Quartet (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                              1 hr & 38 min, color, 2012

While watching a motion picture, either in a theater or at home, have you ever wished you could climb into it and be with everyone and everything you see and hear on the screen?  Not just watch it and be excited and entertained, but be there in it!  Have you ever wanted to touch the people portrayed, to join them there in that projected setting, to rub shoulders with them, to converse with them, perhaps even to embrace them?  Have you ever wanted to take them home with you and get to know them even further and perhaps share your own world with them?  Have you ever wanted to follow them from where you last see them at the film’s conclusion? 

Never do I recall being more affected that way than I have been by “Quartet,” a current work under the producing and directing leadership of Dustin Hoffman and the aegis of BBC Films, based upon a play by Ronald Harwood, with Harwood himself doing the screenplay.  The setting is Beecham House in a rural region of England, a retirement home for musicians, and just about every character in its sizeable cast is a musician – singer, instrumentalist, conductor, director, etc.  And just about every character in it is someone whose continuing company and acquaintance I wish I could enjoy.  If I could, I would like to visit Beecham House (except that it is fictitious).  I feel as if I would get great pleasure as an up-close observer of all the transactions that take place between these endearing people. 

Of course my affections for them and the lively and caring environment in which they carry on their lives to some extent derives from my personal passion for classical music and those who not only perform it but devote their lives to it.  For me they are messengers of heaven itself, whatever their earthly failings or their private pains and heartaches.  Leonard Bernstein once said:  “In the beginning was the Note, and the Note was with God; and whosoever can reach high for that Note, reach high, and bring it back to us on earth, to our earthly ears – [that one] is a composer” who “partakes of the divine.”   I do not think Bernstein would mind me adding that the same can be said about performers, those who receive the Note from the discoverers and run with it.  They are all divine to me.  So I confess to a little bias in my approach to this movie’s subject matter.  Please forgive me!  But Hoffman’s and Harwood’s work does not require anyone to be a music buff or aficionado to enjoy it.  All it requires is a seasoned appreciation of theater and the arts, a good humored respect for, and delight in, the elderly and a capacity for empathy that greatly exceeds curiosity. 

As the title might suggest, there are four of these gifted and inspired people around whom the plot revolves.  One is an opera diva named Jean Horton (Maggie Smith) who has become a crippled retiree, financially and otherwise, long out of practice and forced to move into Beecham House, where one of the residents happens to be her first of three husbands from long ago (Tom Courtenay), an accomplished basso and music instructor.  Another is Cissy (Pauline Collins), an alto from the same opera stage verging on dementia but retaining her kind and friendly personality that goes far in binding the inhabitants of the place together as a family.  And finally there is Wilf (Billy Connolly), a wisecracking and quite flirtatious tenor whose cheeriness thinly conceals a sour disposition toward old age.  As I understand it from the dialogue Beecham House depends to a great extent for its existence upon the proceeds from the annual gala celebrating Verdi’s birthday, in which every able-bodied resident of the place is required to participate.   Late in the season the Home’s musical director (Michael Gambon) feeling that the roster of performers who have been rehearsing do not look promising enough for big box office prevails upon these four, all internationally famous, to climax the event by presenting the famous quartet from “Rigoletto,” certain they will be the drawing card that will put the gala over the top.  All except Horton, a confirmed recluse, are willing, and things get rather nasty before the question and the conflict with her are resolved.  

As infectious as the film is for me, and I know for millions of others, Hoffman has not made a groundbreaking work.  No new precedent has been set, no new cinematic doors of exploration have been opened.  There is nothing in the narrative that you could call profound.  The characters are delightful, but of course the story’s outcome is easily foreseeable.  Frankly, in view of Hoffman’s past work “Quartet” is much more of a feel good movie than I would ever have expected him to have made.  It is clear that he too loves the people in it and their communal involvement with each other, not to mention the venerable music that is lavished upon the ears from beginning to final fade-out.  And, if you see it on DVD, check into the Bonus material listed in the menu, and you will get a feeling for how much of a good time the cast and crew had in making it.      

Be clear regarding the film’s appeal!  “Quartet” is not about music or how it functions.  Even if you do not know a note of music, you can connect with these very human vessels.  They do more than sing and play instruments; they, like all human beings who reach the sunset years, whatever their walk in life, must resist the temptation to become self-piteously morbid.   They must fight against depression, loneliness, weak legs, weak voices, dim eyes, senility and a feeling of obsolescence to mount their brief moments of resplendence.  I for one, having just turned eighty, feel greatly inspired by their examples.  Anyone over sixty owes it to herself or himself to take this little celebrative work to heart.    

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

The Legacy (Poetry by Bob Racine)

How would a dead and esteemed poet speak to subsequent generations?  I hope the inscription would sound something like this.

In thrall to unwritten time, I the bard do call, speak, enjoin.

Where are you, my children yet to be,

seeds yet to be sown, perhaps yet to walk

on titans’ feet and tread the earth into another shape?

Fear not!  I will be but the frail shadow casting myself

upon the flood of your virgin light.  Commemorate me not! 

I ask not for given honor or celebrity past due. 

I recoil at the thought of fetish chains dangling from vest pockets,

to be grappled like shrunken heads by the fingers of an alien elite,

fed to the glut of esthetes and cultists alike. 

Where in the potpourri of my dated fragments,

where in the scattershot of my obsessions, large and small,

would you search?  Where among you is the memory

to sever the plum by which the bulk of me is construed?

The narrative is gnarled, uneven for want of a scrivener’s finesse. 

Neither reason nor excuse do I afford for the failings of my own

fortitude, or for un-kept promises moldering in pewter cups.

Let me come to you, oh brood of the unborn, in the faintest

of whispers, without the ominous ingress of footsteps. 

My only appeal from the grave:

that my poet’s license not expire

with my yet-to-be-forgotten remains. 

You need only forgive me the errantry of the blind,

and my words have hope to outlive the life in my flesh.

Press your ear against the fissures rending my tomb and listen. 

Mend the tear in my dry moldy parchment; see what my

now parched quill has left in your hands.

I would, to be sure, set some source astir among you,

giving flesh and form where heretofore only precept

has shed a murky light.  Yea, let it flow, let it go its way. 

Unlock its secrets, give it room. 

In thrall to unwritten time, so I the bard,

set apart for a day out of eternity, thusly aspire to

the virgin hereafter of this our ancient earth.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier (Book Review by Bob Racine)

                                   Published 2013

The irreversible transplantation of a human being from one world to another can result in sheer joy and a sense of liberation at one extreme of possibility or in tragedy and disaster at the other.  That of Honor Bright, the young Quaker woman whom author Chevalier has created in “The Last Runaway,” her latest novel, falls between these extremes, but the journey she takes and her dangerous, life threatening struggle trying to acclimate to the new environment takes her closer to the tragic/disastrous extreme than someone her age should ever have to travel.  What makes her transplantation complete and final is the time in which she lives – the mid nineteenth century – and an allergy to ocean travel that she discovers on her one and only trans-Atlantic voyage to America, traveling with an older sister engaged to be married to a frontier settler.  Once in the New World, she knows that because of that allergy she can never return to her native England.

But that turns out to be the least of her troubles.  Her sister dies of yellow fever within days of their arrival, leaving Honor on her own and dependent upon the help of strangers in a strange land.  She is left with no alternative but to make her way over hundreds of perilous miles to the Ohio home of her deceased sister’s fiancé Adam, who lives with a widow named Abigail.  Neither is happy to have her, a single woman, around. 

Hardly does she arrive when she is caught up in the intrigue of the Underground Railroad and its clandestine efforts to steer runaway black slaves to Canada and safety.  Honor, a deeply devout Quaker, has always been anti-slavery in her beliefs, those beliefs engendered by her upbringing.  But she has never had any direct contact with slaves or their raw and desperate struggle for enfranchisement while hunted by cruel mercenaries hired to track them down and return them to their owners.  What has been abstract soon becomes painfully real, when an insidiously brash slave hunter begins harassing her and spying on her every move, suspecting (correctly) that she is helping protect the runaways that she encounters in her village.

Largely to escape the lukewarm atmosphere created for her by Adam and Abigail she marries a Quaker man named Jack from the local Friends Meeting and is at once living with his family in yet another strange household.  Having always been accustomed in England to neatness, order, simplicity and stability she finds herself living in a rougher and less refined country, where people are not very settled.  All around her are rugged and rough-edged individuals (female as well as male) who at some level are still on the move westward or dreaming of it.  And to add to her discomfort she learns that the Quaker family she has married into is not willing to help her in her clandestine practice of hiding and feeding the slave runaways, even though they are anti-slavery in belief.  The Fugitive Slave Law has just been passed, and there are severe penalties for anyone caught violating it.  This creates a moral dilemma that shakes her to the roots of her tender faith and her sense of integrity. 

She does have one small ace in the hole.  She is an expert quilter, and she forms a friendship with a woman milliner named Belle, a non-Quaker she meets along the way.  Though they live in separate villages, Belle becomes a most fateful factor in Honor’s life and struggle of conscience.

“The Last Runaway” is as well stitched a piece of quilting as anything Honor herself might create.  It is without a doubt a labor of love and one of those moral tales that forces the reader to wonder if he or she could call forth the needed courage in a dilemma such as Honor faces.  Would I be able to handle being caught between my convictions and the demands of the legal code?  Would I be able to face and risk the possibility of jail or imprisonment to perform surreptitious acts of mercy?  The question becomes phenomenally more troubling when the personal risk gets passed on to loved ones who would suffer almost as much, and for a cause they may not have agreed to support.  Such is the case for this young woman.  And what would I do, if those loved ones were alienated from my affections by what I did, even if I or they did not get caught? 

Honor, of course, does not set out for the New World to right a social wrong.  She is not an activist by nature; she comes to America in search of new opportunity, to be joined to others of her faith and to find a husband of like faith, after a young man in England jilts her.  Her acts of mercy derive from her cultivated instincts, her spontaneous, second nature compassion.  She is caught up in circumstances she never expected.  And pregnancy, when it occurs, adds yet another complication.  She may be young and relatively inexperienced, but she is not fragile or weak-minded.  She learns about her new environment very fast.      

The book is an easy read, only 300 pages in hardback, but it is not a slight work by any means.  It is both historically informative and personally engaging, with vivid characterizations and remarkable incidents and episodes.  This is Tracy Chevalier’s seventh novel; her most commercially successful is “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” which was adapted into an internationally popular movie a few years back.   Her work is modest but mature and rich in imagination.  I strongly recommend it and hope to read others of her works myself.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net