Monday, October 30, 2017

The Florida Project

The title “Florida Project” refers to (i) the projects type of crammed, seedy community these working and unemployed denizens are crammed into, and (ii) writer/director Sean Baker’s undertaking to record the life children and their single moms live in the American underbelly. 
This Florida digs beyond the fantasy of Disneyworld to the seediness of the cheap motel where the transient can afford to take temporary root. This is the world that the liberals disdain, Hillary’s “deplorables,” the people who see no other hope than voting for Trump. 
In an early scene a honeymooning couple find they’ve mistakenly booked into the cheap motel Magic Castle, not the nearby Disney luxurious fantasy. At the end little Moonee and Jansey run toward that Disney dreamworld, in futile attempt to escape their unaccommodating reality. Their mistake is the reverse of the first.
Tom Sawyer meets Thelma and Louise
The bulk of the film is the moving spectacle of Moonee and her friends bouncing through a life of simple adventures. Fueled on sugar, the kids are constantly running, dancing, jumping, doing everything especially the forbidden. “We’re not supposed to go into that room. Let’s go in anyway.” The blackout they cause the whole motel brightens their day, their unharnessed mustang spirit. 
When they burn down the vacated condo complex the blaze excites the kids and adults alike. But it forces a rift between the two kids’ mothers, Moonee’s Halley and the girlfriend who has been giving them free food from her diner. 
The motel moms provide a spectrum of responsibility. At one end is the African American grandmother raising her daughter’s child. She knows discipline should not be fun. Then there’s Scooty’s hard-working waitress mom who is close and generous towards Halley until she feels her son endangered by Halley’s negligence, then violence. These women don't want everything handed to them -- just the chance to make it on their own.  
At the other end, Halley is more immature than her six-year-old daughter. To earn money Halley lives on the fly, hawking cheap perfume, feeding off friends and fraud, finally turning to prostitution, which loses her first her best friend then Moonee. 
Apparently Moonee has not been going to school. She has to be told what “recess” is, because her life has been one long recess. So has Halley’s, which makes her eventual loss of her daughter inevitable. Tragic, but inevitable. 
The film’s themes and emotions are propelled by the children’s amazing performances, especially Brooklynn Prince as Moonee. In the concluding wallop Moonee runs to Jansey not to seek refuge from the social agency — which we first expect — but to say goodbye. She knows she has lost her freedom, her mother, her particular childhood. Despite her rebellion she's resigned to her change.
When the once goodie-goodie Jansey takes her hand and runs away with her, the kids make one last grab at the life they want to live. Like their mothers, they’ll have to lapse into the life to which their social and economic status restricts them. 
In the opening shot, the motel wall provides an abstract composition of pink and grey. The two squirming kids seated in front of it inject life into that abstraction, as the characters do to terms like “the projects” or “the deplorables.” 
Indeed the range of settings frustrates any attempt at generalization. The motel embodies the life Florida tourists ignore. The commercial landscapes are a surreal eruption of crazy buildings and garishness. 
Against those two forms of denaturedness, two scenes find Moonee freeing her imagination in escapes to nature. In one she sits in what she declares her “favourite tree”: it fell over but still carries on. That prefigures her own prelapsarian conclusion. Then she takes Jansey on “safari” — to a field of cows. The games and adventures Moonee keeps inventing are her spontaneous attempt to imagine a richer life than her situation provides. It’s a livelier alternative to her mother’s armour of tattoos.  
Presiding over this world is motel manager Bobby. Willem Dafoe is more familiar as an edgy, crazy character, which lends weight to the moral and character centre he plays here. His responsibility continually pitches him against Moonie’s mischief and Halley’s truancy. But he cares for them both. He achieves a modest heroism when he spots and assails a child molester, then when he drives off Halley’s threatening john. But when the social agency and police get involved, Bobby can only stand aside, sympathetic but helpless. 
Bobby tries to keep up the motel’s image. He repaints the walls and plans to fix the washers. He tries to enforce the laws. The owner instructs Bobby to have the tenants move their bikes off the front balcony. Clearly he wants to upscale the place — like the other motel Bobby tries to get Halley into. The wheels of the economy grind on. Soon even this Magic Castle will go upscale, casting out its desperate tenants and challenging them even more. 
     These are the characters America has left behind. To save America the Democrats have to understand and address them.

Friday, October 27, 2017

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

To qualify for Aristotle’s preferred “poetry” (i.e., fiction) a story has to resonate beyond the particulars of its one-time occurrence (“history”) and capture a universal truth.  A “history” details what happened to have happened once. The more significant “poetry” implicitly begins with “Once upon a time…,” which means both Never and Always. Poetry based on history will respect the historic particulars but serve a wider truth. Its aim is the dynamic that happens over and over — especially in the time the story is retold. A historic fiction is not just about Then but about Now. 
So which label gets Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
As a history the film provides several fascinating insights. Marston is an intriguing pioneer in the new discipline of psychology, particularly in his invention of the lie detector, his nonconformist lifestyle and his DISC personality theory. That divides human emotions into Domination, Inducement, Subservience and Compliance. The plot advances through those stages too, as announced on his blackboard. 
Marston’s story also provides insight into the creative process. A variety of elements from his psychological theory, his feminism, his political idealism and the strength he draws from his two lovers feed into his conception of the Wonder Woman comic series. For example, the constraints of his lie detector meld with his fascination with bondage to make her lariat the stinging instrument of truth. Living with two such self-sufficient women helps him imagine the Amazon’s independence and resourcefulness. His sense of the abuse of women seeps into her predicaments and torments. 
The narrative is structured as Marston’s defence of that comic against the puritanical assault on the adventurous new medium, for its allegedly pernicious effects upon the young. The critics are disturbed by the supposedly innocent medium’s complexity and disturbing depths. Here the film catches the emergence of an influential and ambitious new popular culture form and its persecution by censors and book-burners. To these reactionaries the comics and academia, cultures low and high, are equally dangerous and to be suppressed.
Marston’s wife Elizabeth embodies the emergence of women in academia. She has a doctorate from Radcliffe but can’t get its (Big Brother) institution Harvard to accept it as equivalent to theirs. Her analysis of the campus exchange between two young women and a man is an exciting flex of a perceptive mind. When Marston is fired from his university she helps finance the new family by working — as a typist. Her headstrong will and stevedore swearing make her the 20th Century New Woman, even if she sounds more representative of the tail-end of the century than its midriff. 
The beautiful Olive, who becomes both Marstons’ lover, begins as the typical student, open to seduction by her prof. (Those were the days.) She blossoms into the character strong enough to stand up for herself and even to initiate a lesbian relationship with the more experienced and very formidable Elizabeth. With a women’s rights advocate for a mother and the legendary Margaret Sanger for an aunt, Olive embodies the early force of feminism.  All that makes the film intriguing as a retelling of history. The anachronism of Elizabeth’s fluency of f-words may — rather than be a mistake in tone— lay the film’s claim to be happening beyond its characters’ time and place, to be poetry. So, too, the break from the linear timeline to the flashback structure. The story is told across and over time. And in the highly artificial scene of the lovers’ first sexual threesome, over the 1928 orgy we hear Nina Simone’s 1965 Feeling Good. The scene is happening then but also across time, i.e., now. 
There’s another, similar ripple in that scene. Against all practicality and probability, they “do it” in the vacant college auditorium, disporting themselves with theatrical costume and props. That’s unlikely to have been how it really “happened.” Likelier a discreet speed home and a more propulsive pace.
But it works as poetic metaphor. It suggests that the characters’ behaviour here was not instinctive but with some role-playing, self-conscious performance. All three were acting in an uncharacteristic way there because their instincts were tempered by their “masks” of nonconformist spirits. When they first manage a trois they are tentative, playing it as roles. Once they’re into it, living it, they make erotic use of role-playing and costumes. To the outside world they now play the role of a conventional domestic relationship. The implausible maskery in the first orgy is a metaphor for their psychological wariness at that time and their public concealment later. Marston explains that his Wonder Woman has to wear a mask and pretend to be a secretary in order to be able to live out the freedom of her more powerful nature.     
Whatever its fidelity to the Marston story, the film’s key themes are remarkably current today. Women continue to struggle for equality, professors for academic freedom, popular culture to be taken seriously and thought about as well as enjoyed. The neighbours’ vicious puritanism still reflects American opposition to same-sex marriage, indeed, to any unconventional lifestyle. We still struggle to determine who/what we are and how we can fulfill ourselves. One particular line catches the current liberal explanation for Trump: Elizabeth tells Olive "We were wrong to think ourselves superior to them." The Marston story introduces the liberal evolution that Trump has ended. This film is about Now as much as Then. Good.
     Then there’s that sting at the end, that reminds us our revolutions are never complete. When Olive and the Marstons finally admit their mutual love and need and stop complying with the oppressive norms, they reunite, forever. Even Marston’s death doesn’t separate lovers Olive and Elizabeth. But Olive sets two conditions for her return. She demands a new stove. And she wants weekends off from looking after their children so she can go to a salon or read a book, have time to herself. Even the arch feminist carries the traditional subdued woman’s role.  

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Lucky

Lucky moves — and moves us — on two levels, the personal and the thematic. 
Our visceral experience is of Harry Dean Stanton’s valedictory. He died shortly after completing this work. Across a career of (IMDB says:) 200 film/tv roles, he fashioned the persona of a stoic, weather-pounded and beaten survivor. He had — nope, has —  one of the most lived-in faces and starved bodies in American cinema. His role in Big Love was one of the few which let him wield power. But that role apart, moral authority he always had. 
So when Stanton at 91 plays the 90-year-old veteran living out his last solitary days in a desert town, Stanton is living out his last days too. He’s telling us he feels Lucky — lucky even to be living this reduced hard-scramble life, lucky to have stumbled into that long and rich career, lucky even to be moving towards his — our —unpromising end.  
The film’s major themes centre on two phrases. One is the definition of “realism” that Lucky seizes upon: It’s a “thing,” the ability to see things as they are and to learn to live with that. When he describes realism and then freedom as “a thing” he  blurs the line between the material and the abstract. There is no abstract beyond our physical existence.
As an atheist, Lucky has no afterlife to worry about, nor any judge to whom to hold himself ultimately accountable. He is free to do what he wants and to accept only what responsibility he chooses. He chooses when and when not to light up a cigarette in a no-smoking area. 
The second phrase is the fall that gives Lucky his first intimation of mortality. He literally falls. But in a broader sense, Lucky is postlapsarian man. Adam’s fall left mankind mortal and alienated. The harsh desert landscape here is relieved solely by the plush garden/oasis of Eve’s, the fancy dining spot from which chef Lucky was fired for lighting up in the kitchen. That’s weed as the Forbidden Fruit. 
Whenever Lucky passes that garden he spits the misogynous c-epithet at it. But not the last time. The last time he passes it without resenting his expulsion, his alienation. Perhaps that shows his response to some particular episodes of community. In his daily morning coffee shop, he chats with a fellow WW II vet. He also engages with an irritating insurance agent Lucky earlier challenged to a fight over this predatory job. 
Two key scenes involve his engagement with women. The black waitress drops by to check on him and they share a joint, then a hug. The corner store owner invites him to her five-year-old son’s fifth birthday party, where Lucky to everyone’s surprise breaks out in a warm, gravelly Spanish song. After these scenes, he doesn’t resent Eve’s any more, because his community on earth is the only Eden we can expect. That we need to enjoy. 
At first Harry lives days of unthinking ritual. He buys the daily quart of milk even though he still has two in the fridge — and little else. He mechanically lights up and tosses cigarettes because he has outlived their threat to his health. He swaps barbs with the coffee shop staff and regulars. He paces out the desert. 
The two scenes with the women restore his sense of genuine community, recover his awareness of the richness of life — even at this reduction, in the arid land and aging.  
So here is Lucky living out his last days, sharply attuned to seizing the present riches — such as they are — because there is no beyond to diminish them. If there is a faith to be had then it’s in what we find on earth, not in anything supposedly beyond. In two scenes he talks on his red phone to some man — whom, we never learn. That’s a parody of speaking to someone supposedly in the beyond, of uncertain existence. That’s where he learns his “realism” — from the implied absence at the other end of the line. 
Lucky here recovers his faith in the people around him, the friendly and accepting community. If there is any justice or reward it will have to be here on earth, nowhere else. That may dishearten the conventionally faithful but it should hearten the rest.
And once we accept the limits on our existence, the futility of our attempts to control what lies beyond us, once the only “things” we need are that “realism” and “freedom,” that’s when we can get the most out of life.  After all, once the other man gave up his hopes for finding his escaped tortoise, once he sat back and accepted his fate, that’s when the tortoise came back. That’s the “new deal” that President Roosevelt (that tortoise) here represents. 

Monday, October 23, 2017

Battle of the Sexes

  This replay of the 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King serves as an ode to the America Donald Trump is killing — and a prayer for its revival. 
The two leads’ intros are revealing. Billie Jean appears as a montage of action shots. Her vitality shows her as blur. Riggs paces alone in his high, empty office tower, an ex-champ now a supernumerary for his rich wife’s father. Riggs itches to do something, anything, to recover his lost glory, to reaffirm his superiority as a man. 
In his bragging, bluster, vanity, arrogance, misogyny, showmanship, moral emptiness and ultimate futility, Riggs is a Trump figure. To both, anyone afflicted with responsibility, modesty and humanity is a loser. Riggs hijacks a Gamblers Anonymous meeting to nourish their addiction, not to address it. His clowning barely conceals his lack of self-respect and moral core. 
Against Riggs’s transparent insecurity and empty macho strut, Billie Jean projects a confident, competent, spirited servant to the public good. She’s an icon of two revolutions in America, which Trump is in the process of reversing. There’s even a “Billie Jean for President” sign at the match, among the still-embarrassing reminders of Nixon.
Her revolt against the male-dominated tennis profession is an assertion of women’s right to equality, in treatment and in salary. 
Jack Kramer embodies the male assumption of superiority. The women’s purse should be one twelfth of the men’s even though the women’s games attract equal audiences. Kramer lives by that double standard, flattering women while suppressing them. 
Their egos clash when Billie Jean refuses to play the big match if Kramer is Riggs’s commentator on TV. Kramer claims she won’t have the nerve to abandon the match if he performs. She responds in kind: He won’t have the nerve to see it cancelled because of his refusal to step down. She wins that one, then — spoiler alert — the match.    
She wins with precisely the qualities Kramer says women lack: physical strength, the ability to perform under pressure, and control over her emotions. Her post-game private weeping shows she has the emotions that ennoble a woman — and the discipline to control them. She also has the stamina and rigour Riggs’s game has lost. 
Of course that calumny is what women continue to face in business, politics, academia, wherever the fraternity is too frightened to give women even a taste of the man’s traditional privilege and power. Remember Trump’s mock concern over Hillary’s stamina —then his collapse into a golf cart at his first summit meeting.  
In the second revolution, Billie Jean’s first lesbian affair emphasizes her iconic role in liberating sexual identity. As her gay designer consoles her, soon America will let people like them love whom they want to, how they want to. A postscript details her activism for LGBT rights and the close relationship she maintained with her ex-husband throughout her later gay relationship. His swagger dissolved, Riggs is bolstered by the return of his wife too. 
The designer’s optimism proved true — for a while, until Trump’s current betrayal of the women and LGBT that as candidate he pledged to support.
As Riggs is portrayed here, he has one appealing quality Trump lacks. Riggs acknowledges his needs. He knows he needs the thrill of gambling, assurance that he’s not just a kept man, his sons’ respect and his wife’s — well, at least her presence. Trump is too childish to have even that self-awareness. 
Howard Cosell is another welcome revival in his ABC TV coverage of the match. He too is a reminder of America’s lost glory, when the “mere” sports announcer could abet the social revolution Mohammad Ali embodied in choosing his own name and his own politics. Cosell’s liberalism in pro sports contrasts to Trump’s distortion of the NFL players’ kneeling to protest America’s continuing racism, misrepresenting it as a lack of patriotism.  
How will this film play? I think most viewers will enjoy the drama, the humour, the emotional engagement. 
But there will remain that radical division between the conflicting views of what exactly made America “great.” Billie Jean’s side will say America was great for promoting equality, liberty, opportunities for all, the right of everyone to realize what they individually are. From the women’s ambitions, independence, presumption, sexual freedom and equality of rights, the Trump side will recoil in fear and disgust. This vision of the States Formerly Known as United is how that 1973 mini-drama reflects and addresses America today.  

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Blade Runner 2049

In the first shot a closed eye opens, awakening. The second is of the humongous new mechanical civilization in space. The film’s central theme is of the awakening of humanity in a dehumanized world. 
There it has become impossible to distinguish between the genuine human and its replica. That confusion extends down to Deckard’s dog: “Is he real?” “I don’t know. Ask him.” 
     On a more emotional level, the hero’s spectral android girlfriend tells him she loves him: “You don’t have to say that.” “I know.” To protect him she has herself erased and eliminated. In her drama humanity ennobles even an android, making her human. This spectre has a higher sensitivity: “I always told you. You're special. Your history isn't over yet. There's still a page left.”
I won’t relate the new Blade Runner to the original for two principled reasons: (i) As an independent work, by a new writer and director, it deserves to be treated and read as an independent work, on its own terms. (ii) I haven’t seen the original since it first appeared and don’t remember a thing about it.
In any case, the new film draws on a wealth of pertinent archetypes. The villains’ quest to find and to kill the miraculous baby — and the slaves’ determination to protect the baby in hopes of a liberating revolution — revives a common saviour myth that includes Moses, Jesus, Spartacus, El Cid, etc. Later K learns what his opening target Sapper meant when he said “You’ve never seen a miracle.” Of course the masters always consider their slaves inhuman, subhuman, as the androids represent here.
Hence the history behind the evil Wallace’s ambition to expand his slave race: “Every leap of civilization was built on the back of a disposable workforce, but I can only make so many.” K’s success disproves Wallace’s “All the courage in the world cannot alter fact.“
The blade runner hero is named “Joe” K, evoking the Kafka hero Joseph K who stumbles through an absurdly antagonistic and frustrating universe, the emblem of modern deracinated man.  
There is also the passing of the torch from the old action hero (i.e., king) to the new. K fights the final battle underwater while Deckard struggles to breathe, helpless in his shackles. 
The predominance of water scenes, including the climactic fight to the finish, draws on the association of water with the origin of life. The water scenes confirm the film’s themes of rebirth and resurrection. And of course, “You can't hold back the tide with a broom.”
In the last scene, while Deckard visits his daughter, the memory maker, in her protective bubble, K lies across snow-covered steps, as if frozen in suspended animation. His mission is accomplished, the baby discovered, and he accepts his reality as an android not the hidden human. Like his lover, even an android is capable of acting and feeling like a human, even as humans content themselves with practicing inhumanity.  
The opening eye shot extends further as well. The evil mogul has false eyes, emblematic of his moral blindness and the failed fecundity of his millions of slave androids. K identifies his targets by plucking and reading their eyes. That befits a parable about human vision and understanding under threat,  
The film also plays out the emerging New Woman. As the futuristic fiction amplifies our present tendencies, the film abounds with simpering sex objects, some androids, some real women, some grotesquely amplified caricatures of ersatz sexual appeal. 
     But the greater emphasis is placed on women of strength, will and power: the characters played by Robin Wright, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Carla Juri, Hiam Abbass and Mackenzie Davis. Here there are several Wonder Women, sans magic.  As the android rebel leader Freysa declares, “Dying for the right cause. It's the most human thing we can do.” One woman makes the race’s memories. Another leads their campaign to become human, indeed more human than the reigning humans. 

Monday, October 16, 2017

The Limehouse Golem

This post-modern, self-reflexive horror film is about the audience’s hunger for horror.
The opening scene introduces the film’s story as a music hall performance, announced by the period comedian Dan Leno. Later Inspector Kildare speaks of the public’s craving for sensationalism, for gore, which the plot generously provides. The rabid press embodies the public’s craving for the horrific.
When Leno states he will start the story at the end, a strategy repeated in the later staging of the monster’s supposed demise, he implicitly roots the story in our time. The film like its plot moves back in time. 
  Several modern themes are woven back into the Victorian fiction: Kildare’s career freeze due to his suspected homosexuality (“He’s not the marrying kind”) and his aide’s later implication; the sexual fluidity in Leno’s and in heroine Lizzie’s theatrical acts; the psychological damage done by early poverty and abuse; the latent antisemitism in British culture; the mobilization as suspects of well-known historical figures Leno, George Gissing and Karl Marx; Lizzie’s feminist ambitions and values, especially as she turns her marriage into a theatrical staging with radical inflections of the usual husband and wife roles. 
In fact, the running theme of characters playing roles, “performing” rather than “being,” in life as on stage, may be the film’s central motif. The theatrical characters are always posing, and for all their pretence to family often “plotting” against each other. The line between reality and fiction deliberately blurs when the so-called Golem’s bloody murders are replayed with each suspect cast in turn as the killer. Here possibility is played out as actual occurrence.   
The central role of Klldare is significantly given to Bill Nighy, an actor primarily known for the comedy of befuddlement. He is as modern a character as his antithesis, the adventurous and rule-breaking Lizzie is. Assigned to solve the Golem murders, he is diverted by his sensitivity to save Lizzie from her charge of killing her husband. He recovers his dashed reputation by salvaging her honour.
  But Kildare destroys the evidence of her wider guilt. He early expresses his confidence that there must be a coherence among all the Limehouse murders, “the story.” At the end he has, he knows, his story. 
But its implications are too disturbing, too dangerous, for him to unleash. He prefers to let Lizzie die with her honour restored and the true Golem killer’s identity concealed. As the truth has profoundly shocked him, he protects the public from it for the general good. Perhaps that’s why his name recalls the popular soap character Dr. Kildare, with its healing functions outweighing any detective role. 
     Simply, Kildare opts not to expose the threat of a rampant Woman. Horrors we may crave, but not one that so challenges our traditional gender politics.       

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Brad's Status

“Be present” is Melanie’s last advice to Brad as he takes son Troy to Boston for a college tour. Melanie knows Brad needs this advice. Of course, he doesn’t follow it.
Indeed most of the film is Brad’s absent-mindedness, the memories and fantasies that form his interior monologue about his “status.” He’s so tied to this tormenting reverie that he’s not “present.” He misses out on the pleasure he should be getting from his son’s adventure. That’s what Melanie regrets having to miss. Worse, the more nervous and aggressive Brad gets the more he disturbs Troy, whose rigorous schedule would be better served by Brad’s quiet support.
Brad’s decision to establish a philanthropic organization has cost him the kind of successful career his college buddies had. Their fame, fortune, celebrity and flash make Brad feel invisible. He wasn’t even invited to buddy Nick’s gay marriage. 
Brad also gets sage advice from the young student he drinks with, the reminder of his former self:  “You have enough.” Enough Brad certainly has: the satisfaction of his idealistic career project; the beautiful, wise still idealistic wife; the impressively poised, sensitive, mature son; a comfortable home and lifestyle. What he thinks he lacks is the false values promoted by Trump materialism. Brad’s status is quite solid, until he judges his “status” from the current shallows by which Trump would consider Brad “a loser.” 
This film is a defence of the Trump “loser.” It reverses Trump’s reversal of American values. That’s the theme this film shares with writer/director Mike White’s earlier script for Beatriz at Dinner.  (See separate blog.)
By assuming the Trump values Brad sinks into a larger problem in Trump’s America: the insularity, arrogance and selfishness of white male privilege. That’s what appals the idealistic student with whom he’s drinking and to whom he tries to justify himself, digging his hole ever deeper. 
Brad’s self-flagellation starts to pivot on his dinner date with the media success Craig Fisher.  It starts with Brad being reminded of his place. The star immediately wins them a better table. Brad is unsettled to learn that Fisher spoke at the memorial for Brad’s university mentor; Brad hadn’t even heard of his demise. 
Then the mood shifts. Fisher dispels Brad's illusions about their old pals, less in kindness than in one-upmanship. Their wealthiest success has been exposed as a thief (adding to the man’s fear for his infant daughter’s spinal condition). The rich buddy living the idyllic beach life is a lost druggie and alcoholic. Hey, so money doesn’t buy happiness? Who knew. 
Fisher reports that their gay friend Nick has since his marriage turned him even more flaming. Fisher means this as a put-down, but it rather supports the value Brad needs to remember: the importance of freely and openly being oneself. The Nick character gains emphasis from director White’s playing it.
The conversation crumbles when Brad tries to get personal with Fisher. Brad tells him he’s proud of his friend’s success. But Fisher doesn’t remember the friendly competition Brad remembers they had. There’s a reflexive condescension in Fisher’s “Why would I feel competitive with you?”  Rather than court more condescension and self-doubt Brad leaves.
     Brad moves toward two emotional resolutions. The first is the intense pleasure of the concert, seeing and hearing the beautiful performance, holding his son’s hand. That pleasure moves Brad to tears his pains couldn’t. The second is his new candour with Troy. After Brad confesses his insecurity, Troy simply says he loves him. Pure and simple, like Austin Abrams’ marvellously suggestive, controlled performance.
     Fortunately, we're not told whether Troy gets into or goes to Harvard. Or Tufts. That doesn't matter. The story is complete as it shows Brad growing into his son's already achieved self-acceptance. The last image -- amid the end credits -- is of Troy performing as a street singer, a replay of Brad's fear that's all his son might amount to as a musician. But that would be ok too. For whatever happens, Troy's status like Brad’s status would be quite enough, thank you, so long as he doesn’t get caught up in “status.” 

Monday, October 9, 2017

Stars in My Crown (1950) and Wichita (1955)

When Parisian Jacques Tourneur exercised the Western, his understanding of the genre’s significance to the American mentality and spirit left 1950s films that feel trenchant and contemporary even now. 
Stars in My Crown (1950) and Wichita (1955) both star Joel McCrae as the American ideal, a man with the outlaw’s power and skills but committed to the values of civilization. The McCrae hero thus embodies the solution to the American Western’s essential dilemma: civilization in order to survive needs the gunman’s gun (e.g., Shane, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the Republican hawks ever since). Enforcing the law may require an outlaw or outlaw actions. But here that tension is resolved. In his very presence the McCrae hero exerts a quiet but constant moral authority, proven by his every deed. 
In the former his Parson Gray gives his first sermon in a saloon with his guns a silent but eloquent authority laid on the bar. He wields an efficient bullwhip to save the town victim Chloroform from a bully. 
In Wichita McCrea is the nascent hero Wyatt Earp, forced by conscience and situation to abandon his business plan and to become sheriff. For all the weight of his hefty six-gun this Earp can outdraw and outshoot any villain, even when half asleep. Both McCrea heroes are moral figures of potential force.
Incidentally, McCrae drew on this persona in Peckinpah’s classic Ride the High Country (1962). There he is the moral constant opposed to the Randolph Scott character who briefly forgets his essential moral compass (as developed in his Budd Boetticher films).  
Both Tourneur films trace the Western’s usual extension of civilization into the wild frontier. In Stars the parson introduces religion to a community riven by greed and racism. Arriving as a loner, Parson Gray soon marries a local beauty and they adopt a young orphan boy (who as adult narrates the memory). As Gray thus extends the spirit of the family, the religion he brings heightens the town’s sense of community, which leads to the collective construction of the first church. Wichita depicts the arrival of law and order to a burgeoning railroad town. It mobilizes not just the mythic Earp brothers but also young newspaperman Bat Masterson. 
While it’s hard — alas — to suggest a real modern equivalent to the McCrea hero here, the films’ villains are easily related to our world. 
In Stars there are two threats to the community. A typhoid epidemic begins with the adopted boy then shatters the town. It drives the parson into self-imposed isolation, which only ends when he realizes the fever’s source (the school well). This test draws the fragmented community closer than ever. It also leads the opposing forces of science (the young doctor) and religion (the parson) to realize the other’s value. The debate between science and superstition has of course resurfaced on the issue of inoculation, inter alia
The human evil is the greedy mine-owner Backett. His mica lode exhausted, Backett tries to force the old negro Uncle Famous to sell him his paltry but adjacent homestead. When token financial offers are rejected Backett has henchmen destroy the old man’s crops and animals. This failing, Backett deploys a full-blown Klan attack to lynch him if he doesn’t sell. 
  The Klan attack is a dramatic shift from the film’s — and the genre’s — usual tones of evil. Uncle Famous stands firm against it. The unarmed Parson Gray turns back the attack by purporting to read the black old man’s will. It cites past exchanges with the masked marauders, services rendered them, pleasures shared, even the bequest of the land to Backett. Touched by the old man’s bequests and memories, the Klansmen disperse sheepishly. 
But the Parson has not been reading Uncle Famous’s will. In his voice, as if from his experience, the Parson has been “reading” from a blank page — God’s will. 
Tourneur provides a balance to the Klan in the Isbell family, good-hearted people whose friendly relations with the parson stop short of attending. They are the self-sufficient but moral non-religious. They rally to Uncle Famous’s defence first by restoring his lost seed and animals, then arriving armed to fight off the Klan — if necessary. Awed by the Parson’s moral stratagem they turn churchgoer. American citizenry may include the violent bigotry of the Klan but it also includes its contrary, salt-of-the-earth moral militance. 
Significantly, the narrator’s overall story attributes his development to two major figures, Uncle Famous with his natural savvy and the moral strength of the Parson. Their shaping of the nascent John Kenyon is the serious version of healing and magical transformation, the process parodied in the comical snake-oil salesman. 
If the lowly Uncle Famous’s name is ironic, Chloroform Wiggins has a direct connection to his name. He bears the cause of his congenital deficiency. As a case of arrested development he contrasts to the young doctor who learns to fit in and to serve his father’s medical practice and the parson who survives his crisis of faith. As for the vicious Klansmen, Tourneur leaves open whether the Parson’s address to their humanity transformed them too — or left them in the arrested humanity of their racism. 
The evil in Wichita remains as current a threat as the violent bigotry in Stars. The town fathers persuade Earp to become sheriff because they want to secure the citizens from the cattlemen’s wildness. But when he bans guns from the town they fear the cattlemen will abandon the Wichita economy. In the officials’ greed and self-service and in their opposition to gun control those villains reflect issues still very much alive in America. 
The worst of the bunch is Doc Black, who purports to serve the town while secretly serving the outlaws. Earp’s father-in-law McCoy is  among the officials who reject the ban — until his wife is killed. The nexus of business interest and resistance to gun control, of course, continues.  
     Tourneur’s sense of the bedrock issues in American society extended beyond his westerns. His Easy Living (1949) seems still current in tracing the dilemma of a football star imperilled by a brain injury, torn between the trophy wife he loves but is losing and the more genuinely committed working girl. The respective women provide contrary examples of the modern career girl, too. As Tourneur seems always to remind us, living properly just isn’t easy, whatever the appealing but morally compromising allures may be, now as then.