Bearing Witness

 A culture clash is always a great subject for a movie. Many screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet raise the barriers separating the two lovers by showing that they come from very different ethnicities: see, of course, the (Anglo) Jets and the (Puerto Rican) Sharks of West Side Story. And the suspense element in international thrillers like The Third Man or The Da Vinci Code is heightened when the participants in the drama do not share a common background. Many police dramas set the values of the law-enforcement community against those of the general public. But 1985’s Witness is perhaps unique in bringing together a Philadelphia homicide detective and devout members of Pennsylvania’s rural Amish population, which shuns technology while cleaving to religious and social values that are centuries old.

 The story of Witness is a complex one. An eight-year-old Amish boy, on a rare trip out of town with his recently widowed mother, goes into a train-station men’s room and is horrified to see a brutal murder. He’s the “witness” of the story’s title, and soon Philadelphia police detective John Book (Harrison Ford) is on the case, which becomes far more complicated once it’s known that the victim is an undercover cop, and that corrupt members of his own department are responsible for the death. Through a thorny set of circumstances, Book seeks refuge with the boy's pretty mother, Rachel (Kelly McGillis), and her family. To save himself from detection, he must learn to blend in with the rural, peaceable Amish way of life. This means suppressing his own basic urge to fight back against adversaries, and also fending off the growing attraction he feels toward Rachel. (In perhaps the film’s most quietly complex role, Rachel is attracted to him as well.)

 When spotting this film on a shelf in my local library, I was looking for Places in the Heart, I wanted to re-watch that 1984 drama in tribute to Danny Glover, who had named this as his favorite performance. To my surprise, Glover is also a featured player in Witness, released just one year later, and a comparison of the two roles verifies the breadth of his talent. As Moze Hadner, he’s a down-home drifter, not entirely honest, by no means educated, but filled with a generosity of spirit that ultimately makes him lovable. One year later, as police lieutenant James McFee, he’s a decorated cop who has chosen to put his talents to nefarious ends.

 I’m no expert on the so-called “plain” lifestyle of the Amish, but cast and crew seem to have worked hard to set these characters apart from our “English” world. In the course of the film we get a good look at Amish ways, particularly in a spectacular barn-raising scene, and come to respect their values. There’s also one particularly grotesque moment when we see how stoically the Amish separate themselves from local hooligans who delight in tormenting them. In the leading role, Ford achieves an effective balance between his familiar machismo and respect for a culture totally alien to his own way of life. There are strong supporting performances by young Lukas Haas, ballet star Alexander Godunov (as a would-be suitor for Rachel), and others, all under the effective direction of Australian Peter Weir, making his first American feature. I was especially taken by the cinematography by John Seale, which owes much to the tender light so evident in the 17^th century Dutch paintings of Johannes Vermeer. This was one of the film’s eight Oscar nominations: it won statuettes for its screenplay and editing, and a lot of love from audiences.

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The Play’s the Thing: Why Tom Stoppard Lost It At the Movies

 The deaths, alas, just keep on coming. (In today's news, it's the great Frank Gehry, an architect blessed with rare skill and imagination.) Over Thanksgiving weekend, I read of the passing of one of our greatest playwrights, the Czech-born English man of letters, Tom Stoppard. A fascinating individual as well as an extraordinarily talented wordsmith, Stoppard had premiered his last play (at the age of 83) in 2020. Fittingly, Leopoldstadt was both a brilliant dramatic achievement and a belated exploration of his own Nazi-era Jewish roots. Like most of his plays, it is very much a work tailored to the stage, and will not be coming to local cinemas anytime soon. Which doesn’t mean Stoppard is adverse to film, as I discuss in a 2021 Beverly in Movieland post that I’m repeating here as a Stoppard tribute.  

“Inside any stage play there is cinema wildly signalling to be let out.” This Tom Stoppard quote, from the impressive (and weighty) new biography by Hermione Lee, hints at the famous playwright’s complex attitude toward the movies. From his youth onward, Stoppard was a fan of movies, starting with Disney’s Pinocchio, which he saw at the ripe old age of four. As an adult he loved everything. from Marx Brothers laff-fests to European art films to such popular Hollywood fare as The Graduate. (He and its director, Mike Nichols, turned out to have much in common – including early lives disrupted by Nazis – and later became close friends.)

  But Lee’s biography makes crystal-clear the gulf between writing for the stage and writing for movies. As the successful playwright of such works as The Real Thing and Arcadia, Stoppard revels in prestige and power. It’s not simply a matter of custom: the legalities of the theatre world stipulate that the text of a play cannot be changed for the purposes of stage production without the author’s consent. Some playwrights are probably shy about exerting their will, but Stoppard is not among them. Although unfailingly polite and collaborative, he insists that any changes to the text of a play be made by him. He also demands consultation on production matters, which means that he’s present not only at rehearsals but also at auditions and meetings of the technical staff. The performance of a Tom Stoppard play is, first and foremost, a Tom Stoppard production.

  At the movies, though, it’s the director, not the writer, who is king. (Or, I guess, queen, though female directors continue to be rare indeed.) A major director can hire and fire screenwriters at will, and can even have two writers toiling on the same project without being aware of one another’s existence. Other members of the production team often chime in with their own ideas, and stars have been known to contribute (and sometimes insist on) their own rewrites. This should not be a world in which Stoppard would want to operate, except for the fact that movie gigs are so very lucrative, and Stoppard’s lifestyle is so very lavish.

  Stoppard has been credited on several major movies, including the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. He has also directed an ambitious though modestly budgeted 1990 screen version of his own earliest hit, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, reasoning that only he would have the audacity to ruthlessly re-focus his own much-admired play. He quickly discovered that he was fundamentally NOT a filmmaker: his instinct was always to focus on dialogue, at the expense of camera movement. Afterwards he acknowledged that a filmmaker, though not a playwright, can change the frame. “In the theatre you’ve got this medium shot, fairly wide angle, for two and a half hours. And that’s it folks.”

 Aside from his several screenplay credits, Stoppard has become invaluable to such major directors as Steven Spielberg, because they trust him for smart, honest assessments of their pending projects. For Spielberg, he tried to tamp down the soppy elements that ended the romantic 1989 film, Always, but he also was insistent that Steven Zaillian’s final draft of Schindler’s List not be ”improved” upon. Sometimes Stoppard beefed up dialogue scenes, without screen credit but for serious sums of money. See, for instance, his sparkling work on the key father/son scene between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford in Spielberg’s third Indiana Jones film, which ends with Connery’s Henry Jones telling his long-neglected son that “you left just when you were becoming interesting.”

 

  

Born in the U.S.A.: Indiana Jones and Asteroid City

There was a time, back in the Thirties and Forties, when Hollywood backlots stood in for all the exotic places on the globe. You needed to set your story in a Casablanca bazaar? An Irish village? An exotic palace high in the Himalayas? If SoCal couldn’t find a suitable location, perhaps you went as far away as Yuma, Arizona (where Crosby and Hope filmed Road to Morocco). Back then, Hollywood studios’ screenplays circumnavigated the globe, but their production was strictly all-American.

 How things have changed! I just saw Wes Anderson’s new Asteroid City, an all-star meditation on the difference between reality and artistic invention. Some of it is apparently set in New York, where a TV documentary captures the evolution of a fledgling theatre piece written by Broadway great Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Most of it—showing the playing-out of Earp’s artistic vision—is set in a candy-colored version of the American Southwest, complete with a quaint filling station, a roadside café, and a bungalow court, as well as a freight train that passes through now and again. This out-of-the-way place, known as Asteroid City, gets its name from a small globule of space junk that once landed here. Now it’s the location of a modest but prestigious gathering of military brass, some “brainiac” kids who’ve won a science competition, and their eclectically assorted parents. And did I mention there’s an alien sighting?

 The locale, the cast, and the background music (lots of old western tunes that would surely make the Coen Brothers happy) all shriek Americana. So I was more than a bit surprised, in reading the closing credits, to discover that Asteroid City was shot largely in Spain, with additional production units in France and Italy. I’m sure the financing of the film had something to do with the choice of shooting locations. Anderson, who has made such films as The Darjeeling Limited, and The French Dispatch, has a great affinity for exotic locales. By choosing to shoot in far-flung corners of the globe, he’s doubtless come up with some lucrative funding sources that depend on him filming far from Hollywood, even when he’s dealing with all-American subject matter.

 I like Anderson’s loopy vision of the world, and it’s fun to see such major talents as Scarlett Johansson, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston and even Tom Hanks pop up in offbeat roles. (Jeff Goldblum is billed as the alien.) The approach worked beautifully in probably my favorite Anderson ensemble flick, The Grand Budapest Hotel. (His sensitive coming-of-age romance Moonrise Kingdom is lovely but stylistically uncharacteristic.) But it certainly helps, when the canvas is so broad, if we care about the characters, and if the film is actually about something coherent. In Asteroid City, Anderson’s movement back and forth between the behind-the-scenes creation of a drama and the actual playing out of the finished version can be seen as meaningful . . . or simply aggravating. Me, I’ll go with the latter adjective.

 But of course the big news this week is about the launching of Indiana Jones and the Dial of  Destiny. Talk about Americana—and a great film with which to kick off a holiday weekend. No, I didn’t choose to brave what I hope will be big crowds at the multiplex (today’s film industry needs all the blockbusters it can get). But I rented Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which Harrison Ford gets to play (delightfully) against old pro Sean Connery. Indie’s crusty dad may be Scottish, but the man himself is a strong, smart, courageous All-American. July 4 doesn’t get much better than that.

 

Fly Me to the Moon: Harrison Ford and the Santa Monica Airport

Today’s big aviation news concerns a small solar-powered Swiss airplane that has now successfully completed the first leg of a round-the-world flight. Last Friday, though, the scuttlebutt in SoCal was all about actor Harrison Ford, who’d been injured while crash-landing his vintage aircraft on a public golf course. Ford had taken off on Thursday from Santa Monica Airport, not far from my home. When his tiny World War II-era  Ryan PT-22 Recruit developed engine trouble soon into the flight, he tried to head back to the airport, then realized he wouldn’t make it. A veteran pilot, he was clear-headed enough to pick Venice’s Penmar Golf Course for his emergency landing site. In so doing, he won the praise of flying professionals, one of whom was quoted as saying, ““I think he did the best thing he could’ve done, and he did the thing I’ve feared having to do every time I depart from there in a single-engine airplane.”

Ford’s grace under pressure is certainly something to admire. His mishap, though, added more fuel to the debate over the future of Santa Monica Airport, which caters to the needs of private pilots, movie stars, and the occasional U.S. president. The airport is located in a densely populated urban area. Since 1982, there have been 42 crashes in the vicinity. Some planes have gone down at busy intersections, and even in local backyards. Fortunately, no one on the ground has been killed or seriously injured, but it’s understandable that a lot of folks want to shut down the airport for good.

I won’t get into that contentious debate, which has riled Santa Monica residents for quite a while. Suffice it to say that air travel has not always been kind to Hollywood’s rich and famous. I’m sure I’m leaving out someone, but I’ve quickly compiled quite a long list of celebrity actors and singers whose lives have ended in the crashes of small planes. Way back in 1935 there was actor-humorist Will Rogers, a great believer in the future of aviation, who died near Point Barrow, Alaska, while jaunting with flyer Wiley Post. In 1942, the wonderful screwball comedienne Carole Lombard (who had recently wed Clark Gable) died in Nevada while flying home from a war bond rally. Two years later, the small plane carrying band leader Glenn Miller was lost over the English Channel: he was heading for Paris to entertain the Allied troops. 

Country singer Patsy Cline died in Tennessee in her manager’s small plane in 1963. Folksinger and actor John Denver, himself an enthusiastic amateur pilot and the composer of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,” died in Monterey Bay in the cockpit of an experimental aircraft in 1997. In 2001, pop singer Aaliyah and eight others were killed in the Bahamas after shooting a music video. (It turned out their pilot was unlicensed, and had traces of both alcohol and cocaine in his system.) But of course the most remembered crash of all took place on February 3, 1959, when Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper went down over Iowa after a concert appearance. The event was immortalized in Don McLean’s “American Pie” as “The Day the Music Died.”

Fortunately for all of us, Kirk Douglas survived a serious helicopter crash in 1991. And fortunately Han Solo managed to walk away from the wreckage of his plane last week. But he’ll probably continue to fly, becomes he loves the “combination of freedom and responsibility” he gets from piloting his own craft. As he told Playboy in 2002, “It’s anonymity. I’m not Harrison Ford. I’m November II28 Sierra.”