Children of the South

Mud, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Winter's Bone

Living in the South for the past three years has been a wakening experience. I’ve been to counties where no public transportation exists and the furthest folks move all their lives are about as far as they can walk, hitch a ride, or travel in rusty, run down pick-up trucks. I’ve been to pre-schools with bars on the windows so the daddies recently released from incarceration won’t stop by and unlawfully take their kids. This is the southern United States where poverty maps are as dark red as they are Republican. It is also the South that is appearing with a bit more frequency on the big screen these days; not the genteel South of Gone with the Wind or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but the real, rural south that many young and talented filmmakers want to tell stories about, maybe with the hope of stirring a longing for change again.

Mud is such a movie. Written and directed by Arkansas native Jeff Nichols, whose earlier films include Take Shelter and Shotgun Stories, it is a story about growing up in a rural, poor, small town on the banks of the Mississippi, a river which is beautifully shown here in its different facets and lighting. The three-some that comprise the solid core of the movie are two young teenagers and a fugitive: Ellis, played by Tye Sheridan, who was previously in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life -a young actor that really comes to life in this movie; his comic sidekick Neckbone, Jacob Lofland in a great first role, and the fugitive, Mud himself, Mathew McConaughey, an actor thankfully back from his bad rom-com past, adding Mud to a growing list of movies where he shows he’s one southerner that can act, like he did in The Lincoln Lawyer, The Paperboy or, earlier still, A Time to Kill. 

Tye sheridan and Jacob Lofland in Mud

These are the three romantic dreamers that form a pact, spit-in-the-handshake and all, to help the fugitive evade not just the law but also the gun-toting, Jesus-praying mobsters that are hunting him down, and, most of all, evade the life of tedium and despair of rural poverty in these small southern towns. Mud is a Southern Don Quixote, pinning for the love of his Dulcinea, in this case, his unfaithful girlfriend Juniper, played by Reese Witherspoon.

Mud is much less of a naturalist realism film than two other great and fairly recent movies about kids facing poverty in the rural south:  Benh Zeitlin’s Beast of the Southern Wild (2012) and Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010).

Beasts of the Southern Wild, based on the one-act play by Lucy Alibar, who grew up in the Florida Panhandle, takes place in a Louisiana bayou community cut off from the rest of the world by a levee, where a five-year-old girl, Hushpuppy,  conjures up her imaginary beasts to survive the world of despair and need she is born into. The very young actress, Quvenzhané Wallis, plays Hushpuppy in an Academy Award nominated performance worth seeing.  

Jennifer Lawrence was also nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of Ree Dolly in Winter’s Bone, based on a novel by Missouri native Daniel Woodrell. Ree is an Ozark teenager who is the sole caretaker of her two younger siblings and her depressive mother, forced to hunt down her missing drug-dealing father in order to save her family from eviction.

Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone

Oh, that this were only a big screen reality, as fictional as those old movies about the genteel South! The lives of children growing up in the South are far from hopeful and their struggles are far from fictional.  The South holds the top ranks in the majority of the most devastating statistics, beginning with poverty, always aggravated by the South’s racist history. For example, in the southern states portrayed in these movies, the percentage of students that achieved a scale score in Writing at or above the level of Proficient was 18% in Hushpuppy’s Louisiana and 19% in Ellis and Neckbone’s Arkansas; just a little higher than the 13% in Mississippi, the state that ranks first in the states with the highest poverty rates: 22% total and 36% for African Americans. Arkansas ranks second, with almost 19% total, 36.4% for African Americans. These are also the states with the lowest tax rates, so not surprising that there is such little government investment in things like education or job programs to help people out of poverty. They are also the states where it’s easiest to buy and own guns, Neckbone’s main objective in helping Mud in the movie; guns are pretty much always present in these realistic movies, as are drugs.

The children in the movies are strong and resilient, growing up in the South. They are surrounded, however, by the adults they love, bearing strange nicknames like Mud, Wink or Teardrop, who were also once resilient children but have now become a shadow of themselves, the ghosts behind the statistics that movies like these hope that we will see. 

No Escape

Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper

Class is like fate, unavoidable, inescapable. At least this seems to be the case in twenty-first century USA. In Derek Cianfrance’s moving The Place beyond the Pines that weaves the stories of two men and their sons in a linear yet entrancing manner, this is the message that holds the movie together and down. Those born blue collar remain blue collar or die trying to escape their destiny.

Schenectady, New York is the small town chosen to represent the thousands like it that are rusting around the United States. It is the place beyond the pines, its Mohawk name, another people vanished by greed and prejudice.  Like in Blue Valentine, Cianfrance’s other blue collar movie about loss of dreams, also starring Ryan Gosling, the characters in the movie feel true, despite the fact that we are watching two of the most beautiful male actors around today, battling their destiny.

The strength of the movie lies in the acting and the narrative, which wanes a little towards the end, when it goes into the third of this three-act movie. Ryan Gosling plays like James Dean, tough on the outside while wounded and well-meaning. Gosling is very good as the motorcycle stunt driver in a run-down travelling fair, a naïve dreamer who stumbles onto something worth living for.  He is similar, though less cynical and smart, than his character in Drive.

Ben Mendelsohn is great as a sort of mixture between enabling guardian angel and has-been partner in crime. This Australian actor is certainly one to watch for, in the vein of Gary Oldman, whom he played alongside in Nolan’s Dark Night Rises. Even before that movie he had proven his worth in David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, as one of the Cody brothers.

Ben Mendelsohn in A Place Beyond the Pines

Bradley Cooper has certainly already proven he can be an actor of substance with his role in The Silver Linings Playbook, and once again shows how much more he is than the shallow good looking guy he keeps playing in the Hangover series. His character, more than the others, is the one that evidences that even the best intentions are derailed by fate and class, or both.

It’s too bad that the women in the movie, played by Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne, are quite so secondary to the plot and their men.  We don’t really get to feel much of anything towards their characters, probably because the men they love don’t either. Even Ray Liotta stands out more, playing the crooked, racist man to hate he has perfected in movies like Goodfellas or Cop Land.

The three stories presented end up being pretty movie-like, but the backdrop is not.  It is what makes the movie plausible. Cianfrance is showing the America where dreams are dying, one underclass at a time. A place where sons can’t seem to escape the sins of their fathers, or their place in the world. A country where the true black-hearted criminals end up shielded by society’s institutions gone bad. A place beyond the pines where every-day, ordinary people are trapped like the caged motorcycle drivers in rundown fairs.  

A Long Road to Nowhere

Danny Boyle's Trance, Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire

It is truly exciting when a movie decides to play with the times/space continuum and give your mind a good ride. I was hoping this would be the case with Trance, the new film by Danny Boyle. I’m sad to say it wasn’t. There is really nothing more frustrating than a story line that just doesn’t add up. Then you’re just faced with nonsense and pretentiousness. You can play all you want with the mind and memory in movies, but ultimately the pieces of the puzzle need to come together or, from the beginning, everything has to be surrealist, a l’ Un Chien Andalou.

Danny Boyle’s film is, in this respect, like Christopher Nolan’s Inception: there are too many gaps in the story for it to make sense, so then all that going from place to place takes you nowhere. It also made me think that although Trance played visually more like Boyle’s earlier and great film Trainspotting, it has the duality of Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire: a good and a bad movie rolled into one. In Slumdog, the character’s childhood is one movie; it is rich, it is visually stunning, it is dramatic and complex; actually very  heart breaking. Then there’s the quiz show part, the Hollywood (Bollywood)-like film; the formulaic, feel-good, happy-ending movie that no one believes.  In Trance, the movie starts as a good thriller with a twist, an intellectual heist movie, but ends up not really knowing what it’s about at all.  We are kept at a distance watching very flat, non-rounded out characters. At the end you're stuck trying to piece everything together and realize that  it’s much ado about nothing.

Guy Pierce in Memento

It’s sad when this happens to a good director, like Boyle. Christopher Nolan himself also  made the great Memento which is everything that his later film Inception isn’t. It is a movie that demands attention and thought. It breaks the straight story line and, piece by piece, takes you through the maze of the main character’s mind. It would seem that this is what Trance aspired to do, but the logic and the character just kind of slipped away.

I was reminded of Christopher McQuire’s The Usual Suspects as a contrast to this movie; both are  rather violent movies about a gang of criminals trying to get away with their crime, with only one of them succeeding, after many twists and turns. Where The Usual Suspects succeeds in reeling you in and concluding with a surprising and coherent story line, a great plot that comes together at the end, Boyle’s film does not.



The Usual Suspects

Trance could also have stuck with the psychological mystery thriller part of the movie, in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, also about a therapist trying to help an amnesiac, but it doesn’t start or end there either. The main character, whose mind we’re supposedly occupying, just kind of goes away and we realize maybe we weren’t meant to follow him anyway. In the end, he was kind of erased from our minds, much like everything was erased from his.

 

 

 

 

The Insightful World of Ridley Scott



Thelma and Louise, Alien, Prometheus

There are some characters in movies that are like a ray of reason in an otherwise senseless world. Hal Slocumbe, Chief Investigator, Homicide, Arkansas State Police, is one of them. Hal, played with such natural grace by the brilliant Harvey Keitel in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise, comes into these women’s lives as they reach their dramatic end and yet, paradoxically, he is the only man that truly understands them and their plight; what’s more, he feels it.  As he confesses to one of the disastrous men that crosses these women’s paths: I may be the only person in the world who gives a rat’s ass what happens to them.

I like to believe that Hal is Ridley Scott himself and that his insight into women is what has made this director so very unique. Scott has been a favorite director of mine for many years and for many reasons. I love that he moves from genre to genre with such ease, directing science fiction, drama, action, romance, or horror movies. I love his creativity and innovation; the wonder of movies like Blade Runner that, thirty one years after its release, is still a science fiction and humanistic thriller at its very best. But I particularly like this director’s awareness of women, his refusal to stereotype them, his search for comprehension; his admiration.

Women  in Ridley Scott’s movies are strong, intelligent, resourceful and humane, whether they are the main character, like Ripley in Alien, filmed in 1979, or Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus, filmed in 2012, or not. Even when they are not the main character, they are women to contend with and remain central to the story line, like Angela in Matchstick Men, Rachael, Pris and Zhora in Blade Runner, Sibylla in Kingdom of Heaven, Marion Loxley in Robin Hood,  or Lucilla in Gladiator.  The female actors that appear in Ridley Scott’s films are among the best in their profession, including Susan Sarandon, Kat Blanchet, Sigourney Weaver, Noomi Rapace, Gena Davis, Sean Young, Darryl Hannah, Marion Cotillard, Eva Green and more.

But it is in Thelma and Louise that Ridley Scott displays his comprehension of women and their situation unlike any other male director has before and few have since. As these two women spiral to their death, one of cinema’s most moving deaths ever, they are met, right and left, with men that only do them harm. Their stories are everyday stories of women drowning in a world of sexism. No science fiction here.  The men portrayed represent millions like them.

Thelma’s husband, Darryl, is a man for whom she is nothing more than a maid he has become bored with.  When she’s on the run, he cares less for her and her safety than does Hal, the police assigned to the case; as Thelma says to Louise after her call to her husband: Darryl is mad, but he's still watching the game.

There’s Louise’s boyfriend, Jimmy, who probably loves her, but has never committed to the relationship before, and only does so because he knows she is leaving him:  I never made it work. He says,  I just... It's not that I don't love you.  It's not that.  I just never thought I'd be thirty-six years old and I never thought... I don't know what I thought.  Louise responds to him that his timing couldn’t have been worse; so much the case too many times. And those are the two men they are in a relationship with, the ones who, supposedly, love them.

Then there are the ones who don’t, like Harlan, the man who tries to rape Louise because she drank and danced with him in a bar; there’s the unknown stranger who actually raped Louise in her past in Texas, traumatizing her for good. There’s the “innocuous” J.D., the handsome hitchhiker, (Brad Pitt in the role that put him on the map), who robs them of all their money. All the men that, ultimately, drive them to a point of no return.

Harvey Keitel in Thelma and Louise

As Hal says to the lead FBI agent at the end of the movie: how many  times, Max?  How many times has that woman gotta be fucked over?  You could lift one finger and save her ass and you won't even do that?  In that scene, Hal tries to get between the guns and the women, desperately trying to save their lives at the expense of his own.

Ultimately, the question that comes to mind is whether it is only in science fiction that Ridley Scott sees women emerging as victors over their own destinies.  We’ll have to wait and hope Scott comes up with a movie where an everyday woman, in the present, does so. In the mean time we will say, with the lead character in Prometheus:  My name is Elisabeth Shaw, last survivor of the Prometheus. And I am still searching.