic fashion.
Ethan Learner (Joaquin Phoenix, top-billed) and his wife Grace (Jennifer Connelly) are driving their two children, daughter Emma (Elle Fanning, younger sister of go-to child star Dakota Fanning) and son Josh (Sean Curley), home after a long weekend when Emma protests that she needs to use a restroom, so Ethan pulls into the gas station, goes in to buy windshield-wiper fluid, and Josh gets out of the car to set free some fireflies he’d caught earlier. Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo) is a divorced dad who’s having his final night of custody for a while and has used it to take his son Lucas (Eddie Alderson) to a Boston Red Sox game — the film is set in 2004, when the Red Sox were on their way to breaking the Bambino’s curse and winning their first World Series since 1918 — only the game has gone into extra innings and Dwight’s ex, Ruth Wheldon (Mira Sorvino), is frantically calling him on his cell phone demanding her boy back immediately.
Speeding down the ill-lit back road, Dwight’s SUV hits something he either thinks or rationalizes is just a log; Dwight briefly slows down and thinks of turning back, but he’s so frantic to get home that he just drives on. The object he hit is Josh Learner, who dies on the spot and, not surprisingly, sets his family in general and his father in particular into rage at the injustice of their son being killed by a hit-and-run driver. Had the filmmakers — co-writers John Burnham Schwartz and Terry George (George also directed and the two based their script on Schwartz’s previous novel) — kept their story focused on the effect the accident has both on the victim’s family and on the perpetrator, they could have had a great movie: the action is well staged, the acting is convincing and the horror of the aftermath is beautifully staged. Ethan ends up consumed by grief, finding Web sites and online chat rooms for family members of people killed by hit-and-run drivers, and the comments he gets only underscore his suspicions that this sort of crime is a low priority for the police and that if he wants justice done he’s going to have to ignore the police and courts and do it himself. He’s so consumed by grief, in fact, that he’s unable to have sex with his wife; his daughter is getting jealous at having the impossible challenge of having to compete with her dead brother for dad’s attention; and in one of the most chilling scenes in the film he tears into his wife when she’s about to throw away their late son’s belongings and she accuses him of wanting to cling to them for morbid reasons that are only getting in the way of their achieving — horrible word — “closure.”
Unfortunately, George and Schwartz can’t stop there: they have to power their story on two of the most ridiculous coincidences ever offered by filmmakers (or fiction writers, for that matter) supposedly telling a serious dramatic story. Advised to hire his own lawyer to push the police to investigate harder and also to consider a wrongful-death suit if the killer of his son is caught and gets a slap-on-the-wrist sentence or is freed altogether, Ethan shows up at the law firm he’s hired, and guess who’s been assigned to the case? None other than the perpetrator himself, Dwight Arno. It gets even sillier when midway through the film George and Schwartz decide to make Emma Learner a child prodigy on the piano — thereby giving her, at least, something (a school recital) to prepare for rather than keep stewing in grief the way her dad is doing. And guess who the piano teacher is that Grace hires to coach her daughter for the recital? That’s right: Ruth Wheldon, ex-wife of the person who killed their son. Dwight tries to conceal his crime by putting his SUV in storage and renting a replacement car, but eventually Ethan catches on by seeing a photo of Dwight and his son Lucas in front of the vehicle — and notices it has a grille guard (one of those protuberances that make such a car look even more aggressive than it does au naturel — and which might have been the reason the accident killed Josh on impact instead of just injuring him), which leads him to put two and two together and, rather than do the sensible thing and report his suspicions to the police, go after Dwight with a gun to set up a final mano-a-mano confrontation between them.
It’s hard to criticize Reservation Road because much of it is quite beautiful and dramatically insightful — but for every scene that works as the vivid, moving drama this script had every right and opportunity to be, there’s another that’s so risible in its clichéd plotting and stupid reliance on coincidence that it’s hard to keep from laughing.
The film I picked out was Reservation Road, which I’d recorded last weekend off Lifetime and which, like The Good Girl — the film that immediately preceded it on their schedule — was originally a theatrical release rather than one of Lifetime’s made-for-TV specials. Unfortunately, Reservation Road was nowhere near as good as The Good Girl, not because the basic concept didn’t have potential but because it was badly bobbled in the execution. The title “Reservation Road” is the name of a back road in Connecticut, where all the principals live, and the film opens at a nighttime gas station where the two families at the heart of the story come together in a violent and tragic fashion.
Ethan Learner (Joaquin Phoenix, top-billed) and his wife Grace (Jennifer Connelly) are driving their two children, daughter Emma (Elle Fanning, younger sister of go-to child star Dakota Fanning) and son Josh (Sean Curley), home after a long weekend when Emma protests that she needs to use a restroom, so Ethan pulls into the gas station, goes in to buy windshield-wiper fluid, and Josh gets out of the car to set free some fireflies he’d caught earlier. Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo) is a divorced dad who’s having his final night of custody for a while and has used it to take his son Lucas (Eddie Alderson) to a Boston Red Sox game — the film is set in 2004, when the Red Sox were on their way to breaking the Bambino’s curse and winning their first World Series since 1918 — only the game has gone into extra innings and Dwight’s ex, Ruth Wheldon (Mira Sorvino), is frantically calling him on his cell phone demanding her boy back immediately.
Speeding down the ill-lit back road, Dwight’s SUV hits something he either thinks or rationalizes is just a log; Dwight briefly slows down and thinks of turning back, but he’s so frantic to get home that he just drives on. The object he hit is Josh Learner, who dies on the spot and, not surprisingly, sets his family in general and his father in particular into rage at the injustice of their son being killed by a hit-and-run driver. Had the filmmakers — co-writers John Burnham Schwartz and Terry George (George also directed and the two based their script on Schwartz’s previous novel) — kept their story focused on the effect the accident has both on the victim’s family and on the perpetrator, they could have had a great movie: the action is well staged, the acting is convincing and the horror of the aftermath is beautifully staged. Ethan ends up consumed by grief, finding Web sites and online chat rooms for family members of people killed by hit-and-run drivers, and the comments he gets only underscore his suspicions that this sort of crime is a low priority for the police and that if he wants justice done he’s going to have to ignore the police and courts and do it himself. He’s so consumed by grief, in fact, that he’s unable to have sex with his wife; his daughter is getting jealous at having the impossible challenge of having to compete with her dead brother for dad’s attention; and in one of the most chilling scenes in the film he tears into his wife when she’s about to throw away their late son’s belongings and she accuses him of wanting to cling to them for morbid reasons that are only getting in the way of their achieving — horrible word — “closure.”
Unfortunately, George and Schwartz can’t stop there: they have to power their story on two of the most ridiculous coincidences ever offered by filmmakers (or fiction writers, for that matter) supposedly telling a serious dramatic story. Advised to hire his own lawyer to push the police to investigate harder and also to consider a wrongful-death suit if the killer of his son is caught and gets a slap-on-the-wrist sentence or is freed altogether, Ethan shows up at the law firm he’s hired, and guess who’s been assigned to the case? None other than the perpetrator himself, Dwight Arno. It gets even sillier when midway through the film George and Schwartz decide to make Emma Learner a child prodigy on the piano — thereby giving her, at least, something (a school recital) to prepare for rather than keep stewing in grief the way her dad is doing. And guess who the piano teacher is that Grace hires to coach her daughter for the recital? That’s right: Ruth Wheldon, ex-wife of the person who killed their son. Dwight tries to conceal his crime by putting his SUV in storage and renting a replacement car, but eventually Ethan catches on by seeing a photo of Dwight and his son Lucas in front of the vehicle — and notices it has a grille guard (one of those protuberances that make such a car look even more aggressive than it does au naturel — and which might have been the reason the accident killed Josh on impact instead of just injuring him), which leads him to put two and two together and, rather than do the sensible thing and report his suspicions to the police, go after Dwight with a gun to set up a final mano-a-mano confrontation between them.
It’s hard to criticize Reservation Road because much of it is quite beautiful and dramatically insightful — but for every scene that works as the vivid, moving drama this script had every right and opportunity to be, there’s another that’s so risible in its clichéd plotting and stupid reliance on coincidence that it’s hard to keep from laughing.
Murder by Television (Imperial-Cameo, 1935)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles duly arrived at 10 p.m. and we ended up watching the archive.org download of Murder by Television, a 1935 independent from something called “Cameo Pictures” (the on-screen studio credit goes to Cameo, the posters said “Imperial-Cameo”) starring Bela Lugosi in an intriguing but ultimately disappointing and silly melodrama with a “grabber” title the movie itself never quite lives up to. Produced by William M. Pizor, directed by Clifford Sanforth and written by Joseph O’Donnell from an “idea” by Clarence Hennecke and Karl R. Coolidge, Murder by Television harkens back to a time when the very idea of television was the subject of science fiction — though a few hardy and ill-financed inventors were industriously working to bring it to reality. The producers sought out L.A.’s real-life TV experimenters and borrowed $75,000 worth of experimental TV gear — Milton M. Stern is credited as “television technician,” which I would guess mean that he supplied the equipment and told the filmmakers whatever they needed to know about how it worked — which was more than double the $35,000 they had budgeted to make the actual movie.
The story deals with researcher James Houghland (Charles Hill Mailes),who has invented a new TV system so much better than any that’s come before it — particularly in its ability to transmit over long distances — that all the other TV startups in the area want to get their hands on it by any means necessary. Houghland stages a demonstration and we get to see his daughter June (June Collyer) sing a nice little song called “I Had the Right Idea” as his test program. Then he’s found dead, apparently electrocuted by his own equipment. The suspects include his assistant, Arthur Perry (Bela Lugosi) — who in an early establishing scene was shown having a sinister conversation with another television entrepreneur which seemed to be about Perry stealing Houghland’s secrets and selling them before Houghland had a chance to patent them — and a number of other people, including various hangers-on, other TV researchers and brain specialist Dr. Henry M. Scofield (Huntley Gordon — though the credits leave the “e” out of his first name), who ultimately turns out to be the killer, though both the means of the murder and the motive remain pretty mysterious. Murder by Television also features two racist stereotype roles for Hougland’s servants, Isabella (Hattie McDaniel — amazing that this cheap, cheesy movie features someone who went on to win an Academy Award!) and houseboy Ah Ling (Allan Jung); Jung has to quote Charlie Chan in his role and he looks like he’d rather be playing one of Chan’s sons, but McDaniel acts her stupid role with the power and authority she’d later bring to similar (if somewhat less silly) roles in great films: her superb performance as Paul Robeson’s wife in the 1936 Show Boat and her Oscar-winner in Gone With the Wind.
Originally McDaniel’s role was quite a bit more substantial and gave her a chance to sing — which she could do superbly; before she got into movies she’d been a colleague of Bessie Smith’s on the Black TOBA vaudeville circuit (the initials formally stood for “Theatre Owners’ Booking Association” but the conditions were so rough the performers joked the letters really stood for “Tough on Black Asses”) and in the 1936 Show Boat she’d held her own in a vocal duet with Robeson — but apparently the only prints of Murder by Television that survive are truncated ones in which McDaniel’s song has been removed. (This sort of butchery later affected Lena Horne’s films for MGM in the 1940’s; in most of her films, rather than playing a character, she merely came on, sang and then departed — making it easy for MGM’s distributors in the South to eliminate her altogether.) This explains the discrepancy in the film’s listed running time: the American Film Institute Catalog claims it runs 60 to 62 minutes, while imdb.com lists 53 minutes — the running time of the version on archive.org.
Murder by Television is a cheap, shoddy film that’s interesting for Lugosi, McDaniel, all that cool antique television equipment (interestingly, the TV process used in the film still seems to rely on scanning discs eight years after Philo T. Farnsworth invented the electronic TV system that became the basis of commercial TV when it finally started after World War II) but not much else, and is the first of at least two films in Lugosi’s career that used the preposterous plot device of having a character murdered midway through and then turn up, seemingly alive after all — explained by the lame plot device that the “new” person, played by the same actor as the original, is in fact his twin brother. In Murder by Television it is Lugosi who is murdered about 42 minutes into this 54-minute (at least in the version we were watching) print and then reappears as a deus ex machina, an FBI agent who solves the crime — and though we presume Lugosi’s second incarnation is named “Perry” since that was the last name of the first one, we’re never given a first name for Lugosi II. (Six years later, in The Invisible Ghost, Lugosi had to endure this plot device again, though in this one it wasn’t he but supporting actor John McGuire who died and was “resurrected” in the form of a previously unknown twin.)
Murder by Television is just another 1930’s indie, dully directed and flatly photographed (except for the scenes of the TV gear actually in operation), yet another whodunit that turns into a whocareswhodunit and doesn’t really — as I had thought it might — provide Lugosi fans another opportunity besides the quite interesting 1934 serial The Return of Chandu to see him as a genuinely heroic figure.
Charles duly arrived at 10 p.m. and we ended up watching the archive.org download of Murder by Television, a 1935 independent from something called “Cameo Pictures” (the on-screen studio credit goes to Cameo, the posters said “Imperial-Cameo”) starring Bela Lugosi in an intriguing but ultimately disappointing and silly melodrama with a “grabber” title the movie itself never quite lives up to. Produced by William M. Pizor, directed by Clifford Sanforth and written by Joseph O’Donnell from an “idea” by Clarence Hennecke and Karl R. Coolidge, Murder by Television harkens back to a time when the very idea of television was the subject of science fiction — though a few hardy and ill-financed inventors were industriously working to bring it to reality. The producers sought out L.A.’s real-life TV experimenters and borrowed $75,000 worth of experimental TV gear — Milton M. Stern is credited as “television technician,” which I would guess mean that he supplied the equipment and told the filmmakers whatever they needed to know about how it worked — which was more than double the $35,000 they had budgeted to make the actual movie.
The story deals with researcher James Houghland (Charles Hill Mailes),who has invented a new TV system so much better than any that’s come before it — particularly in its ability to transmit over long distances — that all the other TV startups in the area want to get their hands on it by any means necessary. Houghland stages a demonstration and we get to see his daughter June (June Collyer) sing a nice little song called “I Had the Right Idea” as his test program. Then he’s found dead, apparently electrocuted by his own equipment. The suspects include his assistant, Arthur Perry (Bela Lugosi) — who in an early establishing scene was shown having a sinister conversation with another television entrepreneur which seemed to be about Perry stealing Houghland’s secrets and selling them before Houghland had a chance to patent them — and a number of other people, including various hangers-on, other TV researchers and brain specialist Dr. Henry M. Scofield (Huntley Gordon — though the credits leave the “e” out of his first name), who ultimately turns out to be the killer, though both the means of the murder and the motive remain pretty mysterious. Murder by Television also features two racist stereotype roles for Hougland’s servants, Isabella (Hattie McDaniel — amazing that this cheap, cheesy movie features someone who went on to win an Academy Award!) and houseboy Ah Ling (Allan Jung); Jung has to quote Charlie Chan in his role and he looks like he’d rather be playing one of Chan’s sons, but McDaniel acts her stupid role with the power and authority she’d later bring to similar (if somewhat less silly) roles in great films: her superb performance as Paul Robeson’s wife in the 1936 Show Boat and her Oscar-winner in Gone With the Wind.
Originally McDaniel’s role was quite a bit more substantial and gave her a chance to sing — which she could do superbly; before she got into movies she’d been a colleague of Bessie Smith’s on the Black TOBA vaudeville circuit (the initials formally stood for “Theatre Owners’ Booking Association” but the conditions were so rough the performers joked the letters really stood for “Tough on Black Asses”) and in the 1936 Show Boat she’d held her own in a vocal duet with Robeson — but apparently the only prints of Murder by Television that survive are truncated ones in which McDaniel’s song has been removed. (This sort of butchery later affected Lena Horne’s films for MGM in the 1940’s; in most of her films, rather than playing a character, she merely came on, sang and then departed — making it easy for MGM’s distributors in the South to eliminate her altogether.) This explains the discrepancy in the film’s listed running time: the American Film Institute Catalog claims it runs 60 to 62 minutes, while imdb.com lists 53 minutes — the running time of the version on archive.org.
Murder by Television is a cheap, shoddy film that’s interesting for Lugosi, McDaniel, all that cool antique television equipment (interestingly, the TV process used in the film still seems to rely on scanning discs eight years after Philo T. Farnsworth invented the electronic TV system that became the basis of commercial TV when it finally started after World War II) but not much else, and is the first of at least two films in Lugosi’s career that used the preposterous plot device of having a character murdered midway through and then turn up, seemingly alive after all — explained by the lame plot device that the “new” person, played by the same actor as the original, is in fact his twin brother. In Murder by Television it is Lugosi who is murdered about 42 minutes into this 54-minute (at least in the version we were watching) print and then reappears as a deus ex machina, an FBI agent who solves the crime — and though we presume Lugosi’s second incarnation is named “Perry” since that was the last name of the first one, we’re never given a first name for Lugosi II. (Six years later, in The Invisible Ghost, Lugosi had to endure this plot device again, though in this one it wasn’t he but supporting actor John McGuire who died and was “resurrected” in the form of a previously unknown twin.)
Murder by Television is just another 1930’s indie, dully directed and flatly photographed (except for the scenes of the TV gear actually in operation), yet another whodunit that turns into a whocareswhodunit and doesn’t really — as I had thought it might — provide Lugosi fans another opportunity besides the quite interesting 1934 serial The Return of Chandu to see him as a genuinely heroic figure.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Pearl Diver (Proud Cut Films/Monterey Video, filmed 2004, released 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I had made up our mind to go to the library movie — for the last time for a while since the organ concerts on Monday nights start next week — and the film turned out to be unexpectedly good: Pearl Diver, a remarkable indie (made in 2004 but not released until three years later) by writer-director Sidney King, who apparently actually grew up in the Mennonite community near Goshen, Indiana where the film takes place and drew on his personal experiences for his story. The film basically deals with the prickly relationship between two sisters, Hannah Eberly (Joey Honsa), who left the Mennonite community, settled in a large city and tried to make it as a writer (she’s had one book published, Fidel: Then and Now — a surprising choice for a subject because otherwise she doesn’t seem particularly political at all); and Marian Eberly Miller (Amy Jean Johnson), who stayed behind, married fellow Mennonite John Miller (Brian Boland) and had a daughter by him, Rebecca (Maddie Abshire, who looks about eight even though we’re told the character is six).
The film is centered around the two tragedies that seem to enclose Hannah and Marian like pincers: the violent death of their mother in an In Cold Blood-style home-invasion robbery years earlier and a recent accident involving Rebecca, whose head was crushed in when her father accidentally ran her down in his tractor when she’d gone out into the fields to bring him his lunch. Rebecca survives but her only chance of full recovery is an experimental operation her family’s health insurer won’t pay for (another one of these stories turning on the damnable fact that this country is too pig-headed, elitist or in love with its myths of “self-reliance” and the “free market” to make health care a taxpayer-funded human right the way every other affluent, developed nation has!). King sets up the expected conflicts between the tradition of the Mennonites (who are not as dementedly anti-progress as the Amish: there are scenes of them traveling in horse-drawn carriages and their women wearing long dresses and head scarves, but as the presence of a tractor on the Miller farm and a telephone in their home indicate, they’re not opposed to all manifestations of modern technology) and the city life Hannah led before she returned to her sister’s and brother-in-law’s farm to help them cope with their daughter’s accident, but he doesn’t always give us these conflicts in the expected ways.
Pearl Diver is a difficult movie to get into because it’s hard to adjust to the slow pace King has used — he obviously wanted to draw us in to the slower, more stately, less immediately exciting rhythms of life in an agrarian community — but once you make that adjustment it’s an incredible movie, vividly acted and well structured. There are periodic flashback sequences showing the mother’s murder — or rather dribs and drabs of it — including the horrifying fate that befell one of the crooks even as the other was arrested, tried and convicted of the crime — and he’s now fatally ill in prison, and on his last parole hearing Marian testifies before the parole board that she favors giving him a compassionate release so he can die in the presence of his family, while Hannah writes them a letter telling them she opposes his parole. There are other characters, including the patriarchal widower Isaac Epp (Yevgeni Lazarev), a Russian refugee (and obviously King cast a real Russian in this role because he wanted the character’s thickly accented English to be real) and his son Ryan (Christopher Collard), a cute young musical prodigy who himself is torn between pursuing a big-city career and staying on the farm and helping dad bring in the crop. Ryan and Hannah drift into a sort of romance but one that is discreet and doesn’t come anywhere near consummation (a refreshing change from the ease with which people tumble into bed with each other in so many modern movies!).
The who-stays, who-goes issues aren’t resolved anywhere near the way you think they’re going to, and while the ending is a bit sticky and depends on a deus ex machina device — Hannah has written a book about her mother’s murder; Marian is horrified and insists that it not be published; Hannah gives it to Isaac to read and it jogs his memory of the motive for the murder, and in the end … well, let’s just say that something happens that takes care of the cost of the super-operation Rebecca needs and Hannah yields to her sister’s wishes and destroys her manuscript (which she wrote on a 1930’s-style large typewriter — she refuses to use a computer, one telling detail about her King uses to indicate that she hasn’t forsaken the traditional ways of her upbringing as much as she likes to think she has) — though this is something of a cheat since there appears to be another copy that her literary agent has read (and told her will be a best-seller that will make her reputation when it’s published) — but the clunkiness and coincidence-drivenness of the ending do little to mar a quite beautiful, moving film which was quite obviously of great personal importance to King (there are a number of Kings, Eberlys and Millers credited with technical tasks in the final roll) and which he makes brilliantly and vividly come alive for us as well.
Charles and I had made up our mind to go to the library movie — for the last time for a while since the organ concerts on Monday nights start next week — and the film turned out to be unexpectedly good: Pearl Diver, a remarkable indie (made in 2004 but not released until three years later) by writer-director Sidney King, who apparently actually grew up in the Mennonite community near Goshen, Indiana where the film takes place and drew on his personal experiences for his story. The film basically deals with the prickly relationship between two sisters, Hannah Eberly (Joey Honsa), who left the Mennonite community, settled in a large city and tried to make it as a writer (she’s had one book published, Fidel: Then and Now — a surprising choice for a subject because otherwise she doesn’t seem particularly political at all); and Marian Eberly Miller (Amy Jean Johnson), who stayed behind, married fellow Mennonite John Miller (Brian Boland) and had a daughter by him, Rebecca (Maddie Abshire, who looks about eight even though we’re told the character is six).
The film is centered around the two tragedies that seem to enclose Hannah and Marian like pincers: the violent death of their mother in an In Cold Blood-style home-invasion robbery years earlier and a recent accident involving Rebecca, whose head was crushed in when her father accidentally ran her down in his tractor when she’d gone out into the fields to bring him his lunch. Rebecca survives but her only chance of full recovery is an experimental operation her family’s health insurer won’t pay for (another one of these stories turning on the damnable fact that this country is too pig-headed, elitist or in love with its myths of “self-reliance” and the “free market” to make health care a taxpayer-funded human right the way every other affluent, developed nation has!). King sets up the expected conflicts between the tradition of the Mennonites (who are not as dementedly anti-progress as the Amish: there are scenes of them traveling in horse-drawn carriages and their women wearing long dresses and head scarves, but as the presence of a tractor on the Miller farm and a telephone in their home indicate, they’re not opposed to all manifestations of modern technology) and the city life Hannah led before she returned to her sister’s and brother-in-law’s farm to help them cope with their daughter’s accident, but he doesn’t always give us these conflicts in the expected ways.
Pearl Diver is a difficult movie to get into because it’s hard to adjust to the slow pace King has used — he obviously wanted to draw us in to the slower, more stately, less immediately exciting rhythms of life in an agrarian community — but once you make that adjustment it’s an incredible movie, vividly acted and well structured. There are periodic flashback sequences showing the mother’s murder — or rather dribs and drabs of it — including the horrifying fate that befell one of the crooks even as the other was arrested, tried and convicted of the crime — and he’s now fatally ill in prison, and on his last parole hearing Marian testifies before the parole board that she favors giving him a compassionate release so he can die in the presence of his family, while Hannah writes them a letter telling them she opposes his parole. There are other characters, including the patriarchal widower Isaac Epp (Yevgeni Lazarev), a Russian refugee (and obviously King cast a real Russian in this role because he wanted the character’s thickly accented English to be real) and his son Ryan (Christopher Collard), a cute young musical prodigy who himself is torn between pursuing a big-city career and staying on the farm and helping dad bring in the crop. Ryan and Hannah drift into a sort of romance but one that is discreet and doesn’t come anywhere near consummation (a refreshing change from the ease with which people tumble into bed with each other in so many modern movies!).
The who-stays, who-goes issues aren’t resolved anywhere near the way you think they’re going to, and while the ending is a bit sticky and depends on a deus ex machina device — Hannah has written a book about her mother’s murder; Marian is horrified and insists that it not be published; Hannah gives it to Isaac to read and it jogs his memory of the motive for the murder, and in the end … well, let’s just say that something happens that takes care of the cost of the super-operation Rebecca needs and Hannah yields to her sister’s wishes and destroys her manuscript (which she wrote on a 1930’s-style large typewriter — she refuses to use a computer, one telling detail about her King uses to indicate that she hasn’t forsaken the traditional ways of her upbringing as much as she likes to think she has) — though this is something of a cheat since there appears to be another copy that her literary agent has read (and told her will be a best-seller that will make her reputation when it’s published) — but the clunkiness and coincidence-drivenness of the ending do little to mar a quite beautiful, moving film which was quite obviously of great personal importance to King (there are a number of Kings, Eberlys and Millers credited with technical tasks in the final roll) and which he makes brilliantly and vividly come alive for us as well.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
The Good Girl (Flan de Coco Films/Fox Searchlight, 2002)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched one of the best modern movies I’ve seen in some time — and it was from a surprising source; although it was a theatrical feature produced by something called Flan de Coco Films (a studio named after a dessert?) and released by Fox Searchlight, I recorded it early in the day from Lifetime and watched it later. It was a 2002 film called The Good Girl, a romantic triangle (sort of) evoking memories of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Shaw’s Candida as well as a more recent literary work specifically referenced in the film, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. It’s set in a small town in Texas, where heroine Justine Last (Jennifer Anniston) works at a ghastly discount store with the equally ghastly name “Retail Rodeo.” She’s married to a house painter, Phil Last (John C. Reilly), who’d rather spend time with his friend and working partner Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson) drinking beer and smoking pot than with her. The conflicts in her marriage are neatly symbolized by writer Mike White in the opening scene, in which Phil and Bubba return from a job and park their paint-covered asses right on her couch, and she tears into them about how hard it’s going to be to clean it afterwards.
The 30-year-old Justine is upset that she hasn’t yet had a child, and she’s beginning to suspect that her husband has smoked so much marijuana it’s de-potentized his sperm (and from what we see of them in bed — with her crunched over in a corner, pulling the covers around herself as if they could protect her from him, it doesn’t seem like they often get to complete the sex act anyway). On the job she’s taken with a 23-year-old (at least that’s the age he gives her; he’s really even younger than that!) stock boy named Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal) — well, actually the name his parents gave him was “Tom” (“my slave name,” he calls it) but he’s re-christened himself after Holden Caulfield because The Catcher in the Rye is his all-time favorite book. Justine is drawn to Holden because he seems romantically innocent; Holden is drawn to Justine because she’s the first woman who’s ever looked at him as if she might be interested, and despite her protestations (“I’m married,” she keeps saying, as if that should be the end of it — and he, all full of alienated emotions and adolescent hormones, keeps saying, “So?”), eventually she takes him to a sleazy motel and they get it on — and on the days when they can’t wait to go to the motel they have quickies in the storeroom at the Retail Rodeo.
The Good Girl is a marvelous movie because writer White and director Miguel Arteta fill it full of quirks, but the quirky parts of the story add to the characters and make us feel for them instead of alienating us and leaving us with the feeling we get in so many modern movies that we’re watching lab rats instead of real people. Justine’s boisterous but lovable co-worker Gwen Jackson (Deborah Rush) gets violently ill from an infection and dies a singularly terrifying and pointless death within days — and Justine is too busy fucking Holden to be there to support Gwen during her last days (though Gwen’s illness gives her an all too believable excuse to field Phil’s inevitable where-were-you? questions when she comes home late), Justine benefits in that she’s promoted to manager of Retail Rodeo’s cosmetics department — Gwen’s old job — but that also leaves her less time for her clandestine rendevouses with Holden. The two lovebirds are caught at the motel by Bubba, who threatens to tell Phil and gives a long, self-pitying speech about how he used to idealize the marriage of Phil and Justine and lament that he could never find a woman as loyal to him as she’s been to Phil, and now that he’s found out she’s an adultress he feels liberated from his idolatry and free to express his own desire for Justine — which he expresses as immediate blackmail: have sex with me or I tell Phil.
She does so — and Holden spies on her from the window (this film is full of people looking over each other’s shoulders and trying to find out each other’s business — it’s a staple cliché of movies set in small towns but it’s rarely pursued with the relentlessness of this) and is immediately disillusioned and calls her a whore. Justine buys Holden a box of blackberries from a street vendor, intending to get rid of him by poisoning him — she’s convinced, rightly or wrongly, that Gwen died from eating a batch of toxic blackberries from the same vendor — only she thinks better of it and knocks them out of his hand just as he’s begun to enjoy them. Holden demands that she run away with him immediately and, when she makes the obvious practical objections about how they can possibly support themselves on the run, he steals $15,000 from the Retail Rodeo’s safe — leaving his key in the lock to the storeroom where the safe was kept — and announces that he’s going to be at the motel until noon and expects Justine to meet him there. Instead she does virtually the first sensible thing she’s done all movie and reports him to the police — and then the film cuts to a TV newscast announcing the result: the police came and surrounded the motel, they heard one shot, they stormed the room and then found that Holden had used his gun on himself, a twist “planted” for us when aspiring writer Holden had earlier given Justine two of his stories, and both were about people like him who killed themselves. (Earlier Holden had expressed his life’s dream to Justine: to write a handful of best-selling novels expressing his own alienation and angst and then, like his idol J. D. Salinger, to disappear.)
The film is full of little quirks — like the Bible study class Justine is invited to by the store’s security guard, Corny (Mike White); she drags Paul to it but flees after she sees Holden on his way there with another woman on his arm — and it later develops that Corny had wired the storeroom with security cameras and was getting his own lubricious thrills from watching Holden and Justine have at each other on his security tapes. (This is one of those films that takes a decidedly cynical attitude towards monogamy and humans’ ability to achieve it; just about everyone in it has some sort of sexual twist.) In the end Justine gets pregnant even though Paul learns that his sperm is infertile — so it’s either Holden’s baby or Bubba’s — and Justine gets off the hook by lying that Corny was her affair partner (whereupon Paul and Bubba beat him up) — and we’re left with the impression that Paul and Justine are heading for an uncertain future in which she’s going to have another man’s baby and raise it as theirs, and we’re left there wondering what it’s going to be like if Holden’s decidedly twisted genes (we’ve seen his parents and, in their own ways, they’re as demented as he is) get passed on to a future generation.
The Good Girl is a lovely film of details, and yet the script is well constructed enough that the details reinforce each other and help us understand who these people are and why they behave as they do; it’s also intimately and quietly directed (which made it seem especially odd to appear alongside the melodramatic excesses of the TV-movies Lifetime usually shows) and it wears its literary allusions lightly but gains by them. The Catcher in the Rye is the source that’s directly mentioned but Holden’s last name, “Worther,” ties it in to an even older classic about alienated youth: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which found a mass audience among alienated young people in the 19th century much like the one Salinger’s novel found in the 20th. Indeed, the plot of The Good Girl is an almost direct modern-dress reworking of The Sorrows of Young Werther, which is also about a young man with aspirations to be a writer who falls for an older, married woman, gets rejected by her and ends up committing suicide (and the book became controversial in its time because apparently a lot of real-life young men identified so completely with its depiction of adolescent despair that they killed themselves for real the way Werther had in the book).
The Good Girl is also superbly cast, with Jennifer Aniston superb in the lead (director Arteta reportedly had her wear arm weights during rehearsals so she would develop the hang-dog posture he wanted the character to have) and Jake Gyllenhaal not only younger but surprisingly heftier than we’ve become used to seeing him since — and, ironically, though he’s playing a straight boy he acts more queeny in this film than he did in his openly Gay (or at least Bi) role in Brokeback Mountain three years later. It’s a film that keeps us off balance as to how we’re supposed to feel about the characters — at first Holden sweeps us off our feet the way he did with Justine, seeming irrepressibly charming and romantic, like a giant puppy-dog in need of love — and only later are we, like Justine, so worn down with his insecurity and neediness that she literally contemplates killing him just to be rid of him (and the voice-over narration in which Justine announces that for the sake of her own reclamation she has to get rid of him strikes us in its bitter coldness and jolts us into a new awareness of the dark side of a character we’ve previously been told we should like). Though it wasn’t made for TV and didn’t come from one of Lifetime’s usual sources — and it was an odd fit with the crime/disease/romance/haunting of the week formulae usual for this channel — it was still a breath of fresh air and a welcome film to get acquainted with, especially under the auspices of a network that specializes in domestic melodramas instead of delicate, sophisticated, haunting films like this one.
Last night I watched one of the best modern movies I’ve seen in some time — and it was from a surprising source; although it was a theatrical feature produced by something called Flan de Coco Films (a studio named after a dessert?) and released by Fox Searchlight, I recorded it early in the day from Lifetime and watched it later. It was a 2002 film called The Good Girl, a romantic triangle (sort of) evoking memories of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Shaw’s Candida as well as a more recent literary work specifically referenced in the film, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. It’s set in a small town in Texas, where heroine Justine Last (Jennifer Anniston) works at a ghastly discount store with the equally ghastly name “Retail Rodeo.” She’s married to a house painter, Phil Last (John C. Reilly), who’d rather spend time with his friend and working partner Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson) drinking beer and smoking pot than with her. The conflicts in her marriage are neatly symbolized by writer Mike White in the opening scene, in which Phil and Bubba return from a job and park their paint-covered asses right on her couch, and she tears into them about how hard it’s going to be to clean it afterwards.
The 30-year-old Justine is upset that she hasn’t yet had a child, and she’s beginning to suspect that her husband has smoked so much marijuana it’s de-potentized his sperm (and from what we see of them in bed — with her crunched over in a corner, pulling the covers around herself as if they could protect her from him, it doesn’t seem like they often get to complete the sex act anyway). On the job she’s taken with a 23-year-old (at least that’s the age he gives her; he’s really even younger than that!) stock boy named Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal) — well, actually the name his parents gave him was “Tom” (“my slave name,” he calls it) but he’s re-christened himself after Holden Caulfield because The Catcher in the Rye is his all-time favorite book. Justine is drawn to Holden because he seems romantically innocent; Holden is drawn to Justine because she’s the first woman who’s ever looked at him as if she might be interested, and despite her protestations (“I’m married,” she keeps saying, as if that should be the end of it — and he, all full of alienated emotions and adolescent hormones, keeps saying, “So?”), eventually she takes him to a sleazy motel and they get it on — and on the days when they can’t wait to go to the motel they have quickies in the storeroom at the Retail Rodeo.
The Good Girl is a marvelous movie because writer White and director Miguel Arteta fill it full of quirks, but the quirky parts of the story add to the characters and make us feel for them instead of alienating us and leaving us with the feeling we get in so many modern movies that we’re watching lab rats instead of real people. Justine’s boisterous but lovable co-worker Gwen Jackson (Deborah Rush) gets violently ill from an infection and dies a singularly terrifying and pointless death within days — and Justine is too busy fucking Holden to be there to support Gwen during her last days (though Gwen’s illness gives her an all too believable excuse to field Phil’s inevitable where-were-you? questions when she comes home late), Justine benefits in that she’s promoted to manager of Retail Rodeo’s cosmetics department — Gwen’s old job — but that also leaves her less time for her clandestine rendevouses with Holden. The two lovebirds are caught at the motel by Bubba, who threatens to tell Phil and gives a long, self-pitying speech about how he used to idealize the marriage of Phil and Justine and lament that he could never find a woman as loyal to him as she’s been to Phil, and now that he’s found out she’s an adultress he feels liberated from his idolatry and free to express his own desire for Justine — which he expresses as immediate blackmail: have sex with me or I tell Phil.
She does so — and Holden spies on her from the window (this film is full of people looking over each other’s shoulders and trying to find out each other’s business — it’s a staple cliché of movies set in small towns but it’s rarely pursued with the relentlessness of this) and is immediately disillusioned and calls her a whore. Justine buys Holden a box of blackberries from a street vendor, intending to get rid of him by poisoning him — she’s convinced, rightly or wrongly, that Gwen died from eating a batch of toxic blackberries from the same vendor — only she thinks better of it and knocks them out of his hand just as he’s begun to enjoy them. Holden demands that she run away with him immediately and, when she makes the obvious practical objections about how they can possibly support themselves on the run, he steals $15,000 from the Retail Rodeo’s safe — leaving his key in the lock to the storeroom where the safe was kept — and announces that he’s going to be at the motel until noon and expects Justine to meet him there. Instead she does virtually the first sensible thing she’s done all movie and reports him to the police — and then the film cuts to a TV newscast announcing the result: the police came and surrounded the motel, they heard one shot, they stormed the room and then found that Holden had used his gun on himself, a twist “planted” for us when aspiring writer Holden had earlier given Justine two of his stories, and both were about people like him who killed themselves. (Earlier Holden had expressed his life’s dream to Justine: to write a handful of best-selling novels expressing his own alienation and angst and then, like his idol J. D. Salinger, to disappear.)
The film is full of little quirks — like the Bible study class Justine is invited to by the store’s security guard, Corny (Mike White); she drags Paul to it but flees after she sees Holden on his way there with another woman on his arm — and it later develops that Corny had wired the storeroom with security cameras and was getting his own lubricious thrills from watching Holden and Justine have at each other on his security tapes. (This is one of those films that takes a decidedly cynical attitude towards monogamy and humans’ ability to achieve it; just about everyone in it has some sort of sexual twist.) In the end Justine gets pregnant even though Paul learns that his sperm is infertile — so it’s either Holden’s baby or Bubba’s — and Justine gets off the hook by lying that Corny was her affair partner (whereupon Paul and Bubba beat him up) — and we’re left with the impression that Paul and Justine are heading for an uncertain future in which she’s going to have another man’s baby and raise it as theirs, and we’re left there wondering what it’s going to be like if Holden’s decidedly twisted genes (we’ve seen his parents and, in their own ways, they’re as demented as he is) get passed on to a future generation.
The Good Girl is a lovely film of details, and yet the script is well constructed enough that the details reinforce each other and help us understand who these people are and why they behave as they do; it’s also intimately and quietly directed (which made it seem especially odd to appear alongside the melodramatic excesses of the TV-movies Lifetime usually shows) and it wears its literary allusions lightly but gains by them. The Catcher in the Rye is the source that’s directly mentioned but Holden’s last name, “Worther,” ties it in to an even older classic about alienated youth: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which found a mass audience among alienated young people in the 19th century much like the one Salinger’s novel found in the 20th. Indeed, the plot of The Good Girl is an almost direct modern-dress reworking of The Sorrows of Young Werther, which is also about a young man with aspirations to be a writer who falls for an older, married woman, gets rejected by her and ends up committing suicide (and the book became controversial in its time because apparently a lot of real-life young men identified so completely with its depiction of adolescent despair that they killed themselves for real the way Werther had in the book).
The Good Girl is also superbly cast, with Jennifer Aniston superb in the lead (director Arteta reportedly had her wear arm weights during rehearsals so she would develop the hang-dog posture he wanted the character to have) and Jake Gyllenhaal not only younger but surprisingly heftier than we’ve become used to seeing him since — and, ironically, though he’s playing a straight boy he acts more queeny in this film than he did in his openly Gay (or at least Bi) role in Brokeback Mountain three years later. It’s a film that keeps us off balance as to how we’re supposed to feel about the characters — at first Holden sweeps us off our feet the way he did with Justine, seeming irrepressibly charming and romantic, like a giant puppy-dog in need of love — and only later are we, like Justine, so worn down with his insecurity and neediness that she literally contemplates killing him just to be rid of him (and the voice-over narration in which Justine announces that for the sake of her own reclamation she has to get rid of him strikes us in its bitter coldness and jolts us into a new awareness of the dark side of a character we’ve previously been told we should like). Though it wasn’t made for TV and didn’t come from one of Lifetime’s usual sources — and it was an odd fit with the crime/disease/romance/haunting of the week formulae usual for this channel — it was still a breath of fresh air and a welcome film to get acquainted with, especially under the auspices of a network that specializes in domestic melodramas instead of delicate, sophisticated, haunting films like this one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)