Steven Soderbergh | Erin Brockovich / 2000

missing the ball

by Douglas Messerli

 

Susannah Grant (screenplay), Steven Soderbergh (director) Erin Brockovich / 2000

 

I am certain that I first saw Steven Soderbergh’s film Erin Brockovich when it premiered in 2000; but I have seen it so many times since that I no longer can recall my first feelings about it.  It is the kind of commercial movie that I occasionally enjoy watching—a morally righteous presentation of an underdog, Erin Brockovich (Julia Roberts, playing, in this case, the out-of-work, nearly broke, under-educated mother of three young children) who proves her intelligence and competence by going up against a huge, evil business empire (in this instance Pacific Gas and Electric) by working with sometimes equal frisson with a small-time lawyer, Ed Mastry (Albert Finney).

   

     Surely a film that fits so nicely into the genre (which includes films such as All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor) immediately appealed to me, who, admittedly, have always secretly defined myself as a sort of outsider prophet. Brockovich’s amazing pluck, devotion to her cause, and empathetic embracement of those hundreds of individuals whom she discovered had been suffering the cancers and other diseases caused by PG&E’s callous use of unlined cooling tanks containing the dread carcinogenic hexavalent chromium 6 made her the kind of unintentional hero who any moral citizen can admire—despite the fact that this very sexual being with two previous husbands and, suddenly, a current, live-in boyfriend who is somewhat inexplicably devoted to her children, jokingly describes using her cleavage as entry to the division of country records and later jocularly reports to the astonished law firm working with her boss that she was able to obtain the 600 some signatures necessary because she performed “sexual favors”:

 

Kurt Potter: Wha... how did you do this?

Erin Brockovich: Well, um, seeing as how I have no brains or legal expertise, and Ed here was   

     losing all faith in the system, am I right?

Ed Masry: Oh, yeah, completely. No faith, no faith...

Erin Brockovich: I just went out there and performed sexual favors. Six hundred and thirty-four  

      blow jobs in five days... I'm really quite tired.

 

     The truth—at least the way the movie portrays it—is apparently that Brockovich’s casual dress and down-to-earth manner is what helps her to communicate with the Hinkley natives in a way that the lawyers cannot. Even the “deep throat”-like revelation of a former Pacific Gas and Electric employee, Charles Embry (Tracey Walker) that the company was ordered from headquarters to destroy evidentiary information, is based on what “she looks like,” the fact that she looks like a woman to whom you could tell anything—everything.”

     All of this helps to make the former Miss Wichita (in truth the real Erin Brockovich was crowned the far more glamorous-sounding “Miss Pacific Coast”) an even more miraculous and formidable figure, a woman who, thanks to Julia Roberts, seems to have everything: beauty, family, brains—and suddenly a career! How can you not love this astonishing figure?

    But this time, watching the film on my home DVD the other night, something else kept pulling at me as I watched the loveable flick. While early on in the film Erin describes herself as a very ordinary person—“I just wanna be a good mom, a nice person, a decent citizen. Just wanna take good care of my kids. You know?”—as the film progresses, she becomes fewer and fewer of any of those things she desires. Even though she eventually is earning enough money to pay for daycare for her children, she continues to leave them in the care of her “biker” neighbor, George (Aaron Eckhart). When, understandably frustrated with her lack of personal interest in him, he leaves her, she proceeds to lug them around both to her office and to her homestead visits of potential clients. We have to presume that she just hasn’t been able to find the time to get a proper care person or to enter them into nearby schools.

     Previously, she has spent so much time away from them that her son, Matthew (Scotty Leavenworth) and her daughter, Katie (Gemmenne de la Peña) show signs of strong resentment about their mother’s absence, anger which she meets with equal frustration instead of the necessary sympathy. Her absences have also meant that she has painfully missed important events in her childrens’ lives, including her youngest daughter’s first word, reported by George to have been “ball.”

     If at times Brokovich seems to taking a slightly feminist position, arguing, for example, that neither of her childrens’ fathers cared about what she might think or feel, at other times in this work it is quite apparent that the character is still entirely dependent upon men, particularly the kindness and passivity of George. Obviously, one could argue that this paradox is what faces many women with the competing pulls of family and career, and we sympathize, as does the script, with Brokovich’s plight.

      Yet we cannot quite escape the fact that this woman is still a very needy girl, so desperate for recognition of her abilities and that she is nearly willing to give anything for the attention; as she demands of George:

 

                  For the first time in my life, I got people respecting

                  me. Please, don't ask me to give it up.

 

In fact, she does not give “it” up, but does in some very real ways abandon her children and most definitely sacrifices George in the bargain.

     Susannah Grant’s script attempts to ameliorate this trade-off slightly by having her son read one of the dispositions about a young girl his age suffering cancer because of chemical effects. And in the final scene, Brockovich takes George with her to visit one of the suffering families so that he might see what he made possible by allowing her to work.

      Nonetheless, at film’s end, as the former Midwestern beauty queen stands in her office with her two-million-dollar check in reward for her remarkable achievements, we can’t help but feel that she has somehow missed the ball—that, at the very least, she has left something behind.

      In real life, if there is such a thing, Brockovich married again, raising her children with her new husband Eric Ellis, a relationship that also ended in divorce. I have no information on how her children turned out. But perhaps the film does hint at some of the tensions that would actually recur later in the real hero’s life. Along with one of her ex-husbands, the character upon whom George was based, attempted to sue her in a bungled con-job, suggesting that she had had an affair with her boss Ed Mastry. Fortunately, neither Brockovich nor Mastry took the bait. What is clear, however, is that real life can never be as good or bad as a motion picture portrays it—nor as big or small as the figures it represents.

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (July 2014).

Joel Coen and Ethan Coen | The Ballad of Buster Scruggs / 2018

masters of mayhem and death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (screenwriters and directors) The Ballad of Buster Scruggs / 2018

 

Those bad-boy brothers of American cinema are at it again in their new anthology of 6 short films, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, serving up along with Thanksgiving dinner, mayhem and death. I used to describe Joel and Ethan Coen as being cynical, but over the years I guess I become inured to their so very well-made films, now preferring to perceive most of their works as American versions of the Grand Guignol theater, a popular French-born format mostly featuring rape and death, with larceny, robbery, and other dark-doings dropped in for free.

      In many ways their film-making is a sort of arthouse version of the films of Tod Browning with a large dash of James Whale thrown into the brew of spices of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, whipped up with a postmodern syrup that gives us a stew that despite its sour aftertastes is utterly delicious. Yes, I mix my metaphors, but so too do they.

      Throughout their work the brothers have treated the most serious topics not simply the way the Grand Guignol masters did, as subjects of absolute fascination and utter significance, but as only Americans might, with a sense of innocence and good humor. If you’re going to kidnap a baby, you might as well leave him on the roof you your car (Raising Arizona, the very first Coen brother’s movie I saw with Dennis Phillips in Sacramento), if you intend to create a Frankenstein, you can’t do better than Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men). And it is no accident that these always winking kids choose Western shoot-‘em-up myths as the background for some of their films, in particular True Grit and now the 6 films that make up The Ballad.

      It doesn’t hurt that the Coens’ work with some of the very best cinematographers (in this case Bruno Delbonnel), composers (central to the film replete with singing cowboys are the compositions in this work by Carter Burwell). And it doesn’t hurt that over the years they have employed some of the best of Hollywood (and non-Hollywood) actors as their performers. In this instance, the Coen’s have gathered young and older actors such as Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Harry Melling, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Jefferson Mays, Tyne Daly, and numerous others—all quite excellent.

      Such a large concept, its numerous actors, and various locations—the most difficult of which was “The Gal Who Got Rattled” which required 14 wagons, shipped to Nebraska where they filmed, and many sets of suborn oxen and other desert locations for the first, title film and the second, “Near Algodones,” wherein the brothers satirically recreate a “literal” pan-shot when the bank teller who has been robbed comes after the robber draped with pans for protection for any bullets that might be sent his way.

  

     There are lots of such witty cinematic allusions, including the hilarious rise of the singing cowboy as an angel, lyre in hands, after his death or the wonderful theatrical mish-mash of Shelley, Shakespeare, the Bible, and Lincoln in one of the very best of these films, “Meal Ticket,” in which the lovely armless and legless actor is replaced with a chicken who seems, like the horse Clever Hans, to know how to add and subtract.

       Although I am well known as the spoiler of all times for those who love to not know ahead of time what the story is—I have myself never cared about knowing the “plot” ahead of time, focusing instead of how that story is told—I will spoil no further plots this time ‘round. I think I’ve already suggested that all of them ends in single or multiple deaths. The stories are all fascinating in the manner of Bret Harte and O. Henry, with multiple ironic twists and turns. And the Coens’ use of the Western American landscape is stunning and complex.

        Moreover, the clever brothers have chosen not to release this through a major studio—studios who might surely have all turned the proposition down after 25 years, purportedly, of their work on the project—in order to get their work produced, in this case by the ambitious on-line streaming service Netflix, who released the film to theaters only for a short period, thus delimiting theater revenues. Somewhat like the great European directors, among them Godard and Fassbinder, the Coens have now perceived how to go around the system in order to create something that Hollywood producers simply cannot perceive as safe investments. But oh what a lovely contribution this is. In the hands of Joel and Ethan Coen death is a lovely thing to behold, frightening and as brutal as it may be. I don’t quite comprehend how Netflix evaluate their successes, except for their overall subscribers; and this work has generally been ignored in all the award season selections (which it certainly shouldn’t have been), but kudos for them for having funded such a controversial masterwork.

Los Angeles, December 20, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

Don Askarian | Musicians / 2000

performers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don Askarian (screenwriter and director) Musicians / 2000

 

Although the director has called his 2000 documentary, Musicians, I would suggest that, although many of the figures in this film are indeed musicians, Askarian displays as much interest in “performance”—particularly dance and high-wire movements (which often mimic dance)—as he is with musical sound. And, at times, even when he does focus on musicians, the interest of their performance has less to do with musical sound than with other things in which they engage.

     The several scenes filmed in dance clubs and grunge bars in his homeland, Armenia, has far less to do with music—although we do hear recorded music of pieces that seemingly have not been performed in the US—and more to do with the dancing which animates his figures. Perceiving this, Askarian uses stop-frame and strobe lighting to great effect, representing the emotional feelings of the young dancers he is portraying. 

    In one long scene a small musical group, with unbelievably beat-up horns and a long worn-out drum, arrive at their destination against a rotting wall in the city, occasionally blaring a note or two before they sit down across the overturned drum to dine on tomatoes, bread, a stew, cured meats and, most importantly, slightly diluted vodka, before they are willing to take up their instruments again. Their brief performance sounds as if it might have been played by just such a group in Sicily as in the mountainous country north of Turkey and Iran. But soon the players have put down their instruments again to drink more vodka, and it is clear that despite the director’s urging for them to continue in their concert, they are perhaps too drunk to continue with the music. Yet their whole performance, such as it is, is one of the most joyous, even comical moments, of Askarian’s film.

     Another “musical” performance involves a funeral ritual at a cemetery. A young boy burns something over the grave before anointing the spot with oil and serving drinks to the two men who then play a brief piece upon their reed, flute-like instruments. But the ceremony is far more important, and impressive, than the music with which they close the event.

     One of the longest scenes involves a brilliant tight-rope walker performing before the ancient monastery of Khor-Virap. With only a balancing pole, the walker not only gracefully crisscrosses the metal rope which is nearly invisible against the landscape, but walks blindly, his entire body covered in a black robe, across the same space, climbs small ladders balanced upon the wire, and dances in leaps and bounds across the same space as if he were flying in mid-air. True, this performance is also accompanied by music, but it is the wire ballet that is truly awe-inspiring.

     When musicians are the subject of Askarian’s documentary—a drummer, two accordion players, and musicians performing on string instruments that seem related to the lute—they are generally placed in covered pathways, alleys, the halls of Yerevan dwellings, and other odd locations were the camera focuses not only on their performances, but on the comings and goings of passersby or on the street activities of everyday persons, young boys, girls, old men, and women who live their lives, apparently, as much on the street as inside their houses. Throughout the strange and soaring music these musicians’ performances is played out against a world of decay—walls, buildings, gates, and other objects peeling away and in near collapse. Even the men who perform these pieces are nearly destroyed, one accordionist—who plays what appears to be improvised pieces—is missing a leg; another displays a large portrait of himself in his youth, in almost painful testimony to the old, toothless man he has become.

      That is, obviously, Askarian’s major point. As he writes of this film:

 

               What happens after the empire? All know and expect it in the advance,

               only one thing they don’t know: Despite the destruction, the disintegration,

               the betrayal…despite the annihilation of all bases of the life, the music

               sounds, and how it sounds! Higher and higher, over the human sorrow

               and over the pain! It is also one, daily practiced mental attitude, stand

               and exercise, that awakens a hope in the abandoned and in those, who

               already have lost the last hope.

 

I would argue, however, it isn’t just the music that represents this but the positions, the movements these figures make, their insistence upon performing whatever it is they left to display. The old women who stare out the windows, those who stand upon the streets with a kind of defiance, the young club dancers throwing themselves into the act of movement, even the careful ritual of dining in an open street with the drum standing in for their table, certainly the amazing high-wire leaps of the ropewalker, reveal a kind of graceful opposition to the world which they inhabit, a world in which their survive through their performances, through these very personal acts of art.

    We enter an institution of art in this film only once, where we see a man wearing a costume of another being just like him, ritualistically battling it out with the other, wrestling with and tossing over and over the other and his own body. Askarian views the scene from the top, a spiral staircase spinning out below the camera. Is this his statement about the spiraling down, the inevitable need to wrestle with oneself to express a vision, in short, a failure, of formal art? As a noted filmmaker, Askarian clearly has known that struggle throughout his life.  The folk artists whom he primarily observes have no such dilemmas; their performances are simply part and parcel of the greater community, as natural as breathing in and breathing out.

 

Los Angeles, October 21, 2011

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2011)

Howard Hawks | Twentieth Century / 1934

standing still

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Gene Fowler (uncredited) and Preston Sturges (uncredited) (screenplay, based on a play by Charles Bruce Millholland), Howard Hawks (director) Twentieth Century / 1934

 

Along with It Happened One Night, produced by the same studio, Columbia Pictures the very same year, Howard Hawks’ 1934 film, Twentieth Century (named not after the century, but the famed train from Chicago to New York) would come to define what was soon to be called “screwball comedies.” In Hawks’ case, the genre generally involved loveable but fairly inept male figures who meet up with powerfully smart women with whom they quickly fall in love but are continually vexed, encouraging the two verbally (and sometimes physically) to duke it out. The fun, one might argue, is all in the fight, a realization Edward Albee must have perceived in his less comedic representation, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Yet, it would be interesting to trace the relationship of the Albee play to this genre, particularly as practiced by Hawkes, which someday I might attempt. In any event, it is evident that Hawkes felt that if you truly loved someone, you endlessly fought.

  

   In this case the two boxers are Lily Garland (formerly Mildred Plotka) (Carole Lombard, surely the queen of screwball comedy) and Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore, performing here in his very last great role).

      Jaffe has just hired Garland to perform in his new play, a seemingly ridiculous Southern melodrama. The problem is, as assistant director Max Jacobs (Charles Lane) quickly perceives, Garland cannot act. In order to teach her how to properly emote, Jaffe uses chalk to chart out her movements, and a pearl-headed pin in order to teach her how to scream on cue.

 

     Despite what appears to be a rather insipid affair, the play is a hit, and Garland becomes a star, Jaffe quickly insinuating himself into her life and bed. Over the next few years, she stars in three more of his shows, turning them all into hits.

      But during this same period, it is evident, this hammy Svengali has utterly attempted to control Garland’s life, where she goes, and who she befriends. Finally, fed up with his controlling ways, she determines to go to a party on her own. A fearful Jaffe relents, promising to be more trusting, yet secretly hires a detective to follow and goes even further by tapping her phone. When she finally discovers his treachery, she leaves for Hollywood where she continues to be a great star.

     Jaffe, meanwhile, trying to survive without his Pygmalion, produces flop after flop, and finally must escape another stage failure in Chicago by stowing away on the Twentieth Century train in disguise.

     Quite by accident (there is no explanation of why Garland is suddenly in Chicago making her way to New York, except to suggest that she is on her way to see her new director, Jaffe’s former employee, Max Jacobs) his protégé is ensconced in the train suite adjoining Jaffe’s, and when his comic stooges, Oliver Webb (Walter Connolly) and the constantly drunk Owen O'Malley (Roscoe Karns) discover that fact, Jaffe plots to get his girl back, intruding even upon a love scene she is playing out with her new boyfriend, hoping to get her to sign a contract for a new, as yet nonexistent play.

     Add to these hijinks the existence on board of a harmless lunatic, Mathew J. Clark (Etienne Girardot), who posts religiously-inspired “End of the World” stickers over nearly every object and being on the train and who also passes out bogus checks, and you have the making of a true farce

that, evidently, upon the film’s release was not well received, several critics arguing for a more restrained comedy. For today’s audience, however, the chaos that ensues is just about perfect, and certainly after World War II and, even more particularly, in our quite insane Trump era, makes perfect sense.

     Jaffe’s strategy, involving an exaggerated struggle with Clark and a mad quickly cooked-up plot for a drama about Mary Magdalene—which he describes as: "sensual, heartless, but beautiful – running the gamut from the gutter, to glory—can you see her Lily?—the little wanton ending up in tears at the foot of the cross. I'm going to have Judas strangle himself with her hair." Of course, the ruse works, since, as we all know Garland is still in love with her Svengali, despite her protests.

And despite the film’s box office failure at the time of its release, the movie helped make Lombard’s career, even though some critics saw it no more than a satisfactory performance. Perhaps they simply couldn’t see her often whining hysterics as the comic delights we see them as today.          

     The film ends with a kind of repeat of the beginning, with Jaffe’s domineering directorial commands as they rehearse the new, equally unbearable, play. Yet, it too is sure to be a hit, for Garland, we recognize, is the true one in control, try what he might. In screwball comedies it is always the woman, even if she temporarily gives in to the masculine authority, who rules. And that’s the fun of this genre, the irony that the male ego doesn’t like to admit. Intelligent women rule the world, sometimes even in their apparent submission, a theme repeated again and again throughout cinema. As Lombard, about to marry a surprised and nonplussed William Powell in another classic screwball comedy, My Man Godfrey, commands her soon-to-be husband:

 

                             Stand still, Godfrey. It'll all be over in a minute.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2018).