Trump is Courting Disaster

I planned to post this earlier but my first draft was as long as War and Peace. It’s still wordy, but it’s abridged.

Donald Trump’s ratings are in the dump, and you don’t need to be a genius to figure out that he’s not one! The war against Iran gives him a stage to play hero. It is, though, it’s a tragic comedy. He and I share one thing in common: Neither of us served in the U.S. military. Too bad the Orange Snollygoster didn’t study history; he’d know that reviews of his farce will not be good.

An advisor to Genghis Khan once said, “… one can conquer [China] on horseback, but one cannot govern it on horseback.” In modern terms this sagacious aphorism means that armed forces can conquer, but they cannot build stable nations. Victory parades–real or manufactured – are feel-good moments, but boots on the ground should march home once wars are over. Rebuilding is the work of financiers, planners, diplomats, and–above all else–honest indigenous leaders. An oft-repeated narrative holds that the United State “rebuilt” Europe and Japan after World War II. If you mean American dollars, yes. If you mean much beyond that, no! Don’t confuse what was made possible with American dollars and what was implemented by leaders and institutions.

The American government embraced men like Atlee and Churchill in Britain, General de Gaulle in France, Adenauer in West Germany, Nehru in India, and a chastened Hirohito in Japan. They were needed to execute postwar initiatives such the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the gold standard, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, and the United Nations. Democracy? The United States has long been inconsistent on that score. We even smuggled ex-Nazis out of Europe to work on military projects. Some erstwhile leaders were weak, plutocrats, or unsavory tyrants: the Saud family in Arabia, the Shah in Iran, the Hashemites in Iraq, Ben-Gurion in Israel, Chiang Kai-Shek in China, King Sihanouk in Cambodia, Syngman Rhee in Korea, Fulgencio Baptista in Cuba….

With the exceptions of Britain and Japan, most of those mentioned above proved to be intransigent or catastrophic. China quickly fell to Mao Zedong, who became a communist after the U.S. refused to support him; ditto Fidel Castro! Charles de Gaulle quarreled with virtually everyone and demanded that Vietnam be returned as a colonial possession; Nehru insisted India would follow a Third Way that was neither Western nor communist; and Germany was cut in half. Others made no pretense at being democratic: Baptista, antisemitic Palestinians, Ben-Gurion’s perpetual warfare policies in Israel, the robber baron mentality of the Saudis and Hashemites, radical nationalists in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Korea was the first mess. Rhee was an authoritarian leader who bilked South Korea after the wartime trusteeship dissolved. North Korea became communist and the Korean War (1950-53) saw a loss of over 730,000 Korean and 36,500 American lives. It took until 1987 for U.S. ally South Korea to cast off authoritarian rule.

Modern scholars view Korea as a dress rehearsal for the disastrous Vietnam War (1955-75). It collapsed the French government and wasted billions of U.S. dollars and left three million Vietnamese and over 58,000 Americans dead. The U.S. tried to remake the South in its image, including relocating 4.3 million Vietnamese into “strategic hamlets” provisioned with US goods. The war tore apart U.S. society and ended when communists overran South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Whatever the U.S. was selling was soundly rejected.

Since the end of World War II Korea and Vietnam have been the template for force-feeding democracy and the American Way of Life. The bulk of U.S. military interventions have been utter failures. We’ve sent troops to Africa–especially Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, and Somalia–dozens of times. I’m not seeing any democracies popping off that list. If we move to the Middle East, we’ve sent combat troops to Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Yemen. Afghanistan holds the dubious distinction of being America’s longest war. Before we went there the Taliban ruled. After the dust of 20 years of warfare settled, the Taliban rules. Does anyone remember Arab Spring, which was supposed to be a flowering of liberal democracy? Where?

Maybe you’ve read about the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 or the 1973 removal of the elected Allende in Chile in favor of the despot General Pinochet. But did you know we’ve sent combat soldiers to Central and South America 41 times. We’ve taken out leaders in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, not because they threatened American shores, but because, like Allende, we didn’t like their politics. Tell me what good it has done for the DR or basket-case Haiti. Did you know we’ve been in Peru, Brazil, Lebanon, and Venezuela three times? Yet, the only conflict the U.S. military has “won” in terms of improving standards of living is Grenada, though the Massachusetts State Police could have taken Grenada.

Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize; that’s unlikely given his meddling in the Gulf of “America,” threats to Denmark over Greenland (!), the war against Iran, his incursion into Venezuela, and bombings of Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen. Since the end of World War II, approximately 105,000 U.S. personnel have died overseas. Yes, 90% perished in Korea and Vietnam, but what’s the final toll of lives lost (including suicides), PTSD cases, and money spent for counterproductive results? Is it any wonder that the United States has slipped to #14 in global quality of life ratings? But you know that when you go to the grocery store or fill your gas tank!

 

A Man Needs The Maid in an Actual Mystery

 

 

THE MAID (2023)

By Nita Prose

Ballantine Books, 285 pages

★★★

 

Nita Prose struck gold with The Maid, her debut mystery novel. It scored numerous awards, praise from established writers, and public acclaim. It has even been optioned to Universal Pictures for a yet-to-be-released movie starring Florence Pugh as Molly Gray, the book’s eponymous maid. (Don’t confuse Prose’s novel with a similarly named Thai horror film or Stephanie Land’s memoir.)

 

Maybe I’m a crank, but I found The Maid rather ordinary. It is definitely in the Agatha Christie genre of “cozy mysteries,” meaning that murder is treated in a genteel manner. I’ll concede that Molly is an unlikely central character. She invites descriptions such as naïve, mousy, neurodivergent, and socially awkward. One might also classify her as having OCD. How many people do you know whose primary goal in life is to clean hotel rooms and her home to a state of “perfection?” She works in the five-star Grand Regency Hotel, marvels over its grandeur, and loves to clean. In her words, “I like things simple and neat.” She is aware that her work colleagues think she’s an oddball and that for most, maids are a “lowly nobody.” Still, she considers herself lucky to work at the Grand Regency. Squalor, dirt, and tip-stealing Cheryl are her enemies, though she is happy to clean up the messes of guests, no matter how vile they might be. 

 

Molly’s sheltered life reminds me of Chauncey Gardner in Being There, though Molly’s life has not been a tidy bed of roses. Her mother died when she was young, she doesn’t know her father, and was been raised by her aunt in an apartment filed with collectibles. (Think porcelain made by Hummels, Goebel, and Royal Daulton.) Their tyrannical landlord gouges them and takes his time on needed repairs, but jumps like a panhandling jackrabbit when the rent is due. Molly’s aunt has built a nest egg for Molly, but doesn’t realize she lost most of it in a scam. Thus, when her aunt dies of cancer, Molly is left with very little money and an arsenal of her aunt’s aphorisms that she repeats like a talking doll. Alas, Molly’s salary and tips make paying the rent a challenge.

 

Prose doesn’t specify the novel’s setting. On one hand, we visualize a posh English hotel in the 1950s, perhaps in the Cotswolds, because of the proliferation of tea drinking, stiff manners, and deference to hierarchy. On the other hand, parts of the book (speech, plebian characters, Olive Garden, the legal system) seem very North American. Ms. Prose is Canadian, so perhaps her model is a grand Canadian Pacific Railroad hotel (Vancouver? Banff? Toronto? Quebec City?).   

 

Molly’s orderly life is upset when she befriends Giselle Black, the second spouse–think “trophy wife”–of Charles Black, who is filthy rich. How he got that way is mysterious, but both of them tip Molly generously and Giselle eventually pours out of her woes to Molly. In Molly’s parlance, Charles is “a bad egg” who is jealous and beats Giselle. One morning Molly begins to clean their room–including wiping all traces of a strange (to Molly) white dust from various surfaces–and discovers Mr. Black dead in the bedroom. Before you can say, “Count your blessings,” Molly is in for an adventurous week. It involves Rodney, a maybe boyfriend; a pawned ring; a gun, interference by Cheryl, who dislikes Molly; Juan Marichal, an undocumented worker; Molly’s friendship with the hotel doorman; her arrest for the murder of Charles Black; possible charges for drug running; revelations about Molly’s aunt; and a high-powered pro bono lawyer.

 

Here is a major plot problem. Even before we get the Christie-like reveal, we know Molly is innocent. (She even thanks the police interviewer who gave her a cup of water!) Nor will you not need Hercule Poirot’s “leetle gray cells” to finger the guilty parties. Prose does leave open the possibility of at least one guilty person who goes free, but the narrative so mannered that it’s unthinkable anyone would consider Molly as a murderess. It’s equally hard to imagine that Molly would change as much in a week as The Maid would have it.

 

The Maid is often charming, though it its chief attraction is entering a world and way of thinking that’s offbeat, old-fashioned, unintentionally funny, and charming. I’m not surprised there has been a sequel and a Molly Gray fan cult. If only there were an actual mystery!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Vermont Winter Reconsidered

Not my photo, but it was one of my bad choices!

When I drive into town in the winter and see kids waiting for the bus wearing hoodies and sneakers in February, I often wonder at what age do humans experience WRP (weather-related pain). My theory is that we begin to feel symptoms in our late 20s and WRP full onset comes when we hit 30.

Several of you have made nice comments in texts, emails, or postings about my memories of Vermont winters. Now I must confess that most of my best pre-WRP days came before I reached the big 3-0. I’m more than twice as old now, but 30 bothered me more than any of the other Big-Zero birthdays I’ve had. Maybe it was because I was a teen when Young Turks insisted, “Never trust anyone over 30.” I think, though a 13-year-old eight grader named Julie is the reason.

I contend that hell is a place where bad people must monitor an eighth-grade study hall for eternity. I really liked Julie; she was spunky and funny, but her energy could test the patience of a saint. Especially in study hall! Trying to get “Jules” to sit for 45 minutes was like telling an avalanche to stop being annoying. My birthday is in March–decidedly a winter month in Vermont–and the very day I turned 30, Jules bounded up to my desk and said, “Mr. W, Mr. W., did you know that Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?” I ran my fingers through my hair and replied, “You mean The Beatles?” Said she, “Yes, have you ever heard of them?” When I scooped my jaw from the floor I told her, “Jules I promise to explain this to you tomorrow, but right now I need you to go back to your seat and leave me alone, or I might have to kill you.”

You can put Julie’s question in my box of remembrances of how I fell out of love with Vermont winters. She instantly made me feel like a dinosaur peering into the sky and wondering what those giant rock hurtling toward Earth portended. To add insult to injury, at age 31 I fell prey to WRP.

In 1983, Burlington held its inaugural First Night celebration. It wasn’t unusual for Lake Champlain to freeze over, but that usually didn’t occur in mid-December. The Vermont side of Champlain is usually warmer than the New York side, which lies in the shadow of the High Adirondacks. When it does freeze at Burlington, the winds from New York can sweep across a 12-mile ice sheet. One New Year’s Eve the temperature was well below zero as we marched down Winooski Avenue behind giant Bread and Circus puppets. Even dressed head to toe in insulated clothing it was like a cartoon in which we expected our words to freeze in midair and shatter.

That February we had a massive Friday snow storm in which flakes fell so hard everyone at the high school was sure they were going to send us all home. It didn’t happen and it was a tossup who was more off the rails, the students or the faculty. It took me over an hour to drive the four miles to home. I was crestfallen to see a solid blanket of deep snow in the driveway. Only someone burnt would I attempt what might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. I backed up until I could gain traction, gunned the engine, and slid into the drive. Call me Rocket Man.  I came to rest starring at the sky through my windshield with an acre of snow under the car’s frontend. It took hours to shovel it level to the drive and chisel snow from the engine. WRP supremo.

The following winter was the Great Blue Freezie caper. On a subzero morning I got a call from a colleague who lived ten miles north asking if I could come get him as his car wouldn’t start. We almost made it to school before my car halted outside of town where the Lamoille River tumbles over a power dam. I opened the hood, and witnessed a ten-inch column of blue ice coming from the radiator. Yes, friend, my anti-freeze froze. People stop if they see a disabled vehicle because one could die from exposure. We were delivered to school by a kind man in a pickup reeking of rancid oil and roughly as clean.

My last Vermont winter was quite a treat as well. It wasn’t all that cold, but the first snowfall came on October 15. We never got a blizzard, but it snowed a few inches a day through mid-April. Doable? Not really. By March there was nowhere to put the snow! It was the same winter our adventurous tabby Garp got stuck in a tree, but that’s a striped tale/tail for another time.

Moving to Western Mass for grad school was like landing in Miami. My new take on the Green Mountain State is that for six months of the year there’s no better place to be. The other six are called winter and I’m on medical leave.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

The Scarecrow: A Michael Connelly Thriller

 

 

 

 

THE SCARECROW (2009)

By Michael Connelly

Little, Brown and Company, 2009, 419 pages.

★★★★

 

At first, I didn’t think The Scarecrow was up to par with other Michael Connelly crime thrillers, but the more pages I turned, the more I was engrossed. This “scarecrow” is similar to the farmer’s decoy only in the sense that its intent is to scare away threats to the “farm,” secret, anonymous, and (in theory) untraceable transactions on the dark web. You can assume that most of those activities are illegal: selling weapons, looting accounts, spreading malware, running prostitution rings, payments for assassinations, and moving drugs. The sites are often called “onion routing” as they work by encrypting multiple layers of the web as if each was an onion peel. The scarecrow in this novel nefarious tech genius/serial killer who constructs those layers* and makes the onion nearly impossible to peel.

 

The Scarecrow features journalist Jack McEvoy, whom readers know from Connelly’s novels The Poet  1996) and its sequel The Narrows (2004), perennial fan favorites. McEvoy’s (fictional) brother was among the Poet’s gruesomely murdered victims. Connelly puts a lot of himself into McEvoy in The Scarecrow. Connelly, like McEvoy, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Unlike McEvoy, Connelly left journalism before the Times began mass layoffs. Connelly often includes current events in his novels. Big city newspapers began losing readership in the 1980s, but 2009, the year The Scarecrow was published in the United States, was when major layoffs became front-page news.

 

Connelly pulled off a bold tactic in The Scarecrow in that we know the identities of two of the bad guys before we know anything else. McGinnis thinks he runs Western Data, a security “farm,” but Wesley Carver, his scarecrow in charge of the servers, is the real power. He’s a brilliant MIT grad, but also a nefarious murderer. Meanwhile back at the Times, word has come down that 100 employees are subject to a RIF (Reduction in Force) and Jack is number 99. He’s less upset than you might imagine; he’s burned out but needs the dough so he stays on for another two weeks to train his replacement, the vivacious Angela Cook. Angela is bright, but relatively inexperienced and willing to work for about a third of what Jack makes.

 

Jack plans to go out in glory. After printing an account of the arrest of Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old, for murder Jack is lambasted by the suspect's grandmother who claims that Alonzo stole the car in which a woman’s body was found but didn’t kill her. Although Alonzo is a foul-mouthed drug-dealer, Jack comes to suspect Alonzo, though a vile jerk, is not guilty and was browbeaten into a confession because he’s a young gang member (the Crips). If Jack can prove that, he can probably win another Pulitzer and write a book about racial injustice. He holds his cards close to his vest, but Angela tips him off to a dark web site about trunk murders with similar MOs involving braces, sexual assault, and strangulation. Little do either Angela or Jack know that the very act of viewing the site trips a “manwire” that allows Carver to trace them and seek to ruin and/or murder Jack.

 

Jack flies to Nevada to interview a trunk murderer imprisoned there, but finds his cellphone is compromised, his back account is empty, all his passwords have been stolen, his interview has been pushed back, and he doesn’t have enough money to drive his rental car back to LA. Trust me when I say that this is merely the tip of the iceberg for Jack. He does, however, manage to touch base with Rachel Walling, his former lover and an FBI agent. Some passion is rekindled; though a roll in the hay literally saves Jack’s life, it also gets Rachel fired.

 

The Scarecrow becomes a test of wits between individuals who break rules for differing reasons and when told to keep their hands out of the fire thrust them into the flames to see what will happen. There will be collateral damage. Connelly once again masterfully builds enough tension for nails to be bitten to the quick. Pity the poor crow that sits on Wesley Carver’s shoulder.

 

Rob Weir

 

* Good uses of the dark web include protecting journalist sources and communicating with those in the witness protection program.

 

Winter Memories: Nostalgia or Analogy?

Covered bridge in Fairfax, VT near our house  (NMP)

Is it the curse of old men to dwell on the past? This winter has been so cold and snowy that it reminds me of when winter excited me. The 1970s were distressful: stagflation, gas shortages, high unemployment, appalling fashion and music, and inability to land a teaching job. Emily and I desperately wanted to leave Pennsylvania.

Lots of people like Pennsylvania, but it was too conservative, plus about all this working-class lad knew about the world was nearby Maryland, West Virginia, and Washington, DC. I got married in 1978; Emily and I wanted to live in New England, she because of relatives in the region and me because I was seduced by photos in National Geographic. Those are not the best reasons for pulling up stakes, but we vowed to move to move whenever one of us got a job up north. It happened eight months later. We’ve traveled a lot since then, but we always head back to our adopted homeland of New England.

We now reside in Massachusetts, but our first New England home was in northwestern Vermont where Emily got a job offer. That’s world-class irony, as Vermont and Rhode Island were the only New England states where none of Emily’s relatives lived. The only time either of us had ever seen Vermont was when we were driving to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, got turned around in its notorious traffic rotary, and accidentally drove across the border to Pownal, Vermont. It did not leave a good impression. Pownal was rundown and sported a tawdry greyhound betting track. Its parking lot was where we reversed direction and hightailed it back to Williamstown.

We moved to northwestern Vermont in early winter, before I drove back to Pennsylvania to finish my Masters degree courses. On my return trip, I stopped in Montpelier for a job interview. It was so cold I couldn’t feel my feet!  After all, I was armed with acrylic sweaters, light jackets, thin socks, and ankle-high footwear. I didn’t get that job, thus I was unemployed and, like many newlyweds, cash was tight. Burlington was out of our price range, so we rented a basement apartment in Milton, nearly 20 miles north. We froze our tushes off, but were sustained by the adrenaline of discovery before discovering wool, down parkas, tire chains, engine block heaters, and the wisdom of throwing a snow shovel in the trunk. 

 

We were once among the idiots walking across Button Bay! (NMP)

 

Somehow, it felt romantic to bundle up, dare to walk upon frozen Lake Champlain, hear the snow make a noise under our feet that was a cross between a crunch and a squeak, and watch the thermometer plunge below zero Fahrenheit. I took to calling Vermont “The Land of Right-Angle Smoke.” There were several weeks in which one degree would have constituted a thaw. The air was so heavy and laden with ice crystals that warmed air could not rise through it. River valleys were filled with homes where woodsmoke climbed 25-30 feet above the roofline, smacked into the cold air mass, and made an L-shaped turn. It couldn’t have been healthy to breathe that air, but I didn’t think about it back then.

I finally secured a teaching job, in Milton no less. The community was poor, but I adored teaching in the grades 7-12 high school. When I left after seven years, it had zilch to do with the kids. Oh, sure, I had occasional discipline problems, but nothing I couldn’t handle and I deeply empathized with those growing up without the resources that ought to be guaranteed every youngster. In a literal sense, Emily and I grew up in Vermont. Small wonder it holds a special place in our hearts and we seldom turn down a chance to venture across the border (near Brattleboro) and keep going until we make it to Burlington or beyond. 

Snow falling 1" per hour in our MA backyard

 

Maybe I’m remembering all this because right now, winter in Massachusetts feels like one in Vermont. We’ve had several large snowstorms that crunch-squeak beneath our now-appropriate footwear and numerous subzero nights. Is it geezer nostalgia? I’d plead guilty to miss being in my 20s when the cold didn’t make my joints throb or send me under a mountain of quilts. Maybe. Ask me again about nostalgia in June, when Vermont skies are blue, days are pleasantly warm, farmers’ markets are crowded, and small boats flash brightly-colored sails on Lake Champlain.

Rob Weir

NMP = Not My Photo. There were no consumer digital cameras until the 1990s.

 

Lisa Jackson's Older Novel Skewers Celebrity Culture

 

 

 

EXPECTING TO DIE (2017)

By Lisa Jackson

473 pages

★★★★

 

To paraphrase John Kerry, who among us does not love Big Foot? In Grizzly Falls, Montana, that would be detectives Regan Pescoli and Selena Alvarez. The rest of the town is either scared out of their wits, believers, or boosters who hear the tourism cash register ringing when Big Foot emerges as the prime suspect in a series of crimes. Pescoli and her now-husband Santana think Big Foot is superstitious nonsense. Regan (literally) lacks the time to take Big Foot seriously. She is closing in on 40 and her ballooning belly is lampooned by town busybodies who think her advanced age for motherhood is embarrassing. No wonder Pescoli wears her raging hormones on her badged sleeve. Selena is a rationalist who doesn’t welcome upheaval because she’s next in charge when her boss goes on maternity leave, though Reagan is determined to restore order before checking into the birthing room.

 

It’s personal, as Regan’s teenaged daughter Bianca from her previous marriage was allegedly chased by Big Foot. It’s bad enough that Destiny, one of Bianca’s classmates, is missing but Bianca and a bunch of her high school classmates returned to the forbidden area where Destiny was last seen to “hang out” (read drinking, smoking pot, making out, and scaring each other).  As Bianca is navigating her way out of the woods, she hears movement and senses she’s being stalked. A rattlesnake? A grizzly bear? A cougar? All could be found in the mountains of West Montana. Imagine Bianca’s terror when she glimpses a hairy creature over seven feet tall that smells like a garbage dump. My guess is that you, like Bianca, wouldn’t stick around to get a closer look. She tears off through the forest, stumbles, gets up, runs, and keeps going until she mangles her ankle, tumbles into a small creek, and onto Destiny’s putrefying body. Despite the pain, Bianca screams and speeds back to a parking lot filled with cop cars and reports her find, despite the plea of some of her peers to keep quiet. Not happening; her mom is a cop after all, even if she is embarrassed by her mom.

 

Regan retains her doubts about Big Foot, but somebody or something has killed Destiny. Now imagine being a teen again. Not much happens in Grizzly Falls, but Bianca’s peer group is pretty much like those elsewhere, a volatile mix of recent grads who didn’t go to college, good kids, dare devils, preening beauty queens, scholars, idiots, and entitled jerks and jocks with parents who are even worse. You’d think, though, that young folks would finally avoid venturing out of town, but you’d be wrong. Some of the boys want to act like they’re not scared, and adrenaline, peer pressure, and a taste of freedom are powerful lures. It’s just a matter of time until another kid goes missing and another attack takes place. The local Big Foot Believers club is ready to lock, load, and go hunting. In other words, Grizzly Falls is facing mass hysteria. Can it get any worse?

 

Yep, all that’s needed is hucksterism, an aggressive journalist, and Pescoli’s slacker ex-husband Luke and his much younger second wife. Luke is happy to exploit his biological daughter (Bianca) in pursuit of easy money and a brush with fame. Welcome to the age of greed and “reality” TV. Barclay Spinx is the “host” of a show that “exposes” mysteries. He wants to restage Bianca’s flight for Big Foot Territory! Montana and his TV crew descend on Grizzly Falls like a plague of locusts. Soon, everybody is town including the mayor is anxious to be interviewed, be on TV, or explain why their daughter would be more telegenic than Bianca. The fact that that Regan and Santana want nothing to do with such a sleazy project serves only to encourage erstwhile usurpers to crawl out the woodwork. Meanwhile, Pescoli and Alvarez have several additional murders and missing persons investigations to solve.

 

Is Big Foot discovered? You’ll have to discover that for yourself, just as you’ll have to judge the plausibility of author Lisa Jackson’s mystery. IMHO, Jackson absolutely nails the cult of celebrity, the tawdry aspects of smalltown life, hormone-poisoned teenage boys, jealousy-inflamed girls and young women, and how “reality” can be warped. Think Mark Twain’s “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” for the age of television. Expecting to Die is an incisive indictment of American culture.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Sliding Doors a Look at the Butterfly Effect

 

 

 

SLIDING DOORS (1998)

Directed by Peter Howitt

Miramax, 99 minutes, PG-13 (adult situations)

★★★

 

Movie themes often run in cycles. In 1981, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski made Blind Chance, a film about the famed butterfly theory. It holds that changing the smallest thing from the past, even the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, could alter the future significantly. My favorite butterfly effect movie is Run, Lola, Run (1998). It was part of a mini-trend of similarly themed films: Me, Myself, I (1999), Happenstance (2000), Donnie Darko (2001), Mr. Nobody (2009) …. Some, like Donnie Darko, confused audiences; others ranged from intriguing to middling.

 

Place Sliding Doors in that last category, which is better than its official designation as a Rom-Com. It’s only a romantic comedy in one of its two timelines; one would be better labeled a tragedy. Its focal point is Helen Quilley (Gwyneth Paltrow), who has been fired by her public relations firm in London. On the elevator she drops an earring, which is picked up and returned by a stranger. She heads for the Tube, and misses her train by a split second. These things alone qualify as a bad day on its own, but she returns to her London apartment to find her slacker boyfriend Gerry Flannigan (John Lynch) climaxing with Lydia (Jeanne Triplehorn), his ex-American girlfriend. Helen walks out.

 

In a rewind, Helen makes the train and finds herself in conversation with James Hammersmith (John Hannah), the stranger who picked up her earring on the elevator. Helen finds James funny, daft, and kind. On her trip home she is mugged, allowing Gerry to dodge discovery by minutes, though he leaves clues requiring awkward movements to conceal. By then, we already hate Gerry as a lazy sponge who is being kept by Helen while he’s not writing the book that is supposed to assure their financial futures.

 

In each scenario, Helen ends up seeing through Gerry’s shallow veneer and staying with her best friend Anna (Zara Turner) as she tries to sort out her life. To help keep the timelines straight, script writer/director Peter Hewitt has one Helen coifed in long, straight hair and looking classically “cute.” In the alt-timeline Anna convinces Helen to move on from Gerry. Helen marks the shift by getting her hair cut short in a stylish manner and assumes an air of glamor, despite being exhaustive from working several jobs. In each timeline, Helen comes to prefer James, while Gerry pours out his tribulations to his mate Russell (Douglas McFerren). As opposed to Anna’s sympathy for Helen, Russell laughs hysterically at Gerry and tells him what an idiot he is. In each timeline, Helen discovers she’s pregnant, but in one Gerry’s the father and the other it’s James. (Even Lydia gets into the act!)

 

Things happen that disrupt rom-com formulae. Neither Helen will deliver a baby. In one she falls down stairs and miscarries; in another she is struck by a van. Whatever her fate, though–even one in which she thinks James has been playing her for a fool–it is James who is steadfast in a good way, not the obsequious Gerry.

 

As in most butterfly effect tales, viewers need to be alert; hairstyles alone won’t tip off essential details less obvious than Helen never should have been in a relationship with Gerry in the first place. The title Sliding Doors is clever in its dual meaning–the subway door opening or failure to do so is our metaphorical “butterfly”–but it also references the way the film cuts between the two Helens and, less obviously, the way James’ mind slides between light-hearted and serious. Although Sliding Doors is not likely to be thought of as a significant film, Gwyneth Paltrow is pretty good in it. Because of her career in fashion and her parentage (actress Blythe Danner and director/producer Bruce Paltrow) we expect her to do sophistication well, but she was also convincing as a more earthy and naïve young professional. In addition, her English accent is very convincing. John Hanna is amusing, but would have been more endearing with his manic side tempered a bit. John Lynch is supposed to disgust us and does, though he too could have dialed it back to help us understand why Helen was so blind to his quintessential jerkiness. For me Zara Turner struck the right balance between comedy and seriousness.

 

Sliding Doors is no Run, Lola, Run, but it’s diverting.

 

Rob Weir