Movies About Connecting

Last night I watched a double bill of - wait for it - very similar movies:  Seeking a Friend for the End of the World and Safety Not Guaranteed.

Seeking a Friend has Steve Carell, Keira Knightley, and Britta from Community, but it's not really a comedy. There are a few funny bits, but really it's about how different people cope with the world ending.  It is, however, very touching.  It's really an improved remake of Last Night (also billed as a comedy).  It also reminded me a lot of Melancholia - and relatively speaking it's hilarious, but Melancholia is a tragically depressing film.  In Seeking, people find various ways to manage beyond looking forlorn and weeping.  Some go for destruction, and others maintain a strict routine in a massive bid at denial, and many more leave on a widely hedonistic note.  That's actually believable to me.  Sure people will be distraught or desperate, but many will be wasted for those final three weeks.  The couple we're following have a quest to find their loved ones in the last days, and they develop a relationship of sorts over the course of their road trip.

For some reason, that part of it reminded me of The Sure Thing.  Weird.




Safety Not Guaranteed is about a trio of magazine writers (well, one writer and two interns) tracking down a man who put out an ad seeking a friend to go back in time with him in his time machine.  And, like Seeking, the intern and time machine dude develop a relationship of sorts over the course of putting the finishing touches on the machine.  This one is quirky and sweet and hopeful.  It leaves lots of questions, but they don't really matter in the end.




Both films are about the importance of making connections with anyone we can.  Life is short.  What makes both films work, I think (because neither got consistently good reviews), is the actors. The movies are full of plot holes, so it's not about the stories.  If the Earth is about to be knocked off its axis, then how will it help to be in a bomb shelter - at all?  How could three bumbling reporters uncover dirt on a guy more efficiently than the FBI who's been following him for years?  But these things don't matter here.  Carell and Knightley were spectacular.  Right now it's my favourite film for both of them. They're crass but tender, and very real.  And in Safety, Aubrey Plaza, Mark Dupless, and Jake Johnson were all compelling to watch.  It was lovely.

B+ for both.

Unrestricted Love

My Afternoons with Margueritte is a lovely film about a an uneducated man and the three women in his life:  his bus-driving girlfriend, his abusive mother, and a well-read older woman - much older.  It's no Harold and Maude though.  I think it's better.

It's not at all contrived that someone who couldn't manage in school could suddenly pick up on nuances of literature and connect them to life.  I've seen struggles with literacy prevent kids from having a useful education, and it's curious that we focus so much on the written word when we're moving beyond that in real life such that people can get all their news from YouTube.  But that's not really what the film's about.

It's about love and connections and kindness unrestricted by artificial social constructs that create boundaries around who we should spend our time with.*  It's another reminder to fight the pigeonholing that sticks us in roles that just don't work for us.  But, unlike The Graduate, the characters here actually get somewhere with their personal rebellion.

It's also about education and arrogance.  Germain is well-loved because he is kind and funny and wise.  Some reviewers find his relationship with Annette, his lovely young girlfriend, unbelievable, but I think that just reveals an attitude of rigid and arrogant conformity to social expectations.  They get what they need from one another, and they clearly have a bond in the film.  In fact, it's the whole point.  Similarities in age, education, and/or aesthetics are not what really connect us - that's all just superficial crap.  We connect when we have a profound respect and admiration for another's ideas or actions.  This is different than being impressed by them, as the characters do don't anything spectacular, but how many of us do.

And it's about rising above your beginnings.  We don't need to be taught love from our parents; it's in us already if we're brave enough to share it.

Okay, it's sentimental, but it works.

A-

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*Grammar point:  This bothers me a bit.  I know it should say, "with whom we should spend our time," but that feels awkward and pretentious.  Nobody talks like that.  Personally, I think it's time written language cleans out its closet of some archaic rules that only affect marks on student essays and little else in the world.  I'm taking the first step by largely ignoring them.

The Graduate

I think I first saw this classic when I was about 8 when it first premiered on television.  I'm almost as baffled by parts of it today.  Some call it a screwball comedy, but I think it's mainly just sad (except for Mr. Robinson's speech near the end - that was funny).

Benjamin is home from college and is quickly seduced by Mrs. Robinson, but soon becomes obsessed with her daughter Elaine.  Spoilers below, but it doesn't matter.  The charm of the film is in the way it's carried out more than the plot line.  (And the trailer tells all anyway - I hate that!)


It's curious that Benjamin and Elaine are both involved with university life, but Vietnam isn't mentioned.  There's not a sign of protest on the Berkeley campus except for Benjamin being questioned about being a possible agitator.  Maybe Nichols wanted to give the film a timeless feel, but it's pretty stuck in the 60s anyway.

Benjamin's character is relatable to a point.  He's adrift, held fast by inertia, and unable to choose a direction in life just yet.  He's going to procrastinate as long as possible as all his options look stale and boring. He's awkward and annoyingly adolescent - rudely talking loudly in a library, refusing to care about his affect on others, badgering Elaine with questions and proprosals.  He's having an angsty middle-class rebellion against very little. I understand the draw to Mrs. Robinson for a 20-year-old virgin, but it's curious why he'd fall so hard for Elaine.  She's the beautiful Katherine Ross, of course, but after just one date in which he watches her cry a bit in a strip club, they commiserate about their station in life over burgers, and he later spills it about her mom, he becomes totally obsessed with her and stalks her.  She becomes his goal in life.  Forbidden fruit, or she's just the best option he's got?  To a 20-year-old, she sure beats plastics.  It's funny that he announces his impending marriage to her while still unemployed and living at home.  He's young enough to not have thought that part through, but it's odd that his parents don't question how they'll live.

While Ben passively floats through life, Mrs. Robinson actively works to escape her futile existence. She also doesn't want to be the living dead - managing through life by rote.  She breaks free from the monotony of her situation with an affair.  There's one scene I find absolutely heartbreaking.  She tells Ben she knows nothing about art, but when he asked what she took in college, she says, "Art."  In that one brief conversation, she subtly makes it clear how much she's given up over the years, how much she's let go of her passions.  She forbids Ben to date Elaine, I think, because she has tainted Ben with this shameless experience, and she doesn't want it touching her daughter.  She doesn't want the sins of the mother laid upon the daughter, but, try as she might, she's impotent to stop it.

But Elaine is a conundrum for me.  When Ben tries to catch up to her bus at Berkeley, we can feel her discomfort when she catches sight of him and as he talks to her.  But after she rages at him a bit, she suddenly soften and feels - what? - suddenly she wants him to stick around.  Is she flattered by his obsessiveness? Or does she just feel trapped or bored with her prep-school boyfriend?  She's also avoiding the boring trap of the bourgeois life, so maybe she attaches to him to get a taste of rebellion.

Then he just proceeds to wear her down - it's the only move he's got:

Ben: "We can get a blood test today."

Elaine:  "Benjamin, I haven't even said I'd marry you yet....I just don't think it would work."

Ben:  "Tomorrow, then.  We'll get the blood test tomorrow."

Just like Tom in 500 Days of Summer, he can't seem to hear what she's saying.  Or he just doesn't care. Or he hangs on to the hope that his persistence will win in the end.  And, for Ben, it does.

He rescues her from a forced marriage - after it's over - but, as they sit on the bus together, it's clear they postponed the inevitable call to action with a little drama of their own, but now they still have to decide what to do with their lives.  It's a thrill to do something anti-conformist, but they didn't solve anything.  They're still stuck.

Creating a comedy or a tragedy is dependent on the ending.  Stop on a high note, and it's a comedy.  Stop a little later when it takes a downturn, and it's a tragedy.  For that, why some call this a comedy - much less a screwball comedy - is beyond me.

B+

500 Days of Summer

I watched this for the second time and like it much better, but I still don't love it.  I do love the fanciful bits of filming:  the dance number with cartoon birds, the buildings turning into drawings and being erased, the numbers with different levels of darkness in the sky, and the beginning caveat in print.  I like the out-of-orderness of it that makes it more realistic as a memory.  The story is original and compelling.  So what's the problem?



Tom and Summer meet.  She says lets keep it casual.  He falls in love and is tormented when she dumps her.  The first time I saw it, I couldn't stand it because of Tom's annoying neediness - that he didn't listen to her words when she said she didn't want a relationship, that he thought little things were signs that she was falling for him, regardless what she told him, and that he can't cope without her.  It's just too frustrating to watch him.

After a second viewing, I'm no more sympathetic to him, but I like how he's explained.  He's a product of too many cliched romantic movies, and he's taken his cues from fantasy instead of seeing what's right in front of him.  His blind date spells it out for him, but he still can't see it.  And by the end, he still won't learn.  He's a romantic, and I think we're supposed to admire his tenacity and hopefulness, but the ending was still annoying to me.  It's believable, for sure, but it's bad enough watching it unfold in real life.  Many of us make the same mistakes over and over like we're on auto-pilot.  It's painfully tedious.

But there are some lovely little touches throughout the movie and some entertaining supporting characters that make it worth a watch.

ETA - I like it more now that I know JGL felt the same way about his character:

B+

The Weekend

Andrew Haigh's The Weekend is a lovely movie.  It's about a one-night stand between two men that turns into more, but is doomed because one of them is leaving the country at the end of the weekend.  It illustrates that the length of a relationship isn't correlated with its intensity.  At all.

It's similar to Before Sunrise in that aspect - another favourite of mine.  I also liked Before Sunset, but I worry that a third (possibly in the works) can't work as well.  Once people are together for a time, once they're stable, then the story isn't as interesting.  Then it needs peripheral characters to keep the action going unless someone's dying - or, god forbid, having babies.  Maybe they'll get a cat.  Another Year is a good example of a film about a comfortable stable relationship. It got good reviews, but I found it boring.  And it wouldn't be watchable without the weird friends coming and going.  

There are a few very realistic discussion in The Weekend about the annoyance and difficulty of being gay in public.  It's not as dangerous as it once was, but it's not entirely accepted either.  There's a perception that it's easier in the US, and he's going to find out.  

Both men reveal a practice of tracking relationships - one in writing, and the other on tape as an art installation.  The art aspect reminded me of another excellent film:  Me and You and Everyone We Know.  Miranda July plays an burgeoning artist who films people talking about photographs or pieces of their lives.  It's actually worth it just to see the different things she films - like her shoes talking to one another or the game she plays walking down the street.  But I like quirky.

Me and You is also about the difficulty of connecting - the push-me-pull-me of first meeting, the  resisted desires that can mess up an otherwise enjoyable life.

Movies about Affairs

I watched three excellent movies that, by chance, have a similar theme that affairs are terribly dangerous things yet sometimes necessary to preserve our sanity.

Broken Embraces

A poor woman (and sometimes prostitute) hooks up with an old rich guy for the purpose of getting her dad some medical care. He becomes obsessed with her and pretty much owns her. After some years, she has an affair with a man she really loves, so the old guy destroys the lover's career. This is a beautiful movie, and it's very easy to see how each character got swept up in their role. It's also all about filmmaking and writing, and the creative process in general with nods to Orson Wells.

Little Children

A bored housewife is married to a man weirdly obsessed with one specific internet porn character. The housewife hooks up with a stay-at-home dad. They have sex while discussing how pretty his wife is. What's with the mundane conversations during sex? That's not sexy. Maybe it's to show that their hearts aren't really in it. They reference Madame Bovary who also coped with a boring life by messing around. The affair here isn't out of love, it's just a coping mechanism, a way of distracting them from grieving a fantasy life cut short by children. So at the end the characters re-think it all even though their marriages are troubled at the outset. All the relationships are a bit messed up.

But this movie's really about perversion and desire. Many people on the street have different sexual desires. We are pretty accepting of some these days to the point that we admonish those who don't accept differences. Our desires aren't within our control, so they aren't to be questioned: homosexuality, transsexuality, pornography.... But we draw the line at pedophiles. Of course there's one on the street - the creepiest depiction of a pedophile ever (who was once the teen-hearthrob at the left there). And an ex-cop whose wife just left him becomes obsessed with harassing the guy. There's a good scene in a restaurant with the pedophile on a blind date with a woman who's on meds after a breakdown. They lament how people want you to just get better and be normal in the snap of their fingers. They connect in their knowledge that it doesn't work that way. Then he gets creepy again.

I Am Love

The main character (Emma - another nod to Flaubert) is a bored housewife in a very wealthy family empire. She hooks up with her son's friend as they connect over cooking. It reminded me loosely of Like Water for Chocolate because of all the scenes in the kitchen. I loved that Tilda Swinton looks like a real middle aged woman, yet is depicted as desirable.


SPOILER ALERT

Her son figures out what's happening in a scene very similar to a scene in Little Children where the unfaithful character's wife flashes back to all the little signs of the affair in the middle of a dinner party. He storms out of the party followed by the mom who shoves him, and he falls and dies. She grieves briefly, then uproots her life to be with her true love. She is understood solely by her lesbian daughter who has only come out of the closet to the brother who just died. The daughter gets that we have to follow our heart, not social convention.

I can totally believe someone would have a affair with someone much younger. But I can't believe she'd ditch her kids for him. They're pretty much grown up, but she really risks her relationship with them by doing this. The only one who was bothered by it, died, but that solves that problem in too tidy a way.

But what if your heart leads you away from your children, whom you also love? Does romance trump mothering? Or is that a selfish move? Little Children, the American film, suggests it's selfish. The other two (Spanish and Italian) suggest romance is all that really matters.

I lean towards the kids. I think I can live without romance. I'm not bored by being home because I also write and paint and do everything I would be doing without kids. I sometimes say my life would be better, but I think that's just an excuse for not doing enough with my day. Really, when all the kids are away, I'm not more social or productive than otherwise; I just putz around on-line. But then again I've never been loved like the women in these films.

Has anybody?

Escapes

I'm always amazed when I come across similar ideas over and over in various places. I was in a bookstore and just flipped through a book that caught my eye: Anti-Cancer. Because of my family history, I have an on-going interest in new cancer theories or discoveries. But that wasn't what caught me. It was this:  Three groups of mice had tumours grafted on to them.

"One month after the graft, 63% of the rats that had received shocks but had learned to avoid some of them by pressing a lever had rejected the tumor. The rejection rate in this group was higher than in the control group (which had not undergone shocks), in which only 54% of the animals had rejected the cancerous cells. On the other hand, only 23% of those animals subjected to electric shock with no means of escape managed to over come their cancer. The helplessness of their situation had, it seems, hastened the tumor's spread....It isn't stress itself that promotes cancer development; it is the persistent perception of helplessness the individual has that affects the body's reaction to the disease."

So we're actually better off to be stressed out, but sometimes see an avenue out, than to never be stressed at all. So the fact that we're in a doomsday scenario these days what with the environment, the economy, and the proximity to 2012 and all, isn't a problem if we can see a direction to move in that will benefit our situation.

My question is, with situations much more complex than a shock that can be avoided, do we actually have to be able to help ourselves, or is it enough to have the illusion that we can help ourselves? Is believing that we're doing something the same as escaping the problem? And what if we just stop caring about the problem? Do mice ever acclimatize to the shocks? What if the shocks were minor at first then gradually increased?

And if I escape the problem by watching movies regularly, is that triggering the same cellular activity as if I actually escape the problem by avoiding the pain in the first place perhaps by no longer reading or watching the news?

I thought of these questions as I watched Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It's a gorgeous film. Several of the characters are trapped. An older woman is in a dead relationship but decides it's too late to move on, so when she meets a younger woman just starting a sparkless marriage, she tries to convince her to end it now. The older woman is being shocked and trying to escape by focusing on the other woman, projecting her pain elsewhere. The younger woman is being shocked but tries to get used to the pain. The others are in a triad that works well, a new member is a buffer muting the shocks betwen them. But when she leaves, they have to escape one another. And she is naturally restless so escapes all experiences before they get too painful, but thus endures a different kind of pain. Do all methods of escape count??

Until I just IMDB'd the film, I forgot it was written by Woody Allen. The dialogue made me think it was written by someone whose first language wasn't English. Everyone speaks in a very formal, grammatically correct way - how we might write to one another, but not how anyone I know ever speaks. That felt awkward, and I'm not sure what effect he was trying to achieve there. It's not something I've noticed in any of his other films. Beyond that, I could watch it over and over. But I'm a sucker for Woody.

Canadian Content

I saw three movies lately that are all Canadian-ish. So, I'll be like the CBC and play up the Canadian content. (Very few spoilers - a bit in the very last sentence.)

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to try to be a good man and how to discern what that really means. Men don't have much in the way of really positive role models. To what extent can a guy successfully tease less, yell less, shove and kick less, without a strong alternative offered that doesn't come across as wimpy? Then I saw this beautiful film, Lars and the Real Girl. Don't avoid it because it's about a guy who dates a blow-up doll; I promise they don't have sex (she's religious).

(Ryan Gosling was born in London, Ontario, then grew up in Cornwall.)

The part of the film I want to download and play on a loop is when Gus, the older brother, is explaining to Lars how to know when you stop being a boy and actually start being a man:

"Well, it's not like you're one thing or the other, okay? There's still a kid inside but you grow up when you decide to do right, okay, and not what's right for you, what's right for everybody, even when it hurts.... Like, you know, like, you don't jerk people around, you know, and you don't cheat on your woman, and you take care of your family, you know, and you admit when you're wrong, or you try to, anyways. That's all I can think of, you know - it sound like it's easy and for some reason it's not."

The best part of this speech is he says it all as he's making dinner, then continues after he excuses himself to do some laundry when he hears the dryer buzz. Being a man is not about being the most powerful, being waited on, being the one who can take on all others or the one who gets to call all the shots. It's about being strong and courageous enough to do what's right. That's really hard work, and it's not acknowledged enough when someone rises to the challenge. But it's also not about being perfect. It's about trying your damnedest to get it right once in a while.

The next movie had a fascinating depiction of a not-uncommon triangulation between mother, son, and husband. Ages ago I bought the movie Spider out of a bargain bin. Then the other night, by chance, I decided to give it a try. I had just made it through Eastern Promises, which is brutal but very good, and I needed something to take my mind off it before going to bed. It was a Cronenberg double-bill. Spider, the main character, just got released from an "insane asylum" to a half-way house. As he scribbles in his journals, the film flashes back to his childhood to when his problems first started. As he hit puberty, he started to see his mom as a sexual being, and his dad as the cause of the change, the one who turned this woman from a doting mother into a "slut," actually believing his dad killed his mother then brought home an impostor to live with them.  It's all very Freudian.

(David Cronenberg was born and raised in Toronto.)

It's necessary to see people in three dimensions. I don't believe we can love in part - that we can decide we'll love only the bits we like about a person and hate the rest. We have to love the annoying or disturbing parts too. We all get to a point when we see our parents as human beings separate from us. It can be a difficult step, and many never quite make it.

Being a mother often includes being nurturing, caring, warm and loving. Being a woman often includes being sexual and sensuous, even enjoying a bit of hedonistic excess. But can we be accepted and loved when we're not in our desired role?  That's the trick.

Finally, I saw Juno. What a delight. I actually think the soundtrack with songs by Kimya Dawson really made the film. It's got a fantastic female lead, and the love interest is a guy who's reserved but not passive. He actually shares his feelings without looking ridiculous, and he refuses to be stepped on. In a nutshell, girl meets boy, girl ditches boy, girl makes an effort to get boy back again. But what hit home for me was how she got him back.

(Both Canadian!)

Relationships can't always survive hanging on to a few initial expressions of affection: the poems and letters, home-made trinkets, or even a three-month-salary ring.  We sometimes need on-going reminders of acceptance and concern; we need gestures.

Not much beats a mailbox full of tic-tacs.