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.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
"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.
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?
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.
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, January 13, 2012
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.
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, January 6, 2012
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.
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.
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