Mill Brook House News

Oscar Winners Anora and Conclave Have More in Common than You Might Think

We were rooting for Conclave to win Best Picture, but dark horse Anora, which we hadn’t yet seen by Oscar night, won instead.  On the surface they couldn’t be more different.  Staid Cardinals with closely held secrets vying to replace a dead Pope, trapped in a papal conclave until someone wins a two-thirds majority versus an almost pornographic film about sex workers, one of whom finds herself in a Cinderella dream turned nightmare.  Each won for Best Screenplay (Conclave for Adapted Screenplay) and, indeed, their scripts were tight and gripping.  Both stories feature a key character whose humility and humanity shines faintly at first but blossoms by the end into the “righteous man,” who succeeds where the less righteous fail: Mexican Archbishop Vincent Benitez in Conclave, who is elected Pope, and Igor in Anora, who by film’s end wins the heart of the eponymous heroine. 

Dissimilar as the settings in the two films are, all are claustrophobic.  Trapped within the Vatican, the Cardinals move from their living quarters to their dining hall to the antechamber in the Sistine Chapel where they vote, and back again.  The sex club where Anora works is itself a dead end, but the extensive search for the delinquent Ivan through the clubs and restaurants of Brighton Beach, an enclave dominated by Russian oligarchs and their allied mafiosi, evokes a world that cannot escape itself, not unlike the Vatican as portrayed in Conclave.  (The set for the Cardinals’ living quarters in the Domus Sanctae Marthae was deliberately designed to seem more “prison-like” than the actual building.)

Of course, there are key differences besides the content.  In Conclave we must be told everything, the past sins, ambitions, manipulations and ideologies of the Cardinals, as well as the astounding revelation with which the film ends.  By contrast Anora employs frenetic action sped by constant cutting, and we are told very little.  Few details fill in the backstories of Anora, Ivan, Igor and the others.  For the most part we are shown, rather than told of, Ivan’s shallowness, Anora’s heartbreak, and Igor’s longing.  (Admittedly, it is hard to convey much information with dialogue in which every other word is “fuck.”) 

But these tales are, ultimately, similar: men trapped in their own sins, ambitions, and prejudices, women trapped in sex work, an immigrant community trapped in its own limitations and corruption and the glimmer of humanity that moves through it all, creating some semblance of a moral universe in which good triumphs in the end.  Both films offer a message of hope for these trying times as well as the caveat that goodness pairs best with humility.

 

Movie Review: Captain Phillips

 

On our latest excursion to the Greenfield Garden Cinema we took in Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass’ latest film, which retells the 2009 hijacking of the freighter Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates, its captain’s brave stand against them, and his tense rescue by a Navy Seal team.  The film has won much critical acclaim, and its editing will no doubt earn it an Oscar nomination and perhaps the Oscar itself.  Tom Hanks’ performance, which takes the taciturn Yankee captain from stoicism to complete breakdown after his rescue, may also earn an Oscar nod.

            But the film, though high drama, is not fully realized cinema.  Greengrass, who made United 93, another faithful reproduction of contemporary heroism, does little to transform his stories from news events into art.  Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, made long after that spaceship’s perilous rescue, also starring Tom Hanks (perhaps not coincidentally), makes a useful contrast.  Howard and his screenwriters lift Jim Lovell’s ill-fated space flight out of docudrama and embed it in a mythic context—Odysseus’ return to Penelope, Dorothy’s struggle to get home from an exotic and dangerous other world...  The film is structured around multiple ironies that build to the final one—the mission as a “successful failure”—and is laced with other recurring motifs (outer-space urination being one of the most obvious!)  Greengrass gives us finely observed characters, but little else to hang our cinematic hats on.

            Great editing and Hanks’ performance make Captain Phillips worth the price of admission, but, like so much contemporary news, it leaves one unsatisfied and slightly depressed.  How, one wonders, can people can exist in such poverty and anarchy as these Somali pirates?  (To his credit, Greengrass is uncompromising in his portrayal of their wretchedness.)  And while one is grateful for the Navy’s efforts, the sight of America’s overwhelming force and cutting-edge technology arrayed against the bedraggled beggars is more chilling than heart-warming.  The world’s inequalities are on full display in this film, with no resolution in sight. 

 

 

Kagoshima, Mon Amour

My favorite city in Japan made the news a few months ago, following a burst of lava from the side of its volcano, Sakurajima, sited in Kagoshima Bay. Sakurajima has had small eruptions for some time now, which are of concern because a nuclear plant lies only 30 miles away. For me the concern is personal, for Kagoshima holds a special place in my heart that stretches back to childhood.

It all began in 1957 when my parents took me to see Teahouse of the August Moon, a service comedy about the early days of the American Occupation of Okinawa. I adored it. (That Sakini, the Okinawan interpreter, was being played in yellow face by Marlon Brando went by me completely.) I watched my first grown-up movies (Oklahoma!, Tammy and the Bachelor) that summer, but in retrospect I realize that the trip to see Teahouse was meant mainly as a softening up tactic. A few weeks later, my mother confided that we ourselves would move to Okinawa that fall. I was thrilled.

When did I become a Japanophile? Was it pouring over Little Pictures of Japan from the My Book House series (of which we owned every volume) or playing with the clamshell novelties my mother brought back from New York’s Chinatown that opened up into beautiful paper flowers when soaked in a glass of water? Didn’t all children at the time try to dig a hole to China (which, we were told, lay just below us on the opposite side of the earth)? Perhaps we were all incipient orientalists. But in my case, it lay very close to the surface.

Eagerly anticipating a land of pine-covered hills and kimono-clad geishas, I was horribly disappointed six months later to find myself on a sub-tropical island, whose bright sunlight was blindingly intensified by the ubiquitous coral dust. A battle 12 years earlier had scoured the island, leaving much of it treeless. Pampas grass and sugar cane grew where vicious fighting once took place and often covered deadly unexploded ordinance. As ubiquitous as the coral dust were American military vehicles and installations. No pine trees lit by moonlight, no geishas, no soft breezes, no distant mountains. Teahouse, it turned out, had been shot on the Japanese mainland, not on Okinawa. (A recently constructed Teahouse of the August Moon did exist in Okinawa, but it had been inspired by the movie, not vice versa.)      

Although the island abounded in ancient local arts, whose revival the American military government had encouraged (and—as per the movie—cricket cages were for sale in every local tchotchke shop), at nine I had no more ability to appreciate the local pottery and textiles than I had to discern Marlon Brando under his make-up. I longed for the classical arts and picturesque landscapes of “real,” Japan, land of lanterns, ukiyoe and fireflies.

I was ecstatic, therefore, as I embarked with my mother and sister on my first trip to the main islands of Japan. We left on the overnight boat from Naha, Okinawa’s capital city, and landed the next day in Kagoshima, the southernmost port city of Japan’s four main islands. This time it was love at first sight. My mother had splurged and booked us into a genuine ryokan [Japanese inn]. Our tatami-mat-covered room opened onto an exquisite garden, and waitresses in kimono served our dinner and made up our beds, futon [thick quilts—the foam rubber kind hadn’t been invented yet] spread on the floor.

The inn sat atop the kind of pine-covered hill I had been waiting a whole year to see and looked down over the city. Houses with black tile roofs lay below, a contrast to the red tile roofs of the more affluent homes in Okinawa, and they had good reason to be black. Sakurajima, sitting majestically in the distance, issued a thin plume of smoke from its conical peak. Smoke billowed, too, from the steam locomotives that pulled the trains that wound around the city in the valley below us.

I had not been on a train since I was three and could only dimly remember the experience. Trains did not even exist in Okinawa, so I could barely contain my excitement, knowing we would soon be on that train, heading north to other cities in Japan.

Watching the train and actually riding on it were two different things, however. These steam-driven vehicles had no air conditioning, and, it being summer, the windows were all open, allowing soot from the smokestack to blow in, covering passengers, seats, and floors alike. Tunnels, of which there were many, particularly on the tracks between Kyoto and Tokyo, proved particularly obnoxious as the smoke had nowhere to go except into the train. Passengers rushed to close the windows, rendering the carriage hot and stuffy. Mostly, though, the long slow journey—Kagoshima to Kyoto required an overnight trip—felt incredibly boring to a ten-year-old.

At stations, hawkers filled the platforms, selling bento [lunch] boxes, constructed from the thinnest of thinly shaved wood, and tiny clay pots of tea, and passengers purchased these refreshments through their open windows. Once their contents had been consumed, the empty boxes and teapots, along with disposable chopsticks, all ended up on the floor of the train. Bored by the journey and  fascinated by the perfectly shaped clay pots, whose covers served as tiny cups and which varied in color, shape, and markings from station to station, I amused myself by crawling underneath the seats on the train’s dirty floor to collect them, much to our fellow passengers’ surprise and my mother’s chagrin. (Incredibly, this saintly woman, at my insistence, carried a very large basket of these discarded vessels back to Okinawa for me.)

The little teapots and many other charms of mainland Japan notwithstanding, the trip was hard on one as young as I. The shrines and temples in Kyoto began to all look alike, and in Tokyo I spent a whole day in bed, possibly sick but probably just exhausted. We broke our return journey in the spa town of Beppu—no one had warned us how tacky spa towns in Japan can be—but the long trip south was as tedious as the trip north, and the inn in Kagoshima beckoned like a long lost friend. (Trains, I decided, were best experienced from that hill above the city.)

 Besides Sakurajima and the beautiful ryokan, Kagoshima featured Satsuma-ware, an elegant white ceramic with a crackled glaze covered by delicately painted bird and flower decorations. Shiny and colorful—in contrast to subtle earth tones of much Japanese pottery, including Okinawan—it captured my ten-year-old heart and has never lost its charm for me.

Satsuma-ware derives its name from the feudal Satsuma Domain, which was ruled by the Shimazu daimyo from Kagoshima. Satsuma,
along with other southern provinces, led the revolt against the moldering Tokugawa Shogunate that produced the Meiji Reformation. Satsuma had, in fact, colonized Okinawa in 1609, making it a vassal state, although the island remained “officially” independent until 1879—one reason its culture remains so distinctive—when it was officially annexed to Meiji Japan.

Two summers after that first rocky trip to mainland Japan, we returned to the U.S. (though not before docking in Tokyo Bay in the midst of the 1960 Anpo riots), but 1964 found us back in Okinawa.  The following summer my mother and I made a three-week trip to Kyushu, Honshu and Shikoku where we visited with family, friends, and an array of Japanese potters. Once again Kagoshima welcomed us and became the first stop on our pottery tour, where my mother hunted down the Korean potters whose ancestors had developed Satsuma-ware. The ryokan had been a one-time extravagance, so we stayed in a modern hotel with a large accommodating garden.

Although the shinkansen [bullet train] now ran between Tokyo and Kyoto, Kagoshima to Tokyo still required an overnight journey, but diesel engines had replaced the steam engines, and, sadly, plastic teapots had replaced the charming clay ones formerly sold on station platforms. (Progress, as we know, is a two-edged sword.) I had looked forward to this trip as keenly as the first one, but, at 17, I was old enough to relish every aspect of it. Mist rising from acres of rice paddies graced by egrets, wooden houses with sliding doors and tile roofs, blocks of traditional wood-framed storefronts with their goods out front for customers to see and living quarters—with a cup of green tea for special guests—behind the store—today these things are mostly relegated to movies, museums and theme parks, but they were my Japan. In Shikoku, emerald green rivers ran down the mountains alongside the road our bus travelled. In Tokyo I joined Hiroko, my father’s former secretary, at her local public bath, and far up in the mountains of Kyushu, we visited potters in Onda, where all day long pestles, fueled by water flowing off the mountains, pounded clay. Thrilling but tiring, our trip ended once more in Kagoshima, where our gracious hotel and our ship home to Okinawa awaited us.  

A year later I went to camp in Tokyo with my Girl Scout troop. We travelled TDY in an Army cargo plane, but when I stayed on after camp to visit Hiroko in Tokyo, I was back to using local transportation. I rode the shinkansen for the first time to visit friends in Kyoto, then, late one night, boarded the overnight train to Kagoshima. The next evening I met a family in the garden of the hotel where my mother and I had stayed the year before, and, seeing I was alone, they scooped me up the next morning and brought me to their home for tea and a visit before my boat departed. This would not be my last encounter with the warm hospitality of Kagoshima.

I returned to the United States, went to college, became an art historian, and spent many years in Europe. Finally, in my mid-30’s I reunited with my Asian past when I began to study the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. (Ironically, in Okinawa Hiroko had taken my father to see Ohayo, one of Ozu’s late films, and he had described the delightful comedy to me in some detail. When, many years later, I finally connected the film he had described, which for a long time was marketed in the U.S. under the title “Good Morning,” to my beloved director, I asked my father if he remembered it. Although his account of the film had imbedded itself in my mind all those many years before, he had no recollection of it at all!)

In 1991, I returned to Japan, having accepted a teaching job at a college near Nagoya. That summer, my husband and I travelled south, visiting friends and tourist destinations and managing to attend memorial ceremonies for the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From Nagasaki, we headed, for nostalgia’s sake, to Kagoshima to catch the boat to Okinawa. No overnight sleeper this time, but our destination nevertheless required us to travel all day by bus, ferry, and train. The city had modernized, of course, but its rolling hills and comparative lack of congestion made a soothing contrast to the crowded cities of Honshu. I purchased my own Satsuma-ware, and rediscovered the hospitality I had enjoyed as a teenager when the young host at our minshuku [Japanese-style B&B] insisted on performing a tea ceremony for us.

We took the ferry to Sakurajima, but the majestic volcano seemed less benign than before. A thin layer of ash lay over the city and more thickly on the volcanic island itself. Several volcanoes near Nagasaki had erupted within the previous two years, and the ash around Kagoshima looked ominous.

Sakurajima’s largest eruption in modern times actually occurred in 1914. Thirty-five people on the island died and lava poured into the sea, creating the land bridge to the city of Kagoshima that exists today. The city itself was covered in a thick layer of ash but otherwise remained intact. Subsequently, the volcano lay quiet until 1955 when small eruptions began, hence the smoke I witnessed first in 1957. In 2009 the volcano spewed lava and ash more than a mile above its crater and exploded most recently on Feb. 5, 2016. No one was injured and Kagoshima-jin [people] considered the 2016 eruption “average.”

The threat posed by Sakurajima’s increased activity arises mainly from the fact that the Sendai nuclear plant in Satsumasendai, former capital of the Satsuma Domain, lies only 30 miles away. The first Sendai reactor was built in 1984, the second in 1985. (Japan’s first nuclear reactor was built in 1966.) After all of Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down in 2011 in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown, Sendai was the first to re-open (2015). Why Japan builds reactors close to live volcanos or on tidal plains or builds them at all, given the likelihood of earthquakes, is a mystery beyond solving in this essay.

Mainly, Sakurajima’s 2016 eruption reminded me of a city dear to my heart, which, like so much of Japan, lives on the edge of disaster with calm and dignity and grace.

 

Sakurajima photographs by Steven Sternbach 

 

 

Wim Wenders’ Salt of the Earth

I once wrote a book about Wim Wenders.  It covered the first 20 years of his career, his breakout years in Germany, where he became one of the luminaries of the New German Cinema, which sought to separate itself from the mostly mediocre studio films of Germany’s postwar economic-miracle era, and his foray into American filmmaking, a rocky period which, nevertheless, culminated in the highly successful collaboration with Sam Shepherd on Paris, Texas (1984).  In a recent interview with NPR, Wenders noted that critics characterized these years by three A’s: angst, alienation, and America, and that’s not a bad summation.  The angst was always male; women, if they appeared in the films at all, inspired the intensest angst.  Relationships never worked out (on or off screen).  Wenders collaborated with Peter Handke, a more disciplined, but even more alienated artist, on many of the German films.  They were slow and contemplative and asked more questions than they answered.  Composed of inner journeys and outer landscapes more than real stories, they anticipated Wenders’ eventual turn to documentary, as many of them were already quasi-documentaries.  Kings of the Road (1976) documented the last of Germany’s rural movie theaters; Lightning Over Water (1980), supposed to be a collaboration with Nicolas Ray on a last movie, ended up documenting Ray’s last days, while The State of Things (1982), though fiction, chronicled the all-too-real dilemma of a film crew stuck with an unworkable project.

Although preceded by two short films for French television, the delightful, Chris-Marker-like Tokyo-ga (1985), represents Wenders’ first notable foray into documentary.  The film explores idiosyncratic aspects of Japanese culture on the way to finding out more about Wenders’ hero (and mine), Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.  Another decade of both fictional and documentary films followed, culminating in three Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary: The Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Pina (2011), and, this past season, Salt of the Earth (2014).

With Salt of the Earth Wenders has achieved his most compelling work to date.  A chronicle of the life and work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, the film takes us through Salgado’s short-lived beginnings as a revolutionary, which effectively exiled him from Brazil for a decade, his decision to give up a comfortable life as an economist to become a photographer, and the many photo projects he embarked on, projects that increasingly centered on the world’s marginalized.  The title “Salt of the Earth” is also the title of the 1954 Herbert Biberman fiction film about a strike by mine workers in New Mexico.  In early interviews Wenders sometimes named the Biberman film as one of his favorites, though his inward-looking early films gave little indication of own interest in such subject matter.  

As chronicled by Wenders, Salgado’s photo career reaches a literal dead end when he photographs the Rwandan genocide and its less publicized aftermath, the death by starvation or disease of hundreds of thousands of Hutus, expelled from Rwanda when the Tutsis regained power.  Emotionally and artistically exhausted, Salgado returns to his father’s farm, where he grew up.  It too has been devastated—by drought and poor farming methods—but, together with his wife and life partner Lélia, Salgado successfully replants a rainforest, tiny tree by tiny tree, and the couple establishes the Instituto Terra (earth institute) on the farm, which has since become a national park, to teach others how to restore devastated land.  The reclamation project restores Salgado’s faith in living, and he goes on to become a nature photographer, giving to these images the same breath-taking depth, beauty, and grittiness that had characterized his earlier work, continuing to travel the world and risk his life—as the film documents when the crew has to crawl on its collective belly to elude a polar bear while Salgado photographs walruses in the Arctic.

In creating the film, Wenders collaborated with Salgado’s son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, who accompanied his father on the later expeditions recorded in the film, both to get footage for his own film and to get to know his so often absent father better.  The collaboration with Wenders, the young with the old, was, according to both men, difficult, and editing alone took about 18 months.  However, struggling through hours of footage and differing visions of how to shape the film eventually brought the depth, breadth, intensity, and plenitude that characterize the end product.    

The film is structured around ever-widening circles of family (something a young Wenders found difficult to believe in).  First, there are the three generations of the Salgado family, central to which is the life-long love affair and partnership between Sebastião and Lélia that endures constant separation, yet survives and flourishes; next the human family that Sebastião photographs in all its variety, pathos, and savagery; and finally the family of all living things, at the same time fragile and resilient.  No more angst, alienation, or America.  Wenders confidently embraces the world in this rich, mature, affirmative work of art.

Wim Wenders, 1980's

 

Steven Spielberg's West Side Story

Spielberg’s West Side Story is a thrill to watch with its gritty realism and wonderfully creative dance numbers set against a decaying New York City in the late 50s.  But it is more sociological treatise than Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  In the midst of a “slum clearance” project, loser white guys try to thwart the progress of aspirational newcomers with brown skin.  (Raise your hands if this sounds familiar.)  Jets’ leader Riff is a psychopath, not a teen who has yet to grow up, while Tony is a teen who has spent time in prison for almost killing an adversary in a fight.  One critic faults this backstory for positing prison as a positive experience (as if no one ever reforms in prison and, even if they do, we should never admit it).  But the real problem with Tony’s backstory is that, having almost killed someone in the past, his killing Bernardo in the rumble becomes inevitable rather than the result of a single, tragic moment of revenge.  All of which undermines the love story, which is the core of both Shakespeare’s play and the original West Side Story. 

            Tony and Maria’s “wedding night” lacks both romance and poignancy, knowing, as we do, that Tony, for all his efforts to reform, is still a killer.  The couple seems doomed less from the gang rivalry and hatred that surround them than from Tony’s inability to overcome his killer instinct.  It’s no accident that the song “There’s a Place for Us” has been taken from the lovers and given to Rita Moreno as the matriarchal widow of the original film’s Doc because there really is no place Tony can go to escape his crime, a fact driven home by the frequent police presence in the film.

            The love story is further eroded by the fact that Anita and Bernardo are not simply lovers but live together (along with Maria).  In the original play/movie they parallel Tony and Maria and act as a foil to the young lovers—the more carnal couple vs. the innocent, romantic one. This not only undermines Anita’s part of the four-part “Tonight,” in which she imagines hot sex with Bernardo after the rumble, but makes her “I Have a Love” duet with Maria unbelievable as well.  Her grief is that of a wife, not a girlfriend.  (We even see her in the morgue identifying Bernardo’s body.)  How can she forgive so easily?

            The two songs that should work to build up the love story, “I Feel Pretty” and  “One Hand, One Heart,” which in the original follow upon one another in the intimacy of the dress-making shop (which in Spielberg’s film has been moved to Anita’s apartment), have been separated, the “wedding” song to the Cloisters, a tourist destination, and “I Feel Pretty” to a large department store, where Maria is part of the night cleaning crew. Jarringly, the “I Feel Pretty” sequence occurs immediately after Riff and Bernardo have been killed in the rumble. 

            As I watched the film I kept thinking how artificial, on so many levels, the original movie seemed, but towards the end, as Shakespeare’s series of unlikely coincidences kicked in, I realized that Spielberg’s realism could not sustain the disbelief Shakespeare’s story requires.  His fable has a simple but universal moral: hate kills love and everything beautiful in this world.  Spielberg’s version tells us that gentrification, resentful white men, psychotic personalities, and the abuse of firearms screw things up for everyone.  Tragedy gives way to a complex of social problems.  (The original film acknowledges social problems but confines them to two humorous songs, “Officer Krupke” and “I Want to Be in America.”)

            For pure cinematic pleasure, see Spielberg’s West Side Story, but don’t expect a Shakespearean tragedy of thwarted love but rather a catalogue of social dysfunction that feels all too familiar—which is the point of this movie.  For Shakespeare’s story, see the old version and revel in its theatricality.  And don’t be too censorious of Natalie Wood and George Chakiris in brownface.  (Before being cast as Bernardo in the movie, Chakiris played Riff in the London stage production.)  Just remember, the very first Juliet was played by a man.  (Nobody’s perfect!)

 

 

Ozu: A Closer Look

 

In 2017 I decided to write a book about the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, and I spent the next three years closely analyzing his 33 extant films along with 3 fragments, researching the historical background, and catching up with what other scholars had written.  I had been writing about Ozu since 1983, and my most recent article was published in 2010.  That article went into the book almost unchanged, but, in fact, every article I had ever written about him went in in some form, sometimes as only a paragraph or a single sentence, along with material from my earlier book on Wim Wenders and some of my research on Hollywood’s 1950s films about Japan.  But much of my analysis was new, and most of the older material was rethought, revised, and updated.  I critiqued previous authors, whose work other scholars had let stand, when I thought parts of it did not hold up under close scrutiny.  I nevertheless benefitted greatly from the research and insights of many of those same authors as well as material from many others.  Among those I leaned on most were David Bordwell, Peter B. High, Kyoko Hirano, Tadao Sato, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, and historians John Dower and Ben-Ami Shillony.  Anthologies on Asian film in general and Ozu in particular also proved a wonderful resource, particularly one edited by Jinhee Choi and those by edited by David Desser (with or without colleagues).

 I finished the first draft just as the pandemic struck and was able to spend the next six months revising without interruption, thanks to the pandemic lockdown.  Securing a publisher took another six months, but, finally, in April of 2021, Hong Kong University Press snapped up the manuscript proposal, toward which American presses had been fairly indifferent.  I spent the entire next year revising, editing, gathering illustrations, and creating an index. Finally, in June of 2022, Ozu: A Closer Look rolled off the presses and arrived at my house.  I approached the package apprehensively, like a new mom hoping her child had all its fingers and toes, but I needn’t have worried.  HKUP did a beautiful job and continues to be a delight to work with.

The book is divided into three parts.  The first takes up issues concerning Ozu’s silent films, including a close analysis of his three “gangster” films, the symbolism he used in his silent period, how he pictured sound in these films, and how he structured narrative.  In Part II I looked at his first ten sound films, which were made as Japan’s war with China intensified then morphed into a war with the United States, followed by the American Occupation of Japan, which lasted until 1952.  Each of these films finds Ozu endorsing the policies of whichever government was in a position to censor them while at the same time offering subtle critiques and sometimes mocking those same governments.

 Part III takes up specific themes that pertain to all of the films but particularly those later, mainly color films from the 1950s and early 60s that closed out Ozu’s career.  These themes include narrative strategies and meaning in his late films, his take on gender issues and religion, the extent to which other two-dimensional art forms in Japan (i.e. painting and printmaking) influenced or coincided formally, thematically, and ideologically with his work, and, finally, a discussion of a selection of specific films and filmmakers whose work was influenced by Ozu. 

This book concludes my decades of work on Ozu, whose films will never get old.  I hope it will prove a valuable companion for those wanting deeper insight into the filmmaker and his films and that it, too, will stand the test of time.

 

 

Empire of Light

The first of at least four films paying tribute to old movie theaters, The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) involves a relationship between a middle-aged woman (Cloris Leachman) and a teenaged boy (Timothy Bottoms).  Sam Mendes has updated the story to a tourist town on England’s South Coast in the 1980s.  Stephen (Michael Ward), who is Black, is trying to get into college when he takes a job at the local movie palace, whose upper floors are shuttered.  He begins an affair with co-worker Hillary (Olivia Colman), a mentally fragile, middle-aged woman, whose love-life consists of having sex with their married boss (Colin Firth) in his office.  Stephen frees Hillary from that bad relationship, but his own with her has no future, either.  Shattered when Stephen breaks off their sexual liaison, Hillary must find her way to a more appropriate friendship with the ever-loyal Stephen, who is forced to face down discrimination and violence on his way to being accepted into college.

The film moves slowly, punctuated by two loud and jarring episodes: Hillary’s breakdown upon Stephen’s withdrawal from their affair and the attack on Stephen, in the theater, by a group of skinheads; both involve the violent smashing in of doors.  Parallels, in fact, structure the film: Hillary’s two affairs; the “family” of theater workers, frequently shown sitting around the table in their break room, and Stephen’s small family, also shown sitting at their kitchen table; Hillary’s dead but formerly philandering father and her boss; Stephen’s absent father and the projectionist’s confession that he, too, had run out on his wife and son.  These parallels anchor the story and, along with its evocation of goodwill and tolerance, keep it from floating away on the tides of Hillary’s mercurial personality even as its strength comes from the uncompromising depiction of her instability

Hong Kong University Book Talk on Ozu: A Closer Look

If you haven't read the book but you'd like to see the movie, here is the link: https://youtu.be/lISq-7bID94

 

Perfect Days: A Wenders/Ozu Mash-up

Wim Wenders’ first narrative feature to be nominated for an Academy Award, Perfect Days is beautifully shot and perfectly edited but is not the perfect film some have dubbed it as it often feels flat in its repetitiveness, too much like Groundhog Day.  Despite the benign satisfaction that protagonist Hirayama, so named for the many Hirayamas in Ozu’s films, takes in his daily routine, he is an elderly version of the lonely, isolated, alienated young men who can relate to children but are terrified of women that populate Wenders’ early films.  Wenders, in fact, includes deliberate references to those films.  Like Bruno in Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976), Hirayama reads Faulkner, and on his last trip to his local bookstore, he purchases a novel by Patricia Highsmith, whose Ripley’s Game was adapted by Wenders to become The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund, 1977).  (The bookstore which Hirayama visits repeatedly may itself be a nod to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumière [2003], another less than inspiring attempt to channel Ozu.) 

Hirayama photographs routinely with a now-archaic, small, point-and-shoot film camera, heir to Philip’s exploration of all manner of photography in Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten, 1974), and he listens to rock music from the 1960s and 70s like all of Wenders’ characters from that era.  Hirayama’s music comes from his large collection of cassette tapes, another throwback to the 20^th century, while the diegetic rock music in the early films generally came from the radio.

Perfect Days ends almost exactly as Kings of the Road does.  A close-up of Hirayama driving his van, while Nina Simone’s rendition of Feeling Good (which originated in the 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd) blares on the sound track, echoes Kings, which ends with a close-up of Bruno driving while Roger Miller’s 1964 ballad King of the Road plays.  The “protagonist” in both sixties ballads is an outsider who sings of life apart from the constraints of society.  The only difference in these two final sequences is that the shot of Hirayama is severely frontal while that of Bruno is lateral.  The severity in the framing and cutting in Perfect Daysmay be another homage to Ozu, but it also reflects the severity of the life choices Hirayama has made.

Unlike Wenders’ early films, which were road movies—messy, energetic and pressing forward, despite having little in the way of plot—Perfect Days has a cyclical structure, intended, perhaps, to evoke Ozu, but also in keeping with the fact that Hirayama, as an older man, has settled on his life choices and adopted a routine that varies little from day to day.

The protagonists in Wenders’ early films struggle against history, American hegemony, and bourgeois conformity, but similar struggles, primarily against the salaryman life expected of middle class Japanese men, are in Hirayama’s past.  He has broken with his family.  We are told his father stopped speaking to him—reminiscent of the confrontation between Robert and his father in Kings—and now the father has dementia, but Hirayama still refuses to visit him.  This refusal, along with the visit from his niece and sister, are the only indications that Hirayama is still processing the alienation that drove him to become a toilet cleaner.  Otherwise, his life is composed of set routines that seem to please him but which render the film rather dull.  Perfect Days attempts to capture a kind of Zen stasis, the mu that Ozu so treasured, but mu, often translated as nothingness, indicates a nothingness that is the gateway to sublimity.  The nothingness in Perfect Days—despite brief interludes of pathos, charm and humor—seems mostly to be just nothingness.

 

 

Historic Deerfield’s Leap Year Celebration

In John Ford’s enormously seminal film The Searchers (1956), two men spend five years searching for a young girl who has been abducted by Indians. When they find her, she has entered her teens and become one of the chief’s wives. At first she declares her allegiance to the tribe but later changes her mind and agrees to return home with the men. The reasons for her change of heart are never explained, nor did they need to be for a 1950’s audience. The girl had obviously come to her senses, remembered her past, and realized the advantages of returning to “civilization.” Such was not the case, however, with most white women captured as children and raised up in Indian tribes.

One of the best documented cases is that of Eunice Williams, daughter of a prominent Puritan clergyman, who, with her father and brother, was captured in the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, by Mohawk Indians and their French allies and marched 300 miles to Montreal through deep snow. The raid was a small piece of the War of the Spanish Succession—the one that made Winston Churchill’s ancestor Lord Marlborough famous—which had spilled over onto the American continent. The raid took place before dawn on February 29 and is commemorated every leap year by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. (Pocumtuck is the name both natives and colonists used for Deerfield at one time.)

This year’s commemorative events included lectures, reenactments, and demonstrations of colonial housekeeping crafts.

 Re-enactors, many of whom had come considerable distance, staged the battle that took place after the attack on Deerfield when militiamen from Northampton and other nearby settlements, seeing flames, marched to Deerfield and engaged the French and Indians as the last of them were leaving the burning village. Turned back by an ambush, the militiamen were unable to rescue any of the captives. This year about twenty re-enactors, pretending to be Frenchmen, English colonials, Mohawk and Abenaki, stood in for what had been a battle involving about 300 men. This left much to the imagination, but a narrator helpfully told the story while the actors “did battle” on a field at the Deerfield Academy.

As for Eunice Williams, although her father and brother were eventually “redeemed” (ransomed) and returned to Deerfield, she never went home. Captured specifically to take the place of a Mohawk child who had died, and converted to Catholicism by her Indian family, who lived in close proximity to the French, she refused every attempt by her father and brother to persuade her to return. As a teenager, she fell in love with a fellow tribesman, and, although dubious about the inter-racial union, the local padre married them when they declared they would live together unwed if he did not. Throughout his life, her brother, a clergyman like his father and tortured by fears for her immortal soul, wrote to and of her, and, on occasion, she and her husband visited him, pitching their tent in his yard in preference to sleeping in the house. Eunice herself remained illiterate, so we have no record of what she actually thought about her life with the Mohawk, although her actions speak quite loudly.

For more on Eunice Williams and the conundrum she posed for her family, see John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive (1994). To observe the next commemoration of the 1704 raid on Deerfield, you’ll have to wait until 2020.

Woman in Gold

We watched Woman in Gold with about four other people last Sunday at the Greenfield Garden Cinema’s noon screening.  It tells the story of Maria Altmann’s recovery of five Klimt paintings, including the iconic “Woman in Gold,” a portrait of her aunt, which were stolen from her family by the Nazis.  Maria’s story, at least as told in cinema, is an upper class parallel to 2013’s Philomena: a young male professional helps an elderly woman right the institutional wrongs done her when she was very young.  The two criss-cross the Atlantic seeking truth and justice, and the initially shallow young man discovers his soul.  Helen Mirren as Maria is as captivating as Judi Dench’s Philomena.

Maria’s story begins in Vienna where the Bloch-Bauer brothers, Ferdinand and Gustav, live with their wives and Gustav’s children, Luise and Maria.  The wealthy family hosts the cream of Vienna’s arts community and count Gustav Klimt and Arnold Schoenberg among their friends.  Ferdinand’s wife Adele sits for Klimt, and the portrait, with its intricate gold leaf patterns, hangs in their drawing room.  When the Nazis march into Vienna, persecution of the Jews follows swiftly, the Bloch-Bauer home is looted, and escape becomes nearly impossible.  Adele has died a decade earlier, and Ferdinand has fled to Switzerland ahead of the Nazi invasion.  Maria, now married, and her husband Fritz escape with the help of friends, but they must leave her parents behind.  After the war, art works looted from Austria are returned to the Austrian government, but not to their original owners.  In 1998 Austrian law regarding the stolen art changes, and Maria and her lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Arnold Schoenberg’s grandson) begin a quest to have some of the looted art returned.

 Among Holocaust movies, Woman in Gold stands with Schindler’s List and The Pianist as one of the best.  It has less violence than most Holocaust movies, but Maria’s confession at the end that neither the justice she’s won nor the priceless paintings she’s recovered can compensate her for having had to leave her parents behind in Nazi-occupied Austria is wrenching.  Multiplied by hundreds of thousands of young émigrés, it illustrates the anguish that haunted a generation long after the Holocaust ended.

Saving Mr. Banks and Philomena

With 2013 so rife with docudramas that NPR’s Robert Siegel felt the need to fact-check them, we managed to see two more over the Christmas holidays, films in which the protagonists attempt to heal relationships long severed by time and space: Saving Mr. Banks at the Greenfield Garden Cinema and Philomena at Images, a small non-profit, one-screen movie theater in Williamstown (charming home of Williams College).

The films differ in many of the ways I cited when comparing Apollo 13 and Captain Phillips (10/21/13), with Mr. Banks far more structurally complex than Philomena, a fairly linear narrative recounting an Irish woman’s search for her out-of wedlock child, taken from her when he was three.  As part of Philomena’s story, the film informs us of the horrors of a particular Catholic home for unwed mothers (and we remember the many  exposés in recent decades of similarly abusive Irish institutions for children that thrived in the 1950s).  Flashbacks tell us how Philomena conceived and then lost her child.  Somewhat more avant-garde are the flash-forwards that seem to be Philomena’s imaginings of her son and turn out to be part of a video montage of the child’s life that his friend has compiled.  An on-going dialogue between the two main characters about the virtues and abuses of faith never fully resolves the issue, but the narrative’s many unexpected twists and turns organize the film and hold our attention 

By contrast, Saving Mr. Banks, which tells the story of P.L. Travers’ negotiations with Walt Disney over the rights to film Mary Poppins, has a much more complex, multi-layered structure, whose over-arching theme is the redemption of all imperfect fathers through art, e.g. cinema.  Where the flashbacks in Philomena fill in the beginning of her story, the purpose of the flashbacks in Mr. Banks, which detail Travers’ rich and troubled childhood relationship with her alcoholic father, remains a mystery until the various threads of the father theme begin to coalesce in the last third of the film.   Although both Judi Dench as Philomena and Emma Thompson as P. L. Travers are worth the price of admission, Saving Mr. Banks is more artistically satisfying and, for anyone who is or has had an imperfect father—which may include most of us—cathartic and restorative.  We are moved by Philomena’s story, but Mr. Banks’s story is ultimately our own.

 Both films expand on a recent trend in docudrama—one Steve and I find delightful—of including film footage, stills, and, in the case of Mr. Banks, audio recordings of the actual historical characters in the credit roll.         

"The Judge," starring Robert Duvall, Robert Downey, Jr. and SHELBURNE FALLS!!

The excitement from Labor Day’s shoot (2012) had barely settled down when another movie crew came to Shelburne Falls to film The Judge, a melodrama set in Indiana.  Mistaking Shelburne Falls for a town in Indiana requires considerable suspension of disbelief, but, as Irving Thalberg told his art director, who complained about using an ocean backdrop for a scene set in Paris, “We can’t cater to a handful of people who know Paris.”  And, in contrast to Labor Day, Shelburne Falls appears in the film a lot as do various nearby locations, including repeated aerial shots of the Mt. Massaemet Fire Tower.  (Two days of shooting at Avery’s General Store in Charlemont seem to have been left on the cutting room floor, however.)

Not only does The Judge, directed by David Dobkin, include abundant footage from the ‘hood, it’s actually a pretty good movie.  Robert Duvall is superb as the title character, and Robert Downey, Jr. as his smart-ass lawyer son is fun to watch.  The film’s love story never quite rings true, the final court room showdown is the sort of thing that gives melodrama a bad name, the ending is too drawn out, and the evil-city-versus-virtuous-small-town plot premise is both clichéd and dated, but the characters are well-drawn, and Downey’s two on-screen brothers, played by Vince D’Onofrio and Jeremy Strong, are a delight.  Billy Bob Thornton gives a fine performance as the righteous, low-key, out-of-town prosecutor.  In addition to the actors, the writers (Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque) help to save the film from being just another hackneyed prodigal son story.  Wit and irony not only suffuse the Robert Downey character’s outlook on life but, apparently, the filmmakers' as well, for, in a self-reflexive move, they include one character, the youngest brother, who is a compulsive, amateur filmmaker and also mentally handicapped (in a charming Hollywood kind of way).

If you’re from Western Massachusetts, be sure to sit through all the final credits, which include the “Shelburne Falls Crew” and gratitude to the people of Shelburne Falls and Buckland.  While the production offices were set up in Shelburne Falls, shooting took place in a number of other Massachusetts towns as well.  IMDb credits Boston as the film’s location, but that is an error, no doubt born of the West Coast assumption that Massachusetts is so small it must all be Boston.  I suspect that in LA one can drive 100 miles and still be in LA (or somewhere similar).  Drive 100 miles from Boston, and if you’re not in a different state entirely, you’re definitely in a different world (although not one that looks anything like Indiana).

But, seriously, if you love Western Mass, Robert Duvall, or both, go see the film!     

Labor Day, starring Shelburne Falls

Mid-June, 2012, had Shelburne Falls and much of the rest of Franklin County all a-gawk as the film crew for Labor Day came to town. For several days, the village of Shelburne Falls became “Holton Mills, New Hampshire,” with principal filming in or in front of many local businesses: Rethreads, Keystone Market, Baker Pharmacy, and the Greenfield Savings Bank, among others. Friday, June 15, was a particularly exciting day as an enormous crane photographed young Gatlin Griffith (Henry) cycling across the Iron Bridge.

Shooting also occurred in parts of Turners Falls, Millers Falls, Greenfield, and Belchertown. Western Massachusetts seems to have enchanted director Jason Reitman, who called its combination of landscape and architecture “like…in a dream.” (The Recorder, 9/2/12)

Turners Falls High School film teacher Jonathan Chappell landed a summer job with the film’s “locations department,” which involved scouting and selecting locations, managing them during shooting, and making the necessary arrangements with town boards and property owners.  Since Labor Day was shot digitally, Chappell, who teaches digital filmmaking, was able to observe his craft applied in a big-budget production 

Folks from Western Mass watching the film will note that Shelburne Falls flies by pretty quickly and many of the landscapes don’t really resemble their part of the state. That’s because much of the film, including Adele’s house, where most of the action takes place, was shot in eastern Massachusetts: Acton, Mansfield, Natick, Medfield, and Medway. (The house is in Acton.) The production company headquartered itself in Natick, and, logistically, it made [dollars and] sense to film close to Natick where possible.

Unfortunately, the finished film is a bit of a dud.  Jason Reitman, so adept at directing zinging dialogue between gifted teens in Juno, is at a loss directing passion as observed by a mostly mute pre-teen. (Anyone would be, but for this Reitman, who wrote the script, has only himself to blame.) The film’s unlikely premise, a love-starved woman harboring and falling for a fugitive, isn’t new (think the farm episode in Grand Illusion or Heinrich Böll’s Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, adapted to film by Volker Schlöndorff). But to convince us to suspend disbelief, the hunger and the passion have to be visceral, and Labor Day throws in too many complications to succeed in this department. The revelation near the end of Adele’s miscarriages, for example, helps us understand why she seems more catatonic than simply love-starved, but that story element, along with son Henry’s ubiquity, inhibits rather than enhances the passion.

The narrative’s back story is told mainly through unannounced flashbacks, which are unnecessarily confusing. Considered daring in the 1960’s, such flashbacks have increased in sophistication over the years and often add a touch of mystery, inviting audiences to unravel their meaning, but poor casting choices make those in Labor Day hard to follow, even for inveterate film-goers.

If the flatness of the story-telling, which picks up somewhat as the couple attempts to put their doomed flight to Canada in motion, hasn’t spoiled the film sufficiently, the ham-handed ending certainly does. Ratcheting through twenty plus years in less than ten minutes, two more incarnations of Henry and a nod to the lasting influence of the memorable Labor Day weekend on him—he excels at making peach pie—we finally arrive at a happy ending; but it’s too little too late—for us and, we suspect, the characters—despite the narrator’s assurance to the contrary.

For a few days, Labor Day sprinkled pixie dust on Western Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the magic didn’t extend to the big screen. Perhaps the project was too far-flung for Reitman’s talent or, perhaps, his budget. Since 2012, several other productions have shot in Shelburne Falls. Maybe one of these will immortalize the village in film history. Meanwhile, the stars, the excitement, and the recognition will have to suffice.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas!

         

        Every Christmas at Mill Brook House we bring out our “Christmas movies,” It’s a Wonderful Life and The Shop Around the Corner.  For  some reason we’ve added To Be or Not to Be to the mix, perhaps because, like Shop Around the Corner, it takes place in winter in another Lubitsch-in-Hollywood evocation of an Eastern Europe city (Warsaw). 

         Actually, my favorite Christmas scenes occur in films not strictly devoted to Christmas: who can forget Margaret O’Brien destroying her snow people in Meet Me in St. Louis just after Judy Garland sings a teary Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas? Although not a Christmas film per se, Meet Me in St. Louis was released just after Thanksgiving in 1944, and Garland crooned more to a war-weary nation waiting for its sons to come home than to Margaret O’Brien: “Someday soon, we all will be together/If the Fates allow. /Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.”  Those downer words would later be changed to: “Through the years/We all will be together/If the Fates allow./Hang a shining star upon the highest bough!”  But the original words fit the times.  Within two weeks of the film’s release, the Battle of the Bulge began.  “It ruined our Christmas,” my father, still serving stateside at the time, recalled, citing the sudden increase in War Department telegrams informing neighbors that loved ones had been killed in the offensive. 

    In Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, which treats the fragility of love in wartime directly, the lovers, Maréchal and Elsa, first connect over the tiny, table-top Christmas tree and crèche--its Christ Child constructed of potatoes--that Rosenthal and Maréchel have created for Elsa’s daughter Lotte.  These heart-ache-y Christmases, along with the beginning of Empire of the Sun--where the children sing the hauntingly beautiful Suo Gân, followed by the ship-of-fools-like Christmas party in the British Concession of old Shanghai--move me more than the straight-out Christmas films.  But it wouldn’t quite be Christmas without Jimmy Stewart rejoicing with his neighbors in It’s a Wonderful Life or making a fool out of Margaret Sullavan in Shop Around the Corner.  And how could we let a year go by without watching the beautiful Carole Lombard outfoxing both her husband and the Nazis while Jack Benny makes a fool out of himself?  What could accompany the familiar, well-loved ornaments and tinsel on our tree better than these funny, timeless, feel-good gifts from Tinseltown?

 

Late Autumn

 

Late Autumn is the name of a film by Ozu, who often named his films after seasons: Late Spring, Early Spring, Early Summer (despite being best known for Tokyo Story).  Western culture doesn’t usually draw such fine distinctions between the seasons, but country life has sharpened my sensitivity to the differences between the early, late, and mid of any given season.  Late autumn is a particularly delicate time of year--often gray, an impression heightened (so to speak) by the tall bare deciduous trees all around us.  But within that grayness, muted splashes of color still abound.  Baby trees, with perhaps only a dozen leaves, are bright red or yellow.  Weeds, touched by frost, color up.  The fuzzy, cream-colored tops of goldenrod gone gray nod in the fields and white splashes of milkweed seeds unfurl.  Juncos settle on the fields to enjoy the weed seeds and fly up when startled, darting and tumbling like a gust of leaves in a fall wind.  They, too, are gray with a striking splash of white on their tails, which fan out when they fly.

With trees and bushes bare, I can better see the contours of the Mill Brook and down into the mini-gorge below the dam: the ancient retaining walls, crumbled cabins, and abandoned machinery, covered in rust and fallen leaves.

Late autumn brings hunting to Massachusetts, and last year we discovered a refugee in our backyard, a male pheasant unable to find his way past the new fence that cut off the back fields from the front.  He walked up and down the fence, staying close to the gate as if he knew that was the way out if only it would magically open.  He seemed not to think about other options.  He could have flown out or gone back the way he came, but he apparently felt  strongly about walking through the gate.   We watched him for some time, sure he would momentarily take to the air, but he stayed stubbornly by the fence.  Steve grabbed a camera and, coming quite close, photographed him, then took pity and opened the gate.  Magic at last!  Our bird strode through the opening and only then took flight.

 

Spielberg's Lincoln

    Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, when our garden is frozen and we have more time to be in town, we try to catch up with a few movies at the Greenfield Garden Cinema.  This year we caught Spielberg’s Lincoln on the Sunday before Christmas and enjoyed it, especially the acting.  Critics have heaped praise on Daniel Day-Lewis for his amazing portrayal of Lincoln, but all of the acting was superb.  Who would recognize Sally “You-Really-Like-Me” Field as the terse Mary Todd Lincoln?  Awards have also been rightly heaped on Tommy Lee Jones for his performance as Thaddeus Stevens (who, by the way, really did have a 23-year liaison with his “quadroon” [one quarter black] housekeeper).  James Spader, Hal Holbrook, and David Strathairn gave outstanding performances as did the less well-known actors.  Janusz Kaminski’s award-winning low-light cinematography, capturing the era in the sepia tones we associate with wood, candles, and early photography, is also treat. 

    The film’s story-telling (script and editing) is uneven, however, and often leaves the audience, at least this audience, squirming with embarrassment.  Spielberg has never known when to end his films and has ruined many a good one (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List, for example) with too many endings, and Lincoln is no different.  We do not need to be walked through the assassination, his cabinet gathered round the crumpled body, or flashback to his Second Inaugural.  Lincoln descending the White House stairs on his way to the theater, framed by the dark arch of the portico, would have been enough.  The rest, as they say, is history.  (Steve bought me Sunrise at Campobello on DVD for Christmas.  As Ralph Bellamy’s Roosevelt begins his speech nominating Al Smith at the 1924 Democratic Convention, the culmination of a three-year struggle to find a life after polio, the camera pulls back amid confetti, balloons, and cheers.  We know the rest of the story.  Spielberg should have studied his prototypes better!)

    Unfortunately for this film, not only the end but the beginning is mishandled with two soldiers, one black, one white, telling Lincoln of their exploits on the battlefield and reciting the Gettysburg Address for him.  It doesn’t get more embarrassingly didactic than that.  I once published an article on “Old Age Cinema,” in which I discussed the characteristics that I thought films created by directors in their later years had in common.  As Lincoln started out, I wondered if Spielberg was falling into that category, and not in a good way, but the core of the film, the fight for the 13^th Amendment, was as tight, lively, and irreverent as anything Spielberg or anyone else, for that matter, has made.   That and the acting are worth the price of admission.