Lasse Hallström | What’s Eating Gilbert Grape / 1993

up and forward

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Hedges (screenplay, based on his novel), Lasse Hallström (director) What’s Eating Gilbert Grape / 1993

 

Swedish director Lasse Hallström is well known for his oddball, yet mostly gentle and sometimes sentimental views of family and community life, beginning with My Life as a Dog, including The Cider House Rules, and Chocolat. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (from 1993) is an important step along that directorial trajectory.

     With Johnny Depp as the hero of this tale, Leonardo DiCaprio as Arnie Grape, his mentally disabled younger brother, John C. Reilly as a local commentator, Tucker Van Dyke, Mary Steenburgen as Gilbert’s married secret lover, and Juliette Lewis as the new woman in Gilbert’s life, Hallström could not have gathered a better cast. With the famed cinematographer Sven Nykvist (Bergman’s favorite) and the clever production designer Bernt Capra (father of my Green Integer co-administrator and typesetter, Pablo), the director of this film has some of the very best talents in the industry. The young DiCaprio was nominated for Academy Award for his role as the disarmingly honest Arnie, a grown-up version—he is just turning 18 in this film, despite the doctor’s proclamation that he probably would not live beyond the age of 10—of the younger Arnie of Alfred Hitchcock’s equally oddball, romantic work, The Trouble with Harry—a child, I might remind you that could not differentiate between yesterday, today, or tomorrow.

     In fact, if you think carefully, there are a good number of similarities between the two films. Both involve small US towns (in Hitchcock’s case a kind of Vermont paradise and in Hallström’s an equally small Endora, Iowa—a fictional Iowa town) wherein handsome young home-towners suddenly fall in love with outsiders; both films involve the gossip of locals, which is gradually transformed into more caring and comprehending understanding of those among them; and both are filled up with eccentric characters whose lives become almost unbearable in a world where, as the voiceover announces early in this film, “we’re not going anywhere,” although none of Hitchcock’s characters wish to leave their paradise.

     The “we” of this announcement is not only Gilbert, who works for a small grocer in the center of the town, threatened with extinction by a new supermarket FoodLand on the edge of town (echoing what has happened in so many small US towns when big stores such as Walmart move in), but his two sisters, Amy (Laura Harrington), who is now serving basically as the mother of the tribe, and Ellen (Mary Kate Schellhardt), a younger teenager who still helps in family chores.

     Together they care not only for the troubled Arnie but for the grossly obese mother Bonnie (wonderfully performed by Darlene Cates), who since her husband’s suicide has not left the couch for the last 6 years. One of the quiet rituals of this film is the set table moved over to accommodate the unmovable mother, dressed in a frowsy housedress from which she has probably never escaped. The movie does not explain her shower and bathroom duties, but the audience can only wonder about those issues. As it is, the house their father has built is suffering from her occasional shuffles from the living room into the kitchen.

     Accordingly, we understand almost immediately “what’s eating Gilbert Grape,” stuck in a place that will not allow him any movement, even away from the desperate housewife which he is seemingly forced into sexual encounters since she is one of the very best customers of his employer Lampson’s.

     Yet the good-looking, in this case slightly red-haired Depp as Gilbert, does his best for his troubled family, helping to calm-down his brother from his often attempts to climb the town’s water-tower, and to keep his mother from the town’s abuse for her gargantuan proportions. When Arnie attempts to climb, he helps by singing him down; yet the town leaders are growing impatient with his behavior, and threaten to control the child—even if we and the entire town know he, at 18, is no longer a true child, even if his mind cannot comprehend this.

      Up and down and in-between are the dominate images of this film. If the others are “not going anywhere,” Arnie’s climbing trees and the water-tower are evidence that there are other directions.

The in-between is death by drowning, clearly a metaphor representing the problem of not being able to escape.

     The husband of the woman with whom Gilbert is having an affair buys his own troubled children a small swimming pool, which the father drowns in after suffering a heart attack. Gilbert gives Arnie a warm bath but forgets him there until he discovers the boy shivering the next morning in the now cold water, afraid, surely like his mother, of ever entering the water again. The shock of the event finds Gilbert breaking his very own rules that proclaim, “nobody touches Arnie.” Shocked by his own behavior, he gets in his truck and drives off.

     This movie begins with new possibilities as Gilbert and Arnie stand beside an empty country road to watch the procession of the annual International Harvester Travelall trailers who visit the small town to camp in a nearby recreation location. Arnie is delighted by their arrival, but it is Gilbert who truly discovers another life when he meets the wonderfully open-minded Becky, to whom Arnie runs in despair. Instead of “up-and-down,” the world Arnie has defined as his perimeters, she helps him to perceive a more horizontal movement through space, taking him into the river waters to help cure him of his aquaphobia.

      Back from his own horizontal voyage of guilt, Gilbert attends the primitive birthday party for the child who has lived beyond the prediction of his death. And meanwhile, when Arnie does finally reach the vertical heights of the water-town he has so long been seeking, the moribund Bonnie finally arises from her endless lethargy, for the first time in years, to horizontally move in an attempt save her son from police detention.

     Gilbert, clearly in love with the adventuresome Becky, dares even to invite her into their troubled home to meet his mother, something he has before imagined doing. Bonnie’s gentle statement, “I did not always look like this,” says it all. She recognizes the horrific burden she has been to her own family.

     When the overweight woman finally makes her own vertical voyage up the stairs of the rickety house to the bed she hasn’t used in years, the family finds her the next morning dead. Surely, since they will have to use a crane to remove her from the house, the neighbors will laugh and hoot about the event.

   

     Once again, however, the family comes together to protect one of their own, removing their possessions from the family home and setting it afire, almost like an Indian cremation event or, perhaps, closer to Andrei Tarkovsky’s sacrifice of the grand home in the movie of that same name.

      Yet that act allows the family a new freedom to move in a horizontal direction into the future.

Amy, we are told is now managing a bakery and Ellen is switching her educational goals. Gilbert and Arnie wait by the roadside for Becky, who picks them up in her airstream trailer, presumably to take them on a new road in their lives.

 

Los Angeles, November 26, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).

Sergio Oksman | Uma História para os Modlin (The Story of the Modlins) / 2012

disappearance of an american family

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carlos Muguiro, Emilio Tomé, Sergio Oksman (screenwriters), Sergio Oksman (director) Uma História para os Modlin (The Story of the Modlins) / 2012

 

As strange as is Crystelle Moselle’s story of Manhattan-based wolfpack family (The Wolfpack, 2015), two years before Spanish director Sergio Oskman’s The Story of the Modlins takes us into the heart an even odder and more mysterious American family, Elmer, Margaret, and their young son Nelson Modlin, who, after Elmer appeared in a bit part in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, transported themselves to a dark, constantly shuttered Madrid apartment, where the father and mother lived for the next 30 years.

 

     No one can quite know the family’s true story. The only evidence left is a large trove of photographs, notes, tapes, and other ephemera found near a garbage bin on a Madrid side street, near their former apartment. The packages of unexplained materials left after the family’s deaths, were immediately recognized by the finder and director of this documentary, Oskman, to be of interest and value; but how he might perceive and organize this material was left up the director’s own imagination. Given the family’s isolation and absolute secrecy, there is no way of even establishing a true chronological track of the family’s strange activities, let alone a way of interpreting what their semi-artistic activities and rituals actually meant.

      Oskman proffers us possible solutions without ever insisting on the veracity of his narrative—which, of course, makes it all the more fascinating. What might we imagine of the neighbors next door who never invite anyone into their home and keep the entire place, except for a few hours each day, in entire darkness.

 

     What he does piece together is that Margaret was born of a wealthy Carolina family, whose parents disinherited her after she took up an acting career and, especially when she quickly fell in love with the young would-be actor, Elmer. The couple, nonetheless, married, while Elmer, with delusions of grandeur moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting, a career which, as for so many, ended nowhere. Playing bit parts on television and serials, Elmer, traditionally handsome but without, apparently, much of an acting ability, grew increasingly frustrated, while his wife increasingly moved into the art world, with a particular talent at sculpture-making.

       Today, her art seems amateurish and crude, particularly when she later turns to painting, struggling to represent the entire Apocalypse, with her beloved son, Nelson, as model.

        But, quite obviously, something meaningful to the would-be artists happened before this, immediately after Elmer briefly appeared in Rosemary’s Baby as an on-looker at the very last scene, wherein Mia Farrow, knife in hand, joins the party celebrating the birth of the devil. Peering into the black-covered cradle, at first, is shocked by what she sees, but ultimately cannot resist her motherly duties. But, of course, this is fiction, and the devil with the empty cradle is a thing of the imagination: we never see that horrible visage, and the cradle which, so the documentary reports, was empty.

       Yet, apparently, the Christian-loving Modlins did see something beyond what was presented on the screen. If it is hard to imagine what Elmer thought as he stood in that vast room in the Dakota Apartment building; it is not as impossible to imagine that he saw the end of his career; this was the biggest role in which he would ever appear. The family, it appears, decided to leave the society which had spurned it, embracing a culture they knew nothing about and whose language they did not speak, in order to play out their own hallucinatory fascinations which might explain their own alternative dreams and Christian holocaust beliefs.  

      With the art of Margaret at the center of their lives, the family seemed to go into a kind of artful trance, with, evidently, Margaret—that, at least, is the presumption of the director—filming her young teenage son early in the mornings as he seemed to play out almost ritual stances, but which almost suggest a perverse kind child pornography. And, even if the father was not directly involved in these photographic sessions, when Nelson later escaped from the family, he attempted to replace him, often in the nude.

 

      Oskman suggests that he can see the teenage rebellion growing in the son’s stances and facial gestures as time moves forward—although, time here is a subjective perception, with photographs not clearly expressing precisely when different pictorial compositions were actually filmed. But at one point, soon after Nelson’s photo-sessions actually spill over to the fire-escape, he seems to disappear from his parent’s lives, with only two or three later photographs sent to them and his passport (how the parents obtained his youthful passport is never explained) suggesting his richer life of travel and change.

      In the last two photographs, the beautifully lithe Pan whom his parents loved has trans-morphed into a heavyweight man, who has clearly attempted to shed his youthful “radiance.”

     The final scenes, portrayed through a video tape taken by clearly unexpected relatives, in which Elmer quickly tours them through his wife’s art projects—all centered on a Christian project that one might imagine to be a kind of apotheosis of the evil he had encountered in the filming of the Polanski movie—ends with Margaret’s rather remarkable sculpture of their two heads, in which their ashes were, they announced, to be placed.

 

     Some short time after this “unexpected visit,” Margaret died of a heart attack in Elmer’s arms, and Nelson, again soon after, died of a similar heart attack, leaving the confused and lonely Elmer to sleep upon the apartment floor, eating from what he might be able to cook over the fireplace. His body was found, after several days, with a bottle of gin in his hands. The Modlins had all disappeared from reality as quickly as they had attempted to escape it a few decades earlier.

      As bad as her somewhat surrealist “Christian-based” art appears on screen, it would have been fascinating to see what the art really looked like. It’s not exactly that she had no talent, we perceive, just a lack of vision—which was surely, also, the problem with her husband’s inability to act—just as was true with John Cassavetes’ character in the original Rosemary’s Baby to find a role in film and theater. The photographs of her son, moreover, are utterly fascinating. Although we have no idea what theatrical rituals he was attempting to play out, they are riveting. Wouldn’t it be wonderful just to see a show of those works today?

       Oskman doesn’t say this, but hints at the traumatic question: what do you do it you have devoted your life to art and no one cares about it or wants even to see it? Elmer’s singular moment in his acting career was to take his wayward visitors through his wife’s “great contributions” to the world of art.

      The story of the Modlin’s, alas, is the story of millions of would-be artists, people of great belief in the imagination, but who simply don’t know how to express it or haven’t the talent to do so. This film reeks of the bitterness that happens when the loving and caring artists simply cannot face the truth—particularly, when the society itself has not been able to accept their self-imagined gifts.

       Given all the bad art I have seen in my life, I’d have gladly suggested to some popular gallerist to give Margaret a show. And surely, Elmer Modlin deserved, in some grade B movie, to be offered a small speaking role. At least Nelson saw the world, whether or not he could enjoy it is a mystery that shall never be answered.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2017).

 

 

Sean Lim | You're Gay / 2014 [music video]

going gay

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sean Lim (director) You’re Gay / 2014 [6 minutes] [music video]

 

Fresh off of his first major music video Bubble, gay singer/performer Sebastian Castro came out in the very next year with You’re Gay, a high school gay fantasy. This time he plays a schoolboy who, encountering his beautiful young jock and his shower-room friends in the hall, he nearly goes into a dive straight into the school lockers, desperate to hook up with the hallway cutey.  

    He soon finds himself in the library where he discovers a book titled You’re Gay: A Comprehensive Recipe for Straight to Gay Conversion by, who else, but Sebastian Castro. Before you can say straight to gay, the boy is busy cooking up a magic elixir—not so very different from the one Floozy Suzy cooks up in the 2015 Brazilian film Vagabunda de Meia Tigela to convert his track-running heartthrob—throwing in a pretty flower, a large penile-looking pepper, and a condom to create a lovely golden liquid that he bottles in small pink and other colored balloons.

     Dressed all in white, he enters the school cafeteria, jumps to the table where at the far end sit the jock and his friends, and, pulling out the multi-colored balloon from his backpack begins to lob them into the faces of both boys and girls around him, singing:

                                              You, yeah you! You’re Gay

                                              You just don’t know it yet

                                              Na na na na na na na na na na

 

                                              You, yeah! Dump your girl

                                              or you know better yet

                                              Na na na na na na na na na na

 

                                              Let’s get married now

                                              So I don’t have a rack*

                                              But I’m better endowed

                                              be-be-better endowed

 

                                              Invite your friends

                                              two is a company

                                              and we want a crowd

                                              we-we-we want a crowd

 

                                              You’re one one pop pop pop away

                                              from a bubble (from a bubble)

                                              from a bubble, dripping

                                              with my fucking taste

 

     It doesn’t take long before most of his classmates turn gay, and soon after people all over the world come out. His jock friend goes racing down the hall to escape the inevitable, as his now gay classmates follow, on their way bringing out, as well, one of their teachers who suddenly gets the giggles.

 

        Seb finally corners his destined lover in a classroom, and by the third verse is singing:

 

                                           You’re coming out

                                           You’re putting out

                                           And when they ask what

                                           this is all about

 

                                           You’ll say he was so hot

                                           I couldn’t keep it straight

                                           Run right now before

                                           Before it’s too late

 

                                          Close those ears when he opens his mouth

                                          Close your eyes when he eyes you down south

 

     The jock, as warned, goes on the run, but Seb’s classmates catch him, strip him and ready him for the final lob of the last balloon, after which everyone dances in gay abandon.

      One could argue that in this music video we observe the very opposite of the far-too-numerous high school gay bullying movies. Here the nerdy gay boy turns aggressor, determined to right the homophobic situation by converting all the jocks, their buddies, and sports worshipers into joyous queers. 

 

*In urban street parlance a “rack” is a nice set of tits, but it can also mean a “stash of money.” SEB is arguing that while he doesn’t have tits or cash, he still better endowed, if not financially at least with the size of his cock.

 

Los Angeles, May 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).