Spare a little change: Junebug, coming home, and the eerie effects of the parental gaze

So I’m sitting by the window in this café and the proprietor who I’m friendly with sits besides me and starts telling me about this guy across the street who used to date his sister in high school and was always talking and talking, and there he is now, across the street, 20 years later, and still he’s just talking and talking at someone as though not a moment’s gone by. “If there’s one thing I know about life,” the proprietor announces with absolute conviction, “it’s that people never change.” I ask him why he feels so strongly. He tells me he’s got three kids and that no matter what they do or say as they grow up he saw it all in them from the day they were born. I ask him if perhaps the reason they’ll always seem to the same to him isn’t that they never change but rather that, being his children, he’ll never be able to see them any differently. The proprietor considers this for a good moment and then, quite graciously, concedes that I might have a point.

I told this story to my colleague David Berry and he confessed that he more or less agreed with the café proprietor. People change in little ways, David said, but our essential selves stay the same. But I wonder how many little things need to change to constitute essential change; how much about who we were needs to change before something has changed right down there in that indefinable essence?

When I first left home at 18 and moved to another city, every time I returned felt this involuntary regression. I’m back in the house where I was raised, trying to feel at ease with my family and their habits, yet within minutes we all slip into precisely the same dynamic we’ve always had, the same presumptions and alliances, the same grievances and useless responses. I truly believed that I’d changed, significantly, yet once I entered that house it was as though everything was frozen in time and only physical escape could break the curse of stasis. It took me some years to shake off the frustration that accompanied these reunions. With the holidays here and many of us returning to our families, perhaps for uncomfortably long visits, it got me to thinking about movies that illustrate this scenario.

I thought of The Godfather (1972), how Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone comes back home a war hero, college educated and well-spoken, so different from his siblings, all of whom seem to be easing into their assigned roles within the family’s ethnic tribalism and business of organized crime, and yet by the time the story closes Michael has assumed the position his father once held, as though fate, as it did with Oedipus, were simply meandering on its way to delivering his proscribed sentence. I thought too about Five Easy Pieces (70), which I wrote about last week, how Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea pathologically seeks to reinvent himself as someone from not only a different sort of family but a different class, how he winds up just as unhappy playing the role of a California roughneck as that of a gifted Oregon concert pianist, and how after returning home to find no resolution has no other choice but to keep on running from everything in order to stave off his incessant sense of vacancy. I thought about Brand Upon the Brain! (06) and Guy Maddin’s hero returning to the lighthouse orphanage of his childhood to somnambulistically paint its walls, and about My Own Private Idaho (91), where Keanu Reeves’ male hustler embodies the role of Prince Hal. I also thought about Dogtooth (09) and what happens when the children never leave home. Literally. But that's another story.

The movie that finally struck me as being most emblematic of the experience that had been on my mind was Junebug (05), the debut of director Phil Morrison and writer Angus MacLachlan. After years away, living in Chicago, George (Alessandro Nivola) returns to his rural North Carolina home with Madeline (Embeth Davidtz), his new wife. What’s especially interesting about this homecoming is how George initially recedes from the central storyline upon arriving home. While Madeline awkwardly attempts to ingratiate herself to her in-laws, George seems to be constantly passing out on the sofa, exploring empty rooms or going out. It’s only when he’s called upon by the local pastor to sing a hymn that George breaks the spell and instantly seems to change before Madeline’s eyes into the homey, family-loving Christian his parents raised him to be. “Ye who are weary… Jesus is calling, o sinner, come home,” George sings in a voice so pure it could’ve come from a boy.

Morrison subtly emphasizes the role home and place play in George’s transformation through still, often unpopulated, almost painterly shots of houses, rooms, vast lawns, and churches with immense parking lots. Madeline is a diplomat’s daughter, born in Japan and raised between South Africa and DC—a person without roots, as far as George’s mother’s concerned—and no matter how hard she tries she’ll always stick out everywhere she goes in George’s town, while George, after only a short time there, virtually disappears—from Madeline’s view—right into the town’s tapestry. Then a crisis emerges, George helps his sister-in-law through the crisis, and when he emerges from the event he’s suddenly anxious to leave. In what is perhaps the movie’s boldest move, George and Madeline depart and the story ends with George callously expressing his relief at getting out of that place.

Yet we’re not meant to take this as a simplistic finale, nor as disrespect for George's family on the part of the filmmakers. I think we’re to intuit that George’s family will go on with their lives and George will go on with his and both paths involve some irreducible mixture of free will and stubborn changelessness. It’s only when returning home for a few hours, a few days, maybe a few weeks (!), we are all, or at least most of us, susceptible to this eerie magic that renders us a child once more, unable to assert our individuality and wondering how we ever made it out of the driveway on our own. Until of course we do make it out, and repeat the experience all over.

Haunted by memories of sea, snow, asbestos and orphans: Criterion reminds Canada that its cinema is worth celebrating

I’ve always been more than happy to reside in a country whose citizenry is, by any standard, not especially nationalistic. Yet a frustrating byproduct of our collective patriotic shrug, our amiable reluctance to self-congratulate, is a chronic habit of failing to recognize homegrown talent until celebrated elsewhere—and even then! This is certainly the case with regards to our endlessly maligned—or more to the point, shat on—national cinema: how else to explain the US-based Criterion Collection’s new gorgeously packaged, smartly supplemented prestige releases of, first, arguably one of the finest, if not the finest Canadian film of all time, one that was previously difficult to get hold of on DVD, and that most moviegoers, at least in English Canada, have never seen, and second, one of the very best recent works from a guy who we might at least describe as Canada’s most deliriously distinctive, decidedly demented auteur, one whose work is lauded to a far greater degree in the US and Europe than in his own country?

The first, which a few of you smartypanty Canadian film students may have guessed, is Claude Jutra’s Mon Oncle Antoine (1971), a hauntingly lyrical child’s eye view of eros, community dynamics, corruption and death in 1940s rural Quebec, a work that bears comparison to the best of Louis Malle. Drawn from the childhood memories of co-scripter Clément Perron—relayed to Jutra during an extended drinking session meant to assuage Perron’s hurt feelings over Jutra’s rejection of another screenplay—the film sparkles with details that spill forth from the firmament of deep memory: rosary beards being tangled free from a dead man’s unforgiving fingers; shelves lined with packaged products from some alien, more sophisticated world; an exotic notary’s wife entering a crowded store as an explosion erupts from the mine some distance behind her. This film’s greatness so clearly goes against the oft-farted about notion that Canadian films must generalize their settings to be accessible to a global public: the enduring splendour of Jutra’s lost world lies firmly in its specificity and faithfulness.

Set in a village where the Anglo-owned asbestos mine has coated the landscape and lungs of its citizenry with poison, the story revolves around a pair of deaths, the first of which effects little more than morbid thrills in young Benoit (the brilliantly artless Jacques Gagnon), while the second ushers him toward a more intimate understanding of human frailty, confusion, and, during his uncle’s drunken confession of despair over a coffin accidentally dropped in the snowy woods, a very Quebecois tendency toward despair coated in workingman’s strident joviality. Yet Mon Oncle Antoine could never be mistaken for a somber, unhappy film. It’s rife with the wonder of trespassing into adult realms of lust, and Jean Cousineau’s beautiful, stately score for violin and accordion envelops the richly hued imagery, courtesy of legendary cinematographer Michel Brault—like Jutra, sufficiently well versed in documentary to know how to capture the hidden magic of the everyday—with a delicate, wistful ache.

Criterion’s two-disc set is designed as much as a primer on Jutra as anything else, its highlight being Claude Jutra: An Unfinished Story, a 2002 documentary by Jutra’s friend and colleague Paule Baillargeon, featuring intimate interviews with Brault, Bernardo Bertolucci, Geneviève Bujold and Saul Rubinek. Though Baillargeon’s approach is at times precious—especially her whispery voice-over—her weaving together of Jutra’s own work with testimonies from collaborators and critics culminates in something absolutely heartbreaking. While still in his 50s, this poet of memory, obsessed throughout his life with the mysteries of water, was afflicted with Alzheimer’s. He disappeared one day, and was eventually found washed up on the banks of the St. Lawrence. A piece of paper tucked into his clothing read: “I am Claude Jutra.”

I’ll say less about the second film, if only because it's more recent and has gotten plenty of commentary from the likes of me already. Concerning a young man’s return to the lighthouse orphanage where he grew up under an oppressive, all-seeing matriarch and zombified inventor dad, Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), a hysterical hybrid of silent movie aesthetics, grand guignol, teen detective novels and lovingly embellished autobiography, dazzled audiences the world over in theatrically accented screenings featuring live orchestra, foley, and narration from a dizzying variety of celebrity voices. In Criterion’s gorgeous transfer, it’s still pretty damn good even on your TV, where you can choose to have either Maddin, Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, John Ashbery, Crispin Glover, Louis Negin or Eli Wallach be your aural guide.

The extras are also great, especially Dennis Lim’s essay and ‘Footsteps,’ Maddin’s short doc that captures the foley artists at work in their studio, rifling through plastic baskets of chains, antlers, shoes and phones. These adventuresome audioaholics, clad in white lab coats, turn big wheels, splash water, ride sawhorses and kiss a horse’s ass to simulate a woman kissing a man’s ass. This job looks like too much fun! Even better however is 97 Percent True, a new doc that’s half about the making of Brand and half just about Maddin’s development as an artist, featuring expansive, top shelf quottage from the always witty Maddin and his co-scripter George Toles. It easily betters the previously released Maddin profile Waiting for Twilight (1997).

Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg... Guy Maddin discusses his first docu-phantasia, psychic traps, cold facts, the true nature of truth, and Ann Savagery

Narrated by its author, laden with lyrical repetition so as to send viewers into a wintry trance, My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin’s new “docu-phantasia,” proposes a prairie citizenry of somnambulists afflicted with acute nostalgia, geographically isolated, perpetually snowed-in, surrounded by vestiges of history, lulled by muffled train whistles, cursed with a labyrinthine conspiracy that keeps them from ever leaving, architecturally enveloped by a geometry of symbols alluding to occult municipal histories, grotesque sporting atrocities and aboriginal mysticism.

My Winnipeg delves headlong into Maddin’s private obsessions, actually going as far as re-enacting seemingly banal moments from Maddin’s childhood with a cast of professional actors—one of whom just happens to be Ann Savage, the long-retired star of the masterful, dream-like poverty row film noir Detour (1945). Comically inspired, a frenetic flurry of far-fetched facts, imminently id-soaked, and mostly shot in beautiful, grainy-as-all-hell black and white, the modus operandi of My Winnipeg pleasingly remains very close to that of Maddin’s blatantly autobiographical—and shamelessly fantastical—Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and Brand Upon the Brain! (06). Like those films, it deserves to be seen as among the most finest works in his 20-year career.

Maddin spoke to us by phone from his family’s cottage in Manitoba, where children could be heard uttering bloodcurdling screams in the distance. This interview was hosted by Vue Weekly.

JB: My Winnipeg opens with a close-up of Ann Savage—the actress, we later learn, who will be portraying your mother—taking some rather stern line-readings from you, while you remain off-screen. This choice of starting point has really stuck with me, because in a sense it seems to tell us right off the bat that what we’re witnessing is a sort of incantation on the part of the author, a history willed, even dictated into being.

Guy Maddin: That’s a nice way of putting it. It wasn’t in the script, but it seemed the simplest way of portraying what kind of thoughtless, self-centered lengths I as the documentarian was willing to go to. Even if you had to figure it out backwards, it was my way of saying, Hey, I’m just bullying my way into your field of vision to show you a mythology I’ll do anything to make. The idea of starting out by forcing a woman against her will to say a line a certain way struck me as potentially confusing, but apt.

JB: How concerned were you with getting things right with regards to the Winnipeg history, the Winnipeg culture, the Winnipeg persona?

GM: I just felt that, having been commissioned to make a highly personal portrait of my hometown, if I was honest with myself I wouldn’t have to research anything other than my feelings. Canadians are such lousy self-mythologizers: the preferred medium for mythologizing for the last century has been motion pictures, yet Winnipeg has never really attempted to exploit that, so I had a lot of catching up to do. I had to get the greatest hits all into one movie. I’m always asked how much of My Winnipeg is true. People expect me to say none of it, but the truth to closer to all of it. I did make some factual errors, unintentionally. For example, Winnipeg isn’t actually the coldest city in the world—Ulan Bator, Mongolia is colder. I remember reading that Winnipeg was the coldest when I was a kid. Maybe they have more accurate stats now. Maybe global warming has shifting the standings. Anyway the factual part of My Winnipeg is mostly oral history stuff. I like to break the film down as one-third fact, one-third legend—which is usually truer than fact—and than just one-third wishful thinking, laments and complaints.

JB: To use Werner Herzog’s very useful terminology, I think My Winnipeg trades in “ecstatic truth” rather than “the accountant’s truth.”

GM: When I first heard Herzog use that term, I was thrilled. But I think what I’m after is maybe almost more of the hysterical truth.

JB: For me at least, My Winnipeg feels part of a trilogy with Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! They circle around the same carrion. They all share this particularly urgent delirium. And building on the strengths of its predecessors, My Winnipeg turns out to be one of your most fluid films. It sort of just clips by.

GM: Well Brand Upon the Brain! had a live element, the live narration and live foley and so on. And I think I became more of a showman than a filmmaker then. Filmmakers tend to make things only for themselves, but once we added that live element, I wanted to make sure that people in the theatre were engaged. I really learned the rewards of making that connection, so I always had the audience in mind while making My Winnipeg, from start to finish.

JB: How have Winnipeggers responded to the film? Were you at all apprehensive?

GM: I really didn’t know what to expect. I thought they might just go berserk with anger, because whenever I showed the movie in other cities—Berlin, Sydney, didn’t matter where—there was always some irascible Winnipegger who’d stand up and complain that I left out the Winnipeg Blue Bombers football club, or the Taste of Manitoba food fair, something like that. All the Winnipeggers I ran into were really unwelcome sights, so I thought, Holy smokes, 1600 Winnipeggers crammed into our old vaudeville palace could really turn into a dangerous mob. But they ended up being a really generous, warm crowd. They seemed delighted by these jokes that seemed wedged in there just for them. They even gave my mom a standing ovation.

JB: How much do you consider your development as a filmmaker to be inextricably linked to your essential confinement to Winnipeg?

GM: I don’t think I would have made the same work elsewhere. I remember when I first started out I was determined not to have any association with Winnipeg and went out of my way not mention it. But I eventually found that the more I addressed directly the place where I dwelled I’d feel more connected with the work.

JB: I realize of course that you do escape Winnipeg on a regular basis, but at this point, would you say that it’ll likely remain your permanent residence for the rest of your life?

GM: [Sighs] Yeah, probably. [Sighs again] Might as well just buy the burial plot now. It’s true that whenever I’m in another city I’m happy there for a month, but then I start missing home. And then as soon as I go home it’s… disappointing somehow. I don’t know…

JB: I’m not trying to depress you here.

GM: [Laughs] It’s okay… Really.

JB: But, cementing its connection to Detour, I got this sense in My Winnipeg that you’re like Tom Neal, and Winnipeg itself is your femme fatale, that you’re doomed to return again and again to her, like she’s this maternal siren.

GM: That’s very true. I’ve never thought of it that way, but maybe you’ve put your finger on it. She’s my Barbara Stanwyck and I’m her Walter Neff. We have kind of a mad love relationship, where if Winnipeg looks at me the wrong way I’ll slap it across the face, and then lose myself in its curves… Gee, I really like that.

Looking for lineage on The Orphanage

The marketing for The Orphanage (El Orfanato) is, unsurprisingly, making much of Guillermo Del Toro's role as executive producer, a fact that no doubt prompted whichever dunderheaded critic it was who declared it "This year's Pan's Labyrinth!" Irksome hyperbole aside, I still enjoyed the film when I caught it on a whim at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, and I went back to see it again this afternoon at a downtown multiplex. It takes little reflection to realize that the story, crammed with innuendo, is of course full of holes, yet none of them seem to actually burrow into the morbidly romantic heart of the material, or take anything away from Belén Rueda's engagingly desperate, sympathetically neurotic performance as Laura, the mother haunted by her missing child long after everyone else has resigned themselves to his almost certain death. Laura and her son Simón share the determining attribute of having both been orphans, and the fidelity and solidarity this imposes on their bond is probably of a nature most of us who've grown up with the security of knowing our birth parents can't truly comprehend. It's this aspect of The Orphanage that I immediately found strangely moving in spite of the film being a bit overcooked by its young director Juan Carlos Bayona.

What drew Del Toro to the film however only became obvious to me after my second viewing. In the largely pedestrian documentary that accompanies Warner's wonderful Val Lewton box set, Del Toro articulates his deep admiration for Lewton, and in The Orphanage we can detect a number of traits that connect directly to Lewton's themes (and in discussing them, there will follow MAJOR SPOILERS). In particular, the film is fundamentally controlled by a very relatable tragedy grounded in reality, while its potentially supernatural elements are finally left ambiguous. As well, the film basically imparts upon the viewer the idea that suicide is a good thing, at the very least a way to resolve an insurmountable emotional wound and make amends with a troubled past. The film's ending is unfathomably gloomy, yet it does imply that the heroine reunites with her son and finds a peace that was otherwise obscure to her. 

But as much as the film benefits from its evocation of Lewton's enduringly seductive horror classics, it also works away at the same creeping psychological schisms found at the heart of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, perhaps my favourite horror story ever, one that found its finest cinematic adaptation in 1961's The Innocents. Frustrated maternal urges, isolation and obsession, the veneration if not fetishization of children: all of these factors figure into the mental landscape of The Orphanage (not to mention Guy Maddin's  Brand Upon the Brain! to which The Orphanage bears several curious resemblances). Perhaps this calls for the delineation of a subgenre: manic surrogate mother and child chillers? ...Let me work on that one.