No Boundaries

Well, what a week or so it has been. Sundance is officially over, but it isn’t over for me. I still have two more movies to see this evening and a few more posts to write. Writing so much about movies is fun, but it gets a bit difficult to fit into the spare moments of every day. That is, if you try to do it well. It is good to get it all out of one’s system while it’s fresh.

In the middle of my Sundance forays a couple of things, worthy of thought, came up and took me off track for a while. I’ll just touch on one of them now.

While doing my teeny chore of web-based research on the film Freedom Riders (an excellent documentary about groups of white and black students, primarily, who rode buses into the deep south in 1961 as a way of forcing desegregation of interstate commerce), I found myself sidetracked, at considerable length. The film got me thinking, for the first time, about how pro-integration whites were treated in the South. This has some import for me because I was, for my first six years which were spent in Arkansas, a pro-integration white boy in the South or, at least, the swaddled bundle that my pro-integration parents lugged around.

My father was a reporter for the anti-segregation Arkansas Gazette, then an editorial writer with the, also anti-segregation, Pine Bluff Commercial, then a Nieman fellow at Harvard for a year, then an editorial writer at the Arkansas Gazette. My mother was a part-time writer for smaller, largely union-owned, papers. She had the master’s in journalism from Columbia. He was, more or less, the Brad Pitt character in A River Runs Through It (without the Brad Pitt looks). It was the late fifties and early sixties and we all know about how that was for professional women in the “masculine” careers because we’ve seen the Madmen.

He was born on a proverbial dirt-scrabble farm in the proverbial tar-paper shack in northwestern Montana (between Kallispell and Libby) and ended up in journalism by ways and means that I’ve never understood. My parents met in Washington state where they were both reporters. He realized that the South was going to be the place to be for journalists of that era and sent clippings to the notorious Harry Ashmore.

I know a bit more about their (our) time in Arkansas than I did a few days ago because I found the University of Arkansas, Arkansas Gazette Project. Done for historical purposes, while most of the journalists of the civil-rights era were still alive, this is a collection of oral histories. There are around 130 interviews of most everyone who worked with my father at the Gazette, including a 78 page interview of him, done in 2001, a year before he died, which I didn’t know existed. Guess what I did all weekend.

Continue reading

I wanted badly to love HOWL. I’m a beat-era fanboy and have been for decades. This is derivative of my, more general, love for lyricism in literature and jazz which extends well beyond the beats and is not a celebration of beat lifestyle or philosophy.  Though I do find much of the later compelling.

HOWL is not considered a documentary by its producers or those that make the decisions about what goes in which category at Sundance.  It certainly seemed like one to me.  I found it unusual, but a documentary none the less.

I’m not at all sure why it matters. I think it may be similar to the tendency of authors to cast their work as non-fiction when it isn’t, because the market for fiction is so very very lousy. The market for documentaries is poor relative to their dramatic counterpoints, or so I’ve heard. That the circumstances in film are exactly the opposite of that in publishing is curious indeed.

The HOWL audience could be divided into two parts. The beat fanboys (and fangirls) and those, unknowing at the outset, who watched in wondrous trepidation of all those flying penises. Both groups had reason for some disappointment. It would have been impossible not to disappoint the first group because, as dedicated cultists, we are protective of our favorite facts or persons or theories. We are easily upset by perceived  misrepresentation or omission. We tend to squeal.  I suspect that the film left many of the later group just wondering why.

This is an odd movie.  It is the story of the poem and not the poet. There are three intermingled veins: a James Franco narrative which both presents and explains the poem, lengthy animation sequences which interpret the poem, and a courtroom simulation which portrays the obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, following publication of HOWL, in dramatic form.

I found the Franco narrative limited in that it dealt almost exclusively with the text of the poem. The animation left me thinking that time could have been better spent dealing with more context from the life of Allen Ginsberg and the other beats in a traditional documentary form. It was evident in the Q&A that some are upset with any animated interpretation of the poem. I disagree. Interpretation of literature in film is not exactly new.  It just didn’t fit with anything else. I enjoyed the trial simulation scenes most. David Strathairn and John Hamm are well cast and the dialogue which is taken directly from the trial transcripts is fascinating. If a drama was the goal than this should have been expanded to make up the core of a film along the lines of Good Night and Good Luck.

My personal complaint with most discussion of beat literature is the assumption that the style was born of jazz and  formed completely new in the minds of Kerouac and Ginsberg.  What about Thomas Wolfe? Of the Look Homeward Angel variety. Kerouac describes himself and Wolfe walking past one another on the Brooklyn bridge as a passing-of-the-baton sort of moment. He acknowledges Wolfe’s style as the predecessor to his own. And it so obviously is.

This is the problem with the beat fanboys. Impossible to satisfy.

What constitutes the family ideal in the America of 2010?

It was about who: mother, father, children. Now it’s more about what: love, tolerance, understanding. The what was always part of it, but everything fell into a system of well-defined roles which changed in a well-defined way over time. And there were societal consequences for any who lived outside of those roles.  There were also plenty of conventional families who made do without the what. There still are.

Welcome to the Rileys is a film that defines family in terms of what can work versus what is expected. It begins with three lost souls and ends with something different and better, but not something trite, obvious or well defined.  James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo fill the roles of parents who lived for a daughter who has died. With her death they have largely died as well. Leo more so than Gandolfini who continues to fight to find something approximating life in his world. Kristen Stewart plays an almost-homeless youth lost in the New Orlean’s sex trade. The three interact and something resembling family evolves.

The film is not a simple story of how a complicated man rescues a tough but innocent girl from the evils and perversions of the sex industry. That narrative relies on old-school moral offense to work and has been done several times before.

I found much more in Welcome to the Rileys.  It is a story about the family as an ill-defined relationship for a period of time.  It is the family loosely defined as a tacit agreement to honestly and fairly meet the needs of every member. So it is the opposite of those films which portray the man as the strong though confused rescuer and the girl as an irascible though weak victim.  This new sort of  family lessens the weaknesses and enhances the strengths of all. Participation is passive. Contribution is multi-directional. It has a certain magic.

Gandolfini makes the film, overcoming an unfortunate forced southern accent with his unique mixture of affability and reserve.  As Tony Soprano, his personal amalgam of strength and vulnerability allowed a likable character capable of the horrible. His running away from Soprano may be the source of the ill-chosen dialect.  But the best part, of what made Soprano work well, is present.  In this film he establishes himself as a contemporary John Wayne.  Sensitive in his toughness.  Attractive in his unattractiveness. Bold in his reticence.

Stewart plays the feral daughter of everyman, loosed into the harshness of the world, very well.  She is sensitive, vulnerable, tough, erratic, moody, and honest. There is little sadness in her character which is both good and surprising. Leo is a bit forced in her quiet role as modern housewife medicating life into an enabled form of oblivion.  She does have several humorous revelatory moments as she emerges back into the world. These are some of the best in the film.

The thing I liked best about Welcome to the Rileys is that it points no fingers.  It is a gentle film.  Things just happen. And things must be dealt with.  It is a step in the direction away from outrage (finding and contemplating a source for every woe) and takes the stance that, in just a moment, directions in life can be changed.  That with decisive action, right or wrong but well intentioned, paths can open and solutions can be found.  That ruminating on blame will do more harm than good and is more a way of avoiding action than solving problems.  It is refreshing after so many films that seek an audience by providing a villain that we’ve been trained collectively to hate.

Crime is punishment. Fear is the most of it. You can’t run but you can hide.

The only options are to leave that way of life.  Which, for socioeconomic reasons, can’t be done.  Or to build a shell around one’s self.  To become a zombie-like creature only capable of the most base emotions.  With this comes a myriad of coping strategies, addictions to the most base stimuli, complete isolation from everything. And almost everything outside the shell is fear. These are the makings of a criminal sociopath and the root story underlying a lot of good films.

Yesterday I saw Animal Kingdom, the first feature-length film of Australian David Michod.  WOW.  In the Q&A he said: “I just love American crime movies.”  This one is very good.  Perhaps one of the best of that genre and all done with a fraction of the budget. Not only does it completely enthrall, surprise, and shake-up our neat and tidy little worlds (if only for a couple of hours), it offers a believable glimpse into the makings of that unfortunate personae.

My experience with the World Cinema Competition films has not been particularly good.  I’m drawn to the Palestinian and other middle-eastern flicks which are quite common at Sundance.  They are largely invisible in the United States outside of the festival, so if you want to see them, it is good to see a bundle here in Park City.  But this year I found myself worn out with the topic and let “just what sounds interesting” be my guide. I’m glad I did.  Animal Kingdom is perverse in an awe-inspiring way.

With elements of Casino, Reservoir Dogs, The Usual Suspects and Mystic River, Michod does an enormous amount with an ensemble cast including two first-time actors.  The lower budget of the film relative to it’s American counterparts is apparent but not fatal. Insight into the criminal mind is clear and makes one wonder what Michod did for a living before the movie business.

It is always good to see Joel Edgerton, one of my favorite Australian actors. Keep an eye open for both Michod and Jacki Weaver, a theater actress, who plays the matriarch of this ultimate version of the dysfunctional brood.  She’s just creepy magic!

“The dogs bark and the caravan marches on.”

This is a very, very old phrase. North African in origin, it refers to the passage of camel caravans through Saharan villages. It became a stock phrase of Andre Gide and was  borrowed for American use by Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles. It can mean many things, one of which is that time passes and cultural trends change. Most people move with the changes, others stay behind, or are left behind.  The later tend to bark, whine, complain. The barking goes unheeded.  They become the haters. And are generally without consequence unless the hatred consumes entirely.

This is also the story of Night Catches Us, a film which premiered at Sundance last night and that I desperately hoped would be brilliant.  As a story about what is left behind when a revolutionary movement, the Black Panthers, is ground to dust, it is not, as one would expect, a film about race.  It is a film about my generation.  As children, we witnessed the turmoil.  We believed.  And then it suddenly ended and many were left behind, not really understanding why things had changed or, even, that things had changed.

I wanted this film to work because it is a subject that has been ignored, swept under the rug as a regrettable phase in American history. It is a “period piece”, set in the middle ’70s, concurrent with the end of the war in Vietnam, the end of Watergate, the beginnings of the Carter administration, and the cultural transition from Hanoi Jane Fonda to Sylvester Stallone. The subject is what happens when things settle down.  An ex-Black Panther returns to Philadelphia and finds the stains of his former life, although covered with new patterns, are still present and can not be ignored.  He must confront his past while a younger man, unbelieving in the extent of change, tries desperately to continue living it.

Continue reading