Seven Pounds

All people who are possessed by writing will begin, for better or worse, with critiques of their predecessors; they will grandly dismiss some easy targets, dissect the more subtle culprits and in general claim that there is practically nothing out there worth reading (sometimes, the more panic-stricken among us will announce a "crisis" in art). To be sure, these are the rantings of the young and unsung. The trick is moving past this negativity into a clear system of observation and criticism, shedding the alb of high-and-mighty wisdom, and stipulating some unshakeable criteria for evaluating what we read. Over time I have come to see that the works I admire share one commonality: they know right from wrong. They may indeed deal with religious themes in which moralizing comes with the territory; but, as it were, they more typically involve much more earthbound topoi, plain and daily situations that require decisions based on good and simple values. What is remarkable about our day and age is how many people – most of them, sadly, believers in no force greater than a black hole – cannot endure the application of such values. Kindness, benevolence, mercy, discipline, selflessness, sacrifice, righteousness, courage, patience, understanding, and, above all, sympathy – all these have been deemed the hallmarks of some naive brand of altruism that was really popular, oh about two thousand years ago, and has since fallen out of fashion. More disturbing still is when someone tries to do good with no reward to himself, he is labeled as egotistical and motivated by messianic urges, as if the latter were some kind of disease. For your information, if everyone were possessed by a sliver, by a wispy fraction of the goodness that was inculcated into our consciousness so many centuries before, we would not have the destruction, terror, and hatred that continue to plague us. It remains a matter of debate, however, as to whether we would have something akin to this film.

That we are dealing with a burdensome choice of self-sacrifice is clear from the opening scene: a distraught man (Will Smith) in his thirties calls a Los Angeles emergency hotline to announce a suicide. "Who is the victim of the suicide?" asks the helpful, disembodied voice. After a few moments of painful reflection, he responds with only two words: "I am." The rest of the film will be a prelude to this horrific moment, and it is our task to evaluate whether such melodrama is worth almost two hours of our time. The man in question is subsequently revealed to be Ben Thomas, an IRS agent and inspector who is certainly not what he appears to be. Proof of this simple fact lies in his first inspection: he parks at a nursing home and throws a nasty look at the director's car, a brand-new German vehicle of considerable value. He enters and interviews the director, a revolting, money-grubbing lout ironically named Goodman who has cut spending in the home by seventeen percent, cannot pay his back taxes (he is currently asking for an extension), and yet has still managed to buy a sports car and give himself a raise – all of which may sound eerily familiar to citizens of certain privileged countries. Nevertheless, his greed is surpassed by something far worse: he has been punishing a helpless old woman who refuses to take her medicine by not allowing her to be bathed. Once Ben discovers this fact, he rescinds any possibility for an extension and we feel modestly redeemed. Redeemed not only because every single person should be appalled at how we neglect and discard the elderly, but also because this has always been the calling card of a society predicating social Darwinism and the destruction of the weak. Shortly thereafter, Ben retreats to a beachside house that a tax inspector would be unlikely to be able to afford and has a couple of flashbacks (never mind that the whole film is, in essence, a flashback). In his hazy somnolence he is no longer a tax inspector, but an aeronautical engineer and, against every other indication we have had so far, he is not all alone: he has a young wife who no longer happens to exist. His phone rings, and we learn he also has a brother (Michael Ealy) who is worried about him; indeed, that short conversation with his brother is punctuated by one of Ben's few displays of anger. And, given the film's title, it is equally revealing that he then irately lists seven names, the first three all with the surname Anderson, and the last a female with his own. So I give nothing away by stating that, about twenty minutes in, the arc of the story has already been formed: a young man with a certain amount of clout will give his life to help those who cannot help themselves, a noble ambition stemming from the likelihood that he is responsible for the death of seven people, including, it appears, his wife.  

A few more important details: on his desk, near his phone in that lonely beachfront property, Ben has another list of names. Quick-eyed viewers can discern the word "match" on it, which is more than you need to know. Then there is a display of cruelty on the phone to Ezra Turner (Woody Harrelson), a blind customer service agent to whom Ben imparts his name as well as a few bits of biographical guesswork that would bring lesser men to rage. But Ezra reacts with shame and dignity and politely hangs up the phone, unpossessed of indignation, which cannot be said of those scenes where Ben chides his worst enemy, his past self.  If Ben's heavyheartedness is devastating and all-encompassing, we might wonder why his brave and selfless acts will probably make so many viewers squirm. The same viewers, mind you, who weep at the most sentimental war movies, cheer on the charming gangsters in the modernized westerns that have become so prolific, and praise works for their "moral ambiguity" (when you see this phrase, you know you need to find something better to read). Could it be that most of humanity envies those few souls who actually uphold the good and moral values that might be our salvation? Could there be anything more ignominious than resenting the legitimate sacrifices of others by claiming that they just want to draw attention to themselves? Or perhaps we should concentrate on another locus of emotional manipulation, Ben's romance with Emily (Rosario Dawson), who could really, really use a new heart to replace her rather dysfunctional one? Those IRS fellows are quite a magnanimous bunch.           

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Smith

A Single Man

The changes that occur in the material world may seem overwhelmingly great, but they are nothing if our internal designs remain unaltered. Some souls enjoy being caught up in the hoopla – protesting the latest war, denouncing the latest villain, celebrating the latest triumph of the human spirit – and this is all quite commendable. And yet attentive monitoring of these movements suggests that it is not so much their laudable ends that matter, but the fact that they matter at all. People, in other words, want to feel like they have lived through something of importance. If your whole concept of right and wrong and interesting and banal is confined to the material world, you will have a lot of newspapers to read but may have precious little time for art. Art, of course, also has its faddists. And modern art's inherent flaw is that it must continuously attempt to be modern, which means that its values will be shaped around whatever the loathsome "spirit of the times" dictates (one recent novel featured a character who records background sounds at airports to sell to adulterous husbands, one of the most chilling examples of creative bankruptcy you will ever find). True art, however, is eternal, and it is eternal because apart from technological advancements in its appurtenances it could occur at any place and at any time. Amidst the hubbub of the latest putsch and politicizing, it remains alone like a fortified beacon caressing the salty waves. May all the tyrants of the world be destroyed – I wish them all thunderous doom – and may we still enjoy works of splendid vision like this fine film.  

We begin, as we should given what follows, in a dream, but it is a dream of death. George Falconer (an extraordinary Colin Firth) walks along a snowy road to where a car has flipped over and ejected a young man's bleeding body. That young man is the thirty-something Jim (Matthew Goode). And when George comes closer and realizes that he will have to wait for another life or world to see Jim again, he lies down beside him and kisses him with the tenderness that can only be love or what we have always imagined love to be. There will be many moments like this in A Single Man, which is as much about George's inability to move past this loss as it is about the significance of all our breaths in general. George escapes from this hideous nightmare, one that must assault him often in myriad anagrams, and we note that the time is roughly three in the morning. That notation is vital as, like in any good Greek tragedy, we will see twenty-four hours of our hero, a small span of time for a fate to be decided. When he starts his day a couple of hours later, gone is all the psychic disorder and pain; in its place are puritan steadfastness and ritual. "It takes me a while to become George," a disembodied narrator informs us. "I look in the mirror and see not so much a face as the expression of a predicament." Some reviewers may seize upon this lovely observation as the money quote, and yet the more deeply we proceed into George's day, the less applicable the comment becomes.

A resident of Los Angeles for the past twenty-four years, George has loved his Jim for two-thirds of that period, and nothing of his love has abated since Jim's death in March of 1962. When he sifts through his American memories (we get nothing of Britain as if it never existed), there should be two Jim recollections for every one in which the former serviceman does not appear. Yet all we see and hear is Jim. Nothing of George's work as a college professor of literature is conveyed; nothing of any family members he has; nothing, as it were, that took place before meeting Jim in a jubilant postwar California bar and knowing that here was someone who would remain in his heart forever. Even Charley, née Charlotte (Julianne Moore), his former lover and lone confidante, recurs in a single memory, a horrible, wordless dream from that rainy night when he was dutifully informed by Jim's cousin that a fatal car crash had taken his love away. As he swallows his tears and announces his attendance at the funeral, the cousin coolly replies, "the service is just for family." Only a crude mind would equate the couple with their two smooth fox terriers that accompany Jim on his fatal drive (one dog dies with him and the other, "a small female," is unaccounted for), but the symbolism is obvious and galling. Is the main reason we feel a pinprick of remorse for this metaphor the way in which homosexual couples in the early 1960s were obliged to be invisible? That may be; one well-done if blunt scene in George's classroom hammers that point home. George has loved Jim; Jim loved George; but when one of them vanishes it is very much as if their relationship never happened at all. "Wasn't Jim a substitute for something else?" asks a smashed and still-hopeful Charley (Charley spends most of her day trying to look presentable enough to get bombed in public), which brings about one of George's eruptions at an otherwise sedate and very boozy dinner party for two. No, Jim was the real thing. Nothing on God's green earth could ever return those sixteen happy years and Jim will remain forever young and beautiful.

Many years ago I leafed through an Isherwood omnibus that included the original novel and was not particularly impressed, but that cursory judgment has no bearing on the screen adaptation. The quality of a film about love and loss is based squarely upon whether you care about the love forlorn, regardless of whether it takes place in a time of cholera or war or famine, or whether it at all answers to your own fantasies. A thin, at times gratuitous layer of topicality coats A Single Man, primarily from the mutually assured destruction that Cuban missiles were supposed to harbinger, a conceit that makes George's quandary at once trivial and earth-shattering. "If there's going to be a world with no time for sentiment," George declaims with a tone more befitting this actor, "then it's not a world I want to live in." And of what then is George's world composed? The One Day in the Life of George Falconer premise works not only because a couple of months' worth might have become an exercise in morosity, it also works because the director's natural eye for beauty and color as well as his fetish for the male body conspire into a stunning tapestry of soft moments. The odd, shy stares that George exchanges with his handsome student Kenny (Nicholas Hoult); his frank abuse of Charley's good offices; the lecherous smoke break with a Spanish rent boy (Jon Kortajarena); and the numerous occasions in which George notices eye color, desire, tension, or fear in his fellow humans. And of course, two scenes with Jim. In the first, Jim claims that he has never once slept with a woman ("Doesn't everyone sleep with women when they're young?" is George's glib rebuttal), which if true makes Jim different and pure, not like the thousands of gay men who have not only slept with women, but married, impregnated, and spent a lifetime with them because the life they really wanted could not so easily be lived. The second scene reveals the couple's reading choices (George is deep into this masterpiece) and, after some throwaway bravado on Jim's part, George's passionate devotion to his partner.  And as we know, every swan only has so many summers.

The Dagger with Wings

If you know even a little about the English Romantic poets, you will understand their lineage to the antagonist of likely the greatest literary achievement of mankind. Being a Romantic meant being in love with ideals against all the conformities and customs of bourgeois society, that suffocating python, even with the knowledge that there would always be a bourgeois society; being an English poet also necessarily meant being inferior, because there would always be Milton. Shades of the most famous of fictional Satans still inhabit the gunslinging outlaw, the gangster, the drug lord, and the ruthless chief executive officer who from his underlings wishes to make grist for his golden mill, but they also animate the pious fraud. After all, it is the alleged prophet or clairvoyant who aims to seduce those too feeble of mind and experience to distinguish a sham from a Lamb. Which brings us to this odd and rather unsettling tale.

You may already know a little about our protagonist, if that is really the right word: a diminutive Catholic priest often consulted when an unusual crime stumps the usual investigators. And our investigator, Dr. Boyne, "the medical officer attached to the police force," has something very usual about his approach:

Dr Boyne was a big dark Irishman, one of those rather baffling Irishmen to be found all over the world, who will talk scientific scepticism, materialism, and cynicism at length and at large, but who never dream of referring anything touching the ritual of religion to anything except the traditional religion of their native land. It would be hard to say whether their creed is a very superficial varnish or a very fundamental substratum; but most probably it is both, with a mass of materialism in between.

Dr. Boyne will later claim to be "a practical man" who "do[es]n't bother much about religion and philosophy," and will be corrected as to what a practical man should really do with his time. But between these two sidelights on our Irish coroner, a fantastic situation presents itself: a rich old man by the name of Aylmer has died and his three sons have inherited. A standard bequest were it not for the fact the two eldest followed their father in death with unenviable rapidity. The reason? A fourth son, as it were, who equally qualifies to be the first, a "very brilliant and promising" boy legally adopted by Aylmer "in his bachelor days, when he thought he would have no heir" (the patriarch, like many people of lifelong wealth, married late). Boyne's description of this fellow, "who went by the name of John Strake," will imbue even the callow reader with a distinct impression:

His origin seems to be vague; they say he was a foundling; some say he was a gypsy. I think the last notion is mixed up with the fact that Aylmer in his old age dabbled in all sorts of dingy occultism, including palmistry and astrology, and his three sons say that Strake encouraged him in it. But they said a great many other things besides that. They said Strake was an amazing scoundrel, and especially an amazing liar; a genius in inventing lies on the spur of the moment, and telling them so as to deceive a detective .... Perhaps you can more or less imagine what happened. The old man left practically everything to the adopted son; and when he died the three real sons disputed the will. They said their father had been frightened into surrender and, not to put too fine a point on it, into gibbering idiocy. They said Strake had the strangest and most cunning ways of getting at him, in spite of the nurses and the family, and terrorizing him on his death-bed. Anyhow, they seemed to have proved something about the dead man’s mental condition, for the courts set aside the will and the sons inherited. Strake is said to have broken out in the most dreadful fashion, and sworn he would kill all three of them, one after another, and that nothing could hide them from his vengeance. It is the third or last of the brothers, Arnold Aylmer, who is asking for police protection. 

With all his materialist mores, Boyne certainly resembles a real person; but there is no way on earth or beyond that John Strake is real in person, name, or image, which shouldn't surprise us in the least. Like the Romantic poets (one in particular leaps to mind), he has constructed his own identity to be as lush, mysterious, and provocative as his verse. Someone like John Strake could not possibly have hailed from an average, bourgeois family or entertained the notion of enjoying such a family's quotidian comforts. So when Brown ventures to Arnold Aylmer's isolated residence, a cold and distant patch likened at one point to "the North Pole," he will obtain a private pow-wow since all of Aylmer's servants have already abandoned him – and here we must also abandon our cassocked friend.  

A minor imperfection or two can be in found in each of Chesterton's Father Brown tales (as a whole, however, they form an impregnable fortress of genius), and The Dagger with Wings omits more than one crucial detail, or at least appears to do so. Even the story's name does not quite get at the gist of the matter. Brown will make his way to the lonely house just before a convenient snowstorm literally covers his tracks; there, a lengthy conversation will ensue on an array of subjects: white (or "silver") magic, the sort of man who would sell himself to the Devil, Simon Magus (whom some may include in the last category), and some threatening letters "marked with a sign like a winged dagger." We could inject some levity into these dreadful debates by calling Magus a pioneer in human aviation, but Magus has always been revered by those of dark intent because he was one of the first and most determined apostates. Yet the most salient line of discourse comes after one character declares it the priest's "business to believe things," to which the alleged believer replies: "Well I do believe some things, of course ... and therefore, of course, I don't believe other things." A perfectly logical statement, if you happen to be a weekly subscriber to logic. It may also explain why when one character labels himself an "agnostic," he means it in the precise Greek sense of the word, that is, one who doesn't know. Perhaps I should say he knows some things and doesn't know others.

Mandelshtam, "Вечер нежный. Сумрак важный."

An early work ("Twilight thick and evening soft") by this Russian man of letters.  You can find the original here.

 

Twilight thick and evening soft,
Roars and swells move fast apace;
Humid wind, a veil aloft
Of the sun to mask our face.

All is hushed, all mixed and lost,
Waves rock drunk upon the shore;
And blind joy our mind accosts,
Our heart heavier than before.

Chaos darkens in mute cling,
Air wafts drunkenly and dumbs;
Massive is the choir that hums:
Flutes and lutes and timbrels sing.

Love Crime

Ah, the corporate world, how one longs for its vitality and humanity! Even the most hidebound apologists of market mechanisms may not quite believe that last sentence; on the other hand, capitalism's most adamant critics have gone so far as to claim that the system is utterly incompatible with morality, although some of their proposed replacements have proven to be just as ruthless. Whatever one thinks of capitalism in its myriad guises, its aim has always been and will always be the accumulation of wealth; it is the use, distribution, and actual value of this wealth which remain rather volatile topics. So if you are a rising star in such an enterprise, say, a multinational corporation with its sleek towers and suits, a symphony of metallic ribbons, you would probably be wise to steer your own goals in the selfsame direction. All efforts, all thoughts, every fiber of your creative being should be harnessed to make your company rich, richer, and richest, because you, lone mortal, can only benefit from such an arrangement. That is, of course, unless that other commendable aspect of capitalism, unfettered competition (as only Darwin himself could have envisioned), indicates that despite your hole-hearted commitment to greed, your star is not ascending as quickly as that of your colleague down the hall, at which point a few more typically capitalist manoeuvres may be attempted. And you will find those manoeuvres, bereft of any vitality or humanity whatsoever, in this recent film.   

We are fortunate enough to have not one but two leading ladies, and lead us they most certainly will. The first is Christine Rivière (Kristen Scott Thomas), executive vice-president of the French branch of an American corporation whose specific products and services are never disclosed, probably for more than one reason, but let us move on. Christine occupies a splendid house somewhere in Paris, yet dreams of taking Manhattan by storm (there is, as it were, no other real way to take it). After a series of machinations and double-dealings, she will gain such an opportunity, and the person she should thank is her much younger subordinate, Isabelle Guérin (Ludivine Sagnier). Isabelle's attitude to corporate culture does not seem to match Christine's; that is to say, while Christine appears perfectly capable of bilking her own mother if that's what will assure her fortune and reputation, Isabelle's world view is far more nuanced. From time to time she will flash a predatory fang but, like most animals, more in self-preservation than bloodthirsty pursuit. When we first meet the two women at Christine's palatial home, we can sense jolts from a clear sexual undercurrent (Christine even sneaks in a kiss in a manner reminiscent of a chop-licking middle-aged lecher). Soon enough, however, we learn that what we perceived as physical attraction has much more to do with power, much in the same way that sexual assault has invariably been portrayed as a need for control. As Isabelle devises one brilliant business solution after another – again, we are never made privy to the details – Christine decides to send her underling in her stead to an important conference in Cairo. That she also dispatches thither her weaselly lover Philippe (Patrick Mille), the type of guy whose charm is limited to embracing one woman while winking across the room at another, should tell you all you need to know about our executive vice-president. When between Isabelle and Philippe the all-too-inevitable occurs, Christine takes another, far more cruel step (New York is at stake, after all), one she will regret monumentally and one which triggers a domino effect that will be left to the curious viewer to discover. 

The last completed work of this well-known director (who died days after its release), Love Crime is remarkable among high-quality films in that it contains nary a single memorable line of dialogue. Instead, we are treated to masterful acting and a tortuous script that may in hindsight seem implausible simply because we, unlike the dramatis personae, have already been let in on a secret. Scott Thomas is perfectly cast, not only because her angular good looks begin to resemble a knife rack, but also thanks to her natural comfort as a self-contained, almost regal entity. Sagnier has a crooked face, specifically an unevenly arched pair of brows, that can under no circumstances be considered beautiful, although many would not hesitate to consider it interesting. Her gamut of expressions would be extraordinary in any actor, much less one of her callowness, and it is from these expressions that we may derive the dialogue that the characters are not permitted to utter aloud. One of the finest moments in this regard is when Isabelle appeases an aggressive customer waiting in line behind her with a peppermint that alters his attitude entirely; another such instance is when she visits her sister, whose plain, family-based existence sheds some light on Isabelle's true motivations. Yet for all its wiles and atmosphere, Love Crime suffers from two shortcomings. The first is its title (faithful to the original Crime d'amour): while there is certainly a crime or two or three, depending on how you view matters, the love component, pace what one character asserts very late in our film, has to be deemed dubious at best (alas, this has not impeded an overtly eroticized English-language remake). The second flaw has to do with how a police inspector – yes, the police will become closely involved in the lives of our leading ladies – handles an alibi. What detective could possibly believe that being able to recount every detail of a movie means that you must have seen that movie on the night you claimed? I have pondered this point from every conceivable angle, and am now convinced that something else is in play, as evidenced by that same detective's actions in another scene. If this is not so, then the entire structure of the police procedural collapses rather violently, even if all the other pieces fit so well. Just like a lovely present wrapped in metallic ribbons.