If You Liked Gone Girl, Check Out Dark Places

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DARK PLACES (2009)

Gillian Flynn

Broadway Books, 349 pages, 978-0307341570

* * * * *

Before there was Gone Girl, there was Dark Places, which for my money is a superior effort by Gillian Flynn. Dark Places will appear as a movie latter this year and it might be a good idea to read the novel first as liberties are being taken with the original. Moreover, as many readers know, Ms. Flynn’s Gone Girl was a terrific novel, but Hollywood’s treatment of it was merely so-so.

Gone Girl was about bourgeois society, but Dark Places is, well, darker, with a take on rural farm country poverty that’s Carolyn Chute-like on the bleakness scale. The action shuttles between the indeterminate present and 1985, the year that five-year-old Libby Day was the only survivor of a brutal massacre in which her mother and two sisters were butchered inside their Kansas farmhouse. Her older brother, Ben, has been in prison ever since for what the courts determined—partly on Libby’s testimony—was a drug-addled satanic ritual slaying. And not even Libby avoided harm, as her flight into the winter woods led to several amputated frostbitten toes and fingers.

As we move to the present, Libby has a more pressing problem. When news of her misfortune hit the media in 1985, donors and well-wishers set up a trust fund for young Libby, but twenty plus years later the money’s nearly gone, the public is occupied by newer thrill parades, and Libby is living in hand-to-mouth squalor in a down market trailer park. Out of the blue, a man named Lyle contacts Libby and offers to pay her for a personal appearance before the Kill Club, a consortium of do-gooders, get-a-lifers, and creeps dedicated to getting at the “truth” of various sensational murders across America, including the 1985 slaying of Libby’s family. It seems that numerous Kill Club members have been in contact with Ben and are convinced that he’s innocent, that Libby’s “false” memory was planted by child psychologists, and that she needs to help them expose the “real” killer.

Libby is certain that Lyle and his cohorts are ghoulish conspiracy theory crackpots, and prison meetings with Ben do nothing to convince her otherwise. Still, she needs money and the Kill Club is willing to pay her to track down suspects on their list: Libby’s tramp father Runner, who abandoned his family years earlier, but showed up whenever he needed booze or drug money; Trey Teepano, an older boy with whom Ben hung out and who was a known Satanist; and Diondra, rumored to have been Ben’s girlfriend. They also want to hear from Krissi Cates, a stripper who was then an eight-year-old who accused Ben of molesting her.  Senseless murder… Satan… copious amounts of blood…. cokeheads… alcoholism… crippling poverty… hobo camps… strip clubs… pedophilia….  Talk about your stroll down Low-Life Lane! I doubt anyone has ever accused Ms. Flynn of being the Queen of Sunshine.

Okay, so this is not an uplifting novel. It is, however, a very taut murder mystery and, if you know anything of Flynn’s work, you know that even revelations come drenched in moral ambiguity. It’s a whale of a story and its look at social class is sharper than in Gone Girl. Another reason to read the book and not wait for the film: Rumor has it that parallels to the Manson cult murders are grafted into the narrative. Why? If you’ll pardon the expression, that seems like overkill.  –Rob Weir

Nashville Female Roundup: Make Me a Star

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Nashville is to singer-songwriters what Pittsburgh used to be to steel. The first question one must ask, though, is whether the Starmaker Machinery (phrase courtesy of Joni Mitchell) is cranking out high quality products or interchangeable widgets. The second question is whether supply has outstripped demand. The marketplace will probably resolve both of these questions better than I, but what I've heard in the past year leaves me torn between optimism and pessimism. Here's my take on a crop of several female Nashville recording artists.

Sometimes the best "new" singer-songwriter is a vet who has been kicking around but hasn't yet made the big leap. Garrison Starr heads that list for me. Her slightly nasal young-sounding voice belies the fact that she just turned 40, has 10 LPs to her name, and has been shuttling between LA and Nashville since 1993. Her latest EP, The Forgotten Street is a damn good reason to discover her if you've not already. Call these five selections 'trials-of-love' songs mostly in a country/pop vein, though her "I Could Be Your Girl" is evocative of Robyn's dance hall tunes. Starr has a supple voice that can be little girl-like, guttural, tender, or heart-wrenchingly gorgeous and what she knows that a lot of youngsters don't is which voice to put with which song. You can hear this on "In the Silence," available on YouTube, though my personal favorite is "Halfway Whole," a healing-in-process exploration that's way more honest than 99% of the processed pop platitudes one hears.

All the Pretty Things, the Nashville debut release of Ashley Riley (her third overall), induced less excitement for me. Riley has a bit of Emmylou Harris husk in her voice, but not nearly her range or depth. The album title (and its second track) sum up all that's promising and still in development about Riley's music. She indeed has a pretty voice, but she needs to add colors to her vocal palette instead of relying on shiny baubles. For example, she has a song titled "Love Shark" that, like many of the selections, simply needs to be tougher. This is particularly the case if she is going to keep working with her current band, one that features heavy bass lines and electric guitar breakouts. Put directly, Riley's material is in the country/folk realm, but the instrumentation leans toward pop/rock. She began her career as an acoustic artist and perhaps that was her best destiny.

Sarah Miles might be the artist most likely to break through, simply because she's the one with the most commercial potential. You'll see some of her releases labeled "folk," but that's utter nonsense and she might want to do all she can to discourage that handle. Think Carrie Underwood or Taylor Swift; that is, she's pop music as filtered through those rock-influenced big arrangements favored by the country music industry. She has released four recordings, of which I sampled One (2013). Miles certainly has her pop hooks in order: catchy melody lines, danceable tempos, and a tight backup band. On a less charitable note, One could also be seen as mostly one-note in tone.  With the exception of "Gray," every song on the album opens small and abruptly shifts to high gear. It's a classic pop diva maneuver but, for me, these songs lack to emotional impact of "Gray," where she manages to stay in the slow lane for the entire song. But then again, the pop industry loves singers like this and it won't hurt that the New Jersey-born, UVM grad, Atlanta-based, Nashville-produced Miles is fresh-faced and leggy. If she does make it, good for her. This music isn't my cup of tea, but it's very good of kind.Here's an official video.

Jessica Campbell is trying to follow the same path as Miles. She's an artist whose work I've known for several years and her latest III (2014) will either be the record that makes her, or brings her back to earth. Campbell has a terrific voice and has some fine moments with the pen as well, but she's struggled to find her niche. III is a very Nashville album in that its very slick and polished. The open question is whether its processed like American cheese. There are several nice moments, including "Brighter Days," a soulful pop song, and the chirpy, happy "Better ThanThis." To my ear, though, four of the eleven tracks feel like filler and several others imply fail to ignite. Campbell has certainly paid her dues, but in my heart of hearts I think she's in the same boat as Ashley Riley, and that Jessica Campbell Unplugged is a better musical space.

Rob Weir

The Battle of the Five Armies: Time to Surrender

THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES (2014)

Directed by Peter Jackson

New Line Cinema, 144 minutes, PG-13 (violence and orcicide)

* * ½

One of the better sequences of a padded film

After part two of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug (2013), I purposely dodged part three, The Battle of the Five Armies, when it hit the theaters earlier this year. My ennui with the series was akin to the hysterical 1969 Bored of the Rings parody penned by National Lampoon founders Henry Beard and Doug Kenney. I wasn’t bored at all by Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, but it seemed to me that Jackson had said all he needed to in those three majestic films and that The Hobbit felt like Lord of the Rings Lite.

Lord of the Rings made $3 billion on a $280 million investment, so I understand the allure of making The Hobbit, but my skeptical hackles rose when the project mushroomed from a one-off, to two films, and then a trilogy. A trilogy? J.R.R. Tolkien’s namesake book was just 320-pages-long. One can literally read it in a shorter period than it takes to view the three films (nearly eight hours worth). My skepticism was well placed; if The Hobbit were an undergraduate film, it would have been marked down for “padding.” I felt this keenly after The Desolation of Smaug, so I stayed away from the cinema in hope that more time would allow me to enjoy The Battle of the Five Armies with a fresh set of eyes. It didn’t work.

Martin Freeman is delightful as Bilbo; Richard Armitage is convincing as Thorin, the  dwarf king slowly driven mad by greed and dragon sickness; and Ian McKellen, perhaps to his chagrin, was born to play the wizard Gandalf. Performances are uniformly great throughout, including Benedict Cumberbatch’s voiceovers for both Smaug and Sauron. Still, The Hobbit was a children’s book and only four things of note happen in it: the formation of the dwarf/hobbit alliance, Bilbo’s escape from the Mirkwood spiders, Bard the Bow-man’s takedown of Smaug, and the final man/elf/dwarf/wizard clash with the nasties (orcs, wargs, goblins, trolls). In other words, the story could have been told in one film without resorting to tack-on slapstick sequences, giving big roles to minor book characters (Radagast, Alfrid, Kili), and inventing new characters to introduce an elf/dwarf romance (the elfin Tauriel played by Evangeline Lilly.  Jackson even inserted Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) into part three, though she’s not mentioned in the novel.

The problem with The Battle of the Five Armies is simple: once Smaug is felled about 20 minutes into the film, the next 90 minutes are just filler to get us to the culminating battle. I wish I could say the wait was worth it, but it wasn’t. What was spectacular in the Lord of the Rings series is now old hat. Jackson got us to suspend disbelief within those glorious battle sequences, but when obvious padding occurs in The Hobbit we start to ask questions about how a small intrepid band manages to slaughter thousands of orcs, why an orc chieftain can be killed with a single sword swipe on the street but can endure blow after blow and a near drowning in hand-to-hand combat, how you can “kill” ghosts with a sword, etc. In several scenes we watch orcs being mowed down, tumbling as if they were stalks of grain falling before a mechanical reaper. After one mind-numbing scene after another of this, the forces of evil begin to seem more like forces of ineptitude. I suppose this gives thrills in the ways progressing through a video game can satisfy, but at some point the vicarious sensations wear off and we wonder why we are spectators in this video game.

It’s fun to return to Hobbiton, the elves remain magical, and Smaug setting Lake-town ablaze is better than any fireworks spectacle.  Good stuff, but not enough to justify over two and half hours. The Hobbit trilogy made almost as much money as The Lord of the Rings, but count me among the exhausted viewers who are glad this franchise is finished. You know you’ve lost interest when you find the DVD special feature on filming in New Zealand to be way more interesting than the film itself. Time to move on….  Rob Weir

Clouds of Sils Maria an Epic Fail

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (2014)

Directed by Olivier Assayas

CG Cinema/IFC Film (USA); 124 minutes, R (language, brief nudity, tedium)

* *

This film should have been about them!

Here’s what good about this German-French-Swiss production (in English): gorgeous views of the Swiss Alps and strong performances from Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart. Here’s what’s bad: the script, the ham-handed metaphors, the (lack of) direction, any story line not involving Binoche and Stewart, and everything else about this numbingly obvious and boring film. This is a two-hour film that feels like a climb up the Matterhorn.

The setup is that glamorous actress Maria Enders (Binoche) is on her way to honor her mentor, playwright Wilhelm Melchior. Twenty years earlier Wilhelm hurtled Maria to fame by casting her in Maloja Snake, a play and film in which a teenage girl named Sigrid fell in love with an older woman named Helena (who is eventually driven to suicide). Enders is now world-famous, though she’s a scattershot whose life is, by her choice, micromanaged by her devoted personal assistant Valentine (Stewart). As the two make their way toward Zurich to honor Melchior, word comes that he has died. There is also a rumor that Melchior wrote a sequel to Maloja Snake with Binoche in mind as Sigrid at age 40—the age at which Helena committed suicide. But, as it turns out, that’s not quite the case. Maria is told there were just “notes”—though we suspect that Melchior’s widow, Rosa, actually burned the script—and a hot young director named Klaus (Lars Eidinger) plans to direct a revival of the play with Enders this time playing Helena.

Thank me now, as I’ve just made more sense of the script than the film does. What follows is Maria’s retreat to Sils Maria, Melchior’s home deep in the Alps generously donated by Rosa, who wishes to flee Wilhelm’s memory. There, Maria and Val hole up so she can have an existential crisis over aging and decide whether she wants to do the play. Sils Maria is stunning and, as we learn, the Maloja Snake is a cloud formation that slithers through an Alpine valley and entombs the region in wispy shrouds. It is one of the film’s obvious metaphors, representing the inexorable sweep of time, Maria’s clouded judgment, and Maria’s inability to see the potential for another kind of beauty when the postcard panoramas (her youthful visage) fade. Even more, she cannot see that Val is deeply in love with her. Get it? The play within the play…. Nor can she appreciate Val’s attempts to bring her up to date; Maria finds social media, tabloid sensationalism, and new concepts in how to present plays and movies to be shallow. She’s absolutely oblivious to the charms of Jo Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz), whom Klaus wishes to cast as the new Sigrid. What Val sees as freshness and intensity, Maria sees as a boorish bad girl who confuses F-bombs with complexity. (Ironically, that’s right—Moretz is only minimally competent in the film and has all the appeal of Lindsay Lohan in her train wreck phase.) Needless to say, Maria and Jo Ann will have a parting of the ways. Ooohhh—how profound! A play within a play within a play….  

If this sounds like a one-trick pony, it is. The film’s various subplots—Maria’s disdain for another actor, Jo Ann’s scandalous affair with a married man, Klaus’ attempt to articulate his “vision”—have less weight than the Sils Maria clouds. It’s hard to care about anything in this film except Maria/Val dynamic and, frankly, this film would have been much better as a lesbian love story rather than what it is: a series of rambles across the Alps that always end just short of the hike’s stated destination. I suppose it’s also intended to make us muse upon culture and the gap between sheen and substance, but by attempting to make that point through nothing but gauzy surfaces, Clouds of Sils Maria manages to fail on still another level. –Rob Weir

The Wailin' Jennys: Beauty Beyond Measure

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THE WAILIN' JENNYS

Bright Morning Star

Red House 234

* * * * *

The Wailin' Jennys is a great name for a country/folk trio. It's also deceptive, as these three "Jennys" (Nicky Mehta, Ruth Moody, Heather Masse) are angels, not outlaws like Waylon Jennings. In fact, they put me in mind of the voices dubbed onto the Sirens in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and I do not lightly compare anyone to a power trio like Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, and Alison Krauss. The Jennys most recent album, Bright Morning Star, was released in 2009 in Canada, but not in the U.S. until 2011 and it still hasn't gotten half the attention it deserves. This isn't just a pretty album; it's drop-to-you-knees-and-cry-your-eyes-out gorgeous.

The Jennys do everything right on this album. There is, first and foremost, the blend of three tone-perfect voices: Moody's soprano, Mehta's mezzo, and Masse's alto. Second, there is the aural mastery of the production of Mark Howard and David Travers-Smith, who place the vocals front and center and use instrumentation to generate atmosphere á la Daniel Lanois. They also do unusual things such as pairing acoustic guitar and flugel horn ("Across the Sea") or opening a song ("Storm Coming") with soulful vocals that become even more so when an electric organ rolls over the mix. They also effectively use drums in unexpected ways—mixed with banjo ("Bird Song")  or added as a  poignant punctuation mark to a breakup song ("All the Stars"). Need more convincing that this record is special? How about some fine writing? On "What Has Been Done," Mehta takes on alternative views of that theme: "Have your holy, I'll have mine/soil and birch and open sky/All our stories some day go/dust from air and earth from bone." Now add musical variation: an a capella take on an honest-to-goodness traditional (title track), a splash of Appalachia-meets-gospel ("Bird Song"), a song that comes off like something the Andrews Sisters might have done if dabbling in hula music ("Cherry Blossom Love"), and an album so thoughtful that it opens with a heart-wrenching regret song ("Swing Low Sail High") and ends on hopeful note ("Last Goodbye"). Call Bright Morning Star a shimmering mix of pop hooks, country sweetness, and harmonic perfection.  Rob Weir

Those within driving distance of Northampton, MA can catch the Jenny's in concert at the Calvin Theater on May 1. Call 800-THE-TICK or check www.nbotickets.com

Filth Fails as Black Comedy Despite McAvoy's Superb Peformance

FILTH  (2014)

Directed by Jon S. Baird

Lionsgate, 97 minutes, NR (crude humor, rough language, degradation)

* *

Don't believe the box hype!

Of all movie genres, black comedy is the hardest to get right. Err on the first half of the equation and the film is too dark for the humor to ring true; err on the second half and it's hard to muster the requisite seriousness. The Scottish film Filth flunks part one–its bleakness is so dark that even occasional sharp humor cuts like a murder knife.

The film is set in Edinburgh, but not the parts that tourists see. The film opens with the fatal gang stomping of a Japanese man in an underground station. There is a witness. Cut to the local precinct, which is staffed by a band of detectives themselves just one step—make it a half step—removed from thuggery. The station is ineptly commanded by Detective Chief Inspector Gus Bain (John Sessions), a bumbling fool who longs to write film screenplays and is just riding out his days until retirement by delegating everything. Luckily for Bain, his precinct is filled with Detective Sergeants (DS) angling for promotion to Detective Inspector  (DI). Enter our anti-hero, DS Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy). "Robbie" is easily the best cop of the lot–when he's in the zone, which was years ago. Bain hands Robbie the murder case—just about as bad a decision as he could make, as Roberston embodies the filth of the movie's title. He has, to use an American expression, lost it—his wife, his kid, a younger brother, and his sanity. He is seriously bipolar, a boozer, a cokehead, a sex addict, and an amoral lowlife. The only thing that keeps him going is his intellect, which he directs toward "the games," a perverted plan to undermine his half dozen rivals for the DI position by feigning friendship and bringing them down to his level. Along the way he also seeks to humiliate an influential and wealthy Mason lodge brother, Clifford Blades (Eddie Marsan), and his wife, Bunty (Shirley Henderson). And this is just the tip of the iceberg of Robbie's secret problems.

Filth has some genuinely funny moments and searing lines. Alas, it's only McAvoy's superb performance that keeps the film from sinking under its namesake slime. McAvoy is a gifted actor—the sort who commands us to watch even when he's disgusting. But, in the end, it just boils down to whether even McAvoy can carry us past endless scenes of vomiting, male chauvinism, self-destruction, hooliganism, objectification, and generalized inhumanity. Nope–the film is too black to carry the comedy. We get a zany cameo from James Broadbent as Dr. Rossi, Robbie's drug-dispensing doctor, but his cartoony interludes feel as if someone just switched the channel to a random Dr. Who episode. These radical shifts of tone serve mainly to highlight Robbie's misanthropy to the point where we don't believe the occasional glimmers of decency we're supposed to see. Enter Mary (Joanne Froggart, Anna from Downton Abbey) as a bereaved widow who thinks Robbie might be a kind man. She's sweet, but her screen time is just another unconvincing tonal shift.

I watched this film to the end mostly because I was mesmerized by just how good McAvoy was in such a bad film. I truly admired his performance, though it wasn't in the service of much. Looking for laughs or redeeming social value? Don't look here.

 -- Rob Weir

Millennial Zeitgeist Novels

I like to read “period” novels whenever I teach a U.S. history survey course. I unshelf  Howells and Twain when I teach the Gilded Age, dust off Steinbeck for the 1930s, and dive into Angelou and Walker to get an African-American perspective. With the semester winding down, I’ve been reading about the 1990s.

Recent novels are tricky. Books only evolve from “noteworthy” to “classic” in retrospect; lots of heralded works come off as shopworn or silly a decade later. Even good books take on meanings that eluded the first batch of readers. The latter has certainly happened to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and The Corrections (2001). Both were received in their initial runs­ as if they were sociology as well as literature. So they were, but now each also seems an indictment of Baby Boomers and Generation X excesses. Such generational labels are, of course, media inventions. As a historian, I don’t hold much stock in generational interpretations of the past, so I’ll just call these zeitgeist novels.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was and is a genre-defying work that obliterates the line between fiction and autobiography. Its narrator, Dave Eggers, is both author and principal character. It tells of the travails of the Eggers clan. Paterfamilias John, a nasty drunk, died in 1991, followed the next year by the cancer death of the family rock: Heidi. Her death threw the Eggers children upon their own devices. Eldest son William was already living an independent life in Los Angeles, and soon the remaining children–Beth, Dave, and Christopher–depart Illinois for San Francisco. Challenges arose immediately, as youngest child, “Toph,” was just nine and his primary caretakers were Beth (24) and Dave (22). Both cared deeply for Toph, but neither was prepared to be a parent. (Beth played a larger role than assigned in the book, but she had demons of her own and committed suicide in 2001.)

Anyone who has been to San Francisco knows that it’s a tough town in which to be poor. Dave and Toph eek out a living from their inheritance, Social Security, and whatever work Dave can drum up, but he’s more of a slacker/hipster-wannabe than breadwinner. The book purports to recount his on-the-job-training lessons in responsibility and parenthood, but in retrospect it reads like Eggers’ thinly veiled anger at being robbed of his adolescence. He and Toph trash one cheap rental after  another, as neither is very good at adult basics such as wiping up messes, taking out the garbage, or housekeeping. Dave lands a job, but with a magazine that never made a dime; his real talents include prowess at tossing Frisbees and imagining himself in the sack with sexologist Sari Locker.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius remains a very good read, though a title meant to be ironic now feels solipsistic. Like works such as Running with Scissors, it  has a “look at me” quality whose true irony lies in how badly Gen X mangled attempts to emulate what it lampooned. That is to say, for all the Gen X contempt for Baby Boomers, many of them tried to become hippies and simply weren’t very good at it. Blame the “Dream,” or blame Gen X-fueled MTV, hipster mags, and reality TV. Or, as I prefer to do, read Eggers to gain insight into what confused twenty-somethings were thinking in the 1990s.

Jonathan Franzen’s National Book Award-winning The Corrections is the superior novel. Today it seems the ultimate pre-apocalyptic novel as it ends with the Stock Market “correction” of 1999, and was published just months before 9/11/01. The novel tracks the highly dysfunctional Lambert family. Parents Alfred and Enid still live in the prototypical Midwestern town of St. Jude, but their adult children have bolted to the East. Alfred is a retired railroad engineer/inventor who, in his prime, was a tyrant. Parkinson’s and advancing dementia have transformed him from being difficult to being impossible. Enid, his wife of 50 years, realizes time is short, tries to rally Alfred for a few last hurrahs, and harbors the dream of a final family Christmas in St. Jude.

Good luck with that! The kids are to busy making of hash of their lives. Eldest son Gary is a Philadelphia banker obsessed with the Stock Market, all things material, and few things emotional. He has a postcard family, but Gary is either bullied by his equally selfish wife, or is clinically depressed–depending on whose point of view you believe. Middle child Chip, the family intellectual, is a college professor hurtling toward self-destruction by violating the school’s sexual conduct code that he helped write. That avenue leads him to New York, where he fails as a playwright, and to post-Cold War Lithuania, where he falls in with oligarchs. Diane escapes a bad marriage and reinvents herself as a celebrity chef, only to jeopardize it all by having simultaneous affairs with her boss and his wife. Different problems, but each is too mired in imagine a warm-and-fuzzy Christmas in St. Jude.

Franzen’s novel crosses generations—Depression era parents, a Baby Boomer-turned Yuppie eldest son, an idealist-gone-egoist “tweener” middle child, and a Gen X youngest daughter. Each is a metaphor for the hope and greed of the Clinton years. The first brick fell when the dot.com bubble popped in 1999, Nasdaq lost 78% of its value, and its 457 IPOs shrank to just 76 in 18 months. Looming on the horizon: the falling masonry of September 11. Looking back now, The Corrections feels like the warning siren in advance of the tornado.  Rob Weir