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Review:
I started out my
own working adult life in New Jersey,
at the summerish age of 26. Jersey,
the in-between Everyman bedroom state. In fact, my first apartment was the
Princeton Arms, now in East Windsor, at the time back in 1970 it was Cranbury, off route 571
between Hightstown and Princeton. I worked then at the
David Sarnoff
Research Center
for RCA in Princeton (almost), and sometimes had lunch
at Buxton’s. I would do bike rides on the coastal plain country truck farm
roads. Once I had a day long
motorcycle EasyRide with a friend who would later
be my boss at NBC—the ride covered Princeton, Flemington,
Somerville, those little towns
where the Piedmont starts. Once I got stopped an shook down by a cop on 571 (this kind of thing does
happen in the movie) for driving in the passing lane (of a four-lane highway)
without having anything to pass. The conversation sounded like something from
an Indie movie. RCA would provide my only layoff (in 1971) until the
end-of-my-IT-career at ING at the end of
2001. In the meantime, I would live in New Jersey
one more time, in 1973-74, in “north Jersey” in the
towns of Caldwell and then Piscataway,
while working for Univac. That was before moving into New
York City in 1974 to come out—in those days you
moved to The City.
Here I will tip my imaginary hat to this first feature
written and directed by 29-year-old Zach Braff. You
can follow his blog at the link above.
In the move, the Everyman character Andrew Largeman, played by Zach Braff
himself, is an aspiring TV actor in LA (of course, otherwise Canada!) who
comes back to his native New Jersey
when his mother dies. Now here I make a note of comparison again with
my own situation as an “artist.” I’ve lived in New
Jersey, New York,
Dallas, and Minneapolis
at various times for long periods. I, an only child, would return home to my
parents in northern Virginia many times for visits (my father died in 1986 so
then it would be my mother alone)—and feel recharged when I would return to
my own apartment or condo (often in Central Time) after a flight to return to
my own life, to the life of associates, aesthetics, business, friendships,
quasi-lovers, whatever—the things that mattered to me but not to my parents
or to their world—the life that I had created, that seemed to family to exist
in an unreachable space or domain, like another dimension. So it must have
been for Andrew—except that he never came home. He built his own life as an
actor and artist in LA, and we see very little of that, other than what he
says about it (and one scene where he just about gets fired paying his dues
as a waiter). So I wanted to see more about that life, not the old life in New
Jersey. Now, the trouble with saying this is that
Andrew has been sedated for years by his psychiatrist father (Ian Holm) over
guilt from a boyhood accident that paralyzed his mother and contributed to
her eventual demise—so that can explain his absence. Okay, his one movie role so far was a
network movie where he plays a retarded quarterback (that is an oxymoron).
But, given the charisma of Andrew’s role (at one point he is asked if he is
retarded!?!), I don’t buy that completely—Andrew’s life in LA must be pretty
interesting. Certainly, in my last two years of Minneapolis
before returning “home” for family reasons, my hanging around the Twin Cities film and acting community (ifpmsp)
was very interesting.
Now maybe life in New Jersey
isn’t so different. His other friends include Mark (Peter Sarsgaard,
a gravedigger), and Samantha (Natalie Portman), so the opportunity for
romance will generate a plot (though without the usual beats expected in most
screenplays) and an eventual ambiguous payoff when it’s time for Andrew to go
back.. Now Mark likes to hang out and do drugs,
while another one of his buddies dresses in medieval
armor and still another one stops him when he is riding around on an “easy
rider” motorcycle like he was Peter Fonda. Okay, maybe he is waking up, but
Zack clearly makes himself the center of gravity for the movie, and seems so
dominating that there is not a lot of suspense. There are opportunities that
don’t provide the usually expected crises. For example, Andrew goes to see
Dr. Cohen (Ron Leibman) for an MRI
for his migraines. No, nothing comes of it (no Lance Armstrong type story
here)—but in the waiting room he gets dirty-danced by a pooch, and then when
he strips for the MRI you see that his friends
(at a “strip poker” orgy the night before use his (recently? – he is an actor,
you know) almost hairless chest as a whiteboard like a plaster cast. The best
moment in the film may be when he confronts his father, near the end, about
the time to get off the meds and feel good at himself, as he keeps his hand
flat on his father’s bare chest.
In fact, the widescreen film is replete with detail
images—messy apartments and homes filled with clutter an
knick knacks, and interesting, cavernous scenery (the quarry)—contrasted with
a few scenes of humorous simplicity. For example, when Zack is lying in his
barren white bedroom in his own apartment, there is absolutely nothing—except
that I don’t believe it. Or when he tries on a homemade shirt that matches wallpaper,
well—the picture melts into just one head. This is, after all, an art film.
I’ll get back to the acting stuff—I think an interesting
premise for a sequel for this film would be Andrew’s character trying to make
it in LA (or perhaps O Canada!) – and winding up on
the “A-List” as perhaps Zach will or already has himself. This is justified by the movie in that, all
in all, Andrew comes across as the one character capable of doing great
things with his life, on his own, if only he will. (Maybe that is because
Zach already has.) I have an ulterior motive for saying this. One of my “do
ask do tell” scripts sitting on my hard drive in Final Draft (all 179 pages –
that’s 179 minutes and that’s too long if you’re not Robert Altman, and in CinemaScope to beat for the layered simul
shots) is based on just such a notion—a layered story of a (heterosexual)
young actor, trying to make it, and befriending an older gay man with whom he
can engage in symbiotic manipulations leading to some surprising plot twists
and revelations. (I have the character going to law school and interning in a
law firm as a second choice—John Grisham style—and learning to do Clark
Kent-like sports feats to get his roles.) Of course, you’re not supposed to
give away your logline without going through an agent or a third party—or does that make sense in this day of Google hacking and
blogs. A good title for such a film
would be “A-List” all right. Folks, follow the honor system. Don’t steal my
story.
In any case, a serious treatment of what it takes to make
it in the movies hasn’t been done very often. There is a lot more territory
to explore, with very realistic situations, in combinatorial fashion.
The Feb. 2006 issue of Giant
features a picture story about Zach Braff and his
budding comedy show Scrubs, in which Zach is shown visually in a gradual if
partial revelation.
Fox Searchlight likes to illuminate us with a number of
these big character-driven indie pictures, and another
typical example form late 2004 is Sideways.: 124 min, R, dir. Alexander Payne
(“About Schmidt”). This is a combo road movie, situation comedy, and
John-Sayles-like locale picture. Here the setting is the mid California
wine country, although the trip starts with San Diego,
LA, and Santa
Barbara first. Indeed, paradise might be a rental
car in the wine country on a hot dry clear spring day. Here soap opera
has-been actor Jack (Thomas Haden
Church) is getting married in a
week, and he takes his friend middle school English teacher aka novelist
Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) on the trip of
adventure and, of course, getting laid. Now Miles is a lot more sensitive and
obviously gawky and “unattractive,” rather like a female bird. He has gotten
divorced, but looks forward to making his life count for something if only
Conundrum Press will buy his novel The Day After Yesterday (a bit of a
tautology maybe—this is a writer who is stuck!!) But actor Jack has his problems to: when he takes off his shirt, there is no
hair on his chest, but he does not have the sculpture of Tom Welling. Though
a man of action, he is over the hill, too, waiting to be rejuvenated by a new
wife. But he must get laid first, and the situations pile up, leading to his
breaking his nose, then to a comic breaking-and-entering by Miles to rescue
his friend from a bear who looks like the headless horseman. At one point, Jack suggests that Miles
self-publish—the intentional publicity might pose legal problems for a teacher.
I hate to tell the ending, but it matters: Conundrum Press “passes” on the
work, and Miles feels he is worth nothing, that he has accomplished nothing
with his life of his own. But what
about his long teaching career—that is public service for a greater good than
himself. At one scene, near the end,
Miles is teaching is English class of eight graders as they read from John
Knowles’s A Separate Peace, one of my favorite novels. Virginia Madsen
and Sandra Oh provide as much female support as conceivable to this
script—but it is stuck with the factor that the characters just aren’t really
appealing enough to deserve a rooting interest.
Naming character-driven nests after states or areas is not
new: consider dir. John Sayles and Sunshine
State (2002, Sony Pictures Classics, 141 minutes, PG-13), which is
a slow-paced penetrating overview of a network of characters affected by
plans by big Florida real estate developers for Plantation Island with its
two communities – Lincoln Beach, a more conventional retirement community,
and Delrona Beach, a well-off African-American
enclave and at one time a slave holding. With Sayles, there is always plenty
of irony, which provides indirect comedy in dramatic off-beat conversational
scenes that are always engaging. I was this at a premiere at the Landmark Lagaoon Theater in Minneapolis
in July 2002 with John Sayles and his wife present. This is not the glitzy
Florida you see from an rent car as you drive around from one community to
the next (although I have to admit, I am more familiar with South Florida,
from I-4 (Tampa/Orlando all the way down, and have taken in little of the
northern part; in 1986 I visited Belle Glade, put on the map by the AIDS
crisis in the poor migrant worker community). Cast includes Edie Falco, Angela Bassett, Jane Alexander, Ralph Waite,
Timothy Hutton, Mary Alice, Mary Steenburgen, Tom Wright, Alan
King.
Lone Star (1996, Sony Pictures
Classics, dir. John Sayles, 135 min, R) is another slow-building regional
drama by John Sayles. This time the state is Texas.
Chris Cooper plasy Sheriff Sam Deeds, who uncovers
a 40-year old skeleton of his predecessor, Buddy Deeds (Matthew McGonaughey), and his journey
takes him into a colorful conundrum in a widescreen, grand mystery film, a
lot of it outdoors and along the border. What if Sayles had made a film
called “Crescent City”:
what could he have uncovered, how developers and politicians destroyed the
natural wetlands and neglected the levees that should have protected New
Orleans from Katrina. I wish Sayles had gotten
around to making a movie about the Big Easy in time. He would have warned
us.
Junebug
(2005, Sony Pictures Classics, dir. Phil Morrison, wr. Angus MacLachlan, 107 min,
R) is another regional topical piece about contrasting social cultures. This
time, the location is around Winston-Salem, N.C.
(my last visit there was in 1991) and some Blue Ridge
scenery (Pilot Mountain).
The title of the film may refer to a well-known insect, but it is also the
name of an unborn child who apparently does not come to a good end. This time
the prodigal son, George (Allesandro Nivola) returns to his rural North
Carolina home with his British wife Madelaine (Embeth Davidtz) when she wants to sign up a codger, perhaps
stroke-inhibited artist (Frank Hoyt Taylor) who has a lot of Christian ideas.
George lives on two planes with his Christianity, an intellectual level that
still allows him to direct the churchgoers “Come Home” a cappella, but the
family is very down-to-earth and into all the family and domestic stuff. The
film often dawdles over domestic stills. The plot shifts to George’s dropout
brother played by Ben McKenzie (from “The O.C.”), who struggles with
humanities, like understanding Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)’s novel
Huckleberry Finn, with the bonding relationship between Huck and the slave.
(I seem to remember this from college English at G.W. back in 1964; there was
some passage in the novel that if you have hairy arms and “breast” you will
get rich, a hint of the idea of a visual social and racial ranking
system). Here is a great quote from
the film: “God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to
let you stay that way.”
Juno (2007, Fox Searchlight
Pictures, 91 min, PG-13) makes reference to “Junebug”
a couple of times in this story of the redemption that comes from an
unplanned teen pregnancy. Let’s start with the funniest line: “I didn’t think
he had it in ‘em.” (Juno’s pap, J.K. Simmons),
referring to the “father”, teen Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) who
still has a high pitched voice, can’t grow a mustache (by his own admission)
and has almost no hair on his legs (except in one more grown up shot right at
the end). The “mother,” Juno, is the sassy teen (Ellen Page) who can always
talk in metaphors. She decides to give the baby up and meets the wealthy
couple up the road in St. Cloud, MN
(Jason Bateman and Allison Janey). But Juno sees
too much of the male musician, and the couple winds up wanting to divorce.
Fittingly, the adoptive mother will want to keep the baby, and the teen
couple will get to fall in love without the responsibilities of motherhood.
The script is constantly funny (the drugstore clerk says, “This is one doodle
you can’t undo, Home Skillet” when Juno takes her third +- pregnancy test in
one day there. There is one scene at the Mall of America, and the film was
made in both Minnesota and Vancouver,
and used the Minnesota Film Board.
Thumbsucker
(2005, Sony Pictures Classics, dir. Mike Mills, based on the novel by Walter Kirn, R, 96 min) starts with a likeable 17-year-old kid
Justin Cobb (Lou Taylor Pucci) getting tongue-tied
in a high school debate class. Pretty soon we see him at home, sucking his
thumb out habit, even doing it in the stall. His father (Vincent D’Onofrio) is after him to grow up, while his nurse
mother (Tilda Swinton)
worships actors (one played by Benjamin Bratt) on
cereal boxes. A pretty domestic setup. Now, I can think of another title (I
won’t mention it here), but soon we learn that Justin is entirely
heterosexual, as he ad a girl friend Rebecca (Kelli Garner), and they
experiment with nudity though not sex. Justin looks quite young in this
scene. Lou has an orthodontist (Keanu Reeves) who really wants to help him,
with hypnotism, for example. Pretty soon, the school is involved, and they
recommend meds. On Ritalin, Justin becomes a tiger, articulate and
charismatic, and head of the debate team. Despite low grades, he gets into
NYU. He is catching up fast. You see him medicating himself and in the
nurse’s office. (Schools require that nurses dispense all prescription
medication.) The movie right here gets into the mechanics of debate and some
of the leading edge proposals and arguments. Justin soon starts to question
whether he really needs the meds, or needs anything, after some minor illegal
experimentation. This is a touching film about teenage rebellion muted. We
identify with a teen (like Napoleon Dynamite, below) whose purpose itself
seems muted before bursting out. This small film is in full anamorphic wide
screen.
Since this film deals with debate, it is well to mention
here the Computer Assisted Debate Project (CAD). Web references:
CAD’s home page (an educational program in Atlanta):
http://www.cadatl.org/
President Bush’s remarks:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/03/20050309-10.html
Rocket Science (2007, Picture House /
HBO, dir. wr. Jeffrey Blitz, 98 min, R) is also about
debate, and may have more substance underneath, but it doesn’t tie its loose
ends and winds up being a bit annoying. As the movie starts, a charismatic
high school student Ben Weskelbaum (Nicholas D’Agosto) freezes and goes mute after talking fast about
agricultural policy in a New Jersey
debate championship. Across the state, a stuttering teen Hal Hefner (Reece
Thompson) watches his home break up as dad leaves. A girl friend Ginny
Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) gets him to join the debate team as he bikes around
the neighborhood, sometimes with a suitcase, pseudo-homeless. It’s really
frustrating to listen to him struggle to speak at all. There is a formal
assignment, in which he has to debate the pro side of the proposition that
the government should fund abstinence-only sex education programs. Now Ginny
has developed the con side, which comprises a lot of stereotyped points that
sound good but that don’t really get to the heart of the problem. The movies takes us a bit into the mechanics of formal debate,
as if setting up the mechanism for “Opposing Viewpoints” that I discuss in a
book review. But the process of debate is one thing, the real substance of
the issue is another, and the characters struggling with it is still
something more. In this movie, with its cutesy comedy and sound track, they
never coalesce. We don’t see Hal grow as much as we would like.
The actual substance of the abstinence issue (in all of
its Vatican faith-based “glory”) is discussed
elsewhere on this site. Much of it deals with making heterosexual married
couples as comfortable as possible with the commitment that they have made,
to the extend that they need a monopoly on sexuality, and even on the
emotions that embrace sexuality and culture. But that’s too existential and
esoteric for a high school debate.
More comments on blogger here.
The Great Debaters (2007, MGM
/ The Weinstein Company / Harpo, dir. Denzel
Washington, 123 min, PG-13). This is
apparently the second film that Oprah Winfrey has produced. A “negro college”
team at Wiley works its way up to a showdown debate at Harvard in 1935, and
along the way many of the arguments having to do with segregation, civil
disobedience, and the meaning of the law are examined. Denzel Washington is
the debate teacher; Forest Whitaker and Denzel Whitaker star. Much more
detail on blogger, here.
Loggerheads (2005, Strand
Releasing, dir. Tim Kirman, 95 min sug PG-13, strong thematic elements) is a slow moving
drama that brings threads of three families in three separate areas of North
Carolina: the famous coast (Kure Beach), Asheville, and Charlotte. There are
many spectacular outdoor on location shots of all three areas, including one
from the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The style of the film seems to make more of a statement that the real story.
The kernel of it is a likeable young drifter Mark (Kip Pardue)
who sleeps illegally on the beach, and soon befriends a middle aged motel
owner George (Michael Kelly). Soon we learn that both men are gay, and Mark
is upfront about being HIV positive. They keep their relationship in the
dimension of an intimate friendship (without sex) for a very long time. In
the mean time, a woman who works for a car rental company in Asheville
is reminded of her runaway son by another make renter, and goes on a quest to
find him, having to deal with North Carolina’s
rigid parental revocation laws to protect adoptive parents. You can guess
that the son is Mark, and she is a minister’s wife, and he ran away because
of religious pressure concerning his sexual orientation. But really the film
is a lot more general than that, as the story could work with a number of
character personality issues. Now another device is that the narrative jumps in time from
1999, to 2000 and 2001, as evidenced by overheard radio broadcasts (dealing
with Gore’s campaign and then with Bush’s first 100 days, somewhat before
9/11), on annual Memorial Day weekends (the first two years are covered
quickly). In time, Mark will have met his tragic end, but not because of HIV.
Rather, he is like the loggerhead turtles that he watches. He will be caught
in a rip tide (not shown) near a tropical storm and drowned. This really has
happened to various victims, including one active member in DC’s Adventuring
(the gay outdoor group) in the mid 1990s.
Elizabethtown (2005, Paramount,
dir. Cameron Crowe, PG-13, 120 min) is another coming home movie with a
geographical focus—“my old Kentucky
home.” (I guess John Sayles could call a movie like this “Bluegrass.”)
The film is rather like another boutique arthouse
movie but with full studio backing and budget. Here Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) is am
appealing young man who has just been sacked from a shoe company when his Spasmodica keds flop and cause
an almost billion dollar loss. Back in his nifty apartment he apparently
contemplates suicide (I’m not sure he is as determined or close to it as some
other critics think – because he plays his entire role with way too much
confidence, athletic energy and charisma) but then gets a call from his home
town that his father has passed away. He takes a red eye from the West Coast
(he is pampered by flight attendant Claire (Kirsten Dunst))
to Louisville and drives a rental
car to Elizabethtown, where all
of these homey characters interact in complicated and random ways. (A kid
barfs on a guy who tries to hug him…) Now there are a lot of nifty sequences
with Drew playing cell phone. There is some controversy over cremation, and Drew winds up in possession of an urn with
ashes. There is a comic sequence at the post-funeral with a toy plane that
sets he ballroom on fire, setting off the sprinkler
system. Claire comes back, and lures him into a Howdy Doody
clue-chase road trip home in the rent car, to Memphis,
Wichita, the memorial in Oklahoma
City, and finally a farmer’s market near Scottsbluff,
NB. He drives alone, talking to himself,
actually looking sharp, while Claire stays ahead of him. Drew sees the news
stories of his colossal business failure, but he is ready to rebuild.
Visually, the film is stunning with many outdoor on location shots “on the
road”, apparently without requiring separate labor units. I would have
preferred a full wide screen format.
The film actually reminds me of much of my own road life
(alone, in soliloquy, like Drew in the final sequence), even that in rental
cars, as I have been to all of the places in this film. In fact, I made my
decision to write my DADT book when driving between Sterling
CO and Scottsbluff,
NB on a hot August Saturday in 1994, and
I remember the national monument and bluffs and hiking trails through it
well. I would have included a shot of a magpie bird in the Scottsbluff
sequence.
As one of the other female characters went to comedy
school: Another note on nomenclature: remember the 50s comedy sitcom “Life
with Elizabeth”? It would always
end with “Elizabeth: aren’t you ashamed?” She would shake her head.
The
Last Kiss (2006, Dreamworks, dir. Tony
Goldwyn, apparently an adaptation or close remake of "L'ultimo bacio” (2001) dir.
Gabriel Muccino, Thinkfilm;
this film written by Paul Haggis and Gabriel Muccion,
115 min, R). This is a quick remake of a foreign film into the genre of
snappy romantic coming of age comedy like other films on this page. The film is set in Madison,
WI, with very visible landmarks like the
Capitol and University, even various bars near the center square. (Some was
filmed in Quebec.) Zach Braff plays the architect Michael. He has the boyish
innocence of his own Garden State
and of Scrubbs, even if his chin looks a little
thick. He talks like Zach, always logically. (The Feb. 2006 issue of Giant
Mag offered successive photos of Zach being pried open.) He has gotten
Jenna (Jacinda Barrett) pregnant and is truly in
love with her, he says, or is he, because the doesn’t
want to settle down yet. He sees other marriages and relationships around him
flailing (like his coworker Chris – Casey Affleck). He resists temptation
valiantly but gives in to the body-pawing Kim (Rachel Bilson).
Then he must “tell the truth” (according to Jenna’s father, Tom Wilkinson,
who has his own problems “in the bedroom”) and never give up on getting her
back. So he lays outside her house until….
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006,
First Look/Belladonna, dir. Wr. Dito
Montiel, 98 min, R) is another coming-of-age film
with a family loyalty and return issue, with some rough parallels to “Garden
State” as well as to “One True Thing.” Dito (Robert
Downey. Jr.) is a forty-year old writer who has just made the book signing
parties with his autobiographical novel of that name, when he gets a
low-keyed call from his mother (Dianne Wiest) that
his father is will, won’t go to the hospital, and that Dito
should come home to Astoria, Queens, from LA to look after his father, with
whom his relationship is strained in complex ways. Dito
does come home, and the movie moves back and forth between today and 1986
when Dito is a street-smart but verbal kid played
by Shia La Beouf (now 20, and a young actor who has made it out of disadvantage
by acting, which seems to mature a lot of kids very quickly). He is involved
in neighborhood wars and dogwalking for a “gay”
pimp. When the feud heats up, his friend Antonio (Channing Tatum) has
defended him, and wound up in prison for a shooting. Dito’s
brother has committed suicide by laying down on a subway track in front of a
train – something I had never seen on film before. Dito’s
dad (Chazz Palmenteri)
has a seizure at a moment of family crisis, and young Dito
leaves and abandons the family. When he returns in present day, he really
faces a moral crisis. The present day father (Eric Roberts) will have nothing
to do with Dito since Dito
had abandoned any sense of filial responsibility in order to succeed in life
on his own terms. The mother claims that the father's health had deteriorated
steadily from the time that Dito left home, because Dito was so important to
him as a male legacy, and because he couldn't let go of his "favorite
son." Dito apparently has written about his
family without “permission” (lawyers could debate the significance of this,
since Dito is first of all writing about himself),
and we are not sure if the 20-year-flashbacks are intended to be “true
history” or are they the inventions of Dito’s
novel, with plenty of artistic license. (There are some problems of clarity
in the flashbacks, and the “fiction” issue could explain that.) The girl
friend involved in the old inter-family feud (Rosario Dawson) challenges him
to be a “man” by looking after his parents despite the family strains. (The
film does not specify whether Dito has his own wife and family in L.A., to
"justify" his situation "morally", but it leaves the
impression that he probably doesn't.) But the family loyalty seems tied to
ideas of machismo stereotypically associated with big Italian-American
families: that for a man, your domain is your biological legacy. Let us face
the fact, in our political debate, that it is the expectation of family
loyalty that drives family values and the heterosexual world as we know it.
Parents like Dito’s believe that their children owe
back the emotional loyalty that was given them, and pretty much
unconditionally. Politically, the fight turns into whether people will be
allowed to go their own ways without growing into and returning that loyalty first, and we ought to face that in our debates.
Downey looks a
bit old in the role, and I think Zach Braff himself
would have made a better match as a grown Shia, who
is about grown himself, though. Downey executes the predicament he is in
well, however. It’s possible to imagine Gregory Smith as a younger Dito, as the character’s personality somewhat remembles Ephram on Everwood.
I hope this film is in the Oscar race this year. It could
be in the lineup for Best Picture; I’m not kidding. (I don’t know the budget,
but it would seem to be well under $5 million.) It deals with sensitive
family loyalty issues and may be introducing us to the coming political
debate on filial responsibility. The movie seems an appropriate choice on any
November 1, "All Saints' Day" (or "Hallowmas") when that
majestic hymn (music by Ralph Vaughn Williams) "For All the Saints"
with its common march time and descending blocked melody is sung the
following Sunday in practucally every Christian church.
Music Within (2007, MGM
/ Articulus / Quorum, dir. Steven Sawalich, (book “Windmills” by Richard Pimentel, 93 min,
R). Times have changed, I heard a high school administrator say. As late as
the 1970s, restaurant or public accommodations owners could ask obviously
disabled people to leave the premises and have them arrested if they didn’t
leave because of “ugly laws”, at least in Oregon.
The movie credits Richard Pimentel, played passionately by Ron Livingston,
for changing attitudes and getting the Americans for Disabilities Act passed
in 1991. Actually, it took a lot more people than that, but his biography
certainly walks us through all the moral issues, how we think about
disability, discrimination, people who are different for any reason, and what
all our “moral” rationalizations (maybe somehow related to “karma”) used to
be.
Richard was born to a mentally ill mother who had many
miscarriages, and spent some time in orphanages. Nevertheless, his mother
took him back and tried to bond with him with ballroom lessons. He worked in
his Chinese father’s restaurant beheading chickens, and one day, in English
class, gives a speech on how most restaurant chicken is killed by hand. He
developed a talent for debate and public speaking, but then a college
administrator (himself mentally ill and having a bad day and needing his
lithium, we later learn) admonishes him (when he applies for a scholarship)
saying that he has nothing to say. Go out and get a real life, he says. He
joins the Army to get the GI bill, and is nearly deafened by an explosion in Vietnam
(that sequence, recalling “Rescue Dawn”, was shot in the Philippines).
He has severe tinnitus, and the Dolby digital soundtrack recreates what this
is like well. It’s hard to take. Now, is told he will never be employable
because of his own deafness, and is at first refused admission to college,
despite the fact that he was injured in action in Vietnam.
He overcomes the prejudices. He learns to read lips, since he can’t hear
consonants. He meets another slightly disabled veteran, and then accidentally
meets a brilliant man with cerebral palsy Art Honeyman
(Martin Sheen, whose performance could get a nod for best supporting actor
this year). After they are thrown out of a restaurant and arrested under an
“ugly law,” Richard develops his passion. Now, is told he will never be
employable because of his own deafness, and is at first refused admission to
college, despite the fact that he was injured in action in Vietnam.
But he works his way up in the world, placing disabled people and eventually
working for the government doing that, traveling and speaking all over the
world. The film presents him as instrumental in promoting the ADA
during the first Bush presidency. Honeyman will help him edit his book.
Toward the end, Pimentel, on a radio talk show, tries to
related disabilities with other controversial needs, such as those of people
with AIDS, and gets cut off when he calls the current administration (then
the Reagan Administration) “fascist.”
The question as to whether smaller businesses should be financially
“burdened” with compliance of providing ADA
access is at least touched on.
The “music” in the film is conspicuous (lots of 70s rock),
but its use in the title of the film is symbolic.
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