Saturday, May 13, 2017

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

Don’t let the New York setting and largely American cast throw you off. This is another brilliant examination of Israeli social and political issues by the American-born Israeli director Joseph Cedar. It’s perhaps his funniest but still as insightful and heartfelt as his others, from Time of Favour (2000) through Footnote (2011).
      Of course, the issues at play in this Israel ramify to cover other nations, other cultures, indeed humanity in general. As the Knesset scenes define Israeli politics the US scenes address the American diaspora, largely represented as the right-wing AIPAC. 
Two phrases define the film’s central themes. One is the pledge for peace Israeli Prime Minister Eshel gives the US ambassador: “The opposite of compromise is not integrity. The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death.” The idealistic Eshel embodies the Israel that has offered compromises for peace, striving to sustain justice and humanity — as witnessed in his phone-call to apologize to Norman, his “friend” about to be thrown under the bus in the interests of keeping the peace-making PM in office. 
The second is “tzedokah” — the term that dominates the Hebrew liturgy we hear first in the choir’s rehearsal, to which besieged hero Norman retreats to find peace, and finally in the full synagogue performance. The word means “charity,” the ultimate value in Judaism. The prayer is the Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing. This film is pitched as a prayer for healing in Israel and in the world. Norman proves the however unlikely figure of “the blessed” (what the prayer’s title means).
This despite his early appearance as a pathetic and suspect hustler, a mix of the political fixer or influence peddler and the Woody Allen loser, or nebbish. The “Norman” stamps him a normal guy, an Everyman, and the surname Oppenheim an ironic reminder of the wealth and power he doesn’t have. Try as he may he will never become the “macher” or big wheel he pretends to be.
At first the hustler aggressively tries to “help” business and political figures by putting them together for possible profit, his but mainly theirs. We don't hear him setting his fee. He’s living off a modest inheritance from his mother (coincidentally his channel to official Judaism too) but his eagerness to help others is tinged by his own need to make a living. The thousand-dollar pair of shoes he buys the down-at-luck Israeli minister becomes “the best investment [he] ever made” when that Eshel becomes PM. 
Eventually Norman’s vanity endangers that supposed friend’s career. Norman’s bragging to the woman from the Israeli justice department leads to a ridiculous investigation that threatens to bring down the PM. Of course, like several predecessors PM Netanyahu is currently under investigation for allegedly having accepted gifts or bribes from US businessmen. But Eshel is the ideal not Netanyahu. In Norman’s case the alleged corruption is insignificant, especially in the context of its possibly exploding the current peace effort. 
Norman rises from nebbish to tragic hero by transcending the charity of commercial helping and by sacrificing his life for the greater good. He not only saves his friend’s government and thus the peace process, he manages a traditional Jewish wedding for his nephew and his unconverted Korean wife, e gets the PM's underperforming son into Harvard, he helps a businessman make a  financial killing and — through that — raises the $14,000,000 needed to save his synagogue from destruction. All those good deeds come about through Norman’s compromise, which circumvents any possible complaints about “integrity.” What counts is humanity in all its diverse character and needs. 
At the same time as he is a realistic contemporary American figure — of the Sammy Glick and Daddy Kravitz persuasion — Norman is also The Wandering Jew. He has no family, no home, no definable background — and the nomad constantly wears his one camel-hair coat. 
Norman is only one example of that mythic type. In Srul Katz he meets his doppelganger -- same pestering desire to “help,” same card offering personalized “Strategies,” same disturbing ubiquity. Katz is a seedier, possibly earlier version of Norman, so he may or may not rise to Norman’s heroic resolution. In his doing good and the humiliations he suffers for that, Norman is a minor key Jesus and Katz a minor key Norman.
Heroism? Norman manages a particularly Jewish kind of heroic sacrifice. Ever hear of “suicide by peanuts”? The Lord moves in mysterious ways -- and through unlikely agents -- Her wonders to perform. 
      Norman has to be an unimpressive figure because it is a fantasy to assume any one person can resolve an issue as complicated as peace in the Middle East. In that tinderbox, when the opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death, it takes extended compromise on both sides for peace. But the film remains rooted in fantasy in one other key element: it shows no Palestinian characters. Admitting the reality of the Arabs' 100-year resolve to eradicate the Jews would explode any fantasy of peace. It takes two to untangle.   
The film drives on two kinds of music, the cheery folk melodies of daily Yiddish life and the sombre ageless antiquity of the Hebrew prayer. That balance characterizes Israel, the eternal Jewish state whose legitimacy — however questioned these days — rests on formal edicts from the League of Nations and the UN as well as on Biblical history. In Israel everything smacks of both the fluid present and the echoing historic past. 
     So this individual fixer is also the mythic Wandering Jew. When Eshel recognizes and embraces him in public, Norman moves through a setting of frozen postures as if he were living in a separate time frame. So too the doubled reality in the scenes where characters from disparate settings appear in the same shot. The here and now in Israel is always the there and then as well. The moment is the eternal. The formal division of the plot into theatrical acts confirms the sense of a life lived both as an immediate flow and as part of a larger structure.
     

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

The Dinner

This film doesn’t end. It just stops. As if in mid-sentence. It’s like the abrupt end to The Sopranos, rejecting the reactionary and inane wrap-up to Breaking Bad
The open end is necessary because the moral, social and psychological issues the film sets in motion are too complex and too shifting to settle into any easy resolution. The closest we get to a conclusion is the closing song: “Don’t let the fuckers get you down.” Even that is ambiguous.
Richard Gere gets top billing as Stan Lohman, the congressman about to be elected governor. But his psychologically damaged younger brother Paul (Steve Coogan) has arguably the more central role and conveys the key line: “We make war for love.” 
As a high school history teacher Paul teaches Gettysburg, the beginning of the end — (i) of the civil war, and (ii) of a society securely rooted in values and moral certainty. Of course the Civil War was fought for economics as much as anything else. But the soldiers thought they were fighting for conflicting loves: the mythologized glory of the Old South vs the valiant ideal of egalitarian freedom.
Paul is a savage, it turns out, as we see in his two classrooms rants where his rage and cynicism overrun any academic decorum. As he early tells us, he prefers the heroic days of ancient Greece and Rome, the pagan energies, over the Dark Ages and ensuing silly niceties of modern times. 
That’s why the two brothers and their families take this slugfest to the ultra-expensive chichi restaurant. The setting makes this another exploration of Civilization and its Discontents. As the two couples debate how to treat their sons’ savagery the maitre d’ recites the pedigree of each ingredient. This is an extensio ad absurdum of the refinements of civilization and the rewards of its privileged. 
Paul is uncomfortable there, in part because he can't afford it, he doesn’t understand it, and he feels as  excluded from this ritual as he felt from his mother’s preference for Stan. If he seems sensible in disdaining the manners and the preciousness, he’s ultimately just destructive and rude. 
Stan is easy in that precious milieu, gliding through the crowd of Washington Insiders. His slickness tempts us to dismiss him. But when he decides to abandon his career and bring his son to justice Stan represents civilization at its moral best. 
The brothers’ different responses to the dinner cohere with their different responses to their sons’ brutal and mindless murder of a homeless black woman, burning her alive in an ATM booth. To our surprise, the slick politico wants his son to face judgment. The total strategist suddenly places morality and principle above expediency. In contrast, his more cynical — and less capable of action — brother decides to preserve the sons’ secret by setting out to kill Stan’s adopted black son, Beau, who has decided to turn in the two boys. 
Both mothers fiercely try to protect the boys against Stan’s eruption of morality. Claire (Laura Linley) tries to settle the matter without involving hubby Paul, arranging to pay off Beau for his silence. When he changes his mind, she orders Paul to “look after Beau” — a demand about as motherly as Lady Macbeth. 
Stan’s wife Katelyn shares Claire’s commitment to save the boys, even though they’re only her step-sons. Hungry to save their sons the mothers demonize and wholly misrepresent their innocent victim. Despite this difference, both woman are the supportive roots of their husband’s lives. The fierceness of maternal love bonds the women in contrast to their husbands’ antagonism. 
  Here the film seems most reflective of Trump’s America. In the mothers insistence upon protecting their own family interests above all law and morality, they are Republicans at their most acceptable. Paul slips into their position, off his meds, too weak and confused to resist. But the moral hero is the politician Stan, who places conscience and justice ahead of his own and his family’s interests. That’s the liberal politician, an endangered species in Trump’s America. 
Hence Stan’s campaign for a bill to grant the mentally afflicted the same health coverage as the physically ill get. This echo of Obamacare — and slap at Trumpcare — also reflects on how Stan grew out of his own mother’s madness, which persists in Paul. The figure we initially  reject — the slick Stan, Washington Insider — turns out to hold the moral center. This film posits a liberal humanity against the Trump ethos.
But it’s not an easy choice. Which is the villain: the mother who will do anything to protect her son or the father who places justice and morality over this personal interests? The film ends before the three-day delay Stan grants his wife to try to change his mind. We don't know how that family’s drama will end. Nor should we, given the complexities of the drama at the family, national and archetypal levels. 
But if we’re responsible citizens we’ll try to figure out what we would do in that position. It’s not easy. 
Beau being black replays the Civil War issues in the present moment. The black and white societies remain locked in mutual suspicion and guilt. Paul read even the younger Beau as manipulative and subversive, playing “the race card” to his own advantage. At the tragic ATM scene Beau has the conscience to walk away — but the cunning and self-service whether to blackmail the others or to turn them in. The black boy is given no sentimental support here, played as a fat, awkward outsider ultimately serving only himself. The name Beau is ironic because it evokes the white gentlemen of Tara not their slaves. 
     The older Lohman brothers also carry resonant names. Like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, Stan and Paul are tragic heroes driven to destroy themselves for their contradictory senses of what will best serve their sons, their selves. In matching reversals, the successful doer (Stan) here prioritizes principle over politics and the more theory-bound brother, history teacher Paul, only becomes a man of action when he’s poised to kill Beau.  

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Weirdos

In 1976 Nova Scotia Canadians watch TV coverage of the US’s Bicentennial Celebrations. “It’s not you,” the Canadian teens are admonished by the Cambodian landlord whose back bears the scars of the Khmer Rouge oppression. The kids know nothing about that outside world. They’re confused enough about themselves and their puzzling physical and psychological changes. 
There’s something of a hollowness to that American flash of patriotism, however, even in the 1976 setting. All the Presidents Men, the Nixon exposure, is running in the Sydney movie house. Meanwhile, Antigonish gets Mother Jugs and Speed
But that’s not why Kit and his friend Alice fib to their respective parents and hitch-hike to Sydney. Kit wants to go live with his mother, mistaking her lunch invitation for an offer to move in. Alice wants to seduce him in hopes he won’t move away.  
Kit is abetted by the spirit of Andy Warhol, who embodies and endorses the weirdness that ennobles the human species. There are several “weirdos” here. A boy trying to seduce Kit backs away when Alice approaches; the boy calls Kit a weirdo. The high schoolers in the car and at the beach party play at being wild and weird. The old drunk who tries to steal the cop car is an unrepentant weirdo from earlier time, still crazy after all those years.
So are our heroes’ parents, all apparently old hippies. Alice’s father is a drunk who’s trying to inveigle himself back into her mother’s graces and bed. Kit’s dad Dave is a social studies teacher declared cool by the skylarking teens. But Kit overheard him refer to the French teacher as a “fag.” As he’s trying to come to terms with this own homosexuality, Kit decides to go live with his freer-spirited mother. 
When he finds her dissolved into looniness he has to call dad to come get him. Once Dave hears his son’s concern he apologizes for his insensitivity and by implication suggests a family life that will be as warm and cozy as those delicious views of Nova Scotia. The film closes on inter-generational comfort, Alice and Kit together as platonic friends and Dave and his mother dancing to Country & Western.     
The title refers equally to the adolescent issues of the teenagers and the scars still worn by the survivors of the freedoms of the ‘60s. The latter is a psychological contrast to the Cambodian’s physical marks. Here it’s not the sins but the spirit of freedom that passes from the parents to the children, the fertile weirdness of Warhol. It carries its own costs. 

A Quiet Passion

We know so little about poet Emily Dickenson and she is so renowned for her work that she’s like a blank glass on which we can project our own image. The latest imagination so to “read her” is British filmmaker Terence Davies. Not surprisingly, the sensitive gay British outsider finds a kindred spirit in the reclusive 19th Century New England outsider poet. Davies and Dickenson grew up in opposite situations but with the same predicaments. 
In Davies’ early films a sensitive young man struggles to survive in a brutishly abusive working class British family. His new work shifts to the American privileged class but again the central figure struggles to preserve her independence and quirkiness against an abrasive social order, specifically the regimen of a stultifying Christian faith and repressive patriarchy. 
  In the opening scene young Emily opts out of the school’s two narrow options: having found God already or intent upon seeking Him. The Her option is inconceivable. The headmistress condemns Emily’s independence of faith — or her faith in her own independence. 
Emily’s prominent father is independent enough to resist his visiting minister — “I come as myself!” — but forces Emily into more submission than she’s inclined. Dickenson pere is independent enough to make his children’s free-thinking plausible but still largely constrained by his own conventionality and the narrow thinking of his times. He rejects a gifted soprano’s self-display in recital. 
Mr Dickenson’s wilfulness proves problematic when he thwarts son Austin’s determination to join the Civil War. Out of selfish concern, he doesn’t want his son to die in war. Austin submits to his father’s will but is broken for it. He considers himself now compromised in integrity, honour and manliness. Though Austin survives the period of the war he settles into a sexless marriage and later a shameful adultery that alienates him from Emily. 
Davies provides an apparently unnecessary montage of war scenes and the horrendous body count for two effects. Along with the school scene and the scenes with visiting ministers the war characterizes the rigid ethos against which Emily’s humanity, intuition and sensitivity compel her to rebel. Emily cites the pointlessness of the war’s horrendous toll from a broader perspective than her father’s sole concern for his family.
As well, the father and brother speak of the war from selfish perspectives, respectively warding off and embracing the possibility of death in narrow terms. This contrasts to Emily’s philosophic conception of death as the governing shadow across our life and choices. Where everyone else thinks about their individual lives and how to bend themselves to conformity, Emily nourishes her individuality in order to live fully in the face of mortality. “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.” When she mourns her father’s death she wears white — antithetic to the conventional black — because her mourning has to be personal not prescribed.
With Emily Davies steps beyond his earlier lead characters’ flourishing into sensitive survivors. Emily’s courage, poetic nature and rigorous individuality turn against her when she isolates herself from the world and turns bitter judgmental recluse. 
As a girl Emily is influenced by her pretty, outspoken and individualistic girl-friend. But for all the friend’s sass and cynicism, she settles into normality, for better or worse, even marrying. No such compromise for our Emily. She eventually drives off a suitor by refusing to come downstairs to join him and by railing at him from above. Her motives are mixed, her own feeling that she is ugly and her uncompromising fear of moral compromise in manners and beliefs. 
We see two characters with whom Emily may have had romantic relationships — her potentially lesbian sister-in-law next door and the new young minister whose sermons plumb ecstasy and who himself loves Emily’s poetry. But the film gives no sense of Emily’s physical engagement with either, except for her grief when the minister moves away. Without even the Catholic woman’s outlet for passion in the nunnery, Emily is condemned by puritanism to purity. She has no physical release or expression, nothing like an orgasm, until her deathbed paroxysms which work like a bleak parody of her neglected sensual life. There she releases the energies she has laboured to repress.  
The other women embody the compromises Emily rejected. Her sister lives an obedient life, serving parents and siblings without — at least in the narrative — connecting beyond. Their mother seems to have lived a 50-year post-natal depression, silent and joyless. We don’t see Emily’s girlhood friend in her married life but we can assume she restrained her sass to sustain the marriage. Austin’s wife bears a child — to meet the contract, so to speak — but then retreats to a celibacy her husband will pop outside to relieve.     
In two parallel scenes of a salon musical recital, over the plush singing the camera pans across the salon walls and furnishings for an extended time, long enough for the music to grip us too. In the first, Emily is in the scene though sitting apart from the others, and she shivers at the experience of the song. In the second the music has brought her down from her upstairs retreat but she stays outside the room, behind the door. She closes it to return to her isolation. The music brings Emily out of herself briefly, into the outside world, but not enough to connect to other people.  
Not for Emily the community and shared comfort the art brings the others, however briefly. Bathetically, the accompanist in the second salon concert finds sexual harmony with Austin that she can’t with her syphilitic husband. Emily can’t accept that, though, for her principles extend so far as to poison her sense. To Cynthia Nixon’s credit, there are shots where Emily’s anger and bitterness make her look ugly. For the Belle of Amherst became something of a beast. That is what's so disquieting about her "quiet passion" for poetry. 
Nor does Emily’s own art save her. She lives and dies an unknown poet. Her sparse publications were under pseudonyms. Her considerable fame was exclusively posthumous. As she early explains her poetic impulse, “This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me.” But because she refused to accommodate her vision to any social community, she lost her relationships with even her few appreciative readers. 
      "Poems are my solace for the eternity which surrounds us all,” she wrote. But because her poetry did not establish her in her lifetime it provided insufficient solace. Within the narrative frame she dies imprisoned by her poetic discipline not released or fulfillled  by it. After one convulsion she facially resembles the woman who was everything Emily strived to avoid becoming — the animated young minister’s wife, steel-girdled into the model of Abstinence.  As Emily dreaded, she became what she rejected.  
Davies gives his Emily a harrowing, tormented death scene which in its extremity turns a New England housebound poet’s life into tragedy. People do die like that, you know, in real life if not in consoling films. 
In long shot — i.e., from where we sit now —this Davies hero is his most successful, a universally revered poet whose vision, discipline and deceptive simplicity of language haunt us still. But in close-up her genius curtailed her contentment because she found no way for it to enrich her day to day life. In that respect she was as diminished and abused by her times as Davies’ younger characters were by theirs. In a humane world, without the bigotry of the faithful, without the harsh restrictions of the patriarchal and conformist, Emily might have been able better to reconcile her independence with community and perhaps come to know the non-familial love.