THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

            Based on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, the original Magnificent Seven may be the first ensemble Western, employing a whole group of actors, some of them with distinguished careers, rather than a single dominant star.  The movie spawned three sequels and a television series and possibly influenced a couple of others with similar concepts of plot and character, most notably The Professionals and The Wild Bunch. 

The picture follows the simple plot of its predecessor, showing the gathering of a disparate group of gunfighters under the leadership of a special individual, in this case a bounty hunter named Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington), to fight against an evil man oppressing a whole village full of innocent people.  The bad guy in question, Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), terrorizes a small community to keep his gold mine poisoning the air and water, and employs an army of thugs to kill anyone who opposes him; in an early sequence that reveals his character and methods, he announces his takeover of the town, punctuating his speech by ordering his men to execute some of the people who protest.

One citizen, Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) resolving to take revenge on Bogue and release her town from his grip, hires Chisolm for the job; as it turns out, he also has a serious score to settle with the tyrant.  He recruits six other men who then travel with him to help defend the town against Bogue and his men.  They defeat the deputies Bogue has installed to keep everyone in his thrall, train the inept citizens in marksmanship, free the apparently enslaved miners, and erect a series of defenses against the anticipated attack, which ultimately involves a whole army of Bogue’s thugs and a devastating Gatling gun.  The movie thus follows a predictable but reasonably entertaining pattern, and we all know that, despite the odds against them and the obstacles they face, the Seven will somehow prevail. 

The Magnificent Seven should also satisfy any student of the Western, that great American form, in its deployment of several of its obligatory devices.  Aside from all the gunplay, it features, for example, the poker game, the saloon fight, the whorehouse (dance hall in the old days, when those cowboys really loved to dance), the rite of passage from cowardice to courage in peaceful townspeople.  A couple of times the director, Antoine Fuqua, uses that familiar long panorama shot of a rider or group of riders traversing a vast and empty landscape, and now and then he employs the techniques of the spaghetti Westerns, with tight close-ups of faces, long silences, and an eye-level camera.

Its most problematic elements involve the actors themselves, the group who constitute that Magnificent Seven.  Aside from Denzel Washington, the movie lacks the kind of strong presences who command attention in the original—people like Ethan Hawke and someone named Chris Pratt simply cannot match Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Eli Wallach, and Charles Bronson.  Washington himself underplays throughout, sometimes almost whispering his lines; in one of a few anachronisms, he speaks of a “worst case scenario,” a phrase I doubt ever was uttered in 1879.

The generally awful Vincent D’Onofrio balances Washington, simply chewing up the prairie as the largest and loudest member of the Seven.  The only unusual addition comes in the form of a Chinese expert, Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), who throws knives and darts, some of which he stores in his hair, with deadly accuracy.  Peter Sarsgaard plays the evil Bartholomew Bogue with a chillingly soft spoken delivery, making a little speech equating his savage actions with both democracy and Christianity (sound familiar?).  He commits a couple of actions that perfectly establish his character—when his tame sheriff brings him bad news, he simply shoots the messenger.  Worst of all, in the early sequence where he first appears, he sets fire to the church: holy smoke.

WAR DOGS

TWO NOT SO GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS

            Based on actual people and events, War Dogs tells a most unusual story of two young dopes who more or less fall into the highly profitable international arms trade.  Not surprisingly, the movie provides a salutary lesson in greed, but also shows something of the actual wheeling and dealing in that tricky and often dangerous business.  As both life and the movies teach us, easy  pickings, sure things, and double crossing often lead to disaster, which is what happens when a couple of moral morons involve themselves with guns and find themselves playing with the big boys in a game they don’t fully comprehend. 

            The two friends in War Dogs, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who knew each other in their adolescent years, reconnect when Efraim returns to Florida, partially bankrolled by his uncle (Kevin Pollak), full of ambitions to make a killing in the arms business. He enlists his friend and the two of them embark on their first big deal, attempting to supply an American colonel in Iraq with a truckload of Beretta pistols (why the colonel must acquire the weapons on his own remains a mystery).  The job turns out to be complicated and exceedingly dangerous, involving crossing several borders in the Middle East and surviving an attack from the Taliban.

            As they sink deeper or perhaps rise higher into their new business, the partners accumulate the usual trappings of wealth in today’s America—expensive cars, fancy apartments, a plenitude of drugs.  They also find themselves connected to some heavy hitters, who actually perform a little hitting on Packouz.  Ultimately they land in some difficult territory, partly as a result of diving in over their heads and partly as a result of Efraim’s penchant for double crossing

and back stabbing.  When he stiffs an Albanian partner in a particularly intricate scheme, he and his partner become the target of an FBI investigation.

            In starring Jonah Hill, the director, Todd Phillips capitalizes on some of his work in The Wolf of Wall Street as a crooked, greedy, drug-addled wheeler dealer.  In War Dogs he adds to that image through adding a good deal of plain nastiness and a sort of generalized vulgarity to all his words and actions.  His employs his corpulence, his obnoxious mannerisms, his steady line of profane bluster to good effect, so much so that Miles Teller, though nominally the protagonist and occasional narrator, fades away when they occupy the same scene.  For better or worse, Hill dominates the picture, which generally grows less interesting when he’s absent.  A fascinating story in itself, War Dogs loses much of its appeal in its failure to balance its violence and tension with its sometimes outrageous comedy, summed up perfectly in Jonah Hill’s character.

INDIGNATION

INDIGNATION

          Although he has officially retired from writing—and who could blame him, it’s a tough racket, after all, and he’s had a good run—Philip Roth can still enjoy the lucrative benefits of film adaptation.  The latest Roth novel to make it to the screen, Indignation, actually seems a rather odd choice.  (Frankly, though I consider myself well-read and have read most of Roth’s novels, I have never even heard of this one.)  The new movie uses some material familiar to any reader of his works—Jewish American domestic life, anti-Semitism, the difficulty of assimilation , sexual initiation, and in this case, the fish-out-of-water situation of a Jewish student from New Jersey attending a deeply Protestant college in Ohio.

          The student, Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), the son of a kosher butcher, attends the wonderfully named Winesburg College in Ohio, where he encounters a number of new experiences, all of which turn out badly.  An excellent student and captain of his high school baseball team, Marcus wants only to study and learn, ambitions constantly thwarted by a series of personal and academic obstacles.   He resents the compulsory chapel attendance, the efforts of the Jewish fraternity to pledge him, and his two obnoxious roommates.  Although he captained his high school baseball team, he even refuses to try out for the Winesburgers. 

          When Marcus meets a young woman named Olivia (Sarah Gadon), his troubles and confusions compound.  On their first date, she provides him with the sort of sexual thrill freshmen in the 1950s can only dream about, which causes him to react in some unpredictable ways, and leads to a series of other problems.  His innocence in a way obstructs his understanding of whatever relationship could develop, and he fails to comprehend Olivia’s own difficulties.

          The real meat of the picture, oddly, consists of a series of dialogues between Marcus and the dean of the college (Tracy Letts), a thoroughly obnoxious academic who attempts to discover and correct everything he finds wrong in Marcus’s attitude and behavior.  Dean Caudwell, a kind of compendium of every dean you or I ever encountered in college, constantly badgers Marcus, delving into his background, religious beliefs, dating habits, and even his quite understandable desire to move from his crowded three-student room to a single.  Their dialogues go on for far too long and grow increasingly disturbing, which may account for the film’s otherwise odd and dubious title.

          A picture that starts and ends strangely, Indignation for the most part concentrates on the perfectly interesting subject of its protagonist’s struggles with a new and different situation.  It begins to disintegrate in effect with Marcus’s puzzled reaction to Olivia, his talky meetings with Dean Caudwell, and an attack of appendicitis that brings his mother out to Winesburg; that visit leads to greater disillusionment for Marcus and further problems in his relationship with Olivia.  Ultimately, a movie that proceeds with a certain clarity, simplicity, and reason finally ends, almost shockingly, in madness, despair, and death.

AB FAB

AB FAB

            Most fans of public television know those dreadful British situation comedies, where the canned laughter in reaction to colossally unfunny lines and situations sounds tinny and desperate, and the characters throw pat lines at each other, pause for the laughs, and mug outrageously.  (They may represent retaliation for the American Revolution).  One comedy that didn’t appear on PBS, but ran on a cable channel, differed drastically from the usual tepid, mechanical fare, a wild show called Absolutely Fabulous, which starred Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley as a couple of completely irresponsible, decadent, hedonistic drunks, somehow surviving in the vague fields of public relations and trendy magazines, always hunting for money and men.

            The new movie, cleverly titled Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, pretty much follows the patterns of the TV show, including the presence of a couple of the supporting actors, venturing further into its essential outrageousness and never really pretending to anything like authenticity.  Its makeshift plot involves the efforts of Edina (Saunders) and Patsy (Lumley), feeling their age, who hope to reinvigorate their failed careers by representing the model Kate Moss, who plays herself.  They end up knocking the model into the Thames, landing in deep trouble, absconding to the South of France, and continuing a series of often raunchy misadventures. 

            In addition to Moss, several other famous people appear as themselves, including Lulu, Joan Collins, and in a very funny little moment with Lumley, Jon Hamm. They enhance the appeal of a silly but entertaining film overflowing with improbable situations, bright colors, and weird characters.  If the London fashion scene resembles the one in the movie, that world is heavily populated with completely and variously obnoxious people.   Aside from piling one excessive comic scene on top of others, the movie really consists mostly of wild farce and exaggerated gags, or in other words, amounts to an extension of the old TV show.

Cafe Society

Review of Café Society

          His fans will no doubt rejoice at the annual Woody Allen movie, this one called Café Society, and not terribly different from his last dozen or two dozen mediocre efforts.  (One exception: Blue Jasmine, a very unusual work from Allen, and a very good movie).  Set in the 1930s and narrated by the writer-director, the film shows the career of a young man from Brooklyn, Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), who goes to Hollywood to make a life for himself; he hopes that his uncle, Phil Stern (Steve Carell), a successful movie agent, will help.

          Phil deputizes one of his secretaries, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), to show his nephew around town, the Hollywood of a now romantic past.  After a number of pleasant excursions, the two young people reach a point of mutual affection, but as it turns out, Vonnie is involved in an affair with Uncle Phil.  That discovery drives Bobby back to New York, where he launches a successful career working for his gangster brother as the maître d’ in his posh night club.

          The movie’s occasionally comic moments revolve around the amusing Dorfman family, which bears some resemblance to the family in one of Allen’s better films, Radio Days.  Its emotional elements remain steadfastly on the surface, with the writer-director telling the audience pretty much what the two main characters feel about each other.  Since neither Jesse Eisenberg nor Kristen Stewart convey anything resembling genuine passion, they appear merely to be acting out Allen’s hardly credible lines.  Eisenberg pretty much owns the tiresome role of the naïve young guy, which he’s played far too often, and though Woody Allen, Jesse Eisenberg, and Steve Carell constantly proclaim her beauty, Stewart remains a quite ordinary and quite insipid personality.

          The movie looks carefully polished and authentic, with the cars and clothes and, especially, all the wonderful popular music of its time.  Oddly, nobody refers to the Great Depression that after all, defined the decade.  Café Society belongs with most of Woody Allen’s recent—actually over a couple of decades—works: it’s trivial, shallow, and utterly empty of anything resembling real emotion.

SPLASH AND CUT

SPLASH AND CUT

Review of A Bigger Splash

            It’s one of those occasionally tense European decadent dramas, complete with wonderful Mediterranean scenery, appropriately accompanying weather, and a considerable amount of nudity, just the sort of thing, in fact, to wow the reviewers.  A Bigger Splash also employs a couple of highly regarded performers, Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton, in some rather unlikely roles.  Such a full and attractive package should appeal to the appeal to art house crowd, and its generous display of nudity might even bring in a wider audience.

The story revolves around four characters enduring an uneasy relationship in on a picturesque Italian island, where a famous rock star, Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton), suffering from strained vocal cords and reduced to silence and occasional whispering, is apparently vacationing with her lover, documentary filmmaker, Paul De Smedl (Mathias Schoenaertz).  Interrupting their idyll, her producer and former lover, Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) calls and announces he will be visiting with his 22-year-old daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson), whom he has not seen in many years.  Not surprisingly, his intrusion triggers a series of difficulties, erotic encounters, and ultimately, disaster.

Contrasting with the voiceless singer and the passive filmmaker, Ralph Fiennes maintains a manic volatility throughout the movie.  Dancing, singing, shouting, jumping naked into the swimming pool, and thoroughly obnoxious, he indeed makes a bigger splash than anyone else.  His history with the singer establishes a level of discomfort in the group and of course disturbs the relationship between Marianne and Paul.  He behaves as a kind of engineer of mischief, stirring up the past, delighting in the tensions he creates.  As he grows increasingly annoying, the plot grows increasingly repetitive until some predictable and some completely unpredictable events move the film to a surprising close and a couple of unexpected twists of plot and character.

A Bigger Splash, which owes something to the French movie La Piscine and the more recent Swimming Pool, creates a most attractive atmosphere of Mediterranean languor—the landscape, the houses, the town, the food, the wine all virtually invite the audience to participate in the vacation along with the characters.  The movie runs too long until its strange and unexpected ending, and I am not sure if Ralph Fiennes or Harry Hawkes deserves the blame, but the character seems exactly the sort of person I would never want to be around; his manic energy and domineering personality should alienate even the most forgiving viewer.

Review of Genius

            Many years ago in his reminiscence of The New Yorker, James Thurber remarked that writers in America were either putter-inners or taker-outers, an accurate division of much of our literary history.  Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson come to mind, one an inclusive, verbose celebrant of the nation, its language, its people, the other a neurotic recluse writing spare, stripped little gems in a terse conversational style.  In 20^th century poetry the equivalent artists might be Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg; Hemingway and Faulkner surely provide the most appropriate examples of two coeval geniuses who wrote the best fiction of their time in completely different styles.

            The trophy for greatest putter-inner of that now distant past, however, undoubtedly belongs to Thomas Wolfe, whose novels simply overflowed with words, demonstrating a kind of inebriation with sheer vocabulary.  Based on a book by A. Scott Berg, Genius deals with the relationship between Wolfe and the most famous editor of the 20^th century, Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, who edited, among others, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  When Wolfe enters his world, the writer-editor connection ascends to a new level, in some ways changing the lives of both men.

            After repeated rejections, the young writer (Jude Law) brings his long, unwieldy manuscript to Perkins (Colin Firth), who finds it compelling and astonishes the author by accepting it; they work endlessly, with Perkins attempting to prune the excesses and Wolfe fighting to retain his original, voluminous, and undisciplined prose.  The novel, for which Perkins supplies the title, turns out to be Wolfe’s first and most famous, Look Homeward, Angel, and also turns out to be a best seller, creating a reputation that made him famous in the 1930s, but which, aside from a few courses in Southern literature, mostly in Southern universities, is mostly forgotten today.

            The real story of the film concerns the growth of the personal relationship between the two very different men, one a young, boisterous, immature artist from the South, the other a middle-aged, uptight Northeastern WASP.  Sloppy, awkward, sometimes rude and obnoxious, insulting to other writers, Wolfe becomes a friend and something like a son to the cool, restrained editor.  The friendship also creates tension between Perkins and Wolfe’s lover, the theatrical designer Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), who nurtured the writer’s career and regards the editor as a threat.

            Genius provides glimpses into Wolfe’s brief life—he died at 38 of tuberculosis of the spine—and the success of his later novels.  Comically and truthfully, it shows his bringing a couple of crates of manuscript to Perkins’s office, all of which he considered one work of fiction; Perkins heroically quarried two or three novels out of the inchoate mess.  The move provides only a few perfunctory scenes of actual editing, with Perkins naturally insisting on cuts and omissions while Wolfe begs for inclusion of all of his hundreds of thousands of words.  Whether editing makes for interesting cinema remains doubtful, of course, though with that rare element,  imagination, it might prove a productive subject for some entertaining sequences.  Although he certainly accomplishes his apparent goal of showing the two characters, the director, Michael Grandage, never takes a chance with the fascinating problem of writing and editing.

            Jude Law, who’s been busy lately, makes a perfectly acceptable Thomas Wolfe, with a performance as excessive as the original; the overacting and repetition sometimes grow tiresome, but he projects a believable portrait of the artist.  The real subject of Genius, however, is not the writer but the editor—when was the last time a film employed such a protagonist?—embodied brilliantly by Colin Firth.  Always tightly buttoned up, he wears his fedora in everywhere, indoors and out, even when fishing, in a three-piece suit, with Hemingway (Dominic West), so that the hat becomes an expression of his rigidly controlled personality, perhaps even of his editorial philosophy.  Firth acts with remarkable restraint, establishing the distinction between him and his young writer and demonstrating the gap both must close, perhaps in a way suggesting that two very different men are both in their own way worthy of the film’s title.

Review of Money Monster

Review of Money Monster

            S & B (stocks and bonds) may now replace S & M (you all know what that means) as a sexy subject in contemporary cinema—the love of money is the new eroticism.  Probably fueled by the  financial scandals that flame in the headlines week in and week out, a number of contemporary films show some of the wheeling and dealing in that congregation of gamblers, thieves, and whores that constitutes both Las Vegas and Wall Street.  The trend may have begun with Wall Street itself, then continued through such recent films, once again based on actual events, as The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short, which explains the housing bubble and its bust (frankly, even after seeing the movie I still don’t understand it).

The new movie Money Monster touches on another result of financial manipulation, seldom mentioned in all the learned analyses of the so-called experts, the impact of the shady practices on ordinary people.  The film revolves around a TV show called Money Monster, hosted by Lee Gates (George Clooney), clearly based on the CNBC show Mad Money and its host, the manic Jim Cramer.  Dressed in odd costumes, with a different intro for each show, Clooney jumps all over the set like a crazed monkey, offering financial advice to viewers.  His show suddenly crashes to a halt when an intruder named Kyle (Jack O’Connell) sneaks onto the set, fires a pistol at the ceiling, and outfits him in the sort of vest favored by suicide bombers.

The movie settles into a series of desperate attempts by Gates to placate the intruder and a series of ploys to defuse the situation while a national TV audience watches.   Kyle’s rage results from one of Gates’s stock market tips, which led him to invest an inheritance from his mother in the stock of a particular company that soon after lost most of its value.  Stalling for time, arguing his cause, Gates tries a clever ploy, asking his viewers to buy stock in the company so that it increases in value and Kyle won’t kill him; after a momentary jump, it declines, deflating the host’s image of himself, a nice touch in a film that occasionally mixes comedy with its drama.

The static situation opens up when Gates, still suited in the bomb vest, with the pistol to his head, leads Kyle on a march down to Wall Street itself, followed by scores of policemen and cheered on by thousands of onlookers, a kind of pedestrian parody of the infamous O.J. Simpson slow speed chase.  There they finally learn the real reasons for Kyle’s loss and confront the mastermind behind the stock manipulation that caused it.  The movie ends in a kind of despair over the helplessness of ordinary citizens to cope with corporate exploitation and the hopelessness of defeating the people behind it. 

Although repetitive and generally unconvincing in its attempts to create any real sense of danger and suspense, Money Monster touches on some important matters for contemporary America.  It clearly demonstrates the possibilities for fraud and deceit in the business of stocks and bonds and, worse, shows how the right people can achieve those goals without anything in the way of punishment.  Some of its best material, however, derives from its depiction of just how a television show works, the preparation, the role of the director, the activities of all the people behind the cameras, and so forth.  American film especially excels at showing process—how a thing is made, how a particular job is done, how people manage certain complicated tasks, and Money Matters shows once again the fascination of such a subject.

STILL MORE SHORT TAKES

Eye in the Sky

            No movie could possibly be more relevant to our troubled time than Eye in the Sky, which confronts with exquisite tension one of the most morally ambiguous practices of the   combat in the Middle East.  The movie deals with a single action, the debate over deploying a drone strike on a single house in Kenya apparently inhabited by terrorists intent on a suicide bombing mission.  That simple situation expands into a number of actions, technologies, and problems that now result from the unending “war on terror.” 

            As part of its progress and as a visual demonstration of the complexities involved in its ostensibly simple story, the film shifts constantly among all the people who control the remarkable technologies that send a missile toward a particular target.  Helen Mirren plays a British officer, Colonel Katherine Powell, in charge of a team of experts tracking the activities of suspected terrorists in a surveillance operation employing satellites, drones, and agents on the ground.  She wants to order an American missile strike on the house, but must clear the action through a committee of English government officials and a general (Alan Rickman), who sit around a table arguing the pros and cons of the decision.

            The officials need a confirmation of the threat, a process that as the debate goes on grows increasingly complicated and increasingly dangerous.  In addition to the long range surveillance, the agent in the actual area (Barkhad Abdi) risks his life to investigate the suspects’ house, controlling small drones—one a mechanical bird, the other, believe it or not, a mechanical bug (no pun intended) to spy on the preparations.  The images he sends show the terrorists, apparently preparing for a suicide mission, packing vests with bombs, which increases the urgency of the deliberations.

            The whole mission pivots on one of the disturbing moral questions that contemporary, remote-controlled warfare raises, euphemistically called collateral damage, otherwise known as the wounding, maiming, and killing of innocent noncombatants.  The problem centers on one young girl, selling bread that her mother bakes in a makeshift booth near the intended target; she becomes the single human representative of the term and the reason that so many people agonize over the decision to send a missile into the terrorists’ house.  That tension escalates with the camera’s constant shifts from the British command center to the debate of the civilians in charge to the American military personnel who will fire the missile to the dangerous situation of the agent and his desperate attempts to save the little girl.

            The film also demonstrates some of the conflicts and consequently, the complex emotions among the various entities that control the mission—civilians in government, British and American military personnel, the anguished agent in place—as they debate the pros and cons of the action they contemplate.  For all its technological wonders and its convincing display of warfare as we now practice it, Eye in the Sky creates much of its considerable suspense as much from its examination of the human questions it raises as from its meticulous representation of the process of locating, identifying, and attacking an elusive enemy.

Miles Ahead

            Written and directed by Don Cheadle, who also stars as the title character, Miles Ahead purports to show a difficult period in the life of the great musician Miles Davis, when he stopped performing, recording, and even playing his instrument.  Most of the movie shows a most irascible, mercurial artist abusing his wife, arguing with friends, and fighting a pitched battle with the record company executives attempting to acquire a tape of a private recording session.  To compensate for the repetitive action, the director uses flashbacks to show some other aspect of Davis’s life and art.

            Wearing a major Afro, Cheadle makes Miles Davis, whatever his artistry, a most unpleasant person, drinking, drugging, and alienating most of the people around him.  He also invents an entirely bogus plot revolving around the mysterious tape of the mysterious music.  David Brill (Ewan McGregor), a writer from Rolling Stone, joins Davis in a ridiculous quest to recover the stolen tape from the heartless businessmen.  The two of them engage in one of those tiresome movie car chases, with Davis firing a revolver with an apparently inexhaustible supply of ammunition, thus turning a presumably well intentioned biopic into a bogus thriller.

In fact, despite Cheadle’s impersonation and Davis’s music on the soundtrack (though not enough of it, to be sure), the entire movie exudes an atmosphere of fakery.  Apparently Cheadle had to invent a white character in the form of the completely uninteresting McGregor to obtain financing for the work; the ridiculous plot, such as it is, presumably derives from Davis’s legitimate, though nonviolent conflicts with record company executives.  The final unraveling of the mystery of the missing tape provides a disappointing downbeat ending (no pun intended, jazz fans).  I am sure Don Cheadle could have done a better job, and I believe Miles Davis deserves a better picture than Miles Ahead.

 

Papa: Hemingway in Cuba

            As a lifelong reader of Ernest Hemingway’s work, and as both a student and a teacher of his stories and novels, and creator of a Hemingway seminar, almost anything connected with the author attracts my interest.  His work and his life obviously also attract the interest of a great many others—the most famous writer of the twentieth century, his novels and stories have been filmed many times; he is the subject of innumerable biographies and critical studies; a character in his own right, he’s also been the subject of several documentaries and feature films, rare for any writer, especially in America.  He appears in Alan Parker’s film, The Moderns, about the artistic life in Paris in the 1920s, and in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which employs the same subject.  Unlike most writers, he led an adventurous, eventful, fascinating life, which along with the popularity of his fiction, made him a unique phenomenon in the world of letters.

            The latest treatment of the author, played by Adrian Sparks, based on the reminiscence of a writer named Denne Bart Petitclerc (I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard of him), deals with some of his time in Cuba in the last years of his life.  Played by Giovanni Ribisi, the young writer, called Ed Myers in the film, writes a letter to his hero Hemingway, who likes it so much he calls him up and invites him to Cuba.  His first trip there proves a great success and leads to many more; the film’s plot, in fact, resolves itself into a series of Myers’s visits to Hemingway’s house in Cuba, where he becomes one of the entourage of friends and hangers-on who surround the writer.

            The series of visits also turns into a chronicle of the author’s battles with depression and his angry slide into madness.  Continuing the practice of a lifetime, he drinks heavily, argues with everyone, abuses his wife Mary (Joely Richardson), acts out violently, threatens suicide, and insults and alienates his friends.  Perhaps worst of all, he finds he can no longer write, a circumstance that contributed as much as his alcoholism and his various head injuries to his suicide, eighteen months after the events in the movie. 

            For the most part the film repeats a many of the known facts of a very public writer’s life, most of them reported in detail by innumerable biographers.  The script also depends heavily and frankly, embarrassingly, on a whole catalogue of Hemingway’s statements, most of them taken from his writing and again, well known to the point of cliché—all that stuff about beginning with one true sentence, for example, and the comments  about drinking, sex, danger, love, etc. , and all delivered sententiously by Adrian Sparks.  It also tends to create a parody of a man and a writer who, tragically, by that time had already become something of a parody of himself.

            The portrait of Hemingway also suffers from the performance of Adrian Sparks as the title character.  He looks a good deal like the writer in his later years, but his behavior exaggerates everything about him, taking the character far over the top and pretty much keeping him up there on one loud, long, repeated series of actions and utterances.  Covering some of the same material, the HBO movie Hemingway and Gellhorn accomplishes a significantly fuller and more interesting creation with more sensitivity and artfulness.  The fascinating man, the great writer, the adventurous life, the tragic ending still await the script and the film to bring them all fully into existence.

ANOTHER QUICKIE

ANOTHER QUICKIE

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

            After most famously establishing herself as a comedian with her uncanny Sarah Palin imitation, and as a comic actor in Sisters, where she uttered more raunchy lines and dick jokes than, well, you could shake a dick at, Tina Fey turns more serious in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.  Rather loosely based on the memoir Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker, who covered the fighting in Afghanistan, the movie uses the military lingo for WTF, initials that every Facebook user understands.  In her first non-comic role, Tina Fey plays the reporter, called Kim Baker in the movie, which also transfers the protagonist from print journalism to television.  The film shows a great many episodes, some familiar to any viewer of television news and some even indeed comic, in that useless war that Kim Barker witnessed and reported on; in addition, it also shows the activities of the whole gang of journalists, photographers, cameramen, and their guides and interpreters.

            The general substance of the movie involves the growth and development of an inexperienced, generally ill equipped journalist as she progresses through the chaos and destruction of war to competence in her profession.  After an introduction to the chaotic life of a journalist in a war zone, Kim Barker learns how to become a war correspondent.  She manipulates the Marine general (Billy Bob Thornton) in Kabul in order to get a story; she outwits the lecherous attorney general (Alfred Molina), and she begins an affair with a Scottish photographer (Martin Freeman).  After acquitting herself admirably in a number of difficult situations, she also learns about the betrayal of loyalty and competence through the actions of a colleague and her boss (those familiar with my situation at City Newspaper will understand).

As the novice in Afghanistan discovers, war itself provides an enormous rush of adrenaline, a complicated mixture of emotions that explains some of the attractions of combat, even for noncombatants.  Like a lot of participants in warfare, she finds the gunfire, the bombs, the several skirmishes she covers, the discomfort of primitive quarters, and the death and destruction somehow exhilarating and even addicting.  Although the movie illuminates the progress in learning and awareness of a courageous and resourceful young woman, it also shows something most observers ignore, that war, despite its obvious horrors, often arouses some powerfully positive emotions in people.  It reveals to them a courage they may not have known they possessed, it sometimes ennobles them, it encourages gestures of sacrifice and honor, it intensifies all sorts of feelings.  In the midst of danger, against the bloody background of violence and destruction, people often even fall in love.

To begin with, as a hundred years of cinema shows, Hollywood gives good war.  The innumerable war films almost invariably emphasize not only heroism and sacrifice, but also the moral and physical consequences of mass combat.  Although the movie employs some witty situations and dialogue to convey some of the ambiguity of Kim Baker’s experience of war, it also suggests some reversal of the usual war film, a common point in contemporary cinema.  In short, although this time the protagonist is female and a noncombatant, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot belongs with some other recent films, among them The Hurt Locker and American Sniper; it suggests, like it or not, some of the actual joys of war.  It explains why soldiers encounter difficulty accustoming themselves to peace, a letdown that seldom appears in the usual discussions of post-traumatic stress disorder, and why some well known war correspondents frequently return to the battle zones.  War is hell, to be sure, but it also is somehow a richly exhilarating experience.