MovieMonday: Let Him Go

This is a well-plotted movie with an unusual plot arc that moves from family sorrow to Gothic horror, all set in the largely empty western interior from Montana to North Dakota in the early 1960s.

The main characters are Margaret and George Blackledge (Diane Ladd and Kevin Costner), long-married ranchers whose son is killed in an accident.  

A couple years later, the son's widow, Lorna (Kayli Carter), remarries and leaves the Blackledges' home with their toddler grandson to live with her new husband, Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain) in an apartment in town.  

That there was tension between Lorna and Margaret is hinted; that Lorna is uncomfortable with her new husband is suggested more strongly.  

Then Margaret, sitting in her car in the grocery store parking lot, sees Lorna and her son being abused  by the new husband.  

Margaret decides to investigate, nice-lady style, by taking a fresh-baked cake to the new family's home the next day.  There she learns that Lorna, Donnie and grandson Jimmy have upped stakes and left without leaving a forwarding address.

George, a retired sheriff who is stoical but no less resolute, understands his wife.  When she loads the car and says she is going to find their grandchild, he joins her.  

The strong relationship between these two is rendered effectively and in a minimal style.  The losses of a son and then a grandson resonate but without noise.  The quiet harmony of their life in the first act contrasts with the drama that follows.

Their journey takes them to the North Dakota home of the Weboys, a family whose line of work is unclear but who scare everybody in the surrounding region.  The Weboy sons provide the muscle, and their mother, Blanche (Lesley Manville), is the family leader -- plainspoken, brassy and downright menacing.  

One short visit to the Weboy house convinces the Blackledges that they must rescue their grandson and also his mother, if she is willing.

Naturally, this is not a simple matter.  Margaret and George work together as a team (and with a Native American character imported apparently to provide a useful ally) as the conflict gathers suspense and moves to its fiery end, which is difficult to watch but is faithful to the story as it has been laid out.

This movie was made in 2019 and was released on November 6 on about 2,500 screens, a lot this year, where it sold well, again for this year.   It is available now for streaming at a cost of $20 and is best watched on a large screen.  

The source material is a novel of the same name by Larry Watson, who seems to mingle personal and action themes and who is familiar with the northern interior between the Rocky Mountains and the upper Midwest.

The screenwriter and director, Thomas Bezucha, decided to make the film after reading the book. Michael Giacchino, a veteran film musician, has delivered a score that enhances the film's themes.

Note

Let Him Go was shot in Alberta, Canada, in locations that are similar enough to the sites in the story.

A Thanksgiving Wish

This is a day to be grateful for friends, family and the comforts we enjoy.  But there are many people suffering the effects of two major hurricanes, two weeks apart, in November.  If you believe that all men are brothers, you might consider a contribution to relief agencies that are now active in the region.  

Two major hurricanes, Eta and Iota, lashed Central America earlier this month.  The Guardian, a serious  English newspaper, has a retrospective here and links to previous stories at the bottom of the article.  

The problems:  heavy flooding, landslides, hundreds of deaths, many thousands of families whose homes were destroyed and further destruction to economies already damaged by the pandemic.  Additionally, people crowding into shelters have increased the spread of Covid.

These three agencies get high marks for efficient management from Charity Navigator and are on the ground already in Central America.

Doctors without Borders 

Catholic Relief Services

World Vision

A fourth agency, the  Red Cross is unrated.  Its downside is its large bureaucracy, but that is also an upside:  The Red Cross has teams all over the world and decades of  experience alleviating all manner of human turmoil. 

Further photos from Central America this month, all from Reuters:

MovieMonday: Extraction

In a year when Marvel has decided to defer releasing new superhero movies until theaters reopen, this Netflix movie may have benefited by attracting some of the genre's audience.   Extraction was scripted and directed by MCU veterans (Joe Russo and Sam Hargrave, respectively) and stars Chris Hemsworth, who played Thor in three Marvel movies.

Here's the setup: Tyler Rake (Hemsworth), a grizzled mercenary, has been living in a country shack and doing not much more than drinking when when he gets a call:  "We landed the whale."

His new assignment is to rescue Ovi Mahajan (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the 15-year-old son of a now-imprisoned Mumbai drug lord.  Ovi  has been kidnapped by henchmen of another drug lord based in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.  

(An interjection:  Why would these drug lords care about each other?   Their bases are in different, very populous countries, after all.  Why start a war with a gang 1,500  miles away?  Even if you really hate the other guy, why kidnap his son?  You don't need ransom money.  Why not just kill the child and and leave the body where it lies?  I know, I know -- action movies generally have plot holes, but geez.)  

Tyler arrives in Dhaka where he uses his buff build and combat training, plus guns, to get the boy out on the street, where they are pursued in a long, well-orchestrated sequence of car chases, also with guns blazing.

Then, after it turns out that the mercenary group's plan to get Ovi out of Dhaka has been foiled, Tyler and Ovi end up hiding in "the worst-smelling sewer in Asia" until they are rescued, surprisingly, and there is an interlude in which the characters reveal their motives. The final act involves these two, a new ally, the mercenary team, many police officers, multiple helicopters and much collateral (human) damage -- all while the Dhaka drug lord watches through binoculars from a marble porch, rather as if he is observing a cricket match.  

I don't want to be unkind here.  This plot has more in the way of human motivation than most shoot-em-ups.  There is a father-son theme that explains Tyler's empty life and is echoed in other situations.  A foggy memory reveals its meaning over time, and there is a recurrent underwater motif.  Some scores are settled and, at the very end, there is a suggestion that a prequel or sequel may be in the offing.

Some critics believe the plot reverts lazily to a white-man-rescuer theme, but there may be reasons for that.  First, if you have well-established Chris Hemsworth as your star and a big-budget premise, you're not aiming for the indie market.  (Remember the film's originators came out of Marvel.)  Second, setting this movie anywhere in the U.S. would have been ruinously expensive.   The South Asian location added interest, reduced cost and provided work for local actors and craft talent.  

Finally, the funding didn't come come a major U.S. studio, and there appears to have been some participation by investors from India -- not least because the working title was changed from Dhaka  to Extraction and because virtually the entire movie was shot in India.  The film has attracted much attention in the Indian press and presumably a large audience in that country as well.  

Potsdam, Truman, Chopin and Mom

In late summer 1945, the leaders of the the United States, Great Britain and Russia gathered in Potsdam for a conference after the end of World War II in Europe.   The goal was to reach an agreement on what to do with territories Germany had held.   The setting was depressing, and, worse, the discussions were tense and unavailing even after a welcome Allied victory.   It was a long two weeks. 

By many reports, the most pleasant part of the conference was an evening entertainment planned by the Americans.  A grand piano was set out on the portico, and music was provided by an American violinist and pianist currently serving in the military.  

The two played several pieces together, and then US president Harry Truman, a pianist himself, played Paderewski's Minuet in G.  

To end the evening, the other pianist, Sgt. Eugene List, played  Frédéric Chopin's "Waltz in A Minor," Truman's favorite.  The musician did not know the piece from memory, and he was surprised when the president offered to stand by the piano and turn the pages as List tickled the ivories.  (None of the other conference attendees or aides was confident enough to take the job.  Wimps.)

Later, in early 1947 and after List had resumed his career as a concert pianist, he was invited to the White House to perform for a diplomatic reception.  Once again, Truman asked to hear the "Waltz in A Minor."

Harry Truman

This engaging biography lets us understand the serious but low-key man who was president during a consequential period in the middle of the 20th century.  It opens with his grandparents' settlement in the "Muzzuruh" part of Missouri and continues through his foreshortened schooling, his several careers in banking, farming, artillery leadership in the Battle of the Argonne Forest, among others,  and ultimately to political office and the presidency.  The story is further enhanced by local and political context and observations about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower,  the presidents who preceded and succeeded him.  

Definitely worth a look.

Frédéric Chopin

This Polish composer was born in Warsaw just about a century after the invention of the piano.  (Its predecessor keyboards were big pipe organs and small harpsichords,  which were useful but not particularly expressive.)  As a child, Chopin took to the piano and became known for for his performances and, later, for his musical compositions as well.  

He and the instrument were enormously influential as European music moved from its Classical period to the Romantic one.  The piano's capacity for loud or soft intonation and for staccato or legato renderings, plus its pedals' accommodation of further nuance, allowed more emotive renderings of music. Chopin, Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann and others made full use of these new tools by writing music that allowed pianists to draw more sensitive shadings from the notes on their music scores.     

My Mother

My mother, like several of her children, studied piano as a child.  One of the happiest days of her adult life must have been when she and my father bought a used baby grand piano.  She played often, and Chopin was her favorite composer -- or maybe, on some days, it was Mendelssohn.  Much as I enjoy the waltz that was Harry Truman's favorite, the Chopin waltz I like best is  Op. 64, n. 2, perhaps because I remember my mother playing it or maybe because it is moving and beautiful.

Mom died young, but not as young as Frédéric Chopin.  Dogged all his life by poor health,  he died in 1849 in Paris of complications from tuberculosis.  He was just 39 years old.

Note: This review discusses the latest of many books on why Chopin remains essential to audiences, performers and musicologists.

MovieMonday: The Life Ahead

The headline appeal of this new movie is that it stars Sophia Loren.  

Loren, the serious and seriously beautiful actress of the last century, plays Madame Rosa, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, retired streetwalker and, now, informal foster parent of other prostitutes' children.  

The action starts as Madame Rosa walks down the street with a parcel.  The bag, with two vases inside,  is snatched by a young boy who runs away with it.  

Shortly after the robbery, her friend and neighbor, Dr. Cohen, brings thief and vases up to her apartment. Cohen asks Madame Rosa to take the wayward boy into her care.  

Rosa says no, of course.  She is a serious women, and, not surprisingly, the kid looks like trouble to her.  

The doctor offers money and then more money.   He says the 12-year-old boy, Momo (Ibrahima Gueye),  "needs a female figure, someone who commands respect."

When she agrees, finally, and the doctor leaves, Momo (short for Mohamed) behaves obnoxiously toward the two younger children in the apartment.  One is the child of Rosa's dear friend, Lola (Abril Zamora), and the other, a Jewish boy, is sure his mother will come to get him soon after months of absence.  

Momo, born in Senegal, has lived in Italy since he was three, but he has been mostly on his own since his mother was killed by his father three years later.  

Rosa is a good caretaker with the right children, but she is a not a pushover or a sweetie pie.  She calls Momo "a little shit," and he, like many in the neighborhood, refers to her as "the old bag."  

But Momo has skills.  He's very good at selling street drugs.  He can draw, and he enjoys music.  He's curious about why Rosa leaves the apartment for the building basement every now and then. When Rosa pressures an Islamic grocer (Babak Karim) to give Momo a part-time job, the man shares his books and rugs and the two get to know each other, but slowly and with friction.  

So, yes, Momo loosens up in Mama Rosa's home.  But for every 1.5 steps forward, there is at least one full step back.  Meanwhile, there are signs that Rosa's health is declining.  When Momo shows concern, her own coolness thaws a bit.

Essentially, the story is about human loss, starting with Jewish Rosa whose family died at Auschwitz, and continuing with her friend Lola, whose father wants to meet his grandchild but is not so certain about his sex-worker daughter who is also transgender.  Add in the other boy and the widowed grocer, and it's a full deck of people hungry for family.  The setting, a skeezy neighborhood of prostitutes and drug dealers and carabinieri and graffiti, presumably was chosen to pile on the tension faced by the luckless characters and make the theme more complex.  

This story was told first in a 1975 French novel set in Paris and, second, in a 1977 French film starring Simone Signoret.   I watched part of that film, and it wasn't the great actress' best work.  

This newer version was cowritten by Edoardo Ponti, Sophia Loren's son, who also directed.  Her presence, wearing her age (so Italian, that) and carrying herself with dignity and fear and without false drama, makes it much more interesting than it would have been with a lesser actress.   In addition, Momo's energy and anger are on full display in this movie, and actor Ibrahima Gueye's every movement reads true.   

Notes

The Life Ahead was filmed in the Italian city of Bari, along the Adriatic Sea.  It was filmed in Italian and dubbed into English for American viewers, and this does not work, at least for this viewer.  

It's not that the characters' mouths are obviously speaking a different language -- Italian is rather mellifluous, after all -- but that their dialogue has been rendered in idiomatic US English, which feels jarring given the Italian setting.  So do the occasional insertions of Italian exclamations.  "Mala fangul!"

Fortunately, this Netflix explainer, also in US style, shows how to adjust the setting to watch the movie with Italian speech and English subtitles.  Much better.

A New Indie Film: Teen Goths

The theme of this movie is an evergreen one:  Growing up is hard to do.

The story is about a young woman whose father has died, whose writer mother is on a book tour and who is stuck at her grandparents' house during an eventful summer when she takes up with some neighborhood Goths.  As the trailer indicates, the film Goths are teenagers who wear black clothes and listen to death rock, not the guys who sacked Rome almost 2,000 years ago.  

The release was years in the making and was filmed in Portland, Oregon, the city where I grew up.  Its star is a young woman whom I know and like.  I am not going to discuss the film  because our friendship might interfere with my objectivity.  And, yes, yes, the notion of objectivity in published reports has become quaint, like a 20th-century artifact --  similar, perhaps, to the Lawrence Welk program my grandparents used to enjoy.

(I will say this much:  Part of a scene from the film was released to friends and family a couple years ago.  It was set in a graveyard at midnight, which sounds neo-Gothic, but the lighting was pretty awkward.  If I were the cinematographer, I'd have done the shoot under a bright-but-ominous full moon.  To be fair, however, Portland's cloudy, wet climate would frustrate that goal just about every month of the year.)  

Personally, I thought the Goth trend ended sometime in 2000 or so, but I was wrong.  When  I looked on the internet just now, I found an offbeat advice column that ran a letter in 2019 from a distraught mother who wrote Help! My Daughter Is Becoming a Goth!  Going Goth still may be a way, safer than many,  to declare your autonomy at a time when you are an adolescent and need to scratch that itch. 

Make of this what you will.  My Summer as a Goth is now streaming on Amazon and other online services.

An Invitation

The Id is not offering a review of this film but would welcome reactions from others who have seen it.  These can be posted in the comments section below for the edification of others interested in the plot, the characters, the humor, the setting or any other related matter. 

Other readers will benefit from your insights.

 

MovieMonday: Being There

If you think this year's political season has made Americans more jaundiced than ever before, you might consider this much-admired satirical comedy from 1979 as a bit of an antidote. 

The story opens as a middle-aged man awakens in his handsomely appointed suite one morning and is told by the maid that "the old man" has died.  

The middle-aged man, called Chance, does not react but instead watches television.  We have no idea how Chance came to be in this spot or who the old man was, but we learn that Chance always has lived in the fine house and always has been the gardener on its grounds.  He also has access to the old man's handsome, traditional wardrobe of expensively tailored clothing.

Today we might call Chance "differently abled," but he is more different than that.  He has no affect and is slow to speak, choosing his words with care.  His demeanor, modest and polite, presumably models the behavior of the old man who has died. 

After the maid departs, lawyers come and explain that Chance must leave the home as well.  He packs a leather suitcase and, for the first time in his life, steps out the front door of what appears to be a classic townhouse in a now-rundown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. 

Chance is not prepared for reality on a street.  If you have read the source novel or about this film, you know that he whips out his television remote to turn off some trash-talking young men who confront him.  This, of course, does not work as he expects.

Fortunately for him, Chance is bumped in the leg by a limousine whose chauffeur apologizes and whose occupant, Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine), invites him to her home.  When she asks his name, he says he is Chance the gardener, which Eve hears as Chauncey Gardiner.  The transformation is complete.

Eve's house is even fancier than the one Chance left (and looks a lot like the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina).  Her much older husband,  the prominent, influential Ben (Melvyn Douglas), is dying and under the care of his personal physician.  Ben takes a liking to Chance/Chauncey and is the first among many.

There are many things Chauncey cannot do:  He cannot read or write and, he cannot manage more than a very polite response to any provocation or event.  As he explains repeatedly, "I like to watch television."  Commercials, cartoons, yoga classes, whatever -- if it's on television, he's happy to watch.  

But Chauncey's appearance and manners appeal to the others in the Rands' orbit, including politicians and journalists who listen carefully as he describes the seasons of a garden and the tending of plants.  They  conclude he is speaking metaphorically and sharing great wisdom.  His fame spreads, and the story, like any decent satire, dials the level of farce to 11, and then beyond. 

Being There is bit of a play on the "wisdom of little children" theme.  But children have emotions, which Chance does not.  His situation cannot be taken literally, happily, and the show's politicians aren't nearly as irritating as those we were expected to take seriously in last week's election.

The film also can be seen as a critique of the television obsession of its period, which looks quaint in retrospect.  We advanced citizens of the new millennium are much more absorbed with our cellphones.  

Note

The novel and screenplay were written by Jerzy Kozinski, a  Polish Jew whose family survived the Holocaust by taking new names and passing as Christians.  Kosinski, an energetic and enigmatic young fellow,  arrived in New York in the early 1960s and began writing books, the most approachable of which is Being There.

In addition to writing, Kosinski was a lively conversationalist, popular among New York literati and with television hosts.  He also led an exotic, if not publicly exotic, life on the side.  We cannot know how much his personality was formed by his challenging childhood, but when Chance says, "I like to watch," we know that he got the line from his creator.

Kosinski's first book, The Painted Bird, was described alternately as the story of his own ghastly childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, then as fiction and, finally and by others, as the English version of a similar novel released earlier in Europe.  A 1982 article in The Village Voice seems to document much more uncredited writing help from editors and others.  Kosinski took his own life in 1991.

MovieMonday: The Trial of the Chicago 7 -- and Portland

If I have one regret about this movie, it is that I didn't wait five or 10 years to see it.  

The subject matter has been on famed writer/director Aaron Sorkin's mind for years.   (I enjoyed his earlier projects, The West Wing television series and The Social Network movie years before I started a blog.) 

My impression is that Sorkin chose to release this in the current year of "unrest" in American cities.  The plot concerns a 52-year-old clash between Chicago cops and Vietnam protesters and the long, long federal trial in which the presumed protest leaders were prosecuted for inciting violence during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

That 1968 violence was seen on television (lots of TV cameras happened to be in the city at the time, of course) and has been understood ever since as caused by heavy-handed policing ordered by then-mayor Richard Daley.  This year, the protest violence seems more organized but almost certainly will not result in incitement charges. 

The movie involves eight men's trial in the courtroom of Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella at his best), who is angry, punitive and possibly demented.  Seven of the men are represented by William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) who comes across as more gentle and humane than the real-life Kunstler, whose career was devoted to the defiant defense of underdogs, not all of them admirable, against the man.

The eighth defendant, Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), is adamant that he did not participate in the protests and does not know the other defendants.  His rage builds when the judge refuses to allow him to defend himself, or even to speak for himself, in court.  An extreme overreaction by the judge, which did happen, causes Seale to be separated from the group prosecution.  

And then there are seven.

Between courtroom scenes, we get to know the defendants:  Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) are irreverent/arrogant Yippies who push the judge's limited tolerance even further.  Rubin also teaches demonstrators how to make Molotov cocktails, perhaps in a reference to this year's protests, or perhaps to suggest there is some mystery about whether the Chicago 7 really started the violence in Chicago's Grant Park.

There are apparent inventions in the service of the plot.  Did Richard Nixon's new attorney general, John Mitchell, really order the post-inauguration prosecution of demonstrators in Chicago?  Also, why the fictional enlistment of the previous president's attorney general, Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton) as a witness for the defense when such never happened?   In addition, there is no mention of Lyndon Johnson, the previous president whom Clark served and who was so reviled for the escalation of the Vietnam War that he declined to run in 1968.   (Imagine the Chicago unrest had Johnson been the nominee.) And, no, there was no noble reading of the names of military dead during the trial.

The trial ran from early April 1969 to late February 1970, but the film is shorter, thankfully.  It has some points to make, but I'm not sure how relevant they are today.

Then and Now: Portland

I do not fault Aaron Sorkin for seizing the moment and releasing a film about an earlier period of American political rupture.  He knows more than I ever will about the Vietnam protests and the subsequent Chicago trial.

But I was raised in Portland, Oregon. My high school is up the street from much of the protests that started after the ghastly George Floyd death and have continued ever since.  After school in my senior year, I walked downtown to work at the city's main public library, an experience I remember fondly but would not want a child of mine to have today.

I don't understand why the local Resistance caused $1 million damage in downtown because its preferred candidate lost the 2016 election, or why anonymous threats of violence caused the city leaders to cancel a traditional Rose Festival parade the next spring in a far-out, lower-class (and increasingly minority) neighborhood because a group of Republicans planned to participate.  

By July 9 this year, downtown "protests" had caused an estimated $9 million in private business losses.  Those businesses now are mostly closed, but the fires, the police overtime, the healthcare costs for cops or photographers targeted with blinding lasers are not calculated.   Or at least not reported. 

Back when I lived in Portland, I never saw those noble protestors tutoring poor kids with me at the school not far from my house on Saturdays in the then-scary (now whiter and gentrified) neighborhood.  I don't think the "BLM supporters" (haha) spend their mornings pressing doorbells to urge people to vote for Joe Biden.

My friends who are walkers during the daylight hours describe a one-mile street of now-closed and boarded-up businesses that may be closed permanently in the downtown hub of the city's much-admired light rail system.  

Protesters have torn down statues near and far, including one of an elk, a native animal -- apparently, just because.

There seems to be a palpable protester interest in being oppressed by the local cops, who refuse to play along.  Police restraint in the face of threats -- name calling, projectile-tossing, commercial-grade firework explosions, fires set, threats to burn down houses with American flags on the porches -- is admirable but also has caused a massive escalation in police retirements.  Fun as it is to spray ACAB (all cops are bastards) messages all over town, sometimes those officers are needed.  Now, when arrests are made, the usual response by the district attorney's office is to fail to press charges.  (And I speak as one with personal, substantial complaints about the Portland constabulary's disinterest when people in my family would have appreciated some justice.)  

I could go on and on and on.  But, for the foreseeable future, how many entrepreneurs will set up businesses in now-affordable but empty downtown Portland?  How many lawyers and accountants will relocate their offices to suburbs near their children's schools?  How many travelers will want to stay at cool niche hotels when Antifa enforcers decide which cars may travel on downtown streets?  Who will go downtown, even after the pandemic, for local theatrical or symphonic performances or to visit the very good local history museum with its demolished entry and now-toppled statues of the abominable Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln? 

For his next project, Aaron Sorkin might want to apply his considerable talents to the current moment in a city like Portland. 

Note:

Here is the first of two 2015 stories wondering about the state of the state of Oregon. I may refer to others in future posts.