The Beguiled Entertains, But Be wary of the Hyperbole

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THE BEGUILED (2017)

Directed by Sofia Coppola

Focus Features, 94 minutes, R (sexual situations—should be PG-13)

★★★ ½

One reviewer called The Beguiled "a sexually charged feminist psychodrama." That, my friends, is what is known as hyperbole. The Beguiled is actually an easy-on-the-eye film that sports lovely tableaux and mannered performances punctuated by harrowing pivots, but it's only feminist if you define that term as females forced by circumstance to live without the company of men. It's best not to make this film more than it is: a diverting way to spend an hour and a half—nothing less and nothing more.

The Beguiled is based upon A Painted Devil, a 1966 novel by Thomas Culllin an, previously adapted to film in 1971 with Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page in the lead roles. Sofia Coppola's remake is subtler, perhaps the reason why she recently took away the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. The year is 1863, and the Civil War rages with unrelenting fury in Virginia, where Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) struggles to keep open an academy for young women. In those days, a female academy was a glorified finishing school in which boarding students learned French and music alongside needlework, proper posture, religion, and manners. The overall goal was refinement and mastery of domestic skills, not training for wage earning professions. The war has disrupted normal routines, but Miss Farnsworth valiantly maintains high moral standards, even though her six remaining residents must till their own gardens, forage, and get by the best they can. Farnsworth continues to act as headmistress, supervisor of in-house teacher Edwina Morrow (Kirsten Dunst), and role model to an ill-matched group of students: maturing teen Alicia (Elle Fanning), the slightly younger Jane (Angourie Rice), and three youths: 13-year-old Marie (Addison Reicke), round-faced Emily (Emma Howard), and spunky 11-year-old Amy (Ooma Laurence).

Farnsworth succeeds in keep the war outside the academy's iron gates until Amy stumbles upon a badly wounded Union solider, Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) while collecting mushrooms in the woods. Against her better judgment, Farnsworth allows McBurney to recuperate inside the school. It is here that Coppola shows a more deft hand than either Cullinan or Don Siegel, who directed the 1971 film. Instead of making a fox-in-the-henhouse antebellum horror film, Coppola allows her Beguiled to be more ambiguous.

Is McBurney the fox, or the hunted? It's clear that he encourages the growing affections of the school's three oldest women, but is he a silver-tongued devil or just an impulsive lad with poor impulse control? Kidman is terrific as Farnsworth, whom she plays with outward ice, but with hints of a mushy core. Dunst is also impressive as Edwina, a woman torn between respectability, desire, and the realization that, by 19^th century standards, she's already an Old Maid. Farrell, whose past work has been uneven and occasionally prone to pretty boy preening, does a credible job of portraying McBurney with the right balance of charm, recklessness, and smarm. It's a good thing these three performances are topnotch, or Oona Laurence would have stolen the show; though she's just 11, she's already a force of nature. Oddly, Ms. Fanning—who usually dazzles—is the weak link in the ensemble. She is alluring and flirtatious, but altogether too modern in look, attitude, and even speech. (At one point she actually asks McBurney, "How's it going?")

Strong acting carries the film because, when it's all said and done, this is actually a very slight film. Even at just 94 minutes it feels stretched out. That's because it's an interior film in which personalities and circumstances will either mesh or not, and there are really only a few ways in which matters could be resolved. Coppola engages in a little padding. It is suggested that the war is winding down, though in the summer of 1863 it has nearly two years to go. There are discussions of shortages but, though the academy table lacks meat, there's plenty of food on the fine china, and a nicely apportioned wine cabinet to accompany it. And if you want to know why Virginia looks like it's in the Deep South, it's because it was filmed in Louisiana. Still, I'm glad Coppola avoided the excesses of her Marie Antoinette (2006) or the tedium of Somewhere (2010). The Beguiled is assuredly watchable, though it looks deeper and prettier than it actually is. Best Director? That seems as hyperbolic as calling The Beguiled a feminist film. At its best, a strong ensemble cast takes over; when it lags, it's like having all that Spanish moss hanging from trees in what is supposed to be Virginia—more atmospheric than convincing.

Rob Weir 

#thebeguiled         

Encounter Picasso at the Clark

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PICASSO ENCOUNTERS

Clark Institute of Art

Through August 27, 2017

Think you know Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)? You do and you don't. It's hardly your fault; Picasso began producing works when barely in his teens and continued unabated until his death in 1973. A visit to the Picasso Museum in Paris can be mind-boggling as it holds more than 5,000 works. There are another 4,000 in Barcelona, and you'd still have at least 41,000 left to view if you wanted to exhaust his output.

Dora Maar

If you're dizzy from even contemplating such a brush with Picasso, you can regain your bearings with a visit to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There are just 38 Picasso works on display and these have been chosen to make a point, not to provide any sort of Pablo's Greatest Hits retrospective. Artists as prolific as Picasso draw inspiration from everywhere and the Clark's exhibit, "Picasso Encounters," is meant to be doubly evocative—we encounter Picasso through the eyes of some of the encounters that influenced him, among them: the Old Masters, cubists, printmakers, the stage, and women. Especially women. Picasso was, by today's standards, a serial womanizer, but les femmes were more than sexual conquests for Picasso; they were his muses. In fact, he had trouble working unless there was a woman (or two or three) in his life, whether they were kin, friends, wives, or mistresses. If you think that his modernist/cubist/surrealist mash-ups are merely eye-catching and strange, look hard at his 1937 Portrait of Dora Maar, the photographer and artist with whom Picasso had a brief affair. This painting is so lovingly rendered that the only adjective that really fits is 'beautiful.'

Minotauromachia

Picasso had many women in his life, the most important of whom were Maar, Fernande Olivier, Marie-Thérèse Walter, François Gilot, Olga Khokhlova, and Jacqueline Roque. He only wedded the last two, which means his domestic life was often chaotic. We see this in Minotauromachia, outwardly an amalgamation of modernism, a medieval woodcut, and the Greek story of the Minotaur etched onto paper. But it's also an allegory of Picasso's complicated home life, with the partially nude body of his mistress (Walter) lying across a horse fleeing the horned beast, while unfeeling Picasso's wife (Khokhlova) looks down from above and a figure that is probably Pablo hightailing it up a ladder to safety.    

The Italian Woman

We see different kinds of encounters in this exhibit as well, among them: an early self-portrait that owes much to Velasquez; a Cranach-inspired Venus and Cupid; and his 1953 The Italian Woman, which was influenced by the work of a relatively obscure 18^th century painter named Victor Orsel. The last is a graceful front-facing portrait that would be suggestive of Mexican portraits tinged with Georges Rouault were it not for the impish figures etched above the model. For me the most surprising works were Picasso's linoleum cuts, not because they are necessarily his strongest images, but because they highlight the ways in which he kept his vision clearly imagined through several layers—like a chess player strategizing five moves ahead. Portrait of a Young Girl, after Cranach the Younger II looks at first glance like it an offbeat rendering of a red queen from a pack of playing cards until you think of what it took to produce this one print. Among other things, Picasso had to think through how every dot of red and scratch of black (of which there are many) would look like when the final version was inked and pressed. 

This is a thoughtfully curated exhibit that gives weight to the credo less is more. Is there more to say about Picasso? Of course, but the beauty of the Clark exhibit is that we can begin to hear some of those things without the cacophony of all that could be said about him.

Rob Weir     

@the_clark

Beatriz at Dinner is Thin Fare

BEATRIZ AT DINNER (2017)

Directed by Miguel Arteta

Roadside Attractions, 83 minutes, R (language)

★ ½

There's a line from an old Don McLean song that goes: The world was never meant for one as beautiful as you. He was singing about Vincent Van Gogh, but the lyrics could have been written for the titular character of the new Miguel Arteta film Beatriz at Dinner, though I'm glad McLean didn't waste his words on the biggest dud I've experienced over the July Fourth holiday.

Beatriz (Selma Hayek) is a middle-aged woman with an old soul. She works as a holistic healer at a Los Angeles cancer clinic where she's part massage therapist, part yoga instructor, and part New Age practitioner. Because she's, you know, Mexican, she also has gig as freelance masseuse to the rich, pampered, and clueless. How else can she afford to live in San Jose and put kibbles in the dog dishes and greens in the pen of her pet goat?

Aside from a few establishing shots, this film covers a single day in Beatriz's life—one in which she leaves her day job, battles rush hour traffic, and wends her way to the gated hillside estate of a regular client, Kathy (Connie Britton), who simply must have a massage before her husband Grant (David Warshofsky) entertains a few very exclusive business associates: Yuppie hotel builder Alex (Jay Duplass), his pampered wife, Shannon (Chloë Sevigny); and the big fish: Doug Strutt (John Lithgow) and his third wife, Jeana (Amy Landecker). Strutt is one of the world's wealthiest people, a rapacious real estate mogul without a PC bone in his body or a hint of social conscience in his soul. He's accustomed to getting what he wants, which gives him free rein to be a loud-mouthed bigot who seems to have been fashioned out of equal parts Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, and Walter Palmer (the moneyed dentist who killed Cecil the lion).  When Beatriz's car won't start and she becomes the unwanted seventh dinner guest, the stage is set for a clash between her humanistic, Gaia-centered values and the cultures of arrogance and greed.

Beatriz at Dinner has been called a Trump-era morality tale. By all rights, I should have loved this film and its messages. The bling-and-brag crowd couldn't be more awful in their money-grubbing inhumanity, materialistic shallowness, and soul-crushing smugness. They represent the puppet masters that make the Make America Great Again lumpenproletariat dance like limp marionettes. And yet, I disliked this film pretty much from its onset.    

It could have been a dark and frank look at social class, ethnocentrism, and avarice. To have been so, though, would have required an ingredient fully missing from the menu: nuance. By tarring Strutt (get it?) and his circle with such a broad brush, director Arteta reduces evil to cartoon-like caricatures. And by continuing to slather layer upon layer of that tar, the Strutts of the planet become unbelievable rather than indefensible.

Perhaps this would have made a searing play. It is clearly a vehicle for Lithgow, who does his best to convey amoral creepiness. His is a superb performance and he should not be blamed for the weaknesses in Mike White's screenplay. Lithgow, alas, is the only one with much to do in this film.

The rest of the ensemble is competent, but underutilized—especially Britton, Sevigny, and Landecker, who spend most of the film either being catty or shrugging their shoulders in "Whatcha gonna do?" apologies for the outlandishly jerk-like behaviors of their respective alpha males.  Though she is the co-star, Hayek doesn't sparkle either. She spends some of the film interrupting conversation, getting unattractively drunk, and committing social faux pas. Call them characteristics out of character for her character, though very few people would behave this aggressively, even before the most deplorable of hosts. The rest of the time, Hayek doesn't speak much at all; she hovers around the film's edges and looks sad. Pan to Hayek's sad face. Move in on her even sadder eyes. Feel the weight on her sad shoulders…. And if you haven't gotten the fact that Beatriz is, like really sad, overlay her disconsolance with hints of homesickness glimpsed via flashbacks of a gauzy youthful idyll.  

I do not wish to defend the lifestyles of the opulent and boorish, but this film fails to take them down. It's far too trite to do that.

Rob Weir

Young Radicals a Portrait of Shattered Socialist Dreams

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YOUNG RADICALS: IN THE WAR FOR AMERICAN IDEALS (2017)

Jeremy McCarter

Random House, 340 pages.

★★★★★

(This review originally posted on http:NEPCA.blogpost.com) 
 

 

I didn’t like this book; I adored it! It is so well written that it reads like novel. Among the unorthodox things Jeremy McCarter has done is pen it in the present tense. Another is to make its major theme the death of idealism. Or perhaps I should say its betrayal.

McCarter, a Chicago-based writer and critic, turns his gaze to the first two centuries of the 20^th century, a time in which American socialism sprouted, blossomed, and was pulled up by the roots—its dreams of a global cooperative community sacrificed upon World War One’s altar of militarism, nationalism, greed. Rather than tell this tale through the usual channels of analyzing historical forces, material conditions, and mounting tensions, McCarter shows how larger dramas played out in the lives of five fascinating characters: Max Eastman (1883-1969), John Reed (1887-1920), Alice Paul (1885-1977), Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), and Randolph Bourne (1886-1918). He chose well, as between them, they moved in circles that represented the numerous strains within American culture.

The book’s title is apt, for the five radicals were indeed young and were, in their own ways, warriors within the “war for American ideals.” If you associate socialism with glum Russian apparatchiks, think again. Max Eastman was the editor of The Masses, a publication that was as much bohemian as socialist. Its pages supported labor unions, social equality, and pacifism, but also sported graphic art, poetry, and fiction that ranged from agit-prop to whimsical. It survived on a hope, serendipitous donations, and Eastman's dogged determination to keep it afloat.

Journalist “Jack” Reed was an energetic swashbuckler crossed with a frat boy.  He seduced and exasperated, pontificated at one moment and betrayed his half-baked views the next, pissed off his friends as he exhaled and charmed them on the inhale. He was the very scarred embodiment of a fast, hard, full, short life.  He needed to be where the action was, which is why he didn’t allow a lost kidney to keep him out of Europe as war clouds gathered and why he was a firsthand witness to the Russian Revolution.

Alice Paul wasn't good at moderation either. Like a reckless campus radical, she put her body on the line for the cause of suffrage and wore out others in the process, including Inez Milholland Boissevain who died from taking part in Paul-orchestrated non-stop agitation. Paul’s was a world of picketing, workhouse internments, force-feedings, and embarrassing President Wilson. One of the book’s many revelations is the depth of mutual contempt between Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt. Catt saw Paul as an impetuous troublemaker who threatened her careful one-state-at-a-time strategy and nearly cost Wilson the White House; Paul saw Catt as a self-aggrandizer willing to tolerate the status quo to be an insider player in the Wilson administration.

The latter charge was also leveled at Lippmann, with some justification. Lippmann, who co-founded the New Republic, was an intellectual who had trouble reconciling idealism and pragmatism. As war loomed, he jettisoned socialism for liberalism and joined Wilson’s team in the vain hope the war would "make the world safe for democracy.” Lippmann actually wrote most of Wilson’s famed 14-Points, but their abandonment led him to leak an internal document that doomed Wilson's nationwide campaign for the League of Nations.

A good tale requires a tragic figure and few were more so than Randolph Bourne. His was one of the most inventive minds of his day. Bourne dreamt of transnational identities, cosmopolitanism, and universal citizenship decades before Greenwich Villagers imagined themselves global villagers. His capacious mind was housed in a sickly hunchbacked body that he felt was doomed to be unloved. He was wrong; the beautiful free spirited actress Esther Cornell seems to have accepted his marriage proposal, only for Bourne to perish in the postwar influenza epidemic.

The postwar fallout took more than Bourne with it. Socialism’s promise also faded—not just because of wartime repression and the postwar Red Scare—but because idealists often battled with each other, and bitterly so over the war. It has been said that World War One was the only war wished into being by the left. Though somewhat hyperbolic, roughly half of U.S. socialists—including Lippmann and John Dewey—supported the conflict. Pro-war socialists were mistaken. History would soon judge the Great War a disaster in nearly every way one can measure such things. Ideals such as transnationalism gave way to cynicism and insularity. Paul would hold fast to her principles, but Eastman and Lippman would embark on several journeys between left, center, and right before settling into contrarianism. 

McCarter’s book is a masterpiece of forgotten and overlooked detail. It is also an examination of how dream worlds and officialdom overlapped and separated. The book is so compellingly written that I shall refrain from quoting so you can make your own discoveries and savor the richness of its prose. Kudos to McCarver for restoring the “story” in history and making tales come alive in real time. One can dispute whether the hopes of McCarter's five young radicals were admirable or misguided, but there is something tragic in the observation that we now live in a world too parochial to conceive of globalism in non-economic terms. #jxmccarter

Rob Weir

The Jerry Cans: June 2017 Album of the Month

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THE JERRY CANS

Inuusiq (Life)

★★★★★

The Jerry Cans hail from Nunavut, Canada's far northeastern territory. It's 2 ½ times larger than Great Britain and France combined, yet it contains only 35,000 people, its capital, the Baffin Island town of Iqaluit has a fifth them, and much of the territory lies above the Arctic Circle. Two-thirds of the population is Aboriginal and more than half speak a first language other than English.  

Why the geography lesson? If you're going to put together a band that, as The Jerry Cans have done, is strong enough to appeal to a small but diverse audience yet gain enough traction to win some Canadian Music awards, you'd better be damned versatile. They are. Imagine a less countrified Ray LaMontague fronting a band with the good time vibe of Great Big Sea and you are on the road to getting the Jerry Cans, but you're still not there. This band can rock, toss of an Irish fiddle lick, tamp it down for some folk music, and still find time for some Inuktitut throat singing. That's impressive given that lead vocalist, the muscular- and raspy-voiced Andrew Morrison, didn't know a word of First Nations languages before he moved to Nunavut and fell for Nancy Mike, an Inuk woman (accordion, vocals).

Were it not for the growling breaths and unfamiliar language, you'd swear you're in a hipster club with dancers thrusting pumped arms in the air and belting out the "whooa oooaaa" chorus of "Ukiuq," which zips along to guitar, Gina Burgess' fiddle, Steve Rigby's drums, and Brendan Doherty's bass. On another song whose name contains—I kid you not—22 letters, the song feels like something Hawaiian mixed with pop rock song. I've no idea what Morrison and Mike are singing, but it sounds very, very cool. Then there's "Nirlit," filled with yips, barks, and an ever-gathering pace that's a prelude to a robust song with tinges of punk rock. Can this be the same band that slows things down for the acoustic "Tusaavit" or the piano-centered "Arnaluka?" Each would be labeled tender if Morrison's voice were smoother. But this band doesn't really do smooth for very long. Check out the reggae central groove of "Maikliqta," albeit one supplemented by everything from an infectious hook, some jaw harp, and a few other sounds I simply can't identify. Fancy something in an electric bluegrass mode?  Try "Paniarjuk" or "Isumagivappinnga." The Jerry Cans bring it home with the joyous "Anaanaga" and a repeat of the first track, which I gather translates "Northern Lights."

This record should erase any doubts you had that you're living in the Global Village. Listen. Dance. Enjoy. Just don't ask me to tell you what any of these songs mean. #Inuusiq

Rob Weir

Razor Girl a Good Reason to Cut the Hiassen Habit

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Debra Devi, Roger Street Friedman, Tracy Bonham: Leave It On the Stage

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This column is devoted to reviews of performers who leave it all on the stage. Some of them front bands, but they don't need a lot of fancy tricks; they just air it out. (Ellis Paul is one of my all-time favorites. No one ever leaves one of his shows thinking he mailed it in!)

Debra Devi is a sometimes yoga teacher, but when she straps on her Fender the New Jersey-based Devi is like a demon on the Garden State Parkway. Her debut release Get Free makes me wonder where she's been all my life. She's not blessed with a naturally big voice, but damned if that's going to stop her. Devi claims that the feedback on the Credence Clearwater classic "Suzie Q" inspired her to play guitar. Get that? The feedback. Check out tracks like "All I Need" and her gritty cover of "Runaway." to hear Devi slam straight ahead rock, her muscular guitar and stretch-it-to-the limits voice cutting across the percussion, bass, and keys. Somewhere along the line she also picked up some acid rock influences. On "Another Day" she's like a Fillmore East refugee. After a slow build on "Love That Lasts," she again lets loose with a spray of psychedelic colors. Punk rock gets its due on "Demon in the Sack." Want some attitude? Try this line: There's no such thing as too much sex. She fuzzes out some more on 02H23NO3, a song about a junkie. She also does a killer cover of Neil Young's "Needle andthe Damage Done" in which she adds electric echoes and a rock n' roll treatment that simultaneously makes it harder and more haunting. Her own "Get Free," though an unorthodox musing on playing guitar and yoga-centric clearness, also has a dreamy and opening run that reminds me a bit of Young's "Down By the River." Devi can also dial it down when needed, as she does in "Welcome to the Boneyard" or "When It Comes Down." Both of those songs also show how to make a small voice big. Devi has drawn PJ Harvey and Sheryl Crow comparisons, but her natural voice is closer to that of Parry Griffin, who also knows a few things about when to be soft and when to go large. Devi is forging her own path and it's one you'd be wise to follow. Hearing this record made me chuckle to imagine Devi as a yoga teacher. Talk about Jekyll and Hyde! Terrific stuff. This Jersey girl wields a mean guitar. ★★★★★ #DebraDevi

 Let's stay in the same general neck of the Metro woods for a moment. When you make your musical debut at age 50, as Roger Street Friedman did, you'd better give it all you've got. At 54, the Long Island-based Friedman is back with a second album, the aptly titled Shoot the Moon. Friedman draws comparisons to Bruce Cockburn and Colin Hay. I'd give a voice nod more to the latter, which we can particularly hear on tracks such as "Gentle Love of a Mother" and "Hideaway," especially the second with its slight hint of a rasp. All comparisons aside, Friedman is his own man and there's lots of diversity on this record. Several tracks employ a brass rhythm section. "Puffs of Smoke" has smoking horns, an R & B groove, and a downhill slide POV: Dreams they come and dreams they go/Just like puffs of smoke. The brass also gets a workout on the title track, which mixes funk and blues with the smoothness of a late night TV house band. Yet Friedman also likes to talk a walk on the alt-country side of things. "Pour Me Another" is Borderlands country, right down to the horns splashing just a few drops of mariachi to supplement lyrical references to margaritas. "Nothin's Worth Nothin'" is acoustic country folk about a lost soul, and "No SafePlace" lets loose a tidal wave of the down-and-outs: It's a livin' hell in my native town/They will rob you blind, they will cut you down/For one thin dime they will draw your blood/Been so much spilled it's a constant flood. Good stuff from start to finish, one that also makes musical detours into folk and pop, and makes a side tip to New Orleans. Let's also give a shout out to the fiddle and backing vocals work of Concetta Abatte. Speaking of backing vocals, one of them on the title track belongs to Amy Helm. Yep—Levon's daughter. ★★★★

Speaking of Levon, Tracy Bonham has a new EP titled Live at Levon Helm's Studios. For those who don't know, those studios are located in Woodstock, New York, and some of the proceeds of this project will aid the town library. Tracy Bonham was born in Boston, raised in Oregon, and knows about letting loose on stage. Not only is she a Berklee College of Music grad, she's also a former member of the Blue Man Group. That helps explain why "Devil's Got YourBoyfriend" has dramatic flair and an ominous tone that sounds straight out of "Sweeney Todd." Bonham, though, is a woman of many talents and moods. "Oh, McKenzie's Silver Waters" is a bit like what Emmy Lou might do with a song from the great Northwest. All of the songs are mined from Bonham's back catalog, and each highlights her versatility. "Tell It to the Sky" comes from her grunge period, with its fuzzy bass the only accompaniment to Bonham's voice until the song segues into something that skirts the borders of cacophony. But then there's Bonham fronting a band on "Lucky," and soloing on piano on the torchy, but poignant "Whether YouFall." There's a reason why she's a perennial favorite on this blog. ★★★★  #tracy_bonham

Rob Weir