A Search for America's Soul

When a movie moves you deeply, you know there is a connection of lived experience. Beatriz at Dinner will be one of these movies for you if you are a member of the working class, if you are a mid-career struggling professional woman, if you are a Latino immigrant and, overall, if you have a heart.

Puerto Rican Director Miguel Arteta joins writer Mike White, with whom he made The Good Girl, to skillfully take to the screen a powerful script about the abyss between the very rich and unscrupulous and… the rest of us. What takes the film into a category of its own are the two actors that personify our society’s class and race conflict: Salma Hayeck and John Lithgow; no need to say who personifies what. While both are naturally amazing in their roles, Ms. Hayeck is downright superb. She is our heart and soul.

As the title indicates, the story develops at a dinner given for a wealthy real estate mogul who has razed, devastated and destroyed his way to wealth, played by Lithgow. Ms. Hayeck’s character, Beatriz Luna, is obviously accidentally present. 

The supporting actors to these two pillars are also subtly great -David Warshofsky, Chloë Sevigny, Connie Britton, Amy Landecker- and each contributes to the ebb and flow of tension that slowly builds throughout the film. But it is Ms. Hayeck’s soulful eyes and Mr. Lithgow’s soulless ones that give witness to the philosophies that are in such opposition in today’s world between those that care and those that don’t and for who the world is, as they say, “their oyster”. The critics have called this an allegory of the Trump-era.

You can almost hear Ms. Hayeck’s thoughts, as old as scripture, as she struggles to contain the feelings Lithgow’s character evokes in her (an “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God”- Matthew 19:24; Mark 10:25; Luke 18:25). This is an ancient conflict between those that amass wealth with voracious and insatiable greed and those that are constantly and painfully sorting through the debris the former leave behind.

That this now feels like the political scenario in the United States only makes this movie more relevant. We leave the theater knowing how true it is that we, the declining middle class, struggling immigrants, working women, seem powerless when confronted with the enormity of men like the character played by Lithgow. This is a man who cares nothing for his fellow human beings, who lives only for the present and his “highs”; a man who is catered to and pampered by those that make wealth for and from him. These are the ones lobbying for their interests and  looking to loophole their way through any legal system. We read about it in the papers on a daily basis these days. So the movie will feel like the clear and present danger we face.

Maybe that’s why we love Beatriz at Dinner just that much more; we’re reminded of who these people we’re taught to admire and envy really are. We are glad that there are movie makers out there that are skillful enough to bring that much reality and reflection to a dinner party. 

Guess Who’s Staying Past Dinner.

A half a century after Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (1967), the Sidney Poitier - Katherine Hepburn - Spencer Tracy drama about a young white woman who brings her black fiancé to meet her parents, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) is released; a movie about a young white woman who brings her black fiancé to meet her parents. This time it’s a horror movie, which says a lot about racism and persistent attitudes towards interracial relationships in America. Looking back on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in its own way it too could be considered a horror movie. The blatant racism of the Hepburn/Tracy white parents towards the gentle, good looking, intelligent, humanistic, and all around amazing young doctor that is played by the talented Sidney Poitier is nothing if not horrific.

Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams in Get Out

As we contemplate the great divide in today’s America, without a doubt we find privilege and oppression at its core and, in particular, racism and sexism. It would probably take new treaties on social change (or lack thereof) to explain how in the twenty-first century we are unable to move past these systems of oppression. But thank heavens there are movies! Movies, like Peele’s Get Out, which use parody and symbolism so wondrously that, well, while maybe not being able to explain the why, certainly make it easy for those who have lived oppression to perceive the how. 

Jordan Peele said, of his directorial debut: “"It was very important to me to just get the entire audience in touch in some way with the fears inherent [in] being black in this country, (…) part of being black in this country, and I presume being any minority, is constantly being told that ... we're seeing racism where there just isn't racism."

Ruth Nega and Joel Edgerton in Loving

There have been a number of movies that have addressed the issue of racism through the lens of interracial relationships, most recently Jeff Nicol’s Loving (2016), the story of Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple whose legal battle against Virginia laws banning interracial marriages led to a Supreme Court decision; a movie that received various Oscar nominations this Oscar season. Other notables include Todd Hayne’s Far from Heaven (2002) about a housewife (Julianne Moore) who falls in love with a black gardener (Dennis Haysbert) while going through the pain of discovering her husband (Dennis Quaid) is a closeted homosexual. Their interracial love is the real taboo in this melodrama set in the 1950’s. Marc Forester’s Monster’s Ball (2001), for which Halle Berry won a Best Actress Oscar, is a dark story about a white racist jail guard (Billy Bob Thorton) who falls in love with the black woman who is the spouse of man on death row.  

Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert in Far from Heaven

Others worth mentioning  include Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale (1993), Richard Benjamin’s Made In America (1993), a comedy with  the then real-life interracial couple Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson; or Katherine Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), a thriller which is also a sci-fi romance, made great not by the script as much as by the passion with which the beautiful couple that is Ralph Fiennes and Angela Basset play out their relationship; this movie is a particular favorite of mine for just this reason and because the relationship here is never in question for the race of the couple (it takes place, after all, in the future).

Angela Bassett  and Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days

With the exception of Strange Days, the other movies were directed by white men. While they are good movies, all worth seeing, they were made by people who contemplate the system of racial oppression but have not lived the experience.  This marks a big difference. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote so well many years ago about the black experience (also applicable to other discriminated groups):

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

That is why movies about interracial relationships made by black men or women are so much more honest, real and strong.  In Get Out the black/white relationship is a metaphor; the movie is about the dangers that black men navigate in a society that is most definitely not post-racial. Black directors have tended towards comedy when addressing interracial relationships, maybe to make sure we understand that it is not the romance that is being examined, but rather the context of racism. Such is the case of Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991) about a successful black businessman (Wesley Snipes) who begins an affair with his white coworker (Annabella Sciorra), or Kevin Rodney Sullivan’s Guess Who? (2005) in which a young black woman (Zoe Saldana) brings home her boyfriend (Ashton Kutcher) to meet her parents; it is Bernie Mac  and Kutcher's relationship and their racial conflict that is under the lens (Bernie Mac is particularly great in this movie).

Jordan’s Peele Get Out also uses comedy, as could be expected from one half of the brilliant Key and Peele comedic duo. It is the strength of the movie that it doesn’t fit into a single genre, and while this may not be a work of art-house film making, it is most certainly an original, more so because of the strong social commentary that is presented in such a creative way.  

Movie critics and, most importantly, the audience, are dissecting the movie, finding all the hidden and not-so-hidden messages. The movie has exploded on social media. And this is good. This is what needs to occur. People are talking about this divide, this open wound in America that will not heal until there is a willingness to surrender privilege, denounce the barbarism that is racism and sexism, and recognize and respect everyone’s humanity.

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.