JACKIE

Directed by Pablo Lorrain, starring Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Crudup. Written by Noah Oppenheim.

There is a moment in JACKIE when the newly widowed Mrs. Kennedy (Natalie Portman), at her home in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, murmurs, more to herself than anyone else, “I lost track somewhere; what was real, what was performance.” She is looking back on the days immediately after the assassination of the President (Caspar Phillipson). A reporter from Life magazine, Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup), waits, notebook in hand. She is vague at time, almost defiant at others, but always careful to control her image. What should he ask; what can he ask? Can she be quoted; when not? And, in a grim moment of black comedy, he has to ask, what was the sound of that first bullet?

Any apprehension that JACKIE would be a routine, sentimentalized portrait of the life of Jacquelyn Kennedy in the weeks following the assassination of President Kennedy, are immediately dispelled in the opening minutes of the film. The film, like its subject, is restless. While the chain-smoking Jackie wanders, alone and isolated, through the vast spaces of the White House, dressed in a succession of gowns, some of them official, one of them splashed with Jack’s blood, a slipstream of images, past and present, captures those moments of reality and performance. Impressive reenactments include the famous 1962 Valentines’s Day television tour of the White House; the fateful motorcade; Lyndon Johnson (taking the oath of office; Jackie’s television tour of the White House; a performance by Pablo Casals; excerpts of Richard Burton singing “Camelot”; plans and counterplans for the President’s burial arrangements; the spectacular funeral procession; and the many embraces and recriminations, by turns, in exchanges with Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jack Valenti. Not until more than halfway through the film are we shocked at the sudden moment of Jack’s death, the sound of the first bullet, the eruption and splatter of his blood, his bleeding body thrown across Jackie’s lap.

As imaginatively presented as all this is, I felt pulled out of it at times by the slathers of mournful soundtrack music by composer Mica Levi. An unfortunate pastiche of Benjamin Britten’s music for Peter Grimes, it lumbers along, relentless, insistent, always tugging at our elbow, as it were. It’s overkill, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Like any attempt to pull the story out of history, JACKIE places us in the sight and hearing of moments immediately following the assassination that cannot possibly be documented. The most egregious liberty, to some, will be the presence of the entirely fictitious Priest McSorley (John Hurt) as he counsels Jackie on issues of faith and doubt. To paraphrase Jackie’s comment, when does the performance capture anything of the reality of those days? Jackie herself in her exchanges with the reporter (Billy Crudup) states repeatedly that the television and print story is more real than the events themselves.

THE EYES OF MY MOTHER

Directed by Nicholas Pesce, starring Kika Magalhaese as Francisca.

Perhaps one of the most poignant yet deeply disturbing portrait of loss, isolation, and loneliness I’ve ever seen, the unheralded THE EYES OF MY MOTHER demands serious attention. Yes, it adheres to certain standard tropes of the horror film, notably murder, evisceration, necrophilia, incest, and madness—yet the distancing effects of its stark chiaroscuro black-and-white palette, its painfully slow pacing, and its dispassionate gaze transcend the generic formulas. We are left confounded, curiously detached from its horrors, yet compelled to watch. . . And in its severely ascetic manner, detachment, and visual purity, it invites comparison with Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson.

Francesca is a little girl who lives in a remote forest with her mother and father. She is told by her mother of the fate of her namesake, St. Francis, who, after living alone so long in the woods, beheld visions, and eventually went mad of an eye condition that resulted psychosis. “Loneliness can do strange things to the mind,” muses the mother. She is herself an eye surgeon, late of Portugal. She teaches her daughter the art of the surgical removal of a cow’s eyes (just like a human’s, only bigger”). The little girl holds the lenses aloft with gentle reverence.

Now we are prepared for the pathos and horrors to come. A passing trucker comes upon a savagely mangled woman’s body on the highway. . . . A long flashback takes us to the story’s beginning: One day a salesman comes to the house and kills the mother. The father, newly arrived, finds the killer hacking away at the corpse. He chains the killer to the floor of the nearby barn. “Why us?” the little girl asks the killer. “You let me in,” he replies. “Why do you do it?” she pursues. “It feels amazing,” says the man.

Years pass. Francesca, now a beautiful young woman, tenderly takes care of the killer in the barn, now bereft of eyes and tongue. “You’re my only friend,” she whispers to him, cradling his body in her arms. She also cares for her father, dead of an apparent heart attack, sleeping in his bed, dancing to the blind stare of his corpse, washing his body in the bathtub. Her loneliness overwhelms her and she cries out to her mother, now buried in the nearby forest. Desperate, Francesca drives to a local bar and picks up a strange woman, and brings her back to her home. Rebuffed in her sexual advances, Francesca kills her. Distraught, Francesca wanders out to the highway, where she is picked up by a passing motorist and her baby. After persuading the mother and child to join her back at her house, she snatches up the baby, stabs the mother, and chains her eyeless and mute body to the barn floor.

More years pass. Francesca stocks her refrigerator with the packaged eyes and other body parts of her growing “family.” Finally, one night the boy she has abducted wanders into the barn and releases his captive mother. Francesca is in a panic. “What’ll I do?” she moans, cradling the corpse of her mother (apparently freshly dug up from her grave). Meanwhile, dragging her chains behind her, the mother staggers out to the highway and is picked up by a passing trucker. The narrative circle is closing. The trucker alerts the police, who close in. Francesca crouches in a corner, knife in her hands, waiting, clasping the little boy by her side.

All of this, horrific as it sounds, is told in a style that eschews sensationalism. THE EYES OF MY MOTHER is lean and spare. Dialogue is limited to a bare handful of exchanges. Cinematographer Zach Kuperstein’s lighting is starkly simple. Newcomer director Nicholas Pesce’s static shot compositions are carefully calculated to conceal more than they reveal, while long shots and medium-distance shots keep the guignol horrors at arms length. Francesca herself moves with an almost balletic grace as she goes about the rituals of love and death. The few, powerful close-ups are reserved for the moments of her desperate, perverse need for love—when her loneliness has indeed done “strange things” to her mind—in bed tenderly kissing the corpse of her father; in the bathtub, lovingly bathing his desiccated limbs; in the barn spooning food into the ravenous mouth of her mother’s chained killer; in the kitchen, hugging the abducted child to her breast, oblivious to the wounded mother thrashing about at her feet. Her most beautiful moment comes in the scene when she executes a slow, seductive dance before the seated corpse of her father. Francesca lives in her own dream of love and of family, moving in a space devoid of any remorse, absent from the reality closing in around her. We can’t accept what she is doing; but we can’t deny her our compassion, either.

Like St. Francis, Francesca exists in a state of grace, a terrible, wounded spirit, a mad, isolated figure betrayed by her eyes, seizing the eyes of others as substitutes for the love and family denied her. If we are brave enough, we will watch her with eyes wide open.

SCHUMANN, CRAWFORD, MADNESS, AND HOLLYWOOD

When I wrote about the MGM biopic about Robert Schumann, Song of Love (1947) in my book, Composers in the Movies (2005), I noted that the film’s attempts to deal with the composer’s aberrant behavior and psychological disturbances came hard on the heels of other Hollywood films in the 1940s noir period, notably Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Robert Siodmak’s Dark Mirror.

What I didn’t know at the time was that another film at that precise moment, Curtis Bernhardt’s Possessed, also depicted the psychological trauma and collapse of its protagonist, Joan Crawford. More to the point, it saturated its scenes of mania, persecution, aural and mental disintegration with the music of Robert Schumann—in particular, excerpts from Schumann’s Carnaval. Is it mere coincidence that Carnaval, like Possessed, was likewise a portrait of doubles, possessive love, and manic states of mind? Possession’s release in July 1947 preceded by a bare few months the release of Song of Love in October 1947. And is it mere coincidence that two European-trained composers, Franz Waxman in the first film and Bronislau Kaper in the second, found in Schumann the source of musically dramatic trauma? What is immediately apparent is that Possessed prepares us for a stiff dosage of the “Chopin” music from Carnaval, from the opening credits, to a scene with Van Heflin at the keyboard when he first meets Crawford, to a concert scene, and to numerous dramatic and hallucinatory episodes in the deranged mind of the homicidally jealous Crawford. Most spectacularly, at the climactic moment that Crawford guns down Hefflin, the theme erupts in an hysterically dissonant shriek.

That particular theme, the “Chopin” music from Carnaval, is so brief and gentle, that it hardly seems fertile material for a movie about a dangerously unstable woman. But maybe it’s Bronislau Kap er’s genius to recognize in it the potential for high melodrama. Ah, beneath such placid exteriors can lurk madness and murder! Which is exactly the point.

So, there we have it—two movies about madness, two movies with music by Schumann, two movies released within two months of each other... Just a mere footnote in movie/ music history?

Perhaps my taking the time to write about this at all is a kind of “possession” of my own. Has my lifelong preoccupation with Schumann and his music resulted in finding Schumann under every rock and crevice in the Hollywood Hills?

MISS SLOANE

Directed by John Madden, starring Jessica Chastain as Sloane, Mark Strong as Schmidt, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Esme, John Lithgow as Senator Sperling

MISS SLOANE is the saddest movie I’ve seen all year. The efforts by lobbyist Elizabeth Sloane to defeat the gun lobby in Congress are as corrupt as the forces arrayed against her. And she is extremely effective, as far as it goes. What is it the Bible says, about “The Wisdom of the Serpent”? Just as her tactics include unwonted surveillance, cynical manipulation, and bribery, the gun lobby is even worse as it stoops to blackmailing a United States Senator into holding an ethics witch hunt against her. It’s a vicious, even deadly tennis match, the political ball batted back and worth, intrigues doubling down on both sides.

Of course, in the balance hangs attempts to tighten gun controls. Conservative critics are lining up to attack its “Hollywood liberal smugness”; and progressive voices are applauding what they see as a brave attempt to expose the chicanery that exists on all sides of the issue. Meanwhile, as the movie makes clear, the reality of rampant gun ownership still is, and will remain, out of control.

Meanwhile, what we can applaud in a bipartisan way is a cracker-jack thriller, a carefully crafted plot that asks you, a la THE STING, to pay close attention, from the very opening shot to the twisty denouement. Even so, I doubt if many viewers can see the switcheroo coming. Sloane herself, in Jessica Chastain’s feisty, tightly-wound portrayal (she wears her lipstick like a scarlet flag), is out to double-cross everybody, both friends and foe. And she freely admits her own motives are hardly partisan. Rather than a passionate concern for gun control, she is motivated more by the will to win, to win something bigger than she’s yet brought off. Her methods are so extreme that we begin to wonder at the end if anything we have seen wasn’t ultimately part of her manipulations, on either side. Certainly she pays a heavy price for bringing down her opponents and the corrupt Senator out to get her. So what, really, has she won?

What has anybody won?

LOVING: A QUIET REVOLUTION

Directed by Jeff Nichols and starring Ruth Negga and Joel Egerton as Mildred and Richard Loving.

The bravest thing about LOVING is how quiet and understated it is. The 1967 court case that ended Constitutional prohibition to interracial marriage, that declared marriage a fundamental right, never raises its voice, as it were. It decisively turns its back on Big Moments, Violent Confrontations, and Epic Battles. Rather, Ruth Negga’s and Joel Egerton’s performances of the interracial couple who violated anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia, encountered a particularly quiet but vicious bigotry, were forced to relocate to Washington, D.C. under penalty of imprisonment, and faced potential branding as having bastard children if they lost their case before the Supreme Court, are subtle and understated. Richard, in particular, is a man of few words and reluctance to be a public hero. Their lawyer, Bernard Cohen, is inexperienced. Virginia’s denial of their case is never shown. The Supreme Court case before the Warren Court is dispatched in mere minutes and a few words. No victory dances are permitted, no public demonstrations are depicted. The couple, back home in Virginia, simply go back to their lives, their children at play in the house that Richard has been seen building throughout the film. Of their later lives, only a few titles inform us that Richard died six years after the decision from an auto accident and Mildred never married, dying in 2008.

Indeed, in the one rare moment when Richard has doubts about the ten-year ordeal he and his wife are enduring, the impact is tremendous.

Seldom have the movies given us a private and public drama with such tremendous consequences and with so little fanfare.

NOCTURNAL ANIMALS

Directed by Tom Ford. Starring Amy Adams, Jake Gylenhaal, Michael Shannon. Based on the novel, Tony and Susan, by Austin Wright.

SPOILER ALERT.

Among the installations in Susan Morrow’s Los Angeles high-chic art gallery are an impaled steer hanging upside down in a glass case, a painting consisting of the word RE VEN GE, and videos of an extremely obese nude dancing women. Susan herself gave up creative work years ago and feels only a distant, numbing connection with her high-class gallery. Her personal relationships are no different. She’s estranged from her mother (Laura Linney) and daughter; she’s given up on the handsome and dashing husband she married and sleeps alone while he’s off on business trips sleeping with other women.

One day Susan gets a package containing the proof of a novel written and dedicated to her by her former husband, Edward. It’s called “Nocturnal Animals,” after a nickname given her by Edward because of her sleeplessness. The rest of the movie consists of scenes of her reading the book, interspersed with scenes from the book and flashbacks of her disastrous relationship with Edward (including the abortion of their child). Finally, the book finished, Susan gets an email from Edward, back in town after many years. She agrees to meet him that night. Upon arriving at a restaurant, Susan sits down, orders a drink, and wait. And waits.

And waits.

Fade to black.

This book called Nocturnal Animals is deeply mysterious. It’s a violent affair about a man named Tony and his wife and daughter accosted by three thugs on a lonely Texas highway, forced to the side of the road, and subjected to brutal taunting and abduction. Left alone in the brush country, Tony reports the crime to a weirdly taciturn detective, Andes (Michael Shannon in an oddly arresting performance). The wife and daughter are found, raped and dead. Andes takes up the case. Suspects are found and interrogated and identified. But when the case is dropped and the men released, Andes and Tony take the law into their own hands. Disclosing that he has terminal lung cancer, he refuses to let this last case get away from him. He and the grieving father take the men to Andes’ house. Andes gives Tony a gun. Andes shoots one of the criminals but the other gets away. Tony goes in search of him, confronts him in a cabin, and in a scuffle, shoots him. Staggering away from the cabin, Tony accidentally shoots himself dead.

This book occupies a central and disturbing place in the larger narrative. It shares a communal identity with both Edward and Susan. Is it Edward’s recriminations against Susan? Is it Susan’s projection of her own guilts? Significantly, as Susan reads the novel, she projects the image of Edward into the character of the protagonist, Tony. And the wife and daughter very much resembles Susan and her daughter.

The last half of the film, NOCTURNAL ANIMALS, shifts freely in time, tense, and multiple story lines. Fictive and real worlds seem to comment on each other; and at times, their soundtracks likewise merge. The collective effect is of characters out of time, place, and identity. The shocking images of the dancing obese woman that open the film, such a pitiless and pathetic indictment of the sterility of modern art, are matched by the final image of the empty, staring gaze of Susan in the restaurant as she waits. . . for what?

LOBSTER STEW

LOBSTER, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz.

Perhaps the best approach to LOBSTER is simply to begin with a brief synopsis of events. From there on, it’s every person for himself!

Part One: We begin with a woman stopping her car to walk into a field to shoot a cow. Cut to Colin Farrell. A dog sits at his feet. The dog is his brother. Now single after 12 years of marriage, Colin is checking in to some sort of seaside resort hotel that seems more like a boot camp than a pleasure spa. He identifies himself—his shoe size, his marital past, and his sexual preference—at the front desk, strips for an examination, receives a new issue of clothing, a stun gun, and retires to his single room. Everyone appears to be in some sort of trance. Speech is slow and stilted. We learn that if they find a partner within 45 days they can avoid the fate of being transformed into an animal. What animal would Colin wish to return as? He says, “A lobster. Lobsters enjoy the sun and the sea; they live for 100 years; they remain fertile.” There are hunting forays where the guests stalk each other with their stun guns. Afterward, the bodies of those who are shot are laid out on the hotel veranda. Meanwhile, a hotel maid stops in at Colin’s room every now and then to perform sexual services (apparently to confirm the hotel’s agenda, namely, that he is indeed a heterosexual).

Part Two: One day Colin chooses a woman for his partner. She agrees their utter lack of romantic interest makes them ideal companions. They marry. But when she kills his dog (you remember the dog is his brother), he weeps sorrowfully. Whoops! He has emotions after all! She threatens to “turn him in” to the transformation chamber where he will become an animal. But he kills her and escapes.

Part Three. Escaping to the surrounding forest, Colin falls in with a community of “Loners,” single people who have escaped the hotel compound. They are instructed to remain fiercely celibate. They conduct training exercises and, in general, avoid any contact with each other. It turns out that they employ a spy to infiltrate the resort hotel, the very maid who has visited Colin with her sexual errands. Lovely Rachel Weisz catches his eye. She says she is leaving her post at the hotel. Colin is ordered to dig his own grave. But it is the female leader of the community who is overpowered and who is interred in that grave. Colin and Rachel, who has mysteriously gone blind, leave the community and exist alone for awhile in the forest, where he plays “touching and guessing” games with her, bringing various objects for her hands to touch.

Part Four. The two lovers (if that’s what they are) leave the forest and take refuge in a city café. He promises her he is going to do something that will heighten his sense of touch. The story ends with him in the bathroom, a steak knife poised before his eyes.

I relate all this in as deadpan a manner as possible, since that is precisely the weirdly muted and stilted absurdist comic tone that is LOBSTER. The business of animal transformations is left hovering as allegory more than a reality (although animals of all description ramble about the backgrounds of the scenes). Hints of romance, gay and otherwise, abound, but with always the threat of some kind of dangerous recrimination. What seems obvious enough is this trenchant satire on our society’s determination that everyone pair up together, as if we are all stumbling our way to that Great Ark waiting for us at the end of the world. There are few concessions to those of who demand a linear storyline with characters who have motivations and background stories. It could be very off-putting were it not for the way we are impelled to keep watching, even if we are not permitted expectations of any kind. Shot in the lovely seaside and forested areas of Ireland, the stark but lovely visuals are nicely complemented by chamber works by Beethoven, Schnittke, Schostakovich. There is even a brief moment in the city sequence where the strains of Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote are heard. This is the English debut of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos.