“Here” Today, Gone Tomorrow

I wasn’t at all sure what I was going to feel about Tom Hanks’ latest film, directed by Robert Zemeckis and also featuring Hanks’ Forrest Gump co-star, Robin Wright. Frankly, Here sounded corny, if not downright weird: an entire movie in which the camera never moves, and the story toggles between various occupants of the very same place, from dinosaurs and Native Americans to disparate 20^th century families living in a large old house. All I could think of, going in, was a stage oddity by Thornton Wilder called The Skin of Our Teeth. In it, people representing Adam, Eve, and their kin somehow live both in the Ice Age and in what was, in 1942, the present day. The central theme? Survival.

 Here is based not on The Skin of Our Teeth but on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, derived from his own comic strip. Clearly, its central topic is Time: how life evolves, personal values change and get overridden, individuals—no  matter how bright or how amiable—can’t stand up to time’s onslaught. It’s a motif that certainly has meaning for all of us. Poets have been writing about it for centuries. Here’s what  English poet Andrew Marvell published in 1681:  “At my back I always hear/ Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near.” (Marvell, it must be said, was trying to talk his coy mistress into bed by reminding her that youthful vigor doesn’t last forever. Yes, things change.)

 Zemeckis, who has never lacked for grand ambitions, seems determined to make a film for the whole human race. Certainly, while never moving from one fixed spot, he tries to cover a whole lot of ground. Along with the dinosaurs and Native Americans there are historical figures (Benjamin Franklin) and small children and decrepit oldsters and pioneer inventors and nice people who never quite amount to much of anything. The most recent owners of the house that becomes the film’s entire universe are African American. We learn frustratingly little about them, but I think they are popped into the story in an attempt to cover all (or, I guess, most) bases when it comes to American history.

 But most of the screen time belongs to the couple played by Hanks and Wright. Through the very latest in de-aging technology, we meet them as young high schoolers in love, with pretty blonde Margaret meeting her beau’s parents, a bitter World War II veteran (an impressive Paul Bettany) and his devoted wife. We watch over the years as Richard and Margaret come to share the house with his ageing father and mother. They celebrate a quickie wedding, then there’s the birth of a daughter; Richard’s frustration with his workaday job; Margaret’s chafing at the bonds of matrimony; illnesses and other setbacks, sometimes interrupted by the narrative’s bounce into the lives of other couples with other joys and challenges.

 At movie houses, all trailers are carefully selected to match the upcoming flick. It was obvious, when I saw Here that the multiplex honchos were unclear on what kind of audience would  be watching this film. So I saw a terrifying trailer about American neo-Nazis, and another about actual Nazis in World War II. Then there were spots for benign family flicks like Moana 2 and Wicked. Confusing? I, for one, think it’s my own age group that should respond most thoughtfully to Here. We remember Tom Hanks from movies like Splash and Big, when he was as youthful and lively as his de-aged self in early scenes from this film. And so were we.

 

A Star is Born (Again)

Why, exactly, do we love movies about the making of movies? Showbiz seems like a glamorous , mysterious world that most of us aspire to enter. Many of us nurse private fantasies about a stardom we know we’ll never achieve, and there’s a perverse comfort in discovering that show business has its seamy side—and its tragic side—as well.  

 Curiously, in the early days of sound movies, most of the showbiz stories on the screen—pictures like Busby Berkeley’s 42^nd Street and Footlight Parade as well as chestnuts like Stage Door—were devoted to the challenge of putting on a theatrical production. It was Broadway that seemed most glamorous back then. Berkeley’s famous musical numbers, like the “By a Waterfall” extravaganza from Golddiggers of 1933, contained elements like scantily-clad chorines swimming in formation, gliding underwater, or sliding down waterfalls into welcoming lagoons. Such moments were often shot from above, and the joke was that they couldn’t possibly work in a Broadway theatre.

 Despite moviedom’s ongoing fascination with success on the Broadway stage, the 1930s also saw two popular flicks that chronicle a newcomer’s overnight rise to Hollywood stardom. In 1932, George Cukor directed Constance Bennett in What Price Hollywood?, the saga of a waitress who’s discovered by a film director with a drinking problem. She quickly achieves fame and fortune, while he spirals downward, with romantic complications galore. It was briefly popular, though no one pretended it was a realistic look at the film industry. A mere five years later, William Wellman directed Janet Gaynor and Frederic March in A Star is Born, which is quite similar to What Price Hollywood ? in its plotting, but adds the complication that Vicki Lester (née Esther Blodgett) loves and marries her champion, fading actor Norman Maine. The lavish production, which some say mirrored the troubled marriage of Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay, was enormously successful.

 Almost twenty years later, in 1954, Cukor took another crack at the material, which was to be his first musical and first Technicolor film. This version of A Star is Born showcases the powerful singing of Judy Garland, who was looking for a career comeback, as well as the dissolute complexity of the ageing thespian played by James Mason. (In his George Cukor’s People, film historian Joseph McBride calls this film, despite its studio butchering, Cukor’s very finest effort.)  The restored version I’ve just finished watching is 178 moments long, and there are some unusual tonal shifts from cheery musical comedy hijinks to downright tragedy, but this is the version to see. And hear: Garland belting “The Man That Got Away” is a moment not to be missed. (It was nominated for a Best Song Oscar, but—unthinkably—lost to the sweet, syrupy “Three Coins in the Fountain”).

 Making Esther into a singer opened the door for two further remakes featuring pop legends of the moment. The 1976 film, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, shifts the familiar story to the world of rock ‘n’ roll, adding onscreen sex, a soupçon of infidelity, and a really memorable poster.  The year 2018 saw Bradley Cooper’s re-imagining of the story, with Lady Gaga garnering raves for her first serious acting role.

 Who knows when the next version will show up? Maybe—why not?—it could involve an older female star and an appealing young male newcomer. After all, there’s nothing that says that the woman can’t be the knowledgeable veteran of Hollywood. But we as audience members wouldn’t easily accept that as anything but grotesque. See, after all, Sunset Boulevard. 

 

Tallying the Votes: “Conclave”

You’d think that, after November 5, I would have had enough of elections. But there I was, two days later, checking out a film that is all about what it takes to get elected. No, I wasn’t watching  Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick doing everything in her power to be chosen student body president in Election. (That 1999 flick—both delightful and disturbing—turned Matthew Broderick of Ferris Bueller fame into a much-beleaguered grown-up, and established writer/director Alexander Payne as someone to watch. But I digress.)

 What I saw last Thursday night was not about high school girls in very short skirts, but rather about Roman Catholic cardinals in long ones. The brand-new Conclave, based on a popular novel, takes us behind the scenes of the election of a new pope , after his predecessor is found dead in his Vatican apartment. There’s been no murder most foul: it’s clear the old man died of natural causes. Both the public and the princes of the church are in deep mourning . But life goes on, and a new man must quickly be chosen to wear the so-called Ring of the Fisherman, like the one that has just been wrested off of the dead pope’s finger.

 That’s why Roman Catholic cardinals from around the globe are locked in the Sistine Chapel, directly beneath Michelangelo’s famous frescos, to choose one of their number as the Supreme Pontiff. Each will write a name on a small slip of paper, which  will ritualistically be slipped into a chalice. An appointed cardinal reads each ballot. Because it takes a two-thirds majority to win, multiple rounds of balloting are generally required. Then, at last, the burned ballots will emit white rather than black smoke, indicating to those waiting breathlessly outside that a new pope has been chosen.

 The film Conclave makes clear that, amid all the ritual formality of the Latin rite voting process, there’s often a real power struggle going on. The papal candidates make no speeches and issue no campaign promises, but their views are well known to their fellow cardinals, and factions naturally arise in support of various approaches to the ancient institution they all hold dear. Some skullduggery is also to be expected: the always memorable John Lithgow plays a cardinal who trips up a rival by dramatically exposing a long-ago transgression. We meet also a deeply conservative cardinal who seeks to undo many of the church’s recent reforms, a mysterious Mexican cardinal who was elevated in secrecy by the late pope, and Stanley Tucci as an American cardinal who’s probably too liberal-minded to be chosen pope. At the very center of the film is Ralph Fiennes as a deeply scrupulous cardinal faced with the unenviable task of managing the ins and outs of the Holy See. I should not overlook the film’s one important female character, Isabella Rossellini as Sister Agnes, who sees bad behavior that the cardinals will not admit to. There’s one point the film makes crystal-clear: every cardinal, no matter how modest his manner, secretly dreams of being elevated  to the papacy, and has long since picked out his papal name.

  Conclave is directed by Edward Berger who won acclaim for last year’s All Quiet on the Western Front. He beautifully manages the film’s huge canvas: Conclave is gorgeous to look at, and is well served by a fascinating score. The acting ensemble proves impressive, and Fiennes is deservedly getting raves for his complex role. Yes, toward the end the plot twists become increasingly unconvincing, but Conclave remains a satisfying behind-the-scenes look at a world we’ll never fully know.