Enough Said, a film by Nicole Holofcener

Enough Said, a 2013 film starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini, offers an adults-eye view of misunderstandings, secrets, and how we muddle through after sabotaging our best prospects. Louis-Dreyfus plays Eva, a masseuse, 10 years post-divorce, with her daughter about to leave for college on the opposite coast. Gandolfini is Albert, a divorced dad in a similar situation; they meet at a party, and cautiously begin seeing each other. Both have been burned – they’re not looking for commitment, but they’re about to be home solo, which they’re dreading. 

Eva’s new client, Marianne (Catherine Keener), is a poet, also divorced, with a college-bound daughter. Eva’s clients talk while she’s massaging them, and Marianne, facing loneliness with her daughter’s imminent departure, cultivates her as a friend and confidante. At some point Eva realizes Marianne is Albert’s ex – it’s so awkward she can’t bring herself to say anything – and yet, as she hears more from Marianne, Eva begins to needle him about the same issues that made Marianne divorce him. 

This is a Holofcener film, in which ugly secrets spill and the characters have to clean up their mess, in a humiliatingly-public way. She also highlights male vs female communication styles and expectations: one of Eva’s clients is a young man whose apartment is up a steep flight of stairs. He stands at his door watching her haul her massage table up, week after week. When she complains at dinner with friends, the woman agrees he should offer to help her. The husband says, “Have you asked?” and Eva and his wife both say she shouldn’t have to. This married couple, Toni Collette and Ben Falcone, have the same level of annoyance with each other’s foibles as Eva and her ex, and Albert and Marianne. It’s fair to ask why they’re still together while their friends are not – do they just have thicker skins? 

Should we be so ready to bail when we arrive at those “I can’t take it any more” moments? You are surely your own perfect roommate, and everyone else falls short – too neat, too sloppy, too driven, too laid-back – but if the price of not tolerating these differences is to live alone, do we really want that, for ourselves or for society? After Covid isolation, it’s become clear how many social skills we’ve lost – how to compromise, how to listen, how to empathize, how to have patience. How to be good partners, friends, neighbors, fellow-citizens. 

Holofcener shows situations where we have to work through these issues, even when it feels easier to just walk away. It’s hard to connect in deep and honest ways – should we be blowing off relationships because we’ve embarrassed ourselves or those we’re getting to know? Can we be forgiving, cut each other some slack, and set aside judgment? As Rodney King famously pleaded, after receiving a “wood shampoo” from 34 cops, “Can’t we all just get along?”

In Honor of Virginia Boucher

The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak

This 2021 novel is a beautifully told story about horrendous events. Set variously in Cyprus in 1974, England late 2010s, and Cyprus early 2000s, it relates the Cyprus division and coup in 1974, when an island inhabited by Greek and Turkish Cypriots split into warring factions resulting in murder, war, and dislocation. A Greek and a Turk, both islanders, fall in love. 

Kostas is a gentle thoughtful youth who loves the natural world; Dafne is a fiery freedom-loving girl drawn to his quiet kindness. In Cyprus at that time, they cannot be seen together. A tavern and restaurant in Nicosia, the capital, The Happy Fig, is run by two men, a Greek and a Turk, who welcome all. A fig tree lives inside the restaurant, and narrates chapters of this story. This non-human perspective embraces what we are learning about trees: their communication with each other and with other plant life and their shared earth, through mycorrhizal networks. 

The other major character is Kostas and Dafne’s teenage daughter Ada, born and raised in England. She is a child of the modern world, while Kostas has become a biologist specializing in trees, Dafne an archaeologist. Ada has grown up without an extended family – both her parents’ families shunned them for their choice of partner, so when her mother’s sister visits, she begins to learn her past. 

Kostas tells Ada: 

"I think it’s possible to deduce a person’s character based on what they first notice about a tree… some people stand in front of a tree and the first thing they notice is the trunk. These are the ones who prioritize order, safety, rules, continuity. Then there are those who pick out the branches before anything else. They yearn for change, a sense of freedom. And then there are those who are drawn to the roots, though concealed under the ground. They have a deep emotional attachment to their heritage, identity, relations…”  

This book is not a fantasy; it is firmly rooted in history and biology, including the rising effects of climate change: altered migration patterns, stressed plants and animals. The author also observes the impacts of traditional human behaviors on our world: in Europe, songbirds are considered a delicacy, with millions captured and killed yearly to become exotic meals in fancy restaurants. Kostas’s own mother stuffs and roasts songbirds, which the boy cannot bring himself to eat. She doesn’t think about the slaughter – eating them is a tradition. He can see only wanton devastation. 

Shafak is a fine writer and this novel is a beautiful portrayal of civilization on edge, humans out of synch with the rest of the world. The slow-rolling catastrophe of our dangerously-heating planet seems unable to get our attention to address it. But banishing the words “climate change” from US Government websites will not make it go away. Dismantling FEMA and knee-capping the National Weather Service and NOAA will only worsen the effects – while we whistle past the graveyard of the huge percentage of species facing extinction, too slow to adapt to unprecedented circumstances.

Islands, a documentary by Albert & David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin

I read an article by Michael Shulman in the New Yorker (Jan 20, 2025) about Charlotte Zwerin – now living in her former Greenwich Village apartment, he was inspired to learn more about her. She collaborated on numerous documentaries with Albert and David Maysles, though uncredited until very recently. One of those films is Islands, about the floating pink surrounds of half a dozen islands in the Bay of Biscay adjacent to Miami, Florida. 

A significant part of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work/art was their efforts – calling meetings, talking one-on-one with the holdouts – to win over locals, government entities, and myriad bureaucrats who stymie activities they don’t understand. Finally, after the necessary concession to the Miami mayor, work could begin. Choreographing hundreds of volunteers was the heart of their projects. 

Seeing rolled-up sheets of hot-pink fabric maneuvered by many willing hands, then unfurled one section at a time, is a testament to the unifying power of creativity. Everyone who participates is inspired, taken out of their day-to-day by doing something remarkable together. We see the process then the finished pieces from water level, from the air, from underwater. In the unfurling, a woman frees a young turtle trapped in a roll of fabric, and later we see a needlefish emerge onto the surface from a seam, splash around, and find its way back into the water. 

The other beauty of these projects is their brief lifespan. While art museums go to great lengths to preserve works destined to decay, Christo and Jeanne-Claude left a piece up for a few weeks, then dismantled it. Their art was about time as much as material; people remember witnessing, and it conveys something magical about the location later. 

Christo and Jeanne-Claude financed their projects themselves, as much to guarantee complete artistic freedom as to simplify the approval process. They accomplished this by creating hundreds or even thousands of images – postcards, framed drawings, maquettes, books – of each piece, and selling them. People literally bought into the ideas, supporting their creation. 

I’m delighted that Charlotte Zwerin is at last gaining the recognition she lacked in her lifetime – the New Yorker article discusses the documentary technique the Maysles and their contemporaries pioneered, eschewing lectures and talking heads for the thick of the action, shooting hundreds of hours to capture what they can, then shaping it in the editing room. Though Zwerin is not credited as Editor for Islands, the article indicates she was very involved in editing Maysles Brothers documentaries, and in that process bringing coherence to the footage: creating a film.

Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon - Part 1

I’m in a book group these days with Heinz and Ernesto. The latter, a big fan of David Foster Wallace’s doorstop Infinite Jest, has been pressuring his brother to read that. I intervened – having already read it with Ernesto some years ago, I thought it was not worth a re-read even once, let alone Ernesto’s intended third time. So I suggested that instead we dive into a masterwork by the novelist Wallace wished he’d been: Thomas Pynchon. 

I’d lent my copy of Against the Day to Ernesto a couple years ago, and he didn’t get very far. Clearly, a cooperative enterprise was needed to get the guys through the book, which I wanted to re-read anyway. I gave a copy to Heinz and bought one for myself, and we agreed early this year on an amount to read per meeting. We’re reading approx. 110-page tranches, meeting every few weeks as time allows. 

Ernesto is captivated by the presence of dynamite in the lives of numerous characters: Webb Traverse, anarchist dynamiter who works the mines of late 19th century Colorado, private eye Lew Basnight who becomes addicted to cyclomite, a hallucinogenic chemical sweated off by sticks of dynamite. Basnight has been riding around the mountains of southwest Colorado trying not to get blown up by the Kieselguhr Kid, notorious dynamiter of the San Juans. Webb Traverse and his Finnish compadre Veikko blow up a railroad bridge, observing that “The railroad had always been the enemy… sooner or later you had some bad history with the railroad.” 

We have been introduced to Iceland spar, a form of doubly-refracting calcite which causes ordinary light, passing through, to divide into two separate rays, termed “ordinary” and “extraordinary.” “The Etienne-Louis Malus was named for the Napoleonic army engineer and physicist who, in late 1808, looking through a piece of Iceland spar at the sunset reflected from a window of the Luxembourg Palace, discovered polarized light.” And under the lagoons of Venice lie the submerged islands still occupied by artisans who craft mirrors from Iceland spar. Either they go mad and are committed to institutions, or they go mad and continue their work. 

By page 317 of the 1085 page novel, we have seen some threads which will recur: malign influence of the railroads; capitalist Scarsdale Vibe with his long and corrupt reach; centrality of dynamite, introduction of Iceland Spar, hints of the adversarial time-travel groups the Quaternions and the Vectorists (of which much more is to come); places of significance: Telluride, Colorado; Venice, Italy; Chicago; London; the Chums of Chance (dime novel adolescent balloonists who travel through the earth as well as above it, for hire by various terrestrial entities); and dabbling in chemicals – not only dynamite and its components but photograph-developing, and alchemy. We've seen a vile murder and disposal of the corpse in an evil place where such acts are commonplace; we've watched an unholy love story rise out of what should be enmity. And we've watched the existential clash of capitalism with anarchism. 

It's a densely packed book - one dare not skim. Any slippery turn of phrase may take a character to another part of life or perception. My copy is studded with small sticky notes, and I have a notebook as well where I record significant characters and the page numbers where we meet them. So much to learn! One of the best things about this novel is how much of what seems made-up, is true.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

James McBride, who arrived on the literary scene with his unforgettable memoir The Color of Water, has since leaned on his heritage (Black father, hard-headed resourceful Orthodox Jewish mother) to produce some lively novels. His 2023 book, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, weaves the histories of Jewish immigrants, Black people, and Italians, and the WASP contingent that controls little Pottstown, PA, in the 1930s. 

The grocery store, owned by the small Jewish community’s rabbi, is largely run by his disabled daughter Chona. When recent arrival Moshe meets her, he falls in love and they marry. Her father dies, leaving Chona the store. Despite not making money, it serves as a community hub. Pottstown has a Negro/ Jewish area called Chicken Hill. The store serves its residents, and Chona, a kind soul, lets its denizens shop on credit, hires a couple Black women to help run the store, and writes a pointed letter to the local paper about Doc Roberts, the town doctor, readily identifiable in a KKK march photo by his shoes. She doesn’t care whose sensibilities she offends with her call-out. 

Her husband runs a theater which hosts many prominent jazz musicians, drawing audience from all over. Moshe’s right-hand man, Nate, is married to Chona’s employee Addie – the Black couple are fostering (after the death of his mother) a 12-year-old injured by the explosion of a faulty stove. The boy is called Dodo, but he’s no dummy. He quit school because he couldn’t hear, so the state keeps sending enforcers to place him in Pennhurst, a medieval fortress of an institution for the crippled, retarded, and insane. Chona helps hide him – Pennhurst has a deserved and dreadful reputation – and you’ll have to read the rest yourself. 

A stove blew up in his mother’s kitchen when he was nine. Killed his eyes and ears. His eyes came back. His ears did not. But he could read lips. Nate held the lamp next to his face so Dodo could see them. “What you doing?” The boy’s eyes danced away, then he said, “Making a garden.” For what?” “To grow sunflowers.” “CJ and them said you was on a train this morning.” Dodo looked away. It was his way of ignoring conversation. 

McBride visits the minds of these characters, and we spend time with individuals from Pottstown’s different communities, understanding their behavior, language differences, and gossip. He has an ear for it!

Dylan Considered: James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown"

Neither the first nor the best movie about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown is nonetheless a respectable addition to the canon. So, how does it stack up to D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back, or I’m Not There (Todd Haynes’s 2007 sketches, my personal fave)? 

I’m not counting Renaldo and Clara, Dylan’s own 1978 film featuring his Rolling Thunder Revue (they toured in 1976, after which the concert album Hard Rain was released – I attended the Fort Collins, CO show, where it did indeed rain hard the whole time but was truly great anyway). R&C is semi-documentary, semi-fictional, Dylan making up versions of himself as he’s done lifelong. This 4-hour creation is in a class by itself. 

Timothee Chalamet as young good-looking earnest Bobby Dylan arrives in New York with a newspaper clipping about Woody Guthrie, only to learn his idol is at a hospital in New Jersey. He barely blinks at the big city, catching the next cab out. At the hospital he meets not only Guthrie but Pete Seeger, and sings them a song. Seeger, impressed, becomes an early ally. Edward Norton gives a nuanced performance as the banjo-frailing activist – if you think of the folk singer as a hard-line traditionalist, think again – even at Dylan’s notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance, Seeger wants to pull the plug on the young electrified musician, but doesn’t – he lets the moment play out. 

Is it intentional that Elle Fanning as Sylvie (a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, who insisted on her privacy and was not named in the film) and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez look so similar? I thought Baez was not given enough of her own fame to stand on – we see early performances where he doesn’t yet register with her audience, but soon he’s the one packing the shows. The script promotes a chemistry I didn’t sense, so I felt she put up with his hot/cold antics too long – in the absence of magnetism, I didn’t quite believe her. But Fanning does hit some of those gorgeous high notes Baez is famous for. 

Chalamet plays Dylan as a creature of whims, mercurial, contrarian, sliding out from under the crush of early fame and the demands of Albert Grossman (well played by Dan Fogler), his manager at Columbia Records. At first determined to guide this newbie and build a following by covering others' songs, two years later at Newport, Grossman can see his client is a true original and a star of his own making, and that a manager’s best move is to keep the tape rolling as the young dynamo takes off. Chalamet’s singing is no worse than Dylan’s, though he does sand some of the edges off that nasal delivery. 

Boyd Holbrook is a standout as Johnny Cash; before he married June Carter and (kind of) settled down, he was a wild man. He drank hard, took a lot of amphetamines (now we’d call that meth) and trashed hotel rooms, wrecked cars, chased women, got himself arrested. His friendship with Dylan in this movie was a touchstone – someone Dylan admired, who gave him all the approval he needed. “Track mud all over that carpet,” he said, and Dylan did. Though Holbrook – like everyone else – lacks Cash’s gravelly bass, he does his best, bringing that don’t-give-a-damn energy to the role. 

For a film approaching Dylan’s life as a series of Acts, I’m Not There has some fine sections: a Black teenager with a guitar, hitching freights and singing folk songs. Mid-sixties Dylan in a black-and-white sequence in which Cate Blanchett plays the insouciant subject of press curiosity who treats interviews as games – what’s the most baffling or outrageous thing she can say? What’s the most shocking thing she can do in this situation or that one? With those black sunglasses, black spiky hair, cigarettes, and amusement at the reporters who can’t tell when she’s bluffing, she’s a perfect Dylan. And in the early 70s era of the Basement Tapes with The Band, he goes all-in with costumes. He’s always been a shape-shifter taking on costumed personae – hippies wearing beads, colorful leather pants and cowboy hats, granny dresses and thin-soled leather boots – he could go hog-wild switching up his identity – Billy the Kid, a troubadour, a bandido, a joker – with The Band ready to play whatever roles he needed.

A Complete Unknown is a fine movie - lively, fun, capturing the spark of a prolific poet as he emerges into the light of public attention: startling, inspiring, resisting all attempts to pin him down - as he does today. Maybe early on he toyed with being a leader, but ever since he's been rebuffing admirers' efforts to elevate him, calculating ways to create offense, the whole time slipping off the microscope slide we're trying to squeeze him onto.