"My name is Ángela. They're going to kill me." Alejandro Amenábar's TESIS

On this snowy evening I decided to watch the second of three DVDs sent to me for Christmas by my friend Raúl Ansola: Alejandro Amenábar's 1996 Tesis (Thesis). It was emphatically the wrong film to watch with the lights off.

Tesis opens with Ángela (Ana Torrent), a film student in Madrid, beginning to research her thesis on violence in film. She asks her portly thesis advisor, Dr. Figueroa (Miguel Picazo), if he can access the university archives to obtain for her extremely graphic footage that had been deemed too strong for public consumption so that she might discuss it in her work. Figueroa seems puzzled by her request, the implication being that it's odd for such an attractive young woman to be so interested in seeing violent death on film. But the viewer knows better: the opening scene of the film is of Ángela on a subway train that has been suddenly stopped at a platform due to a suicide: a man has thrown himself from the platform into the path of the oncoming train and has been cut in half. Metro employees guide the passengers out of the car, admonishing them not to look at the corpse, not to be morbid. Nearly all the passengers look away, some even shielding their gaze with newspapers, but Ángela breaks free of the queue and and cranes her neck for a look. A guard stops her, and both she and the viewer are deprived of a glimpse. It's a smart move on Amenábar's part, and is one of the keys to his thoughtful presentation of such sordid material.

Ángela makes the acquaintance of one of her classmates, Chema (the excellent Fele Martínez), a long-haired, bespectacled loner who wears horror-movie t-shirts and has, even at the remove of film, somewhat suspect personal hygiene. He lives in a spectacularly squalid dump of an apartment, to which he takes Ángela to show her his collection of films showing dismemberments, executions, shootings, beatings, etc. Ángela professes to be horrified and disgusted, but she can't help looking at the screen nonetheless.

Her professor finds a particular tape in the grimy bowels of a sub-basement at the university, puts it up, alone, in a small screening room, and promptly dies, presumably from an asthma attack induced from what he saw on the screen: when Ángela finds his body, his inhaler is lying at his feet. She removes the tape from the player and takes it home with her, telling no one about either the tape or her discovery of the corpse. At home—and her home is always brightly lit and sunny, in contrast to the bleak darkness and drab colors of the rest of the film’s locations—she waits for her family to go out and pops the tape into the player. As the color bars fill the screen, she chooses to lower the picture's contrast until the screen is black, leaving the volume up. What she hears is chilling: the sounds of a woman screaming, begging for her life. She dubs this audio onto a cassette, and listens to it obsessively through headphones, never looking at the images. This clear-cut decision—to look or not to look—is again one of the centerpieces of the film. It is not until she reluctantly shows the tape to Chema that she discovers what it depicts: it shows the torture, shooting, and dismemberment of Vanessa, a former student at the university who disappeared two years earlier. Amenábar gives Tesis's viewers short clips of the carnage: Vanessa being beaten, the sound of the gunshot brutally cutting short her screams, and quick takes of saws running through her torso, ripping out her intestines. The footage, even in such short bursts, is horrific, but what's telling is that like Ángela, who covers her face but peers through her fingers, we can't quite look away, either. Chema's flat is full of horror-movie posters and mock tombstones, and while he's odd, he at least seems to know who he is. Ángela sleeps under a poster of Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, and she too is on a journey of self-discovery: at the outset, she has no idea who she is.

Chema and Ángela begin to investigate who might be responsible for Vanessa's death. Horizontal lines in the footage indicate to the brainy Chema that a certain type of camera must have been used, which leads them to Bosco (Eduardo Noriega), a sexy but deeply creepy student who was a friend of Vanessa's and who takes an intense liking to Ángela, worming his way into her life and her family's affections. The second half of Tesis is a fairly standard thriller: Who is responsible for not only Vanessa's death, but the deaths of dozens of other young women, all documented in snuff films? Is it the smarmy Bosco, about whom Ángela has kinky dreams of in which he buries his face between her legs, but not before holding a knife to her throat and drawing blood? Or is it the quirky but kind of charming Chema, who is grungy and suspect and who constantly mutters "Joder" under his breath? Or is it Castro (Xavier Elorriaga), the professor who has replaced Figueroa as Ángela's thesis advisor? I'll say nothing else about the plot, for the last hour of the film is full of nail-biting twists and turns. But in some ways the first half is actually a bit more scary, because it is there that we see Ángela wrestling with the film's central question: To look or not to look? Why are we so obsessed with images of violent death? Why, to step back further, do we like films like Tesis, which deal with such dark subject matter? I'm not sure that Tesis satisfactorily answers these questions. Throughout the film, I actually kept longing for some slightly more incisive commentary on the public's obsession with violence. (In some ways, it's interesting that this film is European: Europe is much more restrained in its depiction of violence, while giving free reign to sexuality on screen; Americans, by contrasts, show gory violence of all kinds and yet flinch when it comes to sex.) I began to think that Amenábar was not going to follow through with some of the issues raised by his premise, but then, in the last five minutes, set in a hospital and which I will not describe, he delivers a vicious and bitterly ironic comment on why we need to see violence on film. It's a supremely clever finale, and is the final flourish that the film needs, for it had turned, in the second half, into fairly obvious horror material, complete with horror-movie music and figures lurking in the shadows. The last five minutes elevate it to something much more.

Amenábar has gone on to do more polished films since: Abre los ojos (1997), The Others (2001), probably the best ghost story on film in the last twenty years, and the recent Agora (2009). But Tesis, made for almost no money, is slick and stylish and one hell of a debut, and as Amenábar is young (only 37), one can only imagine what he'll get up to next. His leads in Tesis are excellent. Ana Torrent, who from certain angles looks like a young Enya, plays her role with remarkable restraint. It would have been easy to sink into screaming-bimbo territory, but she does so only once, when some lights go out, but it's okay—I practically screamed, myself. Fele Martínez is marvelous as Chema, the kind of character about whom you keep saying to yourself, "I hope he's not the killer, I hope he's not the killer." Eduardo Noriega is almost too sexy as Bosco, and this of course makes the viewer trust him even less.

Ultimately, while Tesis doesn't really answer the questions that it poses, you realize that just posing the questions is what matters. Ángela's abandoned thesis isn't even necessary—by film’s end, she has become that thesis herself.

Real women on the verge: Pedro Almodóvar’s ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER

I recently received an early Christmas present from my friend Raúl Ansola in Spain: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, which I somehow missed on its original release in 1999. (I blame graduate school for this lapse. Up until that point, I’d seen all of Almodóvar’s films, usually in the theatre with my friend Kevin. Graduate school, which I began just as All About My Mother was released, interfered with all movie-going.) The film is a revelation, and a landmark in Almodóvar’s career—a moving, beautiful, and utterly believable meditation on loss from a man whose name is usually not associated with believability.

All About My Mother tells the story of Manuela (the fabulous Cecilia Roth), a nurse who lives in Madrid with her teenaged son Esteban (Eloy Azorín), who wants to be a writer. She’s the kind of mother who encourages her son’s talents by buying him a copy of Truman Capote’s Music for Chamelons and then reading aloud from it to him on request, while secretly harboring concerns over his choice of career. This nurturing streak in her character extends to her professional life—she works to convince grieving loved ones to donate the deceased’s organs for transplantation (a plot line that is apparently lifted from an earlier Almodóvar film, The Flower of My Secret [1995], featuring Marisa Paredes, who also stars here). She takes Esteban to see a touring production of A Streetcar Named Desire for his birthday, and when he chases a cab containing the production’s Blanche, the actress Huma Rojo (Paredes), for an autograph, he is struck by a car and killed. And so begins Manuela’s painfully slow process of healing, which takes her from Madrid back to Barcelona in search of Esteban’s father, a transvestite she’d left eighteen years earlier; on the day of his death, Esteban had written in his journal that his only real wish was to know something about his father, whom he’d never met. Along Manuela’s way, she becomes a sort of den mother to a decidedly motley crew of characters: Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a pregnant nun; Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a transsexual prostitute; Huma, the actress now also in Barcelona with the run of Streetcar and who is somehow vaguely responsible for Esteban’s death; Huma’s drug-addled lesbian lover Nina (Candela Peña), the production’s Stella.

What’s astonishing about All About My Mother is the number of levels on which it works. It has plenty of the goofy touches that are part of any Almodóvar film—outlandish characters, tacky, garish sets, ridiculous costumes, campy, sexual dialogue. But this time—probably for the first time—Almodóvar works with a surprising gravity and emotional depth. I kept thinking that I would soon be laughing, but apart from three or four lines of dialogue, I never did. There’s real pain in this film, and it’s carried largely on the able shoulders of the superb Argentinean actress Cecilia Roth, whose face is often etched in anguish and yet who carries herself with such incredible dignity and grace that you fall in love with her instantly. (This is the second performance of Roth’s that I’ve seen—the first was in 1997’s Martín (hache), another gift from Señor Ansola. Muchas gracias, mi querido!) Streetcar is a somewhat obvious choice for the play in which Huma and Nina perform, for women on the verge of a nervous breakdown is not only the title of one of Almodóvar’s most famous films, but such women are his stock in trade. His films are populated by people on the verge of cracking up—mentally, physically, spiritually, sexually. But in those early films there was never any sense of the stakes—they were always such broad farces that you knew it was never really anything to worry about. This is not to suggest any displeasure on my part with Almodóvar’s early works, which are deliriously funny, gorgeously campy, and often involved Antonio Banderas naked and with his legs up in the air. But here, you get the sense that Almodóvar has finally made a movie entirely for grown-ups—there is nothing cheap or low in All About My Mother, and the fact that it never devolves into the soap opera it might have become is what makes it such a delight. He proves here that he can keep his freaks, his clowns, his outrageous scenarios and his implausible coincidences and be serious and moving at the same time. It’s like watching someone on a tightrope: you’re convinced he’s going to fall, but hoping that he won’t. Almodóvar stays high in the air all the while, and all we can do is applaud.

The performances could not be bettered. It has only been in the last year or so that I’ve warmed to Penélope Cruz. I’ve tended to hate her English-language performances, largely because she’s been in such terrible films, such as the awful Vanilla Sky (the lame remake of the much-better Spanish-language Abre los ojos, in which Cruz also appeared), and the tedious All the Pretty Horses (a bad film based on a bad novel). But it was Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona that changed my mind about her, and in Mother she manages to be both earthy and otherworldly (her own mother calls her an “alien”) as the nun who is not quite what she appears to be. Antonia San Juan, who looks rather like a tired Wendy Carlos and who is herself transsexual, is the film’s comic center, and her openness and honesty should feel like a cliché (the hooker with the heart of gold) but doesn’t, thanks in large part to San Juan’s oddly expressive face and superb timing. Marisa Paredes brings an exhausted grandeur to the role of Huma Rojo, the aging actress whose name means Smoke and who got hooked on cigarettes at age eighteen to be more like her idol, Bette Davis. The film’s parallels to both Streetcar and All About Eve (which Manuela and Esteban watch together on the day before he dies) are obvious and yet aren’t belabored either, another instance in which Almodóvar might’ve gone for the shtick but instead went for the pathos. The film is ultimately about the ways in which we grieve, and it is to Almodóvar’s credit that he neither rushes Manuela’s grief nor belittles it. She can still break down in sobs at the end of the film—having a surrogate family does not erase the pain over the one she’s lost. It is this painful honesty, happily coexisting with the freakish and the outlandish that are Almodóvar’s forte, that makes All About My Mother the deliciously adult work that it is. It has whetted my appetite for Almodóvar’s more recent work, like Volver. Yes, Raúl: that is a hint, my friend.

P.S. Those of you who can read Spanish should check out Raúl Ansola’s new novel, Illius, just published in Spain. My own copy is winging its way across the Atlantic, as I write this.

Nobody's on nobody's side: CHESS IN CONCERT

Chess seems to be the musical that will not die. With lyrics by Tim Rice (of Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar fame) and music by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus (the male components of the 70s Swedish pop quartet ABBA), Chess first saw the light of day in 1984 as a concept album—the format that worked so well for Rice’s collaborations with Andrew Lloyd Webber—with Elaine Paige, Murray Head, Barbara Dickson, and Dennis Quilley in the leads. It spawned two huge hit singles—“One Night in Bangkok” and “I Know Him So Well”—and seemed poised to conquer the stage, first in London and then in New York. No matter that the plot was kind of thin and the characters uninvolving—ABBA had composed it, Rice had written the lyrics, and it seemed no dumber an idea for a musical than, say, the life of an Argentinian dictator’s trampy wife or the jellicle cats of T. S. Eliot.

But the show’s stage prospects seemed doomed from the start. The original London director, Michael Bennett of A Chorus Line fame, withdrew from the project before its opening due to health problems; these were later revealed to be the result of AIDS, which killed him in 1987. His place was taken by Trevor Nunn (Cats, Les Misérables, and scores of Shakespeare productions at the RSC), and, according to Tim Rice’s liner notes for the DVD release of Chess in Concert, his and Bennett’s styles merged uneasily on the stage of the Prince Edward Theatre. Nevertheless, this production was a modest success, and a tweaked production, under Nunn’s direction, opened in New York shortly thereafter, to disastrous reviews. (Frank Rich scathingly remarked of the show’s political metaphors: “War is hell, and, for […] this audience, Chess sometimes comes remarkably close.”) There were other small productions over the years, with songs added and then taken away, the ending rewritten endlessly. The score is still loved by many, and retains quite a bit of nostalgia for 80s kids like myself, who fondly remember Murray Head in the video for “One Night in Bangkok,” croaking out lyrics such as, “Get Thai’d! You’re talking to a tourist whose every move’s among the purest.” Now, Chess has resurfaced in a concert version at the Royal Albert Hall (which seems to be the venue for such things, since the amazing Les Misérables in Concert fourteen years ago), with an all-star cast. Before the show begins, Tim Rice steps out on stage and says that after twenty-five years and as many revisions, he and his musical collaborators may have finally gotten it right.

Perhaps.

Chess in Concert bears some resemblance to Chess on the original concept album. It is 1979, in Merano, Italy, which is hosting the World Chess Championship. The reigning champion is the cocky American Frederick Trumper (Adam Pascal), who has an unfortunate, McEnroe-like habit of saying rude and inappropriate things to the press. His companion, second, dogsbody and lover is the Hungarian-born Florence Vassy (Idina Menzel), who has vivid and unpleasant memories of what the Russians did to Budapest in 1956. Trumper’s challenger is the Russian Anatoly Sergievsky (Josh Groban), a man with issues of his own to work out, namely his insecurity over his performance and the demands of his Russian handlers who feel that a Russian victory will send a powerful message to the world at large about the power of the Soviet Union. (As though the world at large gives a shit about chess.) Through a fairly convoluted (and implausible) series of events, Florence dumps Trumper (or is dumped by him—it’s not entirely clear which) and, in part due to the machinations of the skuzzy Russian Molokov (David Bedella) and the skuzzy American DeCourcy (Clarke Peters) winds up shagging Anatoly and derailing much of her own life in the process—not to mention merrily jettisoning any political convictions she may have harbored. Anatoly defects, Baryshnikov-like, and in Act Two, set the following year at the chess championship in Bangkok, the plot turns on whether or not he will willfully blow the match in order to secure the release of his suddenly on-the-scene wife Svetlana (Kerry Ellis) and the possible release of Florence’s presumed-dead father.

All well and good, and it has the ingredients for a fairly solid drama. That is, it would, if we remotely understood or cared about the characters and their motivations. The female characters come off slightly better than the men: Florence and Svetlana get the show’s most ABBA-esque numbers—“Heaven Help My Heart,” “Someone Else’s Story” and “I Know Him So Well.” “Heaven” is Florence’s attempt to explain to herself and the audience why she’s screwing the enemy, and though the song is gorgeous, she doesn’t come up with an answer, and neither does the audience. Far more effective are Svetlana’s numbers. This character exists solely to complicate the plot, and we never quite believe that she and Anatoly are remotely a couple, or ever were. But “I Know Him So Well” is a stunning ballad, with the two women singing, almost in sympathy, about the man they’re both in love with but realize they must let go of. It’s too bad that none of the other songs in the show really get to this kind of depth of characterization.

Many feel that all characters in musicals are ciphers. I disagree, but it’s certainly true of the men in Chess. Trumper is nothing but a brash American stereotype—it’s almost as though he could have been written by the smarmy Soviet Molokov in the show, so clearly does he conform to Eastern European stereotypes of the Ugly American. There is an attempt to soften him with the number “Pity the Child,” but it’s too little, too late—the song’s placement in the show comes long after we’ve given up trying to like him, and he soon disappears from the proceedings almost altogether. Anatoly’s struggles again seem stereotyped—the idea of what someone on this side of the Iron Curtain thinks must be going on in the head of someone on the other side—and though he gets some of the score’s most stirring songs, he’s ultimately rather flat. It is yet another truism of musical theatre that two characters can sing a love duet and by the end of it, we know that they are in love and always will be. Such an attempt is made with the Florence and Anatoly duet “You and I,” but it again falls rather flat—it’s too rapid, and it sinks under the dead weight of all of the heavy-handed political muddle that has preceded it.

None of the other male characters in the show fare particularly well. Molokov and DeCourcy are cartoon villains, while Marti Pellow’s The Arbiter has nothing to do but sing overlong numbers about how he watches the game, calls the shots, and no one should screw with him. Cabaret’s Emcee (who The Arbiter resembles solely in his slight narrator-position in the show) is a one-note character as well—but what a note! The Arbiter could have been something equally fearsome, but he sounds instead like a windbag, and we can’t wait until his song ends so that we can get back to the uninvolving love story.

This all sounds as though I hated Chess in Concert. Far from it—I actually found myself loving it, but with all of the above reservations at the front of my mind as I watched. My enjoyment was largely due to the superb orchestra and the stellar cast. Josh Groban sings the Act One closer, “Anthem,” probably better than it’s ever been sung before, and he uses his perennial earnestness to excellent effect throughout, filling in some of the holes in Anatoly’s character left by the writers. Adam Pascal (who I saw in Rent over a decade ago) is also in fine voice, playing up the sleaziness of Trumper without camping it up. The lovely Kerry Ellis makes an excellent Svetlana, and David Bedella has a wonderful voice and delivers the delightfully nasty “The Soviet Machine.” The biggest surprise is Idina Menzel as Florence. I’d seen Menzel in Rent as well, and met her at the York Street Tavern in Cincinnati years ago when she was promoting her first solo album. I’d long been a fan of her voice, but wasn’t sure that she could fill the pumps of Elaine Paige. To my astonishment, she might actually be a little better. Her Florence is still a mess—and I still don’t believe that the woman who pines for her lost childhood and her missing father would willingly spread her legs for a Russian, even if he does look and sound like Josh Groban—but she’s a hot mess, and, like Groban, Menzel fills in some of the gaps in her character with her deliciously naughty smile, the slightly kooky twinkle in her eye, and her rattle-the-rafters voice. She sings the hell out of “Nobody’s Side,” and even though “Heaven Help My Heart” answers no questions, Menzel’s face and delivery let the audience know that maybe that’s okay—she’s a mess, but at least she knows it.

Twenty-five years on, Chess is dated in ways which the writers probably didn’t anticipate. The show’s Cold War ethos now seems rather quaint in our current political climate, and the metaphors of war and chess seem rather forced. Chess was long described as a work-in-progress, and I think it still is one. But Chess in Concert is by far the best version of this show we’ve ever seen, and it sure as hell has never sounded this good. It was recently aired on PBS, and is now available on DVD and CD.

John Updike, 1932-2009

John Updike died yesterday, at the age of 76. I met him once, in April of 2001, at the University of Cincinnati where I was a Master’s student in the English department. I would have at one point greeted the prospect of meeting a writer of Updike’s caliber with terror, but I was oddly and uncharacteristically calm when we sat for lunch. The previous evening, I’d had my first glimpse of him, when he had given a reading in UC’s packed Zimmer Auditorium. I was astonished by his height—somehow I thought he’d be shorter. Had I been thinking about basketball—and I never think about basketball—and his own fondness for it, I might have been less surprised. What was not surprising was his verbal deftness. Updike spoke in eloquent, fully-formed paragraphs, marred, if that’s the word, only occasionally by the remnant of the stammer he writes about so gorgeously in his memoir Self-Consciousness (1989). For a self-proclaimed country boy from Shillington, Pennsylvania, Updike was the most urbane, most charming, most gracious man I’d ever met. At lunch the following day, he gamely sat at one end of the table with three graduate students, including myself, while the rest of the faculty sat in a sort of exile at the other end. It quickly became clear to me that the two other students in attendance were tongue-tied—there was pitiful silence in our vicinity. Thinking—quite rightly, as it turned out—that this was an encounter that would not be repeated, I launched in. I remember only one question from that lunch: I asked whether or not he felt any qualms, in Rabbit Redux (1970), in attempting to depict a woman’s thoughts as she’s masturbating. Updike inhaled slowly, got a look of mock horror on his face, and said, “Did I actually have Jan masturbate in Rabbit Redux?” When the lunch was over, we crossed campus to the College Conservatory of Music’s auditorium, where Updike was to be interviewed, by way of the football field. I can no longer look at the field without thinking of Updike’s tall and lanky frame in a business suit, striding purposefully across it, continuing to chat about books and films. He needed to use the bathroom before the interview, and we continued talking as we stood side-by-side at the urinals. Given the many accusations of the scatological in Updike’s work, I thought the scene was appropriate. At the end of the day, he shook my hand, pulled me close, and said softly, “You’re a man of letters.” I can think of nothing more dizzying and delighting for a young writer to hear.

In the intervening years, I didn’t keep up with his work quite as I’d used to—my interests shifted from contemporary American literature to British Modernism, which I teach today. But there are few who can match Updike’s prose. He and I are not a match in many ways: he was New England Protestant, tall, athletic, exuberantly heterosexual, happily suburban (the fact that someone would willingly leave New York City is still bewildering to me), rooted in a time and place and tradition, and privileged by that status. And yet he possesses that trait that weds me to certain writers: his own fictional terrain. Doris Lessing is at her best when she deals with Communism and Africa; Virginia Woolf when she memorializes her Victorian past. Updike is most at home in suburban New England, and though he’s ventured off into other areas, he grabs us most when he opens the suburban bedroom door, and writes with grace about what’s going on in there. He is a writer I cannot read without smiling, for his sentences are delicious—you want to spoon them up into your brain.

He probably wrote nothing better than the Rabbit books, about the washed-up high school basketball star Harry Angstrom, who navigates decades of American life and is a sort of working-class stand-in for Updike himself. The ending of Rabbit, Run (1960) is, to my mind, almost unsurpassed in its simplicity and loveliness:

"Rabbit comes to the curb but instead of going to his right and around the block he steps down, with as big a feeling as if this little side-street is a wide river, and crosses. He wants to travel to the next patch of snow. Although this block of brick three-stories is just like the one he left, something in it makes him happy; the steps and window sills seem to twitch and shift in the corner of his eye, alive. This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter he runs. Ah: runs. Runs."

He was possibly the last of his kind, the true American man of letters. Philip Roth might like to lay claim to the title, but he lacks Updike’s calm, steady productivity. I refuse to buy the claims of racism and sexism in Updike’s work—no, Updike was not always politically correct, but as the film director John Schlesinger once said, political correctness is a very dangerous maxim. Part of the function of art is to offend, is to challenge. And while Updike’s women are not often the independent individuals one might like to see, nor are they the whores depicted by writers like Mailer and Roth. I remember a grad student at the time of Updike’s visit becoming enraged by a scene in which Rabbit urinates on a woman, with her willing participation. “No woman would ever want such a thing!” she shrieked. I replied, “How can you be so sure? It’s naïve to think that just because you don’t want something done to you that other people might not enjoy it.”

Above all, I see Updike as a model of how a writer should conduct his or her life. He was unfailingly generous, gentlemanly, and kind; he was a model of productivity—his three-page-a-day rule should be branded on every writer’s forehead; he knew what he was best at and kept on doing it. That’s perhaps what struck me the most about him. If anyone could have had a monstrous ego, it was John Updike. But he didn’t—at least not in my interactions with him. I met many lesser writers in my years at UC, and many had vile temperaments. Updike distinguished himself with a modesty that was surprising and welcome.

It sounds trite, but I don’t think American literature is the same, after his death. I feel about it the same way T. S. Eliot felt about the death of Virginia Woolf, that “a whole pattern of culture is broken.” May he rest in peace.

The forest for the trees: Oliver Stone's W.

Oliver Stone’s W. is like a big, delicious cake, ruined by the baker’s haste: the door to the oven has been opened too soon, and the air has rushed out of the middle, and while the ingredients are excellent and it smells good and looks good and even might still taste good, it’s flat.

I went to this film with some reservations. I have utter disdain for George W. Bush but also utter disdain for Oliver Stone. So, in a sense, I was at cross-purposes with myself: My dislike for Bush made me want to like the film, but my dislike for Stone made me convinced that I probably wouldn’t. I haven’t liked a single Stone film in the past 22 years. Platoon is not the greatest Vietnam War film ever made—Apocalypse Now is, with Full Metal Jacket a close second; Wall Street, with its “greed is good” ethos might merit a second look at this particular moment in history, when everything is crumbing around us; Born on the Fourth of July features a fine performance by Tom Cruise, and little else; Natural Born Killers was loathsome on just about every level; Alexander—unwatchable. I don’t mind being tapped on the shoulder; I do mind being bludgeoned with a sledgehammer, and I emerge from every Stone film feeling assaulted and battered. Many would say that there’s something to be said for this, that Stone is utilizing cinema to its fullest, but I’ve long been an admirer of subtlety over force. Stone’s work has always felt bombastic. But I confess that it was exactly this that intrigued me about W. I was working off the assumption that Stone and I would be on the same page this time—in the past, even when I’ve agreed with Stone’s politics, I found the films tiresome—and thus, I thought that this might be the first Stone film where his histrionics would, for once, fit the subject matter. I was mistaken.

W. roughly covers the years 1966 to 2004, and follows George W. Bush—brilliantly played by an unrecognizable Josh Brolin—from his booze-soaked frat-boy days at Yale, through a series of failed business ventures on Poppy’s dime to an eventual bid for the governorship of Texas, a bid—if the film is to be believed—that is strongly opposed by Bush the First (James Cromwell) and Barbara (an incredibly bitchy and bitter Ellen Burstyn), who complain that the simultaneous bid of brother Jeb in Florida would mean exhausting cross-country campaigning. Both W. and the audience know that Poppy and Barbara both feel that W. would never win, and would fail in this, as he’d failed in everything else. This is the center of W.: what you would think would be predominantly a political drama becomes, instead, the story of a son trying to escape his father’s shadow and to live up to the glorious family name. Had this been only one strand of the film’s plot, the movie might have worked. But James Cromwell, an actor I normally admire, makes an unconvincing George H. W. Bush. Not only does he look nothing like the former president, but he makes no attempt to duplicate the voice, the accent, the mannerisms. The real Bush was known to smile on occasion; Cromwell spends the film glowering and shaking his head in disapproval at his son’s antics. When W. supposedly impregnates a girl named Susie and tells his father, “I used a condom. I’m not dumb,” the look of disdain on Cromwell’s face is harsh—I almost felt sorry for W. Almost.

Brolin, on the other hand, turns in a superb performance. It’s an utter transformation. I kept looking for Brolin the actor, and found him nowhere. He nails Bush’s swagger, his voice, and especially his laugh. The aging process, however, is odd: in a scene depicting W.’s 40th birthday, one character comments that Bush doesn’t look a day over 30, when in fact he looks craggy and middle-aged, despite his still-dark hair; in contrast, Bush-in-office, silvery-gray, looks positively spritely. Brolin is at his best when playing Bush in his presidency, particularly in scenes which duplicate public speeches—one assumes this is because the actual footage existed for Brolin to study. Brolin is in nearly every scene in the film, and its success or failure rests on his beefy shoulders. To his credit, he carries the weight admirably—the film has many flaws, but they are not Brolin’s, they are Stone’s.

The other cast members fare differently. The excellent Jeffrey Wright plays Colin Powell, and he does so much good acting, invests the very staid Powell with so much life that the performance actually rang false for this reason. Richard Dreyfuss is unnerving as Dick Cheney, and plays the film’s single most effective moment: in a briefing, Bush and his cronies discuss the proposed invasion of Iraq, and when asked about an exit strategy, Cheney intones, “There is no exit.” It’s at this moment, and for this moment only, that the film comes completely alive, and you see what the movie might have been, had Stone decided to focus on politics instead of the Freudian-lite analysis of the Bush family behind-the-curtain. Scott Glenn looks nothing like Donald Rumsfeld, and is something of a non-presence in the film; Toby Jones, lately of Infamous, where he played Truman Capote, is excellent as Karl Rove, always in the shadows, working his plots; Elizabeth Banks makes a convincing Laura Bush, proving far more interesting than her boring real-life counterpart. Only the normally-good Thandie Newton devolves into pure cartoon: while she looks a great deal like Condoleezza Rice, her performance consists solely of a few grating lines delivered in a voice more nasal and irritating that Rice’s own; there’s even a weird moment where she and W. brush hands briefly while exchanging some papers—a nod to the backstage rumors, perhaps?

What bothers me most about W. is not that it doesn’t bash Bush. That would be far too easy in this current political climate, and much as I’ve deplored his presidency I don’t think I would have been satisfied with a film that merely made him look stupid. (And don’t be deceived by the ads running on television for the film at the moment, which make it look like a comedy, complete with the Talking Heads singing “Once in a Lifetime”—the film is nothing like that.) I understand that the film is an attempt to understand this much-maligned figure, but the film’s interpretation of Bush’s character seems simplistic in the extreme: the man’s an incompetent buffoon who’s only trying to please his daddy. What’s most striking is that Stone can’t seem to make up his mind as to what the film’s intent is. Is Bush a fool or really a good president who has been misunderstood, and who has had the cards stacked against him? It seems clear that if you think Bush is an idiot, the film will reinforce that; but it’s also clear that if you think he’s a good and decent man, the film will reinforce that too. Stone was on Larry King a week or so ago, and was talking about whether or not the film might affect the current presidential race between McCain and Obama. Now having seen the film, I’m bewildered by Stone’s remark—how could this film do anything but reinforce what you already think about Bush? Given the film’s release date, mere weeks before the election, I would assume that someone—Stone or the producers or the production company or the studio—felt that not only would it make more bucks at the moment, but that it might effect some change. I’d be interested to hear whether or not this film changed anyone’s mind about anything—it plays it safe, and I actually found myself yearning for Stone the bulldog, taking everyone and everything to task.

Stone’s other two films about American presidents, Nixon and JFK, had the advantage of being made long after the events in question. I might be wrong about this, but W. would seem to be the only film about a president to be released during its subject’s term in office. Manohla Dargis, in the New York Times, believes that perhaps we’re just still too close to this subject matter at the moment—a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. Stone would have done better, perhaps, to have made this film ten years from now, where we might have had a bit of perspective, and W. himself would have long since lapsed into old age in Crawford, and we might have been better able to reassess these odd, tumultuous, damaging, turbulent eight years. Whatever the case, W. finds Oliver Stone in a restrained mode—and I, for one, never once thought I’d be able to write “restrained” and “Oliver Stone” in the same sentence.

Aspects of Virginia: VIRGINIA WOOLF by E. M. Forster

I recently found at Half Price Books a first edition (with the dust jacket) of E. M. Forster's slim volume Virginia Woolf, which was originally delivered as the Rede Lecture at Cambridge on 29 May 1941, a mere two months after Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse in Sussex. I'd read the essay some years ago, when I first got interested in Woolf and before I'd read all of her novels. Now that I know more (and now that I'm more opinionated about her), I decided it was time to revisit the essay, but thought that at $50.00, Half Price was asking too much for this particular copy. Showing remarkable and rare self-restraint, I waited, and last week the price dropped to $25.00--and they'd removed it from the locked glass case and tossed it among the other books. Armed with an additional 15% off in the form of a coupon, I marched to the counter.

Forster and Woolf had been friends since about 1910, but their friendship was an odd one. When they met, Forster had already published four novels (Where Angels Fear to Tread [1905], The Longest Journey [1907], A Room with a View [1908], and Howards End [1910]) and was considered one of the best and most promising writers of his generation; Woolf was still writing her first novel. While Woolf liked him a great deal, she found him, as Hermione Lee notes, "as timid as a mouse," "erratic, irregular," "a pale blue butterfly." Her diary is full of encounters with him, episodes that are always rather awkward and truncated--she bumps into him at the British Library, and "[w]e shook hands very cordially; and yet I always feel him shrinking sensitively from me, as a woman, a clever woman, an up to date woman." Lee states that "they had circled warily around each other all their lives." There has been a great deal of critical discussion about the fact that her break with the prevailing form of the novel was as much a break with Forster as with anyone else. While he was not in any direct sense her mentor--she never showed him manuscripts or asked for his advice, as she did with her brother-in-law Clive Bell while she was writing The Voyage Out (1915)--nevertheless his influence can be seen in her early work. The Voyage Out owes much, in its depiction of comic English people abroad, to the collection of characters in the Pensione Bertolini in Florence in A Room with a View; the social questions raised by Night and Day (1919) echo those of Howards End. But here the similarities end. E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf were as different from one another--as the British say--as chalk and cheese. And it is perhaps knowledge of these differences that is at the heart of Forster's curious little lecture on his friend.

Forster's most striking assertion, and the one with which I have the most trouble, is that "her problem" is that "she is a poet, who wants to write something as near to a novel as possible." There is a measure of truth to that. The thing that gives many readers (including some of my students) fits when they read Woolf is the loose, drifting nature of the material, the "poetic" flow of words. But I would argue that with the possible exception of The Waves (1931), which is more a prose poem than a novel, Woolf consciously wrote fiction rather than poetry, and was compelled by narrative--it just wasn't the kind of narrative that readers were used to. My problem with Forster's argument is that it is essentially a rehash of that made by Arnold Bennett in the 1920s, the one that inspired Woolf's famous retort in the form of the essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924), which is that Woolf does not create characters who live and breathe, who linger in the reader's mind after the book is closed. For me, Clarissa Dalloway is as real a character as any ever written, as are Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, as is Orlando, for all of his/her improbability. Both Forster and Bennett object to Woolf's work largely because it doesn't resemble their own. And while I revere Forster deeply, he is unable--as are most of us--to see his own flaws. Forster was a gay man who understood little about male-female relations, and thus most of the love affairs in his work ring a bit false. I've always felt that the reason Charlotte Bartlett interrupts Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson in the field in A Room with a View and prevents things from getting hot and heavy is because Forster himself didn't know what the hell Lucy and George might physically do with each other should things be allowed to proceed. (It would take the 1986 Merchant-Ivory film version to inject some actual heat into this romance, embodied as it is by the gorgeous Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands.) I suppose I just find Forster's argument to be twenty years out of date by the time of his lecture, and might have hoped for something a bit more penetrating from the man who wrote Aspects of the Novel. Also, one could point out that Forster's last novel, A Passage to India, was published in 1924; he lived until 1970. Whatever Woolf's faults, I'm pleased by her productivity, by the fact that she did a remarkable amount of work despite various difficulties, and never allowed herself to be stymied.

Forster also misses the mark when he declares that Woolf had no concern for the threat to civilization posed by fascism and war. This is a gross misreading of her most misunderstood book, Three Guineas (1938), one of the most scathing indictments of war and fascism ever written. Forster reduces this book to its feminist elements, with which he has little sympathy; he says that he sees "spots" of feminism all over her work, as though these spots are symptoms of some embarrassing disease. In his defense, Forster could not have known how eloquently Woolf wrote about the horrors of war and fascism in her diary and letters just before her death, but I'm still bewildered that he could miss the ominous shadow of the war in a book that he otherwise praises, Between the Acts (1941). Is it that men--then and still--don't think that women can understand something as big and far-reaching as war, which Woolf herself once called "a preposterous masculine fiction"?

But here I am isolating out Forster's complaints about Woolf. The bulk of his lecture is about her gifts and strengths--her way with words, her delight in sensual details like food (he goes so far as to say that "when Virginia Woolf mentions nice things they get right into our mouths, so far as the edibility of print permits"), the fact that she liked writing and did it for the pure joy of doing it. And while he may have had issues with her work, his stance is ultimately generous. Theirs was a unique friendship, and a rather ambivalent one. Woolf was competitive by nature, and she was never wholly at her ease with other writers. (Her relationship was Katherine Mansfield was even more problematic than that with Forster.) With people in the visual arts, like her sister Vanessa Bell, she was more comfortable--they were not a threat. I get the sense that Forster may have thought of Woolf in the same way. Nevertheless, he is able to write, "Virginia Woolf got through an immense amount of work, she gave acute pleasure in new ways, she pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness."

Leonard and Virginia in motion: A BOY AT THE HOGARTH PRESS, by Richard Kennedy

I would guess that any reader who has spent a significant period of time studying the life and work of Virginia Woolf must have his or her own "version" of her. In my mind, I have an idea of how she stood, how she walked, the way she moved her head, all culled from photographs and from the many anecdotes and reminiscences I've read about her over the last ten years. There is no film footage of her in motion, and only one surviving recording of her voice, reading an essay called "Craftsmanship" on the BBC in the 1930s: her voice sounds upper-crust, snooty, nineteenth-century, not a bit, in other words, like the fiercely modern voice in her books. While the photographic record is large, it is all those of us who are in love with Woolf (and there is no other phrase which comes close to describing how I feel about her) have in order to create a moving, living portrait in the brain. Thus, each of us must have a personal Woolf, and would probably willingly argue with others about her qualities: "She would never say that!" Or, "She wouldn't wear that kind of dress." This goes a long way towards explaining the problems so many Woolf scholars had with Nicole Kidman's portrayal of Woolf in The Hours--she was simply not their Woolf (nor was she mine, exactly), and so both the performance and the film were dismissed out of hand.

I've seen dozens of interviews with living writers like Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood, and thus I have some sense of them (however misguided) as people. I can read their books and hear their physical voices in my head; I can see the way they laugh and move. But with Woolf--and indeed with any writer who predates motion pictures--my sense of her exists, for the most part, solely on the page. Perhaps that's where writers should exist most--Lessing certainly thinks so, when she bemoans the interviews and publicity that contemporary publishing demands. The lack of a solid image of Woolf, a voice that can talk in your brain, makes the occasional firsthand account of her all the more valuable. Levenger, the Florida-based company that sells wildly expensive fountain pens, briefcases, stationery, and other "tools for serious readers," recently republished Richard Kennedy's slim 1972 memoir A Boy at the Hogarth Press. As I've been revisiting my dissertation on Woolf's diary in order to expand it into a book, I felt that rereading Kennedy's book was in order, so that I could regain that imaginative grasp of Woolf herself that had begun to elude me in these last months of a very hectic college term.

Kennedy arrived to work at the Hogarth Press, located in the basement of the Woolf's house at 52, Tavistock Square, in 1928, at the age of sixteen, through the auspices of his uncle George, a friend of Leonard Woolf's. At first, he was given odd jobs, but gradually moved up enough in Leonard's esteem (no mean feat!) to begin dealing directly with buyers, "shopping" the books to booksellers in the English hinterlands, etc. A Boy at the Hogarth Press presents itself as a sort of edited diary about his years there, until he leaves after infuriating Leonard by ordering the wrong size of paper for the Uniform Edition of Virginia's novels. In the face of Leonard's wrath, Kennedy quits and enrolls in journalism school, apparently on the sole basis of seeing three attractive young women at University College: "Three pairs of breasts and three laughing faces. They looked so happy and carefree. I thought of that basement prison, and acting on the spur of the moment, I sought out the authorities and learnt that there was a course in journalism starting in the autumn." Despite Kennedy's frequent depictions of Leonard's intolerance and miserliness (he complains about having to shell out money for toilet paper for the office), he maintains that Leonard was in fact a surrogate father for him, and that he learned a great deal in his tenure at the Press.

What is perhaps best about A Boy at the Hogarth Press, at least to my Virginia-obsessed eye, is the light it sheds on Virginia Woolf herself. I've read every biography of Woolf, and am therefore used to having her center-stage. It is always something of a shock to read a biography of one of her relatives or her acquaintances, and see her ambling in from--as Michael Cunningham would put it--her own story. One of things I like most about Frances Spalding's excellent biography of Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell is that Virginia herself is a peripheral figure, and being on the periphery somehow, oddly, makes her come into sharper focus for me. The same is true in Kennedy's memoir. Virginia is glimpsed writing in the back storage room at the Press, setting type, opening packages, and performing other mundane, Press-related activities. During a Bloomsbury evening she is observed in a the corner knitting, "a new occupation for her." One morning she is in a good mood because she spent the previous evening out at a nightclub, and describes "how marvellous it was inventing new foxtrot steps," to Leonard's apparent disapproval. She rolls foul-smelling shag cigarettes that very nearly choke an American lady. Virginia is always "Mrs W" in Kennedy's memoir; she usually calls him "Mr Kennedy." Kennedy appears to have regarded her with a certain degree of awe: by this point she had written Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and during Kennedy's tenure there she published Orlando, which was a huge success--Kennedy remarks frequently about their inability to keep the book in stock. We revere Virginia Woolf for her writing, for what she did alone in a room with pen and paper, and naturally many biographies (most notably Julia Briggs' recent Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life) focus on her intellectual and creative life, despite her immersion in the Bloomsbury Group, whose sexcapades have, on the flip side, received an enormous amount of attention. In Kennedy's memoir, it is precisely his record of her attention to the minutiae of the Press that brings her into sharper focus.

Adding to the appeal of Kennedy's book are his own incredible drawings of Leonard, Virginia, and the other characters who drifted in and out of the Press offices. Virginia never allowed herself to be photographed with her glasses on, and Kennedy's drawings of her, bespectacled, typing and smoking, convey the essence of the woman perhaps better than any photograph. Kennedy became quite well known as an illustrator in later years, and his skill at evoking character and personality through a few mere strokes of pen and ink is stunning. These images, converted in my mind into flesh and blood, add immeasurably to my understanding of how Virginia Woolf simply inhabited a room--an understanding that will undoubtedly help guide my continued work on her diary.

If you're interested in Kennedy's book, you needn't buy Levenger's fancy edition (though it is gorgeous)--Penguin published a mass-market paperback edition, including all of the illustrations, some years back. It is currently out of print, but is available used.

As I get more immersed in my own Woolf project, you can expect more postings on books related to her life and work. I am nothing if not single-minded.