Alcoholism and confusion in the cornhusker state

NEBRASKAI am a sucker for father-son movies, so much so that I’ve wept openly at movies of such disparate quality as the lovely The Sum of Us (Russell Crowe’s gay son living with his hilariously supportive father Jack Thompson), the fine Frequency (Jim Caviezel talking with dead father Dennis Quaid through a mystical shortwave radio), and truly stupid Jack Frost (Michael Keaton comes back from the dead as a mystical snowman to help his son). Also, I’m maudlin, and I cry a lot. But I wasn’t triggered much by Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, which I was primed to love. (I’m sure it’s not because I’ve become un-maudlin, since I cried like a baby during the Finn-is-dead episode of Glee a few weeks ago.) Directed by the great Alexander Payne, who gave us Election, Sideways, About Schmidt, and The Descendants, Nebraska is a wry, spare, black-and-white story about an aged, alcoholic father and the son who joins him on a road trip to pick up a million-dollar sweepstakes check that probably doesn’t exist. Because of its pedigree, I expected a great deal more than I received.

The film opens with frail, blank-staring Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) stumble-walking down the side of a road, prompting a police office to pull over and ask him where he’s going. Next, his youngest son David (Will Forte) arrives at the police station to pick up his father, who tells him that he’s trying to walk to Lincoln, Nebraska. That is the location of the company that sent Woody Publishers Clearinghouse-like junk mail that Woody insists says he has won a million dollars. When David asks his father why he didn’t just ask the company to mail him the money, Woody says that he wasn’t going to trust the postal service with a million dollars.

David’s round, crass mother Kate (June Squibb) is frustrated and enraged by not only Woody’s absurd belief that he has actually won the money but also by her husband’s increasingly erratic behavior. David’s newscaster brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk) agrees with his mother, but sweet David decides to humor his father, call in sick at the electronics store where he sells stereos, and drive him from Billings, Montana, to Nebraska. Unfortunately, Woody is a stubborn alcoholic, and after a drunken fall, the trip gets delayed, and the father and son end up spending the weekend in Hawthorne, Nebraska, where Woody and Kate grew up. Complications ensue when Woody tells old friends that he has won a million dollars.

There is a great deal of Oscar buzz about Dern’s performance as Woody, and I’m not sure why, other than Payne’s reputation and Dern’s long career, why this is so. Most of Dern’s acting in Nebraska is in his awkward, old man’s shuffle and his expression-less gazes into space. We’re told that the Grant men don’t say much – at least the old ones, since David and Ross aren’t so taciturn – and that means Woody has little to say other than “What?” He expresses very little emotion other than irritation, even when he’s humiliated or when a truly moving story about his childhood is retold.

Forte has much more to do, and his painful childhood but empathic adulthood make him the most sympathetic character; Forte is clearly more than a hammy Saturday Night Live bit player. Besides the stunning black and white cinematography, the best thing about the movie is Squibb, who has by far the best lines and most emotionally interesting scenes. Granted, it’s always funny when old ladies have potty mouths, but as she transforms from harpy to ardent defender of her family, her performance reveals itself to be deeply layered. If only the rest of the movie was as good.

Nebraska
Directed by Alexander Payne
Written by Bob Nelson
Starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, and June Squibb
Rated R

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Don’t ever join a circus

12-years-a-slave-fox-searchliI think it is possible to write a review of 12 Years a Slave and focus solely on its merits as a film, whether it will win Oscars, and how it could be already a classic. I think that would easily elide what the film, and what films like it, do to and do for viewers, particularly Americans. Repeatedly, slavery has been called America’s original sin; the country was founded on, grew powerful because of, fought a war over, and still reels from slavery and its structural, cultural, and emotional legacies. Except for those who absurdly deny racism’s continual presence and power in the country (and the world), none of this is debatable. However, it can be forgettable, particularly for those who do not knowingly experience or notice the role that slavery continues to play in the everyday lives of Americans. This is why films that detail the horrors of the past are so necessary. They remind us what we should not forget.

12 Years a Slave is based on the 1855 autobiography of Solomon Northup, played in the film by the great British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor. Solomon was born free and educated in upstate New York, becoming a carpenter and violinist. While his wife and children are away, he agrees to play the violin for a traveling circus for a few weeks; its owners kidnap him and sell him into slavery. As a man used to being treated with respect by whites, he is astonished by his treatment by the slavers: taunted, beaten, and beaten again.

Solomon is renamed Plat and sold to a man named Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who, compared to most slave owners, is kind, empathic, and when he realizes Solomon’s skills, respectful. But Ford’s overseer Tibeats (Paul Dano) is threatened and attacks Solomon, who fights back, which is something slaves did not do. In order to save Solomon from Tibeats’s wrath, Ford sells Solomon to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a psychotic drunk with an angry wife (Sarah Paulsen) and an obsession with a young slave girl named Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). It is on Epps’s plantation that Solomon experiences and is nearly defeated by the worst horrors of slavery.

Throughout these chapters of cruelty and evil, Solomon repeatedly speaks of never despairing and never losing hope. He says these words but his face belies many misgivings; he does not believe himself. He is in agony, and he is outraged and he is terrified. Ejiofor’s performance, shifting between perseverance and despondency, fear and courage, is impeccable and impressive. Nyong’o’s Patsey suffers more profoundly than anyone in the film, and watching it happen is agonizing and disturbing. Fassbender represents in one man the confusing evil of the slave culture and yet makes him oddly, uncomfortably sympathetic.

Ultimately, it is director Steve McQueen, a British video artist turned feature film director, who makes Solomon’s story, as adapted by John Ridley, into both art and historical warning. He never flinches from depicting pain and shame, from the act of vicious beatings to its physical toll, and he elicits performances from his actors that resonate these experiences far beyond what would seem to be possible with acting. His visuals – from tableaus of slaves blankly listening to their captors to Louisiana landscapes at dawn and dusk – are unnervingly beautiful counters to the horrors of the human drama.

I read a comment posted on the Internet that described, derisively, 12 Years a Slave as The Passion of the Christ about slavery. Whatever Mel Gibson’s faults, his goal in the latter film was to remind viewers of the suffering of Jesus. This is what McQueen, Ejiofor, and Nyong’o do. They remind us of the suffering of Northup and Patsey, and so many others. And they remind us of what and who caused it.

12 Years a Slave
Directed by Steve McQueen
Written by John Ridley
Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, and Michael Fassbender
Rated R

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Selling AIDS drugs in Dallas

dallas-buyers-club“Screw the FDA. I’m going to be DOA.”

Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey), a newly diagnosed and very sick man with AIDS, says this to his doctor Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner) in the summer of 1985. She had just told him that he can’t get the then FDA unapproved AZT, or any of the promising drugs then only available in Europe. First, Ron bribes a hospital orderly to steal the AZT being used in the study Ron can’t get into. Then, after he figures out the AZT does more harm than good, he starts buying other unapproved medications on the black market. He gets them into the hands and bodies of other people with AIDS through the Dallas Buyers Club, a legally problematic scheme that he borrowed from New York and San Francisco, where other people with AIDS were struggling to find some treatment that actually worked. Ron Woodruff was diagnosed with AIDS in 1985, and in the movie, he is given a month to live. He died in 1992.

Dallas Buyers Club is the story of a man who fought the reprehensible policies of the FDA and the medical establishment during the worst of the AIDS crisis. It is also the story of how a man was transformed from a womanizing, homophobic redneck drunk into a compassionate, responsible hero. The story is a many ways a typical triumph over adversity story, with an obvious structure and ending, and it is also typical in most of the Hollywood stories of the early AIDS epidemic, in which straight people are the heroes and gay people the victims.

That said, Dallas Buyers Club is no Philadelphia, because Ron Woodruff is not a sanitized, perfectly acceptable protagonist like Tom Hanks’s Andrew Beckett. (I’d argue that Beckett is not that film’s hero, who was Becket’s lawyer, played by Denzel Washington.) While he ends up lovable, for much of the film, he’s, well, a jerk. And the film’s second lead, the transgender woman Rayon (Jared Leto), a composite invented by the screenwriters, is one of the most complex, interesting, and affecting characters in any of films about AIDS.

For both Woodruff and Rayon, the writers have produced funny, crass, and pointed lines and many memorable scenes, despite the prison of easy acceptability that is the screenplay’s structure. McConaughey, giving the performance of his career, lost 38 pounds for the role and delivers strings of Texasisms, angry monologues, and mountain of expletives with the gusto and emotional honesty that his last few years as a character actor have only hinted at him being capable of. For example, after Dr. Saks tells him to go to a support group, Woodruff says, “I’m dying, and you’re telling me to get a hug from a bunch of faggots.”

As great as McConaughey is, he is playing a version of McConaughey. Leto’s Rayon is a more complete and more astonishing transformation. Leto not only is unrecognizable, which has a lot to do with his make-up artists, but the depth of his characterization is to be marveled at. Warm, witty Rayon is not a saint either, and her behavior bounces back and forth between selfish and magnanimous, between sympathetic and pitiable. I don’t like how Rayon is used by the writers to make such blunt points and to be the pivot for so much of Woodruff’s transformation. But Leto took their plot device and turned it into a thing a beauty.

Much of why the movie works is the beautiful but raw direction of the French-Canadian Jean-Marc Vallée. His scenes are tightly controlled and packed with emotion, and he creates a great deal of art in his visuals, from bull riding shot through the slots of a wooden gate to a swarm of butterflies lit by flickering fluorescent lights.

Dallas Buyers Club
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée
Written by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, and Jennifer Garner
At Landmark Hillcrest and La Jolla ArcLight
Rated R

 

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Her hair is blue, get it?

blue-is-the-warmest-colorThere’s nothing remotely interesting about Blue is the Warmest Color except everything. The three-hour lesbian love story in French that won the Palm D’Or at Cannes this year features all of the oldest tropes of both love stories and queer love stories. We have the same boy meets girl, loses girl, tries to get girl back again plot except in Blue, it’s just with two girls. And like almost every queer love story, coming out is a central theme; girl realizes she’s a lesbian when she falls in love at first sight, she gets called slurs, and she hides her love and her lesbianism. If you’ve seen any queer themed love stories, you’ve seen Blue is the Warmest Color. But you haven’t. Because only once in a decade of blue moons is there a film that does all of these things so effectively, creating such a moving and beautiful experience. Continue…

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Kill them, your darlings

Kill-Your-Darlings-2A large number of writers have been credited with the phrase “kill all your darlings.” I had always thought it was Dorothy Parker, and the Internet claims it is William Faulkner or Stephen King. A recent Slate article places its origin as a writing guide from 1913. Whoever said it first, it’s been a key piece of advice for writers for decades. Get rid of your most precious, pretentious, silly, extravagant passages, sentences, and scenes. Kill them, your darlings. In Kill Your Darlings, John Krokidas and Austin Bunn’s wonderful film about the beginnings of the Beats, it is spoken by an English professor with the usual purpose, but it also means a great deal more. It is also about getting rid of your personal pretensions, petty moralities, tradition, constraints, and fears. And actual murder. One of the first scenes in the film is Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) holding the dying body of David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), who Carr had called his guardian angel and who had been stalking him for years and who Carr stabbed before sinking him into the Hudson River. Continue…

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