God's Pocket

God’s Pocket is a small Philadelphia neighborhood suffering from all sorts of urban ailments, but don’t tell that to the people who live there because they don’t like to hear it.  This film adaptation of Pete Dexter’s novel by Mad Men star, and first-time director, John Slattery examines the intersecting lives of several characters stuck in “the Pocket,” as they call the area with defensive, chip-on-the-shoulder pride.  The late Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Mickey Scarpato, an independent meat vendor whose downtrodden existence reflects the depressed area he inhabits.  Married to Jeanie (Christina Hendricks), a divorcee with a troubled teenage son, Mickey spends his days half-heartedly canvassing for customers, but more enthusiastically conspiring with cronies to hijack truckloads of beef.  When not pursuing larceny, he hangs out at the corner tap with a cast of barflies who appear to have stumbled in from Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh by way of Cheers.  But when his step-son Leon is killed at a construction site, Mickey becomes enmeshed in pursuing his grief-stricken wife’s wishes to have her son buried in style.  His plans quickly go awry, with some grimly farcical consequences. 

For her part, Jeanie refuses to accept the official version that Leon’s death was an accident and pushes for an investigation, which catches the attention of jaded columnist Richard Shellburn (Richard Jenkins).  His mild interest in the story changes to ardent pursuit after interviewing the attractive Jeanie—pursuit of her, that is, not of the truth.   Throw in a couple of bumbling underworld figures and a gun-toting flower shop owner and you have the formula for what might have been a sharp, quirky comedy with dark overtones of social commentary.  Unfortunately, the raw slice of blue-collar life atmosphere and the comic plot of mix-ups and mayhem aren’t blended well.  The surprisingly lackadaisical script—by Dexter himself, along with Slattery and Alex Metcalf—is just occasionally amusing, and Slattery’s blase direction does nothing to make up for it.  The results are a rather melancholy mélange--mopey but never moving, dopey instead of truly funny.  

The interesting cast, which could have injected novel energy into the film, instead seems dispirited--none more so than Hoffman.  Mumbling his dialogue and looking like he’d just rolled out of bed and hadn’t had his first cup of coffee yet, Hoffman plays Mickey in a manner so self-effacing he almost detaches from the story.  Hoffman was a gifted actor and could live inside a character like few of his contemporaries could, but in this role he’s emotionally absent and as a result Mickey, a character with lots of rough edges, comes out flat.  You can’t engage the viewer’s sympathy when you refuse to engage the viewer at all.  This late-career stumble is sad to witness.  

As Jeanie, Slattery’s Mad Men cast mate Christina Hendricks gets to emote more than the sultry secretary she plays on that show, but she’s still stuck in sexpot mode.  This is a disservice to both actress and character, since Jeanie’s grief is the emotional heart of the film.  Hendricks gamely tries to convey the suffering and the inner strength of a working class mother at an emotional crossroads but is hampered by an ungenerous script and conflicted direction.  The movie needs her to be alluring since that is an important point in the plot but like so much of American cinema, or cinema in general, it fails to integrate her physical attractiveness into her humanity.  Despite frumpy dresses and a dearth of make-up, she’s simply too glamorous for the part, and the attempts to downgrade her looks while at the same time exploiting them are rather absurd.   

Fortunately, Richard Jenkins has a much better time of it with the star-crossed journalist Shellburn.  It’s chiefly in his scenes that the film finds its tone since he alone of the principle actors taps into the story’s sub-current of irony.  Despite working with similar emotive constraints as Hoffman--like Mickey, Shellburn is sleep-walking through life—he’s not hampered by them but instead uses them to explore the at once comic and sad limitations of his character.  The reawakening of erotic longing brings Shellburn out of his shell just far enough to realize he still has a job to do, and something to write about.  Sadly, he blows the opportunity.  Myopic, self-serving, frequently off-putting, this ill-fated character provides the second half of film with some much-needed focus.  The culmination of his story arc pulls the people of God’s Pocket together for a disturbing, ironic finale, a devastating scene that, despite the futility it depicts, saves the movie itself from feeling futile.  

But God’s Pocket is still a mostly inarticulate film, uncertain of what it’s trying to say about life in its particular part of the world.  On top of that it’s unpleasant to look at.   Lance Acord‘s muddy cinematography gives many of its interiors a yellowish brown tinge, rendering images only partially visible, but without artistic effect as compensation.  There’s no art here, just obscurity, as if we're watching the action through a dirty window.  The grimy look may match the depressed spirits of the surroundings, but it adds no layer of expression to what we’re shown--it just strains our eyesight.  In fact, the muddled visuals reflect the film’s major shortcomings: the inconsistency of tone, the obscurity of motive, the lack of genuine urgency to any of the events.  The poverty of God’s Pocket never seems like a social problem worth solving.  The fumblings of the characters never transform comedy (tepid, at best) into viable satire of society or the human condition.  The desperate characters never seem desperate enough for any of that.  The Lower Depths this is not.  It's not that good a neighborhood. 

Life Itself

Life Itself celebrates the life of influential film critic Roger Ebert, who died of cancer in 2013.  The intellectual half of the famous Siskel & Ebert TV team of the 1980s and 1990s (with rival Chicago film reviewer Gene Siskel), Ebert had an encyclopedic knowledge of movies and the moviemaking industry, and an ability to write reviews that explained complex ideas in simple, elegant, and very entertaining language.   He was a born writer with a natural, effortless style which he infused with his genuine passion for films and prescient grasp of their central place in our culture.  An English major at the University of Illinois, he was editor of the student newspaper and began his long association with the Chicago Sun-Times soon after graduation.  His editor asked him to write movie reviews when the current reviewer quit and he never looked back.  For the next fifty years, he wrote thousands of reviews and articles, now archived on his website, www.rogerebert.com, a major resource for anyone studying movies in the last half century. 

 

For many, he was the voice of film criticism in this country, and this became a source of controversy.  He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the first film critic to be so honored, but this didn’t keep his own critics from sniping at his growing profile, which overshadowed nearly everyone else after his hugely successful series of television shows with Siskel began in 1975.  Many academics also regarded him with scorn.  There’s an important difference between academic film scholarship and popular reviewing for the news media, but the fascinating thing about Ebert is that his knowledge was so vast and his writing so good he often straddled that divide.  Scholars can’t easily dismiss him.  This wonderful documentary by Steve James (Hoop Dreams) shows us why, as well as giving us a candid behind-the-scenes look at his horrific battle with throat and jaw cancer and his relationship with his marvelous wife Chaz, which sustained both of them  until the end.  Ebert acted the prima donna in his prime, but when he finally became the star of his own movie, his gratitude for the ways in which his life had been graced by others is genuine and moving.  Two thumbs way, way up.

Saving Mr. Banks

No matter what you think of Walt Disney’s elaborate musical fantasy Mary Poppins (1964), the Disney company is determined you believe it was a milestone in filmmaking.  Which it very well may be--for Disney, and for baby boomers like me who remember with great fondness the first time they saw it in the theater.  You can judge for yourself if it deserves more than nostalgic affection by checking out the 50^th anniversary dvd/blueray released last December.  But before that happened, Disney provided an ingenious bit of pre-release publicity to indulge in with Saving Mr. Banks, a film that purports to be a behind-the-scenes, tell-all tale about the making of the film, specifically the trials Walt and his creative team went through collaborating with the enigmatic author of the Mary Poppins books, P. L. (Pamela Lyndon) Travers.  Turns out the collaboration wasn't practically perfect in every way.  Neither is the movie, but it's filled with enough intriguing notions and expert performances to make it more than just a superior confection--and it very well may represent a new milestone in Disney's unique brand of self-mythologizing.

The film combines two storylines--in the first, the adult Travers (Emma Thompson, in a terrific performance) visits California to work on the script of the proposed movie, and in the second, her difficult childhood on a farm in Australia is unveiled in a series of flashbacks.  Travers resisted Disney's overtures to bring her beloved character to the screen for nearly twenty years.  But in need of money, she considers signing a contract with the persistent film mogul.  The resulting trip to California to meet with Disney and his staff is an unpleasant duty to her, not a promising opportunity, and unsurprisingly is filled with physical and emotional discomforts.  Sitting in a cramped airplane seat, she begins to remember another reluctant journey, one she took with her family as a young girl.  Due to her father's (Colin Farrell) drinking and declining fortunes, she, her wary but unprotesting mother, and two younger sisters, leave a comfortable home in town for a ramshackle farm in a remote part of Australia.  Highly personable and extroverted by nature, her father escapes from reality in flights of fancy that become more elaborate as his drinking worsens.  He turns to his eldest daughter for solace--he sees in her a kindred spirit and he tries to instill in her his love of imagination and dreaming.  When he collapses while giving a drunken speech at a local fair, the family is thrown into turmoil until a stern but kindly aunt (who provides the template for Mary Poppins) arrives from England to take charge of the family and help them through the crisis.  These memories haunt the adult Travers as she tries to come to terms with the current situation, with its similar themes of isolation and financial ruin. 

Banks is the latest in what has emerged in recent years as an intriguing sub-genre of “behind-the-scenes” movies, films about the making of beloved films or other works of popular art.  The last decade and a half, for instance, has produced My Week with Marilyn (2011),  Me and Orson Welles (2008), Finding Neverland (2004), Topsy-Turvy (1999), and Becoming Jane (covering the pre-novel-writing life of Jane Austen, 2007).  Accurate or not, most of them have been pretty good films.  The creation of entertainment is definitely entertaining. Of course, Hollywood has always loved to gaze at itself in its own mirror—stories about moviemaking  are nearly as old as the movies themselves.  Call it self-reflexivity but obsessive self-regard is more like it—Hollywood has never been shy about showing off its Narcissus complex.    

But Saving Mr. Banks is interested in a different kind of complex. Not content to tell how it all happened, Banks delves into why it happened.  Its seriousness is a surprise, given the light-hearted nature of the film behind the film.  Perhaps Saving Mr. Banks should be retitled Rescuing Sigmund Freud because Thompson’s Travers suffers from an unresolved Electra Complex the size of Australia. Underlying her struggles with Disney for control of her "character" lies the conflict in her feelings for her charming but errant father.  They've been waiting years to be worked through, and now, despite or because of, the painful encounters with Disney, the healing begins to take place.

The "Mr. Banks" of the title is the patriarch of the family Mary Poppins serves in Travers' novels.  In the film, she's appalled that the studio's script has changed her mild-mannered banker into a cold, imperious bank manager who ignores his children and cares only for making money.  After battling Disney on this and other critical matters--she objects to the film's being a musical, for starters--he wins her over by making her see that Mr. Banks has to be mean in order for the movie make its point--his transformation into a nice guy is central to the story.  In their view, Mary Poppins has come to the Banks house not so much to take charge of the children, Michael and Jane, as to rehabilitate the father and teach how to be a better husband and father.  By saving him, the entire family is saved.  Through a process of transference, Travers identifies Banks' redemption with her own attempts to reclaim her father, salvaging the memory of his innate goodness and genuine love for his family from the misery of their lives and his failures as a parent. 

There's more than one instance of transference going on, however.  As it turns out, much of this back story about Travers' father isn't accurate.  Travers substituted a romanticized version of her childhood for the equally grim but less dramatic facts.  There was no farm in Australia, to begin with--the family lived in the town of Allora, Queensland.  Her father was not a handsome Irish rogue dying of dissipation but an Englishman of Irish background who succumbed to influenza at 42.  The movie's "real story" behind the making of Mary Poppins is therefore another story, one that Travers herself composed.  The “truth” is based on one more piece of her’ fiction, her own about herself, which adds another layer of myth-making to the film. 
 

It also underscores the complicated relationship between Travers and her adapters.  In a sense, they're doing to her book what she did to her past--reimagining it--and the distress she feels witnessing the former is perhaps an echo of the distress that led her to do the latter.  It's no coincidence, of course, that both of Travers' stories center on her complicated relationship with a commanding male authority figure: collaborating with Walt Disney  doesn't just reawaken the memory of her father, it virtually brings him back to life.  With his fantastic tales and beguiling ways, her father is the original Walt Disney, and in order to reconcile Travers with her father, Disney in a way becomes him.  Wooing her with honeyed words, Hanks' Disney is the successful businessman version of her father--even to the point of having a secret vice.  Instead of drinking himself to death, Disney smokes in private, not wanting to tarnish his public image but laying the groundwork for his death from lung cancer a few years later. 

But the parallels don't stop there, for Travers herself is a version of her father, as well as of the fictional counterpart she created for him, Mr. Banks.  In fact, she's really more Mr. Banks than her father is, for she's the one who needs "saving."  Prim, prickly, and patronizing, as resistant to Disney's brand of fantasy as to the fun of creation collaboration as Mr. Banks is to the charm of his children and Mary Poppins' magic, Travers undergoes a character make-over as crucial to the plot as the flinty banker's is to Mary Poppins. When she finally becomes engaged in the work on that movie, her frosty personality begins to thaw a bit.  This is illustrated by the warm relationship she develops with her studio driver, Ralph (Paul Giamatti), a sweet-natured family man who gushes her worship of "Mr. Disney."  Listening to Ralph talk adoringly about his handicapped daughter, Travers is drawn toward a feeling of familial love (and unconditional acceptance?) she hasn't experienced since childhood.  It's certainly significant  that it is while riding with Ralph that Travers comments on the beauty of the Southern California landscape, evoking another memory from her childhood in the similar looking Australian countryside. 

At the center of this hall of mirrors, and reflected in every one, is the mythic figure of Walt Disney himself.  Fittingly, Saving Mr. Banks saves its nimblest form of salvation for him.  Revered by earlier generations, Disney's reputation has taken a beating since his death in 1966, two years after Mary Poppins premiered.  Persistent rumors of anti-Semitism and racism, his cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Communist witch hunt in Hollywood in the 1950s, and the bizarre (and long since discredited) story about  his body being cryonically frozen for future revival have made him seem less than the saintly, avuncular figure he tried so hard to be during his lifetime.  Reintroducing him to contemporary audiences as a character in one of his own studio’s movies is a clever way reverse that course—but reanimating him as Tom Hanks, America’s Mr. Nice Guy, is an ingenious bit of image restoration worthy of the Old Master himself.  

Not that Hanks’ portrayal is a whitewash.  Too sly an actor for that, he makes sure we remain aware of his earlier screen persona, the cool smart-aleck with the tongue-in-cheek charm, which still lurks beneath the surface of his more heroic characters.  Hanks’ Disney is no idealistic dreamer, he just loves to talk like one, but continued success seems to have merged sales pitch and self-image in his head: he acts less frustrated by Travers’ refusal to compromise on her story than upset by her ability to resist his appeal.  Cautious and doggedly courteous, the Great Man’s patience burns away like a slow fuse (or one of his concealed cigarettes) faced with Travers’ stubbornness.  Hanks’ clever, and wisely understated, performance offers an amusing but admirably restrained portrait of this consummate showman who expects his celebrated place in American popular culture to get him what he wants, and isn’t quite prepared for when it doesn’t. 

But this love letter from Disney’s World to itself is ultimately not about the man but the vision that gave the world a celebrated film, which might make it seem above question.  (The one who initially does question it,  Travers herself, has all her objections and misgivings brushed away.)  From a construction point-of-view, it’s appropriate that a film showcasing the glories of the studio’s past fashions its plot around the past of the main character.  It’s as if the movie is saying, just by looking into the past we will find the truth.  But uncovering the truth is never a simple task, which, ironically, the film also demonstrates because it’s not a straightforward biography but a complex psychological mystery, a riddle about identity and the interdependence of memory and fact--a problematic relationship at best. 

Whether or not such ambiguity was the studio's intention when they green-lighted this project, it's what has resulted, and this inevitably has implications for the story Disney is telling about itself.  Any account of an historical event obfuscates as much if not more than it reveals.  Telling the "story behind the story" just places another story in front of the original one.  It peels nothing back--it adds another layer separating us from the truth.  On top of which, the story of Saving Mr. Banks is revealed partially in flashbacks, which form another level of story-telling inside.  The premise of film is that this inner story functions as its core of "truth"--the key to the enigma of P. L. Travers' personality and the origin of Mary Poppins.  Only It happens to also be fiction, a self--embellished version of the author's childhood.  Perhaps the filmmakers were unaware of this, but it doesn't matter.  Disney may have told Travers' beloved story his way--but she's having the final say.

Nebraska

Nebraska, Alexander Payne’s latest film set in his home state, is the best one so far.  It tells the story of Woody Grant, an aging ne’er-do-well who becomes convinced he’s won a million dollars in a mail-order Sweepstakes contest.  Despite his family’s attempts to convince him otherwise, he insists on making the trip from his home in Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, headquarters of the company that sent him the “winning” letter.  Too old to drive himself, he enlists his youngest son,  David (Will Forte), who reluctantly agrees to take him at least part of the way in the hope his father will come to his senses long before they get to Lincoln.

Midway, they stop in the small Nebraska town of Hawthorne, where Woody grew up and where his surviving brothers and their families still live.  It’s not an entirely happy reunion because Woody’s lifelong alcoholism and wayward behavior as a young man had strained relations between them even before he moved away.  But nevertheless the family gathers to celebrate Woody’s good fortune, to the increasing exasperation of David, who is still trying to convince his father he hasn’t really won anything.  Despite his efforts to keep the story from spreading further, word that Woody is a millionaire quickly gets around town, and old friends and acquaintances come out of the woodwork to congratulate him, in particular his old business partner (Stacy Keach), who has a very personal reason for doing so.

Spare and laconic in style, much like the people it depicts, Nebraska might strike one at first as a short story stretched beyond its limits.  But the slightness of the premise is deceptive—Nebraska is more ambitious than it first appears, just as the seemingly one-dimensional lives of its characters are more complicated and nuanced than we might expect.  As a comedy-drama about the Midwest, Nebraska indulges in its share of easy jokes about the boredom of small town life among its conversation-challenged inhabitants.  But as much enjoyment as the film gets from  stereotypes of taciturn family gatherings and old-timers hunkered over bottomless glasses of beer at the local tavern, it’s also part of Payne’s purpose to upend those patronizing images and expose the complex humanity beneath them.  

When Woody’s wife Kate (a hilariously cranky and profane June Squibb) and elder son Ross (Bob Odenkirk) join the clan in Hawthorne, the stage is set for the airing of grievances and pent-up emotions that’s been a lifetime in coming.  The consequences of Woody’s hard drinking, financial irresponsibility, and indifferent parenting rise to the surface in a series of scenes remarkable for the easy way they sustain a natural sense of humor through the moments of greatest tension.  Bob Nelson‘s script walks a tightrope between these competing moods to perfection, and the results are gentler and sweeter than most family-showdown dramas. 

Payne’s look at the Midwestern landscape is pretty affectionate overall, so it’s interesting that he chose to shoot his film in black and white.  Filmmakers often eliminate color from the image to represent dreariness or sterility, and certainly Woody’s world must appear colorless to him much of the time, drained of hope by age, and by sorrow.  But cinematographer  Phedon Papamichael‘s subdued compositions, while occasionally stark in outline, are never bleak in expression.  The camera‘s lingering gaze at empty fields and idle main streets never conveys Nothingness—on the contrary, the richness of detail and subtle play of light and shade that are uncovered hint at a variegated experience often missing from portrayals of rural and small town life.  

“Black and white” is a misnomer, anyway, failing to take into account the infinite range of grays between those two extremes.  Nebraska is a film of extremes only at first glance.  In black and white, the world can appear at its harshest and least forgiving, but it also can yield up form and pattern often obscured by the distractions of a brighter palette.  Most significantly, the lack of external color focuses our awareness on the film’s interiority.  Nebraska contains little action--the drama is mainly inside the characters, most of whom have never learned to verbalize their internal conflicts and desires very clearly.   Stripped of color, the film's sparse exteriors become transparent to the dimensions of feeling and complicated understanding hidden behind their ordinariness.
 

The black-and-white look also brings Bruce Dern full circle, back to the beginning of his career.  A dependably nasty presence in TV shows and low-budget movies of the early 1960s, Dern haunts many Baby Boomers’ b & w nightmares.  Here his unkempt appearance and surly behavior hark back to his early screen persona as bad guy and ultimate creep.  A later attempt to move into leading-man roles failed, and Dern’s career has been on Hollywood’s back burner for the past two decades.  Now something of a cult figure, Dern turns Woody into the very definition of a comeback role.  He doesn’t do anything particularly extraordinary—he’s always been this good—but his focus on defining his character is so intense it gives the leisurely, episodic narrative an almost relentless drive.   Other geezer-on-a-life-defining-odyssey films are usually more relaxed and folksy—think The Straight Story or Harry and Tonto.   But Nebraska burns with the fuel of Dern’s whole career behind it, and the film’s weird nostalgia owes as much to the actor’s bruised reputation as it does to the ups and downs of Woody’s own life--and probably more.  With his face as furrowed as the landscape around him, his unbrushed mane of white hair standing goofily on end, Dern often looks like a tree bent sideways in the wind.  He and Woody remain standing at film’s end, though.  For both of them, Nebraska is a successful journey home.