The other week I was on a shuttle bus headed back from a wedding reception to the hotel, and we passed a large white van pulled over on the side of the road. The cop car lights were flashing and as we zipped by, I saw the logo on the side of the van. It was a Salvation Army van! What was a Salvation Army van doing out and about at midnight, and in trouble with the law?
My bet is Nathan Detroit found a new place for the craps game.
Rockin' the boat went mobile
I am slowly working my way through the Sam Rockwell catalog. Basically, I want to see anything he’s been in. Doesn’t matter if it was a bit part, because Rockwell’s genius is stealing scenes no matter the role. He’s easily one of the best character actors working today, and also, bonus, he is extremely attractive.
No foolin'
Apparently his mainstream breakthrough was as a vile criminal in The Green Mile, but I remember first seeing him in Charlie’s Angels, in which he plays a shaggy, soft-spoken geek who turns out (11-year spoiler alert) to be the ruthless villain. For a summer popcorn film directed by a man known only by his made-up last name, this actually showed Rockwell’s range nicely. He was easily the shy nerd kissing Drew Barrymore, and just as easily the pompadoured cad shooting her through a window and lighting up a cigarette.
Also, the dancing. He famously loves dancing, and shows off his fancy footwork at every opportunity. I’ve seen him shake it in Charlie’s Angels, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Moon, Iron Man 2, and The Winning Season. No, watch, he’s really good:
I don’t think I’ve seen him in a movie in which he wasn’t unhinged or just a little off. At some point in every film, his eyes go wild with desperation or dark with hopelessness. He often plays someone with a hidden side (Charlie’s Angels, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), or a dangerous side (Snow Angels, The Green Mile), or both (Moon). He invests his characters with such emotion and commitment that I find myself marveling at the humanity he reveals in even his most despicable characters. I’ve read actor interviews about treating their villainous character as the hero of the story in order to find their motivations, but I didn’t really get what that meant til I saw several Rockwell movies close together. He’s never smarter than his sadsacks or kinder than his killers; instead, he knows his sadsack’s frustrations and his killer’s sick itch. He must be a novelist’s dream actor, since he so easily conveys the paragraphs of internal turmoil and meditation usually lost in translation from page to screen.
I’d love to see him on stage and see how his intensity plays out there. But until I get that chance, I’ll be looking out for him in whatever projects he chooses next. Coming soon, Cowboys & Aliens! I’ll be enjoying him, whether he’s looking like this:
Poor clone man, what is your identity now?
or this:
You still look a little lost. I will definitely help you find your way.
What a surprising movie, dearest fellow travelers! When the film started up, and Meryl Streep started in with yet another perfectly practiced accent telling tales from long-ago days while the camera swept over idyllic African vistas, I rolled my eyes and wondered why I’d let Netflix talk me into this. But it turned out to be an impressive film, a romance that investigates what it means to be a relationship, and a historical drama that doesn’t completely romanticize the rich white people’s experiences and their influence on the native black people.
one of many sweeping vistas
Image from http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/blu-ray_reviews51/out_of_africa_blu-ray.htm
Karen von Blixen-Finecke lived a pretty amazing life, marrying twice, growing coffee in the highlands of Kenya, building a school for Kikuyu children, writing a famous memoir, and making sweet, sweet love to Robert Redford. Okay, that last part is just what Meryl Streep gets to do in the film adaptation, but it’s based on real events with Karen’s lover Denys Finch Hatton. The movie’s PG, so we don’t see so much as a boob, but the steaminess of the romance is easily conveyed nonetheless.
My favorite part of the romance was how it was allowed to be a little rough-edged. Sure, there were plenty of scenes in which Karen and Denys share tender moments, or gaze deeply into one another’s eyes, but the conflict between the characters was never resolved to either party’s satisfaction. They were deeply in love, but Karen needed him to be home more often, creating a joint life with her on the farm and not jetting off to do safaris for months at a time, and Denys clung to his independence and his ideal of being able to love someone without possessing them or their time. The movie shows just a couple arguments about their differing needs, but they’re well-written and fair to each character. Karen could easily come across as a needy nag, and Denys could easily be a commitment-phobic cad, but we get to see the validity of both their positions, and the pain it causes them to be unable to compromise on their deeply held beliefs.
How often do you get a romance like that in the movies, one that doesn’t work out (not a big spoiler there; when the movie starts with a voiceover telling us that a man “gave the greatest gift” it’s no big leap to surmise that it ain’t gonna last and probably someone dies), but not because of outside forces like other lovers or an inconvenient death? One that doesn’t work out because love isn’t enough to sustain a relationship if other factors don’t line up like shared ideas about how relationships work and how to balance independence with commitment.
Karen's wedding outfit in "Out of Africa" -- 1913 fashion, yes please!
Image from http://pinoyfilmzealot.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/t500fc-369th-out-of-africa-sydney-pollack-1985/
The other major part of the movie, of course, is that this is a film set in colonial Kenya, a place ruled by a small group of upper-class British men who hardly considered their African “subjects” as anything more than servants and hunting guides. Now I know that Pollack was a sentimentalist, and there is definitely some unfortunate romanticizing and simplifying going on here, but there’s also a surprising amount of complexity and sensitivity. For example, Nairobi in 1913 was far from a homogeneous place but was rather a multicultural hub, with Somalis, Indians, Kikuyu, and Europeans all interacting, and the movie shows that in tracking shots across the marketplace as well as in the background of many tête-a-têtes between main characters. Also, Karen’s connection to the Kikuyu in her life is genuine, and her interest in improving their lives (treating wounds and illnesses in an informal hospital, securing land for her tenants when her farm fails) is real, and appreciated by the beneficiaries. The fact that she says she must get land for “her” Kikuyu, well, that’s paternalism for ya. (Ugh.)
Denys, unlike most of his fellow white men, admires the native Masai and Kikuyu people for having their own traditions, stories, and lifestyles. He still feels totally entitled to hire a local man to be his servant as he wanders the country shooting all the wildlife, of course, and that is an entitlement the film does not address. His admiration also too often veers into Noble Savage territory, but he still provides a welcome contrast to the boorish paternalism of the other members of the ruling elite in the film.
Malick Bowens, yes please
Image from http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3819084288/nm0100942
He also provides a great moment of real moral conflict for the audience to participate in, when he argues with Karen over whether the local children should be educated. Her view is that of course the children should learn how to read, as it will undoubtedly improve their lives and it is unfair to deprive them of it. Hard to argue with, except Denys points out that this will just create little Englishmen out of the children, and since they already have their own culture, do they really need the European one imposed on them? It’s hard to separate out the good of educating people from the harm of doing it by a colonial master’s mandate. Not to mention that it’s not like the Kikuyu children weren’t receiving an education already; it just wasn’t a traditionally European one involving books and schools. And all this swirled about in my head after watching a Hollywood romance! Not bad.
By the end of the (very long) film, I was totally engrossed in the life of this complicated, strong woman and the many people she comes to know and love during her time in Kenya. Apparently, the title for Blixen’s book came from a Latin saying, “Out of Africa, always something new,” and a few inevitable Hollywood clichés aside, this movie delivers on providing a few new ways of portraying love and colonialism on the silver screen.
Also, the cinematography makes me want to visit Kenya, like, yesterday.
Idea #1: Cashing in on the Wedding Movie Trend
Mlle. O’Leary and I were discussing the many weddings we are both attending this year, and we decided we could totally make money off the Hollywood wedding movie trend by borrowing liberally from real life and hokey clichés alike. Girl has ten weddings to attend in one year, and they’re all her close friends and cousins, so she’s a bridesmaid in each. Girl is an Etsy maven, so rather than buy a new dress for each occasion (which she can’t possibly afford, and which she wouldn’t want to anyway because she is Independent and Quirky), she makes over the same dress for each wedding. Of course, she keeps running into the same Boy at all the weddings, and he is always wearing ties that look really familiar but Girl can’t figure out why. There is much malarkey over mistaken identities, wardrobe malfunctions, etc., and in the end Girl’s dress can’t handle any more reworking and it falls apart at the last wedding in a dramatic fashion.
I'm gonna rock that green dress, once it's made into a miniskirt and the sleeves disappear
Image from http://www.ioffer.com/i/McCalls-7847-Wedding-Bridesmaid-Dress-Sewing-Pattern-14898800
In the Hollywood version, Boy helps Girl get to a David’s Bridal, where she realizes she just wants to be like everyone else anyway, and she buys the dress. In the indie version, Boy reveals that he comes from a long line of tailors, and works some magic that makes her dress more beautiful than it ever was before. (Even indie movies have to let the boy save the day, after all.) Boy and Girl realize that the ties he’s been sporting at all these events are from her Etsy shop, so it was Totally Meant to Be.
Hollywood title: Sew in Love. Indie title: Fitting In.
Idea #2: Punking the MBAEs
I saw an ad on the train for an MBAE program — a Master’s of Business Administration for Executives. So instead of just getting a post-graduate degree in how to make more money than everybody else, you can get a post-grad degree in how to make way too much more money than everybody else. Yay?
it ain't good
Image from http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/james-quinn/the-age-of-mammon
Script goes like this: A fresh batch of MBAE students, eager to learn how to make hard deals, screw over their workers, and buy ten yachts in the process, enters the class of Teacher. Teacher is actually a plant from the unions (evil unions!) sent to fix the American Dream from the top down, but passing as a billionaire coming out from retirement to share his pearls of wisdom (it has to be a he, or they won’t listen) with this generation of CEOs. So eager are they to learn Teacher’s secrets, the MBAEs take all sorts of lessons in ethics, collaborative work, and diversity. They’re transformed from evil future CEOs into decent people, and they wield their power for good, bringing the pay disparity back down to a reasonable level and redistributing wealth across the land.
Hmm, that is perhaps less a great movie idea than a utopian fantasy, but I’m seeing it as a comedy, with all these middle-aged men doing homework on collective bargaining, first certain that this will help them learn how to crush such bargaining, and then looking bewildered as they realize they don’t want to. “What is happening to me?” they’ll cry, as tears stream down their faces and they don’t even call each other homos for crying like a little girl. They’ll all be too busy hugging and setting up universal health care.
Investors interested in making these ideas a reality, please apply within.
Welcome back to another round of The Headly Surprise! Today’s honoree is Vera Farmiga as Alex in Up in the Air. This 2009 film follows middle-aged Ryan (George Clooney) as he crisscrosses the country firing people for companies too chicken to do the firing themselves. It’s a bleak premise, and the movie carries that feeling throughout, not least because Ryan is, by nature and by habit, kind of a dick. He gives lectures on how to stay emotionally disconnected from others, and he has a trunkful of reasons why his job is helping people rather than devastating them. Of course, Ryan is played by the puppy-dog eyes and aww-whatever-I-did-I-promise-not-to-do-it-again-baby half-smile of George Clooney, so we can’t totally hate him.
I ain't lookin' for love, but I am looking at you. (photo from http://www.altfg.com/blog/awards/sag-awards-2010-best-supporting-actress-7894/)
Our wayward hero meets Alex in a VIP airline lounge, and they bond over car rental discounts and credit card miles before having a passionate night in Ryan’s hotel room. They sync their calendars to meet up again in various cities around the country, as both their jobs keep them almost perpetually on the move. All goes well until Ryan’s young colleague Natalie lectures him on using Alex instead of committing to her. [**SPOILER ALERT**] Ryan feels inspired to ditch his emotionally stunted viewpoint, and he surprises Alex at her Chicago home in one of those grand romantic gestures that the movies have primed us to receive for decades. But uh oh! Alex is furious that he’s shown up, since she’s married with two kids, and he could ruin her home life with any displays of affection. Ryan returns to Omaha and his previous life a bit sadder and, of course, a bit wiser.
Alex’s Headly Surprise status rests in the way the movie handles this big reveal. There’s no commentary on how her cheating is immoral, or how it makes her a bad mother. In fact, the movie does a neat job of setting Alex up to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl character, there to help Ryan find himself without having her own personality, needs, or desires; it then inverts those expectations by showing that this part of her life, which is so central to Ryan and the movie, is merely in her periphery. Her real life is with her family, and Ryan, fond as she is of him, is just an escape.
And she made no bones about that. Sure, she never told Ryan she was married, but from their first encounter, she sets up their boundaries so they’re both on the same page; she wants a no-strings-attached, uncomplicated, passionate affair. This is what Ryan wants too, and it’s why they work so well together, at least until he starts to fall in love with her. Then Natalie gives him that push over the edge into acknowledging his feelings and suddenly he doesn’t just want a passionate affair anymore.
About Natalie’s speech: she’s not wrong to tell a grown man to stop leading a woman on and tell her how he really feels and take steps toward building a life with her. She just happens to be wrong in this instance because she doesn’t know what Ryan does, namely, that Alex explicitly said what she did and did not want. Alex even expresses this at the end of the movie, saying how surprised she is at Ryan’s hurt, since she never said she wanted more than what they had and she’d thought they were on the same page with that.
This is a wonderful example of listening to what a woman says instead of listening to what you think she means, or what you want to hear. We are far too ready in these United States to dismiss a woman’s words as game playing or indecisiveness, rather than her actual thoughts and feelings. This has very real and dangerous consequences, of course–see all the men who stalk women who have told them they aren’t interested, or the men who rape women who say no, or the legislators who tell women that they don’t really want an abortion no matter what they say. There are other, less physically harmful, consequences to this line of thinking, too, like assuming a woman must be coyly angling for a commitment when she says she needs no such thing. This robs women of their agency and reinforces the idea that they’re untrustworthy, scheming beings instead of autonomous individuals fully capable of making their own decisions and expressing their own desires. If our needs and wants aren’t heard when we plainly state them, it’s no wonder some women start speaking in the code that’s expected of us, just to eventually get the desired result one way or another.
Anyway, Ryan is clearly upset by what he sees as Alex’s betrayal, but he doesn’t argue with her that she was anything but upfront about their relationship. The film honors her character as a three-dimensional person who makes the possibly ill-advised decision to cheat on her husband without punishing her explicitly. It hurts her to lose Ryan, but we get the sense that her life will carry on without him pretty well, and she’ll maybe think of him wistfully in a hotel here and there. That kind of complex characterization is rarely afforded to women who cheat in film; they’re usually shown as sluts or too simpleminded to make up their minds about which man to love more. Alex knows which man she loves and builds a life with, but she’s not above finding some good times on the side as she travels for one-third of the year. She’s not perfect, but she’s not a devil, and for that, she earns The Headly Surprise.
Ladies and gents, it’s time for that occasionally recurring Stowaway feature — The Headley Surprise! Today we welcome Julie Delpy and her Before Sunrise character Celine to the canon, and I tell you, I was so pleased with her. In Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, French college student Celine (Julie Delpy) meets American post-grad Jesse (Ethan Hawke) on the train from Budapest, and soon they’re disembarking in Vienna and spending the whole night talking, kissing, and watching the morning arrive, before parting ways with promises to meet again in six months. This movie is 15 years old, so I knew the basic story before ever putting it in my Netflix queue, but the execution of that story was more beautiful than I’d expected.
Julie Delpy, another Headley Surprise
Linklater’s favorite technique is to take a movie consisting entirely of long monologues and philosophical debates, shoot it in an interesting locale or format, and hope that the speeches are good enough to carry the plotless film. (This strategy even mostly worked in Waking Life.) In Before Sunrise, it works magnificently, due in no small part to the magnetic performance of Delpy, who is instantly likeable and entirely believable as a young woman trying to figure out how to move away from her loving parents into a life of her own.
Before Sunrise is often described as a romantic comedy, although it’s more of a straight romance. Either way, Celine defies genre convention. If this were a normal romantic comedy of the last thirty years, Celine would be desperate for a man, but too uptight to get one (in adult rom coms) OR she’d be too strange or superficially unattractive and in need of a makeover in order to realize she wants a man and can win one (in teen rom coms).
Some of it is a function of the age of the characters; in adult rom coms, it is all about MARRIAGE and BABIES and THAT BLAND POTTERY BARN FURNITURE SET THAT PROVES OUR ETERNAL LOVE,
"I am telling you for the last time, I have a very busy career -- oh all right, if you're going to insult me like that, I give in. Kisses!"
and in teen rom coms, it is all about POPULARITY and DEFLOWERING and ADMITTING THAT NO MATTER HOW SMART YOU ARE, WHAT YOU REALLY WANT IS A HOT GUY TO LOOK AT YOU TWICE.
"Wait, did you just glance my way? I never thought to brush my hair before now! All my artistic dreams seem silly compared to being your prom date!"
Celine is in her last year of university at the Sorbonne, so she’s in that particular place of in-betweenness and uncertainty, as you start to realize that you are not as worldly as you thought you were at age eighteen, and that actually the world is kind of terrifying if you have to navigate it totally on your own. She’s not in any popularity contests anymore, and people haven’t started asking when she’s going to settle down yet.
Ages 21-24 are pretty scary territory to navigate, but they’re also a time of great freedom in Western society, when it’s ok to not be just like everyone else. You were expected to toe the party line in high school, and you’d better start cultivating domesticity soon, but for right now, you can try other things, maybe even see who you are without all those expectations. So age is definitely a factor.
But Celine could still be desperate for Jesse to find her attractive and do whatever he liked to get that attention. She could find herself in a dangerous situation with this strange man and be told she asked for it by not being more careful. She could laugh at all his jokes and agree with whatever he said so as not to appear too smart or threatening. But she does none of these things (ok, she does laugh at his jokes, but fair enough, she seems quick to laugh in general). She has her own opinions and she states them. She is comfortable in her own skin and doesn’t seem at all concerned by wearing her rumpled traveling clothes while flirting with Jesse. Here’s the other factor – she’s no Manic Pixie Dream Girl (damn Nathan Rabin for coining a term I’ve been trying to define for years).
MPDGs are women with childlike interests and worldviews who spontaneously attach themselves to the mopey hero of the tale, who is in serious need of some life-altering sex and full-fledged adoration from a woman with no discernible personality other than “quirky helpmeet.” (See Garden State, Along Came Polly, half the cast of Love Actually.) MPDGs are usually assigned to comedies, but they can be found in dramas and romances, too, especially in death dramas like (Sweet November, Love Story, etc.). Jesse is clearly a mopey man in need of some life altering, but Celine doesn’t exist just for that purpose; you can see the story equally as that of an energetic woman in need of some conversation and life affirmation. (Hint: if you can switch the focus of the story fairly easily from one major character to another, you have two fully developed characters.)
Celine and Jesse do eventually have sex, but not until two important things are said: 1) Celine goes back and forth a bit on the issue, but not as a tease; she’s genuinely trying to figure out if this will ruin or perfect a lovely night. She expresses her concerns to Jesse, saying something along the lines of, “I think I wanted to sleep with you as soon as we got off the train, but now I don’t know.” She tells him she doesn’t want to sleep with him just so he can go home and brag to all his buddies about banging a French girl in Europe. 2) Jesse responds by saying that it’s not that important that they have sex, and even though he clearly really wants to, there’s no implication that he thinks she’s a frigid bitch for not doing it, and it’s clear that she is a person he cares about and so she wouldn’t just become bragging rights.
How often do we hear these kinds of conversations take place in the movies? These are real concerns in the real world, and they have a lot of dramatic potential, too, from an artistic perspective. They humanize the characters so much, and when they do start kissing and roll over into the dark to begin undressing, it is sexy and sweet at the same time, and not a boring inevitability or titillating display.
Oh yeah, they totally do it later
A palm reader appears at one point and tells Celine that she will grow into a great woman. She then gestures to Jesse and says “he’s learning,” which Jesse finds insulting, as if he doesn’t matter, but it’s true that his outlook is much less mature than Celine’s. We get no sense that Celine is settling, though, when she spends the night with him. She’s figuring out what she wants in life, and for this night, she wanted him. There’s no slut-shaming and she didn’t do what he wanted to do without regard for her own wishes. She really is growing into a great woman, and this lovely film captures one of the days on that journey.
Of course, there’s a sequel (Before Sunset), and I’m apprehensive about seeing it, but probably I will. I hope Linklater keeps Celine’s intelligence and independence, because these really made her a terrific Headley Surprise.
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Post Script:
Another Richard Linklater film that really surprises me with its occasional tip of the hat to strong women characters is Dazed and Confused. In his best-known work, the Parker Posey character is the female version of the Ben Affleck character; both of them take gender roles at their crudest and harshest and make those their rules to live by, which, if not easy to watch, is interesting to see portrayed. And the movie has other teenage girls with their own personalities, thoughts, and dreams; maybe not as many as the boys, since they’re not the main focus, but they’re not all relegated to being just props, either. (Some are – the sophomore who spends the night with the freshman, among others.) Sure, the boys talk about them the ways teenage boys talk about girls, as sexual conquests to be made, T&A to check out, and girlfriends to be avoided. But we get to see the girls as themselves, by themselves, too, whether it’s having feminist lite conversations about the gender politics of Gilligan’s Island or worrying over whether other girls like them.
I find the movie as a whole too unpleasant to watch anymore, with its relentless focus on vicious “initiation” scenes that are cast in the same nostalgic glow as the pool hall or the Aerosmith concert, but the last time I watched it, I was struck by how many of the female characters were as fully realized as the male characters.
I’m off work today and on a library computer (damn AT&T is taking forever to set up at my house), so it’s a short one this week. Feel free to post more in the comments!
The Good:
Kartina Richardson, a great film critic, uses Boardwalk Empire as a great example of how to tackle race in historical art. Mad Men, you’ve run out of excuses. (Ms. Richardson blogs at http://mirrorfilm.org.)
A California judge imposed a ban on “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The Bad:
Oh but Obama didn’t mean it, apparently, when he said he was for ending “don’t ask, don’t tell,” because he’s ok with the Justice Department challenging Judge Philips’ ban.
Glenn Greenwald, bless ‘im, takes on Andrew Sullivan’s absurd defense of widespread, secret, and presidentially approved assassinations. Do people really want to live on the show 24? (Via.)
And of course there has been a lot in the past few weeks about this sudden increase in children and teens committing suicide after being bullied, specifically being bullied for being gay or being perceived as gay. I don’t know that it’s an actual increase so much as people are paying a little more attention, but regardless, we need to be paying attention. We need to have strong anti-bullying policies that actually get enacted. We need to reject this BS notion that teachers can have a “neutral” stance on whether kids can torment one another — there is no neutral stance when kids are in danger. We need to stop teaching kids that hate is ok.
The Silly
Sessily sent me the link to this great flowchart of female tropes in movies/TV. Tell me someone who doesn’t fit on here!
This weekend I watched Total Recall for the first time, and while it’s not my most favorite action movie, it features what I’m going to call The Headly Surprise. Remember that review of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels I wrote a while back? (If not, go read and enjoy.) The happy surprise in that movie was that a pretty woman (Glenne Headly) deceived the male leads and was not punished for it, but rather was celebrated. It’s so rare to see that happen in mainstream culture, including Hollywood movies. So rare, in fact, that I think we should point it out when it happens and jump up and down a little with excitement.
And so I bring you a sporadic feature, The Headly Surprise. Whenever I see a movie that features a woman not punished by the film for something women usually get punished for, I’ll mention it here. This doesn’t necessarily mean a physical punishment, but can include the way the woman is talked about or the way the movie frames her. A Headly Surprise movie may include: a woman is smart but isn’t labeled uppity, a bitch, or cold-hearted; a woman is not white but survives the end of the film (if it’s an action film) or isn’t the sassy best friend (if it’s a comedy with a white protagonist); a woman is pretty but there are no nude shots or lingering shots of her body; a woman is fat but her desire for sex isn’t laughed at; a woman has no desire to have sex with men and isn’t derisively called a lesbian or a bitch; a woman saves her own damn self from the villain; etc. The Headly Surprise is usually a movie showing love for, instead of fear of, a badass woman.
Glenne Headly, Hollywood badass (image via reelmovienews.com)
Which brings us to today’s entry in the canon of The Headly Surprise: Rachel Ticotin as Melina in Total Recall. The basic plot of the movie (which is loosely based on a Philip K. Dick story I haven’t read called “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”) is thus: After a bad trip to the implanted-memory doctor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (Quaid) realizes that he is not the married construction worker he thinks he is, but instead is some type of government agent whose memory was erased because he knew too much. He travels to Mars, where he first learned the dangerous information that he can now no longer remember, and sorts out the twists and turns of who he is and who he’s fighting as he meets up with a former flame (Ticotin) and journeys into the underground world of a planet so corrupt that its rulers sell air.
Rachel Ticotin, inaugural Headly Surprise honoree (image via wearysloth.com)
It is not necessary to tell you how it ends to tell you that Melina is awesome. First, Quaid starts out “married” to Lori (Sharon Stone), who is, as we all know, a gorgeous blond, but even brain surgery can’t make him forget the woman he truly loves — Melina, who is a gorgeous woman of color. Unexpected Hollywood Moment #1, right there. #2 arrives when we are introduced to Melina in the shitty bar/brothel she works at. We see right away that Melina is a prostitute, but we don’t get lingering shots of her body or even revealing clothing. We also don’t see any condemnation that she works as a prostitute; that’s just her job and there’s nothing titillating or sad or morally wrong with it, according to the film. Love it.
But my favorite Unexpected Hollywood Moment is #3, when Quaid is dragged to an elevator by Lori and some thugs to be delivered to the big boss for even more of an ass-kicking. The elevator door opens and BAM! It’s Melina, and she came prepared. She mows down all the thugs without missing a beat, then gets into a mighty brawl with Lori. Unexpected Hollywood Moment #4 — this ain’t no catfight. There is no hair pulling, nail scratching, or (always a favorite) accidental-ripping-of-clothing-in-curvaceous-places. These women are fighting to the death, and it shows; there’s punching, kicking, and general ass-kicking by both.
Not only does Melina save Quaid’s life at the elevator, [MILD SPOILER] she also saves his life at the very end of the film, when he’s face to face with the bad guy. This time Quaid is about to be killed, and Melina shows up armed and ready, and BAM! takes out the bad guy. Love it! Now teeeechnically Quaid still saves the day just after that, by pushing an all-important button, so technically the man still saves the world, but it is still a big deal for the woman to save the man from the villain instead of the other way around.
The best part is that it’s an ambiguous ending — did this movie really happen or is it another false memory or fantasy of Quaid’s? — because if it is Quaid’s fantasy, then it is his fantasy that a kickass woman kicks ass and saves his! Fantastic.
I don’t know how many of these elements of the film were drawn from the Dick story, how many were the ideas of the three writers credited with the screenplay, and how many were director Paul Verhoeven’s, but kudos to Verhoeven for producing a Hollywood blockbuster with a Headly Surprise.
Do you have any Headly Surprise suggestions?
Damn, another movie that made me cry. Ask my family and they’ll tell you how rare that is — I’m the only one out of all five of us who is more likely, while watching sentimental schlock and genuinely moving fare alike, to roll my eyes than to have tears in them. Make no mistake, the director of Rabbit-Proof Fence fully intended to make me cry, and tugged my heartstrings all sorts of ways to make sure I did. But the story itself, plus three forlorn children onscreen, was enough to have me welling up at the end.
Rabbit-Proof Fence is an adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s book about her mother, Molly Craig. When Molly was 14, she, her sister and her cousin were forcibly removed from their home in Jigalong, in western Australia, and placed in the “re-education facility” Moore River Native Settlement. Under the White Australia plan of government, “protectors” of Aborigines were assigned to each state and territory in the country. They were supposedly meant to make sure Aborigines’ rights were looked out for, but in reality, they said who could and could not marry, where they were allowed to live, and whether they could keep their own children. It was established policy by 1931, when this movie is set, that mixed-race Aboriginal children were stolen from their families and placed in boarding schools that trained them for a life of working in white women’s houses (for the girls) or in white men’s fields (for the boys). The reasoning, like similar policies in the United States with Native Americans, was that it was best to assimilate the native population into the colonizing society, for their own benefit. Clearly it was better to be white, so whites were doing a public service by erasing Aborigines’ cultural heritage, never mind that grossly erroneous premise or the deep and lasting trauma to the parents and children.
The movie has a clear agenda, but for once I didn’t mind. The girls missed their family deeply, they couldn’t trust any whites they encountered because they would probably report the girls to the authorities and send them back to the settlement, and they walked 1500 miles to be reunited with the life and loved ones they knew. The movie didn’t have to try very hard to show that this was a really bad policy and a horrible affront to human rights — in fact, the movie tried a little too hard to show that the protector, A. O. Neville, truly believed that he was helping the Aborigines and couldn’t understand why they would possibly run away from the settlement. I mean, I guess that perspective is important, to show people that there was a majority of voting opinion that held this belief, because otherwise you’d just assume it was made-up, that it’s too obvious that you shouldn’t separate families based on racial prejudice. Because that is pretty damn obvious, but it wasn’t obvious enough to enough people until the 1970s, when the last children were ripped from their homes with official sanction before the government ended the program.
The most upsetting part about the movie was the very end. The last scene shows 2 of the 3 girls reunited with their mother and grandmother, the music swells, and we all feel relieved that they made it home. But then the voiceover comes up and says that Molly was sent back to Moore River with her own two children nine years later. She escaped with one of her two daughters and once again walked 1500 miles to get home, but that daughter was stolen from her and it was many years before she met the daughter she’d had to leave behind at Moore River. So Molly lost one of her children forever and reunited with her other child only after over 20 years of separation. This is why it’s called the Stolen Generations, plural; family after family was ripped apart in the name of racial purity and superiority.
Molly was torn from her mother, and then her children were torn from her. She was time and again denied her own family, her own choices, her own life. Despite this, she worked alongside her husband and became a mainstay in the desert community she knew and loved; in other words, she carved out her own life in spite of her country telling her she shouldn’t. I admire her immensely for that, and also her daughter for writing down her story and getting it published. Now, because of the movie, it’s a story that millions of people know, and that part of Australian history has been added back into the public consciousness. There are Stolen Generations deniers and former prime minister John Howard refused to apologize to Aborigines for the government’s actions, yes, but they know. People know. And that is the first step to action, right?
Dearest fellow travelers, come with me to the beautiful coastline of New Zealand, where we’ll cover some Film Club and some A Country a Month at the same time. Whale Rider is a 2002 film directed by Niki Caro, from a screenplay by Caro and Witi Ihimaera (who authored the book it’s based off of). Several people recommended this film to me, telling me how much I would enjoy the story of a young girl overcoming a thousand years of patriarchal rule to become the next leader of her tribe. This was an accurate prediction on your part. Whale Rider is a lovely movie.
Whale Rider movie poster
Paikea is named after the legendary Maori figure who rode on the back of a whale from the homeland of Hawaiki to reach Aotearoa (the islands of New Zealand). Pai is a delightful 11-year-old who adores her crotchety old grandfather, Koro, the chief of the tribe. Yes, there is some of that well-worn gruff old man with a soft spot for a precocious young child — a tiresome cliché that flattens out both characters in many films — but it’s kept from getting too sentimental because Koro really does resent Pai for being a girl instead of a boy and thus unable to assume leadership of the tribe. Throughout the movie, he has many opportunities to relent and acknowledge her as his heir, but he refuses right up until the end. He does love Pai but says several cruel things about her and actively keeps her from learning the rites of chieftainship. She loves Koro but consistently disobeys his orders to keep her place as a girl. It’s more painful to watch a film like this, because the characters are acting more like real people than characters in other movies, and real people can be pretty awful to each other, but that’s what makes it so great, and also what makes the eventual reconciliation much more meaningful.
Another thing I liked about the movie is the film’s and Pai’s refusal to make her a saint or ideal. Koro is searching for a prophet to lead his people out of the troubled times they find themselves in (encroaching crime and drug use). Pai knows she is the next leader of the tribe, but she also knows she is no prophet. She is a gifted, sensitive girl, with a strong link to her ancestors and the natural world that her community lives in, but she is not superhuman. She doesn’t want to be a savior; she wants her whole community to come together and bring themselves out of the bad times and into a brighter future. How rarely do films, books, or even real life leaders express this wish? We are so accustomed to looking for saviors (and that’s not even counting religious figures) who will make everything right that we miss countless opportunities to fix our own problems and improve our own communities. Pai knows that the only way to be a strong group is to work as a group, and we see a beautiful illustration of that communal effort at the end of the film, when she leads a giant waka (Maori canoe) full of her neighbors into the sea as part of a celebratory ceremony. We need leaders who know how to bring out the best in us, not saviors who bring the best to us.
And yes, that happens to be my political philosophy. Heroes and saviors make great action figures and film stars, but they rarely make great history without a strong community to build on their vision. Whale Rider shows that truly humble people can also be compelling on the screen, and the numerous regular people in our lives working for a better world show how compelling they are in making history.
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