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Perdóname

“How’s your Spanish?” Alan Rickman’s Jamie asks Juliet Stevenson’s Nina in Truly, Madly, Deeply. What follows is one of the most poignant scenes ever captured on film, in which Rickman recites a section of the Pablo Neruda poem, “La Muerta.”

When I first saw the movie in 1990, I was alone in the theater (it was a weekday matinée and I was playing hooky from somewhere). It was a good thing I was on my own, though, since I wept so openly and so unashamedly throughout the entire movie that I am sure I would have alarmed anyone sitting nearby. Since then, I have seen the film many times, and each time I have cried until my eyes were nearly swollen shut.

Alan Rickman - Truly Madly Deeply poem

It is the finest film I know about grieving, and, while the screenplay is superb, it is the acting that sets it apart. Stevenson’s work is sublime, but here I wish to say something about Alan Rickman, who died yesterday at 69 of cancer. An extraordinarily gifted actor, he had the capacity to find in himself, and share, a very deep humanity.

In his role as Jamie, he plays a ghost who returns to his beloved so he can somehow lessen her outsized grief. It is no easy task to persuade an audience that you have come back from the dead to comfort your stricken lover, but Rickman manages to infuse his character with such deep feeling that I could not help but believe absolutely that he was as real, as vulnerable, and as flawed as I was.

If only he could return to us one more time with a few words of comfort while we mourn his very great loss.

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(For a Spanish/English version of Neruda’s “La Muerta,” click here.)

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A boatload of ★ s for the film A Hijacking

Hijacking

The 2012 Danish film A Hijacking (Kapringen), which I watched recently on Netflix, is, hands down, one of the best movies I remember seeing. Filmed in the Indian Ocean aboard an actual ship, the movie centers around the hijacking of a Danish cargo vessel by Somali pirates; yet, it is more a movie about how we come to measure the worth of a human life than it is about a particular hijacking and ransom demand, and it is more a movie about “us” than it is about “them” as we are compelled from the opening scene on to examine our preconceived ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral.

Søren Malling is mesmerizing in his nuanced performance as Peter, CEO of the company that owns the commandeered ship. A crisp, lean businessman and a master negotiator with a steeliness that might have rendered him a one-dimensional boor were he to have been played by a less-accomplished actor, Malling’s Peter is instead a man of compassionate, albeit conflicted, feeling who is forced by impossible circumstances to make impossible choices.

These painful choices, which include dragging out the negotiations for four months with the pirates’ negotiator Omar, never seem to be motivated by self-interest or greed though. Even when he behaves badly, as he does when he screams at his devoted wife to leave the office, we understand that his outburst comes from utter fatigue and can imagine that afterwards he will likely suffer immeasurably for this lapse into cruelty.

Similarly, Omar—played deftly by Abdihakin Asgar—defies pigeonholing. One moment, he is a menacing and sadistic terrorist; the next he is a shrewd businessman who is embroiled in the dirty affair because he needs to feed his family. The same is true for Peter’s negotiator, Connor, who, dressed in a disorienting Berkeley sweatshirt, never becomes the cold manipulator we would not be wrong to expect. Instead, Gary Skjoldmose-Porter, a real-life hostage negotiator without much, if any, acting experience, brings to the role an understated nobility and pathos.

To reflect the enormous strain the characters feel over the course of months, director Tobias Lindholm has created a movie that is ice-floe slow, claustrophobic, grimly realistic, and edge-of-the-seat suspenseful. Not once does he kowtow to an audience’s baser appetite for bloody violence, slick action, or glib answers to unanswerable questions.

Watch this interesting YouTube interview with Lindholm and Malling.

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“Hideously beautiful”

Scarlett Johansson Under the Skin

Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi horror film Under the Skin is not for everyone, but, once seen, it seeps and settles.

The film stars Scarlett Johansson as the alien femme fatale who is somehow birthed onto the west coast of Scotland for the apparent sole purpose of hunting down lonely men in her white Ford Transit and luring them back to her dark, oozy flat. What she does with them once there we cannot know for sure, but evisceration seems to be a part of it.

Yet trying to understand its precise meaning is a fool’s errand because the power of the movie is in the evocative: in the dark, rainy streetscapes; in the dialogue that sounds sieved through gauze; in the menacing soundtrack that is like “a locust plague of dry tremolos, the strings pressing down until the sound has reached a roar.”

Or in a startling erection, a hand pierced by a rose thorn, a vacant stare above blood-red lips, a rapist gone silent and scared.

What is most potent about Under the Skin, though, is its insistence on showing us at every turn the terrible and terrifying power of sex — a power we little understand, and one that awakens in us that which is at once alien and deeply human.

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It’s a matter of chemistry

Reel TalkI’ve been to three of the four Reel Talk events hosted so far by ReCreative Spaces, a dynamic organization dedicated to building community by offering “short-term, arts-oriented programming in unused, under-used, and unlikely spaces” throughout the DC Metro Area.

Each time I’ve come away with the sense that something very important had taken place for all who attended, something to do with building a better world a handful of people at a time.

The series offers participants a unique opportunity to watch a feature-length film on a topic of social importance—such as the impact of global warming on the planet or the effects of poverty on children—and then to engage in thoughtful, free-ranging conversation about it with the goal of articulating some concrete steps they might take to bring about positive change in their communities. At the heart of each event is a delicious meal prepared lovingly by a local chef—a meal that helps those attending forge new or deeper friendships with the others.

Something very special happened at last week’s Reel Talk, though, that made it stand out for me, something to do with a subtle chemistry at work. First, there was the dynamic Emily Arden—co-founder with John Kagia of ReCreative Spaces—and her capacity to make magic wherever she goes. Next, there was the exquisite, and exquisitely simple, meal prepared by Chef Tim Meadows of Nurish Food & Drink, which is located in the Anacostia Arts Center and which is where the event was held. Then, there was the movie itself, A Place at the Table, which offers an unflinching look at hunger in the US and sheds light on the fact that one in four children doesn’t know where his or her next meal will come from. Last, there was just the right mix of thoughtful, creative, articulate, socially conscious people with the heart and will to foster change.

Of course, the irony wasn’t lost on any of us that we were eating such a special, nutritious meal while children not far from where we sat were going without supper. But, this fact seemed to bring us closer to one another and to open up the possibility that we might find a way to reach out and to help the hungry children in our very own neighborhoods.

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Life is a frolic

The dancing satyr

For the past few weeks I have been visited occasionally by what I can only describe as a half-heavenly image of a flying-haired, bushy-eyebrowed satyr — were he to be crossed with Nigel Hawthorne’s mad King George in a diaphanous nightdress.

Sensual in substance and form, the apparition involves a meadow romp in which he and I are holding hands and dancing round and round in a clockwise circle. Knees high. Laughter spilling. So ineffably a thing of the spirit, I dare not write too much about it for fear it will not wish to return. Still, I can see that it is a signpost pointing me in the direction of my earthly future, one in which I throw off the notion that life is a vale of tears and I am its wailing wall.

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Yo is me

note on windshield

Some weeks back, I discovered a note on the windshield. “Yo dipshit,” it began. “Next time leave me some room to get into my car!” As if I had purposefully parked to annoy. I was only for a moment incensed at having been  misunderstood and wrongly accused. Then, I found I wanted to plead my case: “but…but…but.” Then, I thought about mortality and eternity. And how we humans, the very smallest of dipshits all, get so much so wrong so often. I, myself, have been known to leave angry, judgmental epistles on others’ windshields—always certain that, whatever the trespass, it had come about through intentional inconsideration. I am very hard on others—but no harder than I am on myself.

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Two years!

Two years ago today, I wrote my first Ruminationville piece, “Underthinking is Overrated.” Typically not one to stick out difficult commitments for the long term—except, of course, the commitment of motherhood—I am amazed that I have managed to keep something going here. I can only attribute it to the quiet support of those who have been following me over these many months. Each time I sit down to write, I think of you…and of never wanting to disappoint. Here’s to another year, or two, or four!

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Me

her-joaquin-phoenix

Spike Jonze’s new film Her is an exquisitely tender paen to fragility and a whisper of a cautionary tale about what can happen to our humanity even when we think we are looking. Set at some point in the not-too-distant-but-just-distant-enough future, the movie is billed as a love story between a man (Joaquin Phoenix) and his operating system (given voice through Scarlett Johansson), yet to describe it in this way is to reduce it to a cartoon we can snicker at and then dismiss.

In fact, the audience was pin-drop quiet, and certainly I have not been able to stop thinking about the story, though less interesting to me is the idea that we are more and more lost to our Machines. I know this to be true the minute I step out on a busy street in Washington, DC, and find nearly every last pedestrian with his or her head bowed to a handheld phone. Or check my rearview mirror at a red light only to see that the person behind me is reading or sending a text message. Or watch with horror as I fill my own lonely evenings with empty Internet surfings launched on my multiple electronic devices.

More compelling are the high-waisted pants worn by Phoenix’s character, Theodore Twombly, which left in me such a mournful impression that I have only to call up the visual image to feel the grief it evokes. Its power, I think, lies in the space between the top of the pants and Theodore’s shoulders — just enough to give the sense that shoulders and waist would nearly meet if life were to bend him one bit further.

…

The day after I saw Her I found myself thinking about a joke I had not remembered for years, the one that goes like this: A mild-mannered Midwesterner arrived in New York City for a vacation. Somewhat bewildered by it all, he approached a taxi driver with great caution and was heard to ask, “Excuse me, sir. Can you tell me how to get to Times Square, or should I just go f*@! myself?”

Originally from New York, I split my sides when I first heard it; yet, I think I would have found the joke funny no matter my origins. For me it was either laugh — or break.

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Sergio and Carolina

sergioLast week marked the ten-year anniversary of the death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, High Commissioner for Human Rights and Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations in Iraq.

At the request of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice, and Kofi Annan, De Mello—the “go-to guy” for overseeing some of the world’s most difficult peacekeeping missions in Cambodia, Bosnia, Congo, and East Timor—went to Iraq on June 2, 2003, with a team of other UN experts. The goal, it appears, was for them to come away with recommendations about how to end the US occupation of the country expeditiously.

On August 19, a suicide bomber ran a truck packed with explosives into a Baghdad hotel where the UN offices were housed. Twenty-two people were murdered, De Mello among them, and hundreds more were injured. To this day, little is known about the perpetrators of this heinous act.

Writes his colleague and partner, Carolina Larriera, currently a Harvard University fellow, “And now, ten years later, victims, survivors, family, friends and thousands of  ‘in house’ officials still do not know the exact circumstances of the attack, the motives of the perpetrators and the criminal and moral responsibility of those who allowed and enabled the attack, a critical starting point in the healing process of the terrible wounds generated by this bombing. Instead of medals, we would have preferred the truth; we do not want the facts to be buried under the weight of institutional bureaucracy.”

At a time of growing outrage over secret government surveillance programs that capture the private data of ordinary Americans in the name of national security, it would seem that we have an opportunity to be honest about and to “shed light on the context and aftermath of the Baghdad bombing.”

We owe Sergio, Carolina, and all of the others affected by this tragedy that much.

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Movies taught me everything I know, alas

all mine to giveLast night, I watched all of All Mine to Give on TCM, and it was not an easy thing to do. I rolled my eyes for 103 minutes, and, when it was over, I vowed to express my vexation in writing. I was not so much bugged by its melodrama, though it was hard not to giggle at the overacting, backlot sets, and emotionally leading music. Happily, cinema has evolved. I was bothered more by the idea that movies like this helped to shape my sense of the world and the part I was required to play in it.

Set in 1856 America, All Mine to Give (based loosely on a true story and originally titled The Day They Gave Babies Away) tells the tale of Scottish émigrés Robert and Mamie Eunson (played by Cameron Mitchell and Glynis Johns), who settle in Wisconsin at the invitation of a relative, have a litter of six children, and succumb to diphtheria and typhoid fever, respectively.

On her deathbed, Mamie tells her eldest son, Robbie, that he must find good homes for each of her soon-to-be orphaned children. After her death—and on Christmas day, for crying out loud—he sets out in the snow to deposit his brothers and sisters in homes he has chosen for them, and he does so without first conferring with the adults who are to assume this burden. “Sure,” they tell 12-year-old Robbie when he appears out of the blue on their doorsteps, siblings in hand. “We can take another kid. No problem. And, hey, don’t be a stranger. Bye.”

So, when I was young, and impressionable, this is what I learned from All Mine to Give and movies like it:

1. To survive, you need to buck up and never complain, even if you are asked to do something no child should ever be asked to do.

2. You should not feel, much less show, sadness when sad things happen, like when your spouse dies, or when your parents die, or when your brothers and sisters are taken away from you—and from each other—and you are left all alone.

3. Children are really small adults and don’t much need the comfort or counsel of real adults.

4. Though life is impossibly hard, solutions to impossible problems are easy to find. Why, you can give away a kid just like that, and no one will even blink.

5. Everything in life should happen fast: Above all, grief over the loss of a loved one should never extend beyond 103 minutes.

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