Hadi Khanmohammadi | The Word / 2021

i don’t even want to learn

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hadi Khanmohammadi (screenwriter and director) The Word / 2021 [15 minutes]

 

Iranian director Hadi Khanmohammadi’s short film The Word is a most unpleasant piece in Turkish instead of what one might expect, Farsi. Perhaps Khanmohammadi, who remains in Iran, felt that he could not make such a work in his nation’s own language without endangering himself.

     A young man (Ali Ashrakijou) is teaching his recalcitrant father (Karim Ashari) how to drive, for reasons, one suspects, that have to do with his desire to be freed from driving his father around, allowing the son to spend more time with his friend Hamid, who calls him on the cellphone twice during their driving lesson. But his father insists: “I don’t even want to learn.”

     His father refuses to follow his son’s advice about how to change gears, and, in fact, has difficulty even getting the car to start. But even after it begins to move, he ignores his son’s insistence to change into second gear, thus wearing out the motor.

      The son comments on his stubbornness, his refusal to listen to anyone else, the old man complaining that he simply refuses to listen to his wife, who is constantly airing her viewpoints. But the son is equally disturbed by their relationship, arguing that he beats his wife, something the father refuses.

       Just as quickly, however, the conversation turns to his dislike of his son, the cause, he contends, of all the arguments between him as his wife.

       Although he’s sent his son to university, the boy evidently can’t find a job, the older man arguing that he should take any position in a firm, even a janitor, and work his way up. Clearly, the elder cannot recognize that things don’t work as they might have in a different age, the son refusing to even listen to such nonsense. He already has a degree, his son explains, how can we work as a janitor?; who might even hire him for such a lowly position? But subtleties are not something the father might ever be able to comprehend. He once more stalls the car out, and must begin over again.

     With the car moving off once more, this time speeding, the older man refuses his son’s request to slow down. Again he insists that the son is the main problem. “We’re still cleaning up your shit. You are the main problem. You agitate her against me.” From that accusation he goes on to suggest that his son his trying to make him homeless. The boy, however, explains that he merely asked him to put the house up for collateral in order to get a loan to help him get started. But his father is certain he will waste the money, and then he’ll be homeless.

      Although the boy wanted the loan so that he might open a “hypermarket,” we do wonder if perhaps the father isn’t right about the situation to a certain degree. Would the boy be able to make a go of it? Unfortunately, throughout the film both men make charges against each other that we simply can’t corroborate and have no knowledge of the facts.

      But the father argues that his father never gave him a penny, and he had to work by laboring. Everything he’s done has been by working like a horse. And now his son his bossing him around.

      The son dismisses his achievements, suggesting that all his labors haven’t gotten him very far.

      Yet we do perceive that the father is not blind to everything, at one point insisting upon what all such traditionalists do, “Find a girl to marry. Then you live the way you want.”

      The son protests, “Stop it, for God’s sake.”

       “Why do you avoid the topic of marriage,” the father asks.

     “You think I don’t understand anything, ha? …But you’re always loafing around with those guys. With the deviant friend of yours. Who you walk around with, hand in hand. And you always sleep over at his damn house.”

       The son protests, “Are you insane?”

      “Why should two guys stay together over night?” the father probes. You’re either drinking or smoking. Or maybe you are…”

       Even the father cannot say the word, will not complete the sentence since in Iran any gay activity is punishable by imprisonment, some acts ending in a sentence of death.

       The son turns the conversation to his own father’s defects.

       But this time his comments on what a miserable person his father is and his father’s faults goes to far. As the car lurches to a stop again, the son complaining that his father cannot do anything, that he fails at all, the older man exits the car for a smoke, finally calling out his son. When the boy hesitantly goes to him he slaps he face and attempts to wrestle him to the ground, the son flattening out his father on the front car hood.

       As his boy stumbles away, the father gets back in the car and speeds off past his walking son. But soon after we hear the squeal of tires as if there has been a crash. The son climbs to a nearby hill to see ahead, perceiving that his father his fine, but that the front end of the car has jumped the small retaining wall, the father attempting to push it back onto the safety lane.

       The son finally arrives at the spot, gets into the car and backs it away from the retainer curb.

He waits to his father to join him as the son presumably returns him home.

       There can be no resolution for these two stubborn and failed men. There is no one to come out to in Iran. You can never admit to being who you truly are.

Los Angeles, March 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).

Aaron Chan | Anniversary / 2012

handmade gifts are better

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aaron Chan (screenwriter and director) Anniversary / 2012 [4 minutes]

 

Having just finished his university final exams, Jorge (Ryan Clayton) is on the phone with a friend when he suddenly notes that today is his and his boyfriend’s first anniversary. He quickly hangs up,

trying to imagine what he should bring when they meet up. He shows up to the place where they evidently planned to meet with a rose in hand.

    While waiting he observes a woman (Bekki Mergens), also holding a flower, whose lesbian partner (Maggie Chan) shows up, startled by the fact that her friend has had no more imagination than to bring her a flower. The girlfriend stalks off, her friend, still with flower in hand, running after her.

     A moment later, Jorge now has a guilt-edged picture frame in hand as a present for his boyfriend Lucas (Brendan James Boyd). But soon after he observes a girl (Ann Wang) run up to her boyfriend (Chenda Lee) with the same gift, the young man not particularly charmed by the predictable token of her love. Nonetheless, he kisses her and they walk off together.

     In the next scene we see the handsome Lucas standing nearby, with cinema tickets for the 7:20 film. Jorge walks up to him, handing him a paper flower, which clearly Lucas sees as the slightest of gestures, but good-naturedly greets him with a kiss nonetheless. As he turns to move on, however, Jorge gestures for him to come and look, inviting us as well through the camera to join him.

   On a nearby wall he has painted the words “I love you.” The boys pose in several positions beside the wall-painting in absolute delight.

      Up to this point this charming short parable has been in black-and-white, but the last frame is in color, showing presumably another wall in what must now be their shared apartment, a purple paper flower in a vase next to an unframed picture of the two of them standing by Jorge’s original wall-painting.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2024

 Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).

Atom Egoyan | Guest of Honour / 2019, USA 2020

odd choices

by Douglas Messerli

 

Atom Egoyan (screenplay and director) Guest of Honour / 2019, USA 2020

 

Critics quite literally got all stewed-up over Egyptian-born Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s most recent movie, Guest of Honor. While Egoyan has in recent years fallen into a kind of story-telling rut, and given the highly moral texture of most of his films, he has always been a bit sanctimonious in his exploration of guilt and innocence, including in one of his best works, The Sweet Hereafter, to describe his most recent characters as “ludicrous,” as Variety reviewer Guy Lodge did, or write as The New York Times critic Ben Kenigsberg that the film’s “core revelations are pretty silly, failing crucial tests of motivation” seems terribly unforgiving of the highly intelligent cinema-maker who, like so many other film directors before him, has suffered a short period of diminished results.

     I’m far more sympathetic of this flawed film, agreeing with Glenn Kenny’s comments on RogerEbert.com in which he describes the movie as “a gratifyingly solid work that benefits from first-rate performers.”

     It is true that this version of family guilt and its repercussions is a bit melodramatically conceived and far more slowly revealed than necessary. Yet from the earliest of scenes, when the film’s major character, the seemingly totally honest and level-headed Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), visits Father Greg (Luke Wilson) to help him prepare for his comments about her father who has just died without perhaps ever even attending Greg’s church, but nonetheless requested to be the site of his funeral, we quickly comprehend that there are far darker elements concerning this family-based drama than we might first have imagined.

     The priest is required to be both a kind of confessor to a woman who has never previously crossed the vestibule of his church and also a kind of lay psychologist, particularly when he attempts to explore the reasons why Veronica has insisted on serving a sentence for child abuse while teaching music and conducting an orchestra in a local school—a crime for which she herself as well as the student she is charged with having abused, admit she did not commit. It takes almost the entire film, laid out in a series of interwoven flashbacks, to reveal her near saintly self-sacrifice. Perhaps like the Catholic canonized St. Veronica, she is offering up the vision of her childhood crime in reparation for her own past sacrilege and blasphemy.

     What we do come to perceive in her encounter with Wilson’s character, played very much against type, is that the director is purposely withholding information which might long-ago have relieved some of his confessor’s guilt: that he has indeed known a great deal more about this case that he has at first pretended. But it order to explain that, I shall have to break through—dear reader, I’m warning you—a great deal of the webs of narrative Egoyan has woven around this late-revealed truth.

 

       Let us simply generalize at first: Veronica’s father, Jim (an excellent David Thewlis) is desperately in love with his daughter’s Brazilian-born mother, but as she grows seriously ill, soon after dying, he becomes involved—at least as the young Veronica (Isabelle Franca) perceives it, reminding us a little of Henry James’ novel What Maisie Knew—with her piano teacher, at one point allowing her to hold his hand at Veronica’s piano recital while he is sitting next to her ailing mother and on several occasions both of them retreating during Veronica’s lessons for liaisons elsewhere in the house.

        A child’s knowledge can be an intense experience, particularly when what she believes is a truth that stands firmly against the moral precepts she has been taught by both father and mother. For Veronica, appalled by what she believes she witnessed and, accordingly, now repulsed by her beautiful teacher, watches passively, soon after as her mentor, smoking a cigarette whose ashes fall to the couch on which she is about to nap, is later consumed by a resultant fire.

     Worse yet, as Veronica grows up, dating a boy which, if I am correct (it’s hard to know in such knotted plot territory) the teacher’s son Walter (Gage Munroe), Veronica, to help expunge her childhood guilt, tells the young man of her childhood refusal to act, after which he determines to and succeeds in committing suicide by drowning. It’s almost inevitable, accordingly, that her refusal both times to circumvent death finally is repeated in her refusal to defend herself—despite the clear evidence that the cellphone proposal to meet up for sex with her young male student was sent at a time when she was conducting her orchestra in which that student also performed.

     Father Greg finally reveals his bombshell that Veronica’s childhood teacher was an active member of his congregation, and had confessed to him her relationship with Veronica’s father— more of a needed friendship than a series of sexual trysts—which had been sought out and approved by the young girl’s dying mother.

     And that’s just Veronica’s side of the story. Her food inspector British expatriate father, as Veronica puts it, also made “several odd choices.” A true authoritarian when it comes to the rules of the food health board, both on and off the job, Jim can be both callous and forgiving about the restaurant negligence he uncovers.

     He is happy to award a new Persian restaurant with the health board’s highest rating, while being rather callous when he proposes to close down a long-established Italian restaurant wherein he has discovered a dead rat.

     At an Armenian establishment he discovers an obvious dereliction of the rules, a pile of dead rabbits, with their ears lobbed off, in the kitchen. Not only has the restaurant traded in unprocessed food—source unknown—but is cutting off their ears for another restaurant who serves the delicacy of fried rabbit ears. It probably doesn’t help that Jim has purchased a live rabbit for his daughter when she was a child, and is now diligently caring for Benjamin the rabbit while she is imprisoned.

     However, when the proprietor (played by Egoyan’s wife Arsinée Khanjian) begs him not to write her restaurant up, revealing that the rabbits are for a private party, not for regular customers, and that, if he wants, she will keep the ears and serve them up as a delicacy to the party itself, he overlooks that restaurant’s transgressions.

     Yet, at another point the respected inspector becomes a kind of criminal himself, grinding up rabbit feces to make them appear to be rat pellets which he sprinkles on the bathroom floor of an otherwise spotless German restaurant in which he has just pleasantly dined, using the evidence as a kind of bribe so that he may interview the owner’s young relative who also works there, Clive (Alexandre Bourgeois), the 17-year-old student who Veronica is accused of having abused.

     Despite his anger over being used (and one might argue, truly abused) in this situation, and knowing that just a few moments before the inspector had entered the toilet that he himself had washed the bathroom floor, Clive, nonetheless, confirms that Veronica was conducting at the very time she was said to have sent the cell-phone, suggesting that the message must have been sent instead by the bus driver, at the time supposedly protecting all the student’s cell-phones.

      In a sense, Clive’s proof of his daughter’s innocence now leaves him without a role in her life; she has, in her demand to serve out an undeserved punishment, left him in the dark. Indeed, Jim is a man who, except for his awards and admonishments has had no one truly and deeply to live for since the death of his wife. As unloved as he is by the restauranteurs he encounters, so, does he come finally to realize, is he is now being ignored by his Veronica.

     Invited to the party at the Armenian restaurant, he is asked to say a few words to the guests. Having already drunk too much, Jim embarrassingly babbles on, suddenly imagining himself as the “guest of honour,” a role he has never previously played in his life. His final words, that he will seek out the guilty bus driver and revenge his daughter’s imprisonment, not only shocks his audience, however, but results in a visit from police detectives the next morning.

      As they begin to interrogate him, he suddenly perceives that his daughter’s long-lived rabbit has died. He returns to the Armenian restaurant, dead rabbit in hand, to ask them one last favor, to lob off the animal’s feet so that he might have the symbols they culturally represent of good luck, knowing, at the same time, that any luck in love or emotional caring has eluded him forever.

 

Los Angeles, July 15, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).

 

Dawn Porter | John Lewis: Good Trouble / 2020

dancing for the joy of every man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dawn Porter (director) John Lewis: Good Trouble / 2020

 

All those who saw or heard former President Barack Obama’s moving eulogy at John Robert Lewis’ Atlanta funeral, will already know many of the facts of Lewis’ life laid out in Dawn Porter’s CNN-sponsored film, John Lewis: Good Trouble; specifically that growing up as a child of Troy, Alabama sharecroppers that he desired even as a child to become a man of words, preaching to the family chickens—a lot more responsive to his ruminations, he later claimed, than human beings years after were to his political statements—and that many a morning after breakfast he hid out under the house porch so that he might escape work in the fields, racing down to the road only when the school bus appeared.

      Lewis, even as a boy, knew the direction in which he was headed; unlike his brothers, he was determined to get an education, a desire which his parents supported despite the help he might have provided them in their difficult agrarian labors.

      Obama also retold the stories of Lewis’ early involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, to which the young Lewis turned after hearing a 1955 radio broadcast by Martin Luther King, and his gradual desire to be trained in the tactics of non-violent action.

      We know he was a very young man when he began to be involved in restaurant sit-ins—where he and other young black men were verbally taunted and liquids and food were tossed into their faces or poured on the top of heads with many of the “sitters” roughed up—and soon after, in bus rides where he and his colleagues, following the lead of Rosa Parks, proudly sat up front, often being abused by the drivers and other passengers.

     Soon after Lewis became even more involved in the Nashville Student Movement, he and another member of the group daring to ride a then-segregated Greyhound bus across a large swath of the country, afraid even to leave the bus at stops for fear that the driver would refuse to let them back on and might drive away without them.

      Even worse, the Birmingham Riders, as they were called, were beaten with baseball bats, pipes, and other objects. Arrested by the police they were taken across the border into Tennessee and released. After regrouping in order to ride into Montgomery, they were met with yet further violence, Lewis’ head being hit with a crate. “I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later commented.

      Yet, despite our knowledge of some of these feats, Lewis brushed them off as simply a way of getting into “good trouble” As Lewis later wrote:

 

"I met Rosa Parks when I was 17. I met Dr. King when I was 18. These two individuals inspired me to find a way to get in the way, to get into trouble. So I got into good trouble, necessary trouble.—"

 

     Through Dawn Porter’s film we are visually reminded, moreover, of just how young this thinly-framed, mustached, adolescent really was. With him, we watch a reenactment by the waitress (still proud it appears) who first told him he could not be served at the luncheon counter. And several times Porter encourages the adult Georgia congressman, while viewing such images for the first time since he had experienced them in person, to comment on his feelings in that distant past.

      As film critic Cristy Lemire observes:

 

“Porter does not press Lewis on any issues or ask him any uncomfortable questions. But she does offer him some moments of introspection. In one of her more intriguing story-telling tactics, she has Lewis sit on a sparse soundstage and review images from his own history—some of which he’d never seen before—including non-violent protest training he imparted to fellow African-Americans as they fought to integrate the South, suffering vicious beatings in the process. She also has him look directly into the camera and speak in a way that’s reminiscent of Errol Morris’ inter-

viewing style, and Lewis’ combination of warmth and wisdom makes these statements particularly disarming.”

 

 

    In Porter’s film, moreover, we get images that help us to recognize just how remarkable it was that leaders would choose the then 23-year-old Lewis to become the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and just two years later would ask him and activist Hosea Williams to lead fellow marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

    Waiting for them at the end of that bridge were Alabama State Troopers who briefly ordered them to disperse. The marchers dropped to their knees briefly to pray, while without any further hesitation the police lobbed tear gas canisters at them and began to beat them indiscriminately with their nightsticks. Lewis’ skull was fractured and, once again, as he later reported, he imagined that he was going to die. The rest of the marchers had no choice but to retreat.

     As Obama retold the well-known horror story of “Bloody Sunday,” at Lewis’ funeral, he added an important insight about that event. That evening, Obama suggests, the troopers must have returned home believing they had won their cause, perhaps celebrating it. But a short time later even a larger group of Civil Rights protesters gathered, this time far overwhelming any police force that might be gathered, successfully crossing the bridge and marching on to Montgomery. Lewis could no longer join them, suffering still from the pain of his beating, but he had become a symbol of the righteousness of their cause.

     After that event Lewis claimed he had lost all fear of death, which afforded an even greater freedom.

     Much of the rest of the film—after Lewis chose to leave SNCC, in part because of Stokely Carmichael’s election as a chairman who embraced the use of violence as a means of self-defense—follows Lewis to congress where, as he himself admits, he now stood on the other side of politics, no longer an outsider but someone whose role was to work with others to make important changes.

     In many of these attempts to correct what he saw as wrongs Lewis admittedly failed, despite his continued efforts to get into “good trouble,” including his arrestment for holding a sit-in in the House of Representatives. But as he grew older, he increasingly came to be seen as the “conscience of Congress,” the man who both impassionedly and calmly spoke out for the rights not only of blacks, but of women, and of the LGBT community. He helped to pass provisions, after long years of work, to create the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial along the banks of National Mall’s tidal basin; and he fought hard for the construction of the National Museum of African American History and Culture on Washington, D.C.’s mall.

    It was moving to see, outside of the context of Porter’s film, Lewis’ cortege stop at both of these sites as well as the new Black Lives Matter Plaza, ordered by Washington, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser to be created in a two-block area near the White House on 16th street.

     Some of the loveliest scenes of this new John Lewis film takes us into his own home where, with his now deceased wife, he had created a large collection of mostly black art; and at his office, where during a birthday celebration, the man who claims he cannot sing was moved by the cake his assistants awarded him to perform a spontaneously lovely dance.

     In a real sense, that dance releases some of the deep seriousness and profundity of this great man’s life which we have just reexperience, permitting him, for a few seconds at least, to once more return to his true role as a joyful human being, who somewhat absurdly preached not only to the chickens, but as his sister insists, to his siblings as well. Lewis, it is clear, believed in the deep humanity of all of us and lived his entire life attempting through words and actions to actualize that fact, that we indeed are all equal in the eyes of God and the State.

     Having now lost this great voice, we need desperately to seek it out again in others and, hopefully, within ourselves.

 

Los Angeles, August 12, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and Green Integer Review (August 2020).

Martin Scorsese | Mean Streets / 1973

the true tragedy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin (screenplay), Martin Scorsese (director) Mean Streets / 1973

 

I saw Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets in Maryland the year it was released, 1973. I do remember its endless street scenes in black, green, yellow, red, and sometimes—particularly when the cop cars came around—in white. All the gangster films I’d seen until then had been basically noir films in black-and-white. Here, for the first time in my memory, the evil-doings of mafioso-like figures was painted in the colors of our day, a reality so potent that it would eventually result in some of the best movies of the next decade in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather 1 and 2. And, of course, from another perspective, Scorsese’s own brilliant Taxi Driver.

      Despite the early years of total bigotry toward Italian-Americans (which continues more-subtly still today), Americans took to Italians, particularly to the actions of the mafia, almost immediately, in part, because that culture so resembles our own claims to this country’s origins; the combination of deep religiosity, dedication to family and friends, an innate sense of honor—however one might define that—along with a love of place (usually a narrow swath of land settled by people like oneself, but sometimes confused with a love of country) along with very large doses of hypocrisy and extreme violence. Aren’t these the ingredients behind absolutely every US Western film?

      As Roger Ebert perceived, however, Mean Streets, unlike the later Coppola films, is not really a story of the Mafia, although those pernicious villains certainly do play a role in the movie. But, rather, this work simply reveals the effects of that world upon the children and young adults who live in their community.

     Charlie Cappa (a very likeable and well-dressed Harvey Keitel), the “hero” of this unheroic film, would like nothing more than to run the bar/male-entertainment joint that he has presumably inherited from his uncle, Giovanni (Cesare Danova). He is a devout Catholic, disillusioned by the church simply because the priests so easily forgive his many sins. A few “Hail Mary’s” is all that he is asked for his often-violent attempts to collect for his uncle’s protection racket. He’s not very good at it, and sometimes manages only to get $20.00 for thousands of dollars of debt. He is even bilked by young students seeking drugs.

     One might imagine him in a happy marriage to Teresa Ronchelli (Amy Robinson), a lovely epileptic, shunned by the community, who lives nearby. But as both know, in the world in which they live, such a relationship would be impossible. And they keep their love silent. In a strange sense, the horrific “Johnny Boy” becomes their symbolic child, a boy which had they birthed, might have grown up in this scratch of the New York landscape just like Teresa’s cousin. And this is the true tragedy behind the basically comedic riffs of Scorsese’s film.

     Charlie attempts to redeem himself, instead, on the street, particularly by protecting Teresa’s young cousin, “Johnny Boy” Civello (and amazing vision of a young Robert De Niro), who is the very opposite of his “protector”—a violent live-wire triggered, like the bombs he tosses into US Mail boxes, to go off at any moment. A bit like John Cazale as Fredo Corleone and the equally over-the-top Cazale as the wild partner to Al Pacino in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, Johnny Boy is not an easy person to protect. Certainly, he’s not at all reliable—he owes thousands to nearly everyone—and when any shake-down appears on the horizon, instead of backing away, he becomes nervously ballistic, causing any number of violent battles, more like Irish donnybrooks than Mafioso-like murders. I can’t wait to see Scorsese’s The Irishman, yet another version of the Italian-Irish connections of American immigrants.

     De Niro, this early into his career, already has perfected a role he would play in so many variations: a man so high-wired and near-mad that he almost might be described as “cool.”

     “Johnny Boy” knows that in this world, death is part of the territory. He embraces it as if it were a warm coat to temporarily keep him out of the cold air he inhabits. He knows death far better than he realizes life, and that is his problem and, of course, his destiny. While Charlie attempts to redeem the “mean streets” of this cinema’s title, the “boy” abandons himself to them, drinking in their lurid pleasures, women, money, and momentary friends.

      Thank heaven, however, this highly plotted dichotomy does not at all appear in this film as an effort leaden with ambition. As Ebert writes:

 

 “We never have the sense of a scene being set up and then played out; his characters hurry to their dooms while the camera tries to keep pace. There’s an improvisational feel even in scenes that we know, because of their structure, couldn’t have been improvised.”

 

     As startlingly brilliant as Coppola’s films were, this early story by Scorsese of lost men in search of an American Dream, seems to be closer to the actual world in which we all know we live: violent dreamers who barely manage to stumble through their very everyday lives. Nobody in this film is a true hero, and, strangely enough, nobody in Mean Streets is an absolute villain. That is, quite obviously, the real problem.

 

Los Angeles, November 6, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).

Jonathan Baumbach | Marriage Story / 2019

somewhere between reasonable and crazy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jonathan Baumbach (screenwriter and director) Marriage Story / 2019

 

As in his earlier film, The Squid and the Whale, and now in his new film Marriage Story, couples, ready to divorce begin by attempting amicable separations to help themselves and children in the difficult process in which they will both be pawns to issues to do with time-sharing—how one wonders do children comprehend such alternate times which wrench them out of their communal existence with the people with whom they have lived their entire lives?—and their mutual financial futures, including their formerly shared home and everything that lies within.

 

     But all things surrounding divorce never allow for the “amicable” aspirations of the couples, as lawyers take over their lives, each demanding more for their clients. I’ve observed this several times in the lives of my friends. And films have represented this time and again in works such as Kramer vs. Kramer (with which Noah Baumbach’s new film shares a great deal of sentiment), Mrs. Doubtfire, and the over-the-top version of a divorce film, The War of the Roses. Nothing about divorce is ever simple, as both parties cannot help but dig into their senses of resentment and injustice.

      To have created a rather lighter comedic version of this, as Baumbach has, is almost a miracle. Yet even here, as the lovely couple who you truly do feel should have stayed together, stage director Charlie Barber (Adam Driver) and his actress-wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), try their hardest to protect their young, intelligent and inquisitive son, Henry (Azhy Robertson) to retain his close relationships he has maintained with both his loving father and mother, there are roadblocks at every corner.

      Like Woody Allen’s films, in this movie Baumbach also stirs the pot/plot with other ridiculous tensions of geography, pitting Charlie, the New Yorker, against his wife, a Los Angeles-born figure, who has returned to that city in order to follow a more lucrative and interesting career. She is perhaps right to do so, and her supportive mother (the wonderful Julie Hagerty), and sister (Merritt Wever) welcome her home.

 

     In this case, however, it is a mixed blessing, since both also love her husband, Charlie, and recognize him as a loving presence. Indeed, the very first scene of the film is a restatement of both divorcee’s good qualities, requested by a family psychologist, in which they readily admit how caring and loving, if terribly competitive, they are. We witness Charlie reading to his son in bed, observe Nora tenderly trying to help him adapt to his new life—to which it appears he has completely accepted; the young Henry is quite happier in Los Angeles than the gritty, difficult New York, despite Charlie’s insistence that they are still a New York family.

      Clearly, they are not anymore. Particularly when Nicole seeks out a famous Los Angeles lawyer, Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), based, I’d suggest on LA lawyer Gloria Allred, who seductively intuits Nicole’s long-time feelings of frustration in her relationship with Charlie, encouraging her not only to seek California rights over her custody of Henry but also to take a large chunk of the MacArthur Grant which her husband has just been awarded.

      When he attempts to return to New York to simply help his play make its significant transition, he is served with papers, surreptitiously slipped under his coffee-cup by his sister-in-law. 

      Charlie is told that he, too, must get a Los Angeles lawyer, and should even move to LA in order to maintain any rights for his son’s custody. Like a highway-robber, the first lawyer he approaches, Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta), demands an exorbitant down-payment against his outrageously high per-hour wages.

      Nearly broke, and having planned to pour in any money from his new grant into his small theater company which is about to move a play from off the radar onto Broadway, Charlie seeks a far cheaper lawyer, Bert Spitz (performed by Alan Alda, in one the best roles of his career). Bert advises the New Yorker to not only get an apartment in Los Angeles, but to cancel his New Yorker residency, upon which Charlie has no choice but to fire him. In this world mothers and their geographical locations have complete control.

      Fortunately, despite the evident effects of Baumbach’s own childhood separations from him and his clearly beloved father, the director has chosen to maintain a rather comic view in this newest film, wherein Charlie finally admits his selfishness (which includes a brief affair), and a kind of reconfirmation of the couple’s earlier love, allowing him to regularly visit his son—despite Nicole’s lawyer’s “slightly” better terms for her client—while accepting a year-residency at UCLA to be closer to Henry.

      This is, after all, a movie about celebrity wealth, people who can make such decisions that are somewhere between “reasonable and crazy.” Most of us, in the same situation, would not have had those choices available, alas. And this is what is Baumbach fails to perceive. The general audience, filled with filed divorce cases simply cannot redeem their lives with lovely songs, wonderfully performed, from the musical about the male single Bobby who refuses marriage, from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. Yes, it’s lovely to hear the three women, Nicole, her mother and sister perform “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” and the even more enjoyable end song from that musical, “Being Alive” sung quite brilliantly by Adam Driver:

 

Someone to hold me too close.

Someone to hurt me too deep.

Someone to sit in my chair,

And ruin my sleep,

And make me aware,

Of being alive.

Being alive.

 

Somebody need me too much.

Somebody know me too well.

Somebody pull me up short,

And put me through hell,

And give me support,

For being alive.

Make me alive.

Make me alive.

 

      Currently estimated, the divorce rate in the United States is between 49-50%. In other words, all those lovely weddings and the couples’ beautiful marital vows is a total crapshoot, half of them ending up in the hell of divorce, not the hell of love of which the Sondheim lyric suggests.

      If Baumbach’s film seems to argue for an affirmative solution, for most of those now-separated individuals there is no easy way out. For nearly half of our population, being alive results also in being half-dead. And their children, as Baumbach’s films attest, are left devastated.

      Unlike The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story is a kind of Hollywood romance-movie, wherein everything seems to turn out just fine, father, mother, son remaining in a kind of clumsy relationship spelled out by a later scene of the Halloween trick-or-treat visits, Nicole and her new boyfriend, along with her son, appearing in costumes that resemble The Beatles, while Charlie tags along as a kind of ghost.

      While I liked this film, it also made me very sad, particularly since I now have survived nearly 50 years of love, support, and hell.

 

Los Angeles, December 15, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2019).