Spring Breakers: A lot more than meets the eye

At first glance Spring Breakers seems the kind of film that most sophisticated, enlightened, educated, equality-aware, politically correct viewers would disdain. That would be a mistake. The director, Harmony Korine is an artist and auteur whose work is worth seeing even if you hate it. Either way it makes for a very animated evening of lively conversation. Though it appears to be a shallow beach movie, with the requisite misogynistic male-oriented demand for tits and ass, and accompanying shallow characters, it is anything but.

Harmony Korine, whose previous work like Gummo and Mister Nobody was on the arthouse circuit for years has made a very accessible film with appeal both for brain dead and brain hungry people. Korine is basically a social anthropologist who focuses on outlier societies the Starbucks crowd usually disdains and he sees the whole of the American story in them.

The story begins with 4 gorgeous, shapely, angst-driven teenage girls in a Christian college whose passionate, desperate dream is to go to spring break in St. Petersburg, Fla. If they have any other dreams they are not obvious. Of the 4 only one, Faith (Selena Gomez) seems capable of depth or inner conflict. She truly wants to be a good person, with Christian sensibilities she takes seriously, but she just wants to let loose (in other words, be normal).

The other 3, Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine) are sociopaths – and as such, have a single personality completely in tune with their more adventurous souls. Their Christian college and upbringing may have kept their consciences artificially propped up to this time, but basically their consciences are non-existent and their hedonistic selves can’t wait to be born.

Because they are short of funds the 3 decide to rob a diner. Faith isn't told because they kinda know Faith probably wouldn’t approve. They’ve seen it all on TV, the movies and video games. They know how much attitude and virility works to get you what you want and they have no problem robbing those suckers.

Here is where Korine’s style really starts to take shape. The discordant, dreamlike perspective of the 3 girls fills the screen as if they are on a planet of their own. The camera angle that shows the job smoothly done – like a pop video – complete with music. We follow the getaway driver, Cotty letting Candy and Brit off at the front door of the diner and then as she drives slowly in their stolen pickup truck around to the back door, seeing what Cotty sees through the diner windows – Candy and Brit mercilessly, in their balaclavas, brandishing fake guns, bullying and robbing the diner and its patrons, bags full of cash then seamlessly exiting the back door, diving into the back of the pickup and driving off whooping, hollering, drunk with power. They are so into themselves and man, are they cool!

So, still without clueing Faith into what they have done they gleefully make off to their St. Pete’s mecca. Faith surmises that St. Pete’s with its raucous, debauched portrayal of manic youth spewing, gyrating, blasting its way out of their college-restrained rationalist catharsis is “the most spiritual place I have ever been” – and all 4 girls dive into the beer, sweat and slobber of it. Even though there are titty shots galore and plenty of obviously shameless youths swimming in beer orgies we actually get very little depiction of sex. If the 4 girls ever get to be the little sluts they dream of being, we don’t really know. They sure love teasing though, and work the power of their bodies on to overload.

The St. Pete’s spring breaking crowd splatters onto the screen in full splendor – the constant, numbing, pounding energy, in high-powered pink and turquoise filters high on alcohol and pot, cocaine and whatever, repeated over and over again. It’s all candyland for big kids who’ve had their sweet tooth indulged all their lives.

Then the story takes a darker turn. After they are arrested at a particularly rowdy party, Alien (James Franco) a really, really bad dude bails them out, and they get to see how really bad he and they can be.

Franco at first seems to not be the best choice for Alien. He has a soft, vulnerable side that is a probably a permanent part of his personality. I doubt he can be really as scary edgy as Alien was supposed to be. But then it became obvious that Korine was exploiting this soft part of his personality. A mushy Franco makes Alien as absurdly surreal as the girls spring break/dive into hell is supposed to be. As he tells the girls, he is the living representation of the American dream and through crime, fear, violence he has acquired himself all the material goods everyone in America wants, and he has done it on his terms.

At this point the only character in the film with a moral compass, the only one who does not want the life of pleasure at any cost, Faith, leaves. We are left with various degrees of bad characters to watch take the next step. Will the other girls acquire a conscience and still be saved? Will Alien turn good? Will all of them get the violence and/or being caught by the cops they deserve? See the movie because it’s none of those things.

So how does the depiction of female characters in Spring Breakers rate according to finely-honed feminist standards?

Are the girls individualistic and multi-faceted? No, but they represent a specific social group so I didn’t think they needed to be.

Are they sexually exploited? Some might think so. Shallow guys can see the film and see plenty of boobs without once thinking there might be more to the movie. But I think not because the whole sexual cornucopeia is an accurate representation of a real-life phenomenon, within a specific time and location, in which certain young men and women really do behave this way.

Are the girls victimized? An emphatic – no! They give as good as they get.

This film is not feministically correct. It has all the reasons for disappointment in human nobility and nature that humanity actually deserves.

One question. Girls seem quite eager to take their tops off as a sign of rebellion and freedom. But guys don’t expose themselves any more than they could do publicly anywhere, even though that would also be shocking. Why are so many gay men so eager to go stark naked and publicly show off all their equipment, but straight men will avoid doing so at any cost?

All I can say is that Spring Breakers is normally a movie that would never have appealed to me. I don’t like excessive violence and I don’t like seedy, psychopathic gangsters. I don’t care for shallow, soulless teenagers and in fact being of a certain age I have no affinity with modern teenage angst and its immature obsessions in general. I don’t even like tourist Florida. But I was completely hooked on this film. I as thoroughly engaged and not bored for a second. I am also thankful for having discovered Harmony Korine this late in the game.

    



Links: Harmony Korine video interview with The Guardian and movie trailer clip

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Oz The Great and Powerful: Who has the Power in Oz?

Messing with an iconic movie like 1939’s The Wizard of Oz is not advisable and no remakes have yet succeeded. But the original movie did leave a question unanswered. How did that silly man, that phony Wizard with no real magic powers, who wasn’t even from Oz, get his position and reputation? After 60-some years Oz The Great and Powerful is a fun, (and funnier) film that attempts to answer that question.

The original movie, The Wizard of Oz, and the book by L. Frank Baum that it was based on stands out from other stories of that time by giving so many dominant roles to female characters. Dorothy is our heroine and with the aid of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North she defeats the villainous Wicked Witch of the West (after accidentally being responsible for the death of the Wicked Witch of the East when Dorothy's house landed on her during the tornado). The male characters in the story, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and the Wizard himself all have some weakness or disadvantage and need to rely on the female characters.

In Oz The Great and Powerful, director Sam Raimi manages to remain faithful to the look of the original film, while inserting a contemporary sexual component into the mix. Some have criticized the art and special effects as cheesy, but this was the level they were at in 1939 and their reproduction is glorious. The film is yet another visual wonder. As for the sex, well, the Wizard is much younger here and his skill is slightness of hand. The story is all about the real and the unreal, and in the world of men and women, finding the balance between those two is a game that’s always being played.

Oz The Great and Powerful slightly changes the lesson of The Wizard of Oz, which is “happiness is in your own backyard” to “all that you need is already in you.” It opens the same as The Wizard of Oz, in black and white, but in Kansas of 1905. Oscar Diggs (James Franco) is a smalltime magician trying to pull a fast one on his audience, susceptible women and his friend and assistant Frank (Zach Braff) in the competitive world of sideshow entertainment. He bills himself as Oz The Great and Powerful. As he makes clear he does not aspire to be a good man, he aspires to be a great man and goodness can get in the way of that. He does not want to be honest, he wants to sell people the illusion of magic and make himself rich.

While escaping the wrath of a cuckolded husband Oscar takes off in a hot air balloon unaware that a tornado – yes, the same tornado that will return to Kansas in 1939 – is about to make serious changes in his life’s direction.

After much terror, screaming and prayers – with great special effects and changing everything to color – Oscar ends up in the Land of Oz. Theodora (Mila Kunis), a young charming Witch finds him, believes his flirtation, falls for him and wants him to be the superhero the Land of Oz has been waiting for – a wondrous Wizard whose name will also be Oz, and who will take over the throne of Oz and save everyone from a Wicked Witch who is devastating Oz.

The Wicked Witch, as it turns out is Theodora’s sister Evanora (Rachel Weisz) who totally controls the insecure Theodora. But Oscar allies himself with Glinda (Michelle Williams) and havoc ensues. A flying monkey, flying baboons, a China Doll, Munchkins, Giant Winkies and Quadlings all join the fray. We even discover how the Cowardly Lion got to be so cowardly and meet Scarecrows with missing brains.

The workings of power that display themselves in this movie are a lesson for everyone. Evanora is evil because she loves power too much. She never wanted to love anyone, just make them submit to her. Theodora on the other hand wants very much to be loved but does not love herself very much. Her neediness makes it easy for Evanora and others to use her. To gain Theodora’s alliance against Glinda, Evanora convinces her that Oscar has abandoned her for Glinda. This turns Theodora’s love for Oscar into a murderous hate that not even Evanora can bring herself to feel. Nothing is more powerful than love that turns to hate and nothing more self-destructive.

Glinda, on the other hand, is not fooled by Oscar because she is very secure and grounded. She knows Oscar’s limitations and isn’t swayed by his charm. She doesn’t need him. She understands that underneath the bluster he’s a goodhearted man and just wants his help in protecting the vulnerable people of Oz. Her wisdom gives her the power to make strong and clear decisions.

The three Witches have all the real magic power but can’t share it with the people of Oz. Oscar has no magic powers at all. But Oscar, with his showmanship can energize Glinda’s followers to fight the two other Witches by harnessing the power of their imagination and a little pretend magic.

The stage is set for Theodora heading in one direction to become the Wicked Witch of the West and Evanora in the other where, as the Wicked Witch of the East, in a few decades Dorothy’s house will fall on her and kill her. Dorothy will finish what Oscar and Glinda begin.

James Franco brings a lot of genuine charm and softness to the role of Oscar, although he could work more on diction that does not sound so much like a dude. Robert Downey Jr. was the first choice for Oscar and he perhaps he would have been better at revealing a duplicitous huckster, but Franco is probably better at portraying Oscar’s underlying innocence vulnerability. Michelle Williams does not have much to work with in Glinda’s solid and predictable personality, which is one of the problems with playing someone who is supposed to be the essence of good. Rachel Weisz is affectively sinister but Mila Kunis probably has the best opportunity to display the most range in going from gentle and loving to hateful.

Altogether there’s more grand fun and silliness in Oz The Great and Powerful than a barrel of flying monkeys.

     

Links:  Oz The Great and Powerful trailers,  Video Interview with Sam Raimi and cast of Oz The Great and Powerful,  L. Frank Baum, his life and works,   Other theories of what The Wizard of Oz is all about.

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Zero Dark Thirty: A Woman's Story

Maya, the protagonist and heroine of Zero Dark Thirty is another game-changer in how women are portrayed in the movies. Maybe it helped that Maya actually did exist and was singularly the person most responsible person for discovering Osama Bin Laden’s hiding place. However, she also throws the well-built stereotypes of women in movies all to hell.

Maya is steely and tough, very analytical, thorough and focused. She seems to have no personal life and has the discipline to live without one. She seems to be interested only in work. She is so eager to work she is willing to live in Pakistan for years, without family contact, without love or support, just doggedly doing her job.

Ironically, she is portrayed by Jessica Chastain who until now has played the essence of female softness and gentility, such as the warm, caring wife and mother in Take Shelter, and the warm, caring wife and mother in Tree of Life. Jessica Chastain turns off the softness and gentility in Zero Dark Thirty and plays the CIA agent who seems to have no feelings at all except for completing her mission, nor the obstacles her formidable male bosses place before her. She knows the game they play and she plays it right back. The only times Maya expresses vulnerability is when she winces at seeing a detainee tortured and when a colleague is killed by a suicide bomber.

What does this say about Maya? That women can be the same tough sons (daughters?) of bitches men can be? Probably. Is this a good thing? Only if it reflects the woman’s true nature. If she is tough and is happy without an emotional life then she can do the job. Does she match up to a man? Only the man who’d also be hired to do that job. 

Whatever James Bond seems to be, with his penchant for martinis and beautiful women, the CIA likes to hire the kind of operatives for overseas jobs who precisely don’t want a personal life – the kind who can pore through data, or listen to wires, or watch someone being tortured without once losing sight of their job’s objectives. The CIA deny that their analysts are as intense as depicted in the film, but if you come to see Maya be kissed, or rescued by a brave, strong man, you will be disappointed.

Jessica Chastain and the film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, step through this male terrain very deftly. Kathryn Bigelow set a remarkable precedent in The Hurt Locker, and now Zero Dark Thirty, in conveying a very masculine world. Bigelow knows the kind of personality it would take to survive and function in this world and holds nothing back in portraying it.

Zero Dark Thirty takes us through the 10 years it took the CIA to find Osama Bin Laden, and the dogged persistence of Maya within that team. The film is as cold, hard and tough as the operatives in it. No one has a private life and no one talks about anything other than work. Some have called it an action film, but I think it’s more a procedural that takes you into that very cold, hard and tough world and shows you what most of us couch potatoes never see. We get to see how we’re kept safe by the men (and women) who do the brutal things that keep us safe on those couches. Only this time 2 women are running the show.

The torture scenes are controversial. Bigelow has taken care not to demonize Muslims. One senior executive CIA in Washington is a Muslim. Several are on the CIA team working in Pakistan and so is one of the Navy Seals who kill Bin Laden. One is bought with a Lamborghini. But the torture scenes go on for about the first half hour, and if there were other methods used to gather information they kind of go under the radar. This could mean that Bigelow played up the torture scenes hoping to crank up the intensity of the film, or use the controversy for publicity. She has not clarified this.

Jessica Chastain has been suitably honored by many award nominations, including an Oscar for Best Actress. She won the Best Actress Award for Drama at the Golden Globes. Kathryn Bigelow has been nominated for Best Director almost everywhere, including by her peers at the Directors Guild of America Awards, but she has not been nominated by the directors section of the Academy Awards. This might be a snubbing, or it might be the inevitable result of nominating 5 Best Directors and 9 Best Films. Some directors have to fall through the cracks.

Zero Dark Thirty is not an easy film for sensitive souls to watch. But it is about a very important historical event in our times, and is a bit of history on its own.



Links: Interview with Jessica Chastain, Interview with Kathryn Bigelow, Controversy

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Amour: Love at the fading of the light

Amour flies in the face of everything movies, romance novels, myths and folktales have sold us about love. Amour is about what comes after the soaring emotions and basking-in-beautiful-bodies ends, when all that remains is whether the loved one will accompany you into the very darkest hour of your existence, where no sane person, not even you, wants to go.

Amour is the kind of film least likely to be made in Hollywood. It is no escape. It offers no hope and no solutions. Most filmmakers would be risking career atrophy pitching this to a studio executive. Screenwriting gurus tell newbies they can never hope to get a film like this produced. It examines what most people want to avoid examining. But for people who like movies about people -- where women participate completely -- it is one of the most rewarding films ever made.

Michael Haneke wrote and directed Amour. He is Austrian, but the film takes place in France, in French with English subtitles. The film takes you into those dark places. And yet…Amour is brilliant and uplifting in how it authenticly depicts this part of life and how the actors connect you with the characters. The journey works because Haneke is not a commercial filmmaker but works directly from his understanding of truth and how art can make it beautiful. He does not give us what we want to buy, he gives us what we need. No matter how happy and entertained any of us want to be, what we need more than anything is to share emotional experiences. If done authentically, the result is always rewarding.

Anne and Georges Laurent are the people with whom Haneke wants us to connect. They are in their 80’s and a happily married couple. It’s obvious they’ve had their squabbles and their ways of irritating each other, but nothing would make them want to be with anyone else. They live in a fine Paris apartment, share a passion for music and culture and enjoy the fruits of their lives. Then Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) has a stroke, and everything changes. Their married daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) is concerned, but too self-involved to offer much practical help. Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) examines his options, and decides that caring for Anne at home, is the best option either of them can accept.

This is the rawest edge of love, when loving someone becomes hard work and sacrifice with no promise of better things to come, and when it must endure a whole new series of tests.

Emmanuelle Riva has been nominated in the Best Actress Oscar category for this performance and has already won Best Actress at the European Film Awards. Jean-Louis Trintignant who won Best Actor in the European Film Awards also, deserves to have been nominated but the Best Actor category. They are the ones who must take us through their characters’ journey in a way that will not repel us or disengage us, but will keep our hearts open and interest riveted.

Riva disappears totally into her role. Watching her I forgot this was a healthy actress, making acting decisions and only saw an old woman disappearing slowly, awkwardly into her worst nightmare. She is losing her dignity, losing her independence, losing her mind while all the time her body throbs pathetically on. And she knows things can only get worse. She has nothing to fight with. None of the standard solutions that life has taught her will work this time. The despair must be terrible, but Riva, who at the age of 85 obviously knows how close this is to her potential reality, never lets on there is any separation between her and the dying Anne.

Trintignant also bears the cross of the surviving spouse very convincingly. He feels the horrible inadequacy of the caregiver spouse, the inability to change the circumstances, the understandable desire to run from all this, although he would never do so. He has to risk being hated by his wife who now surrenders her dignity and independence to him. She only hates herself now and can only hate his caring. He has to watch her become somebody he has never known before. He has to struggle with understanding how much her life is worth to her and what he must do to ensure her greatest comfort. Life is lived a minute at a time here, with no idea what perspective the next moment will bring. No plans anymore, even for next week.

Haneke forces the audience to live through the minutiae of these lives. Nothing moves quickly in this film. They are old people and they shuffle their way from one point to the next. We see the time it takes for Georges to pick his clothes out of his closet, to write a letter, even to catch a pigeon clumsily. We are thrown at this couple naked and we will not be protected with any familiar filmic manipulation – except of course, how Haneke has learned to manipulate.

Unless we are fortunate to die quickly, all we will this point in our lives. Personally, I would rather face the experience by watching a movie like Amour, then avoid it and go through it as a rank amateur when my time, or that of those close to me, comes. That’s how great cinema works. That’s Amour.

Whatever reservations Hollywood would have about making such a film, the members of the Academy have named it in the Best Picture, Best Foreign Language, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Director categories. At the time of this posting it has won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.It will probably win Best Foreign Language because foreign language movies are allowed to be “real” in ways commercial American films are not.

  

Links to: Excerpts from Amour and video interview with Michael Haneke, NY Times interview with Emmanuelle Riva

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Rust and Bone: Love Triumphs Over Romance

Rust and Bone is hard, gritty and tough. It has not one romantic bone in its body (except near the end – but that’s between father and son, not two lovers). It's the kind of movie that most audiences do not want to see because it offers no escape. It’s located in the south of France but it’s working class esthetics are not what tourists to want to see, or even know exists. It's so non-escapist that we don’t even get a soundtrack to lull us into any mood. But it does have respect, understanding, generosity and love. For audiences who like to experience the intimacy of how relationships work with real people, who in spite of adversity carry the power of love and hope, it works.

Director Jacques Audiard co-adapted a screenplay based on 2 short stories by Canadian writer, Craig Davidson. One story was about a down and out boxer, and the other was about an orca trainer who loses both legs when his orca attacks him. The stories were combined and Belgian actor Matthias Schoenarts became Ali the boxer, and Marion Cotillard became the female version of the orca trainer, Stephanie. Rust and Bone is in French with English subtitles.

Ali depends on his strong body for everything. No office work for him. Only whatever he can push his muscles against, with no fear of what damage that may cause. Ali has taken custody of his 5-year-old son Sam, from a former wife who’s been using Sam to traffic drug. He is mostly limited to low-paying, unskilled labor working as a night club bouncer, then a warehouse security guard and eventually grabbing the opportunity to make a bit more money in informal fighting matches.

Stephanie also depends on her body for work but she has a profitable entertainment career training orcas at a local Marineland. She and Ali meet at the nightclub where Ali works as a bouncer. She is inadvertently embroiled in a fight and injured, and Ali drives her home. He is caught up by her sexy, gorgeous legs and she is caught up by his caring and kindness. But they are from different social worlds and go their separate ways. When the orca injures Stephanie, her world is destroyed.

At this point I found the way the script re-unites them again somewhat contrived, but once they're together their relationship makes total sense. In a conventional Hollywood script, they would fall madly in love and we would get the romantic, lush tale of two lost souls finding and triumphing over adversity with each other. But that’s not what happens. Instead, something very real happens. Stephanie is definitely no longer the sexy, mini-skirted tease Ali first met. She is deeply crushed in body and in spirit, confined to a wheelchair. She now has to manage a whole new life on only insurance income and no legs. She is depressed, drab, insecure and has not left her apartment since she moved back into it in a wheelchair.

Ali is comfortable with body losses and her condition does not repulse him. She is no longer the sex object that first piqued his interest, but his natural instincts for caring help him coax her back into the open world again. He takes her to the beach where she regains the love of using her body and slowly learns to hope again.

So do they fall in love now? No, they don’t. They stay friends. Both are very realistic about “love”. They do not confuse it with sex, and they don’t confuse sex with anything other than good exercise and release. Both are mostly looking for a human connection that, because of the differing low points in their lives, they find more useful. Everything they do for each other is out of friendship first.

That’s not to say there is no love or sex, but it comes out of the friendship, trust and the bond that holds them together. The first time they have sex is fraught with anxiety for Stephanie and Ali's deferment to her anxiety is quite touching.

Ali’s life is chaotic and the story provides us with many reasons why, in the end, their relationship may not work out. But in the end it is not the romance, surging hormones and orchestral machinations that have always been the most useful tools Hollywood has used to bring two disparate people together. Friendship and the trust that’s been built up with are the tools they use against the chaos.

Marion Cotillard is no doubt the reason Rust and Bone has made it into the awareness of film audiences at large. By this time anyone who saw her performances in La Vie En Rose, for which she won a Best Actress Oscar, and Inception, knows her prowess and abilities. She portrays Stephanie with great but subtle power. Emotions rarely explode but we can see Stephanie’s worlds and realities changing inside her with the subtlest shifts.

Alas, the filmic reality that it is a man’s world and the man’s story is always more important than the woman’s, prevails here. Even though this story is the equal story of both Ali and Stephanie, it is Stephanie who plays second fiddle to Ali. This is a “fact” only in stories and not in real life. Stephanie by far experiences the more interesting challenges and changes, but Ali is the protagonist. His challenges and changes are more conventional and predictable, but he leads the story.

No doubt the men at the creative controls of Rust and Bone were more comfortable identifying with a man and were sure the audiences would be too. But at least this group of men did have enough new vision to see and develop the power Marion Cotillard would have as Stephanie and brought it to this film.



Links: Trailer and site for Rust and Bone, Marion Cotillard's interview on Times Talks video, Antibes, France, Craig Davidson's site for Rust and Bone novel

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Hitchcock: The Revenge of Alma Reville

Until the current release of Hitchcock most viewers knew the great master as a genius. Yes, he, and only he, the great Alfred Hitchcock, solitary genius, the one who put his unique, personal stamp on every one of his films, destined forever to be admired for what one man can do. This movie fills the holes in that opinion. Hitchcock would never have been Hitchcock without his wife, Alma Reville.

Both in real life and the movies wives traditionally are given background, supporting roles. The husband is the doer, the achiever, the adventurer and risk-taker. But the film Hitchcock is closer to the truth. It tells the role his wife played in making the genius her husband was, and it’s wonderfully satisfying in that regard.

Two of our best actors, Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock and Helen Mirren as his wife, Alma take us through the partnership that not only guided Hitchcock for most of his career, but in particular how he came to create his best-received and most famous film, Psycho. The story is loosely based on the book, Alfred Hitchcock and The Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello.

Anthony Hopkins is splendid as Hitchcock, or Hitch, as he was called. He is fitted in prosthetics to look the part and his mannerisms, nuances, tone of voice and personality are spot on. Hopkins makes it hard to believe he’s also been any of the other characters he’s played, especially Hannibal Lector – although Lector could have been uncannily close to Hitchcock’s heart.

Underneath that dumpling exterior Hitchcock harbored a dark and cynical mind that knew how to show those audiences, who thought going to movies would be a safe, escapist experience, a thing or two. His passion for Psycho makes that evident – a movie no one wanted to produce because they thought it would shock, insult and revolt. Hitchcock wanted to make it precisely for those reasons because he knew the audience would love it. Being thought sick or twisted never frightened Hitch.

When the movie begins Hitch and Alma have been married 30 years and it shows. If there was a measure of lust in their relationship once it is nowhere to be seen now. They did have a daughter, Patricia, but she was not seen or mentioned in this film. Hitch is a working husband, Alma is a housewife. They know each other inside out and are each other’s best friends, fitting together like gears in a wheel. What does show is a deep knowledge, need and friendship that was probably always their bedrock. Alma was his talented assistant director, writer, script editor and film editor. She is his mentor and trusted confidante who knows his talent and style even better than he does. This makes them a formidable team.

She is also the more emotionally mature of the two, long enduring his tantrums and fascinations. Whatever Hitchcock became as a filmmaking genius probably started in his childhood bedroom where he spent many lonely evenings as an introverted, but imaginative, little boy. Whatever compensated for his loneliness when he was 10-years-old became the tools of his trade when an adult. Unfortunately, the 10-year-old emotional state was one of those tools.

It’s Alma who brings out the creativity and insecurities in Hitch’s mind and helps to provide them with a purpose. She agrees to mortgage their home to raise money for the picture. She comes up with the idea to kill Marion Crane off in the first 30 minutes. She convinces Alfred to run music under the shower scene. And she notices the collapsed Janet Leigh swallowing after she’s supposed to be dead. When Hitch is sick with the flu she comes in to direct his scenes, and when the first cut is a disaster, she re-cuts the film into the masterpiece it became.

A subplot creates jealousy between Alma and Hitch. That probably did not happen, but works to inject some sexual tension into the film and bring out even more of Alfred’s dark side.

The story takes us through everyone’s initial revulsion at adapting the book Psycho, by Robert Bloch, based on an actual psycho named Ed Gein, to the making of and eventual success of the film. As Hitch builds his movie his mind fuses more and more with that of Ed Gein, who, in fantasy sequences becomes sort of his muse. Are we to think that Hitchcock and Gein are twin minds – one who went on to fulfill his fantasies and ended up badly, and the other put them into movies and ended up happier and more respected? Perhaps.

Helen Mirren provides Alma Reville with the necessary power to fence with an actor like Anthony Hopkins. The two do so deliciously. Mirren had the easier role because most people have no idea what Alma was really like while Hopkins had to re-create an extremely precise, well-known personality who can emote with a non-emotive body.

Some critics found fault with the movie spending so much time on Hitchcock’s relationship with Alma and thought it should have focused on where the “real” action was – the set of Psycho. Even Roger Ebert is dismayed with the attention on Alma, perplexed the director might have wanted to make this a “woman’s film”. But that’s the great divide between what men find important and what women find important.

Scarlett Johansson portrays Janet Leigh, Jessica Biel plays Vera Miles and James D’Arcy plays Anthony Perkins in smaller roles. Director Sacha Gervasi’s previous effort was an Oscar winning documentary about a Canadian heavy metal band, Anvil: The Story of Anvil.

    

Links: Sacha Gervasi’s video interview on Hitchcock and film trailer, Interview with Helen Mirren, Interview with Anthony Hopkins,

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The Sessions: An Exceptional Way to Get Laid

The Sessions is an amazing and remarkable film. It is far more sexual than most American movies have ever been and it is also one of the most audacious yet authentically uplifting films ever produced. It tells us something about the possibilities of relationships between the sexes that movies rarely, if ever, have explored. It could be a good sex education lesson for children, but that kind of emotional maturity from the public may be hoping for too much.

The Sessions is based on the true story of Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes), an American author and poet, who was paralyzed by polio since the age of 6, and from then on lived in an iron lung. He was as self-sufficient as possible. He put himself through university with a mobile iron lung he could operate with his mouth. He also became a published writer and poet by typing out words, painstakingly, one at a time, with a stick held in his mouth. He also had enough money on hand to keep a small apartment in Berkeley, CA and to hire an assistant to bathe him, feed him and help move him around. He was a devout Catholic and attended church regularly. He jokingly explains his belief in a God, “I couldn’t comprehend a life where I didn’t have someone to blame.”

When The Sessions opens he is a gentle, good-natured man who is earnestly trying to make the best of a bad fortune. But whatever his achievements the one thing he has not been able to have is a sexual man-to-woman relationship. His great personality does attract attention from women, but in the end none wants to go the distance with him. In his late 30’s he is still a virgin. One thing or another leads him to decide that hiring a sex surrogate to break him in is the best solution. This brings Cheryl Cohen Greene (Helen Hunt) into his life.

After winning a Best Actress Oscar for the 1997 film, As Good As it Gets, Helen Hunt seemed to drop from the radar. But she has come back in this film with a roar. Cheryl Cohen Greene is also a real person, who was indeed a sex surrogate to Mark O’Brien and she is one of those very rare people who has absolutely no sexual body issues. She can be as sexually candid with her body as someone else can be a massage therapist. It’s a job, it’s information, it’s fun, it’s done. “Shall we get started?” is her signature statement.

They gradually go into fairly graphic (about 95%) sexual activities. Those wanting to know much more than you will ever learn in more salacious movies could do well with seeing The Sessions. Those who thought that sex always has to be an egomaniacal power struggle, a hunger, or a religiously controlled duty of some kind will have that image turned on its head. In The Sessions sex is respect and a basic human need.

Both actors play the basis of their roles in an unusual way. John Hawkes is a very talented actor who should get an Oscar nom for this. After his menacing, meth-stoked, Missouri hillbilly-drawling, Oscar-nominated portrayal of Uncle Teardrop in Winter’s Bone he now plays the extremely vulnerable, Massachusetts-accented, sensitive, cerebral man who can only express himself through the movements of his head and face. John Hawkes intimately understands, from the inside out, what it’s like to be an extremely helpless man. He barely has power over himself, never mind anyone else.

Catholicism plays a benign role in this picture. O’Brien’s only source of confidence is his local parish priest (William H. Macy) who thankfully puts his official Catholic priesthood aside and relates to him in a human being to human being way. The bishop though, would likely have disapproved.

Helen Hunt plays the woman situated very uncomfortably in the American ethos. She is a decent, honest woman and mother. She is happily married to a very understanding husband but practices sex with strange men for a living. Although her role creates tension with her husband in the The Sessions, the tension seems to come more from having to have tension in the story than from any real strain in the marriage.

This kind of woman falls in the fault line between good woman and whore. Many jurisdictions have made sexual surrogacy illegal because they can’t distinguish it from prostitution. So many people believe any sex outside of marriage or with no personal love commitment is wrong, and doing it with clients as therapy is just so not right, that sex has only been presented as dangerous seduction or racy – and vulnerable people’s genuine sex problems remain unsolved. In fact many jurisdictions have laws against sex of any kind between patient and therapist even if the patient desperately wants it.

Unfortunately, inasmuch as the role is expanding physically, its professionalism makes it emotionally limited. Cheryl Cohen Greene is a professional, she keeps her professional distance and her emotions under control and Helen Hunt has to reflect Cohen Greene’s real emotions through this veil of restraint. It keeps her at a distance from us but that’s probably the limitation of the role more than the performance at fault. Cohen Greene is not the one with any problems, so we are naturally more focused on Mark O’Brien.

It's the kind of feel good movie that, in a time of cynical, complicated characters, makes you feel good without selling you short. But even though Helen Hunt is nude in many of the scenes the audiences for this have mostly been women. Could it be women are more attracted to the caring and healing nature of sex while men prefer it shallow and dirty? Just askin’?

Written and directed by Australian Ben Lewin who has made feature films, but since 1994 has been working mostly in television and documentaries.

  


Links: Video interview with John Hawkes, William H. Macy and scenes from The Sessions, Mark O'Brien's poetry, Further writings of Mark O’Brien,  Mark O'Brien, Ben Lewin and the making of the film, The real Cheryl Cohen Greene’s website, About polio

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