Beverly Gray's Blog: Beverly in Movieland, page 70

Galileo Blasts Off for Mercury (Freddie, That Is)

When I was in Cuba last December, our group enjoyed hearing a wonderful choir. At a recent music festival, we were told, they had performed Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Did they know there was a new American movie by that name? “Oh yes,” said the choir director. “But it hasn’t yet arrived in The Package.”  The Package (or “El Pacquete Semanal”) is a collection of digital materials—American soap operas, movies, pop music, and the like—that since 2008 has been sold each week on the Cuban underground as a substitute for broadband internet. The source of these compilations is apparently unknown, but some theorize it is actually the Cuban government, making a buck while winking at the notion of revolutionary cultural purity.
I wonder what Fidel Castro would have thought of Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of a Zanzibar-born Parsi who, having changed his name to Freddie Mercury, became an English rock god before dying of AIDS. I know I personally enjoyed the film, but it flunked my acid test for greatness: I rarely thought about it the following day.
Bohemian Rhapsody, of course, is one of eight Oscar nominees for Best Picture of 2018. Which puts it in the company of such intensely artful, deeply imaginative films as Roma, The Favourite, Black Panther, and BlacKkKlansman. (The idiosyncratic spelling of that last, much as I admired it, is slowing driving me crazy.) Like Vice, Bohemian Rhapsodyis a biopic, shining a light on an influential figure of the recent past.  Like A Star is Born, it chronicles the goings-on of the pop music industry. Like Green Book, it touches on the plight of an outsider whose musical gifts allow him to transcend the usual restrictions placed on others of his kind.
Much of the negative press about Bohemian Rhapsody—and there has been a great deal—involves snarky insinuations that this film has falsified the twists and turns of Mercury’s life and musical career. I did not grow up in the era of Queen, and so I can’t pretend to know what is accurate and what is not. Perhaps the details of the story we see on screen are as bogus as star Rami Malek’s prosthetic teeth. The fact that actual Queen bandsmen Brian May and Roger Taylor have executive music producer credits on the film may be what’s keeping the band’s story seeming so remarkably benign, even despite the lead singer’s sexual and other shenanigans. (Surely this is the most supportive group of sidemen ever captured on film.) By contrast, the role of Mary Austin, Mercury’s once-girlfriend and lifelong best friend, is a sort of mysterious blank; though Mary, as portrayed by the lovely Lucy Boynton, remains sympathetic, there’s no clear sense of what keeps her around throughout the years. The events depicted in Bohemian Rhapsody fall into a conventional sort of “and then I wrote” progression, but no one can deny that Malek’s portrayal of Mercury has an energy and a boldness that brings it alive. Will he be honored with an Oscar as the year’s best actor? Signs point to yes.
I can’t leave the topic without pointing out that the members of Queen, unlike such earlier rockers as the Beatles, were not scruffy lads from blue-collar homes but rather middle-class youngsters with college degrees. Guitarist Brian May, for one, earned a PhD in astrophysics, and served as a science team collaborator with NASA’s New Horizons mission. Not only did he contribute his scientific perspective; he also (natch!) wrote a song honoring the probe that was on its way to Pluto. Too bad it wasn’t heading for Mercury.

The Favourite: Three’s a Royal Crowd

Today, because we’re living in the #MeToo era, we’re well accustomed to seeing powerful men indulge themselves by making the women around them bend to their will. In The Favourite, by Yorgos Lanthimos, who had previously amused and puzzled filmgoers with The Lobster, #MeToo is stood on its head. The film’s chief female characters are anything but helpless victims. Instead, the eighteenth-century women played by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are rude, crude, and very much on the make. No shrinking violets, they gravitate toward power, and know how to use sexuality (as well as belligerence and guile) in order to get it. Unfortunately for them, each is determined to replace the other, in a struggle that becomes increasingly grizzly as the film wears on.
How curious that their target is not only another woman but one of royal birth. The historical record tells us that  Queen Anne of Great Britain, the last monarch of the Stuart line, was fated by circumstance to not have an easy time on the throne. By 1702, when her twelve-year reign began, she had lost a beloved husband to smallpox and buried seventeen young children, many of whom were stillborn. Badly afflicted with gout, Anne suffered great pain. As portrayed in the movie by the impressive Olivia Colman, she was a vain and indecisive woman, easy prey for the domineering Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), who advanced her husband’s military career and her own social standing by effectively making policy on Anne’s behalf.
Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, is a genuine historic figure, an ancestor of both Winston Churchill and Princess Diana. I suspect that Abigail, the character played by Emma Stone, has no such historical roots. Still, she fits nicely into Lanthimos’s portrayal of the British royal court. The daughter of a down-on-his-luck aristocrat, she has the smarts and the breeding to succeed at court, even though she starts as a lowly scullery maid. A tart tongue and a shrewd grasp of the court’s power dynamics gets her into the presence of Queen Anne; flattery and sexual wiles keep her there. But like Sarah, she is not destined to achieve contentment. That’s part of the price you pay when sucking up to royalty: you can easily be replaced when the monarch moves on to something (or someone) else.
Colman’s portrait of Queen Anne is a deeply memorable one, though it’s doubtless not the final word on Anne’s achievements. There’s evidence she took serious interest in affairs of state, and did at least some good while on the throne, serving as a patroness of theatre, poetry, and music. She subsidized the career of one of England’s greatest composers, George Frederick Handel, and knighted Isaac Newton in 1705. But basically The Favourite left me relieved that my own nation is not subject to the whims of an hereditary ruler, nor to those of the courtiers who (at least temporarily) find favor in royal eyes. Still, Americans have come to know what it’s like to be under the leadership of someone who is mercurial, impetuous, and susceptible to flattery. Which is one more way that The Favourite, a tale of eighteenth-century England, seems all too appropriate for the United States of America in 2019.
 As always in British films of this ilk, production values are dazzling, though the movie is also marked by Lanthimos’s occasional oddball aesthetic choices. Period costumes and music vie for our attention with graphic nudity and strange, grotesque moments (like some choreography with moves that look suspiciously like break-dancing) that remind us we’re in the 21st century after all.

Rock Needs River: Are People Who Need People the Luckiest People?

Once when  I was on an airplane with my small blonde daughter, a nosy fellow passenger studied the romping toddler (airplanes weren’t so crowded back then), and asked, “Well, is she home-grown or is she off the shelf?” So stunned was I by the implication that my child wasn’t biologically my own that I had no snappy comeback. But I realized in an instant that adoptive mothers and fathers must face this a lot: the need to confirm that they are the “real” parents of their own children.
Naturally, the movie industry loves a good, schmaltzy adoption story. What could be more engrossing than a tale that highlights a character’s search for identity along with the desperate quest for someone to love?  Adoption stories offer so many angles: those of the would-be parents, the birth mom and dad, the child who needs a welcoming home. Depending on the perspective, an adoption story can be heartwarming or perhaps tragic. Or maybe a bit of both.
Among recent films that deal with adoption, I can immediately think of three. Juno, from 2007, sees adoption through the eyes of a very young birth mother. As indelibly played by Ellen Page, Juno is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who accidentally gets pregnant by an equally naive classmate. Still a child in some ways but surprisingly mature in others, Juno decides that abortion is not for her, then sets about finding the ideal adoptive parents for her baby-to-be. The couple she chooses turn out to have problems of their own, but there’s a happy ending for the right prospective mother. And Juno, her problem solved, is glad to go back to being a kid.
There’s a more ambiguous ending to two 2018 films. A documentary, Three Identical Strangers, concentrates on three young men who discover themselves to be identical triplets, separated at birth. It’s the sometimes painful story of what it feels like to discover parts of your history that have long been a dark secret. Then there’s Private Life, in which writer/director Tamara Jenkins captures her own struggle as part of a couple desperate to have a baby. In the film, Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti are rapidly ageing creative types who have tried every sort of fertility treatment in hopes of producing their own little bundle of joy. They explore adoption too, but have already faced a cruel blow: a young birth mother who strung them along, then inexplicably disappeared from their lives. Eventually they decide to get their hopes up yet again.
Adoption is on my mind because I’ve just finished reading Rock Needs River: A Memoir of a Very Open Adoption, by my colleague, Vanessa McGrady. Vanessa is the adoptive mother of a delightful little girl named Grace, and her real-life story has more than the usual twists and turns. After many attempts amid some complicated domestic challenges, Vanessa discovered she was not able to carry a pregnancy to term. Having deeply researched open adoption, she bonded with a pair of young musicians unwilling to share their peripatetic lifestyle with their child-to-be. The legalities of the adoption went smoothly, but there came a time when—discovering that Grace’s birth parents had become homeless—Vanessa took them in. Her book, in which she continues to ponder this fraught relationship, reveals how hard it is to be good-hearted, when your sense of obligation tugs at you from all sides. Thankfully, she and Grace continue to thrive, buoyed by her book’s success as well as the tight parent-child bond in which they both seem to revel. Which is, of course, the best kind of happy ending.

Goodbye, Dolly. Well, Goodbye, Dolly . . .

It’s a sad time for those who love over-the-top comic personalities. Carol Channing left us on January 15, less than a week shy of her 98th birthday. Encyclopedias list her as an “American actress,” but it wasn’t exactly acting she was known for. No, she was more accurately described as a personality, someone who was always herself, and a self so distinctive that it could be imitated but never matched. With her long limbs, wide mouth, saucer eyes, and bright cloud of platinum hair, she looked like a cartoon character come to life. And her voice, that boisterous squawk, could have belonged to no one else.
Naturally, the Broadway musical stage was where she got her start. After appearing in some peppy reviews, she took Broadway by storm as Lorelei Lee, a flapper first created by Anita Loos in a breezy popular novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. As the stage’s first Lorelei, Channing got to sing “I’m Just a Little Girl from Little Rock” and the indelible “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” (music by Jule Styne and Leo Robin). It was one of the biggest Broadway hits of 1949, but the 1953 movie adaptation supplanted Channing with a much curvier, more obviously sexual Lorelei. Of course I mean Marilyn Monroe, who was actually billed second to more-widely-known Jane Russell, though not for long.
Channing was back with a Broadway triumph in 1964 with Hello, Dolly! This corny but lovable Jerry Herman hit is adapted from a play by Thornton Wilder, The Matchmaker. Wilder’s tale concerns a widow who sets her sights on a curmudgeonly but wealthy merchant. Object: matrimony. Ruth Gordon (later to star in Harold and Maude) was the widow of that non-musical version. For the musical, Broadway queens Ethel Merman and Mary Martin were approached. Both nixed the role of Dolly Gallagher Levi, but Channing made it a triumph, stamping it with her personal outlandish charm. I was lucky to see her perform the role in Los Angeles. No question that she was having the time of her life. Her antics included waving bye-bye to the audience from underneath the descending stage curtain. You couldn’t help loving her.
Still, Hollywood saw fit to give the plum role of Dolly to another screen newcomer, the 27-year-old Barbra Streisand. The behemoth production covered the back lot of 20thCentury Fox, even enlisting studio neighbors to swell the ranks of onlookers in the big parade scene. That‘s how my mother, sister, and husband-to-be all got to make their Hollywood debuts. I may be showing family disloyalty, but I’ve got to admit that the screen Hello, Dolly! Is a turkey. Happily for Carol Channing, by the time Hello, Dolly! was filmed she had finally gotten herself a good movie role. In the 1967 romp, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Channing plays an endearingly wacky socialite named Muzzy von Hossmere. (It seems to me I recall her being shot out of a cannon, among other things.) Fittingly, she was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress. Though she lost out to Estelle Parsons for Bonnie and Clyde, it was good to see Hollywood acknowledge one of the comedy greats.
Speaking of which, I don’t want to completely overlook the death of Penny Marshall, another inspired comic actress, one whose nasal Bronx-ese in Laverne & Shirley and other shows I’ll find hard to forget. Not just a performer, Marshall made the transition into directing, responsible for such big screen hits as Big and A League of Their Own. As a female director she was a pathfinder, and she will surely be missed.

Dick Miller: A Little Man Who Made it Big

Yesterday I woke up to the sad news that Dick Miller had left this world. Dick—pugnacious but lovable—had reached the ripe old age of 90, but was appearing in B-movies right up to the end. Dick, of course, got his start with Roger Corman, back in the heyday of American International Pictures. His first Corman film was Apache Woman, in which the budget was so low that he was hired to play both a cowboy and an Indian. (As a member of the posse tracking the Indian, he almost killed himself off in the final reel.)  Later he played a jive-spouting vacuum cleaner salesman in Not of This Earth(1957) and a good-guy astronaut in War of the Satellites (1958) before taking on the leading role of would-be artist Walter Paisley in Corman’s ghoulishly hilarious A Bucket of Blood.
I knew none of this when I went to work at Corman’s New World Pictures in 1973. I only knew that this very short, very feisty fellow emblazoned with sailor tattoos was often seen wandering through our office suite, kibitzing with everyone who came his way. He and I hit it off immediately, and he gave me a signed  headshot I tacked up on my office wall. Referring to the location week we’d  both spent in a small California town shooting Big Bad Mama (he played a comically inept lawman), he joked about nibbling on my ear and asking me the all-important question, “What’s for lunch?”
Though Roger had started Dick on his acting career, they didn’t always get along. When Roger decided to make Kurosawa’s classic Yojimbo into a kung fu movie called TNT Jackson, he hired Dick to play a friendly bartender and also to write the screenplay. Accounts differ as to what happened next. Dick felt that one too many free rewrites had been demanded of him; the office scuttlebutt was that Dick incurred disfavor by padding his own role. In any case, there was a shouting match, during which Corman ripped up Dick’s submission. Dick has described for me what happened next: “I finally said, ‘Shove it!’ He got up—without his shoes—and kicked a lamp, and broke it. I heard years later that his biggest bitch was that he had broken the lamp.” Miller’s audacity swiftly won him respect among Hollywood underlings who had been dying to tell their producers to go to hell. But it came at a price: for years afterwards, the two men barely spoke.
Over the decades, Corman alumni have delighted in casting Dick in colorful character parts. For Martin Scorsese, he played a nightclub owner in New York, New York. For James Cameron, he was a pawnshop clerk in The Terminator. When, with Piranha,  Roger turned trailer-cutter Joe Dante into a director, Joe gave Dick the plum role of a crass resort owner whose lake just happens to be stocked with man-eating fish. Dick quickly became Joe’s good-luck charm, appearing in virtually every Dante film, most memorably as the hapless Murray Futterman in Gremlins.
When I started working on the biography that became Roger Corman:Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, Dick was one of the very first people I chose to interview. I knew he’d be both funny and honest—and he was. I last saw him in 2014, at the Hollywood premiere of an affectionate documentary called That Guy Dick Miller. One of its producers was Lainie Miller, Dick’s wife of nearly fifty years. Lainie too is quite a talent: you can see a great deal of her as the well-endowed stripper in The Graduate.
Farewell, Dick, wherever you are!

Jane Fonda Joins a Book Club

Of course, as a woman of a certain age, I belong to a book club. So, while on a recent plane flight, I couldn’t resist checking out Book Club, a film featuring some rather spectacular women of a certain age: Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen. This movie—basically a romantic comedy for the AARP set—touches on the very real challenges of getting older. Like: facing the dwindling of sexual opportunities. And coping with grown children who insist on denying you any fun, just in case you might fall and break a hip. Sometimes Book Club is endearing, sometimes merely embarrassing. But it’s a hoot watching four lovely ladies (who among them have earned four Oscars and six Emmys) hold the screen.
The writers of Book Club surely tailored each role to the actress who would be bringing it to life. The part of a ditsy widow too intimidated to pursue romance is perfectly suited to the talents of fluttery Diane Keaton. Mary Steenburgen shines as a still-cute housewife trying desperately to coax her husband into bed. (Her story contains the largest amount of slapstick and has the least convincing outcome, but I have always been susceptible to her sunny charm.) Wry Candice Bergen owns some lively moments as a federal judge thrown into a tailspin by her ex-husband’s engagement to a Barbie Doll type. Exploring on-line dating, she finds herself encountering some much shorter men, including balding tax accountant Richard Dreyfuss. Finally there is Jane Fonda, as a brittle but very successful entrepreneur who oozes sex appeal but has always dodged marriage.
Fonda looks slim and gorgeous, though (at 81) she’s much the oldest of the four women. She’s also totally convincing, though in the distant past I have tended to find her comedy roles (in films like Barefoot in the Park and Fun With Dick and Jane) rather belabored.  That plane flight gave me the opportunity to explore her life (Thanks, Delta!), because one of the other onboard offerings was a fascinating 2018 documentary, Jane Fonda in Five Acts. This film, made with Fonda’s full cooperation, walks the viewer through her remarkable career as an actress, activist, and fitness guru. The first four acts of the title represent the eras in which Fonda’s life was shaped by men: by her father, actor Henry Fonda; by first husband, filmmaker Roger Vadim; by second husband, activist/politician Tom Hayden; and by third husband, media tycoon Ted Turner. In on-camera interviews, Jane Fonda freely admits that her low self-esteem has long made her susceptible to the influence of attractive males.  With her glamorous but chilly father and with each of her husbands, she strove to remake herself in order to win approval. It was only after divorcing Turner in 2001 that she feels she has come into her own as a woman with her own beliefs, goals, and enthusiasms. It’s ironic, therefore, that Book Club casts her as the gal who has chosen never to marry, until an attractive and persistent man convinces her he can love her just the way she is.
I was struck in particular by two of the film’s revelations. First, that although she admires the wrinkled face of her good friend, Vanessa Redgrave, Fonda lacks the courage to allow herself to age naturally. Yes, she’s had some work done. Second, the disapproval she sensed from her own mother (who later committed suicide in a mental institution) stunted her own ability to show motherly warmth. That’s why it’s largely on her own daughter’s behalf that she has made this film. 

Of Princesses Young and Old

I’m not sure what it is about princesses that have little girls (and many big ones too) so gaga. What is a princess, after all? She has royal relatives, but she does not have the obligation of actually ruling. The big decisions are not hers to make, nor is she the one obligated to function at all times as a dignified symbol of her nation. Instead, her role seems to be to wear nice clothing and look pretty. Outside of the occasional royal duty (like opening bridges and housing projects), her time is pretty much her own.
That’s what I’ve gleaned, anyway, from reading a much-discussed new biography, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown. Brown, a Brit with eighteen other books to his credit, has a wicked wit and seems to know everyone in the United Kingdom. In writing about the younger sister (now deceased) of Queen Elizabeth II, he sets aside the usual trappings of biographies, the tidy and inexorable movement from cradle to grave. Instead, this is a book full of intimate glances at her royal highness, as seen through the eyes of servants, friends, ex-lovers, and anyone else with something to say. This sort of pastiche makes for some surprising discoveries, like the fact that in her heyday, around the time of her sister’s coronation in 1953, she was considered hot stuff. Not only was there the forbidden romance with an older man, Group Captain Peter Townsend, who was both a commoner and recently divorced, but she also attracted lustful attention in some unlikely quarters. Most memorable to me was the fact that the great Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, apparently developed a major crush.
Among Brown’s “glimpses” are some eccentric chapters that are pure fantasy. One describes in detail Margaret abdicating her royal perks to marry Peter Townsend and live with him in a modest farmhouse outside of Paris. Another shows her wedded to Jeremy Thorpe, a real-life British politician who years later would be tried for the murder of a same-sex partner. Still another chronicles a disastrous liaison with Picasso, who painted her in all her glory. All of this is great fun to read, but has nothing to do with her actual much-discussed and ultimately unsuccessful marriage to a photographer (and man-about-town), Antony Armstrong-Jones, who was named 1st Earl of Snowdon once he secured Margaret as his bride.
The  place to relive all of this recent history is Netflix’s ongoing series, The Crown. Margaret is by no means the central focus, but I suspect that by the time the series is over, viewers will see her as the bloated over-the-hill party girl she was to become. For more optimistic views of the life of a princess, it’s best to check out pretty much any classic Disney animated feature (Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty). These films teach little girls that though they may start out in rags and be threatened by evil queens and stepmothers, they’ll ultimately win their crowns and live happily ever after, with handsome princes at their side and dresses galore in their closets. A hipper, more modern variant is Disney’s live-action The Princess Diaries. Then there’s Audrey Hepburn, looking every inch a princess in Roman Holiday (though, it must be said, her Princess Ann would much rather dress like a shopgirl and ride a motorbike through Rome than attend to the protocol expected of her). Finally, and most romantically of all, there’s Robin Wright looking every inch a royal in The Princess Bride.
Now I think I’ll return to gazing at myself in a mirror, and fantasizing a royal crown.

Buster Scruggs: The Ballad of Oscar Morning

The morning of the Oscar nomination announcements always brings its share of surprises. This year, as always, gives us plenty of delights and disappointments: I’d personally bring more attention to First Man, and not forget about Widows so completely. But it’s a good list, marked by an international flavor that’s rather new. Look at all the love for Roma, a foreign-language film that’s both spectacular and, well, arty. Not only was first-timer Yalitza Aparicio nominated as Best Actress (along with beloved veteran Glenn Close), but the relatively unheralded Marina de Tavira was singled out for her complex portrayal of the mother of a Mexican family held together by its nanny. I’m also surprised by the attention given to a Polish film, Cold War, whose Pawel Palikowski was nominated in the Best Director slot that most had considered reserved for Bradley Cooper (A Star is Born).
Among my favorite nominations: Spike Lee, a first-timer who has long deserved Academy recognition, has finally gotten it for BlacKkKlansman. And I’m gratified that the expected acting nods for Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant in Can You Ever Forgive Me? are augmented by a nomination for Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whity’s smart, witty adapted screenplay. In the same category, there’s a delightful surprise: Joel and Ethan Coen have been nominated for adapting several short stories for their mostly-original compilation film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
The Coens, who’ve been writing, directing, editing, and producing movies since 1984’s Blood Simple, are perhaps best known for Fargo and No Country for Old Men. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is one of their lesser efforts, which hardly means it’s without merit. The Coens are capable of being hilariously funny. (See one of my all-time favorites, Raising Arizona.) But their sense of humor tends to be dark, and they also have a real affinity for the grotesque. (Wood chipper, anyone?) It’s the grimmer side of their work that shows itself off in Buster Scruggs. The opening tale in the film, featuring a sweet-singing, fast-drawing cowpoke, has its ludicrously funny side, as when its hero lives out the thrust of its Oscar-nominated ballad, “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings.” But the laughs soon become more hollow as each succeeding vignette seems more ominous than the one before. The ending of “Meal Ticket,” about an impresario touring the old west with his unfortunate main attraction, is sad, and Zoe Kazan in “The Gal Who Got Rattled” just about breaks your heart.  By the film’s final segment, “The Mortal Remains,” we’re in haunted territory, with a fadeout that’s eerie and unforgettable.
Most of us have, at some point in our lives, listened to spooky tales around a campfire. Such tales can raise the hair on the back of your neck, and make you wonder what’s lurking in the shadows. Ghost stories are disturbing, and yet we must admit we enjoy getting the shivers, contemplating our mortality in ways we wouldn’t do in the light of day. Sitting in the dark of a movie theatre is another great way to safely experience the more ominous side of life. That’s one reason horror films have never gone out of style. My former boss, Roger Corman, knew that fact well, as did the makers of movies like one of 2018’s most effective (and pretty much Oscar-ignored) movies, A Quiet Place. Back in 1945, a British compilation film called Dead of Night gave a lot of people the creeps. (Its most famous segment features a ventriloquist and his all-too-human dummy.) The scares in Buster Scruggs are quieter, but won’t soon be forgotten.

“Green Book”: Driving Mr. Daisy

I’m firmly convinced that as an actor Mahershala Ali can do just about anything. I first became aware of Ali in 2016, via his role in Barry Jenkins’ award-winning film, Moonlight. Ali played a South Florida drug dealer who befriends a needy young boy, and the supporting actor Oscar he took home is a testament to his uncanny blend of tenderness and menace. To my surprise, he also popped up in a second 2016 film, Hidden Figures. In that paean to the role of African-American women within America’s space program, the drug dealer had evolved into a straight-arrow military man with romance on his mind. Yup, once again he made me a believer.
Now comes Green Book, in which Ali has me accepting him as a classically-trained jazz pianist, being chauffeured around the Deep South by Viggo Mortensen’s dese-dem-and-dose blue-collar Italian, at a time when segregation is still in full swing. Naturally, the two have nothing in common at the start of their journey, but are fast friends by its conclusion. Green Book is intended to be heartwarming, and many people (including the Golden Globes voters of the Hollywood Foreign Press) have found it just that. But I must admit I’m not one of this film’s greatest fans.
You see, although I buy Ali as  a piano virtuoso, I have a hard time with his performance away from the keyboard. It’s really not the actor’s fault. Though this film is based on a true story (and is co-written by the son of Mortensen’s character), the role of Dr. Don Shirley seems more of a cinematic construct than a human being. Obviously the intent was to portray him as a complicated and fundamentally lonely soul: a man whose skin color cuts him off from the white world and whose classical education makes him uncomfortable among his fellow blacks. The film also touches on his homosexuality, a detail that some of his surviving family members have questioned. Personally, I have no problem accepting any of these basic strands of Shirley’s character, but the screenwriters have hamstrung Ali by giving him language that seems flatly unconvincing. Yes, he’s supposed to be a man of culture, but his dialogue throughout the film is so stiff and formal that he seems less a human being than a walking, talking thesaurus. And some of his behavior—demanding that Mortensen’s Tony Lip improve his diction, insisting on dictating improved versions of Tony’s letters to his wife back home—just doesn’t ring true.
There are lots of other heavy-handed aspects of this screenplay as well. The writers seem to be working extra-hard to make their points about cultural differences. It’s cute that Tony gets Don to try snacking on KFC (and then flinging the bones out of the car window), but can we really believe that a man born and raised in Florida has never in his life tasted fried chicken?
Maybe it’s because screenwriter Nick Vallelonga is Tony’s son, but Mortensen’s character seems as real as Ali’s mostly does not. I’m told by Italians of my acquaintance that those noisy family dinner table scenes are absolutely on the money. Interestingly, while Don Shirley’s relatives have loudly expressed their disapproval of this film, a number of Hollywood’s prominent African-Americans (like the not-easily-pleased Harry Belafonte) have given it their full support. I think they’re glad to see audiences recognize a time when black travelers south of the Mason-Dixon line were not permitted to dine in most restaurants and stay in most hotels. Hence the need for the legendary Negro Motorist Green Book that gives this frustrating film its title.

A Cuban Sundae: Strawberry or Chocolate?

Cubans are crazy for all things Hollywood. There’s no question that their number-one matinee idol is Che Guevara, whose soulful image shows up everywhere. But there’s also passionate enthusiasm for Marilyn Monroe, the queen of the souvenir shops. It’s not so surprising that the faces of these two popular icons make an appearance as part of the décor in Cuba’s most famous homegrown movie, Strawberry and Chocolate. Or, if you want to be a purist, Fresa y Chocolate. This film, from 1993, has the signal distinction of being the only Cuban movie ever to be nominated for a foreign language Oscar. No, it didn’t win: it was up against Russia’s Burnt by the Sun (the eventual winner) as well as Ang Lee’s Taiwanese-language feature, Eat Drink Man Woman. But, as they say, it’s an honor just to be considered.
Strawberry and Chocolate was financed in part by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos,with help from both Spain and Mexico. Given the movie’s Cuban governmental connection, its subject matter comes as something of a surprise. This film, frank in its dialogue and in its depiction of the human body, is basically an exploration of what it’s like to be a gay man in post-revolutionary Cuba. From reading the work of my screenwriting students who have Cuban backgrounds, I know there was a time when to be gay was to be considered an enemy of the state, with consequences that were often horrendous. This film doesn’t go quite so far, but it hardly shies away from revealing the nation’s deeply-entrenched homophobia. (These days, I doubt Cuba has become a paradise for homosexuals, but they do have a powerful public champion in Raul Castro’s daughter.)

Strawberry and Chocolate was shot in the difficult era when Cuba was trying to move past its lucrative former connection with the Soviet Union. The first character we meet, David, is a poor university student caught up in revolutionary ideology. He wants to be a writer, but is majoring in political science because he feels this is the best way to help serve his people. He’s a straight-ahead guy, and a bit of an innocent. His one try at romance has not worked out well.
Cut to a scene at Coppélia, Havana’s famous “ice cream park.” This huge installation, the size of a city block, was promoted by Fidel Castro as a place to provide sweet treats to the Cuban masses at rock-bottom prices. It’s there that David is accosted by Diego, who is waspish, witty, and decidedly gay. He’s also well acquainted with art, literature, and classical music. He lures David to his imaginatively cluttered flat, nattering on about an art exhibit he and a friend will stage through a foreign embassy. Though David has no wish to pursue the acquaintance, his strait-laced college roommate decides that Diego is clearly subversive, and that it’s David’s patriotic duty to investigate him.
The plot of the film, such as it is, does not go where you’d think it might. Fundamentally, it’s a character study of two young men with very different preferences, though an emotionally complex neighbor lady who skirts the law in large ways and small also figures in. From what I saw on screen, the Havana of 25 years ago hasn’t changed much from what I witnessed in person this past December. There’s still beauty and clutter, vibrant people in dilapidated surroundings. To the extent that this is a love story, it’s mostly a valentine to a city and a culture that, despite the quirks of a byzantine political system, are still unforgettable.