Proclaiming Eleanor the Great

When you’re successful as an actor, suddenly you start wanting to direct.  Even the fabled silent star Lillian Gish tried it, in a film now lost. Warren Beatty won a 1982 Oscar for directing (as well as starring in) Reds, a tale about the Russian Revolution that also featured Jack Nicholson and the late—and very much lamented—Diane Keaton. Robert Redford, who like Beatty was perhaps eager to escape pretty-boy roles, made an impressive directorial debut in 1980’s Ordinary People. He had no acting role in this taut family drama that went on to be a huge financial and critical success. Ordinary People racked up six Oscar nominations and four wins, including Best Picture and Best Director. Buoyed by this success, Redford directed ten films in all, winning kudos particularly for Quiz Show, a mordant examination of the headline-making TV scandal of the 1950s, with John Turturro heading the cast.

 Ron Howard became a TV and movie star at the ripe old age of 5, thanks to regular appearances on The Andy Griffith Show and in such movies as The Music Man. But, as I discovered when researching Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . . and Beyond. Howard had always wanted to direct. For one thing, he liked being in charge, as he was at age sixteen when he directed his father, his brother, and his future wife in a “A Deed of Daring-Do,” a short that marked his entry into a Kodak contest for youthful filmmakers. (He won second prize.) And, as he admitted after shooting scenes for Willow atop the snowfields of New Zealand, another advantage of directing is that you can dress for the weather and never worry about how you look.

 Recently Scarlett Johansson became the latest Hollywood megastar to try her hand at directing. Her vehicle is Eleanor the Great, a script by Tory Kamen about an elderly woman who finds herself in a highly awkward situation. At a time of great emotional distress, she has “admitted” to a support group of Holocaust survivors that she is one of them. Calling upon the horrific memories shared with her by her closest friend, now deceased, Eleanor spins a long, moving saga of her brother’s death at the hands of the Nazis. To her consternation, her story attracts the attention of an eager NYU journalism student who has suffered her own grievous loss, and Eleanor suddenly finds herself on the brink of being a media sensation. 

 Of course truth will out. There’s a hectic climax in which it looks as if everyone in Eleanor’s life has turned against her—and on the long-awaited day of her bat mitzvah yet! But Eleanor (marvelously inhabited by 94-year old June Squibb) is such a vivid presence that we instinctively hope she’ll come through the scandal with flying colors. And so she does, by way of a series of plot twists and turns involving a respected news anchor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who puts her transgression into perspective and helps everyone understand the role of grief in encouraging bad behavior. It’s both heartening and a little too tidy to make for a good ending.

The actors are all fine, and June Squibb (who after a long career in supporting roles became a genuine star in last year’s Thelma) is a national treasure. I’m sorry that none of the reviews I’ve seen have mentioned the very moving Rita Zohar, a genuine Holocaust survivor playing a genuine Holocaust survivor. Director Johansson, herself descended from Holocaust victims,, has chosen a thought-provoking story as her directorial debut.  I wonder what she’ll try next.

 

 

 

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.

 

Jojo Rabbit Gets in Der Fuehrer’s Face

Each generation gets its own Hitler. I’m not speaking here of world geopolitics, although dictators (alas) currently seem to be popping up left and right. Rather, I’m referencing all the films (from Hollywood and elsewhere) that address the Nazi era in line with the stylistics of their own times.

In 1940, when the United States had not yet entered World War II, Charlie Chaplin took it upon himself to caricature the Nazi leader as an inept clown toying with a beachball representing the globe. The film was The Great Dictator, and it was Chaplin’s way of urging the U.S. to move away from neutrality and join the fight against Germany and her allies. Comedy also came into play with Ernst Lubitsch’s witty To Be or Not to Be (1942), in which a troupe of Polish actors (one of them played by Jack Benny) find their own way to work against the Nazi cause, partly by recruiting a Hitler-impersonator from their ranks. Even the Walt Disney company got into the act, through a nine-minute propaganda cartoon, Der Fuehrer’s Face, in which Donald Duck dreams of being a slave to the Hitler war machine. This hilarious little piece, set to a typically catchy, typically crazy Spike Jones ditty, won the Oscar for best animated short in 1943.

The mid-Sixties,  a time of growing revolt against the ways of the past, saw funnyman Mel Brooks launch his feature film career by directing The Producers (1967), with its infamous “Springtime for Hitler” production number lampooning Die Fuehrer and his fans. The very Jewish Brooks, who years later remade To Be or Not to Be with himself and wife Anne Bancroft as the central players, has been asked how he can find humor in the portrayal of a leader bent on wiping out Brooks’ own people. His response: that such films as The Producers represent a personal triumph over a cruel and powerful enemy. After all, he and his fellow Jews are alive and well; Hitler is not.

 The unexpected hit of 1998, Italy’s Life is Beautiful, dealt with Nazism’s impact on average citizens fancifully, by showing a Jewish father using clowning and imaginative trickery to protect his young son from recognizing the horrors afflicting them both. Audiences mostly found this film heart-wrenching, though critics decried its schmaltz quotient. A huge contrast came by way of Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 action epic, Inglourious Basterds, in which wiping out comically evil Nazis became a thrilling adventure. (Typically, Tarantino rewrote history in order to end with a satisfying bang.)

Which leads me to this year’s Jojo Rabbit, which comes (as unlikely as it seems) from Taika Waititi, a New Zealander who is the offspring of a Maori father and a Jewish mother. In depicting a ten-year-old German boy, circa 1945, who has adopted Adolf Hitler as an imaginary confidante, the film can be called a poignant coming-of-age story. But its most special moments are outrageously comic ones, in which the ineptitude of local Nazi wannabes (vividly played by Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson) is put on full display. Waititi himself hilariously portrays the imaginary Adolf as a figment who’s not especially bright, not especially capable, but still sparks the imagination of young Jojo, who’s looking hard for role models. In fact the power of the imagination also courses through my favorite character in the film, the sympathetic but complicated mother played by Scarlett Johansson. 

For me, Jojo Rabbit is a welcome addition to the ranks of films that defy Nazi-type ideology by asking us to respect the humanity of those who may not be just like us.

Casting About – Thoughts Regarding Tab Hunter, Scarlett Johansson, and Some Others

Last week’s big casting news was that Hollywood A-lister Scarlett Johansson was dropping out of a film called Rub & Tug. At first she had defended her casting as a transgender male in a biopic about the operator of a massage parlor by pointing to the much-honored performances of Jared Leto in The Dallas Buyers Club and Felicity Huffman in Transamerica. But in today’s hyperpoliticized environment the thought that a cisgender female would dare portray a transsexual stirred so much brouhaha that she ultimately passed on the role. (After all, Johansson had earlier gotten plenty of flack for her appearance in Ghost in the Shell, the screen adaptation of a manga series in which her character has Japanese roots.)

What’s a filmmaker to do? Johansson was chosen for these parts because her presence brightens prospects at the box-office. It’s of course possible that a currently unknown transgender male actor could play the role in Rub & Tug brilliantly and rocket to stardom. But the more likely outcome is that, without a major star in the lead, the film won’t get financed. If that’s the case, it will never be made. So how far does it pay to go to find an actor who has lived the challenges that a film depicts?  On the one hand, it’s marvelous to give unconventional performers a chance to show what they can do. In 1987 Marlee Matlin, who is actually deaf, won an Oscar as the angry young deaf woman in Children of a Lesser God. And just this past year, Millicent Simmonds beautifully played the key role of the daughter in A Quiet Place. It’s essential to the plot that this character be hearing-challenged, and so young Millicent’s real-life disability became an asset.

On the other hand, think of going out to find a real cerebral palsy sufferer capable of taking on Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning role in My Left Foot. And think of Patty Duke as the young Helen Keller. In the name of realism (and political correctness), should director Arthur Penn have held out for an actual young actress who was both deaf and blind? Part of the thrill of going to the movies is marveling at the skill of actors who know how to transform themselves into people they are not.

The role Johansson was to have played involves not only a physical transformation but also a shift in psyche. Whoever might play the role has to be able to viscerally grasp what it feels like to be a woman who finds fulfillment through sexual reassignment. Granted, there’s no equivalency at all between being transgender and being homosexual, but I’ve long been struck by the fact that the really great gay roles (like those of the two cowboys in Brokeback Mountain) have largely been brought to life by emphatically heterosexual men (like Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal). Partly this is doubtless once again a box-office issue, along with a general discomfort about singling out gay actors to play gay roles.

Times may be changing, with more actors willing to come out of the closet now, but I doubt that gay performers want to be confined (in the name of realism) to specifically gay parts. The irony, of course, is that there was a long stretch where many of Hollywood’s favorite leading men were gay. Such Hollywood hunks as Rock Hudson and the late Tab Hunter looked the part of heterosexual dreamboats, and so they were required to live a charade, dating starlets and passing themselves off as red-blooded guys.They were thoroughly convincing. Ah well. . . .