Dallas Buyers Club (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                     1 hr & 57 min, color, 2013

Human transformations come in varied shapes and in sometimes strange contexts.  The influences that lead one to a fundamental makeover of lifestyle and world view are not always as obvious or predictable as self-help literature and sacred preachments might lead us to believe.  What made a rabid war profiteer like Oscar Schindler suddenly invest (might as well make that deplete) all his super wealth, earned by the labors of his Jewish employees, in their liberation, when he could have blown the scene, enjoyed his filthy millions for life and left them to their fate?  And what made a loathsome, whore mongering, homophobic, alcoholic, drug abusing cheat like Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), hired out as an electrician at a Dallas rodeo, into a crusader on behalf of AIDS victims nationwide in the early days of the epidemic? 

Yes, he finds himself so afflicted one day of his life in 1986 and starts illicitly trying to obtain life saving pharmaceuticals for himself any way he can get them.  And he develops a neat little black market scheme for circumventing the FDA and its misguided, inept policies of treatment, ones that eventually prove more lethal than healing.  The highly toxic AZT they are administering to their patients is killing them and Woodroof knows this.  Strangely enough he turns his enterprising into the rescue of hundreds of AIDS victims from this speedy demise and gives them a new shot at dignity, when he does not really have to for the sake of his own survival.  One day an opportunistic drug pusher and smuggler, the next a dispenser of free drugs!  Well, almost free!  Admission to this Dallas Buyers Club is $400, after which each member will get without further cost all the antivirals they need, mostly smuggled from Europe, where they are certified as safe and effective.  In short, he goes into business and leaves behind the miserable life he has previously known.  In this version of the story he even takes on as a partner a male transvestite, someone who calls himself Rayon (Jared Leto), someone he would once have treated as vermin.  What happens over time between these two is nothing less than a tale of redeeming grace.

One consequence of his work is social isolation from his former buddies in the rodeo.  His association with gay customers, particularly his partner Rayon, and the mistaken notion at the time that AIDS is something only homosexuals contract gets him branded a “faggot,” but he perseveres on just the same. 

No, Ron does not give up swearing or enjoying his booze or his inordinate, profane flares of temper, but he learns to stay sober and demands sobriety of his partner.  He even converts a young hospital physician named Eve (Jennifer Garner) to his cause.  Does he love these customers of his?  That would be hard to say, but he does practice a lot of tough love, and it pays off.  Some eventually are willing to provide his business free housing and tangible support.  Whether he could frame into words everything that is transpiring inside him is doubtful, but he catches on to it and obeys the transforming impulse.  It takes great moral courage, I think, to get up from a comfortable hospital bed to which well-meaning doctors want to confine him, where he can apparently watch the clock run out, and head for the door.  “I prefer to die with my boots on.”   To me that makes a lot of sense.  Many who benefitted from this man’s labors owe him greatly for that move. 

Of course the FDA and the IRS eventually and inevitably close in on him, confiscate his drugs and almost put him out of business, but even then he does not give up without a brave fight, taking his cause to the courts.  In this struggle he does win a small victory and loosens the grips the establishment has previously exercised upon an infected person’s options.  

Such is the essence of an exciting and most amazing bio pic.  Two few films have addressed themselves to the AIDS crisis from the point of view of the victims.  The only one that stands out in my memory is “Philadelphia” (1994), in which a professional accomplished lawyer (Tom Hanks) is stricken with the disease and sues the law firm that has fired him out of prejudice.  That one was fiction; this one is based upon an actual case history, and McConaughey takes his portrayal into realms of precision, imagination and sheer energy that is almost without equal.  He makes the character all his in every sense of the word. 

I wonder how he ever managed, after the finish of production, to shed the man and take up his regular off screen life again; I suppose he gained back the thirty pounds he deliberately lost to do the picture.  That loss of weight shows in many respects.  He looks much more shrunken in the face than he normally does and is as lean as the leanest beef from head to foot.  Such a tactic is reminiscent of Robert Deniro’s for the later scenes in “Raging Bull” over thirty years ago.  He did just the opposite of McConaughey.  To play the aging Jake Lamotta he put on heaps of weight, stuffing his gut for weeks before those scenes were shot.  We hardly recognized him he was so tubby looking and stretched wide in the face.  But he lost all the excess to go on to resume his career.  If Deniro could do that, I suspect that McConaughey could manage the restoration too.  As I recall, on the night he received his Academy Award he looked quite the healthy specimen of manhood.  Between this and his work in “Mud,” released earlier in the year and reviewed by me last August, I would say that 2013 was his year to shine without a doubt.  Both his and Leto’s Oscars are quite well deserved!

Again, though, we have a dramatic derivative from a true story.  Who is factual in the screenplay (by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallach) and who is fictional I cannot say for sure.  But the movie has more than a basis in fact, unlike “American Hustle” (the last movie I reviewed), which turns real events into the likeness of an absurd comedy with make believe people.  “Dallas Buyers Club,” as far as I can tell from on-line data, recreates the authentic likeness of a person who was once a living and breathing human being without changing his name or softening the tone.  The writing this time at least represents a true story in more earnest.     

The Director is a fifty-year-old French Canadian named Jean-Marc Vallee, who has quite a distinguished career in Canadian Movies and TV but a more meager one in American cinema, though I suspect that after his fine work on “Dallas Buyers Club” he will be showing up on this side of the border again.  The pacing and the timing of the action could not be improved.  And I am pleased that Vallee did not take us to Woodroof’s eventual deathbed.  No mawkish or sudsy conclusion!  That would have been a bad choice.  (He died in 1992, six years after being told that he had only thirty days to live.)  We depart from him when he is about to ride a bull into the arena, with only a closing inscription informing us of his eventual demise. 

I doubt if in the mid-1980s he would have been welcomed with open arms in many churches or respectable circles, but in his own intemperate way and in his own bailiwick he opened doors for so many needy people.  Whatever his personality, we have to admire the transformation he permitted himself to undergo.  

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

American Hustle (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                  2 hrs & 18 min, color, 2013

The Abscam scandal!  I have carried the sound of those words in my mind somewhere ever since the late 1970s when it became a headline, but I never made a study of it or pinpointed the details for my own education, and when I read these thirty-five years later that “American Hustle” pertains to it, I could not for the life of me remember what it was about.  Maybe after Watergate I felt I had had enough of national scandal to last me for a lifetime and instinctively let it pass me by.  Fortunately since that time the Internet has emerged, and those details are now easy to come by.  I suggest that anyone who has seen the picture, or plans to do so, go on line and investigate.  It has to do with a sting operation conducted by the FBI in 1978 that was aimed at exposing alleged government corruption. 

In my recent review of the 1999 movie drama “The Insider,” I expressed some thoughts about what a docudrama is, as opposed to a screenplay loosely “based on a true story” or a whitewash designed to improve the image of a popular figure.  I explained that a docudrama is a dramatic enactment that follows actual events quite closely, an authentic examination of vibrant facts and developments intended to arrive at the truth latent in those events.  I hailed “The Insider” as an outstanding high quality example and I referred to “All the President’s Men” (1976) as another.  Let me make it clear from the outset that “American Hustle” is not a docudrama.  Whatever might be said to be good about it as biting entertainment – and it does a lot of biting and with much professional relish – it goes its own way, only (again, the word) loosely related to the facts.  I mean, l-o-o-s-e-l-y!  I do appreciate the way the disclaimer at the beginning is worded: “Some of this actually happened.”  How refreshing!  Nothing formal sounding!  That is the closest any film derived in any way from fact has ever come to being totally honest about the suspected veracity of its content. 

Abscam is a contraction for Arab Scam, the code name given by the FBI to a scheme it cooked up with a professional con artist (granted immunity from prosecution) to help entrap trusted members of Congress and a Camden, New Jersey mayor into exposing themselves as corrupt.  They arranged for a man to pose as a wealthy Arab sheik who is desirous of contributing some of his millions to the redevelopment of Atlantic City, particularly for the construction of gambling casinos, which were purportedly to raise needed revenue for the area.  The targeted individuals were offered payoffs from this phony sheik’s largess with a surveillance camera planted to film them accepting the payoff.  Many arrests were made and the operation became big hot subject news across the nation.  The FBI took a lot of heat for its methodology in gathering this evidence, and the movie gives them yet more heat.  I cannot imagine any Bureau official viewing it without coming close to having a cerebral hemorrhage.  The agency has not been treated with a great deal of kindness in the movies of recent decades, but what it endures this time out is about as close to outright slander as a motion picture can get. 

But do not let this stop anyone from screening it.  There are five quite fascinating fictional characters involved in the movie’s plot.  A Bronx man named Irving Rosenfeld, played with sneaky understatement but visible tension by Christian Bale, is an accomplished con artist.  He lines himself up with a young woman-on-the-make, Sidney Posser (Amy Adams), from a backwater childhood, who turns out to be even cleverer at the rip-off than he is and manages to take his duplicitous operation into a more ambitious territory, she turning herself into the likeness of a high society British lady of manners named Edith.  Voiceovers let us in on the thoughts and motivations that attract them to each other.  They are thriving just fine until FBI agent Richie Dimaso (Bradley Cooper) catches them in a swindle.  Dimaso, however, is so impressed with their talent that he decides to employ them in a shifty scheme to obtain convictions of high-flying public figures, while he himself is more than a little seduced by the phony lady of Britain.  Dimaso is a supercharged, hot-tempered man of insatiable desire for success, hungry for arrests and convictions.  He bites the hardest of all.

And then there is Roslyn, Irving’s manipulative and unpredictable wife, played with irresistible flair and in your face bravura by the remarkable Jennifer Lawrence.  The main string by which she holds onto Irving is her little boy, whom Irving adopted when they married and whom the adoptive father does not want to separate from.  This tie he feels to the kid serves to complicate plans Sidney/Edith has for having the man all to herself.  And finally there is the Camden mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), a bighearted politician without guile who with the best of innocent intentions gets caught in the net that Irving and Dimaso and the FBI are spinning for him and others.         

One of these five at a very heated moment of confrontation waxes proverbial:  “All you have sometimes are poisonous, f----d up choices.”  This has the sound of a topical sentence amidst the flurry of sordid words that run just about the full course of this movie’s dialogue.  Any one of the five except Carmine could have said it and it would have rung true.  You could call the script a roundelay of passive/aggressive behavior seasoned with the distillation of sex, betrayal, and conspiracy.  Others have called it a wild comedy, but I must confess that I found little to laugh about in it, wild and quirky though it may be.  But there is nothing quirky about a climactic scene in which Irving has to confess to Carmine what he has done to mislead and deceive him.  It is about as heartbreaking a moment as you are ever likely to view.  It is difficult to tell which is the cruelest, the admitted deception or the painful truth.      

The neat thing about these people is the fact that all of them, as self-assertive as they are, reveal quite visible insecurities and vulnerabilities, and we never know which side of each personality will show up from scene to scene, which keeps us on our toes.  There are many surprise reactions to stimuli.  They all play fast and loose with options.  But Director David O. Russell (who recently scored big with “Silver Linings Playbook”) and his screenwriter Eric Warren Singer have done an amazing job of finding the very human core in each individual.  The soundtrack is a bit raucous, but none of its thunder or rattle ever interferes with this process, thanks not only to Russell and his gift for originality but to superb and inspired acting on the part of all the major players, especially the women.  And the movie is never allowed to turn slick; the ride is bumpy all the way.  

We are left trying to imagine how all these compromised parties will live with themselves during the remainder of their lives.  What kind of future relationship will Irving have with his adopted son?  How will Roslyn fare with the drastic and desperate choice she makes?  At what price will any form of respectability be required of any of them? 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

The Robe (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                  2 hrs & 15 min, color, 1953

When I was twenty years old and in college, I was thrust into the life of the ancient world.  The fact that I was an ancient language major had much to do with that.  All throughout high school I had been exposed to the study of the Latin language and had become at least academically familiar with some Roman writings.  I had strolled with Julius Caesar through his Gallic Wars and had made my first acquaintance with Shakespeare’s depiction of the man’s fateful assassination on the Ides of March.  I had plowed page by page through Virgil’s Aeneid and gasped a bit when on the farthest rim of my sophomoric imagination the details of the bloody Trojan War were traced.  Then in college I took up Greek and was soon awash in the life and works of Plato, in the tragedy of Euripides and the comedy of Aristophanes.  It is no surprise that when the motion picture adaptation of Lloyd C. Douglas’ novel “The Robe” – about the Christian conversion of the Roman tribune Marcellus who is ordered to conduct Jesus’ crucifixion – descended upon the country, both my ancient language professors were keen in their praise of it and strongly urged it upon us students.     

It turned out to be a movie that opened up uncharted territory in my historical perceptions as well as my capacity to experience at a visceral level something of the draconian broil and fury of those Bible times.  It also happened to be the first movie ever shot in Cinemascope.  When that gigantic image with its stereophonic soundtrack thrust itself upon my eyes and ears, I had a moment of fearful unreality and disbelief, but one that soon gave way to a degree of excitement that as a pre-ministerial student I found irresistible.  Of course we have far exceeded the rudiments of that production – on screens that have grown even wider and sound systems that dwarf all that has preceded them.  But I was in store for more than a matinee treat.  “The Robe,” though flawed in some glaring respects, has proven to be a film I have liked to occasionally revisit, and what better time than the Easter season.          

One thing that particularly impressed me was Richard Burton in the lead role of Marcellus.  It was the first time I ever laid eyes on him, and it amazed me that this tribune as Burton portrayed him was not some sensitive, discontented, searching soul just waiting for Jesus to fill some empty place in his life.  He brought a three-dimensional hardness and a depth of passion to the role such as I had never encountered in other Biblical epics on screen.  In his hands Marcellus is a tough-as-nails, thoroughly corrupt and self serving man of the aristocracy perfectly content to (sort of) serve the many gods of his forebears, with a cluck of the tongue.  I knew this actor was a very special find, though I was not yet educated to the point that I could put into words exactly how and why.  I just knew he was captivating.  There is not a hint of pretense in his work, nor has there been in any of the multitude of movies and stage works that have followed. 

Marcellus is sent to Palestine by an aggrieved Caligula (Jay Robinson) and he comes face to face with the gruesome task of execution as the Romans practiced it.  There have been many movie depictions of Christ’s crucifixion, but I still regard the one in this 1953 film as the most stirring and potent.  One thing unique about it is its portrayal of the event from the point of view of the crucifiers.  We walk the walk to Calvary and visit the grim Golgotha scene in the shoes of Marcellus and his soldiers and his Greek slave Demetrius (Victor Mature).  We experience the horror and pain of it as they do.  We view it in close-up; the visuals and the powerful throbbing music (created by veteran composer Alfred Newman) that accompany them are almost overpowering.  I can almost smell the stench of death.  When I first saw it that half a century ago, it nearly knocked me out of my seat.  The Scripture I had been studying came alive for me far beyond anything I had expected.  The depiction is concise, only about ten minutes in length, but it leaves me feeling as if I have been drenched in blood and tears and the fury of hell itself.  It leads understandably to Marcellus’ mental and emotional collapse. 

He is seized with fits of insanity, not knowing why until he is sent by Emperor Tiberius to track down and destroy the Galilean carpenter’s robe that he has won in a crap shoot next to the cross and which his slave has run away with.  His search for sanity and release from the guilt he feels over the murder he has committed leads him to the town of Cana, where he comes under the influence of a community devoutly loyal to Jesus.  There he is reunited with Demetrius who has joined the traveling company of the Apostle Peter (Michael Rennie).  When he touches the feared robe again, he loses all fear and is drawn into the believing and loving sect.  All this time he is adored back home by a Roman maiden Diana (Jean Simmons) whom he loves, though he fears that she will not be receptive to his new found and outlawed faith.  Burton makes the whole trajectory utterly watchable.

Much of the film’s narrative is quite well composed, with very touching and sometimes insightfully dramatic moments.  But we also have to endure some blatant historical errors; much that happened in Palestine and Eastern Asia over many decades following the life of Christ as the Christian movement spread is compressed into an unbelievable year or so.  Peter did not reach Rome in anywhere near that short a time.  The most historically misleading of all has to do with the responsibility for Jesus’ death.  It appears to be solely a Roman plot; the Jews are by inference completely exonerated.  There is no mention of the Sanhedrin, or the Pharisaical hierarchy that had schemed to destroy him.  Pilate simply considers him a troublemaker and wants him arrested and out of the way.

There is also some sword play such as you look in vain to find in the novel.  One instance of it is quite pertinent.  Marcellus defends the village of Cana from annihilation by local Roman legions, a victory he manages to win without bloodshed or bodily injury, the first sign of his transformation into a man of peace.  But a second instance of the sword is pure Hollywood, a commando style rescue that anyone familiar with the New Testament would regard as entirely out of character and unlikely for Christ’s followers at that point in time.  

These failings aside, there is much to value.  One beautifully melodic treat is furnished by a young woman named Miriam (Bella St. John); she sings of the empty tomb and the journey that was made to it that Easter morning.  It is vocalizing of a very high inspirational order, and it does much to capture Marcellus’ heart when he happens to hear it.  And the life in Cana as portrayed in detail is unmistakably an expression of pure Christian living and sharing – the genuine article, nurtured by a local weaver named Justus (Dean Jagger).  A humble though quaint contrast to the turbulent life among the Romans previously depicted!    

A most fitting climax is the tribune’s trial before the new Emperor Caligula (Tiberius having died) after his capture upon returning to Rome, accused of treachery against the Empire.  “Do you not call this Jesus whom you serve a king?”  Marcellus’ reply to his sovereign is classic material, and once again Burton serves it up brilliantly.  Diana, caught between her ruler and the man she loves, is positioned to make a life-or-death decision.  A momentous scene, except for the few hokey minutes that follow it and with which the film is concluded!

“The Robe,” produced by Fox, is not a masterpiece, but its shortcomings are greatly exceeded by its virtues.  Henry Koster provided substantial direction and care in its movement, and all the casting, even beside Burton’s, is inspired.  It has always over the fifty intervening years been available for private showing and can now be rented from Netflix.  I see nothing in it that should be offensive to anybody, Christian or otherwise.  Lovers of justice and charity for all can relate to it.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

An Oxymoron for All Seasons (Essay by Bob Racine)

The English King and his Chancellor ride horseback into the small French town, a town having just capitulated to their army that has been laying siege to it.  Thereby it has saved itself from bloody combat and perhaps annihilation.  The people line the streets cheering the King’s entrance, apparently glad of his arrival and celebrating the takeover.  But looks are deceiving for this King; his Chancellor tells him as they ride that the people are under constraint to make this show and that soldiers disguised as town dwellers have been scattered through the crowd to incite them to the display.  To this disclosure the King replies, “Why must you destroy all my illusions?”   Moments later they are in conversation about how conquered people should be treated by the conqueror.   The Chancellor, who has arranged for the capitulation, gives out with some astounding words of admonishment to the King, remembering that only a few hours before the barons leading the army have been itching to burn the town and lay it waste.  Says the Chancellor, “One must never drive one’s enemy to despair; it makes [that enemy] strong.  Gentleness is better politics; it saps virility.  A good occupational force must never crush; it must corrupt.”  Anyone familiar with the 1964 movie “Becket” will remember the scene, those words eloquently delivered by Richard Burton in the title role to Peter O’Toole as the lusty, slightly doltish King Henry II.   

Corrupted by gentleness!?  Hmmmmm!!!!

There is a vast difference between political “gentleness” and personal gentleness.  Gentleness as a pragmatic device to achieve and sustain power as opposed to gentleness as a means of cultivating friendship!  Gentleness as a sly weapon to mislead and detract as opposed to gentleness as a humane “everybody wins” virtue!  Gentleness as a crafty means of enslavement as opposed to gentleness as an opening of the heart!  The former in each of these cases amounts to a mixture of the lenient and the fearsome.  Keep your subjects just appeased enough that they are not fully conscious of how afraid they are.  Keep them loving you and fearing you at the same time! 

 

The phrase that is most curious in Becket’s quote is “a good occupational force.”  An oxymoron to be sure!  What is good about the forced occupation of another nation?  In the context of the movie’s plot it would be more accurate to call it an invasive force.  Henry of course would say that he is reclaiming French towns that he thinks he once owned. 

The Allied nations occupied much of Europe after World War II, simply by virtue of the fact that war had been declared upon us and we were forced to defend ourselves by the conquering of those territories.  That defense had to be an offense.  We did not set out to crush the nations, only the fascist governments that had taken possession of them.  I take satisfaction in knowing that we invested ourselves in the rebuilding of those nations after the war, not in their complete corruption.  At the same time, I cringe at the overkill we practiced in our waging of that war.  I am one of those unconvinced that bombing civilian targets was justified or ever is.  Whole cities in Germany were reduced to rubble, thousands of civilian lives obliterated in a flash!  In retrospect, all that appears to be warming up maneuvers for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Yes, we rebuilt, but as Colin Powell pointed out to George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq invasion, if you conquer territory, you will own it.  And when the fate of another nation lies in our hands, we have to face the thin line between occupation and oppression.  Maintaining Becket’s “gentleness” in the raucous aftermath is no easy matter – quite a balancing act.

I am pleased to see the growing number of the world’s citizens who are unwilling to be corrupted.  The Arab Spring has gotten bogged down, but its very outbreak signals how desperately the peoples of the Middle East yearn for democracy and to be in charge of their own destinies.  When you are under someone’s heel and have no way of escaping you have to do things you don’t like in order to survive.  You have to obey your jailor.  What other choice do you have?  But it takes a lot of discernment and determination and pure stamina to avoid being beguiled by seeming acts of humanity aimed at “sapping virility.”  Whatever Becket had in mind, I define the word virility for use in the 21st century as “vigor or forcefulness,” the third shade of meaning indicated in the World Book Dictionary.

One can suffer repression for so long that the slightest concession or act of forbearance on the part of the oppressor can seem like an act of magnanimity and healing.  A sop that passes for a saving grace!  In George Orwell’s “1984”, the character of Winston Smith at first recoils at his repression by the authorities, wishing for liberation.  But by the end of the book he has been corrupted by what seems to be the patient “gentle” nurturing of a master instructor, an apparent revolutionary who is in actuality a tormentor working for the state.  This tormentor messes up Winston’s mind so badly that he loses all sense of himself and ends up embracing the very Big Brother he has secretly hated.      

Long term inmates of prisons have been known to have their sense of self ruined if not obliterated; they lose all emotional familiarity with any life they once knew.  In “The Shawshank Redemption,” the motion picture based upon the Stephen King best seller, James Whitmore is a case in point.  When the story begins, he has just completed his fiftieth year behind bars, and later when he hears that he is soon to be paroled, he goes berserk and threatens to kill a fellow inmate and is prevented only by the intervention of Tim Robbins, a framed innocent man living on the same cell block.  It is Morgan Freeman, another lifer, who in reference to Whitmore observes that the man “has become institutionalized.”  He has been in the confining walls so long that he has come “to depend upon them” for a kind of protection and security.  That has also happened to citizens of nations under totalitarian control.  Mention of this brings me to the subject of Vladimir Putin.

Much on all the minds of the free world right now is the question of his intentions.  Does he have his sights set on more than simply Crimea?  He is an ex-KGB operative who seems bent on bringing back, if not the Cold War as such, then at least some semblance of the police state that Russia has traditionally been noted for.  How soon will the Crimeans, most of whom seem to be exulting in the so-called annexation at the moment, discover that yet another “savior” is actually a despot working under the disguise of a “gentle” leader?  How much have they lost sight of Russian history under Stalin and Kruschev and the brutalities those men practiced?  They are cheering their conqueror (yes, conqueror) now; when will the cheering stop?  How soon before the vigor and force of their minds (their virility) are sapped?   What oppression or repression is in their future that will make them strong or drive them to despair?   

A “good occupational force!”  So Putin thinks of the move he has made.  The oxymoron, after a whole millennium since Becket’s time, is still alive and kicking. 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.