Critical Speed, Critical Sight (Essay by Bob Racine

Have you ever caught yourself rushing and could not recall why you were?  Am I working to meet a deadline?  No!  Is somebody breathing down my neck?  No!  Do I want to finish this job quickly before I forget how to do it?  Certainly not!  Do I really have confidence in myself to succeed at it?  Oh, yes!  Am I cramming too many back to back activities into one day?  Well-l-l!  Maybe!  Hmmm!  Or is this my usual habit?  Am I just naturally a rushing individual?  Is there a pace my psyche is trained to maintain?  Have you ever been employed by a company that required you to work “with alacrity?”  It is hard not to take the habit home with you.

This habitual tendency to rush shows up most noticeably and dangerously when motoring on the street or highway.  I get quite vexed when I see a driver avoiding a Yield sign at the bottom of a ramp by sneaking around those of us who are patiently waiting on the ramp for the proper moment to move onto the main road, then barging into the next dubious opening, nudging drivers aside who must slow down in order to avoid a collision.  We hear a lot about road rage, but not much about road hogging and pushiness.  None of us I daresay likes being tailgated.  You know that that person nagging at your rear is in a bigger rush than you are and you know that driver would like to push you off the road.   I also cringe when someone turning left who is supposed to yield to oncoming traffic takes a breathtaking turn with only feet and inches to spare between their car and the oncoming vehicle, cutting it dangerously close. 

But then I am humbled to recall, as I often do, that I was something of a hotrod myself at an early age, and am still a little impatient with slower drivers under certain circumstances, so eager to get where I am going.  I have to take note of it and say to myself as I have said countless times, “What’s the big hurry, bud?” 

I am also infuriated by most of the TV car commercials we see, wherein the car being sold is shown speeding or simulated as speeding.  The whole sales pitch is a demonstration of how fast it can travel, of how sleek and soup-ed up it is.  Swooping, swerving, gunning for all its worth!  Appealing to the craving for race car swiftness!  The auto manufacturers and marketers do not stop to think that they are inspiring the kind of driver attitude that results in deaths of innocent people.  Creating speed demons! 

We are a society that seems to thrive on speed, doing things with competitive swiftness.  We are encouraged to buy the dishwasher that works the fastest, to buy the computer that delivers the fastest, the printer that spews out the copy the quickest, to purchase the IPAD or IPOD that downloads in the fewest minutes, to buy the microwave that cooks the quickest, to take the medication that works in fifteen minutes instead of three quarters of an hour.   We cater to movies that can be streamed in a flash instead of losing precious time (or precious something!!!) waiting for Netflix to ship it.  We like things instant and electronically delivered, books that can be downloaded and keep us at home rather than require us to enter into the experience of driving or walking to the public library and browsing the shelves.   Few people, after all, ever make a rush trip to that library. 

I am not saying that any of these preferences is bad.  I just cannot shake the feeling, standing way back and taking the long look, that there is a connection between this speed orientation on every hand and the statistical medical fact that more people than ever contract high blood pressure and such like.

In a 1991 movie called “The Doctor,” William Hurt portrays a San Francisco surgeon who does not believe in forming friendships with patients.  Detachment is his favorite term when giving instructions to his interns.  Keep them at arm’s length!  A surgeon should simply cut!  Well, this doctor as it happens gets sick with cancer of the throat, has to take a leave of absence from his job for many months and soon finds himself getting some of that detached medical treatment himself.  In fact, the name of the autobiographical book that the screenplay is based on is entitled “A Taste of My Own Medicine.”  It becomes his turn to sit in waiting rooms and fill out forms and wait, and sometimes wait and wait. 

While waiting he meets a fellow patient, a young woman who has an inoperable brain tumor (Elizabeth Perkins).  He gets drawn into her predicament and out of a new sense of uncharacteristic humanity combined with curiosity he offers to drive her far out into the Nevada desert to attend a concert by a favorite musician of hers, someone she never thought she would ever get the chance to hear in person.  The leave of absence gives him great leeway in his schedule and the young lady has nothing much to do waiting for the clock to run out.  So they go!

While driving at top highway speed with her at his side, to his surprise, she asks him to stop the car.  He does and she jumps out and starts strolling around, really seeing the desert for the first time.  When he shuts off the motor, gets out and draws up to her side, she tells him that she has just made a vow to herself.  She says she has been rushing by things all her life and in what short life she has left (which turns out to be little more than twenty-four hours) she will never rush past anything again.  They walk all about in a beautiful twilight setting.  The concert is forgotten.  They end up dancing together on the sand, this middle aged professional physician and this obscure youth. 

As a result of his encounter with her, the doctor’s eyes are opened.  Now he too makes discoveries.  He sees that he has been rushing past his patients, rushing past people who were just something to cut on.  And in the months that follow he starts teaching his interns to be aware of peoples’ names.  And he does something unheard of.   He requires them to spend time as patients themselves.  He makes them dress up in patient garb.  Each is assigned a disease or an affliction.  They are ordered to take all the treatment that condition requires, to be poked and take shots and eat the hospital food and sleep in the hospital beds attended by nurses who wake them up in the wee hours for temperature and blood pressures readings.  To walk in the shoes of people, to use his own words, who “put their lives in our hands,” people “scared, who want to live.”  And in an earlier sequence of the picture, while he is temporarily without a voice from the surgery and is forced to convalesce at home, he realizes that he has been rushing past his wife (Christine Lahti) and child too.  What a transformation!

The film is still available from Netflix.  It is slightly dated in some of its depiction of medical industry shortcomings, but it still packs an emotional punch and highlights the meaning of compassion.  “The Doctor!”  2 hrs & 8 min, color, 1991.

I had an English literature professor in college, under whom I took two courses in creative writing, one on essay writing, the other on short story writing.  He taught that the most important thing for a creative writer to have is a sensitivity to life.  Creative writing is not just the sum total of the words you put down on paper; it is more than discipline or vocabulary, more than good grammar and syntax, more than mere reporting or telling stories.  It is reflecting on life in all its striking fine points, seeing and calling forth what most people never see, and one cannot be in a hurry to accomplish this. 

To illustrate he told about an esteemed author who visited the college, and this professor of mine was assigned the task of escorting him all around the campus and the town and the area.  And my professor said it was all he could do to keep up with the man.  They started to walk somewhere the professor wanted to show him but the man wanted to stop and examine everything he passed along the way.  He would leave the walkway when he spotted a tree or a flower or a rock, or he saw somebody doing something that interested him, something the average person would take for granted.  “Let me show you something here. . .What is this over here?”  The best writing comes from collected sensations and impressions and discoveries, things the average person is not likely to take in, if one is in too much of a hurry to absorb them.  A good writer takes his/her time.

Let us all buck the 21^st century trend and form the habit of checking our speed.

From Thoreau’s classic masterpiece, “Walden”:  “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.   There is more day to dawn.  The sun is but a morning star.”

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.

Foxcatcher & Whiplash (Movie Reviews by Bob Racine)

The standard dictionary defines “mentor” as “a wise and respected teacher.”  I doubt if any of us would have any quarrel with that definition, as long as we allow for those who teach by example, those who give instruction or enlightenment to others perhaps without even being aware of it, outside of a formal classroom.  I have to say that most of the mentors who have influenced me fall into this latter group.  However the teaching gets done, surely both qualities are desired of the one instructing – “wise” and “trusted.”  One without the other leaves us either of two things:  a teacher who has the academic qualifications, one who “knows her/his stuff,” as the expression goes, but is difficult to approach, is cranky and shifty and maybe even dishonest; or it leaves us with an instruction giver who is sincere and likeable a personality and easy to relate to but lacking in the fine points of the subject, perhaps even misinformed about some of them, one who only pretends to know the score.    

Two absorbing motion pictures are now in circulation that demonstrate how disastrous mentoring can turn, when the element of trust is either missing or abused.  The two are vastly different in style and dramatic approach, but I thought they would make a good pairing 

“Foxcatcher”(2hrs & 14 min, color, 2014) is the true story of Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), a young wrestler who struggles to come out on top, both literally and figuratively, and entrusts his body and mind and heart to a wealthy, multimillionaire trainer (Steve Carell) who opens vast doors for him but finally betrays his pupil’s trust.  The betrayal takes quite some while to come to light and causes him great heartbreak and conflict.  It even implicates Mark’s brother Dave (Mark Raffalo) ever so painfully.

“Whiplash” (1 hr & 47 min, color, 2014) concerns a young music student Andrew (Miles Teller) in a music conservatory, a jazz drummer, who tangles with a hard driving, bullish, despotic, ironhanded brute of a music school instructor named Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons).  The severe, ego-driven man’s tactics almost drive the kid to a nervous breakdown.

Let us take a closer look at each film.

“Whiplash,” whatever else it is, will bring a heap of pleasure and heady excitement to jazz aficionados.  But do not be misled: this is not a musical exactly; only two whole jazz compositions are played all the way through.  It is a clash of wills and wits that will stir up your blood until you may fear that you are being driven to that breakdown.  It will certainly increase the blood pressure for the space of the picture.  But the issues concerning those who push to excel and what it takes to excel are given a smart and clear cut airing out, filtered through the strong personalities of the two antagonists.  At times one gets the feeling that it actually is a fight to the death, considering that there are deaths people die that precede the final one.  Andrew finds himself under attack in more respects than one. 

Fletcher is a most despicable individual – a crass, swearing, insulting, physically abusive, downright cruel slave driver as an instructor.  He conducts his practice sessions in the manner one would expect of a Marine drill sergeant whipping his trainees into combat shape.  He reminds me of Lou Gossett, Jr. in the early 1980s drama “An Officer and a Gentleman.”  Only Fletcher is far worse.  At moments you might want to strangle him.  But he is unquestionably a study.  If he were not, the film would be without bark or bite and without merit.  Simmons won a quite deserving Oscar for this performance. 

This pompous man, if he were real and not fictitious, should be required to spend a month at least observing the work of symphony orchestra conductor James Levine, who has been supervising singers and musicians for over forty years and now conducts from a wheelchair.  Recently 60 Minutes did a study of him, a man who has gotten nothing short of supreme excellence out of everyone who has worked under him.  He is known for his trusting and patient and supportive manner of leadership.  Unlike the Fletchers of this world, he never screams, never goes into raging fits to make points, but he gets the same, if not better, results.           

Teller holds his own as the harassed, victimized pupil.  He is something of a study too.  He is every mother’s and father’s child who sweats, struggles, and battles the odds to make that breakthrough, much deserved in his case as we come to see quite early in the game.  It is his superior talent that wins our hearts and makes us allies in his fight with the dragon.   Top directing and writing are furnished by Darien Chazner.  And orchids to the film editors!

Mark Schultz, at 27, in “Foxcatcher” is an Olympic Gold wrestling winner as is his brother Dave.   But Mark despite his past victory comes across as a lonely, melancholy, reclusive man with few if any real friends, other than Dave, who is his current trainer at the start of the movie.  Such a man teetering on the thin line between self-confidence and professional worry about his future turns out to be an easy prey for John DuPont, heir to the famous DuPont fortune, who has the money and the prestige with which to entice the guy into his Wrestling establishment, John being himself an accomplished trainer.  But this benefactor is a haunted man underneath, a disguised paranoid schizophrenic, a smoldering psyche that both Schultz brothers eventually suffer from.

Most films about wrestlers and boxers are high charged affairs, working their audiences up into a fever pitch, with lots of slugging and punching and thudding and crashing and down-to-the-wire combating.  Not so this time!   In contrast to “Whiplash” the payoff is slower but in my estimation more penetrating.  Carell (Oscar nominee), who altered his face with an enlargement to his nose to better resemble the factual man he plays, is not brute force.  He delivers lines that have DuPont saying most all of the right and proper things that a supportive trainer would and should say to a trainee, but with an unsmiling face, with cold, grim-looking eyes that hint at a double meaning.  He will give you chills.  Something is stirring beneath that apparently benign countenance.  Let the buyer buy, but beware!

Bennett Miller’s direction, supported by a screenplay by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, is a work of well seasoned artistry.  The pace is slow, but for me it works that way.  He never exploits the wrestling matches for their ringside thrills.  In fact, we never actually see an entire match, only highlights.  He distances us from the big arena, no sweeping shots of audiences.  The story is in the chemistry between the characters, with dialogue restrained; much of what is being communicated comes through the faces or body language or gestures.  Actions speak volumes. 

One thing I especially like is the tight bond between the brothers, who really do care for and about each other, until the shadowy influence of DuPont intervenes.  The DuPont estate is portrayed as a somewhat mysterious environment.  One seems to be welcome, but can one be sure?  John’s mother (Vanessa Redgrave), who keeps a stable of horses and prides herself on trophies of her own for horsemanship in chasing foxes, stays aloof most of the time and extends no hospitality to any of the men residing on her estate.  Her equestrian business is what bears the name Foxcatcher; son John takes over the name when he forms his athletic empire.  In one bold scene she tells her son what she thinks of this “low sport” in which he is engaged, but even that exchange is not clamorous.  The lack of passion and affection between the two is chilling, but it too speaks volumes.

John Dupont’s psychosis finally breaks out of its cage.  The film turns out to be a low-keyed tragedy, not a sports spectacular, leaving much to mystery and wonderment.  It probably is not a general audience vehicle.  But I loved every moment of it, both times I watched.   It is made with a kind of cinematic subtlety that we do not see enough of.

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 Good Lie (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                             1 hr & 50 min, color, 2014

If any average American citizen were to meet up with a native of a more primitive society (in this case rural Southern Sudan) new to our country and that foreign-born person were to ask the American, “Where is your village?”, how would any of us reply to the question?   Do we have “villages” in the U.S. or anything that could be characterized as one under a different name?  In the city of Columbia, Maryland where I reside, we have a small shopping mall named Wilde Lake Village, but do we deserve to call anything situated for commercial use by that title?  I doubt if our Sudanese native would understand that, because in his/her country the village is everything.  It is a kind of extended family or small tribe, just as meaningful to them as our primary families are to us, probably more.  A small community, a world within a world!  A world of extraordinary unity and allegiance and kindred minds and shared habits! 

I am sure most of us on this side of the Atlantic have seen that poster proverb emblazoned on one billboard or bumper sticker or another: “It takes a whole village to raise a child” or words very similar.  But I have often wondered who in our vast teeming population could have created such an axiom.  I wonder for the simple reason that few within our shores have ever belonged to a real village.  Some churches or synagogues or mosques approach the ideal; it depends upon the orientation or the spiritual breeding of the people who compose them.  But if you want to get the true sense of what the word means, treat yourself to a recently released motion picture entitled “The Good Lie,” an original screenplay composed by a woman named Margaret Nagle, directed by Philippe Falardeau, and released by Warner Brothers.  

After sitting through it, I am of the suspicion that it was the solidarity of village culture that enabled all those Lost Boys of Sudan to walk the hundreds of miles they did over barren and unfriendly and dangerous terrain to reach the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya where they found refuge for most of their childhoods, there awaiting the chance to travel to America.  I wonder how many of our American children suddenly and tragically bereft of parents and the structure of town and community and left homeless in a wilderness with little sense of direction or distance and without the food and water to sustain life could travel by foot for a thousand miles in search of a safe haven.  Would they have not only the stamina to make the grueling journey but the resourcefulness or the faith in themselves or in God to do it?  Would they triumph and grow to self-respecting adulthood or would their desolation segue into a version of “Lord of the Flies?”

The film revolves around four of those Sudanese children who age over thirteen years in that camp before they find themselves selected to make the journey by air westward.  All of them are of (what we would call) preschool age, when their village is bombed and strafed and their parents annihilated at the film’s opening sequence and they are left with nothing but their own devices.  One is Mamere, whose older brother Theo is captured by the enemy, leaving him to be the new “chief,” a village status derived from age and seniority.   Looking up to him are his brothers Jeremiah and Paul and his younger sister Abital.  Children leading children!  The remnant of their village!

They learn to siphon water from the ground, to obtain food by chasing a predator from its prey and feasting off the freshly slain carcass, and they even have to resort to drinking urine to quench thirst when water cannot be located.  They are plagued by the possibility of disease; some do get sick; and always not too far away are the North Sudanese soldiers bent on their annihilation.  They have no chart or compass and have to depend upon their instincts and the direction in which the sun rises or sets.  But through their rugged determination they reach the Kakuma Camp. 

One day, thirteen years later, they find their names on the posted list for deportment.  The boys by then are on the threshold of adulthood and the sister is an adolescent.  The lion’s share of the film’s footage portrays the strange life and experience of the boys in the States, separated from Abital when placements are determined in which they have no say. Fortunately they all speak English, presumably having learned the language at the camp, which proves to be a vital asset upon their arrival in America.

An employment agency counselor named Carrie (Reese Witherspoon) in Kansas City gets roped by a friend into the task of meeting the boys at the airport and transporting them to their living quarters.  This done, she prepares to get on with other business.  But the job turns out to be not that simple.  She is amazed, after she drops them off on the sidewalk in front of their new assigned residence, that they are so timid and unsure of themselves that they stand outside the house and do not move.  She has to lead them bodily into the house and get them settled.  She has to show them how to use a telephone, something they have never even seen before.  They are introduced to wall switches, to running water, and to appliances, all of which unfamiliar, and they approach their beds with awe and uncertainty – until they try them out and find them pleasurable.

Slowly she comes to realize that these young men are largely nomadic in background and have a more complicated history than she ever expected, that they are not simple statistics that can be filed away or pegs fitted into assigned slots.  The land is new; the ways of the new world they have to be taught very carefully.  Not only has she not been acquainted with their life story or their background, but she learns that she has taken on a more rigorous task than she ever imagined.  Getting them jobs is the major challenge.  And that is just for starters.

These boys eventually reshape Carrie’s life and expand her horizon as much as she expands theirs. 

Though the village by this point has been geographically left far behind, it is still very much a present reality for the three.  There is a closeness and a passionate concern each has for the others that in my judgment goes beyond what siblings in our country scattered abroad from each other retain.  Mamere never gives up hope of bringing Abital to live with them and that his captured brother Theo is still alive.  But the bonds that hold them together are soon tested by their new lifestyles; cultural barriers complicate the process, even after they are all employed.  The solidarity they have known on their journey up to that point is threatened.  Tensions arise that bring them to fierce confrontation, and Carrie is forced to become the referee.

Probably many of you reading by this point are eager to know what this “good lie (!)” is all about.  Unfortunately to explain I would have to give too much away, so I must leave the matter be for you to find out.  But I can assure everyone that in the context of the story it does make good and meaningful sense.  The sensitively well written script that mixes pathos and humor to superior effect and the splendid acting on everyone’s part make this a crystal quality work, timely, personally involving.

The characters may be fictitious, but the movie’s producers made the very wise choice of casting real life persons whose lives have been intimately touched by the refugee situation.  Mamere is played by Arnold Oceng, the son of a refugee father; Jeremiah is played by Ger Duany, Paul by Emmanuel Jel, and Abital by Kuoth Wiel – all of them Sudanese refugees themselves. 

“The Good Lie” is a saga of loss, pain, desperation, liberation and sacrifice.  Well worth everybody’s time!  The following African proverb signs off the movie most appropriately at the end of the credits: “If you want to go fast, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together.”

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.