Tuesday, February 13, 2024

The Zone of Interest, a film by Jonathan Glazer

The first thing that stood out to me about this movie is the Nazi officers’ haircuts. They are so very ugly, I have to wonder whether that was historically accurate, or a deliberate choice to make the Germans loathsome. I know tastes change, but even Moe, of The Three Stooges, has a better hairdo. Floppy on top, head close-shaved from above the ears down, and with a weird little wanna-be-ducktail point in the back, they’re too broadly hideous to be ignored. Not as hideous as the contrast between the little Eden of the Hoss family, and the back wall of their lovely garden, the razor-wire-topped boundary of Auschwitz death camp. 

This film is hard to write about – what can one say? The Obersturmfuhrer, Rudolph Hoss, played by Christian Friedel, occupies a lovely home (though his wife Hedwig, Sandra Huller, complains it’s not as big as it looks). This idyll is starkly opposed to the adjacent chimneys, barracks, the smoke the servants sometimes close the windows to keep out, the ashes that mulch the soil, the flames, the trains arriving at all hours. 

Hoss hosts the efficiency expert who proposes a design for the crematorium that will make possible continuous operation of the ovens – bodies (except they don’t call them bodies – “units”) go in, the 1000 plus degree heat does its work, then the load is moved to the next room where it cools, and the ashes are soon at 40 degrees, ready to be shoveled out. All that ingeniousness, turned to such a purpose. 

Occasionally the camp next door intrudes – Hoss goes fishing, and two of his children play in the river. He hooks a human jawbone, and suddenly barks at the kids to get out of the water. He hustles them home where they’re subjected to a sanitation treatment – a scrubbing with bleach perhaps, which has them screaming in pain – to expunge the contamination from those people, whose remains have the temerity to end up in the river where he loves to fish. 

Glazer makes clear that it’s possible to ignore something so horrific, so close by – just don’t think about what’s going on, or whether it’s right, or what it means to be on this side of such a wall not that side. It is a willed blindness humans suffer from, and perpetuate suffering through. The veil between what’s behind that wall, and places where we torment each other now, is almost nonexistent.

Monday, January 15, 2024

Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

My disintegrating paperback copy of this deceptively small novel was printed in 1970, though the copyright is 1963. It is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s fifth published work. And it’s dynamite. Or, should I say, ice-nine, the substance that destroys life on earth. I like to give copies to friends and family as high school graduation gifts, because the book contains so many fundamental truths about life, all in one place. 

Vonnegut creates a scientist and his family, a destructive form of water, and a nihilist religion. In his deadpan way he describes the Hoenikker family – Dr. Felix, the father, genius with no moral compass whatever; his daughter Angela, a tall gawky woman with a gift for playing clarinet; his son Franklin who shuns nearly everyone, spending his time building a model railroad world; and young son Newt, a midget born at their mother’s death, cared for by Angela. Dr. Felix invents a substance the US Marines can use so they don’t have to slog through mud in their forays into battle. But that’s not all the substance does. 

Vonnegut introduces such ideas as one’s karass, the people with whom one is connected; granfalloons, people who imagine they are connected; wampeter, the purpose for which a karass exists; boko-maru, the ecstatic kneading of one another's feet; and foma – lies. He invents other terms too, but these are the most important. They’re delineated in the religion Bokononism, which is outlawed on the island where it is practiced. No one may be a Bokononist – lest they suffer a hideous death – and yet, they are all Bokononists. 

I’ve told too much – if you’ve never read this, you ought to find a copy – preferably a crumbling artifact on a used book store shelf – and collect some fundamental truths you might have overlooked thus far.

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Maestro, a film by Bradley Cooper

This 2023 Oscar contender deals well for a while with the curse of biopics: life tends not to fit the narrative arc of a satisfying story. Leonard Bernstein was a colossus in music as in spirit, and as channeled by Bradley Cooper, he fills the screen. The first half is brilliant – one imaginative sequence, an exuberant dance by a trio of sailors, Leonard, and Felicia Montealegre, in a number from “On the Town” perfectly illustrates the attractions Bernstein has to his wife-to-be and to young men. They all dance together and apart, in this scene and in the rest of the movie. 

Bernstein is a man who leans into his appetites, at one point lamenting that his love of people prevents him from the level of composing he would otherwise achieve. The effervescent banter between Felicia (Carey Mulligan) and Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) is marvelous – we feel we are in a time when parties were populated by sophisticates who traded witticisms and opinions with confidence and a light touch. But the second half drags – not just the cigs (I hoped the credits would include Cigarette Wrangler, an essential crewmember for this pic – I looked in vain for a scene in which they weren’t smoking). We already know Bernstein swings both ways, and that despite being a loving husband and father, he is also unbridled in his appetite for men. But the music – the compositions, the conducting – the reason anyone would make or watch this movie – plays second fiddle (sorry!) to his fast living – booze, coke, young guys. 

And it’s here that Cooper and his co-writer Josh Singer fall into the biography trap: they feel compelled to tell more than we need to know (“Because it happened!”) to appreciate Bernstein’s prodigious talents. I would have cut twenty minutes. The fizz of the first half has gone flat, the story dutifully plods on. Between concerts and bouts at the keyboard, we have a lot of slack time filled with pickup scenes and parties. Cut! At Felicia’s command he lies to their oldest, their daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke) about rumors of his behavior at Tanglewood. Later, it’s clear she knows what is going on. Cut! 

Much has been made of Cooper’s prosthetic nose, created by the makeup artist Kazu Hiro. I don’t know what they are complaining about – I used to watch Bernstein’s Concerts for Young People, and Cooper channeled Bernstein brilliantly – I thought I was watching the man not the actor portraying him. If you’ve seen Frank Langella as Richard Nixon, or Liev Schreiber as Henry Kissinger, or, god forbid, John Wayne as Genghis Khan (in “The Conqueror,” best watched in an altered state), you would give Cooper very high marks. 

For me the actor who stole the show was Carey Mulligan, who deserves an Oscar. Understated vs. Cooper’s flamboyance, she holds her own without being pitiful.

Friday, November 10, 2023

They Shot the Piano Player, a film by Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba

I love the Denver Film Festival, now in its 46th year! Depending on their reception, some of these offerings go on to wider distribution, but most you'll probably never have another chance to see on a big screen. If you love film and there's a festival in your area, you should go!

They Shot the Piano Player, a 2022 animated film, is the story of a Bossa Nova pianist with a tragically short career. Tenorio Jr. was a gifted young pianist who pioneered some of the great new syncopated jazz sounds in the early 1960s that captivated Brazil then the jazz world. He played with some of the greats: Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, and many others, but only recorded one album before he simply disappeared. A New York writer working on a book in 2010 about Latin jazz listens to that album then wants to know more. 

His curiosity, and love of Tenorio Jr.’s music, take him to Rio, to Buenos Aires, to the homes and haunts of many musicians who played with him and admired him; gradually he disentangles the story of Tenorio Jr.’s disappearance in 1976 while visiting Buenos Aires. At that time, all over Central and South America, military coups, funded by the CIA as a means of “stabilizing” their political landscape, were rounding up not only dissidents and Communists, but artists, students, musicians, anyone whether overtly political or not, whom they deemed threats. 

So we get our history lesson, but alongside it we enjoy some great music and captivating images courtesy of the film’s animation team. This movie is well worth seeing on a large screen in a theater with a good sound system, where you can enjoy it at its best.

Saturday, October 28, 2023

The Catherine Wheel, by Jean Stafford

This 1951 novel recalls sharply Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which I read about a year ago. The Catherine Wheel spans a summer not a day, but moves back along the remembrances and regrets of its characters as fully and poignantly as Woolf’s. 

Cousin Katherine, unmarried, and fortyish though with hair turned white by a bout of typhus, summers in a grand house outside a small town near the Maine coast. Though the book is set in the late 1930s – early 1940s, Katherine’s life is anachronistic, as if by resisting modernity she can keep time itself from intruding. Instead of a car she has a carriage and team of horses and coachman, as well as a gardener, a cook, a couple of maids, and a tenant on her land. She is the grande dame of the region, respected and appreciated and gossiped-over by the townsfolk. 

Every summer Katherine hosts her twin nieces and nephew, who under her indulgent intellectual eye are free to do as they will. Andrew, now twelve, has been best friends with the tenant’s son Victor, a rough character a couple years older than himself, with whom he would otherwise never cross paths. In summers past they have been inseparable, performing mischief, fishing and clam-digging, swimming and boating, and spying on the townsfolk of the nearby village. This year, however, Victor’s older brother Charles, a sailor, is home with some nonspecific ailment; Victor appoints himself nursemaid and confidante. Andrew is inflamed with jealousy – he has lost his companion, and the hours weigh on him. He longs for Charles’s death, or recuperation and return to seafaring – either would give Victor back to him. 

But this is not to be – Charles’s health waxes and wanes, Victor is under his sway, and Andrew wishes ever more fervently that Charles will meet some terrible fate. Katherine has her own secret, but while she and Andrew suffer and sense each other’s misery, they cannot confide. Yet, their dual distresses unbalance the household, so that instead of Katherine’s firm grip on her emotions and Andrew’s youthful nature steadying them, they only grow worse in tandem. 

Woolf’s visitations into the pasts of her characters are no less perceptive and pointed than those Stafford brings to bear, and we have to ask ourselves: which turning was the one that changed our trajectory from a steady and hopeful one, to disaster? Which thwarted relationship warped our future, crippling our capacity to live our ideal lives? It is too late for remedy – one can only plan for a fitting end.

Saturday, September 23, 2023

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

This book, published in 1995, grew out of an article Krakauer wrote for Outside magazine in January, 1993, five months after its subject, Christopher McCandless (who called himself Alex, and Alexander Supertramp) died of starvation in the Alaska wilderness. Krakauer, an adventurer in the same mold as McCandless, dug deeper after the article was published – who was Chris/ Alex McCandless? Why did he end up alone in an abandoned bus, missing a couple of key opportunities to trek out? Was it hubris, ignorance, or the courage of his convictions, that compelled him away from the practical resources that would have saved him? 

Krakauer asks these questions and more as he retraces McCandless’s footsteps from his college days in Atlanta, to wandering across the south, the desert, nearly drowning in the Gulf of California, living on the edge of the Mojave Desert in the sort of rag-tag community that can only exist in such marginal places. Along the way, McCandless, with his combination of intellectual curiosity, adventurous spirit, and candor, made deep impressions on those he encountered. 

Perhaps because he was young, idealistic, and fixated on his quest for an adventure that would challenge him to the marrow, he evoked protectiveness and generosity from those who gave him rides, offered him jobs and shelter, and tried to temper his singlemindedness. They saw in him a roving son, grandson, brother, or in Krakauer’s case, a kindred spirit, and wanted to help him on his quest, advise him, or lay bare the folly of his pursuit. 

McCandless left enough of a record – in journal scraps, letters and postcards to those he met, and in the margins of books – to provide insight into his convictions. Here’s a quote from a letter he sent to a grandfather living in the Mojave Desert, who had provided him shelter for some weeks: 
“Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience. 
“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.” 

If you have only the haziest memory of your own youthful follies, read this book. You may tell yourself, “I’d never do anything that dumb,” but if you’re honest, you might admit that you did your own foolish things – from curiosity, from a yen for what lies over the horizon, from an itch daily life could not scratch. We remember Chris/Alex McCandless because he was an extreme manifestation of the questing spirit that takes so many of us on our own adventures, away from our comfort zones to an edge where we can see further, and imagine more, and return (if we do) greater in spirit.

Friday, September 1, 2023

The Quiet American, by Graham Greene

Perhaps you have heard of this excellent 1955 novel. You are likelier to have seen a film version – the one from 1958 starring Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy, or the 2002 remake with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. But if you have not read the book, you may be acquainted with plot and characters without perceiving the depths, which are the source of the book’s power. 

Vietnam, 1952-55. Thomas Fowler is a cynical and weary middle-aged English journalist living in Saigon, reporting on uprisings against the French colonial grip. Into his life comes Alden Pyle, the quiet American of the title. His attitudes are bookish and moral and clear-cut. In Pyle’s world there are no shadows. But Vietnam is all gray. He falls for Phuong, the young woman who keeps company with Fowler. He wants to save her, to elevate her from her life in Saigon. Because he is young, when he offers to marry her, Phuong sees better prospects, and agrees. Fowler, who depends on her, strives to recapture the equilibrium of the indifferent – Pyle has got under his skin. Fowler would marry her himself, except that his estranged wife in London refuses to divorce him. 

The plot is not the point. Pyle is murdered, and Fowler has his own reasons for being involved. Besides an undercurrent of rivalry, Fowler loathes Pyle’s methods, the young American’s clear conscience while he busies himself building up the Third Force which will usher in Democracy over the heads of the Communists and dictators. A bomb going off in a crowded square at the hour when the place is most crowded with women and children is simply an error of timing – the parade in which a few colonels would be blown up, was called off. Fowler is there, seeing the young mother holding her dead baby, the trishaw driver whose legs were blown off. Pyle arrives, complaining of the blood on his shoes and shrugging off maiming and death as an ancillary cost of his great cause. 

Greene developed a degree of cynicism over a career spent in places where his privileges as a white Englishman set him apart – alienate him – without grounding him in faith nor honesty. He regards himself as a fraud, and thus recognizes it in those around him. Greene is thereby able to present us both Thomas Fowler, who stands in for his own views, and Alden Pyle, who despite his strait-laced awkwardness, eschewing booze and prostitutes, wields death as the tool put into his hands by those who sent him to Vietnam. He does not apologize: he believes in it, just as American officers would say a decade later, “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” 

When Fowler makes a trip north and rides along on a French bombing run, he witnesses the pilot making a “vertical raid” in which he dives the plane thousands of feet, strafing and bombing as he goes, repeats the maneuver a dozen times, then as they return to the airstrip, blows a sampan out of the water because his instructions are to shoot anything on the river. That evening at an opium house, he addresses Fowler’s appalled reaction: 

You are a journalist. You know better than I do that we can’t win. You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night… But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.” His ugly face which had winked at me before the dive wore a kind of professional brutality like a Christmas mask from which a child’s eyes peer through the holes in the paper. “You would not understand the nonsense, Fowler. You are not one of us.” 

Where the film versions fall short is in their inability to convey Greene’s masterful writing. Here is Fowler’s first impression of Pyle, in a café in Saigon: “Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Common in Boston, his arms full of books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn’t even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined – I learnt that very soon – to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve.” 

Greene tells the story in reverse: almost the first thing we learn is that Pyle has been found murdered where he should not have ventured. Perhaps this is the novelist’s riposte to Pyle’s certainty – to start with his death, then explore what little of his life he spends in Vietnam, showing us what he might have learned and ultimately does not. Meanwhile, Fowler, his foil, tries to open the young idealist’s eyes. Fowler can’t hate him for taking Phuong – the Englishman already knows too much about impermanence – and can’t love him for saving his life during a Viet Minh attack in a rice paddy – he would have preferred just to die. But when Pyle accepts that the road to Democracy is necessarily paved with the innocent dead, that Fowler cannot ignore. Greene’s warning booms down the decades – have we learned anything? Can we? The Quiet American is as timely today as when it was written nearly seventy years ago.