Magnolia

I loved Magnolia from the minute that flower opened on the first drum beat. I took days to puzzle it out, and when I had it unlocked I loved it even more.

Now I find the performances (and sadly, the direction*) pretty mannered, but I've got a sweet spot for the sing-a-long, and it will be fun to write about. I still know what it means, after all.

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The Hurt Locker was forthcoming enough to give up it's meaning in the first ten letters on the screen: war is a drug. Magnolia makes you wait through nine whole words...

One is the loneliest number that has ever been.

...before it tells you what it's all about:

Two can be as bad as one, it's the loneliest number since the number one.

Cue drums, cue story, unfolding like a multi-faceted flower all over the San Fernando valley. I know it seems counter-intuitive that two would be lonely, but Aimee Mann seemed pretty sure and I think we need to look at the possibility.

Turns out, two can be lonely because of a failure to communicate. And this is true! Often, we don't communicate the very thing we need to say to the very person we need to hear it. Instead we throw these vital messages at strangers in outbursts that don't make sense, while to our loved ones we are scared to say what we most should.

Now, just off my head, without having seen the movie is many years, allow me to exampalize:**

Linda can't express to Earl that she loves him because she's freaking out. The druggists misunderstand who she's buying the painkillers for and she is unable to communicate to them what she's really going through.

Earl tries to communicate with his son, Tom (he's always Tom) but misses the chance, leaving Tom to pour out his heart to his dying father only after Earl can no longer hear or respond.

Jimmy Gator and his daughter Claudia can't communicate - Donnie can't let the bartender know how much he loves him - the child genius can't even tell someone he has to pee.

And consider Phil, the nurse, who orders Hustler from Pink Dot (because he needs to find an advertisement for Tom's seminars, so he can contact him for Earl) and the operator thinks he's a prevert.

Failed attempts at communication are all over this movie, big ones and little ones, and most of the time they splatter out like weeping Tom, or Donnie shouting nonsensically in the bar or Linda doing the same in the pharmacy.

In fact, there are only two pairs who share real communication in the whole film. The first is short lived- Earl and Phil speak in fast, private, warm exchanges that Linda and Tom can only yearn for until Earl fades away. And of course, Claudia and Officer Jim are both so off their games that they accidentally fall into real communication at dinner. This is terrifying to them both, because they live in a world where this almost never happens.

So there's a little optimism here, which can be seen again in the sing-along. Two can be as bad as one, but it doesn't always have to be; and we are all in sync and in tune, even if we don't know it.

Then there's the frogs. You didn't get the frogs? I hate to say "exactly", but this one really calls for it. The frogs are a massive, splattering outburst of attempted communication that totally fails, just like everything else. You may choose to see it as a failed communication happening within the story, between the characters and a newly introduced character of God, but I'm going to get meta.

To me, the frogs are P.T. Anderson's attempt at communicating with you, the audience, and you, the audience, don't get it. In other words, the metaphor works because the metaphor fails - which is a pretty wild idea. He's actually working a huge metaphor into his movie that only functions because he knows that people won't have any idea what his movie is about in the first place, so they're never going to know. The couple of us who do get it (days later, in my case) will be like Claudia and Officer Jim - it doesn't hurt the metaphor to have a precious few successful connections of understanding. Still, the metaphor as a whole only works because people usually don't ever figure out what a movie really means.

Which is why it's a good thing you have me.





* And now that they've given him an Oscar for it he'll never break the habit, and we might lose a great talent to the cold pursuit of perfection. The one lesson he didn't take from Altman is the most important: let it be alive! C'mon Paul! Punch Drunk Love!

** Perfectly cromulent word.

Eyes Wide Shut

I switched my computer's region code to Germany so I could watch the uncensored Eyes Wide Shut. It would have been nice to watch it projected that way when it came out, but I live in America and am therefore kept safe from such things.

I'm not even going to bother referring to the main characters as Bill and Alice, because they are clearly Tom and Nicole. This is one of the great examples of - let's call it realist casting. That's when the filmmakers are not in some fantasy land where the audience is expected to forget the real-life identity of the celebrity who was hired because they are hugely famous, but rather in reality, where they know the audience is never going to forget that your star is your star.

A lot of filmmakers get this on a basic level*, but Kubrick is a master of it, and therefore everything you knew or had heard about Tom and Nicole when this movie came out only helps the emotional story. So Tom and Nicole it is.

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Stanley made films very carefully, and if you watch carefully there are great returns. Consider two details in the opening party scene:

1. Nicole puts down her champagne.
After downing the champagne she grabbed the instant she was out of her husband's sight, she sets her second glass a few inches farther away from her than would seem natural. Just a few inches. But this is the invitation that leads to her extended flirtation with Sandor Szavost - a flirtation which comes within one reluctant syllable of becoming a quickie upstairs. Watch the way she touches him, and lets him touch her- how close their faces hover together. Observe all of this, then let's go see what Tom's up to.

2. Tom greets the models.
Tom is a good looking, charismatic man at a swank party and he's alone talking to two beautiful women. Gayle and Nuala are bringing the full flirt, and Tom is flirting back. But how hard? When he greets Nuala he does not place his hand on her shoulder or hip, both of which are inviting and close, but reaches across the space between them to shake the hand that is around Gayle's shoulder. Is there a less intimate option for greeting a beautiful woman at a champagne party? I suppose he could have waved. A moment later, when they try to lure him upstairs, he is walking with a model on each elbow as his hands are clasped together in front of him. Another choice would have been, I don't know, putting his arms around their impossibly sexy waists? It's another option.

Do you see our characters now? Because the details are not accidental; not with Kubrick. They tell you very specific information about our characters. Tom is not thinking about boffing strangers, Nicole really really is.

Later, they get stoned and have the big bad talk. Tom expresses that he "knows" that Nicole wouldn't cheat on him. He holds this absurd notion because he doesn't think like that, and he assumes she doesn't either. Nicole straightens him out on that point, and this is Tom's initial loss of innocence. His mind is blown, man. (Yes, we're dealing with a coming of age story starring a thirty-seven year old. It is, in many ways, a pathetic little tale. But human, and true, and magnificently told, so - onward!)

Tom takes his new unpleasant feelings into the night looking for, what? A revenge screw? The first time he's offered one he doesn't take it - but, in fairness the circumstances (the deathbed of the woman's father) are not ideal. Later a hooker offers him another shot, under perfect circumstances, and he doesn't take it again. He doesn't want a revenge screw.

So what does he want? He doesn't know, because he is a child in these matters. When he hears about the party from Nick Nightingale it sounds perfect: a big secret thing that he can't actually picture but which sounds like it certainly trumps Nicole's little sailor story. An orgy! That's just gotta relieve his terrible, confusing feelings!

Of course, loss of innocence leads not to quick understanding but to complex feelings and often more confusion. Adult questions lead to more adult questions. Poor Tom. Imagine how much worse it would have been if he'd actually done anything. Tom takes his tour of the sex museum as an observer only - he engages in exactly nothing before being chased away from the grown-up's party.

So his terrible feelings have not gone away, only now guilt has been added on top. He retraces his steps on his night of discovery and finds at the end of each path a different end.

At Nick's apartment he meets Alan Cumming's queer desk manager and the story of Nick's rough treatment. Both can be seen as non-traditional sexual behaviors.

At the mansion he meets total rejection.

At the costume shop he meets normalized pedophilia and child prostitution.

At the hooker's apartment he finds AIDS.

And at the morgue with the over-dosed beauty queen he stares death right in the face.

Nice little run of sexual fears there, Mr. Cruise! Then his friend Sidney Pollack, (symbol of cinematic authority since Tootsie) gives him an out. Sid tells him it was all a charade and he can just walk away if he wants. All those bad ends can just vanish from your mind, Tom, if you just agree to walk away from the whole thing.

Throughout the film, the rainbow has symbolized the sexual world. The models try to take Tom to "where the rainbow ends", the costume shop has a big rainbow on it's signage and rainbow-lit Christmas trees are prominent in the hooker's apartment and the deathbed house. It's a perfect symbol for Tom's view of the sexual world - twinkly bright, but he doesn't have enough information to name it any specific color. It's all colors jumbled up, because he has no idea what he's trying to imagine. When Tom returns to his house for the final time he turns off the Christmas tree. With this, we can know that Tom has chosen to turn away from the path he had oh so cautiously begun to follow.

Tom sits on the bed with Nicole and tearfully announces he will "tell her everything". What everything? He's going to confess to all the wild stuff he thought about maybe doing before he ran away in fear? Later, Nicole is tearful, but I can't help wondering if her tears stem from the realization that she's saddled for life with a man who will never probe or grow that dark part of himself that might have connected to the dark part of her that is clearly so lonely for companionship.

This is a story of an innocent who sets out to investigate sex, is scared to death by what he discovers, and runs tearfully back to naivete. That's the meaning of this film, says I.

And if you doubt, may I point out that it's actually in the title: Eyes Wide Shut.

Also, it makes a great double feature with Risky Business, which is essentially the same movie.


*although clearly some don't.

Inglourious Basterds

Quentin invited us to a movie about Jews beating up Nazis on the battlefield and he showed us a movie about Jews beating up Nazis on the movie screen. This is a more interesting tale, it turns out, in part because there is truth to it.

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First, let's get this out of the way- Quentin is giving a certain amount of ownership of the Golden Age of Hollywood to people of Jewish heritage. This can be a touchy topic, since it runs near "JewsRunHollywood!!!" territory. But that notorious sentiment is suspect because it suggests a secret cabal, with organized agendas - not because it points out that a hell of a lot of the people who built and ran major film companies were Jewish. They were, and way to go team.

Ostensibly, this is a violent movie about warfare; baseball bats, machine guns, all the gory gory. But where were the concentration camps? Where were the Panzer divisions? A U-boat maybe? Important stories about militarism and genocide are actually very carefully dramatized and examined in lots of other movies, but here, as reviewers across America very cleverly observed, these elements are Mr. Not Appearing in this Film.

However, another less commonly addressed aspect of the Third Reich is discussed over and over in this movie, from several different angles and with substantial historical fact: Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry.

With Quentin we know that whatever the story, he will be bringing his pet interests to the table: violence and movies themselves. In Inglourious Basterds, however, those things have already been brought to the table - by those guys in the matching arm bands. The violence goes without saying, and isn't really what the film is about. What we're really talking about is cinema, and if you don't appreciate the importance of cinema to the Nahtzees, then soldier, you need a lesson!

After all Hitler's #2 wasn't Göring and his Luftwaffe or Bormann and his politics or Himmler and his Gestapo. It was Goebbels and his movies. Message is power- more so than tanks or guns- and this was well known by the Nazis and by would-be totalitarians ever since.

In the film, Goebbel's success with redefining cinema is discussed directly - and Louie B. Mayer is held up as the competition. The conclusion is that the Reich is doing very well, with attendance up and a stable of real talent. But the battle of the Movie House is fought in the final reel, and the victory is Shosanna's.

Perhaps to demonstrate that collusion can't be assumed by combined efforts, Quentin presents two un-connected plans headed toward the premiere of A Nation's Pride. One is military in nature, conceived by gentiles, very complicated and goes wrong in numerous ways. The other is conceived by Shosanna Dreyfus, incredibly simple, executed with style and uses as it's only weapon cinema itself.

And here is where the real world comes in. No band of killer Jews was running around occupied France scalping Nazis. That was made up. But a largely Jewish-led film industry did use the awesome power of cinema to make Nazis the ultimate cinema villain beyond all measure. That happened quite nicely over the years. It is cinema that made the swastika the most well known symbol of evil imaginable- without movies we would see it only in history books. And it's not just the symbol- the uniforms, the salute, the German accent- all of these have come to define movie villainy.

Yes, a key battle was actually fought on the silver screen, and the bad guys lost. It is with movies that the Nazis tried to turn people against Jews and other "enemies of the reich", and it is movies that have made sure that they can never, ever take that uniform off.

And that's the meaning of Inglourious Basterds.