Ferdy on Films, etc.

9th Annual Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival

Man of Flowers (1983)
Director: Paul Cox

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Paul Cox, a Dutch/Australian director who Roger Ebert has long championed, has made sad nostalgia his stock and trade. Two previous films of his shown at Ebertfest, A Woman’s Tale and Innocence, look at the very old and reflect on the narrowing of their lives and the regrets that have accompanied their choices. Man of Flowers is another distinctive film from Cox that examines one man’s painful memories of his budding sexuality and his current battle in late middle age to reach beyond his cloistered, idealized, but dissatisfying existence.

Charles Bremer (Norman Kaye) is a very rich man who lives in a gated mansion filled, museum-/mausoleum-like, with fine art and flowers. He appears to leave his home rarely and only to perform a limited number of tasks. He plays the organ at the church across the street, goes to the flower market, takes walks in the park to gaze upon nude bronzes, posts letters daily to his dead mother, takes an art class, and visits his psychiatrist. Into this narrowly circumscribed existence are admitted a homespun philosopher of a postman, a clumsy maid, and most recently, a young girl named Lisa (Alyson Best) who we see in the opening scene leave her slum neighborhood, go with Charles to his home, and strip naked while an aria from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor plays in the background. Her performance rouses him out of his easy chair and over to the church, where his orgasmic cacophony of organ music shakes the church walls.

Indeed, this is the only kind of voluntary orgasm Charles has ever known. Flashbacks to his childhood show his elegant mother (Hilary Kelly), a flower lover who bears a passing resemblance to Lisa, his severe father (Werner Herzog), and several sexually charged scenes in which a dour-looking young Charles (James Stratford) sees his mother naked, follows his irresistible urge to place his hand on the enormous bosom of one of his aunts, and walks closely behind another to breathe in her scent. Invariably, his explorations result in physical punishment from his father. These silent vignettes, shot in Super 8, represent dreams that help Charles guide his money-grubbing psychiatrist (Bob Ellis) in prescribing cures for his sexual inhibitions.

Lisa lives with a selfish, cocaine-addicted painter named David (Chris Haywood) who constantly pesters her for money. When she starts bringing home $100 more each Wednesday, he learns that she is stripping for Charles and starts to scheme about ways to get his hands on more. Lisa says she likes Charles, though certainly she is looking for a place to stay to get away from David. One day she shows up for their appointment with a black eye. Charles has already ceased to see her as an anonymous body upon which he can project sexual fantasies. He sees her as his little flower, crying, and “salt water is no good for flowers."

Charles goes to David’s studio to see if he can legitimately give him money through the purchase of one of his paintings. Unfortunately for David, Charles considers his modern art coarse. Later, he admonishes Lisa that David is a much worse artist than she had led him to believe. “He can’t paint flowers." Something else must be done to relieve Lisa of the burden of David. The film takes an unexpectedly comic turn that is as delightfully wicked as it is surprising.

Watching Charles is, at times, like watching a child. His sexual nature has been frozen in childhood. He finds sweet scents and flowers erotic. He enjoys touching bronze nudes, even tries to buy one from a very peculiar metalworker. He is advised by his psychiatrist to watch himself in the mirror and try to masturbate. He considers watching Lisa and her lesbian friend Jane (Sarah Walker) touch and kiss, out of curiosity. He’s very innocent of what intimate human contact looks like because he hasn’t seen much and never engages in it himself. Instead, his mind has turned the guilt his father made him feel into a fetish for beauty that is, nonetheless, without real human intercourse of any kind. My companions at the festival thought he was quite like the character of Chance in Being There, but I didn’t see him that way. Charles’ innocence is not total; he is not ignorant of what sex is. If he reminded me of anyone, it was the guilt-ridden Francis from Exotica whose experience of tragedy inhibited his ability to relate normally to others. Loneliness drove both men to try to experience some contact, some warmth.

Charles, however, is a singular man among men. It is perhaps instructive to know that Lucia di Lammermoor deals with the last surviving member of a Scottish clan who lives in a lonely tower by the sea. He gains the love of a woman, the sister of his sworn enemy, and hopes to marry her to heal the rift. Alas, the plan ends in tragedy, and heaven must be the place of their union. Cox’s haunting last shot brilliantly communicates Charles’—and all men’s—essential longing. l

9th Annual Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival

Come Early Morning (2006)
Director: Joey Lauren Adams

By Marilyn Ferdinand

“It’s going to sound like the biggest cliché in the world, but there are no good parts for women. Well, a few, and Nicole Kidman gets them." So said Joey Lauren Adams about her motivation for writing and directing Come Early Morning, a mature and particular look at a woman in her 30s who has a successful career and a dysfunctional emotional life.

Adams’ own career as an actress should have taken off following her breakout performance in Kevin Smith’s 1997 film Chasing Amy. However, already “aging" out of contention at the ripe old age of 30, Adams envisioned herself on The Surreal Life and decided that rather than gripe about it, she’d move in another direction. In the process, she harnessed the power of another underutilized actress, Ashley Judd, to create a real life on screen.

Judd plays Lucy Fowler, a partner in an Arkansas contracting firm whose m.o. with men is to hook up with one at a bar, get drunk, get laid, and vanish early in the morning. The film opens with Lucy after one such tryst, stumbling into her boots, suffering a slap from the man who doesn’t take kindly to catching her making a getaway and insisting to the hotel clerk that the room be placed on her charge card. She catches a cab to the house she shares with her roommate Kim (Laura Prepon). After throwing her panties in the garbage, Lucy catches a little rest before she has to go into work. We see her on a building site with her partner Owen (Stacy Keach) and watch her demonstrate how well she knows her business.

Lucy frequents a tavern called The Forge, where she likes to listen to the traditional country jukebox and play pool with Eli (Wally Welch). One afternoon, a woman comes into the bar and starts baiting Lucy about the fact that she has two fathers. The catcalls escalate into a full-blown fight, and a young man in the bar pulls Lucy off the other woman and drags her outside. His name is Cal (Jeffrey Donovan), and he draws her attention to the nasty cut on her face. She drives off, giving him an interested look.

Lucy has two grandmothers whom she visits regularly. Nana (Diane Ladd) lives with the verbally abusive Ed (Pat Corley), and every visit is fraught with complaints. Doll (Candyce Hinkle) lives in an assisted living complex, and Lucy drives her to the grave of her nasty husband. When Lucy asks her why she still goes, Doll answers, “You got no say over your heart, Lucy. And if you think you do, you'd best not let yours roam too far." Lucy has been taking this advice all her life, though she hadn’t heard it before from Doll.

When she meets up with Cal again, he asks for her phone number. “Why?" she asks uncomprehendingly. “So I can call you," he answers. “For a date?" she says in cynical disbelief, then says she’s in the book. It is only at this point that she reluctantly tell him her full name. When they finally do go out, she brings Kim along and resists making small talk. They end the evening as all Lucy’s evenings end, in bed, with Lucy making her early exit the next morning. But she finds ways to pursue him anyway.

Despite Lucy’s same-old same-old routine, she seems on the verge of a change. When she learns from Doll that her distant father Lowell (Scott Wilson) was over to replace her VCR, Lucy finds out from Doll where he is living and that he is attending a new church. Lucy gingerly makes contact with Lowell and asks if she can attend church with him. This she does for several weeks, and we learn that the congregation is a caring one, and the preacher (Ray MacKinnon) doles out some pretty good advice.

Predictably, Lucy’s romance with Cal is almost too painful for her. When they make love, Lucy sober this time, Cal’s gentle stroking of her body in comfort brings Lucy to tears. She needs to find a way to ruin it, to maintain her independence. When her business partner decides to take a job that’s less demanding, she feels momentarily abandoned. She runs to the preacher and wonders why God would be so hard on the little child she was, that she’s tired of knocking and knocking on a door that doesn't answer. The preacher advises her to stop knocking and just walk in. This she does literally with her alcoholic father, and listens to him play his guitar, his offering and hiding place. Lucy finally seems to realize that everyone has limitations, and that you just have to work with them.

Ashley Judd gives a nuanced, mature performance that feels real at all times. Bravely, by Hollywood standards, she eschews glamour for direct sunlight on a naked face. She finds a number of interesting mannerisms, such as the way she stands away from a door when she knocks, that make this character completely individual. Her supporting cast members give fully fleshed performances, too, even in small roles. Laura Prepon as Kim, for example, sticks to her hopes for a real relationship. “Don’t you ever get tired of waiting by the phone for some joker to call?" Lucy mocks. “Don’t you ever not?" Kim shoots back.

This film doesn’t offer all the answers, and Lucy doesn’t solve all her problems by falling in love and getting the guy. Her father doesn’t suddenly warm up, and her grandparents don’t realize they’ve been selfish. Lucy has emotional problems, but she’s not a child. She understands through trial and error and utter desperation that she has to figure out how to make peace and learn to be happy. We don’t know what life will look like for her when she finds her way, but Lucy gives us hope that she—and we—will get there. l

9th Annual Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival

Sadie Thompson (1928)
Director: Raoul Walsh

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The world of cinema has lost a great many films over the years to decomposition. Sadie Thompson, a film that held such fascination for movie studios and fans alike that it was remade twice, nearly left us. The only surviving print was kept in the vault of United Artists partner Mary Pickford, whose company distributed the film, and it was badly damaged—nearly the entire final reel of the film disintegrated. Fortunately, Kino International restored and released the film on video in 1987, using still images from the private collections of the film’s cast and crew, as well as the scenario and notes from director Raoul Walsh to create intertitles. Kino also commissioned a score for the video release by Joseph Turrin. Roger Ebert chose Sadie Thompson as the silent film to be featured at this year's Overlooked Film Festival.

The Somerset Maugham story of a prostitute on the run going head to head with a moral reformer certainly has spice, but the special attraction of this first and arguably best rendition is Gloria Swanson. This charismatic actress who became a huge star in the silent era, imbues Sadie with exactly the right degree of natural spunk, fear, and madness.

At the end of a long voyage from San Francisco to Pago Pago, a crewman asks passengers to sign his remembrance book. Reformer Alfred Davidson (Lionel Barrymore) and his severe wife (Blanche Friderici) signal their characters by writing of damnation and the need for repentance. Another couple, the Angus McPhails (Charles Lane and Florence Midgley) temper this response with a plea for tolerance. Finally, Sadie gets her chance to crack wise to the crewman and write a defiant message of her own. In this humorous way, we know exactly who we’re dealing with.

At the dock, bored marines watch the new arrivals, brightening considerably when Sadie comes down the gangplank. The Davidsons are appalled as Sadie is swarmed by men, and head off to the guest house at which they normally stay on their visits to the islands. Davidson has made himself a very powerful man, and detours to the governor’s office for an update on the state of the natives’ souls. Sadie is waiting for a ship to take her to a job in Apia, Samoa, but learns the ship is quarantined for smallpox and will not leave for at least 10 days. Sadie runs from the ship and starts examining herself for spots, carelessly inviting the marines, particularly one named Tim O’Hara (Raoul Walsh), to help her look. They return her to the guest house, owned by a trader named Joe Horn (James A. Marcus) and his hefty native wife Ameena (Sophia Artega). Sadie sweet-talks him into letting her stay just until the boat sails. The marines clean out a store room off the sitting room for her. To thank them, she invites them to listen to some jazz records on her victrola. The Davidsons, of course, are scandalized.

Naturally, Davidson decides to make trouble for Sadie, certain he has seen her in the red-light district of San Francisco. He uses his influence with the governor to have her deported. Sadie is panic-stricken at the thought of returning to San Francisco; she eventually confesses to Davidson that she is wanted by the law, though she swears her innocence. Tim proposes to Sadie and tells her to go to Sydney instead, where his friends will look after her until his tour is up. In a pure act of sadism, Davidson refuses to allow the change of destination. Panic and the incessant rain on the roof sends Sadie into a nervous collapse, putting her at Davidson’s mercy.

Swanson is absolutely perfect in every scene. She affects a jaunty walk that signals her sexual freedom and toughness, but we watch her prepare it every time she must confront Davidson. She’s actually fragile and certainly not the hardened prostitute Davidson would have us believe her to be. In fact, she probably just likes men, and the feeling is mutual. It’s not hard to see how Tim could propose to her, whether she has a past or not. She also has a believable temper. When Davidson tells her he is having her deported, she flies off the handle, unable to be stopped by a roomful of marines. She swears a blue streak, as evidenced by Mrs. Davidson and Mrs. McPhail running from the room holding their ears. The scene is funny but also intense. Sadie may be scared, but she doesn’t bend easily. Nonetheless, when her paranoia finally gets the better of her, we have been well prepared for her break in character by these small moments of uncertainty.

Walsh is a perfect foil for Swanson, the two exhibiting chemistry and a playfulness that make us believe that their short romance could blossom into love so quickly. At one point, as Sadie wonders whether Tim could ever be serious about a good-time girl like her, Tim says his buddy married a girl from San Francisco. "Where in San Francisco?" Sadie asks. "Where they hang the red lanterns." Sadie assumes a look of foreboding. "And are they happy?" Yes, Tim replies, and they have two kids. His lack of judgment reassures Sadie and brings out the softness in her. Therefore, when Sadie sends Tim away at Davidson’s instigation, it is a truly heartbreaking scene. And what of Davidson? Lionel Barrymore has a cunning face that makes this professional meddler into something quite twisted and evil. I thought he chewed the scenery a bit—a Barrymore family flaw—but his fall from grace, seen only in still photos and two brief film clips that survived from the last reel, are chilling.

The entire Turrin score was performed by the Champaign Urbana Symphony Orchestra and conducted with a sure touch for movie accompaniment—an art unto itself—by Steven Larson. This, my first film of the festival, was an absolute joy and revelation. l

Sweethearts (1996)
Director: Aleks Horvat

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Since the dawn of cinema, there have been screenwriters who wanted to tell their stories but couldn’t get anyone to back them. These folks form the core of what we now know as the independent film movement. Writer/directors as diverse as Robert Altman, Woody Allen, and Oscar Micheaux have given us some mixed-quality, quirky, but always individual films. In the 1990s and 2000s, however, the independent film movement started turning out a fair number of writer/directors whose films were, well, kind of all the same. Some had been to film school, so they knew how to make a good-looking film, even on a budget, and they had good enough secondary and post-secondary educations to write well. Quentin Tarantino is, perhaps, the god of this brand of independent filmmaker, because he turned the screenplay into the star.

Invariably, such films like to dwell on fraught modern relationships (even Tarantino’s), and many of these films are very watchable because they engage the literate cineaste’s mind and appreciation for the well-turned phrase. They also attract interesting talent, who like having some great lines to interpret. But after viewing one of these works, I always seem to find myself sitting for a couple of minutes in a short, dumbfounded silence, then drawling, “Wellllll," and realizing I have nothing more to say. With a few of these films, I also have the urge to take a hot, cleansing shower. Dylan Kidd’s 2002 movie Roger Dodger had this effect on me, though I admit I still remember it for a very brief, but touching cameo by Showgirls pariah Elizabeth Berkley.

Sweethearts is the love child of Aleks Horvat, who clearly thought that writing about his (I'd lay money that the movie is semiautobiographical) misadventures in dating using the personals column would strike a chord with a young, arthouse audience. I think he was right, of course. Dating seemed to be going the way of the analog camera in the late 90s, and an epidemic of socially retarded singles made the personals seem like the only option for “singletons". To up the interest ante, Horvat places the opening credits over a personals column upon which an unseen woman is circling and crossing out ads, while a cacophony of voice messages of men making their case sounds in the background. The credits end with the unseen woman loading a gun and laying it across the red-marked newspaper. OK, you got my attention, Aleks.

Cut to Arliss (Mitch Rouse) who is getting ready for a date with a woman who responded to his ad. He’s nervous and cuts his neck shaving. This, he feels, bodes ill for the rendezvous. He always gets involved with nut jobs. He’s afraid that’s the only kind of woman he will ever attract. We watch him go into a coffeehouse named Asylum—of course, it means the crazy place, not the place of refuge. He looks around the room for someone who matches the description the woman gave him during their brief phone chat. He goes to the barista (Margaret Cho) to order a cappuccino. “Double or single?" she asks and then launches into how she can tell a double- from a single-shot guy in pure Cho shtick. Arliss manages to insult her by calling her Chinese. “Oh, now I look Chinese?" The whole scene is quirky, in a bad way.

Eventually, Arliss settles into the dark recesses of Asylum. A dark-haired woman (Janeane Garofalo) dressed in black sits at the next table. She asks him who he’s waiting for. Someone named Jasmine. He thinks she'll be wearing a flowered peasant-type dress. They talk a bit more, and then a very large woman in just such a dress comes in and takes a seat near them. Arliss freaks, and the woman jumps all over him for demanding a slender woman when this overweight lady looks completely wonderful to her. He impulsively kisses the woman to demonstrate that they are together. The woman invites the larger one over to the table. Arliss blubbers incoherently until her equally large boyfriend shows up to whisk her away for a lovely evening. Very soon, Arliss discovers the woman he has been sitting with is Jasmine.

The two embark on what becomes an all-night date at the coffeehouse filled with quirks (Arliss keeps walking in on their waiter [Bobcat Goldthwaite] “exploring his sexual possibilities" with a porn magazine), a revelation of Jasmine’s bipolar manic-depression, a gunshot, and lots and lots more coffee. Arliss, of course, falls for another crazy woman who has behaved in a completely inappropriate way in drawing him into an impossible situation because she didn’t want to spend her birthday alone.

Always an extremely appealing and thoughtful actress, Janeane Garofalo is superb in this film—funny, intelligent, poignant, and resolute. Rouse keeps up with her, but ends up coming off as fairly self-pitying, probably a result of the way the part was written and directed. After the first scene, Cho drops her Asian routine and becomes a fairly normal barista. Goldthwaite’s character adds nothing to the show, but I suppose Cho needed a foil at certain moments so that we aren’t completely immersed in this wallowfest. I was very turned off by the way Jasmine’s predicament was handled, but Garofalo almost pulls it out in the way she assures Arliss that he can’t handle her illness because she’s been trying for 30 years and can’t. The line reading is so true for her character, even as her selfish use of Arliss seems false. But don’t expect much more. You know what liars folks from the personals are! l

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
At Land (1944)
Director: Maya Deren

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Most film buffs know the dream world of Surrealism primarily through the works of Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau. These two gifted and original artists established a vocabulary for the irrational that has been adopted by many Western filmmakers over the years, most famously, David Lynch. One lesser-known genius of Surrealist filmmaking who deserves to be known more widely is Maya Deren.

A Russian Jewish émigré to America during the 1920s, Deren made a mere handful of short or incomplete films, usually in collaboration with her first husband Alexander Hammid, Surrealist supreme Marcel Duchamp, and/or second husband Teiji Ito. It is tempting to infer that she was not the true auteur of these films, but rather a collaborator with these men who provided everything from music to cinematography. Her work, however, clearly reveals a feminine poetry that tracks closely with the work of another genius woman of the cinema, Leni Riefenstahl.

Most of Deren’s completed works are 15 minutes long or less, and many can be seen in one sitting without changing the DVD player. What one encounters in an evening of Maya Deren is an exploration of how everyday objects and movements can imprint on our psyches and float freely through a filter of imagination, dreaming, and emotion. Like Riefenstahl, Deren was fascinated with the human form (Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera [1945] is reminiscent of Olympiad and Riefenstahl’s photography of the human form) and nature as a sanctuary from male-dominated human commerce and a source of primitive power. Both Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land feature the exotically beautiful Deren, but differ in the elements she confronts.

In Meshes, a black-cloaked figure drops a flower on the sidewalk. A figure whose face we do not see picks the flower up, climbs some stairs to a house, removes a key from a handbag, and then drops it down the stairs. The figure runs down to retrieve it, inserts it in the door, and enters the home. Newspapers are strewn on the floor. A phone is off the hook. The figure replaces the receiver in its cradle. A loaf of bread with a knife slipped into it sits on the dining table. The figure climbs some stairs to the bedroom, then returns to the front room. We finally see the figure. It is Deren. She sits in a chair, places the flower in her crotch, moves her hand up her body and over her breast. We see an extreme close-up of her eye, looking aroused, but it flutters closed. The same set of circumstances repeats. When the black-cloaked figure walks with the flower along the sidewalk, Deren makes chase, watching herself through a window in the upstairs bedroom. As the films progresses, another Maya enters the scenario. Later, a man, broken glass, a black hand of death. Each replay takes us further and further inside Deren’s fears and to a shattering conclusion. The silent film's drama is emphasized by the emphatic score by Ito, evoking Japanese ghost stories while mixing images of Mexico's Day of the Dead.

At Land, an entirely silent film, begins in the unconscious, with rolling waves crashing on shore and over the body of Deren. She struggles from her primordial sleep and climbs a twisted knot of driftwood to emerge into a dining room lined with fashionable society people. She crawls through thickets of shrubs, though it appears that she may actually be traversing the length of the long table, unseen by the diners. At the end of the table, a man and a woman are playing chess. It appears Deren can move the pieces with her mind, and she sends one piece plummeting off the table. We next see her chasing the piece down a crag, into a tide pool. She retrieves the piece and steps onto the beach, joining two women who are playing chess. She caresses and pulls their hair while they smile appreciatively. Then she flees down the beach, her footprints heavy in the wet sand.

Particularly feminine symbols and emotions can be seen throughout these two films: water as the unconscious, a flower as symbolic of female genitalia, the homely loaf of bread stabbed by a murderous anger, the desire to coopt the male world of logic, represented by the chess piece, in an all-female domain. Both films feature a feminine trio. In Meshes, Deren herself forms a trinity of conflict; in At Land, she is joined by two other women in a much more harmonious assemblage. Significantly, perhaps, Deren has a male protagonist in Meshes who is a source of sexual desire as well as discord. Seeing both films in succession gives the viewer a hint of Deren’s struggle with the animus, but relative peace with her own femininity.

And this is the significant advance Deren makes both on the idealized views of men and women created by Riefenstahl in her propaganda and her mountain films (The Blue Light, for example) and the male-centric films of Buñuel and Cocteau, which are sympathetic to women but only through the lens of male regard. Deren’s complementary point of view is a crucial addition to Surrealism and a humanist counterbalance to the only other significant female director of the era. I find Deren's films extremely satisfying experiences, telling my side of the story, so to speak, in the vast, collective unconscious that is cinema. l

Alice (1990)
Director: Woody Allen

By Marilyn Ferdinand

In the world that is independent cinema, Woody Allen has his own peculiar place. Neither controversial in his subject choices, nor graphically violent, esoteric, or revolutionary, his only seeming reason for being outside the Hollywood establishment is his insistence on living and working in New York. Unlike his fellow New Yorker, Martin Scorsese, Allen’s focus on a fairly circumscribed set of New Yorkers—primarily the rich and famous—has not led to any great human insights. Allen is a comic, of course, and one does not expect the types of catharsis from a comedy that one does from a drama. Yet, the one-dimensionality of Allen’s characters and concerns, far from showing us what NOT to be, lull us into believing that his fatuous band of neurotics are somehow endearing and, well, so like us.

In his tribute to Alice in Wonderland, Allen again casts his woman of the moment—in this instance, Mia Farrow—as Alice Tate, a simple Catholic married to psychiatrist Doug Tate (William Hurt), a member of a fabulously wealthy, high-society family of New York. When we first meet Alice, she’s bustling about her luxury apartment as though she really had something important to do. We are made to envy and perhaps sympathize a bit with her panic over whether to pick the children up from school herself or have the maid do it, the types of skin creams she is using, whether she’ll keep her personal trainer waiting, and other such privileges that the idle rich housewives who populate Woody’s World indulge to keep themselves in good trophy-wife condition. Of course, Alice isn’t young anymore. Her husband of 15 years treats her with absentminded indifference, though he has very strong opinions about keeping her from becoming anything more than she is. Alice is troubled with back pain, but her specialists can find nothing wrong. Obviously, her problem is her life, not her sacroliliac.

At a day spa, Alice meets her friend Nina (Robin Bartlett), who is never happier than when dishing on the affairs of their friends. Alice confesses that she is attracted to a divorced father she sees at her children’s school. Nina is hoping for something really juicy, but the religious Alice has only sinned in her heart. Then Alice asks Nina’s advice about her back pain, and Nina recommends an acupuncturist/herbalist named Dr. Yang (Keye Luke, in his last role). After Alice receives two more recommendations about the good doctor and his miracle cures (“He cleared up her vaginal tumors practically overnight."), she visits his office in a rundown building in Chinatown whose walls she avoids touching with prissy distaste. Naturally, the wise Dr. Yang diagnoses the problem as in her head and her heart. He gives her a packet of herbs. Later, at a couture shop, she has a glass of water brought to her, dumps the herbs in, mixes them just so, and drinks them down.

Alice goes to retrieve her children from school. While she is seated, waiting for them to be brought to her, the man of her fantasies sits next to her. His name is Joe (Joe Mantegna) and he is a jazz musician. Alice suddenly becomes very seductive. “Tenor sax?" she asks. “Why yes," says Joe. “What number reed do you use?" Alice continues to chat in this intimate manner and eventually makes a date to meet him the next day at the penguin house at the zoo. Before leaving, she says, “When I first heard Coltrane blow soprano, it opened up a whole new world of harmonics for me." Later, Alice can’t believe what she said. “I hate jazz!" she exclaims.

With the help of Dr. Yang’s rare and wonderful herbs, Alice embarks on a journey of discovery. She revisits her first Ebenezer-Scrooge-like moment of compromise when she rejected a loving suitor (Alec Baldwin) to gain security, uncovers the reasons for her passionless marriage, and explores her creative side with the help of her Muse (hilariously played by Bernadette Peters). She embarks on an affair with Joe and has a chance to hear her idol, Mother Theresa; she brings her children to the lecture because she fears that she is not teaching them the proper values. She also ends up reconciling with her sister Dorothy (Blythe Danner), who has stayed true to her more proletarian roots and was always able to see their parents for who they were, not the idealized images Alice has preserved. In the end, Alice comes to know herself better and reach for the things she really wants out of life.

There is a lot to like in Alice, particularly the actors who breathe life into this fable. Mia Farrow is, of course, playing Woody Allen’s idealized vision of who he thinks she is; this is something he always does to his paramours/leading ladies. Yet Farrow brings a particularity to Alice’s timidity and a genuine poignancy to her feelings that her husband loved her once but does no more. I wouldn’t have thought he ever loved her—she just seems like good wife material—but Farrow made me believe it up until the point where she doesn’t believe it herself. The moment is a painful one.

Keye Luke as Dr. Yang takes a close-to-offensive caricature (indeed, when Alice walks into his office and joins a den of opium smokers, I couldn’t believe Allen thought that was a good idea) and brings a doctorly certainty to his ministrations. Robin Bartlett is a spot-on shrew whose grapevine I’d definitely want to listen to. Small roles are memorably filled by the wonderful Judy Davis as Joe’s ex-wife, Julie Kavner as Alice’s interior decorator, and Gwen Verdon as Alice’s mother.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t have the wit and sparkle of such classic 1930s comedies about the spoiled rich as My Man Godfrey and Holiday that Allen clearly is trying to emulate. The attempts at humor are pretty bad. For example, when Alice’s mother tries to explain her alcoholism, she is given the rotten line: “I couldn't help it darling. You know I couldn't resist the taste of salt around the rim of a glass." Putting most of the women in red, black, and white—the “in" colors in New York fashion that year (oh yes, I remember!)—and having Alice wear nothing but those colors when out of the house isn’t really a witty way to say these women are sheep. It’s not even visually interesting. Allen continues with his creepy voyeurism on screen by allowing Joe to drink some of Alice’s invisibility potion and spy on a supermodel in a dressing room and his ex-wife at her psychiatrist’s. Allen’s script doesn’t rise about the level of a safe and solid Broadway show by Neil Simon—so tepid, so condescending, so New York.

I used to love Woody Allen’s films when I was younger and knew less about life; as I’ve grown older, their appeal has faded badly. Alice is one film I can still enjoy, but it only reaffirms for me that Allen is a filmmaker who missed his chance. He was made for mainstream Hollywood. l

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

Raging Bull (1980)

By Roderick Heath

Martin Scorsese was at his lowest ebb. The failure of New York, New York was the first big blow of his career. He indulged his cocaine habit whilst making the rock-doc The Last Waltz, and was finally hospitalized following an overdose. To stimulate his friend’s creativity and, Scorsese felt, saving his life, Robert De Niro pressed him to make a film of the autobiography of Jake LaMotta, one-time middleweight champion of the world and another Bronx-Italian prodigy. Marty, who hated sports movies, virulently declined at first, but De Niro’s continuing passion for the subject eventually convinced the burnt-out auteur to film the subject. Scorsese got Mardik Martin to pen a screenplay; Martin did months of research and turned out a regular biopic script before himself dropping out from exhaustion. Scorsese then got Paul Schrader to redraft it; Schrader broke up the structure, injected dashes of his dirty sensibility, and combined two major characters, LaMotta’s brother Joey and friend Peter Savage into one. Scorsese and De Niro then sat themselves down and spent six weeks making the script exactly what they wanted. What they wanted was described by UA executives as a portrait of “a cockroach."

Whatever the qualities of NY, NY, it was clearly not the future of Scorsese’s career. So he stripped his approach back to basics; Raging Bull reinvents his early style – black-and-white photograph; flatly-lit, long-take, improvised scenes; experimental film editing. It was the first time since Who’s That Knocking On My Door? that Scorsese was allowed to work with his film school chum Thelma Schoonmaker, who had been a victim of absurd union regulations. Schoonmaker’s touch is instantly, virulently, eye-catching. Raging Bull is set thoroughly in the milieu of Scorsese’s childhood (the story begins proper in 1941, the year before his birth), and details a scene, wispily remembered, of small Bronx flats with the constantly intrusive neighborly noise, marital rows, baby whines, tinny radios.

Raging Bull has an ironic style. The distancing veneer of gleaming black-and-white offering one of the most vivid historical recreations on film, with almost every shot seeming fit for Life magazine. The elegant music with which Pietro Mascagni dreamily fills the film suggests a deep sorrow at the transience of glory, the brutal beauty of life, the dulling of youthful quality, and stands in raw opposition of the tawdry humanity Scorsese filmed. In contrast to the starkly shot personal scenes, the intricately choreographed, expressionistic, anti-naturalistic fights are almost like horror movie moments. Scorsese uses sound effects and slow motion to turn Jake, and later Sugar Ray Robinson, into prowling beasts of prey; steam and smoke weave gothic fogs.

Jake LaMotta. Who is this brawling hunk of masochistic meat, this man who became famous for the amount of punishment he could dish out and take in a ring? In many ways he’s masculinity run amok. He fuels his abilities in the ring with resentment and sexual frustration that eventually curdles into sexual paranoia. His most admirable quality – his long-standing refusal to kowtow to the Mafia – springs from venality. “You gonna let them take my money?" he demands of his brother-manager Joey (Joe Pesci), before clobbering him in a sparring session, when Joey’s connected friend Salvy Batts (Frank Vincent) comes sniffing around at the behest of local godfather Tommy Como (Nicholas Colasanto).

The singular quality of Scorsese’s oeuvre, especially for an American director – his willingness to make films of less-than-admirable, even despicable people – is at its apotheosis here. Even Peckinpah tended to love his bastards; Scorsese has an endlessly unblinking eye for the hypocrisies, thuggery, betrayals, cruelties, and pathos of LaMotta’s life and of the culture that surrounds him.

In the first scene of the proper narrative, we meet LaMotta, 1941 model, losing and winning at the same time – the film’s keynote of his character – when he knocks down a black boxer but loses to him on points. This provokes a riot from the fight fans; chairs and popcorn fly to the roof, punches are thrown, a woman is knocked to the ground and trampled by the blood-lusting crowd. So often throughout the film, the corners of the tapestry Scorsese weaves are crowded with evidence of some violence or sleaze; even in the legendary Copacabana (something of an icon for Scorsese, who returns to it in GoodFellas), there’s the evidence of fights just finished or just about to start.

After the travesty of the ’41 fight, Jake, in one of the lengthy domestic sequences that anchor the film, starts an argument with his frazzled first wife Irma (Lori Anne Flax) that boils over into a painful, hilariously accurate moment of marital cacophony. She’s a hard-as-nails, standard-issue, Italian-American woman who lets duty take her only so far before she erupts. Jake, barely concerned or even interested, frets over his tiny hands, the fact he’ll never fight Joe Louis (whom he thinks is the best there is and whom he thinks he is better than), and finally eggs Joey to punch him in the face. Jake lives in a dialogue with the flesh. He understands people and himself, feels and expresses through the way he comes into contact with their meat. He subjects a young boxer, Tony Janiro (Kevin Mahon), to a disfiguring beating because his second wife Vicky (Cathy Moriarty, in her film debut) called him good-looking (“He ain’t pretty no more," Como notes), but also lets himself take a brutal beating for many rounds in another bout, to pay for a row with Vicky, before turning around and clobbering his opponent.

The spirituality and eroticism of punishment of the flesh echoes long through Scorsese. Vicky’s kissing his bruise-riddled body has its parallel in Cameron Diaz kissing Leonardo DiCaprio’s scars in Gangs of New York. Jake is an ancient kind of human, inarticulate and foolish, macho bordering on insane – but when it comes to that language of meat, he’s Aristotle. After he retires from boxing, Jake enters showbiz, which then had a strange, symbiotic relationship with boxing.

Joey, Jake’s usually stabilizing influence, says to one of his children at the dinner table, “If I see you put your hands on that plate one more time, I’m gonna stab you with this knife, d’ye hear me?" Yes, this is the familiar world of working-class fatherhood. The film’s brute honesty about what constitutes family life in this period for these men is best seen as Jake and Joey’s respective wives (Theresa Saldana is the other) sit like decorous dolls on the floor tending the children and Jake walks in and pinions his wife on the floor with kisses.

Jake falls for Vicky when she’s a 15-year-old nymphet (Joey’s already taken her out and tried to make her), the gimlet-eyed, platinum-haired minx who promises intricate sexual possibilities and delivers them. She’s initially one of Salvy’s entourage, and for Jake, it’s partly a pleasurable, infuriating challenge to steal her away from that representative of the unseen influence that’s caging his talents. Vicky’s barely more articulate than Jake; in fact, she’s an icy, careless youth who is overwhelmed by Jake’s sheer physicality (his seduction of her is almost paternal). She enjoys provoking and indulging his sexuality, even as she grows up and finds the oppressive quality of his adoration intolerable. Jake’s desire for Vicky is identified as an illness central to this and any hypermacho culture, which delights in asserting sexual ownership of adolescent women to simultaneously leash and exploit them. Jake lives an American dream riddled with familiar American termites. Is there any more pathetic yet typical, personally apt a comeuppance, than losing his long-worked-for nightclub by mistakenly aiding sleazy businessmen get laid with two underage schoolgirl hookers?

Jake is jailed and strains at a bleak cell, punching the wall in howling agony. He has by this time destroyed any personal support. Once upon a time, Joey put his neck on the line when he found Vicky back in Salvy’s company at the Copa; reacting to Salvy’s sheer cheek, Joey went berserk, hitting Salvy in the face with a glass and slamming his head repeatedly into a door, the height of the film’s violent absurdity. Yet later, Jake, aging, getting fat and lazy after finally gaining his title, starts off trying to fix his television, prodding Vicky over her trips out and Joey over the near-forgotten Copa incident; slowly and malevolently, Jake works himself into a jealous fury (“D’you fuck my wife?"), slapping and threatening Vicky until she spits back confirmations, “I sucked all their cocks, whaddaya want me to tell you?!", going to Joey’s house and, in front of his family, putting Joey’s head through a door and cold-cocking Vicky. She can forgive him, but Joey can’t. If Jake can’t find a real opponent, he’ll make a shadow one. Even many years later, when Jake’s a washed-up comic, he tries to reconcile with Joey without actually apologizing; in a sticky, cringe-worthy moment, he draws his not exactly thrilled brother into an embrace. Vicky’s already kicked his butt out before the nightclub arrest over infidelities; to her chagrin, he barges into her house to gouge jewels from his championship belt to pay his bail.

Jake breaks just about every heart to come in contact with him, but then, his is broken a few times in the film. He feels the long period when, in resisting the mob, he can’t get his title shot, as a slow, maddening torture. To get his shot, he gives into Como’s clear declarations and throws a fight to Billy Fox (Eddie Mustafa Muhammad); he can’t fake it, and afterwards is reduced to a blubbering mess. Here, and in the jailhouse, Jake’s ability to inflict suffering on others seems tame compared to the suffering he generates for himself when his clear, simple, natural capacity for violence is manipulated and betrayed. As a boxer, he’s finished off by Robinson, who, in their last bout, destroys LaMotta, aging, out of shape, having lost Joey’s counsel. Robinson crushes his nose, destroys his face, and tears him down to a bare trunk of masculinity; his flying blood decorates the judges. Still, his sliver of unbowed triumph: “You never got me down, Ray!"

De Niro gained his second (and, to date, last) Oscar for his performance, probably more for his commitment to gaining and losing weight. His LaMotta is a prowling, growling, dead-eyed creature when not in the ring (he reminds you of Quint’s description of sharks in Jaws), then, in the ring, quite literally the raging bull. Only Pesci keeps pace with him; it’s amusing to watch Pesci beating the crap out of Frank Vincent (which he’ll repeat, worse, in GoodFellas) knowing that Pesci and Vincent were, before the film, working as a comedy duo; the underemployed, demoralized Pesci had to be talked into appearing in the film.

The final scene has Jake, 1961, rehearsing the taxicab scene from On The Waterfront (the Tao of palookas) for his act, facing himself in a mirror (a scene egregiously copied by director Paul Thomas Anderson at the end of Boogie Nights. Jake has traveled the full arc of American celebrity, not most or least successfully, but most pungently typical, which is perhaps what finally made him interesting to De Niro and Scorsese. Reflected from the distorted eye of LaMotta’s tale is a grotty, tawdry culture that sups money and youth, pride and strength. As such it manages in a more sophisticated and compressed fashion than New York, New York to eviscerate the self-mythologizing fabrications of pop culture. Raging Bull, finally, is a statement of enormous cultural disgust. Scorsese would continue in this vein with his next film, The King of Comedy. With Raging Bull, deconstructing the ugly truths of American celebrity and life, Scorsese ironically reinvented himself. The film’s epilogue, suggesting a form of religious self-realization, also pays tribute to Haig Manoogian, his mentor.

As for LaMotta, he had, in 1961, made a cameo appearance basically as himself in The Hustler, to which Scorsese would make a sequel, The Color of Money. He was helpful with the production, and later watched the film in the company of Vicky. Astounded and horrified, he asked her, “Was I really that bad?"

“No," she replied, “You were worse." l

“Our Backstreets" #14
Julia Sweeney Redux: Letting Go of God

By Marilyn Ferdinand

“There really ARE coincidences!"

Julia Sweeney bellowed this line in amazement right after she confessed her earlier belief that there are no coincidences. It was a funny and oddly moving moment in Sweeney’s new live show Letting Go of God, about her search for and eventual rejection of God. For me, it was also a strange moment. Only about a week ago, I wrote a review of God Said, “Ha!", the 1998 film of her one-woman show in which she recounted the worst year of her life. In the last line of that review, I hoped that she’d provide an update on the Sweeney clan at some point to give us hope and a good laugh. A week to the day after I posted that review, an item in a local paper said she was in town for a two-day run of her new show. I was lucky to get tickets for the next day’s eventually sold-out performance.

The monologue opens with Julia telling us that she had come to the end of a 4-year love affair that caused her so much pain that one night, in deep despair, she cried out to God to help her. This call in the dark set the stage for a deeper exploration of her religion, unexpectedly triggered one day by the appearance of two Mormon missionaries at her door. The usual reaction to pairs of men in white cotton shirts and thin black ties with bibles in their hands is to politely hide in a windowless room until they stop ringing and knocking on the door. Julia, in an altered state by her spiritual need, invites them in. In answer to their first question, she says, yes, she does believe that God loves her with all His (wait a minute, His?, she thinks) might. Eventually they get to the kookier aspects of their religion, at which point they are invited, very politely, to leave. We then get a brief history of God according to the Sweeneys.

Julia Sweeney was raised a devoted Roman Catholic in Spokane, Washington. We learn of her first religious disappointment—feeling gypped that she hadn’t known God wasn’t reading her every thought before she turned 7, the age of reason. She started telling every 0–6 year old she knew that they could be bad all they wanted and God wouldn’t know, but this knowledge seemed to fall on deaf ears.

In later years, she contemplated becoming a nun. Like me, she was completely devoted to the Hayley Mills character in The Trouble with Angels (“I’ve got a scathingly brilliant idea," she intones in a perfect imitation of Mills’ enthusiastic British accent.) Like me, she watched The Song of Bernadette in perfect rapture and walked around with a towel on her head. But when a priest angrily told her, “Don’t be ridiculous," to her request to be an altar boy, she did the one thing Catholics are taught never to do—go up on the altar and TOUCH EVERYTHING.

Returning to her spiritual quest, Julia tries joining a liberal Catholic church and signing up for Bible study. She becomes acquainted with the horrors and caprices of the Old Testament God, then moves on to the New Testament, where she discovers Jesus is angry and impatient more than she remembered him to be from her youthful ardor. Finally, the book of Revelations gives her a White Rabbit experience, and she decides that Catholicism doesn’t really do the job of explaining her faith. She sets off for Bhutan to visit a Buddhist monastery, where she is appalled by children younger than the age of reason turned into monks, and comes to reject Buddhism. Then she tries the glories of nature by sailing to the Galapagos Islands and witnesses cute blue-footed booby babies having their brains pecked out by their stronger sibling. Brrrrrr!

She was a huge fan of Deepak Chopra and his scientific explanation for God’s existence and gushed all over him when they were both guests on a talk show. When she actually takes a class in quantum physics and realizes that it doesn’t do anything to explain intentionality in the creation of the universe, she wants that moment of gushing back so she can say, “Deepak, you’re full of shit!"

Sweeney has a prodigiously inquisitive mind that never let religious dogma—or even the feeling of comfort she got from praying—get in the way of what reason applied to indisputable facts told her. “It’s so hard because invisibility and not really there look so much alike!" She ends up an atheist. When she tells her parents that she no longer believes in God, they seem to take it in stride. But when an AP story titled “Julia Sweeney Comes Out of the Closet—As an Atheist" shows up in the local paper in Spokane, her parents stop talking to her. Her recounting of how they finally reconcile is funny, true, and touching.

Well, we do get that Sweeney clan update. Father Sweeney finally succumbs to emphysema, after a doctor-induced death watch that had been renewed every Christmas for about 20 years. Julia adopts a daughter from China. In raising Mulan, she stresses that it’s comforting to think that Grandpa and their recently deceased cat are together in heaven.

But it’s not real. l

Julia Sweeney is touring her exquisite show around the country. She will be back in Chicago June 16–17 at the Lakeshore Theater, a fine, converted movie theatre run by the ever-friendly Chris and Jessica Ritter. An audio recording of the show is available on CD. I hope a film is in the offing as well.

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

New York, New York (1977)

By Roderick Heath

When the yellow moon begins to bloom / Every night I dream a little dream / And of course Prince Charming is the theme for me / Although I realize as well as you / It is seldom that a dream comes true / To me it’s clear that he’ll appear / Some day he’ll come along / The man I love / And he’ll be big and strong / The man I love / And when he comes my way / I’ll do my best to make him stay… – "The Man I Love," George and Ira Gershwin

Taxi Driver’s surprise success gave Scorsese heft and fame. He was at this time tagged, along with the other young directors taking American cinema by storm—Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, John Carpenter, John Milius, Michael Cimino, John Landis, Peter Bogdanovich, and others—as a “Movie Brat," an epithet that, like the label “Impressionist" about a century earlier, became a rallying cry. If there was a common feature of these directors, it was their argot of total cinema. Their first and almost last point of reference was earlier movies. They reinvigorated Hollywood as a commercial entity, largely due to their willingness, even love, of making genre cinema, in recreating the dream films of their youths. All of them worshipped Fellini and Godard, but Scorsese was just about the only one damn fool enough to want to be them.

Coppola had given the generation its big breakthrough with his canny melding of the cool, studious effects of European art cinema with epic American narrative in the Godfather films. For all these filmmakers, there were differing layers of irony in their attempts to meld auteurism, art cinema, and classic Hollywood. Many of them wanted to take a shot at the total stylisation of the musical. Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, Scorsese’s New York, New York, Coppola’s One From The Heart, Landis’ The Blues Brothers, even Spielberg’s 1941 (which he made for the opportunity to stage a 1940s musical number), were all troubled productions, most of which flopped and dented the Brats’ domination.

Scorsese went to Hollywood to make New York, New York, but remained a New Yorker. For his fellow Movie Brat directors, melding old and new, hip and square, lush and spare was a necessary and entertaining act of cultural synthesis. Scorsese, however, dedicated his new film to examining precisely the gap between life and art, old and new style, façade and critique, spectacle and honesty. New York, New York sets out to be, as Marty called it, a film noir musical inspired in form by such showbiz tales as The Man I Love and A Star Is Born, with a screenplay by Earl Mac Rauch and Mardik Martin. It tells, in livid, often bruising detail, of a marriage between two professional narcissists, Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro) and Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli). Scorsese set out to create the texture of a personal, realistic film in the Cassavetes mould—virtually all dialogue improvised, which made editing the film hellish. The film’s exchanges make up in vivacity what they lack in the arch, contoured crackle of screwball style.

The first half-hour of New York, New York is a virtuoso, near-continual scene. It’s VJ Day in New York, and the streets have erupted in confetti and abandon. Jimmy strips off his uniform, casts it out the window, and hits the town in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt looking for just one thing: to get laid. The jam-packed Rainbow Room, where Benny Goodman and Orchestra are playing, represented the peak of the sweet glamour of the Big Band era as well as the emotional apogee of four years of war. Jimmy tries his pick-up lines on every bird in sight. He is especially drawn to Francine, seated by herself waiting for friends, splendid in her USO uniform. When his every attempt has failed on the hostile, evasive woman, he announces a new plan: “I want to stay here and annoy you!" He does just this for the rest of the film.

Eventually, when Francine’s fellow USO performer Ellen ( Kathie McGinnis) arrives, her date is Jimmy’s friend Eddie di Muzzio (Frank Sivero, soon a Scorsese regular), who has arranged for the four of them to hook up. Jimmy makes sure to cook Francine good before dropping her home. The next day, Francine is trying to find Jimmy to contact Ellen, who’s on the run from killers and shacked up with Eddie. She watches in amusement as Jimmy bluffs the hotel’s concierge, posing as a wounded war veteran (“Anzio!" he hollers, “I was at Anzio!") and skipping out as always without paying his bill after being manhandled. Jimmy’s in the not-so-fine tradition of Scorsese’s keenly observed Noo Yawk flakes; indeed, New York’s riskiest, most original idea is to make such a flake the hero. For Jimmy is, we learn, talented. He contrives to drag Francine to his audition with a Brooklyn club manager (Dick Miller), and shows he’s a mean tenor sax player, but too edgy and modern for the cleaned-up tastes of the time. Francine reveals she’s just as talented; when the manager expresses a desire for something like Maurice Chevalier, Francine launches into a sweet, swinging rendition of “You Brought a New Kind Of Love," which Jimmy accompanies with contrapuntal elegance. They are fused instantly into a double act.

Romance, or something like it, blossoms. After a gig, Jimmy won’t let Francine get out of the taxi they share to her hotel by kissing her. Francine skitters, slips, and flops about, half in the pouring rain, trying to escape his voracious mouth. Francine finds she’s been offered a gig with the touring big band of Frankie Harte (Georgie Auld), and Jimmy is also offered a slot. Unfortunately, he’s gone before she can tell him, so she packs up and goes to join the band whilst sending her agent (the great Lionel Stander) to inform Jimmy. Jimmy promptly skips town and catches up with the band. He almost gets himself assaulted by Hart when he sits in the audience, draws Francine off stage, and won’t let her return. Jimmy is simultaneously declaring his “not love. I like you very much" whilst ranting at being left behind: “You do not leave me! I leave you!"

De Niro gives the greatest portrait of the artist as major-league irritant since Kirk Douglas’s Vincent Van Gogh. Jimmy’s alternately (and often concurrently) charming, funny, annoying, foolish, dishonest, angry, sullen, violent, and prone to larceny, but always propelled by a volcanic creativity and contempt for a world of schmucks, squares, and sycophants. He dances up steps in joy, throws tables in rage, play-acts, fakes out, schmoozes, assaults, and plays some mean jazz. (De Niro learnt sax technique, but the music he makes is by Auld.) He tries to sweep the world and Francine off their feet with the purity of his energy, and it sometimes works.

The tour continues, endless wheeling between towns in the band bus; Harte’s crusty and boozy, but he keeps the band disciplined. He won’t give Jimmy any opportunity to play his arrangements or his bop style, but he often relies on Jimmy to lead the band. Jimmy dabbles in composition, tracing out the bare notes that will become the title tune, whilst Francine writes poetry. After eading one of her poems about him, Jimmy says, “That was it! That was you proposal, get your coat on, put your shoes on, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go," and drags her to a justice of the peace. When Frankie decides he’s fed up, he concedes to Francine that Jimmy “blows a barrelful of tenor, oh, but he’s some kind of pain in the ass!" Jimmy takes over the orchestra, but appears set for a flop until Francine saves their bacon at an audition with a soulful rendition of “The Man I Love." With Francine headlining, the orchestra enjoys major popularity, but Jimmy is quietly furious she’s getting the attention, and he jealously guards his command. One evening Francine dashes off stage and reveals she’s pregnant. She returns to New York to have the child, and the band, saddled with a far less talented singer, Bernice Bennett (Mary Kay Place), whom Jimmy beds in Francine’s absence, soon faces disaster.

Jimmy signs over the band to another leader, and returns to New York to find Francine riding on a wave of good publicity, her agent having secured her recording dates; Jimmy, the arch, proud individualist, feels she’s degrading herself by kowtowing. Jimmy meets up with black musician friends and jams with them at a Harlem club (“Do they let white cats in?" “Just come in the back way."). For the first time, Jimmy’s style is set free and wild in the be-bop milieu. Meanwhile, behind the pyrotechnics of Jimmy’s approach to life, Francine grows, quietly, from defensive doll, to urgently helpful wife, to coolly calculating go-getter who gets it. And Jimmy, without saying a word, knows he’s going to get screwed by life again. The subterranean arc of anxiety in Jimmy begins driving him crazy.

Like many Scorsese narratives, New York, New York is a study of a macho slow burn, except that this one remains entirely interpersonal. Jimmy gets himself thrown out of a nightclub by getting increasingly soused and truculent as Francine is courted by a Decca executive (Lenny Gaines). In one of the film’s most striking images, Jimmy is manhandled along the entry hall lined by bright neon tubes, embodying the electric distress by which he is caged. He and Francine fight in their car, whereupon Francine is stricken and almost loses the baby. When Jimmy visits her in the hospital, they mouth caring statements for each other, but it’s clear what held them together has dissolved.

Francine is much more a question mark than Jimmy. Minnelli often looks dazed by De Niro, appropriate to the character, yet she barely registers when not singing; her trademark acting touches feel by rote in comparison. Francine is, finally, the opportunist of the pair. Insufferable as he is, Jimmy is curiously honest even when bullshitting. Very few films paint so vivid a tale of how colliding egos and intentions can destroy relationships. Jimmy and Francine are scrutinized by the camera like a microscope on a pair of mating insects. In the space of about a year, we have one failed marriage, the kind that Francine, later a big Hollywood star, will sigh over if mentioned by interviewers.

In the film’s epilogue, we are treated to a short film purporting to be Francine’s latest hit movie, Happy Endings, which Jimmy is watching in a theater. Happy Endings is a brilliantly made pastiche of 50s-style musicals, charting the rise of a doe-eyed usher to major star who yearns for her gentlemanly agent Donald (Larry Kerns), who disappeared just when she made it big. Happy Endings presents just such a spin on the New York, New York story that such a musical would have done. The number was originally edited out of Scorsese’s film, and this was credited with its flop; without the sequence, the film’s careful alternation of glam and grit is unbalanced.

Out in the real world, Jimmy’s not doing too badly. He has a spiffy nightclub, his song “New York, New York" has, in its cool jazz incarnation, become Casey Kasem’s theme song, and Francine’s singing her mountain-leveling version in her live shows. Actually, of course, the song is the work of Kander and Ebb. (In the film, Francine’s poetry becomes the lyric, with Jimmy unimpressed: “These vagabond shoes…are longing to stray…and step around the heart of it?" he reads, nose curled up like it’s week-old fish.) Backstage after seeing her sing, Jimmy meets his son, and proposes he and Francine get together later; she agrees. But neither can finally be bothered.

And yet the film around them is a lovingly textured dream, a paean to the total style of classic Hollywood, indeed catching how artifice can sometimes suggest reality better than reality: in the snow-crusted villages the band tours in, where Jimmy and Francine bicker and are married, or the stunning vignette of Jimmy watching, after the first night with Francine, a sailor and girl jitterbugging in the street below a railway line, suggesting an otherworldly staging by Gene Kelly of Alfred Eistenstadt’s Times Square kiss photo. The musical sequences are bravura in style. Marty’s camera (with immeasurable aid from DP Laszlo Kovacs) zooms, dollies, and glides, picking out soloists and darting in on them, then drawing back and painting rich group shots. Scorsese tips his hat to the influence of Michael Powell at several junctions: Jimmy signs into a hotel as “M. Powell;" the scene where Jimmy cracks up in the nightclub is decorated entirely in neon that glows an infernal, maddening red, a favorite signifier for both directors; and the way Happy Endings reflects, in a distinct, distorted mirror, the larger film’s story, is reminiscent of the ballet at the centre of The Red Shoes.

The central couple’s personal separation symbolizes a vital split in American pop culture. Francine goes Hollywood—big, slick, entertaining, vital but without edge, embracing of artifice over truth. Jimmy remains New York—hip, hard, leaning to black culture, small in scale but intently creative, calmly resigned to his busted dreams (“Yeah I saw Sappy Endings," he tells Francine). The story, conceived as a variation on A Star Is Born doesn’t entirely reverse the formula; instead of having one figure supplant another in stardom, New York, New York suggests there is more than one kind of stardom, more than one kind of success. This Scorsese film obviously had a stylistic influence on such jazz-and-nostalgia-themed films that followed as ‘Round Midnight, Bird, and Henry & June. It failed on first release, but there is a happy ending; when the film was restored to its proper form, it did good business in a 1980 re-release. l

Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story (2006)
Directors: Chris Sheridan & Patty Kim

By Kathryn Ware

In 1977, while on her way home from school, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota disappeared, spirited away without a trace. Twenty years passed before her parents learned the shocking truth—Megumi, and at least 12 other young adults, had been abducted by North Korea as part of a systematic plan to train their spies to talk and be Japanese.

The Yokotas’ grief now had a focus—to locate their daughter and bring her home.

In 1997, it came to light that the Japanese government had knowledge of these abductions but was doing nothing to push what would become known as the “Abduction Issue." Family members of the missing, led by Megumi’s parents, organized protests to demand Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi confront North Korea to return their loved ones. Getting North Korea to admit to the abductions at all was only the first step in the lengthy process. Not until 2002, during an historic summit concerning the normalizing of Japanese relations with North Korea, was an agreement reached for the return of the abductees. By then, eight of them had died.

In the “truth is stranger than fiction" arena of fascinating documentaries, Abduction comes preloaded with a powerful story. It’s almost unbelievable that something like this, the abduction of ordinary people by another country, could happen in modern times. The anguish and heartache experienced by their loved ones is inconceivable, and the details of the abductions, related by a North Korean spy, are disturbing to say the least.

Abduction’s power comes from its astonishing true story rather than from the cinematic presentation of it. Visually, the film seems better suited to the small screen. Other than oft-repeated shots of a beach, a boat, grass, and crowds moving in slow motion, there’s little visually that pulls you into the story. It’s a competent but stylistically undistinguished piece of documentary filmmaking.

Using photographs and interviews with family, friends, journalists and investigators, filmmakers Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim recount the day Megumi disappeared and from there follow the Yokotas on their grassroots campaign to bring the Abduction Issue to the public and political stage. Against an international backdrop, two anguished parents tirelessly fight for their daughter’s freedom. They hand out fliers and collect signatures; they make public speeches; they stand on street corners chanting with other protesters, shouting through a bullhorn at politicians to bring their children home.

Focusing Abduction on the Yokotas’ story is both the film’s strength and its weakness. Individualizing their struggle is personally compelling, but the bigger picture is lost. Certain aspects of the narrative seem lacking or glossed over, most blatantly, what came next for the five returned victims. Other than a few brief clips from a news conference where two survivors apologize for causing their families so much hardship, we learn nothing more, let alone anything about their abduction experience and life in North Korea. The five survivors exit from the film as soon as their plane touches down in Japan. While mention is made that they fear for the lives of those left behind in North Korea, surely there is more to tell.

All in all, Abduction is a fascinating, if incomplete, account of a painful episode in modern Japanese history and a moving testimony to one couple’s ongoing pursuit to learn the truth behind their daughter’s disappearance. l

Zachariah (1971)
Director: George Englund

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Living with a hippie from the 60s has pretty much guaranteed that I’m going to watch every hippie movie ever made. The hubby defines the hippie movement as an attempt by certain naïve people to reach nirvana. The films he identifies as hippie movies include Between Time and Timbuktu (1972), I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968), Head (1968), Alice’s Restaurant (1969), Easy Rider (1969), and Hair (1979, based on the 1968 stage musical), for their sensibility and honest depiction of the successes and failures of hippies to reach their goal.

Zachariah is perhaps the quintessential hippie movie, telling as it does the story of a young man trying to find himself. Of course, the hero's quest is as old as humanity itself. What locates this telling in the American hippie movement is that it is a Western shot through with rock and roots music from Country Joe and the Fish, The James Gang, The New York Rock Ensemble, White Lightnin’, Doug Kershaw, and Elvin Jones.

Over the opening credits, we watch the prototypical scene of a lone horseman riding across a vast expanse of open land to the strains of a slightly romantic score. Into this idyll is introduced an unfamiliar object—a Lucite guitar turned blood-red by the rising sun. Soon, The James Gang crank out a hard-rocking song on this open plain, and our lone rider, Zachariah (John Rubenstein), jumps off his horse, and runs to a scrubby hillside to open a kraft-wrapped box. Inside is a pistol. He squares up to draw, pulls at the gun, and it flies out of his hand. The first word of dialog is his exclamation: “Shit."

Zachariah heads into town where he visits the blacksmith shop of his best friend Matthew (Don Johnson). Coyly, he teases Matthew about something new he just got. Finally, he asks Matthew to make him some silver bullets. Matthew asks if he has some vampires he needs to get rid of on the farm, then sends his young Mexican assistant away so the two friends can be alone. Zachariah pulls out the gun he just received “in a brown paper wrapper." Both young men are enamored with it and run off for some shooting practice. They both become very fast and very accurate in a very short span of time. With that, Zachariah decides he is leaving town to make his fortune as a gunfighter. Matthew presents him with a silver bullet—only one due to a lack of materials. At this point, the two friends decide to go off together.

Having made his first kill, a thrill that has him shaking in both horror and triumph, Zachariah decides he must become an outlaw. He and Matthew ride out to the Crackers’ camp and force them at the end of a rifle to take the pair on. The Crackers, as it turns out, aren’t very good at robbing anything. They get outrun by a stagecoach and miss a rendezvous with a train. Fed up, Matthew and Zachariah dream up a scheme to rob a bank. The Crackers will play music at one end of town, draw a crowd, and then the team will go in and rob the bank. The plan works, but Zach becomes dissatisfied. He’ll never make it to the top with this motley band. He and Matthew leave.

A wanted poster leads them to the man they must find—Job Cain (Elvin Jones), the fastest gunfighter in the West. On arrival at Cain’s hangout, Matthew and Zachariah watch him kill a challenger. Matthew impetuously urges Zachariah to call Cain out. No, says Zach, we need to learn how he got so fast. At this point, Cain picks up a pair of drumsticks and takes over for the drummer of his band (The James Gang). When we watch him beat the kit, we understand how he got his lightning draw.

Abuptly, Zachariah leaves again. He still hasn’t found what he’s been looking for. Matthew stays. The two friends are now on divergent paths. Matthew is on the narrow track to success as defined by his society. Zachariah continues on a spiritual journey that has him explore hedonism, including taking up with whore Belle Starr (the hippie go-to actress Pat Quinn, who played Alice in Alice’s Restaurant), and finally, exploring the power of the desert.

I’m not sure you could find a better blueprint for the hippie movement than Zachariah, including its Amateur Hour feel. There are some laughs along the way (though many fewer than one would expect from a writing team composed of members of the comedy group The Firesign Theatre), but this film is surprisingly serious. Hippies did have to make choices, important choices, and as with the drug-dealing duo in Easy Rider, some made very wrong choices. The sketchy script and the no-budget look of this film make Zachariah a very rough affair indeed, and many will dismiss this movie as a self-indulgent experiment that's only worth watching for the music.

But there is a wonderful gem at the core of this ragtag film—the relationship between Zach and Matt. If you detect something gay in their rapport, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. (It may come as a surprise to younger readers that Brokeback Mountain wasn’t the first gay cowboy film. In fact, neither was Zachariah. The Celluloid Closet [1995] outed Monty Clift’s character in Red River [1948] with this line, again said over a gun: “There are only two things more beautiful than a gun: a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere. Ever had a good... Swiss watch?") Rubenstein and Johnson are exceedingly pretty at this early stage in their careers, and they have a chemistry and close affection that is quite touching. Although the hippie ethos was to make love to anyone in the spirit of freedom, not necessarily gay liberation, there is a true gay love story in this film.

Aside from this very watchable duo, the music showcases some of the top performers of the time who also happen to capture perfectly the sensibility of the film. In addition, roots players White Lightnin' and, particularly, fiddler Doug Kershaw play some of the most haunting music I’ve heard in a while, placing this story squarely in the American experience and honing its spiritual edge.

Zachariah takes a universal story, and particularizes it for its generation. But it also manages to create a lasting impression that one can enjoy even at this more-distant time. This is a film that is both of its time and ahead of it. l

God Said, “Ha!" (1998)
Writer/Director/Star: Julia Sweeney

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The 1980s will be remembered for many things—most of them bad—but one positive development of that go-go decade was the blossoming of comic monologues. Spalding Gray gave us Swimming to Cambodia, Lily Tomlin revealed the depth of her talents in The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe, and Billy Crystal created one memorable character after another in a variety of works.

I was dismayed when I caught the latest in this line of monologists, Sarah Silverman, in her filmed concert performance Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic (2006). Silverman, like Tomlin and Crystal, creates a character, an uber-prejudiced, self-involved Jewish American Princess named Sarah Silverman. She is clearly a very gifted individual, but her act is so one-note that it loses its flavor after about 15 minutes. However, nasty sells these days, and her popularity is assured because she is a pretty woman who talks dirty.

After this painful experience, I needed something to cleanse my soul, and that brings me to former Saturday Night Live star Julia Sweeney and her warm and courageous monologue God Said, “Ha!" Over the course of 90 minutes, Sweeney tells us about 1994-1995, the worst year of her life.

She tells us that the year started very hopefully for her. Although she had just come off a divorce and her bomb of a movie It’s Pat, based on her gender-ambiguous character from SNL, her divorce was amicable and she looked forward to moving from New York to Los Angeles and into her newly purchased bungalow for one. Her idealized vision for her life was one of a sophisticated, strong, single woman and happy about it! Her fears come out, however, as she envisions being one of the active elderly, involved and admired by her neighbors for her independence—in other words, alone forever.

No sooner does she start her brave new life than her brother Mike is diagnosed with lymphoma. She moves him into her bungalow, and her parents come down from their home in Spokane and move in to help care for Mike. Julia has a lot of hand-me-down furniture from her parents. Thus, the experience is akin to moving back home. To Julia’s plans, “God said, ‘ha’!"

In the midst of this nightmare, Julia relates the comedy of family life in affectionate caricatures of her parents. For example, Mrs. Sweeney interrupts Julia’s work in the coach house behind the main house to ask her where her “mixes" are. Julia is baffled about this term. “You know," she says in a nasal imitation of her mother, “your boxes of Hamburger Helper." Pasta becomes noodles; marinara sauce becomes red topping. The 1950s live again for Julia, the would-be sophisticate.

The arrangement has its unforeseen benefits, however. When Julia begins a romance with Carl, a outdoorsy type from Idaho, she finds she has to sneak around her own place to have sex with him when he comes to Los Angeles for a visit. She finds herself saying things like, “My parents are so weird. Come on, let’s go neck in the coach house!" The unexpected titillation of the fear of discovery becomes a sweetly humorous memory when she finds that her parents purposely leave the house empty so Julia and Carl can have some privacy. Her apparently clueless parents are, in fact, adults, and that comes perhaps as no surprise to Julia.

The horrors of dealing with a very sick person aren't glossed over, but the focus is on what Mike has to go through, not very much on her reactions or those of her family. I liked how she recognized that it is the patient who really does all the heavy lifting, and Mike's procedures (chemo every other day through a spinal tap; a shunt placed directly into his skull) are gruesome to contemplate. Her life-goes-on approach is refreshing and hopeful for all of us who will one day face taking care of a dying loved one.

As Mike continues his downward slide, Julia discovers that she has a rare form of cervical cancer and must have a hysterectomy. The odds of this much pain coming in this short a time to one family is mind-boggling. That Julia can joke about a misplaced ovary and Mike can accuse her of trying to steal the cancer spotlight from him is testament to the beauty that can accompany our darkest moments.

Mike succumbs to cancer, though he has to have a psychologist brought in to help him let go of life. Julia survives to this day, still a single woman, an adoptive mother, stronger and in greater awe of the wonderful foundation of her family. I hope she’ll see fit to bring us an update on the Sweeney clan. The world needs some gentle and wise comic monologists today to give us hope and a good laugh. l

2007 European Union Film Festival

After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet, 2006)
Director: Susanne Bier

By Kathryn Ware

I love a movie that takes my expectations, shakes them around for a couple of hours, and ushers me out of the theater thoroughly and pleasantly surprised. A film that blazes a new trail, as opposed to following a well-trod path, is all too rare and cause for celebration in my book.

After the Wedding is just such a film. Director Susanne Bier (who co-wrote the film with Anders Thomas Jensen) has crafted a tightly wound drama that twists and turns without ever feeling contrived, and earned the Danish film a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination this past year.

The story centers on Jacob, a Danish ex-pat working at an Indian orphanage on the verge of shutting its doors. The children’s last hope lies with Jorgen, a Danish businessman who offers millions, but on one condition: that Jacob himself come to Copenhagen and shake hands on the deal. Why has Jorgen made such a personal request? And why is Jacob so reluctant to return to Copenhagen? These are just the first of many small mysteries that fuel the narrative.

Jacob arrives in Denmark where he’s set up in a posh hotel penthouse suite, a fish out of water among all the modern conveniences so foreign to his impoverished life in India. Awkward in a new suit and clutching a video tape of the children he hopes to save, he’s ill at ease during his first meeting with Jorgen, a confident man of wealth and power used to calling the shots, both professionally and personally. Jacob is lean, ruggedly handsome, and serious. We rarely see him smile. Jorgen is a large, gregarious man in the style of all successful businessmen who eat, drink, and socialize well. He talks more than he listens and rattles Jacob with his apparent lack of interest in Jacob’s earnest presentation. What, exactly, is his game?

When Jorgen makes the strange and seemingly innocuous request that Jacob attend his daughter’s wedding, the game, so to speak, is afoot.

Arriving late to the ceremony, Jacob recognizes someone from his past and then a secret revealed at the reception pulls the rug out from under him, casting his trip in an entirely different light. What follows is a compelling personal drama that eludes expectation. As one revelation dominoes into another, Jacob is led to a moral decision with ramifications felt halfway around the world.

It’s no disappointment to the audience that the “big reveal" comes early on in the story; there’s so much more to follow, holding our attention as we watch these characters grapple with each new development. The camera that frequently lingers on extreme close-ups of characters’ faces--especially the eyes--combined with a somber soundtrack, creates an air of uncertainty. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it did, I was deeply moved.

Mad Mikkelsen (the bad guy poker player in Casino Royale) admirably carries the film on Jacob’s shoulders. Rolf Lassgard (as Jorgen) is wonderful in a role that easily could have had him chewing scenery at every turn. Sidse Babett Knudsen (as Jorgen’s wife Helene) and Stine Fischer Christensen (as his newlywed daughter) round out the fine ensemble. The strength and honesty of this acting quartet keeps the film from sinking in melodramatic waters. l

“Our Backstreets" #13
Save Darfur—and Now Chad

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I was watching the news on BBC America yesterday and got the bad news that a health crisis is looming in eastern Chad. Thousands of refugees from the Darfur region of Sudan have been living in makeshift refugee camps, and malnutrition and disease are making inroads. Attending the Amnesty International USA Annual General Meeting in Milwaukee on March 23–25 gave me all of the grim statistics from Darfur—400,000 dead, 2 million displaced—and prepared me for bad news out of Chad. Another regional catastrophe of biblical proportions is teetering on the brink.

In one of those not-entirely-coincidental coincidences, actress Mia Farrow, a United Nations UNICEF goodwill ambassador, condemned director Steven Spielberg for participating in staging the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Spielberg visited China in March to help with the preparations—one assumes that he will have a hand in the filming of the event. Farrow pointed out what I learned, and what was protested at Chinese consulates across the country on March 30—that China is a major funder of the holocaust in Darfur. Referring to the genius German director who filmed Olympiad, the 1933 “Nazi" Olympics in Berlin, Farrow said Spielberg risked becoming known as the “Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games." The irony of a man who founded the Shoah Foundation to record the experiences of victims of the Nazi Holocaust now participating in an event by one of the great human rights violators on the planet certainly cannot be lost on anyone.

Farrow’s speaking out, of course, was probably meant to boost the profile of the protests and shame Spielberg and other influential voices into pressuring China to cut off funding to the Sudanese government for arms transfers. Maybe you’re tired of hearing about Darfur. Believe me, you’ll be plenty tired of hearing about Darfur AND Chad. And one country that is just starting to show some signs of distress over this conflict, the Central African Republic, can be rescued if we act to prevent the further spread of violence and population displacement. Let Steven Spielberg, the Chinese consulate, and corporate sponsors of the Beijing Olympics (Coca-Cola is one) know that any country that encourages the destruction and displacement of 2.4 million people does not deserve their support.l

http://www.amnesty.org/