THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

Midway through the theatrical adaptation of her novel, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion regards herself and her family as “safe” from life’s pain and misfortune. How ironic, how bitter, how poignant, thought BFP. Here, as hard and clear as a diamond is a great deal of what Ms. Didion feels about grief. One of the smartest, sharpest essayists of the past fifty years and a quite successful screenwriter and novelist as well, Ms Didion boasts of her Prada bags and Manolo shoes, her homes in Malibu and on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Joan Didion, through the soft assertive voice of Vanessa Redgrave is shouting, “If I am not safe, who the hell is?”

The backstory, for those cinemaniacs who do not too often get a chance to read a newspaper: Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne, himself a noted writer, and his wife, Ms. Didion, watch helplessly as their only daughter, Quintana, 39, falls ill. At first it was diagnosed as the flu, then pneumonia. Whatever the cause, Quintana, just five months after her marriage, goes into septic shock. The doctors place her on life support, and then into an induced coma. Days later--the night before New Year's Eve—the Dunne’s return home after visiting Quintana at the hospital. Within a minute of sitting down at table, Mr. Dunne suffers a massive, fatal heart attack. An enriching, challenging, devoted marriage of forty years tragically terminated. Four weeks later, Quintana recovers. Two months later, however, arriving at LA airport, Quintana collapses and undergoes six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

As a means of dealing with her intense grief, Ms. Didion found herself writing the book that would help get her through it. She movingly recounts knowing her husband is dead and yet, at the same time, believing that if she acts just so, she can get John back. Her magical thinking. Ms. Didion finishes the book and, in a terrible coda, Quintana dies shortly afterward.

Vanessa Redgrave is, as always, brilliant. Although BFP thought he infrequently detected an ever so subtle Irish lilt to Ms. Redgrave’s American inflection, she held BFP enthralled for the entire ninety minutes. BFP understood what Jane Fonda remarked about Ms. Redgrave in her 2005 autobiography: "there is a quality about Vanessa that makes me feel as if she resides in a netherworld of mystery that eludes the rest of us mortals. Her voice seems to come from some deep place that knows all suffering and all secrets…Like Marlon Brando, Vanessa…always seemed to be in another reality, working off some secret, magnetic, inner rhythm. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_Redgrave )

After leaving the Booth Theater BFP kept going back to the notion that the more you can control, the better off you are. If only it were true. Control freaks like BFP would all live past 100, and live quite well at that. Control is absolutely essential for a perfectionist like Ms.Didion (Or at least, the exacting personality of the “Joan Didion” character played by Ms. Redgrave.), and probably no small part of her success. She’s been reported to work on a paragraph for weeks. Control, it would seem, is Ms. Didion’s indispensable agency of coping. It offers her the illusory comfort of thinking she is safe from the terrors of life, and then when those terrible woes strike, she again calls upon her desire for order to ward off real chaos and allay real pain. BFP understood: thinking you can control life is the real magical thinking.

The Jeff Wall Show at MOMA

The MOMA retro presents about forty Jeff Wall photos going from 1979 until the present. His pics are BIG, an average photo measures about five feet tall and seven feet wide. Some of the largest are the most unforgettable; The Storyteller, and Night are both over fourteen feet wide. He uses a large state of the art view camera to capture both breathtaking outdoor and interior panoramas. He computer processes the images, often combining shots from different photo-shoots of the same event into one to create a wealth of visual detail. The final effect is of an immense color transparency (some like Night are black and white) lit from behind by an electric light box. The pictures themselves are not “real” but staged enactments. Wall hires actors or people on the street he wishes to depict and utilizes artificial lighting to get the desired image. Some shots are based on incidents Wall claims to have witnessed, (such as Mimic, representing an act of racial prejudice) or are solely products of his fertile imagination.

The photos are cheerless, humorless, and yet extraordinarily powerful. Aside from Wall’s dazzling technical virtuosity and the formal beauty of his visual composition, although these are obviously reasons enough to be moved by his work, By Films Possessed suspected her/his feelings went deeper. So BFP read up on Mr. Wall, checking him out on Wickipedia, reading the Roberta Smith review of the show in The New York Times, perusing the essay on the artist in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and finally the Peter Schjeldahl piece in The New Yorker. Smith’s overview seemed just fine if a little too theoretical for a layperson such as BFP. Ditto the magazine article. (Just what, exactly, is conceptual art?) Schjeldahl’s analysis, however, was bracing, critical, concise and, so typical of The New Yorker, marvelously fluid and clear. Thought BFP, “why, oh why can’t I write like that?”

After much deliberation, BFP understood where the strength of Wall’s work emanated from. It's rage: Wall’s photos feel the pain, the silent fury of the outsiders, those living on the edge, the tormented aggravation of all those invisible, unseen people on the margins. In Night, they are barely noticed—two apparently homeless figures and a dog crouching by the shrubbery. The Old Prison, presents a spectacular view of Vancouver, in the right of which is an institution inhabited by the unwanted. The Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party spotlights on the left a boy apart from the other young partygoers. Insomnia is a haunting portrait of loneliness and desperation. Volunteer, showing a young man cleaning up in the dining room of a halfway house or a shelter communicates his resignation and the room’s desolation. But enough already. Go see the show and connect to it in your own way.

Offside

In Jafar Panahi’s socially incisive Offside, as in his excellent The Circle, women’s rights are the issue. On the day of the Iranian soccer team’s 2005 World Cup, a girl struggles to make her way into the men only stadium. Caught, she is detained with other women in the same predicament. The women and soldiers’ infantilized behavior caused by Iran's strict segregation policies highlight their absurdity. All the characters are sympathetic, and Panahi effortlessly demonstrates their essential goodness: a girl escorted to the men’s bathroom escapes during the uproar of evacuating it of males. Yet she later returns, aware of the trouble the officer will suffer.
In the end, the universal love of sport--solidarity through fandom, creates a sense of optimism. Panahi may well believe Iran will eventually rid itself of discrimination. (BFP wonders how long must women wait?) With a light touch, Panahi constructs a thoughtful film so naturalistically done as to make it look as if we’re watching real life unfold.

The Most Underrated Director On The Planet

Kenneth Loach will never be trendy, a dedicated follower of the latest political fashions or cynicisms. Mr. Loach fervently desires a redistribution of economic power, but the viewer will find no hatred of or simplistic attacks on the rich. Throughout his career this British director has been as solid as Gibraltar. With an unembellished camera and the most naturalistic acting this side of real life, Mr. Loach pays tribute to the bus drivers, rail workers, construction workers, teachers, and janitors—the invisible, the unacknowledged, the working people. Despite being the bedrock of any country—in America they’re the people fighting, getting maimed and dying in Iraq—they, lacking an army of public relations personnel, great clothes and a fawning press, don’t stand a chance. They are paid a pittance in comparison to the executives, the celebrities, and the politicians who patronize and exploit them when they are not ignoring them. But in movie after movie, Loach honors them, saluting their humor, their resilience, their love of life. He is the Bruce Springsteen of film—without Bruce’s popularity or fame. Loach also empathizes with the poor and the desperate—the recovering drug addicts and alcoholics (My Name is Joe), the unemployed (Raining Stones), the single mothers (Ladybird, Ladybird), the homeless (Cathy Come Home), and the lawless (Sweet Sixteen). His only peer is The Dardenne Brothers in Belgium.

Loach’s best films reward the viewer with indelibly etched characters. BFP’s favorites are Maggie, in Ladybird, Ladybird, abused as a child, volatile and raging. Joe, a recovering alcoholic, strong, and unaffected. Liam, the wily, tough, aspiring drug dealer, about to turn sixteen. Loach creates these great characters, not only by getting powerful performances from respectively, Crissy Rock, Peter Mullan and Martin Compston (No acting experience prior to this film.), but also by getting vivid, heartfelt scripts, which get right to the core of the person. Six of Loach’s films have screenplays, including the last two mentioned movies, by the brilliant Paul Laverty, who is even more unknown than the director he works so well with. In a just world, these talents would be accorded a knighthood. (Not that they would accept it.)





Loach’s latest,The Wind That Shakes the Barley
ranks with his best.

It’s 1920 and Ireland (or at least Southern Ireland) struggles for nationhood against the British occupation forces, the vicious Black and Tan. Two brothers, Damien and Teddy, have differing destinies: The younger Damien, soft spoken, sensitive, with gorgeous baby-blues (Cillian Murphy, excellent. For those who are not film aficionados, Murphy does have a respectable CV in movies, but, BFP reports, he is especially well regarded for his performances on the British stage.) is fresh out of medical school; he plans to leave rural, impoverished County Cork to heal the sick in London. Teddy, ruggedly handsome, tough and courageous, remains faithful to his Irish roots; he is a proud member of the Irish Republican Army.

Loach and Laverty focus the film on Damien. When, at the railway station where he is about to board the train to London, he witnesses Black and Tans fiercely beating a train conductor and engineer for failing to follow their arbitrary instructions, he understands that justice demands his staying home and joining his brother in the fight for independence.

After much violence and death are inflicted on both sides, England offers to accept an Irish Free State ceding to Ireland a fair amount of autonomy, but not complete independence. The brothers split over the compromise, Teddy accepting it as a first step to ultimate nationhood, Damien only seeing a sell-out. Damien’s arc, a negative one, becomes painful to watch. The brilliance and power of the movie, and what ultimately thrusts the film into a moving anti-war statement lies in Loach and Laverty making the viewer see the vise that entraps and ultimately destroys Damien (And Teddy as well.). His enlisting in a struggle to rid his country of an occupying power will make him commit actions that will torment him the rest of his life. Damien is obligated to execute a young acquaintance who, too weak to withstand enemy pressure, gives up important information to the Black and Tan. Damien is a doctor after all, sworn to do no harm. The soul-deadening choices Damien makes are in the name of a great ideal being realized. Failure to accomplish the dream means he has become monstrous, and for what? Not even for a defeat in which he at least fought to the bitter end, but for a deal that could mean in the end nothing more than surrender of his beliefs.

Laverty eloquently and forcefully presents both sides of the argument: Accept the compromise or fight on. We watch enthralled as intelligent men and women debate and engage each other, Loach rigorously maintaining visual neutrality, allowing their ideas to speak for themselves. More painful to the audience is that we know what they don’t: that their unresolved rupture will entail more death and devastation in their nation for decades to come.

Attention must also be paid to the excellent contributions of both cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (their eleventh film together) and to composer George Fenton (their ninth together)for his heart-pounding music. BFP marvels, in particular, at the naturalistic, clear lighting of the jail interiors and of the action sequences midway through in the cottage.

Loach, in interviews, stated this film was partly a response to the War in Iraq. One sees the comparison. He has also said that he has been working on a movie about the Irish Struggle for twenty years. These are not contradictory statements. The Wind That Shakes the Barley is so heartrending because it’s about the extremely painful decisions men must make in time of war.


Photos: Top: Kenneth Loach, Courtesy: Bryce, Flickr
Middle: The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Courtesy: Potts, Flickr

Don Imus, 4/12/07

Possibly the most perfect way to kick off a movie journal is to not analyze a movie. And since everyone is abuzz about Don Imus, why not join in? To BFP the saddest thing about Imus’ statements is that it reveals yet again the pervasiveness of sexism and racism in American culture. Imus has for decades spewed forth on radio and lately on cable a hateful, mean-spirited, cutting mockery of minorities--primarily blacks, but including gays, Latinos and Jews--women and politicians. He thrives on cruelty and crudity. He should be fired. Should’ve been fired years ago. But do not for one minute think his listeners will go away with him. He earns in the neighborhood of $10 million a year because his ratings bring in, by some reports, over $70 million in advertising revenue. That’s a lot of people listening and laughing. Imus is a sycophant currying favor with his audience by appealing to their racist and sexist thoughts. He is Eddie Haskell grown up.
BFP submits that in November 2006 when Bush and the Republicans “got thumped,” a new line of what is acceptable and what is not was drawn. The failure of the Iraq invasion crystallized for the American public the excesses of American macho culture. We aren’t going to take it anymore. Bob Herbert writes in today’s New York Times: “Powerful statements were made …by women at NBC and MSNBC--about how black women are devalued in this country, how they are demeaned by white men and black men. [They] spoke emotionally about the way black women are frequently trashed in the popular culture, especially in music…”

But BFP wonders, the audience for Imus is still there. Shamed, probably. But BFP thinks that, like Sam Spade, they will have a few sleepless nights, get over it and want to hear another shock jock slam, degrade and demean people who have done nothing to them, people whose only misfortune is that they happen to be born female, or black or Muslim, or all three.