Saturday, December 17, 2016

Nocturnal Animals

Three prominent works of art encapsulate the film’s major themes.

(1) Damien Hurst’s sculpture of a bull as Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows. Sebastian registers as tortured, martyred saintliness, which the bull here redefines as the masculine life force. 
As in his debut, A Single Man, writer/director Tom Ford examines the abuse of sensitivity in American men. Susan’s brother is disowned and banished from his family for being gay. Her mother dismisses the sensitive writer Edward as weak and unambitious. Susan has the courage to marry him anyway. But she weakens as her mother’s internalized blues take hold. When she “grows into” her mother’s bourgeois values Susan abandons art-making for art history and then running a commercial gallery. She leaves Edward in favour of slick, specious businessman Hutton who goes on to betray her. Hutton arranges her abortion of Edward’s child.  As Hutton seems successful but is warding off bankruptcy he personifies the fake status of his and her parents’ world.
Edward dedicates his novel to Susan and says she inspired it. The hero, which she visualizes as him, loses his wife and daughter to rape and murder when he lacks the brute force to oppose the three brutes.  Where in real life Edward watched Hutton drive Susan away after her abortion, in the  novel he watches his wife and daughter (who in Susan’s visualization resemble her and her daughter) driven away by the abductors. Edward lost Susan to her adoption of her mother’s values, i.e., to the shallow gloss of the stylish elitist life. In the novel he loses her to savages, evil night creatures, antithetical to the elegants but in effect equivalent. 

     (2) A Christopher Wool-like painting spells out three layered syllables of “Revenge.”  In the novel the hero avenges his wife and daughter by killing one of the assailants and identifying another for prosecution. He seems to kill himself in the process. As his character turns from civilized husband into illegal killer, he demonstrates the moral cost of abandoning the “weakness” of the civilized, honest citizen. So his novel is a form of revenge against Susan for having left him because of his softness. 
The novel’s power proves Susan was wrong to have lost faith in him as a writer. Her own dissatisfaction with her luxurious life (and husband) and her high-quality art gallery similarly proves she was wrong to have abandoned her initial calling, making art, which paralleled her leaving him. In her new life she can’t sleep because — despite her elegance, status, culture and material success — she is still the “nocturnal animal” Edward called her, a person of imagination and creativity. She can’t sleep because she denied both her own nature as an artist and her love for Edward. The film ends with her alone in the restaurant where she was to meet Edward. He’s standing her up, just when she seems set to take him back (witness her removal of her bright red lipstick and her plotted décolletage), is a second revenge. It’s not a vicious revenge, though, just a reminder of what he warned earlier. When you reject a true love  — or one’s essential self — it can’t simply be recovered. 
There’s yet another revenge here. As Edward’s novel avenges her abandoning him, Ford’s film takes a kind of revenge upon the society in which he has made his fame and fortune as a top-drawer fashion designer. Susan’s scene with her mother, the gallery scenes and her husband’s betrayal define Ford’s other, non-film professional world as shallow, materialistic, dishonest and vain. In fact, the scenes of Susan’s real life have such artificial performances and are so shot with the glossy colours and composition of  luxury product advertising, that her reality seems artificial. Her visualization of Edward’s novel, with its vulgarity, violence and vile characters, seems realistic. 

(3) John Currin’s painting of a large nude woman distorted by an oval lens is another version of the coarse fleshy life that elegant art tends to ignore. Hence — in shocking contrast — the very obese nudes dancing through the opening titles and on screens in Susan’s exhibition. That show combines the large screen images with the fleshy women themselves on platforms, either in person or in 3-D sculptures.The latter ambiguity parallels the film’s shift between Susan’s life scenes, now or in flashback, and her visualization of her ex-husband’s novel. Art and life continually collide and overlap, because art evades reality even as it confronts it. Hence the novel’s plot line which breaks away from Edward’s earlier writing about himself (Susan’s complaint) and yet works out a form of his self-realization and self-presentation. 

     The tension and confusion between art and life have often been treated in film, but rarely with such complexity and moral engagement. The gallery world is far from the novel’s vile hicks but it has a similar rapacity and abusive treatment of the vulnerable. The novel’s family is driving to the artists town of Marfa when they are run off the road and destroyed. 
     The three settings — the NYC college world, the LA gallery scene, the arid waste of West Texas — provide a geographical summary of America. In the current climate they are also a cross-section of Donald Trump’s support: Susan’s arch-Republican parents, the corrupt and corrupting wealth of the elitist gallery and fashion scene and the violent sexist and racist Texas villains. Tom Ford is one of the people making American film great again. 

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Manchester by the Sea

Two water scenes frame the narrative and establish the central character’s fall from grace and failure of redemption. The water scenes — like the title — are significant because they provide the serenity and beauty in counterpoise to the characters’ roiling emotions, anger and guilt. Manchester is the troubled human community that abuts the supportive sea. 
In the opening scene Lee, happy and carefree, frolics with his young nephew Patrick on brother Joe’s boat. In their play Lee teases Patrick that he, Lee, should be the person Patrick should choose as best able to help them survive on a desert isle — not the boy’s father. 
But the bulk of the film demonstrates the increasing gap between the competent Joe and the self destructive Lee. The film gradually reveals how the carefree Lee fell into the violent despair of his later life. Lee is broken when his drunken binge turns into the fire that kills his three children. He retreats into a life of menial chores and drunken, belligerent evenings. 
On Joe’s death, Lee struggles to escape his brother’s assignment to be Patrick’s guardian and trustee. Yet that first scene establishes the memories and the relationship that would make Patrick want Lee to be his guardian, regardless of his present state.
Handyman Lee can fix anything but himself. Although he recovers something of his earlier relationship with Patrick, Lee can’t bring himself to accept responsibility for him. “I can’t beat it,” he says, “I can’t beat it.” The “it” is his guilt and self-loathing that linger from his childrens’ death. 
Lee can’t accept his ex-wife’s impassioned forgiveness, precluding any chance of his  own peace and self-acceptance as well as hers. His violent outbursts against others hide/reveal his inability to forgive himself. When the police interview him about his children’s death, he is as much disappointed as surprised that they will not be punishing him. “You mean I can go?” “It’s no crime to forget to put back the fire screen.”
In the last shot Lee and Patrick sit on the pier fishing. They are together but apart — as they are in every one of their conversations when the language that should connect them separates them instead. Their elliptical conversations should be bridges but they only widen the gaping gap. At the end the men have a new camaraderie and closeness — but it is only partial and late. It rests upon Lee having finalized his detachment from Patrick and arranged for another couple to adopt thim. 
Young Patrick’s cheeky but fond insults contrast to Lee’s inability to express sentiments at all. Instead of openly admitting he’s rented a flat with an extra room for Patrick to visit, Lee says it’s to provide more room “for my shit.” To his ex-wife’s desperate apologies Lee can only hide behind a shell of stammering. Patrick shows more aplomb in handling the nervous chatter of his mother, when she briefly flirts with the notion of having him come live with her and her new Christian fiance (played by Lonergan’s standby for flawed righteousness, Matthew Broderick).     
The water scenes — set in summer flashbacks, against Lee’s winter present — emblematize the grace from which Lee falls and which his failure to forgive himself prevents recovering. A gull at the end of the credits suggests the soaring spirit that Lee has lost. As the most poignant loss is played against a powerful theme from Handel’s Messiah, the later Lee’s only joyful scene in the present plays against a song that merges romantic and spiritual love, “I’m Beginning to See the Light.” 
  As usual Lonergan assumes an emblematic cameo himself. In You Can Count on Me (2000) he played the minister who posits the film’s central theme: “Can you believe that your life is important?” That question hangs over Lee here as it did over James Franco’s earlier hero. Here Lonergan plays the passer-by who hears Lee swearing at Patrick. “Good parenting,” he snaps, provoking Lee’s profane response. As it happens, Lee could be Patrick’s effective father-substitute, if only he could reset his life with self-acceptance.  
  This is a very brave film. It takes courage to unfold at such a languorous pace, with such spare and pointed music, with dialogue that leaves so much unspoken and such nuanced performances. This year we’ve had few scenes as rich as Casey Affleck’s performance after Joe’s funeral, especially the compound inflections of his glance when he meets his ex-wife’s new man. Affleck deserves the Oscar hype. 
     So does Lonergan for daring to tell a story of contemporary guilt and shame where no character finds an easy redemption and the hero a bare gesture towards one. Occasionally fishing with your nephew is a far cry from assuming the responsibility he wants and needs you to.    

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

L'Avenir

The Donovan song’s tension between seeking an impossible purity and living a deep peace establishes the film’s central theme and heroine Isabel’s primary virtue. She lives a life of immediate, accepting presence. She is not tempted by shallow rewards or depressed by disappointments. She embodies the strength and resilience of the examined life. 
As the Rousseau quote declares, desire is the enemy of happiness. Our failed satisfactions are based upon the desire for something new, more, bigger, better, younger — which, once achieved, no longer satisfies. 
Isabel has lived through the political temptations of her own time, from her three-year flirtation with communism through the ’68 revolution. So she’s not tempted by the current students’ strike for pensions or her star ex-student Fabien’s anarchism. In contrast, her husband stays stuck in the attitudes he held at 18. His rigidity and insensitivity tyrannize his students.   
Isabel finds true value and fulfilment in teaching philosophy, training her high school students to think for themselves and taking an interest in their lives. She has a stoic, bemused response to her publishers’ initial insistence on jazzing up her textbooks, then suspending their publication altogether. Her integrity won’t allow her to abandon her values. She maintains her dignity and self-respect. 
Those values also sustain her when her husband leaves her for a younger woman. He is so weak he doesn't make his break until his daughter tells him he has to make his choice. As briskly as Isabel cuts loose from him she ends her loving connection to his family’s country home, where they vacationed every summer and where she planned and cultivated her garden. In all their scenes together she conducts herself with strength and an absolute rejection of self-pity. He lets his craving for the new destroy the quiet value of their love. 
This self-sufficiency supports her when she visits Fabien’s mountain retreat and when her fragile yet demanding mother dies. An encounter with an importunate stranger at a cinema shows her refusal to seek carnal reaffirmation. Her grandson’s birth shows her instead embracing the role of grandmother, fully and warmly. 
In the last scene Isabel hosts a Christmas dinner for her children. To let her daughter eat, Isabel goes to tend to the crying baby, stilling him with yet another song. With the family dinner framed out of the shot on the left and Isabel and the infant framed out on the right, the shot focuses on the shelves of books between them. 
The film is about the use of those books, i.e., the traditional function of philosophy  — detached from the fashions of the day in pedagogy or politics —  to address the one essential question: How should we live our life? 
Aptly, the last song is “Unchained Melody,” which turns an exultation of freedom into a love song. It balances independence and connection.The Schubert song and the Woody Guthrie ballad both provide imagery of transcending the mundane reality by discovering the ethereal around it, on the water, in the sky.  
The other characters live to pursue new pleasures, which inevitably fail to satisfy them. The husband’s new woman has left him alone for Christmas, apparently not yet ready to introduce him to her family. The buyer's remorse may be mutual. Fabien and his German friends debate the political uses of anonymity or the collective authorship (i.e., the death of the author or the personal, a recently fashionable fiction). Isabel's mother buys new clothes she can't pay for and doesn't need. Once a lovely model, she says she's been cast as a corpse in a new movie.
Isabel’s daughter has wanted a baby but at the tension between her parents dissolves into tears and needs to hold him again. As if he will give her the stability she lost through her father’s infidelity. The funeral priest similarly cites Isabel’s career as a philosophy teacher to have justified or fulfilled her mother’s life of pain, isolation and abandonment.  
And then there is Pandora. This is the obese, willful, all-black cat that Isabel inherits from her mother, is allergic to and impatient with, and finally leaves at Fabien’s retreat. Far from the traditional Pandora, who unleashed the world’s evil winds, this one is a minor key replay of Isabel’s themes. Pampered by Isabel’s mother, Pandora hides from whoever else enters her mistress’s flat. She’s heavy to carry, like the unwanted burdens we all have periodically thrust upon us. But like Isabel she has a feral intelligence and instinct. This house cat takes off into the forest but has the instincts to survive, to find her way home in the morning, and to bring her new mistress back a dead mouse. In her instinctual survival and her integrity the cat is another reflection of our wise, warm and worldly philosopher. 
     The film is titled L’Avenir, “the future.” Written and directed by a woman, it offers a real rarity: a heroine of intellect, will and strength. That heralds a refreshing new kind of superhero.