Saving Lives and Eating Apple Crisp

How do you grieve the loss of a loved one? In How to Save a Life, a young adult novel by Sara Zarr, high school senior Jill is mourning the recent loss of her father. But her immediate problem is that her mother has decided to adopt a baby from a pregnant teen they’ve never met. And that teen is coming to live with them.

Eleven Neland ladies showed up tonight to talk about it. Everyone had opinions, and they were not always in agreement. That’s the sign of a good book club discussion! Some of us liked Jill; some of us didn’t. Some of us liked Mandy, the pregnant teen; some of us didn’t. Some of us found different circumstances realistic; some of us didn’t. But we all agreed that the book draws you in from the first page, and you need to know what happens. And Helen didn’t even read the end ahead of time, which I think was high praise.

Mandy is the product of a sad upbringing, and she has some quirks. One of the disagreements we had was whether or not a young woman with her lack of role models could turn out to be sort of naïve, not overly self-protective. A couple of us thought of examples of people who came from horrible circumstances and still managed to hold onto a sort of innocence, but it is not perceived to be the norm.

Jill seems to some to be too sarcastic; her goth façade is not appealing to others. Still more of us just see the grief that fuels her anger. Alice lost her father at the age of 13, and she couldn’t relate to Jill’s anger. A few of us with teens in our houses could relate to a child who doesn’t really want to share what’s happening in their life. But Sue pointed out that at the beginning of the story, you think you know who Jill and Mandy are. And over the course of the book, you find out who they really are. That’s a pretty nice compliment to a character-driven novel.

Dylan and Ravi, the two love interests in the book, are possibly the nicest two teen males we’ve ever “met.” Understanding, kind, perceptive. They put up with everything and help the women to find their better selves. This is where the book might be putting a toe or two over the line into fantasy, but we’re down with it.

We also talked briefly about the sexual activity of the two female protagonists. Do we, as adults, feel like this is appropriate for the intended teen girl audience? Zarr herself said in an interview with The Williams Telos that she “never wanted to wind up in a position where I was being asked to soft-pedal the adolescent experience.” A couple of moms in the group agreed that you have to be real with your teens—“you know what we think; this is someone else’s perspective, and we don’t need to be afraid to hear what other people say.”

Julie, our resident expert on Denver, verified that Casa Bonita was the perfect restaurant for Mandy’s party. But the talk of “Margins” bookstore in the book just made us wish we could go to The Tattered Cover. If you know Denver, you know what we mean.

Because I led the meeting this month, and because I am sort of a Sara Zarr fan (verging slightly on groupie), I had to take the opportunity to tell everyone about Once Was Lost, Zarr’s book previous to this one and one of my favorites. It is such a wonderful story. Go read it now, if you enjoy young adult lit. But I digress.

Why is it called How to Save a Life? We could think of many whose lives were saved. But the prevailing way to do so seemed to be to trust. Mandy and Jill had to have enough trust in those who loved them to open up and share what was going on.

We eventually had to quit talking because Helen had brought some apple crisp that was calling to us. Oh so worth it. It might not save a life, but it sure makes it better.

Judiciously Recommending "The Dog Stars"

Here's a new novel for all you post-apocalyptic fiction fans. Yes, I realize that this is becoming a rather saturated segment of the book market, but bear with me. In this one, there is no capital, there is no arena. No aliens, no districts. There is just a broken world. And it’s definitely not written for the young adult market.

The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller, is set in the not-at-all-distant future. A flu pandemic wiped out most of the population 10 years earlier, but Hig has survived it. Global warming is also on the rise, so some of the natural world around him is dying and changing. Hig and another survivor, a crusty older man named Bangley, live on a makeshift compound at an airstrip in Colorado. Together they have created a perimeter to keep roaming survivors, who are all considered armed and dangerous, out of their territory. Hig also still has his dog, Jasper, who gives him the companionship he so desperately needs since the death of his wife and just about everyone else.

There is an element of bleakness in this novel, particularly in the horrors that people perpetrate on each other in the wake of the disaster, that mirrors The Road by Cormac McCarthy. However, Heller is, among other things, a writer for Outside Magazine and National Geographic Adventure, and his love for nature and the outdoors is evident. Amidst the grim survivalism of the story, Hig makes his way into the mountains, ostensibly to fish and hunt, but mostly to surround himself with beauty and ease his sorrow. Heller’s description of the natural world is lovely, and Hig’s situation is sometimes achingly real to the reader—he is still alive and he still has a desire to live; he is a man of constant sorrow, but he still seeks and recognizes beauty.

There are a couple of gruesome moments, understandable given the situation that the character is in, as well as some language that makes me hesitate to recommend the book to just anyone. There are also a couple of moments where you must suspend disbelief—it seemed he needed to solve a problem or two with the plot. Furthermore, aspects of the storyline read like male fantasy to me. Yet I loved reading it, and I gave it to my husband to read almost immediately because I knew he would love it too. Neither of us could put it down.

The Dog Stars depicts a man caught in the valley of death, unable to give up on hope and beauty.

Learning "The Language of Flowers"

Victoria spent much of her life in foster care, until Elisabeth. Elisabeth was determined to make this volatile young woman her daughter. Then something happened that ended the relationship, but we don’t know what. Now Victoria is turning 18 and is aging out of the group home she’s been living in.
What do you do when you are alone in the world with nothing to your name, expected to somehow create a life for yourself? Victoria turns to the only thing she knows or cares about—flowers.

Elisabeth taught her the “language of flowers”—the meaning that Victorian lovers assigned to flowers as they used them in covert communication. Victoria uses her knowledge of flowers to find her first job, and she sends messages with flowers even though she knows that no one will get the message. But then someone does.

The Fab 5 read The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, and we couldn’t put it down. We really liked the characters, and the whole flower thing is pretty intriguing. The author has had foster children, and she has some idea of what it takes to love a child who has been hurt and traumatized. She also knows a great deal about the foster care system, something we don’t know enough about. There is some mystery about Victoria’s history, and as a reader I was drawn into the story.

But it did seem to us that perhaps she created a sort of composite character, combining the stories of lots of people, because it seemed difficult to believe that all of Victoria’s history could happen to one child. This did not stop us from appreciating and enjoying the novel.

There was one portion of the story that Nancy felt dragged a bit, regarding a new mother who suffers through a difficult period of nursing a baby. You can refer to my last post to remind yourself that some children truly are slow nursers, and it can feel like forever. So we were not all in agreement on that point.

We were all in agreement on one issue—the story wraps up a little too neatly and quickly. Yet we were all satisfied by it, even though we knew we probably shouldn’t be.

Neland ladies get down and dirty with "The Dirty Life"

In the memoir, The Dirty Life, by Kristin Kimball, a young, single Manhattanite journalist interviews an organic farmer, and they fall in love. Somehow she finds herself moving from her SoHo apartment into heavy labor on a farm that uses horses instead of tractors. That transformation is as amazing to her as it is to the reader.

The Neland women had an evening of memories talking about this book. For one thing, we found out that at least three of the dozen or so women there had grown up on farms, and many more had grown up in farm towns or had relatives with farms. I, on the other hand, have basically zero connection to the soil. I did visit a pig farm once in high school, which was a very educational moment for this city girl. This disconnect may be why my garden beans look so poorly, and it may explain a few of the shudders that came over me as I read the book.

Actually I really liked it, and so did the rest of the group. Kristin and, more to the point, her eventual husband Mark, were very ambitious. They decided to begin a new community organic farm that was sustainable and which would provide everything the members needed—milk, eggs, meat, flour, veggies, fruit, etc.  Many of us use or have tried CSA shares of farms. I just have one question--if you have to spend so much time educating people on what to do with kale because they don't really like it, why grow so much of it? But I digress.

We all got tired just reading about farming—milking cows, weeding row upon row of vegetables, tapping the sugar bush. They would fall into bed at the end of long days of work—ew—without energy for a shower.

Alice remembered milking cows every day and the sort of rhythmic comfort that you could take in the routine. She also wondered how it could possibly take 2 hours to milk one cow. Rebecca and I, who have mothered slow nursers, just nodded knowingly.

Those who know about such things talked about the dirt and the smell of a farm, how hard they are to get rid of. They also talked about how good fresh vegetables and milk taste. Some found it hard to change to store-bought milk; others didn’t seem to notice the difference.

Deanna remembered moving onto a farm in late middle school, and going through the same adjustment from city to farm with mixed feelings and completely new experiences.

All of us had some feeling that Mark would be a difficult man to be married to. He seemed very rigid, like things must be the way he envisions them. No one seemed to think they could live for any period of time with a composting toilet in the middle of a shabby apartment.

But, on the other hand, the man could cook. And Kristin could write about cooking. The combination made me think that even I might try a tasty liver. But never—seriously—a cow heart or, ahem, "prairie oysters." Nuh-uh. And Holly pointed out that there are moments where he capitulates to Kristin’s wishes immediately and with no questions asked. They seem perfect for each other.

We laughed about the idealization of her newfound love at the beginning of the book, where she wished that every woman might have the chance to be with a man who has never smoked, gotten drunk, or slept around. That doesn’t seem like such a lofty goal to the many of us who are married to such men.

But for all the laughter, Kimball writes beautifully. She uses lovely metaphors that bring you right into the farm. And the wedding, which seems such a crazy affair, is something I would love to go to someday. Mark has a vision for farming that takes in the sacredness of creation and the relationship of humans to the earth. The book and Kimball's writing made the dirty life seem like something to dream of and strive for, helping us reconnect with some of our agricultural pasts.

The Secret Lives in "Silver Sparrow"

I've gotten very far behind in posting the books I've been reading, so this week I'll be doing some marathan blogging to try to catch up a bit.

The Fab 5 Book Club met, oh, some time ago, to talk about Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones. But first we ate some great Mexican food, from a restaurant that was closed by the health department shortly thereafter. We’re not sure whether we should be sad or grateful that we escaped with our lives.

We also talked a bit about pet-sitting. One upcoming vacation prompted the need for a rat-sitter. Then Nancy mentioned that she once did some cat-sitting for a friend, a friend who left a sticky note on every conceivable surface with instructions about the cat, the food, the way the toilet flushed, etc. Cat people may respond here in their own defense, but it seems there is something about anyone who owns multiple cats that puts them under the shadow of suspicion.

But about the book. Dana and Chaurisse are sisters, but only one of them knows it. They share a father, James Witherspoon, and Dana has spent her life as the product of his secret marriage. Chaurisse, on the other hand, is the daughter of his public wife and has lived a pampered, sheltered life. The book is written from Dana’s perspective in the first half, and the second half comes from Chaurisse.

All of us were caught by the story, wanting to know what happened. We spent some time wondering what it would be like to find out that your father has a whole different family. And what it would be like to grow up knowing that. Children look to their parents for their identity—to find out how much they are loved, to try to figure out where they fit in the list of parental priorities. Daughters look to their fathers for the male perspective on themselves, and they watch their parents’ interactions to find out what marriage might look like for themselves.

To grow up as part of a secret family, your needs always second to that of the public family, means that you are not first priority. But on the other hand, growing up in a secure family with no knowledge of the other family, makes your life and the love you’ve experienced a fraud. It’s a fascinating puzzle to consider.

Identity is a huge issue for everyone involved—a man who doesn’t want to work for anyone else, his brother who looks white but is not, and two women who may or may not be beloved wives. The book points out how much of our identity is shaped by our relationship to others and how we are perceived.

On top of that, Jones sets the story in 1980s Atlanta, which had us all think back on jelly shoes and Add-a-Bead necklaces. Okay, I’m the only one who knew about Add-a-Beads. Must have been a southern thing. There were some cracks in the 80s description—I can’t think of anyone who was fashionably sporting a tube top in the mid-80s—but still kind of fun.

The biggest downfall for us is that none of us could quite understand how the character of James Witherspoon warranted all this female attention in the first place. While it is still missing something to make it great, it is an interesting, well-written story.

Looking forward to "That Old Cape Magic"

As we planned our East coast camping trip this summer, I looked up fiction that had something to do with Maine or Cape Cod. One title popped up under both subjects, That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo. He’s the author of the Pulitzer-winning novel Empire Falls, which is a book I really enjoyed, for lack of a better word. Empire Falls is not a happy book; it’s actually quite depressing. But I absolutely loved Miles, the main character, and I felt like I could breathe the air of the dying mill town that he lived in.

That Old Cape Magic is about a couple married for 30 years; Griffin is still in love with Joy. They go back to Cape Cod for a wedding, with the plan to revisit the place they stayed on their honeymoon, the place where they mapped out their future together. Cape Cod is also where he vacationed for many years as a child. The familiar setting stirs memories of his summers there and, particularly, the atrocious parenting (and education about marriage) he received from the cynical academics who were his father and mother. He thought he'd left all that behind, but it seems that his parents have left a larger mark on him that he believed.

This novel is about Griffin and the parenting he received, but mostly it is about marriage. Russo is a master of detail, especially the contours of a relationship. He plays out the daily irritations that grow into bigger things, and he explores the ways that you can know someone so well—every facial expression, every freckle or scar—but not every shadow of the heart (if you need more explanation just listen to “The Stranger” by Billy Joel). He names the perversity that we are all susceptible to--doing exactly the thing that irritates or hurts the one we love most, even as we know we are doing it.

As in Empire Falls, there is much genuine brokenness in this book. And I can't say it's particularly friendly to religion in general. But there is something weirdly satisfying about having familiar, human disappointments and temptations named and described so well, like reading your old diary.

And since he’s very rooted in the places he writes about, his descriptions of the Maine coast and particularly Cape Cod make me eager to get going—without the bad parenting, of course.

Friday Noon Movie Club: "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"

As I’m about to watch my eldest make the 8^th grade graduation march into high school, I’m feeling my age. What better to make me feel young again than to watch a group of more mature folks taking a big life adventure? I felt younger the minute I walked in the theater, where I was about 20 years younger than any of the other 30 people there.

Then the previews began, which is always sort of a crapshoot—I’m never sure what I will be subjected to in previews. There were four previews before The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and I want to see all of them. The Words, in which an author’s fiction is somehow intruding on reality, Hyde Park on the Hudson, which features Bill Murray as FDR and Laura Linney as something mysteriously between a head maid and a mistress, Beasts of the Southern Wild (okay, this one I’m a little uncertain about) some sort of sci-fi apocalyptic story about a young child in Louisiana deltas, seems to involve a Katrina-style hurricane and some aurochs, an ancient ox-type creature which (I happen to know from my Bible editing gigs) are translated in the King James Bible as unicorns. And Ruby Sparks, which looks like the plot of the aforementioned The Words combined with the quirkier style of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—a young author creates a female character who comes to life.

What did all this teach me? It seems that I am squarely in the demographic of a movie aimed at the AARP audience (no offense to the many of my friends who are already there!). Look what a few good “Masterpiece Theater” miniseries will do to you. My advice: stay away from PBS. It ages you. Watch Step Up 17 instead, or Paranormal Activity 35, because if you watch too much Downton Abbey or Bleak House, you are likely to end up like me. Previews aimed at senior citizens are hitting my sweet spot.

Back to the movie. As I expected, there are lots of predictable things about the story. But that’s not what I was there for. I was there for the actors.

The premise is that the Marigold Hotel is advertised as a newly renovated luxury hotel for seniors citizens, but the renovations have not yet been completed. Most of the new arrivals take this remarkably well after the first moments of disbelief. In my own experience, people expecting luxury are not easily mollified when introduced to something lesser. But this is fantasy.

Judi Dench is Evelyn, a luminous as a widow who is looking to make a new life for herself. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton are Douglas and Jean Ainslie, a long-married couple who can’t afford the kind of retirement they want in England. Tom Wilkinson is Graham, a gay man who grew up in India and spent the rest of his life in England wondering about the people he left behind. Madge (Celia Imrie) is on the hunt for her next, preferably rich, husband. Ronald Pickup plays Norman, a lecherous man who is looking to ease his loneliness, if only for one night. And Maggie Smith plays, Muriel, a bitter and racist woman who needs a hip replacement and can get it more quickly and easily in India. That’s your ensemble cast, an aging version of New Year’s Eve, or Valentine’s Day, or yes, even Love Actually.

Tom Wilkinson is wonderful in his role. Loved him. His character is the best at letting us see India as a place of its own, with pros and cons, without all the drama of the new traveler. Bill Nighy’s Douglas is loveable, if not unique, as a husband who has disappointed his wife but is finding new energy from the change of setting. Penelope Wilton (Matthew Crawley’s mother on Downton), on the other hand, has a thankless role as his resentful and sanitation-obsessed wife who can’t adjust to their new life. It doesn’t matter how well she acts it, the part has nothing to empathize with. Maggie Smith fares better, though I would have liked to see more of her character’s development. Madge and Norman are mostly there for comic relief and for rounding out the cast, but they are not terribly likeable either. Thankfully they are also forgettable.

For a travel addict such as myself, there are parts of this movie that function as something like a drug fix. I am in the early stages of planning my India itinerary as I type, though I wish that the movie showed us more. The fantasy aspect of the film shows through, though, in the quick reference to extra trips to the bathroom after another exotic meal. Much as I want to see all of the world, two rounds with the vicious amoeba were enough to convince me that caution with food is not so overrated, and germophobia is the one way I could relate to the character of Jean Ainslie.

Dev Patel, who played the young man in Slumdog Millionaire, plays the manager of the hotel. Sometimes the gestures and exasperation are just more caricature; other times he is allowed to play the character as a real human being struggling to overcome his life’s obstacles.

I recently heard a podcast that talked about how older people are portrayed in the media. Elderly characters are usually a farce, a ridiculous caricature. Some of these characters rise above that, nicely so. Some do not. I will say, though, that the people who shared the theater with me that day seemed to really like the movie. As the credits rolled, one woman said “Finally, something for us.”

This movie is basically fluff, albeit fluff full of my favorite British actors. There is a little too much sadness to make it complete fluff, and a little too much slapstick to make it truly resonate. While I enjoyed the time in the theater, I left wishing for something more satisfying, and frankly, more hopeful for my future.  

An Enormous Book of Enormous Consequence

The Neland Women’s Book Club met tonight (yes, they’ve met more often than I have recorded, because I’ve been unable to attend for a couple of months now). We talked about The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. This book is about the Great Migration, the massive movement of African Americans from the southern states to the north in the 20^th century. I’ll say right now that I did not finish the book, so some of this is inferred information from the group. Ladies, if I have something wrong, please correct me in the comments!

Our leader of the month, Sue, helped us wade through the issues and information presented by the book. She mentioned that Wilkerson is a journalist, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1994. She was interested in the subject of the migration because of her own parents’ migration, and she spent 15 years researching and interviewing 1200 people for this project.

Between World War I and the 1970s about 6 million African Americans migrated north. That’s in comparison, for example, to the 300,000 “Okies” who famously left the Oklahoma area for the west coast during the Dust Bowl. Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and an extremely restrictive caste system led the people of the Great Migration to leave all they knew, in mostly rural areas, to have more freedoms and opportunities. Unfortunately, they tended to find it difficult to gain employment, restricted housing options and cities infected with crime.

The recently migrated were willing to work hard to make a life for themselves, but their children found it frustrating to live with a lack of prospects, and they were living in community with African-Americans who had already been living in the north and who were already frustrated.

Wilkerson uses a form called narrative nonfiction to follow three people in particular: Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster and George Starling. Sue noted that George was from the same area in Florida where Trayvon Martin lost his life. Wilkerson says she used three books as her models: The Grapes of Wrath, Avalon, and The Joy Luck Club.

I personally was utterly floored to find out that immediately after emancipation, former slaves had many rights, and that those were slowly taken away. I had always been under the impression that Jim Crow laws were pretty much in force from Day 1 after emancipation. And so the former slaves, who had at least a forced and artificial relationship with the white community, had children and grandchildren who had basically zero relationship with the white community. The white community over the years built up a sort of hysteria, basically psychotically afraid of giving black neighbors any power or rights.

Sue said that it is amazing to realize that all of this happened basically in her lifetime, and she was so unaware. Alice said it is one of the saddest books she’s ever read, but she hastened to add that it was excellent. Both of them remembered a time long ago in their Chicago-area neighborhood when the white church community there felt threatened by the arrival of African Americans.

The only criticism that we heard was that the book was somewhat repetitive. That criticism was, fittingly enough, repeated by several people. However, there was some feeling that with all the information presented, some repetition helps the reader retain the important points.

We talked some about how this informs our perspective on our own town of Grand Rapids. Certainly people migrated to GR, and GR suffered white flight. We questioned the role of Christian schools in making our city more segregated, since in the early days the Christian schools served a white community. We wonder how much racism prevails even now, when we don’t even realize it.

A line from the book about Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who was a educated as a medical doctor and ran into obstacles everywhere he went because of his skin color: “Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.” What bars are right in front of us that we never notice? And how does that affect us in ways that we don’t realize?

In a speech, Wilkerson said this: “I believe that the next migration has to be for us as individuals, as human beings, to recognize that we have so much more in common than we are led to believe. And to recognize that when everyone does better, everyone does better."

Friday Noon Movie Club: "Bully"

Last Friday I gave the Friday Noon Movie Club the opportunity to vote on what movie I would see. They sent me to see Bully, and a few of them even kindly came with me. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the documentary. I’ve been feeling like bullying was the new trendy topic, something that comes up because parents always need something to worry about.

I was a tomboy in elementary school, playing tackle football and getting into the occasional fight. Fighting is an inept description of what I was up to—I’d get in one good punch and run, fast. I don’t think my fighting qualified me as a bully, since I tended to be more vigilante than bully. (Think along the lines of the 80s movie My Bodyguard.) I was very self-righteous, very big and tall, and I had a tendency to jump in when necessary until I was in 5^th or 6^th grade. For example, when my scrawny 2^nd grade boyfriend got teased by the bigger boys, I could take them. I probably stepped over the line a bit more in the fight I had with the neighbor girl when I was 5 or 6. I distinctly remember hitting her over the head with a metal shovel and yelling “Get off my property!”

It only took a few minutes of Bully to tell me that it’s about more than just your average playground standoff.

The filmmakers interviewed several children, mostly middle school age, who have been victims of bullying, as well as their parents. They also followed a young man named Alex, who lives in Sioux City, Iowa. They showed him at home, on the school bus and at school. Kids tormented him with terrible words and physical abuse. I had some idea of what it was going to be like, but I was unprepared for the viciousness of the verbal attacks. Some victims are encouraged to stand up for themselves, but that’s just not an option for everyone.

I happen to love and live with two middle-schoolers of my own at the moment. Middle school can be a place where the very best in humankind is displayed—kids are starting to think more critically and they are not jaded, so their idealism and faith development can be beautiful to see. It is also a place that gives Calvinists some powerful evidence for total depravity. The instinct in some to gain, use and abuse power is strong, as is the instinct to stay silent and safe in others.

Parents, teachers and other youth leaders would benefit from Bully. Parents will be particularly affected by the family members who show pictures and videos of the victims as babies and toddlers, talking about them with the same fierce bond of love any parent feels. That aspect of it might be somewhat lost on younger viewers, but their grief would not be.

I’m not sure I’d take just any middle-school student to see it, because the movie includes interviews with the families of several victims who have taken their own lives. While that’s not depicted as a good solution, it might still plant the seed in the mind of a child who is truly struggling—after all, for whatever other consequences there are to suicide, those victims are not being bullied anymore.

For a child who might have a tendency to bully, however, Bully might help them empathize with the victims. With some preparation and some debriefing, parents could use this as a tool to open up a discussion the topic.

At Friday’s screening, there were the four of us, plus a class of high school students who seemed to be paying close attention. Unfortunately for them, they must not have had time for the entire movie, so with about half an hour left, the teachers silently stood up, made a hand motion in the air, and they all filed quietly out. I wish they had been able to see the last portion, which made it clear that the best way to fight bullying is to stand together against it.

There is some feeling of hope at the end as victims and the families of victims gather and speak out against bullying, encouraging young people to stand up for the victims. Though the moviemakers might not recognize it, the film cries out for the real answer: we all need to recognize the image of God in every person.

Friday Noon Movie Club: "A Separation"

This past Friday I was joined by two Friday Movie friends, and we had the entire theater to ourselves. It must be what Siskel and Ebert used to feel like, sitting in that screening room. Except without all the power. And I bet their daughters didn’t call them in the middle of the movie to beg a ride home so they wouldn’t have to get on the bus. Where was I? Oh, the movie.

A Separation is an Iranian film about a problem very familiar to the Western world—a marriage that is being pulled apart by the desire to do what is best for both a child and an ailing parent. No simple thing.

Nader and Simin are a married couple who, from all appearances, respect and love each other. They have been bringing up their daughter, Termeh, to be an independent, intelligent young woman. They’ve also been making plans to leave Iran for another, more open country for their daughter.

The trouble is, Nader’s father has Alzheimer’s. He’s past the point of recognizing his son, though he still calls his daughter-in-law by name. Nader cannot bear to leave him in the care of someone else. Simin leaves, going to stay with her mother with the expressed intention of leaving the country before the visa expires. Termeh is caught in between them, doing what she can to keep her parents together.

In the midst of their frustrations, Nader hires a woman to help care for his father while he is gone for the day. This woman finds the job very difficult for several reasons. She suffers fear of breaking religious law by cleaning the father when he soils himself. She is pregnant, she has a young daughter who comes to work with her, and she is married to an unemployed, hot-tempered man who does not know about her job. A disagreement between employer and the employee leads to a legal battle.

The film gives insight into daily life in Iran, at least for the moderately well-to-do. It gives a glimpse of the criminal justice system there, as well as the precarious nature of any life, subject to forces that we cannot control.

The separation of the title has many implications. The separation of the married couple. Separation between parents and children, between upper and lower class, between those with power and those without. The separations are symbolized by constantly opening and closing doors. Whenever anyone decides to speak the truth to another, they put someone else out of the room before they speak, especially the young girls. The true separations come when anyone chooses to lie to protect themselves, to make themselves look better. Every time an untruth comes out of someone’s mouth, a new separation is born.

This is a wrenching film, but an unflinching look at the struggle between self-protection in the name of safety and self-sacrifice in the name of integrity. The characters are well-rounded and true, as are the performances. Nader’s love and honor of his afflicted father is heartbreaking and beautiful. And on top of it all, you get to see into the daily life of a family in Iran, a world we rarely get to see.

New "Birds" of America

Birds of a Lesser Paradise, a collection of short stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman, explores the relationship of people to animals, of humanity to nature. Those timely themes are the ribbon tying together a gift of well-crafter stories that deliver like Alice Munro without most of Munro’s creepiness.

In a meeting last week I witnessed the silent tension between two women who were silently agreeing to disagree. One told us how she decided with her husband that they would set a limit, $500, on the amount of money they would spend to save their dog, before they even got one. She said that as long as there are people starving in the world, they can’t throw unlimited funds at a pet. Another woman, who loves her dogs like children and has gone through training for her dog to be used in therapy, smiled and stayed quiet.

I understand both of these perspectives. I’m someone who lived happily without a dog for quite a few years and now has one who requires steroids to keep from getting skin infections that require antibiotics, steroids that lead to tooth decay and makes teeth cleanings a necessity. She sighs and turns to another new position as she lies against me, keeping my thigh warm, even as I type.

The complicated relationship between people and animals in Bergman's book moves between that of owner and pet, prey and predator, caregiver and the needy. The “civilized” world and nature also have a complex relationship—we abuse and protect the environment, sometimes at the very same time. Even the threat of environmental disaster is held up against the personal tragedies and triumphs of individuals.

One of Bergman’s stories involves a woman whose boyfriend (named Malachi, no less) runs an environmentalist group. This group requires a pledge of “no breeding” from its members, with the goal that nature take over and humanity die out. The woman finds out that she has somehow become pregnant, and she must re-evaluate what she believes.

Characters with deep respect for their environments seem to be losing out to those environments. Others must make a choice between the animals and the people that they love. Characters revisit their ethics and creeds when circumstances change and their basic beliefs come into question.

Another story that really stuck with me is that of a woman who rescues needy animals. Her partner cannot tolerate it, and he leaves until she can come to a decision. She calls herself “the shepherd of a strange flock," which left me with a lovely vision of the damaged and vulnerable flock that I am part of on this earth, waiting on my shepherd. While this book seems for the most part consciously unreligious, in fact featuring a character or two who are decidedly against Christianity, the spiritual nature and the complexity of earthkeeping comes through loud and clear.

Great writing and interesting characters led me to pick this up again and again, even though short stories usually leave me feeling sort of short-changed. I often feel like I have just commited to a character, only to find out that particular story is finished. In this book, I was eager to find out who else I would be introduced to, where they lived, and what animals “peopled” their lives. This time around I wasn’t discouraged by the abrupt nature of the short story.

Don’t read this if you are looking for heartwarming dog or cat stories. The animals in the book are full and well-rounded, not anthropomorphized, as are the ties that bind them to the humans. The author exhibits both a love for the natural world and a hope in the nature of humanity.

Fab 5 Book Club: The Glass Castle

Tonight the Fab 5 had yet another intense, esoteric book discussion. I actually had to look up esoteric just now to make sure it meant what I wanted to say, which, once you read the definition is rather ironic. I’ll let you get your own dictionary if you need to.

Anyway. The Fab 5 tackled The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. This memoir recounts Walls’s childhood as part of a family that was one part comedy, one part lunacy and one part tragedy. Walls and her three siblings lived a nomadic life with their parents. Mom was an artist, a trained teacher, and always looking for the new bright horizon just waiting to be discovered. Dad was an alcoholic charmer, a highly intelligent man who was more comfortable hustling pool than working steadily at an actual job. He had big dreams, or delusions, depending on your perspective.

The children learned to read early and well, they learned about living frugally and simply, and they moved frequently in search of the next adventure. They lived all over the desert southwest, a vast playground and habitat study for the children, and they eventually moved to the town in West Virginia where their father grew up.  Dad was always on the verge of a new, spectacular invention. One of his plans was to built the Glass Castle, a scientifically designed house made of glass and tailored especially for their family.

 The kids were also often neglected severely, especially as alcohol claimed more and more prominence in their father’s life. Early on there were periods of time where food ran short, memorably a time when young Jeannette was hungry enough to eat the only thing left in the fridge—a stick of margarine. One move saw the children locked into the back of a U-Haul truck for what might be a 14 hour drive, with no way to communicate with their parents. As they got older, they went through periods of time where everyone in the family fended for themselves for food—scavenging the remains of classmates discarded lunch bags, finding ways to get invited to dinner at other people’s houses.

We wondered how these young people remained hopeful, kept their goals in sight, and seemed to feel loved, for the most part. This is an interesting point, after a Bible study discussion I took part in today. We talked about Job, and how he felt right before God, even though everything pointed to God's dismissal of him. We each thought a bit about how and when we have felt "approved of"--and how so often it feels to a child that their parents don't really approve. In this book, the children seem to feel their parents' approval as far as that goes, which serves them well as they push at the boundaries of their isolated lives.

Walls is a great writer, and she manages to tell incredibly sad stories with beauty and wit. That almost goes without saying, since this dark family tale turned out to be one of our favorite reads in a long time. Somehow she makes readers a tiny bit jealous at certain points that we didn’t grow up with such footloose and adventurous parents, even when it was obviously not something to be envied!

Eventually, though, we proved our incapacity for such an unplanned and uncertain lifestyle. Host Nancy produced two miniature boxes of chocolates—one Whitman sampler, and one Russell Stover. Neither box had a little chart telling us the filling of each candy. Rather than throwing caution to the wind and each claiming two unknown pieces of chocolate, Nancy carefully cut each chocolate in half so we could see what kind we were getting. No one got an unexpected coconut or maple filling, and everyone was happy. I kind of don’t think we would make it with the Walls family.

Jeannette Walls has also written a book called Half Broke Horses, about her tough-as-nails grandmother. Nancy and Sonya have both read it and recommend it. I’m hoping to read it soon!

Friday Noon Movie Club: The Hunger Games

There’s no way you’ve missed it, the movie version of The Hunger Games has arrived! The Friday Noon Movie Club was a fun gathering of 6 women, while my rather jealous teens toiled away at school. And I have to say, there was none of the humiliation that exists when a 40-something woman enters a theater to see a movie based on adolescent literature, like when said woman might show up at a Twilight screening. Not that I would know anything about that. Ahem.

As the mother of two young fans, I’ve been nervous for a while about how this movie would come out, wondering how the violent nature of the books would come across on film. And even more so wondering how I would deal with a disappointed daughter if it was more than I was willing to allow her to watch. But I had hope, because Suzanne Collins, the author of the trilogy, was one of the screenwriters, and I hoped that her sensibilities would continue onto the screen.

My faith in her was rewarded. The movie stayed true to the books, showing violence in a way that does not glorify it. Indeed, it does the opposite, showing the sacredness to human life, and the fact that everyone involved in violence is changed by it. The Hunger Games is a horrific tale of societal oppression and mob mentality, with elements of Roman gladiators, Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” and Lord of the Flies, among many others.

Yet the selling point of both the book and the movie is the strong female lead, Katniss Everdeen, a resourceful young woman who will sacrifice herself for those she loves. And Katniss is ably played by Jennifer Lawrence, who was also wonderful as Katniss’s present-day alter ego in Winter’s Bone, a movie from a couple of years ago.

Other characters are well-played, but not well-developed. The constraints of time appear to have cut much of the back story on many of the characters, which proves frustrating to fans of the novels. For instance, Cinna did not play a big enough part. Being a closet Lenny Kravitz fan, I was sort of amazed at how restrained his performance was. I have no idea how it plays to someone who doesn’t know the books, because, having read them, my memory fills in any missing information.

I “enjoyed” the movie, for lack of a better term. I don’t know what to do with that. Is it inspiring? Not really, because it’s such a sad story, even if Katniss does come through. Is it uplifting? No. But there’s something appealing about it, and it’s not just the excitement of the danger and competition. It has to do with Katniss’s refusal to submit to the expectations placed on her, and her refusal to succumb to the baser nature that shows up in some of her opponents. The on-screen treatment of her relationship with the young girl, Rue, is one of the highlights of the movie.

I felt satisfied, if saddened, after watching, but I do wonder if I can tolerate watching the second and third books turned into movies. But I’m not sure I’ll be able to stay away, either.

One more thing—I downloaded the soundtrack today, which was put together by T Bone Burnett (O Brother Where Art Thou?, Walk the Line, Cold Mountain). On first listen, it appears to be a fabulous combination of music, including songs from Neko Case, the Punch Brothers, the Civil Wars, Taylor Swift, Arcade Fire, The Decemberists, The Carolina Chocolate Drops…an amazing list. Even if you don’t want to watch the movie, check out the music.

Friday Noon Movie Club: Jeff, Who Lives at Home

The Friday Noon Movie Club met last Friday (yes, it’s taken me this long) to see Jeff, Who Lives at Home. I was joined by three adventurous moviegoers who had little idea of what they were seeing and were even up for lunch afterward!

Jeff, Who Lives at Home, is about a lovable, pot-smoking, slacker manchild (Jason Segel) who lives in his mother’s basement. He’s watched M. Night Shyamalan’s movie “Signs” a few too many times and is trying to read the signs in his own life.

At the same time, his older brother, Pat (Ed Helms), has lost track of his own sense of purpose, which is leading to desperate attempts at good times and a failing marriage. At her office, Mom (Susan Sarandon) is lonely and disappointed in the way that her life has turned out. She despairs that Jeff will not even be able to accomplish a small repair job in her absence. Each of them are still grieving the long-ago loss of their father and husband, keeping each other at arm’s length in different ways.

The prevailing theme of this movie is Jeff’s search for his fate, his destiny. At different points, old lines like “things happen for a reason” are dragged out, but only Jeff really seems to believe this. Though he is clueless about the world, he is kind and compassionate to the people around him, believing the best in everyone.

Brother Pat, who for all his problems is living the more “normal” life, is angry and bitter. Jeff patiently tries to help him see what he is missing, even though Jeff seems almost completely unable to make any move for himself. Until this day, when he receives a sign.

There is an interesting use of imagery that seems rather baseless. Everyone gets “dunked,” as one of my fellow moviegoers termed it. One gets baptized through the fire sprinklers, two more end up diving into some water. And Jeff is a 30-something single man who helps people and even has a carpentry job to attend to. Not sure what to do with all of that.

Should you see it? Maybe, maybe not. Offensive language abounds; it’s rated R for a reason. But humor bubbles out of this strange brew of painful family dysfunction and corny sentiment.

The last time my youth group small group met, we talked about how God communicates with us, following the Lenten service about questions we have for God. Talking with them, though I can point to concrete answers to prayer and ways that I’ve felt God’s leading, it was still felt sort of nebulous to explain how. So while I laugh at Jeff’s seeking for supernatural “signs,” I can’t help but think that I can understand how he feels, wishing for something to tell me exactly what to do next. So it seems to me that this movie helped me think through what it means to look for direction in life for those who don’t feel God’s hand leading them through it.

Wendell Berry's "Jayber Crow"

Last night the Fab 5 met to choose our books for the next six months, a meeting that is always filled with anticipation. And very difficult decision-making. Four people brought 36 books. Yikes. We pored over them, and in the end were rewarded with a list of 6 books we are very excited to read.

But now I go back to our last meeting, when we discussed Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. The reason I did not write about it at the time is that I had not finished it yet. So we had two discussions about it, last month and this month.

Jayber Crow is about an “ineligible bachelor barber” making his way through life. Orphaned at an early age, Jayber (born Jonah, hint hint) first considers ministry, then finds his way back to his birthplace to settle in and live his life alone, but not always lonely.

I’m probably one of the last to come to the Wendell Berry party. And I am knocked out by his characterization, his description, and his compassion for every character in the book. It took some patience and some deliberateness to make my way through it, but I was rewarded.

This book is about Jayber, first and foremost, a man you come to love. It is also about small towns, generational differences, the change in farming from small homesteads to big agriculture, and the beauty of nature that we both treasure and destroy.

It is also a novel layered with religious imagery, from floods to rainbows, from death to resurrection, from rebirth to sacrificial love, from hell to heaven. And you can’t help but draw the parallel between Jayber Crow and Jesus Christ.

[Spoiler alert]

Jayber, though by no means a perfect man, lives a solitary life, surrounded mostly by men, and is “reborn” to a cold, lonely earth when he flees his old life by pushing himself through a tiny bathroom window at a dance hall. He makes a personal commitment to a woman who has given herself to someone else, and vows to treasure her and love her in the way that he can, from a distance. In their later years, he walks with her, just enjoying her company, through a beautiful wooded area.

The final scene brings the two together as the wooded area is being logged. It brought to mind one of my favorite Over the Rhine songs, “The Trumpet Child.” “The trumpet child will lift a glass / his bride now leaning in at last / his final aim to fill with joy / the earth that man all but destroyed.” That image of joyful union amidst the ruins of sin has always given me goosebumps, and I loved seeing a new iteration of it in Jayber Crow.

Now, having said all that I just did, I should point out that Berry starts off the novel with a warning against finding subtexts, explanations and interpretations, stating that people who do what I have just done should be “exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.” Would that really be so bad???

Friday Noon Movie Club: "The Artist"

This week’s Friday Noon Movie Club pick was The Artist. Now, I knew things were a little different this time around, because instead of walking into a theater populated mainly by middle-aged men attending stag (which, though I am middle-aged myself, and each time I go I might find myself attending stag, still creeps me out), the theater held 3 or 4 couples, of decidedly older ages. Seemed like sort of a sweet beginning!


And then I was joined by 4 friends. We started off the afternoon by admiring the multitude of rocks on the left ring finger of one lucky lady (and no, he didn’t go to Jared). Going to be an exciting summer!

We watched a very random assortment of previews--several of which I've seen approximately 25 times now. I have to say, I'm very curious about Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Maybe it's just Ewan McGregor. I'll be belting out songs from Moulin Rouge any moment now.

Okay, the first thing you need to know if you are going to see The Artist in a theater: a silent movie may not be the best place to eat popcorn. The Artist is a black and white silent movie. While there is music, just as in the old silent films, it’s not blasted through the stereo system in the same way to which we are accustomed, at least not at our showing. Crunching popcorn suddenly takes on a new resonance. One friend must have left the theater with an almost full bag of popcorn, because I don’t think she ate more than a handful during the movie.

It’s also not a great place to have your cell phone go off unexpectedly, as happened to the lady on my right. In fact, it’s not a great place to whisper about the movie or talk at all. On the other hand, there’s no need for anyone to whisper loudly, “What’d he say?” because he didn’t say anything.

I’m a word person, so it kills me to not know what the character is saying. I found myself tensing up at times, just waiting for some words to appear on the screen to let me know what the heck they were saying! But after a while, it becomes the norm, and you develop a new patience with the story.

Now on to the movie. On the surface, The Artist is a throwback to the old days, using the old methods of showing story and character without actually hearing the actors speak. George Valentin is a silent film star loved by legions of fans. We get to know George and his life through lots of exaggerated facial expressions, shadows, reflections, newspaper headlines (Who’s That Girl? is plastered across the paper that his distant wife is holding in front of her face), and other hints. George meets an aspiring actress, Peppy, who charms him, and everyone else. George is himself entertaining and charming, but he is also a proud man.

His pride makes it very difficult to deal with the sudden change that movies with sound bring to the industry. He struggles to keep his career moving forward, losing much through things he can and can’t control. Meanwhile, Peppy is moving up in the ranks, a rising star in the new “talkie” medium. You can’t miss the wonderfully filmed scene where the fading George meets Peppy on a staircase—George is going down, while Peppy is going up. People are moving quickly around them, all looking like they are going places. George doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

It’s a tribute, I think, to Jean Dujardin, who played George, that I liked his character as much as I did, in spite of his pride and self-absorption. Peppy lives up to her name, as played by Berenice Bejo, a lively young woman with an incredible smile.

This movie is partly about the transition from silent films to talking pictures, and it is partly a romance. It is also an exploration of the way we find our own identity, often falling into the trap of believing what is reflected in the eyes of others or believing our own press.

Another aspect of the story is our consumption of celebrity, putting one person high on a pedestal, then letting them tumble when something new comes along. We have witnessed this over and over in show business, and it’s even true for the high school football star who never quite makes it in college. Chris Smit, a professor at Calvin College, has written a book about this called The Exile of Britney Spears. He focuses in particular on the public’s consumption of young female stars, making Britney Spears his case study.

So there is more to this movie than meets the eye. But even what meets the eye is a movie that is sweet, funny, and has both charm and depth. And a really cute Jack Russell terrier.

**Odd sidenote—as I wrote this, Jean Dujardin showed up in an Artist skit on "Saturday Night Live"! Still pretty charming.

Brian Selznick's "Wonderstruck"

The Invention of Hugo Cabret was already a favorite in our family, and the movie Hugo cemented my fanship. So we were pretty excited to get started on Brian Selznick’s latest illustrated novel, Wonderstruck.

Wonderstruck takes the interaction between great story and wonderful illustration that was the joy of Hugo Cabret to a new level. Rather than illustrating the story that he is telling, in Wonderstruck Selznick writes one story with words and writes another with the illustrations that are interspersed in the pages of words. In the words, a young boy in the 1970s has lost his mother and is searching for information on his father. In the illustrations, a young, deaf girl in the 1920s runs away from home.

The two stories, separated by time and place, eventually become intertwined in surprising and satisfying ways. Lots of twists and turns in the story kept us eager for the next pages. Selznick proves that his creativity has not reached its limit, and I’m excited to see what he does next!

I read this one aloud to my 8 year old. She was breathless each chapter, wondering when she would get to revisit the illustrated storyline; she could hardly stand to put the book down each night. There were a few moments, as Ben searches for clues about the father he never knew, that made me wonder if this book would be the prompting of an explanation of the birds and the bees to my daughter. That did not come to pass, mostly because she didn’t want to stop reading to ask questions.

There are sensitive portrayals of the challenges of being deaf. And Selznick is clearly fascinated by museums and collections. In the endnotes, he mentions that credit is due to the book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg, which is a book I remember from my childhood with great affection. He also mentioned that there are many tributes to that book placed throughout Wonderstruck. So what else was there to do but pull out Frankweiler and read that one aloud next? We are about three chapters in.

Mansions and Madness, Oh My!

If you loved Rebecca and Jane Eyre, you might enjoy this one. The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield, might even be a better marker. A gothic story complete with creepy mansion, a history of madness and fires, and secrets kept. Edie Burchill, a book editor from London, visits Milderhurst Castle. Milderhurst was the home of the author of her favorite book from childhood, and it is still inhabited by the author’s daughters. Of course, the Blythe sisters carry a mysterious, secretive air, and Edie can’t help but be fascinated. Especially since her mother lived with them for a time when she was evacuated from London as a child.

Percy and Saffy Blythe are elderly twin sisters—one who is strong and taciturn, one who is nurturing and more timid. Their younger sister, Juniper, is a creative, free spirit who has succumbed to mental illness. Their long-deceased father was an eccentric author who expected his daughters to do his bidding and how loyalty to the family. Edie, meanwhile, is an only child in the throes of romantic disappointment, and the mysterious Blythe family captures her imagination. Her mother lived at Milderhurst, but Edie has never known anything about it.

The book has a great combination of interesting characters and a setting so well described that you can smell the dank, unused rooms in the far reaches of the castle. The author is a bit too wordy at times, telling the reader too much about how what the character is thinking rather than letting the reader figure some of it out. But overall a satisfying read.

Friday Noon Movie Club: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Friday was an exciting day, as I had a record five joiners taking up my row. We saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same title (and he just happens to be coming to the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin in April!). Out of the six of us, four and a half have read the book—one has only read part of it, and one has yet to crack it. We raided the bathroom for toilet paper for those who forgot to bring tissue and found our place.
I’ll start with this: I really loved the book. It’s a little strange, a bit surreal. So the criticism I’ve been reading about the movie scared me off for a while—I was nervous to watch the movie version, afraid it would take away from my memory of the book. After the nomination for Best Picture was announced, in spite of all the slams it has taken in the media, I gathered my courage.

Often, when I really love a book, the movie version really has no chance of living up to it. And with the negative reviews, I had pretty much written this one off before I bought my ticket. I’m sort of glad for that.

My expectations were so low that I was pleasantly surprised by the film. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t have the same depth as the book. But the peculiarity of the young boy, Oskar, and his story remains intact, and I appreciated that. His search to find some sort of meaning in the horror that has profoundly changed his life is universal.

The Bible study group I am part of recently began studying the book of Job. We spent some time this week remembering times in our lives when we also have searched for meaning in suffering, searched for God in the suffering. We haven’t got it all figured out, but we share a gratitude that we have God and his people walking with us in those times. Loud and Close shows the importance of the people walking with us, and that gets half the story right, a step in the right direction.

Thomas Horn plays Oskar in a roll that demands a lot from a young actor and from the audience. Oskar is grieving the loss of his father. He is also somewhere on the autism spectrum, and he sometimes gets shrill and freaked out. This is understandable, but it might have been more effective if he wasn’t narrating constantly. Sometimes we might just need to have seen and not heard so much. Also, until you know that he has these issues, you would think that he’s a spoiled rotten kid who says and does whatever he wants, which sets up the viewer who has not read the book to dislike him almost immediately.

Oskar explores the city of New York, calling on strangers in a quest to discover something about his father. The city plays itself beautifully, by which I mean I enjoyed the filming of New York. One scene, in which a frightened Oskar fights his fear of bridges, shows him running across the bridge as a train speeds past him and the cars speed by even faster. It seems symbolic of his experience—everyone moving faster, passing him by, yet he is making his way eventually.

Viola Davis plays the woman he calls on first, and she’s fantastic in her small roll. Max Von Sydow gives great expression to his character, the renter at grandma’s house. Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks are good as the parents, as far as that goes, but they definitely take a back seat in the movie. I was glad for one scene in which Hanks, playing the oh-so-perfect father to Oskar, shows some slight frustration in dealing with his son’s hesitation to engage. A little more of that realism might have counteracted the sentimentalism. Bullock as mom has a few more honest scenes that she carries out well.

When the movie was finished, the theater emptied out but for the six of us and a few of us regained our composure. We tried to figure out how we felt about it. One of the reasons that the movie doesn’t carry the same weight as the book is that an important storyline was dropped. There’s no way that the movie could have covered all the written territory, and so this was probably inevitable. But the grandfather’s life story in the book adds so much to the reader’s experience, and we missed it.

The one among us who had not read the book at all told us she was a bit put off at the beginning by the imagined scenes of a man falling from one of the towers in 9/11. One friend suggested that the novel’s use of the image is more subtle, and I think that’s true. Also, the novel is more fragmented chronologically, and the movie is more straightforward in its time sequence. Somehow that takes some of the mystery out of it. One other observation: There is a certain amount of suspension of belief that is required of both the book and the movie, and I know that some dislike the book for that reason. That is probably even truer for the movie.

Is this Best Picture? Nope. It wraps up a sad story too neatly, too superficially. I’ve never lived in New York; I didn’t lose anyone in 9/11, so I can’t judge how I would feel if I had. Certainly it was a tragedy in my life like none other I’ve experienced, but perhaps a more direct connection would change the way I looked at the movie. But with the rather low expectations I came in with, I felt that it was worth watching. And just as the director would have wanted, my tissue was well used.

Friday Noon Movie Club: Take Shelter

This week’s Friday Noon Movie Club witnessed the first ever attendance by an adult male! This brave man and his lovely wife joined me for a couple of hours of ominous dread, as I had promised in the weekly announcement. We went to see Take Shelter, a film about a man who may be having visions warning of coming disaster, or he may be on the brink of a psychotic break. Is he a prophet, madman or both?


Curtis is a hard-working man with all the kinds of shelter we look for in life: his own home, a good job as a foreman on a construction drilling crew, good health insurance, friends, and a good marriage to his near-saint of a wife, Samantha. The two are working through the hurdles of bringing up their young, deaf daughter, Hannah, acting as shelter to her as well, as they learn how to use sign language and try to help her connect socially.

That kind of shelter is what we all hope for, often called the American Dream. But Curtis’s fears are becoming much larger than that shelter can handle. And the only way he can find to combat his fear is to protect his family. He becomes obsessed with building a tornado shelter, among other measures. His sources of protection strain his relationships, including his marriage.

This movie is strange and different. It is also extremely well made. The acting is stellar. Michael Shannon plays the perfect everyman—average looks, no particular charisma, but you somehow know that Curtis is a good man, a strong man, an honest man, even as he tries to hide what is happening to him. Jessica Chastain is luminous (and what a year she’s had—The Help, The Tree of Life, The Debt), giving us a demonstration of the Proverbs 31 woman at work, providing for her family in every way she can. I’m trying not to hate her.

Director Jeff Nichols lets us into the horror of Curtis’s fears. After a few of his nightmares I was afraid that I’d stumbled into a horror movie by accident, wondering where this would go. I don’t do horror. But while they took me to the limit of my comfort, they never went beyond it. The nightmares themselves are not the focal point. It’s the fear they inspire and the reactions to that fear that the movie builds on.

There are effective images of ascending and descending, going towards light and away from it, out in the open or underground. Even his job working with drilling makes you feel that somehow he is probing the earth, disturbing or trying to break through something hard and ungiving.

As Curtis goes through this trying experience, he turns on the TV only to see chemical spills on the news. His search for help leads him to a counselor at the hospital who uses a room covered with medical posters warning of HIV and H1N1. All of the everyday horror that becomes normal to us intensifies his feelings of dread—dread that he is either mentally ill or that something horrible is about to happen.

Hiding his fears only disconnects him from everyone else. They don’t understand what is happening, and they react badly. In one scene, members of his community see exactly how afraid he is, and his vulnerability and fear are palpable.

I’ve been thinking about why the movie includes a deaf daughter. There is one obvious plot reason that I won’t tell you about. But I think the disconnectedness that the parents know she experiences, even when she doesn’t know it, is part of the picture somehow. The inability to communicate or to hear what others try to communicate definitely plays a part in the story.

Last fall I saw Martha Marcy May Marlene, in which a young woman is taken in by and becomes a victim of a cult. I wouldn’t recommend it, because it was too disturbing. I wish I could un-see it. But I mention it here because between Take Shelter and the four M’s, the American Dream takes an allegorical beating. Not because it’s a bad thing in and of itself, but because it’s not enough to sustain you when you face the valley of the shadow of death.

If you enjoy movies that leave you wondering, and that give you food for thought for days, see Take Shelter. Take Shelter manages to nail the dread without leaving me feeling violated or hopeless. If you do see it, please let me know what you thought, particularly of the ending. This one will likely be on my mind for a couple of weeks.

"Dandelion Wine": What books remind you of summer?

In the dead of winter, what’s better than a taste of summer? You could have ice cold lemonade, but there’s that whole “cold” thing. Or you can put on your bathing suit, but that also has numerous drawbacks. Instead, how about a book that brings summer back to you?

Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine bottles up the summer of 1928 for all time.

The Fab 5 met to talk about it during a December snow drought. Our hostess lives a ways out, so we were glad about that. We told her we’d only drive to her house in the wintertime if she promised to decorate their mounted bear for Christmas. She obliged.

Dandelion Wine seems to be a novel that draws deeply on the author’s childhood in small-town Illinois. Most of Bradbury’s work is science fiction,, and we were surprised to find that this novel is often categorized as science fiction as well. I wouldn’t call it sci-fi, but sometimes it borders on magical realism.

Douglas Spaulding is twelve years old and has the entire summer spread out before him. He determines to pay attention, to notice things. His eyes are beginning to open to life, mortality, and the temporal nature of things. Through Bradbury’s descriptions, you can smell, feel, taste summer.

You’ll also be reminded of how different a young boy’s life is now. Douglas and Tom are watching things change before their eyes. The town’s trolley is being swapped out for buses. People are growing up, growing old, and dying. And the boys are observing their neighbors intently, finding surprises for the better and worse.

We were reminded of Olive Kitteridge in that this novel is actually a collection of stories all related by time, setting and recurring characters.

Sonya’s favorite story was about an elderly woman, Helen, and a young man named Bill who develop a close connection. They come to wonder if they are soulmates who have been meeting each other at the wrong time in their lives and that someday maybe they’ll be reborn as agemates as well, so that they can be together. It’s very sweet. Sort of reminds me of the Ben Folds song “The Luckiest.”

We were not sucked into the story right away. It took a while to catch our interest, several of us citing the story about 1/5 of the way in about another elderly woman who is visited by some little girls who refuse to believe she’d ever been young. It’s kind of sad; the woman decides that they are right—she is not the same person anymore, and there is no point to holding onto all of the mementos she has saved up, because they cannot make her that person. This was particularly hard for one of us to take, since she has a natural tendency to save up some mementos of her own!

The book grew on me as I read it, and I am happy I did. What books remind you of summer?

Friday Noon Movie Club: "The Iron Lady"

In the 1980s I was floundering through the social minefields of middle school and high school. I knew there was a Margaret Thatcher, and I understood clearly from my Dallas circles that Ronald Reagan was the savior of the US, and I sort of knew that the two of them were sort of connected. There, you pretty much have the sum total of my political awareness in the 1980s.

For a brief while this morning, I sat alone in an empty movie theater waiting for The Iron Lady to begin. I’m not put off by seeing a movie alone, and I wasn’t expecting anyone to make the drive in the aftermath of last night’s big snow, but as I waited for the movie to begin I found myself a little worried about the solitude. Political movies are the kind I should not be seeing and evaluating alone. Luckily for me, one of my neighbors braved the snow and joined me. In fact, she had lived briefly in England in 1986, and she was able to inform me as to who some of the characters were, as when Alexander Haig was referred to as Al, and I could not identify him. So take my review here with a grain of salt, politically speaking.

Meryl Streep gets rave reviews for her portrayal of Thatcher, but the movie itself gets very mixed reviews. One criticism I’ve seen several places is that the movie is too apolitical, which I’ll come back to. Another mentioned that by reducing her popular opposition to footage of protesters surrounding our main character as she sits in the car with her beloved husband, we can only empathize with her and see protesters as nasty, faceless, no-class hoardes. And in the days of the Occupy movements, this is inappropriate. Point taken.

One critic mentioned that if it weren’t for Meryl Streep’s performance, this would be no more than a TV movie. That one I take issue with. While it’s not The King’s Speech in grandeur, writing, and pacing (that quiet movie somehow tied my stomach in knots of suspense), The Iron Lady is a good deal more than a TV movie. Of course, this was a British reviewer, and he probably gets his TV movies from the BBC, not Lifetime. Maybe that’s like calling the HBO miniseries “John Adams” a TV movie. Whatever.

The movie is told through flashbacks, memories that loop through the present due to Mrs. Thatcher’s failing memory. She has long been grieving the loss of her husband, and he appears to her as if he is still alive. She is deciding if the time has come to give his belongings away, and each encounter with another person or with her husband’s “ghost” or with one of his belongings sets her mind back to a moment in her history.

Streep is fantastic as the elderly Thatcher. She disappears into the character. She moves between the world of her mind and the world of the present, showing with subtle expressions the emotions that assail her with each change.

There is no judgment of her in the film, if that’s what you are looking for. I know there were protests of this movie in Britain in the working class towns, partly due to Thatcher’s anti-union stance, and perhaps if I were in England I might have stronger opinions on this. But for me this is more like watching The King’s Speech than a movie about George W.; it’s a character study of someone I know little about. And as a character drama, it is well done. I’ll consider it creative non-fiction, not fact. One thing that my friend and I conferred about as the movie got going--we weren't sure if Thatcher was still alive. Neither of us remembered hearing that she'd passed away, but surely they wouldn't portray her as an elderly woman losing her memory if she were still alive? But they did.

So yes, you want to love this woman that you feel you are getting to know, especially when she is the only woman in Parliament. You grieve with her that she and her family pay a price for her success. You love her spirit and determination. But there are a few moments that show how stubborn and prickly she could be. How she might not have given her family all that she could. How nasty she sometimes was in the office and out. (Remind me not to become famous; I hate to think what faults would play out on the screen someday.)

I, personally, loved the scene where the young Thatcher warns her would-be husband that she cannot be like other wives, that her life must mean something, and that she "cannot die washing up teacups."
I can’t say that the faceless protesters made me think more of her and less of them. First of all, the very existence of the Occupy movements make that impossible, as does the footage of protests that I have seen throughout my life. The feeling I got from those scenes was that as she moved further and further from her own daughter-of-a-grocer roots, seeing protesters upfront was more and more of a shock to someone who now lived in the world of words and ideas and fighting over decisions and legislation, rather than physical labor and struggles for money and livelihood. In that way, I don’t think it vilifies her or grants her sainthood.

So that’s my humble opinion. I enjoyed it very much, though it was a little slow. Another movie that demands some patience. I don’t think it’s as well crafted as it could have been. But it gave me a bit of insight into history, and it served to continue my reverence for Meryl Streep’s acting prowess.

Now, while I refuse to "die washing up teacups," I really must do something about this house.

Friday Noon Movie Club: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

A record number of attendees joined me for the Friday Noon Movie Club today—four! Three friends from church and one from our neighborhood. It’s getting downright crowded in the theater. There were more people in general in this showing of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than I usually see at the Friday noon movies—the crazy holiday season must be behind us now.


After the movie we talked for a few minutes, and later I had a much longer discussion when our church movie group met. Both groups spent the greater part of the discussion just trying to figure out what happened.

This movie demands patience from the viewer. It is long, it is slow, and for the first 20-30 minutes it is impossible to know what is happening. If you watch it on your television, sprawled out on your couch, you will either fall asleep or find something to do while you watch it. And then you will miss half of the story, and you’ll be completely lost.

The story is a twisting, convoluted tale of espionage, populated with people who can’t fully trust anyone and who live under a cloud of suspicion. The 1970s come to life in sets and costumes, and let’s just say that 70s hairstyles really didn’t do much for anyone. There is a grey and grainy atmosphere to the filming, which lends to the cold war feel of the movie. The cities and the time frames blur together; the only way to tell what is a flashback and what is currently happening is to check which glasses George Smiley is wearing. Viewers can’t help but be disoriented, which seems intentional, helping us identify with a cast of characters who stand on constantly shifting ground.

There are some great details in the movie. One of my favorites was the signage. There were signs everywhere, for instance, in the elevator: “Beware of head entrapment.” Or in the reading room, where the sign says “Have you left anything behind?” Also, there are great scenes showing how much paper got pushed around before computers—elevators moving paper, women pushing carts full of paper. And lots of people boxed in by windows or walls or locked trailer-like meeting rooms within rooms.

I also discovered my new favorite celebrity name: Benedict Cumberbatch. Seriously. He plays Smiley’s assistant, Peter; he also plays Sherlock in the BBC show of the same name.

None of my movie pals had read the book (including me). A couple of people had watched the BBC miniseries from the 70s, and they helped explain parts of the story from what they could remember from the miniseries. My husband, Brian, read a few chapters of the book once but couldn’t get into it and gave up. Those who saw the miniseries said that it also started out slow and hard to understand, so apparently that is the M.O. of the story.

Another John le Carré novel that became a movie is The Constant Gardener. That 2005 movie was also a slow burn—not action-packed, but quite beautiful and I loved it. I’m not sure I’d say I love Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It’s got a few scenes that were a bit gritty for my taste, and more importantly, it is just so hard to follow. But the actors are incredible, and by the end I was waiting in suspense to find out who the “mole” was.

See this movie if you enjoy a film you have to unravel or solve; it’s undercover entertainment. If you want a slick action film, go see Mission Impossible.