A Few Good Films (and a Dog)

Belfast is a charming film about childhood, the perspectives of childhood, the importance of family ties, and the mindlessness of sectarian conflict. The director Kenneth Branagh refers to the story as semi-autobiographical, and he wrote the screenplay, so he ought to know. And the film's star, Jude Hill, is a very cute kid who has somehow succeeded in portraying a very cute kid named Buddy, who listens to his grandpa's cracker barrel wisdom in the alley and engages in mock sword fights with his friends in the street.

Branagh has peppered the narrative with mainstream cultural references that those of us who lived through those times will recognize, including quite a few Van Morrison songs and afternoon matinee films on the tellie like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and High Noon, both of which deal with questions that Belfast also addresses, of violence and order, staying and going.

He also shot most of the film in a very sharp black and white that both he and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukous were convinced would heighten emotions and convey the vivid impressions of a young boy.

There are plenty of warm, humorous scenes in the film, and many of them take place on a single street, but beneath it all is an ever-present undercurrent of fear felt especially by the parents. Some of the local Protestants have formed gangs, and it one ten-minute scene early on, a mob goes on a rampage, breaking windows and hurling large stones in an effort to convince the few remaining Catholics in the neighborhood to leave.

Buddy's family is Protestant, but his parents want nothing to do with the strife. Buddy's got a crush on a Catholic girl in his class, and that's all right. His dad is being pressured to join one of the gangs, or contribute to it. No thanks. The local extortionist has always been a loser, a thug.  

Branagh wisely steers clear of grand political judgments and formulas; religious strife has been part of the history of Ireland for centuries and no one has figured it out yet. But he hasn't ignored the situation, either. It's part of the fabric of Belfast, and an integral part of the story of the street that Branagh, for much of his early life,  called home. 

Director Jane Campion has made two pretty good films (Angel at My Table and Bright Star) and two pretty bad ones—The Piano and her current feature, The Power of the Dog, which has quite a few problems, including bad acting, bad directing, and a bad script. This "western" shares with The Piano a very odd tone; we have no word for it in English, but it's the opposite of verisimilitude. Staginess, perhaps? The characters are one-dimensional, the dialog is stilted, and the delivery is often halting and hesitant, in the manner of a high school play where no one has properly memorized their lines and everyone is waiting for a whispered cue from behind the curtain. It just doesn't seem that any of this is really happening. I find it hard to believe that after riding herd together for a quarter of a century, a trail boss would refer to his brother repeatedly as Fatso. And a character named Bronco Henry sounds like something out of Monty Python.

The main character, Phil, is clearly upset about something, and it seems he's been that way since he teethed. Benjamin Cumberbatch has been praised for his portrayal, but anyone who's seen him in other places will know that he's merely Cumberbatching, with his intense and supercilious glassy-eyed stare and distain for his fellow man. It worked faily well for Sherlock and Alan Turing, less well for Hamlet (Branagh's version is infinitely better) and it works not at all in the Wild West. A more skilled actor (Gene Hackman? Robert deNiro? John Wayne?) would have wrapped that ferocious anxiety within a broader character that knew how to bond with his cowhands, his brother, his environment. As the minutes tick by, the question remains unanswered: Why should we care? Campion is engaged here in a sort of allegorical psycho-western, in which the atmosphere is thin and stereotypes abound.

As Hilary and I watched on the sofa in the den, I was reminded of my youth. Why? Because in those days my friends and I would often go to the Saturday matinee at the Avalon Theater in White Bear Lake to see The Guns of Navarone, Sink the Bismark, Thirteen Ghosts, or Call Me Bwana. And we would leave the darkened theater three or four times during the show to buy more popcorn, Milk Duds, or Junior Mints at the concession counter in the lobby. When we got back to our seats, we'd whisper to our friends, "What happened?" It didn't matter much.

The Power of the Dog is the kind of movie that you could leave for ten or fifteen minutes—time enough to even MAKE some popcorn—confident that you'd miss nothing of vital interest. In fact, it's the kind of film you want to leave for fifteen minutes, because it's often painfully obvious where things are headed—the piano recital scene, for example.

Of course, the psycho-western has a long, if not vaunted, history. The great Arthur Penn's directorial debut, The Left-Handed Gun (1958), with a very young Paul Newman in the title role, falls into that category, but a more full-bodied example, Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), comes even earlier, with Sterling Hayden (usually smoking a big cigar) and saloon madam Joan Crawford exchanging Freudian quips that no one in real life would actually utter. It's described in Wikipedia, with uncharacteristic boldness, as a "gender drama with obsessive personalities flirting with dementia."

Perhaps the most successful of such psycho-westerns is Red River (1948), in which John Wayne and a very young Montgomery Clift engage in an oedipal struggle while on the first longhorn cattle drive from Texas to the new rail-line in Abeline. It's important to note here that, unlike The Power of the Dog, in Red River the story is actually robust and fairly convincing.

If you want good story-telling, rich in moral complexity, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi is your man. Though hardly a household name, he stands in illustrious company among only a handful of directors (Fellini, Bergman, Kurasawa) who have taken home the Best Foreign Film Oscar more than once. Perhaps his recent outing, A Hero, lacks the explosive energy of A Separation or The Salesman, but it shares their focus on decent people who try to extricate themselves from a jam but often succeed only in compounding their difficulties. The milieu—middle-class Iranian family life—is fascinating in itself, and the narrative development is both fascinating and excruciating, in so far as evasions and little white lies come back to haunt our "hero" as he tries to explain how he came upon a purse containing seventeen gold coins, and why he decided to return it to its owner. Reviewing a previous film, Roger Ebert once remarked, "The intriguing thing about [Farhadi's] screenplay is that it gets us deeply involved, yet never tells us who he thinks is right or wrong." In A Hero, Farhadi provides ample proof of the throw-away line that lies at the core of Jean Renoir's great film, The Rules of the Game: "Everyone has their reasons."

The documentary Summer of Soul focuses on a series of free weekend concerts held in Harlem during the summer of 1969, a few months before Woodstock took place. It consists of musical performances, of course—The Fifth Dimension, Sly and the Family Stone, Herbie Mann, Mavis Staples, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder—but it also contains recent interviews with some of the headliners and some of the kids (now adults) who attended the event. First-time director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson also weaves footage of the moon landing, the assassination of Malcolm X, and other contemporaneous events, and the result is both a joyous good time and a think piece about how our society has evolved--or not..