American Splendor, dir. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. I was impressed with the idiosyncratic qualities of this film.  Harvey Pekar discovered the secret of modern life—make your own life your art and you will find an audience.  In an era dominated by Reality TV, this story of an obsessive-compulsive, neurotic, angry, and yet principled man represents a fresh approach to the stale personas paraded in front of us on the “staged” reality programs.  The stars of Reality TV really don’t inspire us with their “reality.” They strut their stuff, they posture, they exude the required amount of sexuality, and they whine.  End of story.  Harvey Pekar would never be picked to be on a Reality TV program.  He is no jock, no stud, and no model.  He is a man of diminished hopes and diminished returns.  He is an American Joe, an average fellow who works, pays taxes, and does not cause trouble.  At the same time, his vision of reality is focused on a narrow bandwidth that emphasizes anxiety, frustration, gripes, negativity, desperation, and loneliness.  He does not believe in happiness; life has to be chaotic and troubled, and people have to be exposed and vulnerable.  His motto: expect the worst, and you won’t be disappointed. 

One of the special moments in the film: when the real Harvey Pekar talks to his real nerd friend on  soundstage, while in the background sit the actor playing Harvey Pekar and the acting playing the nerd friend.  So where is the reality here?  There is Harvey Pekar’s life, Harvey Pekar’s comic book series, the film about Harvey Pekar, the real Harvey in the film, and the actor playing Harvey in the film.  Another treat: the exteriors of his “Cleveland” neighborhoods were perfectly rendered and complemented his characterization.  Paul Giamatti did a wonderful job capturing the nuances of this character—but he lacked the ability to draw out the critical and angry core of the real Harvey that came through in the soundstage interviews with Harvey or the segments from the Letterman show that featured the real Harvey.  Giamattti was too much a “sad sack” version of Pekar—and yet I applaud his ability to inhabit the role as well as he did.

So on one level his choice of making art out of his life—and making his wife and coworkers costars in that life—is a brilliant example of American entrepreneurship.  Hey, he makes his life a long-running gig.  He gets paid for it!  But the other side of this “art” is that the comic books, the American Splendor series, is not really an accurate representation of his life after all.  The comic books don’t reveal the essence of Harvey Pekar; they reveal the persona of Harvey Pekar.  He creates a persona that works for his readers—and Robert Crumb’s drawings of Harvey as the animalistic middle-aged drudge perfectly capture that persona.  His slack-shouldered look fits in with his constant critique of bourgeois America.  That’s why Harvey’s gigs on the Letterman show were perfect television entertainment.  He trotted out the persona, and the audience ate it up. 

 The truest moment of the film comes when Harvey, unable to sleep one night, wonders, “If I die, will the character keep going, or will he fade away.  Who is Harvey Pekar?”  The answer to the first question: yes, the comic book series will fade away, because people buy it only because they are hooked by the persona that is contained within. This guy’s life is like his own talk show—once he’s gone, the show will be canceled.  The answer to the second question is, “That’s a good question—for all of us.”  I would hate to have thought of Harvey’s idea and had a series of comic books called American Splendor—starring Robert Yahnke, his wife, his coworkers, etc.  But then again, my circles of reality are much wider than Harvey’s.  Because his life is narrow—and focused, if twisted—it’s easier to create the caricatures required to fill it in.  I don’t think I would have much to say to Harvey.  Perhaps if he were my taxi driver or the guy driving the AAA truck when I needed roadside assistance—perhaps then I would have a brief conversation with him.  I would make do, listen to him, and contribute to the conversation.  But there would be no links between us that would endure.  Harvey would not become my friend—even though, after watching the film, I see something to admire in that person.  In essence, there is a profound sadness at the core of a film like this; and yet there are profound lessons in it for understanding current American values, the real diminishing of the American middle class, the loss of the American Dream, the rise of corporate America, and the danger of an evolving groupthink Orwellian ethic.

The Barbarian Invasions, dir. Denys Arcand (Canada, France).  I watched this mesmerizing film the same weekend I watched DVDs of Wit and A Song for Martin—both powerful films about aging and finitude.  Like those films, The Barbarian Invasions provides a believable plot, characters I could identify with, and a steady hand by the director.  The latter is evident in one of the first shots of the film—a long tracking shot (reminiscent of Goodfellas) where the camera follows a nurse as she navigates the crowded halls of a Montreal hospital.  One of the villains of the film is the inconsistency of the Canadian health system, and this early scene solidifies for viewers the problems with patients who are stuck in hallways because the rooms are already filled.  At the same time, the unions hold sway to such an extent that entire floors are empty—but the hallways jammed with patients.  On another level, this is a film about a son who is estranged from his father—an old story—but one that is told effectively here.  The father, bald because of the treatment for his cancer, looks like an old man in his 70s.  But he is in his early 50s!  The son is a wealthy businessman—but the father knows nothing about him because he has been too busy with his various mistresses over the years.  The son, feeling abandoned by the father, regards him with unremitting bitterness. Of course, something has to give for this film to work—and it does—and what gives is the grudge the young man holds toward the father.  Slowly but surely the father wins us over first, and then wins over his son.  The young man uses his money and his clout with great ingenuity.  The old man is dying.  So the son arranges for a private room on the vacant floor of the hospital.  The son has a contact in a Baltimore hospital—who gladly evaluates the PET scan his father receives in a Burlington, VT, hospital.  Ah, the vagaries of health care.  The title of the film is referred to first as a metaphor for the 9/11 “invasion” by the agents of Osama Bin Laden, but there are further hints at a metaphor relating to all invasions by outside forces that inevitably overwhelm all fortresses of man—and I suppose, by extension, that means the fortress of the human body (diseases).  Another invasion is the insidious drug trade that traffics in broken homes and broken bodies.  Fortunately, the meaning of the metaphor is not limited to one interpretation.  What stays with me from watching the film is the sustaining power of love in human relationships.  What makes people drop whatever they are doing and fly to another city and stay for weeks at the bedside of a dying man?  What is that glue that holds people together in the dark days of human life?  What unexpected transformations of the human heart and soul are possible because of the commitments and routines of human interconnectedness?  Here is another film where the conversations that flow between people are made to matter.  Modern digital technology is shown as a creative and bonding force rather than an alienating power.  The dying man is one of the last angry men—and often he rages at the evils of humankind throughout time.  We listen to him because he is wise and because he is dying.  We want to hear every last word before there are no more words.  An important subplot involves a heroin addict—who becomes the dying man’s supplier of heroin to relieve his pain.  The resolution of that subplot is infinitely satisfying because the story is true to the needs of the addict—and not to the formulas that Hollywood films like to impose upon male/female relationships.  The last scenes of the film, played out at a cabin along Lake Champlaign, is a testament to the bonds between the friends and ex-lovers who come together to celebrate the dying man’s life.  No false notes are sounded in these scenes—every friend is able to say farewell.  The dying man even receives a satellite video transmission from his daughter—on a sailboat in the Pacific—and her final words, “The first man in a woman’s life is her father,” is perfect farewell.  This was a film to savor.

The Fog of War, dir. Errol Morris.  I awaited this film as a big event!  I have taught Morris’ The Thin Blue Line several times in a documentary film course, and I was not disappointed in this most recent effort.  Morris has honed the skill of interviewing a subject in such a way that the subject seems to be looking right at us (even though in fact he is staring into a monitor that shows an image of Errol Morris staring back at him).  This technical sleight of hand is an important component in getting subjects to reveal themselves on camera. The other key to the success of this film—as well as other Morris films.  His B-Roll (the images that cover the voice-over) are extraordinarily imaginative, metaphoric, and even haunting.  He helps us SEE the truth of the words by using appropriate visual support. So here are the rules of war (with commentary) as stated by the subject, Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense under Johnson during the Vietnam War:

1. Empathize with your enemy. McNamara talks about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the important role played by an American ambassador who did not send a hard-line message to Kruschev, but instead triggered a positive response by sending a more non-threatening message. The story of Kruschev’s response gave me insight into the intelligence and articulateness of the Soviet Premier.
2. Rationality will not save us. More on the Missile Crisis. In 1992 McNamara learned that there were already numerous missile sites in Cuba in 1962—and that Castro was ready to use those missiles if he felt the need would arise.  In other words, Castro would have destroyed the world in order to uphold his vision of communism. “That’s how close we were!” McNamara notes that three times in his seven years as Secretary America was on the brink of nuclear war.  “The human race needs to think more about killing.”  I applaud his insight.  Then Morris turns to a biographical account of McNamara’s life—right up to the time when he went to college before the beginning of WWII. 
3. There is something beyond yourself.  Morris continues the biographical approach.  McNamara is at Harvard when WWII begins.  Rather than joining the military, he decides to help form a new Office of Statistical Control at Harvard.  There he put together “the best and the brightest”—all based on hard data about the talents of the applicants.  But this new group of experts helped develop strategies for more effective bombing of the enemy. He tells a great story of the famous Gen. Curtis LeMay, who flew the lead plane in a combat raid in order to inspire the men to lower their abort rates—and it worked.
4. Maximize efficiency. One of the concrete results of their work in WWII—they learned that flying bombing raids over China was ineffective.  LeMay decided to use the Marianas in the Pacific for bomber bases.  “And it devastated Japan.”  LeMay focusedon reducing the loss of crews—not target destruction. McNamara explains that research showed the inefficiencies in high altitude bombing.  So LeMay went to low-altitude runs, and that led to the firebombing of Tokyo.  In one night in 1945 100,000 citizens of Tokyo were burned alive in the firebombing of the wooden structures. Fifty square miles of Tokyo gone. We lost one wingman. As McNamara says this, we can hear a catch in his throat—as if he is ready to break into tears.  This moment recurs several times in the film.  Watching this old man tell his stories was an education in itself—a college course in how to learn from our mistakes in war.
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war.  More on the firebombing.  Then McNamara begins to compare the extent of the destruction to what would have occurred if American cities had been firebombed.  The consequences: 51% of Cleveland, 51% of New York City, 40% of Los Angeles, 35% of Chicago.  As he names these cities, we see the corresponding Japanese cities of similar size named.  These cities were destroyed at the level he ascribes to the destruction that would have occurred in US cities.  This is an amazing, horrific montage.  In all he names 67 US cities where 60-90% of the civilians would have been killed.   Gen. LeMay admitted to McNamara that if the US had lost the war, then they would have been tried as war criminals.
6. Get the data.  After WWII became President of Ford Motor Company.  He applied the same level of logic and reasoning in this context.  He summarizes the advent of the airbag in 1956—when automakers learned that drivers in automobiles needed to be cushioned against accidents like eggs in their packaging.  But in 1960 McNamara agreed to become Secretary of Defense.  Already by 1963 he had told JFK, “We need a way to get out of Vietnam.”  Then, of course, comes the assassination of JFK in 1963.  McNamara helped pick out the spot in Arlington Cemetery.  He cries when he talks about JFK’s death.  When LBJ became president, McNamara was “behind the 8-ball.”  LBJ disagreed with the idea of pulling out American advisors.
7. Belief and seeing are both often wrong.  The Gulf of Tonkin.  Only later did we learn this was a hoax—the equivalent of Pres. Bush’s not finding weapons of mass destruction—but using the claim as an excuse for attacking Iraq.  “We had in our minds a mindset that led to that action,” McNamara says.  “We see what we want to believe,” Morris calls out from behind his monitor.  Then we see montages of bombing of Vietnam.  American forces in Vietnam dropped two to three times the bombs dropped in Western Europe in WW II. 1965: 45,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. He explains that in Vietnam “we did know them enough to empathize” (the first rule above). “They saw it as a Civil War; we were in it for the Cold War.  Remember the French in 1954.  Then McNamara notes that 3 ½ million Vietnamese were killed in this war. 
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.  More great footage—montages of bombing, so many images that fly by our mind’s eye and compel us to grapple with McNamara’s voice-over.
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.  McNamara remembers a Quaker who died by self-immolation to protest the war.  When the crowd urged him to spare his daughter, he tossed her out of the fire (where he had held her in his arms), and she was saved.
10. Never say never. This old man’s face in all of these section haunts me.  I thought we were raised so that we would listen to the old.  Here is an old man as prophet—someone who does not predict the future, but someone who warns us that our current behaviors are insane.  The prophet tells us what is wrong with us in the now. McNamara analyzes two photographs of LBJ and himself.  He respected LBJ, but they ended poles apart.  McNamara was fired.  In 1967 he wrote a memo urging LBJ to change course in Vietnam.  LBJ never responded to the memo.  Several times Morris appears to urge McNamara to finally speak his mind—admit his feelings now that so much time has passed.  But McNamara remains loyal—in his mind—to his responsibility as a public servant, someone who was given a task and saw fit to be faithful to his country’s calling.  By this time 25,000 Americans had died in Vietnam.  We see the Vietnam Memorial, and then page after page from the book that lists the names on the wall, and then name after name on the wall itself.
11. You can’t change human nature.  McNamara notes, “There’s a wonderful phrase—‘the fog of war.’” He quotes from T. S. Eliot’s famous Four Quartets—the line about how inevitably we return to the place from which we started.  Have we returned again to Vietnam?  Have we begun to see what we want to believe rather than facing those truths that are right in front of us?

Girl with a Pearl Earring, dir. Peter Webber (UK).  This film has much to recommend it.  Most important, the film respects character.  We follow a young woman’s development as a character.  She maintains a steadfast courage and feistiness and honor throughout; but also she grows as a person and faces each challenge with initiative and purpose.  She will succeed in life.  She has the right stuff.  She also has a unique talent—she respects the light, and thus understands something essential about the art of painting (as she would about photography, if the film had taken place in the 1900s).  She refines her natural talent at understanding how light can reveal the three dimensions of a human being, and more importantly, reveal the inner world of the person.  Her ability to relate to art is also exactly what the artist Johannes Vermeer needs in 1665 Delft, Holland, in an era when a painter was only as good as the patron who supported his work.  And Vermeer has a patron, a rich and insensitive man who controls all aspects of Vermeer’s world.  In some respects I regarded this film as a well-crafted soap opera.  There is melodrama; there are predictable plot points; and there is great suffering on the part of some of the characters.  But as soap opera it was well-done, much like a good episode of Masterpiece Theater.  For instance, Vermeer’s mother-in-law (nicely played by Judy Parfitt), is the economic mainstay of the household.  Her daughter is busy giving birth to Vermeer’s children, and whether due to post-partum depression, or because of a general emotional instability, she is useless when it comes to running the household.  Without the mother-in-law, Vermeer would be ruined.  She also knows how to sweet-talk the patron when that is called for.  One Vermeer’s daughters is spoiled rotten and brutish and one-dimensional, the one really flat character in the film.  The family’s maid is another mainstay of the household.  She buys the food, keeps the kitchen and house running smoothly, and knows where the bodies are buried.  Then there is Vermeer, aloof, frustrated, emotionally hobbled, unkempt, and remote from his family.  In many respects he is the typical 20^th century figure trapped in the 17^th century.  He is alienated from his art and emotionally adrift.  He needs a real companion—an equal, someone he can talk to about the process of making art and thinking about art and figuring out how to understand the way light shapes and frames the human face and torso.  He finds it all right—in the presence of a young woman (Griet) hired to help the maid with Vermeer’s expanding household.  Scarlett Johansson proves again that great acting often depends upon the actor creating an expression that is expressionless—vacant, open, and receptive to the emotions the audience will pour into that expression.

We follow the progression of their relationship—first strictly as employer to employee (where her response is no more than a curtsy), to scenes where the two are mixing paints together, discussing the quality of light as it relates to a particular work of art, and then at its most intimate—when the young woman becomes his model for the famous painting of the film’s title.  While these scenes unfold, the film offers several examples of how light is used effectively to create beautiful shots in cinema.  There are times when a particular shot reminded me of a Rembrandt painting—with characters lit by golden hues against strong shadows—as if the individuals suddenly pop out against the dark backgrounds.  Several times Johansson is placed in shots to suggest the power of light to capture the essence of character.  She seems lit from within, her face and neck all one color.  I give the film credit for respecting the power of light to convey the subtleties of human emotion, desire, and character.  The film was a visual treat to see on a large theater screen.  I thought of how Stanley Kubrick utilized lighting in similar ways in Barry Lyndon. 

Johansson had few lines in the film, as would befit a woman of her low social standing.  In that way the film was about the way class traps individuals into specific and limited roles.  She was taught to curtsy and to stay in her place.  The climax of the film occurs when Vermeer and she defy those restrictions.  When she stands for the famous portrait, and Vermeer’s wife finally sees it, she complains, “It’s obscene!”  I think she means that her husband has defiled his marriage by making this nobody (the maid) an object of great beauty in a painting where she stands alone—not as a background character in a typical group of revelers.  The pearl earring signifies class; and there would be no way that young woman could ever hope to enter the upper class because she was doomed to the lower class by birth and breeding.  “She can’t even read or write!” the wife exclaims, as if to underscore this point. 

What happens in a great film about character is that one or more characters breaks the convention of class or other social taboos and becomes something that no one could have expected them to become.  And they always have to pay for their transgression!  In this case, Vermeer loses because he has to yield to the conventions of class in order to retain his standing and his opportunity to ply his craft—his art.  The young maid loses her job—and has no other recourse.  But then there is the painting.  For some time the patron possesses the painting—and the scene where he observes it its private cabinet is nearly pornographic.  He possesses her just as he possesses his stuffed animals.  But now where is the painting, almost 350 years later?  It hands in a museum in The Hague, Netherlands, for all to see.  Of course, this story is a fictional account of how the great painting came to be.  But it worked for me as a human drama, as an essay on the eternal power of art, and as a story about how people of like minds found themselves at the right time and made something good come to fruition because of their receptivity and their sensitivity toward each other.  The expected outcome, in a lesser soap opera, would be that the painter and his companion would have a sexual relationship.  Perhaps she would flee with him to Paris!  Ha!  But this film does a better job of resolving the conflicts human nature offers in all of its intricacy and confounding paradoxes.  That last shot of the film—a tight shot that slowly tracks back until the shot becomes a wide shot of the object.  All in one shot we are made to understand the timelessness of works of art—the ways they haunt us, inspire us, and capture our attention and affection.

The Human Stain, dir. Robert Benton.  I saw this film twice and liked it both times.  I was impressed with the quality of the acting—by Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Gary Sinese, and Ed . This seemed to be an old-fashioned film, something from the 1970s, for instance.  It had character, plot, theme.  Based on the Philip Roth novel, it places race relations in the foreground.  It begins with the ending of the film.  We see Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman—relaxed and affectionate in the front seat of his Volvo—drive off an icy roadway in New England.  Before the accident occurs, the looks on their faces show resolution and satisfaction.  Something has been resolved. The car ends up sinking into the icy water of a lake.  They must be dead.  Now I’ve always had a sore spot for the work of Robert Benton.  His films Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart got the emotions right, and this film does too.  It begins with a classics professor Coleman Silk (Hopkins) being relieved of his tenured position because he refers to two students who never attended his class as “spooks.”  He says he meant to call them ghosts; but one definition of the word refers to a negative slam on African Americans.  At home, he rages around the house looking for the phone number of his lawyer—and his wife gets as worked up about it as he is.  Then suddenly she drops dead, and Benton lowers the boom on us with a powerful example of a tracking shot (away from the action).  Fast forward six months.  One night the professor pulls up at a remote house in the country, rented by a writer by the name of Zuckerman (a character in several Roth novels).  He confronts Zuckerman and accuses him of having writer’s block!  I love this scene!  After the bizarre encounter, later the two men sit on the porch and listen to music.  Suddenly the professor, name, begins to dance around the porch to the jazz and then insist that Zuckerman dance with him.  The scene works!  The actors pull it off because they are given a stage to work on—that front porch.  Later, after the two men are now officially friends, Coleman drops the bombshell: “I’m having an affair with a 34-year-old woman!”  What timing!  What great writing!  And what great delivery of that line. 

Now the film begins to move backward in time.  We see the meeting between Silk and the younger woman Faunia Farley, played by Nicole Kidman.  She is great as a lowlife.  “Action is the enemy of thought,” the old man ruminates.  At least he will be no Hamlet in this play.  He will commit—rather than stay on the sidelines.  The two meet again—and then they begin a sexual affair.  Why does she choose him?  She knows about his being fired as the dean of classics.  She knows his wife died of heartbreak.  She tells him, “I don’t do sympathy,” and yet she has acted in a sense out of empathy toward his pain, and because she realizes, perhaps, that he will empathize with her pain.  It is a delight to watch great actors working off of each other’s energy and focus in a scene.  We know now that Coleman will not walk away from this woman; and we know also that she must not walk away from the old man. 

She begins to reveal herself to her new lover.  We learn that she was abused as a young girl and as an adolescent.  She married a nut case—played perfectly by Ed Harris—and later we see Harris talking to a psychiatrist about his reasons for going after Coleman.  It was Harris in the truck in the first scene of the film; in his madness he was going to crash head-on into the car where his former wife was a passenger.  Amazing that the car averted the head-on crash, but then skidded off the roadway and broke through the ice of the pond.  Harris sat in his truck stopped in the middle of the road and marveled at what fate had provided him. 

Kidman’s character is easy to read.  She has buried her emotions deeply because of the pain and losses she has experienced.  She cannot commit because in commitment lies renewed pain.  She tells him about her two children, both of whom died in a fire.  Most people think she was to blame (because of neglect).  She wants to believe she is innocent.  Each time Coleman listens to her, shows his empathy, and commits himself to her, she attacks Coleman viciously at times, but it is evident that her vile language is a projection of her inner defenses.  Amazing that this old man stays with her.  Why? 

Just at the right moment the film moves backward to a third level of time.  In the present there is Coleman and Zuckerman, in the past is a Coleman and Faunia, and beyond that is a younger version of Coleman, (nicely underplayed by Wentworth Miller) ready to attend college many years ago.  We are dropped into that scene at the end of a scene where the old man is confronted by his lawyer, who practically orders him to stop seeing Fonia.  He states his biased reasons, and Coleman upbraids him with a venomous line: “I don’t want to ever see your lily-white face!”  What would make him say that?  In that next scene, we see his boxing trainer back in the late 1940s encourage him to apply to Pitt; he thinks Coleman can get in with a sports scholarship.  Then he makes an offhand remark: “Don’t tell him you’re colored.” 

Now Coleman’s secret is out.  The Dean of Classics for all those years never told anyone, including his late wife, that he was Arican American.  He passed as white.  Why?  How could he have done that?  His father is a railway porter, and his wife is an elegant woman, a homemaker.  Coleman has a sister and a brother.  The family tradition is to send their children to Howard University, a Negro college.  But Coleman wants to attend Pitt—because Coleman wants to be white.  Having dropped us deep into his past, the filmmaker brings us back to the present—in Zuckerman’s house, with Coleman trying to defend himself.  He tells Zuckerman, “This is my last love.  Doesn’t that count for something?”  Back to the love affair between the young woman and the old man.   She dances for him—provocatively.  Their love is tender and even whimsical, but at a deeper level absolutely required for both of them.  They need each other desperately.

Back to the 1940s again.  We see Coleman dating a young blonde woman from the Midwest.  She is naïve, shy, and perfectly fragile.  On a visit to his apartment she does an unartful strip-tease. She dances for him—not a provocative bone in her lithe body.  She declares her love for him.  He takes her home—but does not tell her that his parents are African American.  (By this time his father has died of a heart attack.)  Suddenly we see them walking on a street in his neighborhood.  There are black people everywhere.  The shy blonde tries to bear up under this new environment, but when the door opens—and there stands Coleman’s mother, obviously an African American woman, and all is lost.  A short scene at the dinner table follows, showing the young woman emotionally wilting in front of her lover.  She crumbles in the face of his unstated request to accept him as he is—a black man that has passed for white. “I can’t do this,” she cries.

So Coleman (coal-man? black-man?) becomes white.  In the boxing ring he beats a black man senseless in order to prove to himself that he is white and therefore superior.  That reminds me of his relationship with Fiona.  They spar like two boxers in a ring.  She is a worthy adversary for Coleman, and she almost defeats him.  Back to their relationship. She stays overnight in his house—a first—and a dangerous game.  The next morning she assaults him verbally with as much force as he used when he physically assaulted the black fighter in the ring.  Then she makes her escape, and it appears that Coleman has lost her.  But she comes back the next day, and she calmly recounts the time she tried to kill herself after her children died.  But the rope broke.  “I don’t think you can measure sorrow,” she says.  He listens calmly, and I think he realizes that he has stayed the course and won the most important boxing match of his life.  He says, “There is something I need to tell you.” 

We know what that has to be.  Now Benton returns to the first scene of the film, and this time we see it from Ed Harris’ point of view.  Of course, the two lovers are killed—and we cut to the obligatory funeral scene so that we can see the next plot twist.  Zuckerman is at the burial site, and he approaches a black woman and learns that she is Coleman’s sister!  Zuckerman realizes Coleman was African American.  Now we learn the story of what happened to Coleman when he talked to his mother about getting married—to the woman who died in his arms early in the film.  When the mother realized that Coleman would never tell his wife that he was the son of a black woman, the mother tells Coleman, “You think like a prisoner.  You’re as white as snow, and you think like a slave. Her last word to him: “Murderer!”  As Coleman leaves, his brother enters the house and confronts him: “I don’t ever want to see your lily white face again!” he snarls.  And now we recall the time Coleman used that same phrase on his lawyer.  All that was lost, without content.  Then the film returns to a scene between Coleman and Fiona.  He has told her everything.  “Why me?”  He smiles.  He has had his last love.  He did the right thing—finally.  It was not too late.  They are happy.  They smile at each other.  They await their fate at the hands of the crazed ex-husband.  Now this was a film to savor, a film about ideas, and a film about a man who finally shared himself fully with another human being.

Lost in Translation, dir. Sophia Coppola.  This film works because Bill Murray is in it.  Coppola has an eye for the image, all right.  Early in the film she places Murray perfectly “within the shot.”  She controls the meaning through the shot and the cuts—and Murray simply has to “give a look,” or “stare out the window,” or “sigh a little,” or “move your eyes from left to right.”  But after a while the director begins to give Murray shots of longer duration.  She gives him room for his own brand of physical comedy.  And he is brilliant—trying to set the “right” look for a Japanese photographer, trying to stay afloat on an exercise machine, and singing Karaoke as if he means it. Watching Murray is a reminder that film loves well-defined personas.  Murray is as good as—maybe even better—than he was in Groundhog Day.  He has that basset-hound hangdog look about him.  He’s the guy that finishes last in the marathon; he’s the guy that never received a Valentine’s Day card; he’s the guy that just lost his girlfriend to his best friend.  He’s not quite Sad Sack—but he’s close.  (And didn’t he play Sad Sack once?)  And now Murray brings aging to the role.  His face is lined with years of grimaces, deadpans, and silly grins.  His face is all pitted and sandpapery.  He has the Bill Murray look.  He suffers, he whines, he is emotionally paralyzed.  He is perfect for this role. He has the physical comedy of a Steve Martin, but he is not burdened by having the powerful physique, good looks, and smooth-looking profile of Martin.  When Martin wears a tuxedo, he looks cool; when Murray wears a tuxedo, he reminds me of Charlie Chaplin.

I also appreciated the quiet poise that Scarlett Johannson brought to her role as Murray’s counterpart—the young woman who is as stuck in her life as he is stuck in his own.  She has the right voice for the role and the right moves for the role.  Unfortunately, some of the ways that Coppola used this character did not work.  For instance, that first shot in the film—a close shot of her body shot from the back as she lay in bed—frustrated me because I could not figure out how it furthered my understanding of my character.  It was a daring shot—to say the least—in its overt sexuality and yet its image of ennui.   That kind of shot would fit right in in a French film about a bored young woman.  But it did not work for me.  It gave mixed signals.  Much of the film this young woman sat around in her Tokyo hotel room wearing a T-shirt and her underpants. In one scene her husband is so locked into his work that he barely notices her—walking past him in a T-shirt and her underpants.  Another mixed signal.  Coppola loved to use shots of her sitting curled up in the window of her hotel room and musing on the world laid out beneath her.  But what were we supposed to think of this young woman?  I never got any insight into what she brought to her being—like Murray—a lost soul. What secrets did she have to reveal that would suggest why she allowed herself to fall into this desperate state?  Her depths as a character should come first; the simple way out is to blame her situation on her jerk of a husband.  Now he  was a wooden, one-dimensional character—what a waste of a good actor.

Despite my concerns, I heartily recommend this film because it showcases one of our great comic talents—Bill Murray.  Coppola perfectly realizes Tokyo as a major character in the film.  The scenes where the main characters interacted on city streets were fascinating.  The ending of the film is likewise fulfilling—a simple, moving resolution that overturns no lives and yet reminds us that we are all capable of having once-in-a-lifetime life-affirming experiences with other human beings.  And these experiences enrich us and even “save” us because we are given new hope to carry on our lives with renewed energy and insight.