by Dorothy A. Dahm
From the Masterful to the Mesmerizing
Children of Men
By Dorothy A. Dahm
There is something almost mythical about the title Children of Men, suggesting humankind’s most primal origins. The film’s vision matches its ambitious title.
Loosely adapted from a novel by British writer P.D. James, Children of Men shows us an aging world. It is 2027, and the world’s youngest inhabitant is eighteen years old. Eighteen years earlier, quite suddenly and inexplicably, all women became infertile. Most countries have erupted into chaos; only the United Kingdom claims some semblance of order.
Order, of course, is a relative and undesirable quality in any dystopia, and this brave new world is no exception. A tyrannical government abuses the immigrants who try to make a better life in relatively prosperous Britain. Those who challenge the government are often as unscrupulous as the leaders they oppose, killing innocent people in the name of a “bigger plan.” Hungry for hope, people embrace bizarre religious cults, many of which attribute the infertility epidemic to divine wrath. The truly hopeless swallow Quietus, a widely marketed suicide pill with a potent tagline: You decide when.
Not everyone’s despair is as grandiose. Theo (Clive Owen), a minor governor employee, harbors a quieter desperation. He frequently seeks solace in a bottle of whiskey. He has no motivation to challenge the existing order until an opposition group called the Fishes forces its way into his orbit. The Fishes, who include his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore), demand basic human and civil rights for Britain’s illegal immigrants. However, as Theo is drawn deeper into the group’s world, he discovers a startling secret. Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a young woman in the group, is eight months pregnant. Theo’s indifference quickly subsides, and he joins forces with a few other characters to bring her to safety.
I saw Children of Men shortly after reading James’ book, so I had trouble considering the two separately. While the film offers more action and comic relief than its inspiration, it lacks the novel’s vivid details. James’ masterful and richly imagined childless universe was bleak, thought-provoking, and ultimately hopeful. The film’s vision is equally unsettling although its tactics are more visceral. (Director Alfonso Cuaron has included enough explosions to rival Jerry Bruckheimer.) To simplify the plot, the screenwriting team has consolidated and altered characters. The film’s ending and the book’s conclusion also differ considerably.
And yet, despite all my internal objections, I found myself mesmerized. As a whole, science fiction films are not renowned for their character development, but the film’s cast shows us the human beings behind the cataclysmic forces. Owen is the anti-hero who rises to the occasion and does something truly heroic, Moore is the committed crusader, Ashitey is the ordinary person with an extraordinary power. These roles are familiar to anyone who enjoys fantasy or science fiction, but these actors make them fresh. The supporting cast is equally strong. Michael Caine appears as a wise and kindly old stoner, while Chiwetel Ejifor portrays a combative Fish. Cuaron’s cinematography has immediacy. The action sequences are truly startling, and the shots of London are appropriately bleak. Grayness pervades most of the film, contributing to the movie’s sense of doom.
Children of Men’s most wondrous moment takes place in a barn where Kee shares her secret with Theo. With little preface, she unbuttons her dress to reveal her pregnant belly. In this moment, we can only marvel with Theo at this beautiful and improbable image. If the film lacks the novel’s religious overtones, it shares its faith: a belief that even the most apathetic amongst us can be driven to action with a little hope. In the right circumstances, we can devote ourselves to something with no clear benefit to ourselves.
Real Fur and Faux Feminism
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
By Dorothy A. Dahm
Countless films, including Shakespeare in Love and Girl with a Pearl Earring, have invited audiences to ponder the sorts of events and relationships that might have inspired their subjects’ best-known work. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus imagines what might have precipitated this photographer’s obsession with unusual subjects such as twins, midgets, transvestites. Like its predecessors, Fur does not purport to be a factual biography. At the film’s onset, a disclaimer identifies the film as an “imagined retelling” of three crucial months in the artist’s life. The result is a Beauty and the Beast for grown-ups, liberally spiced with elements of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening.
When the film opens, Diane (Nicole Kidman) is already something of an anomaly in 1950s America: a married woman with a job. She and her husband own and operate a fashion photography studio. Their most important clients are Diane’s parents, wealthy New York furriers. Diane’s familial and business duties leave her little time to pursue her own artistic interests. She seems on the verge of emotional collapse until she meets her neighbor Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.). Though charming and prescient, Lionel possesses a physical abnormality that leads to him being disparaged by society as a “freak.” He introduces Diane to his friends and associates, all of whom are out of the mainstream. They spend their evenings visiting an undertaker, a dwarf cabaret, fetishists, and a drag club. Through her relationship with Lionel, Diane recalls her childhood fascination with the unusual and reclaims her own aesthetic sensibility.
Fur contains some startling moments. Early in the film, Diane’s parents host an intimate gathering for important fur buyers at their daughter’s home. As models parade their pelts for the guests, the camera shifts to clients exhaling plumes of cigar smoke. Later that evening, Diane takes refuge on a balcony. Facing the city, she inhales deeply and unbuttons the top part of her dress. The metaphor may be heavy handed, but director Steven Shainberg makes this sequence work. Like Diane, viewers feel the claustrophobia of the pretense and consumption within and the relief of the freedom outside. Diane’s brief exposure doesn’t seem as sexual as it does emotional: a furtive renunciation of her parents’ world and all they represent.
Although the willowy, conventionally beautiful Nicole Kidman seems miscast as the short, eccentric photographer, she does a good job of playing an emotionally fragile woman. Her downcast eyes, slightly stooped walk, and small voice all bespeak her character’s repression. How closely her performance and the screenplay reflect the real Diane Arbus is another matter, but, this is an imaginary Arbus after all. As Lionel, Robert Downey Jr. is reminiscent of Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta. Although we do not see his face until the end of the film, he uses his expressive voice to create a compelling, almost mythical, character. Ty Burrell is touching as Diane’s husband. Baffled and a bit saddened by Diane’s new interests, Burrell makes Paul Arbus a sympathetic casualty of his wife’s personal and artistic odyssey.
Despite its promise, Fur fails to live up to its potential or do its subject justice. By all accounts, Diane Arbus took mesmerizing photographs because she got to know her subjects before she took their pictures. With the exception of Lionel, the audience never really knows the human beings who intrigue Diane. Because of this distance, they remain freakish to us—and Diane’s attraction to them seems more like adolescent curiosity than respectful adult interest. Troubling too is the assumption that only a relationship with a man could have spearheaded Arbus’s career. Both teacher and muse, the fictional Lionel shapes Diane’s aesthetic vision even as he encourages her to develop it on her own. He is also her prince, who rescues her from her stifling bourgeois existence. How much more satisfying Fur would have been if Diane had taken these first few steps alone.
Helen Mirren Rules (as always) in The Queen
Rarely does a film simultaneously amuse, illuminate, and move, or manage to be both timely and timeless, touching and thought provoking. The Queen is such a film.
The Queen focuses on one week in the life of Elizabeth II, the week immediately following Princess Diana’s death in 1997. When she learns of her former daughter-in-law’s death, Elizabeth has one instinct: to shield her grandsons from any unpleasantness in the media. Her subjects, she quickly discovers, expect something quite different from their queen. Horrified by their cries for public statements and displays of grief, the Queen and her immediate family remain ensconced at their Scottish estate. Prime Minister Tony Blair urges her to acquiesce to the public’s wishes, suggesting the very reputation of the monarchy rests on her actions.
Director Stephen Frears has taken a story still fresh in the public’s memory and done something remarkable with it. The film neither furthers nor derides the cult of Diana; nor does it defend or attack the queen or the monarchy. Instead, it is a simple story about a woman encountering new forces and facing a world she thought she understood. A stiff upper lip, she discovers, will no longer satisfy a public hungry for tears and sentiment. Frears effectively employs real-life footage of the Princess of Wales and the aftermath of her death to illustrate the cultural differences between Diana and her in-laws.
Portraying living public figures is never an easy task, but The Queen’s cast rises to the occasion. Besides bearing a striking resemblance to Tony Blair, Michael Sheen captures the newly elected Labour leader’s accent and youthful energy. As Elizabeth’s chief advisor, Roger Allam is both butler and diplomat: deferential and tactful enough to influence Her Majesty. In the title role, Helen Mirren gives a performance worthy of both British comedy and Greek tragedy. Her tight-mouthed insistence on precedent and protocol are the stuff of satire, but her stoic adherence to her principles makes her both tragic and sympathetic. As the film unfolds, her performance acquires dimension, ceasing to be a caricature and revealing a well-intentioned, if reserved, woman who no longer comprehends her public. Mirren inhabits the monarch, inviting the audience to understand a woman who may not share all of their values.
Regardless of its relationship to historical events, The Queen is a marvelous achievement. It is as much a musing on the tension between public and private selves and the conflicts that separate generations as it is a biopic of Britain’s reigning monarch. The Queen does not require us to take sides in these arguments; rather, it asks us to better understand the people behind these debates.
Now You See It, Now You Don’t –
And Now You Should See It…
“There are three parts of a good magic trick,” says a magician’s engineer at the start of The Prestige, the pledge, or the presentation of an ordinary object; the turn, or the object’s disappearance; and finally, the prestige, the moment when the magician once again reveals the object and restores order to the stage.
The Prestige concerns two magicians, and director Christopher Nolan, best known for Memento, is something of a magus himself. However, unlike his protagonists, Nolan dispenses with the pledge, immediately thrusting his audience into a shadowy world of illusion, obsession, and revenge.
Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) are young magicians in late nineteenth-century London. A single careless act and the resulting tragedy unleash an increasingly bitter and violent rivalry between the two men. As each attempts to become London’s premier impresario, the magicians undertake devious actions to gain each other’s secrets. They steal each other’s diaries and send spies to unravel the other’s acts. Their audiences’ applause does not motivate them nearly as much as their desire to outdo and undo one another.
If the best magicians are charismatic performers, then Nolan has cast his stars perfectly. Bale’s mercurial working-class Londoner and Jackman’s intense American are both larger-than-life presences on screen. Like their characters, the actors compel their audience’s attention. The supporting cast is equally strong. As Angier’s glamorous assistant, Scarlett Johansson delivers what has become her signature role: the sympathetic and three-dimensional femme fatale. Even more arresting is Rebecca Hall’s performance as Borden’s much-neglected wife. Her eyes always anticipating heartbreak, Hall captures her character’s pain and bewilderment. David Bowie is oddly effective as a melancholy, enigmatic scientist. And Michael Caine adds coherence and warmth to an otherwise bleak universe as the avuncular Angier’s engineer.
Despite its clever premise and many tricks, The Prestige manages to be more than a mind-bending game of perception and illusion. A visceral exploration of vengeance, the film illustrates how obsession can submerge, even become, identity.
Rapturous Campers, Not Happy Ones
Jesus Camp
Swimming, poison ivy, and ghost stories are no longer staples of summer camp. At some camps, counselors may even prevent kids from frightening each other with these ghost stories, deeming the tales dangerous and un-Christian. The documentary Jesus Camp explores life at such a camp and the growing cultural movement behind these youth revivals.
Jesus Camp is a visual and audio journey through Middle America. The film transports us down stretches of highway, past chain restaurants and billboards, and into the homes of Christian families that home school their children. At one home, a mother dismisses global warming as a “political issue” during a science lesson. We see kids rock out to Christian rap and heavy metal. Finally, we accompany them to summer camp, where they reaffirm their faith, vowing to “take back America for Christ” and overturn Roe vs. Wade.
What makes Jesus Camp both authentic and unsettling is the film’s lack of narration. Filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady have wisely chosen to let the film’s subjects tell their own stories. Pre-teen Christians, their eyes alight, speak fervently about spreading their faith. Pastor Becky Fischer, the founder of Kids on Fire Summer Camp, frankly discusses her desire to transform her campers into “Christian warriors.” At once approachable and charismatic, Fischer is a formidable figure in the war she references. A gifted teacher, the youth minister uses humor, props, and her own magnetism to engage the children who attend her camps and conferences.
Only one dissenting voice exists in Jesus Camp. That voice belongs to a Missouri talk show host named Mike Papantonio. A champion of both faith and free thought, Papantonio contextualizes the camp scenes by describing the insidious rise of the religious right in American politics. His speeches, coupled with the facts that occasionally appear on screen, remind viewers that the film’s subjects are not absurd anomalies, but real and powerful forces in American government and society.
Jesus Camp is equally effective as a documentary about American Evangelicalism and an exploration of the role of children in public life. The film illustrates that children can become articulate and dedicated purveyors of an ideology if they receive the right training. Jesus Camp raises questions about how those of us with moderate or progressive beliefs should involve our children in our activism. Should we enlist them in our side of the “wars” Fischer describes? Or, honoring our own desire for intellectual freedom, should we allow them to explore a variety of ideas, even while we teach them our basic principles? Our answers, if we find them, will not come from Jesus Camp or the world it shows us.
Editor’s Note – What Would Jesus Do, Now? Although Jesus Camp is no longer playing at local theaters, you will want to be sure and see this documentary when it is released on dvd/video – especially given recent events. “Pastor Ted” Haggard, the evangelical leader caught in the throes of a rather uncomfortable drug and sex scandal, is featured in a number of scenes. In the film, as in life – at least his public one – Haggard demonizes the so-called gay lifestyle, citing that elusive section of the Bible that supports the evangelical anti-homosexual agenda. We won’t spoil the punch line of his now deliciously ironic line that begins "I think I know what you did last night…"
In addition, Pastor Becky Fischer announced on November 7 that the camp will shut down for at least several years, according to a report in The Seattle Times. The Jesus Camp-site has been located at Devils Lake, North Dakota. Hmmmm.
