RUN[,] LOLA[,] RUN (Tom Tykwer, 1998)

Lola Rennt, literally, Lola Runs, but nonsensically turned in the U.S. into an uncomma-ed command, Run Lola Run, contributes nothing to the development of the idea of the permutations of chance and circumstance. It pretends to, with little inserted montages of peripheral characters’ alternate fates as it spins its central yarn thrice, each with alternate details and outcomes pertaining to the two main characters as well, Lola (Franka Potente) and Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu). After her boyfriend leaves drug money on a subway train, making him a candidate for erasure by the gangland boss to whom he is scheduled to deliver it, Lola must run to the bank which her father directs in order to plead for the money to save Manni’s life. She has only twenty minutes in which to do this and reach Manni at the appointed spot in time.

One must make do with what writer-director Tom Tykwer and, especially, cutter Mathilde Bonnefoy have given us. If this German film is devoid of philosophical richness or even moral depth, it nevertheless hugely entertains. It’s fun watching Lola run through the streets, trying to beat the clock as it approaches a fateful noon, her dyed-very red hair flying in the wind. It’s a thrill ride, and the mix of color and black and white, of live action and animation, of brisk and even brisker action formally captivates. Lola Rennt is kinetic and exhilarating. No wonder it took the audience prize at Sundance.

It is also, however, all rather pointless. It tips its upbeat hand most decisively, I suppose, in ending with the episode that ends happily for the couple; but it insults those of us who disbelieve in astrology—how my Aunt Helen would love this film!—by implying, through Lola’s astrologically inclined apartment-mate, that the various events and outcomes are a matter of the alignment of stars and planets. This is a bit of having one’s cake and eating it, too, for although the sequence of episodes, in one sense, suggests consecutive time periods, it is really a case of three alternate episodes occupying the same time period. Then how can the stars be differently aligned?

Perhaps the sum of the film’s alternative possibilities is meant to evoke all of life’s possibilities, but I couldn’t help feeling that each of Tykwer’s “possibilities” is rendered in a rigidly deterministic manner, canceling, or at least damaging the possibility of all these possibilities. Or am I simply attempting to apply too much sense to a sheer exercise in style and a stunning piece of “pure entertainment”?

Here is a film for which the viewer must leave common sense behind. Once that’s done, there is pleasure to be had.

RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (Philip Noyce, 2002)

Philip Noyce deserves a footnote in film histories, I suppose, for guiding young Nicole Kidman to stardom in Dead Calm (1989), a popular though mediocre thriller. The Australian filmmaker, already commercial, relocated to Hollywood for the likes of such inconsequential and stupid projects as Patriot Games (1992), Clear and Present Danger (1994) and The Bone Collector (1999). Before dozing off, I noted that his Quiet American (2002), from Graham Greene, is utterly conventional. Rabbit-Proof Fence cannot redeem his artistic reputation either. It’s a calculated effort to restore his prominence in his home country by tackling an issue of enormous interest, but in such a cautious way as to confirm authorities and official histories in their denial of Australia’s racist past and, in fact, racist present, despite a token national “Sorry Day.”

It’s a heartbreaking film, to be sure, but one whose humanistic outcry against a typical actual event of gross injustice fails to sound out the depth of depravity to which the event belongs. It’s a film muddled by significant cross-purposes despite a lucid script by Christine Olsen, based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara, the daughter of the eldest of three “half-caste” girls whose hideous (mis)adventure both the book and the film portray. In the manner of Steven Spielberg’s execrable, self-serving Schindler’s List (1993), Noyce’s bid for respectability addresses a monstrous instance of official, organized inhumanity, reducing it to an occasion for unwarranted sentimental uplift.

I wrote this about Noyce’s The Bone Collector: “The loss of its horribly tortured and murdered individuals weighs not at all on the film, which instead pursues a ridiculously sentimental view of its lead detective, a bed-bound quadriplegic forensic specialist formerly employed by the New York Police Department.” Despite a more prepossessing topic, Australia’s systematic, genocidal approach to its Aboriginal “problem,” Rabbit-Proof Fence reveals the same corrupt heart as The Bone Collector, although Noyce’s filmmaking hand has grown lighter and more deft. Ultimately, morally, this makes matters worse, not better. Like Schindler’s List, Rabbit-Proof Fence is depraved—the sentimental ravings of a soulless man.

Since 1788, when the British government settled Australia, “civilization” has declared war on the region’s native population. Primitive and nonwhite, the Aborigines were driven out of their homes and, for more than a century, either hunted and killed or herded onto reservations in the areas of Australia most harshly disposed to limiting their survival. An estimated population of 500,000 Aborigines, and perhaps as many as 750,000, was thus reduced by 1911 to 31,000 men, women and children. Human nature took another kind of toll, as white soldiers and civilians raped or cohabitated with Aboriginal women before abandoning them, generating a population of “half-castes.” By 1931, when Rabbit-Proof Fence is set, half-caste girls were ripped from their homes and their black mothers and imprisoned in settlement camps run either by the government or religious missions, where they were trained to obey white authority and to become domestics for white families. This was part of a grand, “progressive” plan for “taking care” of Aborigines by either “assimilating” such girls as these and erasing others. The architect of the plan was A.O. Neville, Western Australia’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, whose ideas were adopted and implemented throughout Australia. In addition to domesticating half-caste girls, Neville pursued the strategy of arranging and encouraging marriages between half-castes and whites. Moreover, mating among blacks was prohibited by law, and black women were routinely gathered up and sterilized. The desired outcome was the virtual elimination of the country’s black population—a clever, “civilized” substitute for hunting, shooting and killing Aborigines.

There is text at the front and back ends of Noyce’s film that in no way does justice to the context that this history sketch provides. Neville, tightly and craftily played by Kenneth Branagh, is presented as sincere and dedicated, if it’s your will to see him that way, or as mad as an imperialist hatter, if that is the will behind your perception. Neville’s dialogue snatches bits and pieces from his own published words, and there’s a lot of that “If only these people knew what we are trying to do for them!” stuff interwoven in his speech, without benefit of context, about the man or his mission, to puncture his position by showing up its monstrous implications. Therefore, the film, about three little girls who escape a settlement camp, has you rooting for the girls wholeheartedly, much as you root for the survival of Jews in Schindler’s List; but this, regrettably, makes the audience accomplice to the accommodation of racism and genocide that the film as a whole effects by failing to provide sufficient context to make plain that the success or failure of the girls’ efforts to reach home in no way covers the momentous issues involved. Indeed, two of the girls, sisters, do elude authorities and, by foot across 1,500 miles, make it back home, but, unconscionably, the film rushes us through the revelation that they were both recaptured and sent back to the settlement camp shortly thereafter. Although within the limitations of this formulaic adventure Olsen has devised a near-perfect script, the fitting of the true story into this formula requires an artistic facsimile of the kind of brutal surgery that Neville himself advocated when he stated, “The sore spot [of the “problem” of half-castes] requires the application of the surgeon’s knife for the good of the patient, and probably against the patient’s will.” Noyce draws extra tears at the finish when the actual elderly women whom the two sisters have become appear on screen spouting near-senile nonsense about how they’re not going back to that settlement camp again. This has the same disgusting effect as Spielberg’s documentary coda in Schindler’s List where the actual Jewish survivors from Oskar Schindler’s list, trotted out, appear on camera at the end of a film that, for its sentimental purposes, fails to disclose that only the end of the war saved these individuals, for Schindler—the real Schindler—routinely, as a Nazi, selected people for extermination from that “list” of his. Well, of course these Jewish survivors are grateful to Schindler and glad to be alive; well, of course, the actual sisters in Rabbit-Proof Fence are grateful to one another for their shared long-ago escape adventure and glad to be alive. And of course we’re ready to shed tears over their seemingly impossible survival. That makes us human; but, for failing to tell the whole true story, Spielberg and Noyce are shown to be somewhat less than human.

I have addressed here only the historical context of the girls’ escape in 1931. There is also a context since that time to which Noyce gives similarly short shrift, making the added appearance of the actual sisters even more of an exploitation and an abomination.

The sisters are Molly, who is 14, and Daisy, who is 8 and whom Molly must carry piggy-back much of the way during their escape as they follow the long rabbit-proof fence of the title. Their cousin, Gracie, is 10. The amateur actresses who play these actual children—Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan—are beautifully directed by Noyce. Gracie is trapped when she leaves the other two because of a planted rumor about the whereabouts of her mother. Molly’s voiceover informs us that she and Daisy never saw their cousin again. For me, this is a proper and intolerable disclosure that suggests the noble film that Rabbit-Proof Fence might have been.

The film does justice to much genuine heartache, not only from the children’s perspective but from that of their family. More’s the pity it chooses, therefore, a sentimental over a tragic path and provides such a limited view of the children’s ordeal. I recommend instead, in the same genre, a masterpiece: Jan Němec’s Czech film Diamonds of the Night (1964), about two Jewish schoolboys, escapees from a train transporting them to a death camp, who elude, for a while, authorities in dogged pursuit of them.

Rabbit-Proof Fence has its moments; Diamonds is indelible.

COLD FEVER (Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, 1995)

From Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Japan and the U.S., Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s Cold Fever is a road film, a wonderful multilingual fish-out-of-water comedy. Atsushi Hirata, a young Japanese executive for a fish company (mull over the guy’s first name), visits Iceland out of filial respect. His parents accidentally died there seven years earlier, and he will need to get to the site of their deaths, a remote river, and perform a traditional memorial service to set their souls at rest.
     Here is a film of mysterious, wind-whipped, ravishing landscapes in the dead of winter, gorgeously rendered by color cinematographer Ari Kristinsson, that never loses its human focus. “Very strange country,” Atsushi says about Iceland, but, of course, he is the stranger there and a stranger as well to his own humanity and family identity. He reluctantly sacrificed his annual two-week golf holiday in Hawaii for this excursion only at his grandfather’s urging. When a tire of the used old Citroen he bought collapses in the middle of nowhere, his exasperated stumbling across a rocky expanse of heavy snow crystallizes his tight-assed point of emotional departure.
     Atsushi meets all sorts of people along the way, and the sweet decency of many of them, to which he is initially resistant, begins seeping into his soul. Not everyone, though, is decent; a vicious American couple divert his plans, necessitating, perhaps, spiritual intervention if he is to realize his goal. (They steal the car, and Atsushi ends up on foot.) Early on, Atsushi is told there may be ghosts afoot in Iceland; he sees the ghost of a girl himself, and the man who becomes his guide and companion to his destination may be another such ghost. This aspect of the film is lightly, shimmeringly executed.
     Cold Fever charms and delights.

BALL OF FIRE (Howard Hawks, 1941)

Brother Orchid (1940) and Tall, Dark and Handsome (1941) had given the gangster comedy something of a vogue when Ball of Fire appeared. Its credits promised a lot; Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder had written the script (from a story by Wilder and Thomas Monroe), and Howard Hawks (Scarface, Twentieth Century, His Girl Friday) directed. But Samuel Goldwyn produced, and the result is an inflated, overproduced, distressingly sentimental entertainment. Ball of Fire, a popular success of its day, hasn’t withstood the test of time.

The “ball of fire” of the title is Sugarpuss O’Shea, a New York nightclub entertainer and gangster’s moll who becomes the resident expert on contemporary street slang for a slew of academics composing a dictionary. This plot premise was intended to refer, comically, to the fairy tale and Disney animated feature (1937) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The resemblance is slight, however, and completely without resonance. Sugarpuss qualifies as neither a Snow White nor, as the joke would have it, Snow Dirt.

Sugarpuss, whose given name is Katherine, and the head lexicographer, Professor Bertram Potts, fall in love, and Potts and his crew attempt to extricate Sugarpuss from the mob, but she goes off with her gangster to protect her would-be protectors. Potts confronts her and calls her a tramp—or, rather, in an embarrassingly mawkish moment, she calls herself this, completing his thought. (Feminists need not apply to this film.) But all gets straightened out and ends merrily.

Stretched thin and strained to the point of archness, this pointlessly glamorous romantic comedy stars Gary Cooper as Potts, a variation on his Mr. Deeds, and Barbara Stanwyck as Sugarpuss. Stanwyck brandishes her gorgeous gams, spectacularly sings “Drum Boogie” (the voice is Martha Tilton’s), and alternates between wit and heartache. The best U.S.-born film actress ever gives here one of her few bad (albeit Oscar-nominated) performances. Unremittingly crude, Sugarpuss is a part unworthy of her. But money matters; Ginger Rogers regretted having turned down the part. (That made two Hawks comedies in a row, since Rogers had also turned down his glorious His Girl Friday.)

There is but one good performance in the film—and it’s certainly not the one given as the gangster by a young Dana Andrews. Richard Haydn applies his nasal voice beautifully to the wistful part of Professor Oddly. Nothing else commends Ball of Fire.

FOCUS (Neal Slavin, 2001)

American cinema can be pretentious and rarely more so than when it has anything to do with playwright Arthur Miller, who though unblessed with great talent can at least claim longevity. (He had that, but has since passed on.) It isn’t one of his plays sanctimoniously sifting somebody’s conscience, though, upon which photographer Neal Slavin’s Focus is based. This artsy parable of the sort that Sydney Pollack once might have directed—remember Castle Keep (1969)?—derives from the forgotten 1945 Focus that was Miller’s only novel and earliest published work. Slavin may have wrought an ugly and tacky thing, but there is little doubt he has also made a gripping entertainment.

The film targets anti-Semitism but resonates, finally, to suggest how decent folk often fail to step up to the plate to oppose and denounce any sort of ethnic, religious or racial bigotry in their midst. It’s a “message movie,” then, that preaches to the converted, allowing them to feel superior to others, as though intellectual bigotry weren’t as offensive as other kinds. But at least Slavin has generated a real sense of danger. He has had the good grace not to make a moribund film.

The place and time is Brooklyn 1944. While Hitler’s regime is methodically exterminating Jews abroad, a neighborhood pack of American fascists, who call themselves Union Crusaders, messily attack the Jews in their neighborhood, or those they decide to believe are Jews but aren’t, late at night. Their messianic national leader is a rabble-rousing Catholic priest (based on radio evangelist Father Coughlin) named Father Crighton, but these next-door neighbor hooligans scarcely require any incitement to hate. It’s their stock-and-trade, their occasion for banding together in response to what they perceive to be, because of the war and the imminent flood of returning GIs, an alarmingly shifting social and national environment. (Father Crighton invokes the word “communists”: a reminder of the linkage between anti-Semitism and Red witch-hunt hysteria.)

A commotion in the street outside, below his second-floor bedroom window Lawrence Newman wakes up one night from a deep sleep and his nightmare of a careening carousel. (Regrettably, the film is full of such grandiose touches, such misguided, unconvincing expressionism.) A Puerto Rican-American is being raped by the son of one of Newman’s neighbors; she cries out for help, reaching up her hand to Newman, whose face she apprehends through the widened crack he has made in his Venetian blinds. (People peering through windows is a motif in the film, an indication of both human cowardice and paranoia.) Newman does nothing to help the woman, nor does anyone else. The “Spic,” as one of Newman’s neighbors identifies the victim, ends up as a result of the attack in a coma in hospital. She eventually dies. Who is this person? Not from the neighborhood, which is respectable, but from the lower east side. Unimportant person. A blood-curdling shriek, and no one lifts a finger to help.

Newman is unmarried. His mother lives with him, and their relationship is warm; but pretty much Newman keeps to himself. He is a decent sort. He would never refer to anyone as a “Spic,” a “Yid” or a “Nigger,” nor is he capable of even thinking of anyone in such hateful, reductive terms. Every week he buys his Sunday paper from Mr. Finkelstein, who runs the corner store. Only, one Sunday Newman digresses from this simple routine guarding his fairness and humanity. Finkelstein has been “moving in” relatives next door to himself, and the neighborhood’s containment of a single, isolated Jewish couple, the Finkelsteins, is threatening to explode. Thus the Union Crusaders set up a newspaper boy across the street from the corner shop, and Newman, timid and unappreciative of the stakes involved, disappoints Finkelstein, who considers him a friend, by buying a Sunday paper from the boy instead, encouraged in this act by neighbors flanking the boy. Two touches attach themselves to this seemingly harmless but socially momentous act. This is a neighborhood without a trace of children; as a result, this one boy selling newspapers, a fascist front, eerily stands out. Moreover, back home Mother balks at the different newspaper Newman has bought this time for her to read. He dismisses her complaint because it pricks his conscience, which he wishes to keep undisturbed. For our part, we note the irrelevancy of Mother’s response. Indeed, this is a film in which people “keep missing the point.”

There is afoot a marvelous metaphor for this myopia: Newman’s eyesight is wavering. It seems that Newman’s imperfect sight has been proving embarrassing for the company for which he works. A personnel officer, he has mistakenly hired to the staff of female typists a Jewish woman, who has been necessarily let go since the company, typical for the time, is wedded to a “Christians only” hiring policy, which in fact it blatantly advertises. Now Newman’s boss worries that the let-go girl will cause trouble by going to the press. (”They” always cause trouble, you know.) He instructs Newman to buy prescription eyeglasses as protection against such an error happening again. Newman complies; but once he wears his new glasses he looks so studious that he himself looks Jewish! Even his mother points this out, although, again missing the point, she adds that probably no one will notice. Everyone does, however, including his boss and the Union Crusaders. At least Newman’s boss knows that Newman isn’t Jewish, but it simply won’t do anymore that Newman’s Jewish appearance is in the front office, thereby representing the company. Demoted, Newman ups and quits; he is incensed by the injustice of it all. After all, he is not a Jew. Tell that to his neighbors (as he tries to), but they won’t have any of it; as far as they’re concerned, it’s certain now that he is a Jew. No wonder he has always acted friendly to Finkelstein! Irony of ironies: Newman ends up working for a firm one of whose two owners is Jewish because no one else in town will hire him because everyone else in town now perceives him as being Jewish. Irony of irony of ironies: the person who hires Newman, Gertrude Hart, is a woman whom he wouldn’t hire at his old job because, wearing his spectacles, she looked Jewish to him. She wasn’t, and isn’t (or is she?), but once they fall in love and marry, her Jewish appearance exacerbates neighbors’ anti-Semitic feelings against him. When incidents against them escalate, Gertrude pleads with Lawrence that either he should join the Union Crusaders or they should move. When at her coaxing he attends a Union Crusader meeting at the local church, he is attacked and thrown out as a Jewish mole. After all, he was the only one there wearing a suit, and, faithful to his normal restraint, he didn’t applaud Father Crighton’s impassioned speech from the pulpit. It is Father Crighton, in fact, who has just warned the congregation that there are spies for the press amongst them—no better than communists, he implies. Missing the point, a bloodied Newman is outraged by all this on the grounds that he is not Jewish. As perceptive as he is kind, Finkelstein advises Newman to take off his now-torn jacket, the appearance of which might further mark him as a target on his way home.

Violence escalates, and eventually, walking home from the movies one night, the Newmans are viciously surrounded and attacked. Finkelstein comes to the rescue with two baseball bats, one for himself, one for Newman. The Newmans go to the police station. The officer in his report identifies the couple as being Jewish. Missing the point no longer, they finally accept the identification. With both facing the camera behind the officer’s elevated front desk, it is the deeply touching moment towards which the whole film has been tending. “It’s a bad street,” the police officer has opined, the implication being that the Union Crusaders, while being the worst of America, isn’t all of America.

It is truly against all expectation that I enjoyed this film as much as I did. It certainly helps that David Paymer, alert and adroit, doesn’t sentimentalize Finkelstein too much; I recall being sickened by the sentimentalization of the sanctimonious Jew in the incredibly vacant West Side Story (1961), one of the worst musical films of all time. The script by Kendrew Lascelles is agile; the use of color probably helps to reduce the level of paranoia that black and white might have imposed on the material. But above all there is the genuine excitement of the film: we worry about the Newmans even as their myopia prohibits us from finding them endearing. However sloppy the film may be visually (and this from a photographer!), Slavin allows us our humanity while charting the growth in humanity of the two main characters.

All the play about sight, about social identification proceeding from perception, for example, is well handled. I am reminded how differently Stephen Daldrey handles myopia in Billy Elliot (2000) and The Hours (2002), where it functions as a metaphor for a character’s sense of familial and social imprisonment out of which he or she must somehow find the means to break out. In Focus, there is a back-and-forth to the metaphor: people, misperceived, misperceive themselves and others. Not only do the Newmans waste moral energy defending themselves against the “accusation” of being Jewish, as though there were something really intrinsically wrong with being Jewish, but those accusing them are morally stunted by their fear and hatred, their failure to embrace the concept of an integrated, productive, harmonious social community.

William H. Macy (best actor, Karlovy Vary) is magnificent as Lawrence Newman, an anxious, low-key Everyman. The secular nature of his character as he navigates with difficulty the inflamed atmosphere of religious and ethnic distinctions makes his Newman, for me, an especially American Everyman. A friend of mine once identified Macy as one of her favorite actors, and I was skeptical about this judgment; I am skeptical no longer. Laura Dern is equally wonderful, and gorgeous and glamorous besides; the subtle degree to which she suggests that Gertrude may in fact be Jewish adds an irresistible note of poignancy throughout—an unexpected index of the need to hide one’s ethnic identity in such a social environment as the film describes. Also, this doubles the pleasure of her acknowledgement of Jewish identity at the end of the film. I have no idea whether this possibility exists in the novel or is Slavin’s invention or Dern’s own contribution; but the note of this possibility that Dern deliciously sounds is exact in its rightful measure. However, perhaps the most surprising performance comes in the role of Fred, the Newman’s next-door Union Crusader neighbor who in some ways mirrors Lawrence’s timidity: it’s Meat Loaf!—billed here as Meat Loaf Aday.

The U.S. Political Film Society bestowed its human rights prize on Focus. The film isn’t perfect; at times it’s not very good. But it begs to be seen for the vivid, even riveting way that it presents its message, especially given the them/us atmosphere that the current Bush administration has conjured to the detriment of ideals and values that we as Americans should hold dear.