Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Room (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                                  1 hr & 59 min, color, 2015
                                     
When we were very small children, the world as we understood it extended not much further than the walls that housed us.  None of us can recall when we learned that life exists outside our front doors or that the earth is a sphere, in contradistinction to the flat floor beneath our feet, but such moments did occur, whether we can pinpoint them or not.  Each of us was born in a box conceptually speaking.  And at some day or hour we discovered that there was a door in that box, and after we passed through that door, we found ourselves in another and larger box and at some crucial point we learned that that box too had a door, and so forth and so on.   Our world got bigger and bigger.  Sometimes the passage through one of those portals was exciting, sometimes we found it scary, or at the very least confusing, but we made our fumbling way with the help of older and more experienced individuals, a journey we could never have completed on our own.
                                     
But suppose a child’s conceptual development were to be unnaturally suppressed for as long as the first five years of life.  What impact would an abrupt change of physical and material environment have upon that child’s tender mind and heart?  Jack (Jacob Tremblay) is a half decade old, when that rude awakening happens to him.  His mother Joy (Brie Larson) has been locked inside a shed with no window except a small skylight for seven years, captive of a man who alone knows the code to the combination lock on the shed’s metal door.  By passing references we learn that as a teenager she was lured by him under the false pretense of helping him care for a sick dog, only to find herself imprisoned.  They call the man (Sean Bridgers) Old Nick, not ever having been told his real name.  There in that tiny space she has been continually forced to submit to him, while Jack stays in a closet, Jack being the offspring accruing from one of those frequent rapes.  (Let the viewer fear not!  The rapes are not made explicit; there is no violence in the film.)
                                     
For Jack they are not in a room (lower case r); they are in Room (upper case).  Room is home; Room is the world.  A TV has been furnished for them by their captor, and Jack has come to perceive that nothing on that screen is real, only make believe.  All that exists are Room and outer space, which by his reckoning is on the other side of the walls that surround them.  He has a scant number of toys.  He has seen animals on that TV screen and considers himself the owner of a dog named Lucky, again make believe.  His first encounter with a real live four-legged creature is a mouse crawling across the floor that he tries to befriend, as any child would befriend a teddy bear, until Joy kills it in his immediate presence.  The moment is quite painful for the boy.  He has no idea at all that beyond that metal threshold is a community with other living and real people like the two of them.   Joy tells him stories and sings him songs and amuses him in any makeshift way she can.  Old Nick is nothing more than the ogre who provides their necessities, a kind of devil that for their survival must be kept at bay; Joy has schooled Jack to think of the man as someone not their friend and not to be trusted.  Jack knows practically nothing about how he came to be in Room with his Ma, and from all appearances has not inquired further in the direction of finding out.  He is oblivious to Old Nick’s fatherhood of him; in his world there is no such person as Dad. 
                                     
But at the age of five Joy decides that it is time for Jack’s conceptual understanding of reality to be bumped up, for the fantasy he has been living and that she has been cruelly forced to live with him to come to an end.   She starts dropping references to a Grandma and Grandpa he is connected to somewhere else – somewhere other than far flung outer space.  He rebels against the notion at first, but she persists, knowing that their freedom, for which she longs, depends upon him grasping the idea.  The movie is most of an hour along when they effect their escape through a most ingenious and risky ruse.  Every viewer’s heart will jump up to the throat pulling for them. 
                                     
Joy and Jack land in the hospital under police protection where they are rejoined with her mother (Joan Allen), whom Jack at once starts calling Grandma.  During the seven terrible years Joy’s mother has divorced the father (William H. Macy) and is currently living with a friendly man named Leo (Tom McCamus), who endears himself to the daughter and grandchild.  But the new freedom is a new and bigger box for the mother and child to find their way through, and within minutes we realize that the tension and suspense are far from over. 
                                     
The film has everything a quality drama could possess.  The acting is superior, as is the gifted direction by Lenny Abramson and the incisive and sensitive writing by Emma Donoghue adapting her own novel.  This is not a thriller; what unfolds is a superb affair of the heart that uncovers a prodigious degree of vulnerability on everyone’s part.  What beautiful and consuming moments Donoghue has created for these well drawn characters!
                                     
Larson has won major awards (including the Oscar and the Golden Globe) and reaped much praise for her performance, all of which she deserves as far as I am concerned.  This woman she plays is not a two dimensional wise-big-mother-knows-best creation; she is much, much more, with multiple moods and curves and reversals and delicate waters to navigate.  Her face tells the untold story of Joy’s crisis past, one that is not entirely resolved; she has extraordinary range and puts it to marvelous use.  But having said all that, it needs to be made clear that the story belongs chiefly to Jack.  All that happens is seen from his point of view; he is in practically every scene; his experience of the odyssey from captivity to precarious freedom is foremost in emphasis.  And Tremblay does great work giving him authentic presence.  Once again magic has been rendered in the directing of a child performer.
                                     
As for the boxes within boxes of which our lives consist, it needs to be remembered that some boxes have more than one door.  We are called upon to make choices between doors, and leaving through one door may make it difficult to find our way back to some point of origin from which we can make another and better choice.  The more our perceptions improve, the more life grows complicated and sometimes fraught with peril!   From what happens in Jack’s life in the weeks following their liberation from the shed, we can easily surmise that this kid will grow up fast when he inevitably learns who his biological father is and when he begins to meet other kids at the school that awaits him.  The film does not carry us that far along; these developments are left to our imagination. 
                                     
Joy has to confront demons in her own head once she is released from the seven-year confinement.  She has what looks like a case of PTSD.  What greater a trauma can a young woman endure than what she has been through?  She is surprised by the onrush of depression.  And Larson makes the struggle quite poignant.  Thankfully she is able to fight the battle among people who love her. 
                                     
I am so pleased that this film was not mounted in Hollywood.  I can imagine what might have been done with the book.  It is an independent  Canadian/Irish production that is so very well edited and paced and conceived, and the intelligent choice was made to have Donoghue doing the screenplay and giving her free rein in partnership with a first rate director.  It may be about a child, but I suggest that no one under eleven or twelve be allowed to see it.  A younger child might find it very disturbing.  But for most adults it should be quite absorbing and maybe rewarding.  They do not make motion pictures any finer than this. 


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.

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Trumbo (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                                  2 hrs & 5 min, color, 2015
                                     
Prior to the declarations of hostilities that pulled England, the other nations of Europe and the United States into a global conflict which we now call World War II, there was no such thing as World War I.  As recently as the late 1930s the international military confrontation that encompassed humanity during the second decade of the twentieth century was simply known as The Great War.  For the several years following the crash of Wall Street in 1929 the citizens of our country could only tell you that a bombshell had been dropped on the economy of the nation.  Many rich were suddenly poor; a struggle for the survival of the average American was underway, not too different from other such calamities that the country had earlier suffered.  Not until well into the postwar period did the enormity and sweep of the crisis become so visible in hindsight that that crushing period was granted the title of The Great Depression.   
                                     
Crises of national impact have to go a stretch and maybe even complete themselves before we understand their lasting, pivotal effects well enough for them to earn a durable appellation.
                                     
After Berlin was conquered in 1945, conditions between our country and the Soviet Union, a World War II ally, suddenly grew quite frosty and tense.  What descended upon the world during that period was actually given a name before it had hardly gotten underway: The Cold War.  The hindsight of history was not required for that titling.  But because of it, the sudden paranoid mood into which the U.S. was thrown spawned an official witch hunt that victimized citizens who were suspected of being a part of a massive Communist plot to take over our government and institutions, simply because they had been sympathetic at one time to Communist ideology and social aspiration before the war. 
                                     
Spearheading this witch hunt was a body of Congressmen called the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), empowered to subpoena anyone it chose and subject them to candid cross examination before the news media and hold them in contempt of Congress if they did not cooperate by recanting their alleged views and naming others they knew who had so “erred”.  Especially subject to this harassment was the motion picture industry.  Hollywood bigwigs largely supported the hunt and sought to ferret out from their ranks all “pinkos”.  Those of us who lived through that time were only aware that a seismic crackdown was underway to preserve the principles of freedom.  It was some time later when it took on the titling of The Hollywood Black List.  Officials of the movie industry who were convicted and many who associated with them were unable to get work for many years afterward, some not ever afterward.   Those sent to prison were given the name of the Hollywood Ten.  
                                     
One of those victims was a man by the name of Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter who had contributed an enormous quantity of work including many high profile and widely admired motion pictures for various Hollywood studios.  He is now regarded as the highest esteemed Hollywood writer up until 1947, when he was required to answer a subpoena and confront the Committee.  He refused to recognize the authority of the body to grill him about his personal political beliefs.  For his refusal he had to spend the greater part of a year in prison and could not get work for almost a decade later, though in the meantime he wrote under various assumed names for abysmal wages.  This movie tells his story and how he struggled to survive with his wife and two children while bearing the stigma of a traitor in the minds of many influential people and many U.S. citizens on the street who recognized him. 
                                     
It was a government sponsored smear campaign.  These men were incarcerated for something that was not actually a crime at all – contempt of Congress.  As I understand it, one can only be sentenced for contempt of a judicial body, not a legislative one.  (If that is not the case, it certainly ought to be.)  But the mood of the country was so paranoid at the time and fearful of Russian infiltration that the heads of state, including a right wing leaning Supreme Court and the followers of the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy, were willing to look the other way as HUAC destroyed lives and reputations.
                                      
Trumbo’s experience serves as an air tight look into the period of the Black List, a vital and revealing journey.  Giving the story its tough but quite human quality is a dynamite performance by Bryan Cranston.  He never runs away with the show; he plays it close to the vest but strikes all the right notes that John McNamara’s screenplay and Bruce Alexander Cook’s biography were apparently written to sound out.  Cranston has won numerous acting nominations including the Oscar and Jay Roach has received fine kudos for his evenhanded directing. 
                                     
In a very real sense the heroes of this tale are strangely enough two major Hollywood producers.  Their names are Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas.  Preminger in 1958, years after Trumbo’s release from prison, hired him to write the screenplay adaptation of Leon Uris’s best-selling novel “Exodus” and Douglas singled him out for the titanic production of “Spartacus”.  Both were warned by studio executives that if they did not fire Trumbo their careers would be ended and they would never work in the film industry again.  Hedda Hopper (played powerfully by Helen Mirren), a scurrilous gossip columnist who commanded a readership of millions ready to be brainwashed by anything she wrote, not averse herself to blackmail among other qualities, assured them that their pictures would be boycotted all up and down the country.  But the two men persisted, and both films released in the fall of 1960 bore the name of Dalton Trumbo in their screenplay credits.  What happened as a result?  Both movies were blockbusters at the box office; “Spartacus”, probably Trumbo’s finest work, took in more receipts for that year than any other release.  The Black List was dead bones.  In the film we see Trumbo moved to tears when he sees his name again at last in the opening credits of “Spartacus”, his long suffering wife (Diane Lane) at his side.  In the remaining sixteen years of his life he went on to do many other writings without ever again having to resort to an alias. 
                                     
Though the film is something of a political statement, it is also a very gripping family drama.  After his return from prison, Trumbo had to move his wife and kids out of a high class California neighborhood and into an inner city middle class residence.  He was hard pressed to feed and clothe and was forced to write, under various pseudonyms, scads of Grade B and Grade C stuff for a tin horn company run by a man named King (John Goodman).  King, fighting his own financial battles, required him to turn them out almost end to end, which kept the man at his typewriter almost constantly day and night.  The pressure of the work took its toll on his health (he was a lifelong chain smoker) and on the emotional state of his family life.  He became so obsessive that he started to alienate his kids, as he used them to deliver scripts for him; it became a boisterous high tension family business.  In one heart wrenching scene he refuses to be interrupted from typing to come to the table to celebrate his daughter’s birthday; the girl’s pleadings have no effect and she is left crushed in spirit.  What kept them all so faithful to him is anybody’s guess, before he awoke to the danger of what he was doing.  But then finally came 1958 and Preminger and Douglas, and all that changed. 
                                     
We have to respect Trumbo for his refusal to conduct any vendetta against those who had almost totally ruined him.  Soon after the restoration of his name the Screen Writers Guild honored him for the sum total of his work; at the end of the movie he is receiving the honor and gives a speech that is quite stirring and without rancor, citing the struggle between good and evil in everyone.  It is a bid for reconciliation.  Cranston delivers it magnificently.  Trumbo was also belatedly awarded the two Oscars for screenplays that others had gotten credit for during the suffering years (“Roman Holiday” and “The Brave One”).
                                     
The film is for sure a kind of tribute to his resilience, but ultimately it is not about poor Trumbo.  Actually he got off quite well compared to others of the Ten.  Some died without ever being publically vindicated or having their professional status restored.  It is about a blighted period in our nation’s history.  The verdict of that history has landed unquestionably on the side of the writers.  It is now evident that what was allowed to happen bears striking resemblance to what was going on in the very Communist controlled nations whose alleged infiltration the Black List was purported to prevent – people judged not for laws broken or crimes committed but for their personal beliefs.  It was on a smaller scale the kind of purge that Stalin and others were practicing on the other side of the world on a vast one.  People being singled out as disseminators of poison doctrine!  It was the closest our country has ever come to the likeness of an Orwellian thought police state.  Pray that likeness will never be seen again inside these shores.  


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.