New Exhibits in Brattleboro That Make Us Think, Laugh, and Marvel

Alison Wright: Grit and Grace, Women at Work

Postcards to Brattleboro

Steven Kinder: 552,830; Coffee and Conversation

Wesley Fleming: Silvestri, Wild and Untamed

Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT

(Through October 12, 2020)

NOTE: Colors of images are inaccurate. Museum lights cause color shifts and light burns.

Things have eased a bit for art lovers in the Northeast. People from my part of Massachusetts are now allowed to visit Vermont, so I made the 40-mile trip from Northampton to Brattleboro, Vermont. It was the first time since March I’ve left the state, so it felt like a big deal. Plus, I got to visit Brattleboro’s Museum and Art Center (BMAC), a favorite small museum. Forget what you might read on old websites, the exhibits reviewed here are open through October 12–face masks on, of course.

Alison Wright is an award-winning photographer who lives in New York City–when she’s home, which isn’t often as she’s often on the road for National Geographic. Chances are excellent that you’ve gasped at some of her images while leafing through National Geographic. Wright doesn’t just document, she composes. The exhibit at the BMAC is devoted to women at work and it is indeed, as the exhibit title puts it, an effort of grit and grace. Lewis Hine once described himself as a reformer with a camera, a descriptor that fits Ms. Wright.

If I might be iconoclastic, I’d like to start with the last image in the exhibit, which is of a small girl from South Sudan with her back to the camera scribbling numbers on a battered slate. As Westerners wring their hands over the potential “hardships” of taking online classes in the fall, perspective demands we look at this image. South Sudan is the world’s third poorest nation, and this girl is “lucky” in that 7.5 million girls in sub-Saharan Africa never attend school. Look at the slate and then tell me those Chromebooks are a hardship.

Each of the 28 images in this exhibit has an amazing, sometimes heartbreaking, backstory. You will see Liberian shop vendors and chicken farmers, Nicaraguan trash-pickers, Tunisian and Bangladeshi garment workers, Indian brothel workers, Rwandan brickmakers, and more. All are women and, despite low wages and horrendous work conditions, a few manage to emerge triumphant. Here are a few to ponder because of their artistic merits.

Paruti, a mother of four, is from Bangladesh. She is a Hindu Dalit; that is, she’s an “untouchable” from the bottom of the caste system and earns just $25/month as a street sweeper. Notice how Wright uses vivid colors that illumine her subject. The use of posters reminds me of how photographers during the Great Depression posed their subjects in cabins decorated with newspaper ads–promises of prosperity a cruel irony. Wright makes a powerful point, the picture worth any words I could write. 

 
Wright’s images of Helena, a co-op framer in Tanzania, and Ishimalanga, a fisher in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are lessons in effective composition. Note how Helena’s hoe is held at an angle that draws our attention to the red shawl that contrasts with the green maize, and how it bisects both her body and the flatness of the field and sky. Ishimalanga’s net is being unfurled in ways that give a still picture the illusion of movement. It is also the most colorful part of the image.

The image of Kadatu, a fruit vendor in Sierra Leone, is simply wonderful. It is filled with color, texture, contrast, and sneaky compositional elements. Notice how the fruit tilts slightly to the right and echoes the slat in the wooden shutter. Note also how Kadatu is posed beside gathered stalks that mirror her erect posture, and how we “see” depth, thanks to the left edge of the building.

Postcards to Brattleboro highlights work created by and sent to Stuart Copans, known to envelope artists as “Shmuel” and is curated by another, Chuck Welch, who goes by the handle “Crackerjack Kid.” It is a whimsical delight of an exhibit that echoes one at Holyoke’s PULP GalleryI recently reviewed. It is amazing what creative people can do with a small space. Even more incredible is how they can incorporate shells, wood, bark, poetry, and messages of all sort onto such small “canvases.” Copans allegedly has a collection of over 25,000 objects. The exhibit feels like walking into a gallery from Zap Comix. You can ponder these wonders, or just wallow in amusement. I’d recommend dollops of each.

 

Can one overdo an important topic? Each night an estimated 552,830 Americans are homeless. This is both a national tragedy and a national travesty. Steven Kinder takes on homeless in Brattleboro, a vest pocket city of just over 12,000. Kinder shows us some of them, but presents them (in acrylic, pencil, and pastel) on large sheets of canvas that hang from the ceiling the way one might enter a sports hall of fame. These–mostly around 8-feet tall–make us look at the homeless as individuals. They posed themselves and most opted to forego surroundings suggestive of squalor. I liked this exhibit, but it’s cramped and some panels are hard to see. I also felt as if subjectivity got lost at times in the oversized panels. Liz LaVorgna also tells of the homeless, but her Coffee and Conversations features photographs and a video installation in which Brattleboro street people tell of how they cope with or have escaped their plight. Those stories are literally told over a cup of java. Maybe it’s just me, but the smaller scale moved me more deeply.

Call me a newbie when it comes to glass art. I confess that I generally glide by it on the way to other things when I’m in a museum. Wesley Fleming has a wall case of work at the BMAC that’s impressive. He has replicated columbine, jack in the pulpit, lady slippers, and other plants in colored glass. I’m coming around, but at present I’m more drawn to those working in non-representational glass. Fleming’s work is delicate and precise, but I’d still rather hold a real flower than one replicated in silica. But Fleming might make me reconsider.

Rob Weir   

Eliza Gilkyson and 2020: July 2020 Album of the Month

Eliza Gilkyson

2020

Red House Records

My worst-kept secret is that pretty songs open my tear ducts. (Where can a guy hide who needs a tissue every time he hears Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”) Eliza Gilkyson’s latest made me reach for a Kleenex a half dozen times.

It is titled 2020 and it’s what we all need to make it through our current travails. Gilkyson, who will be 70 next month, still sings like a chosen one. Maybe that’s because she sings from the heart. Her previous album, 2018’s Secularia, was filled with Gaia-based spiritual observations, and you’ll hear echoes of those sentiments on 2020. The new album opens with “Promises to Keep,” which unfolds to Bukka Allen’s rolling organ, then cuts to Eliza’s spare guitar. The melody and vocal are gorgeous, even though her wink and nod to Robert Frost segues to pointed observations that no one knows what it will come down to… we’re on fire. A few bars later, she captures quarantine anxieties with: I’ve been counting on the angel choir/to put some wings on my feet/…and get me out on the street. The song is a weepy, yet is filled with hope. Not much more to say except, damn, what a great song!

She could have quit there, but more wonders pour forth. “Peace in Our Hearts” has a folk blues vibe with the song’s title providing an all-join-in repeating line. Then comes “My Heart Aches,” and so will yours when you hear it. She chronicles the past 50 years and prevails upon hopeful past slogans—such as we shall overcome, give peace a chance, hammer out justice—to highlight things left undone. When she laments for the children of tomorrow and the world they have to fix… my heart aches, like Tom Dooley I wanted to hang down my head and cry. It is well and proper that later on, Gilkyson does a tender rendition of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The album’s other cover is a rather ominous-sounding take of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” How sad that that song remains relevant.

Gilkyson’s overtly political original song is “Beach Haven,” which is based on a 1952 letter Woody Guthrie sent to his Brooklyn landlord decrying the racial barriers that kept black veterans from living in his apartment complex. That landlord was Fred Trump and some 20 years later his seed (or should I say seedy?) Donald was accused of redlining to keep his own projects lily white. Gilkyson, though, channels her anger into a call for coming together. After all, there’s just so much outrage one can ingest and remain human. Gilkyson’s fragile “One More Day” is a love letter to life, as is “Beautiful World of Mine,” which calls us to be stewards of nature. Warren Hood’s fiddle adds grace to the latter, which is basically a country two-step.

Though they are not paired on the album, I like to think of “Sooner or Later” and “We Are Not Alone” as companions. The first is a soulful, bluesy boot-in-the-butt warning to the powers that be: Sooner or later it’s a natural fact/Gonna rise up, gonna take it all back. Mike Hardwick cauterizes that defiance with searing electric guitar. Fittingly, Gilkyson leaves us with a call to action that’s almost a prayer. “We Are Not Alone” opens quietly and builds to a chorus enhanced by WEWIM—a group to encourage female singers that she cofounded—and together they take us out anthem-style by repeating the song title like a giant group hug.

I adored everything about this album, one of the very best from an artist I have admired for decades. There’s an expression from my Pennsylvania childhood that sums up Eliza Gilkyson; she’s “just good people.”

Rob Weir 

The Dreamers Seems Like an NC-17 Version of Now

The Dreamers (2004)

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Fox Searchlight, 118 minutes, NC-17 (graphic sexuality, disturbing inferences)

(English and French with subtitles)

★★★★★

The French are as obsessed with the events of May 1968 as Americans are with the 1968 Chicago police riots or Kent State. History might hold lessons for contemporary movements such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter, especially the dangers of pushing the Establishment beyond the breaking point.

In 1968, student protests, Communist Party rallies, and wildcat strikes set French against French in ways not seen since the 1871 Paris Commune. These almost toppled the Fifth Republic. The Dreamers opens with a massive protest outside the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, whose co-founder Henri Langlois has been dismissed for refusing a government directive. For serious film scholars–the sort who religiously read Cahiers du Cinéma–this was a slap at French culture, intellectualism, and freedom. The journal and Cinémathèque–a theater, archive, and film preservation center–gave credence to auteur theory, nurtured French New Wave directors, and made millions understand there is a world of difference between a movie and a film. It’s hardly surprising that many New Wave directors made films about May 1968: Truffault (Stolen Kisses, 1968), Godard (Tout va Bien, 1972), Chabrol (Nada, 1974), Malle (May Fools, 1990). Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018) was Italian, but he was definitely an auteur and made numerous films in France, which is where movies were born, by the way.

You don’t need to know all of this to appreciate The Dreamers, but it helps. The Cinémathèque protest is where our three principals meet: Matthew (Michael Pitt), an American studying in Paris; and Théo (Louis Garrel) and his twin sister Isabelle (Eva Green in her first film), two Parisian students obsessed with cinema and each other. The twins invite Matthew into their home, where he has an intellectual discussion with their parents, the 18-year-old variety that sounds deeper than it really is. When mom and dad leave for a month in the country, Matthew moves in.

If graphic sexuality on the screen makes you squirm, you probably ought to steer clear of this film. Bertolucci is also the director who gave us Last Tango in Paris (1972) and La Luna (1979), both of which delved into taboo sexual expressiveness. The Dreamers involves steamy scenes involving masturbation, a deflowering, and leaves-nothing-to-the-imagination copulation. Matthew discovers Théo and Isabelle sleeping naked in the same bed, which they dismiss as the closeness of “Siamese twins” who are joined by thought. As it turns out in the film, Théo and Isabelle are not incestuous lovers, so I suppose one could look at this as commentary on a countercultural impulse to exorcise “hang ups.” For what it’s worth, Bertolucci pulled a few punches from The Holy Innocents, the Gilbert Adair novel upon which the film script (from Adair) was based. I’ve not read it, but reviews mention incest and bisexual three-ways.

Matthew and his new French friends have lots of playful fun at first. They argue over films and music–Chaplin or Keaton? Hendrix or Clapton? They also act out scenes from auteur films–including a race through the Louvre à la Godard’s Bande à part–live like bohemians, smoke, and raid the family wine supply. Always, though, there is a revolution taking place on the streets and Théo feels drawn to it, a source of political tension with Matthew who questions the effectiveness of destruction. Tension increases when the three play the game of Consequences in which the loser must do as the person posing the question commands. Isabelle has secretly witnessed her brother pleasure himself and when Théo loses, he must do so in front of her and Matthew. When she loses, Théo orders her to have sex with Matthew. As they say, the cat is out of the bag and soon Matthew and Isabelle are lovers. Théo is a bit jealous (though he has a girlfriend) and politics begin to loom larger. There is also obvious homoerotic tension between Théo and Matthew, but because it goes no further, it seems all the more erotic.

So, is The Dreamers little more than a sex film in an apartment on a noisy street? I think not. Unlike movies, which seek only to entertain, auteur films often delve into the psyche of characters and seek to make the audience think. The Dreamers is also a film about what one says versus what one will do. Inside the apartment, there is tension between talk of liberation and acting liberated; street protests evoke the old split between anarchists of the word and those of the deed. Would you hurl a Molotov cocktail if you believed it would help topple oppression? Bertolucci layered all of this with lots of period music–including songs from The Doors, Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Steve Miller, and Dylan–and bathes it in the gorgeous cinematography of Fabio Cianchetti.

Auteurs frequently leave lots of things unanswered. May 1968 did not end well. Unions made side deals and street violence begat tear gas and clubs. Did students go too far? Is that why the Gaullists retained power in France and why the U.S. ended up with Nixon? Was liberation too shallow to stand up to challenge? (Good questions for today!) Indeed, is the sex in The Dreamers sweet or voyeuristic? But maybe Bertolucci tipped his hand. The ending song is from Edith Piaf, “Non, Je ne regrette rien” (No, I regret nothing.)

This film is 16 years old, but somehow feels like a newsflash.

Rob Weir

  

The Stationery Shop: Things as They Could Have Been

The Stationery Shop (2019)

By Marjan Kamali

Simon and Schuster, 307 pages.

★★★★

Americans consistently ignore the lesson that they waste time fearing leftists when it’s those on the right who are the real danger. The Stationery Shop is set in Iran, mostly in 1953. That year Mohammad Mossadegh was elected prime minister in the hope he would bring democracy to Iran. He never got the chance; the CIA, British intelligence, royalists, and oil interests overthrew his government. This allowed the autocratic Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to launch brutal reprisals and cozy up to Western powers sucking the oil out of desert sands. In 1979, the Shah was overthrown, but by conservative mullahs led by the Ayatollah Khomeini who installed a theocracy that today makes Iran the fifth most-oppressive government on the planet.

You need to know this to appreciate Marjan Kamali’s novel. On the surface it’s Romeo and Juliet in which its principals succumb to fate rather than suicide, but it’s also a tantalizing look at what should have been on other levels. At its heart is Roya Joon Khanom, who grows up in comfort but not wealth, in a family headed by a father who works for the Shah but supports Mossadegh, a stay-at-home mother, one servant, and a younger sister named Zari. Paterfamilias Mehdi embodies Iran’s struggle between modernism and traditionalism. He wants his daughters to be educated and take command of their lives.

Roya is a curious girl who spends time in the novel’s namesake stationery shop, which also sells books, including those of Rumi, her favorite poet. She spends so much time there that she befriends its owner, Mr. Fahkri. It’s also where she meets and falls in love with Bahman Aslan. Roya’s family is thrilled by their romance, though Zari is skeptical because Bahman seems to love politics as much as he does Roya. She’s also more attuned to rumors Mossadegh will be overthrown. Bahman and Roya are hailed as the boy and girl who will change the world. That’s a heavy burden for anyone to carry.

A bigger obstacle still is Bahman’s widowed mother, who sees Roya as unworthy of her son. She’s also crazier than a cow chewing ergot, but insists that Bahman should marry Shahla, whose family is rich. (A flashback chapter set in 1916 reveals surprising things about Mrs. Aslan.) Opposition leads to an elopement plan, which is aided by Mr. Fahkri. When Roya shows up at Sephah Square where they are to meet, Bahman isn’t there. Even worse, she finds herself in a pro-Mossadegh rally violently broken up pro-Shah forces. Letters go back and forth and Roya is left feeling duped.

As Roya mopes, her father reads the political winds correctly and decides to send both of his daughters out of Iran to study in the United States at Mills College. Roya describes California as looking “like a toy that’s just been opened.” Both sisters unwrap new lives. Zari meets Jack Bishop, who dreams of being a poet, and Roya weds Walter Archer, who looks like comic book character Tintin but is steady and kind.

The Stationery Shop is, thus, stories of paths taken and not taken. It arcs from 1916 into 2013, when both Zari and Roya are old women. Roya knows what happened to Iran, but she has always wondered why Bahman never showed up. That mystery forms the basis for the last part of the novel. Betrayal, it seems, follows a twisted path.

The Stationery Shop is also about social class and the immigrant experience. The latter is often refracted through food and how spices and smells link to culture and memory. That’s not a device; we’ve long known that smell triggers memories. (Warning: American cuisine is lampooned.) It is, of course, an old narrative; immigrants everywhere–including American expatriates–tend to have one foot striding into the future and the other dragging behind in the past. 

I leave it to readers to determine whether The Stationery Shop is an exemplary work of literature, or merely a romance dressed in exotic clothing. I will say, though, that it goes down quickly and easily. Whatever else it might be, it's a good summer read. Once you’ve finished, imagine how the world would have been a better place had Mossadegh remained in power.

Rob Weir

Schultze Gets the Blues Full of Jarmusch-like Quirkiness

Schultze Gets the Blues (2003)

Directed by Michael Schorr

Paramount Classics, 114 minutes, PG

In German (subtitles) and English

★★★

I am fond of offbeat films and have sought them during quarantine. Schultze Gets the Blues won’t be everybody’s slice of schnitzel, but it is certainly quirky. I watched it mostly because its description evoked James Kelman’s Dirt Road, a novel in which a lad becomes obsessed with Cajun music. Schultze is like that, but with a Brobdingnagian German man instead of a willowy Scottish boy.  

Schultze (Horst Krause) is a bachelor salt miner in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. To call his life routine is an understatement. Each day he pedals his bicycle–no easy feat for a man as rotund as he–across the flat marshy landscape and always manages to arrive at the rail crossing in time for the gate to come down and a train to pass. He and other workers then sit at the crossing and ring their bike bells impatiently when the crossing gate tender is slow to raise it. (None would dare simply ride around the barrier. That would be too disorderly.) Each day Schultze dons slip-on shoes to go outside and then carefully exchanges them for scuff style slippers when he comes into the house to cook, watch TV, listen to the radio, or pick up his button box to squeeze out a tune. As Kurt Vonnegut would have said, an so it goes.

We come in on Horst as he works his last shift and his two friends, Jurgen and Manfred, are being laid off. Each is given a parting gift: a large plug-in lamp in the shape of a salt nugget! What next? What indeed. Schultze’s certainly not ready to hang out in the spartan community hall where old guys argue over chess moves but on the other hand, changes such as the sassy new waitress as the local café unnerve him. Schultze is your basic pear-shaped silent type. He’s a respected local accordionist famed for a particular polka that he plays at the annual musikverein (music society) gala–just as his father had done.

One day, though, Schultze hears a snatch of Zydeco accordion from a radio show about Louisiana. It becomes his earworm and, courtesy of the waitress who feels sorry for him and gives him a book on Louisiana, bayou culture becomes an obsession. He even gets a cookbook and prepares jambalaya for Jurgen and Manfred. They’re reluctant converts but are well ahead of the curve; most locals are shocked when he plays what he knows of the Zydeco tune at the gala. If you like droll humor, the concert hall scenes are a hoot. Although the event couldn’t be more stereotypically German, attendees are inexplicably dressed in costumes. Schultze looks like a toreador crossed with a mutant ant.

Still, thanks to the kindness of the wives of Jurgen and Manfred, Schultze is chosen to travel to his town’s sister city in America: New Braunfels, Texas. It’s a real place that was largely settled by German immigrants in the 1840s. Schultze is not exactly the jetsetter type, but he makes his way to New Braunfels’ annual German festival. As he sits in the wings awaiting his turn to entertain Texans in lederhosen, he just shakes his head, picks up his accordion, and walks away. Texas is just as dull as his hometown, except he doesn’t understand what anyone is saying! We next see him in an unseaworthy small boat cruising down rivers and through bayous on his way to Nowhere in Particular,  Louisiana. Though he speaks almost no English, Schultze is on a voyage of discovery and fate.  

Schultze gets the Blues is billed as musical comedy and I guess that will do for a label. It has the pacing of Jim Jarmusch films such as Stranger Than Paradise and Mystery Train. Like those films, the humor is layered with irony and absurdity and you must be patient. In order to get inside the head of an inexpressive man who has grown bored, one must show boredom. The best way is to shoot a film that’s as languid as its main character. At its best, Schultze Gets the Blues is unhurried in a painterly way. The bayou only comes in two flavors: lush, dripping with Spanish moss, and creepy; or a flat and featureless landscape in which there’s a whole lot of horizon.

Krause is well cast as a passive foil drifting to whatever lies around the next bend–an observer who isn’t on any sort of mission. This was director Michael Schorr’s first film and he lets his landscapes etch themselves upon the characters. No one does much; they simply exist within those environments until the day in which they are gobbled up by them. Schorr won a best director award at a Stockholm film festival in 2004, and that also makes me laugh, as Schultze has all of the earmarks of a first film, including some fairly major obvious continuity errors. It is a classic blows hot-blows-cold movie, but because it’s so out of the ordinary, I liked it. It’s not great cinema, but if you’ve seen Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, picture his shots of frozen Lake Erie, bake them in a Louisiana sun, and you’ve got Schorr’s bayou. The final scene also has a splash of Bergman-like absurdity á la The Seventh Seal.  

Rob Weir

The Night Watchman Offers Insight into Chippewa Struggle for Justice

The Night Watchman (2020)

By Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins, 397 pages

★★★★★

We can add Native Americans to the list of people Donald Trump doesn’t care about. He’s trying to end tribal recognition (on a technicality) for the Wampanoag tribe—the same folks who helped the Pilgrims and are part of the First Thanksgiving story. It seems their 381 acres of Massachusetts land stands too close to Trumpian Rhode Island allies who want to build a casino and halt one being built by the Wampanoags. The only way to do that is to remove their tribal status.

Coincidentally, Louise Erdrich’s new novel showed up in my library queue as Trump’s latest outrage was unfolding. The link? The Night Watchman is Erdrich’s semi-biographical novel about the federal government’s attempt to dismember the Turtle Band of Chippewas back in 1953. Erdrich, an enrolled Chippewa* tribal member, has produced a work of historical fiction rooted in fact. The character of Thomas Wazhashk (“muskrat”) is based upon her grandfather (Patrick Gourneau), who spearheaded the struggle to stave off “termination” of the Chippewas’ tribal status in North Dakota. It was then, as now, a blatant attempt to seize Indian land–all under the paternalistic rubric of making Indians more “American” and allowing them to fend for themselves because they were allegedly self-sufficient.

Thomas is the book’s namesake character. He guards the jewel factory that makes precision parts for watches and is one of the few employers of the reservation. The jewel factory is real, as was Arthur V. Watkins, a U.S. Senator from Utah known for being racist toward Indians. He sponsored the Congressional bill that eventually terminated 113 tribes. Watkins was also a Mormon, a sect which comes off badly in The Night Watchman.  

Erdrich, a leading voice in Native American literature, paints a rich culture that co-exists with crushing poverty and lack of opportunity. This is a land of outhouses, substandard housing, rampant alcoholism, hunting-gathering, horses, no electricity, and patched up automobiles. Boxing brings status to some of the young men, but lard on bread is sometimes a meal. For all of this, it is also a close-knit community in which people look out for each other and help in any way they can.

Edrich populates her novel with memorable characters. Thomas and his wife Rose are blood kin to the Paranteau family held together by Zhaanat and her daughter Patrice, as Zhaanat’s husband is a violent drunk and another daughter, Vera, has gone to missing in Minneapolis. Patrice is serious, smart, innocent, and beautiful. Men desire her, including Lloyd Barnes, a Caucasian boxing coach, and Wood Mountain, one of Barnes’ most promising boxers. The reservation is filled with colorful individuals, including Wood Mountain and his mother, Juggie Blue; tribal judge Moses Montrose; Thomas’ father Bibbon; the Pipestone family, and more.

Women are powerful figures in The Night Watchman–few more so than Patrice. She might not know about the birds and the bees, but she is determined and is nobody’s patsy. Another character, Millie Cloud, is equally determined. She’s an introverted Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota, but she has the data to refute the nonsense that the Chippewa were prosperous enough to survive without government largesse. One might accuse Erdrich of trying a bit too hard to impose feminism into her tale as the Chippewa are not matriarchal and the report attributed to Millie in the story was, in real life, mostly authored by a man (Dr. David Delorme). I shan’t nitpick, though, as I found Erdrich’s focus on women refreshing. I also reveled in how those you least expect have proverbial hearts of gold.

The Night Watchman is a sprawling tale with numerous dark turns. Not much good happens to Indians who end up in cities, be it Fargo or Minneapolis. Erdrich also explores exoticism, an often-veiled aspect of racism, which she explores through the various ways in which whites simultaneously revile natives yet find them alluring. One plot device involves the criminal sex trade, another a barely legal underwater act. At heart, though, The Night Watchman is an inspirational David versus Goliath tale of plucky survival. The reservation is also populated by ghosts. Native cosmology is sometimes described as “thin,” meaning that the barriers between the natural and the supernatural worlds are porous.** This has the potential to reinforce community, a factor Senator Watkins hadn’t anticipated.

The Night Watchman is an engrossing read filled with memorable characters, humanity, and determiation. This will probably be shortlisted for numerous literary awards and, no matter what it wins or doesn’t, it is surely a highlight of the 2020 fiction season. It is also a wakeup call. Indians are too often marginalized in discussions of American racism. Perhaps it’s time for a Red Lives Matter movement.

Rob Weir

 * The Chippewa are Anishinaabe peoples and are sometimes referenced that way. They are also called Ojibwe or Saulteaux, depending upon where they live.

** This often remains the case even when Natives are nominally Christian. Through a process known as syncretism, Christian theology is sometimes grafted onto indigenous beliefs.    

The Way We Live Now Truncates Trollope

The Way We Are Now (2001)

Directed by David Yates

BBC Mini Series (4 parts)

★★

Several weeks ago, I heartily endorsed the BCC’s dramatization of Anthony Trollope’s The Barchester Chronicles. Emboldened by such quality I turned to the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) adaptation of Trollope’s 1875 masterpiece, The Way We Are Now. I was especially anxious to see David Suchet in the role of Augustus Melmotte, the film’s anti-hero, as I enjoyed him so much as Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot on Mystery. Suchet is fine in The Way We Are Now, but the novel runs over 800 pages and four episodes isn’t long enough to do it justice.

The title encapsulates Trollope’s intentions. His is a novel about the clash between tradition and modernity at a time in which the first is only partially degraded and the second is unfettered in problematic ways. The Carbury family represents fading aristocracy. Lady Carbury (Cheryl Campbell) is a widow trying to maintain a façade of family respectability through writing very bad books that are (mostly) gently reviewed. It doesn’t help matters that she dotes on her son, Sir Felix (Mathew Macfayden), a veritable man-child who sponges money from his mother so he can dress like a dandy, drink like a fish, and gamble like a fool. Henrietta (Paloma Baeza) tries to warn her mother but Felix can do no wrong in her eyes. We quickly learn that many old families are in the same boat. They have titles, but no money.

Enter the Melmottes. Augustus is a foreign financier who moves his family and whatever it is he does to London and into a garishly appointed mansion in Grosvenor Square. He represents the nouveau riche who make money in industry, banking, and moving paper securities. He has money, but is oily, uncouth, and unrefined. (Scenes of he and his family eating look like they belong in Tom Jones, not Trollope.) He is also Jewish and Victorian society was decidedly anti-Semitic. The Melmottes are too rich to ignore, yet too crass for polite society. That is, until Melmotte decides to help underwrite a railroad envisioned by construction engineer Paul Montague (Cillian Murphy) that will run from Utah into Mexico.

We watch English nobility line up to invest with Melmotte, who promises them they will grow rich and solve their problems. Felix has another plan: feign his admiration for Melmotte’s daughter Marie (Shirley Henderson), marry her, and tap into the Melmotte fortune. If only he weren’t such an utter ass, he might have pulled it off, as Marie is deeply smitten with him.

There are lots of side stories, all of which by necessity are greatly truncated. The Longestaffes are also strapped for cash, which means their unmarried spoiled brat of a daughter Georgianna (Anne-Marie Duff) goes to live with the Melmottes and is courted by a much older banker Mr. Breghert (Jim Carter), who is also Jewish and thus threatens her place in society. Paul is in love with Henrietta, but she is courted by Paul’s best friend and Hetty’s cousin Roger (Douglas Hodge)–a classic triangle. Or should I say quadrangle? Although Paul is scrupulously honest in his work and smells a rat in Melmotte, he has not been forthcoming about his private life and the hold his former American lover (Miranda Otto) has on him. And, of course, the dissolute Felix has been dallying with Ruby Ruggles (Maxine Peake), a servant girl.

Can Melmotte buy his way into society, including a seat in Parliament, or is his a house of cards? Or is everyone dwelling among cardboard jokers? Transitional times in history are always fraught and Trollope teases out those threads. Alas, the series does not. Shortened though it is, there are 36 credited actors, so nuance has to go. Yates plays up the camp angle and some parts are funny, so much so that the edge is taken off of serious matters. Campbell chews scenery throughout and Mcfaydyen often seems to be playing Oscar Wilde rather than Felix Carbury. Anne-Marie Duff will get on your nerves, but not as much as Shirley Henderson, who may be my least favorite actress of all time. Her little girl voice and lack of articulation drove me up a wall, as did her channeling of a libidinous school girl.

These performances detract from the good: Suchet as an amoral conniver, Otto as an icy and sexy femme fatale, Hodge as a dignified frustrated courter, and Murphy as a man caught in the middle of things he cannot control. Yates and the series producer somehow won BAFTA (the British Emmys) Awards for the series. I can only conclude that 2001 wasn’t a good year for TV in the UK. Read the book.

Rob Weir