WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957): Ingmar Bergman and Loneliness

It is too bad reviewers have done such a wonderful job of making Bergman’s movies incomprehensible to the rest of us.  The attention paid to the symbolism and allegories woven into the movie leaves the impression that reviews were meant for insertion in a college text.  Almost every review, regardless of the movie, mentions Bergman’s existential motif and social realism.  Since even a philosopher like Albert Camus had problems defining what existentialism actually was, most reviewers throw the concept in to gain brownie points with their intellectual readership and hope that no one ever challenges them on it.  Bergman, himself, was somewhat to blame.  He piled the symbolism in so deeply that most viewers almost drown in it.  Yet his movies convey emotion.  If they did not, it would be best to leave them for college professors and other intellectual pretenders.  When reading a review, replace existentialism with the terms loneliness or alienation, and the phrase social realism with disillusion and disappointment - then maybe the critique will make more sense.

 

Wild Strawberries is about an elderly doctor who, while about to receive recognition for his lifetime of service, realizes he’s received no joy out of life.  From his Swedish home, Dr. Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom) decides to drive to the Lund Cathedral to pick up his honorary degree rather than take a train.  His devoted housekeeper of forty years, Miss Agda (Jullan Kindahl), is completely disconcerted by this change of plans.  Miss Agda is so accustomed to planning everything out in great detail that this sudden act of spontaneity causes her to quarrel with her employer.  Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), Isak’s daughter-in-law, is separated from her husband, Evald (Gunnar Bjornstrand), and staying with Isak.  Probably because Marianne was so startled by Isak’s sudden whim to drive, she decides to accompany Isak on his trip to Lund.  While driving to Lund, Isak picks up three young adults (two boys and a girl, probably about college age) who then accompany Isak and Marianne for the remainder of their journey.  And after a car accident involving a bickering married couple, for a short time, this married couple accompanies them in the car ride as well – until Marianne becomes so tired of the bickering and orders them out of the car on the behalf of the “children.”

 

So through flashback sequences, horrific nightmares on the part of Isak, and a visit to Isak’s mother and boyhood home, we find out that Isak’s entire life since childhood has been one of rejection, formality and rigidity.  Isak’s mother is an extremely cold and practical person.  Isak’s engagement with a girl named Sara (Bibi Andersson) ended because Sara was in love with Isak’s wild and irresponsible brother, Sigfrid.  (We learn that Sigfrid and Sara are to have six children together.)  Isak marries, but learns one day that his wife is having an affair.  Isak, by then so used to not feeling anything, does not even care.  And Isak’s son, Evald, has become just like Isak causing Marianne to separate from him.

 

Of the three young adults, the young girl also goes by the name of Sara (and also happens to be played by Bibi Andersson).  She’s a passionate young woman who is torn between her infatuation with the two boys she’s with, Anders (Folke Sundquist) and Viktor (Bjorn Bjelfvenstam).  Anders wants to be a minister, and Victor (always the rationalist) wants to be a doctor.  The two young men constantly argue over the existence of God and even get into a fight over this (showing they are still young and excitable).  Isak is so taken by the three (and especially the young Sara) that for the first time in years he begins to have hope.  That, and through conversations he has with both Marianne and Evald, Isak is able to make amends and bring to life the marriage that Marianne and Evald have for each other.  Evald finally understands that he cannot live without Marianne or the child that she reveals she is carrying.  After the ceremony and the awarding of the honorary degree, the three young adults serenade Isak, and the young Sara confesses that it is he and not the two boys she is with that she will always love.

 

I haven’t mentioned in any detail the nightmare sequences.  In Isak’s dreams, he sees clocks without hands, a horse drawn hearse where a clone of Isak tries to drag him into the coffin, and episodes of his wife mocking him at the moments that he is trying to show her passion.  The dreams are disturbing and a bit too easy to interpret.  It wouldn’t take Freud to interpret their significance.  The importance of the dreams is in making Isak understand how unhappy he has become, and how this unhappiness is still preferable to the indifference he has become so accustomed to feeling.  Both Isak and Evald had described themselves as being more dead than alive.  It doesn’t matter what the cause of this indifference is.  What is important is that the father and son become alive before it is too late.

 

This year, Wild Strawberries will be fifty years old, so it is safe to suggest that it has survived the “test of time.”  And so has Bergman.  Bergman was the son of a Lutheran minister, and we can guess that the mother in this film was Bergman’s real father in disguise.  Bergman’s evocation of Sweden as an almost soulless land where affection and fervor are unknown made him for a number of years unwelcome in his homeland.  If Sweden did attempt to welcome him back, it’s been surmised that this only occurred because he became one of the most critically acclaimed directors ever in movies.  Bergman, with his desire to be a joyous eccentric after years of being barely able to smile, was not comfortable with the perceived Swedish way of life.  Whether this perception of Sweden is legitimate or was conveyed to others in movies like the ones made by Ingmar Bergman is hard to know.  My exposure to Swedes (and other Scandinavians) has been strictly limited to those I’ve met that immigrated to America.  Bergman saw those from his homeland as a people that insisted on tradition and living by the clock – which resulted in an unstated authoritarianism.  The resistance to change and unwillingness to accept others different than themselves was what Bergman satirized.  In Wild Strawberries, he further suggested that only by throwing off such practices could happiness be found.

 

With Bergman’s recent death the usual tributes in the obituaries have been printed, and his career has been praised in the most eloquent phraseology.  Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, in which Bergman released at about the same time, are one or the other often hailed as the greatest movie of all time.  So is Wild Strawberries the greatest movie ever made as has often been claimed?  Probably not: we are never swept away by the epic qualities of the film like we would in watching Gone With the Wind or The Godfather, and it certainly does not have the more universal appeal of a movie like Casablanca.  Sometimes the expressions of the actors or actresses seem a bit too pronounced like we were seeing a silent movie where the message of the characters is conveyed by gestures alone rather than words.  And the innocence of the young Sara and her two cohorts is overstated.  Still, if one is in a thoughtful mood and fed up with the crassness of movies that evoke no emotion at all, Wild Strawberries makes one feel sadness and also some relief that there maybe an answer.  Bergman’s dark story has in the end an element of hope.

 

August 8, 2007

© Robert S. Miller 2007

WALL STREET (1987): Oliver Stone, Greed and More Greed

“Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are different from you and me.”

                                                    F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Rich Boy

Oliver Stone’s father was a stockbroker and that seemed like a sufficient enough excuse for him to make a movie called Wall Street.  Stone always makes movies that are in some way autobiographical.  He was an infantry soldier in Viet Nam, so he understandably directed Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July.  He was addicted to drugs, so he was involved with movies such as Scarface and Natural Born Killers.  He liked the music of Jim Morrison so he made The Doors.  His favorite President was John Kennedy, so he created (and “created” in the most literal sense of the word) a movie called JFK, and his least favorite President was George W. Bush, so he directed W.  Over the last ten years or so his movies that he has brought out have been safer, less controversial and therefore less interesting.  And unfortunately, these later efforts were a great deal more honest than what he used to produce and direct.

Wall Street was probably Stone’s best effort at directing, but that’s not to say the movie lacks a number of flaws.  The movie’s significance was in that it came out shortly after the insider trading scandal involving Drexel Corporation, and it is again receiving some passing interest because of recent events bringing the real Wall Street into disrepute.  The character, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) was probably based upon Michael Milken, and Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) I suppose could have been a young Ivan Boesky.  At the beginning of the film, Bud is the young ambitious stockbroker that would do anything to break away from his working class roots.  Gekko already has broken from his roots and, we are to understand, almost singlehandedly runs Wall Street.  Bud spends something like two months trying to bring himself to the attention of Gekko and finally succeeds by delivering Gekko some Havana cigars on Gekko’s birthday.  After a few failed attempts to impress his idol, Bud finally gets Gekko’s attention by providing some inside information about Bluestar Airlines safety violation that is about to be cleared up.  This information was provided to Bud in confidence by his father, Carl Fox (Martin Sheen), who had no idea about Bud’s association with Gekko.  Gekko then buys out Bluestar with the hopes of great savings by forcing the union to lower its concession demands.  Unfortunately for Bud, his father, Carl, who has strong sway with the union, does not trust Gekko.  Bud nevertheless gets Carl to persuade the union to go along with Gekko.  Only later does Carl and Bud discover that Gekko plans on selling off Bluestar’s assets which would essentially leave Carl and many others out of work.  Bud manages to temporarily outsmart Gekko by creating a plan that will cause Bluestar’s stock price to plunge and thus manipulates Gekko into selling the stock at a much lower price to a rival businessman that will keep Bluestar in business.  Gekko, finding out about Bud’s role in forcing Gekko to sell the stock off, arranges for Bud to be arrested for security violations.  Bud, as a wired informant in return for a lighter sentence, has one last conversation with Gekko (while being pummeled by Gekko’s fists) where Gekko boasts about many other illegal transactions he has been involved in.  Bud is being taken to the court when the film ends, so we are never sure what kind of punishment will be dealt out to either Bud or to Gekko.

We also have a few side stories.  Carl, a chain-smoking mechanic with great integrity, suffers a heart attack probably brought on by many things – not the least of which is his son Bud’s disapproval.  A contrite Bud then tries to make it up with his father as Carl is nursed back to health.  We learn that Bud’s girlfriend, Darianne (Daryl Hannah), was a former lover of Gekko and would sell her soul to anyone for a few extra dollars.  She parts ways with Bud when she learns he values other things more than money.  And Gekko has surrounded himself with some of the most opportunistic bootlickers that must ever have existed.  The moral is fairly obvious: Gekko’s “greed is good” motto comes with the price of not having any worthwhile friends.

I can’t say I’m all that impressed with the acting in this 126 minute film.  Daryl Hannah was uniformly criticized for playing the part of a manikin, but I’m not sure why Michael Douglas should receive that much more credit for completely overacting.  There is probably not a single scene in the movie where Douglas ever exudes anything resembling human warmth, though the script does deserve some of the blame for this.  Charlie Sheen is still a bit too young to play the part.  Probably he would have been more effectively brash if he was five years older.  Martin Sheen perhaps did the best job of acting in the entire film and ends up closest to not being typecast for his role.

Director Oliver Stone is not known for subtlety, and Wall Street is probably his least subtle movie.  That’s not the worst criticism.  It has become fashionable for movie directors to believe in nothing and then pass it off as substance.  At least Stone was trying to say something.  We know Gekko’s motives.  He wants money, and he’s certainly not alone in the world wishing for that.  And Gekko’s interesting.  As in most movies, the evil character is the most interesting, but here Carl also shows some personality and backbone.  The problem is this: with Stone’s absolute insistence that this is a realistic depiction of America’s financial district, the only viewers that will actually share in Stone’s convictions are those convinced that there is a bogeyman behind every corner in America.   These individuals believe there really is a great deal of difference in the spiritual makeup of those that are very rich and those that are poor.  If Stone believes that there is such thing as a soul, it is only possessed by male blue collar workers that actually get their hands dirty with something other than money.  

I strongly agree with Stone that it would be best that we made our livings by other means than moving money from one person’s hands into the hands of someone else.  For many employed on Wall Street, money is a plaything rather than something one had to struggle to obtain.  Greed is destructive.  That’s the point that Carl makes to his son after his son’s arrest.  If money says anything about the value of a person it only demonstrates it in the way we’ve made our money – not in how much money we actually have.  Yet if money is used by some as a tool to belittle others, self-righteousness can also accomplish the same end.  Stone is often guilty of such self-righteousness.  Stone grew up affluent, so perhaps Bud is a somewhat fictionalized prototype of the director.  But Stone’s criticism is so heavy-handed that many of the chief characters in Wall Street come off as parodies, and Bud comes close to being a whiny little jerk. 

There probably are men like Gekko in the world that tone it down a bit because they are not grandstanding for a Hollywood film.  Bernard Madoff for example.  And though these individuals can inflict a great deal of damage, what is probably worse is the unconscious indifference that most of us every day show towards the poor.  For whatever he was, Gekko was upfront about his designs and is easily recognizable.  The other sort of damage that the rest of us afflict is not analyzed by anyone like Oliver Stone because it would require a great deal more thought.

August 28, 2009

© Robert S. Miller 2009

AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999): Yuppie Angst

Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), who narrates to us that he will be dead within a year, is going through a terrible mid-life crisis.  While most middle-aged men respond to this by buying a motorcycle, Lester quits his job as a lowly journalist (though he still has plenty of money to live in an affluent suburb), takes on a job as cashier in a fast food joint, starts smoking dope, and makes plans to seduce a sixteen-year old cheerleader.  His good-looking wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), who apparently is no longer good enough looking for Lester, we are led to believe is a shrew.  She matches the color of her shoes with her gardening supplies showing her obsessive compulsiveness, works hard to be a successful real estate agent, considers her husband a failure and decides to have an affair of her own.  Their sixteen-year old daughter Jane (Thora Birch) feels neglected by her father, wants to have breast implants, and occasionally talks out loud about having her father killed.  Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), the teenage boy who lives next door, who is abused by his father and shows about as much expression as a deer that has died with his eyes open, is in love with Jane.  He shows his love for her by secretly videotaping her from his bedroom window while she’s up in her room.  Ricky sells drugs to Lester on the side.  Jane’s friend, Angela (Mena Suvari), is the cheerleader that Lester would like to seduce.  Angela, apparently ashamed of her own virginity, brags to her friends about all of the boys she has been with and encourages Lester to sleep with her.  By the way, Ricky’s father, Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper), a marine who happens to be a latent homosexual, also has some feelings for Lester.

 It’s fortunate for Lester that he has so much wealth to indulge himself in his vices.  It affords him the opportunity to buy a new Firebird, to exercise by lifting weights, to take any job he pleases, to buy his drugs, and to pursue every passion.  Lester’s also glib enough to sass his way through every uncomfortable situation.  Witness the scripted lines he recites to his wife when he catches her in bed with her new lover.  Only one time does he ever seem to be concerned about anyone but himself, and he shows his concern in such a manner that he cannot be accused of committing statutory rape.  Lester gets Angela into bed, and we get to see him feel her up right before she tells him that she has never been with anyone before.  Then Lester decides that he’s no longer in the mood to have sex with her.  Granted, this is a rather dubious way to express one’s own sense of decency.  Lester’s decision not to sleep with Angela is unrelated to the fact that she is sixteen.  He simply has no desire to deflower a virgin.

But though there are no consequences for any of Lester’s actual acts, there does happen to be consequences for imagined acts that Lester performed.  The Colonel, while spying on Lester and Ricky involved in a drug transaction, misinterprets what they are doing together as a homosexual encounter.  Instead of calling the police, the Colonel decides to deliver a kiss to Lester to let him know that he is also interested.  However, when Lester tells the Colonel that he’s really not into guys, the Colonel disappears only to later return with a pistol that he uses to blow off the back of Lester’s head.  Ricky, who has now made preparations to run away with Jane, wanders in, discovers Lester’s body and somehow almost manages a smile.  The smile we are to assume is Ricky showing his admiration for what Lester attempted to accomplish at the end of his life (not quite like the pained expression I had on my face when this movie finally ended).

One movie critic called American Beauty the worst choice for best picture since Titanic.  Such talk is meaningless because, with all that’s been said about Academy Award Winning Material, it’s hard to explain what Academy Award Winning material truly is.  I can think of twenty-five or thirty movies that have won the Academy Award for Best Picture that were less deserving of its Oscar than Titanic.  There may have been five or six films less deserving than American Beauty.  Winning an Oscar should stand for little in any case.  If a movie is good, people will still care to watch it ten or twenty years from now.  Maybe a movie should aspire to do that rather than just appeal to a limited audience.

Director Sam Mendes aspirations could not have been lofty in making American Beauty.  This movie presumably was made by Yuppies for Yuppies, and it is about Yuppies growing old.  I kept hoping that at some point there would be some kind of revelation.  Undoubtedly it was meant as a black comedy, though the critics have tripped all over themselves trying to sanitize Lester’s behavior.  Lester, they reason, was so desperate for the experience of freedom that he must be forgiven for making a few unfortunate choices.  Yet, outside of an unlikely misunderstanding, Lester was absolutely free to make his choices without any cost to himself.  How else could he have behaved?  Lester could have given all of his money away or simply blown it and lived on the streets.  He could have met with Angela’s parents and have explained his honest intentions for their daughter (thus risking a bullet from them).  He could have talked out his problems with his wife, and let her take leave to pursue the same freedom that he craved.   Any of this would have made him a more noble character than what comes across in the movie.  Or if he really objected to the moral code that prevents a man over forty from sleeping with an adolescent girl, he could have just slept with her and shown himself for the dirty old man that he was (and then served his time in jail).  The farce we are instead presented with that magically resolves their tryst only provides the illusion that Lester really cared about the well being of this emotionally brittle girl.  If Lester really did care he wouldn’t have messed with her head to begin with (virgin or not), and I’m not sure why director Sam Mendes lacks the comprehension to see this.

Now if this movie was meant solely as ribald lampooning, why do we care if Lester refrains from sleeping with Angela, does not return the kiss to the Colonel, or happens to win all verbal exchanges with Carolyn by insulting her?  For sheer antics, this movie is not even close to being as outrageously entertaining as movies, or even the Cheech and Chong recordings, made twenty-five years before this movie was filmed.  This movie does not stretch the boundaries of conventional morality because Lester always becomes conveniently insecure (not to mention inhibited) right when he’s on the verge of doing something more than today’s Hollywood can accept.  All the talk about this movie’s realism (naïve and imagined that it is) is too horribly in earnest as to allow one to believe that this movie was intended as a pleasurable comedy.  This movie has been sold to us as a drama – or to some as an important cultural statement.  Ultimately what it ends up being is cynicism.  Lester is a financially rich man who feels sorry for his self and believes in nothing but Lester.

Having said all of this, American Beauty still tells us nothing about ourselves.  It shows us bored characters but never explains in depth why their lives are so dysfunctional.  Also, it offers no suggestions to relieve the tedium outside of temporary fixes.  It gives us no reason to care what anyone else thinks or feels.  With the portrayal of a character that lacks moral accountability, it gives us no reason to behave with dignity - or with real joy or hope.  If the awards of freedom mean little more than voyeurism, drug-use and borderline pedophilia, we have set our standards for freedom extremely low.

September 1, 2006
©  Robert S. Miller 2006

ABOUT SCHMIDT (2002): About Happiness

“Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” Tolstoy

 

I generally do not care for movies like About Schmidt.  Unhappy characters in movies are often glamorous people in glamorous professions who are married to glamorous spouses, and live in glamorous homes.  If they happen to be poor or alone, feel assured that their situation will predictably change by the movie’s end.  Or, in the case of Titanic, the poor boy will end up on the bottom of the ocean and live on in the dreams of the rich girl he loved.  Anyway, the cause of the person’s unhappiness in a movie is usually a desire that is thwarted by some evil or anally retentive individual.  Abusive or fanatically strict parents (the evil step-mother) in movies are generally the cause of all neurosis.  The shrill and insensitive or neglectful spouse is the second leading cause.  And evil employers who don’t give a damn about their workers, or appreciate the tremendous contribution that the star of the movie usually makes towards his occupation, are almost as common as the evil parent or evil spouse.  About Schmidt is different.  Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) is so much like a thousand other people I’ve known that for once I can almost identify with the lead character in a movie.

 

 On the day of his retirement, Schmidt sits in his office among all of his boxes of documents he has prepared for his replacement and watches the clock.  Schmidt has worked as an insurance actuary in Nebraska for most of his life and apparently he was quite good at it.  A retirement party is held in his honor, and his replacement assures him that he will still have plenty of questions for Schmidt as he becomes accustomed to the new position.  Schmidt’s wife, Helen (June Squibb), looks on proudly, though she probably has never understood exactly what it was that Schmidt did for a living.  Schmidt leaves work with Helen and returns to his nice suburban home that has an RV parked in the driveway.  Schmidt shuffles around the house, eats dinner and lunch with Helen, and we understand that he doesn’t have a clue what to do with his life.
 In response to a television add, he decides to sponsor a Tanzanian boy named Ndugu for just twenty-two dollars a month. Schmidt sends Ndugu a number of letters where for some reason he expressed everything that he was feeling.  Most of these letters Ndugu would be incapable of understanding.  Also, after some hesitation, Schmidt decides to go back and visit where he worked.  The replacement, upon seeing Schmidt at the office so soon after the retirement, is taken aback and not so subtly suggests that Schmidt go back home; he does assure Schmidt that he will contact him with any questions.  Schmidt takes the elevator down, exits outside close to where the garbage dumpsters are located, and Schmidt notices that all the boxes of documents that he had organized for his replacement have now been thrown in the trash.  Schmidt returns home only to find his wife Helen lying dead on the floor after she had been performing some cleaning chores.
 At Helen’s funeral, we meet Schmidt’s only daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis).  Jeannie berates Schmidt for not spending more money on the casket, and we get the feeling right away that she’s not extremely fond of her father.  Jeannie is to be married in the near future to a sales man in Denver, and we can guess right away that he’s not much of a match.  Shortly after Helen’s funeral, Schmidt takes off in his RV in order, so he says, to help Jeannie out with the wedding arrangements.  Jeannie is not pleased with this offer of assistance and orders her father to return back to Nebraska until the time that the wedding is actually to take place.  However, rather than return to his boring existence, Schmidt decides to drive his RV around for a few days and take in the sights.  He stops at an RV camp and encounters an almost unbearably upbeat couple there.  At one point, while alone with the wife while the husband is off buying beer, he talks to her about his life and finds solace.  Unfortunately, he misinterprets her sympathy to be affection, gives her a kiss, and she loses her temper and tells him to get out.
 
 Schmidt finally goes back to Denver for the wedding and stays at Randall’s mother’s home.  Randall’s mother (Kathy Bates) jumps into the hot tub with him while she’s nude.  This understandably scares Schmidt away.  Schmidt also meets Randall’s father, his father’s new wife, and Randall’s brother.  Neither Randall nor the rest of his family are exactly what Schmidt had in mind for his daughter.  However, when Schmidt broaches the idea with Jeannie that she might be making a mistake marrying this “nincompoop,” Jeannie tells him to either act like a proud father or else go back to Omaha and stay out of her life.  She feels that her father, who for so many years had been emotionally absent from her life, was now in no position to give her advice.  Schmidt honors her wish and does behave, and he gives a toast at the wedding where he praises all of the new family members that truly horrify him.
 
 Schmidt returns to Denver and finds a letter from the orphanage where Ndugu has been staying.  The letter is written by a Catholic Nun, and it explains how Ndugu has been doing and about his recent recovery from an illness.  It also contains a picture that Ndugu has drawn in crayon.  Schmidt is so moved  by the colorful drawing that he breaks into tears.  Probably, he comprehends that Ndugu with so little at his disposal has created a drawing with more life in it than anything Schmidt had created in his sixty-five years.
 
 Socialist movie critic, Joanne Laurier, refers to this movie as honest criticism and satire (which it is).  The depressing sights and information that Schmidt is exposed to during his pilgrimage point to a depersonalized and sometime sick culture.  However, Ms. Laurier feels that the film is weak because the problems presented tend to be more blamed on personal failings “rather than on a failed society and failed culture.”  This seems to be a mantra with her.  In reviewing the movie Kinsey, she suggested that it was misguided to assume liberation through the elimination of “sexual ignorance,” and instead suggested “liberation is first and foremost a political and economic act.”  Without meaning to take Ms. Laurier’s words out of context, About Schmidt demonstrates that political and economic liberation in itself does not bring fulfillment.  Schmidt was for all practical purposes politically and economically liberated.  Through this capitalistic system that Ms Laurier would undoubtedly assail, he now had enough money to see and learn anything that he wanted.  He could financially assist his daughter if necessary and, more importantly, he had enough money to contribute to a private charity that had meaning to both Schmidt and to Ndugu.  As far as political liberation, the RV he owned was a symbol of a freedom as he could travel to anywhere he wanted with it.  Yes, there is irony in Schmidt being an actuary.  However, in Socialist countries where 80 percent or more of one’s income goes to the government, I’m guessing they would be in need of actuaries as well – and the need for truck drivers, warehouse men, bureaucrats, union members, etc.  It’s unfair to view the problems presented in this film specifically as an American phenomena because characters like Schmidt can be found elsewhere as well.  And it speaks extremely little of men to suggest that their problems are a product of a “failed society and failed culture” because we have the capability of being so much more than automations manipulated easily by outside forces.
 
 I admit that Hollywood is generally at its worst when it portrays the differences of rich and poor people.  In a Hollywood fantasy lack of money accounts for little.  Poverty seems to make the poor virtuous.  Rich people in Hollywood movies are often troubled, and we are supposed to feel sorry for those idle rich who have nothing else to do but travel the world and seek adventure and lurid romance.  But as dishonest as this portrayal of society can be, it is even more dishonest to blame class differences for every failing.  It’s a failure to achieve personal rather than economic or political liberation that has made Schmidt so unhappy.  A little more money or a little less money would have done nothing to bring him serenity.  It is his attempt at personal liberation through the speech he made at his daughter’s wedding and through his letters and contributions to a charity that have given Schmidt his first chance at happiness he probably never before had.   No system of government could have dictated this outcome for him.  This may be the saddest movie that I have ever seen because it is so real.  I know many people, rich and poor, in the same situation as Schmidt.  Yet it gives a key to a man who in the end understands how terrible and ordinary his life has been.
 

September 1, 2006 
©  Robert S. Miller 2006

United 93: An Open Letter to a Critic

I watched United 93 the first week after it was released.  I was interested in seeing what other movie critics thought of it, so I read a large number of them.  Most reviewers portrayed it favorably.  Richard Roeper went so far as to call it the best movie so far in 2006.  A couple of reviewers had more neutral responses.  They felt that the movie was well done technically, but that the director of the movie took few chances because he did want to risk offending any group involved in the 9/11 tragedies.  One reviewer gave a negative review because he did not think we were yet ready for a movie on the subject.  This, of course, is absurd.  You either make a well thought out movie or you do not, and the time of release will not affect the quality of the movie either way.  And then there was the review of Keith Ulrich of Slant Magazine.  I think he saw a different movie than anyone of us in the theatre happened to see.  He hated it.
 
A copy of his review can be found at:
 
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=2208
 
I thought United 93 was a well-done movie that I have no desire to see again.  I wasn’t put off by the topic or the style.  I knew what the movie was going to be about when I went into it.  I tend to agree with the more neutral reviewers.  The movie was not offensive to anyone and that I felt was its shortcoming.  It didn’t change my mind about anything concerning the events that happened back in 2001.
 
Still, the movie deserved more than what Mr. Urlich was willing to give it credit for.  He gave it one-half star out of five.  I didn’t care if he was overly critical.  I’m picky, too.   What I saw in his movie review was a dishonest attempt to bring credit to himself.  Thus, on May 4, 2006, I sent him the following e-mail:
 
 Dear Mr. Urlich:
 
 As acknowledged in your review of United 93, you certainly do as a viewer respond to the work in any way you “deem fit.” Maybe you should be less proud of this.  You are being disingenuous if you believe this purely negative review is more than a need to bring attention to yourself.  Peppering your review with terminology such as synergy, hagiographic, or clusterf**k, makes your review feel “hopelessly bogus” and “thrown in” to create a “dishonest sense” of your own pretended superiority.

 You say there is “no moral center” to the movie, and yet you make frequent references to the manipulations and bias of the moviemaker (by the way, a movie far less manipulative than Academy nominated movies such as Munich and Crash).  I’m guessing it was because the movie was not obviously manipulative that you claim that a moral center was lacking.  As evidence of a “contrived and utterly offensive dramatic hand” you reference the hanging of a picture of the Capitol on the cockpit controls.  You fail to mention that the viewer would have missed that scene if he happened to take even two seconds to grab a handful of popcorn.  I’m curious about what kind of mental process you needed to engage to convince yourself that this movie turned “victims into heroes and adversaries into monsters.”  The names of the victims are never uttered once during the entire movie, and the director bent over backwards to portray at least one of the hijackers as a human being.  Even you would have to acknowledge that terrible things did occur during the hijacking.  This movie did show that the “adversaries” took the lives of certain passengers, but it would be difficult to dispute that this was not factual.  Nor do I remember any member of the audience exiting the theatre in anything resembling a “Pavlovian sort of rage.”  Thoughtful movie goers (the type generally in attendance at a movie such as this) are not prone to such reactions.

 The movie was not a masterpiece, but I’d give it three out of four stars.  I agree that some of the scenes on the ground were not artistically polished as compared to the scenes on the plane, but this does not mean that those scenes were inappropriate.  You were wrong about Ben Sliney’s acting performance since he did come close to conveying the same emotion he probably would have felt back on 9/11.  From reading your review, I feel you are either expecting perfection from a movie or else are trying to make a name for yourself by penning a rejection of a picture that most people felt was worth while seeing.  Since the last paragraph of your review was emotionally overwrought, and since you piously lament the fact that only 10 percent of the opening week proceeds are going to the United 93 Memorial fund (a fact irrelevant to the quality of the111 minutes of film content), I’d have to go with the later conclusion.

Hopefully, you will write more genuine reviews in the future.

Sincerely,

Robert S. Miller
 
 
 For some reason, I have not heard back from the gentleman.
 

 July 13, 2006 
 © Robert S. Miller     2006