Movie Review: Birdman

Birdman (2014)

Four and half Stars out of Five

R

Riggan Thomson: Michael Keaton

Sam Thomson: Emma Stone

Jake: Zach Galifianakis

Lesley Truman: Naomi Watts

Laura: Andrea Riseborough

Mike Shiner: Ed Norton

Sylvia Thomson: Amy Ryan

Tabitha: Lindsay Duncan

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Writer: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo

Music: Antonio Sanchez

Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki

In 2006, Hollywood was the lucky beneficiary of three imports from Mexico. Alfonso Cuarón provided us with “Children of Men”, Guillermo del Toro with “Pan’s Labryrinth”, and Alejandro González Iñárritu with “Babel” – all four star or better films. Cuarón continued the Mexican momentum with “Gravity” in 2013 and now in 2014, Iñárritu has outdone them all with “Birdman”. This powerful influence from Mexico in the form of these three directors is notable, but is there an underlying theme to their artistic efforts; is there something like the Magical Realism that infuses South Americans Gabriel Garcia Márquez (Colombia) and Isabel Allende (Chile)? If there once was a unifying feature to the three Mexican directors, Iñárritu may have abandoned it in Birdman. This movie departs from the others as it fuses influences from the Theatre, from American Cinema, from contemporary American life, and, yes even from Magical Realism. It is a bravura effort notable for its artistic merits, though possibly lacking in some of the qualities that make American movies financial successes.

Like Orson Wells’ “Citizen Kane” (1941), Iñárritu has become with his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski a master of the long panning shot. Wells was a great innovator and his opening shot to Citizen Kane as the camera pans into Kane’s castle and into and through the building is justifiably famous. Iñárritu and Lubezki have instituted very similar techniques throughout “Birdman” as they fly from the opening scene in Riggan Thomson’s (Michael Keaton) dressing room to the cramped hallways of his off-Broadway theater and out into the world inhabited by Riggan. Additionally, Iñárritu has chosen to use another film style last seen in Joe Wright’s 2013 version of “Anna Karenina”. In that movie, Wright experimented with a technique wherein each scene within the movie blended and segued right into the next scene. This lends a sense of a single shot movie as well as a complete collapse of the time sequences within the movie to match those of real life; it gives the movie the feel of live action theater. To say that shooting and acting within such constraints must be especially difficult is clear, but to do it as seamlessly as Iñárritu and Lubezki do in “Birdman” is remarkable.

To help accentuate the theme and background scenery of off-Broadway plays, Iñárritu has also borrowed from the stage many of the acting techniques used in live productions. Each of the actors within “Birdman” are either shouting or at the very least speaking at the top of their voices. This lends a sense of the stage wherein the actors must project their voices to be heard, but it also refers to the near psychotic nature of the mind that resides within Riggan Thomson. Another aspect of his mental deterioration is punctuated by the driving drum rhythms heard in the movie’s score and even more highlighted by the claustrophobic nature of the dark hallways that line his theater. He is in a tight place fiscally, mentally and emotionally. He is emotionally cut off from or has cut himself off from everyone who loves him. He is a kind of bomb waiting to go off.

Riggan’s back story is that he is a former big star celebrity from Hollywood famous for making action/comic book movies featuring a flying character named Birdman. Riggan has moved to New York to open a play he has written; he will also direct and star in this play. This is ostensibly to re-start his career. He is supported by his lawyer and friend, Jake (Zach Galifianakis), his daughter Sam (Emma Stone), his girlfriend and fellow actor Laura (Andrea Riseborough), and yet one more actress Leslie (Naomi Watts). As he enters the final preparations for his play, he must find a new actor to replace one injured on stage. Leslie suggests her former boyfriend and Broadway phenomena Mike (Ed Norton). Mike joins the cast as the play moves through its three final warm up productions before the official opening. Mike is a brilliant but eccentric actor that brings more problems to the already troubled production. Meanwhile, Riggan’s mental condition is shown to be in a deteriorating situation. He talks to his imaginary alter ego Birdman. Despite being imaginary, Birdman being the comic hero argues against the artsy play and demands a return to Hollywood with its action-themed movies; that Birdman is actually Riggan’s lack of self-confidence made manifest is clear. It is also revealed that Riggan’s daughter is a former drug addict who suffered an unhappy childhood as a result of Riggan’s absences.

Iñárritu blends several themes into the movie. To help accent Riggan’s mental state he is shown to display the ability to levitate and use telekinesis while he is alone – always alone. Such abilities can be a kind of Magical Realism, but are really not so in the context of this movie, they are more a symptom of Riggan’s growing delusion. Even though he is widely recognized on the streets of New York for his Birdman role, Riggan seeks a rebirth via an artistic effort. He wants to be recognized as an actor. He thinks not being recognized as an artist, as anyone other than Birdman is the source of his problems. To make this point quite clear, he has an argument with an arrogant but influential theater critic, Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan). She forcefully explains to him that he is a celebrity and not an actor, and that she intends to pan his play so fiercely that it will close very quickly. Riggan comes back just as forcefully that she is no artist either, but simply someone that labels true artists; she is someone that cannot do, but can merely comment. Iñárritu’s comparison of art and celebrity, and even more effectively of the techniques of fantasy in a fictional life versus mental illness are two examples of the high level of art as practiced by him within this film.

Michael Keaton has like Iñárritu achieved a pinnacle in his own career within this movie. His acting life prior to "Birdman" was entertaining, but hardly of the serious artistic heights he demonstrates in this movie. Keaton smoothly moves from one mood to another, even from one personality to another multiple times during the course of the movie. He is morosely arguing with his Birdman legacy wishing for more, he is angrily arguing with a critic or destroying his dressing room, he is broadly smiling following some minor victory, or ultimately he is inwardly facing his reality while reassuring his daughter. Virtually every scene Keaton acts in, he aces with the perfection of the Broadway actor, his character Riggan yearns to be. That Keaton won the 2015 Oscar for Best Actor is no surprise, and an event that gives me some hope for the integrity of the Oscar nomination process. The movie is replete with excellent acting: Norton as Mike and Stone as Sam are two other standouts.

There are some problems within the movie. The three adult women that surround Riggan are so nearly interchangeable in terms of their near identically transparent personalities it is sometimes hard to tell them apart except by hair color or context. We can tell Sylvia is his ex-wife from their conversation, but the role of Sylvia is so truncated and her personality so absent within the story she is easily mixed up with the other blonde, Leslie. Leslie’s personality and that of Laura are nearly invisible. You can tell them apart by hair color but not by much else. To make matters even more obscure, Laura initiates a love scene with Leslie for no obvious reason in terms of the movie or their characters. The motivations and behaviors of these three female characters remain throughout the move quite a mystery. If they are in the movie to symbolize how invisible all the women in Riggan’s life are or have been to him, then that is a valid point; it is just not a point clearly made in the movie.

The much better defined character of Sam also has problems. She is yet another female left on the side of Riggan’s life due to the exigencies of his career in Hollywood. The problem with her character as shown in the movie is that her character is constantly changing. When she first appears in the movie, she is buying flowers for Riggan in her role as his personal assistant (the implications of this are clear – she is an assistant, not a loved daughter). Her affect is one of constant anger and agitation. As the movie progresses, so does her personality: angry to nihilistic to sympathetic to her father’s needs and situation to loving, even adoring of who her father is revealed to be. Such changes could occur in anyone, and indeed as Sam came to know her father and his personal demons better, this would have been a reasonable progression. But to have her change so in only a matter of days seems less than realistic. Emma Stone's acting for these various mood and attitude changes is spot on, but the character herself is problematic.

The sub-title to Birdman is “Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance”. It is referenced as a quote in the movie attributed to the theater critic, Tabitha. She uses it as a back handed compliment to Riggan following his play’s opening night. Her meaning is that despite not being a true artist, Riggan has nevertheless pulled off an unexpected coup with his play. Surely a second meaning could be a sly reference to Riggan’s personal life. He lived his career not his family life; as such he lost his wife Sylvia and is losing or has already lost his daughter. Too late he realizes these losses in a discussion with Sam late in the movie. This scene is there to justify Sam’s warming attitude towards Riggan as her father. And it does also seem to be a reference to how many people live their lives. Maybe reaching for stardom and its pointless celebrity or in the case of the average Joe working long hours to pay the rent and buy the food; but in the end losing what truly matters, the love of those you were trying to nurture and protect. Like the shallow Birdman character that lives in Riggan’s mind, bad choices are made, and Riggan/Birdman just wants to fly away from his problems and himself.

The movie ends with a scene of Sam looking out the window. This scene is both ambiguous and clever. On the one hand, the movie has portrayed Riggan’s mental unravelling in a manner that strongly suggests his levitation, telekinesis and Birdman conversations exist only in his mind. Everyone else in the movie lives with their feet firmly planted in the world we all live in. These people may be theater people, shouting out their lines or like Mike adhering to some extreme views on method acting (even as he hides his personal inadequacies, symbolized by his E.D.). But none of them could fly or hurl objects with the force of their minds. Such events were presented solely as examples of Riggan’s psychosis. And then at the movie’s end, we see Sam look out and down through a window, looking for her father. She does not seem to seem him on the ground, but then smiles as she looks skyward. Has Magical Realism now spread into the movie; is Riggan flying? Or has she seen him lying on the ground and then turned her eyes heavenward with assumption that her father is now finally happy? If the former, I really don’t see the point of the movie, but if the latter, that is has Sam and her father finally reconciled, then the movie has made its point. Riggan has regained the one thing that mattered; it wasn’t his fame, his psychotic belief in his ability to fly, his escape from his bills and harsh critics, it was the love of the one person whose love he must have.

This movie is a powerful one made by an artist who is at the top of his game. But the driving musical score, the cramped scenes, the extreme characters like Mike, will make this movie a hard one to please many movie goers. If you like exceptional acting, clever cinematic techniques, and want to see a complex story told in a complex manner, then “Birdman” may be for you.

Book Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven (2014)

Four Stars out of Five

Emily St. John Mandel

Ionesco published a play in 1961 about conformity and mass movements, “Rhinoceros”. In his play set in a small town in France, the town drunkard, Berenger watches in amazement and disgust as his fellow townspeople transform into Rhinoceroses. Berenger has multiple arguments with his friends prior to each transforming. His friends make the argument that Humanism is dead and is time for the Rhino. Ionesco was making an argument about conformity, but I heard a different argument: that many people, frustrated and confused by modern life would choose a simpler life if they could. I think that at the root of the current wave of apocalyptic movies and books such as “The Walking Dead”, “The Last Ship”, “Road Warrior”, “The Hunger Games”, etc. (the list is endless), there is a subtext that argues for a return to a pre-industrial world. A world where the average person understands the most advanced technology around him (e.g. fixing a wooden fence). But what would really be lost in some kind of apocalyptic end to civilization? In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 book, “Station Eleven”, we get one aspect of such losses.

“Station Eleven” begins with Arthur Leander acting the role of King Lear in a Toronto theater.  During his performance we are introduced to eight year old Kirsten Raymonde, a child actress in the play with Arthur. Arthur suffers a heart attack during the play, and shortly thereafter the world is plunged (quite literally) into darkness as a bad case of influenza sickens and kills over 99% of humanity. The book jumps forward twenty years where re-meet Kirsten, now a young woman – a very hardened young woman. She remains an actress (as well as fierce warrior) in a band of artists called the Travelling Symphony. This symphony is a mixture of Shakespearean actors and musicians. They move along the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan within former automobiles drawn by horses. They encounter a rough crowd in a small village known as St. Deborah’s by the Water. The townspeople are led by an individual known as the Prophet. Fleeing St. Deborah’s by the Water, the symphony heads towards a former airport in Severn City.

Mandel does a very skillful job of moving back and forward in time from the early days of Arthur’s acting career, through his three marriages, to his King Lear performance in Toronto, and finally to various time frames in the post-flu era. In the process of doing so, Mandel weaves several themes from Shakespeare’s time of plague, elements from King Lear and more importantly to a graphic novel written and illustrated by Arthur’s first wife, Miranda. The graphic novel is the source of the book’s title of “Station Eleven”. Within this graphic novel, there is a futuristic view of the world as seen through the eyes of the novel’s protagonist, Dr. Eleven. He governs a mobile worldlet (Station Eleven) that has suffered its own apocalypse. His decisions and worldview have condemned the other inhabitants to a life away from Earth and as it develops a world beneath the waves on their moon-sized satellite. The people that live beneath the water (unlike Dr. Eleven who lives on one of the few islands) strain and rebel at their situation.

The intended parallels of Station Eleven’s Undersea denizens and those of the post-flu world where Kirstin lives are not hard to find. Like my allusion above, the people of Undersea want only to go back to what they once had. Even though they fled the Earth due to an alien invasion, and even though to return to Earth would require untold sacrifices, they will accept those sacrifices, if only they can return to the home they once knew. In Kirsten’s world, many of the villages she and the Travelling Symphony pass through, also have made this choice. They will not tell the new generation of the things they once had (cell phones, etc.), but rather they have chosen in this new (old) world of no technology, no medicine, no nations, and no vision of the future; only instead a vision of the present, which actually is a view to the past.

There are exceptions in Kirsten’s world, and Severn City Airport is one such exception. Here is a Museum of Civilization. This museum is a collection of those very same cell phones, PCs, high heel shoes and so forth. Indeed, right outside the museum’s walls is a collection of the jet airplanes that flew into the airport even as civilization was crumbling. In an oft-used technique by Mandel of coincidence, the Museum is run by Arthur’s best friend, Clark. There are many other coincidences throughout the book, some of which are used to create a few dramatic mysteries. None of the mysteries are very (or even a little hard) to penetrate by the reader. They add little to the story, but they are minor distractions. What does add to the story is Mandel’s use of an extremely nostalgic recitation of the Things We Have Lost. Rarely have I read or viewed a story wherein the various artifacts of modern life that would be lost during a civilization-ending event have been discussed in a more poignant manner. There is little poignancy otherwise within this book, but the almost Ray Bradburian fashion that Mandel uses to describe a loss of the future (in stark contrast to those mourning the loss of the past) is the book’s most notable feature.

There are parallels to the story’s impact on human life that mirror the impact of the Black Plague on Shakespeare’s time. Like the mordant tone of King Lear, the human suffering, its’ sense of regret and madness, Kirsten’s world has its share of those that regret the loss of the future and those that choose madness as an escape. Thus both Shakespeare’s world and his play offer examples of life in Kirsten’s world; in the same manner, the “fiction” within Kirsten’s world of the graphic novel acts rather like King Lear – that is the reality of Kirsten’s world and the fiction of Station Eleven all line up. There is suffering, there is regret, and there is a sense of world’s end. The big difference is that in Shakespeare’s time, you could kill off two-thirds of Europe and not destroy civilization. Whereas, in Kirsten’s (and our) world, if you kill off a sufficient number of people, the people that provide the knowledge and experience of a highly technological civilization, then you lose that civilization. You lose it so bad, it may be unrecoverable. That Mandel gives a glimmer of hope at the book’s end, suggests she may of two minds on the subject of technological civilizations.

But I think her main point is embodied in the epigram at the book’s ending (see below). It seems clear to me that she is suggesting that she too votes for the past. I vote for the future, for medicine, for cell phones and jet airplanes, and for a sense that the future is better, not worse than the past. More complicated, yes, but better, and for me that is the key. Despite my opposing worldview, Mandel’s book is one worth reading; if only to get an opposing point of view.

The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness

And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,

And for me, now as then, it is too much.

There is too much world.

-Czeslaw Milosz

The Separate Notebooks

Movie Review: "The Theory of Everything"

The Theory of Everything (2014)

Two and half Stars out of Five

PG13

Stephen Hawking: Eddie Redmayne

Jane Hawking: Felicity Jones

Director: James Marsh

Writer: Anthony McCarten, Jane Hawking

Music: Jóhann Jóhannson

Stephen Hawking is widely regarded amongst the world’s lay public as a modern-day Albert Einstein, while amongst his peers, his reputation is more nuanced. He is perhaps best known for his description of a method whereby a black hole cannot only emit radiation (now termed Hawking radiation), but in the process of doing so can actually cause the black hole in question to slowly “evaporate”. Amongst the lay public, he is also well known for his book, “A Brief History of Time” (1988). One of his many significant contributions that he has made to science is the work he started in his Ph.D. dissertation, and that was a mathematical explanation for a singularity at the beginning of time. There has been considerable work since his dissertation on this topic by Hawking and others, but the implications that grew from this work and the nature of God are important philosophical points that have played a role in his life and in the movie, “The Theory of Everything”.

“The Theory of Everything” is a movie adapted from a book by Hawking’s first wife, Jane Hawking. She shares writing credit for the movie with Anthony McCarten. McCarten was nominated for an Oscar, which to my mind is an astonishingly bad choice. The movie is an uninspired and pedestrian biopic on the months leading up to Hawking’s marriage to Jane Hawking nee Wilde, their 30 year marriage and its ultimate dissolution. The movie avoids delving any deeper into their emotional lives than skin deep. The trials and difficulties experienced by Jane as she struggles to raise their three children, finish her own work towards a Ph.D., or her reaction to Hawking’s roving eye for other women is likewise barely displayed. The biggest missed opportunity is the contrast that might have been shown between Jane’s life as a devout member of the Church of England and her career aspirations into medieval Spanish poetry versus Hawking’s atheistic and scientific world views.

The movie begins with Hawking in the early stage of his graduate work in cosmology at Cambridge. He is played by Eddie Redmayne as a fairly typical young man moving through life within a small circle of fellow graduate students. The movie makes clear early on that Hawking is a gifted student, working at a level above that of his contemporaries. He meets a young woman at a party, Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones) and despite their quickly apparent differences on religion and career choices, the attraction as portrayed by Redmayne and Jones is readily apparent. This early part of the movie is charming and is marred only by the frequent use by director James Marsh of a series of over-saturated color choices. (There are repeated scenes of nearly phosphorescent greens surrounding Hawking, of browns around Jane, and of yellows and golds surrounding several flashback scenes.) What Marsh has in mind for these color choices is completely lost on me. If he is trying to use color the way most directors use musical scores to subtly acknowledge a character, he needs to re-read the definition of “subtle”. There are times when it appears as if Marsh is trying to show a distorted view of the world as seen by Hawking. But he uses this technique very inconsistently early in the movie (sometimes to a very jarring effect) and then he drops it completely once Hawking’s illness becomes manifest. Its use is simply sloppy.

As Hawking enters into the early stages of his graduate student stay at Cambridge, he starts to display a series of physical problems. He stumbles; he knocks over coffee cups; he cannot easily use a pen. He is eventually diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more well known in the United States as Lou Gehrigs disease, or in the UK (and in the movie) as motor neurone disorder. This poorly understood disease usually strikes late in life and usually results in a death within two to three years. In Hawking’s case, it struck early, but he has far exceeded the norm for survival (he is still alive at 73, nearly fifty years after his diagnosis). Hawking wants to withdraw from life, but Jane won’t have it. She pulls him back and they marry quickly. They ultimately have three children. Their life together seems difficult but still good, initially. Time and career demands do cause strains. The movie hints at extramarital relationships for both Hawking and Jane.

Redmayne’s performance as Hawking is markedly good. His award of the 2015 Oscar for Best Actor could well have been earned. Watching Redmayne signal his emotions to Jane and to the audience as his motor skills slowly disappear is almost always nuanced and skillful. Felicity Jones’ portrayal of Jane’s wider range of emotions as she feels she is losing him at the beginning and at the end of their relationship is heart rending. The acting by both actors brings the only joy to this movie that I experienced. They both surely were honestly awarded their Oscar nominations, though the Oscar committee’s well documented history of awarding Oscars to portrayals of characters suffering some disease or other does cause me to wonder a little at Redmayne’s victory.

In the final analysis though, “The Theory of Everything” is a movie easily skipped. To be sure, there is good acting, but the Oscar nominations for “Best Picture”, “Best Score”, and most egregiously, “Best Adapted Screenplay” are serious miscarriages. This movie is somewhat like Hawking himself in the sense that Hawking has been criticized by some of his contemporaries for receiving accolades partly due to his disability. In the movie’s case, the movie has quite likely received some accolades due to its depiction of a severely handicapped individual and not due to its artistic merits. Fine acting, yes; anything more, a decided no in my opinion.

Movie Review: Into the Woods

Into the Woods (2014)

Three Stars out of Five

PG

Cinderella: Anna Kendrick

Baker: James Corden

Baker’s Wife: Emily Blunt

Witch: Meryl Streep

Director: Rob Marshall

Writer: James Lapine

Writer (musical): James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Into the Woods” reached Broadway in 1987; while there it won three Tony awards, including Best Score. Several attempts were made to convert it into a movie in the 90’s, and Disney finally finished the job in 2014. Just like the musical, the movie version included James Lapine as the writer and many of the original songs by Sondheim. It had Rob Marshall who has the movie version of Chicago on his resume, and it had Meryl Streep breaking her own rule of not playing a witch, playing a witch. So, despite being nominated for three Oscars, what went wrong?

For me, the movie is a string of pearls separated by many onions – they may be pearl onions, but they’re still onions. The first reel of the movie opens charmingly enough. We are introduced to a childless couple of Bakers (James Corden and Emily Blunt), their witch of a neighbor (Meryl Streep), Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Jack of the Beanstalk fame (Daniel Huttlestone), and Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford). They each have an agenda to work through: the Bakers want a child, the Witch wants her youth back, Jack and his mom (Tracy Ullman) need money, and Little Red Riding Hood is evidently hungry. There is undoubted cleverness at weaving the Grimm Brothers' version of each tale into a unified story, and indeed, the first part of the movie does a very good job of creating an interesting narrative. But then, following anti-climax after anti-climax, the movie just kind of peters out after a couple of hours. There are some serious overall story arc issues with this movie.

While the acting and story-telling in the first part of the movie are interesting and cogent, the singing (for the most part) and the lyrics in the early part of the movie were tiresome and not melodic. It was as if someone were singing the words from a movie that was not a musical, and not singing them at all well – I’m looking at you Wolf/Johnny Depp. Of the pearls in this movie, the duet by the two princes (Chris Pine as Cinderella’s dreamboat and Billy Magnussen as Rapunzel’s) did a great job in their song, “Agony”. It was actually a song that was melodious and sardonic. Another great song was the very short one by Cinderella’s mother/tree Johanna Riding, who easily had the best voice in the ensemble. The final song, “Children Will Listen” may have had a confusing message, but it was surely pleasant to listen to.

Acting was at a very decent level with James Corden as the Baker, and most particularly with Emily Blunt as his wife and Meryl Streep as the Witch. The high point of the movie was the witch’s initial entrance into the home of the Bakers. Meryl Streep’s eye-rolling, not quite over the top performance in these very early scenes really captured a sense of comedic acting and summarized brilliantly why the first reel of the movie was the best. Anna Kendrick’s performance as a very irresolute Cinderella was also noteworthy; especially the scene of the Balls’ third night and her third fleeing from the Prince as she finds herself caught in tar and in a moment of time. This kind of clever little aside moment for Cinderella was something that would have benefited the movie had there been more such clever scenes.

What you see for the most part are mistakes like a badly miscast Little Red Riding Hood and associated Wolf. Both characters are written very broadly as sly, wink-wink kind of characters. But neither Lilla Crawford nor Johnny Depp comes anywhere close to infusing their performance with anything but a very superficial resemblance to comedic irony. The oddly typecast Giantess (Frances De La Tour – see the Harry Potter series in order to see her play another Giantess) is a character that does not do anything but mindlessly scream for Jack and then proceed to stomp around. These characters and their scenes not only do not add to the movie, but frankly detract from it.

Is there any message in “Into the Woods”? The odd lyrics in the final song suggest a movie theme but then don't stick to it any consistent manner. In a another song near the end of the movie there might be Sondheim’s and Lapine’s message: “No One Is Alone”. This song is a reasonably decent song to listen to, and the message is certainly a fine one; a message that has special resonance in a post-911 America. Another message is to be found on the movie's poster, "Be Careful of What You Wish For": each of the major characters find out that getting their wish isn't always a good thing - Cinderella finds out what a cad the Prince is, Rapunzel is really not that sure she wants to leave her tower, the Baker’s wife believes she loves and wants her husband, but a little fling in the woods in the Prince is fine too – at least until the Giantess makes her pay for her indiscretion, Little Red Riding really should stick to the path, etc., etc. - mostly minor messages, minor songs, minor performances. As always, Meryl Streep pleases beyond what just about what anyone else can come close to doing. And for me, there were some little surprises like Cinderella on the staircase that make the movie watchable; but again, overall the movie just seemed to go nowhere, and to take a while to get there.

Book Review: "Beloved" by Toni Morrison

Beloved (1987)

Four and Half Stars out of Five

Toni Morrison

The question of whether or not of whether America is “post-racial” is one that has come up many times since the presidential election of Barak Obama in 2008. And in one sense it is one of several themes that run through Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel “Beloved”. This tragic story of the direct and indirect effects of slavery on African-Americans has rarely if ever been told in a more trenchant and disturbing manner than in this novel. How could a young mother be so pushed to the edges of fear and desperation as to feel that her children’s best hope was to die by her hand rather than to be returned to slavery? How can America so badly remember, so badly misunderstand the effects of slavery and the 150 years of ongoing bias and persecution of a people?

Morrison employs her form of magical realism coupled with a non-linear technique of story-telling in “Beloved”. The non-linearity and the multiple-narrative prose that she uses is such that many readers will find this book a daunting challenge just from a structural perspective alone. “Beloved” is based on the true story of Margaret Garner. She was an escaped slave from Kentucky that was returned from Ohio courtesy of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In Morrison’s story, Sethe the mother of two boys (Howard and Buglar) and one 2 year girl (“already crawling baby”/Beloved), and pregnant with her second daughter, Denver escapes from the Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky. Following her horrific rape and whipping at the hands of a local known as School Teacher, she reaches Cincinnati and the home of her husband’s mother, Baby Suggs. Following 28 days of freedom, a search team has found her and aims to return her and the children to Kentucky. Sethe intends to kill all of her children to prevent such a life being once more forced on them. She kills only the two year old girl, "already crawling baby". Since all are considered property she is not sentenced for murder but only for the destruction of property. She exits jail after a few years to the widespread rejection of the Black community in Cincinnati. Baby Suggs takes her back in and provides her shelter at 124 Bluestone Road.

The home at 124 Bluestone Road becomes haunted with a spirit; “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom”. (The home at 124 Bluestone Road is such a singular literary invention that in “Beloved” it assumes the role of another character in the book; it is clearly one manifestation of the Beloved character and all she stands for.) In time, Paul D, a brother of Sethe’s lost husband and father to her children (Halle) arrives at the house on 124 Bluestone Road. He drives off the spirit, but in her place shortly thereafter appears a young Black woman who claims with halting speech the name of Beloved. The now grown second daughter of Sethe, Denver recognizes almost immediately that this is the lost baby, but in an adult's body. Neither Paul D nor Sethe draw the same conclusion initially, though Paul D is compelled to the leave the house by seemingly supernatural means. In time, Sethe recognizes Beloved as her lost child, the child she killed with a hand saw’s slice across the throat. Following Paul D’s departure, life and the narrative style at 124 Bluestone Road become chaotic, almost hallucinogenic. Eventually, Beloved departs and a sense of normality returns.

Of the themes that run through “Beloved”, the racial divide between Black and White people is the one that I cannot but think is the most dominant message to be grasped at by a white man such as myself. In contemporary events, one sees almost daily news reports of the trials young Black men in America face: pointlessly being stopped in traffic by the police, being asked for receipts for bicycles that they are riding when stopped, being shot to death (or strangled or having their necks broken) when unarmed and being guilty in many cases of being black and little else. As damaging as this situation is in early 21^st century America, one still does not get even a glimpse the depth of the divide between the races as seen from the Black perspective in “Beloved”. Reading the descriptions of the surrounding “whitepeople” and their communities on the Black community, one could easily be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that the two races in question were neither of the same species or even the same planet. The slaves and former slaves in “Beloved” speak with unerring consistency of the craziness of the “whitepeople”; not their lack of morality, but their craziness. The behavior of the oppressive race on the oppressed is so far from the latter’s understanding, they don’t even try to explain it in terms of a lack of morality. It simply makes so little sense, the “whitepeople” can only be thought of as deranged.

The concept of an isolated and self-sufficient Black community is another theme that runs through “Beloved” as well. There is a sense of morality, of acceptance for some acts and not for others that stand alone from any judgement from the outside White community. If Sethe’s actions were to be best understood by any people, then surely the former slaves of Cincinnati would be that people. But they reject Sethe’s murder of her infant daughter by isolating her for over 10 years, the entire youth of Denver, Sethe’s youngest daughter.  Yet when Denver does leave her home at 124 Bluestone Road due to starvation, she is readily supported by that same surrounding Black community. They won’t let her pay for the food she needs, but they will give it to her. And finally during the climatic closing scenes, a group of Black women that had tolerated the malevolent spirit within the house will not tolerate the danger that same spirit made manifest in the adult Beloved poses for Denver, for Sethe, for the community and its sense of right and wrong.

From the community’s sense of self the story also delves deeply into the individual’s sense of self. Each of the Black characters in “Beloved” is a slave or a former slave at some point in the book’s narrative. Each of these individuals carries acutely awful memories of the treatment while slaves: Sethe’s whipping and loss of her baby’s milk, Halle’s silent witness of those events, Paul D’s multiple attempts at escape and the metal chain around his neck once re-captured, Baby Suggs’ poorly mended broken hip; the list goes on and on for each. Each of these former slaves carries memories that are so painful, they must suppress them with “re-memories”. This is an attempt to create a reality they can live with, but one that prevents them from being truly who they are. Each of these people has their own brand of “craziness”; it is the only way they believe they can survive.

For Sethe, Beloved and Denver the problem is most acute. The early parts of the book describe with astonishing pain the loss that Sethe feels when her milk for the infant Beloved is stolen from her. She has just been raped and whipped nearly to death, but she is heard only lamenting the loss of the milk. She has had a vitally important connection to her daughter taken from her. It is perhaps a metaphor for all the family disruptions that took place for slaves when their owners would sell their children to another plantation. Again this sense that the owing race was in fact acting as if they were two species instead of one, but for Sethe and her contemporaries, it was far more personal. The connection between a mother and her child has few parallels in human life, and it has just been cavalierly destroyed with as little compassion as if the owner had sold some livestock.

So, is the adult Beloved the physical manifestation of the spirit that once haunted 124 Bluestone Road or is she another lost child looking for her mother? A case can be made for either explanation. There is little doubt by the views of the household members of 124 Bluestone Road (or of the surrounding community) that the house was haunted. There is the apparent cut on the adult Beloved’s neck and her initial halting speech and walk that would suggest she is still learning how to talk and walk (just as a baby). And there is Morrison’s persistent use of Magical Realism as her genre of choice. A ghost story with deeper layers is not at all beyond her reach. At yet, consider the novel's inclusion of story from a youth having seen a naked woman running from 124 Bluestone Road on the day Beloved disappears. And also consider the wider implications of multiple mothers and daughters looking for lost daughters and mothers following the civil war. The story is compelling from either point view, as an allegory or as a description of a wide spread horror with few parallels in history; certainly few in American history.

“Beloved” ends with an epigraph from Romans 9:25: As indeed he says in Hosea, “Those who were not my people, I will call my people, and her who was not beloved, I will call ‘beloved’”. Could there be a more compelling, more human plea for compassion and recognition of a people to be treated and considered human by all that surround them? Not just say that they are equal and regarded as so, but also to love and accept them as so. “Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction 1988 and has been voted the best American novel for the period of 1981-2006. It is indeed a difficult book to work through, but like James Joyce’s Ullysses (with whom it shares some structural similarities) this is a book well worth making the effort to do so.

Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See (2014)

Four Stars out of Five

Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr has written two full length novels of fiction and two more of short stories. “All the Light We Cannot See” is his second novel; written ten years after his first novel “About Grace”. It was worth the wait for Doerr and readers alike. “All the Light We Cannot See” was listed number one on the NY Times Best 10 Books of 2014, was runner-up for the National Book Award, and did win the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is told for the most part in two first person story arcs in the era leading up to and through WWII: the adolescent and blind Marie-Laure in France, and the slightly older Werner Pfennig in Germany. The novel seems to suggest the oft-told tale of young love, but there is in fact much more to this story.

Marie-Laure lives in Paris with her locksmith papa, M. LeBlanc. He works at the National Museum where he often brings Marie-Laure. She went blind at the age of six. While at the Museum, she learns to love sea shells through the influence of a kindly researcher. She learns from her father an enduring love and patience. He spends much of his spare time helping her learn to cope with her new state of blindness. His techniques include making for her a scale model of their Parisian neighborhood and to sharpen her mind, he makes small wooden puzzle boxes. At the same time, in Zollverein Germany, Werner and his younger sister Jutta are adjusting to life as orphans. They live in the Children’s Home; a home run by a kindly, French- and German-speaking matron. During these early years, it is revealed that Werner has an unnaturally high aptitude for fixing radios, and that his sister has one for empathy.

Marie-Laure flees Paris with her father in 1940 as the Germans approach. Unknown to Marie-Laure, her father carries a precious diamond called the Sea of Flames. The museum’s intent is to get the diamond out of Paris and away from the onrushing German army. Marie-Laure and her father end up in the coastal town of Saint Malo, where he builds for her another scale model of their new home town. Werner has joined a school for the gifted or well-connected. He again demonstrates his abilities, this time to the local engineering professor. He also makes a friend with the far too compassionate Frederick, an avid birder. Werner has a first-hand observation of how a movement of bullies (i.e. the Nazis) disposes of such people as Frederick. Werner eventually joins a small detachment within the Wehrmacht that is tasked with using his radio skills to track down illegal radio broadcasts. His assignments eventually bring him to Saint Malo and into contact with Marie-Laure, and into contact with Sergeant-Major Von Rumpel. Von Rumpel is on a personal quest to track down the Sea of Flames.

The structure of the novel is very current in its frequent use of fragmentary sentence structure and parallel story lines. It is a little unusual in the brevity of the various chapters. Until the later parts of the novel are reached, the chapters are almost always less than two pages long. This allows the reader a sense of rapid movement through the lives of the various actors in the drama. It also gives a sense of the simultaneity of the events. What is Werner doing as Marie-Laure taps with her cane down some boulevard in Paris; this quick chapter structure helps give that understanding. I cannot personally understand the use of fragmentary sentences to tell a story, but again it seems like it is the intent of Doerr to use this style to help propel the book rapidly forward. The story telling is also told with a number of flashbacks. There are sequences in August of 1944 where Von Rumpel is closing in on Marie-Laure while Werner and his colleague Volkheimer are trapped in a basement that are intercut with scenes earlier in the war. The interleaving of these story lines helps to build dramatic tension and to increase interest in Marie-Laure’s and Werner’s backstories.

Another note on the structure of this novel requires mentioning, and that is the apparent deep understanding Doerr has of certain areas of knowledge. Werner’s story allows the reader a sense of how radios function, while Marie-Laure’s story gives the same reader a sense of Mollusca and the wide variety of snails that a blind girl might find so interesting. Doerr also employs passages from Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” to create a fictional world within Marie-Laure’s world. These passages help to build understanding for the life of a young blind girl caught up in the throes of war.

But what about the deeper meanings that might lie beneath the story of Werner and Marie-Laure; her story seems fairly straightforward: a young girl, dependent on the kindness and love of those that know her. Her personal development does not contain any surprises or psychological barriers. She simply must survive the war, find her father, and get back to Paris. Werner on the other hand does have some psychological hurdles to leap. Early in his life, he destroys a radio that meant everything to his sister (a sister that is held up in the novel as one who does care about the welfare of others – be they German or not); he did this to protect her from the authorities, but also because Werner always finds it easier to go with the flow than to fight for what he believes in. Time and again, Werner makes similar choices: when Frederick is beaten or when the various partisans he is hunting prove to be merely people trying to live their lives and not the desperate and vicious enemies he expected. Werner slowly does come to the conclusion that he has been making wrong choices, and finally does something for someone else to demonstrate the point. He also finally does something for himself near end of the war to atone for his errors.

“All the Light We Cannot See” has an elegiac ending that suggests an explanation for the title. That is to say, the lives, the souls lost to the air, are like light that cannot be seen. It suggests also in the actions of Werner an explanation why decent, intelligent Germans became caught up in the one of the worst horrors ever perpetuated by Man. Perhaps poor blind and reactive Marie-Laure is a stand-in for the situation France found herself in during WWII. But for me, the best parts and aspects of this book are that it gives a fairly unvarnished view of life during wartime: the starvation, disease, helplessness of most people, the blind loyalty of the various armies involved. There is no sense of the flag-waving enthusiasm often seen in war stories. Instead, there is just a quiet desperation felt by almost everyone in this story coupled with a desire to get back to a normal, non-war time life. And of course, there is also that sense of all those lives lost during this awful war, those children, young adults, and families torn apart forever. The book is not written in a highly emotional tone, but after reading it, it is unlikely the typical reader could walk away from it without feeling an intense emotional pain at all that loss.

Movie Review: Another Earth

Another Earth (2011)

Four Stars out of Five

PG13

John Burroughs: William Mapother

Rhoda/Writer: Brit Marling

Director/Writer/Cinematograghy/Editing: Mike Cahill

I have long thought and often written about the unique role science fiction can play in innovative movies that still work to explain the human condition. It doesn’t have to be science fiction but the genre should be one that allows a kind of flexibility in the rules that govern the universe the story is staged in. Magical Realism as practiced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Toni Morrison is another premier example of how bending the rules can allow the author or screenplay writer to use elements that reasonably expand and show what it means to be a human. In Another Earth, writers Brit Marling and Mike Cahill have used science fiction to explore the tantalizing concept of the “path not taken”. However, the story is so compelling; it would have been a magical movie even without the use of the fantastic elements brought in with the science fiction story line.

High School student Rhoda (Brit Marling) has just been accepted into MIT. She goes out on the town to celebrate with her friends. As she drives home (presumably somewhat inebriated), she hears on the radio a report of another habitable planet being discovered. She looks out her car window for the new planet, and in that moment and its attendant distraction she drives head on into a second car. She has just killed a pregnant woman, her young son and sent that family’s father into a prolonged coma. Four years later she is released from prison. Wracked with guilt she tries to rebuild her life, to find some meaning in her life, and to come to grips with the consequences of her actions. She goes to the now recovered father of that family (William Mapother), John Burroughs to somehow apologize. But her will fails her, and she instead tries to find a way to bring some joy into his life. In a very clever way, the dramatic tension in the movie, is whether or not Rhoda will or won’t tell John Burroughs who she is as she works to help him recover from his personal tragedy.

The science fiction elements of the story are brought into play by showing that this new planet, the one that existed at the fork in young Rhoda’s life is an exact duplicate of the Earth she lives on. Not just geographically but in every way; each person on each of the two planets having lived exactly the same lives up to the point that each of the two Earths becomes aware of one another. It is largely an idea more based in fantasy than science fiction, but in this movie that is not even close to the point. There is some nonsense pedaled in the TV background noise of the movie that tries to give a modicum of explanation for the existence of two Earths; but truly it is not really the point to explain it. The point is only to set up a visually stunning image of Rhoda as she walks out on a pier and stares into the night sky of the second Earth. And even more to the point, to give Rhoda (and the viewing audience) the opportunity to wonder at the consequences of their own lives, their own decisions, and their own paths not taken. In Rhoda’s case, it is a heartfelt examination of the three lives her moment of distraction extinguished. And to the spiraling effects on her life, on John Burrough’s life, even on the lives of her immediate family. Had she only not looked out the window; if only …

The story is at times painful to watch. But it is so easy to relate to. Such an accident could befall any driver. The story is so grounded in reality; this movie could easily have stood on its own without the second earth and “path not taken” themes. But by using them, Marling and Cahill have expanded the message in a provocative and meaningful way. A way that makes this movie a movie I would recommend to almost anyone.