The Queen

Before this film you may not have realized – or, for that matter, ever considered – that amidst all the privileges and luxuries that the reigning monarch of the British Isles possesses, she is still denied the simple right of suffrage.  While there is a certain irony to such a law, it is more interesting to ponder whether the Queen, as henceforth I suppose I shall have to call her, could ever believe in voting for anything or anyone apart from the eternal confirmation of her eternal family right.  For all its faults, a fair and free democracy allows the lowest common denominator to dictate what needs to be done to help the greatest number (whether most democracies are truly fair and free is another tale).  This may include extended pub hours, lower taxes, a faster speed limit, a lower age of consent, a seven-year marriage contract, and the legalization of certain medicinal herbs – all of which have been bandied about the European Parliament in the last two decades.  Ultimately one hopes that lean, muscular, middle-aged reason will prevail; but until that point the head of state – in this case the Queen – and head of government – in this case, a young, idealistic and very religious intellectual – will simply have to get along.

The time is the unforgettable summer of 1997 and the place is England.  After eighteen years of ham-handed, avaricious nonsense, the British people finally rise up and replace high school dropout John Major with the refined and thoughtful Tony Blair (Michael Sheen).  If that last sentence betrays my affection for politicians who can both think and act, not just grunt along to party cheers and call themselves leaders by outyelling their fellow boors, then so be it.  Blair is the tenth prime minister under the Queen (Helen Mirren), and even sports a soccer jersey to that effect, but England is in dire need of a new direction, to wit, sweeping reforms – the last word any person from a thousand-year dynasty wants to hear.  After a tepid first meeting in which Blair echoes his wife and his political advisors in mocking the royal's stuffiness, arrogance, and narrow view of her broad and beautiful realm, fate intervenes and proffers Blair a watershed in modern British history: Princess Diana dies one lonely morning, another passenger on a dangerous Parisian highway.  And with her die the hopes that many nourished of seeing her become the Queen. 

The current Queen is quick to point out that since her son Prince Charles (Alex Jennings) and Diana are divorced, she is hardly entitled to a public state funeral.  But Blair is of a very different mind.  Gradually, and mostly appealing to her as a demagogue, he convinces the Queen that there is nothing worse in the eyes of the rabble than the indifference of the elite (Mr. Blair is a rather keen sociologist).  Whether or not they maniacally worshiped a princess they mistook for an angel, most admirers of Diana would concur that any reaction, positive or negative, is better than treating her like just any other person and burying her in silence and relief.  Yet Elizabeth and her kin say nothing.  Like everyone else they watch the news, snarl at the insidious and misbegotten comments, and gossip and bicker like any other family because, whatever they may think, they really are no different from the rest of us.  Polls are conducted: seventy-five percent find Elizabeth's silence "detrimental to the monarchy," and a full quarter want to do away with hereditary privilege once and for all.  She hems and haws, drives a jeep around that reminds her of her mechanic days in the Second World War, and continues, at least in secret, to ask herself one question: is it worse to dislike a deceased person and not be able to hide it, or conceal this dislike behind a curtain of sympathy and dislike oneself?  Between her husband Lord Mountbatten's (James Cromwell) constant desire to assuage his grandsons by taking them hunting, Blair's nagging  messages, and the Queen Mum's cavalier advice, the Queen decides at last to do a very queenly thing and stop listening to anyone but herself. 

True, the film is nominally about a grumpy and stately woman known to the world simply as Elizabeth.  Yet she remains only its third most important character, the second being the young prime minister who takes office in the summer of 1997.  The film's real protagonist is someone of whom we see actual footage, the princess everyone now loves in retrospect, if only because it's easy to love beauty when it dies young, when it flees mediocrity, when it decides that the evil world is too much for it to take.  The shadow of Diana, represented allegorically as a fourteen-point stag hunted by the royals and slain by a banker when she wanders onto an adjacent estate, looms as large as the clumsy symbolism of linking the Greek goddess of the hunt to a heiress killed with her business magnate boyfriend in neighboring France.  She becomes, in the words of the surly, violent Mountbatten, "more annoying dead than she was alive."  Yet more than anything else, Diana shows us precisely how the monarchy is no longer the straightest path to glory.   Now the most famous are not chosen by some phony divine right but by the people, by their vapid and fickle tastes, by the demos that alternatively loathes, envies and adores the vestiges of despotic rule.  Is that why Prince Charles tells Blair that "nothing has affected" his mother as much as Diana's death "since the abdication," because that event was more personally traumatizing than the subsequent war that killed sixty million commoners?  Perhaps, although, being born in 1948, Charles might not have realized there had been a war.  Charles does shed some tears behind a silent glass door and a silent glass priest (what they say is left to our imagination), and members of the nobility are ever fun to play because they rarely have any real emotions and invariably seem to be acting.  As if the thing they feared most apart from the guillotine were human sincerity.

Pasternak, "Весна"

A work ("Spring") composed by this Russian poet in April 1944.   You can read the original here.

True meaning lurks within this spring,
More lively than the sparrows' sweep,
Unvoiced the song that my soul sings,
Untouched the light that my soul keeps.

And thinking, writing, otherwise,
In octave loud amidst the choirs,
A booming  voice in wintry guise,
Shall liberate once-captured shires.

My homeland's breath in springtime shift
Shall wash away the winter's trace,
And blackest lines of tears shall lift,
From Slavdom's crying eyes and face.

Each blade of grass is primed to stir,
As ancient Prague owns silent streets,
So sinuous these streets confer,
But they will play as ravines meet.

Moravian tales and Czech respite
And Serbs that talk of springtime swoon,
Have ripped away the shroud of might,
And buds beneath the snow shall bloom.

And all shall bathe in glorious haze,
Akin to tendrils on wall panes
Of gilded chambers, Boyar days,
And Fool Basil, blessed in chains.

For night—owls and for dreamers past,
Our Moscow has no peer on earth.
It is our home, our first and last,
Our century's light, our endless birth.

Let the Right One In

The beginning of this film is black, all black apart from small, almost illegible white writing on the left side of the screen.  Slowly we move into our first shot, falling snow against blackest night.  A skinny young boy of twelve stares out from a bedroom that is very much a prison and sanctuary, and a uniformly inimical and cold world stares back.  The only words he utters as we watch the details of a winter’s night compose a vicious taunt about a pig.  He is both swine and butcher, and like the miniature narrator of this novel, his name is Oskar.  

In this language, say a few prominent internet sources, Oskar means “God’s spear”; and God needs a spear for only one thing.  Oskar makes his home with his mom and spends a weekend here and there with his father in another part of Sweden.  His school, which we visit almost immediately, seems even less pleasant as he is bullied constantly by a boy called Conni and his myrmidons.  His tormentor is his size and age but already imbued with all the contemptuous qualities of someone devoted to promoting evil.  Later in the film we come to understand the familial influence that may have embedded its hooves into his back, but until that point he represents what all children must confront: the savagery and immorality of bullies.  What are bullies?  Bullies are monsters, undead monsters.  They are the closest thing we have to demons, because they exist primarily to prey on the weak, to hurt, to humiliate, to drain others of vitality, hope, and self-esteem.  Even at the onset we know that Oskar, a frail, horribly blond youth who cannot possibly stand up for himself, has always been bullied; his posture and defeatist manners betray his past.  His initial comments of "scream like a pig" are echoed immediately thereafter when he is pushed around at school, called a pig, and an oinking sound is made.  We then realize that he is reliving his tortures, fighting his tormentors at the only time he can, that is to say, when they're no longer there. 

Elsewhere in this hell, we see a hazy pair of strangers on a snowy, isolated field of a park (we are surrounded by snowy, isolated fields), a young man and an older man.  The older man seems helpless and tired and asks for the time, and the next thing we know the young man has been slain in a most revolting manner.  The distance of the camera is extremely important because, for so many minutes of the film, it will focus closely on Oskar and on the strange young girl who happens to move into his complex one day.  It will examine them as if they were immortals, flawlessly young and destined never to evince a single wrinkle.  But for the hideous crimes that have been plaguing Sweden the last few weeks, the camera has decided, like the average citizen, to cower in the shadows and only glean the broadest strokes of a malefic scene.  Is it a coincidence that after this terrible murder we see Oskar with a knife?  Like so many youths who cannot fight back, Oskar is consumed by retribution, by divine justice, and he imagines his classmates who have made him into a bad habit as he stabs a tree as if it were their belly.  It is at this point, when his soul has made a tacit pact with evil, that a young girl appears, his age but much more mature.  We don't get a clear look at her initially; she materializes on high and leaps down to the ground off a dumpster like a sprite.  They bond in the way lonely children always bond, through mutual pity and small acts of kindness.  Her name is Eli, and she lives with an older man who may or may not be her father, but turns out to be the murderer we saw minutes before.  Then, about twenty-five minutes into the film, we see what we are dealing with – and we're not the only ones who get to see it.  A reclusive cat owner casually gazing out his window (in Blackeberg, there is little to do except gaze casually out your window) knows what he saw but doesn't believe it.  He stutters his way into a local pub get-together where everyone knows his name, and after a brief period of shock and disbelief all of them set off together to find blood.  

The secret to Let the Right One In – if one may really call it that considering its global renown – has to do with what it does not make explicit.  What Eli exactly is has been the discussion of horror fans since the publication of the original novel in 2004; why she has become a creature so separated from the normal needs and desires of humanity is not revealed.  A legitimate contribution to an age-old myth, however, should involve a twist, and the twist here is the ambivalence of the storyteller towards anything except the truth of children, a truth which can be cruel, ruthless, and vengeful as much as it can be curious, forgiving, and warm.  I have always believed that there is nothing more loving nor more demonic than a child because, in either case, he doesn't know better.  He loves passionately, unconditionally, against all odds, and against all time and space; and he hates with such irreverence to human existence that the most unabashed devilry floats through his head.  When the bullies' lashes scar his cheek and draw blood, the way Oskar looks back at them, the redness of his lips, and the calmness of his entire frame all argue a transformation that has already begun.  No longer is he the victim but an avenging angel biding his time. 

We also see what happens when a woman who survived the murderer's attack decides to enter a room full of cats, what Oskar hopes will happen to his nemesis, whose wickedness runs in the family, and perhaps even why Oskar's father – who also seems to have been tormented as a child, or at least has a vivid imagination – has no interest in his mother and only marginally more in him.  Some of these observations are augmented by the type of gore so commonly incident to movies of these genres; other points are so subtle as to elude the first-time viewer.  And while I do have to protest the involvement of children in this sort of film, however artistically the details are presented and however accurately the qualms and anxieties of almost-teenagers are depicted, this is a fairy tale undiminished by the nature of the violence.  More than anything else, Eli (who importantly states that she is "not a girl," then later flashes a horrific and suggestive scar) operates as Oskar's conscience, which like the conscience of so many children has swung into a realm of isolation, self-justification, and revenge.  In time Eli becomes the proverbial devil sitting on Oskar's shoulder and encouraging him to fight back with force.  And is revenge the right choice to make?  Can a child educate us about distinguishing right from wrong?  That is the question that is never answered as Oskar stands up to his captors, and I, for one, will always root for the destruction of bullies and tyrants.  Even at the hands of other monsters.   

Ripley's Game

Jonathan had been imagining Tom Ripley a frequent visitor at Reeves Minot's place in Hamburg.  He remembered Fritz turning up with a small package at Reeves's that night.  Jewellery?  Dope?  Jonathan watched the familiar viaduct, then the dark green trees near the railway station come into view, their tops bright under the street lights.  Only Tom Ripley next to him was unfamiliar.

We all have, gentle Reader, our biases and delusions (despite overwhelming literary evidence to the contrary, until recently I had always thought this actor to be the perfect incarnation of this literary character), even if biases are as much an indication of the dullard as the highly creative mind.  Yet it is rather amazing that one movie critic claimed he had always imagined this actor in the guise of one of English literature's most famous gentleman murderers, a dream fulfilled in this film.  The association seemed particularly egregious given how one of Ripley's victims recalls his assailant:

He had probably already talked about a man in his thirties, with brown hair, a little over average height, who had socked him in the jaw and in the stomach.

The numerous other descriptions throughout Highsmith's novels of the young American socialite and murderer all amount to the same: not bad-looking, fit, a nice fellow, well-dressed and charming in that effusive way that comes naturally to those of immoderate intelligence.  But what he was not was peculiar or remarkable.  One might remember him because "his face stood out among the faces of the French," yet one would probably not be able to determine why one came to that conclusion.  The fact of the matter is that Malkovich was twenty years too old, too bald, and, most importantly, far too eccentric and flamboyant to evoke anything but a caricature of Tom Ripley.   After all, what is easier to portray than over-the-top evil?  Thus the casting of this film is far more accurate: Tom Ripley as a bland and shy everyman who uses such traits to become a master of disguise.  Disguise not of the fake beard and thick glasses stripe, but in the much more subtle vein of being able to cast shadows upon his intentions and motives, to convince people of different truths at different times.  And nowhere is this facet of his unique personality better reflected than in this novel.

The life Ripley has earned for himself – if earned is really the right word – has much of what we have come to imagine as idyllic Europe: a posh mansion in the French countryside; uncluttered days speckled with gardening, reading, language study, good food and, as he himself admits, more than a bit of Sunday painting; a beautiful and unmeddling spouse who cares as little for daily responsibility as he does; and, most importantly for our purposes, a regular stream of side jobs and scams to supplement his in-laws' generous per annum.  Like most people who have gained society's favor through underhandedness, however, Ripley is the target of more than a few wagging tongues.  Everywhere he goes, someone recognizes him from that scandal with Dickie Greenleaf a few years back, perhaps even from the whole Derwatt Ltd. imbroglio.  It is hardly surprising, therefore, that an entire novel could be based on a single insult.  What is unexpected is that the insult could come from the likes of Jonathan Trevanny.  Trevanny, as it were, would seem to embody quite the anti-Ripley.  He is British, not well-off, married to a good woman without any materialistic schemes, a decent father to his only child Georges, and more than a bit underemployed as a framer in a small French village not too far from the Ripley estate.  But Jonathan Trevanny has one trump card: he is terminally ill. 

How can looming death become an advantage?  Well, life is full of important decisions that we often dismiss into the glorious sunset for some other day's agenda.  But if our days are necessarily limited, what then?  And what if we are young enough to feel that nothing of any value has been accomplished in this life?  Were Jonathan Trevanny a good and kind man who only wanted the best for his family, few readers would be able to endure the Jobian hardships that batter him from all sides.  But Jonathan is far from a noble soul.  And at a party Jonathan falls victim to the rumors about Tom Ripley and snorts mockingly in his presence, leading the American parvenu to place Jonathan in a special cage in his mind for further reference.  As his leukemia, or whatever he has, continues to plague him, he receives word through the village grapevine that his doctor may be concealing the true severity of his condition.  Jonathan makes a few meek inquiries and is only met with the blushing reticence found in equal measure in the completely innocent and the utterly guilty.  At the height of his neurosis and doubt, Jonathan is approached by a man whose real name we know to be Reeves Minot.  Minot is a career criminal, and a frequent collaborator of Ripley's, and we proceed to learn much more about why Minot and Jonathan meet than Jonathan could ever figure out, even by the end of the novel.  Nevertheless, what seems like a rather banal plot – asking a dying, bitter man to devalue life even more and take a couple of souls with him to hell – turns into a stupendous contract with evil.  The evil, naturally, being Tom Ripley, who allows Minot one opportunity to prove his mettle before interfering to save Jonathan's life – on a train, no less – an act of mild remorse that furnishes us with an impetus for a breathless, if no less elegant second half-novel.  

There are many marvelous features of Highsmith's novels (including, most superficially, how convincingly she is able to convey a male perspective), but despite many critics' clucks and coos amoral or immoral behavior cannot be counted among them.  As it were, Highsmith is almost a textbook moralist.  Every character who chooses the wrong path receives in short order a lovely comeuppance; those who adhere to stronger values – there are, I confess, not that many such heroes – survive danger more or less intact.  That Jonathan finds killing so easy because he himself feels the tip of the shroud rings true, if true only for the snivelling coward that Jonathan most certainly is.  Making the victims interchangeably evil Mafiosi – today we would probably employ a terrorist or two – reinforces the suggestion that crime merely takes a weak will, opportunity, and some kind of immediate reward.   The one exception to this rule seems to be Tom Ripley.  Tom Ripley, you see, gets away with so many crimes that we begin to doubt his subjection to earthly or heavenly laws.  What begins as a cruel prank devolves into an inexplicably fascinating portrait of what seem to be almost comically opposite men devoted to the same murderous aims.  But are these men all that different?  Sure, the talented Mr. Ripley has money, intelligence, and a sufficiently unsavory reputation for people to stay out of his way; the not-so-talented Mr. Trevanny has none of that, nor does he have any time to shunt his wretched track.  Yet both possess what can be labeled hubris, and what is better understood as an overweening belief in the centrality of their own petty existence.  Tempered, of course, with passages like this:

Jonathan was not worried, because he knew he would hang on, that this wasn't death, merely a faint.  Maybe first cousin to death, but death wouldn't come quite like this.  Death would probably have a sweeter, more seductive pull, like a wave sweeping out from a shore, sucking hard at the legs of a swimmer who'd already ventured too far, and who mysteriously had lost his will to struggle.

Ripley has always struggled to stay afloat because he knows he is expected to drown; Jonathan will struggle only because he does not want simply to crumble and die as befits a person of his cowardice.  And what then is cowardice if not death's early and sustained victory?

Petrarch, "Io son sí stanco sotto 'l fascio antico"

A work ("So weary from that burden old") by this Italian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

So weary from that burden old,
Of sin and custom's ruthless sway,   
I fear to trip upon my way,
And fall afoul of my worst foe. 

Yet one great Friend delivered me,
With marvelous and peerless grace;
Then so flew past my eyes' embrace,
That watching Him was vain it seemed. 

Anew His voice in distant hum: 
"O you who work, the path is here;
If none bars passage, to me come."

What destiny, what grace, what love?
Shall let me rest, with wings of dove,
And let me rise from this poor sphere?