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.

So Red the Rose

So Red the Rose (1935) was based on the novel of the same name by Mississippi writer Stark Young. It is a film unavailable today on tape or DVD, probably because it seems by contemporary standards too retrograde, especially in its treatment of the Old South and of slavery. It is told from a perspective sympathetic to the Southern viewpoint and makes no attempt to politicize its subject or to view slavery as anything other than a benign practice. In its portrayal of the Southern belle and plantation life it looks forward specifically to the film Gone with the Wind (1938), which may have borrowed elements of the earlier film.

This film begins with scenes of slaves working in the cotton fields to the musical strains of “Way Down on the Sewanee River (cf. Mississippi). The tone is one of tender tribute to a lost way of life. Even though the film romanticizes that way of life, there are ways in which it accurately portrays plantation life and life on the home front.

The first scene of the film makes clear that war is about to break out with the North. We see the old patriarch Malcom Bedford (Walter Connolly) telling the main house servant how nothing will ever change, war will not happen, and everything will continue as it always has been. The film then proceeds methodically to refute this assertion by showing how things do change. One by one sons of the family go off to the war and die. The old patriarch goes off to the war after he is rousted out of bed by Yankee soldiers and forced to show them the way on the road to their headquarters. He returns months later exhausted and shortly after dies.

So Red the Rose offers three perspectives on the Civil War. First is that of Duncan (played by Randolph Scott), cousin and suitor of Valette Bedford. Because he was educated in the North and has friends there, and because he sees the war as a conflict between Americans, he doesn’t support the war or want to fight in it. In a sense he is like the plantation owner, unwilling to accept that change must occur, unwilling to be drawn into the battle because he sees it as fundamentally at odds with the concept of one America. (He never articulates these positions but I infer them from his statements and behavior).

Another perspective is that of survival. The matriarch is at first afraid of war and afraid of the loss of her family. She gradually strengthens throughout the film until she is capable of acts of courage, even when faced with the burning of her beloved home. A similar development of character occurs in Valette, played by Margaret Sullavan, who at first begins as a coy and flirtatious Southern belle but who gradually develops in strength and moral insight.

A third perspective is that of the home front. The film takes place almost entirely on the plantation Portobello, and we learn of the war mainly through bulletins flashed on the screen, through visitors to the plantation, and through reports that filter in. The focus is on a family’s struggle to survive. The story is told from a sympathetic point of view, but even through the film seems sympathetic to the Southern way it is mainly sympathetic to the plight of a family in a time of crisis.

One minor recurrent theme is that of brother vs. brother, embodied in the reluctance of Duncan to go to war, and brought to a head when he finds a Yankee raider wounded in his house and being protected by his family. Scott goes from being a neutral to being a fierce partisan more intent on being partisan than on being human.

The main house servant, well played by Clarence Muse, is a dignified man who though subservient and clearly possessed by the role he is playing does not embody most racist stereotypes. He speaks Latin, and he is of course thoroughly loyal to the family, even when other slaves want to be freed. The stereotype he does reflect is that of the “good” house slave, loyal to his family even when offered the possibility of freedom. In this stereotyped role, the good house slave knows what is good for him and sticks by his white family. There are clear echoes in this kind of character of Thomas Nelson Page’s “Marse Chan” and of the slave in Simms’ The Yemasee who begs not to be freed by his master. At the same time, there is no shucking and jiving in Cato—he is a character with his own dignity.

From a modern point of view the most problematic element of the film is the portrayal of the slaves as contented with their lot, simple, and easily misled. They are easily convinced to give up their work, run amok, and steal possessions of their owners—we then see a scene of slaves comically tackling chickens and hogs. When Valette and her brother go to the barn and reason with the slaves, she reminds one of the slaves of how he picked her up and took her to the house when she broke her wrist and the little brother then reminds him of the rabbit trap he has so far failed to make for the boy. The man seems overcome with guilt. In the next scene we see the slaves walking en masse to the house singing “Go Down, Moses,” or some such song. They have completely changed their minds about wanting to be free. There is a similar scene when the old plantation owner decides to go to war and all the slaves come to the house singing “Go Down, Moses.” In general, So Red the Rose holds with the notion that slavery was an enlightened, paternalistic, benign institution, and that slave owners treated their slaves well.

There are a number of emotionally powerful scenes in the film, as when the mother has a “vision” that her son has been killed in battle and Duncan and the head servant go with her out to the battlefield where they discover his body. This precipitates Duncan’s decision to go to war. The scene in which the Northern soldiers prepare to burn the house as the family watches is especially effective.

Valette’s character looks forward to Scarlett O’Hara. Both are of a type that must have predated Stark Young’s novel and Margaret Mitchell’s—the innocent, pampered Southern belle who confronted with the challenges of war must change in order to survive.

The real theme of the film is the struggle for survival in the face of change and the growth and transformation in character that takes place in the individuals confronted with change.

Only one person in the film, a visitor from Texas who is one of the first to die in the war, has a Southern accent. Most everyone has a British accent.

Wild River

Wild River (1960), directed by Elia Kazan, offers conflicting schizophrenic perspectives. Set in the early 1930s, the movie begins as if it is a documentary, with images of raging floodwaters and a close-up testimonial by a young father about how his father-in-law and three young children drowned in a flood. A voiceover explains that to quell the floodwaters Congress in 1933 passed legislation to create the Tennessee Valley Authority. By constructing a series of dams, the TVA would control floods and save human lives. (The generation of electric power is never mentioned). The TVA would purchase property of people living on the river and they would be relocated. Some people, the voice suggests, would refuse to move voluntarily.

The TVA is presented as a modern and progressive force, a positive development that would bring American individualism into conflict with the federal government. But individualism is only part of the issue. The Garth family lives on an island that the rising impoundment waters will inundate. The eighty-year-old matriarch Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet) is the individual who refuses to move or be moved. Through the visual imagery of the island the film expands the concern with individualism to encompass lifestyle, culture, and history. Old farm buildings, a weathering but rugged old farm house, corn fields, human figures that dart in and out of the corn rows, industrious black workers—this is a glimpse into another world and another life, a world that is part of the American world but that is cut off from the mainstream. To Ella Garth and her family the TVA is the enemy.

The film does not take a stand on this conflict between Ella Garth and progress. Progress must happen, it argues, because progress offers benefits and a safer life to the people who live along the river. The lives that are displaced or simply erased, it also argues, are a sad and inevitable consequence of progress.

Other films and literary works have taken a similar approach to the same conflict, but with more empathy for the displaced. This film is so neutral that it lacks power. This lack of vigor is mirrored in the strange relationship that develops between Ella Garth’s granddaughter Carol (Lee Remick) and the TVA agent Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift), who has been sent to convince the old woman to move. Chuck speaks and moves with the realism of a robot. Carol is beautiful and genuine and wistful and equally lifeless. At the end of the film, Chuck is watching as final preparations are made to raze Ella’s house. Carol approaches him to report that Ella has died. She delivers the news, and he receives it, with the kind of interest one would evince at the news that an aspirin bottle is empty.

Chuck is passive both physically and morally. He becomes increasingly concerned about Ella’s situation and goes out of his way to find another house for her to live in, but he never relents in his efforts to move her. He seems attracted to Carol but is strangely reticent when she declares her feelings for him. She tells him that she loves him and that she wants to leave with him and all he can do is reply that “I don’t know what to say.” When threatened, he often backs off. Only when a gang of town drunks beat them up does he propose marriage. He seems to relish being beaten. It’s as if it takes pain and humiliation to arouse him. Why does Carol love him?

The union of Carol and Chuck is the film’s statement about the relationship of progress and tradition. They unite harmoniously and tradition vanishes. This love plot is a disjunctive counterpoint to the plight of Ella Garth. These two lines of narrative don’t ever fit neatly together, but they do make for an interesting if unsettled film.

The relationship between Carol and Chuck does allow Elia Kazan to direct several intense scenes that remind us of his best films. Ironically, Kazan’s film portrays the consequences of Ella Garth's stubborn resistance against progress as a tragedy, but a tragedy viewed with casual interest rather than with genuine emotional apprehension.

God's Little Acre

God’s Little Acre (1958) gets right the comic tone of Caldwell’s 1933 novel. It correctly conveys the tensions between town and country, between the rural dirt farm of Ty Ty and the town life and affluence of Augusta. It preserves the family structure and other characters from the novel. It fails in a number of fundamental ways. While the film is almost always interesting, it frequently strays in confusing and unsatisfactory ways from the plot of the novel. Fraternal jealousies do not lead to murder in the film. Only Will Thompson (Aldo Ray) dies, by accidental gunfire, after he turns on the power at the cotton mill. The raw sexuality of the novel is missing. It could never have been properly conveyed in a 1958 film, and even today it would possibly push the limits of what mainstream films can do. I think specifically of the scene in which one of the men has sex with Darling Jill in front of the rest of the family.

One failure of the film is its attempt to make Ty Ty noble. He invokes God at the end of the film and seems redeemed from his hole digging ways. He seems more interested in the welfare of the family, in keeping his sons alive, than he does in finding grandpa’s gold. He seems able to look above the horizon in a way that the character in the novel, an abysmally depressing novel, never does.

The novel suggests that environmental conditions of the prevailing economy, the conflict of agriculture vs. commerce, and human sexuality control the actions of the characters. There is no free will, and the one person who attempts to exercise free will, Will Thompson when he turns on the power in the cotton mill, is shot to death. He is the figure of masculine power and sexuality in the novel, the one individual who asserts himself, has the women he wants to have, and he is shot down. The film suggests some of the same dynamic relationships, but softens and weakens them. The film lacks the hard unrelenting edge of the novel, its clinical indifference to the characters, especially to Ty Ty.

The characters in the film do not look like people who live on a farm and spend their days digging holes looking for gold. They look too well fed, too well dressed, and they sweat only a little. The women walk around in high heels and starched dresses. The men appear to be only lightly soiled after a day of shoveling dirt in a fifteen-foot deep hole. These people and their ways of acting and talking and dressing are overly sanitized. They live in a house much too big for a man who is able only to barely subsist.

Ty Ty in both the novel and the film is possessed by the lust for material things. His oldest son Jim Leslie has gone to the city to marry a wealthy woman. His daughter’s husband Will Thompson eschews life on the farm and chooses another kind of enslavement at the cotton mill. Ty Ty chooses not to farm and instead digs holes for 20 years in the hopes of finding gold which his grandfather supposedly buried there. Why he believes the gold is there is never made clear. Ty Ty digs holes in search of elusive treasure for the same reason Will Thompson works at the cotton mill. It is the choice of affluence and material things over the virtues of farming. This is the dialectic established in the film, and though it is suggested in the novel Caldwell doesn’t idolize farming and does not suggest that farming in some way creates virtue in the breasts of those who till the soil.

The film is schizophrenic in a way. It is broad comedy at the beginning as we watch Ty Ty and his sons dig holes and rely on the albino Dave Dawson (well played by a young Michael Landon) to divine the true location of the gold. The comedy of the film is like the broad comedy of a comic strip, whereas the comedy of the novel is focused at people so different from most of us readers of the present day that they seem almost like alien beings. Somewhere past the midpoint, however, the nature of the film changes, and one senses an attempt on the part of the filmmakers to portray the family in a more sympathetic light, especially Ty Ty and his struggle to quell the tensions rampant among his sons. By the end of the film, with its somber and tragic scenes, one almost forgets the broad comedy of the opening scenes and the digging of holes.

I am reminded throughout this film and the novel it is based on of Faulkner’s story “Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard” and the false treasure out at the Old Frenchman’s Place. Did Faulkner borrow from Caldwell, or vice versa? Could Caldwell have seen the 1932 Saturday Evening Post version of the story that later became the penultimate chapter of The Hamlet? I am also reminded of Anse Bundren in As I Lay Dying, who sometimes seems more like the Ty Ty of the film than the Ty Ty of the novel. But these are subjective and unreliable judgments.

The film’s conclusion seems to suggest that Ty Ty is such a crazy fool that he really isn’t to be taken seriously. Greed, ambition for wealth, seems in some way to be responsible for the tension and discord in the family (not to mention sexual jealousy which the film makes far less of than the novel does). At the end of the film everyone is happily tilling the field, planting cotton seed. Griselda and her husband seem happy with one another, at least for now. But when Ty Ty strikes an old metal shovel with the plow blade and decides that the shovel is a sign from God, he starts digging again. Is this just a brief interlude or the beginning of another 20-year cycle? The suggestion is the latter, that old Ty Ty will just never learn, and that despite all the suffering and unhappiness in the film it all really doesn’t matter because these characters are rural redneck farmers and you can’t really expect any better of them (which is pretty much what Caldwell suggests too).

The cotton mill episode is more effectively treated in the novel and is an exploration of how industry—one extension of the comer-oriented world of the modern city and of modern America in general—exploits the individuals. In the film Will Thompson is accidentally shot. In the film he is brutally and cruelly shot by two henchman for the cotton mill owners, who show no concern for the many people who have been put out of world. The aspect of labor vs. owner disputes is watered down in the film, and therefore one of the more controversial aspects of the novel is softened, just as the graphic sexuality and violence of the novel is watered down, erased, or blurred.

The production values of the film are strong. There is good black and white cinematography. The music by Elmer Bernstein seems to me out of touch with the subject of the film and a little precious. Robert Ryan as Ty Ty is excellent, as is Tina Louise in her role as Griselda (Tina Louise is the future Ginger of Gilligan’s Island—she was a wasted talent—this film shows she could act). Buddy Hackett is strangely but appropriate cast as Pluto Swint, the buffoonish, clownish candidate for sheriff and suitor of Darling Jill. Darling Jill herself seems miscast and lacks the sexuality of the character in the novel, while Tina Louise is the burning female character in the film in every way.

For the most part, the film portrays the rural unlettered farmers as simpletons unable to make practical decisions or to lead practical lives. Although Caldwell shares this opinion, for the most part, he sees the farmers as victims of economic and environmental forces. In general, this is a film that has been overlooked and should be better known.

Hugh Ruppersburg
Athens, Georgia

Hustle and Flow

Hustle & Flow is difficult to categorize because it seems so different from many other films. With its focus on the Memphis ghettoes and a man trying to break out of the life his circumstances, and his own inclinations, have forced him to, it is like such films as Rocky and Working Girl and many others—though in its details it is decidedly unlike these films. In its story about the struggle to write and record a song (which becomes a metaphor for transformative change) it is like any number of serious and silly films about celebrity and the quest for fame—here the focus is more on transformation and escape—we see little of what happens after the song is recorded, and a great deal of what happens as the characters work to write and record the song and find a way to bring it to public attention. As I struggled to make connections with this film, I was reminded of any number of analogues, some of them far removed—the old Andy Hardy films of the 30s and 40s often included a subplot about putting on a show and earning money for whatever reason. That Thing You Do, about a one-hit wonder group, is another connection.

But I found it most satisfying to view Hustle & Flow on its own grounds, as the story of the main character Djay’s life as a pimp and his struggle for self-expression. All of the primary characters in this film are distinctive, and above everything else, including the music, they make this film memorable. Foremost among them is Terrence Howard as Djay. He is the film’s center and heart, and he brings the main character to life and gives this film much of its energy. The film begins as he is monologuing to one of his prostitutes about the meaning of mankind and his lot in life. I was immediately reminded of the monologues in Terrence Malick’s films as well as the intense apocalyptic monologues of Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction, though Djay’s monologues seem always intended as a means of exploring and presenting his sense of his own situation.

Although Djay apparently has a number of whores working for him, his favorite, the one he refers to as his partner (meaning his business partner), is Nola (Taryn Manning) a truly skanky blonde white girl whom he apparently picked up at a truck stop. She grows and develops throughout the film—she catches the enthusiasm of his desire to record a song and wants to be a part of it all. She hates being hot and longs for air conditioning. At the end of the film she has become his obsessive promoter, using her own skills to ensure that Djay’s song gets the airplay she believes it deserves. Djay’s love interest is Shug (Taraji P. Henson). She comes across as extremely pregnant and frightened, in general, but perhaps frightened of Djay in particular. Whether she is pregnant with his child is unclear. He pays her little attention early in the film and begins to appreciate her only as she helps contribute to the recording session by providing background vocals for the song. As she realizes her own potential as a singer, she comes to life. She is a powerful and poignant presence. Also effective is Key (Anthony Anderson), who produces and helps write Djay’s song. Key like Djay finds himself living a life he didn’t plan for, and Djay’s desire to rap becomes his own opportunity for escape. D. J. Qualls is a white drug salesman and sound engineer who brings humor to the film.

The film doesn’t glorify or romanticize pimps and whores and their lives. But it does not spend time condemning them either. It helps us understand them and what they experience. It is difficult to watch the film and come away with any sense that it approves of the lives it portrays. There is clear sympathy, empathy. It does strongly suggest that many of the people who live these lives have no alternatives. In Djay and Nola there is a strong longing for another kind of life. Djay’s mid-life crisis is not different from that of many men in their 30s and 40s. His sense of entrapment and failure, his desire to justify himself and to do something that matters, gives the film a universalizing interest. So too does the gradual transformation he undergoes, from a selfish and self-absorbed man who often mistreats the women who work for him, to a man who appreciates generosity and kindness and learns to embody these qualities himself. Such a transformation may seem trite, but in the context of the film and especially of Djay’s character it is convincing. Also convincing is the way he bungles (a major bungle) his meeting with a popular rap artist whom he hopes will help find an audience for his song.

Having never visited Memphis, the home of the blues and of Sam Philips (to whom the film is dedicated) and of course of the King Elvis, I cannot assess the film’s accuracy. But the speech of the characters seems distinctive and convincing, and the settings, with dilapidated low-rent row houses that may be in bad shape but that people do live in and care about, seem real. And although the film give quiet homage to the musical heritage of Memphis, that heritage is present in the film more by implication than by outright fact. When Djay and friends record their first song, they have to build their own recording studio and beg radio disk jockeys and others to give it airplay. The establishment music industry of Memphis is nowhere to be seen.

The Skeleton Key

Few films exploit setting so fully and foolishly as The Skeleton Key (2005). Set in New Orleans and surrounding areas, it would have you believe that the rural South, especially Louisiana, is infused with superstition, magic, voodoo, hoodoo, decay, decadence, sweat, endless rain, gators, and Zydeco. It assaults its viewers with images of broken down shacks, blind people who speak ominous if incoherent portents, ghosts, photographs of ghoulish children, desiccated and unidentifiable animal corpses, lynchings, a magic store in a Laundromat. There are the menacing chickens, one of which turns up for dinner. And of course there is Kate Hudson in an impressive array of skimpy clothes. The South in this film is a place of hidden evil, superstition, danger, decay, madness, and the unexplainable. It is always dark, and always raining. Gothic horror up the wazoo.

“She won’t understand the house,” moans Violet Devereaux (Gena Rowlands), the matriarch of the old plantation house to which Caroline Ellis (Hudson) goes to take a job nursing a dying old man. The meaning of this ominous pronouncement is really a red herring, but it grips our attention for a while. Ellis is from Hoboken, New Jersey, and, yes, like Shreve McCannon, she doesn’t understand the South, at least not the South of this film. Nor would anyone else, probably. Caroline is an adventurous soul. There isn’t a single locked door or darkened passageway or ominous attic into which she doesn’t venture. The old adage of where there’s smoke there’s fire apparently never dawns on Ellis. The most ridiculous moment comes when she is in the darkened attic and there is a small locked room which her key (the “skeleton key”) won’t open. Moreover, something seems to be IN that room, rattling the locks and banging on the door to get out. Is it the mad woman in the attic? Is it Frankenstein’s monster? Is it Jimmy Hoffa? Like every good horror movie heroine, unarmed and dimly lit, Caroline Ellis enthusiastically attacks the door, trying to let out whatever is banging around in there. In a later scene she succeeds in getting into the room.

The centerpiece of the film is the 30-room Devereaux mansion. Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner knew how to use old Southern mansions, and their influence is faintly evident here. At least I wanted to think so. This old Gothic Southern mansion holds a hidden secret, it’s in that room in the attic, and you know it’s going to find its way out. It’s all tied up with magic and human depravity and evil and the history of the place. Part of the secret harkens back to a party at the turn of the century that ended in a lynching. The lynching is supposed to remind you that this story takes place in the South where every black tie dinner ends in a ritualistic murder of servants. By this point in the film, things are rapidly falling apart—not so much the events in the film as the film itself.

The first 45 minutes or so of this film were bad but tolerable. At least you had some interest in how the plot was going to play itself out, how all the ominous premonitions and foreboding hints and foreshadowings would congeal in whatever horrific consummation the film would offer. But in the last half the momentum builds and you know where the film is going, you know exactly where it is going, even if you don’t have the details.

The Skeleton Key would have you believe that every African American in Louisiana is somehow involved in dark magic. One black character, Caroline’s friend Jill, says she does not believe in hoodoo, but she is clearly afraid of it. Superstition and the occult are part of the ambience associated with the Louisiana setting of the film. Yet there is a kind of racism here that broadly indicts virtually every person of color in the film.

I was reminded of The Vanishing, a 1988 French and Belgian film directed by George Sluizer, in which events come to a conclusion remotely similar to the one in The Skeleton Key. Both films build a thick and moody atmosphere of ominous dread, but The Vanishing has an intelligent script, is well made, and offers an interesting psychological understory. I was also reminded of a 1987 film directed by Alan Parker, Angel Heart, also set partially near New Orleans and concerned with voodoo and the occult. It too builds to an ending with a dark if predictable twist.

The Skeleton Key will raise the hairs on your arm. It may also make you yawn. And if you’re from Hoboken, you may think you’ve learned something.

No Time for Sergeants

Thursday, June 1, was Andy Griffith’s 80^th birthday. I decided to commemorate this day by watching the 1958 film No Time for Sergeants. I first watched this film when I was about 10 years old. At the time I thought Griffith’s hillbilly act was hilarious and was especially amused by the latrine scene where Griffith, as Private Stockdale, causes the toilet seats to “salute” the inspecting colonel.

This film was based on the novel No Time for Sergeants by Georgia writer Mac Hyman. The novel was adopted for Broadway, where Griffith played the part he later recreated for the film.

Mervyn Leroy, a director of note in the 1930s and 40s, directed this film. He was in his final years as a director. This film shows none of the skill Leroy brought to bear on such earlier films as I was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Mister Roberts.

Griffith made his film debut in the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd (directed by Elia Kazan), a fascinating film about power, ambition, and the media. Griffith played “Larry ‘Lonesome’ Roads,” a bucolic Southern n’eer-do-well whose good looks and singing talent win him a place as a radio disk jockey and ultimately as a political candidate with national aspirations. Griffith’s performance as a deceptive, ambitious, ruthless individual is nuanced and complex. Ultimately, it becomes too over-wrought, but this first film shows that Griffith had real talent and promise.

In No Time for Sergeants he squanders that talent in a way that may have typecast him and cost him the opportunity to play more varied roles. As Will Stockdale he plays a good-hearted, naïve, uneducated hillbilly who is loyal to his friends and who dislikes bullies. When he is drafted, he goes willingly (even though his father has hidden the draft notices) because he believes serving his country is the right thing to do. He is a combination of Jethro Bodine from The Beverley Hillbillies, L’il Abner from the comic strip, and Huck Finn. He plays a simple but good-hearted bucolic Southerner, uncorrupted, a role that we have seen in any number of films about the South—especially some of the early Elvis films.

The script is poorly written and poorly paced—on a level with the Sergeant Bilko television series. No Time for Sergeants is one of a number of films made in the first two decades after World War II that address a viewing audience of former American GIs still interested in seeing films about the military. Told from the viewpoint of enlisted men, it shows the officers as distant, apathetic, and obsessed with maintaining rank and power.

(Curiously, the barracks where Stockdale and his fellow enlistees stay are integrated—there are several black enlistees living there with the white enlistees—but they are always in the background, always almost out of view. This may be a faint if half-hearted acknowledgement of the civil rights movement then underway).

Stockdale remains uncorrupted throughout this film, wholly unaffected and unenlightened by the experiences he goes through, which include parachuting out of a burning plane into a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb test. Everything in this film is played for laughs, but the humor is weak and strained, at least from 2006 standards. In A Face in the Crowd Griffith’s acting was over the top. Here he just seems to be occupying the role.

In The Andy Griffith Show Griffith played Sheriff Andy Taylor in the quaint and mild North Carolina town of Mayberry. Andy Taylor is considerably more domesticated than Will Stockdale. In Andy Taylor we see another kind of good-hearted, good-natured Southerner--a role that in one form or another Griffith played for most of the rest of his career.

Capote

Two elements in Capote draw my attention: Philip Seymour Hoffman’s extraordinary portrayal and the film's interpretation of the man who wrote In Cold Blood. Even more interesting is the examination of the ethics of artistic creation—what obligation does the writer have to his subject matter—to the creation of art, to himself?

Hoffman’s acting (I am sorry to repeat what so many others have said) is extraordinary. I remember Capote on television from the 60s until his death in 1984. He frequently appeared on talk shows (Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett) and was a sharp-tongued wag and pundit. It wasn’t so much what he had to say as how he said it—the very distinctive manner of his speech, the public fascination with a man who was obviously homosexual at a time when that category was barely acknowledged. By the time I started paying attention to Capote (around the time of In Cold Blood) he had already become an established public figure who was incidentally a writer. Hoffman fully inhabits the Capote persona. His portrayal is so convincing and transparent that you hardly stop to consider that you’re not watching the real thing. Hoffman’s success in this role contributes directly to how the film interprets Capote’s involvement with the writing of his most famous book.

The film is based on Gerald Clarke’s biography Capote, which advances the notion (widely held) that Capote took advantage of the two murderers, promising them help and a new lawyer and rescue from the threat of execution, insinuating himself into the affections of one of the murderers in particular, repeatedly lying about the state of the book, its title, and so on. At the end, the movie argues, Capote became more interested in finishing the book, which he could do only if the story he was telling had come to an end, and it could end only when the murderers had been executed. Capote witnessed the executions. Harper Lee accused Capote of wanting the murderers to die.

I do not know enough about Capote and his writing of In Cold Blood to judge this thesis. I have to grant it some credence, but I wonder whether there is another side to the story, another dimension. It’s clear that Capote became enamored of the media and his own celebrity. But is it necessarily true that the writing of In Cold Blood corrupted him, or that he allowed himself to be corrupted, that he was so in love with writing, with the possibility of fame (especially after his friend Harper Lee’s success with To Kill A Mockingbird, both novel and film), with the project itself, that the killers simply became pawns that he manipulated as he struggled towards his goal? The film effectively argues its thesis by showing how Capote was obsessed with his book and what it might mean for him, that he perhaps was even unaware (or chose to be unaware) of how he was manipulating the killers. At the end he realizes the extent of his errors, and he grieves over what he has done, he feels guilt, though consistently in the film when he feels emotion it is directed towards himself, his own suffering, rather than that of anyone else. The shock of witnessing the executions thus becomes his excuse for failure as a writer in later life.

Even before the issue of corruption raises its head, it is clear that Capote sees in the murdered farm family a story to be told. He pursues it with passion. He tells the town sheriff that he wants to tell the story, that he doesn’t care whether the killers are ever caught--he just wants to tell the story. Thus from the start the issue of justice and the issue of art become tangled. Is it more important that art is created and the novel gets written, or that justice is served and the murderers are executed? As his work on the book progresses and he begins to gain the trust of the murderers, especially Perry, the question becomes more vexing. Capote is on the verge of producing a great book, a new kind of writing, something that may change the face of American literature. This will mean fame and fortune for Capote. But at what cost? Indifference to the deaths of four family members in Kansas? Betrayal and exploitation of two condemned killers?

The film explores these issues in a fascinating way. It is one of the best films I’ve seen in months, whether or not it does justice to Truman Capote. Therein lies the conundrum: does Capote embody its own themes?

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

Part travelogue, part documentary, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus explores a specific and fairly narrow dimension of the American South: backwoods Pentecostalism (not even the mainstream variety), biker bars, damaged souls intent on suffering more damage. Ostensibly inspired by alternative country singer Jim White’s album of the same name, the film begins in Louisiana and wends its way to the coal-mining hills of West Virginia.

Jim White narrates the film and is its main character, in search of something—the soul of the American South, religion, redemption. The film is not really a narrative because it doesn’t go anywhere. Rather, it wanders, from one bar or roadside diner to another, from distorted characters to lost characters to yearning characters. It doesn’t offer answers or conclusions, but it does offer a particular view.

In some sense Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus seeks to explore and define the literary South of Harry Crews and Flannery O’Connor (these are actually two fairly distinct Souths), and Crews himself appears briefly in the film, limping down a dirt road to lean in the window of the broken-down car White is driving to talk about how as a young boy he fell into a large pot of boiling water (a story he tells in his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place). Director Andrew Douglas and screenwriter Steve Haisman do a good job of keeping the film interesting, of finding one disturbing scene or character after another, but the film does after a time seem to lose its energy, to drag.

By no means does this film attempts to define “the” South or even a major aspect of the South. Many of the scenes and characters are ones most Southerners in the normal course of their lives would ever encounter. They are truly remote and backwoods, and that is one of the points of the film, I think, these people cut off from and isolated from the modern world and modern America.

The soundtrack, taken partially from White’s album and partially from others musicians such as the Handsome Family, David Johansen, and Melissa Swingle, is excellent, haunting, and appropriate to the film.

Click here to see the web site for this film.

Junebug

I have an issue with point of view in Junebug: both my own point of view as an inhabitant of a particular region of the United States, the Southeast, which is the setting of this film, and the point of view of director Phil Morrison and screenwriter Angus McLaughlin, who use the American South to dramatize themes and character relationships. On a broader scale their interest is in colliding cultures (a gentle collision at that). On a more specific scale, the cultural collision is illuminated in the developing personal relationship of the two main characters, Madeleine, a native of England who is a Chicago art dealer, and George, born in North Carolina, sometimes (apparently) embarrassed by certain aspects of his regional heritage, other times embracing them.

My issue with point of view is not a criticism or objection but simply uncertainty and curiosity. Exactly what is this film's viewpoint, its intention, in its presentation of the regional materials that constitute the American South?

To Madeleine, the South is an alien place. She expresses no particular preconceptions about it, but she knows little about it as well. Early in the film she learns of a North Carolina folk artist whose work she wants to feature in her gallery and decides that the best way to pursue her interest is to visit him. Since her husband's family lives near the artist, this becomes her opportunity to meet his family, whom he has not introduced to her before. The family is in some way or other supposed to be prototypically small town Southern middle class.

George's younger brother Eugene married his pregnant girl friend while still in high school and suffers perennial frustration over what he chooses to believe is his entrapment. He is profoundly uncommunicative, and jealous of his brother in a way he rarely gives full expression to. He can barely acknowledge his wife, Bernadette, though there are hints here and there of his love for her, especially when she goes into labor. Bernadette is a genuinely innocent, placid, and painfully repressed girl who talks incessantly about whatever enters her mind and instantly takes a liking, almost obsessively, to Madeline. Bernadette is irritating and grating until her character fully expands and develops. George's father is a taciturn man who in the chaos and flurry of his household chooses to watch television quietly or work downstairs in his woodshop, where he spends much time standing around and tinkering but apparently little time producing anything of interest. Peg, George's mother, played by South Carolina native Celia Weston, is the energetic and dominating force in the household. She loves her children but smothers and domineers them at the same time. She is clearly skeptical (and jealous) of Madeline, and she is quick to reach judgments about people, especially Madeline, though she tries to suppress them.

In the background Junebug is a domestic comedy. In the foreground it is about the developing relationship of Madeline and George. Most of all, it is about Madeline's introduction to a different life and way of thinking than her own. She is the main character, and through her eyes, most of the time, we view the characters and the action (what there is of action) in the film.

This brings me back to point of view. What is this film's viewpoint? Madeline herself seems fairly open to new experiences and new lifestyles. She doesn't rush to judgment and is more of an observer than anything else. She is unknowing about Southern people and manners, and this ignorance occasionally leads her (perhaps) to misstep, but her mistakes are never motivated by ill intentions.

The film’s point of view itself is what interests me. Is Madeline shown discovering a new southern culture which the film takes at face value, with openness and respect, or is that culture a target of humor and satire, ridiculed in a Horatian way for its eccentricities and bucolic ways?

I read a number of viewer comments about Junebug that commented on how it views the South without stereotypes. I find such opinions doubtful. We all stereotype. It is one of the ways we understand and categorize the world around us. Surely Junebug does the same. Its view of the South as populated by religious visionary primitive artists, of couples who marry out of high school, of domineering mothers and overwhelmed fathers, of functional dysfunctional families, of church gatherings where heartfelt and sincere pieties abound—these are all stereotypes. The fact that they are not necessarily objectionable—that is, that Southerners or others might not object to them—does not prevent them from being stereotypical.

The film’s heart may be the folk artist David Wark. A strange fusion of William Blake, Grandma Moses, and the Reverend Howard Finster, he produces visionary, demented paintings of angels and male genitals that punctuate depictions of lynchings and picnics. He is, we are given to believe, "mentally challenged," as is apparently his sister, though what may seem mental challenge to some may be to others simply a fundamental rural nature wholly untouched by modernity. Wark’s fusion of spiritual, sexual, visionary, primitive traits make him the incarnation of the authentic. He represents something that Madeleine can intuitively appreciate and respect but not something she ever comes to understand. There’s something disturbing and moving, in a deeply elemental way, about David Wark, and the fact that Madeleine never comes to understand him does not mitigate our own failure as viewers to understand him either.

There are other failures of understanding which the film highlights in Madeleine. When Bernadette goes into labor, the entire family heads to the hospital. Whatever their differences and preoccupations, this is what a Southern family does in a moment of crisis, so the film suggests--they band together and round the person in need. Madeleine doesn’t understand this. Instead of going with George to the hospital in this primal Southern family moment, she goes to talk with David Wark, whose sister has decided that Madeleine’s is not the best art dealership to represent him. This major lapse in Madeleine’s gradual introduction to the South and the Southern family is exaggerated and emphasized by George’s reaction to her decision. He is clearly bothered by it, and for a time you wonder whether this moment may be the beginning of a division that will grow larger between them. When Bernadette’s baby is stillborn, and when we see George sitting with and consoling the grief-stricken Bernadette, the gravity of Madeleine’s mistake seems even greater.

(Others in the film suffer misunderstanding as well. Madeleine is an emotionally expressive woman who frequently expresses herself through spontaneous hugs. When she is tutoring Eugene, and he expresses frustration, she hugs him. Eugene believes she is coming on to him and responds in what he believes is the appropriate way).

What one finally comes to understand is that this film is about Madeleine’s introduction to and education in another culture. There is no piety in the film about this theme, just as the film is completely unsentimental (and unapologetic) in its depiction of the American South. Instead there is a sense of respect for George’s family as individuals and as a unit. When George’s father at the end of the film gives to Madeleine a gift he has made for her in his woodshop, you can see that she and the family may have bonded.

Yet on the drive back to Chicago, George almost seems to apologize for his family, saying to his wife that “I’m glad that’s over,” by which he means the ordeal of their visit with his family. Is he embarrassed over them, shamefaced at her exposure to his true origins? She never responds to his comment. The movie ends. I found the ending ambiguous, not only in the prospects it offers for the future of George and Madeleine’s relationship but also in the commentary it offers on the modern South. It suggests to me a certain superficiality in George, who has intentionally purified himself of Southern traits, who chooses to be of the South when he is home, but who otherwise is willing to forget and leave it behind, with his Southern ways and manners and speech. It is Madeleine who may have learned and grown from this visit to his home, and her silence in response to her husband’s remark may be a sign of what she has gained.

On the other hand, the South of the film may be an island backwater in the civilized world of New Yorks and Chicagos and art galleries, a vestige of past days and ways.

Is the South a place to be embarrassed for in modern America, or should its loss be mourned? The film’s reserve on these points bothers me, but is also a virtue that leaves Junebug lingering long after the final scene on the road back to Chicago.

Walk the Line

The main problem with Walk the Line is that it isn’t a fiction. I liked and enjoyed the film, but I never believed that the two main characters were who they were supposed to be. Both actors—Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon--did credible jobs of imitating the people they portrayed. But the best they could do was imitate, impersonate.

If the movie were a fiction, that is, not a film about real people, then the credibility issue would disappear. The characters in the film are well developed. You understand them fully as human beings, and they behave as human beings. The developing love story is moving and poignant, and you understand the forces that are both bringing Cash and Carter together and forcing them apart. Cash’s family origins, especially his difficult relationship with his father, who (according to the film) blamed him for his older brother’s death, is well portrayed. The musical careers of Cash and Carter, a central source of interest in the film, provide an enriching backdrop to the love story. You believe in these characters.

But when you have to think of Phoenix and Witherspoon as Cash and Carter, the film falters. Phoenix doesn’t sing like Cash sang. He does a passable imitation. Witherspoon comes closer to singing like June Carter, but not close enough.

This is my basic problem with so-called bio-pics. They are always a subjective rendering of the subject’s life. More then that, they are by nature selective in what they choose to focus on, to highlight and to leave out. Biographies are selective and subjective too, but because they usually contain much more detail and information than films can offer, the reader of biographies has more of a basis to reach his or her own conclusions, even to be skeptical of the biographer’s conclusions, than does the viewer of a bio-pic, who is pretty much stuck with the director’s vision of the subject.

Walk the Line differs from Ray in that it is really the love story of Cash and Carter, while Ray is the story of Ray Charles’ musical career. In that sense Ray is a more ambitious and successful film. And Jamie Foxx’s impersonation of Charles is one of the most successful impersonations I have ever seen on film. You forget that Foxx is not Charles. But although you appreciate the portrayals offered by Phoenix and Witherspoon you never forget that they are not Cash and Carter.

The trouble with any film like Walk the Line is not only the issue of impersonation but also the issue of explanation. How can anyone truly know another person—especially a person of talent and genius—how can you truly know the inner motivations of such a person?

Some of the most successful portrayals in the film are by minor characters—especially the portrayals of Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. Presley is portrayed at an early moment in his career. He shows flashes of becoming what he will become, but he is not there yet. The actor who portrays him, Tyler Hilton, doesn’t sing like him much at all, and his portrayal barely manages to suggest a resemblance. He comes across as still in the process of formation. For this reason, I found his performance wholly credible—Elvis as chrysalis, not the butterfly.

Waylon Payne’s Jerry Lee Lewis is such an over-the-top parody or impersonation—as the real Jerry Lee was himself—that he is the center of attention and the source of energy in the few scenes in which he appears. He comes across as a Dionysiac wild man.

Walk the Line is an intelligent film that attempts to portray its subjects with due respect and understanding. I cared about the characters, even if I did not believe in them as Johnny Cash and June Carter.