Lincoln

To say that a film is reverent in its portrayal of a historical character is usually a criticism.  Stephen Spielberg’s great film Lincoln (2012) is reverent in its treatment of the nation’s 16^th president.  But its reverence is embedded in a relatively careful and accurate portrayal of Lincoln’s character and times, specifically in its depiction of his interactions with his family and with members of the House of Representatives as he campaigns for passage of the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery in the United States.

Lincoln is the great national hero.  One can find other great figures from our history worthy of regard, but Lincoln stands above all.  As a film Lincoln does what every other portrayal of Lincoln has attempted—to give a realistic, compelling portrayal of the man.  No representation of a historic figure such as Lincoln can be wholly or mostly accurate.  Who knows what the man was really like?  We have no recordings of his voice, no video records, only written descriptions of him, opinions, his writings, accounts of what he said and did.  Spielberg’s film, and Daniel Day Lewis’s portrayal of the title character, takes to heart descriptions of Lincoln’s voice as high-pitched.  Such a voice runs counter to what we typically expect of our heroes—we need them to speak in booming basso profundo.  But Spielberg’s and Lewis’ Lincoln is absolutely believable.  Cinematic and speculative portrayal though he may be, this Lincoln is the One. 

It is not so much what Lincoln actually was, what he actually believed and said, how he behaved.  It is what we project through him about ourselves and our nation.  Lincoln incorporates our own views of the ideals and virtues that animate the nation, at least the nation as we’d like it to be.  Spielberg and Lewis give us that Lincoln.

Spielberg at least twice in the film uses indirection to present several of the most famous events of Lincoln’s life.  One of these is the Gettysburg Address, which Lincoln gives more than two years before the time span of the film (January to April 1865).  We experience it through Union solders who recite the speech back to Lincoln while he’s visiting a battlefield.  Another such incident is the assassination.  Rather than dramatizing it directly, Spielberg shows us another theatre, where an opera is playing, attended by the young Lincoln son Tad.  A stage manager runs on stage to announce that the president has been shot, and we experience the announcement and its meaning through the reaction on the boy’s face, and through the reactions of the people in the audience.

As radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, Tommy Lee Jones is excellent as one of the film’s two best supporting actors.  I could never quite grow comfortable with him in the role, but his cranky version of the aging senator who was a master at invective and insult and who throughout his life was an ardent supporter of rights for American blacks—and who regarded Lincoln as too cautious and conservative—is very fine.  Sally Fields, as the depressive, sometimes histrionic Mary Todd, is good as well.  Her Mary Todd Lincoln understands how the public views her, and sometimes believes her husband feels that way as well.  On occasion she is completely irrational.  Despite her apparent illness and ill manners (she lambasts Stevens at a White House party for daring to investigate her spending habits), despite her excessive worry about the oldest son Robert’ desire to enlist in the Union Army, the film shows her as a devoted supporter of her husband, especially of his desire to pass the 13^th Amendment, which will, if passed, she believes justify placing her son at risk.

Spielberg gives us a Lincoln with blemishes.  He yells at his wife in one scene, slaps his son after an insulting remark in another, is willing to offer federal appointments to House members in return for their votes.  He is so fast to tell homespun tales during tense moments that sometimes the irritation on the faces of the people around him is clear.  But overriding these negatives is the figure of the man who believed in the nation, in the Union, in freedom for the slaves, who took upon himself the weight and suffering of the thousands who died in the Civil War, North and South, fighting for what they believed.  This is the Nation’s Lincoln, the man of national legend and myth, however true or not he may be, and this is the Lincoln at the heart of Spielberg’s film.  In our own time of crisis, when everything seems in danger of tumbling down, this is a compelling figure indeed.

Big Bad Love

A moody tone piece about a man mired in despair and alcohol over his failure as a writer, a husband, a father, and a friend, Big Bad Love is full of misery. Filmed in the purlieus of Oxford and Mt. Holly, Mississippi, it shows us the South through dirt roads, rundown gas stations, bars, crazy behavior, and eccentric characters.  Its main character, Leon, is drunk through much of the film, and so depressed that he can’t distinguish his own fantasies from reality. Ostensibly he is struggling to succeed as a writer, and we often watch him opening returned manuscript and reading rejection letters, which he posts on a bulletin board over the desk where he writes on his old manual typewriter.  He’s a lover of language and of writing.  He reads the dictionary, remembers strange words, mounts words on the wall above his writing desk.  He declaims poems aloud, when he’s sober enough to remember them.  He does write, some, but mostly he drinks and gets into trouble.

Big Bad Love gives us the South of Mississippi writer Larry Brown, whose 1990 story collection of the same title is its source.  The film is based mainly on the third section of that collection, a long story entitled “92 Days,” about an unpublished and struggling writer confronting the same problems Leon in the movie deals with.  Brown’s stories in Big Bad Love are mainly about working class alcoholic men in their 30s on the verge of divorce, or recently divorced.  They’re lonely for love after deserting, or being deserted by, aging and incentive wives.  They’re like country music songs of a certain type—the George Jones type—that visit and revisit the same self-pitying and self-destructive themes from different angles over and over and over.  The film is loosely faithful to the story, but considerably less woman-hating.  My guess is that there is much of Brown in Leon (well played by Arliss Howard). 

Leon is more a struggling man than a struggling writer, and much of the film is made up of his memories, or himself and his wife (Debra Winger) early in their failed marriage, of their children at a younger age, of his childhood and especially his mother, of his apparently dead father (played in brief appearances by Larry Brown himself).  Memories and dreams interweave with a hallucinatory reality.  The film sometimes verges on making fun of Leon’s drunkenness, and indeed a mild patina of romantic admiration for his excessive living and suffering suffuses the story.

As much as this film’s moody nostalgia (for what?) entranced, it did seem to be working the old cliché that you have to suffer to succeed as a writer, and you also have to make people around you suffer and nearly drink yourself to death and wreak havoc in many other ways.  Everything that could go wrong does.  His daughter dies, his ex-wife reminds him about her restraining order, and he discovers that the brain injury his brother suffered while they were out together on a drunken spree left him nearly a vegetable. He spends two weeks in prison, but when his first story is accepted, and his novel is solicited with the promise of publication, everything turns rosy.  This change seemed too easy.

All the actors, especially Arliss Howard, Debra Winger, Rosanna Arquette, and even Angie Dickinson are good.  My old teacher and friend Coleman Barks was moving and darkly funny as the preacher who gives the eulogy at the funeral.  The soundtrack, a collection of Mississippi blues and John Hiatt and Tom Waits and others, is finely tuned to the film.

 

Good-bye, My Lady

Good-bye, My Lady (dir. William A. Weltman, 1956) follows up on the formula of The Yearling (1946)—a boy moving towards adolescence bonds with an unusual pet, in this case a dog, a rare African Basenji that laughs, weeps, cleans itself like a cat, and hunts with unusual skill.  This film lacks the lyricism and subtlety of The Yearling.  It announces its themes ahead of time, through a deep-voiced singer announcing through song that it’s sad and hard when a boy grows up to be a man--with a harmonica wistfully making wistful music in the background.  (Both the man’s voice and the song are, for lack of a better word, creepy).  The twelve-year-old Skeeter (Brandon deWilde) and his Uncle Jesse Jackson (Walter Brennan) are the primary characters. I liked Brennan in Swamp Water (1941), but here he plays a bumbling, fairly inept, lazy, but kind old man we later came to know as Gramps in the TV series “The Real McCoys.”  One scene in particular is worth the entire film—Brennan’s character stopping and starting, trying to decide what to do, his feet dancing this way and that, as if he’s deep into some sort of country jig, except that he’s just supposed to be bumbling around in a comical way.  We typically see him dozing on the front porch of his shack when he is supposed to be cutting firewood.  His major virtue is his love for his nephew, entrusted to his care after his mother’s death.  (The father is nowhere to be seen, and Uncle Jesse refuses to talk about him, as if to suggest he was some sort of scoundrel who deserted mother and child).

The film purports to show us what life in the Southern backwoods swamps was like for people in the mid-20^th century and earlier.  Skeeter and his uncle live in a ramshackle one-room shack, deep in the woods at the end of a long dirt road.  They eke out an existence selling firewood, mainly to their friend Cash Evans, who owns a store in the nearby town and is something of a friend and rival to Uncle Jesse.  Jesse is illiterate, though the boy is learning to read.  In fact, the stylized depictions of the cabin and its inhabitants probably have a limited basis in reality.  Poverty and good-heartedness are the main qualities of the poor in this film, while the more affluent Cash lives in town (Phil Harris plays this role in a peculiarly loud and wooden way).

Suffice it to state that the film revolves around how Skeeter finds the Basenji dog, names it Lady, loves it and trains it to hunt, and then gives it up when Cash shows him a newspaper ad placed by the owner, looking for the lost dog.  Skeeter decides he must give up Lady, and this is supposed to mark his coming manhood, his recognition that he must give up the dog that isn’t his.  Unfortunately, this message, fairly blunt to begin with, is blunted even more when Skeeter takes great pleasure in $100 reward money the dog’s owner gives him.  The loss of the dog hardly seems to matter.

The boy and his uncle are friends with a kind, hardworking black man who lives nearby, Gates, played by Sidney Poitier.  His wife is played by Louise Beavers, who starred for two years in the first TV show centered on black characters. It aired in the early1950s.  Gates and his wife are good-hearted, hard-working, extremely blessed with progeny.  Although both Gates and his wife are portrayed in a positive way, the film can’t quite escape the stereotype of the wise and kindhearted black folks who give advice to the whites.

The film makes a few jokes, mainly through Uncle Jesse, about the character of Yankees.  He tells a tale about how after a visiting Yankee got snake-bit the snake died.  The kindness of the man sent by the dog’s owner convinces Jesse and his nephew that all Yankees might not be so bad after all.

A few scenes of Good-bye, My Lady seem to have been shot on location, but most of the film looks like it was shot on a set, in black and white, on a small budget.

If this film aspired to be another The Yearling, it didn’t succeed.

 

The Yearling

The Yearling (dir. Clarence Brown, 1946) is a soft spot for me.  Maybe it’s the Technicolor Maxfield Parrish Florida landscapes, or Claude Jarman’s self-consciously joyous face, or Gregory Peck’s young and upright fatherly ways, or the occasionally wooden dialogue, or any combination of these and other reasons.

Based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ novel, The Yearling attends to an infrequently noticed part of the American South—the post-Civil War Florida swamps, where pioneers go to settle and struggle to make their lives after the Civil War.  With its attention to the difficulties of small time farmers, it reminds us of The Southerner, Swamp Water, and even God’s Little Acre.  We sense the influence especially of Renoir’s films about the South here, as well as a touch of John Ford.

The Yearling is an episodic narrative of a boy’s education in the challenges of adult life.  It’s also about a dirt farmer trying to get a hold in the swamplands of Florida, and about his wife, scarred by the deaths of three children.  She’s cold and apparently unloving to her son, but the film gradually reveals that her reserve is her way of protecting herself against further hurt should her living son die like the others. 

Claude Jarman plays Jody in this film.  He’s not really a very good actor, but he’s a wonderful presence.  The film is in love with his broad smiling face and never misses an opportunity to linger on it.  Jody brims with optimism and open spirit, he’s in love with the natural world and its creatures, in love with his fellow human beings and the possibilities of his life, as far as he can understand them.  The Yearling offers up a worshipful, almost reverent cult of boyhood and the innocence and joys of preadolescence.  His father tries to encourage him in his interests, while his mother, at least at first, tries to discourage them.  It’s tempting to see her as a kind of real-life Disney mother, cold and evil like Cruella Deville, or the haughty socially self-conscious mother of the boy in Song of the South.  But The Yearling resists such a reading.  She is human after all.

This film and Jarman’s character really take off in a scene in which Jody and his deer Flag are running through the countryside, alongside the edges of the lake, through the woods.  They startle wild deer that begin running alongside, on the border of the woods, accompanied by music from Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The result is a miraculous cinematic ballet that captures more than anything else in the film the joy that is the boy’s nature.

This film gives us both the frontier as a place of adventure and closeness to nature and also a place of cruelty.  The boy loves nature, stares for hours in reverie at running streams and forest creatures.  He has little awareness of the hard lives his parents live, or of the siblings he never met, who died before him.  Life for him is a long and ebullient romp.  This comes to a head when he finds and takes as a pet the little fawn of a doe his father killed for its liver—he’d been snake bit, and he wanted to use the liver to suck out the poison.  Even the way he came into possession of the fawn, which he names Flag, should have been a warning to the boy, but he is too young to recognize it.  He’s unaware that fawn will one day grow up into something much larger and difficult. Love of Flag, and responsibility to his family are the contending forces for the boy.  Up to a point his parents indulge his love for the deer, but when the animal repeatedly eats crops on which the family depends for survival, the decision is made.  His father orders the boy to shoot the door.  He obeys, in part because he knows his father is right, and then runs away for three days, floating on an old skiff through the swamp and down the river, until he’s found by a riverboat captain and returned home.  This is Jody’s dark night of the soul, and he returns from it, presumably, an older and wiser young man.

Because so much of the film comes to us from the boy’s view, it’s tempting to overlook the struggles of the parents—of the mother to deal with the loss of her children, her fear of losing another, of the father’s struggle to be a successful farmer and feed his family.  The fact that three children have died is evidence of the harshness of their lives.  Because we see her through the boy’s eyes, the mother may seem a cold and harsh person.  It becomes clear as the film moves along that the father understands the reasons for her apparent coldness. 

Frontier life in the film, especially once we’re off the farm, is a bit more hackneyed.  There are disputes with the neighboring Forresters, the death of the Forrester boy Fodderwing, Jody’s good friend, fights in town, rattlesnake bites, injuries, and so on.  The father trades one of the Forresters a worthless dog for a new rifle.  This leads to bad blood and the Forresters stealing from the boy’s family.  Such episodes come at us at an unrelenting pace, but they vary sufficiently so that the film retains its charm and never falters.  Fodderwing is especially interesting.  A frail boy of Jody’s age, he permanently injured himself in a fall while trying to fly off the top floor of his family’s house.  He speaks in poetic haunting phrases about animals and spirits and it’s clear from his earliest appearance that he is a fated lad.  His death is one more step in Jody’s cruel education.

All of these elements congeal in a vision of the Florida frontier and its past that is if not entirely realistic at least coherent and engaging.  Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman are excellent in their roles as Jody’s parents.  Both were nominated for Best Actor Oscars.  Director Clarence Brown won a nomination for directing.  The film won Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction Oscars.  Peck won a Best Acting Golden Globe award.  Acting, cinematography, the story itself, effective editing and appropriate music, all make this an entrancing and charming film of the sort we rarely see anymore.

In 1949 Brown directed Claude Jarman in another film about a boy’s initiation into adulthood: Intruder in the Dust, an adaptation of the novel by William Faulkner.

 

True Grit

Voice is all in Charles Portis’ overlooked 1967 novel.  If the story were told by an uninvolved narrator, we would have an interesting tale of adventure and revenge.  With the voice of Mattie Ross, we have context, personality, human perspective, attitude, youth, naiveté, a sharply critical tongue, a dark sense of humor.  Mattie is the central character.  Rooster Cogburn may be the focus of much of her interest, but without the varying attitudes of surprise and consternation and anger and admiration she feels for him, he would just be another colorful figure in a book about the Old West.

I made the mistake of reading the novel, which I had not read before (despite the good advice of my friend Max Childers), just before I saw the Coen brothers’ 2010 adaptation.  I don’t like to spend much time thinking about how a particular film measures up to its source text.  In this case I couldn’t help myself.  My first reaction was to find a certain lack of warmth in the film.  It was good, I thought, but not as good as the novel.  Maybe in the case of this story, no film could ever quite measure up to the source simply because the language of the written story, the psychological insights, the inner life, make up so much of the tale.  But gradually I changed my mind about the film.  The most important decisions the Coens made were to use the voice of Mattie Ross to tell the story, and to cast Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie.  Steinfeld preserves much of the idiosyncratic nature and orneriness of the novel’s Mattie, yet she never seems limited by the role.  She occupies it.  Beau Bridges as Rooster is sometimes difficult to recognize as Beau Bridges.  He is gruff and mean and not especially friendly. He embodies Rooster in a way that is barely softer, imperceptibly more endearing, that the novel’s Rooster.

A film must have its own character and identity.  Too many adaptations of literature seem entranced by their source texts and never establish themselves as separate artistic works.  True Grit does not have this problem.  It takes its identity from the southwestern prairie, the small frontier town in Arkansas where Mattie’s father is shot, the fastidious horse trader whom Mattie outwits and out deals, the beautiful landscapes, the gothic and episodic plot (several episodes of which the film invents and embellishes, though there is more than enough of the source novel remaining). 

Although the Coens do not give the novel their characteristic treatment of irony and sarcasm, and satire of local color characteristics, it’s clear from their approach that they are the Coens after all.  The combination of crudeness, hard talking, and just plain oddness in Cogburn’s character is an example.  Camera angles, the attention to realistic details of time and place, the formal, archaic speech of the characters, repeated images of violence and grotesqueness—all of these are Coen traits.  Yet they’re perfectly fine for this adaptation of the Charles Portis novel.

True Grit is a border state film in several ways.  Arkansas stands on the eastern border of the Mississippi River, at the entrance to the Great Plains and to Texas.  It is, especially in this film, the state where the South gradually transitions into the West.  In most ways this film is a Coen brothers take on the classic American western, and a parody, or response at least, to the first adaptation of the film in 1969 starring John Wayne and Glen Campbell (dir. Henry Hathaway).  Wayne’s performance has been praised for its force and vigor, but Jeff Bridges’ Cogburn seems definitive for now.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln is the great American hero and legend: the original rags to riches tale, Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, rail splitter, martyr fallen in service to his country.  More books have been written about Lincoln than about all the other presidents combined, maybe excepting Jefferson. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (dir. Timur Bekmambetov, 2012) takes the barest outline of the Lincoln biography, accepts at face value the Great Man’s heroism and legendry, and creates a parallel history in which Lincoln sets out from boyhood intent on killing the vampire who killed his mother.  After meeting another man experienced with killing vampires, Lincoln decides to become a vampire hunter, learns the skills of this secret vocation, and swears to live his life in solitude—a vow he commences to violate throughout the entire film. As we learn, vampires have invaded the nation and marked out the Southern states as favored territory.  They prey especially on slaves, ally themselves with slave traders and slave holders, and in the Civil War, at least in the Battle of Gettysburg, they fight on the Southern side. 

Early in his career Lincoln wields a silver-tipped ax against vampires.  (He chooses the ax, rather than a rifle, because he is so adept at splitting logs).  At first his quest to kill his mother’s murderer is purely one of revenge, but as he becomes aware of how vampires are preying on people, especially slaves, he learns more about the issue of slavery.  Lincoln in the film has progressive views about slavery from an early age, and the film gives no hint of the struggles and ambiguities in the real Lincoln’s mind concerning slavery.  His only real struggle in the film is when to declare slaves free.  He goes into politics because he realizes that he can wage the battle he wants to wage with words and puts the ax in the closet.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter builds parallel connections between the historical situation leading up to the Civil War and the one in the film.  In the real South, white men exploited slaves for economic gain.  To this the film adds the fact that vampires see in slaves easy victims, so they ally themselves with the slaveholders who are also exploiting slaves.  In one scene Lincoln is captured and taken to a grand Southern mansion where the head vampire lives.  The iconography of the great Southern mansion with its columns and moss-draped trees makes clear the connection between slaves, slaveholders, vampires, and the South.  Interestingly, only one brief scene suggests that vampires should have rights like normal humans and be permitted to live in the open (presumably with a good supply of slave blood at hand).  The film doesn’t exploit the notion of vampires as a marginalized victims as the HBO series True Blood does.

We never see, for the most part, the Band of Rivals whom the historical Lincoln enlisted as advisors and members of his cabinet.  Instead Lincoln relies on two main counselors, his childhood black friend Will Johnson (Anthony Mackie) and Henry Sturges (Dominic Cooper), who is waging war against the head vampire who killed his fiancée many years ago in the past.  He warns Lincoln against seeking revenge, but revenge seems to be pretty much what he is after.  On the night that Lincolns rides off to the Ford Theater and its fateful play, he even offers to make Lincoln a vampire so that they can continue their battle as immortals.  Lincoln declines the offer, explaining that there are other ways to become immortal.

The film distorts, changes, or ignores virtually all the facts about Lincoln’s life and presidency.  In particular, it makes Mary Todd Lincoln (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) into the President’s sympathetic ally.  There’s not much of a hint of the sour, depressive Mary Todd who was Lincoln’s real wife.  She’s a flirtatious, attractive, heroic figure and in no ways the cypher that many find the historical Mary Todd to be.  In the film Lincoln vies with Stephen Douglass for Mary’s hand.  Later, she leads a band of escaped slaves through the woods towards Gettysburg, carrying loads of silver to be melted down into bullets.  You can guess what the silver bullets are for.

No doubt Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a silly film, in practically every way.  But I thought the lead actor Benjamin Walker impressive in his role as the Great Emancipator.  It will be interesting to compare his portrait of Lincoln to that of Daniel Day Lewis in the newly released Lincoln, directed by Stephen Spielberg.  But in this film Walker makes Lincoln an impressive comic book super hero.

The film is heavily laden with visual effects.  Often, scenes seem only partially rendered.  In others, film and digital effects seem to fuse in a visually confusing way.  The railroad trestle scene in which Lincoln and friends battle vampires on the top of a train speeding across a burning bridge that spans a deep gorge is over the top.

It makes little sense to complain about the historical inaccuracies in this film about a vampire hunting Abe Lincoln.  Its absurdity makes it worthwhile.

Schultze Gets the Blues

When Schultze and his friends retire from their jobs in the salt mines (one of them says they were kicked out), they are given as a parting gift a large rock of illuminated salt.  Schultze frequently spends time looking at his rock, and we cannot tell exactly what he is thinking.

The first half of Schultze Gets the Blues (2003; dir. Michael Schorr) examines the landscape of Schultze’s retirement.  The tone of the movie is quiet and unhurried.  It conveys monotony, uniformity, and routine.  It shows us scenes of German industrial landscapes, suburban housing sites where the houses (as in Pete Seeger’s song) never vary.  The film is especially fond of showing a particular field with power-generating windmills.  The contrast between the beautiful green field and the windmills is stark.  Schultze and friends often fish off a railroad trestle.  His routine never varies, just as it must never have varied before retirement.  He watches television, goes to the local bar to drink with his mates, occasionally takes part in contests and festivals.  If he ever had a family, we see no evidence of it.  In several scenes he seems to be trying to figure out what to do with his time.  His face conveys complete impassivity.  He is the least expressive character in the film, up to a point.  His one interest is the accordion.  Year after year in a local music festival he plays the same polka.  People know that he will play it and look forward to his performance.  The polka is who he is. 

None of the characters in this film look as if they have ever been near a professional acting studio, much less a Hollywood one.  Wonderfully quirky—they seem drawn from the streets, retirement homes, factories.  They are eccentric, physically imperfect, awkward, and real.  The film’s muted tone, the joy it takes in its odd array of characters—these may simply reflect contemporary German cinema in general, but they gave me great pleasure nonetheless.  

The film emphasizes the emptiness of the lives of these men without work.  Schultze strikes up friendly relationships with women. One is a flamboyant older woman who lives in the nursing home where his senile mother lives.  She encourages him to try new things and is especially enthusiastic about his musical interests. One evening he goes with his friends to pick her up from the nursing home so they can attend a music festival and learns that she has died.  Another friendship is with a younger woman who temporarily works in the bar where he and his friends are regulars.  She’s attractive, doesn’t wear a bra, and does a flamenco dance on the table in the café.  She fascinates Schultze and his friends—they don’t know what to make of her. 

One night Schulze hears a brief moment of Zydeco music on his radio.  He becomes obsessed with it.  He stops enjoying the polka music he’s played for twenty-five years and begins playing a version of what he heard on the radio.  He plays the music too fast and without much rhythm but it’s a departure from his old ways.  Everyone who hears Schultze play his new song is astounded that he has changed his tune.  The temporary waitress at the bar hears him play, seems to understand what he is going through, and gives him a book about Louisiana zydeco music.

The music festival in which he perform his new music (to virtually no applause—one person in the audience calls out that it is “nigger music”) chooses him to play in a festival at a sister city in Texas.  He goes, realizes he can’t play as well as the other musicians there, and rents a small boat on which he makes his way through the bayous of Louisiana, having different experiences, meeting people, until finally a woman welcomes him on to her house boat, feeds him, and takes him to a music hall where he hears the band playing the song he first heard on the radio.  Then he dies.

At his funeral, the German brass band that formerly would have played his polka instead plays the Zydeco song he played on his accordion.  This makes for a moment of absurd dissonance—the mourners in black, following along behind the German oompah-pah-pah band, which is playing Zyedeco.  In a final scene (reminiscent of The Seventh Seal) band members and mourners march in single file across the field with the windmill.

The American South in this film is a place of welcome difference for Schultze.  He knows virtually nothing about it, until he hears Zydeco on the radio.  When the waitress gives him the book about Cajun music, his imagination takes over.  When he cruises up the waterways of Cajun country, what is he looking for?  In some sense, he’s looking for the idealized South he has imagined based on the music and the book.  But he’s also looking for the music itself, the culture surrounding it.  He’s looking for acceptance and change, for a culture of which he can feel a part.  The film shows Cajun country as a place of friendly, sometimes wary people willing to accept Schultze as he is.  Sometimes they misunderstand one another—in a small dance hall, Schultze dances with a woman who goes off to get them both a drink.  He doesn’t understand (linguistic difficulties) and believes she has lost interest in him.  She returns with the drinks and he is gone.  Finally he pulls alongside a houseboat to ask for a drink of water.  He strikes up a friendship with the black woman on the boat, and she invites him to dinner with her and her daughter.  Later she takes him to the music hall where he hears the music he has been searching for.

Schultze probably dies of lung cancer, based on several hints in the film—his coughing, and a TV announcement he turns off in midstream about the risk of cancer among mineworkers.  Given his apparent vigor, his decline at the end is sudden and unexpected, but also appropriate given the closure it brings.  This is both a gently comic and poignantly sad film.

I’m approaching that time in life when many people retire.  Many friends and colleagues have already retired, or died, and I listen to the living ones talk about their new freedom, or their boredom, and what they are doing with their lives.  I worry over what will happen to me .  Will I find myself in the same situation as Schultze, faced with nothing to do, no choices, a succession of endless, weary, declining days?

Judge Priest

Judge Priest (dir. John Ford, 1934) is a small-town comedy set in Kentucky around 1890.  An introductory message suggests that events and characters are based on reminiscences of small-town life by Irwin S. Cobb, author of the stories that inspired and provided models for the film.  Many elements in Judge Priest might prevent it from connecting with modern audiences, and it would take some time to list them all.  The opening credits list among the actors Hattie McDaniel, the ever-present Mammy in films of the 1930s and 40s, and, in bolded type, Stepin Fetchit, the embodiment of offensive African American portrayals in film in the first half of the 20^th century.  In the film he plays Jeff Poindexter, servant to Judge Priest.  He shuffles, walks in a slouch, mumbles almost incoherently, is lazy, covets fancy clothes, and seems not too intelligent.  He follows Judge Priest around like a loyal hound and shows little will or thought of his own.  He’s like a cartoon figure, and it’s difficult to imagine a figure more insulting to African Americans or to people in general who appreciate the dignity of humankind.  (In Cobb’s stories Poindexter is less of a clown figure—he’s literate, articulate in his light dialect, but possessed of many of the traits one might expect in the stereotypical figure of a 19th century African American male from the American South). The film plays Stepin Fetchit and, to a lesser extent, Hattie McDaniel’s character Dilsey, for comic effect.  Hattie McDaniel’s singing, her generally jolly demeanor, enliven the film whenever she appears, but she doesn’t seem to be acting so much as following directions, filling in the required elements of her role--she acts less in this film than in others I’ve seen her in—there’s no sense of the fully embodied character we see her play in Gone with the Wind. 

Judge Priest isn’t deliberately racist—that is, it doesn’t set out to embody a racist agenda (as we might argue such films as W. B. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation do).  It simply reflects the ingrained racism of its time, and of the Irwin S. Cobb stories on which it was based.  But the film certainly enforces the racist status quo of the times and the culture it portrays.

All that said, race is not a major aspect of the film.  We notice it because Stepin Fetchit appears early in the film. Because we are not accustomed to such blatantly racist stereotypes as the one he portrays, we are shocked.  In the 1930s, I suspect there was far less shock among white viewers, if any.  In a sense, the film’s racism is a reflection of its innocence—it gives no sense of the barest awareness that its portrayal of how African Americans live and act should be questioned.

In a similar way, the film doesn’t do much more than gently satirize the Confederate nostalgia that infuses it.  Set in a small Kentucky town that might be placed, because of the intensely Southern sympathies of its residents, in the depths of Mississippi or South Carolina, the film doesn’t explore any of the implications of the border state setting of Kentucky, which was not a part of the Confederacy.  Twenty-five years after the end of the Civil War, veterans sit around drinking and smoking and reminiscing about various battles and exploits they claim to have been a part of.  Some of them are blowhards; all of them are believers in the Cause.  The women of the town are no different.  As Judge Priest tells his sister-in-law, the women in the town have more war medals than the men.  Everyone is stuck in the past, except for a few, who represent the possibility of change.  These are a young man and woman in love (who could have guessed?) and Judge Priest himself, played by American humorist Will Rogers.

The Judge hasn’t necessarily abandoned his former Confederate loyalties, but his speech and actions show he believes the war is over, defeat was the outcome, and the town must move forward.  He brings this perspective to bear in the courtroom and in his advice to his young nephew, Jerome (Tom Brown), and the girl he loves, Ellie Mae Gillespie (Anita Louise).  Jerome has returned from the North with a law degree.  Ellie Mae is a school teacher and the daughter of a young itinerant woman who came into town, gave birth, and died.  She never identified Ellie Mae’s father, so the girl is not regarded by many in the town as acceptable in proper society, although the men leer at her because of her beauty.  (They never say the word, but they regard her as illegitimate and therefore as pariah).  She behaves in the prim and proper fashion of a young lady of her times, of course, and although she knows of the opinion others hold about her, she does her best to ignore them.  (She also speaks with a vaguely British accent meant, I think, to enforce her intelligence and good character).  Jerome’s mother Caroline wants her son to have nothing to do with Ellie Mae.  She stresses good breeding and respectability, and tries to interest him in Virginia Maydew, the daughter of a senator who is Judge Priest’s political rival.  The Judge clearly doesn’t approve of Caroline’s prejudices and does what he can to support and encourage his young friends.

The first half of the film establishes scene and ambience and character, while the second half focuses on the romance of Jerome and Ellie Mae and the courtroom trial of a man named Bob Gillis, who’s accused of attacking three men playing billiards in a local bar.  In fact, Gillis was himself the victim--the billiard players beat him with billiard cues because a few days earlier he had assaulted one of them in the local barbershop—he heard his victim joking about Ellie Mae’s attractiveness and punched the offender in the kisser.  Why does Gillis attack the man?  Because, unknown to her, he is Ellie Mae’s father, living under an assumed name, supporting her with the salary he earns at a local stable.  This revelation makes for much melodrama and pathos, of course.  Judge Priest withdraws from the trial when Senator Maydew accuses him of prejudice.  But behind the scenes, working with the local preacher and Jeff Poindexter, Judge Priest brings about Gillis’ release.  Ironically, he’s not released because he’s found innocent of the charges, but because the preacher, who fought with him in the Civil War, testifies to the courtroom about his heroic exploits.  Outside the courtroom window Poindexter assembles a band that begins playing “Dixie,” and all hell breaks loose.  The result is the trial’s collapse in a frenzy of hysterical hero worship and Confederate nostalgia.  What Judge Priest has managed to do is to play on the extremist Confederate sympathies of the townspeople to draw attention away from the crime Gillis is accused of.  As soon as they learn of Gillis’ Civil War record, they forgive him and his daughter everything.  All is made right.

Rogers doesn’t so much act in this film as pose.  He sits on his porch or in his courtroom bench smoking his pipe, sipping a mint julep, pondering the past, and issuing homespun witticisms.  Some of the most humorous exchanges come between him and Percival.  I remember my mother recalling how her grandmother, my great grandmother, wept at the news that Will Rogers had been lost in a plane crash involving aviator Wiley Post in Alaska in 1935.  My wife’s grandfather stopped watching movies after Rogers no longer appeared in them.  He was an important figure in the popular imagination of America in the 1930s.

The Sound and the Fury

The 1959 adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury chooses to tell its story through the frame of the fourth section of the novel.  This is the one of the four sections that narrates the 1929 novel from an “objective” viewpoint rather than through the first-person subjective view of a character.  This strategy solves some problems for the filmmakers, and creates others, in particular, how to convey information from the earlier chapters, without which the fourth one would make no sense.  It also causes a significant transformation in the story itself.  The existential confusion that marks Benjy’s narrative, the suicidal angst of Quentin’s, the fuming anger of the Jason chapter—all disappear, and the adaptation doesn’t seek to resurrect them.  Rather it makes the story one about a family in an advanced state of decay, attempting to adjust to its circumstances, set in contrast against the more modern setting of the town itself.  And it also becomes the story of how two individuals—Jason and Caddy--make their accommodation with one another and the world.  This is a reasonable approach to adapting the novel, but it carries risks. 

In the fourth section of Faulkner’s novel, two absences are crucial.  One is the absence of Caddy, the only sister in the family, who disappeared some 16 years in the past, since then never seen again, except briefly.  Her absence is the haunting, melancholic force that gives the final section and the rest of the novel much of its force.  She’s the tragic absent mother and sister.  The other absence is one that occurs midway through the chapter: the flight of the young Quentin, Caddy’s daughter, who runs away with her uncle’s money.  Of course, there are other absences too, in particular that of brother Quentin, who committed suicide in 1910, and of father Jason, who drank himself to death some years before.  How can a film convey the impact of these absences, especially Caddy’s, when they involve characters who play no role in the novel’s final section?

Normally, I would not emphasize differences between the source novel and the film itself.  I want to consider a film in its own context.  I am pleased when a successful film is also successful in retelling the novel it’s based on—but a successful film need not be faithful to its source in order to be a successful film. 

The changes made in the 1959 film to the story in Faulkner’s novel help to explain the film’s abject failure.  In The Long Hot Summer (1957), another adaptation of a Faulkner text, director Martin Ritt at least produced a film that had entertaining qualities.  The story as adapted was not really a Faulknerian tale, but the way the screenwriters Ravetch and Frank reinvented it, along with some wise casting decisions (Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Lee Remick) and some profoundly bad ones (Tony Franciosa as Jody Varner, Orson Welles as father Will) made it amusing in ways they likely did and did not intend.  What one realizes about The Long Hot Summer, especially on repeated viewings, is that the screenwriters and director really had no interest in producing a film true to its source, no interest in fidelity to Faulkner.  Instead they wanted to use whatever elements they could distill from the original texts (the story “Barn Burning” and the novel The Hamlet) to capitalize on the public interest in Woodward and Newman and to make a film that would earn money.  The apparently true tale of Orson Welles mumbling his lines for the film with pebbles in his mouth, which necessitated that he record them again without pebbles, alone makes the film worth watching.

The Long Hot Summer is much more a Tennessee Williams tale—with its emphasis on father-son rivalries and on sexual repression—than a Faulkner story.

There are numerous similarities between the adaptations of The Sound and the Fury and of The Long Hot Summer.  Sexual repression and jealousy are a common issue.  Both films are centered in a plantation house.  Both feature a prominent young woman character attempting to find her place in life.  Both involve issues of patrimony, of inheritance, though in different ways.  Both occur in the same part of the American South in the late 1950s.  With all these points in common, what is curious is that one film works as well as it does and the other doesn’t work at all.  Casting certainly posed a challenge.   Yul Brynner portrays Jason Compson—his prominent Russian accent is noticeable whenever he speaks—the film had to come up with some way to explain the accent.  Joanne Woodward appears as the young Quentin[1] Compson in need of love, a mother, and womanly fulfillment—Woodward is too mature for the character she portrays, and it strains one’s credulity when the film suggests that her character would run off with a greasy haired carny.  To account for the odd casting choices, and to make accommodations for several missing family characters, the adapters make changes that fundamentally undermine, subvert, and ruin the story that might well have provided the basis for a successful film.

A major change is that the time of the novel’s story is moved forward from 1927 to the year (apparently) in which the film was made, 1959.  This is a problematic move, but not one necessarily insurmountable.  Pushing the story 30 years forward moves it further away historically from the time in which the older Compsons might actually have remembered their years of glory in the hometown.  The entire novel occurs within the shadow of that heyday and of its disappearance.  That shadow would have been considerably less visible in the late 1950s than in the 1920s, but at least the notion that older formerly well-established families in the town still mourn over their lost days of glory is plausible. 

The film also engages in several strategies to compensate for the absence of the dead Quentin Compson (who’s described simply as a brother who shot himself) and the dead Mr. Compson.  First, it creates a new Compson brother, Howard.  He does little more than sit around on the veranda and drink and look miserable, literally (much like Uncle Maury in the novel).  He has no other function, other than to repeat a few lines once uttered in the novel by the deceased Mr. Compson and to act out with the middle-aged Caddy an encounter that in the novel takes place in their late teens. 

To explain Jason’s accent, and to achieve other goals, the screenwriters create a backstory in which Mr. Compson marries a woman named Caroline.  He adopts her son and gives him the family name and (given the suicide and drunkenness and idiocy of his other three sons) makes him his heir, or at least his namesake. Over the years, Jason has taken on responsibility for saving the Compson family name, as he explains to young Quentin.  Biologically Jason is not related to anyone in the film, except his mother.  Played by Francoise Rosay, and like the aging mother of the novel’s fourth section, Caroline is always calling out to Dilsey for assistance and complaining about humiliations imposed on her by the family, but in the film she does so with a loud French accent.  That still doesn’t explain Yul Brynner’s Russian accent.

Why did the film need to make this change?  Yul Brynner in 1959 was a popular actor whose star was on the rise.  Undoubtedly, the filmmakers hoped to capitalize on his popularity by placing him in the film.  It had to find an explanation for Jason’s accent.  This change accomplishes another result as well.  Every film needs a little romance.  Jason’s identity as the adopted brother allows the constant hostility between him and Quentin that creates much of the tension in the film gradually to develop into what appears to be the beginnings of a romantic relationship.  To make clear to those who have read both the novel and the previous sentence in this paragraph, allow me to restate:  the end of the film prepares us for a romantic relationship between Quentin II and Jason.  Since they are unrelated, nothing wrong there.  And, I suppose, even if one does consider them related, there is nothing wrong there either--this is the Deep South.

The most significant absence in the novel’s fourth section is Caddy’s.  The film solves her absence by having her come home, permanently.  In the novel, she passes very briefly through Jefferson and pleads with Jason to allow her to see Quentin.  He agrees, and Caddy gets her chance when he drives by with her daughter sitting in his car.  This is a terribly painful moment.  Caddy then vanishes, to appear briefly again in what many refer to as "The Compson Appendix” (1945), when she has, at least according to the local librarian, taken up with Nazis.  The plaintive sadness of the novel is, among other things, deeply tied up with Caddy’s absence, with the vacuum that her name evokes.  In the film, Jason allows Caddy to come home.  She moves back in and reunites with young Quentin and begins talking about the parties and dresses she’ll buy for her daughter, and how a woman has to capitalize on her best assets, by which she means her body.  In the film, Caddy is a faded, histrionic, drunk and probable former prostitute.  She’s the reality we never see in the novel, and because she is who she is—a faded Southern belle from a Tennessee Williams play—she destroys the illusion.

Ethel Waters appears as Dilsey, a long-suffering black Southern woman and servant, the mammy of the family.  She does as well with the part as the writing might allow, which is not much.  She receives less attention in the film than the novel, an ironic difference given that she is a central character in the novel’s fourth section. 

Until the point of Caddy’s return, I was willing to give this film credit for at least making a failed try at adapting a difficult novel.  But with Caddy’s return, and with the promise of love between Jason and Quentin, I gave up.   A world of surreal absurdities had erupted.  Bruce Kawin, describing how the screenwriters undertook the adaptation of Faulkner’s novel, has observed:  “Their operating method was to retain as many of the novel’s scenes and characters as possible, rearranging and recasting them in the narrative present.  The problem is that they kept the surfaces and lost the meanings—and even this would not be so much of a problem if the new meanings they created had been dramatically interesting.”[2]  Alex North’s brassy, smarmy soundtrack, better suited for a Las Vegas story of sleaze and corruption, doesn’t help. 

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[1] The name Quentin here refers not to the dead brother Quentin of the novel but to the Joanne Woodward character of the film (whom Caddy in the novel names after her dead brother).

[2] Faulkner and Film (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), p. 23.

Swamp Water

Setting is more interesting than story in Swamp Water (1941), the first of Jean Renoir’s two films set in the American South.  The film opens with a message explaining that the Swamp was once notorious as a place of dangerous alligators and cottonmouth snakes and that residents feared its “vast openness.”  Next we see a skull posted on a crudely constructed cross jutting out of the waters of the Okefenokee Swamp.  The camera pans over to a group of local residents in flat bottom boats hunting for two trappers who have disappeared in the swamp.  They find an overturned skiff and conclude that the men were “gator-et.”  Clearly the Okefenokee is a place of menace.  And in this film’s mythology, it is also a place of perdition, where the damned are consigned to suffer for their sins, hiding out from the civilized world that would bring them to justice.  The swamp thus occupies the same symbolic realm as it does in Hawthorne’s woods.

Swamp Water plies the same thematic territory as Deliverance (1972) and Southern Comfort (1981), both of which examined what happens when civilized individuals find themselves at odd with the natural wilds.  Those latter films take a distinctly Conradian view—civilized people lose their moral bearings in the wilderness and resort to primal means to survive.  Swamp Water doesn’t go so far, but it’s not necessarily in disagreement with the premise.   

The case in point is Tom Keefer (Walter Brennan), framed for a murder he didn’t commit five years in the past and fled to the swamp to avoid being hanged.  Local folks assume he’s dead. But when a local boy named Ben Ragan goes into the swamp to hunt for his lost dog, he encounters Keefer.  Let me say first of all that Walter Brennan’s performance as Keefer is absolutely outstanding—it is the most important reason to watch this film.  But there are others.  Five years alone in the swamp have marked Keefer—he behaves when Ben first meets him almost as a mad man.  He sneaks up on Keefer as he sits in front of his campfire and clubs him.  When Ben comes to, Keefer has tied him up.  He threatens to kill Ben or at least never to let him go.  Keefer has a vacant, distracted stare, and speaks disjointedly.  He lives in a clearing and sleeps on the ground.  When a cottonmouth bites him on the face (!!), he immediately falls unconscious, and Ben assumes he’s going to die and digs him a grave.  But the next morning Keefer wakes up, explaining that he has learned how to will himself to survive snake bites.  When he learns that Ben has taken care of him, they become friends.

Keefer is full of Emersonian insights with vaguely mystical connotations.  He talks to Ben about the importance of all living things, looks distractedly at the stars (“I hear tell that stars is other worlds, too, big shining rafts a-floatin’ in the ocean of God’s night”), isn’t sure he can survive in the civilized world when Ben tells him he can return.  There’s otherworldliness to his character, not the otherworldliness of a saint but instead of a man wounded by isolation and hardship (“Living alone in these swamps is just like living on another star”).  Even in the film’s final scene, after he’s been exonerated and welcomed back to the community, sitting in a chair at a town dance, watching the action, he seems uncomfortable and out of place.  He’s similar to Tom Joad in John Ford’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath (1940), but without a humanist or political agenda.

Another reason to watch this film is its portrayal of life in an isolated Southern village on the borders of the Okefenokee Swamp.  Without much condescension or stereotyping, Renoir shows the people of this town engaged in the normal affairs of their lives.  We see dances, courtship, various forms of work, recreation.  As in The Southerner (1945), Renoir exhibits a remarkable gift for revealing the nuances of a particular way of life. 

I’m interested in Thursday Ragan (Walter Huston) and his younger wife Julie (Anne Baxter).  Thursday is an older man who has married a younger woman, and the film gently plays with the connotations of such a relationship.  He’s often absent from home, hunting and tending to business, and she misses him.  She tells him so, and the implication is that she misses him sexually.  While he’s away a local no good named Jesse Wick played by John Carradine tries to court Julie with his guitar, and although she repeatedly tries to rebuff him it’s clear that she isn’t entirely uninterested. 

Another interesting character is Tom Keefer’s daughter Mabel.  With her father convicted and lost in the swamp, she’s been taken in by a local family and spends most of her time doing menial work.  She’s a wild Ariel-like character, always running to and fro, taking care of animals, protecting kittens, constantly in motion, more or less tolerated by the local community but without a real place within it.  She may be 14 or may be 18—it’s not clear—but after Ben grows tired of his one-time girl Hannah’s capriciousness, he turns to Mabel.

In its attention to an isolated small Southern community Swamp Water is akin to Thunder Road (1958) and I’d Climb the Highest Mountain (1951).  As with The Southerner, one senses the influence of John Ford.  But riding up against Ford’s tendency to idealize his characters is Renoir’s effort to see them as fallible inhabitants of their world.  Renoir’s characters are more three-dimensional than Ford’s, more nuanced.  Yet this is really only a matter of degree, for neither Ford nor Renoir (at least in his Southern films) plumb human character too deeply.

Although I find his father Thursday more interesting, and although Tom Keefer is the fascinating center of the film, Ben Ragan is Renoir’s protagonist.  He’s a young man just starting out in the world.  He’s intelligent and idealistic, and like his father a stubborn individual.  Stubborn willfulness brings father and son into conflict.  A major argument erupts when Ben announces his intention to go into the swamp to hunt for his lost hound.  When Ben returns after a two-week absence, the argument erupts again, and Ben moves out.  What Ben doesn’t see is his father’s deep anxiety for his safety.  What Thursday cannot see is the effect of his dogmatic temper on his son. Ben’s own stubbornness is a virtue as well—once he decides that Tom Keefer is a good man, nothing will alter his loyalty, and even when the two men who framed Keefer for murder try to drown Ben, he refuses to give Keefer up to the local people who want to bring him back to be hanged. 

Much if not most of Swamp Water was filmed on location in and near the Okefenokee Swamp.  The result is a film with a relatively authentic feel that lacks the claustrophobic atmosphere of a studio production.  Only one scene in the swamp seems to have been shot in the studio, and it sticks out like the sorest of thumbs.

In 1952, a Technicolor remake of the film entitled The Lure of the Wilderness was released, featuring the same setting and many of the same scenes and dialogue from the original.  Walter Brennan reprised the same role, though the other cast members and character names had changed.

Pinky

Up North, Pinky’s name is Patricia.  Down South, she is just Pinky.  The film never says so, but the name must have to do with her light skin color.  It is so light, in fact, that she can pass for white.  When she doesn’t mention to people up North that she is black, they assume she’s white.  Instead of struggling against the misperception, she accepts it.  It makes life easier for her.  She doesn’t have to explain where she’s from, who she is, why her grandmother sent her up North to school.  But when the white doctor whom she falls in love with, and who doesn’t know the truth, proposes, she has to decide what to do. She runs away back home to her grandmother to hide, and to decide.  “Passing,” with all the dilemmas and ironies that accompany it, is the crux of the film Pinky (1949; dir. Elia Kazan), which features Jeanne Crain as the title character, and Ethel Waters as her grandmother.

The South in Pinky is relatively monochromatic, or perhaps I should say dichromatic.  Black Southerners live in rustic cabins and engage in field work and menial labor while, in the distance, white columned plantation houses loom.  (The one exception is a young medical doctor).  It’s all pretty monolithic.  At first the film seems to suggest that nothing has changed in the South since emancipation and the end of the Civil War, but in fact we learn that some change has occurred.  The woman who lives in the plantation house, Miss Em (Ethel Barrymore) is old and impoverished, supposedly.  Her house is deteriorating and empty.  And while the stereotypical racist white South seems strongly entrenched, there are people who seem willing, when pressed, to think independently.

Pinky’s role is central.  This seems so obvious as almost to go without saying.  Her light skin is the key.  She returns to the South not as a menial laborer but as a professional nurse, skilled in her profession.  She’s also an extremely attractive woman.  Two white red necks who try to manhandle her comment on her figure.  She’s black, attractive, educated, professional—all of these qualities somehow intermingling and trying to cancel each other out in this 1949 film.  If Pinky were recognizably African American, if she were not so attractive and light-skinned, then the dynamics of the film would not work as they do. She’s everything as a black woman she should not be.  Pinky’s appearance does raise the question of what race really means, though I’m not sure Kazan’s film intended to explore the question.  Rather it intended to explore the issue of rights under the law, of human rights.

Ironically, we have to assume, given her light skin, that Pinky is the product of racial intermingling, if not by her parents then by some of her ancestors, perhaps even by her grandmother.  Pinky has the option of accepting a white man’s wedding proposal.  Because of her skin color, she can live as a white woman, and no one will know the difference.  The man who proposes, and whom she loves, suggests that they live in Denver, where she can “hide” who she really is.  He’s comfortable with her race, but only, apparently, if she hides it.  When she gives him the option of staying with her in South Carolina, where she will not have to hide her true self, he leaves.  One wonders what options were available to the ancestors one or two generations earlier who contributed to Pinky’s conception.

Pinky is saddled both by the presumptions of the film and of her grandmother concerning the obligations she must honor to her race.  To be clear, this presumption is that she has an obligation, that she’s not entitled to pass as white whether she wishes to or not.  It’s interesting to consider the difference between a film such as this one and the novel by William Faulkner Light in August.  The main character there, Joe Christmas, alternately chooses to live as a black man or a white man and occasionally as an individual who makes no declaration of racial identity at all.  When white people learn that he has been passing for white, that he has even been living with a white woman, they are enraged.  Their rage is racist in nature—Faulkner portrays a South in which clearly defined notions of racial identity hold sway.  The South of Pinky is somewhat different, at once somewhat more benign in attitude, but equally inflexible.  In the film, if Pinky chooses to live as the white Patricia, she’s free to do so up North, somewhere else, but at the cost of betraying her black-skinned granny and the black people of the South where she was born and raised.  It’s Pinky’s Granny, and the African American medical doctor, and Ms. Em herself (as we learn) who insist on this obligation.  Behind them, it’s the white writers and director of the film who insist on it.  A racial imperative has evolved into a social one.  To what extent does the social imperative become an evasion of deeper, more pernicious reasons?  I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of the people who made this film, but it is worth considering the gradual evolution of motives—from a situation where a man must accept his black identity because his racist society allows him no alternative, to a situation where a young woman must accept her black identity because of obligations to her race.

Miss Em in the film is a stereotyped character who emerges from her chrysalis into another stereotype.  She’s the crotchety old white woman with a heart of gold—but is her heart gold because she wants to encourage Pinky to honor her obligation to serve “her people” or is it gold because she wants to ensure that the black-at-heart Pinky doesn’t escape to live a white existence in Denver?  Pinky assumes Miss Em is a hateful old racist Southern woman because she remembers being chased out of her yard once as a child.  She’s always assumed this was because Miss Em didn’t want a black child in her yard.  Pinky can’t understand the apparent friendship and close bond that her Granny shares with Miss Em.  Her Granny assures her the connection is real and human and that it has nothing to do with race.  In Pinky the friendship is one way Granny builds her argument for Pinky’s debt to her place.  It’s the result of living in a community where people value one another as people.  Pinky is skeptical of such thinking, as should we viewers of this film be.  No doubt there were such friendships—they’ve been documented in memoirs and fiction (recall the friendship of Molly Worsham and Miss Havisham in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust), but they seem to be reported most often as anecdotes rather than as representative of the norm.

Bernie

The narrator of Bernie (2011; dir. Richard Linklater) tells us that Carthage in East Texas is where the American South begins.  This film is difficult to categorize.  It’s a faux documentary of sorts, based on true events.  The four or five principal characters in the film are played by Hollywood actors, but they are based on real citizens from Carthage, and throughout the film features interviews with individuals connected with events--they are all citizens of Carthage.  Their names and faces appear at the end of the film and roll past in the credits.

One can think of Errol Morris in this film, or even of the satiric documentaries made by the people who made Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind.  Bernie is definitely a comedy, albeit a dark one, and a satire.  The satire aims at the community values of a small town that values friendliness and community involvement over the fact that its main character, Bernie, killed a woman.

Bernie himself appears in Carthage from a seemingly obscure background, hires on as assistant undertaker at a local funeral home, and goes about endearing himself to the members of the community—he is solicitous when they are bereaved, takes part in community activities, he has a beautiful singing voice, and his personality is winning.  He is somewhat effeminate, and in fact many of the townspeople suspect he is gay, but surprisingly they don’t seem to resent him for it.  Jack Black is excellent as Bernie, a much different fellow from Black’s usual roles. 

Bernie seems more comfortable with older women than women his own age, and one person he begins squiring around town is Marjorie Nugent, played in a droll if obvious manner by Shirley MacLaine.  She’s the most unpopular woman in town.  Avaricious and selfish, permanently estranged from other members of her family, crabby in the extreme.  Bernie gradually insinuates himself into her friendship, and before long they are living under the same roof.  He becomes her personal assistant, manages all her affairs, and accompanies her wherever she wants to go.

It’s clear that Bernie likes Marjorie’s money.  He has expensive tastes.  He wants to make gifts to various individuals and causes in the town, and her money makes that possible.  But gradually she turns abusive, treats him more as a slave than a friend, and one day he shoots her four times in the back and stows her body in a freezer in the garage.  He goes on living in her house, managing her affairs, spending her money, as if she is still alive.  He tells people who ask that she is recovering from a stroke.  Finally, her stock broker, who has been suspicious of him all along, manages to uncover the truth.

The townspeople give Bernie credit for not dismembering and disposing of Marjorie’s body.  He keeps it intact, so that she can be buried in the proper way when the time comes.  They think this shows that he really did care for her and wanted her to have a proper funeral.  The local district attorney (overplayed by Matthew McConaughey) moves the trial to another town because of Bernie’s popularity in Carthage.  Although the facts of the case are clear and Bernie has confessed to the murder, the townspeople support him throughout the trial and are outraged when he is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. 

Among the many ironies and paradoxes in this film, the tolerance and fondness of the citizens of Carthage for Bernie stand out.  He is popular and well liked, and Marjorie was an old crone, and that seems to make the difference.

The film implies but never deeply investigates the likelihood that Bernie is attracted not to Mrs. Nugent but to her money, that he’s a poser, a kind of flimflam man who insinuates his way into the heart of the community by pretending to be what he’s not, by spending someone else’s money, by creating a personality for himself that allows him to become the town hero, a modern-day George Bailey.  We can reach that conclusion on our own, or, on the other hand, maybe Bernie wins us over too.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

The apparent randomness of some of the scenes in Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012; dir. Benh Zeitlin), the ways in which they seem haphazardly stitched together, as if they’re scenes from home movies, makes me wonder how one could write a screenplay for this film.  In ways it seems totally random, built of stuff from the sub- or unconscious, from dreams and hallucinated images, yet there is a clear plot.  Just not the kind that logic and cause and effect necessarily dictate.  It includes the father’s illness; the melting of the polar ice caps and the aurochs the melting ice sets free; a little girl’s search for her mother and her fear of her father’s death; how a cataclysmic storm changes the lives of the Bathtub residents.  The storm is a metaphor, mixed up with the global warming theme, of incipient and fatal change in the world, and of how we must all deal with and finally submit to it.  These are born of the imagination of the six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), the main character and the film’s point of view.

There’s no doubt that this film was planned, made with intent, yet part of its achievement lies in how it seems not to show the artifice of its construction. 

Hushpuppy’s oracular pronouncements sometimes seem too precocious--self-consciously written for a six-year-old girl to pronounce. For example, “I see that I am a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes it right” and “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece . . . the whole universe will get busted.” Has Hushpuppy been reading Emerson?  Hushpuppy reminds me of the 12-year old girl Nasia in David Gordon Greene’s George Washington (2000), with all her worldly pronouncements on life and human character.  And of the narrator-character played by Linda Manz in Terrence Mallick’s Days of Heaven (1978).  (These films are all part of the same current). 

The people of the Bathtub are the ultimate social outcasts.  They live on the other side of the levees, exposed to the sea and natural elements and to the pollution that drains in from the nearby city after the storm.  The inhabitants of the Bathtub might be said to live in a post-racial world.  They’re white and black, young and old, Cajun and Creole and African American.  They’re excluded not by race but by environment and heritage, by economic status, which is no status at all.  Their exclusion binds them together, survivors on the margins scrabbling to make their ways.  We never see the nearby city of New Orleans, only oil refineries and levees that wall the Bathtub residents off from the city or vice versa.  Race does not seem an obvious issue in this film.  This may be because the film is set entirely outside the conventional world in which race makes any kind of sense.

People are not the only castoffs in the Bathtub.  The filmmakers have somehow managed to assemble the most amazing conglomeration of random junk I’ve ever seen—all the junk cast out by the civilized world on the other side of the levee. Rusting cars and shards of metals, old signs advertising one product or another, bedframes, trash, stoves, ropes, trailers and houses.  Hushpuppy’s father Wink (Dwight Henry) navigates his way around the Bathtub in a boat made from the remnants of an old truck.  The junk signifies the liminal world that the characters of Bathtub inhabit.  It signifies the order or lack of order in their lives. 

The mother who has died or run off is a defining absence for Wink and Hushpuppy.  The little girl often speaks to her mother, calling out to her to come back.  Wink never speaks of his vanished wife with bitterness, and it’s clear that her absence is a hole in his life as well. 

The film takes the child’s perspective and therefore views the world in simple and even primal terms.  The teacher’s lessons about the difficulty of life, about global warming, about the extinct aurochs who, the teacher says, once seized children as prey, get wrapped up, along with her father’s illness, in Hushpuppy’s apprehension of the world.  The film is like a fairy take, serving for Hushpuppy the functions that Bruno Bettelheim in “The Uses of Enchantment” assigns to the fairy tale:  “In order to master the psychological problems of growing up—becoming able to relinquish childhood dependencies; gaining a feeling of selfhood and of self-worth, and a sense of moral obligation—a child needs to understand what is going on within [her] conscious self so that [she] can also cope with that which goes on in [her] unconscious. [She] can achieve this understanding, and with it the ability to cope, not through rational comprehension of the nature and content of [her] unconscious, but by becoming familiar with it through spinning out daydreams. . . . the child must be helped to make some coherent sense out of the turmoil of [her] feelings. [She] needs ideas on how to bring [her] inner house in order, and on that basis to create order in [her] life. . . . The child finds this meaning through fairy tales.”

It’s difficult to tell where the film ends and the real world begins.  In the final scene Hushpuppy triumphantly leads the remaining inhabitants away from the Bathtub, towards civilization.  Where are they all headed?  What life lies ahead for them?  One image in particular suggests the disconnection that lies ahead for Hushpuppy and the modern world—in the refugee center to which they’re evacuated, and where her father has been sent for treatment, we see her wearing a light blue dress, standing among other similarly dressed children, being spoken to with disapproval and exasperation by a teacher or counselor.  She looks entirely out of place, disempowered.

The film takes its own time.  Not especially slow-paced, it’s not fast either.  It wanders, sometimes, and veers off course before coming back again.  Yet to claim that it veers off course implies that off course is necessarily off course. These wanderings are all part of some larger plan.  There are remarkable non-sequiturs.  My favorite comes after Hushpuppy and her compatriots have managed to drag her father back to the Bathtub from the evacuation center.  He’s clearly dying.  Suddenly the girl looks off into the distance and begins swimming out to sea with some of her younger friends, towards a distant light that she has identified throughout the film with a place where her mother might be.  This turns out to be one of the most interesting, surprising, and crucial episodes in the film.

There’s also a clearly intended ambiguity and indeterminacy throughout.  There are many things we don’t know, some because they lie outside the immediate scope of the film, others because they‘re simply not revealed.  Is Hushpuppy’s mother dead? What is killing her father?  Is the woman she meets out at the whorehouse in the Gulf her mother?  Is that Hurricane Katrina that passes over early in the film, flooding and permanently unsettling life in the Bathtub?  These matters remain unrevealed and unsettled because, I think, we’re not supposed to think in the worldly sorts of terms that provide explanations and justifications where they’d prove unneeded, irrelevant.

The actors in this film are largely inexperienced.  Dwight Henry has never appeared in a film before—he runs a cafe in New Orleans seventh ward.  The six-year-old Wallis is also inexperienced.  One might argue that she has a great career ahead of her.  I’m not sure this is true.  She plays an extraordinary and amazing six year old.  I don’t think she was acting--she was simply being herself. (Both she and Henry are currently featured in a film directed by Steve McQueen, now in production, Twelve Years a Slave).  Virtually all the actors have no acting experience. The cast is clearly a found cast.

We might see Beast as allegory.  The father’s illness and death, the mother’s disappearance, the aurochs, the melting polar ice, the flood that’s coming—the film’s about apocalyptic and personal catastrophe.

 

The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick has defined his own kind of filmmaking. His use of visual imagery, voiceovers, philosophical and religious contemplation, his contrasting of the natural world with the technological, of agrarian and industrial dimensions, his study of the meaning of consciousness and human identity--not in the meaning of culture or ideology but of pure self--these set him out as distinctive. It’s interesting to see how his films have progressed, from the early Badlands (1973) to the most recent, The Tree of Life (2011). One could almost view the last three films—The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), and The Tree of Life--as a coherent piece, with their emphasis on the individual in nature, their contrasting of the inward contemplative nature of the individual against the destructive forces of the outer, modern world. As an example, all three films use trees as unifying iconic symbols.

The contending forces that most interest Malick are laid out for us in the opening scene of The Tree of Life. The quotation from the Book of Job (“"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?") focuses us in particular on the calamity that is the starting point—the death at the age of 19 of one of the O’Brien children, for reasons probably war-related, delivered through a telegram. Mrs. O’Brien questions why God would allow her son to die. The quotation from Job suggests that there are reasons for events on the earth, that there is a greater scheme of things into which the small details of individual human lives fit.

Mrs. O’Brien’s voiceover comments about grace and nature in the opening scene set down for us the struggle between mother and father in the film, Mrs. O’Brien representing grace, and Mr. O’Brien, nature. “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life. The way of nature, and the way of grace,” she tells us. “You have to choose which one you will follow.” (We cannot schematize Tree that easily. I’m deliberately oversimplifying.) The O’Briens’ oldest son Jack, the focus of much of the film, is the product of these contending parental forces.

The Tree of Life is recognizably a Terrence Malick film, but it is different from his four previous efforts. Set in a small Texas town during the 1950s, it focuses on one family that is in many ways a standard 1950s small town family. The father returns from the second world war to marry his wife, and they have three sons. Jack, who by expression and behavior seems constantly disaffected once the birth of a younger brother shatters the harmony of his world, bears the brunt of his father’s willful attention, and even from an early age he is caught up in a battle of wills, as are in one way or the other his brothers and mother, with their strong-minded father.

The telegram’s arrival in the opening scene becomes the center of a fluid movement between past and present, between the early days of the family’s life, and the efforts of the mother and father to come to grips with their son’s death. But the past isn’t merely the human past of a single family. It’s the history of the world, of the entire universe, of life’s development. How does Malick show this dimension? Literally. With images of the big bang and the birth of the sun and the earth, some of them digitally created, others digitally altered images of Hubble photographs, he shows the movement of the universe towards that one moment in time when the telegram arrives and the parents learn of their son’s death.

The point of this must be to contrast with the birth and development of the universe the mother’s questioning of God about why he allowed her son’s death. It suggests that in the grand scheme of things the death is a miniscule detail, yet at the same time it shows that in the life of the parents, of the family, of the surviving brothers, it is calamitous tragedy. It is also shows that in Malick’s view his death is part of a divine grand scheme.

An inevitable comparison to Malick’s film is Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). Both films link the lives of human beings with a encompassing vision of the universe. Both question the meaning of human experience cast against the sweep of cosmic history. In von Trier’s film, the character Justine expresses his view that “Life is only on earth. And not for long,” as the planet heads for its inevitable collision with the earth. There is no existence beyond this final moment in this film. Malick’s view is the opposite. Though he doesn’t consider the issue of life elsewhere in the universe, his film suggests, at least implies (unless we are dealing with scenes of pure metaphor), a life after death where his characters are reunited with one another and where reconciliation, redemption of some sort, is possible. Malick’s view is a Christian one, while von Trier expresses a decidedly naturalistic one.

It’s pointless to ask which film is “better.” I can’t rank them on the basis of my agreement or disagreement with them. I found Melancholia a powerful and sobering experience the first time I saw it. With my second viewing I continued to admire it but was less moved and was bothered by the film’s stylistic dogmatism—von Trier not only expressed his message but also insisted that we understood it. Both films are beautifully made. I wondered why Melancholia was set on an elegant seaside estate somewhere in the United States, and why its first half was devoted to a serio-comic disaster of a wedding while its second half focused on the preparation of the main characters for the end of the world. The two halves of the film, titled “Justine” and “Claire,” suggested two conflicting treatments of character, yet Justine dominated the film.

While I tend to agree with Melancholia’s view philosophically, The Tree of Life impressed me more. Stylistically, Malick’s film is not dogmatic. It presents a particular view of life, one that is undoubtedly religious in nature, but never presses that view. It simply displays, and with the long sequences showing the birth and development of the universe, and the final scenes where family members reunite on a heavenly beach, we are left to our own explanations. It’s possible to come away from The Tree of Life with a naturalistic view, and it’s possible to come away religiously inspired. Maybe both feelings are possible. In Melancholia Kirsten Dunst as Justine stands out. Deeply mired in depression, then passively accepting of the annihilation she knows is coming, the authenticity of her performance is compelling. Yet it’s a monochromatic performance—she doesn’t have to do much more than act convincingly depressed. In The Tree of Life Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain give performances more complex and nuanced. The children in this film are truly outstanding.

While the swank seaside estate where the wedding collapses and the world ends in Melancholia may give von Trier a vehicle for suggesting disdain for a human existence that measures itself on material possessions, one is tempted to wonder whether the estate also gave him a setting for the beautiful images that proliferate through the film, images that in themselves are distinct and stunning but that may also be gratuitous—they’re part of the intentional artifice of the film. One could make the same argument about the small Texas town where Malick centers The Tree of Life, yet there is a logic to the setting anchored in the film’s treatment of a family in the 1950s of Texas. One never has to wonder why Malick’s film is set where it is, while in Triers’ film there’s always the question.

Key images in The Tree of Life are trees, doors, portals, dividing lines (land and sky, under water and over water, inside and outside).

Finally, given my interest in films about the American South, I must consider whether this one fits the category. Because the South is associated with nostalgic notions of childhood (To Kill a Mockingbird), family (The Sound and the Fury), and an idyllic past (Trip to Bountiful), I would argue that Tree of Life fits tangentially. It is not about the traditional “Southern” issues that many other “Southern” films address, but it does use mythic associations of the South with family and childhood and small towns to provide a context for its larger philosophical ruminations.