Wow. I REALLY did not like this film.
And it saddens me to say that because I love Kate Winslet (and I rather like Patrick Wilson, who was in the HBO Angels in America, and Jennifer Connelly), and Todd Field, the director, has always struck me as a thoughtful young man.
Afterwards I checked the blurbs on metacritic and was surprised by how much people did like it, people whose opinions I genuinely esteem.
Oh, yes, I laughed; I cried; it was impeccably well crafted. I even liked the dry voiceover narration, though it seemed to disappear after the beginning only to pop up at the end. I'm going to continue by being specific here, so if you haven't seen it and plan to and don't want to know too much, then wait till you've seen it to read this and agree/argue with me.
First of all, and even more so say with "American Beauty" (coincidentally or not directed by Kate's husband Sam Mendes), I just have very little patience with people making fun of suburbanites--they're just too easy of a target for one thing, but furthermore they seem so ridiculously reductionistic and condescending toward these people, and I just think life is more complicated, and in the end everyone's just trying to make it through the day in one piece. Maybe I live a sheltered life and these people all are living caricatures, but I just tend to subscribe to the the-only-normal-people-are-the-ones-you-don't-know-well school of thought. Sure I was young once and sneered "bourgeois" accusations at the drop of a hat with the best of them, but I grew a little bit older and a little bit wiser and learned to love and embrace my inner bourgeoise, and yes, I do endorse age-appropriate behavior. I think at some point I looked around and realized no proles were condemning that life--it's sort of like when people of a particular identity group are able to get away with using terms that are slurs when used by people outside the group--sort of, but not really.
[I couldn't help but to go dig up this old quote from a Phil Levine interview from his book "Don't Ask":
--At twenty I wanted to kill hundreds of rich, superior, disdainful m*****f*****s. Oh, how they rode above it all.
--You don't anymore?
--No. I don't want to kill anyone. First, money doesn't have to make you an a**h***. It just usually does. But I've met people born of money who had soul, and I've met poor people who were as cold as ice. It's not as easy as I once thought. And I don't want to be a killer. There are hateful people who are just begging for it. I'd like to see the whole Nixon clan working for the rest of their lives in children's hospitals in Vietnam attending to the wounds they inflicted in the name of the free world.
--Did you get involved in the antiwar thing?
--Yep.
--No more to say?
--I could say I stopped the war with my little poems, I turned this country right around and now it's beautiful. But I won't.
--What about the poems you wrote then?
--Will you look at that rain.]
(He was in town last spring, as lovely and as funny as ever, reading from his new book, "Breath.")
And it saddens me to say that because I love Kate Winslet (and I rather like Patrick Wilson, who was in the HBO Angels in America, and Jennifer Connelly), and Todd Field, the director, has always struck me as a thoughtful young man.
Afterwards I checked the blurbs on metacritic and was surprised by how much people did like it, people whose opinions I genuinely esteem.
Oh, yes, I laughed; I cried; it was impeccably well crafted. I even liked the dry voiceover narration, though it seemed to disappear after the beginning only to pop up at the end. I'm going to continue by being specific here, so if you haven't seen it and plan to and don't want to know too much, then wait till you've seen it to read this and agree/argue with me.
First of all, and even more so say with "American Beauty" (coincidentally or not directed by Kate's husband Sam Mendes), I just have very little patience with people making fun of suburbanites--they're just too easy of a target for one thing, but furthermore they seem so ridiculously reductionistic and condescending toward these people, and I just think life is more complicated, and in the end everyone's just trying to make it through the day in one piece. Maybe I live a sheltered life and these people all are living caricatures, but I just tend to subscribe to the the-only-normal-people-are-the-ones-you-don't-know-well school of thought. Sure I was young once and sneered "bourgeois" accusations at the drop of a hat with the best of them, but I grew a little bit older and a little bit wiser and learned to love and embrace my inner bourgeoise, and yes, I do endorse age-appropriate behavior. I think at some point I looked around and realized no proles were condemning that life--it's sort of like when people of a particular identity group are able to get away with using terms that are slurs when used by people outside the group--sort of, but not really.
[I couldn't help but to go dig up this old quote from a Phil Levine interview from his book "Don't Ask":
--At twenty I wanted to kill hundreds of rich, superior, disdainful m*****f*****s. Oh, how they rode above it all.
--You don't anymore?
--No. I don't want to kill anyone. First, money doesn't have to make you an a**h***. It just usually does. But I've met people born of money who had soul, and I've met poor people who were as cold as ice. It's not as easy as I once thought. And I don't want to be a killer. There are hateful people who are just begging for it. I'd like to see the whole Nixon clan working for the rest of their lives in children's hospitals in Vietnam attending to the wounds they inflicted in the name of the free world.
--Did you get involved in the antiwar thing?
--Yep.
--No more to say?
--I could say I stopped the war with my little poems, I turned this country right around and now it's beautiful. But I won't.
--What about the poems you wrote then?
--Will you look at that rain.]
(He was in town last spring, as lovely and as funny as ever, reading from his new book, "Breath.")
Second of all, I have never in my life witnessed a mother with as little natural affection for her child as Kate Winslet's character--last I heard there were actually hormones or something that made you occasionally like your kid. Again maybe I'm sheltered, but I just couldn't believe it for a minute. Now, I know some mothers feel overwhelmed at times by the demands of the role, annoyed at times, and even some are happy having someone else do most of the work--but I don't recall them once showing Kate's character liking her kid, it was just so absurdly extreme.
OK, so I thought the Emma Bovary bookclub scene was pretty funny, but then Kate's character, who is so superior to everyone else because she was an English major, is going on about Emma's lack of choices--well, great, that explains Emma, what's your excuse, b****? Give me a break. No one forced you to marry some weenie and have a kid you don't like for chrissakes. English majors are not this insensitive--I personally take offense--what? you're so sensitive to Emma's plight but you have not a shred of recognizably human regard for your own child, puh-leeze, what is this garbage.
Finally, you know I could probably offer some serious feminist indictments of the portrayal and imaging of women (objectification, male gaze, and all that) in the last four films I wrote about here: Perfume, Casino Royale, Inland Empire, and Piano Tuner, but the Bond film actually was going for a more modern feminist Bond girl with Eva Green's character, and the other three were blatantly freaky, which is to say maybe these people have issues but at least they're not sanctimonious and smug and superior and think they know better than and about everyone. They all have elements of fantasy, whereas I frankly thought this film, appearing to be based on reality (though none I've ever seen), was far more insidiously misogynistic and offensive, and if it's going to deal with social issues, then it should be judged with regard to those. Not speaking from experience, but as far as I can tell one of the basic realities that all women with young kids face these days is what balance to strike between work in and out of the home and the economics of these choices, and this film boiled it down to three options. You can either be (a) a fulltime homemaker, and like it, and if so, you're a Stepford wife braindead suburban caricature, or (b) a fulltime homemaker, and hate it, and hate your kid, and feel trapped (Kate's character), or (c) work and be the sole income provider and be a castrating shrew and wind up cuckolded by (b). But hey, so much for nuance and reality. Hey 21st century women, damned if you do and damned if you don't--oh you want to be liberated, do you, well here, hope you enjoy it. But then we're supposed to care that this woman gets a clue in the end?--I repeat, puh-leeze. Not that the film is any less ungenerous with the men, and no doubt they're as confused as anyone by the redefinition of gender roles, but I'm sorry if I'm a little less sympathetic to them given the liberties they have historically bestowed upon themselves.
The one bit I liked was the perverts-are-people-too scenes with the guy and his mom, and then I found out why. So I go to the Charlie Rose episodes on google video to watch the segment with Todd Field (1/3/2007), like I said, a guy I am disposed to like. Mind you he wrote the screenplay with the guy who wrote the novel this was based on. (I liked one review that referred to the two main characters as escapees from a New Yorker story.) So he's talking about how his wife is very involved collaboratively in all aspects of the filmmaking process and then he says that the key scene with the creep and his ma wasn't even in the original screenplay, that his wife stuck it in there because "she said you're missing something here." Yeah like maybe just the slightest shred of human decency? Next time just let her make the film, buddy. (OK I still think he comes across as a very thoughtful guy and I will probably continue seeing his films; I haven't given up on him.)
God, I probably sound like the clueless suburbanite who didn't like Emma B. Maybe I just don't get the "satire." Maybe I've gone soft in my old age. If anyone sees this and wants to enlighten me as to its great merits, I'd be more than happy to hear it, but until then all I can say is ick, ick, ick and more ick!!!
[but seriously, Pardis, tell us how you really feel...]
[this train of thought continues in Notes on a Scandal, which I did like]
And just in case anyone is concerned that I'm letting David Lynch and those guys off the hook too easily, here's what Jonathan Rosenbaum had to say (ouch--harsh!):
"Many of my colleagues believe Lynch's best early feature is Blue Velvet (1986), which I regard as a gripping but limited piece of designer porn. Like his more offensive Wild at Heart and his more charming TV series Twin Peaks (both 1990), Blue Velvet offers a vivid illustration of how a man can turn his most lurid puritanical obsessions into clout and big money -- and get an audience to wallow in those obsessions without thinking about them very hard. It has little of the meditative integrity and private intensity of Eraserhead, but then little in his work before Inland Empire did. The exception was Mulholland Drive (2001), which also had a bone or two to pick with the Hollywood studio system and hinted that Lynch might be returning to his formal and poetic roots.
Writing about Wild at Heart in 1990, I suggested that Lynch's career seemed to dispute William Butler Yeats's memorable formulation In dreams begin responsibilities. He seemed to be in determined denial about the implications of the violence he trafficked in, with a child's view of good and evil, a formalist attitude toward images and sounds, a solipsistic desire to remain politically disengaged, and a lack of interest in understanding or addressing how the grown-up world works. "To claim that Lynch is ideologically innocent and naive about his neofascist fun seems fair enough," I wrote. "But to claim that he's ideologically neutral is to succumb to that same innocence and naivete."
Lynch's attitude doesn't seem to have changed much since then except in one crucial area -- the impact Hollywood has on artists struggling to keep their freedom and autonomy. In his new book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity..."
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