Archives for December 2005

“Catherine sometimes started at the boldness of her own surmises, and sometimes hoped or feared that she had gone too far; but they were supported by such appearances as made their dismissal impossible.”

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

A friend and I made plans to go to the movies Friday night, and he more or less handed me the reins when it came to picking the movie. Ah, carte blanche. No wrangling, wheeling, dealing, or tradeoffs of the sort that, in ensuring neither party is bitterly opposed to the chosen fare, ensure as well that neither party is delighted with it. Christmas had come early.

On the strength of this review, I chose The Family Stone, a decision in which I was only galvanized by a different critic’s snide, pun-infested look far down upon it from up high. When a critic spends a paragraph dictating what “a better movie”–i.e., a different movie–would have done, rather than reviewing the movie at hand, you know it must have confounded her. And any movie that confounded Manohla Dargis is a movie I’m game for. (Another strange reaction came from David Edelstein: he likes the movie but thinks the insular, judgmental Stones are the ideal family. They’re not even the protagonists. What a less interesting movie he saw than the one I did.)

Good thing, too. My friend and I both were taken with The Family Stone, for many of the reasons that Armond White’s typically provocative review corrals. The other possibility had been Pride and Prejudice, which I think would have been his own choice. So as the movie began I was a little nervous about having steered us in this other direction, not knowing whether it would pan out. But as the early plot–a comedy of manners that cuts far closer to the bone than many of its kind–played out, I thought that the spirit of Jane Austen was within shouting distance even here. Not the Austen of Pride and Prejudice, but the author of Northanger Abbey, a novel in which the gothic terror feared and dreaded by the heroine is all in her head, but the social terror attending her scrutiny by the family she wishes to marry into is very real.

Although it begins as a straightforward, funny-unsettling examination of such terror, the movie broadens its focus to the search for love and acceptance more generally, and gets much more complicated. It tries to do a lot, and for the most part succeeds even as it veers from the cool, surgical dissection of social mores–with a central scene in this vein that forgoes the anesthesia but is as electrifying to watch as it is painful–to slapstick physical comedy to romantic farce to frank sentiment (I’m trying to steer away from naming it sentimentality, but White calls the movie “intelligently sentimental,” which is another viable solution). There are a lot of balls in the air by the end. Everything is under the control of the director, but just. I watched the whole thing with my heart in my throat.

Diane Keaton, whom I was laughing at just last week while rewatching The Godfather, Part II on DVD, is very subtle here, and Sarah Jessica Parker is like some whole new actress you’ve never seen before. As White points out, there are superficial similarities between this character and Carrie Bradshaw, but by Parker’s second scene any fugitive thoughts of Sex and the City are left in the dust. Her vulnerability here has nothing to do with the faux vulnerability–curable by the right shoes–of her television role. She’s fantastic.

Here’s a little bit of the White review that proved so decisive for me:

Despite awkward shifts of tone in Bezucha’s emotional balancing act, he makes up for his flaws whenever he looks into Meredith’s and the Stones’ crooked hearts. In one such sequence Susannah, the film’s quietest character, sits alone at night to watch Meet Me in St. Louis on TV. (“This is my favorite part.”) Images of Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” are juxtaposed with a montage of each character isolated with their dashed or unexpected hopes. Garland’s plaintive, beseeching voice underscores Bezucha’s vision.

Understand: This is a great moment because it’s not ironic. It’s felt. The same way Vincente Minnelli felt it and meant it 61 years ago only, now, in modern terms–challenging the antipathy and unease that fills the Stone household. The pixilated TV distortion of Garland’s cartoon-vivid face looms ghost-like, an unreachable idealization of what family life should be, poignantly played against Stone hard reality.

Oh, and it’s a laugh riot, too. Go go go.

A reader writes:

I find it odd what a presence you’ve become in my life; I didn’t think it was possible to care so much, to be so saddened by, to fear the loss of a person whom I’ve never met.

Take care of your health.

Nor could I have possibly imagined how comforted I would be by the kind words of hundreds of people whom I’ve never met. My love to you all.

Bad weather and the threat of a transit strike notwithstanding, I spent most of Friday successfully relocating to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I now plan to spend the next two weeks doing next to nothing. Today, for instance, I have just two items on my truncated itinerary: (1) Shopping for heart-healthy food. (2) Answering my accumulated e-mail.

Regarding the e-mail, I want all of you to know how much your warm words have buoyed me up. I only hope that frequent blushing isn’t bad for the heart! I expect it’ll take the better part of the coming week for me to get back in touch with everyone, so please be patient. I don’t want to do this–or anything else–in a hurry.

I miss the blog very much, and I intend to post on occasion from Smalltown, though not obsessively. OGIC has been laboring mightily (and very successfully) to keep the content flowing in my absence, so I think I’ll let her do that for a little while longer, poking my head in at odd moments whenever I feel so moved.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go see whether there’s a grocery in Smalltown that sells Ry-Krisp….

Be careful, it’s my heart,

It’s not my watch you’re holding, it’s my heart.

It’s not the note I sent you that you quickly burned,

It’s not the book I lent you that you never returned.

Remember, it’s my heart,

The heart with which so willingly I part.

It’s yours to take, to keep or break,

But please, before you start,

Be careful, it’s my heart.

Irving Berlin, “Be Careful, It’s My Heart” (music by Berlin, courtesy of Marc Myers)

Whenever anybody starts to get on my nerves, I just clutch my chest and start wheezing. It’s amazing how that makes them shape right up!

“All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.”

Jean Renoir (quoted in Robert Hughes, Film: Book I)

Readers write in with two different points of view on the MFA and its rather blunt instrument, the writing workshop. First, a quarrel with my cynicism:

As a veteran of a famed MFA program in theatre directing and several playwriting workshops, I must take issue with your complaint against MFA programs. Granted, some of the craft “rules” taught there are arbitrary, based on the instructor’s whim (for example, one of my favorite playwriting teachers hated all plays set at Thanksgiving). But such “rules” are made to be broken when the artist does so for an effective artistic reason. The point is, master the form first, then learn how to bend it to your own ends.

I can’t tell you the number of scripts I’ve read in which the writer can’t begin to tell a cohesive story, or plants obvious and sloppy exposition (often having people who have known each other all their lives suddenly rehash background information they both know), or fills the script with clich