G.O.P. Split Over Whether to Emphasize Misogyny or Racism

“In politics, you’ve got to dance with the one who brung you.”

The Meat Planet

Rarely is astrophysics so mouth-watering.

Autumnal Equivent

The morning when you change the default setting on your car's environment from blue to red.

Liberty

Just bought a bottle of Irish at 7:30 am on Independence Day because I could.

Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson remains his own best parodist, so I'm uncertain whether the pride of place he awards to Benjamin Britten in Moonrise Kingdom is a newfound enthusiasm or just escalation.  I'm getting tired of comparing Anderson's films to Cornell boxes, but the labored set design of Summer's End, the mid-Sixties holiday retreat of the Bishop family at one end of New Penzance, an island halfway between Montauk and Martha's Vineyard, claws at the eye.  Weathered trimming, desultory board games, and kitschy oil paintings aggressively crowd the frame to draw in this curator of summer cabin aesthetics.

Kingdom is as wry and diverting as previous Anderson outings, but it doesn't carry quite the dread of mortality that stalked, say, The Royal Tenenbaums or The Darjeeling Limited.  This is probably due to the focus on adolescents Sam and Suzy; the adult A-listers' roles are respectfully muted.  Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman are delightful discoveries, although I couldn't help imagining Jason Schwartzman coaching them off-camera.  I suppose it is gluttonous of me to have wished for a scene between the Camp Lebanon's conniving Supply Master (Schwartzman) and Commander Pierce (Harvey Keitel's mustache).

I hope Ed Norton becomes a permanent addition to Anderson's collection.  The alarm that Norton's Scout Master Ward displays when he learns that Sam is an orphan poignantly illustrates the potential of Anderson's declamatory dialogue style.  I am Jack's bottomless well of wistfulness.

The Submission

Like The Mirage, Amy Waldman's The Submission engages in a bit of alternate history:  What if in 2003 a jury selected a design for the memorial to the victims of 9/11 only to discover afterwards that the designer was an American-born, non-practicing Muslim named Mohammad Khan?  Waldman gives us a number a perspectives on the controversy, but ultimately they all revolve around that of Claire Burwell, the only representative of the victims' families on the jury and initially the strongest advocate for Khan's design.

With its parade of types gleefully misunderstanding one another, The Submission recalls nothing so much as The Bonfire of the Vanities (which Waldman herself invokes digressively in a character portrait).  As in Wolfe's farce, Deeply Held Principles are incinerated and crushed by Unintended Consequences, and the only relationships that preserve their meaning are personal.

Reading The Submission during the controversy over Anne-Marie Slaughter's unintentionally anti-capitalist essay reinforced the sense of privilege that admitted Claire to the jury in the first place and affirms her role in bringing the narrative to its conclusion.  All other players are too freighted by their class and cultural baggage to empathize with anyone else.  The closure Waldman affords to Claire is not available to anyone else, and Waldman never suggests it should be.

The Mirage

Matt Ruff's The Mirage presents itself as an alternate history in which a hegemonic "United Arab States" is attacked by Christian fundamentalist terrorists on 11/9/2001, hijacking airliners and flying them into the Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad and the Arab Defense Ministry in Riyadh.  As an alternate history, it is shoddy at best.  The Mirage functions much better as a satire on the War on Terror and Aughts pop culture.  The novel's chief delight is anticipating the roles played by public figures in the alternate world before Ruff reveals their names.  Most of these are clever, but Ruff's genius stroke is how he alternately resolves the Second World War and where he locates the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel.

Melancholia (von Trier)

Previously:  The novel Solaris by Lem and the film adaptations by Tarkovsky and Soderbergh

The only gloss I can put on Netflix's association of Lars von Trier's Melancholia with Soderbegh's Solaris is that they are both interior dramas tangentially provoked by otherwise indifferent astrophysical phenomena.

Once again, von Trier makes a woman (Justine) suffer while he condemns us for our petty, blind selfishness.  Once again, mental illness in a dysfunctional society becomes a beatifying double-negative, but no one is redeemed.  For me, von Trier's films succeed or fail depending on whether he can pull off the catharsis.  I was cheering at the end of Europa (Zentropa) and Dogville, but I walked out of Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark wanting to punch someone.

Melancholia succeeds primarily on the strength of the performance of Kirsten Dunst, who I hope escaped from von Trier mostly unscathed.  Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Justine's sister Claire, the only other human in the film, and Claire's relationship with Justine is all that survives the dénouement.  The pre-title sequence, set to the Prelude from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (get used to it now), is visually stunning, clearly violates Dogme, and is probably the only part of the film I'll ever need to watch again.

Dunst is marvelous as Justine, mincing through her wedding reception, genuinely disappointed that she cannot pretend to be as happy as she knows everyone wants her to be.  For once, a von Trier heroine is more adult than anyone around her.  Aside from portraying von Trier's cartoon notion of an ad executive, Stellan Skarsgård is excused from his usual duty of brutalizing the protagonist.  That role falls to John (Kiefer Sutherland), and even he lets the abuse accumulate in his tight eyes and tighter jaw rather than pouring it out on his wife, Claire.

So Justine cannot find happiness in her marriage or her career, and in the second half of the film she returns to John & Claire's absurdly grandiose estate to convalesce while her serotonin levels align with the eschaton.  Von Trier's prior films have depicted worlds more deserving of destruction than Justine's awkwardly banal wedding party, and it's difficult to work up much outrage over John's withholding of certain information.  That John and Claire fail to prepare either themselves or their young son for the climax of Melancholia is no indictment, nor does von Trier intend it to be.  But Dunst's Justine is so affectingly doleful that she seems serene by comparison.

While Justine is marking the stations of the cross via the endless rituals of the wedding reception, Dunst's legendary smile buoys us through all indignities, and it's impossible to imagine anything dimming it for long.  When we realize during the film's second act that it isn't coming back, that's when we're ready for the world to end.

Solaris (Soderbergh)

Previously:  The novel by Lem and the film adaptation by Tarkovsky

I like Soderbergh, but I might not have checked out his Solaris had Netflix not grouped it with the Tarkovsky and von Trier's Melancholia, which was already on the Queue.

So the set looks like Blade Runner and the plot sounds like Aliens, but there the pretensions to science fiction end.  Soderbergh decided the most interesting aspect of the novel was Kelvin processing (or not) his grief over his wife's suicide.  To make this work, I should like to have had more exploration of the conflict that drove Kelvin to walk out on his wife, provoking her to kill herself.  As presented, it is far too trite for the third act to pay off.

It's possible that Soderbergh intended to demonstrate that humans are irremediable pattern-seekers, and that Kelvin's unresolved grief created the visitations by his dead wife and then his final vision.  But we hardly need a self-organizing, environment-manipulating planet for that.

This interpretation was defeated for me when Kelvin was visited by a Gibarian so out of character from Kelvin's memory of him that Soderbergh lets us believe that this Gibarian was speaking for Solaris.  This reinforces Kelvin's narcissistic response to the phenomena and sets up Solaris as a gnomic godhead that redeems human transience.  As fetching as Clooney and McElhone are to watch, to me this was substantially less interesting than Lem's novel or Tarkovsky's adaptation.

I was surprised how quickly I tired of Jeremy Davies; I didn't even care about his "twist."  When Kelvin spies Rheya conferring with Gibarian's child, I had an awful moment where I thought that she might find renewed purpose by adopting him.

The one idea of Soderbergh's that I enjoyed was Kelvin's worry that he was "remembering [Rheya] wrong."  Does love mean remembering everything about someone with complete accuracy?  Is it less loving to forget something about someone that they would like to change?  To forgive without forgetting is said to require grace, possibly of divine origin.  For those of us who can't travel to Soderbergh's Solaris, forgetting will have to do.

Followed by:  Lars von Trier's Melancholia.