Big Eyes

Posted on December 24, 2014 at 5:14 pm

In Woody Allen’s 1973 film “Sleeper,” set in a decadent future, Diane Keaton plays a superficial socialite who tries to think of the highest compliment she can give to an amateurish painting. “Oh, it’s Keane! It’s pure Keane!” she exclaims. Audiences of that time would recognize that reference to Walter Keane, responsible for the wildly if inexplicably popular “big eyes” paintings of sad-looking waifs. When the concept of “kitsch” (cheap, popular, low-brow, and corny “art”) first came to the United States in the 1970’s, the Keane images were often used as an example.

Note that word “responsible.” Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) was “responsible” for the success of the paintings but he was not responsible for producing them. It was revealed in a dramatic trial that while Walter Keane claimed credit as the sole artist behind the paintings (and prints and books), he had never put a brush to canvas. Every one of the paintings was created by the only artist in the family, his wife, Margaret (Amy Adams).

Director Tim Burton, whose film about notoriously awful movie director Ed Wood is one of his best, has created another very good film about very bad art. Like that film, “Big Eyes” is highly stylized, with heightened period detail exaggerated to reflect and comment on the art that it depicts. At one point, in some distress, Margaret pushes a shopping cart through a grocery story, seeing the big eyes in the faces of everyone she looks at.

This film also draws on the 60’s era beginning stages of the women’s movement to anchor the story. Margaret took her daughter and left her first husband at a time when most middle class women were expected to stay home and defer to their husbands. She arrived in San Francisco at the dawn of the “consciousness raising” era, at the epicenter of movements advocating more focus on individual needs and personal fulfillment. But Margaret still thought of herself as powerless in her relationship with Walter, in part because it was her nature and the way she was raised to defer and get along, partly because she was dependant on him. She married him in a hurry because her ex-husband was threatening to sue her for custody at a time when single mothers who left their husbands and had to find jobs had very few rights. “I’m a divorcee with a child,” she tells a friend. “Walter is a blessing.”

It was also partly because she loved him, at first.

Margaret was pretty good at painting the pictures, but Walter was undeniably a world-class genius at selling them. He was very good at marketing up: he sold to movie stars and appeared as a guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He got a commission for a mural at the World’s Fair. And he was even better at marketing down. When he noticed that people who could not afford the paintings were taking home posters from the gallery, he realized that there was an opportunity there. “Would you rather sell one $500 painting or a million crappy reproduced posters?” Pretty soon there were Keane images for every budget, with the originals in an art gallery and the copies in stores, alongside kitchen utensils and t-shirts.

Margaret signed her work “Keane,” and Walter slipped easily into taking credit for it. He told Margaret (correctly) that no one took women artists seriously and that (also correct) that he was willing to do the kind of glad-handing and public appearances that she is not. So, she stays locked in her studio painting all the time, increasingly isolated, finally even from her own sense of who she is.

The eerie look in the big eyes of the children in the paintings begins to seem haunting. Margaret realizes that she has to leave another husband. And she has to tell the truth.

Tim Burton has a story with the grotesquerie built in, not just the outlandish images but the turbulence of the era. Waltz has the showier role and delivers as a man whose ebullience mutates into a grandiosity from which there was no return. Adams, as the woman whose passion for expression grows — finally — into the ability to speak for herself with her voice as well as her brush.

Parents should know that this film includes some disturbing themes including emotional abuse, broken marriages, fraud, some sexual references, and brief strong language.

Family Discussion: Who was responsible for the success of the big eye paintings? Why did Walter lie and why did Margaret let him?

If you like this, try: “Ed Wood” from the same director

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Based on a true story Drama

Pride

Posted on December 22, 2014 at 6:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and brief sexual content
Profanity:	Very strong language, some crude
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some peril and violence, bullying and harassment
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 9, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	December 22, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00OY7YNKI

The ingredients for this film were so irresistible that it is a unexpected bonus to find that it is so much better than it needed to be.

It’s based on a true story of extraordinary kindness, generosity, and friendship and it stars a bunch of adorable English actors (Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy) who could read the tax code out loud and make it cuddly and uplifting. But it is also very smart, very touching, and very timely, and one of the best films of the year.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher imposed a system of market-based economic changes that created massive upheavals, depicted in films like “Billy Elliot,” “Brassed Off,” and “The Full Monty.” The miners were on strike from 1984-85 after the Thatcher government announced that it was shutting down many of the coal mines, and it was a bitter, angry time.

It was also the early stages of gay pride. And one young activist, Mark Ashton (the enormously charismatic Ben Schnetzer) sees a connection between gay pride and the miners. They have a common enemy. He sets up something called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, and gets a couple of friends to join him in collecting money to help the miners on strike.

But most of the miners groups turn him down. Only one responds, a group in Wales. Their leader Dai (Paddy Considine) comes to London to pick up the money LGSM has raised, and his thanks is genuine and very moving. “When you’re in a battle against an enemy so much bigger and stronger than you, to find out you had a friend you never knew existed, well, that’s the best feeling in the world.”

They invite the LGSM to visit, and the welcome ranges from warm to a bit stiff and uncomfortable, except for one woman who calls them perverts and tries to get them thrown out. As one might predict, there are scenes of gay men dancing and cute country folk asking questions (“Is it true that all lesbians are vegetarian? I heard that at the covered market!”). And one of the local guys sheepishly asks one of the London gay men for a dance lesson to impress a girl. There’s also a guy who’s not out to his family. And, as time passes, the spectre of a far worse scourge than Thatcher will shift the focus of the gay pride movement to AIDS.

But for a brief moment, there was a connection that grew from a common threat to a unity of purpose to understanding and real friendship. The final section is a reminder of how much difference we can make and how much that difference is needed.

Parents should know that this film has some mature themes and strong languages. Characters drink and smoke and there is some peril and violence.

Family discussion: What did the gays and the miners have in common? What groups seeking dignity and justice can you help?

If you like this, try: “The Full Monty,” “Brassed Off,” and “Billy Elliot.”

Wild

Posted on December 4, 2014 at 5:58 pm

“If your Nerve, deny you—
Go above your Nerve—”

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) adds the name of the author, Emily Dickinson, to the quote she has inscribed in a journal for hikers kept at her entry point on the Pacific Coast Trail. And then she adds her own name as well. It is her own name in a very real sense as she was not born with it and it was not her husband’s name. It was a name she chose from a dictionary at the end of her marriage as the name she wanted to go on with, a name for going above her nerve.

Strayed was lost. Her mother Bobbi (a glowing Laura Dern), the “great love of (her) life,” died of cancer. Her husband Paul (“Newsroom’s” Thomas Sadoski) was loving and supportive but Strayed fell into a self-destructive death spiral, obliterating herself through “detached” sex with strangers and substance abuse that ultimately included shooting heroin. She and Paul recognized their divorce with matching tattoos to keep some part of the idea of permanence connecting them. And then, with nowhere else to go, she decided to take a walk, more than a thousand miles. It was a chance to reconnect with something she knew she loved to do and to get away from the bad choices she was making. The Chinese proverb says that the longest journey begins with a single step. Strayed wanted to take those steps between her old life and whatever was ahead, to begin to feel an un-obliterated life.

Her 60 pounds of equipment filled a backpack called The Monster. She did not practice putting up her tent or using her stove before she left. She was scared, and soon she was also hungry. She had brought the wrong fuel for her stove. A burly farmer driving a tractor gruffly agreed to give her a ride to some food, and then told her he was bringing her back to his house. She looked at him, trying to figure out if he was planning to attack her, hoping he was not. He was not. The farmer and his wife were kind and generous with her. She got the right fuel, and, a few stops later got some advice about getting rid of some of her load, down to burning each night the book pages she had finished reading. Plus, she didn’t really need all those condoms, did she?

Strayed’s book became an international-bestseller, so poetic and inspirational Oprah rebooted her Book Club to endorse it. Like other memoirs combining real and spiritual/emotional journeys, what makes it work is the narrator’s voice. This is as much an internal story as an external one. Screenwriter Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity”) and director Jean-Marc Vallée (“Dallas Buyer’s Club”) understand that this is not a travelogue, though there is some stunning scenery. It is about Strayed thinking back through her chaotic, messy life through the experience of putting one foot in front of the other on her way to a place called The Bridge of the Gods. As she thinks back on her life, we begin to understand the context for this trek at the same time that she does. As we expect from Hornby, there are some great song choices, too.

Strayed’s adventures and encounters along the way resonate with her memories. The farmer is not the only potential danger. The film understatedly but clearly shows how any woman in any sort of wild has to constantly calculate the threat level of the men she encounters. And, in a scene where Strayed comes across another hiker taking a bath in a lake, we get something we rarely see in films, a woman appraising, or maybe just appreciating, a male body. This is a character moment for Strayed, who as we see, has been too impulsive in sexual encounters. But here, she stands back and just savors the moment on its own, owning it without having to do anything about it. “I’m lonelier in my real life than I am out here,” she says.

Feeling your feelings can be painful. Strayed loses toenails and, at one point, her shoes. There are angry, raw patches of skin where The Monster digs into her. She thinks through painful memories of her mother’s illness, her father’s abuse. She remembers being inconsiderate of her mother, a woman who was thrilled to get a chance to go back to school, to think and question and learn. And for the first time, she begins to understand what her mother said about putting yourself in the line of beauty. Just because some things are terrible doesn’t mean everything is. “This has the power to fill you up again if you let it,” someone tells her.

Witherspoon gives a performance of quiet vulnerability and courage. In some ways, as producer as well as star, this was as daunting an undertaking for her as the hike was for Strayed. There was a real risk of making it a glamorized, soapy star vehicle. But as producer and actor, she gives this story the film it deserves.

Parents should know that this film includes explicit sexual references and situations and nudity, substance abuse, references to domestic abuse, and very strong language.

Family discussion: What do you think the quote means and why did Strayed use it to begin her hike? What does it mean to say that wounds come from the same source as power?

If you like this try: Strayed’s books, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Torch, and Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, and another 2014 film about a real-life woman on a long, long walk, Tracks.

The Imitation Game

Posted on December 4, 2014 at 5:03 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Wartime violence
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie, homophobia, suicide
Date Released to Theaters:	November 21, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	March 30, 2015
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00RY85CQI

Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician with an enormous intellect, an almost equally enormous ego, and an almost equally enormous secret. He was one of the founding thinkers behind modern computing and it is his name that we use for the test that determines whether a computer has achieved true artificial intelligence status. The Turing test standard is human conversation. If a human cannot tell whether he or she is communicating with a person or a computer, than the program has passed the Turing test and is true artificial intelligence.

I’m not sure that Alan Turing could have passed the Turing test. Cumberbatch, who also plays a super-smart, arrogant, and obnoxious guy in “Sherlock,” creates a very different character here. Turing himself is an Enigma. In the opening scene, a sort of job interview nightmare in which Commander Denniston (Charles Dance) is trying to interview Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) for a spot on the team working at the famous Bletchley Park estate to break the code the Germans were using to send orders to their troops. If passing as human means meeting even the most minimal standards of civility and responsiveness, Turing failed that interview. He seemed to think that it was he who was interviewing Denniston to determine whether the task was of sufficient interest and import to merit his attention.

Denniston begins to dismiss him. But when Denniston says that everyone thinks the code, known as Enigma, is unbreakable, Turing says briskly, “Let me try, and then we’ll know for sure.” Denniston does not have a better idea or a better option.

The German code is unbreakable because it is constantly changing, so by the time any one message has been decrypted, whatever was learned could not be applied to whatever comes next. The Allies are perpetually behind. [The process, complicated as it is, has been simplified for the purposes of the movie, glossing over the important work done by Polish mathematicians, the contributions of the French, and the challenges faced as the Germans continued to make the Enigma more complicated and impenetrable as the war continued.) While a bunch of brilliant mathematicians, scientists, and puzzle-solvers (including Joan Clarke, played by Keira Knightley) worked away, Turning realized not only that what made the code unbreakable was the inability of any then-existing computational mechanism to perform enough calculations fast enough to decrypt the messages before the code was reconfigured the next morning, but that he could create a machine to do it.

We know how it turned out. But director Morten Tyldum keeps the story gripping on several levels. First, there is the conflict between Turing and just about everyone, and the pressure for immediate results as he is spending a lot of time (years) and money on something no one has ever seen before. Second, there are the interpersonal struggles, and Turning’s internal difficulties. He did want intimacy, and we see in his memories of his first love, a boy at his school. He likes Joan, and is briefly engaged to her. But he was gay at a time when being gay was punishable by prison. Then there are other kinds of secrets. One of the people working on breaking the code may be a spy. And once the code is broken, the Allies have the wrenchingly painful decision about what to do with the information. It’s not just a puzzle. It is statecraft, and terrible compromises and terrible losses are part of the job.

The film adds some unnecessary drama and oversimplifies parts of the story. But it is a powerful, complex drama and a long-overdue tribute to a true hero and visionary.

Parents should know that this film includes wartime themes and images, some disturbing, wrenching moral choices, betrayal, the pressures of being a closeted homosexual when it was a crime, drinking, smoking, and some sexual references.

Family discussion: Do you agree with the decision to withhold the news that the code had been broken? To allow the mole to keep spying?

If you like this, try: Read up on the history of the codebreakers at Bletchley (The Secret Lives of Codebreakers: The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park, Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-boat Codes, 1939-1943) as well as those in Poland and the spies who helped them get the information they needed and try some online version of the Turing Test.

Foxcatcher

Posted on November 20, 2014 at 5:55 pm

John Eleuthère Du Pont was of the wealthiest men in the world. He was an ornithologist, a philatelist, a purchaser of military weapons (including a tank), a wrestling fan who set up a luxurious training facility for the US Olympic team, and a murderer who died in prison in 2010. Steve Carell, almost unrecognizable, does a better job of erasing himself than of creating a different character. He has a hawkish nose, a set of small, inbred-looking teeth, a clenched posture, and the aristocratic delivery of a prep school graduate used to deference from everyone but his mother. But he is never able to make it all into anything but a cipher. Director Bennett Miller (“Capote,” “Moneyball”) and screenwriters Dan Futterman and E. Max Frye wisely stay away from simple explanations and Lifetime Made-for TV-style histrionics. Miller’s pallette is drab and his presentation is spare, in contrast to the opulence of the Du Pont estate and the training facility. But the film overcorrects, as though underplaying and long, silent stretches without even a musical score can somehow convey seriousness and import.

It begins promisingly as we see Olympic gold medalist Mark Schultz (a somber Channing Tatum) stumbling his way through a talk to some bored schoolkids about character and America, and then waiting awkwardly for his pay, $20. And one of the best scenes of the year is his practice session with his brother, best (and only) friend, and coach, David Schultz (Mark Ruffalo), also a gold medalist. There is enormous tenderness in David’s touch as he pushes on Mark’s arms to stretch him, and even as it seamlessly turns into a wrestling match that eloquently conveys intimacy, trust, dependence, and some competition as well.

Mark gets a call from some Du Pont factotum, inviting him to come to Delaware to meet John on his luxurious estate, called Foxcatcher because of the fox hunting history of the Du Ponts, a rare family that has been wealthy since the earliest days of American history.

On the surface, John conveys an easy noblesse oblige as he introduces himself, and Mark is nowhere near worldly enough to see the arrogance and instability under the surface. Mark has been listening to coaches all his life. When John says he likes to be called “Eagle,” Mark sees leadership. When John says he wants to help Mark be the best in the world, Mark sees a chance for something he did not let himself realize he wanted, a chance to be more independent. And independence is what John is looking for, too. He is an adult dependent in many ways on his mother, bitter about her focus on horses and her obvious feelings for him, somewhere between indifference and contempt.

John builds a lavish training facility (in real life for more sports than just wrestling). “Foxcatcher” is emblazoned everywhere. The athletes are polite, even respectful, but no one thinks John has anything but money to contribute. Mark loves being seen as special and gets caught up in John’s decadent lifestyle. But then John, who has the attention span of a mayfly, decides he needs to bring Dave in, too. Dave’s lack of interest only makes him more determined. Soon, Dave and his wife and children are at Foxcatcher. Mark is resentful. John is increasingly unstable and there is no one there to stop him until it is too late. When it’s over, he is affectless. The problem is, too much of the movie is as well.

Parents should know that this film has tense and disturbing confrontations, some violence including murder, strong language, drinking, and drugs

Family discussion: What was John hoping to achieve by sponsoring wrestlers? How did he feel about John? How did he feel about Dave? Why?

If you like this, try: “Capote” and “Reversal of Fortune”