Thursday, October 30, 2014

Tearjerkers? How So? (Essay by Bob Racine)



Without hesitation or qualification and with supreme satisfaction let me report that in my judgment the movie version of “The Fault in Our Stars (2 hrs & 6 min, color, 2014) could not be a better adaptation of the book authored by John Green and reviewed by me in the September 15 posting on this blog.  If you have not read that review, it would be wise to do so before proceeding further with this blog entry.  To put it in good slang terms, the makers of the film really “nailed” it.  The casting of Shailene Woodley as Hazel and Ansel Elgort as Augustus was an inspired choice.  The Director Josh Boone and the screenplay writers Scott Newstadter and Michael W. Weber are perfectly tuned in to the magic, the heartbeat and the dynamic of the novel.  It makes me wonder if Green and these movie makers collaborated from the very beginning, working as a team with one unified vision.  Not that I would be surprised; I cannot imagine how anyone could even begin to improve on that irresistible book and its superb, lifelike dialogue that, as I indicated before, has found a permanent place on my library shelf as well as a permanent spot in my heart.  If you have read the book, see the movie too.  If you have not read it, read it and then see the movie, or vice versa, whichever the case.  They reinforce each other. 

“Tearjerker this is not.”  Here I quote myself from that 9/15 write-up.  I still hold to that opinion.  Which brings me to my theme!

How do we define the term “tearjerker?”  Is it a reference to any motion picture that evokes tears?  Not by any means!

You can consult the dictionary for a definition of that label and what you get invariably is a moving entertainment that makes use of “excessive sentimentality” or some such phrase – something constructed specifically to incite you to get out the hankie or end up wishing you had brought one.  But a more appropriate research for meaning should be applied to the root word “jerk.”  The tears are allegedly being jerked out of you.  So how is that pointed, monosyllabic term defined?  “A sudden sharp pull, twist or start.”  A sudden motion!  A sudden movement producing a sudden aftereffect or fallout!  The giveaway modifier here is “sudden.”  A manipulation that takes the control of your emotions completely out of your hands by a swift grab!  An attack, if you please!  An assault on the tear ducts!

My mother was the first person in my life to demonstrate for me the interplay of watching motion pictures and weeping.  I remember especially when she and I, when I was maybe eight (early in World War II), watched a war romance called “Tender Comrade,” in which Ginger Rogers portrayed a war widow talking to her infant child upon the news of the husband/father’s demise overseas.  It was a kind of aria, brimming with sorrowful words and phrases, and it seemed to my very young mind to go on forever.  I think she was telling the kid, as he slept in the cradle, what she hoped someday to tell him for real and make him understand, about why a man with a family sometimes has to go to war and make the world safer for them and risk making the ultimate sacrifice. 

I was somewhat bored by all the talk.  It was not my kind of picture at that age.  But then my boredom gave way to distress, when all of a sudden my mother reached over, took my hand, clutched it tight, pulled it over into her lap, and turned on the tears, which she dabbed at with the handkerchief she retained in her other hand.  I felt somewhat embarrassed as well as unsettled to have her do that in the presence of other people watching the screen.  Obviously she was imagining that she might sooner or later lose my father, who was draft eligible at that time, and that I would then be all she had left.  (She never did, I am happy to report!)  My being an only child must have made that imaginary trip all the more intense for her.  I wanted ever so much to extract my hand from her tight grip, but I was afraid to try.  Though she indiscreetly did this without my permission, resisting her would have seemed to me at the time most disrespectful, and it was not as if we were alone.  Other viewers would be witness to my conduct.  So I sat there grinning and bearing it.  I chalked it up as one of the most agonizing movie viewings I had ever undertaken.  The world the film depicted and the one in which my mother vicariously participated was completely foreign to me.  The best thing about that flick for me, as I recall, is the fact that it did mercifully end.     

Tears are shed for any one or more of several reasons.  They can be an expression of, or a response, to: Sorrow; Loss; Grief; Shame; Anger; Pain; Affection; or Joy.  A good movie can evoke any or all of these emotions – to varying degrees, in small or abundant amounts.  Rarely do you hear anyone in the movie audience blubber or scream or squall or make notable tear-drenched sounds that impact upon the rest of the viewers.  In all likelihood the most you get, if the crying is picked up by your ear, is a sniffle or a quiet sob or a nose blow.  I suppose that most of the crying I have done over the long years while viewing (yes, I have a lot of my mother in me after all) has been of the silent variety.  I ooze the tears, my eyes water over, I may choke up slightly, but I never boo-hoo.  But whatever the outward manifestation, profuse or minute, crying for me during movie screening is generated by a strong identification with the struggle or the plight of one or more characters in the story. 

Few people go to the movies for the express purpose of dissolving into a crying fit.  Ordinarily they work up to a tearful point, when something they are viewing touches a certain chord inside of them in a way that they probably never expected.  It was, and is, clear to me that that was my mother’s experience on that day in her life and mine.  She used to view a lot of films, of various genres, and few of them ever grabbed hold of her as that one did.  Her experience was unplanned, whatever feminine predisposition to cry may have been hers.  There was no jerking.

A male friend of mine rather recently watched a motion picture that I recommended for him (and others), one that dealt with a family struggle, especially as it impacted upon the children.  It was one that had brought forth more than one instance of tears for me over several viewings of it.  (It has been said that men are less likely to dissolve into a flood or even choke up than women.  I think that is largely true in our American culture.   I must leave it to the behavioral sciences to postulate as to why.  It has to do with upbringing and psychological conditioning and stuff like that to be sure.  I get that in other countries it is often quite different.)  Well, my friend reported to me that before he got very far into the story, he made a vow to himself – a VOW, mind you! – that he would not cry, even as he began to sense that the family’s plight would invade his heart and stir things up.  He confessed his inbred resistance to crying at the movies and he promised himself before the end of the first reel that that resistance would prevail, as it was accustomed to doing.  Humbly he admitted, after the fact, when he gave report, that he could not keep the vow.  He was melted down by what he saw and heard.  His arrival at that moment of suds was the result of a slow, incremental process or dynamic.  He was ultimately surprised by his own capacity for tenderness.

That is what a first rate movie does.  It conditions us, as it exposes us to situations that we perceive as crucial and life-affirming, as the plot thickens.  A real tear-jerk-er is a film that is poorly conceived, manipulative, exploitative and patronizing.  One in which mature people sense very early that the film makers are attempting to set them up!  One in which the human material is so thin and fallacious and thickly, ridiculously sentimental that the response on the part of any self-respecting and intelligent viewer is one of either revulsion or a complete turn-off.  Only those of small mind and shallow perception would become emotional in such a case. 

It is all in the writing and in the eyes and ears and hearts of the audience.   Yes, I cried through the last half hour of “The Fault in Our Stars,” but it is no tear-jerker.   The life issues it examines have to do with living and dying at an early age, no measly subject, and that subject is treated with supreme care and with great soulful imagination.  Everyone should become familiar with it, and I do not very often say that about a movie or book or story I write about. 


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.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante (Book Review by Bob Racine)



                                      Published 2011

“I am having trouble concentrating.  I try to do what a new sign in the kitchen commands me: Live in the moment.  I have to.  There is no other way for me, not anymore.”

These are words passing through the mind of Dr. Jenny White, a surgeon specialized in the care and healing of human hands, who in her early sixties has been out of practice for many years due to Alzheimer’s.  Her dementia is so far developed that she becomes displaced in time very easily.  People in her life who have died are sometimes still alive for her.  She forgets the names of her grown children.  There are gaps between the last thing she remembers doing and the present moment.  What has transpired in the meantime is a blank page in her memory.  Anyone who has had any acquaintance with the disease or friends or relatives who have been afflicted with it would find these kinds of things ever so familiar.  But two factors make Jenny’s story quite unusual.  One is the fact that Amanda, a close long time friend and neighbor of hers, has been murdered, a blow to the head delivered from behind, and Jenny is a suspect in the police investigation, since four fingers of one of the woman’s hands have been surgically removed, something Jenny would be professionally skilled at doing. 

The other curious thing about her story is the manner in which it is told by this first time novelist, Alice LaPlante.  The entire 455-pages (in hardback) relate Jenny’s narrative from her point of view.  All of it!  The reader sees and hears only what she sees and hears.  We know only what she knows at any point.  We never shift over into the mind of anyone else.  Events and conversations all unfold in her presence.  There are no narrating voices, no overriding commentary.  We only know that someone is addressing her or making comment to her when she hears them speak or when they write in her journal telling of incidents and memories that she would not otherwise remember.  Jenny tells her story in present time as she experiences it.  The entire book is her internal monologue responding to what is said to her or to what happens around her or to what is done to her.  She is in every scene.  We have to piece the story together from the fragments.  The writing, therefore, is appropriately terse, economical, sporadic – even somewhat fitful.  
             
And brilliant!  A most fascinating personal saga that achieves the seemingly impossible!  It works!

Jenny, a widow, has a twenty-four-year old daughter, Fiona, to whom the afflicted mother has entrusted the power of attorney and the complete responsibility for her finances.  Fiona shares the ownership of the house and the decision-making regarding it with her twenty-nine-year-old brother Mark, who lives out of town.  The two of them have hired a live-in caretaker named Magdalena.  And all of them have known Amanda intimately and are somewhat traumatized by her death and embarrassed by the police investigation of her murder that implicates Jenny. 

Please do not let me leave the impression that we only get glimpses of these characters; the fact of the matter is they slowly but definitely take shape and reveal themselves in the fragments.  Complete, fleshed-out images of them emerge from the trolling we do in the waters of Jenny’s mind.  By the time one finishes the book, one will be well acquainted with the attributes, good and undesirable, of all the people who have played a part in Jenny’s life. 

Family friction is not in scarce supply.  Mark is a young man riding a wave of poor investments and threatened bankruptcy, scheming to get his hands on a sizeable portion of his mother’s money and pushing to get Jenny to transfer power of attorney over to him.  Fiona, though academically successful, is not the most emotionally stable of people.  She has trouble coping with her mother’s outbursts.  Amanda, who we get to know rather thoroughly in references to the past, is a very shifty individual.  Jenny’s relationship with her has been love/hate to a considerable degree, though little of the embattlements remain vivid in her failing memory.  Magdalena is quite thorough and efficient at her caretaker job for the most part, but there is something shady about her that comes to light late in the game.  She also has a habit of not noticing when Jenny has wandered off.  A few of these wanderings lead the woman into gravely dangerous circumstances, which we also encounter strictly through her perceptions of them. 

It is intriguing that we do not always know how much one of these individuals knows about the others, since the viewpoint is consistently that of Jenny herself.  We are locked into her fluctuating consciousness.  To speak in movie terminology, we never see anything that happens off screen, unless it is precisely recounted in Jenny’s presence or written in her journal by someone else.  And Jenny has secrets even from herself.  She knows that her deceased husband James was a loose cannon and faithless, but she has elaborate devices for rationalizing the fragility of the marriage and tends to romanticize what went down between them.  Her most undesirable trait is her paranoia that makes her an unjust accuser of those trying to help her.  For instance, she attacks Fiona for meddling in her finances when her back is turned, forgetting that months before she has signed over all money matters to her.           

Actually very little space in the book is taken up with the police investigation.  In the truest sense of the word this is not a thriller or a purposeful murder mystery.  We always know that this investigation is going on and that Jenny is only faintly aware of it.  It is like a sword that hangs over her head, but she cannot get it into that head that Amanda is dead, even from natural causes, let alone the violent nature of the death.  She has a lawyer who sits in on all the interrogation and protects her rights under the law.  It is not until surgical instruments used on Amanda’s hands are found in Jenny’s possession that she is formerly charged.  The barrier for the courts, however, is her mental unfitness to stand trial and what to do with her when found guilty of the crime.  There is, of course, a secret attached to the friend’s death that is not disclosed until the final section of the novel.  By that time Jenny is so mentally out of focus that she cannot comprehend what is going on, even when it is spelled out for her.  But the reader learns the full details, which put everything that has preceded into a different light.  The ending is tragic, but not in the manner one might suppose.  For Jenny ignorance and dullness of mind really do become a kind of bliss.  The tragedy actually engulfs someone else, someone who is painfully knowledgeable about Amanda’s demise. 

The mercy of God is not in so many words ever mentioned by any of the characters, but we can feel it oozing out of the pores of the book.  Compassion takes unusual forms, but it does unfold, not just for the main character but for those who have to suffer the agonies of care-giving someone with this disease.  That Jenny is not able to comprehend the straits to which she is ultimately confined makes her case far less heartbreaking than it might have been.  LaPlante in her choice of material celebrates the woman’s keen imagination, however meandering or fanciful.  Jenny White’s ability to frame her random memories into a shape that is comforting to her is in a strange way comforting to us.

The reading of “Turn of Mind” was a real adventure for me.  I recommend it for adults who can appreciate the innovation.  I would advise, however, that you read it right through.  If you try to spread it out over weeks and weeks, taking long absences from the text, you will probably have a difficult time getting relocated when you choose to take it up again.  Considering all that is depicted out of sequence, its coherence will be easier to discern if you stay right with 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.

Monday, October 6, 2014

Awakenings (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                                           2 hrs, color, 1990

The recent death of Robin Williams has naturally triggered memories of  outstanding performances he has given on the wide screen, and while I recall moments of great hilarity he has created, ones I hope to view again and enjoy again, and in a style that no one has been able to ape, we must not forget that he has made dramatic contributions that are just as native to his genius as the comic ones.  Likewise they too are endemic to his special talent; no one else could have pulled them off exactly as he did.  Perhaps the most low keyed of all is the portrayal of Dr. Malcolm Sayer, a neurologist who conducted an amazing experiment at a chronic hospital in the Bronx in the summer of 1969 that became known worldwide. 

Sayer, as Williams portrays him, is a very quiet, retiring and humble man who in his quiet, retiring and humble manner implores his staff to allow him the administering of a new drug to a few dozen victims of a largely paralyzing disease, whose symptoms he traces to encephalitis.  Encouraged and supported by a nursing assistant named Eleanor (Julie Kavner) he believes heartily that his patients are not brain dead as he has been informed by his superiors but “alive on the inside,” and he manages to press his case to get miraculous results.   He demonstrates what we might call deferential, self-effacing persistence.  Although cast alongside a more boisterous player during the course of the film, Williams generates a magnetic field that brought forth rare inner qualities for which he had not been noted up to that point – the year of release being 1990.          

That other actor is none other than Robert Deniro giving one of his most powerful and remarkable portrayals as Leonard Lowe, a man who has resided in that hospital for over thirty years unable to move his limbs or to speak or to eat or even to turn his head without assistance, one of the group under Sayer’s care who display varied manifestations of this immobility.  Some can shuffle around the floor; all of them can catch a ball if it is tossed at them but without bending an arm or leg.  Frankly as a group they strike a rather hideous pose.  Using Leonard for a successful trial run, Sayer amazes everyone including himself when soon he has them all awakening from a years-long catatonia, speaking and walking and discovering the world anew. 

Suddenly for these resurrected individuals it is the little things that take on gigantic importance.  Leonard awakes at nighttime and cannot understand where everybody on the ward has gone and why the place is so quiet, when he is wide awake.  He has some difficulty distinguishing day from night and is afraid to go to sleep after the following day passes.  Sayer has to assure him that he will not stay asleep as before but will wake up when it is morning again and that that will be another day.  He is curious about his grownup image in the mirror, the first reflection of himself he has seen since he was nine years old.  He learns how to eat corn on the cob, how to shave for the first time, how to dress himself, how to comb his hair that has grown to never before seen lengths and is mind blown by the sight of street scenes through which he is escorted – mobs of people milling around in unfamiliar dress.  He discovers rock and roll and goes into a frenzy like that of a child when he is allowed to wade into the water at the shore.

Sayer is frightened, wondering what kind of strange Pandora’s Box he has opened.  His most overwhelming moment and the audience’s most hilarious moment consists of a visit he and his patients make to a dance floor, where a swing orchestra is playing music that was popular when many of the patients were younger and healthy, before their affliction came about.  Suddenly he has a lot of turned on, swinging and swaying and jitterbugging folk, one of whom pulls him against his will onto the floor kicking up his heels – this staid, private, almost antisocial man who has a devil of a time keeping up with everyone.  I laughed myself silly during both of my screenings.  A most touching and sweet diversion is delivered by a woman named Lucy (Alice Drummond), who rediscovers the voice she once had, singing “Just a Song at Twilight.” 

But of course the effect of the drug is not permanent, and Leonard, who starts taking it some time before the rest of them do, is the first to manifest retrograde symptoms, and here is where the full throttle skill of Deniro’s acting kicks in.  I doubt if a majority of even the most professional players could master the tics and shakes and shudders and spasms and seizures that he has to simulate.  We can only dimly imagine the hours and days and maybe even weeks he had to spend mastering them before confronting the camera. 

Contrast has always been an essential aspect of any work of art in any medium, and the two male stars of “Awakenings” provide a most potent manifestation of it.  You have Deniro rattling the rafters, tearing up the scenery, openly volcanic alongside Williams playing it cool, soft and poised.  Both are fine tuned, exactly what they are supposed to be and they make a spellbinding combination.  Williams, though he may seem upstaged in the familiar sense of the term, is just as vital to the drama and is just as adroit in the use of body language and visible emotion as his costar.  Having been an actor myself who has played both types, I can truthfully attest to this state of play.  The softer portrayal can appear to be the easier, but if done with earnest it can be the most demanding of the two.  There are many examples of this phenomenon in cinema history.  Richard Burton seems for a spell a mere straight man in “Becket” to Peter O’Toole’s complex, conflicted Henry II, but he is anything but that.  Jack Lemmon seemed a wearisome Mr. Uptight next to Walter Matthau in “The Odd Couple,” but his is actually the most demanding of the two roles, a fact that becomes clear upon close, careful inspection.  Bette Davis is a ghastly scourge of horror in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” while Joan Crawford, the victim of her abuse, who barely moves a muscle, is a quiet force to contend with from her wheelchair, but just as essential to the conflict. 

Williams could have merely walked through the part, but his work here is a study in the brilliant use of subtlety to unearth the soul and psyche of a subject.  There is more to what he does than at first meets the eye.

And it is Sayer who gets in the last word of reflection, when he is talking to his fellow physicians assembled.  In trying to make sense of what the experiment has meant to posterity, despite its disappointing outcome, Sayer declares that the awakenings could not have come about if not for the adamant will of the patients themselves.  “The human spirit is more powerful than any drug.”  So it is!

The screenplay by Steven Zaillian (to gain acclaim for his writing on “Schindler’s List” just a few years later) is based upon a book by Oliver Sacks, M.D., and the picture was directed by Penny Marshall with a knowing, sensitive approach and a skillful hand.  As I announced when I opened up this blog, I will be taking a look at old movies from time to time, especially those like this one that have not dated and are eternally new.


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.