Winter Getaway - La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty)

If you’ve been holed up for a few weeks with a cold, like I have, perhaps there can be no more effective break-out than a trip down to St. Anthony Main to see La Grande Belleza, Italy’s entry into the Oscar race for best foreign film. The film takes place almost entirely in sunny Rome, with its quiet streets lined with low-rise buildings bordered by orange trees and steeped in ochre and umber, it’s tidy evergreen gardens, and its lavish parties attended by the city’s “beautiful people.” No, this is not Pasolini’s Rome, nor Rossellini’s, nor even Fellini’s, though director Sorrentino has often been compared to that master.

Anyone looking for antecedents might consider that the world of La Grand Belleza resembles Antonioni’s world, with this difference: Antonioni’s characters are full of existential angst in the face of life’s evident tedium and meaninglessness. Sorrentino’s characters, though equally attractive, wealthy, and spiritually adrift, simply want to party on.

The film follows a few a days in the life of Jep Gambardella, who, as the film begins, stands at the heart of the social scene. Well, it’s his 65th birthday, and the first fifteen minutes of the film are devoted to a party held in his honor on his terrace overlooking the Coliseum. It’s a wild, colorful, Euro-disco, bump-and-grind affair, jarring in its effect, and viewers may begin to wonder where all the ruminative scenery they saw in the trailers has been stashed.

Things quiet down soon enough (though they erupt again intermittently) as Jep wanders the streets of the city the next morning, running into friends seemingly at every turn. He attends a avant garde dramatic performance staged on the ruin of an antique monument set in a grassy field outside the city (I think I saw Roman Polanski in the audience), and later he interviews the actress, who seems also to be a fortune teller. This is the only time during the film that we see Jep do anything productive.

Yes, Jep, is a writer. As a youth he wrote a popular novel—an Italian Catcher in the Rye, perhaps—but has written nothing substantive since then. People ask him from time to time, “Why don’t you write another novel?” but he brushes such queries aside. “I’m having too much fun doing nothing,” he seems to say. Or perhaps it's just: "I really have nothing more to say."

But Jep (Toni Servillo) doesn’t seem to be having that much fun. He carries an expression on his face somewhere between flickering amusement and incipient gloom. 

Two events tip the scales more serious downward.

One evening after a party, Jep brings a lovely woman from Milan home with him, and after they’ve made love, she offers to show him some photos of herself she’s posted on Facebook. “Sure, I’d love to see them,” Jep says, feigning enthusiasm. He stands out on a balcony surveying the city while she runs off to find her laptop, and makes a vow of sorts: “I will no longer agree to do things that I don’t want to do.” By the time his companion returns, he’s gone.

Jep’s world is more seriously rocked when an old friend whom he hasn’t seen in decades arrives to tell Jep that his wife has recently died. Elisa had broken off with Jep before marrying the friend, and now, decades later, the man has discovered by reading her diary that she never really stopped loving Jep. Jep’s reaction, as usual, is muted; naturally he’s more concerned about his friend’s grief than his own might-have-been. But from time to time we see dream-like flashbacks of a very young Jep, swimming off a craggy shoreline somewhere in the Mediterranean (ala Antonioni’s L’Vventura). Elisa is sitting on shore along with three other ravishing but somehow innocent-looking teenage female friends.

But it would be a mistake to suggest there is any kind of narrative thread to be found in La Grande Bellezza. For the most part the movie simply flows. Jep and a small circle of friends often sit on his terrace at night talking about nothing, and in time we get to know a few of them slightly. One, a hapless dramatist who’s never cracked the big time, finally decides to return in defeat to his home town.

“In all of Rome, you’re the only person I feel like saying goodbye to, Jep,” the man says, underscoring an important point. The success of La Grande Bellezza rides on the fact that Jep, though just as dissipated as anyone else in his crowd, in also vaguely humane and certainly well-liked.

A saintly nun with no teeth, an eleven-year-old avant garde painter, a cardinal who’s good at exorcism though what he really likes to do is cook, a forty-year-old stripper with a mysterious malady, a magician and his giraffe, a Marxist busybody, a lame man who has the keys to all the old villas and monuments in Rome. The cast sounds Fellini-esque but the tone is entirely different. The cinematography is lush, the editing slightly jumbled. Along with the parties and the Euro-disco, we have haunting scenes backed by Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, Górecki, and the Kronos Quartet.

Come wander with Jep through the streets of the holy, imperial, eternal city.  

   

Finnmark - Beyond Sleep – W. F. Hermans

When I purchased a copy of the novel Beyond Sleep by Willem Frederik Hermans I had no idea what the book was about. I was just killing time, combing the bargain bin in a little bookstore in Wadena, Minnesota, while some friends checked out the Ben Franklin across the street. I suppose the odd Dutch spelling—Willem Frederik—caught my eye. The blurbs on the dust jacket by Nooteboom and Coetzee didn’t hurt.

The bio on the inside flap began: “Hermans is considered one of the most important Western European authors….” I could easily finish the sentence myself. “…one of the most important Western European authors that no one has heard of!”

I brought the book up to the sales counter and waited patiently while the clerk answered the questions of a man in a plaid shirt, down vest, and unlaced Sorels who was looking for some thriller by an author named Lee Child. “He has twelve books in the database … we carry only one … we don’t have it right now.”

Many buttons were pushed during this search, and it took quite a while.

Finally my turn arrived and I handed my find across the counter. “I got it on the $2 shelf,” I said. 

He took one look and said, “This isn’t a $2 book.”

Frowning, I replied, “Well, that's where I found it. 'Buy three and get the fourth one free.'” I pointed  toward the corner shelf near the entrance to the restaurant behind the shop.

“It was mis-shelved,” the man said in a tone of mild indifference. (Yet as he held it aloft I noticed the book did have a tell-tale remainder slash across the bottom of it.)

“I really don’t care," I said. "Let’s forget it.”

There was a long pause. “OK. I’ll give it to you for two dollars.”

“It doesn't matter. Really, I never heard of the guy.”

“No. I’ll ring it up at $2.” Once skeptical, now he was determined.

“Thanks, I appreciate it. I can assure you no one else is going to buy it.”

I probably shouldn’t have said that. Just because I’ve never heard of W.F. Hermans doesn’t mean that no one in Wadena will have heard of him.

*

I imagined Beyond Sleep to be a dark, introspective, psychologically knotty work on the order of Hermann Broch or Thomas Bernhard. Only later did I notice that the image on the cover, though clothed mostly in shadow, shows a naked foot silhouetted by light penetrating the wall of an old-fashioned canvas tent. The blurb under the dark silhouette, by Roddy Doyle, says: “The language is dry; the socks are wet; the compass is lost. A masterpiece.”

True to such hints, Beyond Sleep is mostly a book about camping. The narrator, one Alfred Issendorf, is a Dutch grad student eager to make a real impact in the world of science—unlike his father, a botanist who fell into a crevasse and died before he was able to distinguish himself in any way. Alfred was seven at the time, and he’s been haunted ever since by the notion that a spectacular discovery will somehow reunite him with his father and also dissipate the  cloud of depression under which he often labors.

On the suggestion of his advisor, Alfred heads to Norway to join a small team of trekkers heading north to the largely barren hills of Finnmark, where the mosquitoes are thick and the sun never sets from mid-May to late July. Before meeting up with the group, he plans to obtain some aerial photographs of the region in Oslo from a professor-colleague of his advisor. Here he meets the first of many obstacles that will try his patience and test his fragile sense of self-worth throughout his expedition.

Alfred’s self-appointed task is to locate craters in Finnmark that were created by meteorites rather than glacial ice, but without the photos his quest becomes a more or less random investigation. His three companions are all Norwegian (Alfred doesn’t speak the language) and they all know the country they’re traversing well. Though they’re courteous, Alfred has trouble keeping up, lacks the proper boots for crossing streams, and is often left with nothing to do as his colleagues make and break camp, catch fish, gather fuel for fires, and all the rest. Though he bungles his knee badly during a river crossing, Alfred soldiers on, determined not to become a laughing stock. I WILL NOT BE LAUGHED AT, he says to himself at one point. They must speak highly when my back is turned.

The foursome engage in some interesting conversations about the origins of the universe, both scientific and theological, as they sit around smoking cigarettes after a long day of hiking. They also take up the issue of how difficult it is in modern times for anyone to distinguish himself—to do something that will be remembered. 

There are some good descriptions of the unusual countryside, and Alfred spends quite of bit of time describing the relentless attacks of flying insects both inside and outside the tent. A herd of reindeer pass. Heavy rains descend.

For much of the book, however, the overriding tone is one of hardship, desperation, and a sense of unworthiness. Yet the prose has a degree of lightness and abandon to it, too. Here’s a typical passage.

  

Reaching the other side of the stream I have a sense of sinking deeper into the moss with each step I take. The moss gives way to black mud. I am entrenched among polar willows that come to my waist. Arne’s already climbing up the other side. How did he get there? My shoes fill up with water. I have to raise my legs higher and higher to make any headway in the bog, which is knee-deep. I can feel the seat of my trousers getting wet. But what can I do? My camera and map pocket, which I’m wearing round my neck, must not get wet so I hold them aloft, but then I have to drop them again as I need both arms to steady myself. I have to speed up, raise my legs even higher now, because staying in the same place for even a second means sinking an extra ten centimeters. My upper body is drenched too, not with water but with sweat. The mosquitoes attack my face, get into my eyes. I am panting so heavily that they get sucked into my mouth; I can feel them on my tongue, on my epiglottis. I don't shout for help because there isn’t any. As a last resort I let myself flop forwards, across a thicket of willows. They bend under my weight, forming a web. Slowly I extract my left foot, manage to place it on three flattened willows, then pull the right foot loose and stand up straight.

The tale takes a turn for the worse when Alfred discovers that Mikkelsen, who joined the party at the last minute, possesses the aerial photographs that he needs for his research. Having been largely deprived of sleep for days, due to the ever-present sun, the bugs, and his colleague Arne's snoring,  Alfred begins to spin weird, paranoid scenerios about what’s really going on.

It could have gone like this: Sibbelee sent Nummedal a letter telling him about the research I planned to do, at which Nummedal thought: Aha! Now’s my chance to get back at Sibbelee for having contradicted me at that important conference all those years ago….It would be bad form for a professor flatly to turn down the request of a colleague, but Nummedal is too crafty for that anyway. More devious. He summons his pupil Mikkelsen and proposes an interesting little research project for him to undertake—my research.         

I don’t want to give away every twist and turn of the plot. Nor would it be fitting for me to say anything about how the domain “beyond sleep” to which the title refers fits in. Suffice it to say that Hermans’ little novel, first published in 1968 but only translated in 2006, makes for a good winter read. 

American Hustle – Blue Jasmine - Philomena

American Hustle succeeds by virtue of razzle-dazzle and acting chutzpah. The tone is set even before the opening scene with the brief advisory: Some of These Things Really Happened. It’s a gleeful hint of the dynamic narrative to follow, which consists of scams and counter-scams, romances real and feigned, friendships formed and destroyed, as a young FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) sets out to grease his career path by exploiting the gifts of two small-time con artists (Amy Adams and Christian Bale) to ensnare some local politicians. Add Jennifer Lawrence to the mix as Bale’s manic-depressive wife and Jeremy Renner as the populist mayor of Camden, New Jersey, and you’ve got a feast of grade-A character acting. Robert de Niro’s cameo as a mob boss adds an element of gravity to the story at just the right time.

The film is cleverly edited, so that the viewer seldom knows as much as do the characters themselves about what’s going on. Brief flashbacks occasionally fill in the blanks, but during the first twenty minutes, we really have no idea who is on who’s side or what’s going down. Viewers may leave the theater wondering if they really care for any of these people—but it would be hard to deny that it was fun following the twists and turns of the plot.

Blue Jasmine, in contrast, is thin on character. Woody Allen seldom elevates his screenplays above the level of cliché, and this film is no different. Two woman, adopted sisters, have followed different paths. One is beautiful and (until recently) wealthy. The other is a plain, working-class woman, divorced, who bags groceries at the local supermarket. They have nothing in common, but when the golden girl (Cate Blanchett) loses everything, she has no other alternative but to move in with her sister (Sally Hawkins).

We follow the lives of this odd couple for a few weeks, but it’s rough sledding. Their arguments are tiresome and repetitive, their amours predicable. And there are very few jokes to enliven the journey. Hawkins’s ex-husband isn’t very interesting and her new boyfriend is worse. Alec Baldwin, as Blanchett’s husband, is, well, Alec Baldwin. 

In the end, Blanchett’s portrayal of a woman in steep decline, though carefully nuanced, is hardly more than a series of reflexive lunges for the Xanax bottle followed by the vodka bottle. I suppose she’s doing her best, but as I mentioned earlier, the script is paper-thin. The best parts of the movie are the lavish parties in Long Island and San Francisco, during which we get to admire the décor and the real estate.

There is something to be said for a film that depicts how a human life can crumble. It elicits our compassion. Unfortunately, due to its lack of convincing detail, Blue Jasmine barely scratches the surface of this theme. (For a far better treatment of it, try Susan Seidelman’s film, Smithereens).

    

Philomena is a gem. Here, once again, we have class juxtapositions, with Judy Dench as a small-town Catholic woman looking for the son she gave up for adoption a half-century ago, and Steve Coogan as the sophisticated (but recently-canned) BBC journalist who agrees to write a “human interest” story about her, almost as an act of personal desperation. Coogan is looking for something, too—a meaningful life. And although the quest to find Dench’s son serves as the focus of the film, much more of it is devoted to how this odd duo learn to communicate with one another during their search. Dench’s naiveté and religious faith mask some serious truths that Coogan is sensitive enough to pick up on. And Coogan’s wry irony is sometimes even funnier as we watch it sail right over Dench’s head.  

Here’s a sample exchange: the two are in Washington, D.C. standing in the Lincoln memorial in front of the far-larger-than-life statue of the president. Coogan says, as a means of making conversation. “You know, Lincoln was the tallest American president.” Dench replies, “Oh, you can see that even when he’s sitting down.”

Snowy Owl Hunting

Though snowy owls seldom wander as far south as Minnesota—except to a few grain elevators in Duluth Harbor and the Sax-Zim Bog near Meadowlands—this winter they’ve been sighted in many places across the state and even down into Iowa and Illinois.

Why? Several explanations have been offered, but to me it seems obvious they like the cold. We’ve been having a frigid winter, with daily highs often below freezing and wind-chills sometimes 50 or 60 degrees below zero. Our governor, in his wisdom and compassion, has closed all the schools in the state three times already.

Even in average winters, birders arrive from Florida, Texas, and California and hire a birding guide in hope of adding the snowy owl to their life lists. I ought to have the gumption to spend at least a little time hunting one down now that they’ve been sighted in the immediate vicinity. And I do.

It was a gray morning, but the temperature had risen 35 degrees overnight to a relatively balmy 18 above zero. The house was no longer emitting large thumps as if the paper carrier had missed his mark by forty feet. 

Our first stop was the Mississippi River near the Franklin Avenue Bridge, where friends had seen two whitish owls flying overhead a few days ago. We clomped through the snow along the Mitchell Trail on the west side of the river, then descended to river’s edge on the east side and walked downstream to the railroad bridge. 

Blue jays, crows, and a single downy woodpecker.

From there we drove south on Highway 55 past Fort Snelling and Mendota, following the bend of the highway east at the oil refinery. A few miles later  we took a right turn (south again) onto Goodwill Avenue, past snow-covered fields and a large horse farm, to a bridge across the tiny Vermillion River. Quite a few snowy owls have been spotted near here according to online sources.

We saw nothing. We drove east on 180th street, crossing the river again, and probably spent thirty minutes overall combing the trees on both sides of the road. No owls. No hawks, even.

Then we paid the nearby village of Vermillion a visit. We’d never been there. It has a Catholic Church with an Austrian-looking spire, a prosperous farm implement dealership spread out across both sides of the road, and a German café called The Stein House.

Heading north again, we made a brief stop at Schaar’s Bluff, where the view out across the bend in the distant Mississippi is fantastic, then made our descent into Hastings to eat lunch at the Onion Grille.

It took us an hour to get back home, during which time we listened to a Duke Ellington CD with songs such as “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ but the Blues.”

I don’t have the blues, however. I didn’t really expect to see an owl. After all, Peter Matthiessen wrote a whole book about snow leopards, and he never saw one.

But what did get me down was when I took a closer look at the ebird map of where snowy owls have been sighted near Vermillion. It wasn’t on Goodwill Avenue but on Hogan Avenue, the next highway over. We were 500 yards from the hotspot when we turned back.

Of course, it’s possible to see the owls anywhere. And clicking on the observation records later, I didn’t see any sightings more recent than January 12. That’s two weeks ago.

It's snowing right now. And you never know. I might see a snowy owl in the backyard tonight.

In fact, any owl would do.

Much Ado About Nothing - the film

Seeking to escape to Southern California, if only for an evening, we rented Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing. (I didn’t know it was in black and white, but little matter.) Whedon is best known for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Avengers, and Roseanne, and I half-expected the film would be a sort of “I’ve got a nice house in Santa Monica and some swell young acting friends…but no script!” sort of deal.

In fact, the comedy is well-acted and the cinematography is lush. The dumb parts of Shakespeare’s play—the mistaken-identity element especially—are streamlined, while all the romantic banter between Beatrice, Benedict, and the others characters is given a low-key spin that conveys more emotion and less of the playwright’s over-cleverness than is usually the case. There’s something odd, but also nice, about an Americanized Shakespeare. The “flat” accents give individual words a new thrust. We notice the archaisms and think about what they mean and how they fit.    

     

I didn’t recognize any of the actors except Clark Gregg (from The Avengers—even him I didn’t know by name) but they seem to be guided uniformly by a desire to speak their lines without undue emphasis, as if they were actually conversing. Amy Acker is especially good as Beatrice, sharp-tongued but also a little weary and lost.

The film rolls along at a steady clip, with well-choreographed movement inside, outside, in the kitchen, down in the surveillance room, and so on. The mellow pop soundtrack goes well with the suits and ties. A lot of wine gets drunk, cart-loads of courtesy and wit are exchanged, and the economical production ends up being genuinely romantic and also sweet.

Caesar Must Die or Frances Ha

The two films mentioned above have several things in common. They’re both black-and-white films with superb cinematography, they’re both “about” art and life, they’re both very good…and I saw them both on the same night.

The contrasts are no less striking, of course. Caesar Must Die takes place in an Italian prison. Frances Ha takes place in Manhattan. Caesar is about middle-aged men suffering the confines of long-term incarceration. Frances is about young women who aren’t always sure where they’re going to spend the night.

But enough of such silliness.

In Caesar Must Die, a group of convicts mount a production of Julius Caesar. They  aren’t professional actors, but their faces are full of emotion and they’re fascinating to watch. The idea of killing someone is not entirely foreign to many of them; they can relate to Caesar’s megalomania and swagger, to Marc Antony’s dissimulation, and to the loyalties and suspicions of conspirators, in ways that many actors perhaps cannot.

The production underscores how good Shakespeare sounds in Italian and how helpful subtitles are when watching any play by the Bard. We see only a highly abbreviated version of the play, which might also be considered a blessing. The film’s brilliant lighting and mis en scene also add  interest.

Frances Ha comes at us from a dreamier and more casual place. Two young women share an apartment. They’re zany, they love to smoke cigarettes and talk, and we might wonder if they're lesbians…except they’re both straight. Frances (Greta Gerwig) is an apprentice at a dance company; Sophie has a plum job at Random House. Frances would prefer to renew the apartment lease she and Sophie share rather than move in with her boyfriend. But Sophie throws her a curve by announcing that she’s moving out because another girlfriend has invited her to share an apartment in a “cooler” neighborhood.

Frances’s downward spin accelerates when she learns that she’s been passed over for her dance troupe’s lucrative Christmas performances. For the rest of the film, we watch Frances floating through the melancholy holiday season, crashing for a few days with some entertaining guys she knows, visiting her parents in Sacramento, taking a spontaneous trip to Paris to visit a friend who isn’t there, and pouring wine at the dining room of her alma mater to earn some cash.

At one point an erstwhile friend tells Frances, “You have an old face...yet you seem very immature.” And Frances’s obliviousness and irresponsibility are a little annoying. But beneath the goofy, klutzy exterior of this “undateable” young woman, we begin to see a harmless buoyancy that’s rather appealing. The film is full of energy supplied by a host of minor characters and also by the vigor of New York City itself, while both the tone and the pacing of the film are near-perfect.

Inside Llewyn Davis

There is never a dull moment in the Coen brother’s new film, Inside Llewyn Davis. Nor is there an exciting one. 

The film chronicles roughly a week in the life of a Greenwich Village folk singer, though the focus is far less on his music than on his social life—or lack thereof. Llewyn “divides his time” between his erstwhile girlfriend, who happens to be his best friend’s wife; a professional couple who teach at Columbia and live in middle class comfort on the Upper West Side; his childhood home in a working-class borough where his sister lives with her son, now that their father has been put in a home; and a coffeehouse where he occasionally performs. He pays a visit to his agent and to a posh recording studio, where he’s been hired to do a session; he takes a trip to Chicago with two strangers to try to set up a gig with an influential club owner.

In the course of watching scenes from this peripatetic life unfold, like the pages of a film storyboard,  an image of Llewyn forms in our mind, but there isn’t much of an “inside” to it. He’s irascible and hot-headed but never actually devious or manipulative. He takes his art very seriously but has weathered so many defeats that what might once have been an inflated ego has long since become a modest chip on his shoulder. But unlike Job, Llewyn Davis never asks why. When things go wrong, he just picks himself up and starts in again. 

All the same, an aura of suffering and futility hang over the film, and Oscar Isaac does an admirable job of sustaining Llewyn’s weird mix of artistic integrity, fatalistic resignation, and raw spleen. Along with most of Llewyn’s friends, we like him…but we don’t like him much. Can he sleep on the couch tonight? Well…OK.      

    

The Coen’s are past masters of the individual, self-contained scene, in which a character we’ve never met appears vividly before us (often from behind a desk), plays his or her bit part in the protagonist’s life, and exits the stage. There are plenty of such characters and scenes in Inside Llewyn Davis, through which we get to know the circumstances and events of his life piece by piece—the death of his former singing partner, his former girlfriend’s abortion, how much he owes in back dues at the seaman’s institute. Part of the fascination in watching the film is observing how deftly the bit characters play their roles without quite stepping over the line into caricature.

The Coen brother’s films have always carried a stylized element—some call in “mythic,” other call it “comic book.” In recent films such as A Serious Man and True Grit, the excesses have been more muted, the artistry more pronounced. (Remember The Hudsucker Proxy? Sheesh!) Inside Llewyn Davis seems solid enough, scene by scene, that comparisons to Flaubert may be in order. Also like Flaubert (I’m thinking of the novella Julian the Hospitaller) the most exciting event happens off-stage, after the film is largely over. But that’s as much as to say that Inside Llewyn Davis may be a masterpiece…but that doesn’t mean it’s wildly entertaining.

Postscript: I don’t mind admitting that I’m old enough to remember those days of early commercial folk, when Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio were wildly popular. Very white, very clean, somewhat bland. But also spirited.  I bought a few copies of Sing Out! Magazine, learned a few chords on the guitar, bought some Hohner harmonicas, and watched Hootenanny on TV. But I never liked the genre much. When the Yardbirds and the Kinks came along, things got better.

Now, forty years later, I’m glad I know all the verses to “Three Jolly Coachman.” Then again, when was the last time they sang that at a party?