In Defense of Donald Trump

In Defense of Donald Trump

Now that the Republican National Convention has painted President Trump with a new brush, we can see him as a different person from the one most of us think we know.  He is, some claim, sweeter and softer, rather like a new flavor of cupcake, and kinder and more compassionate, sort of a Father Teresa.  It’s about time to emphasize a number of other unappreciated qualities he has modestly hidden.  A simple list of some of his words and deeds, in no particular order, should suffice to dispel some of the common reactions to his personality.

At the convention he did NOT mock any disabled people.

He set an example for hard working Americans by taking on an extra job, selling Goya products in the Oval Office.

He may not own a dog, but as the Access Hollywood tape demonstrates, he has expressed a fondness for felines.

He has welcomed several immigrants from Eastern Europe, married two of them, and taken a whole family into his own family.

He has generously contributed a substantial sum of money and provided a good deal of publicity to assist the career of a previously little known young film actress whose work had been limited to a narrow genre of the cinema.

He is a great defender of marriage, has done it three times.

Apparently pro-life, he has fathered at least five children by at least three women; like King David, to whom many Evangelical Christians compare him, in John Dryden’s words, he spread his Maker’s image through the land.

Although with his typical diffidence he has not claimed it, he is no doubt the most ecumenically minded president in history.  In addition to being so warmly embraced and blessed by a flock of Evangelical pastors, a couple of months ago he  made two separate religious pilgrimages, one on foot through a valley of danger, visiting both a Protestant and a Roman Catholic site. On top of all that, interrupting his statement on another subject, he also gave a shout out to the Jewish community, “Yo Semite.”

Think for a moment of what he’s done for the publishing industry, those dozens of books he has inspired, and his consequent support for all those writers.

By courageous example, he has also, in these difficult times, endorsed the makers of hair dye and pancake makeup.

For a man who modestly claims not to read, he has uttered some spontaneous poetry that can only be termed Dadaist.  The disquisition on windmills some time ago and more recently, the showerhead speech, provide unique examples of his mastery of this difficult and often baffling literary genre.  (If you doubt me, read the texts).

Finally, in light of his comments some time ago about how he spent the Vietnam years avoiding sexually transmitted diseases, which as he said was his “personal Vietnam,” we should understand the true depth of his learning: in what must be a reference to the classics, he was actually of course fighting the Trojan War.  Those expensive prep schools are worth every penny.

 

 

 

IRISH AND ITALIAN

IRISH AND ITALIAN

          By now I am sure, anyone at all interested in current cinema knows about the release of Martin Scorsese’s new work, The Irishman.  In addition to all the initial publicity surrounding its appearance, on both Netflix and ultimately in theaters, most of the reviews appear to provide the usual Niagara of superlatives worthy of a Donald Trump rally speech, interrupted only by exclamation points, that generally passes for film criticism these days.

          Based on a book about a real person, Frank Sheeran, who worked for the Mob and allegedly killed Jimmy Hoffa, the movie features a whole compendium of the director’s typical methods, subjects, and themes.  Essentially a voice-over narrative, which Scorsese often employs, the movie proceeds from the reflections of the aged Sheeran (Robert De Niro), now in a nursing home, facing the end of his life.  Complete with a priest who sporadically visits Sheeran, the narrative then constitutes something like a confession, with the narrator returning frequently to his greatest regret, his estrangement from his daughter.  (Perhaps because of his Catholicism, Scorsese likes to use the device of confession, which also explains his attachment to voice-over narration).  Apparently to prevent the work from turning into one long, linear chronology, the director moves scenes and sequences back and forth in time as he follows Sheeran’s career from truck driver to thief to mob enforcer to the confidant and eventual assassin of the labor leader.

          Along with some of the director’s favorite techniques, the cast includes some of his favorite actors; aside from De Niro, who has appeared in so many of his films he easily qualifies as Scorsese’s alter ego, Al Pacino appears as Hoffa, Joe Pesci plays Russell Bufalino, and Harvey Keitel occupies a small role as Angelo Bruno, all actual mobsters in Sheeran’s life and career.  In keeping with its pseudo-documentary style, the film often freezes a frame, showing those men and other gangsters, complete with the dates and causes of their deaths, mostly of course from lead poisoning.

          Along with the frequent movements back and forth in time, the film applies state of the art techniques to alter the appearance of the characters, so that they look the appropriate age in a particular scene or sequence.  Typically, Scorsese also uses the appropriate popular music of each time period as a background and even a commentary on the people, places, and actions.  The clothes, the cars, the interior decoration all match those moments—Scorsese is famously meticulous in the look of his pictures.

          As for the picture itself, despite the hype and the praise, it is actually a very long, repetitive, intermittently dull movie not terribly different from a number of Scorsese’s films, though inferior to several of them; it takes a long time in its elliptical manner to tell its essentially simple story.  If it resembles any of his films in the gangster genre he frequently explores, it seems quite close to Casino, another long, repetitive, overpraised work based on a mobster’s reminiscences.  Its time scheme, its production values, its distinguished cast rescue it from what could have become crushingly boring. 

          Despite that cast, however, the performances generally disappoint, especially those of the two headliners.  De Niro naturally occupies the screen most of the time—it’s his story, after all—but he seems to play almost every moment the same way, with the same mostly impassive facial expression; he confronts almost every situation with a squint, a shrug, a downturned mouth apparently intended to show emotional engagement, but mostly suggests a kind of deadly neutrality.  Pacino, on the other hand, plays Hoffa with an occasionally exhausting excess, remaining on one note—anger—throughout and confined by the picture to a series of repeated scenes, in most of which he flies out of control.

Perhaps surprisingly, the most impressive person in the movie, the real star, turns out to be Joe Pesci.  Totally unlike the scary psychopath of GoodFellas  or Anthony the Ant of Casino, as Russell Bufalino he virtually exudes enormous confidence, even charm, as he attempts to instruct Sheeran in his understated way in various violent behaviors, including murder; somehow he retains a certain likeability throughout the picture, and somehow, with his quiet style he dominates the scenes he occupies.  He essentially outperforms every other actor in the movie, quite an achievement, considering his colleagues in the cast.

Scorsese’s apparent attempt to make the film a kind of epic, a reflection of an era with its own peculiar hero, ultimately fails.  His major figures prove only intermittently interesting, his plot meanders without a good deal of energy, and the focus of it all, Jimmy Hoffa, generally seems a hysterical clown.  Despite the gushing paroxysms of so many critics, great length does not automatically confer greatness itself; size provides no special grandeur.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

          At least since Pagliacci the clown who laughs on the outside while crying on the inside is a most familiar figure, a sentimental cliché, but the much discussed new movie Joker takes that concept a good distance farther.  The title character, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) works for a hire-a-clown agency, where he dresses in a costume and waves advertising signs, entertains children at parties and in hospitals.  A man singularly without joy, he suffers from a neurological problem that causes him to laugh uncontrollably for no reason, a condition that, not surprisingly, lands him in trouble when he laughs in the presence of the wrong people at the wrong time.

          A very different person from the Batman’s notorious adversary, Arthur lives with his disabled mother in a crummy apartment in Gotham City, stamping grounds of course for our old friend the Caped Crusader.  (Among references to other movies, including such disparate titles as Psycho and The King of Comedy, the Batman franchise dominates the plot, with names, people, and events that echo the comic books and the films).  Inevitably his character has inspired much learned commentary on his predecessors in the role; his makeup recalls several of them and his behavior perhaps most closely resembles Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the character as a sort of Iago, in Coleridge’s words, “motiveless malignity casting about for an occasion.”  Since he lacks the compelling enemy represented by Batman, in effect he ends up striking out at any target that attracts him, and some of the attacks are shocking.

          Dogged by bad luck, his disability, and his extremely odd personality, Arthur finds his world increasingly frustrating, another motivation for his violent actions.  Since the comic book script takes his story all over the place, the movie often teeters on the brink of incoherence, with new stories frequently intersecting with Arthur’s daily life and all its problems; he embarks, for example, on a quest for the man he thinks is his father, a man who also becomes a victim of his increasing distance from reality; he may or may not have a girlfriend who lives in the same apartment building; he may or may not join the audience for a late night television talk show.   At times the movie makes it difficult to discern if he is living in the real world or in a fantasy of his own creation; at a certain point the real and the hallucinated world merge and Arthur commits a series of shocking crimes while the city explodes into violence.  His actions, one of them captured on television, inspire riots that serve as the background to what becomes his homicidal insanity.

          Perhaps because of its origin in comic books, Joker displays a kind of drab, muddy color scheme and a consistently squalid setting.  Gotham City entirely lacks glamor and most of the dwellings, especially Arthur’s apartment, look shabby and grimy, needing paint, repairs, cleaning.  Even the talk show that Arthur ultimately appears on—with Robert De Niro playing the host—looks dark and dull, without the brightness and glitter one would expect from show business.

          Although Joaquim Phoenix no doubt deserves some praise for his performance, which must have been a grueling experience, the horrible sound of his endless cackle and the constant closeups of the pained rictus of his grinning countenance grow difficult to endure.  The insane violence of his actions adds another level of disquiet to the film’s subjects and incoherent themes, which somehow manage to be simultaneously excessive and narrowly defined.    

          Perhaps at least partially as a result of the publicity and the debate surrounding the movie, Joker enjoys a record size box office, and apparently its nihilistic themes strike a chord in certain young people, so troubling a notion that some theaters post a security guard in the audience.  Personally, I am not sorry I saw the film, but somewhat sorry it exists for me to see it.

New Chick Flick

New Chick Flick

          Always happy to jump on a bandwagon, the reviewers now crow about the new wave of liberated women in contemporary cinema, perhaps another, more positive spin on MeToo.  The gushing over Wonder Woman  somehow omitted to mention that the movie was really just another superhero flick, dependent on the usual stunts, pyrotechnics, and computer generated images, as much a silly comic book as any of a dozen of its predecessors—the Batman franchise, the Iron Man franchise, the Spider-Man franchise, etc., etc.  A comic book is a comic book, a superheroine differs not at all from a superhero, and given the wondrous technology of contemporary cinema, anyone of any sex can spin and fly through the air, shoot out thunderbolts, battle monstrous villains, and wear a distinctive costume: big deal.

          With a good deal less fanfare and very little in the way of the fabled magic of the cinema, a couple of recent films further demonstrate the penetration of women and their roles in today’s movies.  Both Widows and The Kitchen show strong, independent women taking over roles that formerly belonged to men, specifically for most of them, the men they married.  Though based on quite different sources, they share a surprising similarity of subject, tone, and theme.  Oddly, however, in both films the women, generally represented as smart, tough, and resourceful, are also, not to put too fine a point upon it, criminals.  They steal, they kill, they destroy: what’s not to like?

          In Widows four women whose husbands, a group of thieves embarking on a big caper, are incinerated when their scheme goes terribly wrong, decide to finish the uncompleted job.  One of them finds her husband’s detailed map and designs for the robbery and decides to enlist the other widows in a scheme of their own.  They then follow the usual patterns of the big caper flick—casing the home of their quarry, a corrupt, mobbed up Chicago politician, assigning specialized tasks to each suitable member of the quartet, meticulously checking on bodyguards, security devices, schedules, etc., figuring out precise locations and timing, in short practicing all the methods of the form.

          The film then shows the actual robbery, which unsurprisingly escalates from a meticulously planned operation to a series of violent confrontations, shootings, and even a death.  In keeping with the traditions of the form, the action naturally enlists the audience on the side of the perpetrators, so the viewers in effect must root for the bad guys, one of the great paradoxes of so many crime movies.  The genre, whether featuring men or women, appeals to the spirit of criminality in all of us.

          Following a quite similar pattern, The Kitchen also features a trio of newly independent women carrying on the activities of their spouses, though in this case, the husbands have been incarcerated.  The title refers to the area of the West side of Manhattan known for generations as Hell’s Kitchen, a tough, largely Irish community, but also perhaps to the kitchens that the women leave in order to embark on their own criminal enterprise.  Bitter about their treatment from the Irish mob that controls the streets of their neighborhood, the women seek more financial support from the mob leaders, and when the crooks reject their requests, resolve to take matters into their own hands.

          That decision involves canvassing the neighborhood shops, informing the owners that they will now collect the protection money and provide the service that the mob never did.  When the local gangsters get wind of the development, a small war breaks out, and of course, the women eventually win it, then go on to bigger and better sources of income and power.  The two main characters, played by Melissa McCarthy and Tiffany Haddish, undergo some major transformations, approach the brink of an internal battle, but eventually settle for equal shares of territory, money, and power.

          The most impressive actions of both movies, more powerfully emphasized in The Kitchen, demonstrate a shocking propensity for violence.  The armed robbery and shootings of Widows follow a relatively logical path from the intricate planning to the execution of the scheme, an understandable result.  In The Kitchen, however, the women carry out a whole series of murders, most of them in cold blood, and come to enjoy the process as well as the profits; the movie really suggests a whole new level of viciousness for the chick flick, no longer a vehicle for romance and light comedy, or even for costumed superheroines performing acrobatics, but now a perfectly functioning addition to the long, crowded genre of crime film.  As they used to say, sisterhood is powerful, now it is very powerful.

          One of the differences between the two films may result from their different origins; Widows is based on a novel by Gillian Flynn, while The Kitchen began life as an apparently still running series of comic books.  That movie’s open ending implies more to come, though it doesn’t inspire in me any wish to see a sequel or read the comic books.  Both films, however, demonstrate how far the chick flick has progressed in the empowering of women, proving that they can commit crimes of all kinds as well as any cinematic males and behave with viciousness worthy of any gangster, even without dressing up in a dominatrix outfit.  The scene that perhaps best summarizes the distance the form has traveled amounts to the best pushing-on-old-lady-down-the-stairs act since Richard Widmark’s memorable moment in Kiss of Death.  It must be seen to be appreciated.

         

Tarantino’s Hollywood

          As usual, the praise and prizes pour in for Quentin Tarantino’s new movie,  Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with most of the commenters describing it with the recurring term, “epic.”  If one strictly applies the word to the length of a work, then the movie certainly earns it—Once Upon a Time runs for almost three hours, not an uncommon length for a Tarantino film.  Probably the most overrated filmmaker around—though there is a lot of competition for that spot—he positively drools over excess, which somehow thrills the reviewers, and might explain the overused adjective; in his work, including the present one, epic too often simply means bloated.

          The movie’s once upon a time is 1969, a pivotal year for a number of reasons, ending a tumultuous decade and because of the notorious murders committed by the Manson family, which the director confronts and which in a sense end a particular era for Hollywood itself.  One of its stunning achievements is the director’s reproduction of that period and its setting in Southern California, which has rarely looked so attractive in a film and makes you wish you lived there.  Hollywood characters naturally populate the film: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, an alcoholic TV star on the decline; Brad Pitt plays Cliff Booth, Dalton’s stunt double, best friend, chauffeur-gofer; Margot Robbie plays the doomed actress Sharon Tate.  Crowded with famous faces in smaller roles, the picture also exploits the presence of people like Al Pacino, Bruce Dern, and Kurt Russell, along with less well known performers impersonating some now departed actors.  Rafael Zawierucha plays Roman Polanski, for example, and Mike Moh does a turn as Bruce Lee in a fight scene with Cliff Booth.  (Damian Lewis, who plays Steve McQueen in a brief scene, incidentally, looks amazingly like the star). 

          The movie proceeds episodically, showing scenes and sequences from Rick Dalton’s career, both past and present, mingling the various moments in time.  Throughout the action it provides a kind of history of the popular culture of the late 1960s, with familiar titles on movie theater marquees, snippets of old black and white television shows, even a clever recreation of a scene from The Great Escape where Rick Dalton auditions for the Steve McQueen role, repeating the exact words and movements from the original.  The clothes, the cars, especially Rick Dalton’s immense Cadillac, a great yellow battleship of a car, and in contrast, Roman Polanski’s classic MG, recall a time when automotive styling achieved some distinctive and attractive shapes and looks.

          As usual, Tarantino includes overextended, sometimes quite unnecessary sequences, apparently to exploit the star power of his cast.  In one barely relevant moment Brad Pitt climbs up on the roof of Rick Dalton’s house to repair a TV antenna (remember them?), mostly so he can take off his shirt and display his trim, buff torso to the females in the audience.  Demonstrating a weakness in the narrative, he employs a voiceover by Kurt Russell to provide information about a series of spaghetti Westerns that Dalton, following in the footsteps of Clint Eastwood, makes in Italy to resurrect his career; the voiceover papers over an apparent need to abbreviate yet another long episode.

           In a long sequence Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, goes to a theater showing The Wrecking Crew so she can see herself in the movie as a member of the audience; for several long minutes the camera shows her repeatedly reacting and overacting with glee, looking around, virtually mugging to signify giddy enjoyment.  In one clever twist in an otherwise silly piece of film she watches actual scenes from the picture with Sharon Tate so that the woman playing the actress responds to the person she impersonates.

          With the invasion of the Manson family, whose members appear and reappear throughout the action in usually casual but increasingly ominous ways, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood reaches its perhaps logical climax, which the people and plot have been inexorably approaching throughout the movie.  The director, however, changes history by reimagining the crime, providing an alternative ending to the shocking event that in a sense ended the decade.  As a result, the movie concludes with a final sequence that begins in violence and ends in wishful thinking, perhaps appropriate for both Hollywood and Hollywood.

THE GREAT WAR

THE GREAT WAR

          “For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon, one of the most famous poems of World War I, provides the title for Peter Jackson’s documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.  Jackson takes the words, slightly rearranged, from the fourth stanza:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

          Jackson’s film indeed remembers the Great War, the War to End All Wars—the usual titles for what came to be known as World War I when another European and global engagement inspired the now familiar numbering—and especially the men who served.  The director, best known for The Lord of the Rings spectaculars, mined what must be hundreds of miles of film from the collections of the Imperial War Museum to show some of the story of the British soldiers who fought and died in that conflict.  Any veteran of cable TV knows the innumerable documentaries on this, the first filmed war, but Jackson uses entirely unfamiliar material from the archives to create something like a soldier’s history, from the declaration to the Armistice.  He shows the sequences of recruiting and training, complete with inadequate equipment and preparation, and the embarkation to the Continent, so eagerly anticipated by politicians, propaganda, and the combatants themselves.  The film then settles into an essentially chronological account of what became organized butchery on a hitherto unimagined scale.  He accompanies the film with narration drawn from the words of the soldiers themselves as they described their own experiences from that recruiting, outfitting, training, and so forth, then of course the years of stalemate and suffering, all the way to the Armistice.

          The director chooses footage of practically all the activities of the soldiers, concentrating especially on their daily life in the squalor of the trenches, interrupted by the innumerable dangers of their periodic attacks across No Man’s Land, that devastated ground, a wasteland pocked by shell holes, inhabited by the dead of many nations, fought over for four long, bloody, useless years.  He shows the first appearance of the clumsy early tanks, one of the major weapons that World War I introduced, along with the airplane and poison gas.  The movie reveals more than most of the usual documentaries the realities of existence in those trenches that came to symbolize the static warfare that a legion of incompetent and inhuman generals established.  As a result, we see bodies and parts of bodies everywhere, headless corpses, bodiless heads, all so familiar that the soldiers hardly notice them, and of course long lines of wounded men.  We also see less dramatic but equally distressing images—the lice that bred wildly in the unsanitary conditions, the lesions of trench foot from long periods of standing in water, even the boards placed on sawhorses that passed for latrines, as well as the men using them. 

One of the saddest short sequences, however, involves an officer reading a short speech to his men just before they go over the top, as the expression went, a moment that, as Jackson points out, would constitute the last half hour of their lives; they indeed did not grow old.  The picture also at least hints at the truth of the prevailing English social system, which happily sacrificed the lower classes in a slaughter that took the lives of a million of their subjects.  Jackson omits one important result of the war, the mutinies that occurred in every nation’s armies, the refusal of men to obey the idiotic commands that would send them to certain death.

When the war finally ends, the soldiers meet their enemy, often in the form of prisoners, and realize that they were fighting innocent, ordinary young men like themselves, who served under the same fools, suffered the same privations and fears, and endured the same attacks and barrages.  As history shows us, of course, that War to End All Wars ended nothing and in fact created the Second World War, the national divisions that remain today, and perhaps even the wars that followed.

One of the most remarkable achievements of They Shall Not Grow Old involves the actual methods of turning the available footage into a watchable feature film.  In an extraordinary postscript, Peter Jackson addresses the camera and details all the painstaking effort that the production required.  He shows how his technicians brightened dark images, darkened bright ones, dealt with the problem of all the varying frame speeds—from hand cranked cameras—in order to achieve a uniform speed.  He recruited lip readers to translate the silent dialogues into actual speech, even recovered the notes for the sort of lecture that the officer delivers to those men who don’t know they are about to die.

He also mentions several of the untold stories of that war that he had to ignore in order to concentrate on the trenches.  He includes some footage of the air war, for example, some of the work in the factories, including the important role of women, who in fact were to some degree liberated by their war work.  We can only hope that he or someone like him will now use the technology, the experience, the people, the whole cinematic infrastructure he has created to tell those necessary stories before they are entirely lost to the global memory.  The film at least validates Binyon’s poem: it remembers.

 

ROMA

ROMA

          The Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s career includes a rather unusual variety of works.  Like the comedian who has always wanted to play Hamlet, he apparently disdains the successful mainstream Hollywood films he has made, while aspiring to something he believes is stronger, truer, perhaps realer.  In addition to the erotic road movie, Y Tu Mamá Tambien (2001), he directed Children of Men (2006), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), and Gravity (2013), pictures that won both critical praise and box office bucks. 

His new film, Roma, however, brings his focus back to his native country and, according to his own statements, his family history and background.  Its simple story involves a middle class family living in a suburb of Mexico City, the Roma of the title; the family consists of the physician father, the research biologist mother, a grandmother, and three children.  The real subject of the picture, and the character through whose eyes all the people appear and act, is the maid/housekeeper/nanny Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio).  The movie opens with her going about one of her daily tasks, repeated throughout the course of events, and progresses deliberately through the routine of her days—cleaning, making beds, helping the cook, obeying the whims of her sometimes capricious employer (Marina de Taviva), and especially, dealing with the children.

The movie settles into the rhythms of the family’s life, often set against the troubled background of recent Mexican history—the action takes place in the 1970s—showing some of the large and small public events of its time.  A small band of uniformed men, playing a martial tune, marches down their street periodically; a group of apparent paramilitary trainees engage in some sort of ninja exercises; a political controversy ignites a demonstration that explodes into vandalism, violence, and death.

As the country undergoes its struggles and tensions, so does the family.  The father, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), claiming initially to be attending what turns out to be a very long conference, actually leaves his wife and children for another woman.  Cleo’s boyfriend Fermin (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), one of the militant kung fu fighters, turns out to be a vicious betrayer, who impregnates her, then refuses to acknowledge either her or her pregnancy.  The focus on Cleo and the plight of the mother and family emphasizes the strength of the female and the weakness of the male characters, selfish, cruel, and inadequate. 

Filmed in black and white, at times in an almost documentary style, and somewhat reminiscent of the highly praised Indian film of 1955, Pather Panchali, in its frequent employment of panoramic shots, Roma expands its view from the confines of the family household where Cleo works to the squalid town she visits to confront the angry, faithless Fermin.  Its concentration on the family expands along with the camera’s changing focus, comprehending some of the breadth of the political violence and its intrusion into Cleo’s life. 

Its steadfast fix on Cleo, her endless humdrum chores, her relationship to the family she works for, and the ultimate resolution of the marital problems all combine to make Roma a rather different version of that familiar contemporary genre, the chick flick.  In this movie the women confront and triumph over adversity, even tragedy, and reaffirm the power of the family and their love of the children.  The film shows the inadequacy of the males and the growing strength of the females, a theme far distant from the usual romantic nonsense of the form, and a theme appropriate to the plot, the characters, and to Roma itself.

A Different Kind of Cinema

After yet another summer of comic book movies, superhero movies, and just plain bad movies, most accompanied by paroxysms of praise from the usual unreliable sources, perhaps viewers and reviewers should look for some other kind of cinema.  I do not refer to the much celebrated “diversity,” which seems to translate as women, people of color, or LGBTQ individuals instead of straight white males playing those same superheroes in those same overproduced spectacles, a practice that still fails to make them better films.  A character of any gender or race with superhuman abilities acting against a background of exploding sets or engaging in an extended automobile chase or flying through the air or battling it out with some unlikely villain still fails to make a bad idea better.  Over the last year or so, however, a number of small, mostly unheralded works appeared, attracting too little attention from critics and audiences; none is spectacular in any way, but all are worth viewing.

Aside from their avoidance of stunts, pyrotechnics, and computer generated effects, the element that most distinguishes three recent films is the almost total absence of major stars.  The Florida Project, The Rider, and Leave No Trace tell their small, undramatic stories with simple plots and ordinary people.  The phrase means exactly that—the movies show their subjects apparently playing themselves in the stories of their lives.  If any people on the screen are really professional actors, I don’t imagine that many in the audiences have seen or even heard of them before.   

The only familiar face in The Florida Project, Willem Dafoe plays the manager of a welfare motel where a single mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her daughter Moonee (Brooklyn Prince) live, along with a number of other tenants, barely managing to survive.  The simple, generally straight-ahead plot shows the daily struggle of people scraping by, trying to cope with poverty, joblessness, homelessness, eventually even hopelessness.  In addition to all that they must cope with, they face a bureaucracy that, however well meaning, manages to obstruct and even oppress them.  Focusing mostly on the children who live in the place, the film looks almost as if the director, Sean Baker, simply set up his camera and allowed them to just be themselves, just be little kids; although the film refuses to settle for any kind of satisfying closure, those children, running around the place, annoying other tenants, playing games, eating treats, getting into trouble, yearning for something more, something that they probably will never have, are both sad and quite wonderful.

In some ways even more experimental than the latest art house favorite, The Rider shows once again how well nonprofessional actors can perform on the screen--not amateur actors, who often act their little heads off, but non-actors, again, ordinary people.  Though hardly even flickering on the critical radar screen, The Rider deserves a good deal more attention from reviewers and audiences than it attracted.  In a gritty, naturalistic manner, the movie deals with people essentially playing themselves in the context of their own particular situation; in effect it celebrates the small events that, like it or not, make up the substance of all our lives.  The film chronicles the efforts of a severely injured young rodeo rider, Brady Blackburn, played by Brady Jandreau, to resume his career; Jandreau’s real father plays his father, and his developmentally disabled sister Lily plays his sister Lily.  Hoping that his injury—apparently causing serious brain damage—will improve, he works at a part-time job and occasionally employs his skill as a horse trainer; he dreams, however, of returning to the rodeo.  He frequently visits a friend, Lane Scott, again an actual person, an actual friend, playing himself, a quadriplegic paralyzed from his own accident, in this case riding Brahma bulls.  In a moment that captures the poignancy of the whole situation, Brady talks with his friend, exercises him as well as he can, while in the background a video repeatedly shows Lane riding the bulls and the disaster that ensues, a moment of triumph and tragedy that contrasts with the condition of the two injured cowboys.

The minimalism, the drab naturalism, and the laconic dialogue reflect in their own way the sensibility of the modern Western, the notion of a world long past, where the ambitions of a cowboy, a rodeo rider, an admired celebrity diminish into anonymity, and a promising career dwindles into a job as a cashier in a discount store.  The film, however, also falls into the classic Western mode, paying tribute to an honorable history, with many of the objects and themes associated with the form—horses and riders, of course, panoramic shots of the endless, empty South Dakota prairies, even a tragic shooting with a revolver.  The Rider displays a kind of bleak and understated eloquence in its unsentimental and uncompromising story of a cowboy who only wants to ride his beloved horse and compete in the rodeo.  It offers very little in the way of solutions beyond the vague promise that life, as it must, goes on.

Based on a novel titled My Abandonment, perhaps the most minimalist film of the trio, Leave No Trace confronts a simple and possibly not uncommon situation in an era haunted by homelessness, post-traumatic stress, and maybe even a sense of utter emptiness.  The plot consists merely of the efforts of a father, Will (Ben Foster), and his 13-year-old daughter, Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), to live entirely off the grid, as the saying goes.  Living in a tent in the forests of the Northwest, they spend some of their time eluding the park police, the rest merely subsisting, which seems to suit them well.  The film lacks a back story, so one must assume that Will suffers from some form of PTSD; he visits a veteran’s center, picks up pills, then sells them to a drug dealer for the money to buy their necessities.

When Will breaks his leg, he and Tom find assistance from a small community of somewhat reclusive people like themselves, who also dwell away from cities and towns; though a good deal more normally connected to modern life, the several families understand and sympathize with the plight of the father and daughter.  The period of healing for Will becomes a period of adjustment for Tom, learning about the hospitality and kindness of strangers, coming to understand something of a society she has not really experienced.  The movie ends with a sad yet logical conclusion to the life she and her father have shared.

All three films, as I noted earlier, depart drastically from contemporary cinematic fashion; they deserve some attention, however, in part because of that departure.  They achieve, in a sense, something of an experimental quality in their offbeat subjects, their understated narratives, their refusal to compromise with reality and thus, their honesty.  They also affirm that some filmmakers still dare to try something so old fashioned that it’s brand new—small stories about ordinary people, simply told.

                                     

PLAYER ONE

PLAYER ONE

          In 2045, to nobody’s surprise, the world of Ready Player One looks pretty much like the dystopia envisioned by scientists today—overcrowded, polluted, dangerous, with millions of people living in squalor.  In Ernest Cline’s rich and lively novel Ready Player One, the population mostly survives the general devastation by inhabiting a version of virtual reality, a not unlikely prospect.  Anyone with a computer can create an avatar, some idealized version of themselves, and log into a global virtual world called OASIS, where most of them spend a good deal of their waking lives.

         

         The protagonist of the novel and Steven Spielberg’s adaptation, Wade Watts, participates in OASIS through his ancient laptop, improving his appearance by means of a created persona, his avatar, and calling himself Parzival, appropriate for someone on a quest for something like the Holy Grail.  Inspired by the legacy of the creators of OASIS, Wade/Parzival (Tye Sheridan) and two sidekicks, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and Aech (Lena Waithe), pursue a series of cryptic clues, solve riddles, engage in contests, and battle a horde of rivals, some of them avatars, others actual humans, in order to obtain three magical keys and achieve a prize that will transform their lives and OASIS as well.

In addition to the trio’s various complicated adventures, including an ongoing struggle against the murderous head of a corporation attempting to take over OASIS, the film depends upon the book’s profound engagement with popular culture, particularly teen culture from the 1980s.  Thanks to the memories preserved in various electronic devices, Wade possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of comic books, video games, movies, songs, and television shows from that time, all of which aid him in his quest.  He must, for example, play an antiquated game against a created monster to gain access to an important goal; a fan of Back to the Future, he drives the famous DeLorean from that movie in an important race; he finds himself repeating some of actions of the TV shows he has watched over and over (Family Ties is a particular favorite); his sidekick Aech, also an adept, enlists the comic book character Iron Giant in a climactic showdown.

           Although the movie strips down and simplifies many of the novel’s complications, Spielberg manipulates all the avatars, monsters, and battles with his customary skill and the usual assistance of digital technology; in fact, the novel really seems a natural choice for his sort of filmmaking.  In a complex sequence that some people call intertextuality he in effect makes another movie inside his movie.  He places the trio of questers inside a perfect reproduction of The Shining, repeating many of that movie’s most memorable moments, like the ocean of blood by the elevators, the two sinister little girls, the decayed crone, and even the photograph, slightly modified, of the Hotel Overlook’s guests from the past.  It’s a kind of tour de force for a filmmaker who often specializes in such gestures.

Although I generally avoid comic book movies, superhero movies, special effects extravaganzas, and all the other expensive and elaborate claptrap that passes for filmmaking these days, Ready Player One actually works, with its strong story, terrific sets, and rich context of popular culture.  The translation of the novel into the visual medium, probably partly a result of the author himself collaborating on the screenplay, succeeds admirably.  The only surprise about the film is the very limited commentary it has inspired; it deserves more.