Imaginary Heroes

Here's an entry in the dysfunctional family drama genre, replete with suicides, potential terminal illness, drug use and teen angst.   It’s got it all.   The picture tells the story of a troubled family in the wake of the suicide of the eldest son, a star swimmer.   It features Sigourney Weaver as the aging 60s-generation mother, Jeff Daniels as the dazed father, who alternates cruelty with awkward attempts to express love, and Emile Hirsch as the long-suffering younger teenage brother.

Writer and first time director Dan Harris actually has a fairly light touch and there’s a comic tone to much of the piece that belies the above description.   Still, this film covers well-tread ground.   It displays the hallmarks of a first-time effort as it mimics other films that must have moved Harris.   Moreover, although Harris has written a few features previously, as a director he doesn’t yet quite know how to translate to the screen ideas that must have looked really good on paper.  

On the plus side, there’s very nice work from Weaver as the mom and Hirsch as the son.   The teenager who obfuscates with nearly everyone else will always tell her the truth, will share what he really thinks, because she’s always done the same for him.  

Secrets revealed towards the end throw a different light on the eldest son’s suicide as well as Daniels’ character and reveal the reason that Daniels’ marriage to Weaver is so troubled.   However, for this sort of picture to work there must be the ring of emotional truth.   Not every scene misses, but too often scenes that are meant to be moving are too redolent of cliché.   This film is finally too flawed for a recommendation.  

- Mar 11, 2005  

Born Into Brothels

This 2004 film about prostitutes’ children in the red light district of Calcutta who learn photography from a British photojournalist picked up the Oscar for best documentary feature on Sunday night.   I’d caught it the night before as it’s just now getting theatrical release in Chicago (pathetic!).

British-born, New York-based Zana Briski arrived in India in 1995 with the intention of documenting via photography the miserable lot in life that Indian women often face.   As she writes in the film’s press kit, “I had no intention of photographing prostitutes until a friend took me to the red light district in Calcutta. From the moment I stepped foot inside that maze of alleyways, I knew that this was the reason I had come to India.”

“It was the children who accepted me immediately.   They didn’t quite understand what I was doing there, but they were fascinated by me and my camera.   I let them use it and showed them how to take pictures.   I thought it would be great to see this world through their eyes.   It was then that I decided to teach them photography…On my next trip I brought ten point-and-shoot cameras and selected a group of kids who were most eager to learn.   I had no idea what I was doing, but the kids loved it and turned up to class every week.   And the results were amazing.”  

She began to videotape the workshops despite having no experience as a documentary filmmaker, and eventually enlisted veteran documentarian Ross Kaufman to co-direct.   The result is this film.  

What’s remarkable is that despite their squalid environs, the children retain their playful spirits.   Occasionally, though, there is a sadness in their eyes, a worldy-wise expression that children shouldn’t have. In a few years the girls will go into their mothers’ line of work.   As you watch, the sense of wanting to do something to stop them being exploited is palpable.   That’s why it’s heartbreaking when the pull of the life proves inexorable for some of them.  

The images the kids capture are often striking.   I can’t put it any better than these words from the film’s press kit: “The photographs taken by the children are not merely examples of remarkable observation and talent; they reflect something much larger, morally encouraging, and even politically volatile: art as an immensely liberating and empowering force.”

The issue has been raised that these filmmakers have created this story and influenced the very events that they are covering.   That’s 100% true and I say, good for them.   It would be a shabby person indeed who would have maintained the air of journalistic detachment, “objectivity” be hanged.    

I’ve also heard the charge that perhaps teaching the kids photography is not the most practical skill that they could have been taught.   I find that I have no use for this argument.   Briski is not a social worker or even a teacher, but she gave them what she had to offer.    

Further, the organization that Braski formed, “Kids With Cameras”, is doing similar projects in Haiti, Egypt and Israel and is founding a school in Calcutta.  

The organization’s website states:
“By teaching the art and skills of photography, Kids with Cameras empowers children growing up in difficult circumstances and allows them to appreciate the beauty and dignity of their own expression.”

“Kids with Cameras is founding a school for the disenfranchised children of the Calcutta brothels… Briski is mounting a campaign to provide a combined educational and residential facility for the children whose lives were touched by the workshops and for children like them…The Home and School will provide a safe space for learning and expression, away from the dangers and degradation of the city's red light district. We will empower the city's forgotten children by encouraging rigorous academic excellence, leadership qualities, participation in sports activities and studies of the arts. We will promote unity, social inclusion and environmental responsibility, and provide an educational and cultural framework for children to change their own circumstances. We will create a new generation of stewards of the planet.”

If you’d like to look at the some of the children’s photographs, I’ve deposited the following link:

http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/kidsgallery/

Aside from the Oscar, this film has won 17 film festival awards.

- Mar 4, 2005  

Vera Drake

Mike Leigh makes my kind of films: talky and with intense ensemble acting, they tend to riff on themes of the British class system with a dollop of comedy mixed in.  

In this one, Imelda Staunton plays the title character, a hardworking cleaning lady in post-WWII England with two grown children and a beaming visage.   She's about the last person you'd expect to have a secret life as a "back-alley" abortionist.   Non-judgmental and selfless, Vera doesn’t conceive of performing abortions in any moral terms other than that when there’s someone in trouble, she must help.   In fact, she’s in a bit of denial about what it is she’s actually doing.  

Events transpire which demonstrate the dangers women faced before abortion was legalized in England in 1967.   Ironically, Vera embodies both that danger and the only helping hand accessible to women of her class.

I find it interesting that Leigh's up for best original screenplay on Sunday, given that there is no script per se.   As Helen Bushby of BBC News writes, "Leigh's legendary methods of working involve getting all the actors together for months of preparation, so they can develop the characters while he evolves his plot around them...'I was not given a script or plot, and so we spent six months creating Vera - I knew I was playing an abortionist but that was it,' [Staunton] said."

This approach makes Leigh’s work a feast for those who love the craft of screen acting.
Watching Staunton's performance, there’s never a doubt that Vera is a real person reacting to events in the way this person would.  

Aside from the screenplay nod, Staunton is up for best actress in a leading role and Leigh is up for best director.

- Feb 25, 2005  

William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

I saw this with a friend who knows her Shakespeare and she believes that with ‘Merchant’ Shakespeare mixed his genres rather too much, as though he couldn’t decide whether he wanted a comedy or tragedy.   However, that’s a criticism of the play.   The question is: how does this film handle the text and the perennial question of whether ‘Merchant’ is _about_ anti-semitism or is itself anti-semitic?  

Admirably, the filmmakers haven’t soft-pedaled the theme of anti-semitism but instead meet it head on.   However, this approach necessitates a gravitas that makes the tonal shift to comedy somewhat disorienting.   By the time you get to the farcical business with the rings near the end, you don’t much feel like laughing.  

And how is Pacino as Shylock, the Jewish usurer who would famously exact his “pound of flesh” from the breast of his debtor, the indigent merchant Antonio (Jeremy Irons)?   Pacino disappears inside the character and gives us a Shylock with some subtlety.   His Shylock is a nasty villain but one whose behavior makes sense by his own logic.  

Lynn Collins makes a fetching Portia and late-Renaissance Venice is evoked in a painterly way by cinematographer Benoît Delhomme.   Plus it’s got MacKenzie Crook (a.k.a. Gareth from the great ‘The Office’) in a supporting role.

In short, with the above caveats I would recommend this to anyone interested in an intelligent, non-P.C. mounting of ‘Merchant’.  

Incidentally, the most interesting discussion of ‘Merchant’ I’ve seen recently is an interview from a few years back with theatre director Andrei Serban, who mounted   ‘Merchant’ for the American Repertory Theatre a few years ago.   I’ve reprinted excerpts below:

“Four hundred years ago, when Shakespeare wrote the play, it was a comedy. Shylock was a commedia dell'arte character with a red beard, red hair, and a huge nose - an allegorical representation of the devil. This didn't bother anyone, because it was recognized as a stage convention. At the time there was no ‘Jewish question.’”

“…Four hundred years later, at the end of the apocalyptic twentieth century, we are amazed that ‘Merchant’ could ever have been comedic; there's almost nothing funny about it. I thought at first I'd treat the play as a romance, a light comedy, but after Auschwitz this really is impossible.”

“[Shylock] at first acts to defend his honor but eventually becomes entirely rigid and inflexible, fanatically sticking to the law in the name of self-defense. He cannot bend to compassion and humanity, and of course he loses. But the Christians, too, are not always compassionate. Portia pleads for mercy but shows none towards Shylock.”

“….At the end of the production, I want us all to walk home knowing that there are no heroes, there are no perfect human beings, but that gentleness and compassion are essential if we are to live with each other. Shylock is deeply mistaken, but so are they all. They all strive to live up to the great image of perfect love and morality, to be true Christians, and of course they fail. Nobody is a true Christian; no one can easily practice forgiveness or love their neighbors as themselves. We all fail our own high standards, just as Shylock fails to be compassionate and Bassanio fails to be faithful. The play can help us understand our own situation in life. We need to find a way to live with each other despite our contradictions; we all must strive for wisdom and compassion.”

Of course ‘Merchant’ contains two of Shakespeare’s great speeches, which for enjoyment's sake I’ve deposited below.

Shylock (when asked of what use a pound of flesh could possibly be to him):

To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else, it will feed
my revenge. He hath disgraced me and hindered me half
a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains,
scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my
friends, heated mine enemies—and what’s his reason? I
am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed
with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed
and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian
is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we
not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you
wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a
Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian
example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will
execute—and it shall go hard but I will better the
instruction.

Portia (in disguise as adviser to the court, lecturing Shylock):  

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.

 - Feb 18, 2005  

Hotel Rwanda

As you probably know by now, this film takes place in Rwanda in 1994 when Hutus massacred around 1,000,000 Tutsis.   It tells the story of Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), the manager of the swank Hotel Des Milles Collines and a Hutu, who, at the risk of his life, turned the hotel into a shelter from the killers’ machetes for around 1,200 Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus.  

The film shades in some background as we learn that during Belgium’s rule of Rwanda the Tutsis collaborated with the colonialists in oppressing the Hutus.   In the wake of the Belgians’ departure, the victims became victimizers as the Hutus set about massacring the Tutsis.    

As the film begins, Rusesabinga is portrayed as a man who goes along to get along, his hard-won position as a manager at the Hotel necessitating a certain amount of quid pro quo with the powerful. He just wants a good life for himself and his family and hopes the madness rising around him will go away.   When it becomes clear that it won’t, he brings to bear all his finesse and understanding of Realpolitik to save his “guests”.

Having just seen ‘Notre Musique’ last week, the words of a guest at the European Literary Encounters in Godard’s film echoed in my mind as I watched this one: “Violence leaves a permanent scar.   To see your fellow man turn on you leaves a feeling of deep-rooted horror.”  

This film makes you feel that fear, the powerlessness.   However, I can’t help wondering whether Godard would approve of it.   He famously disapproved of ‘Schindler’s List’, the film to which ‘Hotel Rwanda’ has been most often compared, which he felt did not adequately deal with “the horror”.   After all, this film is not about the slaughter as much as it is about Rusesabinga's struggle to save the 1,200.

A tough critic might also note that there is a sense in which doing a film on 10-year-old crimes is a safe way to confer saintliness on the filmmakers and to guarantee Oscar nods.  

Such criticisms would be unfair.   Rusesabinga is a man who showed heroic selflessness and the film tells his story powerfully.   Further, the film is to be commended for focusing on its African leads rather than on the Caucasian supporting characters and for indicting the West for (among other things) evacuating its citizens from the Hotel while leaving the Africans to probable slaughter.  

The remarkable Cheadle is up for a best actor Oscar.   Equally good is the British actress Sophie Okonedo as his Tutsi wife Tatiana; she has deservedly been given a nod for a best supporting actress Oscar.   The film’s also up for its original screenplay by Keir Pearson and Terry George (George also directed).

- Feb 11, 2005