Prisoners: morally ambiguous

Prisoners is a disturbing movie, less for its subject matter - the abduction of two little girls - than its moral ambiguity. Are we really supposed to believe that a father who prays the Lord's Prayer before he allows his teenage son to shoot a deer, and who much later prays the same prayer with a great more difficulty, would become such a vigilante character as to beat a suspect almost to a pulp? And I mean 'pulp'.

Another character, supposedly once a Christian, also goes on about doing her now evil work in order to make people stop believing in God. At least I think that's what she said. Sorry, run that by me again? It sounded like a last minute motivation pulled up out of the hat.

There are also some rather iffy plot-holes by the end of the movie, and quite honestly I almost lost my own plot when late in the piece there was lots of stuff about mazes and snakes, neither of which, as far as I could tell, had much to do with the overall mystery.

Okay, gripes over and done. Hugh Jackman is terrific in his role of the ambiguous father. I couldn't much believe in him as a Christian, but I could understand a great deal of his pain and frustration as a father. Jake Gyllenhaal (whatever happened to movie stars having pronounceable names?) is his opposite number: just as determined to solve the case but only through legal means, and frustrated that those legal means can sometimes cause unintended dire effects. Gyllenhaal always seems to bring great integrity to his roles, and here, even though he plays someone who mostly keeps his anger at bay, he's extremely effective. In fact I thought he was the star of the movie; it's actually Jackman who gets top billing.

The rest of the cast are excellent in their own quirky ways. The black couple who also lose a daughter aren't made of such tough metal as Jackman's character; you long for them to bring integrity and honesty to the brutality that Jackman is imposing on the suspect. When they continually wimp away from this I found it frustrating: why don't they speak out against what Jackman is doing? He's obviously not the friend they'd thought him, and worse, he's likely to get them all put away in jail.

The production values are terrific in every way. Some have complained about the music score; personally it never intruded at any level for me, so it obviously did its job well. I think the movie is overlong. Over half an hour before it finished I was beginning to wonder: how long is this going to go on? There were plenty of places where judicious cuts could have been made, which would have made an already suspenseful movie into an even tauter one. But, this is the movie as it stands, at nearly two hours. There are plenty of great moments along the way.

Two plays in two days

Last night I went with a friend to see The War Play, by Philip Braithwaite. It's a somewhat fictionalised story of what happened to Braithwaite's great-uncle Jack, who died in the First World War. I won't reveal exactly what happens in the play because there's a certain shock element to some parts of the story, but it's superbly put-together, and if you have a chance to see it, go. It's on at the Fortune Theatre in Dunedin until the 18th April.

There are only four actors in the cast: Jonathan Martin plays Jack, back in the WWI period, and Ben Van Lier plays his great-nephew, Philip, in the present. Not only does Philip talk directly to the audience most of the time, but he talks about writing the play, which is still 'being written' as he speaks. This brings a kind of intentional dislocation to the piece.

He also has several scenes with his father, played by Simon O'Connor. O'Connor is just wonderful as the not particularly likeable old man. But he also plays several other roles, and in one extraordinary moment, moves from one side of the stage, where he's been playing Philip's father, to the other. In that brief moment in the dark he changes costume, on stage, and becomes Jack's father. And the character is quite different.

The remaining actor, Alexander Walker, plays everything from a religious minister to a political minister, from an obnoxious Australian to Jack's slightly crazy brother, Eric. He probably played other roles too that I've forgotten for the moment...he was ubiquitous in the very best sense.

All of the actors bring huge energy to their roles, especially Martin. The direction is excellent and detailed and keeps the audience well abreast of what time in history we're in as two stories run in parallel. This is a play about fathers and sons, and also about truth and lies. Even some of the stories in the play may be lies or half-truths. We're not always sure. What is certain that the shame that the Braithwaite family suffered in regard to their son, Jack, was unwarranted, and the truth about this is finally revealed in this drama.

Lighting, music and everything else is top notch.

I went to a play of a different kind today. This one was a film of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Love's Labour's Lost, a play that's sometimes regarded as one of Shakespeare's lesser efforts, or one that's difficult to stage. There was no hint of that in this production. The cast sailed effortlessly through the play, one which focuses greatly on language, its complications, its humour, its verbosity. It's also a delightful play about young love and the need for love to mature before it's of real value. The ending can seem odd: after some two hours of light-heartedness and playful flirting, suddenly everything darkens. But it darkens to a purpose, and the four young men who've been courting the four young ladies suddenly discover that love needs to be taken seriously. Constant flirting and jesting won't keep it alive.

The RSC has followed up this production with one of Much Ado About Nothing, which it's (temporarily) renaming Love's Labour's Won. The same cast is in both productions. The first, the one I saw today, takes place in an Edwardian setting, just before the First World War; the second takes place after the war, in the twenties.

LLL is set in a facsimile of a genuine English country house (even though the story ostensibly takes place in France): the three-storey facade is reproduced, and during the course of the production shifts away to reveal the library, or another room with French windows (and a grand piano). But there is also a bowling green, and a scene on the roof, and various other settings. This piece is rich in actual scenery and furniture. In spite of that it moves at cracking pace. The stage is also extended right out into the audience, so that many people are seated just at the edge of the stage on either side. (Cricked necks would result, I'd have thought). The cast move on and off this from the back as you'd expect, but also walk in from the sides on catwalks. There is an enormous amount of stage area.

The cast are wonderfully dressed in beautiful Edwardian pastel colours, or whites, and the women have a ball in their various long gowns.

It's hard to single any cast member out, but one of the delights is the young fellow playing Moth, Peter McGovern. He sings and dances (in a mock Ivor Novello moment - there is a small orchestra that plays regularly throughout the show) and has a perpetual grin on his face. His main foil is the tall and solid John Hodgkinson as the crazy Spaniard, Don Armado, who mangles English as the drop of a hat.

Edward Bennett as Berowne and Michelle Terry as Rosaline make a wonderful sparring couple, and Bennett in particular, with his great long wordy speeches, never puts a syllable out of place. Leah Whitaker and Sam Alexander make a great royal couple, and are ably supported by the two respective couples on each side.

This is a play with an abundance of clowns: Costard (Nick Haverson) is the first to appear; he's the coarsest, but also the most energetic. Chris McCalphy makes an excellent Dull, the policeman who is short on words, but pertinent to the scenes he's in. David Horovitch and Thomas Wheatley play the blathering wordsmiths, Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel, and manage to make the circumlocutions sound interesting.

I loved every minute of the play, and would be happy to get a copy of the DVD when it's available, in order to catch up on it again.

The Wasteful Things

We've just watched a Japanese movie called I Wish. That's the English title, of course (in Japanese the film is called Miracle).  The cover quotes the New York Daily News, who says it's Extraordinary.  The Guardian calls it A Gem of World Cinema.  And there are more lines from other sources telling us how brilliant and revelatory and delicate and observant it is....and so on.

Well, it's quite a delight, but extraordinary it isn't. Its script is very loose, and the long-awaited 'miracles' at the end of the movie turn out to be something of a fizzer. Sure, there's a more settled feeling in the air amongst those participating as the credits roll, but to all intents and purposes, life goes on pretty much as before.

The film is about two young brothers (perhaps eight and ten, and played by real life brothers) who live in separate cities, one with his mother and grandparents, the other with his muso father. The father is the 'problem' according to the mother, and there's a brief flashback about halfway through showing what life was like for all members of the family before the split. The two boys have telephone contact with each other, and after it's announced that the new bullet train will be starting up in a couple of months' time, the boys decide on asking for a miracle at the moment when the northbound train passes the southbound train. Quite why this is significant isn't clear, but then a lot of things in the movie aren't clear: you just accept them because you don't have a choice. The director, Kore-Eda Hirokazu, isn't into explaining things. Certainly you can pick up most points in some measure - and no doubt there's a bit of a cultural gap to cross - but Hirokazu just drops stuff before us and shows us something and leaves us to deal with it.  Because the movie has an immense amount of natural charm, and because the younger boy in particular is an absolute delight, with a face that lights up at the drop of a hat, and because there's no real villain in the picture, or any sense of an evil world out there (even the smoking volcano is fairly benign) you enjoy the movie as it wends its quiet way along (it's 128 minutes).  There's enough of a story to keep us interested, and the performances from the kids - the two young leads, their assorted companions, and various other children who get a few seconds of screen time - are so natural and enjoyable that the fact that there's little else going on barely matters.

There are a number of adults in the picture, but their lives are almost secondary to the children's, and for the most part they're a pretty amiable lot (the squabble flashback between the parents is the only grim note in the piece). The two grandparents (a taciturn grandfather and a grandmother with lots of hand-me-down information) and the elderly couple who suddenly find themselves landed with seven children late in the movie, are genial and pleasant people. Even the grandfather's drinking companions are played more for comedy than anything else. Compare the elderly people in some older Japanese movies, such as Ozu's Tokyo Story, for a quite different picture of the older generation.

The film doesn't disappoint, in spite of the hype on the cover. If you're prepared to take the movie as it comes, you'll enjoy it. Much of what happens skims across the surface like a breeze. And perhaps that's the director's intention. At one point, the father says to his younger son: "There's room in this world for wasteful things. Imagine if everything had meaning. You'd choke."  A lot of the detail in this film is trivial, seemingly unimportant; even the events are small-scale. But the father's point is that not everything has to be significant - children, for instance, are often seen as unimportant - and Hirokazu has managed to make something of considerable value out of 'wasteful' things.

Krishna Shanoi

A wonderful online children's book about grief, fathers, sons, a book that will speak to any boy or girl who has lost their father at a young age and never known whether they were loved or not.   It's called Glasses, and it's by Krishna Shanoi

Make sure you view it on full screen....wonderful detailed drawings, and concise, moving text.

Krishna Bala Shenoi is a name entirely unfamiliar to me, and I was only alerted to this book by a tweet from Roger Ebert, the film critic.   Shenoi's website, Artistic Scrapyard. has a wide range of artistic work.  Glasses is finely finished, compared to some of the other material showing, but you might also like to check out the video, Tissue - a love story, which is a video using a combination of animation and live action.  (It also has a surprise ending - and is beautifully matched to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.)

Single parents are brilliant...Often!

Today I received a tweet from someone called Alison (she goes under the name of @plus2point4 on Twitter). It was retweeted to me by someone I follow.

Anyway, she's promoting a website called Single Parents are Brilliant. It's in reaction to the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, basically laying the blame for the recent riots in the UK on people who've been brought up by single parents.

Now I guess what he's saying is that boys (in particular) who come from fatherless households (or households where the male isn't their father, and isn't married to their mother) are likely to be the young men in society who get into trouble. To an extent, I don't disagree with this view. I believe that society is in a dangerous place in terms of bringing up heaps of young men without a father in sight. The same thing is happening in New Zealand, and is a cause for alarm here too.

However, what's happened is that Cameron seems to have lumped all young people who've been brought up by single parents under the same grouping, and this is what's got people like Alison hot under the collar. When I first saw the tweet, which basically consisted of: Today we are launching the new campaign to show the world how BRILLIANT Single Parents are, I was at first inclined to lean towards Cameron's point of view.

But then, of course, I had to stop and think: I was brought up by a single mum! (It was a long time ago, admittedly, so I've a kind of right not to have thought about it straight away!). My father and mother split up when I was three - my understanding is that my mother thought he would follow her after she left him, but he didn't. My mother was fortunate to have had the support of her own parents, who welcomed her back into the family home - even though she herself felt she'd made something of a failure of her marriage. It wasn't the done thing to walk out of a marriage in those days (I'm talking about the late forties.)

Suffice to say, here I am, 60 plus years later, and as sane as most men. I think the help of other family members made a big difference, but that doesn't change the fact that I grew up essentially fatherless. (We never had any communication after he and my mother broke up.) The lack of a father hit me emotionally when I was in my mid-twenties; until then I'd sailed along without it seeming to be much of a problem. I guess I dealt with it by writing about it - and eventually marrying someone who was also brought up by a solo mother! We declared that we would hang on in there so that our children wouldn't have to go through the same emotional ups and downs we had experienced. And we have.

I was also fortunate, when I was living in London in my twenties, to be asked to do a bit of 'fathering' for a boy who was himself being brought up by a single mum. Luckily this boy and I got on like a house on fire, and we're still in touch today. He's now a happily married man, doing a high-powered job.

So, yes, I have to agree that single parents can be brilliant. Sure there will be some disasters - it's the nature of life on this planet. But there's no simple box into which all single parents can be slotted - many make a really good job of parenting. Some do struggle. And a host of other factors come into play, just as they do in any walk of life.

So, Mr Cameron, it seems you might need to find some other 'reason' for why the riots happened in your country....

Dreams of Rivers and Seas

I've just finished Tim Parks' Dreams of Rivers and Seas, which requires readers to keep their wits about them, and try and pick up and sort through the innumerable clues, themes, metaphors and other links that permeate the book. It's a mystery of sorts, but that's not its prime focus.

It's not been my favourite read of all time, although Parks is an interesting writer; this is probably only the third of his books I've read. (Interestingly enough, he cribs a scene out of his non-fiction book Teach Us to Sit Still, and revamps it for one of the few amusing scenes in this book. It occurs when the American writer visits the Indian husband/wife medical couple.)

It concerns a dysfunctional family: the father, Albert James, is a scientist who's wandered off into some almost completely abstract research that seems to go nowhere (his books are annotated with elliptical sentences that no one can understand, and his lectures aren't much better); the mother, Helen, is a woman doctor seemingly dedicated to helping the poor, but she's also manipulative, remote and regards her deceased husband (he's just died at the beginning of the book) as something of a saint. She is so interwoven with her husband that no one else seems to matter to her. These two live in Delhi, one of the many impoverished places they've settled in over the years.

Their son John, (also a scientist) is in his early twenties, and a bit of a puzzle: naive, immature and desperate to connect with his parents, yet somehow unable to. He has seldom lived with his parents because of their lifestyle, and we discover late in the book that his real father may actually be someone else altogether.

There are two other major characters: the son's girlfriend - also immature, a wannabe-actress, and caught up in her view of herself as something of a rebel - and a forty-something American who wants to write a biography of the father. These five (even though the father is dead his 'ghost' constantly infects and affects the story) intertwine and disconnect and crash into each other in a myriad number of ways, along with a host of other characters. This being Delhi, there are people everywhere.

While the story is about words, and language, and meaning, it's also about family, and what people can do to each other, and how they can destroy each other. It's about selfishness - the father, in spite of being regarded as something of a saint by several of the characters, is perhaps the most selfish of all; the mother exudes it, in spite of her work with the poor. It's also about the fathers (and to a lesser extent, mothers), and the rebellion against them that many people go through, and in some cases, never overcome. The young man begins the story desperate to 'know' his father; by the time the book is finished he has reached a point of hating him (the ending is somewhat ambiguous, so I may be reading this wrongly). Parks brought this theme into Teach Us to Sit Still as well; his anger at his father was possibly one of the reasons why he was continually having what was initially diagnosed as prostate problems - in this newer book, the father has supposedly died of prostate cancer. In fact, the more I think about it, the more links there are between the two books; but that's not uncommon in a writer.

Parks is an excellent writer, and Delhi is portrayed in all its glory and awfulness; the characters are strongly written, and often extremely annoying (!), and in spite of its rather grim atmosphere, it draws you along at a cracking pace.

Ladder racks and chess

It’s not every day you’d find a blog that claims the lack of a ladder rack was what lost the writer his father.
It’s a bit of a confusing post, but somehow in it there’s something deep – as its sole commentator notes. Apparently the blogger had tracked down his long-lost father after some time only to discover that he carried all his work gear in the back of his red pickemup (an interesting word I haven’t come across before, although when you break it down into its component parts – pick em up – it makes perfect sense) and this caused scratching and damage to the truck bed.
Quite how he got from there to losing his father again, I’m not clear. But it seems it all hinges on the ladder rack.
My loss of my father hinged on the game called chess. (Bit of a far cry from ladder racks, but there you go; each to his own.) If chess hadn’t been his master, instead of him being its master, he and I might have had a number of good years together. But some obsessions take hold of you, and chess came before family, in my father’s case. I haven’t seen him for sixty years – admittedly he died back in the early sixties, so I wouldn’t have seen him for all those years anyway, but that’s not the point.
Ladder racks and chess. Life is always made up of little choices.