Doubt

Though it features the Catholic church, Doubt is a fine morality play about modern Christian churches in general.  Here you have an authoritative nun, Sister Aloysius, who faces the wind of change blown in the early 1960s by the relatively new priest in her local parish, Father Flynn.  Flynn, in the first sermon we hear from him, channels Paul Tillich by claiming that doubt is the essence of faith.  Flynn says he wants to bring love, compassion, tenderness, and tolerance to the parish and Catholic school, while Sister Aloysius only seems to want to bring hard-headed authority.  Flynn thinks the secular “Frosty the Snowman” would be a fine song to sing at the school’s Christmas pagaent, while Sister Aloysius thinks that the song is purely pagan superstition.  So here’s the age-old fight between the revolutionary and the conservative.

Caught between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius is the young nun, Sister James.  James is innocent and trustworthy.  She’d like to be compassionate to her eighth grade students, who in Aloysius’ opinion would love to turn the wimpy compassion offered by James into rebellion.  James would like to side with Father Flynn, but one day she notices something odd about the behavior of the relatively new black student.  He is called to Flynn’s office in the middle of class, and he returns to class with alcohol on his breath.  She reports this to Sister Aloysius, and here’s where the ball gets rolling.

Sister Aloysius, without firm evidence, thinks something inappropriate has happened between this black male student and Father Flynn.  Aloysius pursues the truth, making firm accusations along the way, but how can she know? She may be completely wrong.  With this scenario Doubt plays with our contemporary knowledge of the recent sex scandals in the Catholic Church.  Father Flynn vehemently denies Aloysius’ charge, and Sister James, a possible witness to the scandal, would really like to believe Father Flynn is innocent.

SPOILER ALERT

So from here on I’ll discuss the movie looked at from the ending backward.  You’d think, in a typical Hollywood production, that Sister Aloysius would be typecast as a grim, cruel authoritarian.  To some extent she is, but then the movie makes room for the idea that such a person and position is necessary, especially in a school environment.  Further, Aloysius represents old time values — specifically, for Catholics, the glory days before Vatican II.  Father Flynn is obviously a Vatican II revolutionary, the kind of guy who thinks the church needs to modernize for the sake of … well, what exactly?  Either the church, or possibly himself.

Flynn makes his case for change based on several points that political and religious “progressives” would love to associate themselves with.  For example, absolute civil rights and social tolerance for nearly everyone and everything, including the idea that homosexuals are homosexuals by nature.  While the movie makes room for a viewer’s acceptance of many of Flynn’s beliefs, it associates them with Flynn’s probable pedophilia.  As we all know, being a pedophile today is the worst social sin one can commit, down there in a gutter with being labeled a racist.  So it’s funny that Flynn wants to blow the wind of tolerance through the church — which would elicit a loud Hurrah! from a whole lot of people these days — but he does it while seducing little boys in the rectory.

What is the movie’s point of view? Which character does it side with?  Obviously the writer-director, John Patrick Shanley (whose only other movie as a director is Joe Versus the Volcano, interestingly enough) has crafted a story built on the favorite aesthetic value of writers and artists since the mid-nineteenth century: ambiguity.  What is really true, and who is really right?  The movie does a fine job of leaving these questions open-ended, while humanizing all of the characters — the title of this movie says it all.  We have no doubt that even a few viewers might sympathize with Father Flynn’s pedophilia.  Still, it’s hard to say that — from the point of view of the mainstream in 2009 — Sister Aloysius isn’t ultimately the good guy (or nun).

It’s worth pointing out that there are a few theological howlers in the movie.  It concludes with Sister Aloysius’ doubts, but if she is talking about her faith in God, she has a deep problem. Contra Tillich, doubt is a sin; it is the opposite of faith.  Also, Sister Aloysius claims at least twice that she is “stepping away from God” in order to pursue Father Flynn.  Either she is joking or stupid, because bringing sin to the light — especially such wickedness as Flynn is accused of — could never be called “stepping away from God.”

Entertainment: 9

Intelligence: 9

Morality: see above, but it’s far tamer than Kids-in-Mind says.

Doctor Zhivago

After reading around the web, few movies attract as many conflicting opinions as Doctor Zhivago, and so it was in our own little household.   Was it too long?  Does it praise Zhivago’s adultery? Are the characters’ actions unrealistic? Go elsewhere and others will answer with a raging “yes” or a shoulder shrug and a smile.  We hardly know what to say ourselves.

It’s even hard to say what this movie is really about.  Yes, it’s about a poet/doctor who apparently loves one woman (his wife) but desires another, the lovely Lara, whom the movie equates to yellow flowers and the blazing sun.  Yes, the movie is also about the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.  It’s also about poetry versus ideology, Zhivago’s private world of family life and writing versus the political reality of the Bolsheviks.

It’s even arguable that this is about the framing device.  The movie is really one long story told by the Alec Guinness character, a high-ranking Soviet who is looking for his niece.  Finding a girl he believes to be the one, he tells her of the father she never knew, the story of the renowned poet, Doctor Yuri Zhivago.  So the entire movie is a Soviet officer’s romantic tale of events, many of which he may be inventing.  Why exactly is he telling it to this poor worker girl?  We think it’s because the girl is orphaned and the officer is alone, both isolated by the grim ideology of the Soviet system.  The story of Zhivago offers them a rare chance to connect relationally, and the audience a chance to see a Soviet humanized.

But above all else, this movie is about movies.  You will see Lara dissolve into a flower.  You will see several seconds of a completely black screen, as a train travels through a tunnel.  You will see the camera pointed at the tops of trees.  You will see a Russian mansion’s interior covered in ice.  These are formal techniques you won’t find in other mediums.  Attach a sprawling Victorian-era plot, a love triangle, and pretty pictures courtesy of David Lean, and it’s not so unclear why people have always liked this movie, despite numerous features easily characterized as flaws.  Doctor Zhivago feels like an event.

Calling Doctor Zhivago a “love story” would be too hasty.  Zhivago does have a inexplicable obsession with his mistress, and the movie accentuates this obsession by showing us yellow flowers and playing the four-note “Lara’s Theme” over and over and over.  But Zhivago is also obviously an adulterer, a fact which the movie makes clear.  For one, his wife is unwaveringly faithful and sweet.  “How could anyone cheat on her?” C. repeatedly kept saying during the movie.  Also, when Zhivago first considers Lara lustfully, we see him only in the shadows, which suggests the blackness of his desire.  Lara herself, a fallen woman of sorts, has been used and abused by two other men in the movie.  When Zhivago asks one of them about her, before he fully knows her, the man replies that he will give Lara to Zhivago as a wedding present.  So Zhivago is one in a line of men to dominate Lara, who consents after initially refusing him. Most telling of all, Zhivago loses his wife forever and is enslaved in the Red Army precisely because he is returning home from a tryst with Lara.

So Zhivago’s adultery is not necessarily mishandled.  Recall the early scene where Lara goes to church.  After she confesses, the priest reminds her of the story of the woman whom Jesus told to “go and sin no more.”  What happened to that woman,the priest asks rhetorically.  We do not know, he answers, and then he exhorts Lara to heed the commandment.   The rest of the movie offers us a chance to see what happens when the characters do not heed that command.  The ones who suffer most: Zhivago’s family.  In the end, Zhivago collapses and dies while frantically pursuing Lara.  This final scene may be unforgivably sentimental, as Roger Ebert argues, but it is anchored in a relevant moral point.

In the background of Zhivago’s follies is the destructive transformation of an entire nation.  Living under the old Russian czar wasn’t so pleasant, but communism couldn’t be said to be much of an improvement.  The movie presents multiple views of the Russian Revolution, primarily from the eyes of Zhivago’s upper-class family.  At times they praise the removal of the old injustice, but what dominates is the fact that everybody gets really poor, really quickly.  Zhivago’s family is hounded by Bolshevik officials, and Zhivago himself is nearly accused of corruption on multiple occasions, though he has no political affiliation.  So the family travels from Moscow to the deep countryside, fleeing the poverty and political oppression of the big city.  The countryside provides respite, but we find civil war raging even there, and the Red Army’s operation, we discover, are everywhere.  For Zhivago and company, there is no escaping a time of terror.  The movie does a good job of conveying the general feeling of catastrophe and economic loss, and this in fact is probably the best reason to see it.

Entertainment: 9

Intelligence: somewhere between 2 and 8

Morality: 7 (a couple of risque scenes, and this score will drastically drop if you think the adultery is glorified)

Pride and Prejudice (2005)

“This is not Jane Austen,” says C.  She is correct, though the plot is faithful to Jane’s book. But having studied this movie shot-by-shot, we can easily declare it a well-crafted movie.  In terms of applying film technique to an early nineteenth century plot, the movie is a classic.

Austen diehards like C. will undoubtedly have issues.  Some of the actors may seem miscast, or at times inept.  We refer especially to Donald Sutherland as Mr. Bennett, whose interpretation of Bennett as a low-key mumbler seems to be different than the sarcastic jokester that Austen had in mind.

Likewise, the movie veers towards a kind of kitsch romanticism that the book never approaches.   But of course it does; it’s a movie, and they all do that.  Consider that Austen’s book is concerned with virtues and manners, with educating readers on the degrees of appropriate conduct and sentiment.  In the book, the first thing that Darcy and Elizabeth do after getting engaged is to talk about what was wrong with how they previously acted, particularly with their manners.  Darcy even goes into a psychiatric evaluation of his childhood, and how that childhood programmed him to act prideful and conceited “in practice, though not in principle.”  This is not the kind of thing that couples do ten minutes after getting engaged, but oh well, it’s a Jane Austen book.

This movie, however, focuses on Elizabeth’s internal emotional state and projects that turmoil onscreen.  There are two or three short dream sequences, one of which has her standing on the edge of a cliff, the wind threatening to blow her off.  The scene in which Darcy famously gives Elizabeth a letter likewise focuses on Elizabeth.  That encounter here is as much fantasy as fact, as much Elizabeth’s baffled, emotional interpretation as a coherent, realistic sequence of events.  This movie is not Jane Austen; it is a romantic fantasy.

Despite this, this version of Pride and Prejudice aims to be the most realistic of all film versions.  The opening sequence swoops through the Bennet household in one take, in which we see the animals in their front lawn and the laundry strung out in front of the house.  Later, at the ball, we watch perhaps a hundred people happily dance, though we can almost smell the sweat and stink of the place.  The sets, when we reach Lady de Bourgh’s and Darcy’s estates, are elaborate and realistic.  Someone spent a lot of money to make what we see look like early nineteenth century England.  Even the ladies appear to have gone lightly on the makeup.

About this film’s craft.  Everyone should notice the extraordinary long takes, in which, for example, the camera swoops through the entire scene of the ball.  This is unusual, perhaps unprecedented for Jane Austen period movies, but it aims to relate the connected intricacies of the English social world.  In that way it is faithful to the book.  Jane is not much one for detail, but she is one for relationships.  Here, the camera has found a way to visually demonstrate those relationships.  In that way, we guess this movie is like Jane Austen.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 8

Morality: 10

Les Miserables (1998)

We’re hearing lately about the hot new Christian movie, Fireproof, which is supposedly a heartgrabbing work of spiritual realism.  Except that Kirk Cameron plays a firefighter, which is sort of like casting a munchkin as the Cowardly Lion.  Anyway, we can’t figure out why Christians would waste capital making a TV movie for the big screen when they could simply take a classic like Les Miserables and remake it.  Or better yet, they could save money — the recession is here after all — and just watch this version of Les Mis instead.

Now you have to understand that Victor Hugo’s book is something like 1300 pages long.  Most people don’t read that many pages in a lifetime.  So while Roger Ebert complains that this 1998 version of Les Mis is basically a Classics Illustrated version of the story, which is true, that still makes this movie better and more compelling than 95% of the schlock currently marketed to us. Busy people like us can save time by getting the highlights of Hugo’s story here.  Nothing wrong with highlights.

Best of all, there’s no music in this one.  Whoever thought that Les Miserables would make a great musical should be forgiven, a lot, because he’s caused plenty of unnecessary delusion and suffering.

The story of Les Miserables is, in one sense, filled with the conflicts of grace and law.  Jean Valjean, our hero, receives grace from a priest at the beginning of the story.  Nine years later, the great Valjean — an important official who is hiding his criminal past — grants grace to anyone in need.  Valjean is opposed and eventually pursued by Javert, an inspector with a heart of stone.  Javert tries to observe the law consistently, with a professed personal goal of never breaking it once, and so he tries to make everyone else follow the law too.  Lawbreakers to Javert are anathema.  So what happens when Javert realizes that Valjean was once a criminal?  Take one guess, and you’ll probably be right.

The movie’s best half is its opening half, which whisks along and then turns into a chase scene.  This is far from the pacing of Hugo’s humongous novel, but oh well.  The movie’s second half takes a bad turn in a couple of ways.  One of those is the syrupy treatment of the Parisian revolutionaries, which include the token black guy and a campy treatment of mob violence and warfare.  The other problem is the casting of Cosette, who is played by a young lady who badly fakes a British accent even though she’s playing a French woman.  Still, these problems aren’t enough to overwhelm the compelling dynamic between Valjean and Javert.

The movie — so says C. — is mostly faithful to the book, ending abruptly but still ending as the book does.  You miss all of the ornate description that Hugo gives, which C. loved, by the way.  Realize that this Les Mis is the Hollywood version, preferring classy actors, expensive sets, and chase scenes to the intricacies of character.   But it’s still compelling.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 9

There Will Be Blood

We have finally reached that point.  We finally have a well-regarded story — a movie in this case — in which the villain is the one and only showstopper.  Oh sure, everybody loves Milton’s Satan.  And the Joker has been much beloved twice in recent pop culture.  But in both those cases, there was a hero to counterbalance the villain.  In There Will Be Blood, there is no hero.  There is only Daniel Plainview, a force of nothing, a supreme exemplar of depravity, on-screen.  As viewers, we can feel nothing but disgust.  Plainview is beyond pity.

Reader, if you’re looking for a fulfilling story, do not approach this movie.  Long ago, Aristotle told us what makes a tragic story work for an audience: catharsis.  There is no catharsis in There Will Be Blood.  Plainview has no redeeming qualities, and he is not a great man.  Since there is no joy in the movie either, you will leave this movie feeling like a pile of manure.

Unlike a great movie like Amadeus, in which the villain and main character accidentally enacts a useful morality tale for an audience, There Will Be Blood offers nothing more than the hollowness of Plainview.  Sure, there is lots of vague religious symbolism, underneath the great photography.  But Plainview starts out as a hideous man and grows only more hideous throughout the movie.  We’ve known people like him.  We do not want to be around them long.  So why would we want to spend 150 minutes watching Plainview degenerate into a greedy, isolated husk of a man?  Here, that is all you will see.

The counterpart to Plainview is a charismatic preacher named Eli Sunday.  In typical Hollywood fashion, Sunday represents the nuttiest of the nuttiest that “Christianity” has to offer.  You’d think they could throw us a decent, honest Methodist or Baptist every decade or two.  But no, Sunday has to cast out the demons of arthritic old ladies and shout “I bite you, devil!  And if I don’t have teeth, I gum you!”  Sunday’s church is the Church of the Third Revelation, the place where the local ignoramuses go to hear the new doctrine that Sunday dreamed up two days ago.  He’s a holy roller who’s only in it for money and power, and it’s a wonder that the movie doesn’t depict him as actively searching for paramours.

Sunday, like Plainview, is nothing but a vile man.  Sunday, though, is the more pathetic of the two, a petty hypocrite with an annoying, boyish yell.  Both Sunday and Plainview are slaves to money and personal greed, and the movie’s attempt to be intellectually brilliant is to create an ever-changing power relationship between Sunday and Plainview.  Sunday baptizes Plainview so that Plainview can build an oil pipeline, and Plainview baptizes Sunday, in his own way.  Need we say that neither baptizm is really effectual?

Oh, but what of the plot?  Not that it matters much, since it’s the performance of Daniel Day-Lewis and the nice photography that’s on display for the credentialed critics to “ooh” and “aah” at.  Plainview is an oilman who creates a town called Little Boston in the middle of the California desert, thanks to the participation of poor families like Eli Sunday’s.  Plainview promises to make Little Boston into a boomtown.  This is music to the ears of Sunday, who longs for a larger audience in his Church of the Third Revelation.  The more people to hypnotize each week, the better.

But there’s one problem: Sunday cannot take his mind off the money that Plainview owes him, and Plainview refuses to pay.  You see, the Church of the Third Revelation needs its $5000 smackeroos.  As usual, the church gets greedy, and then gets conned by crooked capitalists.  The Word becomes the servant of Mammon, for it can get rich no other way, so the thinking goes.  Sunday thinks he can serve God and Mammon, while Plainview just thinks that God is a superstition.  These are your heroes.

The movie’s final scene absolutely flounders. It punishes Sunday more than it does Plainview, whose atheism gains something of a conquest as the movie closes.  It is a failed ending of what begins as a promising movie.  The first twenty minutes have no dialogue, just oil prospecting.  These are the best twenty minutes of the movie, with the opening shots alluding to Plato’s allegory of the cave.  At the one-hour mark, the movie shifts for the worse, when Plainview’s degeneracy is obvious and painful, and by the time it flashforwards to the 1920s we’ve already long known that Plainview is utterly despicable.   At least twenty minutes needs to be cut from its runtime.

The movie has almost nothing good to say about entrepreneurship or Christianity.  The local townsfolk who get roped into Plainview’s schemes and Sunday’s false church are merely dupes.  Everyone else is a greedy son-of-a-gun.  Only Plainview’s adopted son escapes the madness, and he retreats to Mexico.  Since the movie obviously attacks the idea of the self-made man, the central American myth, this flight to Mexico by the movie’s only honorable man can only mean that the American Dream is a total sham. That dream, so say says the movie, is practiced only by crooked capitalists and stupid holy rollers.  Trust us, if you watch this, there will be pain.

Entertainment: 1-9

Intelligence: 8

Morality: 1 (what morality did it demonstrate?)

John Adams

Note: This review only covers parts 1 and 2, for reasons explained below.

Remember the way the Joker’s lair looked in the old Batman TV show from the 1960s?  It was always tilted at an angle, as if the level on the camera were somehow broken.  Someone forgot to check the level on the camera that filmed this John Adams series.  The debates at Independence Hall look like the Joker’s lair, angled for no apparent reason, so that you can almost see the Penguin and the Riddler sitting with the Virginia state delegates, cackling wildly while they and George Washington plot to take over Gotham.

That’s not the only directorial problem in a series that suffers from weird shot after weird shot.  There are scenes where there’s an unfocused object in the extreme foreground, for no apparent reason.  There are even plenty of shaky, handheld-type camera movements for those who think eighteenth-century parliamentary procedure needs to look like The Bourne Supremacy.

Maybe the reason for this is to spice up the subject matter, namely John Adams, which is pretty dull at times.  Even Adams tells everyone how bored he is at the meetings of the Continental Congress.  They’d introduce a motion that two plus three equals five, he says, and then debate it for two days before motioning to approve it.  But then, in Episode 2, we see meeting after meeting of the kind of debate and discussion that Adams says he’s weary of.  It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching some Congressional committee go at it on C-SPAN, which no one these days has the patience to watch for two minutes.

So yes, John Adams suffers from being dull.  It’s not as if Adams himself was boring — take a look at his resume sometime — but the way he’s portrayed here should make any viewer wonder why we are watching a series about him.  Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson all come across as much more intriguing characters than Adams here.  The drama of the early Revolutionary War is barely seen, but when it is we are much more interested in it.  Even the Adams’ family’s daily life — Abigail Adams’ floor-scrubbing techniques, the family’s bout with smallpox — are more interesting than Adams’ many speeches about liberty.  At least HBO has created something that will make a better substitute in public high school history classrooms for the next two decades.

Episode 1, “Join or Die,” begins with the Boston Massacre.  Adams famously defended the British soldiers accused of murdering a bunch of Bostonians, so the episode is dedicated mostly to the trial, which comes off as just another episode of Law and Order except that the lawyers wear wigs and use big, Latinate words like “desanguination.”  The main point of this episode is to show that the American colonists were rabble-rousers who tended to use mob tactics.  They form a mob that leads to the Boston massacre, they scream for British blood throughout the trial, and then they tar and feather a British ship captain afterwards.   Above it all is Adams, who looks on the tar-and-feathering scene with disgust and says that most men are weak and need “strong government.”  It isn’t more than a few minutes later, however, that Adams is denouncing British tyranny in a church after just being elected to represent Massachusetts at a meeting of the Continental Congress.  All men have their contradictions, but this Adams doesn’t know what kind of story he is in, or else he’d be screaming for a more coherent representation of himself and his fellow colonists.

Episode 2, “Independence,” is the C-SPAN-like episode we mentioned above.  There are interesting moments, however.  Maybe the best is when Franklin and Adams are reading Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence.  Franklin, who is portrayed excellently in this series as a shifty character prone to ironic humor, starts to edit the document.  Jefferson complains that every word was precisely chosen, but Franklin insists that “sacred and undeniable” is pulpit language, and that “we hold these truths to be self-evident” is a much more palatable and pragmatic choice.  You get the feeling throughout these two episodes that church doctrine mattered less to these guys –  it is totally absent, after all — than eighteenth-century philosophical abstractions.

Scenes like this demonstrate that the series should’ve been reconceived as Founding Fathers or From Colony to Nation or something broader like that.  The mix of personalities we’ve known since grade school, portrayed here with a good degree of accuracy, is quite dynamic at times, so that focusing on Adams seems merely opportunistic, coming on the heels of David McCullough’s best-selling, pop biography of Adams as it does.  We couldn’t make it to Episode 3.  Adams’ was a life of debate, negotiation, and politics, and so it seems likely that the rest of the series will have the same problems as the first parts of it.  Let us know if this isn’t true.

FYI: There’s a brief shot of unexpected full-frontal nudity when the British captain is being tarred and feathered in Episode 1.  The series is rated “TV-14,” probably just for that.

Becoming Jane

Wouldn’t Jane Austen like to become one of the characters in her stories?  In Becoming Jane, she basically does.  This movie is a lame attempt to make Jane Austen’s life a Jane Austen story, except that the ending is a bit different, in that the female heroine becomes a famous spinster instead of a blissful bride.

Yes, we gave away the ending, but it’s common knowledge that Austen was a spinster.  So you know where this movie is going from the beginning.  She will not really run away with the penniless, rambunctious man whom she loves, even though she wants to.  Why, then, would she choose a mundane life over a wild love affair?

As it turns out, the Jane Austen in this movie is something of a moral hypocrite.  She’s faced with choosing to run away and eloping with her beau, Tom Lefroy, or staying with her family.  Austen at first chooses to run away, but when she finds out that Tom is ditching his responsibility to his own family, she gets upset and chooses to return to Spinsterville.   So Austen is irresponsible to her own family, but she gets put off when her man is irresponsible to his.  The movie basically says that it’s okay to elope when you don’t owe any money to your family.  In other words, pay your debts first, then head to Vegas.

Emotionally scarred for life from this lost love affair, the movie makes it clear that all of Austen’s writings were derived from this event.  She makes makes sure that all of her characters get happy endings and wonderful marriages, the kind of ending she never got.

Ho hum.  The Austen expert in our household described her viewing experience as “very mediocre,” while the other half of our reviewing team picked up a book midway through the movie.  Ladies, listen carefully.  Do not put your husbands through this movie.  Watch it with your friends, or offer to try with your husband the best version of Emma or Pride and Prejudice you can find.  But do not bore your husband so much that he will despise even the thought of coming within 100 yards of an Austen book or movie.  Becoming Jane will leave that bad a taste in his mouth.

Entertainment: 3

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 3

Hamlet (1990)

In the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 27, there’s a little-used passage in which the Levites lead a liturgy of curses.  The Levites shout out “Cursed be he who . . .”  Then all the people respond, “Amen.”  Some of these cursed actions are in unmentionable territory these days — they make old ladies in the pew blush and parents rush to cover their children’s ears — because everybody wants a syrupy sermon about change you can believe in and your best life now.  But there the unmentionables are, in the Bible that you want your kids to read and imbibe so badly, said out loud by all of the people.  Old ladies included.

Now one of these is “Cursed be he that lieth with his father’s wife,” and this for some reason came to our minds while watching this version of Hamlet.  It’s a pedestrian version, manned by Mel Gibson, who is as charismatic as usual, but then it gets to the part where Hamlet jumps on top of his mother and then she kisses him.  The whole scene is clearly incestuous, influenced more by outdated Freudian psychology rather than by Shakespeare’s words.  Which got us to thinking.  Should a movie ever portray something like this?  That’s ever, even in a negative light. We mean, it’s one thing to write about it, but another thing to bring it before someone’s eyes.  Or is it?  Clearly the Bible speaks of it, yet it is communicated in a wholly different medium than film.  Anyway, the incest scene overshadowed everything else for us.  It is disgusting.

Anyway, to this pedestrian version of Hamlet.  It’s set in medieval Europe, where everyone looks like they just got off the set of Braveheart.  Mel Gibson has a beard.  Tim Burton’s wife goes crazy, which happens in just about all of the other movies she is in.  The final battle scene is tragicomic, with Hamlet, fresh from returning from England, renewed and confident, being tragically tricked.

It did strike us that the last thing Hamlet does before dying is kill his uncle, which is taking the law into his own hands and preparing the way for foreign invaders (Fortinbras’ Norwegian army) to take over Denmark.  This is important, especially for this movie version, which completely cut out the subplot about Fortinbras.  Hamlet is a revenge play about deception and madness in the high courts of a kingdom.  The tragedy of the play is not just Hamlet’s woes turned into his own death.  It is not simply about an individual’s woes, but the woes of the family, the court, and the entire kingdom due to murder.  By the end of this play, Claudius’ murder of Hamlet’s father affects the whole of Denmark.  The entire kingdom loses its king, has its ruling family succeed in killing each other, and is invaded by foreign enemies.  Murder in high places has caused the downfall of the state, the king’s family, and the individual (Hamlet).  This movie version eliminates a lot of that depth, which, without the Fortinbras episodes, instead focuses almost completely on the individual’s collapse.  Well, that and his incestuous relationship with his mother.

Entertainment:7

Intelligence:3

Morality: 0

Hamlet (1996)

Hamlet the play offers a crucial choice for directors.  The character Hamlet, prior to the opening lines, just experienced his father’s death and his mother’s marriage to his uncle.  He’s also got issues with his sometimes-girlfriend.  So directors can choose option 1, which is to make Hamlet a depressed mope.  This depression is exacerbated when Hamlet sees his father’s ghost, and so Hamlet spends at least the first four acts sulking and raving.

Option 2 is what Kenneth Branagh chose for his uncut, 72 mm version of Hamlet.  His Hamlet is upset about burdensome family issues, but he has a degree of emotional control over them.  Instead, he goes on a mission.  Just after Branagh’s Hamlet sees the ghost, he is out to produce the downfall of his uncle Claudius with every word and in every scene.  This is a cunning, calculating Halmet.  His mad fits and crazy actions are feints, deliberately pretended in order to provoke Claudius and his court.

Consider the famous “to be or not to be” speech in this movie, which is probably its best scene.  Claudius and Polonius hide behind glass doors that look like mirrors on one side but are windows on the side they are on.  Hamlet walks into the stateroom with glass doors, and while it looks like he doesn’t know Claudius and Polonius are behind one of those doors, he might; it’s not clear.  Then Hamlet stands in front of the door Claudius hides behind and gives a monologue on the option of suicide for a troubled person living in a weary world. Hamlet looks right at himself in a mirror, but he is also looking right at Claudius, who interprets the speech as if it’s meant for him.  Is Hamlet giving a moment’s thought to suicide, coincidentally looking at Claudius, or is he really provoking Claudius?  A few minutes later, he certainly is provoking Claudius, when he realizes that Ophelia is questioning his sanity on behalf of her hidden father. In other Hamlets, the “to be or not to be” speech follows the confrontation with Ophelia, which means that Hamlet contemplates suicide because of, on top of his other problems, his lost love with Ophelia.  In Branagh’s version, the “to be” speech is not at all about lost love.  It is about the powerplay between Hamlet and Claudius, internally and externally.

That is one of several of Branagh’s brilliant scenes in what is an uneven movie.  The reason it is uneven is because Hamlet is massive — Shakespeare’s longest play — and contains a lot of repartee that needs to be cut.  Branagh cut nothing, however, so the four-hour runtime is going to take up a third of your day.  Also, some scenes don’t work.  The one in which Hamlet sees his father’s ghost, for example, looks like a bad horror movie.  Most of the flashbacks, which can’t be done in a stage version anyway, are not necessary.

This movie provides a crucial test of a family’s standards.  In the first act, we see brief flashbacks of Hamlet’s liaisons with Ophelia.  Unfortunately we didn’t know this was coming; there’s no way of knowing.  It’s basically one naked actor on top of another, though the camera angle doesn’t allow a viewer to see everything (a PG-13 rating).  Now we think the seventh commandment — don’t commit adultery — is a good rule for life.  So here we are with a scene in which two people, at least one of whom was married at the time, took their clothes off and rolled around as if they were married.

Some people just call this “acting” for the sake of great art.  But it is a simulation of the real act, and a simulation that is real in the sense that two living persons participated.   We wouldn’t want either of us to pretend to love somebody else physically (or emotionally for that matter), especially when it’s being recorded for all of posterity to remember.  Not even a peck on the cheek.  So what are supposed to think and feel when we see two real people — not just characters in a movie — being recorded while pretending to have sex?  It seems like it should be repulsive.  Would you want your wife, or your daughter, or your mother, in such a scene with another man?  Wouldn’t you squirm if you watched such a scene with them?

All of these thoughts and questions flash through our mind, so we turned off the movie immediately.  Only later, months later in fact, did we skip through much of the rest of it.  If that makes this review incomplete, so it is.

The Village

We live a few miles away from a former utopian community, the kind of thing wildly popular back in the early nineteenth century.  You didn’t have hulahoops or disco or another other readymade fad back then, so people had to work really hard to create shortlived sensations that looked cool.  Back in the early 1800s, that took a lot of wild, religious fantasizing by crazy guys, like Joseph Smith or Charles Fourier, who thought we should get together in one big cosmic lovefest and turn the oceans into lemonade.  People went crazy for this stuff.  They packed the wagons and headed to a commune in the deep woods, sometimes of the “free love” variety and sometimes of the Shaker variety.

The central questions of The Village are, what was the motivation for all that communing in the woods’ stuff, and what kept them together, if anything?  The movie’s plot setup is that a group of people, living by mid-nineteenth century standards, reside in a nice, open plain encircled by woods.  They can’t go into the woods because, presumably, evil spirits live there.  They are so evil that they are called “Those Who Cannot Be Named.”  Unfortunately this is the longest title for a movie villain somebody could imagine, so it gets real old after they utter it three times.  One day, a villager gets seriously injured, and so one of the characters must go into the woods to get help.  In other words, somebody has to leave the communal paradise and venture into the land of evil spirits.  That’s a very big “Uh-oh” for these people.

All the liberal critics jumped on this movie’s back as if it were utterly absurd to go where it does.  That’s fine to an extent; it is absurd in parts.  For instance, the village idiot is supposed to be mentally handicapped, except he does things that only a rational, diabolical person would do.  So is he just pretending to be dumb, or does he vacillate between retardation and brilliance?  Either possibility makes no sense, but let’s pass by that.

Is it okay if we give away the trick ending?  Okay, close your eyes, you who don’t want to see.  The whole point of this movie is how people — societies, cultures, et cetera — construct myths to constrict human action and impose ethical standards on the whole population.   The myths about evil spirits in The Village are what keeps the commune together.  It’s a negative myth structure — it holds people to a belief and tells them not to do something — so of course some skeptic within the society will eventual say it’s all hooey and try to break out of it.  Still, the movie’s setup is plausible given that that the village is barely into its second generation.  The first generation, the concerned guardians, knows the lie, and think they had to make up myths to protect their children.  Again, this is a pretty wild scenario but still a plausible one, because people tend to look to continue their beliefs into the next generation — for the sake of reproductive success, perpetuation of ideology, preservation of labor and tradition, and whatever other reasons they might have.

A great example of a negative myth scheme is political correctness, which the critics who hated this movie have to adhere to, for fear of discovering truth.  But the characters in The Village, especially the first generation, know that much about PC is a bunch of baloney.  They’ve suffered the consequences personally.  They don’t think modern society is really that great, so they create an alternative in the woods, using the same kind of negative myth scheme as the one they tried to break away from.  It doesn’t take a very long search on the Internet to realize that a great number of people sympathize with the first-generation villagers in this movie.

It’s too bad The Village chooses to say that its characters made a great choice to go out into the woods.  It’s understandable why they did what they did, and God knows we have our moments where we think we want to get far away from the moral decay around us.   But we’re called to be “in the world,” not “of the world.”  Except in extreme cases, that bars us from communal isolation.  It certainly doesn’t mean that we tell our children lies about evil spirits in the woods so that they’ll always behave just like us.  Christianity is founded on Good News, not a constricting, horrifying myth.  In that case, the movie fails, but it’s not completely stupid or unthoughtful, as others might claim.

Entertainment: 5

Intelligence: 6

Morality: 7