The Best Films of 2013

1. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (dir. Alain Resnais)

I suppose it should be no surprise that the wisest, most mature film of the year should come from perhaps the wisest, most mature living filmmaker.  Now at 91, Alain Resnais has long ago earned the right to settle down and make whatever senile, esoteric film he wants, but instead he makes this remarkably perceptive film on the delicate interaction between life and art; individual dreams vs. a shared cultural heritage; and the fragility of time and memory  (an oft repeated theme in Resnais’ work).  Not only is this perhaps his best film in thirty years, it strikes this viewer as the work of an old magician showing his audience that he still has a few tricks left up his sleeve, and the hurried, impassioned work of a man trying to make a poignant final statement about life, death, love, and his art before time, that great equalizer, finally and inevitably catches up to him.

2. Nebraska (dir. Alexander Payne)

Following in the spirit of the great American road movies of the 1970’s (Five Easy Pieces, Harry & Tonto, even Paper Moon), Alexander Payne’s best film to date journey’s into the heritage, and consequently, legacy of a Midwestern family.  Bruce Dern has been working his entire career towards this role which he inhabits with aplomb.  Mistaken by some for condescension and use of Midwestern stereotypes (a sin for which Payne was regrettably guilty of in his previous, Hawaii set, The Descendants), Payne actually exhibits an almost Todd Solondz-like mastery of tone which reveals the essential compassion at the film’s core, as well as Payne’s deeply felt, personal understanding of the milieu.  Note the subtle eye for detail in the characterization of June Squibb’s very Catholic, bawdy vulgarity vs. Bruce Dern’s pained, stoical Lutheranism.

3. To The Wonder (dir. Terrence Malick)

Seen by many as the forgettable stepchild, or B-side to Malick’s operatic and highly praised The Tree of Life, if anything this may be the superior of the two.  Both less cosmic and more disciplined than it’s predecessor, To The Wonder is nonetheless a triumph of poetic and personal filmmaking.  Rather than contrasting (or connecting) the triumphs and tribulations of a single family to the unimagined vastness of the cosmos, instead Malick equates love, the virility of nature, and the quest for spiritual identity with the search for God.  At its best, his exalted visual style bestows a sense of holiness and reverence on even the most mundane of subjects.  And, at it’s best, is the closest modern film has come to producing a cinematic act of prayer.

4. Prisoners (dir. Denis Villeneuve)

If there was one film this year that caught me off guard and proved to be unexpectedly compelling, it would be Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners.  This intense, slow building, morally complex thriller turns the “revenge drama” sub-genre on its head by exploring its characters in philosophical and spiritual terms rather than using them as cynical and facile political allegories.  Like Mystic River, this film suggests the seemingly conflicting natures of justice and faith, yet Hugh Jackman’s everyman rage proves far more salient and pitiable than Sean Penn’s actory histrionics.

5. Like Someone In Love (dir. Abbas Kiarostami)

In his two most recent outings, Iranian master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has turned his lens from his native land to two very different, almost disparate cultures: Italy (Certified Copy) and now Japan.  Like To the Wonder, Kiarostami’s latest seems to have suffered critically by being the follow up to a highly praised predecessor.  Rather than a step back in filmmaking, if anything the critical confusion seems to rest in a sense of cultural dislocation: the warm, inviting Italian countryside of Certified Copy vs. the cold, impersonal Tokyo metropolis.  The difference between the two films is almost an East vs. West dichotomy.  And that’s the point.  It’s the sense of cultural disconnectedness (a theme often employed by Ozu) of the two principal characters, and that need for understanding, connection, and human warmth that they both seem to have lost (or possibly abandoned).  Kiarostami’s technique may be intentionally distancing at times, yet his effect is poignant, and in the film’s final moments, quite surprising.

 

6. The World’s End (dir. Edgar Wright)

Film by film, Edgar Wright is proving himself to be the master comic filmmaker of our era.  With The World’s End, Wright achieves what Tarantino seldom (or never) has: the ability to digest familiar genre tropes and regurgitate them as intensely personal reflection and even film art.  The film’s dramatic thrust–reconciling nostalgia and illusions of past triumph with the reality of a world that you need more than it needs you–is so well and movingly captured that it takes a mid-film twist into 1950’s sci-fi territory in order to contain it.  Despite the emotional immaturity of some of the characters, as a filmmaker, Wright proves to be both insightful and compassionate, while the film succeeds simultaneously as a buddy comedy, reunion drama, political satire, sci-fi/horror film, and parody.  No easy task, but he does it.

 

7. In The House (dir. François Ozon)

François Ozon has developed as a filmmaker in recent years.  From the unsettling, erotic thrillers of his early career to the more humane domestic satirist he has become, Ozon has never lost his skill for balancing the beautiful with the sinister.  Ozon slyly attacks bourgeois institutions such as contemporary art, literature, smug intellectualism, and middle class home life with a film that essentially exposes how contemporary culture has come to define itself by these things rather than the other way around.  In fact, the approach of In The House is essentially surrealist and would feel at home in Luis Buñuel’s oeuvre right in between The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.  Though, in reality, it’s most closely related to Pasolini’s bizzare-o satire, Teorema.  Thankfully, however, Ozon is less alienating and more compassionate than his Italian counterpart.

 

8. The We and the I (dir. Michel Gondry)

If nothing else, music video wunderkind Michel Gondry’s latest experiment triumphs for use of the most philosophically and politically prescient title in years.  Here Gondry utilizes the device misused by Richard Linklater in Dazed and Confused, by charting the longings and insecurities of a diverse group of inner city Bronx high school students on a bus ride home after the last day of school.  Where Linklater attempted a more cerebral, and ultimately condescending tone, Gondry’s inclusiveness and emotional honesty charts the profundity of adolescent moral development.  The resulting observation, which discovers the process of forming one’s individuality in the context of social interaction and the greater culture at large, is as vibrant and natural as any film you will see.

 

9. Bullet To The Head (dir. Walter Hill)

Sylvester Stallone cements his return to action film stardom in this, the best of his now several “comeback” films.  Best because at last he hitches himself to Walter Hill, a director who understands the fundamental dynamics of action films better than virtually any other living director.  Hill, in comeback mode himself, a director who studied at the schools of masters such as Howard Hawks, John Huston, and even Jean-Pierre Melville shows an emphasis on moral reckoning and codes of ethics over mindless violence and CGI bombast.  For Hill, action is character (when properly contextualized) and the line, “Sometimes you have to abandon your principals and do the right thing,” perfectly captures that professional ethos.  For Stallone and Hill, two dogged veterans of the action genre, violence proves not to be merely a contrivance to advance plot, but an illustration of human weakness.

 

10. The Grandmaster (dir. Wong Kar-Wai)

If Walter Hill is one of the masters of the action film as it has developed in the West, then Wong Kar-Wai (along with Zhang Yimou) is the master of the action film as it has developed in the East, even though neither Wong nor Zhang is exclusively tied to the action genre.  In The Grandmaster, action and choreography become the primary tools of emotional expression in a film that seamlessly combines national history with cultural myth.  The visage of the two leads (Wong regular, Tony Leung, and the always gorgeous, Ziyi Zhang) promotes inscrutable mystery and emotional distance, yet when in combat there is an explosion of passion, as if they can only truly express themselves in the terms of their art, even if it is a martial one.  Though this may not be Wong’s best film (that distinction belongs to the underrated 2046), it exhibits many of his most potent themes, including the tragic tenuousness of time and cultural memory (a theme which, to bring this list full circle, he learned from Alain Resnais).

 

Honorable Mention:

Caesar Must Die (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani), Passion (Brian De Palma), Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel), Pain & Gain (Michael Bay), 42 (Brian Helgeland), American Hustle (David O. Russell), Mud (Jeff Nichols), Byzantium (Neil Jordan), Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland), The Lords of Salem (Rob Zombie)

 

The Forgettable and the Overrated:

Before Midnight, The Bling Ring, Blue Jasmine, Gravity, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Prince Avalanche, Spring Breakers, The Wolf of Wall Street

 

Terrence Malick, Theologian: The Intimidating, Exhilarating Religiosity of “The Tree of Life” and “To the Wonder” on Notebook | MUBI

Terrence Malick, Theologian: The Intimidating, Exhilarating Religiosity of “The Tree of Life” and “To the Wonder” on Notebook | MUBI.

I don’t generally repost articles, but I found this to be especially compelling.

The New World

That Terrence Malick is an enigma need not be overstated.  Much has been made and speculated over regarding the director’s almost J.D. Saliger-like reclusiveness and the notoriously mysterious twenty year gap between his second and third films–a gap which, thankfully, appears to be quickly dropping between successive films.  Currently, with only six completed films to his credit in a forty year career, he has consistently been pointed to as the kind of filmmaker who seems to embody the adage of quality over quantity.  For the critic, however, if nothing else, the gaps between films allows for them to be categorized neatly into groups of two: there is the photographic brilliance, and the innocent, blue collar poetry of his first two films (Badlands and Days of Heaven); there is the mature, transcendent revisionism of his middle two historic epics (The Thin Red Line and The New World); and finally the cosmic-as-personal Christianity of his most recent films (Tree of Life and To the Wonder).  Above all, however, Terrence Malick is a poet working in a medium whose audience often tends to shun unfamiliar forms of expression.  And it is his poetic instincts which are simultaneously his greatest strength (and legacy to the artform) as well as potentially the very characteristics which can get him into trouble.

Pauline Kael once described Days of Heaven as an “epic pastiche” with too many ideas that don’t grow out of anything organic, and described it as “an empty Christmas tree: you can hang all your dumb metaphor’s on it.”  While I’m not convinced she was right about the film (Days of Heaven remains a personal favorite of mine), Kael was always a challenger of prevailing notions.  I do, however, understand her inclination, which has been periodically leveled against several of his films.  Poetry, and in particular visual poetry, without discipline can far too easily become mindless ambiguity: form without substance.

Though not necessarily my very favorite of his films, in some ways, The New World represents the apotheosis of Malick’s art–both grounded to narrative just enough so as not to distance a more casual audience, while still maintaining the lyrical grandeur one has come to expect from his films, achieving the kind of organic representation that Kael felt was lacking in his earlier work.  I write here about the primary, theatrical version of film rather than 2 1/2 hour Academy cut which was released briefly in late 2005 (sadly, I didn’t get to see this version), or the nearly 3 hour director’s cut released on DVD and BluRay (which I also own, but find to be unnecessarily indulgent).  The New World might best be viewed as a creation myth.  But unlike the creation story at the center of his Tree of Life, this creation story is less concerned with the origins of the universe than the origins of man–or, if you prefer, the origins of a nation.  Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell in perhaps his best role to date) and Pocahontas (first-timer Q’orianka Kilcher in a revelatory, under-recognized performance) are the new Adam and the new Eve of the Edenic American continent circa 1607.  And like the biblical Eden, it is sin which brings about the fall of this new Paradise.

The opening scenes of English ships arriving at the shores of Virginia set to the introduction of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold opera, are are among the most captivating scenes from any film in the last decade and immediately set the tone for things to come.  In a film filled with contrasts and juxtapositions, perhaps the most startling early on is that of the English in their bulky, metal armor and the Natives in their buckskin.  The cautious, early interactions between the two cultures breeds suspicion and unease on both sides.

At times, the film somewhat over-idealizes the way of life of the Natives–Smith’s narration suggests that they have no concept of greed, deceit, or even forgiveness, a notion contradicted by Pocahontas’ pleading with her kingly father for forgiveness, as well as the tribe’s proficiency with weapons and military strength–but thankfully, it never quite reaches the simplistic level of Indians=good, Europeans=bad.  Instead, Malick’s humanism reaches far deeper than that, uncovering the complexities of colonial contact.  As one critic pointed out, “He (Malick) creates uncanny, expressive imagery, such as a pair of hands, turned outward from a praying position so that they are cupped, to scoop a clam out of the fecund sea. It is an image of promise, yet both the pearl and the plundering are implicit.”  Indeed, for that is the double-sided story of The New World and of America herself–a land in many ways destroyed in order to make way for the promise of hope, opportunity, and new beginnings.

Nevertheless, like a story by Emerson or Thoreau, the film finds tragedy in man’s estrangement from his environment, and peculiarity in his desire to reshape nature as represented in a scene where an Indian stares perplexed at a meticulously manicured English garden late in the film.  The beauty of nature vs. the encroachment of civilization is a common theme throughout Malick’s work.  As with the clam in the sea, the sets of hands, so often seen outstretched to heaven throughout the film, suggest it might be a kind of prayer: a prayer of thanks for the beauty that surrounds us, and a prayer of repentance for the destruction we have wrought.

Simultaneously more optimistic than The Thin Red Line and more focused and disciplined than Tree of Life (the films which immediately preceded and followed this one), The New World ultimately succeeds through the character of Pocahontas whose strong will and open heart finds peace through sacrifice.  And fittingly, it is images of resurrection which dominate the film’s rapturous finalé, confirming that only through destruction can there be rejuvenation, and only through death can one find life everlasting. It is here that the ambiguous mysticism of her elliptical narration becomes solid and takes form, how the word is made flesh.  Though her chiefly father may have been just in distrusting the Europeans, it is her compassion which transcends justice and finds grace.

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New LETTERBOXD account…

For those of you interested in following a running log of the films I’ve been watching, along with a star rating of each, feel free to follow my Letterboxd page at: http://letterboxd.com/ahstanleykubric/

No longer will I be maintaining a viewing log directly on this blog, so check out the letterboxd page.  Feel free to comment here, comment there, comment everywhere.  Also, I will continue to periodically essay certain films, books, ideas etc, here on the blog.

Scarface (1983)

THE WORLD IS YOURS… proclaims a marquee atop the Goodyear Blimp.  The phrase clearly strikes a chord with Tony Montana since he has it inscribed on a giant, Atlas-like globe and sets it as the centerpiece of the foyer in his Miami mansion.  The world is all he wants, and for a time, all he gets, as later in the movie it reads less as a proud mission statement and more as an ironic epitaph.  Actually, both uses are a sly homage to Howard Hawks’ 1932 gangster classic, of which this is ostensibly a “remake”.  While the structure of the Hawks film is vaguely evident, director Brian De Palma and writer Oliver Stone craft their own cinematic world and brand it with their own unique personalities.  And, of course, the third person in that trinitarian alliance is Al Pacino, who as Tony Montana creates perhaps the most scenery-chewing performance of his career, which probably puts it on the short list for most scenery-chewing performance in film history.  This is not a criticism.

De Palma is no stranger to controversy, particularly when it comes to the ratings board, but in the case of Scarface, not only did he engage a ratings battle (it got an “X” rating three times, before he had a narcotics officer testify to the authenticity of the film in order to reduce it to an “R”), but also ongoing accusations that the film actually glorifies drug use, the narcotics industry, and glamorizes violence.  Nothing could be more absurd.  Part of the controversy, no doubt, stems from its misunderstood reputation within the hip hop community, the appeal being Montana’s ambition, flamboyance, and braggadocio (“All I got in this world is my balls and my word, and I don’t break them for nobody!”)  Subtlety has never been De Palma’s strong suit, and with Tony Montana, he finds a character which he can fully exploit with operatic grandeur.  The story is not simply one of sex, drugs, and violence, but the tragedy of a bad man and the corruption of the American Dream.

Few filmmakers can claim to understand the mechanics and pleasures of the cinema as well as Brian De Palma, who in his own way, is one of the most “pure” filmmakers this country has ever produced.  In Scarface, like many of his other films, this is made evident in his manipulation of artifice, whether it be the painted billboard of a serene Miami sunset which fills the frame at the beginning of the film, or Robert Loggia’s office walls painted like the phony paradise of a tourism brochure.  To De Palma, cinema is not reality, but the illusion of reality, and he is constantly playing with that illusion.  But this works on more than simply a visual level, because the entire empire Montana builds–all of the money, the fame, the VIP treatment, even his trophy wife–all of this too is an artifice.  He has balls, but no courage; money, but no charity; a beautiful wife, but no love; an army, but no friends.  It is in the latter scenes where Montana begins to recognize this fact that a genuine pathos is developed, both transforming the film from merely an exercise in personality to an exploration of character as well as answering those who would reduce the film to a monument of excess.  I doubt he is ruminating on the words of Matthew 16:26 while staring besottedly at the molehill of cocaine piled atop his desk, but he might as well be.

Much has been made of the film’s extreme violence, as much was made in 1932 when Howard Hawks was equally castigated for appearing to endorse gangsterism and reckless violence.  Though the violence of Hawks’ film may seem tame by today’s standards, De Palma’s still has the capacity to shock.  Yet for all of their stylistic differences, few filmmakers can boast a superior handling of violence than either of the two directors.  Tarantino tries to, but quickly devolves into cartoonishness.  The climax of Scarface owes as much to Shakespeare as to M-16’s.  That Pacino’s howl “Say hello to my little friend!” has become something of a pop culture mantra, clearly misses the fact that the exclamation is less a declaration of fortitude and resilience than it is a genital euphemism.  And the climactic outpouring of bullets and blood adequately represents what one critic referred to as a “cinegasm”, something that De Palma might well have invented with the finalé to his 1976 film, Carrie, or perhaps even more overtly in his 1978 film, The Fury.  It is catharsis in its purist form, but whatever term you wish to use, one thing is undeniable: it is cinematic.

Mozart’s “Requiem” and Prayer’s For the Dead

Requiem – Mozart by Gardiner – YouTube.

Over the last few weeks, my girlfriend and I have found ourselves in the presence of some of the most glorious music ever written, including symphonies by Beethoven and cantata’s by Bach.  And while experiencing the fourth movement of Beethoven’s fifth symphony is sublime, the work that I am most interested in addressing is Mozart’s Requiem which we saw performed at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston.  I claim no musical expertise.  I play no instruments, my sense of rhythm is shoddy, and my voice is an insult to shower singers everywhere.  Unlike literature and film, in which I have a certain working knowledge, my understanding of music theory and even basic terminology is limited.  I do believe, however, that I can recognize great music when I hear it, and like everyone, I love great music.

That the Requiem was Mozart’s final work (and what a finalé to an astonishing oeuvre!) is unquestioned, but what has become a rather well known piece of music lore maintains that while writing it (at the behest of a generous benefactor) the great composer was well aware of his impending death and focused all of his passion and energies into completing what he might well have considered his own funeral music.  Whether this is true or not (I tend to think so) is up for debate, but the music speaks for itself, and like Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, it sings out with the fervor of a dying man’s final plea for mercy on the souls of dying men.  Kyrie Eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.  Lord, have mercy on us.  Christ, have mercy on us.  Lord, have mercy on us.

The Requiem’s merits as a work of art and music have been well established, probably from its very first performance, but what of its merits as a work of theology?  I find it very difficult to separate the two, because the very tone, substance, and spirit of the music is derived from its theological intent, namely an extended prayer for the dead: a Mass set to music.  The often grim texture of the music reflects the grimness of its subject matter: death and the hope of posthumous salvation.  As far as I can tell, the idea that the living can, through prayer, influence the souls of the dead–specifically, those souls in Purgatory–is exclusive to Catholic theology (and ancient Orthodox Judaism).  The Eastern mystic might claim that there is no such thing as death, only the transference of one energy into another, thus there is no sense in praying for those who have merely altered states; for the Protestant it might seem like little more than a quaint anachronism, instead claiming that one’s eternal destination is determined in life and cannot be altered afterwards; and to the atheist, the very notion of praying for the dead might seem like borderline lunacy, for death has to it a grave finality.  Yet to the Catholic, it is an essential part of the Christian life dating back to the early, primitive Church, and to St. Paul, and inherited from Orthodox Judaism from before the era of the Maccabees.  There are prayers, services, and Masses devoted to those who have passed away, and none more beautiful than the Requiem Mass.

But beyond the historical evidence which confirms that the public practice dates back a good deal further than many of its opponents would suggest, praying for the dead is inseparably linked to the doctrine known as “the communion of the saints” which holds that what St. Paul metaphorically referred to as the “body of Christ” (i.e. the Church) is composed not only of the living followers of Christ, but of the departed–the Saints in Heaven and those souls in Purgatory.  Salvation, therefore, it would seem, is not a purely individual effort, but one in which the entire body of Christ takes part and is held accountable for.  Unlike Cain who denied responsibility for his brother (in order to hide his crime), we–both the living and the dead–are in part responsible for each others well being, for the body need all of its parts in order to function fully.  Far from being either morbid or sentimental (as it has alternately been accused), the communion of saints and consequently, public prayers for the dead, is a doctrine of compassion and brotherhood in which the intercessor and those for whom he/she prays are bound together in hope and love.

I can be quite certain that the Christian doctrine of the communion of the saints is true and be equally certain that Mozart was in no way trying to prove it by writing the Requiem.  It is not an apologetic work, nor an argument, nor is it particularly cerebral (unless, I suppose, you happen to be a music theorist); it is a work of art–and a great one at that–but beyond that, or perhaps because of it, it is also a work of charity and love in which a great artist utilized his considerable talents for the benefit and spiritual enrichment of those whom he had never met, and provided for all time a voice for the voiceless and a song for those who, like myself, might otherwise never hear that eternal melody.  Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.  Grant them eternal rest, Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them.  Amen.

Grace and Modernism in “Journey to Italy” (“Viaggio in Italia”)

Take it for what it’s worth, but speaking as a bachelor, if there is a greater movie about marriage than Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954) floating around out there in filmdom, then I haven’t seen it.  (If you know of a superior example, feel free to mention it in the comments section.)  Ever since having seen Martin Scorsese’s documentary My Voyage in Italy in which the famed director takes the viewer on a personal journey through his own experience of Italian film and how it has influenced his work, I have wanted to track down many of the films of Roberto Rossellini, particularly his several 1950’s collaborations with his wife at the time, Ingrid Bergman.  At the time of seeing Scorsese’s doc, I believe I had only seen Rossellini’s groundbreaking neorealist masterpiece, Rome, Open City.  Unfortunately for me, many of his other films remained unavailable on DVD and even VHS (for those of you who can remember back that far).  Gradually, however, I managed to catch several of his films, thanks to a few Criterion collection DVD releases and a couple of retrospective screenings in Los Angeles, but Journey to Italy continued to illude me.  Fortunately, TCM recently programmed a month long tribute to the director and much to my delight Journey to Italy was included.

By 1954, Rossellini had progressed beyond the neorealist stylings of his early films and was pioneering a new, richer kind of cinema.  In his review for the Cahier du cinéma, François Truffaut called it the first “modern film”, by which he meant the principles of modernism, which for decades had already influenced the world of literature, poetry, and painting, was finally beginning to seep into the world of film.  Novelists like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and William Faulkner; poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; and painters like Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso had revolutionized their particular art forms (in some ways for better and in others for worse) by making the subjective, individual experience the focus of the work rather than the objective, external event.  As a result, devices such as first-person narration, stream-of-consciousness, and Impressionism had become dominant forms of artistic representation since the late 19th century in every form of media except the cinema.  That is, until Rossellini.

Truffaut was right to describe the film as modernist, but he was not complete in saying so because it seems to me that there are elements at work in the film which transcend modernism, and those elements are what I like to call “grace”.  The film tells the story of a middle aged British couple played by Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders whose marriage is quickly collapsing in on itself due to bitterness, petty jealousy, and wounded ego’s.  They seemed destined for divorce, and as a viewer, one might be forgiven for thinking that after the way they treat each other, it might well be for the best.  Nevertheless, due to a recently deceased relative, the two are forced together for a furlough to Naples in order to sell a piece of inherited property.  While there, they flirt with the idea of divorce, while each in their own way toys with the idea of an extramarital affair prefiguring the self-imposed temptations presented to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (another excellent film about marriage).

Bergman’s and Sander’s personalities seem to be as different as the landscapes in which they wander; her romanticism vs. his condescending irony is as stark a contrast as the vitality of Naples (streets teeming with pregnant women) is with the desolation of Pompeii, which the couple visits accompanied by an archaeologist friend who is excavating the ruins of the destroyed island.  Rossellini’s isolated characters, as well as his mastery of empty space within the frame of his images can almost be seen as a turning point in the history of cinema.  Fellow countryman, Michelangelo Antonioni would later turn similar forms of alienation into an artform unto itself.  Jean-Luc Godard would take Rossellini’s existential inquest and deconstruct them to revolutionary effect.  And the European artfilm movements of the 1950’s and 60’s are born.  But Rossellini doesn’t stop there.

While viewing the excavations on Pompeii, they witness the plaster casting of a buried human form, killed long ago by the eruption of Vesuvius, now found buried under layers of volcanic debris, frozen in a position of everyday life–a snapshot in time caught at the unexpected moment of death.  It’s a powerful moment both as a viewer and for the Bergman character who is brought to tears forced to suddenly confront the fragility of life.  The moment is not only a profound recognition of human temporality, but also a metaphor for the relationship between Bergman and Sanders.  Even he, the anti-sentimentalist, appears to be moved by the sight.

Rossellini would later go on to boast about his atheism, but for those who have seen his films, it’s sometimes difficult to take the claim seriously.  He was fascinated with finding the miraculous within everyday life, and like Flannery O’Connor, with exploring the seemingly arbitrary workings of grace.  In films such as Rome, Open City or The Flowers of St. Francis, grace flows as naturally from the story as a prayer from the lips of a saint, but in later films such as Stromboli, Europa ’51, and Journey to Italy, grace works much more mysteriously and more shockingly, because it’s almost unexpected.  In the films finale, after having returned to the mainland from Pompeii and with marital dissolution seemingly inevitable, the couple accidentally drive into the middle of a religious parade in which shouts of a miracle having happened ring out among the turbulent crowd.  The two are inadvertently swept up into the surging masses and separated.  As one critic put it, their reunion amidst the “…noisy crowd becomes an intimate epiphany, and [at once] a rigorously understated film becomes an overwhelming vision.”  It is here in which Rossellini’s film transcends the stylistic trappings of modernism and shows a deeper understanding of human nature than any artistic movement can on its own provide.  It is here in which alienation makes way for genuine connection, and in which existential angst and despair finds hope in the love of another.

“Fathers and Sons”: A place in Russian Literature

Russian literature is often regarded from one of two points of view: the first, while perhaps conscious of its reputation for psychological depth, spiritual insight, and political allegory approach the weighty tomes of a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky with a kind of existential dread not unlike what one might experience when having the tools of an 18th century dentist uncovered before one’s eyes while being asked to open your mouth and say “ahhhh”.  In this view, the rewards, though there may be some, are not worth the mental slog required to surmount such literary obstacles.  To those of the second point of view (of which I count myself one), Russian literature is a four course meal prepared by a master chef that fills both mind and soul with insight into the human condition.  19th century tsarist Russia invariably had its problems, but for a time it produced a literary culture the likes of which had been unseen since the poets, playwrights, and philosophers of ancient Greece.  For both types, I have good news and bad.  The good news, particularly for those of you who identify with the first type of person, is that Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons may provide the perfect introductory work into the rich, varied world of Russian literature; but for those of the second type, the bad news is that I find the work ultimately to be undeserving of its prestigious reputation.  Allow me to elaborate.

The controversy surrounding its publication in the mid-1800’s is undoubtedly also the reason which has led to its reputation among the literary elite, and that being embodied in the character of Bazarov.  It was Bazarov the nihilist, with his newfangled philosophies, which sent shivers down the spines of the older, conservative Russian bourgeoisie, and it was Bazarov the nihilist who in the novel as well as in Russia itself, sent shivers down the spines of the mid-level landowners–the liberal democrats (not necessarily to be confused with the modern American understanding of the term)–and it is indeed Bazarov the nihilist who sets the novel apart from its literary contemporaries.  While I know of few people in modern society who would openly identify themselves as nihilists (besides perhaps the Germans from The Big Lebowski), it is nevertheless the philosophy which in recent years has begun to so thoroughly decimate modern popular culture.  The embrace of a kind of cosmological cynicism and complete distrust of any institution or moral philosophy can be found at the heart of such overrated filmmakers as Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, and several other critical darlings.  What was seen as controversial and new in the mid-19th century is now old, tired, and caustic, having long since overstayed its welcome as its damaging effects have been felt all throughout the 20th century.

The fallacy, though, of course is in the notion that nihilism (from the Latin, meaning a belief in nothing) was somehow a new philosophy even in the mid-19th century, when of course it was not new at all, but a very old mistake given fresh life by a new generation.  It is here that the generational conflict implied by the title of the novel comes to bear.  The older generation adopting what might be seen as the traditional Russian values, while the younger generation embodied by Bazarov and his friend, Arkady, adopt a philosophical non-conformity which challenges everything for the sake of challenging it.  The problem with nihilism (of which there are many) is that it has no ideal.  It believes in nothing and therefore strives for nothing but the destruction of all, including itself.  As a philosophy, nihilism is unsustainable, and it is in the moments in which Bazarov’s actions appear to defy his beliefs (his love of Anna Sergeevna, the flirtation with Fenichka, or his aiding of Pavel Petrovich after their duel), that he becomes a truly human figure.

I have spoken much of the philosophy, but little of the actual novel.  Turgenev understands ideas (even bad ones), and even more so he understands human behavior, these are the novel’s strengths.  There is a great believability and a psychological insight seemingly distinctive to Russian writers into the behavior these characters.  His prose, however, comes across as being rather stiff and even forced at times, flaws which while bothersome, I am willing to attribute as much to the translation (I read the Oxford World’s Classic version translated by Richard Freeborn) as to the author.  Sadly, though, I cannot help but feel that Turgenev was hopelessly outclassed by his contemporaries.  He has not the poetry of Pushkin, the humor of Gogol, the depth of Dostoevsky, the imaginative scope of Tolstoy, or the lyricism of Chekhov.  To be fair, though, he does have one advantage which few of the others have and that is brevity.  At just over 200 pages, Fathers and Sons reads like a novella in comparison to some of the more monumental works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, or in particular Tolstoy.  This is why I advocate it as introductory course to Russian literature, though not necessarily as one of its high points.

A question I kept asking myself as I was reading was: how did Turgenev feel about his characters?  Was he advocating the philosophy of Bazarov, or merely as a novelist attempting to honestly create a character out of the stuff of humanity: ideas, philosophy, behavior, inconsistencies?  And while I cannot be sure (it probably doesn’t matter anyway), I am led to one of the most beautiful passages in the entire book, for which I will provide no context:

“Can their prayers and their tears be fruitless?  Can love, sacred, devoted love, not be all-powerful?  Oh, no!  No matter how passionate, sinning, rebellious is the heart hidden in the grave, the flowers growing on it look at us serenely with their innocent faces; they speak to us not only of that eternal peace, of the great peace of ‘impassive’ nature; they speak to us also of eternal reconciliation and a life everlasting…”

Amen.

 

Concerning Beauty and The Night of the Iguana

It may be a futile task for anyone to attempt a purely objective analysis of a work of art.  I say that not because I adhere to the ridiculous maxim that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or because I believe that beauty is an inherently subjective matter; in fact, I hold both of these statements to be false.  I believe there is such a thing as objective beauty–a rose, a sunset, and a pietà are beautiful regardless of one’s capacity to appreciate them.  However, while I do believe in objective beauty, I believe one’s response to that beauty can only ever be subjective.  The French writer Stendhal responded rightly when upon viewing Michelangelo’s sculpture of David in Florence in the 19th century, he fainted at the sight of its magnificence and as a result had an entire syndrome named after him.  I have never been to Florence and thus have never seen the David in person, however, I suspect that I would not faint in its presence, though the problem is mine and not Michelangelo’s (nor David’s).  I have seen hundreds of photographs of the statue, and while I fully accept that to experience it in person would be a thousand times more sublime than to see only a photographic reproduction, that I have seen so many images of it–even inadequate images of it–I have doubtless been numbed to its full aesthetic impact.  Fortunately for Stendhal, he had not been numbed by photographs and coffee table art books, and was thus able to properly gauge its true beauty.

I say all of this to point out that for me to attempt to objectively discuss a work like Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana would be an exercise in futility, because it is a work that I hold dear, not only because I respond emotionally to it, but because in some ways I feel as though I might have written it; nay, I almost feel as if I did write it.  I say this not out of vanity (indeed I’m quite certain that I’ve never in my best work come close to equaling the poetry of this play), but because like Stendhal seeing the David, I wept upon reading the play for the first time several years ago, and might just as well have fainted.

Last night, my girlfriend and I went into Houston see Theatre Southwest’s revival of what many critics consider to be the last of Williams’ major plays.  Personally, I disagree with that analysis.  I find it hard to discount later works such as Small Craft Warnings, or even experiments such as In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel or Vieux Carré as minor works, though Iguana was undeniably the last of his major Broadway successes.  Regardless of one’s views on late-career Tennessee Williams, I find The Night of the Iguana to be not only Williams’ greatest work, but one of the two or three greatest works ever written for the American stage–in close company with Eugene O’Neill’s towering, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

The production itself was adequate, though far from anything like Broadway standards.  The facilities were intimate, the set was well designed, and the performances were satisfactory, with a couple of them being quite good.  But those elements only really matter to an extent.  I suspect it would take a poor production indeed to fully extinguish the lyricism of Williams’ prose.

For decades, audiences and critics seem to get lost in his characters various sexual tropes–in this case the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, a disgraced Episcopal minister turned tour guide with an eye for sixteen year old girls, not to mention the recently widowed Maxine Faulk, owner of a dilapidated hotel in the rainforest on the Mexican coast, who amuses herself with a couple of Mexican cabana boys, and Hannah Jelkes, the virginal New England spinster whose story of the two “love encounters” in her life provides the play with one of its most moving sequences.  Yet as much as sexual confusion is a recurring theme throughout Williams’ work, to say that the play is about sexual confusion is to mistake the forest for the trees.  The story is no more about sexual disfunction than it is about an iguana, though like the titular iguana–captured and tied up by the cabana boys to be later fattened and eaten–sexual disfunction becomes a convenient central metaphor (the iguana, like Shannon, is literally at the end of his rope).  Williams’ real concern here is the spiritual and emotional battles which we all fight, and the genuine healing power of human sympathy and kindness.

The Rev. Shannon has long since been locked out of his church for “fornication and heresy”, two vices which he practices with relish as much outside the church as in, and has turned to leading tour groups to see the wonders of God’s world with a minister of God.  His latest tour is a group from a Baptist women’s college in Texas, but prior to the plays opening, the good reverend has either seduced or been seduced by (depending on who you ask) the youngest member of the group and having been found out, takes a detour to the remote, coastal hotel owned by Maxine and her recently deceased husband.  His plan, such that it is, is to hold up until he can first suffer a nervous breakdown and regain his emotional sanity, and then second, dissuade the group from either a) filing charges against him of statutory rape, or b) calling the tour company to get him fired.  Enter Hannah Jelkes and her grandfather, Nonno, who at age 97 is the “worlds oldest living and practicing poet”, hoping to finally complete the poem he has been working on for the last twenty years.

If the play had ended after the second act I’m convinced it would still be a major work of American theater, but it’s the third act which elevates it to a level with few peers.  Here Williams unleashes his entire arsenal of emotional turmoil, compassionate humanism, and poetic reverie.  What stands out is not the more lurid aspects of the characters lives, but the compassion with which Williams views them and his utter lack of condescension in dealing with human weaknesses and flaws.  He casts a caring eye, neither condemning nor condoning his characters foibles, but rather suggesting that through kindness and understanding lies the hope to heal past traumas and induce emotional and spiritual growth.

Though in part kicked out his church for heresy, the Rev. Shannon’s vision of God as a tropical thunderstorm rather than the “senile delinquent” which he had been preaching, brings him closer to orthodoxy than I suspect even he intended.  His desire to preach the “gospel of God as Lightning and Thunder”, while certainly a personal and mystical vision, becomes unintentionally closer to the depiction of God in the Book of Job as arriving in a whirlwind.  But God operates through a variety of means, including the natural world and a kindly spoken word.  Both things are beautiful, and I would argue objectively so, because they both point to an Ultimate Beauty.  To Job, God appeared as a whirlwind, but lest we forget that to Elijah he appeared as a still, small voice.  So what then are we left with?

“How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

“Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.

“A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then

“An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth’s obscene, corrupting love.

“And still the ripe fruit from the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

“O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?”

Beautifully said, Nonno.  Most beautifully said, indeed.  Stendhal was right to faint upon seeing the David and Hannah Jelkes was right to thank her grandfather for composing such a lovely poem, so it seems only right for me to thank Tennessee Williams for writing such a lovely play and then cry after reading it one more time.

Wise Blood, or, the strange marriage of John Huston and Flannery O’Connor

Periodically at my church St. James the Apostle Episcopal Church, I host an evening in which I show a film and then lead a discussion afterwards focusing on the finer points of film artistry and how, through the vehicle of art, we as viewers might come to know God more deeply and have a fuller understanding of our own place as human beings.  This past Sunday, I showed John Huston’s Wise Blood and in the following post will attempt to distill 45 minutes worth of discussion into a brief essay on this unique and sadly underseen film.

Paradoxically, the film of Wise Blood succeeds because it is an atheists rendering of a profoundly Catholic novel.  It is this same paradox which perhaps explains why Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew remains arguably the most moving depiction of Christ yet put to film.  Director John Huston’s adaption of the Flannery O’Connor novel is almost startlingly direct, and this is its strength.  Whereas a Catholic or even Protestant filmmaker might have been too taken by O’Connor’s near allegory, Huston is uninterested, and instead presents the story with the textural details of the physical world of small town Georgia, emphasizing character, story, and location, rather than theme.  Huston’s film succeeds because consciously or not, he recognized that O’Connor’s work exists within the physical world, and her themes exist to serve her story rather than the other way around.

Wise Blood is an unusual film by just about any standards and is perhaps destined to always be a cult favorite rather than a mainstream success.  It tells the story of an ambitious young man named Hazel Motes who returns home after being discharged from the Army and promptly begins to preach the Church of Christ Without Christ in which “the lame don’t walk, the blind don’t see, and the dead stay that way.”  Finding himself surrounded by false prophets, charlatans, conmen, and charismatic revivalists (including flashbacks of his fiery preaching grandfather played by Huston himself), Motes’ gospel is one where there ain’t no sin and there ain’t no need to be redeemed, because to Motes, “No one with a good car needs to be justified.”  Brad Dourif plays Motes with all of the zeal of O’Connor’s prose, as does the equally compelling supporting casting, including, Harry Dean Stanton, Ned Beatty, Amy Wright, and Dan Shor as a troubled young man who becomes Motes’ only disciple.

Hazel Motes fits squarely within the O’Connor tradition of “Christ-haunted” characters.  To her, the South was hardly “Christ-centered” but “is most certainly Christ-haunted” and Hazel Motes might well be the prophet of that vision.  The book describes his obsession by saying, “Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on water and not know it and suddenly know it and drown.”  The imagery is simultaneously Biblical (referencing St. Peter’s brief walk on the water) and ghostly, the spirit of which is wonderfully captured in Dourif’s performance.  It is from such descriptions that I feel the figure of Christ portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ seems more at home in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor than the work of the Gospel writers, and why that film is so successful as a film and questionable as theology.

But the Christ-haunting of Hazel Motes is not simply for dramatic value, and certainly not to promote any kind of religious hysteria, but because the story is about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it.  “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”  Motes must be broken down in order to be rebuilt, and he must lose all that he has been clinging to so that the only hand left to hold onto to save him from those drowning waters is the hand of Christ.  Far from being hopeless and brutal as some readers/viewers have claimed over the years, both O’Connor’s novel and Huston’s film affirm that amidst a world of charlatans and competing religious hoopla, there is a genuine faith to be found; a faith that is seldom easy and often painful (anyone who advocates an easy, pain free faith is probably trying to sell you something), but very real and life-changing.  O’Connor recognized this, and while Huston may not have, he was smart enough to know a good story when he saw one.