This Great, Diverse Nation

At midnight on the last day of the year in some countries people bring out their brooms, open the front door, and sweep out all the malice the old year brought with it in the hope that the new one can start clean. This year we’re more in need of a time machine to roll back the events that led to November 8 and reverse the outcome of the day that shook America to its core.

There has been too much loss this year!

We are deeply saddened by the departure of beloved activists Muhammad Ali and Tom Hayden; authors Harper Lee, Elie Wiesel, Edward Albee; film actors and directors Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher, George Kennedy, Patty Duke, Curtis Hanson, Michael Cimino; musicians George Martin, Prince, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, David Bowie, Maurice White, George Michael…and too many others. We carry the dead with us because they made our lives richer.

So we try to wrap up the year taking stock of what’s been. In film, this is usually a rather happy thing to do because film is art-is creation-is life. And while it has been a year of disappointment in many of our fellow human beings who allowed the November 8 outcome, it hasn’t been a disappointing year in cinema.  I have three films that prove my point: Moonlight, Hell or High Water and Manchester by the Sea. There have been more –Loving, Fences, Birth of a Nation, Queen of Katwe, Sully, to mention but a few other American films—but these three have commonalities that resonate with what is occurring in the United States.

First of all the three take place in present day America. Then, the protagonists of the films are all struggling, working class Americans trying to make ends meet in a country where the American Dream has truly become that and only that  for a growing majority: a dream. While showing the plight of everyday working folk, all three films also majestically show what a diverse and immense country these United States are. There is Chiron, the black, gay protagonist of Moonlight, who lives with his drug addicted mother Paula in a rough neighborhood in Miami and is assisted by a drug dealer and the love for his friend Kevin. Up north east is Lee Chandler, a white, Catholic Bostonian janitor who goes back to Manchester by the sea to take care of his nephew Patrick when the pillar that held them up, his brother Joe, dies. Finally there are the Howard brothers, Tanner and Toby, trying to stay alive in one of the dying small towns in Texas in Hell or High Water.  Such different places, such diverse races and cultures, and yet there they all are, Americans, a big part of a nation that has left them behind. The graffiti on the wall in one of the first sequences of the film Hell or High Water pretty much sums it up:

“3 Tours in Iraq, but no Bailout for People like us”

Another thing the three films share is the tremendously strong relationships of love among the male protagonists in the three stories. The scripts of the three movies are centered on men, not to say there aren’t important roles for women, like Chiron’s mother or Lee’s wife, but they are peripheral to the main relationships. And the casting of these male protagonists has been magnificent! Truly great acting. What’s more, I expect most of the main characters of these films will be nominated by the Academy for one acting award or another.

Trevante Rhodes as Chiron in Moonlight

There is the ever more impressive Mahershala Ali who plays Juan, the crack dealer in Moonlight. It’s not a big part, but his acting is perfect, as is Trevante Rhodes who plays adult Chiron.  Jeff Bridges is ever great as Marcus Hamilton, and Gil Birmingham is another perfect cast as his partner officer in Hell or High Water, but it's the Howard brothers that are the ones to watch in this movie. Chris Pine surprises as Toby Howard, given all the rather “light” movies he’s been in before this one, but it is Ben Foster that shines as his brother Tanner in Hell or High Water. The depth of these sibling’s love is only comparable to their grief and the hardships they faced growing up. That’s somewhat the case for the brothers Joe and Lee Chandler in Manchester by the Sea, but while the actor Kyle Chandler is just right for the part of Joe and Lucas Hedges is a true young acting revelation as Patrick, it is certainly Casey Affleck as Lee that grabs your attention and your heart. Very likely this actor will walk away with the Academy Award. The supporting actress nominations for Naomie Harris, as Chiron’s mother, and Michelle Williams as Lee’s wife, are also probably a given.

Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham (Hell or High Water), Kyle Chandler and Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea)

As the year ends, film award season begins. It is my hope that one of these three films will take the Best Picture award at the Academy Awards this year, my preference being Moonlight also because of the great directing by Barry Jenkins and James Laxton’s beautiful cinematography. However there is a film that seems to be creeping up on these strong contenders, according to film critics: Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, so I should mention it as well.

I confess I will be upset if the Academy or even the Golden Globes gives La La Land a best picture award. This is not the year to retreat to la la land, in any sense. Not that it isn’t a cute movie with a good score and the ever-charismatic Ryan Gosling; one in which Jon Legend delivers probably what amounts to the movie’s best and only original lines. But it is a nostalgic movie, of not the right kind. It is precisely that “return to” (Make America…) nostalgia that has already led the unimaginable to happen.  

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in La La Land

Much like The Artist was a tribute to silent films in its time (another “huh?!” Oscar winner nobody remembers now, as was predictable), La La Land is a tribute to Gene Kellly’s Hollywood, down to the shoes. Yes, boy those were great times of dance and fun IF you were a white “struggling artist” living the life of … Beverly Hills pool parties, where everyone owns Prius cars, jobs as a barista on the Metro Goldwyn Myer Studio set, with thousand dollar jazz collector items? Oops, those are the “struggling artists” of La La Land. The director still sees Los Angeles pretty much as the Hollywood of Rebel without a Cause, I guess, because despite the fact that only about 27% of the population of Los Angeles is non-Hispanic white, the only thing that reflects this in the film is the opening dance number. There is, of course, the jazz club full of only black people and Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling (like in the segregated fifties of yonder year), and maybe that’s why Gosling’s character talks about being the (white) savior of jazz music. Nope, not going to be happy if that film wins.

This is not a time for la la land. It is a time to speak out for the disenfranchised America shown in the other three movies I write about. Many of those disenfranchised have been fooled into shooting themselves in the foot voting into power an army of Goldman Sachs and bigoted one percenters that will only make things worse for janitors like Lee, gay black men like Chiron, or the white, angry folk living in the small, dying, southern and rust belt towns of this great, diverse nation. It never ceases to be a time for hope, but let’s bring in the New Year with what we really need: a time for action.

A House Divided

When I wrote about the election of the first woman president in the United States in my last post it was with more than hope, it was with conviction. There was a worm of a doubt buried deep in my gut that she might not win, but it was of the kind that makes us think about the sudden occurrence of a tsunami when we don’t even live near the ocean, or the thought of an endless darkness in death. It just couldn’t happen. Now, as in some Stanley Kubrick-like science fiction movie, we are faced with the reality that a considerable part of the America that voted wants to be the old, white, decaying man in the Kubrick movie, or are the apes screaming and scratching their heads at the monolith they’ve come upon, which is the present day America most of the rest of us inhabit.

It was with a lead-filled heart that I read about the 53% of white women that voted for a man who considers them no more than a hunk of meat and treats them worse than that. A woman abuser. A misogynist who even worded expressions of lust towards his own daughter. I guess, like the movies about women presidents (see post Down the Rabbit Hole…and Into the White House) women that voted for this man, in their subordinated mind, can also only conceive a woman as president of the United States as science fiction or comedy.

As the feminist author Simone de Beauvoir wrote so well: “When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior." To have voted for someone who sullies the very essence of who we are as women is to have internalized inferiority.

Could that also apply to the people who did not vote? Fewer than 26% of eligible American voters cast their vote. What a waste of such an important right and responsibility! And the majority of voters behind the man who won were white, dreaming of making America that place where racism allowed them to use their privilege as oppression; so not so great a time to go back to if you were a woman, disabled, gay, or belonged to a racial / ethnic minority. How hard it is for the privileged to give up the illusion of the righteousness of their privilege! How difficult to embrace difference and equality! I must admit that in a nation that holds up its modernity as a badge of honor I did not expect to see, in the 21^st century, a desire to take this country back to its darkest days of bigotry, inequality and hatred.  

I begin this post with two photographs, one from a movie released in 1915 and one released this year; both share a title: The Birth of a Nation. The first movie was originally titled The Clansman, like the book on which it was based, and was directed by Kentucky native D.W. Griffith. This movie is a glorification of the Klu Klux Klan. Enough said. One hundred years later, a black director, Nate Parker, has made a movie with the same title, but this time to honor the slave revolt led by Nat Turner in 1830. The movie made by Griffith was part of the hate-filled, bigoted campaign to maintain racist views and subjugation, a philosophy of hate that has been at the basis of the plight of people of color ever since, as is vividly depicted in another movie released this year, a documentary this time, brilliantly directed by Ava DuVernay:  “13^th”.  

 

"13th" Documentary by Director Ava DuVernay

Griffith’s movie helped support a philosophy of hate, and thankfully we’ve moved away from that as a society. The movies of the 21^st century have moved in the opposite direction, towards laying the ground for understanding, unity and progress. Many, like 12 Years a Slave, the new Birth of a Nation, Selma, Race, return to those dark times as a reminder of the horror of what it was. As we read about the endorsement of the KKK for the new president, and about white supremacists, nationalists and anti-immigrants being appointed to positions of power in the new administration, people who would divide this nation once again, we should turn to these movies and remember what it would be like to have another “Ku Klux influx” (borrowing a term from the amazing novel, The Sellout, by the first American author to win the Man Booker literary award this year).

It is certainly one of the greatest ironies of life that the KKK uses a Christian symbol when theirs is a philosophy of division and hate, the diametrical opposite of what Jesus Christ predicated: “Whoever fails to love does not know God, because God is love.” (John, 4:8). It was also Christ that first spoke about the evils of a house divided (Mathew 12:25), which Abraham Lincoln, speaking against slavery, then took upon himself to remind the people of the United States about: “A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Moonlight, Directed by Barry Jenkins

Movies like Fruitvale Station, Straight out of Compton, or Moonlight, clearly one of the best movies of 2016, remind us of how far we still have to go to reach that point where our humanity, everyone’s humanity, is recognized, respected and allowed to thrive. We’ve been held back by bigotry, which now wants to raise its unbearable head once again.

But let’s never forget that the first woman to run for President of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton, won the popular vote. She lost the Electoral College vote (the second time this happens in this century), but most of the Americans who voted, voted for her and for the future she stood for, one of progress and not regression. This is one house that can no longer be divided because many women, people of color, the LGBT community, people with a disability, and all those people of good will who want a better, more humane tomorrow for everyone, know that there is no going back. 

Down the Rabbit Hole… and into the White House

“I don't think..." then you shouldn't talk, said the Hatter.” 
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I have taken quite a hiatus from my blog. I haven’t stopped going to movies (check out the updated Fresh Cuts tab where I rate the movies seen). In fact, I’ve needed films more than ever to survive what has kept me away from the keyboard: the 2016 Presidential Campaign.

As everybody that lives in the United States knows, reality has given way to fiction in this presidential race. As one tweet put it, we’re caught between trying to break the glass ceiling and hitting rock bottom.

It has been maddening to see the misogynist, vulgar, narcissist candidate running for the GOP ticket take this election into a rabbit hole of chaos. The support he has received, not just from his base and the GOP, but from the media/press has been even more infuriating. That he ended up being the candidate for the Republican Party is definitely not due to any merit of his. This support has come on the back of the unwarranted and despicable attacks that have been made to Hillary Clinton. Since it has been clear to me since the 2008 campaign who the best person fit to run this country is, I have been hard at work providing my grain-of-sand support to get the first woman president of the United States into an office she well deserves.

As we have very clearly come to see in the final days of the campaign, sexism has raised its abominable head and has tried to drag the race into the gutter, succeeding in getting the GOP there. Despite this and because this country is still a nation where good things happen and often, we will very probably finally have a woman president in the White House come January 2017!

The idea of a woman in the White House in the movies has only been seen as science fiction and as a rather ridiculous proposition. You can count these movies on two hands. Since this is a movie blog, let’s take a quick peek at how utterly preposterous the idea of a woman American President has been to filmmakers.

Let’s begin by saying that most movies that portray a woman in the White House as President are usually quite mediocre, if not downright bad. The idea first appeared on film in 1953, in the movie Project Moonbase, directed by Richard Talmadge. The movie took place in the futuristic world of 1970, so science fiction, and to cement how futuristic it was there was a Madame President. The lunar expedition in the movie is foiled by the mission doctor who turns out to be a spy, so the crew crashes on the moon to stop him. The officer in charge of the mission is actually a woman, but one who turns to her male subordinate whenever there’s trouble and marries him after landing on the moon. What’s more, she requests her husband be promoted so she won’t outrank him!

It would take 33 years for another movie to portray a woman as President of the United States in 1986. The title of the movie is an indicator of just how ludicrous the idea seemed to the movie industry: Whoops Apocalypse. What’s more, in this British satire directed by Tom Bussman, the actress Loretta Swit plays the first woman president of the United States, who takes up the office only after the previous president, a former circus clown, dies as a result of daring a journalist to hit him with a crowbar.

Loretta Swit as US President in Whoops Apocalypse

The following year, 1987, Joan Rivers took the commander-in-chief position in the Australian movie Les Patterson Saves the World (directed by George Miller), another political farce where Rivers is really just the comedian-in-chief.

So, yes, after sci-fi, the comedy genre is the one used to portray women as presidents. Another decade would pass and Christina Applegate would bring the chuckles to that idea in 1998 when she played President Diane Steen in Jim Abrahams’ film comedy Mafia! (Originally entitled Jane Austen’s Mafia!). Another ludicrous and sexist plot that leads this woman president to almost declare world disarmament before her gangster ex-boyfriend convinces her they should get married.

Christina Applegate in Mafia!

Argentine director Gabriela Tagliavini tries to do a better job portraying the President of the United States as a woman, but again it has to be in a science fiction setting. Perfect Lover, released in 2001, was also known as “The Woman Every Man Wants” because it takes place in a future, the year 2030, in which women are the dominant gender and the plot still centers on a man wanting an old-fashioned complacent and sexy woman.

Still about another decade later the film Iron Sky (2012 - Timo Vuorensola), this time a science-fiction comedy for heaven’s sake, brings us the year 2018 (so close) in which a Sarah Palin-like President of the United States leads the US against an attack by Nazis from the moon, while nuclear war breaks out on Earth. Believe it or not, there is an Iron Sky 2 in the making.

Iron Sky

We arrive at this year’s Independence Day: Resurgence (2016-Roland Emmerich). Another science fiction movie in which the President is a woman, played by Sela Ward. It’s another end of the world movie, so I guess that’s why a woman is the president, one who is, this time, killed by the alien queen. So much for democracy winning!

Sela Ward in Independence Day: Resurgence

Such a short and sorry list! TV has done a little better, with 24, Commander in Chief, Madame Secretary, Scandal, State of Affairs, Prison Break, and a couple of other non-sci-fi or comedy shows that have a women as President of the United States (although women in politics are still getting laughs: Hail to the Chief, Veep, Parks & Recreation). But here’s hoping that once that final glass ceiling is shattered, it will become a bit more common to see women leaders in film, as Hillary Clinton takes us out of the rabbit hole and into wonderland.

Kubrick, An Optimistic Clairvoyant

There was a Double Kubrick matinee at my local movie theater, one I could not miss: A Clockwork Orange (1971) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I’ve seen both before on the big screen and in video format, but who can pass on a chance to see them back to back on the big screen again? How fabulous both these films are in their very disparate ways! They hold in common the outstanding art of this director as well as his vision for the future, almost clairvoyant in many ways, as we can attest from the “future” of 2016.

But what an optimist Stanley Kubrick was, in so many ways!

Malcom McDowell, Warren Clarke, James Marcus in A Clockwork Orange

When A Clockwork Orange was released in the Peru of the 70’s, where I first saw it, it was considered scandalous above all for the violence and sex it contained; multiple stories circulated about half the theater goers walking out, some even becoming physically indisposed watching the film; something that would only pique the interest of a film enthusiastic teenager. It wasn’t, however, the violence or the open (horrifying) sexuality of rape that is shown in the movie that caught my attention, and that of the millions of followers this film has since gained, but how exceptional Kubrick was in taking the (then) rather underground and complex look at society that was contained in Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novella to the screen, actually improving his work, and creating his own piece of art.

The original book was a complex look into a future where some of the budding issues Burgess regarded as negative in the world would prevail, with the dire results that are so brilliantly visually summarized in the film. There was the political system that would try to solve its social problems by shifting the “moral” responsibility from the individual to the state, as it removed individual choice, contained in the figure of the Minister and the political system; there is the American popular culture that was fostering homogeneity, passivity and apathy in youth  so well represented in middle class Alex and his pals; the justice system that was violent, corrupt and, ultimately quite ridiculous, marvelously portrayed by the Chief Guard and the probation officer, Deltoid in the film; and finally even the psychological movement of “behaviorism” , popular at the time the book was written and also a part of Burgess’s critique.

Michael Bates as the Chief Guard in A Clockwork Orange

Taking this to the big screen, in particular, the dystopian world resulting from all these criticized tendencies, was a task that probably only a capable filmmaker like Kubrick could achieve so well. The set and costume design, to the last detail, is fascinating to see, while disturbing; the music is quite brilliant, including the “Old Ludwig Von”, and the casting, in particular Malcolm McDowell in, most definitely, his best film to date, are all part of the brilliance of Kubrick. What ends up a paradox, so many years into the future, is how Alex and his Droogs, a violent, hedonistic and nihilistic group of young men if there was one, creating a chaotic future, now pale when compared to the gangs, drug dealers, and terrorists of today. The cautionary tale of a future with the wrong moral choices certainly was outdone by our reality. The most violent scenes that led people to walk out of the theater back in the 70s are quite innocuous when compared to the violence contained in many television series and movies today. For example, the beating up the old drunk tramp in the movie is probably one of the more brutal scenes of a Clockwork, along with the rape scenes, of course, but he’s the same tramp Alex encounters later on, quite in one piece, with all his teeth in place; how benign this now seems when compared to a man getting his head bashed off by a car door, or another broken to pieces by a bowling ball, scenes from the very popular now televised series Daredevil!

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey, filmed in 1968, had us on commercial air travel (Pan American) to the moon and beyond that year so, yeah, a bit optimistic on the timeline. When we see this film, however, from the perspective of filmgoers that have since been through 7 episodes of Star War films and countless other space movies that have since come out, we can only marvel at the storytelling and design that Kubrick perpetrated way back 48 years ago! The space suits, the pods, the space stations: there has been nothing new under the sun since this ground-breaking space film. Everything looks quite recent. But he outsmarted all the other space travel and alien films that have come since in making sure to never show an alien life form on the screen, beyond the monolith that represents them in the movie. They are, therefore, both more of a “menace” to humans than shown in any other movie since they were here since the dawn of man and continue into the future and beyond.  Are they the Gods that Prometheus has us searching for still?

Watching 2001 you realize how many directors have borrowed or imitated Kubrick since, not just Steven Spielberg with the Star War films, or the Star Trek ones, with the gadgets, but also films like Terrance Malik’s Tree of Life, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity and even Christopher Nolan’s Inception and Interstellar. If it’s not Kubrick that is being borrowed from, it’s Ridley Scott and his Alien and Blade Runner, also made over 40 years ago.

And this is probably the biggest feeling with which I left the movie theater after that double feature: how unoriginal, linear and formulaic so many movies have become! How very predictable and already “chewed” the plots are, how terribly FX and digitized fantastic scenes have become, to the point of numbing the audience towards their presence. Maybe I’m being harsh and most movies have always been like this. Maybe these were always just rare gems in the mines of cinema; if so, we have to value them all that much more for their rarity. 

Love Hurts

There are moments of awareness that occur in the course of some romantic relationships that can change them so completely that what was cemented over time bursts with the fragility of a soap bubble. This is the reality of love, and what is masterfully captured in the film 45 Years.

There are not that many films about romantic relationships that present the point of view of a woman who realizes that the man she loves and with whom she has built a life has never really felt for her what she perceived. While many films capture the range of romantic relationships, curiously they don’t capture what has probably led to more divorces than anything else. This is not love lost, it’s love that never really was.

In 45 Years a childless couple, Geoff Mercer (Tom Courtenay), and his wife of 45 years, Kate, played with stunning realism by Charlotte Rampling, are living a supposedly happily-married life in the English countryside when Geoff receives word that that the body of Katia, the girlfriend of his youth, has been found preserved in a glacier in the Swiss alps where she went missing a half-century ago while they were on a hiking trip. This is the beginning of the unraveling of Geoff and Kate’s relationship and Kate’s realization of the relationship she was really living. This takes place over five days.

Charlotte Rampling in 45 Years

Movies capture a vast range of romantic relationships. Maybe too many of them are of the they lived happily-ever-after kind (derogatorily referred to as “chick flicks”, by sexists). There are also a lot of the love goes tragic kind where something or someone gets between the lovers, yet their love is mutual and never dies (even if one of them does). Illness strikes, for example, and we have all the way from the cancer that separates the young lovers in The Fault in Our Stars, to old-age dementia in Michael Haneke’s amazing Amour. It can be war and/or a marriage to someone else (marriage not for love) that separates the lovers, and there are as many of those as there are rom-coms, including some greats like Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, Joe Wright’s Atonement, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, Neil Jordan’s The End of an Affair, or even Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, to name but a few. There are also those about society’s senseless mores that separate lovers: racism, homophobia, classism; movies like Ettore Scola’s We All Loved Each Other so Much, Todd Hayne’s Far From Heaven, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, or even Robert Wise’s West Side Story (and all the other Romeo and Juliet inspired films).

But I can think of few movies that address the true heartache of realizing the simple fact that the one we thought loved us as much as we loved them never really cared that much, but fell into the comfort of being loved. In 45 Years there is the complication of a terrible deceit, not uncommon in these relationships. In fact, they are built on deceit.

Meryl Streep in Heartburn

There is Heartburn, directed by Mike Nichols, which comes to mind. Heartburn is based on Nora Ephron’s autobiographical novel about her marriage to Carl Bernstein. Ephron wrote the screenplay to the movie and this is without a doubt why this movie contains so much heartache. Ephron has penned some of the most successful romantic comedies ever, including When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle, but without a doubt Heartburn is the only real relationship of the lot.

And now there is 45 Years, which tops the list. The film is beautifully directed by Andrew Haigh, who does a wonderful job of keeping the pace of the movie on track with the crumbling relationship. But it is Charlotte Rampling who makes this film into a masterpiece. As movie critic Peter Travers writes: “In 45 Years, Rampling shows us everything a true actress can do without a hint of excess or a single wasted motion.”

I’ve written about romantic films on Valentine’s Day before, being the die-hard romantic that I am, but for every love that lingers in its happiness, it is undeniable that there are probably ten that don’t. So here’s to this reality of love as well. There are many movies about the wonders of love and then there is that final scene in 45 Years in which we are witness to that heartbreakingly haunting stare the brilliant Charlotte Rampling gives of a life lost to love.

Are We All Savages?

I am quite in awe of many elements of The Revenant. The movie has fantastic cinematography, breathtaking locations, great performances by Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Forrest Goodluck, Domnhall Gleeson and more, a now very famous bear scene, and the recreation of a time period to the dirtiest, grittiest detail, all well assembled by the talented hand of Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu. I also noted the inclusion of the First Nations; an ancillary inclusion, but inclusion none the less, something which DiCaprio is now lifting in his award acceptance speeches.

There are, in other words, many things to admire about this film. However, it has left an aftertaste that is feeding a growing discontent with the film in its entirety. The story is based on the pirate, frontiersman, fur trapper and trader Hugh Glass, who died in 1833. Glass is a frontiersman of lore because he was mauled by a bear and left without supplies or weapons by his fellow fur traders, yet he managed –with the help of Native Americans- to make it back to Fort Kiowa, in South Dakota, 200 miles from where he was abandoned. That’s the skeleton of a story that Iñárritu takes and makes into The Revenant, a tale of survival and revenge full of brutality, ruthlessness, viciousness and pain far worse than even the original story ever had. It kind of brings to mind that macho-nostalgia western that is becoming Quentin Tarantino’s specialty. It becomes one of those movies, like Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, that you admire while watching, but never see again, because most people aren’t masochists.

The majestic landscapes and the beautiful winter scenery is interspersed with a man being brutally mauled by a bear until he is left a human rag, leg broken, flesh torn; and then the same character is suffocated, buried alive, falls down cataracts, then off a cliff, shot at, knifed and, well, yes, he survives it all. That’s just one character. More natural beauty and then a blood bath of a battle scene between the fur traders and the Ree People in which a live actor, naked, is dragged through the mud. Another beautiful landscape and a woman is being raped, and so on, throughout the whole movie.

The real Glass lived many years after the bear attack and never took revenge (much less the bloody revenge we see in the movie) on Fitzgerald or the younger man that left him to die. In fact, he continued to work as a trapper and fur trader until many years later he met his death on an expedition, under the attack of the Arikara People once again.

So Iñárritu had to add to the skeleton story, it would seem to justify a lot of the violence, and to bring the audience closer to the frontiersman Glass. This is where he brings in the Native Americans in the form of Glass’s son and wife. The real Hugh Glass apparently had no native son to fuel his revenge, nor any known Native wife to visit him as a ghost. The inclusion of Native Americans is, as I mentioned before, auxiliary to the plot, not the main point at all. The main point seems to be the two white men, the rugged traders, Glass and Fitzgerald, both survivors in the rough frontier days, the latter a man who also stands in for those working-class, oppressed men who get the short end of the stick from the American Government in the form of the Captain of the fort.

 

Forest Goodluck in The Revenant

 Iñárritu is not one for subtle messages, as we know from Babel or even Birdman, so he makes sure the audience knows he’s taking a stand for the Native Americans losing their lands and their lives, being immersed, in the process, in the different squabbles between the Europeans. There is even a sign that reads: “We are all savages” in the movie. But beyond that and because the story focuses on the Glass and Fitzgerald rivalry, it’s not clear what the director actually meant the audience to come away with respect to the First Nations (so maybe that’s why their mention in the acceptance speeches are necessary).

All this may be the reason that The Revenant has gotten such polarized reviews and disparate interpretations about its central point. A writer for the Guardian has called it “meaningless pain porn (…) A vacuous revenge tale that is simply pain as spectacle” much like, this journalist adds, “putting a camera in a cage and then setting a man on fire" and filming it, which is what some terrorist groups have done.  This same writer wonders: “This empty, violent movie will scoop up awards. What does that say about society and our attitude to violence?” That’s pretty much the same perspective that The New York Times film critic has, although for that critic the movie is “An American Foundation Story” (American as in the white, European settlers and frontiersmen, not the Native Americans).

Tom Hardy in The Revenant

On the other hand there are reviews like those of Rolling Stone Magazine, which is all praise for the movie, yet begins by warning: “Note to movie pussies: The Revenant is not for you” (confirming the macho-nostalgia aspect of the film). For that critic, the movie is about surviving nature (not quite sure if he’s considering Native American attacks as part of “Nature”).  This critic adds: “That's the movie. And a visceral punch in the gut it is. You could gripe about the excess of carnage and lack of philosophical substance. But surviving nature is Iñárritu's subject, and he delivers with magisterial brilliance. “

Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant

Yes, you can “gripe” about the excess of carnage and lack of philosophical substance and I think the critic, in his praise for the film, hit it right on the nail. This is a movie that deserves to get the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki and maybe even the awards for acting for Tom Hardy and Leo DiCaprio, although they both have tremendous competition in their fields (in particular Leo, because of Eddie Redmayne’s spectacular performance in The Danish Girl), however there is still a group of film lovers that prefer the beauty of the allegory, the things not said or shown directly, but dexterously implied, like that baby carriage bumping down the steps of Odessa.

A Farewell to a Gentleman Actor

Colonel Brandon, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Professor Severus Snape, Hans Gruber. Alan Rickman didn’t just play these characters, he created them.  “Jo” Rowling, as he called the author of the Harry Potter books, is the first to recognize how much Rickman added to Severus Snape, the character he played for so many years in the Harry Potter films. And I believe there will never be a better Sheriff for Robin Hood, nor a better Colonel Brandon to make Mary Anne regain her faith in humanity and all of us Jane Austen readers to wish such a man would come along to save us from despair and disappointment.

Rickman was an artist in every sense of the word. He didn’t begin acting until he was 28 –he was a graphic designer before that- and he didn’t make a film until he was 41. His first film was a very Hollywood action movie, Die Hard, but it was that much better because of his portrayal of Hans Gruber, who went on to be considered among the top movie villains of all time.

 Alan Rickman was also a very good director, directing two great women and friends of his: Emma Thompson in The Winter Guest (1997) and Kate Winslet in A Little Chaos (2014). How much sadder does it feel to see that his art grew and that we know he had so much more to give us!

There are two films that Alan has left behind, which we will see with the same heart break that we saw the films that “outlived” Philip Seymour Hoffman or listen to David Bowie's Blackstar, released just a couple of days before his death. The first is Eye in the Sky, in which he stars alongside Helen Mirren and Aaron Paul, playing Lieutenant General Frank Benson, the man placed as a go-between Mirren's military Colonel and the board of government representatives tasked with the ultimate decision of whether ridding East Africa of some of its most dangerous militants is worth the death an innocent young girl. The second is Alice through the Looking Glass where he voices (with that incredible and inimitable voice of his!) the blue caterpillar.

He has been immortalized by his films, yet we will miss him dearly.

I’ve Seen that Movie Too

Carol feels like an old film. It is set in the America of the late fifties, but that is not what makes it anachronistic, but rather it’s belief that the audiences watching it are stuck in that time period. We're not. Not to say that its a bad film. Carol has a lot going for it, in particular the very detailed and beautiful photography and amazing production and costume design, enhanced by the two gorgeous actresses that play the title roles, Cate Blanchet, as Carol, and Rooney Mara, as Therese, now both candidates for an Academy Award for their performances.

   

Rooney Mara as Therese

The trouble with the movie is that it suffers from what I will call the Brokeback Mountain syndrome, which is that while supposedly addressing the issue of homosexuality through a love affair in a place (Brokeback) or time period (Carol) in which the discrimination against those relationships was extreme, in order to call out that discrimination, it does so almost apologetically, directed at a straight audience, as if it were trying to “sell” the love affair to straight folk. In the process of doing this it sacrifices reality.

Cate Blanchet as Carol

This approach starts with the fact that both films use straight actors to play people of a different sexual orientation. The audience knows this because we live in a world of instant information, so it somehow already detracts from the subversive intent of a film that is trying to show the fluidity of sexuality. Wouldn’t the beautiful Jodie Foster or Portia De Rossi been a better casting choice in Ms. Blanchet’s role? And Rooney Mara could easily have been played by Ellen Paige or even Kristen Stewart, who showed much more realism with a gay role in Clouds of Sils Maria (also about the relationship between an older woman and a young gay woman). They most likely would have brought more realism to the roles but, more than that, isn’t the point to offer these roles to actors that are probably looking to expand the landscape?

This is really an oddity, considering that Carol director, Todd Haynes, is identified with the New Queer Cinema movement. Haynes has addressed sexual identity and societal norms in other of his films, like Far From Heaven, Poison and Safe.

But since gay actors can and do play straight characters, why not have straight actors play gay people, even though, in this case, the gay relationship is at the center of the plot? So, let’s leave that aside. The next faux pas of the movie is the relationship of the main protagonists itself. Does anyone really believe in love at first sight? Is that romantic at all in the twenty-first century? Or are we to assume that this is what happened among gay women in that time period? Watching Carol you can’t help but think: who behaves like that? What adults seriously fall in love at first sight and with literally no context beyond their good looks, they turn their lives inside out. Even if we accept that the sexual magnetism was strong, the movie never really develops anything else. There is never any complexity in the relationship between Carol and Therese. That may have passed muster in those Hollywood films of old that no one (not even back then) really believed, but in the twenty-first century of Supreme Court rulings and a stronger movement towards gender equity, it is hard to swallow.

And while both Ms. Blanchet and Ms. Mara, who have more than proven their value as superb actresses, are good in their roles, there is really nothing that extraordinary about their acting. That is, nothing like how we’ve seen them act before, for example Ms. Blanchet in Elizabeth I or Ms. Mara in Girl With a Dragoon Tattoo. Unless, again as was the case with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback, the award is for acting like a homosexual person in a love relationship.

Finally there is the very contrived plot in this screen adaptation. Carol, played by Ms. Blanchet, is about to lose custody of the child she supposedly loves profoundly, yet when the drunken husband takes away her daughter and threatens to file for full custody, does she follow in another car to make sure her child is all right? Does she call him back to negotiate and get him to come to his senses? Does she even try to see her daughter? No, she picks up her suitcase then gets Therese, the much younger woman she has fallen in love-at-first-sight with, played by Ms. Mara, and goes on a road trip! She’s seen this woman all of two times, one for less than five minutes. So, this is love?

Despite the mink coats and money Carol obviously possesses, the road trip they take is to the worst little towns and motels possible in the Midwest, and in winter! And yet still they somehow manage to get caught on tape in the process. In the end (spoiler alert), Carol cedes custody of the child she loves in exchange for the young woman she barely knows but apparently loves more. Is this really a happy ending?

Could it be that even though the director is gay, he is a man and so this all appears plausible to him? What did the author of the book intend as the happy ending? The book on which Carol is based, “The Price of Salt” by Patricia Highsmith (author of other novels taken to the big screen, like Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, or Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley), may answer some of the questions raised. Ms. Highsmith is rather legendary for having been a person who did not like people much and who, despite being gay herself, discriminated against black people and was outspokenly anti-Semitic. She did not have long term relationships or children, and was described as rather cruel and harsh. An anecdote, it seems she lived with cats and about three hundred snails in her garden in England and once took hundreds of snails in a handbag to a cocktail party saying they were her "companions for the evening".

Most of the audience will know little of this and will remember only Mr. Haynes adaptation, which is, again, captivating in its visual beauty, with its old Hollywood-style actresses in a romance –a gay romance- story with a happy ending. All very straight and acceptable, but not very real.