Songcatcher

Songcatcher (2000) is worth watching (and listening to) for the Appalachian music alone. As much as there is to admire about this film, there is much to question and criticize as well. It comes across as the rough draft of a film rather than as a finished product. It is heavily thesis ridden, and the only times when it really seems to come alive are when characters sing or play—Iris Dement sings a ballad in one memorable scene, Taj Mahal (in a minor role as a visiting African American guitarist) plays a duet with another character, and in another scene, following a nighttime dance, three mountain people sing about death in haunting, dirge-like performances.

There is too much that is obvious and forced about the film. Clearly it is about women struggling to prevail or at least survive in a male-centered world. Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) leaves her position as associate professor at a small college when she is denied promotion to full professor by a group of male faculty. A male expert in her field (folk musicology) is hired in her place. Her lover, a ridiculously timid and mouse-like music professor, even votes against her. She moves to the Appalachian mountains to teach in a school run by her younger sister. For much of the film McTeer’s performance is wooden, and she portrays Penleric in a shallow, one-dimensional way. Virtually everything she says and does is predictable, and it becomes clear from an early moment that her character is going to be a main focus. But there will be many other points of focus as well.

All the women in the hill country are oppressed by men in some way. While the women characters are individuals with many redeeming qualities, the men are mostly animalistic dolts. They get drunk and beat one another up and get their women pregnant and make jokes about the schoolmarmish doctor who is stealing their music, according to Tom Bledsoe, played by Aidan Quinn. One theme focuses on women struggling against male patriarchy. Another focuses on the invading agents of civilization and progress, which threaten to wipe out or exploit the hill culture. (Presumably, Penleric is one of these agents, thought the film makes little notice of this fact). Another theme celebrates the rich musical culture of the hill people. Another theme seeks to dispel stereotypes about mountain people. Another theme highlights the lesbian relationship that Penleric discovers between her sister and a partner teacher at the school. Still another focuses on the gradual development of Penleric’s character, as she relaxes and drops her preconceptions and her stiff demeanor and discovers the humanity and cultural wealth of the hill people. And finally there is her developing relationship with Tom Bledsoe. Some of these themes are not developed in much depth. The lesbian relationship of the two schoolteachers is not very pertinent—though like everything else it falls victim to male intolerance.

Director/screenwriter Maggie Greenwald has embedded so many themes and agendas in the film that none is fully developed. The result is a disjointed, scatter-shot effect, and the film never fully congeals. Only the music, and the developing relationship of Penleric and Bledsoe, holds one’s interest. So too does the character of Viney Butler, grandmother of Bledsoe and an old mountain matriarch, played by Pat Carroll. Her encyclopedic knowledge of mountain music initially draws Penleric to her, and Viney undertakes to loosen Penleric up. Viney is the most vital character in the film.

The film constantly reminds us that Appalachian culture is in danger of being wiped out by invading outsiders who want to buy up the land, excavate coal, and bring progress. But it never resolves this theme or even makes its own stand on the matter clear. Should the hill people be left alone, their culture and way of life unmarked by the civilized world? Or should progress and coal mines and educated ways be encouraged?

At the end of the film, Lily Penleric has lost most of her notes and recordings of the music she went to record in the mountains. They were destroyed when the school burned down—the result of arson committed after some of the men discover the lesbian relationship of the teachers. Rather than start over, she decides to leave the mountains and invites Bledsoe to go with her. Although he has been wailing throughout the film about the horrors of the outside world, and about how the mountain people just need to be left alone, he decides to go with her. They are apparently going to earn their living by selling recordings of mountain music—a specific kind of exploitation, though also a means of preserving it. So this woman who struggled throughout the film to make her way in a world of men in the end backs down from her chosen career and goes back to civilization with her man. This doesn’t make full sense.

All these themes make the film stiff and shallow and give it the sanitized quality of a Hallmark Hall of Fame television drama.

The film indulges in its own stereotyping as it celebrates the culture and people of the Appalachians and their preservation of Scotch-Irish ballads for hundred off years. Yet the sentimental, nostalgic stereotypes of the film are certainly preferable to the hillbilly stereotyping we find in No Time for Sergeants and Deliverance.

One example of carelessness: Penleric and two others are struggling to haul her recording device up a nearly perpendicular mountain side so that she can record mountain ballads. The climb is nearly impossible, and her device is destroyed as a result. When they reach their destination, they find someone else—a land agent—already there at a fully developed homestead. Is there another way to reach the place? Is there a road? Why did Penleric have to climb up such a steep mountain approach when easier ways were apparently available?

Having stated all these reservations, I found Songcatcher enjoyable and, in its subject matter, unusual and original. I recommend it.

Hugh Ruppersburg
Athens, Georgia

This Island Earth

The best element in This Island Earth (1955) is the evocative title. I’ve always liked that title and last night had a chance to see the film for the first time. In part I was encouraged by an August 22 New York Times review of the newly released DVD that called the film “among the most poetic and dreamlike of 50’s fantasies, full of imagery both wonderfully inventive (the matte paintings that represent the surface of the planet Metalluna, under constant asteroid attack) and pointedly banal (the flying saucer has a polished wooden floor)."

Like most science fiction films of that decade, This Island Earth reflects growing awareness of and concern about science, cosmology, nuclear power, war, and our place in the universe. It shows the obvious mark of the UFO paranoia of those years.

This film is one of the first, if not the first, science fiction films to have a plot that does not involve alien monsters terrorizing earthlings. The plot centers on an alien laboratory hidden in Georgia that recruits earth scientists to conduct research into nuclear energy. The home planet of the aliens is about to run out of energy, most of the alien scientists have been killed in an interstellar war, and the earth scientists are the planet’s last hope.

In the film, the lead alien is named Exeter (Jeff Morrow). He has snow-white hair and an elongated and distorted forehead. He talks like a fusion of Ralph Waldo Emerson, an insurance salesman, and a motivational speaker.

The two best science fiction films from the 1950s in my mind are The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951—one of the best science fiction films ever) and Forbidden Planet (1956). Both are inventive, well made, and highly intelligent. They were clearly groundbreaking films, along with Destination Moon (1950). This Island Earth doesn’t measure up—the special effects are dated, the script weak, the overall tone of the film banal. The acting is poor, and the dialogue is poorly paced. In one scene the lead characters are informed that their brains must be erased—they seem totally unfazed. It's simply a dated film, and the virtues that it does have do not overcome the pervasive flaws.

This Island Earth was based on a novel by Raymond F. Jones, a largely forgotten science fiction writer of the 1950s and 1960s. I don't know his work, but based on what I have read about him, especially his interest in genuine scientific problems, I may have a look at this novel.

Baby Doll

A central image in Elia Kazan’s film Baby Doll (1956) is the decaying plantation mansion that belongs to Archie Lee Meighan. He bought the mansion intending to restore it and therefore to please his adolescent wife, Baby Doll, whom he also bought after a fashion from her father. The mansion signifies power, wealth, affluence, respectability, none of which Archie seems to have in the nearby town. Its decay signifies the general atmosphere of decadence that pervades the film and that Kazan, using Tennessee Williams’ screenplay, presents as the environment of the American South. The mansion is an empty relic, literally empty for most of the film, with most of the furniture repossessed.

Archie is not a descendant of the planter family that once owned the mansion. He aspires to better than middle class respectability, to wealth, to his wife’s sexual appeal, to everything he cannot have. There is some hint in the film that Baby Doll’s family was once wealthy and respectable, and during the first half of the film she often plays the role of the put-upon and dispossessed Southern belle, condemned to a miserable existence by declining family fortunes and bad luck.

The basic premise of the film is that Archie married Baby Doll after acquiring her from her father. He promises not to sleep with her until she turns 20. He keeps trying and failing to earn enough money to buy furniture and to restore the plantation to a state that will suit Baby Doll. She is young and irresistible and he fetishizes her. He wants to possess her sexually—this is the goal of all his efforts. To possess her will put the final brick in the wall of power, wealth, and masculine authority that he attempts to build and that collapses throughout the film. The film is about the collapse of Archie’s ambitions and dreams. Everyone in town thinks he is a joke. He is a big man only in his own imagination. He is a man held victim by his own wife, a nineteen year old who constantly berates and insults him and whom he hides his drinking from (he does a lot of furtive drinking).

Archie is not the only person who fetishizes Baby Doll. Her father apparently did the same, as her name suggests—she is never called anything else in the film. The film fetishizes her too. Our first image of her is of her sleeping in a baby doll nightgown in an undersized baby bed. Archie has bored a tiny hole in the wall so that, from the room next door, he can peer through the wall and watch her sleep. It is an incredibly bizarre and fascinating image, and, along with one other scene, it largely helps explain the uproar that the film provoked in some quarters on its release.

Baby Doll was released during the same decade as Nabokov’s novel Lolita, another story of fetishization.

As a drama, Baby Doll is full of bizarre and interesting characters but it is also a turgid mess. The appearance of the Sicilian cotton gin owner Silva Vacarro inserts an alien element into the film. As a man he is attractive to Baby Doll, and he awakens her sexually, the film suggests, though they never have sex—he takes a nap in her baby bed while she sings to him—this is the closest they come to sex. In another scene he talks quietly to her, flirting with her, seducing her with his voice and his manner, and the scene is intensely sexual. One would never expect to see such a scene in a film of the mid-1950s.

Silva represents a syndicate—whether this is an allusion to organized crime is unclear—the word syndicate certainly does represent corporations and industry, which is moving in to push out the traditional ways of earning money that threaten the traditional South in the film.

As the ultimate object of masculine desire, Baby Doll is also the ultimate victim, the superb male possession. Even Vacarro, who offers her satisfaction and escape, is really only interested in using her to get revenge on Archie, who apparently burned down his cotton gin.

The film offers numerous clues to the decline of the world of the film. The decrepit mansion is one clue, of course. In one scene, a black man who lives on or near Archie's plantation asks him when they can begin to plant cotton again. Archie doesn’t want to grow cotton. He probably doesn’t know how. But he does own a cotton gin from which he earns (or once earned) money for ginning the cotton of farmers. When the foreign syndicate moves into the town and opens a gin that charges lower rates, Archie and others in the town are put out of business. Resentment against foreigners, outsiders, is the result. When Vacarro’s gin is burned, many people in the town express approval.

Vacarro is not only resented because he is an successful outsider but also because his identity as a Sicilian, an Italian, what Archie calls a “greasy faced wop,” makes him racially ambiguous.

Another way the film demonstrates the decline of the region is the behavior of the black men and women who live around Archie’s mansion. They are always present, sitting around, doing very little at all, occupying every conceivable racial and racist stereotype. They laugh at Archie because they understand the deal he has contracted with his juvenile wife. (Everyone laughs at Archie—they see him as a sort of sexual joke, the old man who will never be able to satisfy his young wife if he ever gets the chance to try). On the one hand the film’s portrayal of blacks seems racist and stereotypical. On the other hand they are a sort of mute chorus that understands and fully appreciates the folly of the man on whose land they live. Is there any nod of recognition to the incipient civil rights movement? An old black woman sings “We Shall Not Be Moved” in a scene where it appears to have absolutely no significance.

Karl Malden as Archie at first is reminiscent of the character Mitch he played in A Streetcar Named Desire, another Kazan directed film based on a Williams script. But as the film develops he changes. The film actually has Malden repeatedly bellow his wife’s name, “Baby Doll,” just as Marlon Brando so memorably bellowed for Stella in Streetcar. But while Stanley Kowalski is a brutal, self-centered man like Archie, he is also a genuine masculine force, while Archie is failing physically. The film is about male authority, male possessiveness, and the ultimate victim is Baby Doll herself.

This was the first film Carroll Baker ever made, and certainly the most memorable. Her performance is remarkable, and even though the acting by Malden and Eli Wallach (who plays Vacarro) is strong, she is the center of the film. Wallach as Vacarro is grating and disturbing—he comes across as vaguely ethnic when he first appears (the pencil moustache and the little round hat are a dead giveaway) I thought he was supposed to be a Mexican. Eventually he reveals that he is Sicilian. He is like an infernal imp, tormenting and taunting and enticing Baby Doll, confusing and playing with her, finally trapping her on a rotting rafter in the mansion attic and forcing her to sign an affidavit that her husband burned down his cotton gin. The scene in which he chases Baby Doll through the second floor of the house and up into the attic is manic and bizarre. It was like Satan tempting the virtuous young woman to sin, to sex.

As a setting the South (apparently Mississippi) is a world of decay, moral and economic decay and depression, social upheaval, racism and racial suspicion, and change. It is also a place where attempts to aspire to long lost aristocratic prestige and position are bound to fail.

Aunt Rose is Baby Doll’s maiden aunt. She was passed on to Archie as part of the deal which brought him the girl. He hates and despises her and at the end of the film he tries to kick her out of the house. At the end of the film, as Archie is carted off to a night in jail, and as Vacarro leaves with the dubious promise of returning for Baby Doll the next day, Rose calls Baby Doll into the house. Both are victims, and the question with which Baby Doll ends the film is one of ambiguity—will she be remembered, or will she be left behind like Aunt Rose?: “Well, let's go in now. We got nothing to do but wait for tomorrow and see if we're remembered or forgotten.”

Archie is carted off to jail just as Blanche at the end of Streetcar is taken off to the sanatorium. It’s the state hospital in Baby Doll. Rose goes there to eat the chocolate the attendants give her. Archie, given his alcoholism and the fact that everyone more or less thinks he is crazy (the sheriff makes clear that Archie has had to be arrested repeatedly), will ultimately probably end up there as well.

Hugh Ruppersburg
Athens, Georgia

A Soldier's Story

A Soldier’s Story (1984), directed by Norman Jewison, is a typical kind of lawyer/crime film where a crime is committed in the first scene, and the rest of the film shows how the lawyer interviews witnesses and suspects and gradually figures out who the murderer is. The lawyer hears various accounts of how the crime was committed. He pieces the evidence together, and gradually the facts become clear. The narrative in effect works its way backwards towards the discovery of the evildoer, and in the process offers insights and various points of view into the characters involved.

In this case, practically the entire cast of the film is black. The action occurs at a army base in Louisiana in 1944 where African American soldiers are trained. Although they’ve been told they may see time in battle, in fact they spend most of their time working, cleaning, digging ditches, for the white officers and white troops. The film is based on Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play. Fuller wrote the screenplay for the film. Denzel Washington acted in both the play and film, though he did not have the leading role.

The lawyer assigned by the military to investigate the crime—the murder of a black sergeant—is African American. He’s the first black officer many of the black soldiers or their white officers have seen. There is some suggestion that he was assigned to the case so that the murderers—ostensibly two white soldiers—could not be arrested—no black man in 1944 in Louisiana could accuse white men of murdering a black man and get away with it. A further complication is that the murdered sergeant, Sergeant Waters, played by Adolphe Caesar, treated many of the black recruits cruelly. He is especially prejudiced against Southern blacks and went out of his way to torment them. He believes they impede the possibility of progress for other black soldiers. He is an assimilationist—he believes the time is coming when black men will be allowed to adopt the ways of white men and thereby find financial success and equal justice. He is trapped by his own racial attitudes, and in the scene where he is murdered—revealed in fragments as the film develops—it’s clear that he is full of anguish and guilt over some of his actions. Waters is not a particularly likeable man, and any number of the soldiers—white or black—could have killed him.

The film takes place at a time when the civil rights movement is a decade away. Everyone can feel it coming. The racial dynamics of the time are dramatized through the various characters and their interactions with one another. Howard Rollins plays the role of Captain Davenport, the investigating lawyer. Colonel Nivens, commanding officer of the base, is a native Southerner and not sympathetic to Davenport’s mission—he apparently believes two white soldiers killed Sergeant Waters and does not want them arrested. Scott Paulin plays Captain Wilcox. He is a good-hearted and paternalistic moderate. He is sympathetic to the soldiers and to Captain Davenport, but at the same time he constantly stereotypes them and makes assumptions based on race. Davenport himself makes assumptions—it takes him a while to realize that in Nivens he has an ally, in spite of Nivens’ shortcomings. Davenport comes to the base believing the murderer is a white Southerners, perhaps a Klansman. Sergeant Waters himself is full of racist assumptions. All these characters, but especially Nivens and Davenport, struggle against their own racial preconceptions, and this struggle fuels the dramatic tensions that drive the film, along with the unraveling of the mystery of who killed Sergeant Waters.

All the actors in the film do a credible job, but the entire film has an artificial feeling to it. It’s thesis driven: everything is directed towards the lesson the film seeks to teach about the importance of believing in the humanity of others. It’s formulaic both in the numerous lawyer films it emulates, and in the way it works as a film about life in the barracks—every soldier has his own story, his own personality, and these come out as Davenport moves forward with his investigation. It’s also a film that shows the marks of the play on which it is based. It never gets out of the box in which the play takes place, and even though we know there is a Southern town nearby the base, a town the soldiers are forbidden to visit after the murder, we don’t see much of it and we don’t learn much about how the soldiers feel about the town or how the town feels about them—we see the townspeople briefly, in two clichéd scenes that betray all the usual stereotypes about white racist small Southern towns. This is a shortcoming given that one of the main points of interest in the film is to watch characters discovering the limitations of their own racial assumptions—does this discovery limited to the army base? Or are we to see in some sense the army base and what happens there as a microcosm of the larger society in which it exists? The film has a slight claustrophobic quality to it.

I felt uncomfortable watching the film. It seemed artificial to me. Despite the fact of its mostly African American ensemble cast and the screenplay written by an African American dramatist, it often seemed to be working from a white director’s point of view—everything was too peachy clean, too neat, too washed and starched, too sanitized. It was too easy to read the characters. The lessons and discoveries in the film are too simple and straightforward. In this sense it reminded me of Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, made only a year after this Jewison film. Despite the fact of the African American authored novel on which that novel is based, it seems to be set in a racial fantasy land. The army base and racial environment surrounding the soldiers in A Soldier’s Story are no fantasy. We just don’t experience enough of it, and as a result the film’s ability to drive home its message is weakened.

Even so, A Soldier’s Story dramatizes an important moment in American civil rights history. The movement itself was accelerated by the involvement of African American soldiers in the second world war, and by the gradual if slow willingness of the American military to treat them fairly. The lessons of the film are important, and for that reason A Soldier’s Story would make a good educational experience for high school students studying the civil rights movement and race relations in the United States.

Miami Vice

I watched Michael Mann’s Miami Vice and then went home to watch Wong Kar Wai’s 1991 Days of Being Wild. The films of both directors are infused with intense atmosphere. While for Wong atmosphere more often than not is contained within closed spaces, such as rooms and apartments, Mann chooses sprawling cityscapes. Both directors explore the interactions of their characters within and against these settings. While in Wong the result can be a liberating claustrophobia, in Mann the result is a kind of agoraphobic entrapment, where the horizon, ground, and sky gradually close in.

Miami Vice is an entertaining film and in every way superior to the television series. There was a mannered and vacuous superficiality to the television show. I never managed to sit through an episode, though what I did see of the show made me wonder whether the two main actors were sampling the narcotics of the smugglers they sought to capture. The effect was of an over-long rock video, shiny, soporific, and deadening.

Unlike many films based on television shows, this one does not depend on its source. It is so unlike the show that you hardly think of it. The fact that Mann directed both the TV series and the film makes this all the more remarkable and certainly gives him the authority to make the considerable changes that he makes. He shows no particular reverence or respect for the source. He takes the scenario of two undercover officers on the Miami vice squad and completely reinvents it. One review I read suggested that this film expected viewers to have the television series in mind as they watched, and that the shock they experience as they encounter the disjuncture between TV show and film become part of the text of the film. This may be so, but the film works entirely well on its own.

Cinematography is a major element in Miami Vice, as it is in most Mann films. But in this one Miami is filmed in washed out colors, as if to remove any semblance of glitz and glamour.

Miami Vice the film is always interesting but often only casually so. Tension doesn’t begin to build until the final confrontation between cops and smugglers, and then the film really takes fire. But it takes an hour and forty-five minutes to get there. Jaime Foxx as Tubbs seems often merely to be reading his lines, and though he is effective enough in his role he’s not committed to it with much passion (certainly not with the passion and accuracy we saw in Ray or even in Collateral). Colin Farrell as Crockett often seems unfocused if not constipated, but he too carries out his role well enough. Both are preferable to, and more effective than, the originals.

In this film, the Russian Mafia, Aryan Nation, and drug lords from various South American nations conspire as the villains, and they are formidable if mechanical. Why do movie villains often seem more intelligent, evil, and technologically savvy than they are in reality?

In the end, Crockett and Tubbs survive and leave room for a sequel, if Mann is foolish enough to undertake one. Not as sharp as Collateral or as operatically full as Heat, Miami Vice is still a successful effort by one of the better commercial directors at work today.