I, Tonya (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

2 hrs, color, 2017

“Everyone has their own truth.”  Such is the declaration of the accomplished figure skater Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) as she ponders all that she has lost in the way of prestige and respect after getting caught in the scandal that ruined her professionally. We are somewhere in the middle of the 1990s, after the worst has happened.  She is talking to a nameless camera operator but her words are meant for the millions of us who are giving heed to this very thorough bio-drama that tracks her life from age 4 to age 23, when the axe fell on her.  This flimsy self-defense before the camera will not satisfy those like myself, who regard her as a glory-seeking athlete in her younger days who never learned what true self-respect requires of a headliner.  The film asks for some of the audience’s sympathy while not soft soaping her own contribution to the infamous incident that became international news.  

How many of us remember the incident?  In 1994 some misguided friends of hers, most notably her husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), thought they would take matters into their own hands to insure that champion skater Nancy Kerrigan would not be an obstacle to Tonya’s winning top honors in the 1994 Olympic trials.  They arranged for a paid hit man to attack Kerrigan, smashing her knees and disabling her from participation.  The subsequent investigation led through various phases until Harding herself was finally implicated.  Not that she planned the attack or approved of it but that she knew her husband was up to something nefarious and was very slow in reporting the same to the FBI.    

Hats off to the screen writers who took full cognizance of Tonya’s poor, redneck background and her bitter childhood under the supervision of an extremely abusive mother (Allison Janney)!  Janney very much deserves the Oscar for Supporting Actress that she won for the performance. She is a study in and of herself.  We have all been exposed to images of the fanatical stage mother, of which Ethel Merman’s character in “Gypsy” is an unforgettable example.  But this mother is something far beyond anything that even begins to feel like a cliché.  She is mean and nasty and believes that the way to “love” is through intimidation and cutting the ground out from under her daughter.  Nothing Tonya can do is able to elicit any kind or degree of praise or encouragement or positive reaction from the woman.  “You skate like a graceless bull dyke.”  Can you imagine a more deflating remark a mother could make to a young woman under her tutelage?  And the remark follows some performing we the audience see that to any ordinary eye looks to be quite smooth and professional.  Nothing Tonya ever does is good enough for this harridan.  How does anyone get it into the head that you build up by tearing down?  But skating on the ice is all from an early age that the girl has known, something that at least brings her public notice and acclaim, so she keeps on with it.  The mother even pays a young man to heckle her daughter before she descends upon the ice; fortunately that is the moment when she becomes the first skater ever to achieve a triple axel.  We are left wondering whether or not the mother was hoping to incite her to this success by the bribery.  

Sebastian Stan is magnificent too as the husband who over time also becomes abusive, though he starts off seemingly quite admiring of her and her appearance.  But one frustration leads to another and the marriage starts to implode.  What at first is admiration somehow segues into a need to control, hence the claim that his felonious behavior is a way of “protecting” her.  At one very insightful point Tonya admits that receiving abuse is the only way she has ever elicited love or anything like it, so why not marry an abuser?  It is a quite well tread tale, in numerous films, but the stars are so good and the writing so superb that they make an old story feel remarkably new.

Though I have reservations about Tonya’s motivations and her sense of personal propriety, I have to admit that the scene in the courtroom when sentence is pronounced barring her for life from any further participation in professional skating, among other penalties – fines, community service, etc. – is quite distressing and heartbreaking to watch.  Her initial sentence is eighteen months in prison, with these other things offered as an alternative on suspension of the sentence. She pleads that the major penalty of prison be imposed and that later she be allowed to continue on with her skating career.  She asks to be jailed; she is willing to endure that and she makes the plea backed up by thousands who still believe in her and want to see her continue.  She is faced with a tremendous void without skating, the one thing that has given her ragged life meaning and purpose.  Robbie in tears and simulated shock makes the moment truly penetrating.  Frankly I thought it was a fair offer.  After all, she is not a second rate performer; she has accomplished great feats in the ring.  But the judge refuses.

Once again I have to take issue in a matter of movie classification.  It seems that in recent years it has gotten easier for one to be designated a comedy.  A Google biography of Harding calls “I, Tonya” a black comedy.  But if this is black humor, then so is the legend of Joseph McCarthy.  We cannot seize upon scattered laughs in the course of the footage or in the words of a rabble rouser and call the whole production an entertainment built upon the absurd. The absurd does not comprise the basis for the screenplay of “I, Tonya”. I had the same reaction to the release of “Get Out”, also designated a comedy, which I recently reviewed.  I considered it and still do a horror picture; it takes us on a walk through a nasty series of surreal encounters in which life and possible death are juggled.  It takes us far beyond what we could call the anticipation of bizarre captivity.  It throws the hero into the grip of sinister forces bent upon his total corruption and destruction. What is to laugh at in that predicament?  In “I, Tonya” the things that happen are based upon fact and deal in factual developments.  The characters are disturbingly plausible.  A serious issue of justice and morality is treated in deeply dramatic terms.  For me this biopic is drama.

Since it is unlikely that we will ever see a sequel to it, it seems fitting for me 

to fill you folks in on some of what has transpired in Harding’s life since that sentence was handed down to her.  For one thing she has divorced Jeff, with whom she no longer keeps company.  The same is true of her and her still living mother, and she has remarried twice since. Interestingly enough she has not given up on skating.  She still performs for select audiences and has expressed the desire to have her own skating TV show for a nationwide airing.  Now at age 47 she is still capable of doing a triple axel and remains the only skater who has ever achieved it.  Actually the first “sport” in which she took part after her dismissal was women’s boxing, securing a few unremarkable victories and suffering a few just as unremarkable defeats.  I am pleased to say that she did not stay in that arena for very long. 

She won herself a place in the cast of Dancing with the Stars, where she has thrived so much better.  She has made many TV guest star appearances.  And she claims she has found at last the happiness that eluded her before.  Her second marriage lasted only a year, but her third one has been a seeming success; by it she became the proud mother of a son in February 2011.  Whether any further offspring has emerged over these past seven years, I cannot say for lack of up-to-date information.

I think it is safe enough to assume that Harding has managed, since her great loss, to maintain respectability and we can only hope a measure of transformation as well.  At least we have heard no reports or rumors about alcohol or drug addiction.  She has not thus far landed in any ditch.    

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

Murder on the Orient Express (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

1 hr & 54 min, color, 2017

                              

After the Bible and Shakespeare, who is responsible for the third largest publishing output in all of human history?  This author has given us a voluminous quantity of novels, plays, essays, poems and short stories that it would take years for any modern chronicler to even approach, let alone exceed.  It would require a museum to house a copy of every extant composition, and perhaps an encyclopedia to list all the titles.  Am I talking about a historian?  a scientist?  a scholar?  One would think it would be somebody of great versatility, a super intellect, or at least somebody occupying a niche in a class or category that the person shares with no one else.  One of a kind maybe? 

                              

Guess again!

                              

The individual who has achieved this feat has been with us until fairly recently; death occurred in 1976.  And who ever said that the male of the species has dominated the writing domain, since the Bard’s demise?  Yes, I am speaking of a woman, someone celebrated for as long as there has been breath in most of the bodies including my own now living on the earth. 

                              

Agatha Christie may not be the most prolific writer of renown; she has not set any standards of brilliance or blazed any new trails.  She has not raised any bar of quality to which others have been compelled to adhere.  She has just churned them out and churned them out, ever since she came into public notice, and that was before she even reached the age of twenty.  The first specialty of authorship that probably comes to most of our minds when her name is mentioned is the mystery story.  (I myself had the privilege of appearing in a performance of one of her who-done-its many years ago, a play derived from a work of hers entitled “And Then There Were None”, better known in theatrical circles as “Ten Little Indians”.)   

                              

This woman is not a shoddy writer, and she has always had the knack of weaving a clever plot, a tireless creator of suspense who can be relied upon to entertain and to stretch the viewer’s or the reader’s expectations, and “Murder on the Orient Express”, first issued in novel form in 1934 and previously adapted to the screen in 1974, is no exception. The time setting is the 1930s and in movie terms the period scenery takes almost full command of what the eye beholds.

                              

The leading character is someone who has appeared in numerous works of hers – a Belgian detective by the name of Hercule Poirot, played here quite colorfully and at times passionately by Kenneth Branagh (who also directed the film).  Poirot was introduced very early in Christie's oeuvre as a former police investigator retired to private life and preferring a detective business of his own.  The man is distinguished in this film by a very long handlebar mustache that curls most conspicuously on both ends and a thick almost French sounding accent to go with it.  In the opening sequence he is waiting by the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem to board a ferry that is to take him to Istanbul where the famous Orient Express awaits him.  But before his departure he is prevailed upon to identify the thief who has just lifted precious stones out of the Temple and hidden them.  He not only fingers the thief but uncovers the stones as well.  In this introduction we are given a taste of his deductive technique, not so very different from that of Sherlock Holmes. 

                              

Everybody seems to know him and admire him, even though he is reticent to take on any more cases until he has had time to enjoy an extended vacation.  But of course we know that that vacation will have to be postponed, after a murder during the wee hours aboard the Express interrupts his plans and seemingly those of all the varied passengers on board as well.  The murdered person is a man traveling under an assumed name (played by Johnny Depp) but identified by Poirot as the suspected kidnapper and murderer of a child back in the States.

                              

A rather sizeable ensemble cast of players comes under suspicion as Poirot is compelled to conduct what turns out to be a very confounding investigation.  Space would not permit me to list all of them, but aside from Branagh some of the other major ones who drive the plot are Michelle Pfeiffer, Penelope Cruz, Daisy Ridley, Josh Gad, Willem Dafoe, Derek Jacobi and Leslie Odom. In fact I find it quite hard to discuss fine details, especially vital facts about the characters, without giving away so much and spoiling suspense, so I choose to confine myself to speaking about Poirot, the ambience of the production and about what influenced Christie to compose this particular tale.

                              

It seems that divine intervention plays its part when a snow drift blocks the rails and barricades everyone on board.  What we then have is one of those secluded confrontations wherein the suspects are several and when escape to the outside world is impossible.  In “And Then There Were None” it is an island to which some famous individual has invited an assortment of people, just about all of whom die off before the real murderous instigator of the party is unmasked.

                              

Poirot is totally devoted to a black/white universe.  “There is good on one side and evil on the other with nothing in-between”.  Such is the code by which he has always lived and done his work.  But on this fateful journey across most of the Eurasian countryside he runs into a complex situation that calls his code into serious question. He is forced to ask himself if society’s system of justice is really as neat as he has always supposed it to be.  This, after he has to face a circumstance unlike any he has ever had to confront before.

                              

Poirot is drawn in this episode more vulnerable and fragile than Christie was accustomed to making him.  He finds that he cannot quite make sense of all the clues and contradictions the case turns up.  He also reveals something about his heart of hearts in his quiet reflective conversations with a beloved woman in his past, who I assume is a departed wife.  Thoughts of her bring tears to his eyes, when he is alone.  He confesses to her that for once in his long career he is stumped.

                              

“Murder on the Orient Express” is fiction, but in this case Christie was certainly influenced by fact.  Many of you I am sure have become familiar with the Lindbergh kidnapping/murder case that occurred in the early 1930s in New Jersey.   It was called the Crime of the 20^th Century.  The 20-month old son of Aviator Charles A. Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh on the night of March 1, 1932 was lifted out of his crib and never seen alive again.  Many weeks later his body was found, victim of a bludgeoning, not very far from the Lindbergh residence.  The case dragged on for three years before a German immigrant named Hauptmann was arrested, tried and executed for the crime. The case was dominating the American newspapers at the time Christie’s book was published, though Hauptmann’s execution had not yet taken place.  There was much controversy surrounding the case’s outcome.  Many prominent people had doubts about the German man’s guilt, one to which he never admitted.  Some of the evidence used to convict him was thought to be ambiguous.  The handwriting of the ransom note had some characteristics in common with the man’s recorded samplings, but it was never precisely identified as his.  Even Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady at the time of execution, weighed in with her doubts, so much so that she strongly urged the New Jersey governor to postpone the execution until further investigation and study had been made, but to no avail.  Many to this day think perhaps it was a rush to judgment.    

                              

In the opening of the 1974 movie version, newspaper clippings spell out the details of the 1930s crime, though fictional names were used, some of the time element has been altered and additional tragedies in the wake of the crime have been added.  There are those who think they see some parallel between some of the characters in the thriller and people known to be close to the Lindberghs.  I will say no more on that subject for the benefit of those unfamiliar with how Christie resolves the story’s tension.  Any who are curious enough to do so after seeing it can make their own study of the official record and draw their own conclusions.

                              

Whatever the conclusions about the factual case and its bearing upon the Christie yarn, we have to admit that the story reminds us in elaborate form that a homicide never victimizes only one single person.  The cruel wanton killing of one victim does permanent damage to a circle of decent people, those related to and personally acquainted with the deceased.  Lives of the survivors suffer from the injustice, not just once but in a never ending spiral of recollection and angry resentment and hatefulness.  Those left behind bear the indignity.  Poirot, who is in the habit of enjoying the work of catching criminals, ones in whose fate he is not accustomed to having any personal investment, seems here to get caught in a web of emotional involvement and has to surrender a large measure of control over his usual habit of playing the judge with the last word.  He has to make a decision that leaves everyone on the train and in the audience in the grip of controversy.  After the last fadeout, you may be left wondering if in some strange way you have been compromised.    

                              

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

The Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton (Book Review by Bob Racine)

Published by Thorndike Press, 2016

The autobiography or, as it is sometimes called the memoir, is a category of writing I usually approach with some caution.  I have found it to be overall the least dependable of source information pertaining to its subject.  Of necessity we get a biased view of developments.  I have been disappointed several times by the author being too close to the subject or by his or her interest in clearing the name, justifying actions once taken that have become suspect on the part of the public being served.  One can often sense that these writers are only telling us what they want us to know.  They do not always “come clean”; issues of a questionable ethical or moral character get skirted.  Sometimes it is not difficult at all to sense when truth is being compromised. 

But, not wishing to be misunderstood, let me say that I have read some that were quite convincing and some even inspiring.  And there are some that seem to transcend the subject and open a vast territory for inquiry and reflection.  Such a one is this powerful tome by an award-winning author named Glennon Doyle Melton.  It is the account of a married woman’s struggle to bring order out of the emotional chaos caused by her husband Craig’s betrayal. 

There are roughly four types of autobiography.  One is what I call the straight chronology comprehensive.  This is the kind in which the author presumes to “tell all”, to cover the whole story of her or his existence, usually composed sometime very late in the person’s life.  The chapters follow in chronological order; the book is usually quite long.  

We have as well the straight chronology limited.  The autobiographer is not trying to cover the whole career, to be exhaustive.  Only events within a restricted period of time are shared, but they are significant enough that they give a well-rounded picture of the person, for good or ill or suspect.   

Then there are memoirs that are revealing about the one writing, but also revolve around someone else in the experience of the author, some person or group of people.  “Tuesdays with Morrie”, which I have reviewed as a movie, having also read the book, is a splendid example.  Or those who spend months embedded with a unit of the military, those researching the lives of people struggling with disease or examining life in a slum or the state of things in nursing homes often come forth with what proves to be eye-opening revelations not just about the area of inquiry but about themselves.  We share the reporter’s experience of a thing and when we finish we feel as if we have stored away a lot about the reporter.

And lastly there is the autobiography that is structured more like a work of fiction or a novel.  The story is told in the first person, but it is also depicted in the present tense.  Each happening is portrayed as if it is taking place while you read.  And that is what we have in “The Love Warrior”.  Take the  opening as an example.  The author is getting married:

“It’s almost time.  My father and I stand at the edge of a long white carpet, laid just this morning over the freshly cut grass. Craig’s childhood backyard is transformed by the start of fall and the promise this day holds.  My shoulders are bare and I feel a chill, so I lift my face toward the sun.  I squint and the sun, leaves and sky melt together into a kaleidoscope of blue, green and orange.  The leaves, my soon-to-be husband, our families sitting upright in their dressiest clothes, and I – we are all turning into something else.”

And on and on she goes for THE ENTIRE BOOK, never once jumping into a past tense.  If you did not know anything about the book you are reading, just hearing this very short excerpt, you would think you are starting in on a crisp novel or short story.  All at once we are far removed from an academic format.  She is not straining to remember her wedding day, not fishing for memories, not setting down any documented account of the place and time.  She is reliving it by making it immediate, irresistible, and just as vivid and authentic.  This opening passage appeals to the senses, to esthetics, with emotional range one is not likely to find in an ordinary recount.  I suppose others have been composed in this fashion, but never was there one as rich as this beauty.

I must confess that it is a temptation for me to not write a review; I would love, if it were possible, to just quote you the entire text.  Each and every tidbit of it I find just as captivating.  It would lend itself to monologues, to dramatic recitations. I cannot think of a single written confessional coming from someone wrestling with addiction that could match the thoroughness and the vividness in which Glennon lays it out – the steps taken toward her self-abuse in her pre-marriage life – the rationalizations, the impulses that drive someone with so much self-doubt to take the plunges, one after another – bulimia, drink, drug use.  She demonstrates how one can grow up with many friends and acquaintances, including a very loving sister and two reasonably faithful and caring parents but still feel not at home in her own body and experience intense loneliness, the kind that makes all incidents seem strange and that makes her surroundings seem unreal. 

She never takes the easy way out by shifting into overview or simple summary.  Everything that happens, even her wedding night and the daily life of her marriage, is portrayed in minute detail, and yet it never becomes tedious.  There is a well sustained sense of what happens next.  It is as if she is actually reliving things, internally as well as externally, and giving personal report of what takes place as it transpires.

She comes to realize that she has had a representative of herself, a false self that hides her real one.  How she discovers her real honest self is through communication on Facebook, following the marital crisis.  Not knowing who if anyone is reading, she feels a sense of liberation from having to look someone else in the face.  “That’s not my representative.  That’s the real me.  I want to learn more about me, so I keep writing.  My fingers are flying now, pounding against the keyboard like they’ve been waiting a lifetime to be freed.  They type juicy, dangerous, desperate sentences about marriage and motherhood and sex and life – it all pours out fast and furious, like the real me is gasping for air, like she’s trying to get it all out at once in case she’s never allowed to surface again.”

Her realization, after discovering her husband’s years-long infidelity and his addiction to pornography, has to do with what women have come to mean for many men.  She sees that she has been part of “a system that agrees that women are for being implanted and teased and painted and then arranged and dominated and filmed and sold and laughed at. . .sex is something men do to women.”

But this book is not Melton’s debut by any means.  She came to be a celebrated author back in 2014 with the publication of “Carry On, Warrior”, another book full of exciting anecdotes about her private life.  In that work also she covers a lot of ground, though she is more conventional in format and all that she depicts predates “The Love Warrior”.  In that work she does not tell a continuing story.  Each chapter is of the nature of a short essay on a given topic that relates to her life with her family and her marriage.  I have read both books, and for pure spiritual nurture I am ever so fond of both.  But I find “The Love Warrior” much more of a challenge and full of sustained energy.  It has a tension that lays claim to points and predicaments in my own experience.  It is dramatically focused.  A quite forceful and gripping memoir! 

“Carry On, Warrior” is like a Valentine with many streamers attached, very charming.  “The Love Warrior” is more explosive, more concerned with a long but successful recovery from an initial shock.  There is genuine warfare in it, inside Glennon’s body and mind and soul.  She digs deeper into herself.   

Have any of us over fifty ever taken stock and noticed that the process of self-discovery begun at an early age is still going on?  Hear it in her own words:

“I’d looked around and decided that adulthood meant taking on roles.  Adults became, became. . .  I became a wife and then a mother and a church lady and a career woman.  As I took on these roles, I kept waiting for that day when I could stop acting like a grownup because I’d finally be one.  But that day never came. My roles hung on the outside of me like costumes. . .I wake up each morning paralyzed, disoriented, stripped, naked, exposed.  Wondering, Who am I? Who was I before I started becoming other things?  What is true about me that can’t be taken away?”  At this point she is still wrestling with the question of what to do about Craig in the wake of what she has learned about him.  “Who is this woman who will or will not step back inside this family. That is the question that needs to be answered before I make this decision.”

For me, the most trenchant passage of the writing has to with the well-meant but frail attempts that friends of hers make to comfort her in the wake of the shattering discovery about Craig.  The one that really sets her off is the question “What happened?” 

“I want to pick up a crystal vase and smash it into the ground.  That’s what happened, I’d say. The few times I try to tell the shattering as a story, I regret it.  Spoken words make what happened to us too tidy, too palatable, too ordinary.  I can’t describe the ferocity of the fear and rage inside me with words tame enough for the light of day.  When I finish the telling, I want people to be as shocked and confused as I am.  I want thunder to roll and mouths to drop open.  But most often the listener makes the pain harder for me by trying to make it easier for her [the listener]”.

She goes on for several pages depicting six different types of Job’s comforters.  There is the Shover, someone who insists that there is nothing unusual about her predicament, the everything-happens-for-a-reason-this-will-be-a-blessing-you’ll-see type, someone who shoves her toward the door of hope impatiently.  “But I don’t want to be shoved.  I want to turn to that door in my own time.” 

She leaves no doubt that she is a true Christian believer.  I especially like the way she relates her faith to her three children.  A woman approaches her in the church hallway and starts to warn her about the dangers of divorce.  Divorce is not God’s plan for her family.  God’s preference is the nuclear family and if she steps outside his umbrella of safety, he doesn’t promise to protect her.  “God gave you to Craig as his helper. . .Your duty is to help him through this time.”  In other words, God values her marriage more than her soul, her safety, her freedom, or her self-respect; her marriage, however bad, is the cross upon which she should hang herself.  Then she thinks about the kids and realizes that they do not want her to become a martyr, but to show them how “a woman deals honestly with an imperfect life” and that God loves them more than the tenets of any institution of religion.

She declares that “making decisions is never about doing the right thing or the wrong thing.  It’s about doing the precise thing, and the precise thing is always incredibly personal and often makes no sense to anyone else.”  What a shrewd insight!  What shrewd piece of writing this book is!  I highly recommend 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.

The Post (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

1 hr & 55 min, color, 2017

Of all the discoveries I have made in the screening of this vital docudrama, and there are several, the one for which I am the most grateful is Katherine Graham.  She heretofore has been a total unknown to me, but thanks to the ingenuity of producer/director Steven Spielberg, the screen writing finesse of Liz Hannah and Josh Singer and the superlative acting prowess of Meryl Streep in the lead she is now and forever will remain visible to my mind, however long I go on living and breathing in this body.  Graham (now deceased) was the owner of the Washington Post in 1971 when the firestorm over the publication of what has come to be called the Pentagon Papers occurred.  The Post had been bequeathed to her upon the 1963 death of her husband Philip, who had built it up from a local feature into a nationally respected publication.

When Mrs. Graham took charge of it many thought that she was not qualified for the job and regarded her as a journalist beyond her depth, even though she had been in the newspaper business most of her adult life and the paper had been in the family even before that.  She was surrounded by many strong-minded men who played major roles in the decision-making process; they regarded her as essentially a figurehead.  She admits in the course of this drama that she has never thought of herself as having administrative capabilities on the scale that the position requires, never having dreamed that she would land in the job even upon the demise of her husband, whom she regards as a brilliant strategist. 

While meeting with bankers in one very crucial scene she seems a little cowed by the onus of responsibility that had always been regarded up to that time as a man’s calling.  But she comes of age in short order when her editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) pushes for the printing of those classified, stolen government documents pertaining to the waging of the Vietnam War, known soon enough as the Pentagon Papers.  The documents had been smuggled into the possession of the New York Times by activist/journalist Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys).  Then later some quite furtive detective work on the part of the Post staff turns up the documents, and once in the Post’s possession as well the burden of deciding about their release to the public and risking prosecution falls squarely upon Graham’s shoulders.  How she wrestles through the dilemma and arrives at her choice and grows many feet taller in the process is worth the price of admission.  The movie belongs to and honors this woman as portrayed by Streep.    

The documents revealed upon close inspection that the heads of government, including five U.S. Presidents since the end of World War II, had been lying to the American people about the alleged need of halting the spread of Communism as a rationale for the U.S. involvement in the political and social affairs of Southeast Asia.  The myth of a Communist North Vietnam encroaching upon an innocent South Vietnam had been sold to the American people, when the fact of the matter was our imperial interest in gaining a foothold in that region.  We were the aggressors, not who we were being told was our enemy.

There is nothing about the content or style of this powerful factual thriller that I would fault.  Spielberg knew exactly what he was doing and he got the results I am sure he was looking for.  I am impressed by how Tom Hanks in the role of Bradlee seems quite willing to keep a little lower profile than ordinary.  He is fully visible and forceful, but he takes second place alongside Streep and shares the spotlight with other male figures such as Bob Odenkirk as Ben Bragdikian, the journalist responsible for obtaining of the Papers, and Bruce Greenwood as Robert MacNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson; this man played a significant role in the escalation of the Vietnam War and was a longtime friend of Graham’s.  (Good casting!  There is a striking resemblance between the two men!)

And how timely can a movie be?  In this present era of political turmoil, when the honesty and integrity of political leaders is being called into question almost daily, we need this reminder of how valuable the press is, of how journalism can lead the way into the disclosure of truth and Free Press rights can be vindicated with courage, discretion and thoroughness.

Newspapers!  Yes, they have taken a beating in many quarters with the improved sophistication of digital TV coverage and its instant delivery of the news.  Our illustrious President has reported that even the New York Times and the Post are fading out, an assertion that strikes me more as wishful thinking on his part than an informed opinion.  As a matter of fact neither paper is on the verge of demise; both have as solid and dependable a readership as they ever have had.  There is still something to be said for editorializing, for three-dimensional analysis of current trends, of controversial developments.  There is still something to be cherished about the pursuit of fine points that more routine reportage can easily, and in some cases necessarily, gloss over.  News vehicles are meant to educate not simply inform.  And I love what one Supreme Court Justice said in defense of the Pentagon Papers exposure: the right of a free press was granted by our nation’s founders because the press’s first loyalty is to the service of “the governed, not the governors”.  That is another gift I take away from my viewing of “The Post”.

And here is another:  Katherine Graham in the last scene quotes something her father, another newspaper tycoon, once declared, that “the news is the first rough draft of history”.  I have never thought of it that way, but it makes excellent sense.  History in the making!  History from the ground up!  The barest facts preserved for future specification! 

There is a disturbing aspect to what we learn here about the events of the early 1970s.  I shudder to contemplate whether a Supreme Court of today would give leave for a newspaper to print what has been classified material, however vital the upshot of it would be when shared with the public, even a public that has the right to know when it has been deceived by Congressional, Executive and Military leaders over many long years.  I trust that the people of this country would not be so easy to mislead if a major war was instigated by a power hungry chief executive, even if victory was assured from early on.  

The Iraq invasion, one for which there was no justification, never found any real support among the populace.  I trust that by now we have learned that when a major power conquers a smaller nation, that major power owns what it invades. Such was the counsel that Colin Powell gave to George W. Bush before the first shot was ever fired, counsel that apparently Bush never took to heart.  There is no easy hit and run about such an invasion.  By that move we helped further destabilize life in the Middle East.  That would have been the case, even if weapons of mass destruction had been discovered.  The American people have undergone a tremendous loss of innocence over the last six decades.  We have learned, and rightly so, to be cautious about anything our leaders tell us, about the official word.  Open minded and seekers of enlightenment we must be, but cautious!  The best antidote to nationalistic extremism!

The closing moments of “The Post” lead us right up to the door of Watergate.  It ends exactly where “All the President’s Men” (another quality work that champions journalism) begins, even though the latter was filmed forty-one years earlier.  High school Social Science teachers could use the two movies to great advantage by screening them for their students in chronological order.  Together they cover three vital years in the history of our nation.  I have disclosed before in this blog that I believe strongly in the intelligent and courageous use of the docudrama.  When a top grade one comes along you can be certain that I will write about it.  I do not imagine that you could do any better than these two. 

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.

Special announcement

My good readers, this week I am having a new computer installed for my use.  I anticipate better service from it than from the aging one I have been using.  So be prepared for some extended time without my posting.  It may take  few weeks or a month or so for all my documents and materials to be transferred.  I have some professional people working on the project, so I anticipate being ready for activity within a reasonable time.  Please bear with me!  I'll be back soon.  Thank you!

Darkest Hour (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                                                        Email Address:

                                                              bobracine8971@gmail.com

2 hrs & 5 min, color, 2017

Winston Churchill is one of many celebrities about whom I have mixed emotions.  Yes, he accomplished many fine things; he was a military officer; he served for many years as a member of the British Parliament, where he influenced the passage of some crucial laws.  And he served two terms as Prime Minister, most notably during the early forties when he faced the burgeoning threat of Hitler. So many of his compatriots wanted to appease that dictator for the sake of survival and peace, but Churchill was the voice of resistance, and we all need to be thankful that he was. 

He was also a capable artist; over his lifetime he completed a few hundred paintings, most of which can still be observed in museums. He was a fighter plenipotentiary and took his country through World War II and victory over the Nazi empire, though it needs to be pointed out that he could never have prevailed in that struggle without the aid of the United States. We came into that War two years after the British did and by that time his cause was in the gravest doubt.  He had a lot of help.       

But of course he was something of a hothead.  One nickname for him was Bulldog.  He was very temperamental and could reduce people to a pulp with his arguments.  He got his country involved during World War I in the infamous Gallipoli debacle.  He pushed for the invasion of Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula in the hopes of pressuring the Turks to shift their allegiance to the Allied Powers, but it did not work, and there were about 250,000 British casualties.  A cruel defeat and a stain on England’s history from which it never recovered!  And it took many years for his military reputation to recover.  There was a recklessness about him that struck fear into the hearts of many of his fellow countrymen.  He was not the kind of Prime Minister I would want leading me under peaceful circumstances, but it just so happens that what the United Kingdom needed in 1940, after Germany declared war on it, was a hothead, or maybe what we today would call a hawk. 

And now we have this movie docudrama, “Darkest Hour”.  When I heard that it was centered around Churchill’s induction into the responsibilities of Prime Minster at the start of World War II, I feared that it would be a whitewash, that he would be lionized as a supreme heroic figure, with little or no attention to his faults and failures.  But while his decision-making during the course of the scenario could not quite be classified as reckless, it could be called quite impulsive.  When he comes into office, Germany is in the process of conquering one European country after another – France, Holland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, et al, and the entire British military constituency of 300,000 is trapped behind the lines at Dunkirk, leaving England completely defenseless.  (“Darkest Hour” dovetails quite nicely with the movie “Dunkirk”, recently reviewed by me on this blog, a more epic account of the eventual rescue of those 300,000.)  England has been left by its previous Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, in quite a mess and its conservative Parliament in a shambles. 

So Churchill steps into the vacuum, appointed by the King to form a new government, but he is not greeted with open arms by that Parliament.  In fact, the hawk admits, when privately consulted about his plans and his strategy after taking office, that he has none.  He talks big and turns a brave face toward the British public, while in private he seems quite at a loss; he even admits to fear, something not normally associated in peoples’ minds with him.  There is all kinds of conservative pressure being brought to bear upon him to enter into negotiations with Hitler.  The old guard in the legislature is ready to avoid war at any cost, even the loss of England itself.  And Churchill is right on the verge of agreeing to this, when he gets a bird’s eye view of what the citizens on the street actually want.  For the sake of those who have not yet seen “Darkest Hour” I will not spoil the suspense by telling how this comes about.  

And King George himself exerts some secret influence on his warlike disposition as well.  His King would have paid a severe price had he been captured by an invading German army, and he is not in the mood for escaping to Canada to avoid the ordeal.

Gary Oldman earns his Oscar for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role working through the bumps and grinds of taking Churchill apart and examining the mind and the heart of the man.  I personally have not viewed much of Oldman’s other work, though I know he has been around for a number of years.  I find absolutely no fault with his portrayal.  He faced, I’m sure, the temptation to ham it up and to make the man a colossus.  But he finds the right balance between his gruff and vulnerable sides, between the sandpaper and the soft spots, and he does it without diminishing the force of the man’s personality or the prodigious weight of his intelligence or of his imagination.  His work here is quite a study.  There is some delightful humor also in his interactions with fellow compatriots – even his first private encounter with the King.  This Prime Minister certainly had a knack for wittiness.  Whatever your opinions or reservations about Sir Winston, you do well to observe Oldman at work.  He takes possession of the movie.  He had to undergo some rugged physical reshaping to play the part.  

Let me interject here that another very quality piece of drama pertaining to British history is the current TV Special Series entitled “The Crown”.  It has completed two seasons and I now wait with great anticipation for Season Three.  Those who have not viewed the first two would do well to consider the work of John Lithgow as Churchill, even though his is a supporting role.  Regrettably the character has already died and I am not certain whether or not there will be flashback scenes including him in the remaining episodes.  As far as I am concerned Lithgow is as effective as Oldman.  Both give this figure a memorable treatment.  (Lithgow won an Emmy for his.)  Of course “Darkest Hour” is a more compressed narrative pertaining only to a few months early in the Second World War, while “The Crown” is a continuing saga covering all the decades in the reign of the current Queen Elizabeth.  Albert Finney also did a Churchill not too many TV seasons back, and I would laud his work as well.    

Kristin Scott Thomas contributes a nice touch as Churchill’s wife, who knows the man inside and outside and provides some much needed insight and empowerment, especially her keen understanding of what she sees as his inescapable place in the making of future history.  She provides a needed soft touch to steer his thoughts when his fury threatens to go off the deep end.  However it may have been actually, this helpmate is a definite leveling influence.  She even has a touch of the poet about her. 

There is one more category of Churchill’s accomplishments, one that I would rank above all others.  He was a tremendous writer.  He got his literary talents going very early, when he was in the army fighting in India during the 1890s.  His first two books tell of his experiences during that time.  After his departure from the military he got work as a war correspondent covering the Boer War in South Africa.  All his life he was writing.  Many books and articles poured out of him.  His words were shaped by respect for great ideals; he could wax ever so eloquent on the printed page. 

I am now going to close this reviewing by listing some of the many dozens of quotes for which he is responsible.  Every italicized word that follows is his.  Have an enjoyable read.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years.  To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to change often.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

 The price of greatness is responsibility.

Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal.  It is the courage to continue that counts.

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

You have enemies?  Good.  It means you’ve stood up for something or sometime in your life.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year.  And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen!

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.

What is adequacy?  Adequacy is no standard at all.

In the course of my life I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

The first duty of the university is to teach wisdom, not a trade, character, not technicalities.  We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what is required.

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; it’s also what it takes to sit down and listen.

Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.

All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

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

The Big Sick (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                                                        Email Address:

                                                              bobracine8971@gmail.com

2 hrs, color, 2017

What a ghastly sounding title – The Big Sick!  But there is nothing sick about the tale this low budget, independent film portrays.  It concerns an interracial romance and a clash of cultures, the stuff of big drama, but the makers preferred to give it a tender, warm hearted comic tone, while leaving much to the imagination in terms of outcome.  

Boy meets Girl and in the most relaxed and pleasant circumstances – at first.  The male in this case is a young Pakistani man named Kumail Nanjiani.  That is his screen star name, and in the film he actually plays himself.  You are never told this in the film’s credits, but the story is very loosely derived from Kumail’s personal life.  A fact-based scenario, one that was Oscar nominated for Best Original Screenplay of 2017 (by Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon)!  All other players are cast to portray fictional characters who represent influences in his life, apparently just a shade shy of the real people.  The direction is by Michael Showalter.

The female is a University of Chicago aspirant named Emily Gardner (Zoe Kazan).  They meet in the very first scene, when she attends a standup comic presentation of his in Montreal (twin city with Chicago) in which Kumail is one of many participants.  She is both an annoyance for him, “heckling” him during his presentation (not really; her outspoken words are actually friendly and flirtatious but regarded by him as a “heckling” interruption), and an instant romantic attraction, which he discovers afterward at the club’s bar. 

Kumail falls head over heels for her and she for him, but of course this presents him with a dilemma.  His very strict Pakistani parents are already hard at work trying to set up an engagement for him with any of an assortment of young Pakistani women.  They want him to marry among his own race, become a doctor or lawyer, and Emily is about as Caucasian and western liberated as a young lady can be.  Kumail is also expected to be a devout Muslim, and his parents do not know that he is having a small crisis of faith, pretending to be in prayer at the expected times each day, but pursuing a more freewheeling life of choice, with his heart inclined toward a career as a standup comic. 

He keeps his newfound romance a secret from them as long as he can, but Emily’s insistence upon meeting his family backs him into a corner and forces him to admit that he has not told them about her, a fact which plummets her into a crisis of the heart – an untimely development that happens to accompany her being stricken with an unrelated life threatening illness.  Her hospitalization soon draws him to her bedside for an extended and anxious time.  But fear not; the movie does not sink, as you might imagine, into tearfully saccharine sogginess, a la “An Affair to Remember”.  It remains intelligent, sturdy, funny and enriching all the way. You might hate to see Emily get sick, because she is far from a helpless little miss; she is a fighter and holds those she loves to a high standard of honesty.   

There is more to this little pleaser than Boy and Girl.  We meet a few individuals who give us some wonderful laid back moments of reflection upon themselves and each other.  I was so pleased to see Holly Hunter once again active after a long absence from the screen.  She is Emily’s scrappy, impulsive, but somewhat emotionally
conflicted mother ready to move heaven or hell for her daughter, perhaps too ready. 
And her father is played by Ray Romano (best known for his starring role in the TV
series “Everybody Loves Raymond”).  I find him more entertaining in his oddball way than anyone else in the picture.  He has some of the best dialogue and his comic timing is superb.  He is brown skinned himself, so I assume he too is Middle Eastern, though he never comes forth and says so.  Kumail also seems to make that assumption.  On one of his exits Kumail says to him, “Here’s to peace in the Middle East”, and Romano looks very embarrassed and self-conscious upon hearing it.  

This is one of those movies in which your love or dislike of it depends almost completely upon how you relate to the characters.  If you like the people portrayed, you like the movie.  If they turn you off, so the movie will displease.  I personally love everybody in it.  I think my love affair with them began the instant the affair of Kumail and Emily got started.  None of them is what you would call larger than life.  None of them plays a character who shows any sign of turning the world upside down or setting any new records.  As just ordinary people from off the streets they won me over.        

So did Kumail’s parents.  I do not mean that they won me over to their rigid point of view; they did not.   It is because we get to see them through Kumail’s very loving eyes.  There is the scene in which he confronts them insisting that he must make his own choices, but his confrontation is not that of a hardnosed rebel; he does not throw down a gauntlet.  They come off as so flat out biased that I think he knows what they will say to him before they say it.   Kumail is somewhat amused – not in a disrespectful sort of way but with a very loving attitude.  He sounds as if he knows they will not always hate him, and there is that powerful moment in which he announces at the dinner table, after he has supposedly been cast out of the family, that he has no intention of leaving the family; he makes the moment a gift to them.  You just have to witness it to believe it and enjoy it.  The mother and father are really lovely people in their own way.  Kumail’s respect for them elicits our respect.

I guess I am saying that the movie bypasses cliché.  It refuses to be what we might expect it to be.  But there is drama; Kumail is put through an agony over the question of Emily’s fate, and his encounter with her parents brings out the strength as well as the awkwardness of everybody involved.  He is not by habit a screamer, but there is a scene in which he takes out his frustration on the operator of a fast food restaurant, though his rage is short lived. He is very self-effacing.  And I was deeply moved when he goes on stage and tries to be funny after he has returned from the hospital and seen Emily in a coma.  It is a short, but personally agonizing, soul baring moment and Nanjiani handles it magnificently. 

“The Big Sick” is not a pace or precedent setter, but its creators know where the heart is and enter it with great affection and humor.  I recommend it for all who value personal friends and family.

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.