Category Archives: Character

A Day at the Races

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Into the Starting Gate

Into the Starting Gate

When longshot Palace Malice flew past the finish pole at yesterday’s Belmont Stakes (me in terrific grandstand seats rethinking my bets), it was yet another big race with a big-heart story behind it. Racing is full of them, and the New York Times coverage of yesterday’s race (see the slideshow) provides the current tale. NBC regularly milks viewers emotions with these stories, and you can’t watch its replays of Secretariat’s 1973 runs without feeling you’re watching the hero of an age.

Yesterday’s finish was an exciting validation of the Triple Crown, with three equine princes in the top slots: Palace Malice’s first place was followed by Preakness winner Oxbow in second, and Kentucky Derby winner Orb in third.

If you want to indulge your interest in horses and racing from your favorite chair, you can’t do better than:

1. Luck, the star-filled cast of this star-crossed David Milch HBO drama showed the people behind the two minutes on the track. (This is the only demonstration of how claiming races work that I’ve ever actually understood.) I’m still mourning the misguided cancellation of this series, but have to let it go.

2. Seabiscuit, the book by Laura Hillenbrand; or the movie, starring Toby Maguire, Jeff Bridges, and Chris Cooper. Seabiscuit was an unlikely horse-racing winner, and his real-life rags-to-riches story fit Americans’ late Depression mood like a glove.The camera-work in the movie, which gives you a jockey’s eye view of the race, shows once and for all what a dangerous adrenaline rush this sport is.

3. Horse Heaven, a novel by Jane Smiley. She won the Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, but I enjoyed this book infinitely more. Huge cast of characters, including several horses, whose personalities, I have it on good authority, are portrayed with precision.

4. Lord of Misrule, a novel by Jaimy Gordon. While Horse Heaven describes the path to the high end of horse-racing, National Book Award winner Lord of Misrule describes the other direction: small tracks, low stakes, iffy horses, iffier players. Characters who really are characters.

5. The Eighty-Dollar Champion, by Elizabeth Letts. If the heart-pounding action of thoroughbred racing seems a little too much, this book tells the true and unlikely story of Snowman, a former plowhorse and his farmer-rider who became national champions in the incredibly demanding sport of show jumping (a favorite Olympic event!). Another heart-warmer.

Not recommended: Secretariat, the 2010 Disney-produced movie, starring Diane Lane and John Malkovich. Every cliché imaginable and appallingly unrealistic. Ick.

The Real British Princesses

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I discovered Jerrold Packard’s book, Queen Victoria’s Daughters, at a library book sale and couldn’t pass it up. Five of Victoria and Albert’s children were girls, and she doted on several of them, particularly her eldest and possibly brightest child, Vicky. By contrast, she never warmed to her oldest son, Bertie, even though he was destined to be King Edward VII. Cozy domestic life is associated with the Victorian era, but the Queen wasn’t a terribly involved or nurturing mother. Later, when her girls were married, she provided bad political advice—to Vicky especially, whom she persuaded to maintain her Englishness after marriage to her Prussian husband, Fritz. This alienated his parents (the emperor and empress), the stifling Prussian court, and, worst, estranged her from her three oldest children, including the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, England’s great enemy in World War I.

Victoria searched for appropriate royal husbands for the girls among the minor and now bygone German royal houses. Compassionate Alice, second oldest, married Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, plain Helena married Christian, Prince of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, and the youngest, Beatrice, married Henry, Prince of Battenberg. All the girls made royal marriages except Louise, the artistic fourth daughter and reportedly the most beautiful, who married John, future 9th Duke of Argyll. Although John’s father headed the Highland clan of Campbells, one of Britain’s oldest and most prominent families, the lack of royal blood created controversy across Europe.

Ironically, the issue of royal blood was no minor matter. Queen Victoria was a carrier of the hemophilia gene. Statistically, half her sons were likely to be afflicted, and any minor injury could bring on a fatal hemorrhage. Son Leopold inherited this damaged gene and died at age 30 after a fall. Of Victoria’s daughters, Louise and Beatrice were carriers. The disease had devastating effects on a number of Victoria’s 40 grandchildren in several royal families.

In addition to Vicky’s marriage to one German emperor and motherhood of another, her daughter Sophie married Constantine, king of Greece; Alice’s daughter Alexandra married Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, both of them murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918, along with their four daughters and son (a hemophiliac); Beatrice’s daughter Victoria Eugenie became queen of Spain.

English royalty’s multigenerational affiliations with German families—the Hanovers, Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and her children’s marriages—created political problems after the Great War. The wartime king, George V, renamed the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family after the longtime home of the British monarchy, Windsor. Members of the Battenberg family, into which Princess Beatrice married, Anglicized its name to Mountbatten.

Victoria’s reign seems both long ago, in terms of the massive intervening cultural changes, and quite recent historically. Her last daughter, Beatrice, died in 1944, and her last grandchild, the unhappy queen of Spain, in 1969. Meanwhile, Victoria will be the great-great-great-great-great grandmother of William and Kate’s baby (baby-William-Charles-Elizabeth-George VI-George V-Edward VII-Victoria).

I recommend this highly readable and fascinating book for anyone interested in British history, women’s history, or the intricacies and political shenanigans of 19th c. royal households.

Telling an Award-Winning Story

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Live-action shorts are to feature films as short stories are to novels. You have to get in fast, establish the scene and your characters, make a limited number of points—and out you go. I wrote about the short documentaries nominated for the Oscar last week. Now that we know Curfew won the live-action category—it got my vote!—here’s why.

The other four nominees (and all the documentaries) were pretty depressing. True, Curfew opens with a young man (filmmaker Shawn Christensen) sitting in a bathtub full of bloodied water, and he’s holding a razor blade. Damage has been done. Still somehow there’s a sense of incipient redemption, because when his sister phones in desperation (“you’re last on my list”) and asks him to babysit her nine-year-old daughter for a few hours, you know he’ll say “OK.” After he cleans himself up.

The unlikely relationship between the uncle and niece develops engagingly. A true story is unfolding there. Curfew benefited from the charming, cool, and always on-point performance by Fátima Ptacek (with Christensen at left).

 

Two other films were about children–young boys living in impoverished circumstances (Afghanistan and Somalia) whose big dreams are hard to hold onto. In Oscar handicapping, these two cancelled each other out. Today’s U.S. child actors are vastly better trained and directed than they used to be. These boys hadn’t had that support and retained some awkwardness.

The fourth movie was about an aging gentleman, a concert pianist, facing a confusing mélange of past and present, real and unreal, as he searches for his wife. Well done, if a little too predictable and a lot too like Amour, so a no-go for this year in such a strong field, the critics agree. And the last, Death of a Shadow (right), too slow-moving and surreal, short on action and long on atmosphere and outright weirdness. Steampunk clocks, silhouettes of corpses, endless corridors, creepy teeth.

While all the short documentaries were right around 40 minutes, making for a squirmy evening in only semi-comfortable chairs, all but one of the live action shorts were half that length. Curfew packed in so much feeling and character that it was a rich experience, deep if not long. And, BTW, it was edited on Christensen’s MacBook Pro!

  • Curfew (USA, 19 minutes) trailer
  • Asad (South Africa, 18 minutes) trailer
  • Buzkashi Boys (Afghanistan, 28 minutes) trailer
  • Death of a Shadow (Belgium/France, 20 minutes) trailer
  • Henry (Canada, 21 minutes) trailer

Oscar’s Documentary Faves

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A real treat this weekend, viewing all the Oscar-nominated short films in the documentary and live action categories! The treat part was seeing such remarkable filmmaking, though the subject matter of the documentaries, described here, was, well, let’s just say, “tears were shed.”

♦ King’s Point will be grimly familiar to those who know South Florida’s senior communities. The residents’ acerbic observations drew knowing laughs, but the jury remains out as to whether this type of congregate living is really a good thing or a concession to society’s lack of better choices for the elderly.

♦ Most moving for me was Mondays at Racine, about two sisters who once a month provide free services in their hair salon for women with cancer. Having their heads shaved exquisitely focuses and concentrates the women’s sense of loss and despair; the powerful emotional counterweight is the support of the sisters and their “been there” clients.

♦ Have you noticed the growing number of NYC homeless collecting bottles and cans by the hundreds (5¢ each)? Redemption exposes the way of life—and the diversity—of Americans whose survival now depends on others’ trash.

♦ Open Heart is the story of eight Rwandan children who must leave their families to travel 2,500 miles for surgery at Africa’s only hospital providing high-risk cardiac care for free. Meanwhile, the Italian medical organization running the hospital must fight the Sudanese president for promised financial support.

♦ Last, and probably the cinematically strongest of the lot, with a nice story arc, is Inocente, a talented San Diego teen (pictured above) who dreams of becoming an artist—a goal made even harder to achieve because she also is undocumented and homeless. All five films introduce viewers to some remarkable people, well worth knowing.

2-25 Update: And, yes, Inocente won, and it was great to see Inocente herself on stage with the winning team, as they called for more support for the arts and young artists.