My last truly important birthday was probably my 18th, and that was a long, long time ago. I still feel like I’m 18, act like I’m 12, and sleep like I’m 5 months old. But life doesn’t often let you live in the blissful ignorance that I’ve mastered. Nothing will make you feel the icy fingers of mortality around your neck like cleaning out your childhood home, putting it up for sale, and preparing to close that lengthy chapter of your life.
That’s what has occupied me for the past two weeks. My sisters and I looked through our parents’ remaining belongings, decided what to keep and what to sell. Eventually the rooms in that very familiar house became empty and small. We sat at the kitchen table and repeated the stories we’ve told many times about life in that house. We noticed that a cardinal flew by — an in-family omen of my Mom — and that a penny appeared on the floor of my bedroom — an omen of my Dad. We cleaned and straightened and prepared for the realtor to usher through interested buyers and nosy neighbors. I focused on the garage and set aside some of the odds and ends that my Dad had left there, grabbing at the rapidly disappearing threads that connected him to the life I now find myself wandering through.
And today, my odometer clicked up another meaningless notch. Which is strange, because I never feel any older on this anniversary, but I know that I must be, because those days with them in that little warm house seem so long ago. And I know now, sadly, that the empty house is part of my life going forward, as much as the one that rocked with laughter and happiness. I guess that growing up, which I am still doing at 48, is a matter of trading experiences for memories. I’m lucky, because almost all of them have been good, thanks to life in that little house.
2009. Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto. Directed by J.J. Abrams.
There’s a particularly good episode of Northern Exposure — one of television’s funniest and most-thoughtful series — in which the Native American character played by Graham Greene is studying white American culture for examples of healing and instructive myths. He notes that various tribes have stories that help put the universe in perspective and help explain the often-unexplainable burden of being human. After questioning everyone in town, he finds that no one can name myths in white culture similar to those you find in Native American culture. He then stumbles into a theater and realizes that we Zhaagnaash just call them movies.
I’m encouraged by the recent reset of a few of the action movie franchises — Batman Begins wiped away all the cartoonishness of the earlier attempts, and the Dark Knight was a great, moody followup. I have to admit that I never saw any of the previous big-screen Star Trek movies and I was never a fan of the television show. It was the positive reviews of others and the opportunity to see a blockbuster on a giant screen that drew me to this J.J. Abrams production.
Because he’s working with a cast of relative unknowns (not at the time of this writing, of course; they are all stars now), the burden of success for this important franchise was propped on his youthful shoulders, and it was a wise choice. The mind behind Alias, Cloverfield and Lost succeeds in telling a story that not only honors past storylines and characters, but adds energy and some exciting plot twists.
Replacing the iconic leads of Shatner and Nimoy must have been the greatest gamble, and I think Chris Pine as Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock are a suitable update. Nimoy plays a crucial role, as well, cleverly and logically appearing as an older Spock. The story — a genesis story for the crew and the Enterprise’s mission — allows for the introduction of all the familiar characters: Bones (Karl Urban), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and sets up the ascendance of Kirk, Spock and the crew to command of the Enterprise.
Their nemesis in this first chapter are some ticked-off Romulans (led by the villainous Nero, played by Eric Bana) intent on avenging what they see as Spock’s failure to save their home planet. There are many spectacular scenes, amazing special effects, brain-clenching jumps in time and all the science-fiction and action movie twists that make a few hours in a darkened theater so much fun. So I’m going to shut up about the story here.
Except to add this: The metamorphosis of James Tiberius Kirk from fatherless and rudderless rebel to spaceship-commanding savior of the universe is the story we keep telling ourselves, over and over again, despite its unlikelihood. That there is greatness inside each of us, however raw and unrecognized, that can be channeled and that can define our lives. That we are destined to be something better than we are. Star Trek is an explosion-filled summer blockbuster, but this story is told again and again, in more conventional settings, in simpler stories, in the movies we love. Those are our healing myths, and I think we need every one of them.
2008. Starring Michelle Williams. Directed by Kelly Reichardt.
Summer is the time of blockbusters — screen-filling spectacles of ’splosions and sequels. The fantastic and futuristic epics that challenge the stabilizing structures of logic while we suspend our disbelief. Reinterpretation of familiar narratives and remakes of films that were better in their first iteration.
But once in a while, you are reminded that there is drama in everyday life, and a story that will break your heart behind every person with a downcast face you pass on the street. That’s why we need the blockbusters and explosions. There is just too much real pain to witness while we’re struggling to carry on with our own, and we need distraction.
Wendy (Michelle Williams) is carrying her particular burden from Indiana to Alaska, and is accompanied by her loyal pal, Lucy, a golden dog with a “friendly face” who shares her woes. Wendy is hoping to find work at a fish cannery, and is rationing her meager savings to get there, sleeping in her car and bathing in gas-station bathrooms. But when her ‘88 Accord breaks down in Oregon, and Lucy goes missing, Wendy faces disaster on a personal level.
There are really two themes to this simple and incredibly sad film: one, that when you’re poor and alone, you are very vulnerable, while disaster awaits any wrong step; and two, the default approach we take to each other is distrust and defensiveness, even as our natural empathy battles to reach out to another human being in need.
There’s that word, empathy, that’s actually been a matter of debate this summer. As if people shouldn’t be empathetic to each other; as if there is a basis for such a debate. Without empathy, what stops my neighbor for killing me for what’s in my pocket? What stops me from laughing at someone else’s pain and suffering? It seems strange, but there is an actual debate in society whether we should act like psychopaths. (Maybe with this question in mind, the cruelest, least-empathetic character in Wendy and Lucy wears a large crucifix as a sign of moral superiority.)
Michelle Williams is remarkable as Wendy, determined but weary from walking everywhere on her skinny legs, self-reliant but clearly at the end of her rope. A phone call that she makes to her sister, just “to call” but met with suspicion, is heartbreaking. The voice at the other end of the line just wants to hear that everything’s OK, even though it’s clear that things are far from it.
Although there are few details in the story to tell you what brought Wendy and Lucy to this point, I really felt for Wendy, who is hesitant to accept kindness from others, wary of being in their debt. And I feel for Lucy, whining and unable to understand when the dog food bag is empty. As much as I’d like to help the characters, I realize that many real people are in similar situations or worse, and I probably have walked by them, distrustful and defensive. That’s what a tough old world with a limited amount of empathy will do to you.
2008. Starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett. Directed by David Fincher.
There are many deaths in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; that is, there are many lives lived. I say that because, if what this story tells us can be boiled down to a single point, it’s that, in order to live, you must accept that you will die.
To make this point as simply and gracefully as the movie does, it shows us the life of a man born into a physically old body that becomes younger as he ages. In all other ways, he experiences the joys and pains that everyone experiences: the loss of those he loves, the missed opportunities, the chances taken and the regrets carried.
I wasn’t excited to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in the theaters. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it at all. It seemed gimmicky, too much like a movie I really don’t like, Forrest Gump, which shares a screenwriter. Well, this is the movie that Forrest Gump should have been. Instead of putting the lead character at the center of all of our lifetime’s keystone moments, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) experiences all the changes of mid-century America, but from the perspective of an average man, however physically unique.
Benjamin is born as his mother dies, and his distraught father, who sees a wrinkled and crooked infant, drops him on the doorstep of a New Orleans old folks home. He is discovered by Queenie (Taraji P. Nelson), who will care for and raise him, as he grows from an invalid baby into a spritely senior citizen. His time in the old folks home is enlightening, as those around him “pass” every day, while others are obsessed with their memories while they can still hold them. He meets people he’ll remember long after they’re gone, and he’ll meet the love of his life, although she is just a girl. Upon reaching 17 years of age, he feels restless and leaves to find adventure and purpose, a young man with stiff bones and receding gray hair. His travels and experiences shape who he is, as they do anyone, and he keeps returning home to find others have passed, or moved on, or changed.
Benjamin’s story is told through the reading of his diary by Caroline to Daisy (Kate Blanchett), her dying mother, the young woman that Benjamin loved, in a New Orleans hospital directly in the path of a hurricane. Caroline makes a point to say goodbye to her mother, and reading the diary seems like a way to pass the time, but there is much to learn in the telling of Benjamin’s story. From the beginning, with the tale of a clock that runs backward, created so that the time and people we’ve lost will come back to us, to the end of the story, when memories bring back to us the times we’ve had and the people we’ve loved before they are washed away forever.
David Fincher gently handles this story within a story, with changing perspectives in time, surrounding characters who move forward and backward in time. The scenes are dark and often quiet, with much of it set during late nights and early mornings, and traveling from New Orleans to the Pacific Ocean to New York and Paris, and back again to New Orleans. The characters who fill Benjamin’s life are colorful and genuine, from the sweet and loving Queenie to the tugboat captain who considers his tattoos as his art, and who helps the elderly youth cross a few of life’s most-memorable thresholds.
One of the characters’ turning points comes through a clever portrayal of how we dance around with fate, illustrating how many small acts can build into events that can knock us off course. Telling that story of missed chances and unfortunate timing enforces my belief that, if fate is real, it must be so complicated and unpredictable that we cannot reliably foresee anything. What holds Benjamin back from being what he wants to be — a lover, a husband, a father — is the uniqueness of his physical condition. For the rest of us, it is our own unique circumstances. But whatever it is, the movie tells us, it’s not too late to “start again.”
This movie struck a surprising chord with me, given the way life has appeared to me over the past few years. Some lines seem like they’ve just come out of my mouth. I know I’ve said, as Benjamin says at a happy moment, “I was thinking how nothing lasts, and what a shame that is.” And whether it’s an optimistic outlook or a threat, I agree with Queenie’s sentiment that “you never know what’s comin’ for you.” You might be surprised, as I was, by what you’ll feel watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Found out late this afternoon that Kill Rock Stars recording artist Jeff Hanson, 31, has died. This tragic news, on a cold and rainy day in Minneapolis, is sad and sobering. I first heard him being interviewed on public radio a couple years ago, describing how he sung his trademark falsetto (forgive me if that’s not the right term) as a child, and utilized the same style when he became a songwriter. I picked up his self-titled LP, and was impressed with the delicate, unconventional songs. If you are a fan of Elliott Smith or Iron & Wine, this is an album you should listen to.
No definite word on cause of death yet — but it doesn’t matter. This was someone with a surplus of talent, who was reportedly excited at how his career was going, who had an unlimited number of songs to write, who has left us too early. I am really saddened by the news. RIP, Mr. Hanson.
Jeff Hanson site
2008. Starring Daniel Craig, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench. Directed by Marc Forster.
There were so many negative reviews of this, the second movie in the series of reinvented James Bond adventures, that I was not in any kind of hurry to see Quantum of Solace. Even though I loved 2006’s Casino Royale, which introduced us to Daniel Craig’s icy, brutal James Bond, who lacks the winking casualness of past Bonds, and substitutes his bare knuckles for the increasingly goofy devices that drove earlier movies. Casino Royale began its reinvention with a bang — a relentless parkour chase that leaves the viewer out of breath and happy for the change in pace. The film ended — and if you haven’t seen it, I’m sorry — with the death of a romantic conquest that this Bond couldn’t shrug off with a sip of the perfect martini.
That’s what I’ve heard doomed this movie — Bond’s guilt for the death of his new love, and the thirst for vengeance that would lead him off mission. You know, 007 has “lost his smile.” But I went into Quantum of Solace with an open mind, and I loved it. Yes, Daniel Craig rarely smiles, and his Bond can’t seem to trust anyone, but that’s what I expect of an agent. When the trail for vengeance exposes an infiltrator who puts his beloved boss and adversary, M, in danger, Bond lashes out and keeps swinging, bounding from country to country in pursuit of a mysterious group of criminals whose goal he doesn’t yet understand.
One member of the group unlucky to cross paths with Bond is Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, looking much healthier than he did in The Butterfly and the Diving Bell), a supposed eco-friendly entrepreneur who is much friendlier with totalitarian thugs than tree-huggers. Greene is buying vast regions of desert in South America for a mysterious purpose, and killing off Bond’s fellow agents and undercover friends. Meanwhile, Bond keeps running into Camille (Olga Kurylenko), who is as persistent in her own pursuit of revenge.
The action scenes are great, as always — Bond conducts gun-blazing chases by car, boat and plane, and there’s a rooftop chase that ends in an amazingly tense struggle to the death among scaffolding, ropes and broken glass. Craig’s Bond doesn’t spend much time sipping drinks and chatting up the ladies — he may be the most peripatetic character since Lola of Run Lola Run. I also have to say that Craig looks believably beaten after a scuffle, his face full of scratches and bruises. But those rough angles of his face look at home in a tux as well. His Bond is gloomy and dour and he seems driven by something dark behind his eyes, but it’s just that this angry Bond thirsts more for revenge than a shaken martini.
For my mom, gone from this world six years now. I hope she wakes up with breakfast in bed every morning, and with no worries about her kids.
The Sweetest Gift, A Mother’s Smile (performed by the Blue Sky Boys)
Written by J.B. Coats
One day a mother came to the prison
To see an erring but precious son
She told the warden how much she loved him
It did not matter what he had done
She did not bring to him parole or pardon
She brought no silver, no pomp or style
It was a halo bright sent down from heaven
The sweetest gift, a mother’s smile
Her boy had drifted far from the fireside
Though she had pleaded with him each night
Yet not a word did she ever utter
And though her heart ached, her smile was bright
She left a smile, son, you can remember
She’s gone to heaven from heartache free
The bars around you could never change her
You were her baby and e’er will be
She did not bring to him parole or pardon
She brought no silver, no pomp or style
It was a halo bright sent down from heaven
The sweetest gift, a mother’s smile
Thanks, Mom.
2008. Starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross. Directed by Stephen Daldry.
The secrets we keep from each other, with varying degrees of shame, is the theme that seems to run through The Reader, the adaption of the Bernhard Schlink book and last year’s Oscar nomination vehicle for Kate Winslet. It is a sad, quiet story that imagines an intense, brief love between two people neither can handle. Winslet is deserving of the Oscar win, especially for her work in the second act of the movie, but her young co-star nearly outdoes her.
Ralph Fiennes portrays the adult Michael Berg, whom we quickly learn has shallow relationships with women, even a chilly, long-distance relationship with his daughter. Michael is reminded of himself as a younger man (David Kross) — in a very nice transition — who, as a 15-year-old, came down with scarlet fever and was helped initially by a mysterious woman. After recovering, he sets out to thank her, finding the emotionally direct Hanna Schmitz in her threadbare apartment. Before leaving, he glimpses her in a state of undress, and runs out. He’s back soon though, anxious to leave his boyhood behind, and she is once again willing to help him.
Michael’s home is orderly and calm, but stiflingly cold, and escapes again and again to Hanna’s apartment and the warmth of her bed, several times before even knowing her name. And she seems to prefer it that way. Soon she asks him what he’s studying. He reads his lessons to her, then some of the books he has brought, even comic books. He reads to her in the afterglow of their torn-apart bed, then she begins demanding a chapter or two before they get to it. He becomes obsessed with her, and when she realizes how he feels, she breaks off the relationship by simply packing up and moving away without a word.
Michael is destroyed but goes on, a brooding child who has had a bitter taste of adulthood. (Kross really is amazing in this difficult leading role, allowing Michael to age from an impulsive and immature boy to a distrustful, brooding law student.) He ends up in a class led by Bruno Ganz (whom I haven’t seen since Wings of Desire) focused on the trial of several former SS guards responsible for the deaths of Jewish workers killed in a fire. The trial has resulted from the publication of a successful book by a camp survivor. Here, Michael is reunited with Hanna, looking harried and desperate as one of the defendants — one who is increasingly taking the lion’s share of the blame. As the trial progresses, Michael realizes one of the secrets she kept from him, and he is torn by the decision of whether to share it.
I’m not going to share it, or the way the dominoes fall as a result of Michael’s decision. Although the film is bleak and hopeless — you’re either going to watch it or you’re not, so I couldn’t possibly dissuade you — I respect the film for taking the difficult and much-more-interesting route through the rest of the story. Hanna Schmitz is an unlovable character, maybe even an unfeeling monster, but she is unmistakeably human, so much a product of her flaws and environment as Michael is a product of his. And Michael may be the only one to see this. The penultimate scene (the one that takes place in New York) accomplished the near-impossible — I began to feel that victim had treated victimizer unfairly. This is Michael’s challenge, as well.
The grace of the final scene, in a gloomy drizzle, made me hopeful — hopeful that, despite whatever I might do in my bleak, bitter life, others might put off judging me until they’ve read the entire story.
2008. Starring Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei. Directed by Darren Aronofsky.
The talk leading up to this past Oscar season was that there couldn’t have been a better actor for the role of the washed-up warrior in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler than the once-famous Mickey Rourke. That may be true. But I think that, instead, there could not have been a better way to reintroduce the natural and intuitive acting skill of Mickey Rourke than this role — a role that seems written precisely for him.
Rourke becomes Randy “The Ram” Robinson very seamlessly, and it may be because he looks unlike the Mickey Rourke of Angel Heart and of Diner, the pouting, brooding young Brando (who also made the most of his evolving image) of the 1980s. He does look a lot like the vengeance-driven Marv of Sin City, but I had no idea that he had cost Robert Rodriguez so little in makeup expenses. Rourke is enormously muscular, biceps and pectorals no longer taut, but scarred and heavy. The breaths and groans that emerge from him as he wraps himself before his match don’t seem voluntary, and the winces evoked as he bounces on the mat seem real. So does the pain he feels when he tries to make contact with the people he spends the movie reaching out to.
Robinson finds himself 20 years past his prime, still wrestling on weekends for wads of cash, while working in a supermarket to pay for his tentative trailer home. He spends his off-hours at a strip club, admiring a mature stripper named Cassidy (another revealing role for the brave Marisa Tomei). The two of them have much more in common than either one realizes — both provide a fantasy for their customers, who are oblivious to the pain they are feeling on their respective stages. And both of them are growing too old to be convincing much longer in their roles. Randy reaches out to Cassidy, but her dreams are more condo than trailer. When she lets her guard down, she finds that they are could share more than ’80s nostalgia and a love of Ratt and Guns ‘n’ Roses.
The Ram has a heart attack after a brutal match, and suffers a subsequent re-evaluation of his life. He doubles his efforts at reconciling with his estranged daughter (a chilly Evan Rachel Wood — she looks as if she’s been living in cold storage) and, on the brink of making good on years of neglect and disinterest, gives into bad habits that threaten to derail the happy ending he’s been wishing for.
Aronofsky captures the heartbreak of a dying dream, with The Ram’s struggles to keep his tiny trailer home and the demeaning job in the supermarket. (I love the familiar tracking shot as Rourke plops on his hairnet and walks the the deli backstage to emerge through the plastic curtains and greet the ugly shoppers. Rourke faces it with more dread than the walk out to face his wrestling adversaries.) This simple man, embarrassed by his hearing aid and afraid of the failing wrecks he sees around him, deserves to have someone care for him as his star fades.
I don’t have any enthusiasm for pro wrestling. I guess I figured out long ago that — spoiler alert! — it was fake and not very well faked. (Although a friend’s family took a very young me to see Mad Dog Vachon wrestle in Duluth — when we gathered to ask for autographs, he chased us all away with a demented growling. That was scary.) But it’s clear that the blows in the ring and the crashes to the mat can make for a very painful and debilitating retirement. Another Minnesota wrestling legend, Verne Gagne, now suffering from Alzheimer’s-related conditions, has been in the news for an assault on and related accidental death of a fellow nursing-home resident. The sadness behind that chain of real-life events would be too hard to believe if scripted.
The Wrestler reminds us that life is filled with pain, all kinds of pain. Some you choose, some chooses you. You endure it, because you must. And you are expected to get up and comfort yourself, and expect more of the same as long as you live. You might heal, but you won’t forget the pain.
1943. Starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Choosing a favorite Hitchcock movie is a hopeless challenge. Rear Window has Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart, and the unbearably suspenseful scene when Raymond Burr comes home early. North By Northwest has Cary Grant dealing with a worst-ever case of mistaken identity. Strangers on a Train has that amazing plot, plus the carnival scene. Psycho has Norman Bates, the shower scene and its overall weirdness. Vertigo, its own weirdness and Jimmy Stewart. Finally, the scene in The Birds in which the birds attack the townsfolk caused me, as a child, to piss my pants. Literally.
Shadow of a Doubt, despite its lack of any diuretic shocks, has all its own charms and, according to Hitchcock’s daughter, was the great director’s favorite movie of his own.
Teresa Wright, looking as pretty and wholesome as a Rockwell painting, stars as Charlie, daughter of the wholesome Joseph and Emma Newton (Henry Travers and Patricia Collinge) and the pride of bucolic Santa Rosa, CA. Her mother named her after her uncle Charlie who, when we meet him, is in Massachusetts, lying next to a pile of money and about to evade a pair of trailing detectives. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, his namesake is lying on her bed, thinking of telegraphing him when a telegraph arrives. The announcement that he’s coming to visit proves to her that they are connected — “like twins,” she reminds her family.
Uncle Charlie (the great Joseph Cotten) arrives at the train station and immediately settles in. In time, he surprises his niece by tearing up the evening paper, roughly grabbing her arm and giving a truly disturbing speech at the dinner table. She stills wants to believe in Uncle Charlie, in part because of how much he means to her mother. But when two reporters show up to write about the family in a magazine feature but only seem interested in learning about the recent visitor, the beans get spilled. And young Charlie, filled with doubt, begins her own investigation.
The image of twirling dancers is being telegraphed between the two Charlies, as well as the melody of a waltz. When the young Charlie learns that police are searching for the “Merry Widow Murderer,” clues begin to fall into place. The relationship between niece and uncle change, and not for the better.
A highlight of the film for me is the peculiar friendship of father Joseph and Herbie Hawkins (Hume Cronyn) who are as hooked on true-crime stories and their own theories on how to perform the perfect murder, they are unaware of how much they creep out those around them. And the precocious, glasses-wearing young daughter — a standard role in films during these years — adds to the quiet screwball nature of the Newton household.
Shadow of a Doubt is much more serene than Psycho, much more bucolic than Vertigo, much, much less incontinence-invoking than The Birds. But its conflict — that young Charlie will destroy her family by telling them what she suspects about Uncle Charlie — is a clever-enough hook to make it memorable among all the other Hitchcockian classics.
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