2/25
Just a few Oscars afterthoughts. I will leave to others, or another time, the discussion about the Best Picture Award or other critical analysis of what this year's nominations had to say about how we are now. I want to comment on two things : one, this year's collection of short live-action films, and two, a few words about Vice.
The short films are always kind of the poor cousins at the Oscars, this year threatened with exile to commercial time, rescued back to live tv at the last minute. My good friend Beppe and I always look forward with eager anticipation to our annual visit to the Independent Film Center a week or two before the Oscars to see the shorts. This year's visit was like no other.
There's usually a variety of movies including at least one with a quirky point of view that comes in at an angle and whisks you away, with a laugh, or knowing nod. This year's collection was relentless and unforgiving in its constant, unrelieved tension. The audience left looking dazed. ('Abused," Beppe said.)
With one exception, the theme could have been bad things done by and to boys. And with one exception, redemption was hard to find. Two were from French Canada, and on each from Spain, Ireland and the US.
The opener, Madre (Mother) from Spain, impresses you at first with the way the story develops almost entirely through phone calls. The horror rises as woman tries to locate her son lost on a beach with a dying cell phone. And it never ends....you are left with the worst possibilities still possible. I through up my hands in frustration as it ended.
Fauve, from Canada, shows the day's explorations of two boys gone tragically bad. Only a final poetic image gives a sense of transcendent beauty amidst the tragedy.
Also from Canada, Marguerite, a film about a woman dying from kidney failure and her attendant The subtext is how our attitudes about same gender love affairs has grown and evolved. Its end is affecting, moving, a touch of beauty in the midst of tragedy. It was my favorite for its belief in the possibility of grace and beauty in the midst of a depressing season.
The most difficult to handle is an Irish film, Detained, about the youngest boys (10 years old) to ever be convicted of murder. In what was known as the James Bolger case in which a two year old boy is brutally tortured and then killed for no reason. It certainly draws into question the concept of the innocence of children. I suppose it's valuable and helps us to ponder how these things can be done by fellow human beings. As a grandfather of two beautiful young grandchildren, it was simply too disturbing for me. And I continue to be haunted by it. Knowing that the victim's parents objected only heightens my sense of being upset by/with this film.
Finally, the film that did win,Skin, is a bitter O Henryesque parable on race/perception of color in the US and what we are teaching our children. Despite its capacity to capture the nuance in most lives, eg, a vicious racist can also be a loving engaged father, it's still a difficult film to watch.
On the one hand, there is high quality in these films. On the other hand, I'm trying to understand what they are saying about where we are. The theologian Rubem Alves has made it clear that if all we offer are images of suffering, it does not inspire people , it deadens them. If we want people to rise up and fight for a better world, we need to create images of beauty so that the can become imagined and then real.
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Vice is a fine well made film with the quirky perspective I missed in the short films needed to make a real life horror story easier to absorb. Like Michael Moore with a touch of Garcia Marquez. Not to mention the acting virtuosity of Christian Bale (even physically transformed) and Sam Rockwell. In the end, this film is vitally important right now.
The reality of life in the Trump presidency has been so overwhelming as to have obscured everything that came before. George Bush, Jr can be a buddy to Bill Clinton and do his painting and be the guy you'd like to have a beer with and we forget the (literally) horrendous crimes against humanity committed during his administration. The calculated use of the tragedy of 9-11 to justify a war in Iraq at the expense of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives was nothing short of criminal. Not to mention smaller tragedies like costing Colin Powell his integrity.
We are reminded that Dick Cheney was the architect of all of that. And there is the final tragedy of watching Cheney take the one place in his life where he maintained his decency, his protection of his daughter Mary from public political strategic homophobia, and tacitly gave the nod to his daughter Liz when she threw her sister under the bus in her own campaign for her father's former seat.
It's important not to forget this history as we seek to change our present reality. What we're up against is deeper, and more insidious than one bad president, even as we descend ever lower.
Vice is more than worth a look.
