THE BIRTH OF A NATION

THE BIRTH OF A NATION (15 October 2016)

Written, directed, and starring Nate Parker as Nat Turner, Armie Hammer as his master, and Aja Naomi King as his wife.

The time is 1831. Turner is a literate slave and preacher on a Virginia plantation who led a 48-hour slave rebellion that resulted in the deaths of more than 50 slave holders. He was captured and hanged, along with more than fifty slaves. What little we know of his story comes from the publication in 1831 of The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, by a white lawyer named Thomas R. Gray. In 1861 the white abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson published an essay entitled Nat Turner’s Insurrection. A century later, in 1865, William Styron published his controversial, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner. Initial attempts by Hollywood to adapt it to the screen were blocked by Black Anti-Defamation Association, a group of African-American actors.

Turner’s motives have been regarded, by turns, as political, religious, and personal, the latter hinging on his vengeance for his wife’s brutal rape by local slave masters. Now, in Nate Parker’s new film, there is a decided emphasis on Turner’s bloody vengeance for the brutalization of his wife. There is even a scene where she gives him permission to avenge her rape. With Biblical fire and brimstone—“For every verse they use to support our bondage, there’s another one demanding our freedom”—he hastily arms his followers and leads them into battle against the slave holders. There is carnage on both sides. To the strains on the soundtrack of the song, “Hanging Fruit,” a dozen slaves are hoisted into the trees, where they are hanged by the neck. Turner’s execution quickly follows.

As beautifully shot and edited as is this film, I must admit that at moments like the “Hanging Fruit” scene, I began to squirm. Moments of subtlety that had heretofore been present were subverted by heavy-handed sermonizing. Moreover, I had been trying to resist a growing awareness that Parker was loading up Turner’s story with images of spiritual transcendence and ecstasy. Turner’s insurrection is here fraught with Jesus metaphors of martyrdom: Blood flows from an ear of corn. At crucial moments, heavenly rays outline Turner’s body. An angelic figure, wings and all, appears to him at the moment of his death. A murmuring, churchly chorus surrounds the moment. The benevolent Turner has become a holy warrior.

To what degree this dilute the political contexts of Turner’s story is a matter for debate. I for one, regretted the concession to Cecil B. DeMille’s brand of Hollywood religious hooha. There is no gainsaying Parker’s fervor and his admirably restrained performance as Turner. But I got the impression that the political and social contexts of a story about revolt and freedom were sacrificed to a more simplistic revenge story. As critic SalamischahTillet writes in the New York Times, “In a film about coming to terms with the nation’s founding sin of slavery. . . the representations of rape here feel eerily retrograde.” In an appended note, the critic observes that The Birth of a Nation is “out of step with the cause it has often been associated with, Black Lives Matter, which has steadfastly resisted the model of a single charismatic male leader and has primarily been led by African-American women.”

If you want to check out a film that bears more than a little resemblance to this, but which chronicles its true story with no concessions to spiritual eyewash, see Fred Schepisi’s wholly admirable The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, the Australian story of a 19th-century indigenous slave’s bloody revolt against his masters.

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (15 October 2016)

Directed by Tate Taylor and starring Emily Blunt as Rachel, adapted from the novel by Paula Hawkins.

It doesn’t take long for THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN to derail. Not the train; it survived. No, the titular “Girl” and the Story itself. I recall my frustrated attempts to read the novel a couple of years ago. I think it was not quite halfway through that I literally threw the damned thing against the wall. Or was it out the window of a train? I really don’t remember. The convoluted plot, the arbitrarily contrived intersections of the characters—three narrators, no less—and the baffling dislocated narrative line left me profoundly disinterested and, frankly, pissed off. It’s as if director Tate Taylor decided he was going to outgun the French master, Alain Renais in drowning the hapless viewer in a swamp of confusion. Actually, he succeeded. Resnais’s masterpiece, MURIEL, has nothing on THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN.

How happy I am to see that Anthony Lane’s review in The New Yorker agrees with me: “Half the sentient beings on earth appear to have read the book,” Lane writes, “alleging with near-unanimity that they couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t pick it up. I tried.” He goes on to note the drab mediocrity of it all: “The tale is set largely in a suburb on the Hudson, and nothing is duller or more stifling, as a rule, than people who wish to make it perfectly plain how stifled they feel by their dull suburban existence.”

I defy you to hang with me as I try to work out the plot. Rachel used to be married to Tom. But Tom had an affair with Anna, and is now married to her. They have a baby. They also have a nanny named Megan. Megan looks a lot like Anna. Megan is living with a creepy guy named Scott. She is also hot for her shrink, Kamal. Rachel is also seeing Kamal. Meanwhile, during one of her train rides up the Hudson, Rachel spots suspicious activity on the balcony where Tom and Anna live. Is the girl in the clinch Megan? Is it Anna? And is her squeeze Scott, or Tom, or Kamal?

Who gives a damn?

And did I mention that Rachel is so spaced out psychologically and so drunk throughout that she can’t figure out anything? Never mind, she will soon commit murder. But no, it is Anna—or is it Megan?—who does the deed.

I have to admit Emily Blunt is very brave taking on the role of the drunk and wobbly and spaced out Rachel. The bombshell that years ago graced THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA is here a dour, bleary wreck.

During your next train trip, I suggest you pick up a less convoluted, bewildering book, say, THE SPOILS OF POYNTON, by Henry James.

NEW BOOK BY JOHN C. TIBBETTS

In THE GOTHIC WORLDS OF PETER STRAUB University of Kansas professor John C. Tibbetts presents the first serious study linking Peter Straub to the evolving contexts of the Gothic Tale, including the fairy-tale tradition of the Brothers Grimm, the ghostly shivers of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, the Weird monstrosities of H.P. Lovecraft, and today’s postmodernist trends in transgressive body horror. In addition to close looks at the celebrated novels, like Ghost Story and The Talisman (co-written with Stephen King), and the challenging short stories in Houses without Doors and Interior Darkness, Tibbetts examines for the first time Straub’s archives, working papers and correspondence. Several “close-up” interviews reveal the private and idiosyncratic sides of Straub, at work and at home. In short, continues Gary K. Wolfe in his Preface, “The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub provides an invaluable road map to the complex, multileveled novels and stories that will eventually come to define Straub's legacy.”

Peter Straub with the bust of H.P. Lovecraft (photo by John C. Tibbetts)

In his Foreword to the book, cultural and literary historian Gary K. Wolfe writes that “perhaps more than any author of his generation—Stephen King included—Peter Straub has extended the literary possibilities of horror fiction.” Winner of every award and accolade in the field of horror, including the World Fantasy, World Horror, Bram Stoker, and International Horror Guild Lifetime Achievement awards, Straub’s standing in contemporary Gothic horror is indisputable.

John Tibbetts (left) and Peter Straub, Providence, Rhode Island

“[He is] the premier stylist of the modern supernatural novel,” writes historian Douglas Winter, “a writer of rare wit and intelligence.”

In an interview with Straub’s occasional collaborator, Stephen King, conducted especially for this book, King observes that Straub brings "a poet’s sensibility to the field of dark fantasy and creates a synthesis of horror and beauty.”

DON’T BREATHE: INSIDE OUT

Spoiler alert!

Filmmaker Fede Alvarez has crafted a neat reversal on burglary movies: Instead of the thieves secretly contriving to enter a house, here they are desperately seeking to exit the house. It’s not the going-in that matters, it’s the going-OUT. And Alvarez does something much more disturbing. He delivers a piece of relentless, savage horror with an artful panache that is just this side of the movie it most resembles: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

The three would-be robbers, played by Jane levy, Dylan Minnette, and Daniel Zovatto, have targeted a blind and reclusive Gulf War veteran (Stephen Lang), who lives alone in a blighted neighborhood. Legend has it that the accidental death of his daughter has left him with a stack of money secreted away in his dark old house. So off they go, confident they can get in, find the money, and get out, before waking the sleeping man. But no. The man’s preternatural senses wake him and enable him to stalk the very people stalking him.

The film plays upon our sympathies like a demented pianist attacking a keyboard. On the one hand, of course, there’s this poor old guy, alone, blind, the victim of these vicious robbers. On the other, we have three hapless thieves falling prey to a half-crazed guy who not only brutally attacks them with blazing guns and heavy hammers, but, it turns out, is hiding a nasty secret in his old dark house: He is holding captive the young woman who killed his daughter in a traffic accident. He will release her only after she delivers the baby that will replace the daughter she killed.

The second half of the movie is a nightmarish flight and pursuit through every room, attic, basement, trap door, and corridor. When the lights are on, the robbers have the advantage; when they are off, the power play reverses. And there is something especially creepy in the moments when pursuer and pursued—who is who continually shifts about—stand together in the same space, motionless, lights on or off, each waiting for the other to betray himself with the slightest sound or breath. Balancing the sheer audacity of the brutalities is the artful mise-en-scene. DON’T BREATHE is a miracle of canny camera placement and scene composition, almost elegant in its calculation and execution. Pursuer and pursued are constantly kept in the frame in every possible kind of shot composition. In other words, while we are repelled, sometimes disgusted at the atrocities depicted, we can appreciate the beauty of the film’s design. Here is the supreme paradox. How do we deal with unspeakable horrors when they are delivered with great artistry? Perhaps the former is all the more effective due to the latter.

FIREFLY!

  “You Can’t Take the Sky from Me!”

Lately I have had the opportunity to revisit FIREFLY, the legendary, swashbuckling television series from 2002. Written and produced by Joss Whedon, it fell short of one complete season before the Suits at Fox cancelled it. But not before it garnered an enthusiastic fan base that has since grown over the years to cult proportions.

And the enthusiasm is justified.

Thank goodness, there’s nary a superpower or cape or mask among the nine members of the crew of Captain Mal Reynolds’s “Firefly” class transport ship. They are very human, flawed and heroic by turns. They ply the spaceways as they smuggle, steal, and scavenge their way in a futuristic world, caught in the crossfire of a galactic civil war.

Cast members are Nathan Fillion as the good Captain; Gina Torres as Zoe, his tough second-in-command; Alan Tuduk as “Wash,” ship’s pilot (and husband of Zoe); Adam Baldwin as soldier-of-fortune Jayne; Jewel Staite as engineer/ mechanic Kaylee; Morena Baccarin as the professional “companion” (read that: courtesan) Inara; Ron Glass as the priest Shepherd Book; and Sean Maher and Summer Glau as a brother and sister on the run from the Federal authorities.

FIREFLY, bless it, is concerned more with personalities and crew relationships than it is on special effects (although there are some beauts) and chases (although yes, there are a few). It has a great heart. And the joy and comradeship shared by the ensemble cast is compelling and real.

It is also one of the more heart-breaking might-have-beens, in that producer Whedon was blocked from finishing it and revealing its many secrets.

But at least the glorious fragment that has been left us is available for all to either revisit of discover for the first time. They can’t take THAT away from us!

GENIUS!

A Film by Michael Grandage about Editor Maxwell Perkins and his famous clients, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe.

Should the spontaneity of the creative urge be counterbalanced by the restraint of reflection and reconsideration? This new biopic about the relationship between novelist Tom Wolfe and his editor at Scribner’s publishers, Maxwell Perkins, considers the issue. The “genius” of this dual portrait is not just that the editor restrains the novelist, or that the novelist rebels against the editor. No, GENIUS shows how the two enter into a reciprocal dynamic.

Maxwell Perkins
(played by Colin Firth)

Thomas Wolfe
(played by Jude Law)

Two contrasting scenes provide a case in point. In the first, mild-mannered Perkins and volatile Wolfe are in Perkins’s office locked in nothing short of literary combat as they pore over passages from the manuscript of Wolfe’s first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Perkins tries to cut and trim Wolfe’s notoriously expansive and unwieldy verbiage. “Cut! Cut!” shouts Perkins. Protest! Protest! groans Wolfe. He watches in dismay as Perkins’ blue pencil dances across the typescript, line by line, correcting, erasing, questioning. Each cut by the relentless Perkins is answered by two more lines from the stubborn Wolfe. And so it goes. Eventually, the offending page has been sawn in half, as it were. The two men, gaze happily at each other, exhausted. While Perkins releases the core beauty of Wolfe’s sprawling prose, Wolfe in turn learns lessons in concision and restraint.

Now we turn to the second scene, which reverses the process. Perkins has dragged the reluctant Wolfe to a lower East Side jazz joint. Perkins admits he doesn’t like music. Wolfe takes up the challenge and demands Perkins choose a favorite song for the jazz combo. Right. “Flow Gentle, Sweet Afton”? The combo takes up the tune, moderate at first, but then explodes into a syncopated frenzy. It’s Perkins’ turn to be educated. The formally stiff editor loosens up under the spell of the hot music, and we see him for the first time shamelessly intoxicated and in synch with Wolfe’s volcanic energies.

The rest of the film extends and confirms the exchange that produces this unstable compound of Art and Craft... and ultimately the struggle to bring Life itself to the printed page.

I submit GENIUS to any prospective writer who feels himself or herself free of the restraints of an editor. Most writers know and respect that humbling process. And most editors justifiably regard themselves as essential partners in the creative work. Not just Wolfe, but many other writers have depended upon the sobering influences of the professional editor. I cite short-story writer Raymond Carver as a prime example. Where would the tight concision and spare prose of his work be without his editor, Gordon Lish? (See the fictionalization of this process in Stephane Michaka’s novel, Scissors.)

By contrast, consider the fate of a writer like Ray Bradbury, surely the latter-day inheritor of Tom Wolfe’s extravagantly descriptive prose. It pains me to acknowledge that the beauty of Bradbury’s prose that enlivens the first two-and-half-decades of his work gradually became bloated and overwrought in the last three decades of his life. As long as he was responsive to friends, editors, and associates, few American writers produced such masterly writing. But when, like Wolfe, he fell so much in love with his prose, it overmastered him. It was like he puffed so vigorously into a balloon, that the balloon soared aloft, carrying Ray with it, leaving behind considerations of story and character.

Let GENIUS be an object lesson—and a warning—to all of us who strive to breathe life into our writing. Having said that, I feel the breath of Maxwell Perkins on my neck—

And I’ll stop here.

TARZAN’S NEW QUEST

Edgar Rice Burroughs always found new ways to plunge a civilized John Clayton back into his native jungles to resume life—with scarcely a missed step—as Tarzan of the Apes. In Tarzan and the Foreign Legion, for example, he’s a World War II Air Force officer whose shot-down plane plunges him into the Sumatra jungles to continue the War. And here in the new Warner Bros. film, THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, he’s a late-19th century aristocrat who effortlessly sheds his waistcoat and cravat and finds himself back in the Congo to foil a plot by the King of Belgium to enslave the Congolese.

And so, we’re off and running. Or, to put a finer point on it, swinging... I have to confess since my boyhood, all I really cared about in the many Tarzan movies was the vine-swinging quotient. Across the decades, the aerial escapades have really been the bottom line for me. But good tree-swinging has proven to be sporadic at best. Lumbering ancient Elmo Lincoln in 1918 was earthbound. The young Johnny Weissmuller did a fair job, courtesy of a team of acrobats in his first three films, TARZAN THE APE MAN, TARZAN AND HIS MATE, and TARZAN ESCAPES (1932-36); but as he grew heftier in the mid-1940s most of the tree-swinging abated. Gordon Scott’s Tarzan in the late 1950s was too muscle-bound to soar aloft. A few years later an emaciated Jock Mahoney spent most of his time on the ground. And in GREYSTOKE, Christoph Lambert was too busy in England to indulge in much aerial hi-jinks.

Now, in LEGEND OF TARZAN Alexander Skarsgard gives us a couple of nifty flying sequences, but that’s all. Most of the time he’s preoccupied with rescuing Jane from the clutches of the evil Christoph Waltz. At other times he’s fending off the wisecracks of his sidekick, Samuel L. Jackson.

Drawing by John C. Tibbetts of Edgar Rice Burroughs
and his two most famous characters, Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars.

Most of the familiar tropes are here. Jane is abducted, of course. She’s always a captive of somebody or other. And when things look hopeless with the bad guys, Tarzan summons the beasts of field, vine, and water to come to the rescue. One detail is different, though: In the inevitable clash with a Great Ape he gets pounded into the ground. And his famous yell is different. “What’s that?” someone asks. “It’s Tarzan,” comes the reply, “only it sounds different.”

Painting by John C. Tibbetts of Tarzan and the Golden Lion
(after the original by J. Allen St. John)

Unfortunately the film fails to explore the anxieties crucial to any Tarzan tale: John Clayton’s confusion between his aristocratic heritage and his savage jungle instincts. Alas, no identity confusion here. Instead, Alexander Skarsgard’s passively slips in and out of both identities without batting an eye. Author Burroughs at least was quite clear about it: We forget that he ended TARZAN OF THE APES with a noble act of renunciation: John Clayton gives up his claims to the titles and estate of the House of Greystoke and as Tarzan returns to the jungles where he belongs. He doesn’t question the mystery of his origins. “I was born there,” he says quietly. “My mother was an Ape, and of course she couldn’t tell me much about it. I never knew who my father was..."

That’s the right of things. The jungle is, after all, where the trees and vine are...