West Side Story (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

2 hrs & 31 min, color, 1961

Here is a trivia question for all you movie goers and fans: Who is the only director ever fired from a film in the middle of production who went on nevertheless to win an Oscar for that very direction? 

The answer: Jerome Robbins, co-director with Robert Wise on the movie version of “West Side Story”.  He was fired for becoming over the months of production extremely difficult to work with.  Robbins, as many of you know, was responsible for designing the choreography on the musical, not only for the movie, but for the original stage production.  In a very real sense it is his show.  And because the work of the choreographer was so essential to the staging, he was given the title credit of Director.  Practically everybody in the huge cast did both singing and dancing during the running time, and Wise was not a dance director.  He could never have brought the picture off without Robbins’ genius.  It is a picture of extensive body movement, not just in the dancing but in the walking and running and fast-stepping of the players in the fine points of their performances.  I suppose Wise oversaw the dramatic close-ups, but it was Robbins who gave the brilliant film its pace and its beat. 

It was an unprecedented screen work upon first release in 1961.  Leonard Bernstein’s score and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics were unusually demanding on the cast and crew.  It made a sound that had never been made on the Hollywood screen before, and dancing had never been used on screen before as we see it.  The Rock era was only five years along, and movie audiences had not yet grown accustomed to the strange new offbeat/backbeat/street beat, jagged footloose-ness and finger snapping of the words and melodies.  Without a doubt Robbins was an essential in the movie’s creation.       

But what tripped him up was his perfectionism.  He was never satisfied, changing his mind over and over about the setup of a choreographed scene.  On the stage he was working from scratch and had much more authority and flexibility; there was much more room for experimentation.  But making a movie is vastly different from mastering a stage.  The result of his obstinacy was tightened control by United Artists.  Not only was he threatening to lengthen the shooting time exponentially and put the producers in jeopardy of having players leaving the film to fulfill previously made commitments elsewhere, but money was also a strong consideration.  He was costing them  a lot of it at a time when movies were generally in a slump and studios were tight with a buck.  Those of you under fifty years of age in all likelihood are not aware of that.  

In some ways the stage is a stronger medium than the screen, but in other respects, quite visible and dominant here, the screen has greater possibilities.  The movie’s opening is quite a bender of expectation.  Well before there is any personal confrontation we get a sweeping overview of New York from the lower Battery up to a west side playground by way of an aerial air born camera pointed straight down  and panning steadily in a leftward direction, with finger snapping music slowly coming upon the audience’s ear.  It is like being told that “Somewhere in the big city a heart beats – maybe many hearts.  Dreams and soiled ambitions are perking in a pot.  So let’s go find and visit them.”  Then it ends with a fast zoom shot down onto the playground.  

Actually the movie got made just in time.  Once shooting stopped, that entire section of the city was bulldozed to make room for Lincoln Center, upon which construction started immediately afterward.  That means that there is nowhere anyone can visit today in which the settings can be found.  I do not know whether it was planned that way or not, but if the city designers and the studio had not mutually cooperated, the results film-wise might have been disastrous.  

Now here is another trivia question: What famous movie critic thought “West Side Story” was corny and crude and predicted that the music would be passe and forgotten in not more than a decade.  The answer: Pauline Kael, famed critic for the New Republic magazine in her early years and for The New Yorker in her later life, not to mention her many books about movies and various special articles she wrote.  I will not go into her life; I simply mention that she made many enemies among her fellow critics and wrapped herself in a mantle of controversy that grew more and more thick the older she got before her death from Parkinson’s disease in 2001 at age 82, many years after her retirement.  She did have a shrewd way with words and could be very entertaining for readers with her humor.  She had admirers but not a lot of close friends in show business.   

It is needless to point it out but I will anyway: Kael could not have been more wrong in her prediction.  It is almost universally agreed that “West Side Story” is Bernstein’s greatest musical achievement, and considering all he composed over his long and productive life and career, that is saying a bunch.  His melodies from that scenario are heard quite frequently, on radio, TV and just about every medium you can think of.  The play has been produced dozens of times in various venues and continues to emerge within the clear hearing of the public.  And what is remarkable is that despite all the unconventional material the show contains, there are easy to follow melodies that cozy up to us with such sweet effect, ones that are not sentimental but that are heartfelt and passionate and have soul and radiance.  Every musical number is without doubt a showstopper, an event – a bridge crossed to move the plot along, not a detour or a mere dalliance.  Everything that happens musically contributes something essential.

At the core of it we have the soul and spirit of Shakespeare.  The story is basically “Romeo and Juliet”, the bard’s timeless tale about young lovers trying to penetrate walls of social division and hate to make a chosen life for themselves in the face of impending tragedy, only instead of the streets of Verona, Italy during the Renaissance we have the mean streets of New York City in the middle of the 20^th century.  Instead of two prominent well established feuding families acting out of bitter, age old rivalry we have delinquent street gangs baiting each other into open warfare to get control of neighborhood territory.  One is the native Jets and the other Puerto Rican immigrant kids who call themselves the Sharks.  Every segment of the plot comes right out of the centuries-old play starting, as the play does, in a public place in which the antagonists annoy, insult, punch, provoke, trip, chase and finally clash with each other.  Only while Shakespeare employs mostly words, Bernstein uses nothing but soundtrack music.  The seemingly runaway score proves, for those willing to get into it, not runaway at all.  It has design and organized energy and leads somewhere decisive.  It is, aside from being ingeniously composed, very forceful and confrontational.  

I know I am not giving anything away to say that the story revolves around a native teen boy named Tony (derived from Anton) weary of his delinquent past, and Maria, a sheltered Puerto Rican girl just recently arrived in the States from the Caribbean. They are the tragic, star-crossed lovers caught between the rival gangs.  Natalie Wood scores high as Maria and Richard Beymer does an earnest job of making Tony stand tall and strong, even though his sweet baby face at times gets in the way of what should be a tough demeanor.  Their scenes together draw out the very best in each, until the climactic sequence when death parts them.  Wood dominates the entire closing sequence; it is one of her finest screen moments.  We watch her turn from a dreamy kid into a hateful antagonist herself, from fantasy to crushing reality.  

Then a film that has thrived on fast movement and colliding fury fades gently out in grief and silent mortification.  All that is left are distant echoes and melodic recaps over closing credits.  Tre-men-dous!

But there is another player in this tragedy who deserves the highest marks of all.  Her name is Rita Moreno; she  fills the part of Maria’s friend Anita,  the lover of her older brother Ricardo (George Chakiris), leader of the Sharks, and when I say fills it, I mean she  makes every second of it her own.  She is totally electrifying in every respect.  Hers may be a supporting role, but I cannot imagine the film without her.  She is a very active and aggressive force, oozing sensuality out of every pore, a feisty foil for male high-mindedness all about her.  She strikes chords that ring the rafters in every direction.  She is quite a dancer too; she and Chakiris in the “America” number on the rooftop do some configuring that still astounds me after all these decades.  They are in every regard over the top.  (Moreno can currently be seen as the mother in the TV series “One Day at a Time” recently reviewed on this blog.)  

And a word needs to be said for Russ Tamblyn, who plays Riff, the acting leader of the Jets.  He is sharp and right on cue in every scene in which he appears; he too is quite an accomplished hoofer.  It was a pleasure to watch him, both in the choreography and in the dramatic moments.  

Anita and Ricardo try to take Maria and her roving eye in tow, but she slips out of their control and falls hook, line and sinker for Tony, and that is when the big trouble begins.  That is when the tribal solidarity throws up a roadblock to love and understanding.  That is when the latent savagery comes to the surface.     

“West Side Story” will live on and on.  It is the saga of displaced youth struggling for survival in a world others have created, youth forlorn, uprooted and misdirected.  It is the kind of thing that deserves front page attention in any age, including ours, wherein such deathly dangers threaten to snuff out otherwise beautiful lives.      

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

Beware the Idolizers (Essay by Bob Racine)

In the New Testament Jesus describes what it would be like at a last judgment.  At least according to the literal text he does.  The souls of men and women would be separated into two groups, something like sheep and goats.  The “righteous” sheep are escorted into eternal life and the “unrighteous” are sent wailing and screaming into a yawning hell awaiting them.  Even though I am suspicious of the text as written (I prefer to think of it as a fictitious parable, not a prediction), I find one detail most fascinating and that is the reaction on the part of the ones consigned to heaven.  It seems they are surprised!  They are surprised to find themselves among the chosen, surprised by their fate.  

They are unaware that they have done any outstanding good during their lives.  When did we ever do the kind and considerate things the Judge describes?  How do we rate this special commendation?  We are just plain, ordinary people who did the best we knew how.  This outcome relates beautifully to something Jesus says in an earlier passage about not letting the right hand know what the left hand is doing.  Let your good deeds become a matter of simple habit.  Do not sound the trumpet when you do them.  

Most decent people are a bit fearful about getting singled out for big awards.  I say most!  There are the braggarts and the showoffs and the egotists to be sure, who consider winning top honors the be-all and the end-all. But most of the members of the human family do not make such an assumption.   

I am no exception to this rule.  Ever since my teen years I have had those in my extended company try to pin on me some badge of sanctity and superiority.  When I was in high school, there were those in my peer group (not a majority, just a small few) who, because of my expressed wish to become a clergyman and my consistent attendance at my local church, bestowed upon me the rank of “good ole boy” or outstanding Christian or maybe simply someone to look up to.  That reputation was significantly enhanced when my home church selected me to be Youth Pastor during what was called Youth Week, when young people supposedly occupied all the offices of the church for seven days.  Then when I won a local Better Speakers contest and traveled to the state Baptist retreat to represent my local Baptist community, I was told that I had the gift for public speaking and because I could make with the theological, evangelical talk, all my closest friends assumed that I was especially endowed and that seminary was surely in my future.  None of this is to say that they fell at my feet or openly regaled me when I walked into a room.  I was not a star, but I could often feel that I was being distanced by my peers and by grownups as someone already set apart.  

When I was dating my first wife, who was active in my home church, we were thought of as the ideal couple.  A few adults in the congregation actually said this to our faces.  It was assumed early in our courtship that we were bound for the altar. As I see it now, we were in a very subtle manner almost herded into matrimony.  At the very least we were subjected to enormous pressure.  We had a reputation to live up to.  

Did we believe what was being told to us by implication?  We did indeed, and we paid a very bitter price for doing so, because we were anything but the ideal couple.  After we tied the knot, we almost at once began to have serious difficulties.  Did we let friends and acquaintances know we were in trouble?  Certainly not!  We were married for three solid years and our announcement of pending divorce was a real shocker to all our Baptist acquaintances.

In some Baptist eyes I was suddenly a pariah.  I was not publicly humiliated or ostracized, but the breezes that blew in my direction took on a new coolness.  At the very least I was on trial again.  Yes, I was called of God, but after that I had to work harder to prove my commitment.  Being a divorced minister in those days was frowned upon.  Marriage was for life, and the violation of that bond was not quite but very close to being a sacrilege.  

I am pleased to say that I had many good things in store for me over the following half century, that I recovered my good name and my sense of calling, and I found out that my best talents lay in other domains than the parish ministry.  Life has been every bit as rewarding as I had hoped it would be.  

So when recently I learned that someone in the church my wife Ruby and I  now attend and have belonged to since the early 1980s, someone we know and respect very much, told others in the congregation that we are the ideal Christian couple, I recoiled.  It was like that mantle seeking me out again, even at the age of eighty-four.  My wife and I are happily married now for thirty-six years, but we are anything but the ideal pair, if there really is such a thing.  We’ve had our problems, just like all other couples do; we have to re-create our lives all over again each and every day. When I heard about this report of us, I wanted to scream, “Spare us this!  Don’t lay this burden of expectation on us!  Let us be the fumbling, stumbling, seeking folk that we are.  Don’t idolize us.  The top of that pedestal is a very dizzy place to be and very risky,”    

Just a few days ago before this writing, Ruby and I heard a complimentary remark about us to which I had anything but a negative reaction.  We have two very dear young friends who recently told us that we are an “inspiration” to them.  Now that is language I can relate to.  I am pleased to know that we have inspired people toward action and productivity.  You do not have to be the ideal to accomplish that.  You do not have to be a superior individual or have reached greater heights of success.  These two people  have already outshone us in their chosen fields, so we know they are not coming from some assumed position of inferiority.   They are two folk who have welcomed us into their lives, who seek us out and we them.  Their friendship is an abundant blessing to us year after year.  And the lives they live are evidence of their commitment to high and resplendent ideals; it is not just empty words.  We know that coming from them the praise has deep meaning.  They do not lock us into some Holy Other cocoon and observe us from a distance.  They are themselves an inspiration, and they know it.   We are very, very close.            

Inspiration!  That is what true leadership really comes down to.  A President should be an inspiration to his people.  The Presidency is about more than making laws or getting laws passed or performing ceremonies and even more than making treaties or arrangements with foreign powers, more than foreign policy.  He should be the embodiment of values and ethical standards.  A President should have a vision pertaining to the world order, not just ambitions for his own country or his own political party or his own special commercial interests.  This leader should be more than a voice heralding a subversive brand of populism.  He should have character.  This is not say that he should be perfect or that all his decision-making should be correct.  As a human being he is subject to mistakes and to error.  But his very person should be enhancing for all who hear him, all who look to him.  

Donald Trump, by my standards, fails in every one of these respects.  He has a bullying way about him.  He is anything but the leader of all the people.  He has to react to every criticism, has to make wrong all who challenge his judgment.  His attempt over his first year in office at running the government as if it were a large commercial corporation has been disastrous.  And this is but the tip of his iceberg.  In short, he is a dangerous man.

As I see it, he does not really inspire anyone, not even his base.  He just has a lot of officials he has selected running scared, looking for the least opposing way they can hold on to their offices and maintain their personal political careers.  He thrives upon a widespread distrust of Hillary Clinton and upon those who think any conservative in Congress is better than any liberal, however besmirched a moral reputation might be.  I appeal to the Republican National Committee to prime another candidate for the White House and urge Trump to resign his office.  I do not expect that they will, but time will tell how enlightened the electorate will choose to become, enough to make better choices.  God, I hope so!  I pray so!     

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

Michael Clayton (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

2 hours, color, 2007

Can you imagine what it would feel like to wake up one fine day and realize that the cause to which you have devoted enormous energy and commitment for many years, heart and soul, is just the opposite of what you had always assumed it was?  Here we have a man who thinks he has served a humane and noble purpose by pouring himself into the manufacture of a weed killer that allegedly will enrich the soil of thousands of failing farms across the nation and lift the fortunes of people struggling to survive, who discovers that the product is a deadly cancerous poison that will have just the opposite effect upon the ground in which it is planted.  Let us further imagine that this man is a bipolar individual who can only maintain emotional balance if he takes a stash of prescribed drugs on a daily basis.  Add this tenuous condition to the rude awakening and you have someone who while going off the meds becomes a walking dangerous liability to the company whose product he is supposed to be promoting, a person teetering on the edge of madness.  

Such a one is the pivotal character around whom this legal thriller is woven.  As played by Tom Wilkinson he lights quite a fire.  But the director Tony Gilroy introduces him in a most unconventional manner.  We hear him in voiceover for about the first three minutes or so of the footage.  He is spewing forth a mouthful of seemingly incoherent protestation, as the camera peruses the normal activity of the New York City law firm called UNorth, by which he is employed.  The sharp contrast between the apparently peaceful work scene and the demented rantings of Wilkinson is rather strange and unsettling.  What, we are inclined to wonder, is going on?  All on the surface is calm and civil while the voice we hear suggests that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.  The first hint we get that all is not rosy with UNorth is a phone call from a journalist picked up by one of the firm’s top flight lawyers Marty Bach (Sidney Pollack).  The unseen journalist is sniffing out rumors that the firm is about to merge with a British company, an inquiry Bach treats dismissively. 

The frantic words in voiceover are being addressed to a man named Michael. The message has been sent by phone or is about to be.  Presumably this Michael is someone attached to the firm, someone that the troubled man considers his only confidant, the only one who stands a chance of being a sympathetic listener to the outrageous tale he is trying to tell in his broken, disjointed speech.  It is not until a few minutes later that we learn who Michael is.  The name is Michael Clayton, the lead character that George Clooney is about to portray.  (Yes, the movie’s title is one and the same with the name of the lead man.)

Who is Clayton?  We meet him as he walks away from a poker game without finishing it.  He looks dejected and ill at ease, beaten, and within the following hour after he drives away in his car, an attempt is made on his life.  A flashback fills us in on why.  Clayton holds a law degree and was once a district attorney but has not practiced any law for some years.  Instead UNorth has used him as a “fixer”, someone who looks after the private lives of the law firm’s clients.  In plain, down-to-earth language he is hired to keep people out of trouble, to settle personal crises before they become the kind of major crises that could tarnish the name of the firm.  Clayton, who knows nothing about the fraudulent claims regarding the weed killer, UNorth’s product, has smarted under this job description, fixer, for years and has failed to be restored to the prestige of a practicing company attorney.  He calls himself a janitor.  

One thing that contributed to this status is his failure to make a success out of a project, once entered into with his brother, to erect a thriving restaurant business, the brother having turned out to be a self-destructive addict who ran the experiment into debt and sank it.  Clayton is still trying to sell off the property but having trouble getting a good offer.  He himself has a history of a gambling fixation.  So, no, our title character is not a heroic type.  He is kept where he is allegedly because he is good at cleaning up messes but has not yet proven capable of cleaning up his own.   

We learn that the frantic man we hear on the soundtrack is named Arthur, a recent middle-aged widower and an attorney who has unknowingly created the scandal that, as a matter of fact, has already surfaced in the form of a three billion dollar class action law suit.  Arthur is finally seen at the end of about the first half hour in Milwaukee hearing testimony, during which he does something obscene in public that is a major embarrassment to UNorth; he is arrested and of course Clayton is sent into the ring to bring the beast under control.  But Arthur soon becomes aware that Michael is not the sympathetic ear he has expected.  It seems that Arthur’s language about deception and cancer makes it impossible for Michael to understand what his friend is talking about.  When Arthur is murdered, the crime made to look like a drug overdose suicide, Michael’s suspicions are raised to such a height that he starts an investigation of his own and turns up some sordid documentation that gives shape to Arthur’s paranoid complaints.  This investigation puts Michael’s life in danger as well, hence the murder attempt already mentioned.  

Behind all this nefarious activity is none other than the chief counsel for UNorth, a high level woman named Karen Crowder, played brilliantly by Tilda Swinton.  (In fact, she won a Supporting Actress Oscar for this performance, one she rightly earned.)  Karen has a prodigious investment in the success of the firm, having climbed to the top tier over some years and still perfecting her bargaining and selling skills.  She almost singlehandedly has been put in charge of protecting the reputation of the supposed weed killing product.  She has lots of personal capital riding on the favorable outcome of the law suit leveraged against her firm.  She is not alone in the subterfuge; others collude with her, but she goes beyond even what they expect in hiring the assassins that plague Arthur and Michael.  

I like the way Gilroy directs her.  She does not come off as some sensuous personality using her seductive manner to hook her buyers, no guns blazing approach.  In fact, she is not very attractive at all.  She has other more subtle devices for beguiling the customers, and we get to see her in her solitary moments rehearsing her presentations; she comes across as clever but a bit tremulous.  In fact the first time we lay eyes on her she is in seclusion, half dressed and in a total nervous sweat.  

There is one other notable character in this drama, a grade school boy named Henry (Austin Williams), Michael’s son, a very sharp, curious and much read youngster who exerts a peculiar influence upon the nearly insane Arthur, a man he only talks to over the phone and never meets.  Henry seems to enjoy most of the time he spends with his divorced father when they are together.  The two of them have a very special moment when Michael makes his son aware of the gifts he possesses and urges him to keep excelling and to bypass the traps others in the family including himself have fallen into.  In a movie full of tough talk and ugly dealings and brazen encounters it is a warm and tender scene much to be savored.  I am so pleased that screenwriter Gilroy included it.  (Yes, Gilroy both wrote and directed.)   

“Michael Clayton” is one of the most powerful and penetrating screen dramas to show up over the past twenty years.  Released in 2007, I am just now reviewing it, because in that year this blog had not yet been set up; it would be five years later before I got started.  I have seen it several times studying its intricate plot structure and its brilliant interweave of personalities and its ever so insightful dialogue and its memorable encounters between the lead characters.  Nothing fanciful ever crops up in Director Gilroy’s devices; every move he makes is consistent in style and tone with every other.  The picture smolders; it never gets away from him.

The R rating is fitting; there are words spoken that you would not want your preschoolers or preteens to hear.  We are taken into a world that the decent ones among us would not want to visit for real, but it all shapes up into a morality play of Shakespearian quality.  It carries the echo of St. Paul’s reference to “evil in high places”.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

Home Front by Kristin Hannah (Book Review by Bob Racine)

Published 2012 by St Martin’s Press 

The following quote is taken from the novel I am reviewing, an instance in which a mother is giving some sage advice to her twelve-year-old daughter, a mother who as a child herself experienced neglect and abuse and who endeavors to give the benefit of what hard times have taught her to her child: “One smile can matter.  Let people know you’re ready to be their friend, and if they give you a chance, take it—don’t be afraid. . .You never know when a sentence, a hello, can change your life.”  The girl is struggling with the emotional aftereffect of rejection and bullying dished out by some school mates of hers.  Not only are the words themselves sound instruction to be coming from a parent, but they take on extraordinary significance when they are read in the context of the book’s plot situation.  They are not being spoken in person, mother and daughter sitting side by side on a living room couch.  They are being transmitted to the child from halfway around the world.       

In “Home Front” we are taken into the life of an American family upon which the Iraq War delivers a stunning blow, only in this case it is not the father, the man of the family, who is snatched away for military service, but the mother.  

Jolene and Michael Zarkades are residents of Washington State, married for well over a decade, parents of two small girls, Betsy now twelve and Lulu now four.  From all appearances their lives are nothing out of the ordinary.  He is a successful trial lawyer in Seattle who commutes by ferry each day.  She is a trained helicopter pilot who belongs on a voluntary basis to the Army National Guard and always has since the two of them tied the marital knot. She thinks of hers as the best part time job on the planet.  The early morning hours of the day belong to her children.  The intervening hours are taken up in the air and she is there for them after school at the end of the day’s maneuvers.  Husband and wife have fallen into a very typical pattern: the father more wedded to his profession than to his family and the mother obliged to provide the discipline and order and nurture for the children. 

But all is not smooth sailing for them. The routine of their lives has become an irritant for Michael and his absorption in his work a growing irritant for Jolene, though most of the time she is in denial about it.  Their sex life has ground to a halt and intimate sharing is a seldom thing.  

The rickety domestic arrangement does apparently work—UNTIL the inception of the Iraq War.  Jolene finds herself deployed into the conflict and the convenient structure of their family life is decimated.   The only way left open to Jolene for providing guidance to her girls is through long distance e-mail letter, hence the exchange I earlier referred to.  Suddenly Michael is faced with the frightening prospect of becoming the sole parent on the premises.  He greets the news with disbelief and disorientation.  One sore point that this turn of events plays upon is his deep dislike not only of Jolene’s military connection but of the military crowd among whom she mingles on special occasions.  Her deployment forces him to face his dark resentments and to assume responsibilities at home that he never expected to shoulder.    

The author is Kristin Hannah, a writer with remarkable range and astute imagination.  This is the first of her novels I have read, but I am certain it will not be the last.  This fictional family is a challenge to both heart and mind right from the early pages and they take us on a journey of soul and spirit that will be difficult for me to forget however long I am fortunate enough to remain in this mortal body.  You look in vain to find the slightest wisp of soap anywhere in this narrative. You know you are in today’s real world – a world that is not always kind to the innocent or to the hard pressed working man or even to the committed energies of working mothers and a world that can be raw and brutal.  All the characters, including Mila, Michael’s mother, Tami, a longtime friend of Jolene’s, whom she met while in flight school and who gets deployed to Iraq with her, and Tami’s husband and son, who live next door, are fully alive and easily accessible.  

Hannah has superior knowledge of her characters; she knows what makes each of them tick, what drives them and how they size up and measure their world.  She never misses a single beat of any heart.  Not an angle or a tension or a fear is neglected.  It certainly could not have been an easy novel to compose.  The tempo of the tale is wonderfully strong and consistent

But nothing gets belabored.  Her sense of economy is faultless.  She knows how long to linger over a tumultuous scene and when to move on.  The story is told alternately from Michael’s and Jolene’s point of view.  The ordeal each goes through is portrayed in the most precise, agonizing terms.  And “ordeal” is not a figurative term in this case.  They are both purged through and through – purged of idols of the mind, of the remnants of their earlier innocence, of barriers long ago erected against growing pains, of rose-colored assessments of evil and good, and of defensive habits of thought and action that past grief and loss have engendered.  The rupture of their domestic arrangement is at times excruciating.  Neither one is ever the same again, especially after tragedy occurs.  The war leaves Jolene leveled in mind and body, after she loses a leg and has to sweat out the coma into which the crash of her helicopter leaves Tami, who is much more than just a friend.  She has for years been a staunch emotional buttress for Jolene, whose alcoholic parents died in a car crash when she was only seventeen, leaving her on her own.   

But the hardest readjustment of all is required of the kids.  What they go through really shakes the pillars loose. How do you explain to a preadolescent let alone a four-year-old why their mother, the woman who gave them birth and nursed them, who provided the sturdy shoulder to which they have always clung, must put herself in harm’s way for the expanse of a whole year?  Hannah does not skim over their emotional holocaust.  The way she depicts their crying spells drained me of tears at two or three points.  I am not sure how Hannah does it, but I almost believe I can hear them crying right off the page.  The dialogue she puts into their mouths transcends literary limitations.  Betsy goes into rebellion; Lulu is assaulted by all kinds of sensitive little girl fears; her whimpering is for real.  As I earlier pointed out, no soap was needed to drive things home.  The struggle of Michael as he copes with their needs tests him right down to the bottom layer of his being.  How does he go on with his professional life as a trial lawyer, supervising a whole law firm, and be present to his children’s needs and crises without the assistance of their mother?        

Actually it is his work as a defense lawyer that delivers a strangely ironic twist to his struggle.  It seems that his current major case has to do with the defense of a man in his twenties who is charged with the murder of his wife, a man who comes across at the beginning as remote and uncommunicative, but when he starts to talk Michael discovers that he is an Iraq War vet suffering from PTSD.   This opens a gigantic door of opportunity for Michael.  His involvement in the case affords Hannah the chance to air out the issue of postwar treatment of returning vets (but without usurping the place of the personal family crisis in the book) and gives Michael a handle on how to understand and minister to Jolene’s pathological state when she returns from the same War.  Hers is almost as dire as that of Michael’s defendant.  

If Jolene and Michael were a married couple of solid rapport with each other, if they were two people deeply committed to each other and to the sacred core of their marriage, that would have been a plus factor that would make a significant difference.  A deployed soldier needs to have strong backing from the family s/he leaves behind.  But it so happens that Michael, practically on the eve of her departure, presents Jolene with the news that he does not think he still loves her.  Can we begin to imagine what it would be like to depart for the battlefront with those words or words to that effect ringing in the wife/mother’s ears.  Jolene leaves for Iraq doubtful that her marriage can be saved, though she has to leave the girls with Michael, there being no other option and there being no opportunity for further discussion or counselling.  The Army will not wait.  Her spirit is half crippled before she ever gets going and it is this uncertainty that the readers of the book take with them on that journey, a shadow that looms.      

Yes, “Home Front” is a novel of pungent emotional effect, very demanding on the human heart; I got hooked very early and finished it in just a little over a week – something most out of the ordinary for this slow reader.  Without letting any spoilers escape from the bag just let me say that love and honesty do triumph.  

Very timely!  Most enthralling!

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

Repast: The Testimony of the Loaves and Fishes (Poetry by Bob Racine)

The following poem is one I have been working on for quite some time.  I guess I have been timid about sharing it due to its bizarre nature and its strange language.  Much of the poetry I have written over the years, like this one, has been inspired by incidents in the New Testament.  But this one might take some getting used to, so I strongly suggest that you not stop with only one read-through.  Give it a second and maybe third reading in the hopes of it becoming clearer and/or more meaningful.  It covers more territory than at first may be apparent.                        

Mark me well, name me not. 

Only know how my paltry life ceased,   

when I saved the day and the same day saved me. 

Millions of grains of cosmic truth assembled 

with five thousand I was to feed. 

A tough Prophet’s act to follow, yet I became 

the unwitting subject of abundance.  

Mark me well, name me not. 

Only know where I’ve been, where I go,  

what I know, what I am –  

a progeny of soil and water, land and sea, 

grain and sperm, a fertilized egg  

in the ovum of a little known place. 

Before that day, 

mindless morsels in bondage to human appetite, 

mere loaves and fishes without even a pauper’s praise. 

This to remain, but for the grace of someone 

building a new Kingdom of Light.

Mark well the airtight refuge I took from him 

in a traveler’s pouch. 

Know, if you will, the field of force he unleashed,

laying siege to my cloister. 

I saw him not as he harvested

thousands of grains of truth in his teeth. The scandal of 

the man, the Prophet, the Kingdom Builder, 

the Truth Reaper, lost to me in my functional innocence.

The plentiful harvest, hands that labored in the ground, 

the plow that split the furrow –  

I was of the fruit they had borne.  And now 

a harvest in the making that would feed forever 

the sons and daughters of earth! 

A seed must fall into the ground and die to give birth.

I had sprung from its core, and only he who now 

stirred above me knew my worth – 

the Lord of the harvest yet to be.

I marked myself well –  

what I was – lackluster crumbs to sustain 

lackluster life, bartered for a peasant’s pittance, 

fated to be human refuse. 

What was I in my meagerness at such a 

cosmic renaissance?  Out of my element 

I awaited the sentence of human forgetfulness

And yet, of me he spoke, as of the seed that could move 

a mound of rock and return its abundance to the sower. 

I knew not that I was of such ancestry as had given the Word 

its flesh, such flesh and such Word as now shed its light 

upon the living and the dead.

Then into the void, as pebbles upon still water, there fell 

the murmurs of a milling crowd, the shuffling of feet 

uncertain of home and what somehow I knew to be 

the invisible soul’s longings laid bare 

amidst spectator hunger and ambivalence.  

And I heard my summons, 

the curl and crackle of the cloth about me, leaving me bare 

before air and soil and water and twilight chill and 

expectant throngs of humanity awaiting my pleasure. 

“Cover me!  Cover me!” I would have cried, but heaven

had not made me the gift of a voice, at other times 

so unenviable.

It mattered not.  I was spared from attrition 

by the Prophet’s genius stroke.  

Destiny marked the place, and I, if the attributes of 

flesh and blood  had yet become mine, would have known 

to call this repast by one of love’s many names, 

my then throbbing elements borne up in hands reaching

into heaven. 

This one who placed himself above the mollification of 

the mass mind, this healer out of the world, valued me 

above the genre of raw human necessity, made me a party 

to his compassion, to intangibles I would never perceive, 

tangibles to become reconciled with intangibles 

all about me.

For all this I was rendered immortal!

The five thousand, unmarked by destiny, nameless in 

their mass generality, not perceiving, partook of me, and 

began their mortal trek homeward.  They saw not that I then 

passed into history to witness in their stead 

last Passovers and betrayals, crucifixions and Eucharists, 

vow takings and idolatries of sacred covenants.

Mine is the miracle of odyssey, 

to be touched by more than I could ever touch, 

to bear no cross, only a sign read by some, 

of things taken in and recomposed to embellish 

the weak and the hollow,

of life in substance and fullness.

Mortification – ’tis beyond my simple extremity, 

yet now I tear apart, I scatter wide,

in tempo with hearts that break for disease and distress. 

Arms to embrace – they are denied me, yet now 

I delight to be dropped on mercy missions penetrating

the wide world.  To love and befriend, win or gain favor – 

such gifts outside my purview.  

Yet now nations call to me.  I confer with them 

across their dinner tables.

But for those in high places, draining

the oceans and granaries of the world, for those 

crazed in their gluttony, fouling nature’s nest and 

crippling my kindred, for the eat-meat-greet mobs, 

in their gusto mistaken for dedicated enclaves, 

I have nothing – no tears to weep.  I must defer to

the better breed of flesh and blood.  It is for them to 

cut a delicate path through callousness, extravagance, 

monopoly and greed.  I am otherwise enjoined 

by powers impervious to human loss and shall be, 

as long as Earth is a sovereign substance in living space.

Mark me well, name me not. 

Only know where I have been since that day, what I 

sew and reap evermore.  

I answer the squalling summons of hunger and need, but

I hunger no more myself.  Before soil and water and 

expectant throngs I move and germinate and wax 

mutely eloquent, no longer jealous of any act I must follow, 

favored to pass, in search of other multitudes, through 

all that stands or crawls, while prophets and peacemakers hold

my intangible worth in escrow for the millions yet unborn.  

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

The Bane of Human Neglect (Essay by Bob Racine)

Just about every weeknight my wife and I watch the evening news on PBS television while we eat our dinner off trays brought from the kitchen to the living room.  You might say that we fill our stomachs with the meal while we fill our heads with the details of current events.  One is a treat, the other a process of keeping educated about history in the making, not all of which is gratifying to say the least.  Normally this practice poses no great problem, but occasionally we come across things on the broadcast that leave a somewhat bitter taste in the mouth to go with the taste of supper, and they do not make for a very good mix. 

Recently we were indulging in our nightly banquet when a segment was run pertaining to widespread hunger.  As is PBS’s policy we were told ahead of time that some of the images we were about to see may be upsetting for some viewers.  I do not recall the exact country in which the shocking scenes were taking place; I think it was one of the African nations – Somalia perhaps or South Sudan.  But that word of caution by the station could not have been more fitting than it was on that occasion.  I remember seeing children with skeletal bodies, with flies buzzing around their heads – heads that could seemingly not move, even though the openness of their eyes indicated that there was still some life in what was left of them, but for how long?  Children, no less!  Some of these inhabitants had swollen stomachs. We saw some victims lying in roadways or curled on dusty ground and even some who were being treated in makeshift hospitals wrapped up in somebody’s embrace.   I would not be surprised to view such conditions if I had been watching scenes from liberated concentration camps after World War II, but this was 2017, a year in which industrialized barbarity was not supposed to happen, when the lessons of the past had taught us that genocide is a scourge that no one wants to repeat.     

I saw all this as I surveyed the dinner tray in front of me, all the nourishing items that my wife had so wonderfully prepared.  There they were on the screen gasping for life, and here we were living high on the hog, delighting in the plentiful bounty that was available to us in our suburban environment, in our secure and well heated and well preserved habitat.

Can we even begin to imagine what it is like to literally not know where the next meal is coming from?  When we affluent westerners run out of a commodity of fruit or vegetable or meat, we always take for granted that it can be replaced.  What do we do?  We just hop down to our favorite super market and buy more, knowing before we set foot in the place that it will be there.  And if we do not have the cash, we swipe the little card and charge it to credit.  We go through these motions without thinking about them.  Maybe we will grouse a bit, if the store is unusually crowded and we have to stand longer than we like in the checkout line.  We may complain, if one of the apples is a bit sour; we may even feel as if we have been cheated.  We do not worry that any one of our favorite foods is going to run out and become worrisomely scarce.  We all know of the hungry thousands, but we do not dwell on the subject as we spread the next serving of butter across our fresh bread or chew into our next fragment of fresh meat or silently swoon over our next mouthful of tasty peas and carrots. 

It should come as no surprise that my initial sensory reaction to those images intruding upon our dinner was the feeling that my appetite was about to desert me.  I watched the wretched bodies and suddenly I could hardly taste what I was eating.  And needless to say I was also flooded with mixed emotions.  Anyone who could watch that display of suffering and not feel at least momentarily shaken is someone for whom I feel gravely sorry.  

I have met people who sincerely believe that the resources of the earth are limited, that there is not enough to go around to everybody, hence there is supposed to be truth in the old bromide that there are “the haves and the have-nots”, that that is a fact of life, unchangeable and unalterable and that the haves must accept it.  If I believed that, I would have had no adverse reaction to those TV images, perhaps a little pity but for the most part I would have drawn a deep breath of relief that I am on the prosperous side of that implacable barrier.  And when we create this world view, we move many feet and inches and perhaps miles closer to feeling superior to those have-nots.  And beyond that we start assigning status to them, based on race, religion, skin color or station.

All kinds of emotions swept down upon me.   First of all came shock.  None of what I was seeing matched anything I had quite witnessed before anywhere.  I felt a bit numb when those images assaulted me.  This was no science fiction, no horror movie deriving from some imaginative writer/director’s pool of daring and curiosity.  This was certified realism captured by a roving camera’s eye.  

And I felt intense anger.  I was mad as hell at the powers that be in that country. How could they by any logic whatsoever have let conditions come to this?   These people were suffering from not only neglect but from political repression.  Somebody’s sense of governmental priority had been corrupted. The barons of the land had laid claim to territory for the most outrageous of reasons, ones that subordinated innocent native civilians to the ash heaps.  It was outright cruelty, insensitive, blind power used to either enslave or to crush, whichever suited the purpose of those who wrote the rules for needless warfare.  Somebody somewhere had decided not to know about things going on in their very backyard.  Of course, we are all tempted to live on that level.  We can so easily choose not to know – choose not to know – about people next door.  After all, who has the time to be bothered! 

And I felt frustration – the realization of how helpless I was; I wanted to act, but I was frozen in place. And there lurked in my mind a resentment at being forced to watch.  How dare they impose upon my supper hour!  How dare the news people interfere with my comfort!  I begin to understand those who avoid the news altogether or certain aspects of it for the simple reason that it is depressing. Why torture myself?  Why give myself nightmares, when I’m not in a position to remedy what I see? And along with this emotion comes the confounding question of how our remoteness from the centers of power can be overcome.  We want to say, “I’ve been there already; I’ve sweated through that.  Don’t make me do that again.” But of course we know we have to do it again and again.  And alongside this feeling of being invaded was the feeling of embarrassment.  Though I knew that those people on the screen could not see me, I was hesitant to look them in the eye just the same, those eyes that bulged from their faces and bore into mine.            

Guilt was lurking around.  I started reviewing in my mind what I have done to answer the cry of the hungry millions.  Seeing what we saw brings you up short.  You feel as if you have been caught in the act of committing a crime.  

But you know, when you get past the shock, that no such crime has been perpetrated.  Guilt in and of itself is the bluntest of devices for treating the problem of human neglect.  It is only human to be made to feel guilty when there is no basis for the charge of real guilt.  We are all vulnerable that way.  But we have to remember that we are all individually responsible for the oversight of our own consciences.  Our feeling of guilt is no real gift to the needy.  They do not benefit from it.  The only thing they benefit from are our actions, our well planned investments of material resources, our informed donations, a well cultivated spirit of generosity.

One reason I value so much the news accounts on PBS is the time they take sifting through the subject matter, presenting all sides of a political issue, completing the picture.  There is no heavy hand of rhetoric trying to massage our brains.   No one is stumping or attempting to rabble rouse us into some kind of drastic subservience to a cause.  I can watch a program that exposes hunger and starvation in its rawest form without honestly considering myself under siege.  Disturbed maybe!  Heartbroken!  Unsettled!  But not manipulated into impotent guilt. 

So where does all this leave us?  After we have moved beyond the shock and the anger and the momentary guilt, where do we find ourselves?  Nursing our hatred for the perpetrators of such inhumanity will serve no good purpose.  It would be tantamount to gagging on our own bitterness and bile.  We cannot afford to wrap ourselves up in that cloak of abject sorrow until we smother ourselves to death.  I can only speak for myself, but for me what soothes the mind and heart is to tune my ear to hear and my eye to see the abundance of humanitarian activity presently taking place in our world answering the summons of vast need in the Gulf States and in the Caribbean where hurricanes and devastating storms have ravished the homes and the livelihoods of millions of people who themselves face the possible terror of hunger and dehumanization.  Arms and hands are being extended throughout our nation and stretching every nerve to come to the assistance of those who are under threat.  However much the increase in rains and floods may be due to the warming of the earth, however small the world may be getting it becomes clear to all who observe that people across the globe are becoming more of a family than ever before perhaps due to that smallness.  The Global Village is still in play.  Its inhabitants are looking more and more upon the suffering millions and recognizing that they are indeed our sisters and brothers.  Thousands are internalizing that realization.  In that direction the hope of humanity lies.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

The Healing of the Leper (Poetry by Bob Racine)

We carried nature’s vile secret wrapped up in a cloth.  

Only we knew it was worth more than the coin we begged,
the bunch of us a gaggle of sawed-off, dry-rotted stick people
wishing to become straw.

And yet we had this power – default of human fear.

Through a poisonous eye I looked past those weeds and slopes and pronounced my blunted curse upon my Enemy, as he called heaven to task upon my staved and feculent limbs.

“Make a show of it only to priests,” said he.

But only for a price had I ever kept a secret.

Who now would pay – the penurious priests?  

The rich young rulers with their backhanded charity?

The curious drew near and would have

fingered what moments before they had shunned,

had I not clung to the same scurvy cloth.

Then, as if hell were drying to the bone,

I watched their dazzled eyes dim one by one,

leaving me alone with my Undoer.  

In him I soon found that which I feared most –

the vile, hideous purity of my own soul.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

The Water and the Flame (Poetry by Bob Racine)

John the Baptist 

bit his heel into the dust, dug up smoke, made holy fire, 

his heart pumping thunder beneath an animal skin vest.

This

before he came to the river, 

where water flowed richer than fire. 

He took life from the sun, honey from the bees,

defied the treachery of derelict rock, 

serpents daunted by the tip of his staff, 

the ground mashed to gravel in the passage  of his feet, 

birds and locusts flushed from declivities of 

eroded sand and rotted-out log.

All this

before the muddy bank, before he came to the river, 

where water flowed richer than fire.

The house of Herod was rankled. 

Quarry stone cried to quarry stone, 

sent its blasting dispatch to Jerusalem towers, 

shuddered through the weathercock atop 

the Roman governor’s iron gate.

Then it was the multitudes saw John’s great footprint in the earth, 

heard the howl on the mountain, saw the gust of holy smoke.

They watched the unquenchable flame, 

while John knew not, nor did they, that only the river 

could calm the flame.

John heard it flowing, striking fear to his heart, 

buckling his knees into the soft shore mud. 

With his bloodshot eye he saw the stretch of its ancient arm, 

heard its pulse that would never beat at any mortal’s bidding.

He tore from his back the animal-skin vest, 

loosened his girdle, sank his staff into the mud bank, 

as if it were a lance blunted from battle, heaved the sandals 

from his tired feet, and cast his bulk upon the willful waters.

The fearless fish remembered on that day when once 

water covered the earth, as John the Baptist pushed his heel 

into the soft river bed, laid gentle hands into the stream, 

bringing with them the expectations of his people.

All this 

when he came to the river on his knees, 

where water flows richer than fire.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

All the Way (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

2 hrs & 11 min, color, 2017

Historical turning points have always attracted film makers.  Especially is this true of political turning points, those in which a shift in legislative or judicial fiat drastically changes the temper of the nation or alters the perceived moral compass by which that nation is guided.  “All the Way” (this title lifted from a campaign slogan of Lyndon Johnson’s ( “All the way with LBJ”) has to do with events of the 1960s into which Johnson was catapulted upon the tragic death of John F. Kennedy.  It is about him and how he came to terms with a complicated set of pressures for change, most notably the pressure of racial demands launched by the Civil Rights Movement under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King and the unfinished business of the Civil Rights bill that Kennedy had introduced in Congress.  As the shrewd metaphorical phrase would have it, Johnson really “had his work cut out for him” even before he was sworn in to the office.  

Though the movie is not a masterpiece, it does reach a considerable height of excellence in the portrayal of the man by Bryan Cranston.  He won a Tony for his stage performance and an Emmy for this television adaptation in which he reprises the role.  At this point it is inconceivable to me that any other actor would ever again attempt to fill this demanding assignment.  After all, Johnson is not an easy subject to get right.  How could anyone else begin to approach the quality of the work that Cranston turns out, wherein he treats the man as quite human in a variety of particulars.  He is a person of sometimes thunderous speech and at other times he is soft spoken as he wrestles with personal anxiety and fear, and at still other times he is a coarse and blatant humorist.  He did not hesitate to use intimidation and threat to bend people to his political will.  Sometimes he could be a sulky childish complainer. Those who worked under him learned to be cautious about offending him.  The way Cranston portrays him one never knows what to expect from moment to moment.  There is not the slightest suggestion of a formula, but every facet hangs together and grinds together to make the man unforgettable.

The screenplay does not by any means overlook the misguided decision Johnson made sending in troops to respond to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and unleashing a major war from which our country has not yet fully recovered after five succeeding decades.  That decision is portrayed as something he made hurriedly while enmeshed in the Civil Rights issue, giving no careful thought to what it would entail.  Johnson died in 1973, only four years after leaving office, and it has been reported that he regretted his move long before his decision not to run again for the office was announced.  I suspect it weighed so heavily upon him that it must have served to shorten his life.  But he takes full credit for getting the Civil Rights legislation through Congress.  One wonders if anyone else, including Kennedy could have done as much.

Underneath all his brashness and seeming self-assurance we know he is aware that to be the leader of his country he must soothe many fears, compromise with many a seeming opponent, and he is toughened enough by his previous experience in politics to know how hard it is to make permanent friends.  You are always in the limelight with many eyes watching you and waiting to shoot you down as soon as you make a blunder.  No president has ever had a more difficult row to hoe than he had, with the southern Democrats counting on him to uphold the Jim Crow standard and so many northern moderates, Republican and Democrat, black and white, looking for him to make courageous decisions for change on their behalf, especially with regard to education.

But there is much more to recommend “All the Way” than one actor’s work.  There are crucial characters who are also quite admirably portrayed by some top talent.  One fellow southerner he had to tangle with was Dick Russell, Senator from Georgia, who was quite opposed to the Civil Rights bill, portrayed with quiet aplomb by Frank Langella; he is my choice for the best supporting work in this narrative.  His spoken words are spare, but he delivers himself in good understated form.  And Johnson’  wife Lady Bird comes to full life with the talent of Melissa Leo.  She rings true in every scene in which she appears.  

Actress Aisha Hinds has a cameo as Fannie Lou Hamer, an African American woman who was cruelly assaulted and beaten by a gang of local law enforcers in Mississippi for daring to inquire about what she had to do to register to vote.  This shocking incident is related in detail by her with words to a camera; an explicit portrayal of it would not have been any more shocking.  Hamer played a huge part in making the despotic extremes of southern racism vivid, even if Johnson saw fit to preempt her when on the air for fear it would alienate too many whose votes he needed.  The film does not tell you, but she became a major leader in the Civil Rights Movement.  She was an American Votings Rights activist, a philanthropist who worked primarily in Mississippi. She was instrumental in organizing Mississippi’s Freedom Summer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and she was the vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  Her life would be a bold and vital subject for a movie within itself.  Check her out on line and you will see.

Bradley Whitford does a substantial job of portraying Hubert Humphrey, who catered to Johnson in search of a Vice Presidential appointment; he even bears a slight resemblance to Humphrey.  Stokeley Carmichael, Roy Wilkins and Ralph Abernathy show up in fine fettle at the hands of Mo McRae, Jo Morton and Dohn Norwood respectively.  They have a scene unto themselves in which the divided attitudes toward Johnson and what course of action his Presidency calls for them to take are incisively brought to light.  

And of course there is Anthony Mackie stepping into the shoes of Martin Luther King.  His work is good enough for a supporting role, though not as forceful as was David Oyelowo in “Selma” a few years back.  But mention of him brings to mind a disappointment I have with the film, when considered from one critical angle.  The mere two hours and eleven minute running time short changes so many people whose portrayal in finer depth would have made for a more thorough, engrossing and educational experience.  But the script revolves around Johnson, and it is satisfying to note that he is not whitewashed in the least.  

Cranston carries things quite admirably.  Jay Roach, sixty years of age, is the director of this work.  He and Cranston have collaborated before on the 2015 bio pic “Trumbo”, which I favorably reviewed last year, and I credit him in part for getting this performance out of Cranston.  I should think they know each other’s work habits and methodologies well enough by now to make a first class team.  And a favorable word should be addressed to Jim Denault for his imaginative camera work.  Under his fluid and guiding hand this becomes a genuine movie, not a mere filming of a stage work.  

The author of both the play and this screenplay adaptation is Robert Schenkkan, an award winning writer who has been active in theater and screen work for many years.  His dialogue is tough and keen-edged; it meets the challenge of writing for recent historical figures whose behind-the-scenes remarks and conversations are not a matter of record.  Not an easy assignment!  I think the most revealing words he puts into Johnson’s mouth are the following: “People think I want great power, but what I want is solace”.  One who endures the flames and arrows of outrageous Presidential fortune could crave no less.   

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.