Capitalist Pigs: “Okja “

When I sat down to watch Okja, I knew only that this was a recent Korean film, highlighting the warm relationship between a young girl and a supersized CGI pig. My guess was that the film would have something of an ET vibe, featuring tenderness, innocence, and a certain amount of whimsy. And, to be honest, these elements can all be found in Okja. But it didn’t at first occur to me that any film written and directed by Bong Joon-ho—who followed up Okja with 2019’s lacerating Oscar-winner, Parasite—would doubtless be well laced with black humor.

 I also didn’t realize at first that Okja is a true East-meets-West collaboration between Bong and Hollywood, with Netflix and Brad Pitt’s adventuresome Plan B Entertainment much involved. A good part of the story takes place in New York City, and key roles are played by box-office favorites Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, and Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal’s role as the sell-out host of a TV animal show is hilarious, though I found him absolutely unrecognizable, even after I saw his name in the end-credits. As for Swinton, she takes her usual perverse delight in playing a character who’s obnoxious in the extreme. Her role is that of a corporation head who has nothing good to say about her father (an investor in Napalm) and her sister (under whose company leadership a lake exploded). She coos to her team about her own development of adorable super-pigs, whose meat will be (among other good things) inexpensive and environmentally friendly. Of course she’s lying through her teeth, and Giancarlo Esposito (of Breaking Bad fame) is on hand to help take things from bad to worse.

 But these aren’t the only questionable characters in Okja. When the super-pig she’s helped to raise in the mountains of Korea is summoned to New York (supposedly to be crowned as top pig in a competition arranged by Swinton’s company), young Mija can’t prevent her beloved pet from being taken from her. But she finds she has some unlikely allies, members of the Animal Liberation Front, who’ll do just about anything to protect animals from human exploitation. Led by the (usually) soft-spoken Paul Dano, they at first come across as earnest and reasonable, but their passion for their cause leads them, at times, into outrageous acts. Their intentions may be good, but often they seem as crazy as the greedy capitalists they oppose with single-minded zeal.

 So what becomes of the young girl and the giant pig?  I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that in this film everyone ultimately gets what he or she deserves. Though there are some stomach-churning moments that spell out the ultimate fate of most of those giant pigs, our two favorite characters live to enjoy another, brighter day.   

 Okja had its world premiere in 2017 at the Cannes Film Festival. Despite some technical difficulties during the screening, it was rewarded with a four-minute standing ovation, and was nominated for the prestigious Palme d’Or. Filmed in Korean and English, the film makes a deliberate mistranslation (by Korean-American actor Steven Yeun, playing one of the ALF activists) an essential part of its plot.

 By the way, anyone checking out the recent DVD (which boasts a separate disc full of extras about the film’s technical challenges) should be sure to keep watching until the very end. Following a long set of end-credits, there’s a sardonic coda featuring the re-united ALF team. It’s as though Bong can’t bear to end his film on a note of Happily Ever After. 

 

“The Fabelmans”: Close Encounters with the Spielberg Family

Over the years, I’ve had many lunches at the Milky Way, a dairy café on an ethnic stretch of Pico Blvd. in West Los Angeles. Its proprietor was, until her death at age  97, a pixie of a woman named Leah Adler. She was hard to miss, with her close-cropped blonde hair, her bright red lipstick, and het Peter Pan collars. Until old age caught up with her, she’d literally dance around the restaurant, greeting guests warmly, and making sure everyone knew which menu items were preferred by her famous son.

 The movie posters in the lobby, as well as that prominent E.T. doll, told the tale. Leah Adler was the mother of Steven Spielberg, and she wanted the whole world to know it. On one occasion, I even came close to an encounter with the man himself. We’d ordered the cheesecake for dessert, and Leah breathlessly informed us that Steven, seeing it emerge from the kitchen, had declared he was tempted to scoop up a bite with his finger. I looked where she pointed, to an area near the dining room entryway, but could see only the back of a head topped by a baseball cap. So much for star-gazing.

 Anyone aware of this unshakeable mother/son bond would be curious indeed about The Fabelmans, a memory film billed as the true story of Steven’s growing-up years. By the time I saw it, I knew something more of Leah Adler, of her musical aspirations as a young piano student, of her domestic eccentricities, of the painful moment when she broke up the family unit. As played by Michelle Williams in a bravura performance, she’s lively, creative, self-promoting, the acknowledged fairy queen of the household. When, on a family camping trip, she dances in the moonlight in her white nightgown, she wins everyone’s heart. (Mine too!)

 What I knew little about was Spielberg’s engineer father, here called Burt Fabelman, As played by Paul Dano, he’s a brilliant nerd, in love with his wife, his family, and his work on early computer technology. There’s an amiable cluelessness about him that’s a fresh take on movie fatherhood, but at the same time he reminded me of so many screen fathers –-like Chris Cooper in October Sky—who praise their sons’ intellectual drive but can’t accept their chosen professions.

 The young Spielberg clone, Sammy Fabelman, is introduced to movies by both of his parents, with his father focusing on technological achievement and his mother passionately cherishing movies as akin to dreams. When Sam starts to film his own backyard masterpieces, with his little sisters in starring roles, both parents cheer him on. But as he nears adulthood, refining his cinematographic skills and learning to shape the world that surrounds him through the lens of his camera, moviemaking becomes his retreat from the disturbances of everyday life. Ironically it also, in the film’s most crucial episode, becomes his proof of a reality he doesn’t want to face.

 My least favorite part of the film strays from the family story to show a teenage Sam enduring anti-semitic taunting while romancing a girl with a Jesus complex. The outcome of that segment reveals Sam using filmmaking as a quixotic way of handling his oppressors, but the romance—funny though it is—seems a rather cheap way of getting some laughs into the picture. For me the film’s highlight is the visit of Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), a rather mysterious circus performer who descends on the family at a time of tragedy. It’s he who explains to  Sam why the artist always has to go it alone.

 

 

Little Boys Blue: “Wildlife” and “Hillbilly Elegy”

There’s nothing especially fresh about stories in which a sensitive young boy watches in quiet dismay as his family disintegrates all around him. Over the years there’ve been films galore on this subject. Like, for instance, 1941’s How Green Was My Valley, in which the family unit is destroyed by social forces and the exploitation of the land. In other films, personal weaknesses outflank social issues as the chief cause of the family’s failure to thrive. I’ve just seen two of these, both made quite recently.

Hillbilly Elegy, based on J.D. Vance’s popular memoir, is the latest release in the long line of work from director Ron Howard. Howard’s sensitivity toward actors is well known, as is his interest in the rural South, stemming from his own childhood portrayal of Opie from Mayberry on TV’s classic The Andy Griffith Show. I have not read Vance’s memoir, which traces his journey from Appalachia to Yale Law, but it apparently has a strong (and controversial) political bent, playing up the forces that contribute to the dark side of the American Dream.  In Howard’s hands, though, this is chiefly a multi-generational saga in which loyalty to the family unit is overridden by drug abuse and other horrors. We know that young J.D.’s mother Bev, once a nurse, is hopelessly addicted to opioids, and has even ventured into heroin. We know that as J.D. grows up he’s appalled by her behavior, at the same time that he glorifies his feisty salt-of-the-earth granny, Mamaw. But Mamaw is no saint, particularly when she signals her fury by setting Papaw on fire (!). Frankly, I didn’t see much onscreen motivation for any of this, no particular reason why these people are in this kind of psychic pain.

 The screenplay cuts between the young J.D. and his grown-up self, courting a gorgeous Indian-American and trying to make a good impression on big-league Washington law firms. Drawn from a select dinner party (he worries over which fork to use) straight back to the old homestead, he has to confront his mother’s full-blown overdose. That hot mess of a mother is played by Amy Adams (still looking for her first Oscar win). And playing the indomitable Mamaw is a transformed version of Glenn Close (still looking for her first Oscar win). The usually elegant Close now shows off a dumpy figure, frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, a foul mouth, and an ever-present cigarette. Sounds like Oscar bait to me.

 A smaller, more delicate project is 2018’s Wildlife, based on a novel by Richard Ford. It was adapted for the screen by actors Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, with Dano making his directorial debut. The heartland family unit at the center of the drama consists of father Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), mother Jeanette (Carey Mulligan, spectacularly good), and son Joe. Jerry seems like a nice guy, but also someone who’s never grown up. Having lost yet another job, he gets it into his head to join a team of firefighters, risking their lives for a pittance to put out a stubborn mountain blaze nearby. In his absence, Jeanette evolves from a sweet, supportive wife into someone determined to make her own way in the world. This includes getting her own job, and then cozying up to a wealthy older man who adores her. Meanwhile poor young Joe stands by, trying desperately to keep his parents’ relationship intact.

 It’s a hugely sad but totally convincing portrait of a marriage splitting apart at the seams. Dano and Kazan, who starred together in another of their projects, the hilarious Ruby Sparks, deserve all the kudos they can get.