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

The Fury: What Just Happened Here?

 

 

The Fury (2024)

By Alex Michaelides

Celadon, 294 pages

★★★★

 

Mysteries with omniscient but unreliable narrators are always fun to read because they keep you on our toes. Once you know you can’t trust the voice telling the story, truth is up for grabs. The Fury is such a book. Author Alex MIchaelides calls his murder mystery a “whydunit” rather than a whodunit, though maybe whodunwhat would be better.

 

We know early on that our narrator Elliot Chase is a liar, but is he telling the truth when he tells us he is in love with actress Lana Farrar? Though she’s older than he, we know that Elliot was once the companion, perhaps lover, of the much older author Barbara West. We also know that Elliot considers himself Lana’s best friend, but does he know the difference between love and obsession?

 

The Fury takes us to Aura, Lana’s privately owned Greek island near Mykonos. Lana is an American who became a big star in Los Angeles. She now lives in London for most of the year with her 19 year-old son Leo –fathered by her first husband–and is now married to the overbearing Jason. She originally bought Aura for privacy and a break from Hollywood, but now uses it as a refuge from London’s unrelenting grayness. It was on Aura she first met Agathi, who is now her personal assistant wherever the household du jour might be.

 

The Fury is very Greek in several ways. Michaelides is a very good writer, the sort who can invoke everyone from Ford Maddox Brown and Agatha Christie to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus . If Heraclitus doesn’t ring bells, that’s because he’s been dead for around 2,500 years! He postulated that fire was the basic element of the universe, his way of saying that change–not continuity–is the constant of the universe. He was also known for bouts of melancholy so deep that he was called “the weeping philosopher.” He’s not a character in the book per se, but The Fury often evokes a Greek tragedy and its characters struggle with questions of whether they yearn for the comfort of stability or the enlivening chaos of change. Several experience bipolar mood swings.   

 

Those themes play out on Aura. In addition to Lana, Leo, Agathi, Jason, and Elliot, there is caretaker Nikos, who might also be in love with Lana, and actress Kate Crosby who might (or might not be) Lana’s friend, and once dated Jason and might (or might not be) having a torrid affair with him. Seven people, one corpse, no outside intruders, and a dark and stormy night (the novel’s namesake “fury”).  Lana waffles on everything, Leo is furious with his mother for dissuading his plan to become an actor, Jason is a disengaged gun-loving testosterone-poisoned jerk, Elliot is Elliot, Agathi would do whatever Lana asks, Nikos doesn’t like anyone except Lana, and Kate drinks too much.

 

Agatha Christie would have loved that scenario! (Is Agathi a play on her name?) Of course, Christie would have also gathered all the survivors in the drawing room and either Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would have unveiled the murderer. Not Michaelides. You can read The Fury any of a number of ways, including the possibility that there was no murder or that it took place elsewhere in the past. Or maybe it was a dream, a play, a turnabout staged revenge, a madman’s fantasy, a purloined plot, a straight-forward point-and-kill murder, or any of the above in plug-in combinations. It’s a short book, but the only non-Heraclitus constancy is that few readers will like Elliot.

 

As a minor critique, some readers–and I lean that way myself–may find it hard to feel much sympathy for any of the characters. Each, in his or her own way, is vain, vacuous, over-privileged, and shallow. The novel often exudes a sense that these seven people deserve each other. I really like how Michaelides crafted the book, though I would have been just as happy had seven guns fallen into seven hands that simultaneously pulled the trigger!

 

Rob Weir

Middle of Nowhere: A Fine Neglected Film

 

 

Middle of Nowhere (2012)

Directed by Ava DuVernay

AFFRM/Participant Media, 101 minutes, R (language)

★★★★

 

Each year some of the most creative and intelligent independent American films are shown at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. The sad reality is that a lot of really terrific films win prizes at Sundance but are seldom seen outside of the festival circuit. One of them was Middle of Nowhere.

 

There have been several movies made with that title, but the one I’m talking about was directed by the talented Ava DuVernay, who won a director’s award at Sundance. She and several of her actors were also feted at various festivals that spotlight Black films. DuVernay, a Los Angeles native, turned her lens and pen–she wrote the script–at the carcel state. Statistics show that 35 percent of American prison inmates are Black men, though they are just 13 percent of the overall population.

 

Middle of Nowhere references the location of the correctional facility in which Derek (Omari Hardwick) is pulling an eight-year sentence for unspecified crimes. DuVernay filmed the prison scenes at USP Victorville, which is roughly 100 miles from Compton where Derek’s wife Ruby (Emayatzy) lives. She’s a nurse who is in medical school studying to become a doctor. Derek’s arrest puts a serious crimp in her plans. Derek assures Ruby that he’s both devoted to her and that he’s a passive victim of circumstance. The long commute by bus to visit him behind bars will eventually lead her to drop out of school, a decision–along with her marriage to Derek–that leads to estrangement from her mother Ruth (Lorraine Toussaint) and her sister Rosie (Edwina Findley). A furious Ruby becomes a relentless crusader working for Derek’s early release.

 

A small number of viewers complained that Middle of Nowhere is slow and weak as a drama. They missed the point. DuVernay’s prison sequences–the journey from Compton, the barren desert landscape, the cold efficiency of check-ins and frisks, rolled coils of razor wire, electronic rows of maximum security doors–are so well done as to suggest a gritty prison drama. Ditto bodily injuries to Derek that he insists are not serious. The ambience and suggestions of block violence are chilling, but this is not Derek’s story; it’s Ruby’s.

 

DuVernay does not suggest that justice was subverted or done. This is an insider film, but one of the mind, not the clink. It probes the toll Derek’s imprisonment takes on Ruby. She has sidetracked her career, alienated her family, and lost friends to the point that her only real solace is the kindness of the bus driver, Brian (David Oyelowo). He is clearly attracted to Ruby, but he’s also sympathetic and gentle. Ruby is at the point where she needs to believe that Derek was, as he insists, just a guy who got “caught up” in stuff that he neither planned nor initiated. But what if–as Derek’s friend Rashad insists–that’s not true? What if he’s done a lot of things Ruby doesn’t know about?

 

In essence, as the late Roger Ebert observed, Ruby becomes trapped inside of her own identity crisis. Who’s the unjustly imprisoned party? Should she push on with her crusade or move on? How much personal capital can Ruby spend before concluding she has made a bad investment? And there’s Brian….

 

This is a very well-acted film that was made on a shoestring budget. If, at times, it looks it, that’s because the entire project came in at $200,000 and was a wrap after just 19 days. To put that in perspective, most Hollywood studio films take at least 40 days to film, have budgets north of $35 million, and spend about $40,000 on catering alone. Need I list for you the ones whose food was more digestible than the movie? Middle of Nowhere is both a small jewel and a bargain by comparison. It’s available on DVD and various streaming platforms.

 

Rob Weir