KING OF THE HILL (NOT THAT ONE)

Before he balanced a career between epic biopics of revolutionary political figures and wealthy stylish casino thieves, Steven Soderbergh made a handful of films that hardly anyone has seen. The guy behind the huge scale globalism of TRAFFIC and CONTAGION (both about a kind of virus) also explored the terrain of KAFKA's soul and made a pseudo-autobiographical satire on industry and art in SCHIZOPOLIS (which includes the wonderful line "In the event that you find certain sequences or ideas confusing, please bear in mind that this is your fault, not ours. You will need to see the picture again and again until you understand everything.") It's fairly typical for commentators to perceive this as a 'one for the studio/audience, one for me' pattern, but that's only if you think audiences are stupid,  directors can't be interested in two kinds of things at once, and that art ceases to have substance once it becomes popular or entertaining.  CHE and MAGIC MIKE are both entertaining and have something to say. And so does the just re-released KING OF THE HILL, a warm but honest coming of age story by AE Hotchner, the man who taught Paul Newman how to make salad dressing (and with whom he wrote the magnificently titled memoir 'Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good'), is finally getting a DVD/BluRay release, and is an elegant surprise.

A St Louis Depression context, a boy protagonist who really is growing up, colorful characters on the sidelines (including a performance of delicacy and, since his death, great pathos from the great Spalding Gray), fusion of comedy and brokenness - it could be written by Mark Twain and shot by Matisse, so welcoming is the light (perhaps too much - Soderbergh himself says that he feels it should have looked bleaker). Beyond that, KING OF THE HILL is a lovely, truthful treatment of the making and breaking and remaking of faith in life. It's better than pretty much anything available at the multiplex this week.

KING OF THE HILL is released today by Criterion, with the usual full-to-the-brim features, alongside a brilliant addition - an entire bonus feature film, Soderbergh's follow up THE UNDERNEATH, which he includes here because he doesn't like it enough to warrant a full release on its own terms. Such humility - at least in public - makes it easier to like KING OF THE HILL even more.

Things Change

The next time someone tells you that the definition of marriage has never changed, you might invite them to read this.

Ireland Trip July 2014: Emerging from the Pool Younger

Dave Wilcox, Karen Moore and I are leading a trip to Ireland this July - you can find out more information here - and we'd love you to consider joining us. Watching The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp the other day had me considering one of its tricks, when the central character emerges from a swimming pool younger than when he went in. That feels like a good metaphor for what I think will happen to those of us who spend ten days in northern Ireland this summer, walking the landscape, building community, re-imagining. So here's my thoughts on Colonel Blimp, written originally for Reel Spirituality and I hope you'll think about coming with me to Belfast in July.

How can I convince you to watch The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp? The question itself is problematic, for a film so dedicated to a desire for an end to war, the violence inherent in the attempt at convincing someone else of its value is paradoxical. The understanding of non-violent communication advanced, for instance, in Marshall Rosenberg's work raises profound implications for film critics (and critics of any medium). Non-violent communication invites us into a revolution in how we talk with each other: speaking not what we think the other needs to hear, nor what we might want them to believe, but what we would like the other to understand, and letting go of whether or not they do.  And the purpose of listening is to understand the other, not to be persuaded, or to persuade. So if unthinking persuasion is a form of violence, then it’s paradoxical to ask how I can persuade you to watch The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a film, among other things, about the hope for an end to violence.

It’s a challenge faced by characters in the film I was most reminded of while watching the exquisite BluRay of Blimp, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, also newly restored (though prematurely released, for the restoration work is incomplete, and copyright reasons mean it can only be bought on BluRay in Italy.  But I still couldn’t resist buying it, so if you come to my house we can watch it together). Blimp is about a British army officer living through three wars, failing to speak up for the woman he loves, and feeling out of time with his culture, while the most consistent relationship in his life is a great friendship with a German opposite number.  America is about a kid growing up into a gangster living through family torment, failing to understand - and ultimately horrifically abusing - the woman he loves, feeling out of time with his culture, while the most consistent relationship in his life is a flawed friendship with an unstable comrade.

Roger Livesey’s Colonel and Robert de Niro’s operating partner gangster have much in common - they fight for a living, they lose the woman they love, they wonder what’s in it for them.  Both films are staggering in scope - each a canvas of over 40 years in the life of one man.  Both are about suffering and loss and what we do with it.  Their protagonists make different choices - the Colonel endures with no sense of victimhood: he merely serves and feels sad, yet at his twilight he is loved and friended and proud; Noodles, however, struggles to grow out of childish, selfish impulses, can’t handle the responsibility of loving someone well (or letting them go), and his ultimate tragedy is to try to control every outcome. It blows up in his face, and the film’s flashback structure may belie one of the most disturbing first person narrative postures in cinema: our ‘hero’ may actually be dreaming most of the film, in which he gets the moral upper hand, while he’s actually hallucinating in an opium den, awaiting his own murder.

It’s in their reflection on what it takes to make a life, and their resonance with the achings and longings we all share - for love, for forgiveness, for security, for fame, for joy, for family, for the feeling of being part of a bigger picture, that Blimp and America become religious iconography, lenses through which we imagine God.  The Colonel is wise enough as a young man to know that one day he will be old; he has that ineffable sense of knowing that there are things he does not know.  Noodles - sent to prison as a teenager for avenging his young friend’s murder - was mixed up to begin with, then stunted in confusing childishness with childlikeness. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and so he thinks he can do anything; without mentors or initiation, he is left grasping for how to be in the world - confusing a desire to possess with love, unable to ask for things instead of demanding them or worse.

The jazz of these films is exhilarating - the sequence in which the Colonel’s post-heartbreak life is portrayed as a decade or so of hunting exotic animals, so that wall-mounted dead heads is all he has to show for it; the first meeting of Noodles and his best friend/nemesis Max, when a pocket watch is switched between three guys, each of them telling the time at which they took it; the set-up for the duel in Blimp (which Scorsese homages in Raging Bull), that leads to deep friendship between two men whose countries are at war - a more courageous statement than most current storytellers have been willing to make in the context of our contemporary conflicts; the use of a muzaky version of Yesterday to evoke not only Noodles’ regret but the shallowness of the world he’s entering (or fantasizing); and most of all the last two minutes of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which deserve to be seen without spoilers.  Blimp’s co-director, Michael Powell, wanted to be eulogized as ‘film director and optimist’; the last line of this epic comedy of the human condition, manages to be both perhaps the saddest and most life-affirming one might imagine.

One of these films is thirty years old, the other seventy.  One day everyone reading this will be older than both combined, should we find ourselves into eternity, or if Ray Kurzweil’s singularity proves to have sufficient tenacity. Whatever our age, we will form an identity partly from the leavings of our memories: how we interpret the story we’re telling ourselves about what has happened to us and what we have done yesterday will determine the shape of the story we choose to live in today.  If everything is autobiography, if storytelling is a way of life, then we actually do live in a magical, fairy tale world where we can construct our own meaning. Isn’t that what we all do? With reference to personal experience, sacred texts or wisdom, community traditions, and the exercise of discernment, we figure out a story that works (or doesn’t work until we find one that does). The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Once Upon a Time in America are two sides of a coin - they could be about the same man making different choices. Both begin with the protagonist traveling through a door in time - the Colonel swimming in a Turkish bath, Noodles walking through a gate in a train station.  The Colonel emerges from the pool younger - it’s 40 years ago and the story can start with limitless possibility; Noodles comes back through the door 35 years later, and his story is ending, filled with regret.

Emerging from the pool younger. I’d like that. I’d like to respond to a film’s evocation of a full life by choosing to reset my own path in the places where it lacks responsibility, or service, or rest, or community, or kindness.  I’d like to respond to a movie that honors ‘protocol’ by learning to take life seriously, but to not take myself too seriously. I’d like to respect the calling of a film like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, whose directors made some massive out of very little, who gave themselves over to the imagination and created something that will last. I’d like to avoid living like the characters in Once Upon a Time in America. But I shouldn’t deny the resonance with Noodles’ brokenness - if you can empathize with (and learn something from) a fake colonel in Second World War London, why not with a fake gangster in Prohibition New York? If Colonel Blimp can emerge from the pool younger, can’t I do the same?

Come to Ireland with us in July and let's talk. Sound good, ok?

The Wisest Movie of Last Year Isn't Nominated for Any Oscars

There's a moment toward the end of 'Stories We Tell', the Canadian actor Sarah Polley's hybrid reconstruction-documentary-group therapy session, that I think may stay with me forever.  At least I hope it will, so wise is its appreciation of the work of being human, the hope of moving beyond past failures and sorrow, and the invitation each of us receives to make a life as a participant in something much larger than ourselves.  Call it the out-working of the redemption of humanity, call it being etched into the Panorama of Being, call it the pursuit of happiness - whatever it is, Sarah Polley's dad knows what he's talking about when he says 'You can't outrun the mask of comedy.'

An actor with distinguished theatrical form, Michael Polley had reached the beginning of his ninth decade when Sarah decided to make a film about their family experience.  The less you know about that experience, or at least the way it would be headlined on TMZ or the Huffington Post's less nuanced pages, the better.  The beauty of 'Stories We Tell' was, for me, indivisible from the surprise value, the sense of genuine unfolding of narrative unpredictability.  Most popular documentaries these days are better described as 'crafted non-fiction', by which I mean they aren't really about the discovery of something new (last year's Oscar-winning 'Searching for Sugarman' is a great example: a lovely, rhythmic movie with a heart, but whose makers seem to have known what the story would be before they recorded a single pixel).  But there's an incomparable excitement when watching a non fiction film in which the audience is able to trust the filmmaker's own naïveté - what might be imperfectly called an 'innocent gaze', which captures something they didn't expect, that wasn't scripted, that arose only because two previously independent entities (in this case Sarah Polley the director engaging with her relatives as the subjects of a film in which she also plays a major role; rather than Sarah Polley the sister and daughter merely hanging out with her family) met on a film location and something new was born.

There are lots of these births in 'Stories We Tell' - the birth of relationships (between people who either didn't know each other before, or only thought they did), the birth of trust (between Polley and the audience, in the first instance; between Polley and her subjects for the rest), and eventually the birth of redemption. Michael Polley says this memorable thing toward the end of the movie (it really forms the climax), a little red around the eyes, a little quieter than before, but with a perceptible inner smile.  'You can't outrun the mask of comedy', says Michael, at the end of a long interview, intercut with home video footage, dramatic reenactment, and voices from the past.  He says it as a riposte to those who believe that life is always spiraling downward, who assert that our inevitable deaths are merely the signifiers that everything is meaningless.  'You can't outrun the mask of comedy' is his way of saying that even death is to be treated with amusement - it's silly for us to think we could ever understand the mystery of our lives. The fact that he says it after being seen to have suffered great costs in his family life, and in the context of offering forgiveness to someone who hurt him a great deal, even to the extent of empathizing with the other party's own pain, makes 'You can't outrun the mask of comedy' the wisest piece of movie dialogue, and 'Stories We Tell' the best movie of the last year.

The Paradox of the People who want Us to Buy Their Stuff so that We Will Be HAPPY

I'm still reading 'Darling', the spiritual autobiography by Mexican-American writer Richard Rodriguez, and am beginning to feel the pre-emptive regret that sets in when you know something wonderful is about to end. I don't want this book to stop.  The wisdom that Rodriguez unveils in 'Darling' - why women will lead the future of humane religion, the use and misuse and underuse of newspapers to define cities, the interplay and collisions between sexuality, sacrament and the internet, and most especially the question of how, in the age of superficial connection, we might both retain and renew ourselves as embodied souls - is of the kind that causes me to scrunch up my nose and smile with gentle awe. Rodriguez understands that good writing - or at least original writing - depends on (in fact, may consist in) taking two things that aren't already understood to belong together and out of them creating one new thing.  And so, this, tucked into his argument ('Final Edition') that the death of newspapers may mean the death of cities, and launched from a riff on the epidemic of disembodiment our age has embraced and regretted at the same time:

'Something funny I have noticed - perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Dovos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? they want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can clock your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a cafe table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the 'New Establishment' issue of Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London; they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortgage and Do Not Disturb signs and views of the park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a way to pump episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (ADD TO SHOPPING CART), they will do it.'

Wily, Rodriguez anticipates the reader's question (what must be done, etc.) with 'An obituary does not propose a solution.' He's right - lament and renewal are not the same thing. They can happen at the same time, however, or pretty close to it, and, of course, the tools of disembodiment are not inevitably so: I'm writing this on one of them. But I'm feeling more and more drawn to consider the degree to which I am an embodied person with access to technological tools that, when stewarded thoughtfully, can promote the common good (and mine), held in tension with the degree to which every day I am being invited to surrender my will to a machine in order that I might become more like one.