‘True Grit’s’ ‘Everlasting Arms’

Posted on January 19, 2011 at 3:57 pm

I was pleased to see Beliefnet blogger Mark Roberts write about the use of the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” in its evocative soundtrack.

Ironically, according to Ethan Coen, they knew “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” from another movie, The Night of the Hunter, where it is sung by an insane murderer. The Coens wanted to use music that reflected point of view of True Grit’s protagonist, 14-year-old Mattie Ross. According to Coen, she is “an old Protestant at the age of 14.” So they picked a hymn that would have been sung by Protestants in the late 1800s, the era in which True Grit takes place.

Roberts’ discussion of the song’s origins is fascinating and deepens my appreciation for the hymn and its resonant use in the film.

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Music

True Grit

Posted on December 22, 2010 at 8:05 am

In a remake of the John Wayne classic that is truer to the Charles Portis book, the Coen brothers have made their most sincere film yet, a western as spare and yet majestic as its unspoiled landscapes. Like all great westerns, it is a meditation about the forces that shaped the American spirit, the determination, resilience, passion for justice, and most of all the mingled pragmatism and idealism.
Joel and Ethan Coen’s previous films have had a preciousness and remove from their often-grotesque characters, a frequent feeling of ironic air quotes in their picaresque speech patterns and fantastic, even mythic plot twists. This time, they give us a sincere and appreciative portrayal of a steely 14-year-old heroine (remarkable newcomer Hailee Steinfeld) who wants to find and kill the man who murdered her father.
Steinfeld plays Mattie Ross, a girl whose tight braids demonstrate her no-nonsense determination. She crisply negotiates the disposition of her father’s body with the undertaker and then demonstrates her mastery of horse-trading by selling back to the local broker the horses her father had come to town to buy, and, with a little extra leverage from a threatened lawsuit, getting some cash and a pony out of the deal. And so when she sets her mind to hiring the top tracker in town to find Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the man who killed her father, you know she is going to be successful.
That tracker is Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), a man who may too old and infirm (he has an eye patch and a drinking problem) and possibly be too quick to kill (he can’t or won’t recall under oath the details of some of the men he’s killed) to do the job. It turns out someone else is looking for Chaney, a Texas Ranger named LeBoeuf (Matt Damon). The two men have no interest in working together and even less in bringing along a 14-year-old girl, but their mutual determination and stubbornness has them soon on the trail together.
The first version, directed by Henry Hathaway, was a bit of a miss-match and a more than a bit meta, with Wayne playing and playing off of his screen persona, pop singer Glen Campbell as LeBoeuf, and Kim Darby, then in her 20’s, playing Mattie. In this film, the actors are far better matched to each other and their roles. Bridges, whose most memorable role may be in the Coens’ “The Big Lebowski,” fully commits to the character, not caricature, of Rooster Cogburn. The asperity and resolve of the young girl are well matched by the man who may be undisciplined and ungovernable but who is also in his own terms honorable. It is these two, both who must continue after dire physical sacrifice, who represent the forging of a social construct that will support frontier society.
The landscape, spare, magnificent, and challenging, is stunningly photographed by the Coen brothers favorite cinematographer, Roger Deakins. Production designer Jess Gonchor makes every shot look like a painting somewhere between Thomas Eakins and Grant Wood. Each shot is meticulously framed to add a transcendent dignity and seriousness of purpose to the story.

(more…)

A Serious Man

Posted on February 9, 2010 at 8:00 am

Larry Gopnik (theater actor Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics professor in 1967 Minneapolis. He covers a blackboard the size of a movie screen with equations, confidently lecturing his students about the uncertainty principle but outside the classroom unable to cope with the uncertainty all around him. He can explain that Schrodinger’s (hypothetical) Cat inside a box may be both dead and alive, but he has a much harder time understanding his wife (who is leaving him), a student who may be attempting to bribe him for a better grade, the tenure committee that will decide his professional fate, all of which has him feeling as though he is in a box and both dead and alive, too. Larry’s son does not seem to care about anything but being able to watch the western sitcom “F Troop.” His daughter seems to spend all of her time washing her hair. His brother (Richard Kind) seems to be either a genius or completely mad, but in either case he does not seem capable of living on his own. Larry wants to be a serious man, and he wants some answers.

So, like a character in a fable or a fairy tale, he brings his questions to three rabbis, a young one who wants him to see everything as an expression of God’s will, an experienced one who tells him a mesmerizing but pointless story about a non-Jew’s teeth and tells him to do good works, and one who is very old and remote and is too busy thinking to talk to him. Internally, he becomes more stressed but his reactions are passive and conciliatory. The audience feels a sense of helplessness and dread as it seems we are more aware of the disasters heading for Larry than he is. A record company calls to tell him he needs to pay for the records he ordered. He says he has not ordered anything and they tell him that under the terms of their agreement not doing anything means ordering. And Larry is as poorly equipped to resolve that problem as he is to stop his wife from leaving him for a neighbor who somehow has the confidence, admiration, and deference he wishes for. Throughout the movie, there are many close-ups of ears, but no one seems to be listening to what is going on in front of them. He goes up on the roof to adjust the antennae, but still has trouble receiving the signal.

Under pressure, he begins to make some compromises that are contrary to his values, and that increases his stress and sense of losing control. As he searches for some sense of meaning or connection or even (he is a scientist after all) rationality, he does not realize that the answer is what he tells his students: that everything is uncertain but you are still responsible for it on the midterm.

Much has been made of the fact that for the first time Joel and Ethan Coen have made a film with autobiographical elements. Like Larry’s children, the Coen brothers grew up in a Jewish suburb of Minneapolis in the 1960’s, and like Larry, their father was a professor. But you get the feeling that they have once again appropriated and embraced and tweaked a genre just for the fun of it, and that it has no more meaning to them than any of the others. As Larry says, the stories are just illustrative; the math is how it really works.

Once again, as with Wes Anderson, meticulous and imaginative production design and a level of opacity far beyond most mainstream releases is often confused with profundity. Perhaps this is an ink blot for us to project our own questions on. Or perhaps it is their version of what Larry tells his students, and our midterm is coming up.

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Drama Spiritual films

Interview: Michael Stuhlbarg of ‘A Serious Man’

Posted on October 8, 2009 at 8:00 am

Michael Stuhlbarg stars in the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man,” as a professor in 1960’s Minneapolis who struggles with professional and family problems.

NM: You conveyed so much in your body language when you get hugged by the Sy character. How did you create that physicality?

MS: You know what? It just happens. It just naturally happened that way. We did it once and everyone laughed and it was like the blessing for the whole movie. You do as much preparation as you can and then when you get yourself into the space and you’re asked to just do it you leave yourself open to what happens.

NM: In a conventional movie, we would have had some sort of explanation, probably very simplistic, about what led to the strained relationship between your character Larry and his wife Judith. But in the Coen brothers movies, we seldom get that kind of clarity. Did you and the actress who played your wife come to some kind of understanding about the history of your characters’ relationship?

MS: Absolutely. Sari Lennick and I got together and talked about what those things were for us. Since they didn’t explore it in front of the camera we felt like we needed to bring something to ground us in what we were going to do so we discussed that thoroughly.

NM: You said that the director of photography, Roger Deakins, is almost like a third director because the Coens wait until he thinks the light is perfect before shooting. How do you, as someone trained in theater, where there is prolonged concentration, stay ready so that you can jump into the scene the moment the sunlight is what Deakins has been waiting for?

MS: It’s just one of those things that comes with doing film work. The light is all important in terms of capturing a particular moment and part of the challenge of the job for me is to be ready. I did my work before hand and hoped that when I got in front of the camera the work would pay off.

NM: One of the movie’s greatest strengths is the specificity of the production design which does a lot to tell us who these characters are. How was your performance helped by the make-up, hair, and clothing that seem so perfect for a middle-class suburb in 1967?

MS: Fríða Aradóttir helped me with the hair and Jean Black helped me with the make-up. We did a “haggard chart” to keep track of the various stages of misery that my character was experiencing. Jean and Fríða have been working with the Coens forever. Fríða is very tall and Icelandic and Jean is short and from Texas, so they are really quite a pair, kind of opposites but they work so beautifully together. So I just threw myself at their mercy and we just played. Jean and I sat down with the script together and marked out what Larry might be like physically and how haggard he might be on an given day.
Costume designer Mary Zophres gave me the shell for my character by finding those clothes.

NM: I was very impressed with your physical and verbal fluency with the very complex physics material your character has to lecture on. How did you manage that?

MS: Just a lot of practice! I sat in my hotel room in Minneapolis and just wrote it out over and over and over until I didn’t have to think about it so much any more, until it was just part of my natural instinct.

NM: Was there one scene that was especially challenging for you?

MS: There were a couple of moments that I just couldn’t stop laughing. I just find the story so funny. My first scene with Adam Arkin, in his law office, we were both just laughing our heads off. I would start and then he would start and it took us over half an hour just to calm down. And then with Richard Kind, the scene where he is on the sofa and I am on a cot in the living room, and he says “Boy, you should have worn a hat,” that just made me giggle. And then there was the constant challenge to try to monitor the emotional emotional journey that Larry was on and I had to trust that Joel would tell me if I went too far. He did on one occasion when I gave him the option of getting a little teary, but he said that is probably what is going on with him, but put a lid on it.

NM: What do you think the response will be to this movie, especially from non-Jews, who will find much of it unfamiliar?

MS: I hope that people will just come and have a good time. There may be a word here or there that they may not understand but so much of it is universal of someone who goes these troubles and tries to find an answer to his questions and has trouble trying to get them.

NM: What inspires you?

MS: I love a sense of humor, I love intelligence, I love specificity, I love surprises. I’m inspired to get out of bed in the morning and fill my day with good things.

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Actors Interview

Three Movies Examine Our Struggle to Understand God

Posted on September 29, 2009 at 2:59 pm

Three new and very different movies have one thing in common — they all ask their characters and their audiences to think about the nature of God and faith. This week we have a perky romantic comedy with Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner called “The Invention of Lying.” As the title suggests, it is about a world in which everyone tells the literal, concrete truth all the time. And then one man figures out that he can lie, and that since no one else is aware that lies even exist, he can pretty much get away with everything. Since no one lies, everyone is completely gullible. So much is clear from the trailers. But Entertainment Weekly reports that there is a more controversial element to the film and that one of the “lies” the Gervais character comes up with is the idea of God.
Gervais, who also co-wrote and directed the film, has responded to concerns from bloggers.

1. No one has seen the film.

2. Even if the film suggests there is no God, it is a fictional world. One of my favourite films is ‘It’s a wonderful life’ and at no time am I offended by the suggestion in this wonderful work of fiction that there is a God.

3. If the film was not set in a fictional world and suggested there is no God then that’s fine too, as it is anyone’s right not to believe in God.

4. By suggesting there is no God you are not singling out Christianity.

5. Not believing in God cannot be blasphemous. Blasphemy is acknowledging a God to insult or offend etc.

6. Even if it was blasphemous, which it isn’t, then that’s OK too due to a little god I like called “freedom of speech.” That said, I am not trying to offend anyone. That would be a waste of such a privilege.

7. I am an atheist, but this is not atheist propaganda. When creating an imaginary world you have to make certain decisions. We decided also that there would be no surrealist art, no racism, no flattery, no fiction, no metaphor, and no supernatural. However, we decided that apart from that one “lying gene”, humans evolved with everything else as we have it today. Joy, hope, ambition, ruthlessness, greed, lust, anger, jealousy, sadness, and grief. It’s just a film. If any of the themes in it offend you or bore you, or just don’t make sense to you, you should put everything right when you make a film.

I really hope everyone enjoys the film and keeps an open mind. I believe in peace on Earth, and good will to all men. I do as I would be done by, and believe that forgiveness is one of the greatest virtues. I just don’t believe I will be rewarded for it in heaven. That’s all.

I have a different take, which I will discuss in my upcoming review.
Perhaps an even more unexpected place for a discussion of God and faith than a comedy is in Michael Moore’s latest documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story.” Moore is well-known for his attacks on the Bush administration (“Farenheit 911”), insurance companies (“Sicko”), and our treatment of guns and violence (“Bowling for Columbine”). In this new film, he takes on the financial crisis. His argument turns out to be based not as much in economics as in his own Catholic faith. He even interviews the priest who performed his wedding ceremony to help make his point that the current system is not just bad policy; it is not WWJD. The media often creates the impression that faith-based politics are right-wing and it is provocative and refreshing to see a different point of view.
And then there is a movie that is going to be difficult to put in any category, because it is the new film from the Coen brothers, who are masters of genre — both evoking and transcending them. According to the New York Times, their new film “A Serious Man” “is both a Job-like parable of Jewish angst in a 1960s Midwestern suburb and a bleakly antic meditation on divine intent, the certainty of uncertainty and the mysteries of Jefferson Airplane lyrics.
The film’s central character is a scientist who seeks the advice of three rabbis to help him find meaning and purpose. That makes this film unusual in two respects — the portrayal of Jewish theology and the portrayal of clergy as a place to go for guidance.
And I am glad to see movies providing some guidance as well, by engaging us in very different ways about issues so profound and pervasive that it is only through a variety of approaches we can begin to understand what we believe.