Ignore the Dumb Title: Good Time Has Much to Say

GOOD TIME (2017)

Directed by Josh and Bennie Safdie

A24 Pictures, 101 minutes, R (violence, language, sexuality)

★★★★

This overlooked film was nominated for the Palme D’Or and then disappeared in a flash. That’s puzzling as much of it is quite good. It is, however, encumbered with a terrible and misleading title. The moment one says, “bank robbery film” and “good time,” most folks will conjure images of a goofy slapstick caper film. Good Time is a caper film, but it’s more like Of Mice and Men mashed with Dog Day Afternoon than cheap laughs fare such as Going In Style or Quick Change.

We know we’re into something different from the opening scene. Nick Nikas (co-director Bennie Safdie) sits vacant-eyed across from a psychiatrist who unsuccessfully tries to engage him in a word association test. It’s not that Nick is being uncooperative, it’s that the exercise is too hard for him. Into the office bursts his brother “Connie” (Constantine), who yells at the shrink, tears up his notes, and leads his brother out of the office.

We next meet the brothers wearing rubber masks and trying to rob a bank. It goes wrong and they flee, with Connie (Robert Pattinson) yelling out instructions to his brother. Connie gets away, but Nick is apprehended when he runs straight through a plate glass door. From there we switch to Connie’s attempt to raise $10,000 for his brother’s bail, as he is worried that Nick will not fare well in jail. He’s right; Nick is badly beaten and hospitalized.

It is here we get the caper part of the film. Connie—his hair hastily cut and bleached, as the robbery money had a dye pack that would have made him easy to identify—spirits a sedated, bandaged, guarded man from the hospital only to discover it’s a different criminal, Ray (Buddy Duress), not Nick. From there it’s a wild night of flight, an encounter with a teenage accomplice (Taliah Webster), a bottle filled with valuable LSD, pursuit through an after-hours amusement park, and more.

Are the caper scenes funny? Let’s just say that the humor is more in the vein of Reservoir Dogs, but without the witty repartee. By the time the night is over, the film is more tragic than goofy, and more violent than slapstick. The overall look of the action is like colorized film noir, the garish offerings of New York City stores and the lurid lights of the amusement park striking us like paintballs between the eyes.

Rex Reed hated all of this and called the film “pointless toxicity” and a “totally surreal look at people in crisis.” My rejoinder is, “Exactly!” minus his “pointless” judgment. We will meet Nick again before the film ends and it slowly dawns on us that virtually every character in the film is handicapped by happenstance. The contrast of bright colors and darkness underscores the gap between the American Dream and the hazy nightmare through which our marginal protagonists fail to negotiate.

I am not usually a Robert Pattinson fan, but he’s very good as Connie, a man much smarter than the people in his family and neighborhood, but not smart enough to overcome the fact that life’s deck is stacked against him. Duress plays to the hilt his part as a small-time hood whose foul mouth is the toughest thing about him. There is also a delicious small part for Jennifer Jason Leigh, Connie’s putative girlfriend, Corey. She shows up acting as dumb as a rock and looking as shabby as a cast-off rag doll, both being pretty close to true (for her character).

Taliah Webster is cool as cucumber as a cynical black kid who says she’s 16, looks 14, and has seen enough to be jaded about cops. Webster’s brief make-out scene with Pattinson—consistent with the plot—raised eyebrows. It may not have been the smartest thing to write into the script given current sensibilities. Then again, it might also be an honest look at what goes on among the underclass. In either case, as good as Webster is, her character needed a deeper back-story to clarify her motives.

Acting wise, Safdie steals our heart. His Nick is not merely mentally challenged; he is so severely handicapped that he is like a loyal dog that follows Connie’s commands. Though Connie loves his brother deeply, he doesn’t run a sheltered workshop, which is precisely what Nick needs. In the end we are left wondering what Nick’s future will be. I could not imagine a bright one for Nick, Connie, Corey, or anyone else in their immediate circle.

Does this sound like a film that should be titled Good Time? It’s far from a screwy comedy, but it’s worth watching for many other reasons. That includes the unsettling ones.

Rob Weir

Warlight a Masterful Triumph

WARLIGHT  (2018)

By Michael Ondaatje

Knopf, 304 pages.

★★★★★

In 1992, Michael Ondaatje won the Man Booker Prize for The English Patient. If there is any justice, he will win again for his doleful and astonishing Warlight.

How to explain what this book is about? I suppose we should start with the title. If you think that wars are over when they officially end, you’ve been fortunate enough never to have experienced one. Ondaatje’s novel opens in “the dimmed warlight” of 1945, just after the war against fascism has been won. That’s cold consolation to a city such as London, where war’s festering wounds and devastation lie all around. So too do secrets, old scores, and not-yet-subdued dangers. The very path to the future is bathed in a hazy half-light.   

Now ask yourself what you know of your parents’ lives before you were self-aware. Would you know about it, if when your mother was a girl, a thatcher’s lad fell through the cottage roof and couldn’t be moved for several weeks? Do you have even the faintest idea of what your father’s job entails? Of what your mother’s education was like? Of what either of them did during a war in which their children were packed off to America and Wales for safekeeping?

The narrator of Warlight is 14-year-old Nathaniel Williams. When he and his older sister Rachel are told that their parents are going away for a year—ostensibly because Unilever has sent their father off to Singapore—they fret over this less than one might think. Neither parent is what you’d call warm, and its unclear if their mother, Rose, cares at all, or if she’s just spectacularly bad at the whole motherhood thing. What is odd, though, is that the children are left in the care of a large-nosed, disheveled man named Walter, whose ideas about domesticity are even more challenged than Rose’s. Nathaniel dubs him The Moth for his furtive ways and soon forgets his actual name. And before you know it, the household is like a London Underground station through which all manner of people pass through. A few are sophisticated, but mostly they are a Dickensian array of misfits, petty criminals, and shadowy figures. The one constant is The Moth’s friend, whom Nathaniel and Rachel call The Darter because, as Walter explains, his welterweight boxing nickname was the Pimlico Darter. It also describes his propensity for dancing on the edge of malfeasance. Not exactly the company with whom you’d expect private school kids to be spending time.

Nathaniel soon begins to skip school and The Darter puts him to work—first at a restaurant, but soon joining him for late night trips down the Thames in a mussel boat to do some “delivery” work that might better be called “smuggling.” Those activities include cargoes of greyhounds for dog tracks, some legit but mostly not. But in the warlight, who’s to notice forged papers? The descriptions of London’s squalid piers and mysterious buildings are alone worth a read. What exactly took place inside a former monastery converted to a factory? How are people getting by amidst the rubble of the Blitz? It’s an exciting time for young Nathaniel, especially after he meets Agnes, who is way beneath him on the social scale, but who both introduces him to the pleasures of the flesh and is the blithe counterpoint to his brooding tendencies. 

I began to presume that Warlight was a coming of age novel. It is, but it’s so much more. I shall say only that it has much to do with the aspects of Rose’s life that an adolescent boy could not imagine, and a 17-yeard-old daughter could only partially infer. It also has to do with nurture, socialization, and early childhood. To what degree are we products of our genes versus the influence of various role models and our striving to invent ourselves? How many times can a single life shift gears? Can we ever truly overcome our essential natures? Though we have our suspicions, these will remain open questions, even when we meet Nathaniel again at age 28.

Michael Ondaatje has written more poetry than novels and it shows—in a good way. They are passages of this book that are read-aloud beautiful—sentences whose prose sparkles nearly as brightly as the provocative observations held within their content and context. I will also tell you something very important: nothing in this book is an incidental throwaway. It’s hard to know what impresses more, Ondaatje’s dreamy prose or plotting worthy of an artisan craftsman. If warlight is akin to the gloaming, this novel illumines like a hot summer sun.

Rob Weir

Shepherd's Hut Like an Aussie Huck Finn

THE SHEPHERD'S HUT  (2018)

By Tim Winton

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 288 pages.

★★★★

One of the hardest things for a novelist to do is capture adolescence. Most writers such as 57-year-old Tim Winton, who are accomplished enough to land a novel with a major publishing house, have long ago left behind the confused logic of adolescence. Plus, most of us would have trouble explaining our own coming of age, let alone concoct a convincing story for someone else. In literary terms, there's a reason why Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been, since 1884, the gold standard is depicting the adolescent mind.

Winton's The Shepherd's Hut will, in many ways, remind you of Huckleberry Finn. His 15-year-old protagonist and narrator Jackson ("Jaxie") Clackton is–like Winton– Australian, but the parallels to Huck Finn are striking. Both Huck and Jaxie grew up semi-feral, both have abusive fathers, both cuss a blue streak, neither is much for book learning, and both engage in a great adventure. Jaxie is a bit cruder, but replace the dark Mississippi alluvial soil with the parched red sands of Western Australian, make the dangers more site-specific, and exchange Twain's runaway slave for an exiled priest, and the two tales converge.

This is the case even though The Shepherd's Hut is set in the present. Winton gives the story a timeless quality. Jaxie knows some music and news from television, but he's effectively removed from direct everyday reality. He lives in a dying town in isolated Western Australia, an area roughly four times the size of Texas with under 2.6 million people—more than 75% of whom live in the city of Perth. No city luxuries for Jaxie; his town is so dead that even the IGA has closed. The Clacktons are poor, Jaxie is unpopular in school, and he's a loner–except for a childhood friend Lee (Lee-Ann) who becomes a bit more than that as they move into their teenage years. As if Jaxie's life can't get any worse, his mother dies of cancer, a tragedy that exacerbates his father's drinking and penchant for violence. When Jaxie and Lee are caught in a compromising position, she is carted off to a town far away. Jaxie has to deal with losing Lee, his aunt's withering condemnation of his morals, and a damaged eye courtesy of a clouting from his father—a figure Jaxie despises so much that he calls him "Captain Wankbag."

Jaxie's adventure begins when his father is killed in a freakish garage accident and Jaxie discovers his body. In his 15-year-old mind, he's sure he'll be accused of murdering the old bastard. So Jaxie sets off across the empty expanses with a vague idea of finding his soul mate Lee and living away from people. To give a sense of how little Jaxie has thought this through, he takes a rifle to shoot game, but not many cartridges. He wisely chucks his Vans for hiking shoes, but grabs a plastic cooler instead of water bags, doesn't pack extra clothing, and hastily grabs a butter knife instead of a proper hunting blade. (Trying skinning a kangaroo with a butter knife!)

Winton vividly describes the landscape, but does so in ways that emphasize how it would be seen through 15-year-old eyes. I admired how Winton depicted the vastness of the land and its silent indifference to those upon it. In this sense, Winton makes us feel Jaxie's peril in ways more profound than harrowing escapes from brown snakes, venomous spiders, abandoned mine shafts, stray barbed wire, or monitor lizards. In fact, Winton mainly makes us worry that Jaxie will perish of dehydration or starvation.

One thing that doesn't endanger Jaxie is loneliness. He is relieved to find a water tank in the middle of nowhere, but disgusted to find that there's actually someone living in the old shepherd's hut to which it's attached. Enter Finton MacGillis, an elderly Irishman living alone in a place that Jaxie thinks is overpopulated by a factor of one. We eventually learn that Finton is an exiled priest who talks non-stop, but won't say why he's been transported to his solitary fate. Can Jaxie trust Finton, or is he some sort of conman or pedophile? He thinks he wants nothing to do with Finton, but can't explain why he keeps delaying his quest to find Lee.

What ensues is a strange relationship that makes sense only because Winton so thoroughly probes subjects such as the teenage psyche, the impact of loneliness on adults, and the spiritual reflection unvarnished nature induces. Something dramatic occurs to upset the delicate equilibrium, but that's up to you to discover. It's also up to you to determine if it's compelling. I found it slightly more plot convenient than convincing, but the rest of the book enthralled me.

I highly recommend this book. You will quickly understand why Winton is a four-time winner of the Miles Franklin Award, which is given to the best work on Australian life, and why he's been twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Rob Weir

Women with Amazing Voices

To repeat an old rant, too many Nashville-based female singers are like Lego pieces: unsnap one and pop another into place. As a rule they are young, small-voiced, whispery-toned sopranos—pretty to hear, but with all the distinctiveness of a block of clapboard houses painted white. Here's a June 2018 edition of Women with Amazing Voices—the ones that will make you want to stuff those Lego pieces back in the box and hide them in the closet.

Ellen Starski, The Days When Peonies Prayed for the Ants

Ellen Starski has a unique voice you'll either love or find odd. Put me firmly in the first camp. Its nasal, but expressive; dramatic, but controlled. The latter quality is one I really admire. "Daughter of the Sea" is a perfect example. This song has theatrical qualities with its bouncy, edgy strings, but it's deliberately paced and the tension comes from small shifts in Starski's voice, not flashy outbursts. It's also typical in that most of the songs are about loss, family, and coming to grips with the ways of adult life. "Ode to Nanny and Cookie" is about her grandmothers; the tone is somber and wrapped in moody repeated guitar pulses. "Miss You Mary" is homage to her mother and she wrenches emotion from lines such as I was looking for a place to bury the past with you. A different kind of yearning emerges in "Missing You," Glimpses of you still surface on my skin/I shower and the world comes crashing in…. Starski lists influences such as Leonard Cohen, Aimee Mann, and Sarah McLachlan, but there's also some old-time country in it that, to me, evoked Kitty Wells. Check out songs such as "Honey, I'm Not Him." When she sings I told you once don't make me tell you again/You better stay away from my man it's way more ominous than you'd expect. It also has Appalachian seasonings that reflect the northwest Pennsylvania coal country from which she hails. "Taken By the Breeze" also has an old-time flair, though its catchiness is enhanced with just a touch of mariachi brass that takes us south of the mountains. Ms. Starski also has a footlights-quality to parts of her repertoire. "Chasin' the Sun" feels like a string band vaudeville song, and she also engages in moody spoken word forays such as "Slip of Paper" and the title track, one that is completely silent for thirty seconds before Starski recites a rhythmic poem to flute and snare drum accompaniment. I always appreciate musicians who take chances and Starski's recording ranks high among my 2018 favorites.  ★★★★★

Gretchen Peters, Sad Songs Make Me Happy

Perhaps the name Gretchen Peters gives you pause, but I’ll bet you know her music. She has a dozen records of her own, including the newly released Dancing with the Beast, but she is best known as a songwriter; she even has a niche in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Her “Independence Day”—a hit for Martina McBride—ranks # 50 of the Top 100 greatest country songs of all time, but you’ve not heard it the way it should be sung until you’ve heard Peters perform it. Luckily you can; NoiseTrade has released it on a compilation of Peters’ back catalogue material. Take the collection title seriously; Peters has an affinity for tough songs. “Independence Day,” for example, is based on the infamous 1977 Francine Hughes case, and involves an eight-year-old girl who is at the fair the day her mother sets fire to the home of her abusive husband while he and she are in it.* A tragedy? Not from Peters’ perspective!  “Disappearing Act” (from her new album) is about mortality, and "Blackbird" is another murder ballad.  “On a Bus to St. Cloud,” a hit for Trisha Yearwood, is a sad song of missing a lost love; and “When All You Got is a Hammer” is about an Iraq War vet who comes home with PTSD and the deck stacked against him. When he chillingly strikes back Peters sings, When all you got is a hammer/Everything looks like a nail. There are several tender moments on this collection, including the lovely “The Way You Move Me” and her Peters' manifesto of things of value in “The Answer.” Mostly, though, this is an album about when life isn’t exactly as imagines, like the harried woman in “Five Minutes,” or the woman aching for “The Matador,” but fearing his rage and not sure who I was cheering for… I loved the fighter and the bull. A final word: Although Ms. Peters’ music is often labeled country, that's an inaccurate descriptor. Her voice is like a huskier version of Emmylou Harris’ and like Harris, the music transgresses folk, pop, country, and Americana borders. Quite a lot, in fact, is piano-based—more like a rawhide tough Sara Bareilles than a CMT cutout. ★★★★★ 

*For those needing further proof Sean Hannity is an idiot, he has used "Independence Day" as a theme for his radio show under the mistaken impression it's a patriotic song!

Angela Josephine, Daylight

This album has been dubbed a combination "folk-opera and personal exploration" and that's an excellent description. It's deeply spiritual in a dark and honest way—musings filled with doubt, yearning, and surrender to the reality there are mysteries we cannot answer. In her stunning eight-minute finale "Face to the Wind," Angela Josephine asks do you know the way of darkness? Her revelation isn't what you expect, nor is her insistence: I'm taking the cross in this way/there's no other way… In it we also hear some of the instruments she has mastered: piano, guitar, mandolin, dulcimers….  Ms. Josephine's voice is soulful, emotive, and adaptable. She's Grace Slick-like in the way she works the band and trippy grooves of "Got to Believe," which is another song that doesn't play out to usual scripts. She takes to task a man with no one to hold/just a prayer/and a Bible/and what you've been told. And what do we do with the refrain of the ambience-dripped, feedback-enhanced, echoic "River Rising" with its refrain: O sister glory be/Glory be our mother/O sister glory be/The father, son, the lover. The title track is the album's most cheerful, one that unfolds to scampering of mando notes, but Josephine mostly walks on the mysterious and dark side. "Red Roses," for example, is a (sort of) love song but one so moody it could be French—or Leonard Cohen! Josephine is a talented singer, musician, poet, and thinker. She recorded this album in a barn in her Michigan Upper Peninsula homeland and those old beams sparked a lot of serious contemplation. ★★★★

Kris Angelis, Photobooth

Florida-born Kris Angelis now resides in Los Angeles, where she's an actress and singer/songwriter. She has just dropped a single titled "Photobooth" and has released a five-song NoiseTrade EP to mark this. Like much of her music over the past 5-plus years, "Photobooth" is upbeat, a giddy romance unfolding behind a photo booth curtain. Angelis has a small voice, but it's sweet and she can kick it up to drop into danceable arrangements. She draws comparisons to Brandi Carlile and Rachel Platten, though I think her voice is cleaner than Platten's. Check out "Heartbreak is Contagious," her warning she doesn't want to be the rebound girl. Much of it is just guitar and voice, but Angelis gives lots of bounce to the song to make it sound bigger than it is. That's the same approach we hear in the piano-shaped "Prove Me Wrong," the joyous "Roll the Dice," and the indie energy of "A Billion Hearts." Perhaps you've seen Angelis on TV; now give her a listen. ★★★★

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On Chesil Beach Exudes Quiet Tragedy

ON CHESIL BEACH  (2018)

Directed by Dominic Cooke

Bleecker Street Media, 110 minutes, R (some nudity, sexual situations)

★★★★

Two things are obvious in watching On Chesil Beach: Saoirse Ronan is one helluva of an actress and Ian McEwan says more in a novella than lesser writers manage to utter in their doorstop tomes. This scant story manages to tear at our heartstrings through a slow simmer rather than a raging boil. It is a tragic tale that relies on two of the saddest scenarios imaginable. What if you met the right person, but at the wrong time? What if a couple was perfect for each other—except for one thing about which neither knew anything at all?

Florence Ponting (Ronan) and Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle) meet at Oxford and are immediately drawn to each other because they are unlike their peers. She is the haute bourgeoisie offspring of a tyrannical industrial titan father and a toffee-nosed mother, with only younger sister Violet (Emily Watson) to lend support. She is both terrified of and resents her father—and the film hints there might be something more sinister in the deep background—but she is like him in one respect: she is driven. Florence is an aspiring classical violinist with an ear for perfection.  

Edward couldn’t be more different, starting with the fact that he likes rock n’ roll. His father is a schoolmaster and his mother (Anna-Marie Duff) is brain-damaged from a freak accident, a condition sometimes made manifest by walking about topless and smeared with pigment as she dabbles in painting and collage. And you can forget basic housekeeping. Unlike Florence, Edward has no one for emotional support. He is as shy as Florence is driven, but both are oddballs when they find each other at Oxford—he because he has to reinvent himself as a sophisticate without any guidance; she because she’s bored by pretense and is far more sensitive than her peers.

Here’s where timing enters into the equation. It’s 1962 when they graduate and marry. The film’s major action—such as it is—takes place on the film’s namesake Dorset beach where the newlyweds have gone to honeymoon. “English” and “beach” are pretty much an oxymoron. Director Dominic Cooke uses the idyllic isolation of Chesil Cove, its walking-challenged pebbled beaches, an abandoned seaward-facing fishing boat, and the slate gray of the English Channel and its skies to suggest that Florence and Edward now face a blank slate future that lacks clear direction. Everything about the honeymoon is a disaster—starting with the fact that the marriage will be immediately annulled, as neither has the slightest idea of how to consummate it.

The tragedy is palpable. As we see in flashbacks, Florence and Edward truly care for each other. Theirs is a 1962 misfortune, with Florence unsure of what it might mean to be a woman as well as a brilliant musician, and Edward trapped by 1950s misinformation on how to be a man. They are, literally, out of place out of time—too young to be married, and premature insofar as what lurks on the horizon: the sexual frankness of the later 1960s. The story does get ragged toward the end, as the script—also penned by McEwan—departs from the novella’s sequencing and gives us rather maudlin and less convincing vignettes from 1975 and 2007. But we get the point; destiny gets in the way of what should have been destined.

By now you’re probably thinking that this movie sounds more like a play. You are right to a point; On Chesil Beach requires patience. It is not about action; it is about bruised interiors, damaged psyches, and unfortunate circumstance. Such a film requires top-drawer acting and gets it. Howle hits most of the right notes as a man-shaped boy handed a set list of expectations for being a grown-up, but not the wisdom to evaluate what makes sense versus what is rubbish. Ronan is even more spectacular; she is, at turns, as delicate as a spring flower and precociously independent, even when the latter means being emotionally distant. Her performance during the seduction-gone-wrong scene practically personifies the death of innocence.

On Chesil Beach won’t give you adrenaline-rush thrills. It goes one step further; it will break your heart.

Rob Weir

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Bring Me Back a Good (if not convincing) Mystery

BRING ME BACK (2018)

By B. A. Paris

St. Martin's Press, 304 pages

★★★

Bring Me Back is a mystery that will keep you engrossed, even when you can't stand the protagonist, and even though a central reveal comes too early. Overall it's a readable and clever novel, even when it's not very convincing.

It was gutsy of Ms. Paris to cast Finn McQuaid as her lead, as he's the kind of jerk you'd avoid in real-life if you had an ounce of commonsense. Finn is vain, furtive, quick-tempered, and self-centered. He's also financially set thanks to an old friend, Harry, who helped him get his feet on the ground after a testosterone-fueled assault by bringing Finn into his high-powered London investment firm. The book is set between the years 2002 and 2016, which also tells us that Finn lined his nest during the global recession. As we know, profit-takers during those years are unlikely candidates for sainthood.

You'd better have a good tale if you want readers to connect with an egoist such as Finn. It's here that Paris casts her finest spell. Not much actually happens in Bring Me Back, but the novel is a bit like the old Alfred Hitchcock film Gaslight in that it sucks us into a psychological whirlpool. It's also like Hitchcock in that the more you suspend belief, the better you'll enjoy the spin.

Paris leads with intrigue: A British couple heading home from a French vacation makes a rest stop. When the male driver returns from the toilet, his female companion has disappeared without a trace. We soon learn that the couple is Finn and his girlfriend, Layla Gray. The book goes back and forth between time and point of view, and we immediately learn that Finn is an unreliable narrator. He is quite naturally the prime suspect in Layla's disappearance. Though he's cleared of wrong-doing, he informs us that he told both French and English authorities the truth, "just not the whole truth."    

We also learn that Finn met Layla in the Underground—he an upscale Yuppie on his way to a party, and she a Scottish country bumpkin in London for the first time with no clue that she'd never find a youth hostel bed on New Year's Eve. Layla ends up staying at the posh flat Finn shares with Harry and before you can say, "Holy plot device," Finn has dumped his girlfriend for Layla. Harry is baffled as Layla is everything Finn is not: sweet, vulnerable, reckless, non-calculating, and naïve is ways that blur the line between inexperience and mental instability. The last trait surfaces anew when she and Finn move to a country cottage, but Layla begins to act oddly. She claims she longs for London because Devon reminds her too much of the Isle of Lewis, where she grew up. It also makes her miss her sister, Ellen, who stayed on Lewis to care for their father in his final days, even though he was an abusive alcoholic lout. But the trip to France was not an engagement trip, as Finn told police. Was the purpose something more sinister? 

Twelve years pass. Layla has been declared legally dead, Finn now lives a quiet life in the Cotswolds, and he is affianced to Ellen, Layla's sister. She is Layla's opposite—calm, sophisticated, sensible, demure…. But the very announcement of impending nuptials sets off a string of bizarre consequences that begin when Ellen receives in the mail the missing piece of a Russian doll set she lost as a child. Only Layla knew about this. Other Russian dolls appear, with Finn doing his best to snatch them away before Ellen discovers them. There are reports of Ellen sightings and Finn begins to get emails with information that only Layla knew. Is she back? Is this a sick joke? Why doesn't she show herself? These questions haunt Finn. He becomes more and more agitated and irrational—which doesn't make him any more likable.

As I suggested earlier, much of Bring Me Back is more or less a crib of Gaslight, with the gender roles reversed. Although I unraveled a few rather obvious clues early on, I give Paris credit in that I did not anticipate the mystery's resolution. Nor did I particularly buy it once I finished the novel and thought about it. But perhaps this is the classic definition of a good summer read—one that keeps you swirling in the whirlpool until you cling to a branch, pull yourself out, and discover that the churning water was only two feet deep.

Thanks to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this novel.

Rob Weir

    

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The Breadwinner Far More than a YA Film

THE BREADWINNER (2017)

Directed by Nora Twomey

Written by Anita Dorn and Deborah Ellis

A24 Films, 94 minutes, PG-13

★★★★

There are those who argue that the Taliban must be part of any permanent peace settlement to end the war in Afghanistan. Very few of those raised voices come from women.

The Breadwinner did scant business in North American markets, though it gained an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. I certainly understand the war-weariness of the film-going public, but imagine what Afghans must feel.

I highly recommend watching The Breadwinner to gain insight into why sex and gender matter in Afghanistan. The subject matter is distressing, but the film is superb, and its animated format allows the squeamish to consider the violence inherent in the Taliban worldview without being bombarded with gory imagery. In fact, one of the film’s many virtues is that, by cartooning the violence, viewers are forced to confront ideological brutality rather than getting sidetracked. Let’s give this variety of fanaticism a name: misogyny.

We are taken to a marketplace where eleven-year-old Parvana sits with her father, Nurullah. By most measures, Nurullah would be a hero. He was a teacher who gave up his job to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet rule (1979–89). In this struggle he lost his oldest son to a bomb explosion and his own leg. Under Taliban rule (1996–2001), however, Nurullah is a worthless person, and is forced to peddle scant goods—including a hand-embroidered costume that was supposed to be for his eldest daughter’s wedding. He also has to hold his tongue from the insults of gun toting young Taliban punks who fancy themselves the purifiers of Islam. One day, Nurullah's not obsequious enough and he’s dragged off to prison.

Big problem. Women are not allowed to be in public without an adult male escort and there is now none in Nurullah’s household. How is his wife, Fateema, supposed to provide food or haul water for herself, her two daughters, or her infant son? She is beaten and threatened with prison for even raising such a question. The answer is always the same: find a male relative and stay out of sight.

Parvana comes to the rescue by cutting her hair, donning boys’ clothing, and passing as Aatish, Nurullah’s nephew. You can probably write the script from here—with harrowing escapes from being exposed as a central theme. Add to this threats and insults when she/he shows up at the prison seeking information on “Uncle” Nurullah. Parvana has an even more dangerous secret: she’s literate—a big no-no for Taliban misogynists. But as Aatish, she makes some money reading and writing for the large numbers of illiterate people, including Razaq, who may or may not see through Parvana’s disguise. Can she trust him as a potential benefactor?

Such a charade cannot last; they have an obvious shelf life. But Parvana means “butterfly” and Aatish translates as “fire.” The names are metaphors for both personal transformation and for the conflagration that will bring down the Taliban. Interspersed is Parvana’s serial storytelling to her baby brother of a young man’s encounters with the evil Elephant King.

The Elephant King folk tale has obvious parallels and, I suspect, that it, the film’s cartoon-like look, and the fact that the movie was adapted from Deborah Ellis’ YA graphic novel have led quite a few people to assume that The Breadwinner is a kids’ film. Perhaps, but I’d suggest that it’s deeper than that. The Breadwinner is ultimately a triumphant (of sorts) film about a tragedy. The script, direction, and imagery of the film do indeed cast an adolescent vibe, but as I suggested earlier, this is a deliberate softening of bloody detail in the service of focusing on the mindset behind the horror.

The rise of ISIS has shifted attention from the Taliban’s brutality, though insofar as the two groups view women, both are misogynist monsters. But don’t take my word for it­—ask the women in the post-Taliban parliament. Ask female professors, social workers, and school children. Ask Malala Yousafzai. And if the U.S. government agrees to a future government that includes the Taliban, ask why the hell we ever sent troops to Afghanistan.

Congratulations to all associated with The Breadwinner. It looks like a children’s film, but it’s really a testament to how you can slay dragons with a feather instead of an AK-47.

Rob Weir