And the Atlantic Film Festival begins, with this frolic of a fairy tale about whisky and redemption, a sort of SIDEWAYS that, in place of neurotic, pretentious, SoCal yuppie wine geeks, gives us scarred, working-class, Glaswegian ex-cons. Which, to me, makes it about a million times more charming.

The film's title, like everything else about it, is both squirmingly earnest and defiantly evocative.  The angels' share is the percentage of spirit that evaporates every year from the stored whiskey: it represents what is lost, but also what is offered up.  It is the spirit of generosity and the poetics of pragmatism, and it emerges as a social metaphor for those who've been written off.  I found myself warming to the title the more I thought about it, even in its final, most literal invocation.

"Everything about this film screams Nova Scotia," said the festival programmer to us as we took our seats, "It's set in Glasgow; it's about people turning their lives around; and, you know, stealing booze."

Sure enough, when our Dogsberrying group of misfits make their way to the Highlands in kilts, and "I'm gonna be (500 miles)" started up, a not insignificant portion of the audience (including me, and not just because I was expecting the Doctor to show up) sang along in clear, broad Scottish accents.

On the other hand, this is the sort of film which rousingly plays the Proclaimers as kilted Glaswegians seek out legendary whiskey in the Highlands. You've been forewarned.


Here, share in my good mood:


And now, a personal tangent:

At the film, I had a revelation. When D  moves to Nova Scotia, I'm getting him a kilt to celebrate. My mom and I agree that he will rock it. (And the best part: it will be a major victory in his ongoing war on pants.) Now I just had to find out what my mother's family tartan is.

There followed this series of manic midnight messages to D in Hawai'i, who was having an unusually frantic day on set and probably did not appreciate a thousand questions about how he would look in a skirt: 

"Ugh: apparently we are lumped in with the MacLennans, a clan with a singularly hideous tartan (What's that whirring, thumping sound? Is it my ancestors spinning in their collective Presbyterian graves in Glasgow and Northern Ireland?)."

["Hmmm," wrote my sister-in-law after examining the MacLennan tartan, "not sure who decided that green, teal and red should all go together."

"Ancient clan warriors," I replied, "who'd been up all night drinking and painting themselves with woad. Never trust the color-sense of a woad-covered man."] 


"I'm tied down to it," I went on to the unresponsive D, "but I don't think you should be. I think instead I'm going to get you a plaid from one of the clans represented by characters in the Scottish play. Unless you indicate a favorite, I'm leaning towards MacDuff. (Although I really think you would look best in MacDonald. But we can't totally throw signification and association out the window and declare your allegiance to a Haligonian bridge, for God's sake. That way lies madness.)"

[Silence.]

"Do you prefer your sporran in muskrat, badger, or leather? Or shall we go the full Canadian with beaver? Too on the nose (so to speak) for a crotch accessory?"
[No answer from D.  Odd. Clearly he needs some local context.]
"This wins the prize for Canadian non-story of the summer. It honestly reads like an Onion article:

The Halifax artist donned a kilt last October and has since decided that he prefers it over pants.

“You don’t feel so confined or something,” says King, 40.

Pants for men in the Western world seem to be pretty much the norm in modern times, but for most of history, it wasn’t. Even Romans thought pants were for barbarians.... He wants to wear the kilt “because it is a more authentic type of clothing or something and has a history to it.”"

[Crickets.]

"Do I detect an ominous silence from D?" my mother interjects, "I mean, you can lead a man to a kilt, but ..."

And he doesn't even know yet that this kilt (even without the [everyday] sporran, the socks, the matching tartan things that hold up your socks, the dress sporran, the ceremonial knife, and the Jacobite jacket) is going to cost as much as a mortgage payment. Shhh. No one tell him.


Saturday, September 15, 2012
Farfara

Internal June, External January

It's snowing again in Nova Scotia.  Having done my dutiful and invigorating round of civically-minded shoveling, I'm burrowing in for a day of reading and course prep.  It's going to be a week of Ibsen and Chekhov and Shaw (leavened by an exploration of the Icarus myth across the ages that I'll link to  a lecture on intertextuality and plagiarism that somehow heavily features the Beyoncé video for "Single Ladies").   My neighbors just rang the doorbell to give me cinnamon rolls as a thank you for shoveling the walkway. Life could definitely be a lot worse.

[There was a moment earlier in the week when the specter of a less than Little Women-worthy society crossed my neighborhood. Leaving the house, I encountered my neighbor on the other side, hanging up her laundry in the freezing air.  I greeted her in jolly tones.  And she gave me the cut direct.   I felt ready to succumb to a fit of the vapors.  This was very un-Nova Scotian.

A friend quickly sent me to this definition of the verb "to cut" from The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811), a book I heartily wish to absorb in its entirety into my everyday usage:

To renounce acquaintance with any one is to cut him. There are several species of the cut. Such as the cut direct, the cut indirect, the cut sublime, the cut infernal, &c. The cut direct, is to start across the street, at the approach of the obnoxious person in order to avoid him. The cut indirect, is to look another way, and pass without appearing to observe him. The cut sublime, is to admire the top of King’s College Chapel, or the beauty of the passing clouds, till he is out of sight. The cut infernal, is to analyze the arrangement of your shoe-strings, for the same purpose.

Ok, I replied, to be honest it might have been the cut indirect.  She didn't cut across the alley to avoid me.  But she was hanging up laundry at the time, and that sort of tied her down.  I would have preferred either the cut infernal or the cut sublime.  (I'll have to start practicing those.)  If she was looking at her clothesline when I said "hello" from five feet away, does that make it a cut sublime?  I certainly hope so.

My mother (who birthday it is today - Happy Birthday!) joined the debate: "This reminds me," she said, "of the description of various forms of PR in Sheridan's The Critic, as expounded by the expert, Mr. Puff: 'puffing is of various sorts: the principal are the puff direct, the puff preliminary, the puff collateral, the puff collusive, and the puff oblique, or puff by implication.'  Maybe you could use one of these on your neighbor to improve relations."

My friend S, a scholar of the Renaissance, brought her expertise to bear with some sobering words: "Better than the lie direct -- that would have led irretrievably to a duel, unless you had thought of an 'if'."

Happily, it didn't come to that.  I don't have it in me to get up at dawn again this week.

In fact, I saw my neighbor hanging laundry again two days ago.  She smiled broadly at me: "Hallo."  "Hallo," I replied, much relieved.  It turns out that there is a very fine line between stone-cold and stone-deaf.)

There's been a lot more activity at Sycorax Pine lately, due in part to my new policy of attempting at least "Lightning Reviews" of a few lines for everything I watch and read.  I'm a few behind right now, but feeling good - come by and take a look around to see the changes.

So, if I have time to venture beyond work today, what will I be doing?  Finishing Betina Krahn's The Husband Test (my first of Krahn's, and a fun gambol). Starting Lady Audley's Secret, which promises to be no less scandalous, and possibly considerably more so. Watching the end of Secretary (I've been on a bit of a Maggie Gyllenhaal streak lately, and I'm not enjoying it at all).  Tuning in for the next installment of Downton Abbey, which I'm really lapping up.  As I said in the comments at Read React Review,

There have been some moments that twinged my anachronism radar, but I really appreciate the multi-level (and relatively unsentimental) treatment of how class functioned in complex and codependent ways in a country house setting. The key moment for me was when the new middle-class heir (who until then I had assumed the modern spectator was meant to identify with) sweeps into town and tells his valet that he has a “silly job for a grown man.” Brilliantly rendered by both actors and the director.

Trying to finish up Geraldine Brooks's March, which hasn't (at the halfway point) impressed me to the extent that it did my book club mates.  I am assured that at some point in the next twenty pages, however, it will become unputdownable.  I do want to forge ahead to the point where Marmee's voice enters the narrative.  Oh, and listening to Nina Simone.  I'll leave you with the lady herself on this fine Sunday:

Workers and watchers wander, ghostly, 'round a dilapidated cinema, crowding each other in tight hallways, pressing close in the empty theatre, always choosing the adjacent urinal in depressing bathrooms.  The first words are spoken more than halfway through the film, when one character tells another that the theatre is haunted.  But it turns out that the other man doesn't understand him - he's a Japanese tourist who has come to the theatre in search of {awkward cough} connection.  A film about nostalgia and haunting and the inability to let go.  Nothing wrong with it, but I found it all too easy to let go: I don't have sufficient meditative capacity for these long-developing shots that don't, in the end, develop into much beyond silence and endless waiting.  The fact that that's the point didn't, for me, make it an interesting point.


Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Dir. Ming-liang Tsai
(Taiwan, 2003)
***
Watched Jan 14.

World's most philosophical dentist, in practice with his wife, becomes convinced she's cheating.  Begins to have visions of violence, sex, Dennis Leary (is this last redundant?).  Ultimate question: will Leary ever play anything but id personified?


The Secret Lives of Dentists
dir. Alan Rudolph
(USA, 2003)
***
Watched Jan 6.

I have always been a bit more immune to the famous "Lubitsch touch" than I ought to be.  After all, what is there not to love about witty dialogue batted briskly between stylish characters, splashing in tidal pools of double entendre?  But the three films by the director that I have seen (Trouble in Paradise, To be or not to be, and Ninotchka) left me sadly cold.  All struck me as potentially scintillating films that descend into sentimentality, predictability or falsehood.

When I began Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait last night, I thought Ernst and I had finally understood each other.  It begins likea  hellish counterpart to Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946).  Where the British film follows its hero from a technicolor earth to an infinite, shining black-and-white heaven, Lubitsch opens Heaven Can Wait (1943) down below, in the glossy, vast waiting room of Hell, where an oddly compassionate Devil (all waxed mustaches and toothy smiles) waits to judge whether you've been bad enough to earn a fast trip through a flaming trap door.  If not, it's back into the elevator for you, and we'll see whether they'll take you above.

So Henry van Cleve, child of privilege, charmer of parents and grandparents and legions of women, sets his considerable persuasive skills to work on Satan.  By way of earning a place in Hell, he recounts his life story, starting with a mischievous, spoiled childhood spent getting drunk with the French maid and making astonishingly filthy jokes (for Code-muzzled Hollywood, at least):

That woman with the elaborately expensive dress and the ludicrous accent is the maid, by the by.

The early part of the film is the most ingenious, because it is in the carefully drawn stereotypes of his various family members (a father who can't give utterance to any sentiment but the need to maintain a stiff upper lip, for instance) that the film strikes its richest comic balance between affection and the harshness of satire. On learning that our hero has been sneaking out to drink champagne at a restaurant with the French maid, this is how his family reacts:

Goody Two-Shoes Cousin Albert:
"But that's not all, grandfather.  It seems, from what I could gather, that Mrs. Asterbrook, of the Asterbrooks, who was sitting at an adjoining table, resented bitterly the idea of Henry dropping a nickel into her decolletage and complaining to the management because no chocolate bar dropped out of Mrs. Asterbrook."
Mother:
"Mrs. Asterbrook?  How can I ever face her?"
Grandmother:
"What a disgrace!"
Father:
"I'm going to teach that boy a lesson."
Grandfather:
"Yes, that what he deserves - throwing nickels around like that.  Knowing the Asterbrooks, I can tell you right now we'll never see that nickel again."

The grandfather is by far the most appealing character in this familial menagerie. He is all bluster: stern disapproval masking a boyish love of hijinks.  (The scene above ends with his congratulation of his grandson Albert, whose willingness to rat on his cousin apparently does the family proud.  No sooner does Albert make his smug way downstairs then he finds himself on the receiving end of a glass of water his proud grandpapa has poured from the landing above.  There is much giggling and grandparental creeping-away that follows this dousing.) This aged ancestor wields the words "I love you" like they are a club to bludgeon his family with at the end of a string of insults. [Anything after this point, by the way, might be accounted a spoiler by the more... plot-squeamish among you.] Even when his beloved grandson falls in love, marries, and drives his beloved away with his perpetual infidelities, who is on hand to help the scamp win her back but grandpa!  Naturally.

Don't worry: the heroine will get her own Dickensian nightmare of a family, all of whom are simultaneously affectionate and unbearable.  They are meatpacking magnates, their company represented by a cartoony cow who gleefully proclaims her joy in being eaten in singsong verse.  "We're very proud of Kansas," her mother declares in funereal tones, upon first being introduced to New York society. Her parents are so ensnared in conflicting midwestern puritanisms that every breakfast descends into an apocalyptic battle for the funny papers of Dr. Strangelove proportions.  It's a remarkable scene when we are given a glimpse of these morning maneuvers.

Despite an abundance of scenes like these, scenes which would make sublime short comedies in their own right, the movie falls flatter and flatter as it goes on.  In part this is the same problem I've had with Lubitsch before: the pacing isn't as crisp as this style normally warrants. It isn't as sharp and rollicking and mercilessly paced as Wilde or Coward or Sorkin or Shaw working with similar material.  But this isn't even the real problem.  This I could forgive when weigh in the balance against the abundance of great scenes like the breakfast table battle.  No, the problem is the heroine: Gene Tierney really sinks this film.

I don't ever remember hating Gene Tierney before, although I have to admit that it has been some years since I have seen anything of hers. (I LOVE Laura, so I'm not going to hold this or The Ghost and Mrs. Muir against her.)  But here she is stiff and undernourished and paralyzed by artificiality. The words that fall from her careful pout are somehow both diffident and tortured.  And, thanks to bad styling and some truly terrible wigs, she is not even particularly lovely for most of the film.  Of course, she has a hard row to hoe: while Don Ameche gets to be the dashing, energetic playboy, beloved of all who see him (with the notable exception of a showgirl he encounters in middle age, who really gets the best of him), she has to play the befuddled, put-upon wife, doomed to perpetual cycles of betrayal, disillusionment and forgiveness-against-her-better-judgment until finally she perishes (some years after her self-respect must have died).  She does get some phenomenally complex scenes, however, the best of which is the one where, having left her philandering husband and returned to Kansas, she tells her parents and smug Albert that she won't be judged for the years of her marriage under any circumstances.  It wasn't ten years of suffering, she says, and she refuses to be cast as that kind of woman.  It was a decade of highs and lows, like any other marriage.

Oh, it begins so very high. Henry sees her at a public telephone, lying to her mother about why she isn't home yet. Smitten, he pursues he  into a bookstore, where he finds his beloved perusing a book titled "Making your Husband Happy."

What is a man to do in a situation like that but pose as a sales clerk and persuade the young lady that she needs neither the book nor the man she myopically believes she is marrying.  After an astonishing sales pitch, the disguise begins to crumble:

She:
"If you don't change your attitude, I shall have to complain to your employer."

He:
"I'm not employed here.  I'm not a book salesman. I took one look at you and followed you into the store.  If you'd walked into a restaurant, I would have become a waiter. If you'd walked into a burning building, I would have become a fireman.  If you'd walked into an elevator, I would have stopped it between two floors, and we'd have spent the rest of our lives there."

Swoon.

D, a word to the wise (by which I mean anyone smart enough to fall in love with a bibliophile): anytime you want to say those words to me in a bookstore, I'm yours.

And let's not forget the film's best (only?) elevator: the one that takes hell's rejects up to the other place.  It's hard not to remember this part of the bookstore scene at the film's end....

Last night I ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery.

That is to say, I spent an hour and a half in company with the new movie (part biopic, part legal drama, part animated hallucinterpretation of the poem) based on Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

I am starting at the end of my first experience with the Atlantic Film Festival, which has been unfolding languorously around Halifax for a little over a week now.  And a giddy week it has been for me: I missed the festival entirely last year, and - determined not to let it slip by again - I found myself on a frenzy of ticket buying.  Seven films in as many days, and all of them more or less gratifying.  Two of them Cannes award-winners.  Several by directors whose work I already admired.  None of them Canadian (through no fault of the programmers, since they included a panoply of intriguing Canadian and Maritime films at times I couldn't make them, including the rather bleak national entry for this year's Academy Award).  And I still have regrets: I didn't manage to make it to the new Woody Allen film, although I wanted to.  I comfort myself with the knowledge that it is almost certainly fairly awful.

More backstory on Howl, which stars a surprisingly good James Franco.  Last week I was talking to a friend from my department about the film, and she said "You know he is getting his doctorate in English, right?".  "Ha!" I scoffed, "Where?".  "At your program," she said, surprised to be delivering this news, "At Yale."  I thought she was lying.   I knew I had arrived at Yale a decade and a half too late to overlap with David Duchovny; it just seemed like the taunting of fate that I then left a year too early to coincide with another movie star.  (Once I saw Duchovny on "Inside the Actors Studio" while I was in the throes of my dissertation.  James Lipton asked him about his Yale years, which seemed fine at first, but then he said something like, "You left... before completing your dissertation.  What was the title of that work?".  And David Duchovny, possessor of fame and wealth beyond most people's wildest imaginings, just sort of, well, crumbled away, collapsing in on himself as he travelled mentally back to the masochistic, excruciated mindset of someone in the advanced stages of pursuing their doctorate.  He curled forward and shook his head slowly, and I thought, "Yes.  Yes: you never lose that terrible anxiety of underachievement, no matter what else you accomplish in life.  David Duchovny, I know exactly how you feel.")

As it turns out, my friend was only telling me true. James Franco has just begun his Ph.D. in literature and film.  So all I could think throughout this film was how very different my seminar years of graduate school would have been if this Ginsberg-tinted Franco had been a part of them.

But, the film:

It is a sort of a quilt of a project, a stitching together of "interviews" with a youngish Ginsberg (played by Franco) at the moment when his book Howl and Other Poems has landed its publisher in court under obscenity charges.  His reflections on poetry, inspiration, and his biographical influences (most notably a series of men he loved and situated as muses and often priapic heroes in the poem) are interlarded with animated illustrations of the poem, which unfurl like whisps of highly sexualized smoke, and with scenes from the trial itself.  The casting of the film is phenomenal: in the trial scenes, for instance, the uncomprehending prosecutor is played with convincing bluster by the suddenly gray David Strathairn, while the coolly eloquent defense is portrayed by who else but Jon Hamm, who delivers a defense of literary freedom like he is pitching ad copy to a skeptical corporation.  It is all brilliantly rousing, even before you see a line of famous character actors playing professors and critics of literature, called in as "expert witnesses" on the necessity of words like "snatch" to the artistic integrity of Howl.  And, more impressively, it is rarely clear.  The court scenes don't succumb to the Hollywood conventions of juridical process any more than they have to: most of the time the witnesses and lawyers are merely muddling through some very murky ethical and aesthetic territory as they attempt to establish a concrete legal conception of literary value.

The least compelling aspect of the film is the animation, sad to say.  This isn't because it is an objectionable choice: it is in fact a compelling formal experiment, and if ever a poem were made for this sort of experiment, it is Howl.  But the aesthetics of the CGI don't match the polish or complexity of the rest of the film: they seem clumsy where everything else is elaborately casual, and the human forms seem wooden exactly at the moments when they should be as organic and sinuous as a vine.

As the credits began to roll, I turned to the colleague sitting next to me in the theatre.  "So," I said, "will you be showing your freshmen this film in 'Introduction to Literature?'".  "Well, I had high hopes for it," she replied with a laugh, "but ... no, I don't think so."  I thought back to the students sitting next to us, texting persistently through the first twenty minutes of the film, who got up and left in the middle of the umpteenth cartoon copulation to grace the screen.  As they stepped in front of me, two of several departures that didn't seem related to the film's quality, I had to wonder whether they weren't (oddly) unready to be "dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts."

You may remember a bit of bemoaning from a couple of weeks ago:

I was in the midst of two weeks' visit and general caretaking with my grandparents (aged 89 and 90), and the visit was filled with delights.*  But the mysteries of Netflix (notice how I distance myself from the fact that I am the organizing principle behind all this - the invisible hand of the free queue) meant that my first disc upon arriving back in the USA after a long time away was a famously weepy tragedy involving the callous abandonment of an elderly couple by their progeny.

So it was that I approached watching Leo McCarey's unsung masterpiece of mature romance, Make Way for Tomorrow, with some reluctance.  But when it was over, I was so struck by the nuance and sincerity of it all, and above all by its respectful, round treatment of a profoundly unmediagenic theme, that I talked about it ceaselessly to my grandparents and all their friends.  I couldn't seem to get off the subject, despite a certain lack of enthusiasm I detected in my audience for the topic of growing old to discover your children are miserable, selfish ingrates.

The premise is this: Ma and Pa (played by Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore, both decades younger than the parts they are playing) call their children together for an announcement.  Pa (yes, they call each other Ma and Pa almost to the exclusion of any other names, which made me wince and dread a Leave-it-to-Beaveresque tale) has lost his job, and with it the ability to pay their mortgage.  The banker (one of Ma's old beaux) has given them six months to find a solution.  Great!, the kids say, that gives us plenty of time to come up with something for you.  Well, Pa adds, the six months are up this week.  We were hoping to solve the problem on our own, without bothering you all.

Already we can see the careful way McCarey has crafted this family dynamic.  The kids are understandable nonplussed: now they are facing a desperate situation, and the potential upheaval of their households if they take in the elder generation, with no time to adapt, prepare, or gather resources.  But it is hard to take Ma and Pa to task - they are the matriarch and patriarch of this family, loathe to impose their problems on their independent children, or to accept that they are no longer completely in control of their own lives.

Ultimately, they hit on a horrible solution: no one has room for two more in their home except the wealthiest sister, and she is saddled with a rich husband who wants nothing to do with his in-laws. At one point he refuses to have her mother over for the evening, because they have plans to go out.  You should just tell them, he insists, that we are never going to take her on.

"Coincidentally," his wife says, as she gets ready to do her nails, "who are we going out with tonight?"

"My mother."  Piercing glare from his wife.  "But that's different."

Furious nail-filing.  And then, casually, poisonously, she replies: "I was so afraid it would be someone I didn't like."

So the eldest son takes in his mother, putting her in a room with her callow-as-can-be teenage grand-daughter (Rhoda), and his sister takes in her father, making room for him on the couch of their one-bedroom house.  It's just temporary, they all assure themselves.  Just until rich daughter works something more permanent out with her husband. (She won't.)  Or until Pa gets a job.

So the couple of fifty years, who had promised themselves they would always be together, go their separate ways.

The minute portrait of family life that follows is excruciating - and this is a mark of how well crafted it is.  The teenage grand-daughter's friends won't come to the apartment any more because they are embarrassed by Ma, who eagerly chats with them.  Rhoda starts going out more, making dates with much older men, even staying away whole nights at a time, to her family's distress.  Don't you want to spend time with boys your own age, her grandmother gently asks - boys whom you might want to marry?  The look of scorn this question elicits is familiar to anyone who has ever had or been a teenage child.  Ma intervenes in her daughter-in-law's parenting and housekeeping, claiming that she just wants to lift the burden from her as she works.  But, dear!, she says, You seem so busy playing bridge.  I don't play bridge, the daughter-in-law replies through clenched teeth, I teach bridge.  Each intervention is like a criticism: you are too involved in making money to pay attention to what really matters - taking care of your family.  I found myself turning pretty strongly against Ma.

Meanwhile, Pa is staying with a considerably more crotchety daughter, who becomes irritated with him when he falls ill, and rushes him from the tiny couch to their bedroom for appearance's sake when the doctor arrives to take a look at him. Still, Pa can't seem to stop harping on about how untrustworthy the perfectly competent doctor is, complaining that a bit of Ma's cooking and caretaking always put him right in the past.  When the doctor asks him to make certain sounds while he listens to his lungs, Pa refuses.  When the poor man tries to examine his throat, Pa bites him.  My patience with these parents begins to run very, very thin.

In a classic piece of ambivalent film-making, McCarey sets up a scene in which Pa calls Ma on the telephone.  We only hear her side: she receives the call in the middle of a bridge lesson at the apartment.  (Let's recall that the family's livelihood depends in part on these bridge lessons.) Before the call, she had the maid bring her chair into the center of the room, where she rocks creakily and loudly, drawing alarmed looks from the clients, all of whom are wearing black tie.  From time to time she goes around the table, looking at the cards and complimenting the players in great detail on the features of their hands.  Her daughter-in-law begins to sweat.

Then the phone rings, and it is Pa.  She starts to talk, at the top of her lungs, the way those who don't often use cell phones still do, unable to believe the voice could travel so far without a really powerful set of pipes behind it.  She is giddily happy to hear his voice.  Soon all the heads in the bridge room are turned towards her, although she has her back to them.  She believes she is entirely alone with Pa; we know she has an audience, imposing on their privacy.  But it is an increasingly tender audience - they (we) can see the affection at work here, and they (we) sympathize.  The bridge players exchange a series of small smiles.  Soon Ma's anxieties come to the fore.  Is it cold there?  Pa isn't used to the cold.  How much did he pay for this phone call?  Well, she concludes sadly, he could have bought himself a nice warm scarf for that price.

She hangs up, and we know he won't call again.

This isn't the only time that McCarey writes a surrogate audience into the film for us, modeling the affection he wants us to feel for this exasperating couple.  At one point, Pa receives a letter from Ma, but he has broken his glasses, so he goes to a shopkeeper he has befriended and asks him to read it aloud.  The shopkeeper is a remarkably three-dimensional character - somehow he is the essence of Jewish film stereotypes, and yet warmer and more genuine than any of the couple's awful children.  The device of the letter lets us step squarely into his shoes, allowing us cannily into the intimacy of their longing for each other (finally the shopkeeper decides it is too private a letter and can't go on). But it also creates a complex scenario for the revelation of a key piece of news: Ma is being shown around retirement homes, in the unspoken hope that she will get used to the idea of them.  Pa is clearly aware not just of the implication of this news, although Ma doesn't lay it out clearly, but also of his friend's judgment.

As outrageous as these filial tactics seem, the truth is that Ma is putting enormous pressure on the income and emotional stability of her son's household. When she sees that they have written away for information about a facility for aged ladies, she preempts the inevitable.  I have been thinking, she tells her son, that I would really rather be at a facility.  Don't tell me no.  She takes his face in her hands: "You always were my favorite."  There is no mind game here; this is an era in which less public stigma (although no less private trauma, I suspect) was attached to parents' having favorites among their children.  And indeed he is the least wormlike of her offspring; he at least has the decency to feel guilty about foisting her off on a somewhat bleak retirement home. He walks back into his bedroom, looks at his wife in the mirror, and tells her sardonically that she can be proud of the work he did today.

Ma's conditions for going to the facility aren't many, but they are strongly felt.  First, Pa must never, ever know that she has gone.  He is going to stay with their daughter in faraway California, and his conviction that he will get another job in his seventies - a job that will allow him to bring Ma out to join him - is unshakable.  Even Ma tows the line of this delusion, always claiming that she "believes" in Pa's capacity to solve problems like this.

"Why don't you just face facts?" her grand-daughter asks, insensitive but genuinely frightened for her.

"Oh, Rhoda," Ma replies, without a trace of anger in her voice, "Where you're seventeen and life is beautiful, facing facts is just as slick fun as dancing or going to parties.  But when you're 70, well, you don't care about dancing, you don't go to parties any more, and about the only fun you have left is pretending that there aren't any facts to face." Gently, as if resigned: "So would you mind if I just kind of ... went on pretending?"

Ma's second condition is that she get to say goodbye to Pa.  They meet in Manhattan, where he is going to catch a train that evening.  They spend the day retracing the events of their honeymoon five decades earlier, and they realize that this is the only vacation they have had together since.  Because this is NYC, everyone is incredibly nice to them, charmed by their obvious affection.  They revisit the hotel they stayed at on their honeymoon, and the management is eager to treat them to anything they might like.  Pa urges Ma to have a drink with him at the bar.  Oh no, I coudn't, she cries.  But look, Ma, he says, women are drinking here now.  Tentatively, she looks up and down the bar, and then she orders... an old-fashioned.  They go to dance, and the bandleader sees them struggle with the jaunty music of the thirties.  He abruptly stops the song, to the consternation of all the other dancers, and strikes up a waltz, just for them.

This scene contained the very moment when I realized how brilliant a piece of work this film is.  Ma and Pa sit at a table in the ballroom of their honeymoon hotel of yore.  This is a scene well known from thirties cinema, but the figures are unfamiliar - we expect Marlene or Greta, not this homespun, dowdy pair.  As one of the commentators on the Criterion disc notes, this is the very rare film that is a romance of old age.  But a romance it is: they are swept away in the moment, and they lean towards each other, backs to us, in that classic Hollywood shot.  Moments before their lips touch, she looks, startled, back over her shoulder.  Straight at the camera.  Then, smiling, she leans away from him.  It is a perfect moment - more expressive of romance within the values of a certain era than a kiss ever could be.  And the way it involves - ensnares - the audience is chilling.

They skirt the issue of their upcoming parting and dance around the topic of their truly awful children.  Who is really to blame for this situation?  McCarey has laid a careful foundation for the tragedy that is the end of this film: their separation is inevitable and heartless, but wholly plausible.  Their lives with their children really are untenable, for clear and specific reasons.  Ma even understands her own complicity in the outcome, without absolving her children: "If I'd been all I thought it was, things'd be different now.  You don't sow wheat and get ashes, Pa."

The day is supposed to end with a big family dinner before they all deliver Pa to his train.  But Ma and Pa decide, in the final analysis, to blow their children off.  Pa does this, skillfully, in a phone call to his kids - a call the McCarey chooses not to show us in its entirety, but which the kids feel is a sign that Pa understands the extent of their betrayal.   They fret and grind their teeth over how inconsiderate these old people are.  But the eldest son - the favorite, you recall - keeps everyone busy until the time has passed when they could see their father off at the train station:

"I kinda thought they'd like to be alone," he admits.

"If we don't go to the station, they'll think we're terrible," one sibling complains.

"Aren't we?"

The final scene of the film is so profoundly tragic, without any trace of histrionics or any need for events outside everyday experience, that I wept uncontrollably.  So did Orson Welles, apparently, since he told Peter Bogdonovich, "Oh my god. That's the saddest movie ever made.  It would make a stone cry.** And nobody went!"

It was indeed a box office failure, coming as it did amid the ravages of the Depression, when people didn't feel like spending a Friday night contemplating the certainty that they would grow old, lose their job and their home, and be rejected by the kids they had spent their entire life caring for.  Studio executives begged McCarey for a happier ending, and cut him loose when he refused and the film didn't sell.  When he won an Oscar for another film he directed that year, The Awful Truth, McCarey told the Academy that he was grateful, but they had praised the wrong film.

It is a film of ideals - simultaneously scathing and understanding like many of the great naturalist novels of the late 19th century, novels which showed their characters being ground into despair by the economic realities of their lives.  Social security had just been passed in 1935, as Gary Giddons points out in the Criterion commentary, and the controversy surrounding it bore a striking similarity to our current debate around health care.  Look, this film says, this is what happens when we allow the market to take its course with the elderly.  Real people are crushed.

Not a profitable film, then, but a fervently admired one.  George Bernard Shaw (always one for a good piece of socially conscious art) wrote a fan letter to McCarey after seeing his film.  Directors all around Hollywood quietly adored it. And years later, in Japan, a film-maker named Ozu made a movie under its influence.  He called it Tokyo Story.




Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
Dir. Leo McCarey
****



* I did spend a lot of time ferrying my grandmother to dentist appointments, which was more grueling for her than it was for me.  Amid these appointments, however, I had a dream that I bit down too hard on something, and all my teeth fell out.  I went to our dentist - who also happens to be a family friend - and he said "Tsk.  You should have come to me more often."  Well, Dr. Freud?

** Phew.  I'm not a stone. I can always count on Orson to save me from these moments of ontological doubt. 

Tonight was movie night at my grandparents' retirement community, and the selection met with skepticism from the older crowd:  "WALL-E?"  "What does that even mean?"  "I haven't heard of it."  "It is about the future?" "Like science fiction?"  "Hmmm."  "Wait - it's animated?  Hmmmmmm."  "Is it for children?"

After several iterations of this conversation in which I tried - animatedly - to champion the brilliance of the film, I decided to accept my grandmother's invitation to join them for what would be my second viewing.  That way I could witness the reception firsthand.

Now I know that Wall-E is so 2008, and we have all stopped thinking about how sublime it was on a daily basis, but here are a few thoughts that occurred anew to me while watching it tonight.

• Poor, neurotic WALL-E.  He is the antithesis of the alpha hero of romance.  This is a sort of hero I would like to read about more often - one whose appeal is entirely in his bumbling individuality, and who becomes ever more clumsy the more besotted he is.  The charm of this romantic trope is that it feels truer to life than the suave, take-charge model of heroism, who (I can't help but think) is much more frequently seen in practiced womanizers than in the genuinely love-struck.  Love raises the stakes, and thus it makes us less competent than we might normally be at everyday social and physical interactions.  Thus WALL-E can barely take a step as he courts Eve without toppling gigantic pyramids of stacked piping.  It is his irrepressible enthusiasm that charms, not his polish.

• Oh, Eve. Or as WALL-E knows her - Eee-vah.  What a kick-ass heroine you are.  I love the gender politics of this robot amour.  He is the neurotic, timid-but-enduring eccentric, and she is the type-A, trigger-happy, careerist directive-obsessive.  His devotion (and creaky obsolescence) delights but also perplexes and embarrasses her.  His is the winning character, the one who earns our affection, but hers is the dynamic one, making her in a sense the protagonist of the film.  She is the one who develops, the one with a character arc - she must learn how to reconcile her directive, her programming, her stated purpose in existing, with her love for WALL-E.  In less canny hands, this could have gone very quickly in an anti-feminist direction - love is the imperative, blindly following your career is narrow and selfish! - but we can't forget that her directive involves saving the world.  She is right to be torn.  And WALL-E's love takes the form of wanting to do anything that will help her fulfill her purpose.  And while we're at it, let's not forget that she is the muscle in the relationship - WALL-E does his share of Buster Keatonesque rescuing, but it is Eve who mostly rides in at the crucial moment to save his fragile self from peril.  Go, Eee-vah: never stop blowing stuff up with your Apple-designed iArms.

• So, as Eve's dilemma shows us, this is a film that is keenly interested in the ethics of mission (or programming, nature, vocation - to ring the changes on this theme).  Is it right to abandon (or diverge from) your calling?  Many of the moments that address this issue are surprisingly complex.  Consider, for instance, obsessive-compulsive cleansing-bot MO: at one point he is traveling along the path on the floor that marks the parameters of his duty, when he encounters a divergent track of "foreign contaminant" leading off into the distance.  What is a bot to do, faced with the choice between the letter and the spirit of his programmed law?  Naturally he takes the road less traveled, true to his identity but not to his scripted duty. But this choice requires a physical wrench - he has to tear himself violently from his well-worn path.

• This is possibly the only EVER climactic love scene that involves a cockroach climbing ecstatically over the lovers.

• Speaking of the cockroach, it seems clear to me that the people at Pixar sat around late one Friday night, watching Hello, Dolly, thinking about the nature of love and loss, and saying to each other, "Let's lay bets about what the most skin-crawlingly disgusting creature is that we can make absolutely adorable."  Or maybe they had just been reading a bit too much Kafka.  Next Pixar mega-hit?  The Trial.

• The final credits: awesome.  Did I realize last time I saw the film that they not only tell the story of how the characters resettle the Earth but also do so in the form of highlights from the history of art, starting with ancient Egyptian tomb paintings and Roman mosaics and culminating in Van Gogh's swirls and primitive video game animations?  Backwards and forwards, all at once.

• I wondered again about the debate surrounding the representation of humans in the film, which some critics at the time claimed was misanthropic.  The residents of the Axiom are indeed unflatteringly ungainly.  This is a result, we are told, of declines in bone density over 700 years of micro-gravity, although the implication is that a life spent sucking down "nutritional" shakes ("Cupcake in a Cup!") while in a permanent state of hypermediated Roman recline may also have played a part.  But, in contrast to so many other dystopian visions of the future, this is an essentially optimistic portrait of humanity (and, well, machinery).  As soon as they are jolted out of their tv- and slurpee-induced daze, their first instincts are warm and charitable - they connect with WALL-E and each other, they delight in their surroundings, they want to save babies from a thorough squishing when the ship reels off its rigidly programmed kilter.  Nature red in tooth and claw this isn't: this is a world so profoundly benevolent that even the robo-villain is motivated only by a desire to fulfill its duty and ensure the comfortable survival of humanity.  Its failing is that it chooses letter over spirit, failing to see that vaster ideals like love and home trump the virtue of adherence to a plan.

I wondered what the reception would be from this audience, whose average age I was single-handedly dragging down to about 70. (The first time I saw it was on the big screen in Los Angeles itself, where I am bound to say that the film's cinephile elements played very differently.)  "The special effects were very impressive," my grandfather concluded, "But I don't know about all those enormous people on the space ship."  "It should have been a half hour shorter," a friend said firmly, to a chorus of affirmative murmurs.  "Well," I replied, "Critical consensus is that the first thirty minutes of the film are its strongest and most revolutionary, while the part of the film on the space ship is quite a bit more conventional.  But, after all," I felt honor-bound to add, "it was only, um, a ninety minute film."  I mean, it wasn't exactly Intolerance.

My grandmother adored it, however.  "The imagination," she said, in awed tones, when the credits had just started rolling, "How could anyone have the imagination to make something like this?".

And she was more than a little smitten by WALL-E as a Don Juan, I think: "Their courtship was so well done.  When La Vie en Rose played under it, I couldn't help but remember the first time I heard it - in 1951, at a rooftop party in Beirut...."