Weekend Movie Fare: Carol

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Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Carol

Rooney Mara & Cate Blanchett

Hailed as a top Oscar contender this year in numerous categories—best director, film, actress, and cinematography—Carol (trailer) is the story of a wealthy but unhappily married woman (played by Cate Blanchett) who embarks on a relationship with a shopgirl (Rooney Mara) she meets by chance. Unquestionably, it’s a period piece (nice Packards!), written by author Patricia Highsmith, herself a lesbian, who wrote high-class mysteries like The Talented Mr. Ripley, and it would have had considerably more shock value—and prompted more audience reflection—in its 1952 novel version, The Price of Salt.

In a story set in that era and with the social class differences involved, there are lots of ways for this relationship to go wrong. Worse, with a husband willing to play his ace—custody of his and Carol’s four-year-old daughter Rindy—the stakes are high. Yet, I didn’t find this movie either engaging or revelatory. Of course Blanchett is terrific, as always, though even she may underplay the role of Carol through most of the film. Mara, as the initially childlike Therese Belivet, is so indeterminate that it’s hard to root for her happiness (what would that require, exactly?) and even harder to see what the glamorous, sophisticated Carol sees in her. Perhaps director Todd Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy hoped that, by making Mara more or less a cipher, viewers would be free to pin their own romantic hopes and dreams on her.

In the New York Times, critic A.O.Scott calls Carol “a study in human magnetism, in the physics and optics of eros . . . (giving) emotional and philosophical weight to what might be a perfectly banal question: What do these women see each in each other.” That was my question, all right. Therese says she is almost will-less, that the complications in her life arise because all she ever does is say “yes,” and the film takes on the challenge of imbuing her most important affirmation with real meaning. In a season where we’ve seen so many excellent high-drama films, this one, to me, did less than I would have liked it to. I’d give it a B-.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 94%; audiences: 79%.

Savannah Walking Tours

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Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt, Savannah, Georgia

Savannah (photo: wikimedia.org)

On a recent week-long trip to Savannah, my family group indulged in a number of interesting walking tours. Not only were they a good way to explore this beautiful city, they helped us stave off any extra pounds we might have put on, thanks to this city’s fabulous food! One of us wore a fitbit, which provided electronic validation of the more than 16,000 steps we accomplished on our most ambitious day, but 14,000 was not unusual.

Flannery O'Connor, Savannah

Mini-lending library outside Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home (she raised peacocks)(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

It’s hard to believe that at one point, developers wanted to destroy the system of squares that make the city so unique, as the nation’s first “planned city.” Each square has different features—statues, fountains, styles of benches—and most are filled with live oaks draped in Spanish Moss.

How much you enjoy walking tours depends a lot on the personality of your guides and what they choose to highlight. Maybe we were just lucky, but all our tours were great. In addition to several house tours—including the Mercer Williams mansion on Monterey Square, featured in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and the tiny early childhood home of author Flannery O’Conner—we especially enjoyed:

  • The “Savannah Walks” one-and-a-half hour Civil War walking tour (912/704-1841). We heard the story of how Savannah wasn’t burned by General Sherman—the precise reason depending on the guide—probably some combination of: the Confederate forces had already abandoned the town, Sherman was set up in the beautiful and comfortable Green Meldrin house on Madison Square, and he had friends who lived in the city.
  • The “Southern Strolls” history walk (912/480-4477). I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this, as we’d already done so many, and maybe others felt that way, too, as only three of us showed up at the Johnny Mercer Bench in Johnson Square at the appointed time. The guide gave a very quirky, personalized tour, and while we saw a few of the same sights, his interpretations were so entertaining, we all agreed it was the best tour of all!
  • To explore some of the area’s African-American history, we took the Freedom Trail Tour led by Johnnie Brown. While not strictly speaking a walking tour, this minibus excursion does let passengers out to visit the Civil Rights museum and the First African Baptist Church—organized in 1773—whose upstairs pews, made by slaves, retain markings indicating which African tribe the congregants came from.
Savannah carriage

Our carriage awaits! (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

For a general orientation to the city, the hour-long carriage tour that leaves from City Market provided a good overview (912/236-6756) at a pace slow enough to absorb the stream of information. We did that one our first morning. Later that day, we also took one of the many trolley tours. Although it covered a wider area, the presentation was canned, and added little to what we had already learned. There are several trolley tour companies and you can’t walk a block without seeing one pass.

So, going to Savannah? Pack your walking shoes!

Your Travel Circles:

Although Savannah is well worth a visit on its own, you can add on a couple of days there pretty easily if you’re traveling to:

  • Charleston, South Carolina (106 miles)
  • Jacksonville, Florida (139 miles)
  • Atlanta (250 miles)

****The Crossing

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(photo: readerwalker, creative commons license)

By Michael Connelly, narrated by Titus Welliver – What a pleasure it is to enter the Los Angeles airspace of Harry Bosch and his half-brother Mickey Haller. Teaming up his two protagonists from the Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer series was a brilliant move by Connelly, and I’ve enjoyed every story of the two of them, fighting crime and for justice. In this latest double-outing, Connelly does not disappoint.

In The Crossing, Bosch takes the lead. He’s retired, not by choice, and rattling around his garage doing not very much. Haller approaches him about serving as an investigator on a difficult case he’s undertaken: a man accused of a brutal murder based on supposedly irrefutable DNA evidence, but Haller is convinced his client is innocent. Bosch is doubtful. Worse, if he agrees to help the defense he’s “going over to the dark side” in his own eyes, and it will be seen as a betrayal by all his former police department colleagues. Still, reviewing the case files does raise a few unanswered questions and, as we might expect, Bosch’s investigatory instincts soon overrun his reservations, and, with nothing more than the box for a luxury wristwatch to go on, he’s off. But meanwhile, a couple of rogue cops are up to something, and the brothers are in their sights.

Seeing Bosch and Haller work in their respective roles—investigator and courtroom advocate—lets Connelly show off his characters’ different skill sets and keeps the reader (listener, in this case) well entertained. It’s instructive to hear Haller’s reminders that, while Bosch may be on a search for the truth, the client must be their uppermost concern.

As to the effectiveness of the audio version, Welliver’s excellent reading, combined with Connelly’s clear writing style, made it easy to keep track of the characters and the story. Welliver is super-prepared for this reading, as he played the character of Harry Bosch in the eponymous Amazon television series that premiered in 2015. An interview with Connelly and Welliver is included in this Crime Fiction Lover preview of the television series.

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The Big Short

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The Big Short

Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, Brad Pitt, Christian Bale

Five stars for this comedy-drama (trailer) based on the best-selling Michael Lewis book about the 2008 financial crisis and the lonely voices in the wilderness calling, “Housing bubble,” “Housing bubble,” “This will end baaaadleeee.” The idea that mortgage-backed securities could be anything other than rock solid so went against conventional wisdom that no one listened. But, as we know now, these securities had become more and more vulnerable as riskier loans were bundled into them, and the chaff soon outweighed the wheat.

It takes a bit of understanding about how this financial market operated to grasp the significance of the action. Director Adam McKay, who wrote the screenplay with Lewis and Charles Randolph, cleverly provides the necessary background, having characters break the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience. For example, from her symbolic bubble bath and sipping champagne, actress Margot Robbie tells us what a financial bubble actually means. It’s “ a terrifically enjoyable movie that leaves you in a state of rage, nausea and despair,” says A.O. Scott in his New York Times review, which includes a clip from McKay on some of the clever ways the film explains the financial goings-on.

The cast does an exemplary job of embuing characters with strong personalities. Christian Bale plays Dr. Michael Burry, a loner physician-turned-hedge-fund-manager who figures out the problem early (and whose character confirms my aversion to heavy metal music). He takes the unprecedented step of actually looking at the individual mortgages bundled into the securities being offered and sees that many of them are weak and involve adjustable rate loans. When their interest rates go up, the homeowners will default. This, to him is an investment opportunity; he’ll bet against the mortgage market. The banks are happy to back his scheme (involving credit default swaps), seeing it as a sure-fire winner for them.

One of the banks he approaches has on staff a skeptical analyst, played by Ryan Gosling, who believes the good doctor may just be right. He convinces the unconventional trading firm led by Mark Baum (Steve Carell) to invest in the swaps, too. In one of the movie’s funniest sequences, Baum sends staff to Florida to investigate some of these mortgages. They find unbuilt houses, a forest of “for sale” signs, and two beach-bum mortgage brokers (Max Greenfield and Billy Magnussen) , who don’t hesitate to say they will insure basically anything. “Why are they confessing?” Baum whispers to his staffer. “They’re not confessing. They’re bragging,” he replies. Similarly, Melissa Leo, as an official at an investment rating agency, is badgered into explaining how, if her firm rated investments accurately, the banks would just take their business down the street.

In a Colorado garage, another pair of youthful investors (played by John Magaro and Finn Wittrock) wants to parlay $30 million into a bigger fortune. They set out to New York to figure out how. There they stumble onto the real estate problem and see the credit default swaps as their big chance, but they need connections, and they get help from their neighbor back home, a disenchanted former investment banker (Brad Pitt).

It’s telling that the few people who foresaw and took advantage of the inevitable crisis were all, one way or another, Wall Street outsiders. They weren’t unaware that their gains were made on the backs of everyday Americans who lost billions in housing value, jobs and homes, pension fund value, and savings. Meanwhile, the many individuals and institutions whose carelessness, greed, or criminality created the bubble in the first place have not been called to account. No less an expert than Paul Krugman has written, “I think (the movie) does a terrific job of making Wall Street skullduggery entertaining, of exploiting the inherent black humor of how it went down.” And, even more important, he says it “got the underlying economic, financial, and political story right.” And it’s still a story lots of people don’t want Americans to hear.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 87%; audiences, 91%.

****A Better Goodbye

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(photo: Thomas Hawk, creative commons license)

By John Schulian – If you’ve wondered what goes on in those sketchy “massage” parlors, this expertly written and well paced debut thriller is your chance to find out. Set in Los Angeles on the bitter fringes of the entertainment industry and reeking of fake glamour, the story pulls you into its world from the opening chapter. It’s classic noir, dealing with people who don’t have much going for them who will probably never go far. Schulian has done a remarkable job recreating their lonely world, an inspiration he describes in this interview.

A multiple point-of-view story, the principal characters are Jenny Yee, a Korean college student earning tuition money in the massage business, Scott Crandall, a washed-up out-of-shape television actor whose main source of income is the massage business he owns, his would-be friend Onus DuPree, and Nick Pafko, a former boxer still haunted by the freak accident that killed an opponent when the poor sap hit the ropes exactly wrong.

Scott was glad to hire Jenny, as his last Asian girl was leaving, and in their business he needed someone to please the “rice chasers.” Meanwhile, her priority is a new job where there is someone to provide security. A string of vicious massage parlor robberies has made the women nervous. An out-of-work ex-boxer who will also keep the books sounds like just what Scott needs. Nick can’t quite get over being offended to be working in a jack shack, but it soon becomes obvious the girls need him.

Always playing the angles, Scott has no respect for the girls, for Nick, or, for that matter himself. “What a f— town. Shake a tree and whores fell out of it. Whores and actors, like there was any difference between the two.” Scott is drifting into a closer orbit with his scary friend DuPree, putting everyone at increased risk—not from the cops or any of the other forces of order, but from the climate of violence DuPree creates, like a mountain making its own weather.

One thing about this book is you learn a whole new vocabulary [!] and a lot about a subculture of desperate young women. IRL erotic massage is estimated to be a $1 billion a year business in the United States, often involving immigrant women with few choices. The exploitation isn’t a surprise, nor is the potential for violence, but Schulian’s uncanny ability to get into the minds of these quite different individuals makes for a compelling read.

He comes by his skills honestly, with respect to character development and a driving storyline. Although this is his first novel, he has published short stories, and his main career has been as a Hollywood scriptwriter, working for television programs such as L.A. Law, Miami Vice, and JAGS. He co-created Xena: Warrior Princess—for a while the world’s foremost syndicated TV series. He has been a sports and magazine writer and has edited two anthologies of writing about boxing, which no doubt contributed to the authenticity of his character Nick’s voice.

The book title comes from a Patty Griffin song, “And I wonder where you are, And if the pain ends when you die, And I wonder if there was some better way to say goodbye.” A knockout.

A somewhat longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

****Wolf Winter

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arctic wolf

(photo: myri-_bonnie, Creative Commons license)

By Cecilia Ekbäck, narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan – Swedish-born writer Ekbäck’s debut crime thriller is set in remote north Sweden in 1717. The long darkness of winter is closing in, and the scattered homesteads on Blackåsen Mountain are preparing for what the signs suggest will be a rough time. The Lapps who have come south for the season say it will be a “wolf winter,” which they describe as “the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal. Mortal and alone.”

Paavo, his wife Maija (MY-ah), and their daughters, 14-year-old Frederika and six-year-old Dorotea, are new arrivals from Finland, and they haven’t spent a winter this far north before. They aren’t sure what to expect, even though they don’t know the mountain’s dark history of evil portents and mysterious disappearances. One thing they do not expect is for Paavo to decide to leave his womenfolk on their own and travel to the coast to try to earn some money. He won’t return before spring. And they definitely don’t expect that Frederika and Dorotea will discover the mutilated corpse of one of their new neighbors, a man named Eriksson, in a glade where they’d intended to pasture their goats.

When Eriksson’s death comes to light, some of the neighbors attribute the savage attack to a bear, others suggest wolf, but Maija who is an earth-woman by training—a midwife and healer—insists the death was caused by a human agent. Almost certainly, a murderer is in their midst.

Yet no one misses Eriksson, a man who made it his business to ferret out and exploit people’s weaknesses. “Sometimes God did take the right people” seems to be the view. In this tiny community in which everyone knows everyone else and, presumably, most of their secrets and hidden grudges, the layers of deception keep being peeled back.

In the region’s central town the immense power of the church resides in the person of the priest, Olaus Arosander. He starts out as Maija’s adversary, skeptical of her belief Eriksson was murdered. While he doesn’t trust her kind of knowledge, he has secrets of his own that put him at odds with his church’s views. Over time, Maija and Arosander both become committed to determining what happened to Eriksson, and whether his death is the end of violence on Blackåsen Mountain or the beginning.

The notion of wolves takes on both a corporeal and metaphoric significance in the story. It becomes clear that predators are ravaging the countryside, preying on the community’s weakest members. Darkness, too, means more than the months’ long absence of sunlight. It also refers to the special knowledge—call it intuition, call it the ability to read signs, call it something more, but don’t dare call it sorcery—that helps Maija sort truth from misdirection. In that place and time, such “special knowledge” was a potentially deadly inheritance, one that Maija received from her dead grandmother and which she fears has been passed on to Frederika, who doesn’t yet understand its power or how to control it.

Wolf Winter works well as an audio book. Bresnahan’s narration is clear, and the characters are easy to distinguish both by the reader’s voice and Ekbäck’s helpful cues regarding the speaker’s identity. This is a perfect listen for the shortest days of the year—preferably in front of a fire, in heavy socks and woolly robe, because the novel’s chills come from both the weather so ably described and the hearts of the characters. Another great contribution to the Nordic noir tradition.

A somewhat longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website here.

The Man in the High Castle: Guest Post

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Man in the High Castle, Philip K. DickGuest-reviewer David Sherr gives 5 stars to this 10-part Amazon Studio Series production, which he binge-watched one recent weekend. Says David:

The Man in the High Castle is a complex story of espionage and betrayal based on a 1963 Hugo Award-winning novel by Philip K. Dick. It’s produced by Ridley Scott, who directed Blade Runner (1982), based on another of Dick’s dystopian tales, and Frank Spotniz (The X-Files). The story provides an alternative history: Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany win World War II, and the United States is under totalitarian rule.

While very few movies are as compelling as the book that inspired them, this one holds true to its source in essential plot and character development. (This Gizmodo review describes some of the differences, for fans of the book.) The series is perfectly paced with tight dialogue and uniformly superior directing and acting. The cinematography is exquisite—lingering shots in muted color settings.

Man in the High Castle

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa in Man in the High Castle

Among the production’s leading actors are Alexa Davalos, Rupert Evans, Luke KleinTank. One particularly outstanding and subtle performance is that of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as the melancholy but kind US Japanese Trade Minister, Nobusuke Tagomi, in the accompanying photo. (You may remember him as Chang in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Academy Award-winning film, The Last Emperor [1987], or Eddie Sakamura in Rising Sun [1993], based on a book by Michael Crichton.)

The artistic director, costume designer, and set designer all deserve kudos. The film depicts technology, clothing, hair styles, and vehicles that appear to be from at least a decade earlier than 1962, when the story is set, which is consistent with a point in the story-line about how progress is inhibited by the effects of fascism.

The Man in the High Castle became available for Amazon streaming on November 20. It’s billed as “season one,” so there may be more to come.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 95%.

Guest review by David Scherr. Contact him at dmsherr@gmail.com or on Twitter: @davidsherr

Last-Minute Book Gifts

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book gifts

(photo: Quinn Dombrowski, creative commons license)

Is  Santa still searching for a few perfect stocking-stuffers for the people on your list? Here’s some help.

I scanned through the books I’ve read and reviewed this year, and selected some for people having different interests.

Included are a few lesser-known books, too. You don’t need me to tell you about Everything I Never Told You (by definition!) or other front-of-the-store best-sellers.

And, you’ll find The Cowboy and the Cossack there, once again, because everyone who takes my advice about it says it’s one of the best books they’ve ever read!

Clicking on the title will take you to my review. If the lucky recipient likes:

While you’re at it—buy two copies, one for yourself! Happy reading!

****The Man in the Wooden Hat

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tulips

(photo: Denise Krebs, creative commons license)

By Jane Gardam — Getting to know intimately one half of a married couple can ill prepare you for meeting the other half, who may fail to live up to their superior advance billing, or, as likely, be so surprisingly normal—even pleasant—that you mistrust your own memory of past marital revelations. Award-winning British writer Jane Gardam’s books Old Filth (from the husband’s point of view) and The Man in the Wooden Hat (the wife’s) apply these different lenses to the same 50-year marriage.

I’ve read only this one, published in 2009, but went back to reviews of Old Filth (2006) and found that many of the animating events in the couple’s life are described in both novels. While the bones of the relationship remain the same, “Little here is as it seemed in ‘Old Filth,’ and both books are the richer for it,” said Louisa Thomas in her New York Times review.

The sobriquet Old Filth—created by and applied to talented barrister Edward Feathers, later Sir Edward—is an acronym for “Failed In London, Try HongKong.” Try there, he does, and succeeds. Also in Hong Kong, his future wife Elisabeth Macintosh debates whether to marry him, decides to, and carries through at rather a slap-dash pace in ancient borrowed finery. Eddie’s preoccupation is that Betty should never leave him, and she promises she won’t. This is a promise Betty learns will be enforced by Edward’s best friend, the card-playing Chinese dwarf Albert Ross (“Albatross”): “If you leave him, I will break you,” Ross threatens, and she is sure he means it.

The wedding ceremony follows by a few hours a one-night affair, in which Betty is deflowered by Eddie’s nemesis, rival barrister Terry Veneering, a secret to which The Albatross, unfortunately, is privy. Trust Charles Dickens to recognize an allusive name when he hears one; like the nouveau riche social climbers in Our Mutual Friend, this Veneering has a charming surface. His attraction for Betty lasts for decades, and he weaves in and out of the story of the couple’s marriage.

While a story of interpersonal relationships, the book takes place after World War II, and is necessarily revelatory about broad social upheavals in Britain. Class and privilege are never the same after the unraveling of Empire, the economic upheavals of the decade before the war, and the war itself. The world into which the three protagonists were born simply disappeared beneath their feet and dissolved out of their arms.

Gardam’s novel follows the couple from youth to old age, with Betty’s death planting tulips in their rural garden. Mostly, though, it focuses on their early relationship, including the tragedy of a miscarriage that leaves Betty unable to have her heart’s desire, children. The closest relationship she maintains with a young person is with Veneering’s precocious son, Harry, whom she meets when he is nine years old and “crunching a lobster” under the table at a banquet. She has numerous lively and colorful friends in Hong Kong and later in London, whose appearance in the narrative is always welcome.

As for the everyday relationship between the spouses, the reader is shown the benefits of accommodation rather than the head-to-head battles that often characterize “relationship books.”

Well plotted and carefully written, full of good humor and getting on with it. A third book in the Old Filth trilogy, Last Friends, was published in 2013. It’s a view of the Feathers’s marriage from Veneering’s point of view. Now that should be interesting!

Charles III

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Charles III

Tim Pigott-Smith in Charles III

The prize-winning play King Charles III, billed as a “future history play” and now on Broadway at the Music Box theatre, is a compelling theatrical conjecture. It anticipates the time when Queen Elizabeth is gone and her oldest son, Charles, is in position finally to become king. Charles, alas, has always been a person from whom little has been expected (some would say this is one reason QEII has hung on so long), a view which he himself has contributed to. His perceived rejection of Diana—“the world’s princess”—in favor of the unloved Camilla Parker-Bowles added fire to his critics, who had previously mustered little more than a yawn.

In the play, the Liberal Prime Minister assumes Charles will play the role of thoughtful rubber-stamp that his mother did, so well portrayed in The Audience (Helen Mirren as Queen) on Broadway earlier this year. Not so. In their very first meeting, Charles objects to a Liberal bill to restrict freedom of the press. As in a high-stakes chess game, parliamentary move and monarchal countermove ensue. In the fragile edifice of his family, the issue of controls on the frenzied media are of more than academic interest. The plot keeps turning and turning, and I won’t say more about it, except that I found it riveting.

Let’s talk about style. The simple set is intended to remind the audience of the Old Globe, showing shows five sides of an elegant brick structure. A frieze running around the entirety, about ten feet above the stage, comprises semi-abstract faces lit in various ways to denote “the people”—crowds, demonstrators, in other words, those most likely to be affected by the affairs of state on which Charles aspires to be a benevolent, active force.

The echoes of Shakespeare are more than visual. We have the machinations of Lady Macbeth, the indecisiveness of Richard II, the desperation of Lear. Written in blank verse, playwright Mike Bartlett’s language is often given an Elizabethan cadence, “Husband,” Kate calls to William, and nearly every scene ends in a rhyming couplet. This is artificial, but doesn’t seem artifice. Rather it reflects the tragedy, if tragedy is defined in the dramatic sense, as a fall from a great height, playing out before us. We are seeing critical precedents discussed and the weight of 1600 years of history. Such events are worthy of Shakespearean language in the country’s leaders, and not the territory of “Oh, whatever” or a graceless “WTF?”

The cast, which comes from London’s prestigious Almeida Theatre, is excellent. By training and experience, it manages this demanding language well. Tim Pigott-Smith is a heart-breaking Charles (The Telegraph of London calls it “the performance of his career”), and Margot Leicester is perfect as Camilla. I also especially liked pencil-thin Lydia Wilson as Kate and Richard Goulding as “the ginger idiot,” Harry. Adam James and Anthony Calf were fine as the Liberal and Conservative leaders, respectively. The program notes that many of the actors had vocal training, and that stands them in good stead in various scenes, in which solemn chanting (this is not a musical!) establishes a moody atmosphere, which is not to say there are no laughs elsewhere.

Bartlett also wrote the theatrical version of Chariots of Fire (seen in London in 2012 and greatly admired), among many others, and won a Best New Play award for Charles III. It’s nice to see something on Broadway that grapples with thought-worthy issues, including questions for which Americans are merely interested observers, like the future of the monarchy.

As in London, the production is directed by Rupert Goold, the award-winning Artistic Director of Almeida Theatre. I wondered what the U.K. critics thought of it, and found they quite approved. For example, critic Michael Billington in The Guardian said, “It gains traction as it goes along and by the end has acquired a borrowed grandeur through its Shakespearean form and a tragic dimension through the performance of Tim Pigott-Smith.” Agree. Whole-heartedly.