Do you have 10 minutes? That is the amount of time filmmaker Julien Nitzberg shares with us in his latest mini-documentary, “To Be Loved and Understood,” about comedian Patton Oswalt, as part of a web series called “Rituals” hosted by the YouTube channel Thrash Lab. It is a short, provocative look at Oswalt’s life on the road as a standup comedian, or as we soon see, his daily grind and uneventful routines.
“You can walk out of hell and into the light. You can wake up to your higher self, and when you do, the world is suddenly full of possibility, of wonder, of deep connection. You can be patient and you can be kind. You can be wise and almost whole. You don’t have to run away from life, your whole life. You can really live. You can change and you can be an agent of change.”
–Amy, Pilot Episode, Season 1
These words are Amy Jellicoe’s first reflections and they are also her last, for now. They are the same, but they are different, filled first with cleansing spirit and last with journeyed wisdom. Enlightenedhas taught us in two seasons that the path to clarity is long and meandering, but that in its darkest alleys, its fluorescent-lit basements, you can end your journey with a deeper conscience of what you began it with.
Mike White has also proven in two seasons, in a show deep with metaphor and feeling, that standard television conventions with snappy dialogue and easily graspable characters aren’t cornerstones for audience engagement. He knows each season, each episode, is its own identity, but that it thrives on connecting itself and creating fulfillment in its small gestures and lucid allusions. White takes a glance like Amy’s towards the seashell on her nightstand, and infuses it with symbolism, her retrieval of it from the ocean floor as she narrates the above quote. By working outside the small screen’s fluid boundaries, this is also a show that challenges its audience. It pulls in places comfortably chained and yanks a tendon sadly only a small portion of viewers has been willing to bleed out and examine.
But often when you bleed and see your weakness for what it is, you become stronger, more aware, and grateful. Those qualifiers can sum up my thoughts on this hopefully not finished series that has seemingly ended on a conclusive and yet still flavorfully ambiguous note. Unlike any show I have ever dedicated my attention to on a weekly basis, there have been none to affect me in such spiritual, holistic ways, whose words linger with me into the middle of the week instead of just the middle of Sunday night. Amy is a character who is attainable and detestable, but her flaws give us these enduring feelings. She makes the world beautiful and upsetting because that’s how we experience it.
“How strange is this life? To be born into a body.” I think sometimes we forget the mystical being of nature, and all it takes is an introspective question like this to cut through our jaded sensibilities. “Am I the fool, the witch, or am I enlightened?” Amy asks herself, but I think it’s fair to say it’s also been our question about her as well. She teases us at first, telling Tyler to prepare himself, forcing his hand to confess to Eileen. Amy, in grimacing fashion, accuses Krista of ruining her life as Krista gives birth to new life. Her mother wants her to move out after she finds the truth about Amy’s mission. “Why is it your business?” Helen questions. With so much focus on the greater good, Amy forgets to display it to those in her midst.
I recently saw the film “The Way” with Martin Sheen, who stars as a man walking a pilgrimage by foot across northern Spain with ashes of his son, who dies early on trying to complete it. In an interview, Sheen says that people who begin “el camino,” as the natives call it, pack too much and eventually donate things, getting rid of extra bags or clothing. But by their journey’s end, they have also released things internally: their doubts, their anger, their jealousy, their darkness. Amy’s journey, mostly on the heels of her bruised, bumper sticker sedan, which screeches and swerves throughout this episode, finds similar liberation.
In fact many of Amy’s moments of clarity come in her car. When I used to become pent up with anger as a kid, my mother would tell me to run around the house to burn some steam; the subtext of course was to clear my mind. The driver’s seat has been Amy’s mental release, an indoor bubble from Los Angeles to Riverside to escape reality, to regain control in the cathartic grip of the steering wheel. In the process, the negativity fizzles out. Things are sacrificed, most notably her job.
For almost the entirety of this show Amy has been looking upwards to a better future, but most practically to the upper levels of Abaddon. She’s wanted to make her pitch. A new job: community liaison. A new plan: environmental friendliness. We got closure as policemen escorted her into the elevator, leading her revolution not with the idealistic black ensemble witnessed in her dream or the picketing protesters she raised her fist towards in season one. Amy looks to the elevator ceiling, but no sea turtle gently paddles by, just gridlocked fluorescent lighting and industrial noise. Amy will finally have her meeting on her own terms.
Szidon has at her. “You will always be in the margins with your fucking idealistic notions that don’t apply.” Amy has asked the important questions and unearthed the dirty work. Damon and company isn’t laughing in her face anymore. Her idealistic notions are the only things that have kept her alive.
“I will fucking crush you like the bug you are!” Szidon screams through the closing elevator in a role reversal so obvious and so viscerally perfect. Maybe that’s his insect rhetoric talking from all of the honey bee television screens saturating his office. The unique characteristic about honeybees: after they sting they die. What a prompt metaphor to acquire here.
The smile that slowly erupts after Amy has indicted herself as she walks to her car, similar to Tyler’s grin after he began hacking computers, blends satisfaction and fear. “I was driving and I have nowhere to go,” she tells Levi as they sit together again. “Am I crazy?” Our frustration with Amy leans most heavily on her perpetual state of optimism because our human instinct is tethered to a sense of doubt and pessimism. It angers us that someone can show this much hope, especially in her homeless state.
Levi breaks it down. “It’s a beautiful thing to have a little hope for the world.” As Amy invokes her can-do phrases, there is belief this time. Tyler isn’t alone. Dougie isn’t so hard-shelled. Connie wants to make a difference, too. Amy doesn’t have to read the newspaper. The everywoman, who drinks coffee and wears a USA t-shirt, has this type of power.
Season three hangs in the balance and HBO has a decision to make. But if there’s anything Enlightened has taught us, it’s to have hope. It’s a beautiful thing to have a little hope.
Little League baseball has always been a great subject for the medium of film, but it turns out its comedic appeal can be just as enticing on the stage. “Take Your Base,” the latest Black Box musical from first time writers Jeff Sharkey and James Murtaugh, continues an excellent string of productions in the cramped theater, never forgetting of course to bring humor to the table.
For about four hours last night, more than half of America was staring at a screen. When half the Super Dome lights went out, everyone took out their phones and began tweeting and retweeting, coming up with theories and the wittiest jokes about the power outage. The Superbowl is often a night of social gathering, but more so than ever, it’s a collective gathering of many individuals.
In last night’s episode “Follow Me,” Amy Jellicoe is wary of this kind of interaction, or lack thereof. On her “date” with Jeff, she confesses her disapproval of screen staring, turning the human population into Zombies and cutting them off from human connection. That could be the rehabilitation center talking, or it could be the fact that she’s been staring at a screen every day for work, and wants her freedom looking into something real.
But Amy’s always been a little unclear of what she wants. Is bringing down Abaddon purely an environmental justice or are the fifteen improperly respected years she’s given, as she preaches to Dougie, the kindling to a revenge-filled fire? It’s a similar confusion with Jeff, whom she proclaims to her mother is not a date. But remember in “The Key,” Amy dons her makeup in the car next to Tyler, claiming she wants to make a good impression. What kind of impression? Maybe Amy doesn’t know, but she’s leaving it up for interpretation.
This ambiguity is often dealt with in Amy’s selfish selflessness, most frustratingly in Krista’s hospital wing, where her own personal goals and daily problems can’t stay backstage in light of a bedridden coworker. “Do you have a Twitter?” she awkwardly questions Janice. Krista’s tolerance level for Amy seems to be rising but this episode more than any other felt like Laura Dern was playing a caricature, not Amy. I often wonder what Amy’s professional social interactions were like pre-meltdown. Was she this socially inept, this naïve, this unaware?
You can see it in her puppy-dog expression when a couple comes to greet Jeff at their restaurant. “They recognize you from your writing?” It’s not that it’s a dumb question, but it’s more telling of Amy’s technologically clouded mind. After explaining the power of social media, and the allegorical mobilization of armies, Amy equates Jeff with an angel, following him to another world, an idealistic one of richness and fullness, not muddled down in the “small, dumb, and mean” occurrences in life. The name-calling, the finger pointing, those are characteristics found both upstairs and in the bowels of Abaddon.
In the latter, I’m referring to Dougie, who for all of his aggression is really a sympathetic character. “This is my domain!” he yells, and his frustrations over losing Omar appear to bleed into his own life. Is he mad Omar is gone, or is he mad Omar escaped from the hard drive lined walls in which at certain moments blend right into Dougie’s deep colored button-down. For all of Levi’s socially hidden anger last week in paradise, this episode is curiously blunt, but progresses the situation considerably, political correctness be damned.
I don’t blame them. It starts with Amy wanting to look the CEO right in the eye. “Who are you?” he asks her. “Just a nobody who’s worked here for 15 years,” replies Amy. Tyler’s not happy she’s blown her anonymous cover, but it’s too late. Amy has started her new life on Twitter, excitedly typing in “P-E-T-A,” “Amnesty International,” and then “Mia Farrow.” She’s written her first “twit.” “Follow me!” she barks at Connie, ironically trying to gain attention over the computer screen, in a deftly framed shot. “She’s a fucked up chick,” Dougie finally gets off his chest to Tyler regarding Amy. “You’re a retarded techy!” he throws at her. The insults fly, the truth revealed.
But just as easily as they are dished, they are received back in spades. Dougie, is the most insulted after he sees the email gossip. I’ve found that what hurts these characters the most and heightens our compassion for them, is the un-confrontational banter. The stuff spewed behind closed doors. It happened after Amy’s “fake” proposal to the board last season and it’s happened to Dougie over the Internet. Those two worlds, one of fulfillment, one of bitter smallness, affect Amy because they come from the same place and exist in the same space. The Internet can create armies of good, hope and enlightenment. It can also diminish them.
Watching the elite do-gooders schmooze makes Amy feel out of place, like her outburst at the librarian’s wine drenched celebration. She has followed Jeff to this new world she spoke of, and like being dropped in a foreign country must quickly learn the codes, the customs, the language. But you can see Jeff’s interest in her research diminishing, as it quickly rises in just “her.” Maybe he’s not her prophet. After all, she’s gaining followers in more ways than one. Dougie’s on board and Tyler reaffirms with a fist pump of solidarity. These “dirtbags” are connected through rejection, with Amy as their spiritual guide.
“Even a nobody like you can have power,” Jeff asserts to Amy. If a librarian can master social media, anything’s possible.
If there’s one thing Mike White captures beautifully in “Enlightened,” it’s the slow and subtle progressions (or digressions) of a character through both the arc of a season, and, specifically in “Revenge Play,” in an episode. It’s also his character’s sometimes laughable, sometimes pitiable handling of an episode’s theme, grasped so firmly and confidently until it’s tested and pushed into its darker corners.
Such is what happens to both Amy and Tyler in a role reversal so abrupt and yet so pleasantly surprising. Focused and motivated with a third party support from reporter Jeff, Amy has more than just a couple of handouts about Abaddon’s toxic waste records now. She’s got insider stuff and a person to leak it to. “At some point, you must do. It is not enough to have good intentions, you must act on them,” she reflects as she walks into work. Indeed, this is a struggle endemic to Amy, sitting, waiting, hoping, underneath the fluorescence of Cogentiva.
After another meet-up with Jeff in one of “his” places (this is no TGIF), and a couple of silencing stares from an African-American crowd, Amy accepts the fact that the severity of her whistle-blowing could be grand and unforgiving. It’s prophesied in a dream she has later, as she walks in slo-mo with another African-American crowd with slightly 70s hairdos, ready to tear down the company. I’m not sure if this is a mere conflation of her night out with Jeff, but maybe these are the types of people Amy wants flanking her as she swings her wrecking ball. The CEO is escorted out, pandemonium in the air, and then there’s Krista, sobbing, in cuffs with the elevators closing. Theory switching into melodramatic practice.
It’s a dream, but Amy realizes it could soon become her reality. That “What have I done?” face she dons in this fantasy quickly spreads to her conscious state. Then Krista is rushed to the hospital from a seizure and Amy begins worrying about the spiritual powers at play. Has her subconscious desire thrown its negativity into the real world, into Krista’s baby bump and caused this minor emergency? Everything is heightened in Amy’s world but she makes it so. I was hoping this episode might produce an un cringe-worthy Amy moment, but whenever she’s in the company of Janice or Krista, she drops the ball. Her mother tells Amy to give Krista her newly quilted pillow, saying, “Acts of kindness set things right.” “Not in my world,” she responds. That conviction, that motivation to do, to act, to set things in motion quickly begins to evaporate.
The subplot under Amy’s wrestle with action is the hard drive inspection due to Amy’s email hacking which is caught one day. Dougie, in his best Michael Scott midday announcement form, alerts the troops that members of IT will be checking computers the next day, and to ease tension, orders everyone to remove their porn. I just couldn’t help but see this as a moment in Dunder Mifflin, a joke cracked to keep morale high during another day in the dungeon doldrums. Get rid of the porn he says, “And I’m talking to you Connie,” clearly a joke that no one finds funny, awkwardly backing into his office to silence. Substitute Connie for Phyllis, or more appropriately Angela, especially after she prays for Krista with Amy, and the momentary role-play is complete.
What does Dougie do anyway? He lurks in his glass box, shoots nerfball hoops, and nervously scans his worker bees punching numbers. His liaison last year to keep Amy on task, Omar, plays the Dwight Schrute in all of this, the boss’s sidekick now autonomous internal investigator of coworker behavior. He insults Tyler, unrecognizing the beast he unleashes inside of him. Connie doesn’t believe negative energy creates negative things, that it’s all left up to God. Tyler can’t take that chance anymore because he’s been reluctantly doing it his whole life. Omar runs into Amy in a huff and spouts about racist mentalities being responsible for his firing. Naturally, Amy finds compassion, her benefit, too often her burden.
“I’ve been too nice, and because of that, these people think I’m a joke,” Tyler says out of his spectacular grin. It’s one of the few smiles Tyler has given us in the series and it’s particularly thrilling to see, oddly similar to Claire Dane’s grin in Homeland’s start to its own second season. After switching his implicating hard-drive with Omar’s, he’s killed two birds with one stone. We don’t see him switch the hard-drives at night, but we can imagine his decision to do it. He’s crossed the Rubicon, and good intentions be damned. The greater good is at stake here he emphatically addresses Amy. But she has turned a bit sour. “Tyler you framed him!”
What a change. Amy wants her cake but she’s realizing she may not be able to eat it. At some point, she’s going to have to realize what Jeff told her, that there’s going to be a lot of fallout. She just may not be fully ready for it. But Tyler, who earlier accuses Amy of jeopardizing things because she’s pissed off about her life, begins to exhibit those same accusations. At this point, he’s all in. Is Amy?
Zero Dark Thirty, the brilliantly and intensely crafted film from director Kathryn Bigelow, opens with a black screen and a mosaic of panicked voices. They are from September 11th, 2001, cluttered screams and calls that both set the mood and the motivation for the entire film. It is a deftly and passionately handled chronicle of the hunt and raid of Osama bin Laden, the man largely responsible for the loss of over three thousand innocent lives that fateful day. But it is also prominently about the woman, the CIA operativeMaya, in charge of the hunt, and her tireless effort to find and kill the world’s most wanted terrorist.
The very next scene begins in 2003 in a torture room, in which a man with potentially useful information is shackled with his arms stretched out. He has bloody marks on his face and his treatment is gruff, brutal, and severe. The main interrogator Dan (Jason Clarke) uses simulated drowning and locks his prisoner in a small crate as part of his “enhanced interrogation,” a kinder, political term to clean it uglier cousin “torture.” This depiction of course has caused its own kind of interrogations from government officials and media, whether practices like that existed and if their purpose actually gleaned elemental information.
Thus, there is a tendency to look at both of Kathryn Bigelow’s films, this and 2008’s Oscar winning The Hurt Locker, as either bold forms of propaganda, or at least morally biased depictions of war. But these films, especially this one, are not meant to end discussion; rather, they invite even more ethical questions about this specific ten-year period of war, and the United States’ current presence in the Middle East. This, in effect, is a bold and daring piece of cinema that can disappointedly only be compared to a few other historical pieces of fiction, which includes her last feature.
It is a narrative though, how could it not be? Accordingly infused with documentarian feel, we follow Maya (A powerfully refined Jessica Chastain), and her emotional journey through a job that requires emotion to stay dormant. Bigelow, who teams up again with Hurt Locker writer Mark Boal, subtly tells us that’s a lie and that our hunches, our sometimes impenetrable consciences, require a faith and hunger that by-the-book logic overlooks.
Her hunch lies on a man named Abu Ahmed, an Al-Qaeda courier she believes, through many other testimonies and witnesses, works and carries out messages for bin Laden. It is a long and arduous process, filled with governmental speed bumps and other, more assured opinions, some from an eventual, rare female friend Jessica (Jennifer Ehle). Resistant opinions also come from her boss Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler), who has his own dilemmas between weighing initial domestic safety and Maya’s requests for bigger-picture enforcements (Chastain’s performance is punctuated with her aggressive yelling of an ultimatum to Jonathon to get her more intelligence).
Her struggle is depressing, scarring, and real. Maya has no real backstory, no explanation to her training or past experience. This is her first big job and her only one, and in this is a symbolic humanizing that lifts her into a rootable figure- containing a refined swagger that is tested to crumbling heights. She finds death’s door always lurking, near roadside bombings and breached doors. She tells a Navy Seal in the midst of mission gone wrong, “A lot of my friends have died trying to do this. I believe I was spared so I can finish the job.”
Chastain’s performance is slowly calculated and masterfully designed, portraying a woman whose character is split into thirds following significant events of this hunt. In that first scene, she supplies Dan with the water for the man’s torture, slowly accepting her duty with trembling hands. As time progresses, so does her spirited self-esteem, intensity, and willingness to grab answers from hesitant mouths. After crucial moments of gunfire and death, she loses her stateside innocence altogether. We gravitate to her bridled confidence, her tempered self-assurance and sit in awe.
In the current string of television, Clare Danes plays a similar CIA operative on Homeland, searching for a terrorist nearly her whole time at Langley, Va. Bigelow’s film dwarves this largely dramatic serial not necessarily in its content matter, but by its main character’s ability to deflect any punishing and lustful vices. Both women however are triumphs and torchbearers of the intensified hunch and the never-ending pursuit to obtain its veracity. In a male dominated landscape, these women have the strenuous effort of not only following their leads, but fighting for their ability to have them. We see in both, though, the darker moments of their similar missions, the physical and mental expulsion and draining required in capturing their targets.
Bigelow proves this alternate reality once again in the otherworldly surroundings of life in the Middle East, and its stark banality back at home. In The Hurt Locker, her main character temporarily back from war stands and stares in a grocery aisle, puzzled and immobile at the infinite bright-colored cereal brands. It is all at once a commentary on PTSD and human life, a dichotomous image that cries for a country’s wartime introspection. This type of reflective, iconic moment permeates throughout Zero Dark Thirty as well, a film detailing the idiosyncrasies Maya found that ended up being so vital. Bigelow captures the small things in her frame, a desktop background, an unresponsive instant message, and fills them with power.
We aren’t concerned as much with yarn and push pins as much as we are with Maya’s personal journey. Strategy is referred to but, unlike Homeland, we don’t examine round the clock surveillance teams at work and the logistics of putting cameras and microphones in hidden corners. These things are inferred, much like the torture. Instead, we become immersed in the field and in the plight of a woman hardened early by the brutal interrogations. We become immersed in the necessary ground components of a mission, tag-team phone relays and small bribes that all factor into the monumental equation.
Bigelow separates this ten-year journey with chapter cards, slowly evolving into the decision to infiltrate the white washed mansion in which Maya believes Bin Laden resides. This is a longer process in which conjecture must be strong, because it was stronger for Weapons of Mass Destruction the many higher-ups nervously posit.
The final raid on bin Laden’s high-walled fortress in Abbattobad is one of the most riveting final thirty minutes of film I’ve seen. The swarming of Navy Seals (most notably played by Chris Pratt and Joel Edgerton) from their helicopter journey to their night-vision, green-lit raid is a master course for inducing suspense. At over 150 minutes long, this is the fastest and most unnoticeable “long” movie this year, a testament to the film’s moving arc.
Again, the level of torture has spurred debate. It happened, but to what extent? Would it have mattered if things were conducted differently? That is then the next question, something only a parallel history could tell. But Bigelow also asks us the more important question of “where do we go now?” It’s the last line of the film directed at Maya. The decade-long hunt, the lives lost, all of it now completed with a few bullets, and yet we march on, but where? All that tension built up and contained, now expelled. What’s the next move? This is the existential question more than just Maya must face.
When book adaptations hit screens there are usually judgments about things that are left out or about directors that don’t capture the original author’s intentions. All of that is moot in The Perks of Being a Wallflower because the author Steven Chbosky is the film’s screenwriter, producer, and director. It’s safe to say he knows the characters, the flow of emotion, and most importantly all of his fans.
The film takes place in suburban Pittsburgh and spans the course of one school year, centering on a shy kid named Charlie played by Logan Lerman. He’s an introvert who has never really fit in and trembles from his past, which is occasionally presented to us in flashback, memories that get deeper and darker as the film progresses. His inital battle is reconciling the suicide of a friend; his everlasting one is with his former aunt.
He is just starting high school and has no friends until he gets taken under the wing of two seniors, Patrick, played enthusiastically by Ezra Miller, and his stepsister Sam, Emma Watson’s first major role since Harry Potter. They, along with several other latch-ons including Mary Elizabeth (Mae Whitman) are forcefully non-conformists, rebels who enjoy listening to good music-meaning music made on vinyl- partying, and performing in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Charlie finally has people to “fit in” with so he can adhere to their lifestyle and then find his own. Along the way of course are mistakes, some volatile and some subtle, that demonstrate the polarizing nature of high school friendships and sexual identity. There is not necessarily anything new here, and we see identifiable patterns emerge, ups and downs throughout the course of a school year that toggle with many familiar adolescent themes of personal identity, social inclusion, and unabashed honesty. It seems kids on the periphery of high school hierarchies always find deeper meaning in life, an awareness of their own identity easier than the “popular” group.
But these ideas are all clutched with such spirit, especially by Ezra Miller, who finds a medium between boneheaded prankster and emotional companion a la Breakfast Club’s Judd Nelson. High School films are meant to feel this way, establishing connections with more overt characters that represent a distinct group of kids. Charlie tries new “things” at house parties, including a relationship with Mary-Elizabeth, though his true affection is for Sam. She swings to 80s tunes and has an effervescent air, but is tied to bad boyfriends (a common theme in the story). Like every group, they need a meeting spot; there’s is the town diner.
In a small subplot, Charlie makes friends with his English teacher Mr. Anderson played by Paul Rudd and thus reads tons of books like “The Great Gatsby” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He gets extra reading assignments and near the beginning of the year, laments that Mr. Anderson will be his first friend. By the end of the film, this is a silly worry, and probably something Charlie is actually grateful for.
It isn’t all breezy though, and that’s what makes the film a little more powerful than your average high school drama. Smart, funny, heart-breaking, The Perks of Being a Wallflower tackles its themes with the same conviction and tenderness its characters do.
“I can remember everything. That’s my curse, young man. It’s the greatest curse that’s ever been inflicted on the human race: memory.”
This quote is the subtle yet prophetic sentence that resonated with me most in Citizen Kane, said both so powerfully and nonchalantly. It pushed a domino of similar themes and thoughts ruminating in my mind found paralleled (after recently reading) in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the film Ruby Sparks (directed by Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris). These floating ideas centered on memory, and they tackle more of its intricacies, examining how three protagonists suffer from this alleged “curse,” this often-lovesick stasis in time, a nostalgia that cripples and weakens.
We have so much room to think in our heads that sometimes our developed minds become more of a burden than a blessing. But when we do the most thinking, best or worst, usually comes in private, when we are alone. Just imagine a writer trying to compose a philosophy paper in the middle of a house party, or for a less extreme example, imagine reading a poem and reflecting on it with the TV projecting noise. When other thoughts are filtering through different mediums, our imaginative juices become stifled, our thoughts have a tough time getting through. But when we are alone, with time to reflect, time to think without external influences, we develop heightened thoughts, fixations.
The character Charles Foster Kane provides us a first glimpse of this. The opening shot of the film begins with a slow, upward camera tilt foregrounding the gothic looking fence surrounding Xanadu, his private island. He wallows in bed, alone in his mansion, continuously reciting “Rosebud,” with the grandiose walls built from his edifying capitalist creation ironically unable to echo the repeated name. After his second wife leaves him, Mr. Kane inhabits his fortress alone, unnecessarily large and vainglorious. For such a big man, how small he feels. He is in a prison, which is deemed by Richard Jenkins in the new movie “Liberal Arts” as any place from which you can’t escape. In this case, it’s Kane’s past, and Xanadu acts as his physical penitentiary.
“Rosebud…Rosebud,” only now does he pontificate its clutching hold on his life. For the first time, he is alone. No one can hear his demands, subserviently enlarge his hubris, love him. All he has left are his memories, and for the first time they creep over exponentially into his reality. With only yourself to please, why live in reality when you have memory?
This presumably is also what motivates Jay Gatsby to wake up every morning. Living off his relationship with Daisy from five years back, he banks on bridging a gap that included Daisy getting married. Gatsby went to war and had to leave her, but their relationship nestles in his head, as it does when he inhabits West Egg, NY, across the lake from Daisy’s new home. He too has a large manor, a party house filled lavishly every weekend by guests who balance out the rest of the week’s empty rooms and silent halls. This is Gatsby’s way of coping with this still fervent dream of reconnecting with his former love. He is, as U2 melodically tells us, stuck in a moment and he can’t get out of it. How eloquently Fitzgerald details these feelings, his prose illuminating the depth of Gatsby’s obsession. Nick Carroway narrates, near the end, Gatsby’s interminable desire, one already out of his reach.
“And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out Daisy’s light at the end of his dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”
Alone, with only his fondest memory. But time didn’t stop when war called. People moved on with their lives. Helen Hunt had to choose someone else while Tom Hanks bobbed back and forth on his raft. Away from society, Gatsby’s return includes the false presumption that things can pick up where they are left. Memory tricks us in that way, it makes things feel closer or farther away, gives heightened emotions to moderate things because it isn’t etched in stone. We can change our memory, provide it hope and convince ourselves things were better back then, creating some fantastical ideal, a memory we want, not the one we actually have.
In Ruby Sparks, we find a character who manifests his memory with the vision of a girl. It’s not surprising then that “The Ivory Tower” also becomes a point of reflection in the film, as we find our main character Calvin (Paul Dano) living in his solitary apartment with his little dog, coincidentally named Scotty (for F. Scott Fitzgerald). His confines are a symbol of the wealth he received with his megahit first book, and he is deemed a wunderkind in many literary eyes. His biggest struggle however is compromising his ego and breaking through his severe writer’s block. He still anachronistically punches his typewriter keys instead of making the digital switch, a possible attempt to keep a physical connection between paper and thoughts. Or maybe, as a book store owner in “Liberal Arts” claims (I liked this movie), because books help gain more appreciation of trees and the paper-making process.
Regardless, he struggles, until he makes a breakthrough with his shrink. He begins to write the character Ruby, a girl he loves, one that embodies the characteristics and attributes of his “dream girl.” She is just like him, confident, quirky, goal-oriented, and in a Stranger than Fiction sort of way, also completely real! Living, breathing, talking, Ruby is perfect and she’s all Calvin’s. But she never changes. You see, once she appears to Calvin out of thin air, he stops writing about her, stops writing his novel that has finally pushed him past his blank misery. He has become fixated on a certain person. But this can only last so long.
We usually love someone because they change, because they’re different from us and don’t always do things according to our plans. How boring life would be if everyone were the same as us, an idea viciously articulated by Calvin’s ex-girlfriend at a house party. Though both may have been in the wrong, she accuses him of having wanted to be in a relationship with himself, not her. It reminds me of Leland, Charles Foster Kane’s right hand man, finally confronting Kane about his egomaniacal mindset.
“You don’t care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love ‘em so much that they ought to love you back. Only you want love on your own terms. Something to be played your way, according to your rules.”
Though hurtful, its criticality and truth is necessary to cut the charade, necessary to change the way we think. Calvin slowly realizes he must finish his book from this newly implanted idea and that Ruby must ultimately disappear because she’s not real. She’s not real in the sense that he’s not living a real life with her; he controls her, knows that she is just a figment of his imagination, himself in idyllic girl form. How do you move on? How do you let go of the past? You must accept being sad, accept suffering, because that’s what life is.
I don’t mean to be bleak, but here is a snippet of a Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers interview, in which they talk about myths and how we perceive the world, articulated less bluntly.
CAMPBELL:“All life is sorrowful” is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow — loss, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it.
MOYERS: Do you really believe that?
CAMPBELL: It is joyful just as it is. I don’t believe there was anybody who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” And the way to awake from it is not to be afraid, and to recognize that all of this, as it is, is a manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all.
It’s tough to accept that, but living is the hard part, it’s the whole essence of being. What Campbell says is that we are looking for the wrong thing, namely, the meaning of life. Instead, the meaning is all in the living, the being. Maybe it’s coincidental then that I bring up Little Miss Sunshine, also from the Ruby Sparks team. Below, this is my favorite scene, my favorite conversation of the movie in which Steve Carell’s character, Frank, attempts to explain to Dano’s character, Dwayne, how suffering is life-building, and is dark for a reason.
Dwayne: I wish I could just sleep until I was eighteen and skip all this crap- high school and everything-just skip it.
Frank: Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he’s also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he uh… he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, Those were the best years of his life, ’cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn’t learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you’re 18… Ah, think of the suffering you’re gonna miss. I mean high school? High school-those are your prime suffering years. You don’t get better suffering than that.
It’s always the common adage that you learn more from losing than winning, when all of life isn’t given to you on a silver plate. For the above three men, privileges pervade their lives, allowing them to dwindle into the past without ever moving forward. When there is no reason to wake up, no daily routine, it is easy to fall victim to the past, and believe it can be repeated. Fitzgerald synthesizes this in the voice of Nick Carroway.
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
I recently watched Swingers and found this theme again, this time manifest in Jon Favreau’s character Mike, a man with an arresting nostalgia for his broken relationship, now six months old. She was his college sweetheart, six years spent together, and now, living in Los Angeles, he attempts to shed his depressed persona. It is a struggle, alleviated intermittently by “swinging” friend Trent (Vince Vaughn). Halfway through the film, we believe Mike has made a breakthrough but we find him one afternoon blinds closed, sitting on the floor, harboring more gloom. What elevates this film to brilliance is this seminal scene, a conversation between Mike and a friend, who attempts to splash him awake with a paradigmatic shift in thinking.
Rob: She won’t call because you left. She’s got her own life to deal with, man, and that’s in New York… alright? And she’s a sweet girl, and I love her to pieces, but fuck her, man. You gotta get on with your life. You gotta let go of the past. And Mikey, when you do, I’m telling you: the future is beautiful, alright? Look out the window. It’s sunny every day here. It’s like manifest destiny. Don’t tell me we didn’t make it. We made it! We are here. And everything that is past is prologued to this. All of the shit that didn’t kill us is only – you know, all that shit. You’re gonna get over it.
Mike: How did you get over it? I mean, how long did it take?
Rob: Sometimes it still hurts. You know how it is, man. It’s like, you wake up every day and it hurts a little bit less, and then you wake up one day and it doesn’t hurt at all. And the funny thing is, is that, this is kinda wierd, but it’s like, it’s like you almost miss that pain.
Rob: Yeah, for the same reason that you missed her… because you lived with it for so long.
Time heals and it makes you aware of how to move forward. I’ve always thought, even when it’s hard to accept, that every experience helps build you as a person. But it’s only what you do afterwards that validates it. Kane, Gatsby, Calvin, they didn’t restart themselves after what they thought was perfection had left them. How do you move on? You have to take your memories with you without letting them consume you. It’s something we all struggle with, but it’s a timeless human problem, evidenced in 1920s literature, a 1940s classical film, and contemporary pop culture.
So is memory a curse? It is if you make it. Or it can be a reminder that life is about living in it, good or bad. The future is beautiful, alright?
Guillaume Canet’s Little White Liescaptures the essence of a family-friend vacation: an intimate gathering prodding group sociality through anger, laughter, tears, and love. It’s not a new concept, think back to the 1980’s Big Chill, but now add some Spanish beach, sun, and French flare along with another strong ensemble cast. Even in the lazy resort house to which they call home each year, life isn’t a summer breeze.
This, most notably, is because a thread in this group of friends breaks, both metaphorically and in actuality. Ludo (Jean Dujardin), in a surprising opening scene, finds himself near death and in the intensive care unit of the hospital, sending shockwaves to his close-knitters ready to embark on their annual getaway. Dujardin continues another silent role- the tying factor to everyone- and his signature eyebrows and lip curl are still pronounced underneath the scars and bloated sores. The family travels anyway, an escape not to abandon but to add temporary levity to their shocked communal travesty. This line however becomes blurry.
The group dynamic is as such. Max (Francois Cluzet), the owner of this vacation house, is married and a restaurateur. He has a short temper and has a perfectionist mindset, displayed partially in his consuming anger with weasels that crawl between the house walls. Before the trip, he is confronted by Vincent (Benoit Magimel), also a married man, who explains that he is in love with Max, but claims he is not gay. Then there’s Eric (Gilles Lellouche), a free-spirited womanizer who happens to be in a relationship, simultaneously aiding Antoine (Laurent Lafitte) who has love trouble of his own, attempting to decode texts from a fleeting girlfriend. Marie (Marion Cotillard) is the emotional connector here, a bisexual independent insecure with her own relationships and trying to move past her former romance with the hospitalized Ludo.
Cotillard, among others, plays warm and gentle, sopping up several poignant moments of tears while demonstrating her acting prowess in softer shades of expression, seamlessly oscillating from smiling self-assurance to agitated confusion. It is fascinating watching these people interact with each other, expressing subtleties of rawer emotion within a public forum, always surrounded by each other, repressing their more polarizing wills that incrementally build to burst in comically, shockingly, revelatory outlets. Such is the case with Max, who curiously displays his newfound disdain for Vincent following his surprising confession. Max’s homophobic tendencies spill out in awkward bursts and poor settings, which then turn into group interventions, all at a moment’s notice.
Canet panders toward an intimate lens, capturing conversations and social gatherings with uncut closeness, contrasted with sweeping shots of the ocean. These are nostalgically set to American sound waves of Credence Clearwater Revival and Janis Joplin, songs that don’t have much purpose but to break silence and add flavor. At two and a half hours, surely time creeps over, but we have lived with these people. They aren’t shown to have learned fully who they are or what they have done, but there is a better understanding of themselves, which is a nice glimmer of hope.
InLawless, an explosively feisty flick set in prohibition 1930s Virginia, three notorious brothers run their own moonshine bootlegging business. It’s a lower class operation compared to the established gangsters of the area, and by established I mean that they wear nice suits and open machine guns in broad daylight. They have power, and they also control the fear, which is a lethal combination to have, especially in the wooded, main road town in which the film takes place.
These are all set pieces, cliched parts to the outdoor gangster film, filled stock full with standard shootouts and conventional characters. But Lawless, directed by John Hillcoat and written by Nick Cave, and based off Matt Bondurant‘s real-life novel, blends them together with surprising grit and passion. Bondurant tells his family story, a tale of three brothers, bootlegging their way through violent competetion and corruption. Hillcoat, without burying the plot in complex, heavy thematics, still adds an ominous visuality with a dark, musty lens. This is both an indicator of the Virginia wilderness and also homage to gangster classics that fed off stark contrasting hues, often signifying life in front of and behind closed doors.
The brothers are Howard (Jason Clarke), Forrest (Tom Hardy), and Jack (Shia LaBeouf), oldest to youngest, but it’s Forrest who’s in charge of the operation. Played with powerful subtlety by Hardy, Forrest contains both the dialect and notoriety of Jeff Bridge’s Rooster Cogburn, known by many, understood by the closest listeners. He grunts and groans, passes judgment to Jack in growling counsel, all under the infamous guise that he is incapable of being killed, a farcicle tale of mortality. This is a threatening epithet for some and a challenge for others, but somehow his body is on a mission, which is impressive considering the film’s violence meter raises steadily, catering to a possible tagline as “I see your physical defamation and I raise you some bullet wounds.”
But Lawless emotionally is told from Jack’s perspective, the “good” one in which Forrest is wary of letting into the family business. Jack’s only contributions come from driving the moonshine from place to place, but his ambition is to move from the driver’s seat to the passenger side. He is unphased by death but still marvels at rifle shells, especially ones that come from established mobster Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman). Attempting to prove his worth, Jack starts to run the business on his own after Forrest is physically unable. LaBeouf is less angsty and screamy, but he commands screen time with veterans, that although have less instrumental roles, still emit an undeniable, overshadowing presence.
One of these other veterans is Guy Pearce who plays a Chicago policeman named Rakes, looking to eradicate the bootlegging industry. His greasy cowlick is a glaring divider for a head that seems to be screwed on too tight. His polished gray suits stand out amongst the dirt ridden locals, making him an object of envy and outsider loathing. Pearce speaks with squeaky conviction and corrupted confidence, handling a gun too easily, brutally beating others like his routine. His maniacality comes in little things, like slowly pocketing his white laced gloves.
It is a brutal world but Jack wants a part of it. Paralleling The Godfather and Goodfellas in this manner, proving oneself becomes an overambitious attempt to gain instant credibility. Balancing Jack however is bootlegging partner in crime and friend (Dane Dehaan) and a tender love interest (Mia Wasikowski). She is the town preacher’s daughter, with a father that is weary of his lingering, courting presence. She brings a lighter, naturalistic side to both Jack and the film, as does Jessica Chastain, who magnetizes Forrest with her refined beauty and bare-skinned presence. Provocative, enticing and a former dancer, her pastel dresses and red hair literally and figuratively add color to the Bondurant’s headquarters in which she serves coffee.
This is a man’s world however, or at least a violent one. I screened this shortly after the Aurora shooting and it seems this film, like Gangster Squad, could have easily been pushed back a few months as well. The gun powder becomes desensitizing as it reaches its climactic end, a chilling mob and police revolutionary era standoff. In this case, the performances, the sum of the parts, can overpower the whole, which lacks a certain gravitas and weight. In this type of film however, illegal alcohol can still taste mighty fine.
My name is Jake Kring-Schreifels. I'm an aspiring journalist attending Fordham University looking to make it into the Sports and/or entertainment business!
