What a Wonderful World This Would Be—Well, Maybe

A Review of Midnight in Paris by S. Linwick for J. Morton

Directed by Woody Allen

Written by Woody Allen

Starring Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, Tom Hiddleston, Rachel McAdams, Alison Pill, Corey Stoll, and Owen Wilson

Score: ☆☆

Midnight in Paris didn’t fail to elicit consistent, hysterical laughter from the balding sexagenarian sitting across the aisle and one row ahead of me in the Minneapolis movie theater. Accompanied by a matronly woman in an orange, linen shift dress, the mirthful man in question sported a linen, button-down shirt of the same hue, carefully pressed cargo shorts, and a pair of those fashionably sensible KEEN sandals. In other words, Midnight in Paris charmed Woody Allen’s target audience: the (probably) neurotic, white, heterosexual, liberal, (upper) middle class male.

That’s not to say that Midnight in Paris didn’t entertain me. In all fairness, it’s a pretty film. At times it’s even a pretty hilarious film. But its initially humorous characters eventually wind up seeming rather hollow. Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), for instance, ultimately come across as merely mediocre caricatures. Moreover, although the protagonist Gil (Owen Wilson) is certainly cute and comical, he isn’t particularly complex or compelling. So as the final credits started rolling, I found myself wondering, “Huh. That’s all there was to him? That’s all there was to Midnight in Paris? Um, okay.”

But I don’t mean to suggest that Midnight in Paris disappointed me. It didn’t; my expectations for it weren’t that high in the first place. Of course class, race, and gender are basically non-issues in this flick.  As I noted, Allen’s films generally cater to neurotic, white, heterosexual, liberal, (upper) middle class males. That’s why money, for example, never really presents a problem at any point in the picture—not even for time travelers like Gil. Everyone in Allen’s (transhistorical) Paris also appears to be of European descent. Indeed, in a piece on the treatment of race in legal culture, Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr. (Professor of Law at Duke University) denominates the dismissal of “‘identity politics’ as unimportant to understanding the law and doing justice” as the “Woody Allen Blues”—i.e., the “liberal establishment’s inability to deal with race and identity.” “The six-line chorus that gets repeated by the ‘Woody Allen Blues,’” Culp explains, “is that if we do not speak of race, then racism does not exist” (512-13).[1]

Who knows? Maybe Allen is just loath to imagine a world in which a guy like him who faces problems like his isn’t always the center of attention. That would shed light on why even lesbians only dote on men in this movie. Stein’s famous lover, Alice B. Toklas, does make a brief appearance, but shortly after Hemingway hails her, she fades into the shadows so Stein can tend to Pablo Picasso, Hemingway, and Gil. Likewise, Djuna Barnes evidently materializes for the sole pleasure of a quick caper with Gil. Gee, what a wonderful world this would be—well, maybe for Woody Allen or the man in the orange, linen shirt. 

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[1] Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr., “The Woody Allen Blues: ‘Identity Politics,’ Race, and the Law,” Florida Law Review 51 (1999): 511-28. 

Now That's Some Class

Erik Lensherr revenges  his mother's death in Argentina

A Review of X-Men: First Class by S. Linwick

Directed by Matthew Vaughn

Written by Ashley Miller, Zack Stenz, Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn, Sheldon Turner, Bryan Singer

Starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne, and Jennifer Lawrence

Score: ☆☆☆☆

Even the title of this film cleverly invites its audience to examine the construction of class. (Here I employ a sense of “class” synonymous with “category.”) Perhaps the most salient question it poses is, “How does society decide when and where a species—a kind of class—ends or begins?” Or more specifically, “Are Professor Xavier’s X-Men necessarily ex-men (i.e., ex-humans)?” So although “first class” conventionally denotes a specific socioeconomic station, in this particular flick, the term remains productively ambiguous; “first class” may refer to an originary group (the founding members of the X-Men), a superhuman—or a paradoxically inhuman—division of humankind, a superlative set of individuals, or all of the above. Indeed, throughout the film the characters themselves struggle to determine whether they actually belong to any class and—if they do belong to a class—how they ought to conceptualize the nature of that class.

Erik Lensherr—who eventually assumes the moniker “Magneto”—proves the most problematic character in the throes of this existential class crisis. At some moments, I find Erik profoundly compelling, but at other moments I find him utterly unconvincing. Michael Fassbender deserves most of the credit for Erik’s magnetic appeal. His exchanges with Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Raven Darkholme (Jennifer Lawrence) are more often than not quite moving. Erik’s rationale for parting with Charles, however, seems tenuous at best, which—given Erik’s obvious intelligence—strikes me as one of the script’s most serious flaws.[1]

But the questions that X-Men: First Class raises, not the answers it offers are what—aside from the awesome action sequences and special effects—truly distinguish it. Suffice it to say that when I described this film to a friend as “the best movie of the year,” I was only being slightly facetious. Who knows? It very well could be. Mutatis mutandis.

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[1] Because of his childhood experiences as a prisoner in a concentration camp during World War II, Erik knows the genocidal horrors that humans are capable of committing. In fact, a Nazi eugenicist—Dr. Klaus Schmidt—who is convinced that Erik possesses superhuman magnetic power attempts to tap that power by torturing Erik and his mother. After Erik fails to comply with Schmidt’s injunction to move a coin with his magnetic power, Schmidt has Erik’s mother escorted into the room. Schmidt then explains that he will count to three, and if Erik cannot move the coin within that space of time, he will shoot her. By the count of three, none of Erik’s efforts prove successful, and Schmidt keeps his promise. Enraged by his mother’s murder, Erik discovers that he can access his powers through his rage, and he promptly demolishes Schmidt’s quarters. 

But this delights Schmidt, who is no mere Nazi. In actuality, Schmidt is none other than Sebastian Shaw, a “mutant” with the ability to absorb, radiate, and generally manipulate energy. Shaw’s grand plan in X-Men: First Class is to trigger a nuclear war that will wipe out all but the strongest living organisms—in his view, to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff—and thereby to accelerate the evolutionary process. Somewhat surprisingly, just before Erik revenges himself on Shaw, he admits that he endorses Shaw’s program—he “agree[s] with everything [Shaw] said.” “But you killed my mother,” he adds as he forces the same coin that he could not move in time to prevent his mother’s murder through Shaw’s skull. Like Shaw, Erik wishes to rid the earth of non-mutants—in other words, those conventionally classified as “normal.” Yet if he truly agrees with Shaw, he would have to concede that his own mother was one of those basically normal and unspectacular humans who, at the end of the day, didn’t really matter. Shaw is motivated by his passion for eugenics. Erik, in contrast, is motivated by a desire to protect forms of life that society deems “abnormal.” I can’t help but think, then, that because Erik’s concerns are essentially ideological, he might do well to spend more time grinding an ideological axe with Professor Charles Xavier and less time playing with magnets.

"I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act." 
- Orson Welles

Note from a Concerned Reader

The Stars Are Half Empty; or, Why I Didn't Vote in the Black Swan Poll

"I curse the Satanic force that dreamed up the four-star scale (at the New York Daily News in 1929, I think). It forces a compromise. So why don't I simply drop the star ratings? As I have explained before, I'd about convinced my editors to drop them circa 1970, when Siskel started using them. To drop them now would be unilateral disarmament. Do editors even care about such things? You're damned right they do."

—Roger Ebert, "'You give out too many stars'"

When I read 2NK's "Introduction of Methods," I was hoping that I was witnessing a subversive takeover of the ubiquitous star scale. I've long had mixed feelings about the scale, so something that twisted it without doing away with it entirely has a significant appeal. Before I get into what I had hoped I was seeing in 2NK, let me briefly touch on the duality of the current system.

Roger Ebert does a very good job laying out the case against the star rating system in his column, so I will attempt to offer a very brief summary in saying that the system's ability to compare movies is fundamentally flawed. Comparing Airplane to Lawrence of Arabia is hard enough. Using the same system to compare both of those films and Gigli and Chaos and your cousin's amateur film project is simply absurd. While Gigli was bad, no one would suggest that it was either immoral or technically deficient, so it must rank above the other two. When the bottom of the barrel is considered, it's easy to see how a "typical" bad film like Gigli ends up with 2½ stars.

Having said all this, I frequently appreciate the star system because it makes the review quickly accessible and potentially stripped of all spoilers. If Francis Ford Coppola makes a film, I want an assessment of quality without a shred of plot, and I get this by looking at nothing but the stars.

So here's where 2NK has the opportunity to twist all this is an exciting way. By giving each star a specific meaning (as outlined in the Introduction), it's changed the stars from a scale-type ranking to a checklist. Beautiful cinematography? Shade in star number two! A character too complex for anyone save Hugh Laurie? Shade in number four! Zagat has been doing this for restaurants. USGBC has been doing this with "green" buildings. And both systems have proved to be useful if not perfect. On 2NK, that we're using stars isn't meaningful, but it does bring with it familiarity that makes it more instantly accepted by the mind and this makes me wonder if maybe this could be first step towards dismantling a broken 80-year-old system.

In conclusion, let me finally address Mr Aranofsky's latest work with the my 2NK rating, and when I've issued it "☆★☆★☆," let no one say that I've given it "two stars." 




-J. Lucas

On Beauty and Being Just

A review of Jane Eyre by C. Cleary

Directed by Cary Fukunaga

Written by Moira Buffini, adapted from the novel by Charlotte Brontë

Starring Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, and Jamie Bell

Score: ☆☆☆[1]

When I resolved to write a short review of the new Jane Eyre movie as a means of 1) placating our thousands of hungry, loyal readers and 2) staving off threats of superiority from a vicious competing cohort blog, I promised myself that I would avoid pettily commenting upon the fact that JANE EYRE DOES NOT LOOK LIKE THAT!! Instead, I'm going to do just that. Mostly because when I was Google Image searching "Jane Eyre 2011" to find an image for this post, this blog came up, and in it, the author concluded: "But the driving force of Jane Eyre is the remarkable portrayal of Jane by Mia Wasikowska, whose absorbing performance and beautiful presence magnify the film’s visual beauty."

 Um......yes. And this is the problem.


Is it an absorbing performance? Yes! Of Jane Eyre? Not really. A new Jane Eyre, maybe. I don't mean to enforce adherence to the original text or anything (yes, I do), but what happened to Jane's stubborn assertiveness? In the film, she loses most of it after age ten, partially because Jane's splendid narration is missing, leaving, in the film, eye contact and Jane's "beautiful presence" onscreen to bear the heavy brunt of communicating Jane's insoluble will (yes, insoluble--as in, not dissolved by Rochester's domineering presence). 

Jane's not directing anymore--instead, she's obeying orders and crying on cliffs as we stare at her face. But Jane did not lay herself over the rain-stained cliffs of the heath to cry never-ending torrents of tears like a mourning seal when Rochester would leave for a few days or intend to marry a dum-dum or whatever. She was like eff that, it is raining out here and I've still got to govern this silly French girl for four more hours today, and then draw strange drawings revealing my even stranger soul.

Am I arguing that visual beauty is overrated in film? Never, my friends. Never. But the camera's fetishization of the well-lit and well-proportioned/traditionally beautiful female face is not to be conflated with the beauty of the landscape (a la Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice), or, if you want to think about it this way, set in contrast to the sublimity of the gothic landscape, to begin to mean only its pleasing (pleasingly feminine) image [2]. Especially when you're adapting texts about female characters who are not chiefly beautiful. Jane Eyre's face is boring. It's a blank space! Don't even try to look at it!


Okayyyy, you're right, reader--I'm being unfair. I can't think of an actress with a face uninteresting enough to satisfy me as Jane (does such a thing even exist? has filmic representation ever not endowed the object with meaning?)

In sum, it's hard work to film this so novel-y of novels, and maybe shouldn't be attempted. After all, besides the fact that I don't want Jane Eyre to have a face, there's not supposed to be a lot to see (I'm going to refrain from making an analogy to Bertha's imprisonment/Rochester's blindness...ahem).  It's Jane's narration and novelistic presence, and not necessarily the events of the plot, that drive the novel. All you've got is nothing happening + very little happening while you wait for something significant to happen. Well, you know, until all that crazy shit starts happening. But there's no time for this in the film, so what were incredibly powerful plot moments lose their potency and become a series of not entirely satisfying cheap thrills (I use the term "cheap thrills" loosely...). See marginal utility. And so, as my roommate pointed out, an adaptation like this one has difficulty granting its scenes enough silence and space for viewer anticipation to develop. So what I'm advocating for here is Jane Eyre doing very little in a dark, dark house with a blurred-out face and voice over narration. Yes....

Hmm, wait a minute--this review sounds altogether negative, but in truth, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this movie, especially for the following reasons:

 

1. Gothic to the max

2. Rochester: yes.

3. cinematography: yes.

4. Mia's acting is a pleasure to watch. It's true.

5. Excellent job of illuminating the dynamics of Western culture--i.e. "oh, wait--Rochester was actually taking advantage of this girl who knew no other life, huh?" There's a nice scene in which Jane and Mrs. Fairfax are looking out the window of the house as Jane vents her frustration about this.

6. costumes

And there you have it [3].

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[1] Though three stars appear here, in truth, the star system is temporarily suspended until we figure out just how the hell to quantify our opinions of a film's merits.
[2] I apologize for using the word "fetishization."
[3] Bessie, you need to review this movie.

Of Gods and Men

A review by C. Cleary

Directed by Xavier Beauvois

Written by Xavier Beauvois and Etienne Comar

Starring Lambert Wilson, Michael Lonsdale, and Olivier Rabourdin

Score: ☆☆☆☆☆

All the stars*. At least. Go see it. Bring some wine, cheese, and a pretzel roll.


*Caveats: There should have been significant (named) female characters. There should have been significant (named) characters from the village.

PLEASE DON'T SING ALONG TO THIS SWAN'S SONG

An incomplete review of Black Swan


Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Written by Mark Heymanm, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin

Starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, and Vincent Cassel

Score: ☆☆X

Black Swan truly inspired both of us. Indeed, its banal characters, its perpetuation of certain profoundly disturbing stereotypes, and its predictable plot inspired us to begin this blog; we felt compelled to weigh in on the general hoo-ha over the film. Too few critics were calling attention to its self-indulgent misogyny—i.e., to its superficial, at times even snide, portrayal of its female characters, not to mention the evident pleasure it takes in the process of Nina’s demise.


But as we developed a scoring system with which to evaluate films, we became increasingly excited about reviewing other films and decided that we would rather not waste much breath in a diatribe against Black Swan.[1] Still, we do think the film deserves more consideration than we can bring ourselves to afford it. We’re therefore asking you, our esteemed readers, to share your two cents; please take a moment to vote in the poll to your right. How many stars would you give Black Swan?

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[1] In summary, we think Black Swan deserves two stars and one imploding star: one star for cinematography, half a star for “originality,” half a star for illuminating the social dynamics of Western culture, and one imploding star for sexism.

“What is it with this shit and being a man?”

A review of Blue Valentine by S. Linwick


Written by Derek Cianfrance, Cami Delavigne, and Joey Curtis

Starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling

Score: ☆☆☆☆☆

To read an explanation of our scoring methods, please follow the link below:

http://linwickclearyrevolution.blogspot.com/2011_01_01_archive.html

From my perspective, Blue Valentine’s most impressive feat is its searching examination of conventional gender roles. The film’s opening scenes left me filled with skepticism about its ability to stage a story I hadn’t seen one thousand plus times before: a bitter wife and mother grows increasingly distant from her doting husband and child until she decides that she must detach from them in order to “find herself.” Such stories inevitably portray wives and mothers in a negative light while depicting husbands and fathers as modern heroes. (Why do men always get to play the heroes?) To the extent that these stories seem to encourage men to embody the role of a caretaker, I do not object to them. Nevertheless, they simultaneously suggest that a child really only has one caretaker. I’d very much like to see a film in which two parents decide that they will share the duties of childcare equitably, and consequently, their relationships with each other and the rest of their family improve. While Blue Valentine does not tell such a story, it does evince a commitment to revising that same old story to which I object.

In a flashback halfway through Blue Valentine, Dean rehashes that hackneyed tale yet again as he reveals that his mother left him and his father to pursue a relationship with someone else. After Cindy’s mother, Glenda, asks him why he doesn’t know what his mother does for a living, he explains, “When I was, whatever, 10, my father and her just decided that it wasn’t gonna work out between them, and she met somebody, and I think…that was that.” At this moment in the flashback, Glenda finds herself at a loss for words. Perhaps her silence indicates that the thought of leaving her own terribly unhappy and abusive marriage never occurred to her. In another flashback earlier in the film, when her husband—Cindy’s father—throws a violent tantrum because he doesn’t like the meal that she has cooked, she can only cringe and reply, “I’m sorry. Do you want me to make you some eggs?” So Cindy’s mother, too, finds herself acting out a fairly clichéd part: the passive and abused wife.

Both Cindy and Dean are haunted by the specter of their parents’ marriages, and both are consumed with the struggle not to be like their parents from the very beginning of the film. Cindy, for instance, confides in her grandmother, “I don’t ever want to be like my parents. I know that they must have loved each other at one time, right? Did they just get it all out of the way before they had me?” Especially given her parents’ own quarrels over the table, Cindy’s agitation when Dean criticizes the instant-oatmeal breakfast she makes for their daughter, Frankie, is more than understandable; she does not want to passively or apologetically endure Dean’s disparagement and thereby replay the role she watched her mother play.

And Dean’s overwhelming fear that Cindy will disappear from his life like his mother disappeared from his and his father’s life is evident from his first exchanges with Cindy in the film. As Cindy pulls out of the driveway to take Frankie to school and then go to work, he yells after her, “Hey, Cin, put your seatbelt on! Hey Cin, put your seatbelt on!” A few moments later he angrily throws his cigarette at a speeding car, shouting, “Hey, fuck you! Why don’t you slow down, you fucking jackass? Motherfucker! You’re gonna kill somebody, asshole.” Towards the end of the film, Dean jealously charges the doctor for whom Cindy works as a nurse, “You’re fucking Dr. Feinberg?! You’ve been emailing my wife?!” Dean finds anything or anyone with the potential to challenge his marriage profoundly threatening; he does not want to wind up alone, like his father.

But Cindy and Dean’s marriage consistently proves unsustainable as the two discover how difficult it is not to become their parents. For most of the film, however, such a fate seems inevitable for at least one of them. If Cindy stays with Dean, she will ultimately resign herself to a life not unlike her mother’s; her marriage with Dean grows increasingly more hostile and violent. If Dean lets Cindy go, however, he will be left not unlike his father. The critical question, then, is how the two can avoid repeating at least one set of their parents’ mistakes.

Blue Valentine, I think, does provide a hypothetical answer, if not a definitive answer, to this question. It does so by deconstructing the category of “man,” a category that seems to loom large over the psyches of the film’s main characters. In one flashback Dean tells his colleague Marshall, “You’re a man amongst men. No homo!” This remark would justifiably raise the hackles of anyone! Dean’s subsequent interchange, or rather, shouting match with Cindy in Dr. Feinberg’s office, however, undercuts it. Exasperated with Dean for showing up drunk at her workplace and attempting to lure her away from it, Cindy forcefully vents her frustration by pushing Dean. What might be considered a (heated) philosophical dialogue ensues.

CINDY  Fuck you! Fuck you! I’m more man than you are, you fucking

cunt!

DEAN  Don’t say that shit about being a man.

CINDY  I am. I am. I can handle it.

DEAN  What is it with this shit and being a man? What is that? What

does it even mean?!

CINDY  Yeah, what is that?

DEAN  What does it mean?

CINDY  You’re scaring us. You’re scaring us.

DEAN  Don’t say that stuff. “Be a man!” What is that shit?

CINDY  Don’t bully people.

DEAN  I’ll be a man. You want me to be a man? Here, is this what

men do?

[DEAN violently shoves papers off of counters and proceeds to

trash the nurses’ office]

CINDY  Oh, just stop it.

DEAN I’m a big man. Look at me. I’m a big man. I’m being a big

man.

CINDY No, I’m the man!

Here Cindy’s synecdoche—i.e., her substitution of “cunt” for “woman”—effectively devaluates the category of “woman” in contrast to the category of “man.” (This moment raises an important question: why is the slang for “vagina” one of the most derogatory and offensive words in the English lexicon?) Why does Cindy assume that a man can “handle it,” but a “cunt”—a woman—cannot? In other words, why does her ability to “handle it” necessarily mean that she is “the man”?

Dean appears to regard “the man” as a more dubious figure. Indeed, after asking Cindy what being a man entails for her, he enacts a performance of what “men do,” aggressively devastating the space around him and punching Dr. Feinberg, who has been making untoward advances on Cindy. Both Dean and Cindy, then, seem to be confused about what exactly a man is and what significance such a figure should play in their lives. Is the man always the more capable figure? Do his supposedly superior capabilities stem from his will to establish his authority, his dominion? Should a man play “the man”?

Although the concluding scenes of the drama are particularly dismal, they also contain kernels of hope. Finally, Cindy articulates what she seems to have been seeking for the duration of the film. “You’ve got to give me some space,” she enjoins Dean. Fortunately, Dean hears and heeds her request. Walking away from Cindy and her parents’ house (where Cindy and Dean’s last exchange in the film unfolds), Dean turns around when Frankie comes running after him. “Go back to your mom, please,” he asks her and then challenges her to race back to Cindy before turning around and walking off into fireworks crackling in the distance. Unlike any of the other men in the film, Dean does not play “the man.” Instead, he acknowledges and affords Cindy the space she desires, thereby relinquishing the almost tyrannical control he has heretofore exercised over her. No longer must she resign herself to playing her mother by submitting to Dean’s whims or to playing his mother by leaving him; perhaps now both characters can begin to practice roles they find more satisfying

Blue Valentine: More Scenes from Another Marriage

A review of Blue Valentine by C. Cleary

Directed by Derek Cianfrance

Written by Derek Cianfrance, Cami Delavigne, and Joey Curtis

Starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling

Score:  ★★★★

This doesn't make much sense, but if I had to sum up my thoughts about Blue Valentine, I'd say it's a movie I won't remember about a character I will. I've been impressed with Ryan Gosling since Half Nelson--Michelle Williams, not so much (isn't this the same character she played in Mammoth...? and sort of the character she played in Dawson's Creek, even?).  It's hard for me to think, off the top of my head, of many characters more psychologically complex than Blue Valentine's Dean.  What's more appealing than an intuitive, ditzy, ignorant, stubborn, eloquent, tender, suffocating asshole? I'm not going to say that Gosling's acting carried the weight of the film, because Cianfrance wrote his character well (particularly regarding everything Linwick has already said about indifference towards/refusal of "man"), and in fact the whole movie is well written and nicely shot. But whether we attribute it to Gosling, Cianfrance, or a combination of the two, Dean kept me interested.

And it is pretty hard to make a movie about the turmoil of marriage interesting to me. Know why? Because once, over the span of a few fateful, thundering summer days last year, I watched Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, and even, I think, some episodes of his TV series of the same name, and I therefore know too much already. I don't care to know anything more! Movies about marriage remind me of flipping through one of those stick-figure animation flipbooks, you know? Look, they're sleeping...oh, they woke up....they're jumping up and down...they're flailing their arms up and down....aaaand they're sleeping again....aaaaand they're flailing their arms again. Perhaps these married people should build lives for themselves apart from their apparently doomed/imprisoning relationship with their spouse, eh?

Anyway, on to Cindy: at least for me, being invested in Cindy would have required not only a more psychologically nuanced character, but also more scenes of Cindy working, hanging out with her kid, and speaking/philosophizing with her co-workers in the same way that we see these things with Dean. That, unfortunately, doesn't happen.


1. Do we ever see Cindy and Frankie (Cindy's daughter) hanging out without Dean?
2. Well, but maybe Cindy doesn't have funny things to say to her daughter? Perhaps Cindy doesn't philosophize, either? Of course she doesn't. She's the mother: she's practical, and also, importantly, humorless.


The amount of time spent humanizing Dean as he interacts with his daughter, clients, and co-workers is probably roughly equivalent to the time the camera spends focusing in on parts of Michelle Williams' body.

The movie cuts back and forth between the past and the present, and there is a little more time and thought put into portraying past-Cindy, but I'm afraid this is to build up a nostalgic longing for her in the audience to aid our identification with Dean.

One final note: Bored as I sort of am by the "inevitably doomed marriage" theme, interesting for Cianfrance to turn a divorce into a happy ending. Like, the kind in which the closing credits are shown amid stylized fireworks and colorful billboards of Dean and Cindy in love. Interesting to make a film that serves as a sentimental testament to a failed marriage.

"...and with these very hands": male redemption in The Virgin Spring

 We have thirteen "followers"; we have no reviews. No, you're not surprised, and neither are we. Nevertheless, someone's gotta start reviewing something, I say, and since I'm still not able, on this third snow day, to make my way anywhere near a theatre to see Blue Valentine (our first scheduled film to review), I'm just gonna go ahead and review the Bergman film I watched last night.


(If you haven't seen it, and you don't like surprises, here's a synopsis.)

A review of The Virgin Spring by C. Cleary
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Written by Ulla Isaksson 
Starring Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, and Gunnel Lindblom

Score:  ★★★

I'm not entirely sure to which genre TVS belong--a tragedy of minimalism verging on horror? It's consistently extraordinarily "intense," as my roommate puts it, without coming close to melodrama (my most hated genre/convention): one storyline, a handful of stoic characters plus one dumb virgin and her wild, evil-looking foster sister (sigh, more on this later), no dramatic music. Violence is sudden, inexplicable, and harrowing; redemption--for the virgin's father, let me emphasize--the same.



According to ol' Aristotle, tragedy is characterized by a reversal of fortune (preferably from good to bad) and the working through this that brings us catharsis.  In TVS, the focus shifts halfway through the film from Karin's (the virgin's) relationship with her mother, to her father's relationship with himself and God. He is the avenger; he is the one upon whom redemption and grace are bestowed. He is the one who offers up his hands in service (promising to build a church "with these very hands," the same hands he has used to murder his daughter's rapists/murderers). He is the one who talks to God. Well, I'm not convinced that I should care. Not enough time has been spent developing the father's character for catharsis to take effect as a result of his ultimate peace. Like the virgin's mother (I am left to assume), I find myself unhealed. Because receiving redemption second-hand through the prayers and promises of your husband hardly counts. And I have no reason to suspect that the film intends to leave us unsatisfied.I'm still giving it half of a 2NK star, though, for its horror-laced appropriation of tragic convention into a serious contemplation of theology's "problem of evil."



And now for some elaboration on what we mean by the star we've called "Illumination or Subversion of the social dynamics of Western culture," since several people claim they "have no idea what you guys are talking about." Well, when we started talking about starting this blog, it was because we wanted a space to review films like Black Swan: popular, well-received films that, despite their merits, alienate certain viewers and perpetuate outmoded and oppressive race, class, and gender-based ideologies. In her essay on Ibsen, Adrienne Rich explains writing (which can be expanded to include all forms of art, though perhaps most especially writing) as "re-naming" and as "re-vision":

"Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see-and therefore live-afresh" (read the full essay here).

Little appeals to me more than this "re-naming" potential of art (and of blog writing). Actually, we should probably rename this star the Renaming Star... but in any case, we believe the extent to which a film lends itself to "renaming" or to envisioning alternative--and particularly less oppressive--realities by revealing and calling into question the status quo constitutes at least one-fifth of its merit and power. Yeah, it's quantifiable--by stars.

In the case of TVS, we must consider the pretty graphically disturbing rape scene, a rape scene I find unjustified. It doesn't seem much of a stretch to consider this a virgin sacrifice for the sake of intellectual and philosophic pondering on the nature of violence, evil, and grace. Had the virgin suddenly popped up from the forest floor, alive again, her parents' moral directive probably would have been "Be careful," or "Watch out," or "Don't ride alone into the forest in beautiful, potentially seductive clothes." But the truth is that this kind of violence isn't inexplicable or inevitable--it's indicative of a wider culture of male domination and violence perpetrated against women that this movie ultimately does not ask us to question, though it both calls into question and glorifies avenging violence with violence.

On to character: the naive, doomed virgin; the jealous foster child who serves as her foil; the pious, doting mother; the honorable, avenging father; the creepy, evil, forest-lurking rapists--obviously these generic conventions from the original ballad aren't exactly psychologically compelling characters. The mother, however, is sort of a psychologically compelling generic convention, only in that even when she's hysterical she's somehow stoic and able to act incisively. Really, as far as generic conventions go, I suppose they're all pretty compelling, due in large part to some great acting and close-ups of the evil foster child's snarling face (I really like her snarling face).

One further note: when considering this fourth star, I'm planning on taking into account the Bechdel test, created by Alison Bechdel. A film passes the Bechdel test if 1) It has two women in it, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than a man.

There are three main female characters in TVS--the 15-year-old Karin, her mother, and her black-haired devil of a foster sister--but though they talk to each other, they don't do so substantively (topics include clothes, men in bushes, and men not in bushes), and things only happen to them, with the exception of the mother closing the shed door to lock Karin's rapists/murderers in for her husband to then kill.

In closing, in considering TVS' artistic merit/"originality," I'm reminded again of that essay of Rich's: at some point she claims that "we need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us." I'm not convinced that the rewriting or the retelling of this ballad was anything more than a passing on of some very problematic traditions. 

I give Bergman credit, though (he's so happy to have it), for his snow falling softly and other scenes of cinematographic beauty, for use of silence, for some interesting dialogue, and perhaps for his brutally honest and stunningly graphic filmic representation of a subject rarely breached even in writing (though like I said, ultimately I find it unjustified).

AND THERE YOU HAVE IT, ONE HALF OF THE DEFINITIVE REVIEW OF THE VIRGIN SPRING!

Boom.

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