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.