Emperor's New Clothes?

[Lots of spoilers here] Sometimes a movie is so annoying you wonder whether it's the movie that's the problem or your understanding of it.  Such is the case with The American, a European movie starring George Clooney (he also co-produced it, along with three women and one other man).   Roger Ebert thought it was great, Sam Adams at Salon.com is more pro than against, as is Michael Atkinson in Sight & Sound - though whether the following sentence actually makes sense I'm not sure:  it’s mature, fastidiously logical (and therefore skimpy) with exposition, and patient, and arguably this is what audiences have responded to.  


Okay, well this member of the 'audience' didn't respond to it.  Nor did my wife.   And both of us found the almost total lack of exposition and information irritating rather than 'fastidiously logical.'  In fact, logical is about the last thing this movie is.  Okay, in terms of the main character it's logical that his personality, from which the emotions have almost entirely left home, will eventually cause the hell he lives in (as the local priest notes) to consume him.  Unfortunately for Clooney's character, it consumes him just as he's possibly finding a kind of salvation, a way out to life again, and that's so typically European art house in its approach that it's utterly predictable. 


Clooney plays an assassin who also happens to be a top-notch assembler of made-to-order guns.  There's a lot of fiddling around with the making of a particular gun, which has been ordered by an unlikely female assassin who's working for somebody anonymous.  After a violent and surprising opening scene, the movie moves at a snail's pace.  Clooney, at the behest of his boss, goes and lives in a small Italian village (very picturesque, it must be admitted) where he refuses to be contactable, and only rings the boss when he wants.  He claims to know nothing of machinery, but it's so patent a lie that the parish priest, who keeps turning up whenever needed for the script, tells him so to his face.  He meets up with the female assassin in a ridiculously obvious way in an outdoor and very public cafe, gets his specific orders, presumably orders the basics of the gun somehow (he's obviously not into the Internet, which in this film might not exist), and finds the odds and ends to adapt it so that the gunshot sound is suppressed if not silenced.  In order to do the latter he visits a local mechanic (who happens to be the priest's son, though that has almost nothing to do with the story) and, for some reason when left alone in the mechanic's tumbledown workshop, goes round surreptitiously collecting a pile of odds and ends.  When the mechanic catches him at this, he offers to pay for them and the mechanic says he doesn't need to.  Okay....  This scene is done as though there was a Hitchcock element to it.  There isn't. 


Back home he makes up the suppresser out of all these bits, though why he's chosen to live in a place where there's so little access to the parts is a bit of a puzzle.  He takes the gun through its paces with the other assassin in a remote place by a river, and everyone's happy.  Except that the Swedes are still trying to kill him, as they were at the beginning.  Who knows why.   Very slowly, he falls in love with a local prostitute, who, in typical European movie-style, spends most of her on-screen time with the majority of her clothes off for no good reason except that she looks as good with them off as on.  He picnics with her in the same spot he showed off the gun, and it seems possible he might kill her too, but somehow he pulls himself back from the brink.  He's constantly suspicious of people sitting in cars outside cafes.  


Finally, he delivers the completed gun to the female assassin in an isolated cafe, where everything is made to seem more mysterious than it really is, and we gather that for some reason she's going to kill him.  She misses her chance, he drives off into the village again where they're holding some Marian feast-day.  She kills his landlady, (why wasn't she watching the procession?), hides on the roof, targets him and the girl as they're conveniently talking - and standing - in the crowd, and just as she's about to shoot, is shot herself - by the boss.  Huh?  All that time and energy getting a gun sorted out to kill Clooney and she gets killed by the one giving all the orders?  What has she done?  


Clooney prowls the streets (he does this a lot in this movie), which are suddenly surprisingly empty given that a procession was taking place a few moments before, and of course is followed by the boss.  There's a little shoot-out, the boss is killed and Clooney is wounded.  He drives back to the river place where he'd told the girl to meet him (she gets there on foot apparently, even though it's miles away, because there's no other car in sight), Clooney drives in dying, and dies.   


The thing is inexpressibly silly, as were so many movies of the period when telling the audience almost nothing was considered an arty approach.  Clooney is excellent, as always, and obviously felt there was something in the script to make it worth his while.  But the problem is, there isn't anything in the script.  Apart from the minimalist redemption of the main character, all the other Hitchcockian tricks are smoke and whatever-the-expression-is.  People die and are left behind without a single police presence throughout.  The news of the first three deaths is headlined in a newspaper days after the event (and by headlined I mean it takes up the entire page), though why three deaths in Scandinavia would be especially important to the Italians I'm not sure.  In another random headline, 'two more prostitutes are killed' - what prostitutes?  Certainly none in this story, and the only reason for this bit of nonsense is to make us think Clooney is going to kill the girl he's fallen for.  And again, the headline and story take up the whole front page. 


I could go on, but I won't, even though the movie continues to annoy me.   It obviously hasn't done Clooney's career any harm, and in fact it's actually done quite well in America where you'd hardly think it would get noticed.  But Clooney's made some much better low-key movies than this, and I think mentioning the Emperor's new clothes might be appropriate at this point....

The Insatiable Moon

The Insatiable Moon is a film that needs to be seen twice. First time around you're trying to take in the way things work in this particular world, and how the story all fits together. A second viewing gives you more time to reflect.

Arthur (played by Rawiri Paratene) believes he's the 'second son of God.' He lives in a boarding house with a bunch of other people with mental health issues, and is by far the most outgoing and positive of them all. The story explores whether his ability to discern other people's inner turmoils, his belief that God is benevolent to his children, his prophetic words and other insights, are truly charismatic gifts, or merely part of his brain dysfunctions. It challenges us to believe in miracles, in the need for a true belief in God and not just a religious one, and of course, most of all, it challenges us to see people with mental health issues as people loved by God.

The 'villains' of the piece might be a bit too black and white, but they're mostly minor characters: the really interesting people in this movie are those who have a sense of the spiritual and are willing to follow it even if it causes them pain, or requires them to change long-held attitudes.

The scene towards the end, when the suburb of Ponsonby rallies for and against having a boarding house for people with mental health problems in its midst, is the climax, but the more important scene comes earlier, at the funeral of one of the boarding house residents. This is where Arthur comes into his own as a prophetic voice, a man who speaks the words of (first) Son of God.

The other interesting character is the man - Bob - who runs the boarding house: foul-mouthed and short-fused, he nevertheless cares deeply for the men he feeds and cleans up for (seemingly single-handed). This is a vocation for him, rather than a job, although it's unlikely he regards himself as a spiritual man. The 'spiritual' man in the story, the Anglican priest, is at odds with himself and his spiritual life, and seems rather wet by comparison with Bob. It's not that he's meant to represent institutional religion; that would be too simplistic. Rather he's a man in the wrong job, and wisely, by the end of the movie, he's realised it.

Mike Riddell, the author of the original book and the scriptwriter for the movie, doesn't give us all the answers - although he teases us with possible answers at times. His seven years of effort (along with a host of other supporters, including his wife, who directed the movie after the original director had to pull out) in getting this movie off the ground have borne good fruit.

Intuition and Structure in Composing and more...

I bought a copy of a book called Performer as Priest and Prophet a few months ago, but hadn't got round to reading it. I first came across it at work, where my boss had a borrowed copy from the Hewitson Library. Something about it rang bells, and I bought a secondhand copy (it's out of print). However, with all the shifting around in the house due to the renovation of the kitchen, it kind of got shelved in more ways than one.

The book is by Judith Rock, a professional dancer (and former auxiliary NYPD police officer!), and Norman Mealy, a liturgist and musician (and occasional hymn-writer) - Mealy died before it was completed, but still had a great deal of input.

I only began reading the book this morning (in the bath - a great place to read: the mind seems more relaxed, and absorbs more, and is less distracted), so I can't really comment on it overall. But one thing struck me, and that was Rock's comments on intuition in the arts. (She wrote the Introduction.)

It made me consider how I write music. To an extent, I've tended to put down my way of composing. For the most part, I start at the beginning and finish at the end. Sometimes I do some chopping and changing on the way (particularly now that I work half between the piano and half between the Sibelius program), and at all times I'm looking for the right note or chord in relation to what goes before and after. But I seldom start out with a 'plan,' and sometimes the music just doesn't go - even though it seemed promising at the time - and gets abandoned before it reaches the end. Sometimes something that seemed promising is promising, but it takes a patch of time away from it to realise it. My piano piece, the one that wound up with the title, A Cowboy Learns the Tarantella, is a case in point. I woke up with the 'theme' running around in my head, went to the piano, jotted it down and then thought: that's pretty basic. But a few days later it came together, and 'basic' or not, it works. And Schoenberg Plays with his grandchildren - another piece that didn't in any way start out with that title (the titles tend to come later) - also started out with what seemed a great idea, but it just didn't want to work. It was only after I came back to it some time later than I saw the potential: same kind of material, but different approach.

I kind of find the music as I go along, rather than having it all worked out beforehand. Even with songs, it's as if a particular idea connects itself to the opening words, and we go along from there. It's very possible that a totally different idea could work - in fact, more than possible. What gets written on Tuesday may not have turned up on Thursday.

Structure suffers a bit in the process - I've discussed this several times in this blog - and there have been pieces, particularly pieces for larger forces than just a piano, or piano and voice, that have required some considerable sorting out. That's perfectly normal, of course, for any work, and I probably do it more with the piano pieces and such than I remember afterwards. It's just because they're smaller scale and more manageable in terms of tidying up structure.

What I'm saying is that I suspect far more composers work intuitively than we're led to believe by musicologists. The latter find all manner of connections in works afterwards; the composer doesn't think 'rationally' about these connections at the time; he or she tends to be so focused on getting the thing down on paper (preferably before it all blows away and he or she loses concentration) that he/she doesn't pick up a number of the connections.

But when you go back over your own work - particularly some time later, after you've forgotten the sweaty stage - you can often be surprised by what's turned up.

And talking of that, in one of the posts I just picked up regarding structure, I find that I was writing about a screenwriter called Blake Snyder. I'd forgotten his name altogether, but now realise I've just read a book by him called Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: the screenwriter's guide to every story ever told. It's a sequel to Save the Cat! the last book on screenwriting you'll ever need. When I got Save the Cat! on interloan, I thought it was the first of the two books I was getting; it was the second. This second title goes through about fifty well-known movies and shows how each and every one of them follows a structure that's virtually identical.

Now whether that's really true is another matter. Whether the scriptwriters sat down and said: here's the structure, what story can we tell, is another matter altogether. I rather think Snyder has come along, like a musicologist, and made these films fit his theory. In the end the book isn't very inspiring. I'd still like to have a look at the first of the two books, though I suspect it's title is a little overblown. Yes, certain facets of storytelling turn up again and again, particularly in the movies - and there's a certain satisfaction in that. But quirkiness in movies, oddball approaches, the thing that is different, is also satisfying, and it would be horrible to think that we would have to endure endless movies all plotted along similar lines forever and ever Amen.

(Incidentally, I've just seen that Snyder died just last month of a pulmonary embolism- he was only 52.)

Well, I've strayed a fair way from my opening, but that's what happens when you don't have to go to work for a couple of days, and can relax while blogging!

Performer as Priest and Prophet

...mediocrity is where most performers exist: midway between extremes, neither brilliant nor excessively dull. One does one's best with the gift one is given. The point is that to say yes to that gift as it really is, is to say yes to its limits - and yes to the honest work that hones and polishes the gift. This is not the anxious, angry work that is really a denial of limits: 'If I just do a little more, then I'll be able to..." A Salieri can never become a Mozart. To say yes clears the air so that one can see and rejoice in things as they really are.

From Performer as Priest and Prophet, chapter 4 (pg 75), by Judith Rock and Norman Mealy, published Harper & Row 1988

I don't think the authors mean by 'mediocrity' a state of poor artistry, but of the 'mean' between brilliant and excessively dull.

Point of View

I finished reading Christopher Priest’s The Prestige a couple of days ago. I came across it because my son and I were having a discussion about a particular video of a quick-change-costume act that appeared on tv recently. In spite of watching several times and taking my son’s advice to not look at the two principals, but to watch away from them, I still missed seeing whatever trickery they were up to. Whatever it is they do to achieve their extraordinary quick changes, it’s superbly done.
Anyway, Ben mentioned Priest’s book because it talked about illusion and distraction in magician’s acts. But it turned out to be a lot more than that: a marvellous tale of deception and feuding between two rival magicians with some strange electricity thrown in, and quite a bit of distracting of the reader away from what the author doesn’t want you to see; well, at least not until he’s ready.
In the end the story is just a little over the top, leaning towards fantasy - and yet there are no cheap flights of fancy; it’s all told in a seemingly pragmatic way. That the events in the story are often much less than pragmatic is another thing altogether.
Priest manages four different storytellers very successfully (or is that six?), conveying the contemporary laidback attitude of the first narrator, the slightly bumptious and curiously doubled storytelling of the first magician, the background to the events told by another modern character, a woman this time, and the last long section told by the other magician – who has more than a few tricks up his sleeve, and isn’t anything like the character the other magician makes him out to be.
We get the same story more than once, and yet each re-telling peels back more layers of strangeness, showing that Priest, while not exactly leading us the garden path, is certainly not giving us all the information all the time.
Telling a story from four points of view is an achievement in itself. I know how difficult I’ve found it to successfully switch back and forth between two characters in the most recent novel I’ve been writing. (It has the working title of My Twin is Dying, but isn’t likely to finish up with that.) Priest has the advantage over me of retelling his story; I’m trying to tell a chronological story but varying who’s doing the telling as it moves along.
A friend of mine – she calls herself Sanchona on the book cover – discussed point of view at length with me (and other writers apparently) while she was writing her book A Family of Strangers. It’s one of those subtle things in writing that most new authors don’t quite see the need to deal with; great writers seem to do it without thinking.
Sometimes I think writers in discussion groups on the Net go overboard on how point of view should be achieved, and are too restrictive. Take any decent classic novel and check out how they’ve done it. I can guarantee there are as many ways of doing pov as there are of telling stories. The thing is to know what you’re doing in the first place.