Higher Ground: between God and a hard place

This thing we’ve been calling the culture wars has in recent years aggregated at least one mighty bipartisan ethic: ambivalence is bad for you and your country; tolerance is a slippery slope; agnosticism is for wimps; which side are you on? (Just as an aside: How strange it feels to be posting this review so soon after learning of the death of God is Not Great author Christopher Hitchens.) Yet betweenness is a fundamental part of life; we are ever moving from one place or one absolute to another, most often learning the most we’ll ever learn while on route. Betweenness is what story is made of.

All this is just my way of contextualizing my strong feelings for the closing note struck by Higher Ground—something about which I feel no ambivalence at all. The directorial debut of Vera Farmiga, who also stars, is about living with religious values that remain fixed while one’s life remains insistently fluid. The movie is elegant, intelligent, sensual, and a little uneven—a few truly bum notes stand out against a predominantly careful and wise series of choices. But its closing moments sweep the central character up into a scene of un-showy yet immense bravery and still manage to leave us without firm resolution, and that absence is itself something meaningful.

Farmiga plays Corrine, who, having already conveyed a deep curiosity about Jesus as a child and having survived a potentially catastrophic accident with herself, her husband and her infant child miraculously intact, becomes in adult life a member of some radical New Testament community nestled somewhere in rural New York. Based on Carolyn S. Briggs’ memoir This Dark World, Higher Ground begins with extended scenes depicting key moments in Corrine’s youth before catching up with her in the present, a time of great tumult: Corrine’s best friend (Dagmara Dominczyk), a vivacious, raven-haired fellow believer who has no problem leading a fulfilling erotic existence under God, becomes terrifyingly, senselessly ill; Corrine’s fierce intellect becomes increasingly unsatisfied by the gender codes of her sect and the pastor whom she admires yet resents; and Corrine’s unhappiness with her marriage to her high school sweetheart Ethan (Joshua Leonard) is about to overwhelm her normally unbreakable composure.

Despite the repression, despite moments of alarming, sudden violence, there are no clearly marked villains in Higher Ground, and Corrine’s heroism is a quiet one, rooted mainly in her refusal to shut out the voices of desire or doubt or the longings of the spirit. Farmiga depicts the religious community with both affection and frustration, at times celebrating the camaraderie, at others reeling from its enforced naiveté. Her approach only goes astray in the few moments where she tries to slip fantasies into Corrine’s waking life, and the story itself only feels awkward in a few scenes dealing with Corrine’s immediate family, such as the one involving her sister and a big bag of blow. As for her work as an actor in Higher Ground, I can’t say that Farmiga ever gets it anything but right. Her lack of judgement as a director carried over into her performance, so we see Corrine fully surrendered to the ecstasies of worship, mothering and fighting for her dignity in equal parts. The last seven or eight years has found Farmiga emerging as an interesting actress under the direction of Minghella and Scorsese, but we may just be seeing her at her very best here, taking on both roles, and directing herself.

Senna: Life in overdrive

Though it rather daringly confines its visual trajectory to nothing but archival footage—most of which feature its hero, Brazilian racing superstar Ayrton Senna, traversing tracks the world round at dizzying speeds—it could hardly be said that Senna simply goes around in circles. Its narrative, which skims the surface of Senna’s personal life in favour of his professional one, is burnished down to its mythical contours, rendering Senna’s meteoric rise to World Champion and tragic death at 34 in a mid-race crack-up as an Icarus tale, not one of hubris exactly—Senna spoke with great humility about his gift and his sense of debt to the god who endowed him with it—but of a deep faith in speed and glory that transcends reason. One memorable interview clip finds Senna describing a major turning point in his career arriving when he found himself behind the wheel and feeling as though he was no longer conscious. But this yearning for ecstasy was balanced by a fierce intellect, one trained to make split-second risk assessments. Senna was a champion because he was ruthless on the track, and his record for accidents was nearly as exceptional as his winning streak. Some thought him reckless, but the thrill of his greatest feats are undeniable: he won the Brazil Grand Prix with his car stuck in sixth gear for multiple laps; his fingers had to be pried from the wheel afterward.

Senna the film, now available on DVD, directed by Asif Kapadia, edited by Chris King and Gregers Sall, and written by Manish Pandey, understands very well that adrenaline is key to its appeal, whether the audience is full of racing enthusiasts, those who crave a solid sports documentary, or those who are simply drawn to high-stakes stories of ambition. Things move fast, excitement accumulates, and we’re often treated to views of the action from Senna’s on-board camera. But it should be said that this need for speed ultimately obscures everything else, and the absence of talking heads makes it tough to distinguish between the various commentators we hear speaking almost constantly on the soundtrack. So by the time Senna is over, you might feel as though you missed a great deal in the blur.

Immortals: It's all Greek to Tarsem

Set in 1228 BC, Immortals tells the story of how a fierce peasant with an unlimited gym pass rose up against and ultimately defeated a sadistic warmonger with a lot of help from body-buttered Aryan deities. Apparently it’s all based on Greek myths, though departures from the source material are conspicuous and most often really dumb. One could argue that director Tarsem Dhandwar Singh (the artist formerly known as Tarsem Singh, or plain old Tarsem—his name just keeps getting longer) is very much in his element; he clearly prefers the god’s eye view whenever possible and finds countless opportunities here to have his actors strike poses modeled after the cover paintings of fantasy novels.

Theseus is bulgingly embodied by future Superman Henry Cavill, while his antagonist, King Hyperion, is played by Mickey Rourke, who seems to be channeling Brando in Apocalypse Now, what with his croaky voice muttering out from the gloom, his munching of chestnuts, the crumbs stuck in his scraggily beard, and his looming over a basin of water as he interviews an unfortunate minion. The two first meet when Hyperion, just like Thulsa Doom in Conan, slaughters mom before Theseus’ eyes. “Witness hell,” says Hyperion, whose route to mega-evil was earlier explained as the result of his despair over the death of his entire family during a plague. The gods did nothing to save them, he complains, so why bother with faith?

Turns out Hyperion’s got a point, because the gods can actually intervene when the mood strikes them, and in fact do so several times throughout Immortals, whose multiple dues ex machinas add up to an apologia for fundamentalists and constitute a defense for all those who choose to interpret religious texts literally. An odd sort of suspense, or perhaps anti-suspense, is at work here: no matter how heroic or resourceful Theseus and his friends are made out to be none of it really matters because every time they’re in big trouble the gods just swoop down and take care of business, climaxing in a cage match with some butt-ugly titans that involves a lot of exploding heads and makes no sense whatsoever. So the protracted third act is especially dull, and it doesn’t help that Steven Dorff’s horny thief—the closest thing to an actual character in the movie—gets swallowed up at the top of it in a horde of baddies.

TIFF '11: Fueron con dios

The 1917 Mexican Constitution featured a number of severe restrictions against demonstrations of faith. The opening scene of The Last Cristeros, which consists of only voice-over and a black screen, gives us the rundown—one year imprisonment for ringing a church bell, for example—and efficiently provides all the context needed to comprehend or at least intuit all that follows, even if you’re unfamiliar with post-Revolutionary Mexican politics. The government’s war against the Cristeros—those who took up arms to defend their right to worship—officially ended in 1929, but the film takes us into the mid-1930s, following a small group of hold-outs as they make their way across gorgeous, arid and unforgiving northern terrains, where the occasional bullet comes seemingly out of nowhere, where nights are long and cold and food and water in short supply, and doubts blossom.

Directed by Matias Meyer and co-scripted with Israel Cárdenas, who co-directed the tender and memorable Cochochi, The Last Cristeros is a beautifully photographed and edited modern-Mexican take on the anti-western (if the term suits). Not unlike Meek’s Cutoff, it depicts an arduous journey through wilderness where danger looms quietly and everyday tasks are depicted with great accuracy and empathy. But the film also recalls Of Gods and Men, in that this is a story, peppered with many songs and prayers, about spiritual integrity and acts of bravery in a situation where such acts have arguably lost all practical purpose. Meyer’s Cristeros, their faces deeply lined under massive sombreros (some of the actors are actually descendants of Cristeros), clearly have no chance of making any difference in Mexico with regards to religious intolerance. And it’s equally clear that they will not survive. Which is why the last scene is so poignant—this isn’t The Wild Bunch; isn’t going to end in thrilling slaughter, so instead opts for a final moment of tranquility, the Cristeros in Christ-like loin cloths, in the face of looming death. The film is one of only two Mexican films at TIFF this year, and a major highlight of my Festival thus far.

Dreaming of deep history

A landslide hermetically sealed what would become known as the Chauvet Cave some 20,000 years ago, preserving its contents in a sort of natural time capsule. Among these contents are paintings which carbon dating tells us are roughly 32,000 years old—by far the oldest works of art in the world. The cave was discovered in 1994 when explorers found air shafts along its nearby cliffs. Because of the delicate atmospheric conditions needed to maintain the integrity of its contents, access to Chauvet has been restricted to a handful of scientists, with very few exceptions. It is our great fortune that one of those exceptions was made for Werner Herzog and his skeleton crew.

It is difficult to put into words why so much in Cave of Forgotten Dreams is so immensely moving. Obviously, that we’re seeing manmade images of such unfathomable vintage is itself deeply impressive, but the sophistication of the paintings goes far beyond crude representation: they elegantly envelop the undulations of the cave’s walls; they convey decidedly personal impressions of the beasts they depict, and sometimes imply movement through repetition; one image of a cave lion is drawn with a single, six-foot-long brush stroke. The genuine artfulness of these paintings prompted Herzog to make his film not merely a document of some extraordinary discovery, but to use it as a platform for speculating on the dreams of its Stone Age authors, whom he imagines as envisioning “the landscape as operatic event,” and whom he aligns with both the German Romanticists and cinema’s forefathers.

One of the most remarkable works Herzog encounters is a palimpsest, with one layer being painted some 5,000 years after the first. In a sense, Herzog’s film is another layer to this collaboration that stretches across millennia, evoking a poetry and sensuality unique to its form, and making the most relevant use of 3D technology I’ve ever seen. Organ and cello music heighten our sense of having entered an ancient cathedral. Spotlights from the crew’s headlamps move like fireflies across stone and stalagmites and the places where calcites have rendered the cave floor into a rink of glistening wax. In the most spellbinding passages, Herzog’s informative, characteristically eccentric running voice-over falls silent, leaving only Ernst Reijseger's haunting score on the soundtrack, and his light panels move across the paintings like a caress, echoing the torches held by those who came before. The result is a feeling of intense intimacy.

There’s more, of course, to Cave of Forgotten Dreams than just the cave itself. As with Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog is also very interested in the people who have gathered from many places and disciplines to work in and around Chauvet. Most memorably, he speaks with a scientist and former circus juggler who confesses that during his initial visits to Chauvet he had alarmingly vivid dreams of lions every night and needed time away from the cave to recover. It’s one of those things you might imagine the mischievous Herzog scripting for his subject, but the truth is that, after seeing this film, it’s actually hard to imagine spending time in Chauvet and not being haunted by primordial visions, by things lodged deep in the psyche, rarely awakened, and beyond language. Do see this movie.

Of Gods and Men: the limits of brotherly love

We know that Xavier Beauvois’ Cannes Grand Prize-winner Of Gods and Men was drawn from the 1996 incident in which seven Tibhirine Trappist monks were kidnapped and eventually beheaded during the Algerian Civil War, the exact circumstances of their slaughter a matter of controversy and contention to this day. So we might expect something draped in dread to unfold here, a drama whose hopeless fluctuations amount to nothing more than a death march. But inevitability is a force one strives to come to terms with when one’s life is devoted to worship and public service. That things are bound to end poorly becomes a matter of secondary importance once Beauvois and his collaborators usher us into this realm of carefully nurtured quietude, where disparate, overwhelming inner struggles are conducted and resolve terribly hard-won, where fraternal bonds are largely strengthened as much through disagreement and prolonged panic as they are through a sense of harmony and shared ideals. This is indeed a meditative movie (how could it be otherwise?), yet also at times a joyous one, one that reminds us of several important things: that running away only brings new things to run from; that need, vocation, and genuine communion transcends the confines of dogma; and that god (or God), whether regarded as a concept or a true presence, is only alive when his followers engage fully with the world in all its disorder.

Written by Beauvois and Etienne Comar, and photographed with a loving (and necessary) bias toward natural light by Caroline Champetier, Of Gods and Men pulls us in by immersing us in the monks’ daily activities, especially those of the abbot Christian (Lambert Wilson), an Islamic scholar who has the magnificent nerve to quote the Koran to Muslim terrorists threatening his life, and Luc (Michael Lonsdale), a trained physician who administers humble remedies (not to mention shoes) to the local, largely impoverished Algerian population. As the threat of uprising prompts government officials to plead with that monks to flee and the townsfolk to plead for their steadfastness, each of the monks are forced to make their cases for staying or going, the disagreements causing considerable tension that seems only to abate when the group joins in song, their roster of Gregorian chants emerging as one of the film’s most fortifying refrains, the other being Beauvois’ dogged use of lingering close-ups to glean some sense of the monks’ individual inner turmoil, which emerges as diverse and resonant. Luc, who is not the eldest among the monks but whose health is poor, seems to be the only one who knows from the start what his choice is. “I’m not scared of death,” he says. “I’m a free man.”

It’s serendipitous that Of Gods and Men should arrive in theatres while Claire Denis’ White Material still lingers in the memories of many moviegoers (at least in the US; here in Canada the film has yet to enjoy a well-deserved release). Both concern the legacy of French colonialism as it effects those attempting to make a life for themselves in those countries afflicted, but the contrast is fascinating. Denis’ mise en scène is narcotic in its way, but also secular, dark, fierce and brutal, where Beauvois’ approach centers on the serene and a universal, non-denominational sense of religious feeling, even when the grotesque looms just outside the monastery gates. It’s a gift to have both these visions circulating through our collective consciousness, helping us to reflect on the complexity of global ruptures, and those ghosts from the past that continue to haunt us.

Small Town Murder Songs: This town ain't big enough

Ed Gass-Donnelly’s feature debut deposits an okey-dokey sheriff with a murky past and capacity for mayhem in the rural Mennonite community of Conestoga Lake, Ontario, whose vast prairies render every passing pedestrian vulnerable to the wrath of God. Walter (Peter Stormare) is bear-like, middle-aged, his rage bottled and sealed by an exterior that could be mistaken for timidity if you didn’t know him, the spectacle frames so outdated they’d be hip in the city, that goofy uncle moustache. If Walter were more articulate, or overtly sinister, or nursing an urge for secret refinement and solitude punctuated by violent sex, Small Town Murder Songs’s particular thread of portentousness—squeezing each scene for tension and regularly injecting thundering music over the soundtrack, the film’s almost a mediation on portentousness—would seem heavily indebted to Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 or The Killer Inside Me, but Gass-Donnelly is chasing something at once more diminutive, or short story-like, and more mythical. You develop this cumulative awareness of there being less to all this than is intended, the emphasis clearly more on the director’s stylistic moxie than on probing the psychic depths of its troubled protagonist. And in an industry as starved for personal style as Canada’s, this emphasis will probably work in Gass-Donnelly’s favour.

Walter attempts to find religion all over again, primarily through the love of a good, nattering, matronly waitress (Martha Plimpton). His redemption is interrupted by the discovery of a young woman’s body. The investigation leads him back to his much sexier and trashier old flame (Jill Hennessey) and has him discreetly pointing an accusatory finger at the douche bag who constitutes her current beau. What’s most intriguing about all this is the notion that just because you’ve got a vendetta doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

With conspicuous references to basic instincts and intermediary passages riddled with copious slow-motion, wailing dirges that declare “You can’t hide what you are,” and mammoth titles chiseled into the sky by the Lord reading “REPENT AND PROFESS YOUR FAITH,” you can’t exactly call Small Town Murder Songs subtle, but it’s too enamoured with allusion, repeats its flashbacks too often to retain their needed enigma, and, in short, writes a lot of cheques it can’t cash. Those titular musical refrains, all of them elegantly composed and judiciously edited (Brendan Steacy’s the shooter, Gass-Donnelly his own cutter), are clearly the bedrock of Gass-Donnelly’s conceptual gambit, but they’re so consistently overwrought that only an apocalyptic shower of fireballs could give them their due send-off.

The gleam of pretentiousness cast over much of Small Town Murder Songs never extends however to the performances. Stormare, so rarely granted this sort of role, is tremendous, seemingly never caught without a precise notion of Walter’s shifting emotional levels, and as brooding with his bulky physicality as with his face. Plimpton completely fills out her role without ever resorting to too much gesture or false nuance. She has a remarkably convincing scene where she needs to pray while thinking of the dead girl’s panties. Hennessey’s perfectly cast and groomed here, but has little to do. If her character were given more attention we might have gleaned some sense of what she and Walter were really all about, and since, as the real object of his desire, she’s finally the key to our understanding of Walter’s dark side, her absence is felt that much greater. The undernourishment of Hennessey’s role points to the central question that lingers with anyone trying to reckon with Small Town Murder Songs. It’s very hard to know if this needed a lot more to make it truly resonate, or a lot less—even at a meager 75 minutes, there are scenes that feel superfluous. Boil it down to music videos and you might find its true raison d’être. Extend and seriously deepen it and you might find a satisfying slice of Canadian gothic.

Small Town Murder Songs opens in Toronto and Edmonton this weekend.

The Rite: Study hard, eat well, exorcize regularly

Diagnosed with a dearth of faith, aspiring priest Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue), who only joined the seminary to wriggle out of working at his old man’s funeral home anyway, gets sent to exorcist school at the Vatican, where he meets a kooky old Welshman (Anthony Hopkins) who teaches him the ropes. Their first client’s a pregnant teen who becomes a contortionist and barfs up bloody spikes whenever the Devil’s steering the bus. But what really rattles Michael’s sturdy skepticism is the way Satan seems to know his secrets, and speaks them out loud through the mouths of the possessed, in front of everybody, and in English, no less. Because The Rite is fundamentally about the acquisition of faith, as a weapon against diabolical forces attempting to control the flesh, as a way of focusing your mind and settling on a career. This is the story of a young fellow finding his vocation, and thus doubles as a recruitment video for the Catholic Church. Come, we’re told, and fetching Italian journalists will dig you, even if you can’t make out with them. More importantly, you’ll get to put demons in the sleeper-hold on a regular basis.

I certainly appreciate how The Rite, helmed by 1408 director Mikael Håfström, “inspired by” true events and “suggested by” a book by Matt Braglio, honours its own convictions enough to hold off on dopey spectacle and manifest its evil in relatively subtler forms—if Satan made everybody levitate and do the head-spin there wouldn’t be any reason to doubt his existence. Perhaps the central problem with the film is that its conflicts are so abstract and internal that the final showdown feels artificially protracted and actually pretty dull, with not especially riveting newcomer O’Donoghue driving the devil out of Hopkins, who in going from mentor to victim gets to transition from affecting an amusingly businesslike air to supplying a torrent of Hannibal Lecter-like taunts. At least he’s having fun.

There’s also something about the way The Rite appeals to the ostensible latent Catholic in all of us that feels annoyingly simplistic, that feeds into a childish desire for sweeping solutions to life’s most complex problems and absolutions from responsibility for our inner demons. Michael does indeed initially question church dogma and defer to psychology in his attempts to explain away freaky phenomena, but once he rises to the occasion and casts Satan out of a poor soul the implication is that he’s learned a glorious truth, one tantamount to a free lunch: by simply speaking some magic words, The Rite assures us, and doing so like you really mean it, we can each of us be cured of what agonizes us.

Parallel lives: Allen Shawn's Twin

Twin (Viking, $32.50) is the second memoir from Allen Shawn. His first, entitled Wish I Could Be There, was a personal investigation into phobias, of which Shawn admits to possessing several. Here, picking up from themes developed in the earlier book, Shawn explores the nature of his relationship to his autistic twin sister, Mary, who was removed from the family home at eight, and has since lived in various institutions designed to assist those with similar disabilities. Allen and Mary are now in their early 60s and visit regularly, yet it’s clear that the familiarity and comfort they enjoy in each other’s presence remains accompanied by profound, sometimes troubling mysteries of identity and perception seemingly inherent in their very coexistence. “It wasn’t until I reached middle age,” Shawn writes, “that I could even begin to acknowledge that being Mary’s twin was a central fact, perhaps the central fact, of my life.”

Shawn is the brother of actor and playwright Wallace Shawn and the son of long-time New Yorker editor William Shawn. He’s forged a career as a composer and teacher, though I’m far more familiar with his brother’s plays and memorable performances in Woody Allen movies or My Dinner With Andre. However, reading Twin, it becomes immediately apparent that however talented he may be in the discipline to which he’s devoted much of his life, Shawn is, like his brother, an immensely gifted writer. He displays a knack for transitioning between personal storytelling and essaying on science and history, weaving these elements into a seamless whole by way of an articulate yet arrestingly frank voice. It’s rare to encounter a book as emotionally involving from its first page as Twin—though it bears mentioning that that first page also features a joke about Mormon heaven that made me laugh out loud, and an amusing analogy between deep feelings of loss and the worry one might suffer over a vanishing pair of pants.

Allen Shawn

One chapter begins with a compelling defense of agnosticism, of acknowledging the value of religious feeling even if one isn’t inclined to value religion. This speaks to Shawn’s restless questioning and unsettledness, a fundamental aspect of his psychological makeup that no doubt feeds his continued desire to understand Mary’s inner life while never presuming that such understanding could ever be complete or even accurate. Shawn interrogates the moments in his life where he believes he may have come closest to experiencing something akin to Mary’s state of being, such as a fever-induced out-of-body experience he once endured as a child, or the feeling of being transported that comes with listening to or especially composing music. “Perhaps the closest I can come to understanding her inner life,” Shawn writes, “is when I am sick, or exhausted, or anxious, or exhilarated, or have taken a drug that changes what I hear and see and feel. Such moments at least suggest that there are different ways of perceiving and being.”

The Shawn family was unusually secretive, founded on a parental relationship at once brimming with kindness and even romance and defined in part by William Shawn’s romantic partnership with another woman, which continued concurrent to his marriage and lasted 40 years, ending only with his death. “We are a very bright, attractive and unusual family,” Shawn’s mother once told the medical staff of one of Mary’s homes. She rather hilariously compared her family to the Kennedys. Shawn doesn’t mock or take sides with either of his parents, but wonders how their complicated dynamic affected and was affected by Mary’s condition. He also comes to terms with their varied methods of accepting Mary’s separation, and his own lingering guilt. Shawn’s writing conveys such bravery and insight that it can only serve to remind us just how painfully long it can take to begin peeling back the veils enveloping our families and inherited legacies. He relates how in his final years his father once stated: “They made a big mistake making life so short.” Ain’t that the truth. But would it ever be long enough to settle such questions once and for all?

Season of the Witch: some had it coming

After experiencing an unexpected moment of moral clarity while thrusting his blade through the belly of some helpless woman during the smoky Battle of Smyrna, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and his grizzled old infidel-slaying buddy Felson (Ron Perlman) resolve to quit the Crusades and return to a plague-ridden Europe where everybody everywhere speaks English and have gone without shampoo for longer than anyone can remember. Picked up by some eagle-eyed church cops for desertion, Behmen and Felson decide to take an escort gig rather than face execution. Their destination is some remote mountain-top monastery, their cargo a wily teenager (Claire Foy) charged single-handedly causing the Black Death via witchcraft. Thing is, that accusation might just turn out to be entirely accurate, so you could say Season of the Witch starts out as a remake of The Seventh Seal, with Cage modelled after Von Sydow and Perlman after Björnstrand, turns into a Dungeons & Dragons module, pays homage to The Exorcist during its climactic supernatural showdown, while the whole thing could be interpreted as an apologia for the Inquisition, an implication exacerbated by the film’s entirely superfluous, essentially unrelated prelude concerning a conscientious priest who gets iced by an accused witch whose death by hanging he oversaw earlier that same day. But it might be grossly overestimating the ambitions of this project to presume any sort of polemic, even such an inanely misogynist one.

The reunion of Cage and Dominic Sena, who directed the actor in his remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, should have at least offered some super-stupid fun, but there’s an almost puzzling stiltedness to Season of the Witch. Cage seems largely disinterested, even in the bits where he gets to bark or convey spells of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sena meanwhile seems to be lacking decent coverage for virtually every scene, so many of which end with lingering close-ups of hammy reaction shots, that enduring convention of daytime soaps. Scripter Bragi F. Schut—not, from what I can tell, a pseudonym—resorts to medieval melodrama clichés and dialogue so comically leaden as to invoke Monty Python: “Damned fog. Like a veil before my eyes!”

But producers Alex Garter and Charles Roven should share some blame too, given that it looks like far too much of the film’s relatively limited budget was spent on umpteen needless crane shots and abysmally poor CGI, which winds up gauzed over everything from splintering bridges to apparently supernatural wolves to vast History Channel battle scenes. The zombie monks shamble about like puppets—could they not have just used puppets?

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.

Vision: this nun won't take nein for an answer

The titular 12th century Benedictine magistra and mystic of writer/director Margarethe von Trotta’s Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen was a preternatural renaissance woman of the highest order, writing plays, botanical and theological texts, composing music, and founding an independent, all-woman monastery on her way to canonization, feminist revisionism and cinematic stardom. While scandalizing her peers, she was deft in her dealings with both church and state. But she was human like anybody else and suffered from longings and envy, which allows Vision to see-saw engagingly between the steady accumulation of its protagonist’s accomplishments and her occasional surrender to overwhelming emotions.

There’s a superfluous and fairly silly prologue involving a millenarian sect gathering to mark the last night of the first millennium and its implicit apocalypse. But the sun insistently rises the next morning and the world’s stage is set for von Bingen’s entrance… about 98 years later. Von Trotta quickly dramatizes von Bingen’s childhood cloistering before darting ahead 30 years to the moment when she assumes the role that will facilitate her destiny as maverick and renown polymath. Around this point we catch a glimpse of von Bingen’s visions, replete with sudden zooms into our heroine’s supernaturally blue eyes and psychedelic cloud formations. It would seem advisable to regard such religious experiences as best left to the imagination, but von Trotta’s approach to this material generally feels ambivalent about whether to mime it’s subject’s austerity or follow Ken Russell’s example as to how to shoot nuns: on the one hand Vision is almost elliptical in its efficient rendering of biographical bullet points; on the other it employs expressionistic hand-held camerawork and contemporaneous but decidedly non-diegetic choral music that could furnish several Omen sequels.

“God loves beauty,” declares von Bingen in Vision, and the proof is manifested in von Bingen herself, embodied here by the positively ageless Barbara Sukowa in her fifth collaboration with von Trotta, the pair of them having forged their careers four decades back as important figures in the New German Cinema. Sukowa makes an agreeably radiant visionary, though her beauty doesn’t distract from the character’s chaste integrity. For secular viewers at least, Vision will feel most alive when von Bingen throws a bit of a tantrum upon discovering that her young protégée, also rather fetching, will be leaving her for another convent. There’s nothing beyond our own suspicions to imply anything erotic transpiring between the two during those long, lonely Dark Age nights, but perhaps there’s no harm in us having our own visions of transgression nonetheless.

That old-time religion, spectral, beautiful, spooky, everlasting: The Night of the Hunter

On the knuckles of one hand is the word LOVE, on the other, HATE, and let’s just say the former’s there mostly for show. Preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a charismatic psychopath, likes to employ these stark tattoos to recount an inane little religious parable about the war between our better and lesser selves, the whole thing wrapping up in a triumphant wrestling hold and a slack facial expression that presumes his listeners rapture. There’s a scene where a boy tells his sister a bedtime story, and another where an old woman narrates the discovery of the baby Moses for a gaggle of children. People sing each other songs and tell each other tales throughout The Night of the Hunter (1955), which is itself balanced on the frontier of rural noir and horrific fairy tale, though we might well just call it Southern Gothic. The only movie ever directed by the great actor Charles Laughton and one of only two ever written by the great critic James Agee, this resides in its own category, a peculiar, and tremendously beautiful work that has a nagging tendency to stick in the minds of all who see it. It’s available now on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

John (Billy Chaplin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) watch as the cops come for Ben (Peter Graves), their father, soon after sentenced to death for robbery and murder. Ben spends his last days sharing a cell with Harry Powell, and after Ben’s execution Harry’s left haunted by the question as to where Ben hid the stolen cash. Upon release, Harry finds, weds, and ultimately disposes of Ben’s all-too naïve widow Willa, played, with a little too much theatre, by Shelley Winters, in a role that very much anticipates her unlucky widow in Lolita (62). “My body’s just a-quivering with cleanliness,” she exclaims at one point. She longs for new baptism and in some macabre sense finds it at the bottom of the same river where Ben was said to have installed his treasure. The image of Willa below the water’s surface, seated behind the wheel of a Model T, her hair flowing behind her in chorus with the weeds, a spectral tableau of death photographed by Stanley Cortez.

That image is more haunting for the absence of underscoring, its near-silence finally broken only by Harry singing ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’ unaccompanied, the same song he’ll later sing in a wonderfully unlikely duet with Lillian Gish’s tough, shotgun-wielding foster mother and fierce child protectress while he encircles her house in the dead of night. The resistance to over-cook such moments with obviously portentous music or framing is emblematic of Night of the Hunter’s exquisite elegance. There’s a scene where Pearl makes paper dolls with some of the secreted bills and a handful of them are blown by a night breeze right past Harry’s feet without his noticing. Laughton knew when he’d cast his spell. You’ll say it’s a shame that Laughton never directed again, yet when someone does it so perfectly once perhaps that’s enough.

Mitchum, usually the essence of cool anyway, likewise never winks at us, largely keeping his focus singular and Satanic, only to suddenly transform into an animalistic fiend, almost cartoon-like, in two key moments. His Harry is a very American sort of false Messiah, a chastising, sexually repressed misogynist convinced he holds private conference with God, with whom he’s worked out his own personal moral order. This arrangement grants him complete license in pursuit of his goal, and so he follows those kids relentlessly as they make their way slowly down-river on a skiff, overlooked by turtle, owl, toad, fox, sheep and rabbits, storybook emissaries. Harry’s in no hurry. I’m not even sure he really wants the money. He’s convinced of his right to some strange and bloody destiny and follows it without pause for remorse, ambling along by horse or by car, taking what he needs, exterminating whatever blocks his path on his way to glory—and right into the highest niches of cinema history.

"Language is like a drawbridge": A conversation with Joshua Ferris

photo by Nina Subin

Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End chronicled the life and death of a Chicago advertising firm. Relayed in the first-person plural, it was sharp, witty and insightful about how work informs our lives. It was also a hit, and won Ferris the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel. Ferris’ follow-up, The Unnamed (Reagan Arthur/Black Bay Books, $15.99), is more harrowing and more moving. It concerns Tim Farnsworth, a successful lawyer stricken with a bizarre ailment that manifests in compulsive, uncontrollable walking. In the midst of whatever activity Tim can suddenly be carried far away by his own legs, trudging through sometimes punishing weather without appropriate clothing or supplies until he collapses into sleep whenever and wherever his body finally gives out. His condition gradually eats away at everything he cherishes, including his job and his marriage to Jane, whose genuine devotion to Tim is pushed to its limits. The Unnamed observes its characters’ trials with tremendous tenderness. Though fascinating, inventive, and at times extremely humorous, it’s uncompromising, even brutal in how it follows its central idea to what ultimately feels like its inevitable conclusion. I spoke with Ferris last week when he was in Toronto attending the International Festival of Authors.


JB: Your first novel took its title from a line in Don DeLillo’s Americana. There’s a certain boldness of language and engagement with vernacular in The Unnamed that occasionally recalls DeLillo as well. Does he remain an important touchstone for you?

Joshua Ferris: DeLillo’s a giant. He’ll forever be incorruptible for me. His books are woven into my reader’s DNA. How that translates into my own writing is very hard for me to say. I think it’s important to try to not sound like DeLillo. I’ll go out of my way to strike sentences that sound too much like DeLillo or Proust or Hemingway. If I can feel the hovering presence of someone I admire within a sentence, I scratch it out.

JB: Because it gives an undesirable sense of assurance, knowing that your writing conforms to a tested model?

JF: No. It just gives me a sense of anxiety. I’d rather write a bad sentence that seems to possess authorial intent from me than write a good sentence whose authorial intent can be ascribed to someone else. That may be pride talking, but I think it’s also something deeper than that, going back to an Emersonian self-reliance that states that to borrow from someone else is to abdicate your originality. There may in fact be nothing new under the sun, but it’s important to try my best to sound like me.

JB: What does it mean to name something? Your novel implies that the difference between having and not having a name is the difference between having a place in the world and being rejected by it.

JF: I think that’s accurate. It’s also about having a set of attributes that adhere to you. There’s a tic you find sometimes in writing. You have a character named John and you’re told something is “a very John-like thing to do.” It’s a shorthand for some writers to convey an entire personality, just using the character’s name as a modifier. When you take that name away, you’re looking nakedly at the object itself—maybe you’re unable to look at it. The specific referent in the title of The Unnamed is the unnamed disease. You can’t make anything of it. Doctors can’t rally around it. There can’t be a 5K run in benefit of it. So the result of this namelessness is a tremendous loneliness. Adam named the animals for a reason—he was lonely. By naming the animals he got closer to them. If he’d kept the animals nameless it would have been a much chillier garden. This goes back to what language can and can’t do, how it bridges certain gaps, how it breaks down. The limits of language are something I wanted to explore in the book, especially with respect to subjective experience, how you can or cannot convey to your most intimate loved ones how you’re actually feeling. To extend the metaphor, language is like a drawbridge. Sooner or later it goes up and you can’t get to the other side.

JB: Do you relate to Tim and Jane’s relationship, to how they attempt to express their feelings to each other?

JF: Yes. I think what they do in a more dramatic way what many married people do, which is come together at a moment in time, find themselves speaking the same language, and then for whatever reason fly apart. Far apart, and for a long time. Then they come back together for inexplicable reasons and do it all over again. My reading of the book is that it’s basically a love story.


JB: Has writing this novel strengthened or weakened your faith in the durability of love?

JF: That’s tough to say. I don’t think that a novel informs or comments upon its writer. The writer had those ideas somewhere in them prior to writing the book. Once written, the book might represent one-tenth of the writer’s understanding of love. There’s still that other 90% of the writer’s psyche that hasn’t been plumbed. The Unnamed is one take regarding one couple. It can’t really teach me anything. All I taught myself in writing it was how to write the book. The finished novel is not a textbook for the future writer.

JB: But are you surprised by what you’re saying about love as you write, what you seem to believe or hold dear?

JF: Yes, quite often. I’m probably being instructed as I write, getting some clarity as to how I see things. It’s like feeling something in the dark and then suddenly shining a light on it. Pretty or not, there it is.

JB: You were saying earlier that you have a poor memory. What makes you say that?

JF: Fiction seems to be made up of three predominant branches, those being memory, imagination and language. I can do language pretty well. I can do imagination well. But memory seems to be my weak branch. I’m sure there are writers who would want more branches or fewer branches or whatever, but that’s how I see it.

JB: The Unnamed lends itself to being read as an allegory, but I’m personally uncomfortable with that term because it seems to imply a one-to-one relationship between the ostensible metaphor and what it represents.

JF: I never in a million years would have written this with the intention of it being seen as allegory. The allegorical readings I’ve come across have surprised me. It’s obviously a metaphor for sickness because I invented the disease. I wanted to explore sickness without the baggage of a known disease. When I read Kafka, I don’t think of Josephine the Mouse as an allegory or metaphor for something else. I don’t read about K.’s travels in the castle as a metaphor for the terrible bureaucracy that overtook the 20th century and led to the systematic decimation of Jews in the Holocaust. I take it all very literally, and only later think about the allegorical possibilities surrounding the story. That eventually gives you a fuller and more interesting reading, but I think the primary work of the reader is to imagine the actual, literal situation described. That’s responsible reading. The rest is 10th grade term papers.

JB: There’s a current running through The Unnamed that concerns religious belief, and it seems that you’ve left the door open in the novel’s final passage, with Tim suspended in this almost metaphysical space of listening and anticipation.

JF: That was always my intention. Dogmatic fiction, fiction that closes doors on possibilities, isn’t exciting for me. To go back to DeLillo, one of the great triumphs of White Noise is that it is excoriating about technology. Technology is something to be dreaded in the book, and there’s a real nostalgia for pre-technological time. But the same sentences that cause me to arrive at those conclusions are the very same sentences that bring a tremendous Romanticism to technology. Throughout The Unnamed there are philosophical ideas presented concerning the existence of God or the difference between the mind and body. For me to have tried to close the book with clear, absolute conclusions to the explorations of those ideas would have taken the book out of the realm of fiction and into that of the essay. I don’t think that’s my job. I was always trying to tell the story, to rely on imagination, and where it landed was where it had to land.