Meet The Fockers

Meet The Fockers isn't much of a movie -- its really not much more than an extended episode of a middling sitcom -- but it has something very special: A cast of actors with marvelous, quirky faces. The sixtyish foursome at its center -- Robert De Niro, Blythe Danner, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand -- are glorious in their mature, wrinkled, slightly sagging distinctiveness. And even Ben Stiller and Teri Polo, as the beleaguered young couple faced with introducing their very different families prior to their weeking, have more character in their angular faces than just about any other film actors their age.
I didn't much care for Manohla Dargis's article on plastic surgery on last Sunday's Arts & Leisure front page in The New York Times. I thought she was unnecessarily timid in talking about the actors who have destroyed their images in vain efforts to remain youthful. But the actors in this film prove Dargis's point. They look good, but they don't look 25, and they don't seem to be bothered by that. They simply look like real people, if a bit better than most of us.
Some of the lustrous seniors even give performances here. Dustin Hoffman is pretty marvelous as a left-wing lawyer turned stay-at-home dad, and Barbra Streisand matches him in good humor as a free-spirited sex therapist for seniors. Blythe Danner is a beautifully modulated and effective actress. Out of the seniors, only Robert De Niro, playing a boring stiff, fails to shine. His character was funny enough in its first outing, 2002's Meet The Parents, but he has no new sides, no colors and thus ends up holding no interest.
Stiller and Polo find themselves in a similar bind; they're playing exactly the same characters, with pretty much exactly the same reactions as they did the first time around. What's the point?
But this painless if mediocre comedy has become an enormous hit, and so I would imagine we will get another sequel when the next generation of Fockers hits the street. And that will be okay if Hoffman, Streisand and Danner can be around to welcome it to the world.

The Egyptologist

Arthur Philips is a talented, and clever writer, but halfway through The Egyptologist I couldn't help feeling that something was missing from this novel. So far, the story had been told from three points of view: The archeological explorer Ralph Trilipush, his fiancee Margaret, and his emerging nemesis the detective Harold Ferrell. Trilipush's tale is presented as a series of journal entries, written for both history and Margaret, Margaret's as a set of increasingly desperate letters from her home in Boston to Ralph's dig site near the Valley of the Kings, and Ferrell's as recollections written down more than 30 years later for the benefit of Margaret's nephew.
The subject is a dig for the tomb of a little-known, possibly apocryphal Egyptian pharaoh, Atum-hadu, whose erotic poetry the explorer has translated and published in a scandalous volume that he hands out to virtually everyone he encounters, including the noted explorer Howard Carter, who is simultaneously searching nearby for the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.
Implied from the beginning is the possibility that several figures in the emerging story have been murdered, and that Trilipush is not the landed Oxford scholar that he presents himself to be.
So what's missing? The book is very well written, with the multiple points of view convincing, the characters amusingly self-absorbed and duplicitous. It's clever, but maybe not clever enough. The solution to the central mystery becomes obvious about halfway through, and, as one Amazon.com review succinctly put it, from there on the book has a "get on with it" quality. I raced through the second half to see how Phillips would tie the ends together.
There also are hints of additional intrigues never developed. Surely I am not the first to see that Ralph Trilipush's name is an anagram for the author's, and that the initial M plays a significant by unexplained role (it is Trlipush's middle name, it is the way his fiancee signs her letters, and added to the author's name is an anagram for a "reviewer" of Trilipush's work).

Runaway

Alice Munro's stories aren't much like anyone else's, certainly not those of most of her contemporaries'. Although her work is published in all the right periodicals -- The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly -- that's where the resemblance to John Updike or Ann Beatty ends. Where the modern short story relies on the carefully detailed incident, the captured moment, Munro's stories may span years and tell of momentous events in the lives of her characters. They aren't very short -- typically about 40 pages -- and they are novelistic in their sweep and subject matter. In one of the stories in Runaway, her latest collection, a woman searches for years for a daughter she has lost to a religious cult, moves three times, pursues several careers, loses a husband and later a best friend, and goes through several boyfriends.
Another story -- also spanning 50 years or more -- moves structurally from first-person diary entries to conventional narrative, to epistolary, back to conventional narrative and ends with a dream sequence.

Hotel Rwanda

Hotel Rwanda is a devastating film, a riveting and horrifying account of an atrocity to which the world turned a blind eye. The picture is well-written by Keir Pearson and Terry George and effectively directed by Mr. George, and it's superbly acted, by Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Fana Okoena and others.
Cheadle stars as Paul Rusesabagina, manager of the Milles Colones, a popular, five-star tourist hotel in Kalinga, who becomes a savior when long-standing tensions between the country's Hutu and Tutsi populations erupt into civil war. Paul, a dark-skinned Hutu, is married to a light-skinned Tutsi, played by Ms. Okonedo. Before the war breaks out, he insists to his family that all will be okay under a UN-brokered truce, but he collects favors to be called in if his family becomes endangered. But when the troubles start, his friends and neighbors flock to his home, refugees begin pouring into the hotel even as the European guests are being ushered out, and Paul finds himself using all of his bargaining and negotiating skills to save as many lives as he can manage.
The predominant image I carried away from the film was Cheadle's dark, worried face, his brow furrowed, his black eyes tight and darting about as he tries desperately to determine his next move. Cheadle's performance is a career-defining one, and I think he deserves an Oscar for it.
The huge accomplishment of this motion picture is to bring into sharp focus a tragedy that was for most Americans, I suspect, too distant and poorly understood to matter. George, Pearson and Cheadle make us see the devastation through the eyes of a privileged man and family whose sense of security is suddenly shattered.
I think it ranks up with Schindler's List and The Pianist as one of the most important documents on the devastation of war to be released in the last 20 years.

A Few Notes on "Jazz" and the Documentaries of Ken Burns

I have only begun watching Ken Burns' documentary series Jazz, so I can't comment extensively on it yet, but having recently watched several other Burns documentaries -- The Shakers, The Brooklyn Bridge, and Huey Long -- I want to make a comment about what I consider to be his signal contribution: The way in which he mines and animates our national trove of photographs.
The Civil War first brought Burns to my attention. While I didn't watch most of that series, I recall that it was famous in part for its rounding up of a vaast collection of early photographs that illustrated the narrative. What Burns with still photographs is quite interesting: He pans and zooms over them in time to music, so that these static images become animated, spring to life in a compelling way.
While it is interesting in some of his other documentaries, the quality of the music and its direct relationship to the narrative in Jazz make the first episode of that series particularly striking to me. He also uses early moving film, I found myself most struck by the movement over the fixed images.

*****

Burns' documentaries rely more on overlaid narration than many other respected recent non-fiction films. These are not stories told "in the words" of those who lived them, for the most part. Burns' films have distinct narrators. Like the camera's movements over the still pictures, the narration is applied to the historical record. It's the layering of image, music and narrative that supplies the power.

What's The Matter With Kansas?

As entertaining and insightful as Thomas Frank's book is, I think it misses some important historical context in its understanding of the roots of the neoconservative movement in middle America.
Perhaps Frank, at 40, is just a little too young to understand. I grew up in the 1960s, in a family whose convictions and even feelings of personal safety were rocked by the urban riots and by the Vietnam War, in ways that my parents had a hard time either explaining or accommodating. Roe vs. Wade, which Frank puts at a central place in the culture wars, came some five years later, and while it has had a lasting effect on our political life, I think it was less of a catalyst for the rightward swing than a bolstering of a process already in place.
Let me tell the story this way:
Like the blue-collar people Franks writes about, my parents were traditional, high-school-educated, union-dues-paying Democrats who -- during the years in which I came of age -- converted to resentful, Nixon-supporting conservatives.
I can say, not proudly but honestly, that my parents had a deep-seated racism that had caused them to move from "the city" of Baltimore out to the suburbs in the late 1950s, in fear of their neighborhood "turning." I grew up in a completely white, blue-collar, Catholic suburban environment until, in the 6th grade, the first black student entered my elementary school
I remember what an "event" this was. Even more momentous was that this girl, whose name I recall was Bonita Jackson, was quickly moved from the "slow" class up to the "accelerated" class of which I was part. She became, in fact, a friend, the first black person I had even known as a peer. (We had had a black cleaning woman -- a "colored girl" -- for a short time, but I really didn't know or think it was worth knowing anything about her at this young age).
Bonita only lasted in my school for a couple of months, at most. One day, she was gone. I have no idea why or to where.
That was a positive experience in my evolving view of race. Before Bonita, I had considered blacks to be "boogies," a sort of subhuman species that it was best to stay far away from. That's what I was taught by my parents, and meeting Bonita was eye-opening for me.
My parents didn't react negatively when I began to talk about her, but I am sure they felt threatened.
More overtly threatening to them were the race-related sit-ins and riots of the 1960s. I remember driving through Cambridge, Maryland, home of protests led by H. Rap Brown, and being warned by my parents about how dangerous the civil rights movment was.
I remember hearing about the riots in Watts and Newark and Detroit, and for a time remember hearing how Baltimore, where I grew up, had been spared this plague. And then, in April 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and Baltimore went up in flames.
I remember being sent to the corner convenience store to buy flour, and seeing people loading large grocery bags in fearful anticipation of what might happen over the next few days. We were in the suburbs, but close enough to the bus line to be considered in danger.
These also were the years of growing Vietnam protest, and I had a brother, 9 years older than myself, who was eligible for the draft. Here was a dilemma for my parents that was particularly hard to assimmilate.
My father was a veteran. My mother's older brother was a career Air Force officer. My parents grew up during the depression, and knew World War II as the noble cause it was. They were pround, anti-Communist patriots. Being of Russian descent, they were also particularly conscious of the Soviet threat.
And here was Vietnam -- so difficult to explain, and so dangerous to my parents three sons, especially the oldest. My brother was frightened of the draft, and my parents supported him in his efforts to stay out of the service. And yet their concern managed to be almost purely personal. To them, the war protests were at best wrong and at worst evil.
I remember an enormous argument between my mother and my brother over his marching in the Washington moratorium in 1969, and then the next year over the killings at Kent State University. To my mom, the students at Kent State had no business being out of class protesting -- weren't deferments supposed to be for going to school, not skipping it to protest? -- and so she had justified the killings in her mind as the fault of the students.
In this context, the Nixon-Agnew appeals to "law and order" had a particular resonance for my parents. They saw a world going out of control, and the Republicans promised to restore order. My brother, on the other hand, had in his room a poster with a quote from Adolph Hitler extolling law and order and denouncing activist students.
And then there was the new sexual freedom, in society, in the movies. And the entire phenomenon of Jane Fonda, sex kitten turned anti-war activist. It was, frankly, mind-boggling and threatening to my parents and many of their peers.
Thomas Frank doesn't really talk much about the 1960s in his analysis. He focuses on trends from the 1970s -- when he grew up -- as well as much earlier Kansas pioneer and Depression-era history. In this, I think his analysis is problematic. It misses the tumult of the 1960s as a key to the rightward swing of the nation. Here is where I saw that blue-collar resentment building. It ended up being directed toward the Democratic party for some quite obvious reasons: They were the party that showed the strongest support for the Civil Rights movement, and they were the party that first turned against the war inVietnam.
Once the Democrats had been successfully blamed for the Civil Rights movement and the war protesters, two things that seemed to directly threaten our homes and culture, it was relatively easy for the Republican party to begin blaming them -- and, by extension the programs they had supported and pushed through -- for the failing economy of the 1970s, the oil embargo, changing morality, etc.
That, it seems to me, is how the Republican right took over.
Frank, for all of his talent and insight, gets this part of the story wrong, I think.
What Frank does get right, I think, is his final analysis of the way in which issues of social class have been removed from Democratic Party discourse, and the way they have been cynically co-opted by the Republican Party. I think his criticism of Bill Clinton is misguided -- I believe Clinton is the one recent Democratic politician who has been able to make the case that social equality and a "fair shake" for the working class are good for the country -- but nevertheless I think Frank is correct in general that the left has "lost" the hearts of middle America just as surely as the right has won them over.
This is a book well worth reading.