Still Life: Why Books are Better than TV

 

Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery (2013)

Directed by Peter Moss

Magnolia Pictures, 85 minutes, Not Rated

★★

 

Are you disappointed when a book you loved is made into a TV show and what you see doesn’t match what’s in your head? One can’t really fault the script writer or director for that. After all, there’s no reason why anyone else would carry the same impressions as you. Still Life, though suffers from a major fault. The Peter Moss-directed version of Louise Penny’s first Armand Gamache novel sacrifices the very thing that has made her novels­–# 15 is due this fall–so beloved: strong characterization.  

 

The novel Still Life introduced us to Gamache and Three Pines, Québec; Still Life the TV show tries to cram all of the characters into 85 minutes, gets many of them wrong, and jettisons character depth in favor of solving a mystery. It’s bad choice; the mystery isn’t actually all that complex. I’m not sure if this Penny project went any further than the first book but let’s put it this way; if you tried to read Penny’s 293-page novel in 85 pages, you’d have to read 3.5 pages per minute and you’d miss a lot. (I’ve read books that fast written by some academics whose turgid prose would be masochism to read slowly, but novels are a different story!)

 

Here's a thumbnail of the storyline for those who’ve not read the novel. Seventy-eight-year-old Jane Neal, a retired school teacher, walks in the woods and is murdered. Who would kill such a harmless and well-loved individual? This brings Chief Inspector Gamache (Nathaniel Parker), the head of the homicide division in Québec, to the tranquil, close-knit, and hard-to-find village of Three Pines to investigate. He is accompanied by his right-hand man Jean-Guy Beauvoir (Anthony Lemke), efficient Agent Isabelle Lacoste (Judith Baribeau), and pouty, flippant Inspector Yvette Nicol (Susanna Fourrier). The mystery involves a shocked village, a close-to-the-margins family, three ill-behaving teens, a confession, unrequited love, Jane’s not-very-sad niece, art, and the creepy Hadley mansion.

 

We also meet a few of the Three Pines regulars: painter Clara Morrow (Kate Hewlett), Clara’s artist husband Peter (Gabriel Hogan), and aging poet Ruth Bardo (Deborah Grover). If you wonder about Olivier and Gabri, Myrna Landers, Dr. Harris, and Gamache’s wife Reine-Marie, the term cameo applies. That can partly be explained by the need to elide to fit everything into 85 minutes, so I call no fouls on this. I will, though, assess technical fouls for numerous other transgressions, though Moss got Jean-Guy, Peter Morrow, Isabelle Lacoste and Yvette Nicol right, though Baribeau wasn’t on the screen very long.

 

Now for the misfires:

 

·      Kate Hewlett was too beautiful to play the part of Clara Morrow. At the very least they could have splattered her with paint and mussed her hair!

·      A smiling Ruth Bardo? No, no, no! She’s a tart-tongued, whiskey-mooching misanthrope who was often amusing, but seldom in a nice way. It takes numerous books to gain insight into why.

·      Myrna Landers is mere background in the show, but she’s played by the very attractive and shapely Patricia McKenzie. Penny’s Landers is a cornerstone of the village, runs the bookstore, and is kind, but her beauty is mostly internal, as she’s presented as obese. (I gather she’s even thinner in the new show. Shame!)

·      I’ve liked Nathaniel Parker in BBC productions and movies, but he’s miscast as Armand Gamache. He says some of the right things, but he lacks gravitas. Crinkly eyes alone don’t convey much. Mostly he’s a presence in the film around which the mystery unfolds, but we get little sense of his keen mind or commanding presence. Penny fashioned her fictional Gamache from Atticus Finch, her late husband (Michael Whitehead), and a Québec tailor whose surname she borrowed. For other reasons hard to articulate, I simply didn’t buy Parker as Armand.

 

I hasten to remind that my comments apply to the DVD version of a 2013 production. I’m not an Amazon Prime member, so I’ve not yet seen the latest attempt to bring Gamache to the small screen. I can only hope that the Alfred Molina-anchored series is stronger. If I do watch it, though, I think I’ll wait until Ms. Penny is done writing books.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Peace is Compromise Not Conquest

 

Thoughts on Racism and Activism

 

College campuses are aflame with protests over conflict in the Middle East. Key phrase “in the Middle East.” Analogies are made to the anti-Vietnam War protests of my youth. These are specious for several reasons, the most obvious being that this war does not directly involve the United States. No Americans are engaged in fighting in any sort of official capacity.

 

Some would say the United States is directly involved as it sells weaponry to Israel. True enough; it has supported Israel since 1948 and, after three wars were launched by Muslim powers, began sending military aid after 1971. (Four more wars have occurred since then.) I’ve long argued that the United States shouldn’t be sending anyone military aid, but good luck convincing policymakers of that. For the record, the United States has also sent aid to Palestine since 1994–more than $40 billion through 2020. 

 

Another difference is that few anti-Vietnam protestors were under the illusion that the “Establishment,” as we called those holding police and political power, would turn the other cheek. I can’t recall anyone calling themselves “activists” or “revolutionaries” who anticipated anything other than rough treatment for acts of civil disobedience. They were willing to risk arrest, prison, and/or severe campus sanctions.  Message: If you need to feel “safe,” stay away from protests.

 

Protest can also damage your future. Ask Jane Fonda, who has never shaken the “Hanoi Jane” appellation she got from visiting the North Vietnamese frontlines during the Vietnam War. She has apologized many times, but the taint remains. How hard is it today to scour social media to identify “troublemakers?”  

 

Frankly, though, it was the Jane Fondas actively rooting for a U.S. defeat and those who draped themselves with North Vietnamese and Vietcong flags who many in the peace movement saw as obstacles to peace. They gave it a stink of anti-patriotism rather than challenging the nation to live up to stated ideals. Today’s keifa-wearing college protestors leave behind a stench of anti-Semitism , despite the occasional Jewish student standing in solidarity with them. The same is true for perceived anti-Islamophobia circling Israeli-flag wavers confronting pro-Palestinian chanters..

 

And here’s the big kicker: None of this will bring peace to the Middle East. Americans enculturated into a sports mindset view all issues as having a “winner” and a “loser.” There is nothing about the current conflict between Israel and Palestine that fits such reductionist thinking. An A versus B scenario yields either the status quo in harsher terms or the destruction of Israel. What, after all, is implied by an old slogan attributed to David Ben-Gurion (“No Palestinians, no problem.”) or to that of anti-Semitic demonstrators (“From the desert to the sea.”)?

 

Some might argue that divestment will “force” Israel to change. Don’t bet on it. Capital is amoral and Israel is not South Africa under apartheid. The GDP of Israel is $525 billion and it has $27.7 billion worth of annual investment. Palestine’s numbers pale in comparison: $19.1 billion and $3.7 million. If you think pressure will change this, explain why foreign investment in Israel has risen by 29% since its invasion of Gaza.

 

 An enduring peace will require compromise and admission of guilt on both sides. There are no “good guys” who can claim the high moral ground. Here is a short list of “hard” questions that are mere starting points for negotiation:

 

·      Why did Palestine reject statehood in 1947-48?

·      How can a bifurcated Palestine (West Bank and Gaza) survive when other attempts (West/East Pakistan, Cyprus, Azerbaijan/Nakhichevan/Nagorno, Lesotho) struggle?

·      Will Israel abandon West bank settlements?

·      What will be the fate of Jerusalem?

·      Why is Israel the only regional democracy?

·      How will Palestine atone for the murder of I,139 Israeli non-combatants and the taking of 250 hostages?

·      Will Palestine apologize for citizens who cheered 9/11?

·      Will Israel rebuild Gaza?

·      Will Palestine concede Israel’s right to exist? 

·      Will Palestine renounce terror?

·      Will Israel repudiate expansionism?

·      Is there a path to regional citizenship?

 

If any or all of this is resolved, it will take a long time and be hammered out by professional mediators and independent bodies that can sway major powers. It seems almost impossible to believe that Likud or Hamas can play any role whatsoever in the solution. Nor can clashing groups of college kids spurred on by manipulating elders and outside agitators do much more than bring home the war of hate.

 

 

Hither Page Didn't Grab Me

 

 

Hither Page: A Romance  (2019)

By Cat Sebastian

Self-published, 224 pages

★★

 

I don't remember exactly how Hither Page came to me for review. I guess it was sent my way because I read a lot of mysteries and have a fondness for Agatha Christie's English mysteries with eccentric characters.

 

Hither Page has some amusing stuff in it and is diverting, but it also has features that irk me. A lot of people try to write like Agatha Christie but they are too often Christie simulacrum. It’s not as simple as mixing a few oddballs, a quaint English village, a murder or two, and befuddlement before revelation. I don't wish to accuse author Cat Sebastian of being a mere copycat, but I can understand how many readers could draw that conclusion.

 

There's another genre of writing and film-making that makes me impatient. I call it the striptease, a form of expression where it's very obvious early on that two characters are hot for each other and will end up in the sack. It doesn't really matter to me if the characters are straight, gay, animal, mineral, or vegetable, but when you can see it coming from a mile away you just want the characters to get on with it.

 

As Page and Sommers Book One, the novel introduces us to James Somers, a doctor who is squeamish around blood and violence, and Leo Page who does investigation work for an agency headed by Sir Alexander Templeton who is probably blackmailing Leo, who is gay at a time in which such activity is unlawful. As it turns Doctor Sommers has the same proclivities. There's a whole lot of eyeballing, obsessive thoughts, and suppressed urge in this novel, but there was absolutely no doubt that the two are going to become lovers. So get on with it already and cut to the mystery.

 

It takes place in an English village called Wychcomb Saint Mary immediately after World War II. It's a place full of gossips, cranks, loonies, and clueless rich people who could have been drawn from the Monty Python upper class twit of the year sketch. There is Colonel Armstrong and his handsome secretary Edward Norris, a lady killer by which I mean in the cad sense not the sanguinary. There is grumpy Marston, a name plucked from a Eugene O'Neill play, a nervous recluse who had been a POW during the war, drinks too much, and lives alone in a cottage in the woods. Daniel Griffiths is the local vicar and his wife Mary was probably once pretty but is now down-at-the-heels. Add Miss Edith Pickering, who hired a “daily woman” house-cleaner who pokes around where she's not supposed to. Mrs. Hoggett, the cleaning woman in question is our first corpse. She leaves £1000 to 15-year-old Wendy Smythe who befriended her, but where did a cleaning woman get that kind of money?

 

There's a lot of kind of back and forth in this novel. Apparently lots of people in Wychcomb hold grudges, so many that Colonel Armstrong rhetorically asks Page, “[H]ave you ever met a rich man somebody did not wish to kill?” (Ya’ think that might be foreshadowing?) There's a subplot of a missing drug Veronal, a barbital, that fits the theory that Mrs. Hoggett was dosed and pushed down the stairs, and an attempt on Leo's part to pass himself off as an architectural expert who is writing about the local church’s features. He is so obviously not a scholar that villagers see through him quicker than it takes to polish off a biscuit and a cup of tea. How about back stories about who is heir to the colonel's estate, meddling Home Office agents, and relatives who might be non-relatives.

 

Cat Sebastian has a husband and three children but according to her website likes to write “steamy, upbeat historical romances” usually with one or more LGBTQ+ characters. Meh! That's fine, but this is a very messy mystery and an extremely sappy love story. There's a second book but I think I shall duck it. And I know for certain that Agatha Christie remains on her throne.

 

Rob Weir

St. Ambrose School for Girls: Scandal and Murder

 

The St. Ambrose School for Girls

By Jessica Ward

Gallery Books, 356 pages.

★★★

 

There's nothing like a private school for a tale of jealousy, sexual predation, and murder.

 

Jessica Ward spins such a yarn in The Saint Ambrose School for Girls. Ward writes about what she knows and those familiar with western Massachusetts immediately grasp what Ward intends. Saint Ambrose is a Gothic brick campus in the small town of Greensboro Falls on the Massachusetts New Hampshire border. It’s a dead ringer for the old Northfield School for Girls. Ward is a graduate of Northfield Mount Hermon* and did her undergraduate work at nearby Smith College. OK, so St. Ambrose and Greensboro Falls are Northfield.

 

There is much to commend about the educational excellence of private schools, but young people living in what is essentially a rural cloister can be a different matter. After all, the students are aged 14 to 18 and to the degree that they lie rely upon adult role supervision at all, it is their teachers and house parents. Mostly, though, they take their cues from each other. They are prone to cliques, shifting friendships, and the vicissitudes of the maturation process. Quite a few are children of privilege with a propensity to look down their noses at those who aren't.

 

Sarah Taylor is certainly not a rich kid. She is the daughter of single parent Tera who tries too hard to fit in with other parents on drop-off day of fall semester. This mortifies Sarah, who sees her mother as bargain basement amidst a runway of Versace. In her mind, the latter exude faux politeness but can't wait for her mother to shut up. She’s probably right, but, as the saying goes, Sarah has issues. She's a Goth, bipolar, has made suicide attempts, and needs a heavy dose of lithium to stay stable. She's not violent, but she is anxious, excitable, and prone to fantasizing. She also hates sports, a no-no at private academies.

 

Sarah’s world at Saint Ambrose clashes with that of Greta Stanhope and her posse. Greta comes from money, is preened to the max, and is a bully. Ellen “Strots” Strotsberry also comes from serious money, but doesn't seem to care much for Greta and her crowd. Strots is also working on her ‘tude by being a field hockey jock, dressing down, smoking, and cultivating being unconventional,. She's also a closeted lesbian because officially there's no sex on campus and also because it's 1991 and it wasn't always safe to be out, especially in Northfield excuse me, Greensboro Falls. Strots befriends Sarah to annoy Greta, who is also awful to another scholarship girl, Keisha, an African American and a field hockey teammate of Strots.

 

Ward throws in other elements common to melodramas about private schools. There's Nick, a hunky English teacher who drives a vintage Porsche. He’s married but his wife is a much in demand researcher who is seldom on campus. That makes it easier for students to swoon over Nick. So too does a dowdy female math colleague, but the girls vie for his attention. Some feel very proprietary about demanding it. And what would a private academy be without scandals, fights, accusations of cheating, wealthy donors seeking scapegoats to deflect guilt from their little darlings, illicit behaviors, long-buried campus secrets, Mountain Day, a wicked dean, and some good old American violence and tragedy?

 

Ward is an excellent storyteller but as you can tell from my snarkiness, I wouldn't call The Saint Ambrose School for Girls a prose tour de force. Ward, who also writes paranormal romance novels under the name J. R. Ward, knows her audiences. Her novel is filled with ambience that keeps you reading to find out who did what to whom and why. You won't find many departures from the template of others in the sullied underbelly of private schools genre. That said, if you're looking for a diverting beach or airplane read this will do the trick.

 

Rob Weir

 

* For those unfamiliar with the Connecticut Valley, there used to be two schools on opposite sides of the Connecticut River, Northfield School for Girls located in the town and Mount Hermon School for Boys in a wooded area of Gill, Massachusetts. After the 2004-05 session, the Northfield campus was closed, and enrollment reduced. Both male and female students now attend the Mount Hermon campus. (The old Northfield campus has been sold.) 

The Vaster Wilds: Best Novel of the Year?

 

 

The Vaster Wilds (2023)

By Lauren Groff

Riverhead Books, 255 pages.

★★★★★

 

In just five novels Lauren Groff has taken us to Cooperstown, Florida, hippie communes, a 12th century nunnery, and Jamestown colony. The Vaster Wilds is about as good as fiction guess gets. You could think of it as Thoreau stripped of romantic notions.

 

If somewhere in your educational career you were told that the House of Burgesses was the cauldron of American democracy, you were the victim of a hoax. Jamestown was a nightmarish disaster for the first 30 years after the English landed there in 1607. It was controlled by elites on behalf of the Virginia Company, a joint-stock venture funded by London investors. Settlers were charged with finding gold or other marketable commodities.

 

Most of those in the settlement were forced to go there. Jamestown was a place of "unfreedom": indentured labor, poor people, enslaved Africans and Indians, servants, and orphans. There was no more dangerous place in the world for an English person to be. From its onset Virginia was a place of starvation. Arrogant leaders believed that the native population would feed the colony in exchange for English goods. They might have had a better chance of that had they not warred against Indians. In campaigns that reached the epitome of stupidity, soldiers burned Indian fields even though the Jamestown death rate from starvation hovered at about 80% per year.

 

The protagonist of The Vaster Fields is a young girl variously called “Girl," "Wench," "Fool," and "Zed.” In England, though, she was the servant of a cultured mistress who taught her how to dance, dress, and read in exchange for taking care of toddler Bess. Groff's novel is short on dialogue but long on poetic evocations. It is not until about 40 pages into the book that we learn the girl's name is Lamentations, or at least that's what she believes as she is an orphan. Lamentations adores Bess and her mistress. Alas, when the mistress is widowed she is wooed by Rev. Callat who becomes stern and cruel. Things erode quickly, but what comes next is even worse when the minister decides to venture to North America. As a servant, Lamentations spends most of her time below decks though she does acquire a lover on the ship, a Dutch glass blower not destined to follow her ashore.

 

The minister's wife is appalled by filthy, lice-ridden, culturally bereft Jamestown. Lamentations tries to protect Bess but soon the Callats are starving like everyone else in Jamestown. The colony descends into barbarism, the minister becomes even more cruel, and though Lamentation carries his last name she thinks that “Callat was an insult not a name....” Horror besets the colony: murder, thieving, Indian attacks, even cannibalism. As settlers die, Lamentations steals a sack, cloak, flint, two coverlets, and a pewter cup. In her flight through the frosty night she finds a dead soldier and appropriates his boots.

 

The rest of the book is Lamentations’ attempt to stay alive. She is still a girl but one of determination and adaptability. Because she is alone, the novel is largely narrated by her thoughts. She observes, “The world... was worse than savage, the world was unmoved. It did not care... what happened to her.” Her vague goal is to find the French, having heard on the ship that they were nicer than the English, but she has little idea how far they are from Virginia. You name it, and she faces it: a pursuing bounty hunter, wolves, bears, hunger, a concussion, Indians, hobnails coming through her boots, and the very real threat of death at every turn. If you wonder what she ate, a sample includes baby squirrels plucked from a nest, bark, grubs, and anything else that will staunch her hunger. Along the way, Lamentations loses dogmatic faith for something more primal, her faith paralleling the way she must live. She understands, “There could be no fight in this world, only submission.”

 

The Vaster Wilds is a short book that reads like an epic. It is a remarkable piece of writing that makes you feel as if you are the voice inside our protagonist's head. In a roundabout way, it is also a book with proto-feminist and environmentalist themes. It will shake your view of early America. I would venture to say it is better history than is found in high school textbooks. I sincerely doubt I will read a better novel this year.

 

Rob Weir

Beau travail Doesn't Translate Well

 

 

 

 

Beau travail (1999)

Directed by Claire Denis

Pyramide Distribution, 92 minutes, Not-rated

In French with subtitles

★★

 

French auteur Claire Denis scored big with her first feature Chocolat (1988). Critics and film professors loved her 1999 film Beau travail and hailed it as a masterpiece. But audiences, especially in North America, didn't know what to make of it. It's a very austere film that mirrors the detachment of the three principal characters.

 

Although it is based loosely on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, much about Beau travail is distant and unfamiliar. Unless you can endure slow pacing, uncertain motives, and the ambiguity of events that might or might not be playing out before your eyes, you could find Beau travail a cold, unrelatable film that does not justify its kudos.

 

My use of the term “cold” is deliberately ironic, as it takes place in a blazing hot and parched section of the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti near the end of French colonial rule (1977). It involves a French Foreign Legion outpost in which we sense its commander (Michel Subor) and his adjunct-chef (think sergeant) Galoup (Denis Levant) know they are playing a meaningless role in a dying drama. They appear bored, but maintain the fiction of discipline  out of an equally outmoded sense of honor. Or perhaps they think they can position themselves for some future advancement. Like most things in Beau travail, motives are hard to ascertain.

 

Gung ho recruit Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin) is the fly in the ointment. He works hard to impress, apparently unaware that he is breaking a stint of malaise. When he helps rescue a helicopter crew, he is popular with other soldiers, but this somehow makes Galoup jealous. Why?

 

Exactly! This is unclear because the film is told in flashbacks from Galoup’s point of view and he would probably be considered an unreliable narrator. That is, if he spoke more than a handful of words. Thus, we don't know whether his point of view is what occurred, an ex post facto salve to a guilty conscience, a dream, or fiction from the get- go. To top it off, there appears to be unrequited homoeroticism on Galoup’s part. Does he wish to train, kill, or sodomize Sentain?

 

Gallup drives Sentain to an arid salt pan and dumps him out to find his way back to base. Temperatures in Djibouti are routinely over 100°F and a broken compass is the only clue we have of his fate. Did he die? Did nomads save him? Did he dessert? Even the film's title is enigmatic. It can mean good work or beautiful work, and in this case the small gradations of meaning probably matter.

 

Beau travail is as much an intellectual exercise as a movie–a montage of landscape, simmering tension, clashing colors, black bodies, white bodies, uniformed commanders, stripped-to-the-waist soldiers, sweat, and precariousness.

 

Does all of this add up to significance or nothing at all? The ending of the film is memorable, but weird. It's a kind of Greek chorus but is it Zorba-like joy or a signifier of tragedy? You tell me.

 

Rob Weir

Imitation of Life: The Same Film Twice

 

 

 

 

Imitation of Life (1934 and 1959)

Directed by John Stahl/Douglas Sirk

Universal, 111/125 minutes, Not-rated

★★★★

 

Hollywood often remakes foreign films for English-speakers. Less often, it updates older films, and rarer still it remakes the same film with  tweaks. Imitation of Life was one of the latter. Both the 1934 John Stahl-directed film and the 1959 version by Douglas Sirk are considered “culturally significant” and included in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. Each tackles the theme of an interracial friendship between two adult women, which proves problematic for their respective daughters. There are cosmetic changes between the two but the biggest differences are that Stahl’s film was in black and white, Sirk’s in color, and Stahl’s version was riskier for its time.

 

Imitation of Life was first a 1933 novel from Fannie Hurst inspired by a trip to Canada with her Black friend, author Zora Neale Hurston. In the 1934 film, Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert) is a widowed mother to Jessie. She’s trying to keep the household together by selling maple syrup door to door. That’s quite a challenge, as is keeping track of Jessie. Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers) knocks on her door. She wishes to apply for a housekeeping job, but went to the wrong address. Delilah is dark-skinned, but her daughter Peola is so fair she can pass for white–a common denominator in both films. Before you can say “pancakes,” Delilah and Peola move into Bea’s home.

 

Pancakes save the budget. Everyone loves Delilah’s pancakes, but being Black, she isn’t a good candidate for a business loan in 1934. Bea becomes the front side a venture that gets its startup funds, space, and equipment from Bea’s ability to bluff, fast talk, and make fanciful promises. It works, and their Atlantic City Boardwalk eatery is soon raking in the dough (so to speak). They even borrow an idea from down-on-his-luck Elmer Smith (Ned Sparks) to “box it” and sell it for home use. They hire him! Bea and Delilah are such good friends that the latter doesn’t want any profits, but Bea has a workaround for that.

 

The crisis comes as the girls grow up. Peola (Fredi Washington) is ready for higher ed, but she wants no part of a Negro college. She leaves home and attempts to pass, but her mother has a distressing habit of finding her, upsetting her romantic plans, and getting her fired from Whites-only jobs. At 18, Jessie (Rochelle Hudson) develops a way-too-obvious crush on Stephan Archer (Warren William), her mother’s boyfriend. Identity issues are settled by a combination of acceptance, disappointment, and tragedy.  

 

This film almost didn’t win release as the Hays Office disapproved of implied interracial dating. Such a thing could lead to miscegenation, which was illegal in much of the country. Another sticking point was a near-lynching scene. Why to think such a thing was even possible in the United States!

 

The 1959 film had an easier time gaining release, but was still risqué given the contentiousness of civil rights clashes. Douglas Sirk altered a few things. Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), an aspiring actress, loses daughter Susie at a crowded Coney Island beach. They are reunited with aid from stranger Steve Archer (John Gavin). She is found in the safekeeping of Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) and her own white-looking daughter Sarah Jane. When Lora learns the Johnsons need a place to stay, she takes them in.

 

Move ahead 11 years and Lora is an acclaimed Broadway actress, Steve is her boyfriend, and the Johnsons are ensconced on the lower level of her posh New York apartment. Steve and Lora have a brief falling out and she has taken up with her script writer/lover Allen Loomis (Robert Alda). That falls apart and Steve is back in the picture. He agrees to watch Susie (Sandra Dee) when Lora goes to Italy to make a movie. That melodramatic relationship plays out, as does the Peola-as-Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) scenario. Both films have comparable endings.  

 

Which version is better? In my view, Colbert did comedy better than Turner, but not even Colbert could match Turner for glamor. I found Fredi Washington’s performance in the ‘34 film the most-riveting of all, but the ’59 movie featured a cameo from 50’s pretty boy Troy Donahue and a glorious clip from Mahalia Jackson. The 1934 film is funnier, but the ’59 version holds up better. Watch them both and compare notes.

 

Rob Weir

Giving Up (For Now?)

 

 

 

I once so obsessed over books that if I started one, I had to finish it. I’m not sure why,  but I can report that I got over whatever mania gripped me. 

 

 

 

Occasionally I give up on something because I’m just not in the mood for what’s on offer. Once or twice, I’ve revisited something I tossed aside and absolutely loved it. One such endeavor was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I ditched it in 2001 when it won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. It’s a wonderful book about the Golden Days of the comic book industry as well as a tale of Jewish life, the immigrant experience, and the American Dream. It’s surely one of the best novels of the 21^st century.

 

Am I equally off base with the three below? If any of you have read one or more of these, feel free to tell me why I’m nuts and why I should try again. 

 

 

 

The Bee Sting was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. Paul Murray follows Ireland’s Barnes family from one travail and lousy situation to the next. The very title suggests they were doomed to be dysfunctional. When Dickie and Imelda Barnes were wed, a bee flew up her veil and stung her so badly her face swelled up like a circus balloon. That’s why there are few wedding snaps.

 

I disliked Murray’s writing. He’s one of those who jumped on the who cares about punctuation bandwagon. That was en vogue when postmodernism was all the rage, but I was never a fan. Murray isn’t even consistent in his avoidance; sometimes he punctuates and sometimes he doesn’t. I can also do without James Joyce-like stream of consciousness prose.

 

The Bee Sting also appears to suffer from Angela’s Ashes Syndrome, my reference to Frank McCourt’s 1996 memoir. There has been a definite trend among Irish novelists to see who can wear the Most Miserable Childhood crown. I grant that there is a deep streak of fatalism in Celtic cultures, but I think I’ve overdosed on them and I feared that Imelda’s bee was still active and buzzing around my head. One of the reasons I loved the film The Quiet Girl (2022) so much is that it left me with hope. 

 

 

 

Speaking of unrelenting despair, Kerry Howley takes a look at the contemporary life in Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State. This non-fiction biography meets investigative reporting work tells us that privacy is dead, whistle blowers should beware, it’s not a good idea to carry off classified documents, and don’t speak to officials who claim they can help you. It follows Reality Winner, a disaffected Black intelligence officer.

 

That’s as far as I got before I gave up, though the New York Times called it an important book that’s often “darkly funny.” It’s hard for me to imagine what’s “funny” about a five-year jail sentence or that Big Brother really is watching. I know the Deep State is scary and that privacy is more myth than reality. Howley might be right when she insists that we are little more than “data about data.”

 

I tossed it aside because: (1) I don’t believe Edward Snowden or Julian Assange are free speech crusaders, (2) because some, like Daniel Ellsberg, are cut from very different cloth, and (3) I don’t know what to do with what Howley is telling us. We could chortle at the absurdity of our times–and there were some world-class stupid things going on in the book–but ultimately, the Deep State is no laughing matter. Or maybe it is. I didn’t make it to the punchline.  

 

 

 

Perhaps I have a thing about prize winners. In 2003, Edward P. Jones won a Pulitzer for The Known World. It’s about Henry Townshend, an ex-slave who becomes a landowner who lords over his own Black slaves. That’s a real thing, though The Known World is a novel.

 

I’m not sure why I couldn’t get through a book that many have proclaimed a masterpiece. Theories: (1) I’ve known about Black enslavers since my undergraduate days. (2) I’ve thought about how slavery negatively impacts everyone associated with the "peculiar institution” since I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin forever ago. (3) I have found other novels about the horrors of slavery more interesting.

 

Of the three books mentioned, The Known World is the one I’m most inclined to put back in the queue. What say all of you?

 

Rob Weir

 

Poor Things: A Debatable Film

 

 

A rare shot of Emma Stone clothed!

Poor Things (2023/24)

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Searchlight, 142 minutes, R (graphic nudity and sex, language, gore)

★★★

 

Poor Things is a hard film to review. It has been hailed as a masterpiece, hysterical, and an instant classic. It has also been excoriated as pornographic, appalling, and garbage. It’s never boring, yet each assessment has merit. The only thing I’ll say for certain is that it takes intellectual gymnastics to argue the title makes sense for either Alasdair Gray’s book or the movie.

 

At heart it’s an inversion of Frankenstein. What if Mary Shelley’s monster survived and like his creator, became a celebrated surgeon who privately conducts macabre experiments? In Poor Things, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) looks the part of the monster minus the electrodes. He is square-jawed with a face scarred as if a drunkard tried to carve mosaics into it. Baxter has fame, a well-appointed estate, and a meek but enthusiastic assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Yousesef). In his spare time, Baxter has fashioned a potential companion, Bella (Emma Stone).

 

Bella’s story begins when she throws herself off a bridge into the Thames. Her body is brought to Godwin’s lab, the first of many times we see Stone’s naked body. She is dead, but is with child. Godwin removes her brain and replaces it with that of the still-viable fetus in the belief that his hybrid creation will rapidly mature. You can imagine how some might feel about an infant in Emma Stone’s body. Godwin places her under Max’s tutelage and presses him to consider her a future bride when she gains coordination and an adult mind. Yet Godwin–whom Bella calls “God” for more than a shorthand reason–admits his own yearning for her. If only he weren’t a eunuch–because why would such a creature as he need male tackle?  

 

The opening of the film is in black and white, but it goes to color about the time Bella discovers the pleasures of masturbation. She is developing fast, but there is no jumpstarting the fact that Bella has no experience with social graces. Not that the lecherous Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) notices; he sees only her surface beauty.  Bella likes to touch herself, but she really likes “jumping:” coitus. She is easily persuaded to run away with Duncan so she can have lots of it. Their journey takes them to Lisbon, Alexandria, Marseilles, and Paris before Duncan is a broken man. At each step, Bella’s mind and awareness advance as Godwin anticipated, but she remains id-driven.

 

When Bella needs money to return to London, she has no problem turning to prostitution in a house run by the head-to-toe tattooed Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter). She also forms several (ahem!) attachments to Toinette (Suzy Bemba). Through it all Max remains ready to wed Bella. If only General Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), her husband from her pre-bridge-leaping days hadn’t showed up. Can any of these jumpings be saved? 

 

Poor Things is like Fifty Shades of Gray crossed with Gothic surrealism. It is visually gorgeous. Director Yorgos Lanthimos–he of the equally weird The Lobster–presents London as steampunk Victorianism. He enhances off-kilter themes via liberal use of fisheye lenses and gauzy shots that mirror its moral ambiguity. Beauty and ugliness are similarly up for grabs: Stone’s body and relative innocence are juxtaposed with the simian-like Swiney and the cynicism of fellow ship passenger Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael). Not to mention potentially off-putting things such as bloody operations, discussion of genital mutilation, and revenge served strangely.  

 

Stone won a Best Actress Oscar for a role that was physically demanding on many levels, not just spending most of the film unclothed. It’s an open and debatable question, though, whether she should have been honored for a film so many found offensive. I actually found Dafoe’s performance more affecting in advancing contemplation of what constitutes a monster. It is a well-acted film across the board except for Mark Ruffalo whose appeal eludes me. He was supposed to be outrageous but, as usual, he goes over the top.

 

My rating is the coward’s path. I adored the visual impact of Poor Things, admired the new take on Frankenstein, and found it very funny in places. Yet it is indeed a male gaze film–though there’s plenty of male nudity as well–and is often degrading and stomach-churning. As a sex comedy, it’s not in the same galaxy as Doris Day. Or even Meg Ryan.

 

Rob Weir

America Fantastica: Weird Road Trip, Satire, or Daily News?

 

 

America Fantastica (2023)

By Tim O’Brien

Mariner, 464 pages

★★★

 

Tim O’Brien insists that America Fantastica is the last novel he intends to write. If you only know his Vietnam War works such as The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato this one will surprise you. It is a lampoon of contemporary America that draws comparisons to Jonathan Swift, though Carl Hiaasen might be a better analogy. It drew both praise and criticism, the latter because it’s often difficult to know if O’Brien is laughing with us or at us.

 

It rather depends on how sensitive you are, but any way you slice it, it would be hard to call this an optimistic work. Many of those who praise the novel argue that it’s a perfect put-down of our current era of fake news, racism, violence, Trumpism, and the loony right. Set in 2019, America Fantastica gives us anti-hero Boyd Halverson. He is one of life’s losers. His ex-wife Evelyn is the daughter of Trump stand-in Jim Dooney, an amoral and filthy rich egoist with more than few screws loose. For example, he owns a major league baseball team whose entire roster he fired and proceeded to play solo against the Phillies. (It didn’t go well!) Boyd holds serious grudges against Evelyn and her father, though he’s no pillar of the community himself. He manages a J C Penny’s store, but prior to that he was a “journalist” who specialized in increasingly bizarre disinformation campaigns he hoped would land him a position with Fox News.

 

Halverson snaps, figures he’s owed $300,000, walks into a Fulda, California bank and pulls a robbery. He has to settle for $81,000, which is all the bank had in cash. In the process, he takes teller Angie Bing hostage. She’s a diminutive redhead who claims to be a sincere Pentecostal Christian, though she’s also a motormouth, has an overactive libido, is a raging materialist, and has a boyfriend named Randy who is dumber than homemade sin and a homicidal sociopath without a conscience. (You can’t have something you can’t spell!) O’Brien calls him, “a piece of stupid wrapped up in cowboy clothes.”

 

Boyd and Angie are the mismatched principals of a non-great American road trip. There are hitmen, an heiress, ex-cons, Iraq War vets, rich SOBs, Covid deniers, and a parade of Angie lovers who might or might not be in the ex- category. What seems to be lacking are pursuing cops and there’s a reason or two for that as well. In other words, it’s a world of players and games-players. Halverson wants revenge and Angie seems to want to convert Boyd, spend all of his money, and shame him into making his move on her. She’s happy to explain why he should pursue her sexually and what’s wrong with him for not doing so. Gee, could it have anything to do with what she says Randy will do when he catches up to them?

 

America Fantastica is often laugh-out-loud funny, though whether the guffaws should be bitter or appropriate is open to interpretation. O’Brien skips us through conspiracy theories that are too ludicrous to make up, like one that claimed that a dozen American presidents–including Lincoln and Kennedy–never existed. He argues that “laughing at evil is the best revenge,” yet O’Brien also calls his book a slice of “mythomania.” Is America Fantastica an absurdist work? Undoubtedly, but when O’Brien states that “mythomania had become the nation’s pornography of choice,” is he being reportorial, cynical, world-weary, satirical, or all of the above?

 

My take is that America Fantastica suffers from uneven pacing and tone. Like many who have written road trip novels, O’Brien never quite made up his mind if he wanted to write a series of weird vignettes or a tightly-threaded narrative. This ultimately gives us the literary equivalent of a goulash with too many ingredients, some universally tasty and some that are an acquired taste. I liked America Fantastica, but like lots of other readers I was unsettled by it. Is America really as screwed up as O’Brien infers? It might well be, but do you see what I mean about being unsettled?

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Salvador Dali in Florida

 

Persistence of Memory

 

Salvador Dalí Museum

St. Peterburg, Florida

 

Thirty-six years after his death, Salvador Dalí (1904-89) continues to fascinate everyone from college students adorning their rooms with cheap Dalí posters to collectors who shell out millions for canvases at art auctions. Not bad for an enigmatic artist whose works often induce more head-scratching than deep understanding. Part of that has to do with Dalí’s singular talent for inventing himself. His mustache is instantly recognizable as are his famed “melting clocks,” which first appeared in a 1931 painting “Persistence of Memory.” 

 

 

 

There is much about Dalí that surprises, not the least of which is St. Petersburg, Florida is home to the second-largest repository of his works in the world. (Dalí’s home town of Figueres, Spain is number one.) The St. Petersburg collection is built upon 1,500 works belonging to Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, who befriended Dalí and became major patrons for some 40 years. Last month I paid a visit to the “new” facility (1982). The museum is located several blocks from the facility I toured the previous time I was in St. Petersburg. Frankly the exterior of the old building was more interesting than architect Yann Weymouth’s glass dome encased by glass cubes, but the interior space works well.

 

Dalí is so well-known for his surrealist works and outlandish personal display that they can obliterate his other personae. He didn’t begin as a surrealist or as a mustached peacock. Most young artists start by emulating their influences. A special exhibit titled Dalí and the Impressionists launched with cooperation of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts shows how he was shaped by Monet, Degas, Renoir and cubists such as Matisse and Cézanne. He also spent his youth painting in the style of Spanish (and Catalan) masters, especially Diego Veláquez (who was also a prototype for Dalí’s mustache) and then toyed by academic realism. Only then did he turn to the style for which he is most remembered.  

 

Dali work age 14

 

 

 

 

As for surrealism, if you have to ask what you’re seeing, you’re asking the wrong question. The surrealists insisted that these were dream images. That can be tempered a bit. It’s no accident that Dalí went in that direction in the 1920s . World War One left much of Europe a devastated landscape. This helps explain the nightmarish quality of many surrealist paintings, as does substances such as absinthe, mescaline, and peyote. Dalí later denied he used drugs, but many believe that was another reinvention. There is no doubt, though, that the past war was on his mind–a bandaged soldier with crutches where his trunk should be, horses fired from canons, crucified figures, a giant hand looming over a barren landscape, the wreckage of buildings personified….

 

 

 

There is debate over Dalí’s ideology during the rise of fascism in the 1930s. He feigned neutrality but there is strong evidence that he was sympathetic to Hitler it’s irrefutable that he was a Falangist (supporter of Franco). Dalí’s chameleon nature and reputation were such, though, that his 1934 visit to the United States was a sensation. You can date the American love of Dalí to that visit. One giant Dalí canvas, “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea,” is a masterful trompe l’oeil. Up close, it’s a nude woman with an elongated head looking through a portal. But why is there a blurry head-shot of Lincoln on the lower left. Ahh, step back about 30 yards, the woman disappears, and the entire composition morphs into Lincoln. (Squint and you can see it.)

 

Whither Dali? 

Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea

 

 

By the 1950s Dalí was putting surrealism in the rearview mirror. He became a Catholic mystic putting a religious spin on “The Discovery of American by Columbus” and in his 1960 painting “The Ecumenical Council.” Dalí’s ego is on full display in the latter. You can see Dalí on the lower left painting the enormous scene before your eyes. 

 

The Discovery of America by Columbus

 

 

Ecumenical Council

 

Dalí was perhaps a problematic human being, but he was never boring. The museum also has whimsical 3-D objects such as one of his lobster telephones. And who but Dalí would create a nude bust topped by a baguette? 

 

 

 

If you find yourself in St. Pete, make sure to get to the  Dalí Museum. One tip: Avoid the 360-degree “Dalí Alive” show in the courtyard dome. It’s an upcharge and tells you nothing you won’t see inside. It was cutting edge in the 1980s, but it’s not a patch of the immersive art shows of today.

 

Rob Weir