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.

Moonlight (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

1 hr. and 50 min, color, 2016

Have you ever been lulled and seduced by the sound of soft ocean waves?  Have you ever found them hypnotic?  That sound plays a big part in the story of Chiron, an African American boy growing up and struggling to find his sexual and social identity.  We first see him as an elementary school age child in Miami being chased by ruffians and hiding out in an abandoned shack, frightened into mute withdrawal, until a tall grown man named Juan (Mahershala Ali), who happens to be a drug pusher, rescues him from the nasty, bullying malevolence which he is facing and takes him under his wing. 

Juan soon discovers that Chiron has no known father and is up against a drug addicted mother (Naomie Harris) from whom he receives no love.   He soon meets and comes under the watchful and sympathetic eye of Juan’s woman friend Teresa (Janelle Monae), who gives him a home away from home where he can stop in as the need arises.  This offer gives him some respite from the pain he endures at his mother’s hand and opens up new territory for him to explore, though it is not quite a total rescue.

One standout scene consists of Juan teaching Chiron how to swim.  It is a major moment when that gentle surf I have already mentioned works its charm.  It feels to me like a baptism of his spirit.  The camera literally gets into the ocean with the two of them and performs in a kind of ballet motion.  We watch as over time the kid catches on to how to conduct himself safely in the calm waters, a new vista opening up for him.  Juan tells him he is “in the middle of the world”.   This is quite literally true, water occupying about three quarters of the globe’s surface!  It is in this scene that the first sign of joy begins to appear on Chiron’s face.

But Chiron is greatly conflicted when he learns of Juan’s profession.  Without a strong rudder he faces a huge crisis propelling him into a drastic, startling move that sets his sail in a dangerous direction.

Juan is a Cuban who has been hustling all his life but has apparently mellowed over the years, possibly due to the sickness from which he is soon to die, one never identified.  He left me wanting to know him better, to explore what he as a child went through.  Maybe another movie can be made, set at an earlier time, telling his own tale of stand-up-or-be-knocked-down.  (Ali won the Oscar this past season for Best Supporting Actor.) 

The life of a child living in a thicket of poverty and neglect is not new on screen, but this is no blistering indictment of anybody or anything.  There is no aura of bleakness despite this setting and there is no political pulse beating behind the writing.  It is not an especially controversial presentation, though in the not too distant past it would have raised eyebrows in the black community in its treatment of a black child who discovers that he is gay and whose discovery is not held in a negative light.   The aura and pace of the film are low keyed, soft, gentle, without frenzy or delirium, even though there are a few incidental characters who are hostile and bullying.   He is called a faggot and subjected to various indignities.  It remains for Juan and Teresa to assure him that the barb does not apply to him and that he has ample time to decide whether he is gay or straight.  Juan also tells him that only he can decide what kind of life he is going to live. 

The kid’s story is told in three extended chapters, covering the space of about fifteen to twenty years, beginning with preadolescence, jumping to late teens, and ending when he is in his middle twenties.  A different actor portrays him in each chapter – Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevente Rhodes respectively.  A friend named Kevin shows up in all three segments, also portrayed by different players.  He is someone who plays a very important part in Chiron’s coming of age. 

Barry Jenkins is the director of this gem, an African American graduate of Florida State University, only thirty-seven years of age and already, after only three modest movies before this one, displaying great genius.  Lots of people recognize this, as evidenced by the Oscars “Moonlight” won for Best Picture and for Best Screenplay, an honor which he shared with fellow writer Tarrell Alvin McCraney.  The movie also won the Golden Globe for Best Drama.  He is not an activist or an iconoclast.  He treats his characters as young American men, who just happen to be black, trying to find the center of themselves through the maze of peer pressure, growing pain, bewilderment, disillusionment, emotional upset and discovery.

At the same time Jenkins does not misrepresent the quirks of the subculture in which the story takes place.  There is much dialogue that some might find a little difficult to understand.  I confess that I had to consult another writer’s plot summary before some links were connected for me.  There is a lingo that pervades much of the action that I found curiously interesting even before I got the translation.  Just the sound and pace of it has its own appeal.  Jenkins sets the story in the environment in which he himself grew up and where he could wield the language meaningfully and astutely.  But of course there is never a flood of words; this is a lean script but at the same time a very crisp one.  The dialogue is mostly and appropriately slang.

Late in the film, after violence and betrayal have impacted upon both, Chiron and his mother have a reconciliation that stands very much alone in my memory.  It is a very emotional scene, but not overdone or in the slightest soapy.  Great acting all the way through the movie by Naomie Harris!  She really delivers!  As far as I am concerned she has the most difficult role to fill in the entire screenplay.  What a bridge of emotion she has to cross!

Facial expressions play a major part in assaying the inner life of Chiron and Kevin, especially in the closing half hour when they are alone and weighing the content of the lives the two of them have thus far led.  It is a brilliant piece of work in and of itself.  (Here Kevin the grownup is portrayed by Andre Holland.) I was deeply moved by the course their simple conversation takes and the non-verbal messages they send back and forth with their eyes and their body language.  By the close of it Chiron has undergone a very simple breakthrough that points to a significant change that we are to assume will not be all that long in coming about, even though the exact form of it remains unknown.  I was on the verge of tears following them as they groped for words to express deep seated feeling, trying to cut through the pretense and the buddy/buddy palaver and the shame over past mistakes.  The last few minutes, overlaid with the sound of those gentle waves on the shore, left me almost in a trance.  Beautiful and breathtaking!   

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.

Cruelty - Up Close and From Afar (Essay by Bob Racine)

Until very recently I never gave much thought to what animals had to be put through in order to be counted on to perform for the pleasure of human beings.  Practically everybody of my generation has been to the circus at one time or another in their lives and we have all been dazzled and maybe thrilled to see those elephants and tigers and lions performing in obedience to their so-called “trainers”.  Did we ever notice that they did not fawn over the man who cracked the whip?  A domesticated dog, hungry for human attention and with lots of instinctive affection to bestow, bubbles over when laying eyes upon just about anybody who comes into view, especially when the approaching individual is the pet’s owner or even somebody halfway familiar.  Walk into any pet shop and you will be greeted by yelps and sniffs and scratching coming from just about every cage on the many shelves.  But in the circus we see no wagging tails on those performing beasts in the ring, no delight in the very presence of those giving the commands.  They respond only to threats.

The ones performing are not domesticated; they are captives who have been subjected to the cruel abuse and repression of their captors.  A few weeks ago 60 Minutes had a segment that featured an elderly married couple who have made it a life’s work gathering proof of such cruelty.  They have spent what must be millions to expose the racket, even to the extent of paying photographers to eavesdrop with hidden cameras behind the scene to record the deadly doings.  They have extended their investigation into many different countries. We were warned ahead of time that some of what we would see would be deeply disturbing and horrifying.  It was!  But the good news is that these folks have had tremendous success in getting humane laws passed and rescuing what must be hundreds of animals from a fate worse for them than death.  Barnum and Bailey’s recent abolishment of its elephant extravaganzas was surely one of the fruits of the labors of these humane and committed folks. 

In 1962 a movie, “Hatari”, featuring John Wayne, put in a successful bid at the box office.  Unlike other Wayne vehicles, this one had no villains.  The viewer visited an African game compound and watched as an assorted band of daredevils captures one animal after another for display in the zoos of the world.  Romantic comedy was mixed with the action; Wayne and Elsa Martinelli (owner of the hunting business for which the men work) fall for each other, and Red Buttons provides some sassy pun licks, but ultimately it all comes down to the dangerous business of capture and ship. Hatari after all is Swahili for “danger”.  I remember feeling entertained by the film, especially by Henry Mancini’s score that included the famous “Baby Elephant Walk”, but over the decades since, my consciousness raising over animal rights has reached such a point that I do not plan ever to see “Hatari” again or recommend it to any viewers.  The only positive thing I can say about it is that no animals are killed for sport – only one crocodile to save a member of the party from fatal attack.   

What we are not shown in the film are the conditions to which the captured animals are subjected.  I know they are confined to pens awaiting their new existence displaying themselves for curious citizens in varied countries.  But how can we not be aware of the fact that these denizens of the forest will never know freedom again?  Their fate is unknown, after we last see them, but thanks to 60 Minutes I have a rather clear idea of what it is.  

Animal rights are one thing, human rights are right there alongside of them.  There are thousands of refugees from war torn nations who are at this very minute being treated in like fashion, confined to walled-up and wired up encampments barely surviving, and many of them will likewise never know again the freedom that was once theirs.  We say that what is happening to these creatures is cruel, which it is, but the more I give thought to the subject of cruelty, the more it becomes clear to me that cruel treatment does not necessarily involve sadistic treatment.  Conditions themselves can be cruel – conditions that evolve from desperate and dangerous circumstances that nobody welcomes. 

The dictionary gives us essentially two definitions of the word “cruelty”.  On the one hand, it is identified as delighting in the pain of others, and secondly as doing what causes pain, whether the doer is aware of the result or not.  A cruel act can be nothing more than the making of a decision that causes needless suffering.  Pertaining to the first meaning, a sadist is a demented individual who enjoys inflicting pain.  Such a one does not have to have a political or practical reason for what s/he does.  The suffering s/he imposes is reason enough.  Watching another living being writhing and slowly succumbing to the numbness of death feeds some perverted hunger of theirs.  They glory in the agony.  Jack the Ripper comes to mind and numerous self-confessed killers on Death Row, as well as the Nazi death camps that were run by people hired to be monstrous.  But by far the most insidious form of cruelty is the second type, the unintentional, the suffering that emerges from what is conceived of as a high and noble purpose. 

Those of us who have seen the movie “Apocalypse Now” might recall the moment in which Robert Duvall as a military commander expresses delight in the smell of napalm.  He claims it gives him a lift, especially in the morning.  He bellows about it as he bends down to serve water to a wounded civilian right after his company has leveled the town and brought devastation upon the civilian he is supposed to be serving.  He is so distracted by his own waxing enthusiasm that he never finishes letting the man drink.  He does not seem to be pleased with suffering as such, but he is totally insensitive to what impact his actions have had upon the lives of Vietnamese peasants.  He wants to win the war, to correct something that allegedly needs correcting, but he might as well be delighting in the smell of blood, which for sure is just as keen in that morning air as is his beloved napalm.   

War’s and injustice’s cruel aftermath!   

How many of us decent citizens have ever been the recipients of cruelty as children?  I know I was.  I am not speaking of domestic abuse and violence; I suffered none of that.  I mean the kind of cruelty that one child can practice upon another on the playground or in the streets during playtime.  I was not a very brave kid.  I was terrified of rough play or physical combat.  Bullies were not unheard of where I spent my preteen years.  Some of what I underwent is such a painful and shameful memory that I could not bring myself to talk about it, much less put it down in print.  I saw what must have been criminals in the making, whether they ever stepped over onto the wrong side of the law or not.  My parents and I did not live in a very affluent neighborhood.  And I realize now all these decades later that the economic deprivations contributed to the shaping of many young minds.  A child fights back against such things and the inhibited scaredy-cats like me are an easy target.  If you get stomped on at home where you cannot defend yourself, you take it out on weaker playmates who you know will not make trouble for you.  The seeds of inferiority get planted in the child’s mind and as they germinate the seeds of superiority can grow up right alongside in a tug-of-war. 

What the two types of cruelty have in common – that which comes from close up and that which comes from afar – is the needlessness of it, whatever form it takes.  No human or social or political good is served when innocent people are savagely conquered and exploited.  It only serves to fulfill the demands of somebody’s warped understanding of their own or their nation’s or tribe’s importance and the supposed authority of their own brute strength.  Those immigrants who have found shelter in our country could tell us a lot about that.  We can only imagine what they have lived through.  Let us as a nation of peace and plenty welcome them and support them in their struggle to start a new life.  

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.

Arrival (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

1 hr & 56 min, color, 2016

                                               

Visitors from outer space!  Often they are called “aliens”.  And in the minds of many the word “alien” has come to be a synonym for “enemy”, or at best someone who falls under suspicion, deemed a potential threat.  In the lore of science fiction we have become accustomed to variously shaped creatures from other galaxies who do not comport themselves as we earthlings do and make strange sounds that our scientists have to translate into our language(s).  Or in some cases the visitors have already familiarized themselves with our speech patterns and phraseologies and are prepared to communicate in the native tongue(s).  Or in the spookiest of the lore they may not speak at all but cast themselves in the cloak of mystery or make certain atmospheric things happen that have the sole effect of frightening the human race.  Who are they and what do they want other than studying us?

An “alien” by dictionary definition is actually defined not as an enemy but as an outsider, someone not a citizen of the given country or territory or region but simply residing among the native population – for a designated span of time as a visitor or for an indefinite future.  The question might hang over their heads, be they from outer space or immigrants from other nations: Are they our friends or have they come to subvert? 

Such is the question posed in the current movie “Arrival”, which has stirred up big box office and has arrested the attention of science fiction lovers worldwide.  Among its virtues is the astute portrayal by Amy Adams of a brilliant Linguistics professor and author, Louise Banks, who is called upon by the U.S. government and its military to penetrate a giant oval shaped object suspended over a field in Montana and try to ascertain the language of the aliens who dwell within it and to find out why they have come and what they want.  (Several others have landed in various countries around the globe.  Those nations’ scientific geniuses are at work also in penetrating the mystery.)  Adams does a superb job of bringing this petite lady of letters to life and giving her dimension and power.  Louise approaches her task with some fear, as would anyone in like circumstances, but she evolves into a gutsy fighter who stands her ground when she has to face up to hawkish powers that be, insisting that the visitors are not invaders and that time must be given for the people of earth to fathom their message.  Watching this dramatic transition take place is quite gripping and fascinating. (I am floored by Adams’ failure to garner an Oscar nomination.  She certainly does top drawer work.  I have not at this point seen all the contenders’ performances, but there is at least one she surpasses in my judgment.)

The screenplay by Eric Heisserer from a story by Ted Chiang certainly challenges the intellect and the imagination.  It leaves engraved upon our memories some awesome images, in particular the sight of Louise standing before the huge glass partition that separates her from the creatures who are entreating her for a meeting of minds.  The connections they make do not come easily.  We are not told how long she is at the site or how long the visitors from space stay, but the precise editing conveys the sense that the encounter lasts for at least many weeks.  The labor and the fatigue are constantly in evidence.      

Another plus is the eventual relationship Louise enjoys with her little girl, who interestingly enough is a product of the mother’s adventure with the aliens.  No, she is not impregnated by one of them; the father is scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) whom she meets at the site of the oval capsule and who supports and assists her in her struggle.  You will have to see the movie to understand how this parental linkage comes about.  When the film takes time to portray warm personal emotion it is at its very best thanks to the directorial skill of Denis Villeneuve. 

If only that skill had been put to more discerning use!  Some are calling “Arrival” a masterpiece, but I must dispute this claim. For one thing, I found nothing new about the soundtrack.  We’ve heard those growling chords more than once.  They sound like some primordial beast laboring with a stomach spasm.  And I found the cinematography to be equally heavy-handed – too many dark, dreary images, even in the case of exteriors. The film is a stirring drama of search and discovery, no doubt about that.  The concept it puts forth in the portrayal of intergalactic encounter is both startling and challenging.  But for me the story material eventually devolves into the working of an arguable premise and into misty confusion. 

There is nothing new about earthlings having a transformation of consciousness experience from an encounter with extraterrestrials.  In “2001: A Space Odyssey” the apes in the opening sequence, just from standing in front of the monolith and touching it, are changed from grubbing little lower life forms into rational homo sapiens.  And in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” we have a friendly outer space visitor come to earth to try to persuade humankind to abandon nuclear weapons.  Some are persuaded; many are not.

Those who have not seen “Arrival” might want to stop their reading at this point.  I am giving a spoiler alert here, before I take on what I consider this arguable premise – beginning with the following paragraph. 

For those of you still with me, here I go!

The premise has to do with the ability to tell the future.  Louise learns to look at time differently.  She finds that she can foretell her own future and has come to be joyous in the living out of what she sees coming.  But such a thing is humanly impossible.  Why?  Because the future does not exist!  You cannot foresee what does not yet exist.  It has to be created, and that takes time, years and years for most people – years and years of decision-making, of trial and error and the imposition of history that others have been instrumental in making.  To believe that such a thing is possible, one would have to presume that those futures are determined by someone else – God or some higher power of predetermination.  That would preclude any possibility of hope as a thing to hold onto, when nothing else is apparent.        

Yes, Louise is content and joyous in the living out of what she foresees, and why should she not be?  She lives in a comfortable, secure, and loving environment, with a loving husband and daughter.  But why would you take hope away from those who are not so fortunate?  There are thousands of displaced persons in our world, and many of them will never find a secure place; they will die in the middle of their plight.  Anyone who watches the news should be well aware of that.  Victims of poverty, war and agonizing disease!  The mere odds themselves tell you that.  I for one do not crave such an unearthly foresight, and I do not suppose that any other sensible person now living would.  The idea of time past closing some gap with time to come lends itself to a nice mathematical mind game, but as a working principle it is overwhelmed by hard reality.     

And would somebody explain to me how Louise is able by a quick phone call to turn a warmongering general into a peacemaker?  Somehow she has set forces in motion that result in nations coming together in unity.  But we are given no insight into how this is supposed to have been facilitated.  That, if such a thing is plausible, would be another story within itself.   

I would be willing to take part in a discussion of the movie with those who have found it other than I have indicated.  I am in a show me attitude!  What did I miss in my two complete screenings of it?  Or let me have argumentative feedback at least.  That would be exciting.  I wonder what Stephen Hawking thinks of 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.

In the Heat of the Night (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

1 hr and 50 min, color, 1967

                                               

Landmark movies do not have to be super spectacular creations.  “In the Heat of the Night”, released fifty years ago this summer (yes, another half century anniversary), did not introduce any new cinematic devices or any technical innovations or original narrative techniques.  Viewers did not set new records in attendance; crowds were not lined up at box offices in serpentine formation around the block.  But the picture did sell, enough to start a groundswell of interest that led to Oscar victory and did make an unmistakable impact upon the American movie audience’s mind.  It was what it signaled that set it apart and drew earnest attention from all over the country.  To put it precisely, in the words of Malcolm Boyd, it was in this one that “the black man became a man” on screen at last, in every sense of the term.   The African American male image has never been the same since in motion pictures. 

Sidney Poitier is a proud, professionally competent northern police detective, a homicide expert, traveling through Sparta, Mississippi, who gets roped into showing bigoted small town sheriff Rod Steiger how to solve a murder and throws Jim Crow racism back into the redneck teeth with a flourish.  Director Norman Jewison and Screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, working from a John Ball novel, are our benefactors.  The film is full of high tension face-offs, and almost every scene is memorable.  It not only portrayed the entrenchment of Southern bigotry at the time but ripped into it and exposed its raw core.  And it did not do this in the garb of a docudrama or a narrated, topical illustration.  It was staged as one might stage any conventional who-done-it, served up with a heaping helping of police detective work and undercover investigating.  But its detective hero just happened in this case to be a man whose racial identity pushed buttons that set off a chain reaction of enmity and violent aggressiveness. 

This was not by a long shot Sidney Poitier’s first starring role.  He has been in films since the early 1950s and in most of them he has played a lead.  (The most memorable of those is “Lilies of the Field”, which I recently reviewed.)  But this was the first case in which the film was devoted intentionally and conspicuously to the red hot button issue of Southern styled racism.  By 1967 most of the landmark civil rights legislation of the Johnson years had already been enacted.  The 1963 March on Washington was recent history and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial was fresh in most Americans’ minds.  But of course what was on the books and what was being enforced were worlds apart.  Jim Crow still ruled the South, especially in small town and rural areas.    

Many of you reading this may be unfamiliar with the film for the simple reason that it came out before you were born or at least well before you were of an age when you would have been aware of its existence; maybe it got lost in the torrent of world events or of personal struggles of your own.  I myself was only thirty-four when I first viewed it at a theater on Times Square.  It was an afternoon in the middle of a week, with very few people present.  That was nothing unusual at a matinee, except for the fact that the rest of the viewers in the audience were all black, and they were so exercised by what they saw that I began to fear that maybe I, the lone whitey, would not get out of there alive.  (I did, of course!  They acted as if I was not even present, and that pleased me no end.) 

Can we now imagine how cathartic as well as electrifying it must have been for them to see a black man stand up to the white baron of the community, returning the man’s facial slap without hesitation?  That was a first, and it tore through the air.  The big shot is so startled by what this supposedly inferior black man has done that he is reduced to tears.  What gets unmasked in this scene is the essence of so-called Southern white paternalism.  We see that it is nothing more than a thin veneer loosely disguising hate, thuggery, and paranoia.   The black folk who saw it on first release must also have found catharsis in the scene in which three redneck hooligans gang up on Poitier in a garage, and this black Philadelphia citizen fights them back with courage and expertise.  This is one of two scenes actually in which the detective comes perilously close to getting lynched.  But he does not kow-tow for an instant. 

Not that the man is a crusader.  He is a reluctant participator.  He is on his way to visit his mother when he is corralled by a twist of circumstances into taking charge of the investigation.  He is not out to prove anything, other than the identity of the killer.  He simply believes in being thorough and professional in the performance of a duty, regardless of the time or place.  In the larger sense he has nothing to prove and is not out to impress the white establishment or curry favor.  

Poitier may be the focus of attention all the way through, but he is not the only leading player.  Rod Steiger is mammoth in the role of the sheriff, who is conflicted over the investigation Poitier is doing.  He feels pressure from two sides.  The white oligarchs of the town do not want Poitier to show them up; Steiger is ready to put him on the train and ship him out.  But the wife (Lee Grant) of the murdered man, an industrialist from the north who has come south to build a factory, has other ideas.  After seeing how hasty and incompetent the sheriff is in arresting a suspect who Poitier proves is innocent, she declares that she wants the black detective kept on the case until the true felon is caught, threatening to pack up her dead husband’s engineers and equipment and leave the area, if her wish is not met.  The factory is something of huge economic importance to the life of the community, and the bigwigs need to keep her appeased.  And there is Steiger right in the shaky middle – the horns of a daunting, king-size dilemma!  

Steiger was quite brilliant with anything he did, though he was never a box office champion.  He was something very special and quite versatile.  He might have second billing here, but he makes something prodigious out of this easily rattled, nervous, slouchy, gum chewing officer of the law.  Not only do we get to observe his chief’s performance on the job, but in an intimate scene the screenwriter takes us into his inner mind to show us how lonely and wretched he is.  By film’s end he has come to feel a quiet respect for Poitier.  Steiger’s work in the movie earned him a well-deserved Oscar, and the work of the combined cast and crew earned the Best Picture trophy.   

The settings are so believable that I sometimes get the feeling while watching that I am smelling the town, smelling the dusty roads, smelling the jail and police station, smelling the depot.  There is nothing phony about the visuals and nothing half disclosed about the reactionary fear of the isolated town.  And a low keyed jazzy score by the celebrated Quincy Jones on the soundtrack adds its rich flavor as well as the voice of Ray Charles singing the title song. 

Not often have I ever pleaded with my readers for their attention to what I am highlighting, but this time I cannot think of a better word for what I want to say.  I plead with everyone reading this who has never seen “In the Heat of the Night” to check it out from Netflix and screen it, or if you remember once seeing it but the memory is hazy, check it out and refresh yourself on a vital aspect of American life and history.  I am saddened to have to say that it still reflects upon a very real danger dogging at our nation’s heels.  Hate crimes and enflamed racism are still very much with us, as recent killings that have made front page news so painfully demonstrate.  Jim Crow may not be as dominant as he once was, but he is still lurking around.   See this and educate yourself a little more on the subject.

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.