Say It Ain’t So, Joe! John Sayles’ “Eight Men Out”

Baseball is America’s game. That’s its reputation, anyway—as a wholesome family entertainment in which athletes face off against one another at a sporting event that’s easy to watch and enjoy.

 The fact that the players’ faces aren’t covered is one reason that baseball seems to be the favorite team sport of moviemakers. So’s the basic set-up of the game. There’s no scrum of heavily padded guys smashing into another clump of players, similarly outfitted, with the spectator desperately trying to locate the pigskin and figure out who is who. Instead, in baseball, one solitary soul on the pitcher’s mound rhythmically faces down one batsman at a time. A man with a ball versus a man with a bat: what could simpler or more dramatic? 

 That’s got to be at least part of the reason why there are so many baseball movies. Some are lively and pure fun, like 1949’s Take Me Out to the Ballgame and 1958’s Damn Yankees, both of them star-studded musicals. Some are heartwarming biopics about baseball greats, like The Pride of the Yankees (1942, about Lou Gehrig) and several films focusing on major league baseball’s first Black player, Jackie Robinson. (See 1950’s The Jackie Robinson Story, in which Robinson played himself, and 2013’s 42, starring Chadwick Boseman.) Baseball takes on an almost mythic significance in The Natural (1984), Bull Durham (1988), and Field of Dreams (1985). In the last of these, a young farmer in search of a father figure builds his own ballfield and greets the ghostly Shoeless Joe Jackson, along with the other disgraced members of the Chicago White Sox, who were banished from the sport forever for their part in fixing the 1919 World Series.

 Writer/director John Sayles has never much gone in for simple projects. Though his films over the years can be sorted into many genres, he seems to particularly appreciate American history, as seen on a broad canvas. In 1987, he won wide critical acclaim for Matewan, the often-brutal story of West Virginia coal miners overcoming obstacles to form a union. One year later, he directed an ensemble of major Hollywood actors (including John Cusack, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, and Charlie Sheen) in the story of what is often called the Black Sox Scandal. Eight Men Out details how, in an era when betting on baseball games was rampant, members of the pennant-winning Chicago White Sox were approached by mobster types to throw the series, in exchange for promises of hefty payments. What made Sayles’ screenwriting complicated is that, no one, including baseball historians, has the whole story. We don’t exactly know who-all was in on the fix, nor who agreed, and then eventually changed his mind. What we DO know is that there were many bad guys around, including mobsters, greedy players, and a team owner (Charles Comiskey) so cheap that some players apparently agreed to throw World Series games as a way of getting back at a boss-man who promised them bonuses but never paid up.  And we know that eight players were eventually prosecuted, including at least one (Buck Weaver, played by Cusack) who deplored the idea of playing to lose, but never squealed on his teammates.

 Sayles takes it all on: the players, the crooks, the management, the sportswriters who smelled a rat. (He himself appears as journalist Damon Runyon, and the great Studs Terkel plays another sportswriter of the day.) Sayles has also got the little urchin who looks up at his former hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and cries out, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Very mythic; very moving. 

 

The Gregarious, Gorgeous Teri Garr

I once had the good fortune of seeing Teri Garr up close and personal. It was decades ago, long before the brilliant comic actress was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the cruel disease that recently ended her life at age 79. The place: the tiny, cramped locker room at Jane Fonda’s then-famous West Hollywood exercise studio. Both of us were changing out of exercise gear. She was among friends, clearly—and I saw her as a true life force, lively and exuberant.

 She brought that same exuberance to her acting career, which included the wife role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the adorable mädchen who loved a roll in the hay in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Her biggest screen success came in 1982, with the release of Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman stars as an out-of-work actor who disguises himself as a woman to win a soap opera role. The gender confusion that arises in this Sydney Pollack film is hilarious. But it also seems quite modern, given that there’s a move afoot to deny a newly-elected transgender U.S. congresswoman the right to use the women’s restroom in the Capitol. (So what, pray tell, is she supposed to do when the need arises?) 

 When Tootsie was being cast, Garr apparently hankered for the role of the female lead. Julie is depicted as a slightly damaged but sturdy soul who interacts with Hoffman’s Dorothy Michaels in a popular hospital-based soap opera. (She introduces herself to the new cast member as the “hospital slut.”) Julie treasures Dorothy’s friendship and is guided by her relationship wisdom, but has no inkling that this sassy older woman is actually a man—and that he’s in love with her. After losing the role of Julie to Jessica Lange, Garr was reluctant to take the smaller part of Sandy, the neurotic would-be actress who’s Michael’s protégée and at one point his accidental lover. (Don’t ask!) Luckily for us, Garr ultimately changed her mind about the role. Sandy’s uproarious neediness is a highlight of the film, and resulted in an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Ironically, Jessica Lange was also nominated in this category, and took home the gold statuette: it was the only win for Tootsie that evening despite a whooping nine nominations. (This was the year of Gandhi—and the gender-bending Victor/Victoria). But if Lange won the Oscar, Teri Garr completely won my heart.

 Like all the greatest comedies, Tootsie has something to say, about the human condition. Its particular focus is on how women are treated in what often continues to feel like a man’s world. What Dustin Hoffman’s character discovers—in this beautifully directed, beautifully written, beautifully edited film—is that women benefit from being able to stand up for themselves. And, as a man, he comes to acknowledge that women need, and deserve, basic respect. Two prominent characters who have not learned this lesson are Dabney Coleman as an outrageously sexist TV director and George Gaynes as a preening actor who makes it his business to tongue-kiss every actress on camera. (By contrast, Julie’s father, as played by Charles Durning, is a manly but gentle widower who is smitten by “Dorothy” and complicates things by proposing marriage.)  Big kudos to screenwriter Larry Gelbart for finding the funny in the battle of the sexes while acknowledging that his characters all have something to learn. One of those characters of course is Garr’s Sandy. But she fights to hold onto her sense of humor. That of course also describes Garr, who considered titling her memoir, Does This Wheelchair Make Me Look Fat?  

 

Quincy Jones: Remembering a Thriller

I’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to write a tribute to the late Quincy Jones, music man extraordinaire. Now I think the time has come. On Sunday, daughter Rashida Jones accepted the honorary Oscar that was supposed to be handed to her dad at this year’s Governors Awards ceremony. She was even able to deliver the speech he’d penned for the occasion: the man was prepared! Always an optimist, Jones celebrated music and film as having the power to make “the world a more understanding and embracing place for us all to exist.”  (Other honorees included writer/director Richard Curtis—who was warmly roasted by Hugh Grant—as well as veteran casting director Juliet Taylor, and the longtime producers of the James Bond films, Barbara Broccoli and Michael J. Wilson.)   

 It’s hard to write about Quincy Jones because, in his 91 years of life, he found success as a record producer, composer, arranger, conductor, trumpeter, and bandleader. He also functioned from time to time as a movie producer (the 1985 Spielberg screen adaptation of The Color Purple was one of his projects) and occasional actor. As an arranger and conductor, he worked closely with greats like Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. Hit tunes with which he was involved ranged all the way from Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” to the wacky Austin Powers theme music (originally called “Soul Bossa Nova”) to Michael Jackson’s bestselling Thriller album, on which he worked as a record producer.

 The artistic period I know best is the 1960s, and I’d like to remember Jones in terms of that pivotal decade.  He attracted attention for his very first score, written for Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964), in which Rod Steiger played a Holocaust survivor haunted by his memories. He went on to score films that were both serious (The Slender Thread) and comic (Walk, Don’t Run). But his first of many banner years was 1967, when he was involved with scores for five films, including Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing, the thriller Banning, the very dark In Cold Blood, and the year’s top award-winner, In the Heat of the Night. The last of these featured a bluesy Jones-composed title song performed by his longtime idol, Ray Charles. Though In the Heat of the Night was nominated for seven Oscars and won five of them (including Best Picture), Jones’ contribution to that film was overlooked by the Academy. Still, in that same year he was honored with two of his seven competitive Oscar nominations, one for the jazzy score of In Cold Blood and one for “The Eyes of Love,” an original song featured in Banning. “The Eyes of Love” made hm the first-ever African American to be nominated by the Oscar voters for Best Original Song. His two Oscar nominations in a single year was also record-breaking for an African American composer.

 Ironically, Jones never won a competitive Oscar. He gained another Best Original Song nomination for a Sidney Poitier romantic comedy, For Love of Ivy, and a decade later his film score for The Wiz was also recognized. The Color Purple earned him three nominations, including Best Score, Best Song (with Lionel Ritchie also involved), and Best Picture (he was nominated along with fellow producers Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, and Frank Marshall). And the posthumous statuette he just won was not his first honorary Oscar. Back in 1995 he was given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, the first musician ever to be so honored by the Academy. (He eloquently called his time on stage to receive that golden trophy “the proudest moment of my life.”)

 

“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.