Category Archives: Character

A Most Wanted Man

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Hamburg, port

Hamburg, Germany (photo: wikimedia)

Ambiguity, betrayal, characterization, desire—The ABC’s of John le Carré are all in place and working hard in this new film (trailer here). The setting is the gritty port city of Hamburg, from whence much violence rained down on America—and the dirty water of the first scene is the proper element for the dirty business to come—and the real world of espionage. I won’t say more about the plot. Acting throughout is exemplary. Perfect music.

(Must contrast this with the over-long, deeply implausible, and fundamentally boring Poirot mystery on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery last night. What happened there? I get it that it’s just supposed to be fun. Wasn’t.)

A Most Wanted Man is both movie title and epitaph. John le Carré’s encomium is a must-read. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 90%

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***The Killing Floor

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Greyhound bus, Cleveland

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Lee Child (narrated by Dick Hill) – This is the first Jack Reacher novel (1997), and the first I’ve read. They’re so popular, fans must either get past the flimsy logic behind Reacher’s choice to become a Greyhound-riding drifter or Child at some point strengthens that case. Like Jo Nesbo’s first Harry Hole novel (reviewed here), you know from the get-go that Reacher’s woman will be an endangered species before the plot runs out.

Maybe male writers just have to get that damsel-in-distress-rescue-fantasy-thing out of their system, but I wish they would. It’s too transparent an attempt to give their protagonists some depth via a meaningful, but brief relationship with really good sex. These relationships have to be short, though, so they don’t spill over into sequels and doing the laundry, picking up the kids, and the other minutia that would inevitably follow if the relationship continued.

The plot had a pretty big “huh?” in it, too, though I quite liked the image of homeless Jack Reacher tooling around the Georgia countryside in the borrowed Bentleys. (Spoiler alert: The “huh” was, if the Margrave powers-that-be hired detective Finlay because they mistakenly thought he was slow-witted—because of what Finlay says was the worst job interview in history—wouldn’t their FBI agent confederate, who knows Finlay, have set them straight?) Superb narration by Dick Hill!

*****Miracle Boy and Other Stories

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cock fight, cockfight

(photo: wikimedia)

It’s hard to pass up a book by someone with the irresistible name of Pinckney Benedict, and you shouldn’t. His 14-story collection, Miracle Boy and Other Stories, is something that will stay with you a long time. (“Miracle Boy” was made into an award-winning short film—trailer). I came away with a strong sense of the people, animals, and the not-necessarily-explainable happenings in his narrow, timeless Seneca River valley setting, an oasis where myth, history, modernity, and even the future exist side-by side. Other readers have been similarly entranced.

The following quote, from a boy talking about how he copes with the world, demonstrates the deceptive simplicity of Benedict’s prose: I could usually get along by just looking them straight in the eyes and smiling and nodding and making little noises like I understood [what they said] and I thought what they were saying was just great. (“Bridge of Sighs”)

How many of us have faked it just like that?

Several themes (no doubt many more than my weak skills can identify) pervade many of these stories. The possibility of falling, literally and symbolically, is a strong one. It appears in the eponymous story, in “Joe Messinger is Dreaming,” and in the jet crash of “The World, The Flesh, and the Devil”: The wet soil of the field looked soft as a featherbed. It seemed inviting, as though it wanted him simply to loose his hold on the ladder, to spread his arms, and drop down sprawling onto it. (“Mudman”)

The close melding of humans and their animals weaves throughout. Benedict’s dogs are not the bright, cute fellows cocking their photogenic heads at us in our friends’ Facebook posts. Animals can be victims, when an epizootic plague strikes the valley’s farms, or aggressors in stories of dog and cock fights. They can take on (distressingly) human qualities and tend to look out for #1 (not you). Feel the speed and powerful movement in this passage about a pack of wild dogs chasing a downed aviator: He shoved his way forward in the pack, striving for all he was worth, until there were no dogs in front of him. He flew through the forest, and the frontrunner’s howl broke from his throat, and the dogs behind him took it up adding their voices to the awful wail. (“The World, The Flesh, and the Devil”)

The river valley’s isolation nurtures altered mental states in which interpersonal connection falter and sizzle out: For a brief instant (my father) stood still, motionless as I had never seen him. It was as though a breaker somewhere inside him had popped, and he had been shut off. (“Mercy”)

I ordered this book because of an interesting interview with Benedict in Glimmer Train, and feel quite smug that I ordered it from his independent publisher, Press 53 of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, not Amazon. At the time I ordered, Press 53 was engaged in its “Books for Soldiers” campaign, and because of my purchase, mailed a book to a deployed or recovering U.S. soldier at no additional charge. Nice!

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The Orchard

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The Cherry Orchard, The Orchard, Chekhov, movie

(photo: pixabay.com)

Interesting experience recently, seeing The Orchard (trailer) at the Trenton Film Festival. In the story, filmed in real time, six actor friends get together for a weekend to prepare an improvisational performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard—the world’s most performed play. Excellent score by Towering Inferno.

The movie script is something of a mashup of Chekhov and Pirandellos’ Six Characters in Search of an Author, but with its own absurdist excesses. (I’ve seen Six Characters and have forgotten it in its entirety.) With the heavy regional English accents and scenes where everyone talks at once, I missed a lot, but that seems the intent.

The private arguments over which actor should play which part suggest viewers are glimpsing intimate scenes that expose jealousies, rivalries, and personal histories. But, really, they’re scripted. After a while, the story moves seamlessly into Chekhov. And out again. Some of the non-AC scenes could be 20 percent shorter, but the cast is terrific in their actor and Chekhovian personae. As the synopsis says, after this weekend, “Will they ever be friends again?” Good question.

Personally, I think Wallace Shawn’s Vanya on 42d Street (1994) was easier to watch—another movie about trying to mount a Chekhov play, but The Orchard is a worthy effort suitable for specialty audiences with a taste for fine ensemble acting.

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Such Stuff as Dreams: The Tempest vs. Ida

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Shakespeare, The Tempest

Sherman Howard (Prospero) and Erin Partin (Ariel) in The Tempest, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (photo: imgick.nj.com)

Quite a contrast recently between the nonstop cannonade of literary touchstones in The Tempest—in an exuberant and colorful production at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, alas, only through June 22—and the oppressive restraint of the near-silent black-and-white movie from Poland, Ida, viewed the same day (trailer).

In the live—and lively—play, the portrayals by Sherman Howard (Prospero), Lindsey Kyler (Miranda), John Barker (Caliban), and especially Erin Partin (Ariel) were remarkable.

Shakespeare touches button after button with his iconic quotes: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here” (wait, that sounds like John Boehner’s voice!), “Now I will believe that there are unicorns,” “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” “What’s past is prologue,” , “O, brave new world, that has such people in’t,” “my library was dukedom large enough,” or “he receives comfort like cold porridge,” Ida has hardly any dialog.

David Denby in The New Yorker puts a positive spin on this, saying, “I can’t recall a movie that makes such expressive use of silence and portraiture.” In Ida, instead of being carried along by a current of words, we float in a bleak, misty, ambiguous atmosphere, albeit rendered with beautiful cinematography, “every shot as definitive as an icon,” Denby says, quite truly.

But after all Shakespeare’s verbal passion, Ida felt like cold porridge indeed. Perhaps the filmmakers had some great story in mind and just forgot to tell it, because they give the barest of bones and leave viewers (me, anyway) with more questions than answers—not so much about the past, which the movie explores in sufficient glimpses—but about what is going on right now in the minds of the characters on the screen.

Agata Kulesza, does a fine job playing the aunt of the main character, a sheltered, opaque novitiate raised in a convent (Ida), played less well by Agata Trzebuchowska. The pair uncover a terrible but not uncommon World War II tragedy, and the question of whether exposure to her aunt’s earthiness will persuade somnambulant Ida to abandon the convent seems none too debatable. Bear in mind the Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it 93%, so don’t take my word for it.

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*****Pictures at an Exhibition

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Sara Houghteling, Nazi art, Monuments Men, Pictures at an ExhibitionBy Sara Houghteling – “A thriller, a travelogue, and a mystery,” said the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about this 2009 novel, the story of Max Berenzon, son of a successful Parisian art dealer who, in the 1930s, falls in love with a woman, Rose Clément (the real-life Rose Valland), assisting in his father’s gallery. The three share an encyclopedic knowledge of the artists and artworks then in museums and galleries and private hands.

As Jews, the Berenzons must hide in the countryside during the war, returning to a ravaged city, their hidden artworks looted, the gallery burned, and little chance of recovery. Those familiar with The Monuments Men will appreciate this perspective on the story. (In the movie, Rose is played by Cate Blanchett and called Claire Simone). Houghteling weaves a good story that keeps the pages flying, and writes with vivid style: “That same winter, I was in Le Puy, where the stark, bare tree branches were like Chinese calligraphy against the sky.” Lovely.

Berenzon’s father advises him to give up searching for the family’s lost artworks, advising they will not be recovered for subsequent generations. And, indeed, regular news reports tell of the “discovery” and return of looted works, where that is possible, is the ongoing purpose of The Monuments Men Foundation. Says Houghteling in a postscript: “The locations of some 40,000 art objects remain unknown. They are in public and private collections and, many believe, in the former Soviet Union, plundered a second time by Stalin’s Trophy Brigades.”

****Ordinary Heroes

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Scott Turow, Ordinary HeroesBy Scott Turow, this World War II tale (2005) started off slowly for me, but by the time the main protagonist (the narrator’s now-dead father) is in the European war zone, I was hooked. The narrator discovers that his father, a Captain in the U.S. Army’s Judge Advocate General’s office, was court-martialed near the end of the war and could have faced a firing squad for his actions in pursuit of an OSS rogue spy.

The framing story that introduces the narrator’s quest to excavate his father’s past wasn’t quite compelling enough and the big reveal not that much of a surprise, but the book’s middle was terrific. Characters were well developed, and various hellish aspects and moral conundrums of war convincingly frustrated the captain’s search for the spy at every turn. Coming to terms with the damage of war was a life-long project for the father, carried on silently throughout the narrator’s life. New York Times reviewer Joseph Kanon liked it, too.

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Tamer of Horses

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Iliad, Hector, Tamer of Horses

Hector, Tamer of Horses (photo: farm6.staticflickr.com)

A wonderful play by Trenton playwright William Mastrosimone in production through 6/8 by the Passage Theatre Company. Amazing acting (Hector, played by Reynaldo Piniella; Ty Fletcher, by Edward O’Blenis; and Georgiane Fletcher, by Lynnette R. Freeman), and the well-plotted play moves along briskly, exploring the limits of teacher and teaching. The play never descends into sentimentality in dealing with a tough street kid and the middle-class couple that believes it better to try to save him than protect themselves. Direction by the sure-footed Adam Immerwahr.

The Iliad and its hero Hector, Tamer of Horses, also stars, providing enduring lessons to a generation that knows a Trojan as something you buy at the drug store. Homer’s words “take their place next to urban rap lyrics” as the modern-day Hector and the disaffected teacher “match wits in a struggle for Hector’s survival.” Passage Theatre productions appear at Trenton’s easy-to-get-to Mill Hill Playhouse. Secure parking right in front. Don’t miss it!

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The Rum Diary

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The Rum Diary, Johnny Depp, Hunter S. Thompson

(photo: pixabay.com)

Is it that drinking-to-oblivion has exhausted its limited appeal? Is it that we feel we’ve been there before? Is it that I’m just old and crotchety? If you have The Rum Diary (2011) (trailer) on your Netflix list, you’re in for a few good laughs, but a predictable romantic element and a decided downturn in enjoyment when the main character suddenly dons a cloak of sanctimony near the end.

The movie, set in Puerto Rico in the late 1950’s (great cars!) is based on Hunter S. Thompson’s book, and while Johnny Depp, Richard Jenkins, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi (who makes the least likable character in the movie fun to watch) are more than fine in their roles, the material isn’t up to their performances. It might have been better as a straight comedy without hitting viewers with occasional deeply menacing information, then staggering on as if nothing just happened. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 50%.

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**** The Reversal

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Michael Connelly, Mickey Haller, Lincoln Lawyer

If you’ve read the Lincoln Lawyer series, you know Mickey Haller does most of his legal work from the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, which has the vanity plate NT GLTY

Got my Michael Connelly fix for the year—The Reversal—a 2010 crime thriller that alternates chapters between brash lawyer Mickey Haller and his half-brother (or did you miss that one?) cynical LAPD detective Harry Bosch. Both men have teen daughters so are especially anxiety-prone when a man convicted of abducting and murdering a young girl is released from San Quentin as a result of DNA evidence and must face trial again after 24 years.

It’s interesting how Haller—working for the prosecution this time—must introduce old evidence without revealing to the jury the prejudicial information that the accused has already been convicted once. Nor can he say why some witnesses are unable to appear (dead or demented) and interviews with them, actually their previous trial testimony, must be read aloud.

While this isn’t Connelly’s best, he never disappoints and received four Amazon stars from readers. If you like every plot angle tied up with a bow, in this one, that doesn’t happen, and the author leaves Harry still pursuing leads as to the convict’s possible involvement in other crimes. It’s as if Connelly was leaving the door open for a never-written sequel.

Matthew McConaughey, Lincoln Lawyer

Matthew McConaughey stars in the movie version – note vanity plate!

For a fun Netflix pick, Matthew McConaghey in The Lincoln Lawyer. Rotten Tomatoes Critics rating: 83%. I thought it was better than that, and I’d read the book! Also notice how the movie poster changed the license plate to “NT GUILTY,” thinking viewers were too dim to figure it out, I suppose.

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