Nebraska

directed by Alexander Payne (2013)

Nebraska was my first VIFF gala and what a great way to start off the 2013 festival. I predict Oscars for both Alexander Payne, and Bruce Dern - at least nominations, if not the actual awards.

It's such a warm, touching flick.  At times hilarious, while others will make your heart all squishy. I liked it so much, when I got an invite to a promo screening, it was a no-brainer to see it again. I enjoyed it just as much the second go round, but I took more notice of the values it both criticized and exalted.

It's a beautifully human film, that visually stuns with Phedon Papamichael's Walker Evans style, B&W cinematography.  He packs it full with long static shots of endless prairie vistas and medium shots of small town, and rural life, that imbue the stark imagery with a retro longing quality for times gone past.  It made me oh so homesick and nostalgic for the prairies. It has a lovely instrumental soundtrack too, produced by Mark Orton and the rest of the Tin Hat Trio rebanded, (as Tin Hat), for the first time since 2005, to create their varied takes on American roots music.

Alexander Payne is known for his relationship tales, and usually they involve more upper and middle class protagonists - this one is a little more down to earth in portraying rural farm folk, and small town people, but it still contains the same acerbic criticism, and upholding of certain values of Payne's other flicks. There's a privileging of the values of the have mores, over the lesser blessed. And although there is much criticism, ultimately, the ideals of patriarchy and it's egoic concerns, are implicit in the content and resolution of conflicts within the plot.

The plot is simple.  The Grants are a small family of 4 living in Billings Montana: David, an electronics salesman, (Will Forte), his older brother Ross, a local news caster (Bob Odenkirk,) their parents, Kate, a former hairdresser, (June Squib), who is a reductive caricature of the foul mouthed, and hostile nagging female, that constantly hectors everyone, especially the silent and stoic alcoholic father, Woody, (Bruce Dern) who suffers from the effects of Alzheimer's. Woody believes that he has won $1,000,000 through a magazine sweepstakes mail out, and wants to collect his winnings in Nebraska, since his family is unable to convince him that the sweepstakes is a scam.  Much of the humour in the film is through the interactions with their extended family. Woody is the youngest of 7 brothers, and his brothers never left the small town of Hawthorne, Nebraska, where they grew up.

What struck me most in the film, was how selfish everyone was regarding their actions with one another.  Everyone kept a ledger that was very unbalanced, noting only where they gave, and not when they benefitted from the generosity of others. This attitude reflects the American ideal of the so called self made man, which in turn gave rise to the disconnected nuclear family, all of which are based on the hierarchical patriarchal mode.  There is criticism of this mode, but acceptance of its primacy is ultimately supported through the actions of the characters.

There is a exploration and dismissal of the value of fairness in the film too.  There is a distinct differentiation between wealth that is perceived as earned or unearned.  The recognition of fairness is something that is innate, and not just to humans - we are born with a moral capacity to judge others for their behaviour around fairness, and William Damon's 1970's studies demonstrated that equality bias in how children would rather something of value be destroyed than see it unfairly divided.  The operational modes that dismiss these values are supported by many factors and over the course of the film the justifications and reasons behind the foibles of the main characters are revealed.

Stacy Keach's character Ed Pegram, reminded me of my father with his aggressive macho posturing.  Pegram was a prime example of the selfish perspective - yeah this is a the nature of being human - we see everything through the lens of our own needs, but in this instance the relative wealth of his old partner became intolerably unfair.  As Ed puts it, the windfall money Woody didn't even earn - it wasn't right that Keach didn't have a stake in it.  From his perspective, he had given more to Woody than he got, so he was the victim!  The fact is, when you look at things from a relative perspective, it's always possible to cast oneself in the poor unfortunate category, vis-a-vis another.  And doing so justifies selfishness.  It's just as easy to see yourself as better off, but that will generally create discomfort, and since the idea of fairness is so ingrained, we come up with reasons to justify inequity - based on merit and personal accomplishment.

When Will punches Ed in the face, I guess we're supposed to cheer at the old bully getting his comeuppance - an eye for an eye and all that.  But the way Ed's face fell when he saw how carefully Woody folded the letter and placed it in his pocket, it was apparent that Ed understood that he'd been being needlessly cruel to an old befuddled man.  Ed looked ashamed.  This could have been a moment for transcendence of the violence as a resolution to conflict model, but no. David's measured and deliberate response plunges us back down into the usual old egoic macho competitive concerns. David defends his dad's honour and decks an old man.  The young bull pushes the old one out of the dominant position.  It doesn't represent any kind of change really, just a change in who's doing the bullying.

What are the roots of the silence and stoicism of the Grant men?  Could it be they are all PTSD traumatised from their war experiences?  Could the very model of masculinity that demands they maintain a dominance over the earth and everyone else in their lives, women and children included, and also a similar control over their devalued "feminine" feelings be the cause? When one of the wives tells Woody that his brother has an injured foot. The brother's response? "It's ok.  It just hurts."  Rigid gender roles do hurt - men and women both. The Grant cousins Bart, (Tim Driscoll) and Cole, (Devin Ratray), delight in showing dominance over their cousin David's leisurely drive to their town from Billings.  They operate out of a competitive, zero-sum, paradigm.  You're either on top, or on the bottom - there's no such thing as equality.  In addition to being of lower consciousness, they're low status too - unemployed, and most troubling, they're also convicted sex offenders doing community service for rape - though they and their mother deny that reality.  And of course the denial of rape culture is very strong everywhere, but especially in this conservative family values community, the acceptance of men hurting women seems to be par for the course.  In fact there is a de-facto acceptance of violence in many forms, though from the females it's more verbal.  Kate is very vicious in her treatment of everyone - she's always been a bitch as Ed flat out tells David. Women who exert any form of power, especially sexually, well they're sluts and bitches ain't they?

The old homestead, that was hand built by the grandfather with the help of his brothers, had been abandoned and left to moulder back into the land.  The value of family helping one another  - these are what Payne seems to be championing throughout the film, that mythical past of living on the land, "salt of the earth" as Kate references one family, is not a lost utopia either.  Here too, there's rot in the foundations of that patriarchal model.  When Woody is in his parent's bedroom, he says "I would get whipped if they found me in here." He seems oddly nonplussed when he says, "There's no one here to whip me now."  The reins of power in the hierarchical patriarchal model are those very same same whip hands that subjugate.

And the satisfying moment in the film where you discover how much Woody wanted to be the provider of THINGS for his sons - sure he wanted a truck and a compressor, but mostly he wanted to leave the money for his boys.  He was ashamed that he had failed to provide for his grown up sons, long out of the house and living their own lives.  David tells him he shouldn't worry about that, they're fine and he turns the tables and provides for his father those totemic objects of desire.  The satisfying resolution of the film is when Woody gets to act as if he won a million dollars; he's driving down his old hometown streets in his prize winner hat, waving to the folk and leaving them with the impression that he's now a rich man.  What does this illusion support?  The idea that what other people think is MORE important that truth.  That it's a pretty great thing to pull a fast one, and have the appearance of relative success, then lord it over the folk and community you abandoned before you take off with all that supposed unearned wealth. Of course it's just a fantasy version of doing that, but there's still something really smug and soulless in taking pleasure in the idea of simultaneously thumbing your nose and humble bragging about wealth.

And what of the road not taken?  Ed tells David he wouldn't have been born if not for his intervention - Ed was the one who convinced Woody to stay with Kate instead of leaving her for the woman he loved - as Ed describes her "a halfbreed from the reservation."

There are only 2 instances of POC in the movie, this off hand and derogatory mention of a Native woman, and a scene where Woody goes to the garage he used to own.  The first reference is a brief example of the NDN standing in for freedom and spiritual truth, which of course patriarchy does not allow.  Hohum.  In the 2nd, there are 2 Hispanic, presumably Mexican immigrant men working in Woody's old garage and Woody's attitude towards them is judgmental.  He dismisses them, saying "They don't know what they are doing."  This is an almost invisible recognition of the racist realities of rural white bread America's hostile reaction to the increase of POC in the population.

One of the most poignant scenes of what could have been, arises near the end when Woody is driving through the town saying goodbye.  He passes by Peg Nagy, (Angela Mcewen), the woman he dated before he met the woman he'd spend the rest of his life with, and the expression on her face at his leaving was one of tender longing and contemplation for that imaginary life of love they could have had.  Made my heart rise in my chest.

There was one scene that I had to ask the writer Bob Nelson about after the gala screening. Towards the beginning of their travels to Nebraska, David and Woody pass by a double locomotive with the engines coupled in opposing directions.  This was such a perfect visual metaphor for the way Woody was at odds with his family, I wondered if Nelson had written it into the script.  He hadn't, and he couldn't tell me whether it had been a deliberately created scene, or just one of opportunistic synchronicity.  I lean towards the latter, but who knows, because there were a lot of visual puns, one which made me chortle aloud, when Woody and David take a leak on the roadside next to an farming irrigation apparatus.

No they aren't peeing here:P

Nebraska is a road trip flick and that style of film always brings to the fore, the issues in the relationships between the folk on the journey.  The strength in Payne's film derives from his understanding of the mysteries of family - how we can fool ourselves into thinking we know and understand our loved ones completely. Especially the roles of family can be barriers that keep us from seeing our family members as wholly unique and complex. We are all many faceted and often present only a slice of ourselves in interactions. With some people we are merely acquaintances, or coworkers, to others life partners, to our parents and our children, we will too often be confined in the dynamic of child or parent.  But really, we are capable of being much more whole in our interactions with all people, not simply presenting an aspect of who they expect us to be.

The movie emphasises the value of love and support for your family, for good or ill, and that can be problematic if that enables selfish or self destructive actions, but honouring the values of acceptance, forgiveness, and above all love, are generally speaking, practices that have the potential to create a better place for everyone.  I think the film overall is more an exploration of problematic values than supportive of the status quo, and it's really such a great flick in terms of the performances that I can't in good faith do anything other than highly recommend it.

Delivery Man

directed by Ken Scott (2013)

I was trepidatious some about going to this, leery that it was going to be awful like all those terrible sitcom like, bumbling man, sexist comedies, Seth Mcfarlane and ilk, like making, so I almost bailed on going, especially since my husband didn't want to see it. I decided to go though, because I was pretty sure it was a remake of Starbuck - a film that got great buzz the year it screened at the VIFF. And yeah, it is a remake and it's even written and directed by the same guy, just transplanted from a Francophone Montreal locale to a more marketable NYC English language setting.

Vince Vaughn is a bumbling man child in this, but he's a doofus with an arc, and yeah it's the usual guy gets serious about shit when he's about to become a parent tale, but this flick adds in the so ripe for hilarity complication of his having to deal with 533 biological children wanting to meet their sperm donor dad, known to them only by the ID "Starbuck".

I liked it. I've always liked Vince Vaughn, even in his asshole roles, since I think he's a cutie-pants sweetheart, but especially that his character in this is a lovable fuckup, is something I can relate to.  I'm really comfortable identifying with the characters who stumble and struggle eh? :P

It's a fun movie with the a sweet message about family values, and doing the right thing. Sure it's got a happy ending, but what's wrong with that? Every movie doesn't have to be all traumatic and dramatic to have some deepness. Yeah, it's a male lens on parenthood too, but I'll overlook its white bread, falsely presented, middle class positioning, in favour of it's over arcing messages on the importance of love, accepting, redemption, and family.

The chubbed up Chris Pratt, is really funny as the best friend lawyer, and I'm pretty sure I saw Patrick Huard, (who played Starbuck in the original), in a small uncredited cameo. And I'd say seek out the original too, if you'd rather hear this story told on a smaller, culturally specific, scale - en Francais.

Ender's Game

written and directed by Gavin Hood (2013)

I read the Orson Scott Card book this movie is based on when I was a teenager, but the only thing I remembered clearly was the arc of the boy becoming a Nietzschean superman soldier, and how he ended up shrugging off that training in the face of his encounters with the supposed enemy bug race.

The movie pays short shrift to that transformative end, and is basically a bunch of Harry Potter kid soldiers in kamikaze training school, who spend most of the flick playing zero g quidditch laser tag.  It's a bombastic pro-military recruitment flick, and its fascist, or would that be speciest?? mentality was way to ugh for me.  I found it specious for sure, and even though the effects are great, it's actually pretty boring.  I liked the portrayals of bullying and social engineering, but the best part for me was seeing all the tough little guys in the movie.  Ben Kingsley has a small role as a Maori with honorific facial tattooing and he looks awesome.



On the way home from the movie, I passed by a launch party for the latest release of Call Of Duty Ghosts.  And it struck me that this is exactly the crowd the movie was made for -  it's bound to appeal to the kids and other folk with childish black and white morality toolsets, who are into playing war games.  It's a natural fit, since I think they buy into the horrible idea of killing being honourable, especially when that murder has been justified through the idea of othering the enemy to be inhuman. Also, through the emphasis on "national defence", which too often is doublespeak for aggressive offense, of course.  Unfortunately, it's a sad truth that a majority of people have been indoctrinated in these terrible beliefs worldwide, and this movie does more to reinforce that mentality than plant the seeds of peace and redress briefly referenced in the coda.

In any case, Orson Scott Card is a raging homophobe so I'm glad he's not getting ANY money from the proceeds of the movie.

Gravity

written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón (2013)

I was born shortly before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, so I grew up steeped in the mystique and glamour of the astronaut. I think every kid of my generation had dreams of being an astronaut, at least until we realized how much talent and work that would entail. This movie is about as close as you can get to the experience of what that would actually be like in terms of the amazing visuals. For sure, it's a gorgeous, spectacular, technical achievement, but I don't know that it's a very accurate portrayal of what those space folk get up to task wise though. In fact I doubt that it is, because it for sure isn't accurate in depicting how I imagine astronauts would behave under the circumstances presented in the flick.

Sandra Bullock commands the most screen time, but she's framed as a doofus in comparison to the mission commander played by George Clooney. It's his last mission and he's channeling his usual charm of the cock of the spacewalk, and has oodles of experience compared to the neophyte startrekker, Bullock. She was recruited to install some kind of medical scanner of her design, that has been repurposed for space use, so she's a genius engineer.  As Clooney says, NASA doesn't waste it's time on uselessness. However she sure doesn't act like she's got any brains in her head for much of the flick. I kept thinking, did she even go to astronaut school? She's mentions that she had 6 months of astronaut training, but whatever for that, because the whole movie she's bumbling her way through one crisis to the next, doing DUMB things. I kept groaning at the way she was written. It was just way too much like misogynistic, WOMAN DRIVER bullshit. Especially since there was no need to have her making stupid mistakes either - the beauty of a space tale, is with the setting being such a hostile environment, things could just HAPPEN without the need for human error.

Bullock's character does have an arc - she's lost a child and since then has been living a very circumscribed life - just working.  Not living to work, or working to live - work is the only thing that keeps her going.  So literally and virtually, she's lost in space. And the way this is resolved I found irksome too, because when she regains her will to live, through a spiritual moment - she gives credit to CLOONEY, for choices she makes on her own. Ok, these are aspects of spirituality that I can get behind - to honour the ineffable and have a sense of awe or transcendence, also a feeling of connection to the people we love who have passed, and it's great too to recognize that we don't do anything on our own, but build on the work of others.  Unfortunately,  I thought that the movie framed these spiritual truths in a very dualistic male/female manner with her being the ignoramus and receiver of edjumacations - the usual humble female role thang eh?  

And there was also the fact that the first guy to die - the red shirt - well he had a brown face. And the bad guys in this could have just been asteroids, or circumstance,  but NO - they're RUSSIANS cluttering up the orbital areas of the earth with their malfunctioning space junk. Too sexist, too white, too Manifestdestiny Pro-American. Still it looked real good, and it's exciting as hell. I think it's going to be especially enjoyable for those not prone to notice its embedded disdain for women.

I just found out about this short film made Alfonso Cuarón's son Jonas - he's also the co-writer of Gravity.

I really liked seeing this mirror perspective to the same scene from Gravity, because in the film, I didn't understand the language of who it was she was talking to when she was undergoing her egoic death. I had assumed he was Chinese, maybe a Laplander. I had an inkling it was somewhere Northern because of the dogs, but that was just guessing. What I did understand was that he was a simple man who had a family. And what's the point of this scene? I think this high tech flick about a women who is not in touch with her needs, contains this portrayal of Native People because the Cuaróns are using them to represent a "natural" life style, where human relations are paramount over ego, and its concerns for achievement.  That's what movie folk tend to use us Indigenous types for anyhow - spiritual shorthand for living in balance with nature. This is something that is a timely and important value, and since it's a concept that is so undervalued in current society, the fact that the NDN's are invisible is actually quite appropriate.

Further thoughts based on a comment I left on  Outlaw Vern's Gravity review :

Spoilers….I had a lot of problems with Gravity and they all related to gender. I really didn’t like how incompetently Bullock was framed in context with Clooney. She was always doing STUPID stuff,  at first being the stumbling, bumbling, screaming, female being rescued and hauled around by Clooney, and then doing her usual flustered lady thang, in reaction to the implacable relentless monster – space. After some thought though, and after seeing the short film Cuaron’s son did – it shows the conversation Bullock has with the guy on Earth from his perspective – I came around to understanding that aspect being a direct result and possible subversion of patriarchal gender values. Yes, the way she was portrayed had too much of the awfulness of gender stereotyping, but she could just as easily have been a male character. I think the choice of casting the role as a woman was deliberate: not because women are incompetent compared to men, but largely because patriarchal values read women as having a higher humanistic capacity BECAUSE of their gender and life giving caregiver roles.  It’s more the norm for women to have feelings, than to repress them, and for them to be vulnerable and grow is also more acceptable. That these aspects of herself were parts she had lost and rejected, set the arc of her character's growth, and framed the moral message of the film - to reify the importance of our connection to others, the earth and the environment. In some ways it might have been more of a push back against gender stereotyping to have a male character transforming this way, but I think having a woman navigate the vacuum of space jockey ego achievement, gave more strength overall to the rejection of the patriarchal systems that puts so much weight on things that have very little to do with the rest of society. True her return could also be read as her failure to get er done up there, and a call out to "get back to the kitchen and make sammiches",  but that's a small mind response, and really what's more important than making sure our kitchen - the earth - is looked after, and each other too.

The Book Thief

directed by Brian Percival (2013)

This was a really well made adaptation of the award winning novel by Markus Zusak. With the great performances and high production values in this WWII coming of age period piece, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets tons of nominations once the award season rolls around.  I enjoyed it while I watched it, and took pleasure in the ways the story was clever with the construction, making note of all its pointed writerly references. What's the title of the rescued banned book read to the Jew hiding in basement? The Invisible Man of course :)  Death as the narrator, voiced by Roger Allam, had some of the most poetic and beautiful lines.  And it's definitely got book loving as its hardcover core value, but its greatest strength is in terms of showing the development of a writerly personality.

The girl, played by Monsier Lazar's Sophie Nélisse, can't read, but she's got a brain and she works hard to learn with the help of her foster father - Geoffrey Rush in one of his sweetest roles ever.  He's not a bastard for a change!  He paints her an alphabet wall in the basement, where she can chalk the words she's learning in one of the best depictions of DIY dictionary use ever.  (The Color Purple and Nettie's homemade post it notes is another good one.) It's the foster mom that's the shrew with the hidden heart of gold that shoulders some of the antagonist work until the real bad guys show up. (Nazis in case you were wondering, duh.) And that stereotypical female role, with Emily Watson wielding the sharp tongue of the witchy wife, paired off with her sadsack husband, that leads me into the area of criticism.
The story is super sentimental with fairly shallow characterisations of most of the supporting roles, and it's trying to be profound, but I didn't buy its using a backdrop of genocide and fascism to dramatise a very personal story.

For starters, I didn't like how it had the mom being all megabitch.  Hohum for positive depictions of female power. But especially the fact that it was another case of whitewashing history is what irked me.

There's a heavy handed metaphorical moment where Mein Kampf gets it's inner pages painted out so the girl can put her words there.

Yes that's such a sweet idea eh?  And of course it's a humanist perspective too - a book of hateful ideology repurposed for creative use - but I also think it's a dangerous one.

It's analogous to the scene where the Nazis are burning the books they see as degenerate - the ideas which the regime figured were dangerous to their ideology.

But you can't and shouldn't try to erase or skew historical truth!  It's such a revisionist view of Nazi Germany too.  Very similar to Life is Beautiful, which I also found offensive in terms of presenting a false view of the reality of the horrors of Italian fascism.  By implication, we're supposed to believe that all those Germans were of the same mind as the protagonists, or that there were sooo many of them with their morals and ethics held hostage by their crazy leaders.  And while there's some truth to that on an individualistic level, for the most part it's a goddamn lie.  And that kind of lie is the most insidious of all, because it allows us to keep on accepting bullshit ideas and excuses for NOT behaving in human ways to one another.  It's the system man!  What can you do against an evil amorphous bureaucracy? Howl at Hitler in the safety of an echo chamber? shrug. The truth is we ARE the system; it's made up of all of us acting in concert in ways that exploit and dehumanize others.  We're all complicit in that we benefit from the suffering and exploitation of many many people.  Just one example: the people who made the technology we're using to read this are, at the very least wage slaves, if not actual slaves!

Yes, there are repressive regimes where it's dangerous to display your opposition, but I prefer stories that showcase the bravery of open resistance.  While I understand the fear that keeps people silent in the face of injustice,  I think it's sad and retro to make heroes of people hiding their beliefs under a bushel because of the hostility of the dominant culture.  Because really,  Silence = Death; the death of the opportunity for a dialectical process that leads to change, and in truth, actual death.  Othering, hatred and genocide didn't end with WWII eh?


The best thing you can take away from this flick is the importance of using your voice to speak out on anything that matters to you.  Just doing that creates space for others to do the same.