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.

Cool Hand Luke (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

2 hrs & 7 min, color, 1967

                                       

Two sobriquets are pinned onto the character that Paul Newman portrays in this 1960s classic.  One is the title itself, “Cool Hand Luke”, one he acquires in a game of cards.  The other is “a natural born world shaker”.  This one he picks up retrospectively at the end of the film, and it would be much more difficult to explain how it comes about.  That, as a matter of fact, is the upshot of the screenplay. 

The time setting is the late 1940s in the Deep South.  Luke is a World War II veteran who has not been able to regain his sense of self-worth since his discharge.  He has taken excessively to drink and teeters on the edge of despair.  He is not a violent person, but he gets some kind of retributive kick out of decapitating parking meters while under the influence, and this violation of public property lands him on a prison farm to serve two miserable years.  When he arrives he gives no indication that he is anything but a very passive, peaceful individual.  From all appearances he is, in contrast to the men with whom he is placed, the quiet type. 

But this apparently cool individual turns out to be a clever wielder of passive aggressive behavior and over time comes to exert a powerful influence upon his fellow prisoners that is measurable only in the most intangible of terms.  His quietly insinuating ways anger those around him on the farm at first, until he is forced to put on boxing gloves and contend with a big bruiser of a man named Dragline (a terrific George Kennedy) and gets beaten up (well, almost) while his jailers look on and do nothing to break up the match.  But strangely the treatment does not make him into a fighter – at least not with fists or physical force.  You have to observe the emanating chemistry itself over the film’s expanse to fathom how this happens, how he progresses from a quiet cool to become “a world shaker” respected by his fellow prisoners, especially Dragline, who ironically becomes his greatest friend and admirer.    

It is when Luke begins opening his mouth and dropping little hints as to why he has become a bum that the character comes to life.  He describes his downward odyssey by his observation that as a civilian he “couldn’t find elbow room”.  He also starts to evidence some yearning after divinity.  While slaving on the road at the start of a rain storm he surprises everyone by crying out for God to speak loud enough for him to know that heaven is listening, that he, Luke, is not forgotten.  But even this loud prayerful plea is not uttered in some humble, breast beating manner.  It sounds rather showy.  It becomes clear that there is a gaming trait in his personality that slowly activates his spirit.  Just for the fun of it he sets a fast pace while tarring a road; his fellows get hooked and hasten to keep up with him.  The job gets finished far ahead of schedule to the amazement of the bosses standing by.  

The most conspicuous expression of this gaming trait is his claim that in the space of an hour he can eat fifty eggs.  His bunk fellows take him up on the claim and get him to prove it, everyone betting money on the outcome.  The demonstration comprises the funniest sequence in the entire movie; it allows us to take a huge breath before more dramatic collisions with the bosses come about.  And those collisions do come about; a lighthearted comedy this is not. 

The overseers are not by any means paper tigers.  They turn out to be not only strict but lethal when the defiance of their authority is carried beyond a certain point, either actively or passively.  You just may come away from the viewing feeling as if the wrong men are in prison behind that barbed wire.  The management turns out to be more criminal than the assumed criminals they manage.  These incarcerated men are not the hardened type of criminal, not the psychopaths or the demented gorillas.  The severe conditions to which they are subjected seem way out of proportion to the lesser crimes that they have committed, those only punishable by time in a local jail facility. 

We have all heard some version of the phrase “failure to communicate”, and in this script the words fall from the lips of the head overseer played by Strother Martin, a physically stumpy little actor who appeared in dozens of movies from the 1950s through the 1970s.  Usually he filled the shoes of a villain or of some halfwit or mentally deranged troublemaker, but here he is in charge of the operation of the farm and he projects the image of someone who is laughably unsuited for his job, but dangerous just the same.  He uses the words to refer to Luke’s snide resistance to his policies, after he slaps Luke to the ground.  “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”  At a climactic point later on Luke uses the statement to poke fun at the whole establishment and pays a bitter price for doing so.

When certain infractions of the rules occur, they have something called The Box, which requires the prisoner to spend the night standing on his feet in a very small shed, with only the option of curling up into a ball to come to a stooping position on the tiny bare floor.  The film is full of sweat, grime, summer heat and putrid conditions.  (How much the state of things has changed over the past seventy years I am not certain.  We see nothing but Caucasians among these characters; I am sure that today all penal facilities have been integrated, at least officially.) 

I would like to believe that in the twenty-first century Luke would be treated for PTSD, something that at that time had not even become a featured topic for discussion among medics, let alone among the public at large.  But despite his seeming impairment and low self-esteem, naivete does not exist inside this man.  He knows what the world at large is like, having helped fight a savage war and done his share of the killing.  He nurses a subtle disrespect for the abuse of authority and entertains no illusions about the impotence behind his captors’ bullheadedness. 

But not all the movie is concerned with life among the inhabitants of the pokey.  There are very emotionally penetrating moments as well.  One is the scene in which Luke’s mother (Jo Van Fleet) comes to visit.  She is physically a pitiful wreck, but a very tenderhearted and friendly tease, who seems to know that it is too late to expect great things of her son.  In this one and only appearance of hers death is heavy in the air.  She arrives at the gate laid out on the back of a wagon, completely incapable of bodily movement, except to pump constantly on a cigarette.  Ms. Fleet is absolute perfection in this small but crucial role.

The conversation between them is remarkable, not only for what is said but for what is not said and not needing to be said.  She knows that he is a failure, but she smiles and lovingly reminds him of the dreams for him they have shared in the past.  Strangely he calls her by her first name, Arletta.  “You did your best, Arletta!”  It is touching that he takes pains not to lay any kind of guilt trip on her and sets her conscience at ease.  Their encounter is quite sad but far more loving than just civil.  We know they are saying goodbye, that she will soon pass on from this world, which she does. 

News of her death later on brings Luke to a moment of deep tearful pathos, with him singing a song by himself with simple string accompaniment that links him with his childhood past.  Newman was never been better than in this movie and in this solitary moment he excels par excellence, reaching deep into our souls.  The mother’s death also becomes a spur to raise his gaming imagination to a new high.  It sends him running from the farm and gets him in deep, deep trouble.  But faced with the threat of annihilation he transcends his cosmic despair and finds spiritual resilience he never knew he had. 

The fine directing comes from Stuart Rosenberg and the outstanding original screenplay is the labor of Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson.  Because of these three men Luke’s saga is by turns disquietingly funny, heartbreaking, tender, wistful, fiercely confrontational and oddly inspiring.  This is one of my 100 favorites which I itemized on this blog just a few years back.  I not only love it; I treasure it.

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.

Crying Foul with the Tongue (Essay by Bob Racine)

Most of us growing up were taught or at least encouraged not to “cuss”, a more raw form of the word “curse”.  Our parents did not like it when we used what has been referred to as foul language, unless one or the other or both parents were in the habit of doing the same.  Great pains have been taken during the course of civilization (at least western civilization) to shield the kiddies’ ears from exposure to such language as the barons of society deemed harmful in the shaping of their character. 

Not until the 1960s did we start hearing “God damn” on the soundtracks of American movies.  It was some years later during the following decade that the F word and “shit” began popping up and joining the movie vernacular.  We had something called the Hays Office and the various state boards of censors that listened to those soundtracks with a scrupulous ear.  Whether any of them ever took into consideration the fact that even the most well brought up kids were daily exposed to cussing on the school grounds or on the playing fields is difficult to determine.  By the time the kids started on a regular diet of motion pictures the exposure had already taken place.  (Currently certain words are still being bleeped out of news broadcasts and even some dramatic shows so that those delicate little ears miss out on them.)

Are those restraints really missed?  Well, let us consider the query.

I know that I often find myself using “damn” or “hell” when I am at home and for the most part alone, mostly in reference to some inanimate object that is not obeying my instructions properly and causing me delay or frustration.   I even sometimes cuss out people who have “gotten my goat”, but not so that they can hear me.  It is more a conversation I have with myself.  “Four letter words” we have come to call them, which in a way is misleading, because “love” is itself a four letter term as are “kind” and “meek”.     

We of course as a society have done tricks with foul expressions to make them seem less foul.  Goddamn-it has been disguised as dog-gone-it.  You see, dog is God spelled backward, and gone-it is another way of wishing for somebody or something to be banished.  We want God to “gone it”, that is, send it to – well, maybe not literally hell.  Few of us have any clear idea what a literal hell would look like anyhow.  But at the very least we want something that is annoying or confounding us to be cleared out of our space, to be removed from our path.  Send it away from me, not to be seen or encountered anymore. 

Or sometimes we settle simply for the lone word “damn” as a substitute, a shortened, abbreviated form of the whole mouthful.  We just assume that when we “damn” something we are counting on powers beyond our own control to do the dispatching.  God is the silent participant, maybe the elephant in the room.  We have even softened the edge of this word by itself; we have traded it in for “dern”. 

Oaths, as they were called in the ancient world, were always thought to involve wishing harm to come to someone or something else.  If you cursed you were releasing the fury of heaven upon human mortals.  An individual had it in her or his power to literally place a curse, in some cases carelessly, upon their worst enemies.  And in so doing they were supposed to place it upon themselves as well.  A kind of black magic!  In the movie “Gone with the Wind” Scarlett O’Hara is seeing Ashley Wilkes back to the battlefront, when he begins talking in pessimistic terms about the outcome of the war, and she upbraids him about talking that way and tells him anxiously “Say a prayer quick!”  Erase the spell quickly before God (or the Devil) has time to act on your wish, as if the man has really wished for it! 

Traditionally held to be the worst form of profanity is the utterance of words that defame deity.  The Decalogue is explicit in its condemnation of language that takes “the name of the Lord thy God in vain”. We are enjoined not to speak of anything or anyone deserving of respect in a loose or defamatory manner.  And especially is this supposed to apply to the name of deity or to anything deemed sacred.  To profane that name or things that are considered holy is to speak of them with contempt, or with disregard for their holiness. 

Another term for this is blasphemy.  Jesus among other things was accused of it when he seemed to be rewriting the Judaic Law.  “The Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath.”  He was considered a blasphemer just by the fact that he healed on the Sabbath.  He offended the Sanhedrin’s sense of propriety and seemed to be claiming for himself the power and privilege that belonged only to the Almighty.  Once I heard a very misguided fellow minister report that he had been spending time listening to words uttered on TV commercials and serving as a one-man censor board.  He wrote to the network complaining about the “blasphemous” use of the term “holy cow” on one occasion.  His action was frowned upon and ridiculed by his fellow clergy (including me), but the fact remains that at one time in our Christian history the understanding of blasphemy was carried to just such a ridiculous length.  I have never been quite sure what in this man’s view was being blasphemed, the cow or the God who created the animals of the field.  It can get quite confusing.  Was deity being ascribed to the animal?    

You would be hard pressed today to find devout souls who are rabid about offending the ear of the unseen God.  Many who are sensitive to the use of verbal profanity oppose its use more on the grounds of what is inappropriate or disrespectful, not strict religious taboo.  It should be apparent to all moderns by now that four letter utterances that are meant in a crude or unkind or flagrant way are really a means of releasing frustration or to holler about the frustration.  They express anger; they do not amount to condemnation.  “Damn” is a manner of saying “I can do without this” or “I can’t believe this happened or that I heard that or that such an occurrence is possible”.  But it gets really risky when it is directed at individuals.  In such a case you might not be cursing another person’s soul, but after enough of it you might be cursing the space between you and the intended other.  You may be sewing the seeds of acrimony or creating an abiding hatred.  You can poison the air between you and the other person or persons.  The language becomes divisive, lays the groundwork for alienation or scorn or outright enmity.

We have all probably met persons whose lives have been so oppressive, due to deplorable circumstances in which they grew up or by choices or failures or the plague of associations with evil company that their entire outlook on life is poisoned, and it shows up with an almost endless flurry of expletives that fill the air they sit or stand or walk in.  The words fall like confetti all around them, except they are not let loose to celebrate anything.  For them it has become a blighting habit.  So pitiful!  So sad and heartbreaking!  The only one they have cursed it seems is themselves.

Have you ever noticed that in movies that have their setting in ancient times, there is no attempt made to simulate profane speech?  How could there be?  The fact is that we do not know exactly what a cuss word in ancient Latin or Greek sounded like.  To hear English words like “damn” or “shit” or “hell” or the F word spewing out of the mouth of Julius Caesar or Mark Anthony or even one of Jesus’ disciples would seem quite bizarre and anachronistic.  To say the least, it would be laughable!  There was a motion picture version of Lloyd C. Douglas’ book “The Big Fisherman” that put in a very brief appearance back in the late 1950s, a tale about Simon Peter and his struggle to come to terms with the advent of the man Jesus Christ.  Peter was portrayed as a rough cut individual who was acquainted with lowlife ways and did not know what to make of this strange man who taught forgiveness and kindness and humility.  It was not a very well written work, and it is not surprising that it never really caught on with the public.  But there was one exceptional scene in it I shall never forget. 

Peter comes up against two ruffians who make fun of his new attachment to the carpenter’s son and decide to test his new faith.  First of all they slap him in the face.  Peter feeling the urge to fight back mutters “Deliver me from temptation”.   A second time one of them slaps him he repeats the prayer a little more earnestly, “Deliver me from temptation”, and yet a third time he is struck and repeats the words obviously very riled up and gritting his teeth to keep from yielding.  Suddenly one of them socks him on the jaw and he goes sprawling to the ground.  That pushes him over the edge and as he rises to his feet he changes his prayer to “Forgive us our trespasses” and knocks both of his enemies down in one swing.  They scamper away and do not bother him anymore.  At once he is seized with self-disgust and cries out “You’d better give up on me, God.  I’m not your type.”  But in a few moments he is begging God not to give up on him.  He falls into a sobbing heap on the floor of his fishing boat where he remains until he hears Jesus calling him to follow.  A very touching moment!  No ugly words necessary!  What a shame that the rest of the splashy spectacle was so asinine and nauseously contrived.  It has predictably disappeared from the repertoire.    

If a scene like that were set in modern times, a new convert butting heads with hoodlums on the street perhaps, we can be pretty certain that we would hear some cussing in our own language, the man cussing first at his attackers and then at himself for having such a tough time putting his new faith into practice.  How would we depict that profanity in a Biblical setting?  Interesting question!   

Recently I saw and reviewed that short series “One Day at a Time” and I was impressed by how much strong emotion, even near volcanic emotion, was put across, especially by the mother, without weakening the fiber of that continuing tale by any profusion of cussing.  Yes, a word or two sneaks in but never did the writers perform as if the gutsiness of it depended upon a full outlay of gross terminology. 

Where are we now regarding the use of what is sometimes called “colorful” language in dramatizations, especially in motion pictures?  Has someone torn open a Pandora’s Box?  Is it “anything goes” now in contrast to where we were a century ago?  I suppose so!  But have we made so much of it tiresome on the ear?  How much does the impact of human personalities portrayed on the screen depend upon dropping or scattering these ugly terms of human conversation into the script?

It all depends upon the kind of people you are setting out to portray.  If one is dealing in something lurid or violent, explicit or not, it seems more authentic not to impose any kind of strict ban on salty language that people watching would expect to hear.  But I have seen movies in recent years in which the F word was heard far more than seems believable.  Go into any dive or men’s locker room or even into any prison ward and how much in the space of an hour would you hear it?  It is heard, yes, and frequently, but not with every other breath that is taken.  If it cannot add force where it is needed, if it becomes a kind of tic or verbal spasm, a kind of show and blow, a pointless monotony, does it really serve the purpose of good dramatic art any more so than those taboos of yore?  I would say not. 

                                       

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.

Silence (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

2 hrs & 41 min, color, 2016

Sometimes we encounter motion pictures in which it is considerably difficult to know who to root for or what to root for, and yet we find the content compelling enough that we have to stay with it.  I long ago lost all interest in missionary enterprises designed to carry the Christian Gospel to the “heathen” and convert them.  I have the greatest admiration for those who travel abroad to heal or to feed or to educate or to rebuild what has been laid waste, but counting converts is really for me a distortion of what Jesus meant by the Great Commission.  So I approached “Silence”, Martin Scorcese’s epic about the sufferings of Catholic priests in seventeenth century Japan, with a bit of caution.  What vested interest had I in the success or failure of their efforts?  Why would I root for them, and what would there be in the hostile acts of Japanese rulers that would enlist my sympathy?  I need not have worried.  More is at stake in the conflict portrayed than I could have imagined.    

“Silence”, it must be said, is not a general audience movie, not something to be watched when you are fatigued at the end of the day and desirous of relaxation, not something to be screened on a passenger airliner during a long cross country trek and you need a break from the stress of the trip you are taking.  Those who screen it should choose the time carefully, setting close to three unhurried hours aside to do some hard thinking, for that is what it demands of you; it is a thinking person’s movie. 

In its early sequences it does not appear to be so.  A struggle for survival gets underway.  The Emperor has decided that everything western must be abolished from the land, which includes a deeply entrenched Catholic Church of Portuguese origin.  Priests (referred to all through this story as padres) are being tortured in a manner most brutal in the opening scene. We are told in narration that they have requested this test of their faith, but none of those we see seems the least bit stoic in his attempt to endure.  We have reason at this point to ask where Scorcese is taking us. 

Scorcese was raised Catholic but has over the years referred to himself as a lapsed one.  What he actually is in relation to the Church of Rome remains something of a puzzle, I think even to himself.  He has all but admitted as much.  He may be lapsed, which is to say that he may not be a regular practicing adherent to the disciplines of that faith, but he has not quite been able during his lifetime to shake its influence.  We have seen strange elements of religious obsession in characters he has created in his many dramatic screenplays.  He even adapted Nicholas Kazantzakis’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” and in his 1974 work “Mean Streets” (which I still consider one of his best) he creates a troubled youth torn between his involvement with fellow hoods and his strange enthrallment by priest and ritual and Confessional. 

For close to a quarter of a century he labored to bring to the screen the 1966 novel “Silence” by a man named Shusaku Endu.  He enlisted the skillful services of screenwriter Jay Cocks, who in my estimation deserves as much credit as Scorcese for the brilliance of the end result.  It follows the lives of two young priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver) living in Europe who volunteer to travel to Japan and try to locate a beloved mentor of theirs named Ferreira (Liam Neeson) who lived there for many years but has disappeared and according to rumor has abandoned the faith and is either still living there somewhere or has died a martyr’s death.  Their bishop is not inclined to let them go; Christians are being murdered all over Japan, and he supposes that the young men could be put to better use somewhere else.  But their importunate, impassioned plea finally persuades the bishop to release them, the bishop supposing it to be a divine calling.  They fear for Ferreira’s life and feel greatly indebted to him, though it has been years since they were his pupils. 

So they go and are smuggled into the country by an ex-believer now living a derelict’s life, a man they are not sure they can trust.  In fact, just about everyone they meet in their stealthy travels is possibly a betrayer.  I was soon more fearful for their safety than for their mentor’s.  Their dark passage through terrain with which they are not the least familiar draws us in and makes us deeply apprehensive.

Soon they make contact with the remnant of faithful Catholics in Japan who are starved for priestly leadership, craving the Mass and the Confessional and the rite of Baptism for their offspring.  The young priests press their search for Ferreira, until the Emperor’s legions get wind of what is happening and close in upon them and their following.

For the first hour or so of the picture the two padres are the epitome of courage and confidence, armed with intelligence and priestly training.  They administer the sacraments to droves of natives who have been living in secret and remain devout, even in the most dangerous of circumstances.  But a change begins to take place inside the two men as they witness the ordeal the people they are serving have to endure.  The solidarity of their own faith begins to erode.   They gradually become aware of the fact that what they are doing is putting so many innocent worshippers’ lives in danger and they soon lose their innocence, to say the least.  What is ultimately lost or gained is the subject of this lengthy odyssey.         

Garupe’s death from drowning launches Rodrigues into a most painful and tormenting ordeal and makes him quite vulnerable, once captured by the authorities, in facing the Emperor’s Inquisitor, the man most to be feared.  As portrayed by Issei Ogata, this aging Japanese functionary proves to be something other than a bloodthirsty beast.  There is very much a thought-out method in the madness he perpetrates.  What he requires of Rodrigues is far more than the endurance of physical torture.  The Inquisitor turns out to be a master manipulator of the mind and heart; he seems to know the man behind the collar already when he falls into his lair.  Along with his powerful intrusion comes another Japanese personality and presence known as the Interpreter, played most engagingly by Tadanobu Asano.  These two cunning, shrewd men shake Rodrigues to the very depth of his soul and just may do the same for the audience. 

                                      

The cast is huge; Scorcese must have had to spend months putting it together.  Just imagining this staggers my mind.  And a tremendous amount of ground is covered in this masterwork.  The chasm between human strength and human weakness!  The universality of truth!  The arrogance of the will!  Forgiveness – human and divine!  Despair! Anguish!  The gift of mercy!   Love and fidelity!  The seeming silence of God!  They all play their mysterious part in the course of events.  And there comes the moment when Rodrigues has to perform the most painful of all acts of love.  What would that be?  I will leave those who choose to view the film to find out how that estimate is made.  It is at that point that I believe the wisdom behind the writing of Cocks and Scorcese becomes most apparent.

You may be wondering whether or not the young priest finds his long lost mentor.  The answer is yes, and Ferreira’s appearance opens up a whole new sphere of torment for him.  Liam Neeson gives a very wonderfully modulated, magnetic performance as a man who has undergone a strange transformation, one that has rewarded him in one respect and bound him in yet another.   It would be unthinking of me to neglect sounding some strong praise as well for Andrew Garfield’s performance.  He is in just about every scene and is consistently effective in filling the shoes of this bedeviled young priest.   

There is much suspense in “Silence”.  Nothing one might expect to happen seems to happen at all.  Almost every twist and turn of circumstances brings with it a new shock or a new challenge to the unsuspecting viewer’s assumptions.  Nothing is neat, either visual or audial or plot-wise. There are many encounters with danger and more than enough times when we must watch somebody’s execution or torturing, some of which is bizarre.  There is one very explicit beheading.  This is a film for thinkers, but the collision of minds is not portrayed in ivory tower surroundings.  It finally raises the unspoken question of how much power a captor can exert over someone else’s destiny.  It is a deep dark journey of spirit and conscience.  Though I cannot recommend it for a general audience, I am so very pleased that I discovered it.  All who approach the imperatives of religious faith with an open mind should be able to connect with it. 

                   

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.

One Day at a Time (Sitcom Review by Bob Racine)

13 episodes, 30 minutes each (give or take), 2017

Ethnic-based humor scores again, quite high in fact, as we are taken into thelives of three generations of Cuban Americans in one very active and adorable family.  Heading the fatherless household is a lively thirty-eight-year-old mother, Penelope Alvarez (Justine Machado), a plump, feisty, but tenderhearted woman who provides most of the energy and spark.  The continuing tale, spread out over thirteen episodes, embraces roughly the length of a school semester and revolves around the preparations for a supreme event in the life of Penelope’s fifteen-year-old daughter Elena (Isabelle Gomez).  More about that coming up!  A twelve-year-old son Alex (Marcel Ruiz), not in the least defiant, proves himself smart and rather resourceful when trouble is on the scene.  And there is Lydia Rivera (Rita Moreno), Penelope’s mother, the kids’ grandmother, who is something very special.  More about her coming up!

One word of clarification: These thirteen episodes have never been shown on network, cable or PBS television.  They are the property of Netflix itself, released only for streaming.  But they are based upon an earlier series of the same name, which I have never seen, that ran on one of the networks from 1975 to 1984.  That one, created by wife/husband team Whitney Blake and Allan Manings, was about a single mother and two teenage daughters, but did not involve Latinos.  Norman Lear, chief producer on that series, by now a ninety-four-year-old TV icon with an excellent track record in situation comedy, calls the 2017 version, which he is also involved in producing, a “reboot” and claims that the idea for it came from Brent Miller, a partner of his in the business.  Aside from Lear, the production heads on this current one are Mike Royce and Gloria Calderon Kellett. 

Penelope, with a record of army service in Afghanistan, is the one shouldering the big burden – as mother, breadwinner and caretaker and all without the assistance of her husband Victor (James Martinez), whom she met many years ago. Victor, never seen until the last two episodes, is presumed to be still under treatment for PTSD and alcoholism after all the intervening time since domestic tension and violence precipitated the marital separation.  Machado in this fiery role is tremendous, especially in the occasional scenes when she talks tearfully about the trials of being a single parent and the emotional burden of sleeping by herself without anyone to look her “in the eye and say ‘I got you.’ ” She genuinely loves her children and her sometimes burdensome, irritating mother, but she can stand her ground quite forcefully when she feels put upon and deprived of her womanly or motherly dignity. Ten firecrackers exploding simultaneously could not create more excitement than she does. 
Though she is somewhat hyperactive and at times overwrought, she is nevertheless a prime mover in all situations. A great piece of casting that makes me hope that we have not seen the last of this series!

A high point for her is a dispute with her doctor employer over wage discrimination between her and a male fellow worker.  She walks off her job in protest and has her employer chasing after her to beg her back and willing to make adjustments.  We should all glory in the victory she wins and even the way in which she wins it. 

Giving lively support is Todd Grimmell as a single unsure-of-himself neighbor named Schneider who is almost like a member of the family.  He does his best at learning the mores and the language (Spanish) of the Cubans and serves their needs in various respects while angling for some of the love he never got being an orphan.  Also adding contrast to the antics of the primary players is Stephen Toblowsky as the aforementioned aging primary care doctor by whom Penelope is employed, with personal family troubles of his own that the tightknit Cuban family helps him forget – a quite funny/sad man-child.

The kids Elena and Alex face typical but crucial factors in the business of growing up – drug temptation, sex instruction, sexual identity, a taste of romance, developing talents, taste in clothes, the limits and boundaries of freedom.  One very special issue is Elena deciding whether or not she is gay, a matter that eventually becomes a hot potato that sends the adults into a whirl of confusion, consternation and ultimately division, but one that allows the grownups to do some soul searching of their own before the struggle is completed.  Elena is quite the earnest feminist for her age; she recoils against anything that seems to put the woman in the position of being controlled or consigned to a demeaning role or image.   She is also a vegetarian, which compels her to revolt against the idea of the Catholic Mass in which she must feast on the body of Christ; her strict Catholic grandmother especially has trouble with this.        

Let me make it clear that in this series we do not have one of those domestic oddities in which supercool kids, mature before their time, exert control over uptight and unsuspecting parents.  The kids remain kids, vulnerable as well as questioning, but kids just the same.  And Penelope remains the mother in all the tight straits.  She takes discipline seriously but without demeaning the dignity or the intelligence of her children.

But the queen of the show is the incomparable Rita Moreno as the multi-faceted, devout, conservative-minded Grandmother Lydia Rivera, who is at times slithery, at others wise, at yet others a clever spinner of backhanded influence, and at almost every turn quite droll and funny.  The series would have been like a jewel with a missing diamond without her on the scene.  Somehow she knows just what inflection of speech is called for and just the right expression of facial and body language to keep her character on the right comic track.  She can say and do the most outrageous things and make them seem clever if not completely funny and make herself endearing to us the audience.  When the subject of Penelope’s impending divorce comes up she invokes the strict Catholic position on putting an end to a marriage.  “We Cubans don’t get divorced.  We die!” 

Lydia is not averse to causing a bit of worry.  When Penelope herself tries to put together an outing for Sunday morning, her only day off, and doing the unthinkable of not attending church, Lydia considers it an outrage.  In the debate that ensues when Penelope further admits that she has some doubt about the existence of God, Lydia disappears, sulking, but proves amenable to repair work when Penelope finds her.  As far as further involvement with a man is concerned, she declares “My body belongs [strictly] to God and my husband’s ghost”.  But she does not mind being escorted around by Penelope’s doctor boss.  We are persuaded to care about this rigid Grandmother and her feelings, as long as her behavior stays within loving bounds.  I love the way she yields so easily to an embrace; she is not a cold fish; she is touchy/feely on all the right occasions.   

And Lydia can work on our sympathies most ingeniously in her moments of sad reflection about all she and her family had to go through escaping from Cuba upon the insurgence of the Castro regime.  Her monologue describing her painful separation from her older sister is quite moving and a bit heartbreaking (they never saw each other again), as is her recall of the emotional stress she went through over her daughter at risk during the Afghanistan deployment. 

Another touch of real drama comes in the form of a girlfriend of Elena’s named Carmen (Ariela Barer), who is faced with the sudden deportation of her parents.  I do hope we will be seeing more of her as well in future episodes, if or when there are any.  

Of course, husband Victor pays a visit to observe his daughter Elena’s quinces,
(pronounced something like keen-sis).  That is a Spanish word that some are probably unfamiliar with, but what it amounts to is a sizeable party celebration of Elena’s becoming a young woman, a Cuban tradition.  Actually Victor is interested in more than his daughter’s big night.  He claims that he has overcome his mental lapses and his enslavement to alcohol and is ready to pursue the renewal of affection with Penelope.  That is a story within itself that occupies the last two episodes.  I will leave that for all who view the series to find out about.  No spoilers from me!

“One Day at a Time” is domestic entertainment of the highest order.  The music, the editing and the photography are a blast, and the scripts are consistently sharp-witted, thematically fine pointed, transparent at every turn and mature – and at least for me educational!  All who treasure family love and solidarity will find inspiration and plentiful food for thought.  A prize package to be sure!  Give yourself a treat and set six and a half hours aside to enjoy it.

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.

Lion (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

1 hr & 58 min, color, 2016

“I’ve found home.”  Those words out of the mouth of a young twenty-five-year-old Indian man, Saroo (Dev Patel), come late in this inspiring true story but represent one of the final steps in the resolving of an extraordinary dilemma.  At age five Saroo (Sunny Pawar) finds himself lost in the dangerous and swarming streets of Calcutta, not knowing where he is or how far from mother and siblings and his poverty stricken surroundings he has come.  All he knows is the name of the dirty, remote village where they reside, one that nobody around him has ever heard of.  Little could he know that it would be a quarter of a century before contact with “home” is ever re-established.  What transpires in-between is an odyssey not only of distance but a powerful one of the human heart.

“I’ve found home!”  It has a clarion sound to it; three simple ordinary words, but somehow together they ring a beautiful bell, poetically rolling off the tongue of a young man who has been through an internal struggle that almost tears his life completely apart. 

“Lion” is based upon an autobiography, “A Long Way Home”, by this very person, Saroo Brierley.  This is one of those instances where the old bromide about fact sometimes being stranger than fiction earns its credibility and in huge terms.  The screenplay was composed by Luke Davies, and some delicate and fastidious directing is provided by Garth Davis.  But the story is more than strange; it is truly fabulous and relevant in a very significant way for everyone who has had identity crises and had to shoulder the challenge of making life altering decisions that conceivably could alienate them from persons they love.    

Saroo as a five-year-old is adopted by a wealthy Australian family named Brierley, under whose cultivation and rearing he grows to manhood and becomes a very gifted person.  His adoptive mother (Nicole Kidman) and adoptive father (David Wenham) truly love and cherish him, and by all appearances are destined to be the cradle of warmth and the source of stability and affection for the rest of Saroo’s existence.  He falls in love with a bright and caring young woman named Lucy (Rooney Mara), a fellow student, who returns the love and provides him additional undergirding.  But something is astir in Saroo’s mind and heart that threatens to derail him and his relationship with those he has come to love.  He knows, even though he has not shared the fact with his adoptive parents and friends, that there is another home somewhere in his native country, and what haunts him is the fact that he does not know if any or all of his native, biological family is still alive or, if alive, in the same location.  It is by pure happenstance that he gets misrouted from them and from the company of his older brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate).  How he deals with this conflict and the sense that he is living a lie, as comfortable as that living has become, is the deeply touching drama around which this film is centered.     

For some time he hides from his adoptive parents the fact that he is searching for clues to solve the mystery.  They are not aware that he even considers himself something other than an orphan, having hidden his early life in a cloak of secrecy.  He has an adoptive brother named Mantosh (Divian Ladwa), taken into the Brierley home at about the same time as Saroo, who has not matured as Saroo has and suffers from a spastic tendency to do bodily harm to himself.  Saroo’s secret breaks out into the open when he tells Mantosh that he is not a brother, a remark made in the presence of their parents that is flung at him in a tone of angry dismissal.  This jab throws Mantosh once again into an overt self-punishing fury.

But Saroo perseveres on.  He makes extensive use of modern digital maps in his search, but the task is extensive and painstaking.  All he has to go on is his recollection of what his early childhood surroundings looked like, since no one has ever heard of the town where he lived and cannot give him any hint or suggestive clue about even the direction in which he should search.  After all, how many of us humans remember life at the age of five in any great detail?  There is a map in his head, however vague, that he has to study and from many different angles.  In the meantime, he is put through a sense of cerebral and emotional conflict that threatens to drive him almost insane.

One person who especially suffers from his choice to locate the dim past is his adoptive mother.  And here is where the great gift of Nicole Kidman as an actress comes into play.  The woman has devoted her life to the dream of adopting orphan children and has had the great good fortune of marrying a man who shares that dream with her.  There is one scene in which her monologue fills us in on this; in stirring words she relives how she came to do what she has done, and she acts as if a thousand daggers have been driven through her heart to see where her venture has led her.  She has to watch as one adoptive son fails to build a life of his own other than as an angry, mentally unstable, bummed out straggler and the other one greatly gifted and intelligent but haunted by a past that she has never known he had until he reached adulthood.  She is not the picture of a complaining, abusive mother.  She is a person of obvious strength but deep caring whose caring heart has been deeply injured.  Kidman’s role is small but compelling, enough that she snagged an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress.  I think anyone training to be a professional performer would give time well spent to studying her work in this scene.     

Bringing joy and security into the life of a child other than one’s own biological offspring sounds exciting and promising, but one must come to terms with the fact that there is always risk involved.  There can be genetic factors or injuries at birth or repressed traumas that lie dormant until the child reaches a certain age or, as in Saroo’s case, cultural complications.  It is clear from the way Dev Patel portrays him that he suffers guilt over what appears to his sensitive mind to be desertion on his part.  Most adopted children never know who their biological parents are, but in Saroo’s case he knows quite well and the story of what became of the “deserted” family and how his disappearance from the home has impacted upon them can remain an emotional burden that might be grievous to carry around for life.   

Yes, he finds them, as is self-evident almost from the start.  The closing footage is handled with sensitive care and is paced and edited with great vitality and without heavy-handed or soapy distractions.  There is a sense of sustained rhythm that the flow of events never loses.  And we are rewarded in the closing credits with some insight into the culture from which the young man has descended.  The most fascinating disclosure is the derivation of Saroo’s name.  It is a Hindi word that translated means, not surprisingly, “lion”.  The name seems appropriate for him.  He is required by his life circumstances to go on the hunt and to follow his instincts as well as his intelligence in search of a desired, life-sustaining prize. 

The film is a warm and wonderful gift to all who care about the dispersed and the dispossessed.

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.

Fences (Movie Review by Bob Racine

2 hrs & 18 min, color, 2016

What was the status of civil rights for minorities in the early 1950s in the U.S., long before the landmark legislation that was enacted over a decade later?   You get a sense of it in this adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning play by that prolific African American playwright August Wilson.  It was first staged in 1987.  It is set in a poverty row neighborhood in Pittsburgh and it spares no effort to disclose the fragility and festering though hidden wounds that keep a small struggling family just a baby step away from heartbreak and the collapse of love and personal loyalty.

Not that Wilson was out to make an encompassing socio-political statement – in this or any other of his ten plays, all with black characters and their settings in Pittsburgh.  He does not scan the length and breadth of anything; he just observes the human minutiae, the blades of grass, not the sprawling forest.  The two leading characters are Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) and his wife Rose (Viola Davis), two economically poor people in their fifties.  Both of them have had to confront, and are still confronting, disappointment.  Troy was a runaway from home at fourteen and a small time thief who spent fifteen years in prison before landing a job as a city garbage collector with no real future.  He fears that his two sons, Lyons (Russell Homesby), already an adult, and Cory (Jovan Adepo), seventeen, may follow in the path he has trod, and his fear impels him to treat them with overweening strictness – a strictness that leads eventually to mental and emotional abuse.  A quite charming fellow, until his sense of control is challenged!

Troy from early on has always dreamed of being a professional baseball player but was prevented from realizing that dream by the many years he spent behind bars.  By the time he got out he was already far into his thirties and no pro ball club was hiring black men to any great extent, especially one of his age and lack of training.  Jackie Robinson’s career was just getting off the ground.  He had to learn that trying for a career in sports was futile for him, and he demands that his sons develop a craft rather than go in that direction.  His clash with Cory, who has been presented with a chance to make a start in football, needing only his parents’ consent, is heartbreaking.  Troy refuses the consent, when Cory evades getting and keeping a job at an A&P. 

Rose is a more than decent woman, one who loves her sons and tries to protect them from the hardnose policies of their father.  Viola Davis brings her to vibrant life, a woman of deep and provocative feeling who, as she tells Troy in an especially stressful moment, has shared the same dumpy house with him in the same dumpy neighborhood for all the eighteen years they have been married.  “I had dreams too [that were never realized]!”  You know from hearing and studying her that her love for her husband is real, which makes his disclosure of infidelity exceedingly painful.

Troy has his moments of great insight and he knows how to make and keep a friendship with a fellow garbage collector named Jim Bono (Stephen Henderson).  The movie begins on the street on a Friday afternoon, when he and Bono are wrapping up their day’s work and when they settle into Troy’s backyard for lightweight conversation and good-humored exchange.  Bono is a short stocky man, very low keyed and good natured.  He makes appearances throughout the movie and becomes a kind of moral compass for Troy. 

The other key character is Gabriel, Troy’s brother (Myketi Williamson), a World War II veteran with a head injury from combat that today might be controllable but at that time condemned him to a state of arrested childlike development. He visits Troy and Rose intermittently, carrying a bugle wrapped over his shoulder, thinking that he is the Gabriel of Scripture that is supposed to blow his horn at the end of human history.  He walks around through the streets with a grinning face proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  Troy seems to have infinite love and tolerance for him and points to him as a casualty of the white race’s wars.  Gabe (as he is called for short) plays a very vital role during the closing moments of the story.

A good discussion question: How does Rose heal the rupturing that her husband has created, or does she, and what motivates her to make the sacrifice she chooses to make that closes off so many doors and opens so  many more?

Washington and Davis starred together on Broadway in a revival of “Fences” in 2010.  In this adaptation to the screen Denzel himself is the director of the show.  He joins a very minute club of motion picture persona who have dared to attempt the task of directing themselves.  Few have ever met with sterling success at this feat.  Orson Welles and Woody Allen still occupy a commanding lead.  Washington seems to have become the latest of them, though it is very difficult making pure cinema out of a highly theatrical piece of work.  As with the play, most all of the action takes place in the yard or the interior of the Maxson home. 

One factor that glares at us is the complete absence of drugs.  Today in a redominantly poor black neighborhood that would be highly unlikely.  Booze does play a part.  In fact, that turns out to be an Achilles Heel for this black man.  He can make with the words in great abundance, and his jolly demeanor makes him immediately charming, but he drinks too much.  One moment of drunken debauchery turns him into an emotionally lethal weapon in dealing with Cory, who has signed up for military service.  It is a signal moment of chosen and complete alienation. 

One noticeable failing of the film is the complete anonymity of Troy’s mistress.  Even if she is never seen or heard from in the play, there is no established protocol against bringing her to life in the screen adaptation.  For someone who becomes a wedge between husband and wife, greater attention should have been paid.  I suspect that Washington’s respect for August Wilson, one that borders on worship, may have elicited from him a fear of altering the supposed sanctity of the original text.

But the performances of all the cast are top grade and they boost the power and the poetry of the classic August work to give us a memorable experience.  I would walk many miles to see either of the two leads, Denzel or Viola, at work in anything. 

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.