Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Spending time in the library
Thursday, September 28, 2017
A fight for equality or more hype?
Emma Stone and Steve Carell star in Battle of the Sexes, a movie about the much-heralded match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
Battle of the Sexes -- the story of the much-hyped 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs -- isn't exactly a good movie, but it contains interesting work around the fringes.
Bill Pullman, to take one example, steeps his performance in a fully vested sense of privilege as Jack Kramer, a former tennis champ and executive director of the Association of Tennis Professionals. A staunch opponent of the idea that women and men tennis players should earn equal money, Pullman's Kramer stood at the head of the tennis establishment.
Pullman effortlessly imbues every ounce of his performance with an ingrained belief: Women never could equal men on the tennis court. I don't know what the real Kramer was like, but Pullman has been asked to embody the sexist beliefs of a sport that was male-dominated in the 1970s, and he uses the opportunity to deliver a character who has no idea that he's confusing prejudice with fact.
Another fine -- but also minor performance -- in Battle of the Sexes belongs to Elizabeth Shue, who plays Riggs's wife, Priscilla. The scene in which Priscilla dissolves their marriage becomes an exquisite rendering of decisiveness from a woman who understands that Riggs, a compulsive gambler, never will provide the stability she needs. Priscilla tells Riggs the marriage is over with a sense of dignity, authority, and love that's stunning in its compassion.
In line with Shue's performance, the movie treats endangered marriages with a kindness that's quite unusual. Prior to the big match, King's marriage is being tested. She begins a lesbian relationship with her hairdresser. King's husband (Austin Stowell) tries to weather the storm, holding his emotions in check.
It also should be noted that Sarah Silverman has a nice turn as Gladys Heldman, the savvy woman who helped organize and find funding for the women's tour that King and others started.
I know. I haven't said a word about the big match that the movie presents as a pivotal moment in the evolution of the women's movement. I also haven't mentioned that Emma Stone does a credible job as King, although I found myself constantly evaluating her against whatever memories I have of the real person.
With a set of crooked false teeth, Carrel gives an interesting spin to Riggs's life, making him a man whose chauvinism becomes shtick. At the time of the match, Riggs was 55; King was 29. Solely on the basis of his gender, Riggs tried to sell the idea that an aging male tennis star could beat a vibrant young woman with an exceptionally strong game. Riggs, of course, couldn't conquer the difference caused by age, even with a gargantuan supply of vitamin supplements.
You don't get the sense that Riggs totally believed in his chauvinistic rants. He was trying to sell tickets and provide himself with a big payday. For him, the match was an opportunity to put himself into the center ring of a circus -- until, of course, the moment when he realized that he couldn't beat King.
For King the stakes are higher: She wants to prove that women should be treated equally by the tennis authorities. Earlier in the movie, she leads a revolt in which women players withdraw from high-profile tournaments and create their own tour. The issue: equal pay.
Much of the movie (too much, I'd say) is taken up by the budding relationship between King and her hairdresser (Andrea Riseborough). At the time, any hint of gayness would have destroyed King's career, so she was forced to walk a thin line between her emotional needs and her public image.
In part, the movie is hampered by its structure. Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (Little Miss Sunshine) alternate between Riggs and King, a stylistic choice that's equivalent to putting a net between two parts of the narrative and, then, shifting from one side to the other. As a result, Battle of the Sexes can feel as though it's moving sideways instead of gaining forward momentum.
Faris and Dayton do a decent job with the big event, which took place in Houston's Astrodome. The surrounding hoopla almost overwhelmed the actual match, which King won easily.
During the match, the directors show us shots of women rooting for King and middle-aged men looking disconsolate as they realize that their avatar was headed for defeat.
Granted the '70s were a tumultuous time for male/female relations. I know. I was there. But the guys I knew at the time thought the King/Riggs spectacle had less to do with gender barriers than with hype: I didn't take the match seriously enough even to watch the ABC telecast of it.
Working from a script by Simon Beaufoy, the directors must have realized that they had loaded their plates, picking a subject that touches on gay emergence, marital woes, shifting cultural norms, the inflated atmosphere that can surround sports and the desire of some to cash in on all of the above. Faris and Dayton never quite find a tone to encompass the chaos that not only rocked the culture but impacted individual lives.
Put another way, this is one tennis movie that could have used more topspin.
Wild, crazy and ... well ... dangerous
Tom Cruise plays a drug smuggler in the middle of an impossibly complicated situation.
If you really want to know the story of Barry Seal, a pilot who supposedly worked for the CIA and smuggled drugs for the Medellin Cartel, you'll have to do some on-line research or read books such as Daniel Hopsicker's Barry & The Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History. Or you could try Del Hahn's Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal or you could devote your time to something other than taking a deep dive into a strange footnote to US history.
As someone who hasn't delved deeply into Seal's life (I haven't read either of the above two books), I assumed that director Doug Liman took a Hollywood-sized share of liberties with Seal's story to bring American Made to the screen. He also hired Tom Cruise to play Seal, a bored TWA pilot who -- according to the film -- went did surveillance work for the CIA in Latin America, stumbled into the drug trade with the Medellin Cartel, found himself at odds with the DEA, and cut a variety of deals as he attempted to keep himself out of jail.
Liman, who directed Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow, uses a framing device to tell Seals' tale. The smuggler makes a series of videotapes that lead us into extensive flashbacks in which Seal's complicated life of crime unfolds.
Cruise portrays Seal in typical Cruise fashion. Seal is all amped-up energy as a pilot who responds to events with pinball speed and very little reflection. Cruise's Seal has enough mischievous charm to make the movie fly, that and screenwriter Gary Spinelli's appreciation for the rank absurdity that put an unknown man into the middle of a historical maelstrom.
Seal may be a pilot, but he's no Top Gun; he's a blur of serial impulses, a down-scale version of other Cruise characters, but a welcome reminder that even when he plays a less-than-admirable guy, Cruise's big-screen magnetism holds sway.
The script isn't big on motivation: Bored with his TWA gig and dabbling in the occasional smuggling of cigars, Seal becomes a prime target for CIA agent Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson). Schafer assures Seal that legality doesn't really matter so long as he's working for the "good guys."
Seal lies to his wife Lucy (Sarah Wright Olsen) and tells her that he's leaving TWA to open his own business. As the movie progresses, Lucy senses the truth, but she, too, is dazzled by the riches that Seal's drug smuggling brings, especially when the CIA relocates his operation from Seal's native Baton Rouge to the small town of Mena, Arkansas.
Liman approaches a fractured narrative with speed that tends to give a near antic quality to the proceedings which also include an appearance by Caleb Landry Jones as Seal's dirt-dumb brother-in-law.
If you approach American Made as a Cruise-driven entertainment, you'll find an involving helping of all-American cynicism in which the world spins without the benefit of a moral compass.
To bolster the film's authenticity, Liman makes occasional use of news footage, but in American Made, tone convey's more of the movie's truth than any particular incident, and -- like most movies that deal with the rise and fall of a criminal, American Made shows the dizzying fun of Seal's rise, a time when he had so much money, he couldn't launder it fast enough.
The difficulty with this kind of buzzed filmmaking is that it immerses us in a world that spins without the benefit of any moral compass, obliterating any real sense of personal responsibility. Part conniver and part pawn, Seal resembles an adrenaline junkie looking for the next high.
Whether you see this as a statement about American life during the 1980s or as a perverted form of entrepreneurial striving may not be the point: Cruise and Liman ask us to share Seal's kicks and risk, right up until the inevitable crash puts a stark exclamation point on what has been an enjoyably crazed ride.
An aging queen finds renewal
Victoria & Abdul focuses on Queen Victoria and the Indian Muslim who perked up her final years.
If nothing else can be said about Victoria & Abdul, a nicely appointed period piece starring Judi Dench as England's fabled Queen, it should be noted that director Stephen Frears has come up with one of fall's best special effects. No, it's not an explosion and it has nothing to do with the far reaches of space; Frears's great contribution to the world of effects arrives in the form of a sculpted, multi-colored gelatin dish that is served as dessert to the Queen, who -- in her dotage -- no longer has the most impeccable table manners.
The dessert serves as a reminder of courtly opulence, a bit of ornamentation that tells us far too much time is being spent on matters of far too little importance.
Enjoyable in the way of slightly wry British period pieces, Victoria & Abdul is so dominated by Dench that it could have been named solely for the Queen who ruled from 1837 to 1901. Victoria died at the age of 82 to be succeeded by her son Edward VII whose reign lasted a mere nine years.
When we meet the Queen, she's in that phase of life in which she's being indulged (sometimes grudgingly) by the royal household that attends to her. She falls asleep during formal dinners and needs servants to help her to sit upright in bed, as if they were pushing a great rock up a steep hill.
As imagined by Frears and screenwriter Lee Hall, the Queen's problems are twofold. She's bored and lonely, never having totally recovered from the death of her husband Albert, some 31 years prior to the start of the movie.
The emotional vacancies in Victoria's life are addressed when chance brings an Indian Muslim to London to present the Queen with a ceremonial coin. Tall and handsome, Abdul (Ali Fazal) arouses the Queen's interest. She gives him and another Indian jobs as footmen and later makes Abdul her munshi; i.e., her teacher in matters pertaining to the mysterious ways of the East. Victoria learns Urdu and listens as Abdul slips in the occasional slice of wisdom gleaned from the poet Rumi.
In the early going, Frears sets a mostly comic pace, suggesting that he may be trying to mock the pretentious formalities of court life. The burden of representing all this pretension falls on actors surrounding the Queen: Tim Pigott-Smith as her flustered secretary, Michael Gambon as the dour prime minister, and Eddie Izzard as Bertie, the Queen's ambitious but patently hollow son and heir.
Dench, who played Queen Victoria in 1997's Mrs. Brown, provides the best reason to see the movie. She makes the Queen's loneliness convincing and even conveys hints of girlish infatuation as she gets to know Abdul. She's charmed by him. She badly needs to be charmed by someone because everyone around her seems to have curdled into near-parodic members of the aristocracy.
But Victoria & Abdul has more in mind than comedy. It also assays the cultural frictions created by the presence of a Muslim in this upper-class gaggle of bigots and stuffed shirts, a crowd in which eyebrows seem to be raised in perpetual disapproval.
Victoria & Abdul is based on a true story, but I don't know whether it's accurate to say that in her final years, Victoria tried to pierce the curtain of propriety that surrounded her, taking aim at the royals who wanted Abdul sent back to Agra, India, and the obscurity from which he emerged.
Unfortunately, Abdul becomes a kind of prop, a character who allows Victoria to show her decency, as well as to make one last stab at asserting her authority. When Abdul's wife and mother-in-law arrive, their faces are hidden behind burqas. In a way, Abdul himself remains hidden. Is he a simple naif whose motives are pure? Is he a bit of a charlatan trying to advance himself? Frears would have done well to give us more than glimpse into Abdul's soul.
Speaking of Frears, it's worth noting that some of his sharper edges seem to have soften from the days of the 1980s when he gave us movies such as My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Dangerous Liaisons. There are traces of bitterness and restrained sarcasm in Victoria & Abdul, but nothing the will unsettle most viewers.
Though their main characters find themselves in quite different circumstances, Victoria & Abdul seems aligned with Frears's Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) in which Meryl Streep plays a deluded New York heiress. Both movies have crowd-pleasing elements and moments of rue and both deal with aging women who face debilitating losses of luster as the ticks of mortality's clock grow ever louder.
A key figure in the struggle for rights
Looking for some peace and quiet
In Pursuit of Silence reminds us that silence really is golden.
If ever there were a time for a documentary such as The Pursuit of Silence, it's now. Director, editor and co-cinematographer Patrick Shen has made a movie that reminds us of the necessity to find some peace and quiet -- and also that the two are intimately connected. We all know a lot about the opposite condition in a time when Kim Jung-un screams at Trump and Trump yells back at Kim, when TV news often consists of antagonists shouting at one another, when sporting events are filled with wall-to-wall noise having little to do with the games, when volume in movie theaters can be cranked to ear-splitting levels, and when the ubiquitous rings of cell phones are likely to jar the senses at any moment. When you watch The Pursuit of Silence, which informs us of the high decibel counts with which most of us live, you may find yourself longing to find a silent space. Even our national parks and forests aren't entirely immune to noise from passing cars or from planes passing overhead. Shen keys on composer John Cage as an early and important artistic proponent of silence, citing Cage's 4'33, a totally silent piece that he debuted in 1952. If you can't get away from the din of the city, you'll find a bit of respite in some of Shen's beautiful imagery, glimpses of Alaska's Denali National Park, for example. A tea ceremony in Kyoto made me wonder whether every world leader shouldn't be required to engage in such a ritual before giving a speech. Shen interviews experts on the impact of noise on human well-being and leaves us with a quote we'd all do well to inscribe on our doorposts: "Silence returns us to what is real." To use a popular phrase in a new context, "Maybe it's time we all got real." The above image, by the way, is one of the calm, meditative sights that Shen uses to put us back in touch with the silence many of us spend excessive amounts of time trying to avoid.
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Learning to survive catastrophe
Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Jeff Bauman, a man who lost his legs during the Boston Marathon bombing.
For most of its 116-minute running time, director David Gordon Green's Stronger stakes out a claim to importance. In telling the story of Jeff Bauman (Jake Gyllenhaal), the movie becomes one of the rare entertainments that isn't about graphic displays of violence but about realistic depictions of the effects of violence on those who experience it.
For those who don't recall, Bauman was waiting at the finish line for his girlfriend (Tatiana Maslany) to complete the 2013 Boston Marathon. He lost both his legs when two bombs exploded. Bauman also was able to identify one of the bombers, having stood about a foot away from the perpetrator.
In the climate of "Boston Strong" that followed the bombings, Bauman became a hero. He was honored at a Boston Bruins hockey game and later at a Red Sox game. He was bombarded with public adulation. As a survivor of a cruel tragedy, he became a symbol of triumph over terrorist mayhem.
Green shows us what Bauman's life was like in the post-bombing days. In a wheelchair and reliant on his girlfriend and his mother (a strong Miranda Richardson), this goofy but good-hearted son of Boston faced dual problems: adjusting to a disabled life and also to the attention he never sought.
Gyllenhaal's performance anchors the movie; he mixes moments of humor with moments of self-pity. Gyllenhaal portrays a man who others see as a hero, but who would rather get drunk with pals than pat himself on the back. Who can blame him? For Bauman, using the bathroom has become a physical ordeal.
To play the role, Gyllenhaal lost weight, turning Bauman into a gaunt figure with a crooked, diffident smile. A Costco employee who worked roasting chickens before the bombing, Bauman never seemed to have any great ambitions. Had the Marathon explosion never happened, he might have been content to watch Red Sox games in bars while exchanging stinging insults with friends. He might have been a working-class Peter Pan, a young man who sees no great benefit in entering the adult world.
Bauman doesn't always appreciate the help he gets from Maslany's Erin, the girlfriend who quits her job to help him through his arduous therapy, which includes learning how to use artificial legs.
Green tries for authenticity in his depiction of working-class Bostonians, a little grittier than what we saw in Peter Berg's Patriots Day, another movie about the Boston Marathon bombings.
Bauman's family and friends are tough, profane and not altogether agreeable people who are only too happy to join him at a bar or try to capitalize (emotionally) on what they view as his ascendance. As Patty, Bauman's Mom, Richardson creates a character who's jealous of Erin's potential to replace her as the central figure in Bauman's life.
Richardson's face reflects a mixture of bitterness, fear and occasional hope; she never tries to make us like a character who has difficulty letting go of her son. Bauman lived with his mother at the time of the bombing and remained at her home afterward.
Maslany proves equally determined as Erin, a young woman who goes through hell along with Bauman and is pushed to her breaking point. Like everyone in Stronger, she's not afraid to lose her temper.
Green doesn't dwell on the explosion that took Bauman's legs, although he brings it up in quickly inserted flashbacks that, by the end, of the movie, blossom into a more vivid (and perhaps unnecessary) display of the blast that changed Bauman's life.
Scenes in which Bauman meets Carlos (Carlos Sanz), the bystander who helped him at the site of the bombing, are well played by both Sanz and Gyllenhaal. Carlos lost a son in Iraq. Evidently, many who had relatives who were killed or maimed in America's recent wars looked to Bauman's story to reassure them that life could go on.
Toward the end, Green yields to a temptation that he manages to elude for most of the movie. He allows the movie to join the inspirational chorus in which Bauman, as a person, and Bauman, as a symbol, begin to merge. These final scenes have an unavoidable taint of hagiography that mingles with a genuine thematic attempt to give Bauman moments of reconciliation that allow him once again to be comfortable in his own skin.
Obviously, there will be those who find the film's conclusion more stirring than I did, but Gyllenhaal's strong performance and equally vital contributions from a fine supporting cast keep Stronger on track, making it a powerful look at what happens when ordinary people are damaged by events over which they have no control.
I can't think of a more wrenching scene than the one in which doctors remove the bandages from Bauman's remaining legs. Not only is the removal screamingly painful, but it also serves as a stamp of finality on Bauman's condition.
Green shoots the scene creatively, showing us Bauman's tormented face and the face of his girlfriend in profile; what remains of Brad's legs appears in soft focus between them. Do we want to see? Does he?
Together, Green and Gyllenhaal have made a movie that asks us not to look away.
He thinks everyone else is better off
Director Mike White casts Ben Stiller as a father whose confidence is lagging in Brad's Status. 
Ben Stiller knows how to squirm in his own skin. Cheers for writer/director Mike White, who has found the perfect vehicle for Stiller to express a nearly intractable case of mid-life jitters. In Brad's Status, Stiller portrays a father who accompanies his son on a tour of the New England colleges to which the young man has applied. The trip forces Stiller's Brad to evaluate his own life. Mostly, he doesn't like what he sees.
Brad believes his old college chums have surpassed him in the success department, and Brad wonders whether he hasn't wasted his life running a non-profit when he could have been focused on magnifying his bank account.
Not that Brad is suffering. And that, ultimately, may be the movie's point. Brad and his wife (Jenna Fischer) live a comfortable life in California with a son (Austin Abrams) who's going to have no difficulty attending a good college and finding a place for himself in the world.
But Brad is undone by his ceaseless competitiveness. He insists on evaluating his life in terms of others -- even to the point where he might be envious of his son should the young man be admitted to Harvard. Brad graduated from Tufts, a fine school but not Harvard.
White, who wrote the screenplays for Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl and Beatriz at Dinner and who directed Year of the Dog, this time adopts an accessible approach, keeping his focus on the way Brad's rampant feelings of inferiority look when contrasted with what seem to be his more or less problem-free life.
To make the point, White's screenplay introduces us to the men with whom Brad compares himself.
White plays a successful movie director who happens to be gay but who didn't invite Brad to his wedding. Luke Wilson portrays a hedge fund manager who has acquired all the accouterments of great wealth, including a private jet. Jermaine Clement appears as Billy, a tech whiz who made a fortune and retired to Maui to live with two young women who know how to fill out bikinis.
Michael Sheen's Craig rounds out the quartet of jealousy-inducing stories that torment Brad; Sheen's Craig is a pundit who often appears on TV. He teaches a course at Harvard and can't make it through a restaurant dinner without someone approaching him to offer praise.
During Brad's visit to Boston, he and Troy meet one of Troy's friends. Shazi Raja portrays a young woman who seems to grasp the magnitude of privilege that supports Brad's life, but she's not entirely likable, either. She's a little too glib, a little too quick with her accusations, and a little too disrespectful of Brad's experience.
That, too, gives Brad's Status a welcome sense of realism.
White brings the movie to a somewhat predictable conclusion and he pretty much follows a blueprint in scenes that show us that the objects of Brad's envy aren't problem free. Everything looks better when viewed from the outside, and Troy seems far better adjusted than a father who picks at his life as if it were a scab that's beginning to itch.
OK, so it's not an insight that will rock your world, but White delivers it in a movie that manages to be easy going and troubled at the same time -- more insightful and a bit more rueful than you'd expect from what initially sounds like such an unpromising premise.
A kinder, gentler boarding school
When I was in college, issues of in loco parentis were routinely discussed in campus newspapers. I'm not sure discussions about the role of college administrations vis-a-vis the lives of their students are conducted in quite the same way anymore, but the initial title of School Days suggests a role for schools that goes well beyond classroom instruction.
That approach certainly applies to the Headfort School, Ireland's only primary-age boarding school and School Life's fascinating subject. I don't know if you can extrapolate larger educational meanings from School Life, but I do know that I would have loved to attend such a school, this one located on the remnants of a large estate.
School Life focuses on a husband and wife who have taught at Headfort for almost 50 years. Both are dedicated teachers who bring their own personalities to everything they do. The students at Headfort range in age from three to 13, but the film concentrates mostly on the older students.
Amanda Leydon teaches literature; her husband John Leydon teaches Latin. She supervises school dramatic productions; he helps students with their musical development, most of it centered on rock. John's demeanor and wry delivery may put you in mind of actor Bill Nighy, which -- for me at least -- created an instant fondness for the man. The Leydons manage to stay in touch with their students, even as they occasionally sneak off for a cigarette, blowing smoke out of a school window.
Because directors Neasa Ni Chianain and David Rane focus mostly on the Leydons, their documentary tends to highlight the arts. The film avoids spoon feeding us information, preferring instead to stay close to students and teachers in ways that allow us to draw our own conclusions about Headfort.
I would have loved to see how subjects such as mathematics, which John Leydon also teaches, and science are taught, but School Days certainly gives us a feeling for an institution that has been built on the idea that a kinder, gentler experience can achieve as much as those built around unflagging discipline.
Dermot Dix, the school's headmaster, discusses the Headfort mission on the school's Web site: "The children's happiness is central and precious."
At Headfort, that ideal doesn't seem to interfere with helping Headfort's students gain admission to some of the best Irish and British secondary schools.
The directors' approach precludes giving certain information, so I did a bit of research myself. By my rough calculations, the cost for Irish students who board at Headfort and who are over 10 years old is roughly $7,710 per term and about $2,400 more for students who do not reside in Ireland. The school offers scholarships for children under 10 and "a small number of bursaries" for older students who may not otherwise be able to afford private education.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the annual cost per pupil of students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. was about $11,222 in 2013-14. According to the Private School Review, the national average private school tuition is about $9,975 per year. Private elementary school tuition is $8,918 per year and private high schools average about $13,524 per year in the US.
But money isn't the only measure of value. Lest potential parents worry that their students will be unable to compete, Headfort's web site assures readers that children are taught the national curriculum and work to standardized tests, but the school also emphasizes the hope that its students will become "critical, rather than dutiful, thinkers. At Headfort, we know that education is a means of liberation, rather than confinement."
Watching School Life convinced me that, at Headfort, these words transcend the usual brochure boilerplate. If the Leydons are any indication, everyone at Headfort practices exactly what the school preaches.
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