Goodbye Solo: The Best Film Released This Year (So Far)

'Goodbye Solo' (I know I've mentioned it before - but it's now out on DVD in the US and just released to cinemas in the UK and Ireland) is the most frustrating film I’ve seen in ages, and also the best film I’ve seen released this year.  Ramin Bahrani, recently anointed by no less a credible source than Roger Ebert as ‘the great new American film-maker’ had a lot to live up to after his stunning movies about the economic fringes of the US immigrant experience.  ‘Man Push Cart’ and ‘Chop Shop’ tell human, and humane stories about the most mundane of circumstances – the need to make money to survive; but they do it in a way that conveys such urgency, and is completely without cliché that they take on the propulsive force of the most exciting action films.

‘Goodbye Solo’ is set in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a tobacco town not far from where I live, enervated by the collapse of other industries, and now home to, among others, a large contingent of African men, many of whom drive taxis.  As in so many other cities, many of these taxi drivers are highly qualified individuals, who occupied a very different social stratum in their homeland.  Coming to America may have granted them a better life – but America has not been as good to them as they hoped.

And so, Souleymane from Senegal (Solo for short) drives folk around Winston-Salem, and picks up William, an elderly white man, who makes an unusual request.  He wants to be driven to a mountain range in two weeks’ time, and be left there, no questions asked.  He will pay handsomely for the journey, and for the silence.  It is obvious that he intends this to be a one way trip for himself.  Solo – and we – can’t stand it.  Who is this man, William?  Why does he want to die?  Why does he go to the movies so often?  Why does he become violent when queried?

And who is Solo?  What happened in Senegal to make him want to leave?  Does he love his girlfriend?  Will he stay with her?  What are his dreams?  What does he believe?

The thing is, ‘Goodbye Solo’ never explicitly tells you the answers to these questions; but when it’s over, you know.  You know that there is nothing more important than love; that love necessarily presupposes the pain of loss; that the question of will and intention is at the heart of what makes us human.  In a recent interview with the director, I asked him if his film challenges the myth of liberal interventionism – the notion that all problems can be solved by an outside force imposing its will.  His response put my all-too-fertile critical pretentions in their place.  ‘Goodbye Solo’ has no politics, he said – it just wants to ask what would happen if two very different men met at the right time, in the right place; I’d add that it wants to ruminate on the loneliness that post-modern, post-industrial life has bred for so many; most of all, it wants to tell a bloody good story, and tell it more richly, and more believably than anything else I’ve seen this year.  It upset me, but it also made me feel more alive.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

This review was originally published in Third Way magazine - check out the magazine here.

Clint Eastwood's Moral Imagination, Or Why Glenn Beck Should Read More Speeches

It's that time of year again - you know, when Clint Eastwood releases a trailer for a movie that looks fascinating and completely different from the last thing he did, and your triple reactions run something like this: 1: Hmmm, Clint's got a movie coming out - didn't we just see 'Gran Torino' five minutes ago?; 2: Hmmm, it's got Morgan Freeman playing Nelson Mandela in it - how come no one ever thought of that before?; 3: Hmmm, it's a movie about the 1995 Rugby World Cup - how come no one ever thought of that before?  Well, no one ever thought of making a gripping film out of the ancient 'old racist bloke in Detroit has his heart melted by a Hmong family and saves the world through non-violent atonement metaphor before singing a jazz song over the early end credits' plot either.  So I'm rather excited about 'Invictus' - biopics are always a risky proposition, but there's an implication in the trailer that this one might do more than retread what we already know or think we know.

Mandela has rightly become an unimpeachable moral figure, but it's par for the course to ignore what he actually stood for.  Mandela is more than a mascot, though our culture might prefer him this way; but he actually has things to say.  Icons of moral authority who act toward the common good are often treated this way: I was astonished yesterday to see the digital wall montage that Glenn Beck uses to underline the gravity of what he's saying - accompanied by the invocation 'Speak Without Fear', an image of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr appeared, leading into Beck denouncing (yet again) concerns about climate change, and announcing his willingness to go to prison for the right to eat steak.  We might imagine Dr King would agree that particular cause doesn't exactly warrant a new letter from a Birmingham jail.

In fact, we might also imagine that a reading of Dr King's actual thoughts about the actual world would surprise Glenn Beck and his audience.  In fact, and let me not be misunderstood: it's kind of obscene for a man who recently imagined aloud his fantasy to poison Nancy Pelosi and joked about President Obama setting the people on fire to attempt to inveigle his way into the legacy of non-violence enacted by a man who, there can be little doubt, Beck would be denouncing if he were alive today.  But if his audience were being exposed to what he actually said about the world, I'd tune in every day.  Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea - maybe we could organise a campaign to encourage talk show hosts only to use images of moral leaders if they're going to spend two minutes every show actually quoting what they actually said.  Beck could begin with some reference to Dr King's 'Giant Triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism'; maybe he could just agree to read a paragraph a day from his 'Beyond Vietnam' speech...

Lest I get ahead of myself, let's get back to the movies - I'm hopeful that the Eastwood/Freeman Mandela is more than a cliche, and resists the urge to laze in platitudes.  Clint's last movie showed something about quiet authority, and portrayed a radical idea: that justice or peace sometimes costs its proponents a very great deal; it did this without barnstorming speeches or spelling it out; it gets better in the memory the more I think about it.  Eastwood's Walt Kowalski in 'Gran Torino' felt like the culmination of every iconic character Clint has played - a man with no name/Dirty Harry all grown up and full of regret for past mistakes, who makes a choice to invert it all, and live beyond the narrow circle of selfishness.  Mandela made that choice a long time ago - who knows what Clint's vision of a moment in his life might bring?  We might be about to see a film about an iconic figure that transcends the typical mistakes of making him unreachable to the rest of us; we might actually see a portrayal of Mandela that tells us something about leadership rather than merely represents him as a kind of political pop star.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAL6hPm0-Ss&NR=1]

Problem of the Day: Has Martin Scorsese made a Ghost Story? And if so, What am I going to do about it?

So I was up early this morning having slept restlessly after watching the end of 'Battlestar Galactica' last night (no spoilers - suffice it to say that fans of Richard Dawkins and Thomas Merton may find themselves both satisfied; I certainly was).  Cylons colonised my repose (for some reason the early models, one of whose bosses is depicted above, were the stuff of my childhood nightmares), but I managed to avoid the bad dream I might otherwise have had when I was younger and less apt to resist imagining the imminent doom of the planet.  I have a sensitive constitution, as they say.  Which segues neatly into the reason for this post: why I am about to let you, dear reader, down.

Over at The Film Talk, my genial co-host and I are busy as usual in TFT Central, grafting away at the plans for Episode 98, which will - must - feature 'This is It' (and if you heard our preview at the end of Episode 97 you'll know just how much we're looking forward to that particular endeavor, although early reviews are surprisingly good), and 'Paranormal Activity', (image below) the once-every-ten-years-straight-outta-the-gate-micro-budget-huge-audience-scare-the-life-from-you-neo-Blair-Witch-Project, cleverly marketed with midnight screenings before opening wide wide WIDE.  It will be unavoidable for the next few weeks.

And here's the problem:

I hate scary movies.

I spent the better part of 'The Sixth Sense' (and, yes, before you jump in, there was a better part - and we tend to like Shyamalan round here, no matter how unpopular it makes us) employing the time-honored tactic of removing my glasses and staring at my left foot, thereby reducing the height that I would be propelled out of my seat when whatever Mr S wanted to frighten me with appeared on screen.

I got as far as being picked up by my friend Alex and half-way to the theatre before I decided that I couldn't go through with our previous arrangement to see 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose'; I was sure it would be an ordeal.  (Note to the snark police: I mean for good reasons; I'm told the movie's not bad at all.)

I even found my viewing of 'The Black Hole' at Escapism last week to be problematic - Maximillian Schell made me jump on more than one occasion, and the final sequence in which he is possessed by the spirit of his pet robot to rule over Hades is just about as much as my resolution can take.

So, to the presenting issue:

Jett wants us to review 'Paranormal Activity' this week.  I can't face seeing it.  I think I can address the ethical question by carrying out one of our patented q&a reviews; and I'll devote some serious attention to thinking 'em up; but I just don't think I can sustain the emotional assault course of watching the movie.

This isn't just for reasons of psycho-spiritual balance, although I do tend to think that there's enough struggle in most days to make me less than apt to subject myself to more for entertainment's sake.  And I'm not averse to horror films per se - 'The Exorcist', 'The Shining', 'Quiz Show' (trust me - it's a horror movie about the potential collapse of a man's soul) each find their way into my roster of re-watchable movies, most of the time.  No, I guess my resistance to 'Paranormal Activity' resides in a combination of the emotional terrain questions I've just raised, and the fact that it seems this apparently very accomplished film chooses to present the mystery of spirit as a threat.  We've mentioned on the show before that no less a philosophical artist than Stanley Kubrick considered the tale of Jack Torrance, the hotel, and the tricycle to be 'an optimistic story', because, he said, any story that posits the existence of an afterlife for human beings must therefore include hope.  Fair point, Stanley, even though I think he was slightly joking.  Of course, 'The Shining' doesn't exactly present its vision in an optimistic way.  Nor, I'm told, does 'Paranormal Activity'.  [SPOILER BELOW THE PICTURE]

We see a young couple killed by ghosts.  It's supposed to thrill us.  Next week, we will watch angels try to save humans from their selfishness in 'Wings of Desire'.  It will feel transcendent to watch it again.  It will thrill me.  And I don't think I'll have missed anything by not seeing 'Paranormal Activity'.

Now, I've read that Orin Peli, the director of 'Paranormal Activity' used to be afraid of ghosts, and that he made the movie as an attempt at catharthsis.  Good for him.  I'm pretty sure, however, that it wouldn't be cathartic for me.

So here are my five questions to you - I'd appreciate any advice you can give:

Can any of you convince me to see 'Paranormal Activity' before we record on Friday morning?

What is the purpose of horror fiction?

Does horror on film create, reduce, nurture, or ignore horror in real life?

Is it a good thing to pay to be frightened?

And, given that Martin Scorsese's 'Shutter Island' looks like a serial killer/scary mental institution/murderous-rage-from-beyond-the-grave film, is there any advice you can offer to help me prepare for the inevitable repeat of my pre-emptive angst when that movie is released next year?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYVrHkYoY80]

The Teeth of Gilgamesh

I saw 'Jaws' in a cinema for the first time, having grown up afraid of swimming due to repeated pan-and-scan broadcasts on probably all four of the terrestrial channels granted me in childhood, but never having the opportunity to see it projected on a canvas large enough to do it justice.   I was struck by my friend and co-host's suggestion that the story of Roy, Ricky, Bob and the shark is a Holocaust film in disguise - evoked by the the city fathers' refusal to acknowledge the danger, the fleeing of the powerless bathers from the sea, the conversation about the delivery of the A-Bomb, and, perhaps most Freudian of all, the fact that gas is used to kill.  As is often the case, my co-host impressed with his mysterious ability to find things in movies that no one has said before, or that at least don't show up on the first page of a Google search.  I'm fascinated by his suggestion that the most obvious analogue to 'Jaws' in Spielberg's work may be 'Schindler's List', and I'm sure we'll talk about this on TFT soon.

It dovetails with the fact that, for me, 'Jaws' has become the archetypal film for representing the meaning of violence in our shared culture - there are obvious parallels between the death of the shark and the origin of the myth that order can be brought out of chaos by the application of more chaos found in 'The Epic of Gilgamesh'.  In 'Jaws', paradise is restored through ultimate force; in that regard it looks like the story that catechises pop culture, unquestioned.  So it's troubling, and philosophically compelling.  It also happens to be crafted from a rock that looks to me like the secret headquarters of perfect film grammar; so it's an utterly compelling, character-rich tale.

I leave you with three questions:

1: What other films do you, the TFT community consider to be philosophically deeper than their reputation would suggest?

2: What films other films can you think of that end with the opposite of the climax in 'Jaws', with a negotiated settlement rather than killing the bad guy?

3: Where did Murray Hamilton (below) get his jackets?  And does anyone know if you can buy them in Tennessee or North Carolina?

Mental Illness and the Movies

Just a brief post from me as I'm on my way to Nashville to, among other things, meet up with the maestro for a screening of recent cult film 'The Room' at the glorious Belcourt Theatre. Meantime, I'd like to recommend the gutsy article at the Huffington Post from Glenn Close on the cinematic portrayal of mental illness. It's a significant moment when anyone is prepared to criticise their own work, especially when that work is among the most successful and iconic they've done, but Close all but disassociates herself from 'Fatal Attraction' because the way it turned a human being with a personality disorder who needed help into a monster whom the audience was supposed to consider worthy only of being spectacularly murdered.

There are, as Close writes, notable exceptions (such as 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', above) to the superficiality or demonising portrayals of mental illness; but for the most part, the contours of the mind in the movies are subject to the same kind of over-simplification or plain ignorance that shows up every time the term 'schizophrenic' is used to describe 'split personality' (an entirely different condition) or, more disturbing, when 'psychotic' is used interchangeably with the accurate term given to the extremely rare phenomenon of 'psychopathy'. According to the Native American scholar Joe Gone, 48% of US Americans have a diagnosable mental illness, and so Close's points about ignorance not helping any of us are just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm not an expert in any of this, although like most of us, have not been untouched by mental illness in my friends, my family, myself; I'd love to have a conversation here about the portrayal of psychological conditions in cinema - any particularly good examples of accuracy, or bad examples of egregious misunderstanding?  If mental illness is frequently rooted in conflicted desire and expectation, and if cinema is about desire, is it possible that the movies might actually have the power to make us sick?  Or to heal us?