HOMECOMING (Jon Jost, 2004)

An American family in crisis is at the heart of the single most brilliant American film of the 1990s, The Bed You Sleep In (1993). Set in Oregon timber country, it is a trenchant account of a family within the context of regional economic downturn in the mid-1990s. A lumber mill is in the midst of a timber shortage caused by (among other things) stringent environmental laws. The opening image encapsulates the moral, emotional and social complexity of this circumstance: the mill’s smokestack belching out smoke into the air, conveying both productivity and pollution. A train moving from screen left to screen right, in another long shot, reinforces the ambiguity of the preceding image while also establishing the patient, steady, analytical pace of the piece. Logging cranes in operation, resembling gigantic metal insects, simultaneously suggest useful labor and alien intrusiveness.

Ray owns and operates the mill. In addition to the timber shortage, the mill must contend with the housing slump wrought by an overall ailing economy. Ray bemoans to his partner his personal expenses: house payments, car loan, tuition for his daughter, Tracy. He concocts a scheme that his partner rejects as overextending the business: importing logs from New Zealand and selling them at profit to Japan. Ray chides Tracy’s boyfriend while fly fishing with him: “Fishing is about taking your time. It’s not about getting ahead of yourself.” At work, though, financial stress constantly pushes Ray ahead of himself. “It’s all getting too complicated,” his wife, Jean, tells her best friend.

Ray and Jean’s marriage is happy and deeply affectionate. However, Ray’s humanity makes it difficult for him to keep work stress and family life separate and distinct from one another. On a fishing outing with Jean, he is shy when she suggests their making love right there, out in the wild. Of course, he accedes to her intimate invitation, however, and the event further complicates our grasp of the distinction/relationship between humanity and nature that underpins much of what we see in the film. All marriages should be as mutually supportive as this one appears to be.

Nevertheless, there is a family secret that has disrupted things in the past and threatens to do so anew. Jean is Ray’s second wife, and he clandestinely began his affair with her while still married to his first wife, and this has imposed a burden of guilt on Jean, and a lingering suspicion of Ray’s capacity to lie convincingly—a suspicion further compounded by her own guilt, because she in a sense abetted him in this long-ago lie. Overcompensating for her guilt, Jean has always regarded Tracy, Ray’s child from his first marriage, as her own daughter. The love and trust she has poured into this child have given her a way to deal with and repress her guilt, which nevertheless has erupted periodically, we learn, whenever they quarrel as accusations against Ray. “When have I ever lied to you?” Ray at one point asks her, and we are convinced that he never has and never would lie to her. But he did deceive his first wife and, too, fell out of love with her and, although on both fronts Jean was the beneficiary, her own sense of complicit guilt won’t allow her to forget Ray’s past “bad” though very human—one might say, natural—behavior.

The intersection of the socioeconomic stress, which affects the community, not just Ray and Jean, and the couple’s own marital history is one of the most extraordinarily complex elaborations on the theme of individuals in society that one can find in American cinema. Disaster awaits the two, and when it comes it’s triggered by freshman Tracy, away at college, whose women’s support group has convinced her that her father, whom she calls “Ray,” sexually abused her as a child. Memories are popping up in her head—not “memories” exactly, but “images,” she writes Jean, explaining that she doesn’t know when, if ever, she will be able to return home. Of course, cinema consists of “images,” and if there were objective validity to Tracy’s claims of “repressed memory syndrome” Jost would have no difficulty in establishing the purported abuse by way of flashbacks, or a prologue, or an epilogue. But while we are privy to the film, Jean, in the film, is not, and Tracy’s at best ambiguous, likely untrue, accusations have the force of subjective validity. When Jean reads Tracy’s letter aloud to Ray, which she somewhat theatrically does rather than allowing him to read the letter for himself, Tracy’s sincerity is unquestionable.

The situation is tragic, for Jean, driven to “believe” Tracy in order at least to try to assuage her own complicated guilt, demands that Ray tell her “the truth,” which there is no way for him to establish, and which she is incapable of accepting on the basis of its indeterminableness. The marriage unravels; emotionally, each family member is between a rock and a hard place. (Tracy never appears in the film.) From Tracy’s boyfriend, who is insensitive and dense, Jean learns that Tracy has committed suicide; Jean commits suicide; Ray commits suicide. (Ray’s suicide, by shotgun to the head, is shown from start to finish, and it occurs out in nature, out in the wild where Ray is accustomed to fish.) In each case, the motive is the same: a total loss of peace of mind. (We imagine that “objectively,” but wrongly, that the trains of suicides will “establish” in the press the certainty of Ray’s guilt vis-à-vis his daughter.) Closing shots stressing again community powerfully convey, again, the relation between this family’s tragedies and the socioeconomic context; but they accomplish something else besides: they wring from these tragedies a metaphor precisely for the community’s socioeconomic stress—a long problematic American history that’s taking its toll. This is shattering cinema.

The writer, director, cinematographer and editor of The Bed You Sleep In is Jon Jost, perhaps (along with David Lynch) the greatest living American filmmaker. After making a number of films abroad, including the superlative Oui Non (2003), Chicago-born Jost returned to the United States, to Newport, Oregon, on the Pacific coast, to make Homecoming, another film about another American family in crisis, and with a title as withering as the film itself. Extra-textually, the “homecoming” is Jost’s own; textually, it refers to an American soldier, killed in Iraq, whose body returns home for burial, helping to bring his family to grief, threatening to undo its already frayed and wobbly integrity, and thereby exposing, by extension, a deep American divide. Jost has said that the emotionally ripped-apart families in both The Bed You Sleep In and Homecoming are metaphors for America itself. The film ends with a printed indictment of key members of the Bush administration, calling their actions pertaining to the murderous invasion and occupation of Iraq both impeachable and treasonous.

The family in Homecoming is never given a family name. It is a family that is not a family—a loose suspension of isolated individuals rather than a functioning combinate organism. It is also a blended family consisting of Jeffrey, a businessman, and Mattie, who works as her husband’s secretary, and Mattie’s two sons. Steve is also Jeffrey’s son; Chris, who at 26 is six years older than Steve, is not. On the other hand, Chris’s stepfather is the only father that Chris has known. The absent biological father, whom Chris considers visiting in Anchorage, Alaska, is a presence in the film—an invisible part of the blended family, especially insofar as Chris, who is unemployed and irresponsible, is a bone of contention between Jeffrey and Mattie, and the absent biological father more or less sums up the difficulty between them. If I were to apply traditional terms to the narrative, I would have to say that the film’s protagonist, who is also absent, is Steve. He constitutes an even weightier presence in his absence than Chris’s father does.

Steve’s death in Iraq—he is drowned as the result of a ludicrous transportation accident—and his burial in Oregon (we never even see the corpse) provide the occasion for the family’s gravesite implosion. To cope with his loss, Jeffrey obsesses on the letter about Steve that he and Mattie received from Steve’s commanding officer; having just buried his son, Jeffrey insists he will write the CO to thank him. The distribution of characters within the burial frames stresses the lack of family unity, even in grief; but Chris, at a considerable distance from and not facing his mother and stepfather, seems especially alienated. Nevertheless, he makes an overture for family inclusion, asking Jeffrey, when he writes the CO, also to thank the man on his behalf. Throughout the film, one character shuts another out cold, and here again it happens. Jeffrey tells Chris to write his own letter. He thinks he is chastising Chris for not taking individual responsibility, but he is shutting out the boy from what is left of the family, oblivious to the healing potential in shared family grief and, most cruelly, oblivious to the fact that, just as he has lost a son, Chris has lost a (half-)brother. Chris, fragile to begin with, explodes, giving full expression to his disgust with the war and to the pointless, unnecessary circumstance of his brother’s death. It is a defense of his bond with his deceased brother, but Jeffrey hears instead a verbal assault on his lost son. To retaliate, Jeffrey shuts out Chris further and harder, referring to Steve as “my son,” in effect assaulting Chris with the fact that Chris is not his son. A low-level shot of a small American flag planted at Steve’s burial plot flings back and forth in improbably contrary winds, as if shaking its banner to say “No!” The colors of the flag—red, blue and white—match the colors of the cap that Chris wears throughout the film—this, the symbolical connection of brothers that the father of one boy and stepfather of the other cannot grasp because of his solipsistic sense of family. (For Jeffrey, the paramount issue is that Steve embraced his values and Chris has not.) At another burial later on, another gravesite will be adorned by both a flag and the cap: a fatality of the two wars, the one in Iraq and the one at home.

Jost is not a reductive filmmaker but an expansive one who is drawn to realistic complexities. Chris’s suicide, at one level an attempt to mimic his brother’s death, is (in the Freudian sense) overdetermined; it is the result of both a train of events and a complex of motivating factors, including Chris’s rejection by a former girlfriend. This is not a simple film in which Bush II’s Iraq war causes this and that at home. Rather, the war enters the mix of human lives, contributing to their disastrous course along with a great many other factors—all the problems, in fact, that predated this latest U.S. military misadventure. There is even an elusive sense that the war, a kind of immense distraction, is somehow an attempt to escape or evade the problems at home.

I hate the term “experimental filmmaker,” because it makes Jost and other filmmakers whose work I cherish sound like mad scientists trying willy-nilly to see what works on screen. Like Chaplin, Ford and Welles, Jost is an expressive artist. As is his wont, for Homecoming he has marshaled an artillery of distancing devices that (properly) undermine the narrative flow and the capacity of films to lull the viewer into a comfortable, cozy feeling. No one could ever mistake his work for that of Spielberg or Zemeckis. Jost wouldn’t be caught dead flattering our vanity, or his own, by encouraging in us, his audience, simplistic, self-congratulatory responses. He doesn’t make films in order to manipulate us; he makes films in order to express his ideas, his way of seeing things, so that he can share these with us. (Manipulating, sharing: two opposite motives in filmmaking.) Jost doesn’t want us to be drawn into his scenes of family crisis in Homecoming; he wants us to stand sufficiently outside, and be sufficiently alert, to grasp these scenes of crisis. Rewarding, his art is also stringent, demanding. Thus he gives us, among other things, the following: images that seem to disintegrate before our eyes; “place” shots that, at first, seem like Ozuvian inserts but by their number accumulate into a visual character that helps explain the lives unfolding in their midst; split screens, with the camera seeming to move from one full-frame image to another full-frame image that provides another perspective on the same event, or some new but related activity; scenes where one character is audible but another, with whom the first character is speaking, isn’t, where we must take pains to watch as well as listen so we gather up the combinate gist. (I am reminded of one of my favorite films, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 The Passenger, where we sometimes must rely on what we hear because the crucial visual information is just beyond the camera’s view.) More restrained than in the past, Jost is careful not to dazzle us with flights of technical virtuosity; but he does ask that we, his audience, fortify ourselves with a good draught of Keatsian negative capability.

One of the qualities of Jost’s cinema is its ambiguity—not the manipulative kind that tricks an audience (the Sixth Sense-kind), but the kind that approximates the richness, the complexity, the mysteriousness of human reality. Hence, the elliptical nature of his filmmaking, as when we can’t quite hear what someone is saying, or when someone asks a question and a cut keeps us from hearing the answer. One of my favorite ambiguities in Homecoming may be of my own invention, but Jost’s kind of filmmaking certainly encourages the mood that predisposes me to “discover” it. Jamie, Chris’s girlfriend, is as hard a worker as Chris is not; she cleans motel units. Jamie lives in a house that her parents left to her. Behind the glass in a door we see a “Bush-Cheney” sign, one that is exceedingly small and, with the “Cheney” part partly out of view behind the wood of the door, seemingly half-hearted. What does it mean? Is Jamie for Bush? It would seem so, except for the size and only partial visibility of the sign. These exceptions led me, at least, to a marvelous train of conjecture. We first see Jamie reading a book—and not the New Testament; can someone who reads, someone who works hard, in her spare time, possibly be for Bush? If not, is the Bush sign a token of respect for the political inclinations of her deceased parents? Or is it protection against communal outrage? (In suburban Shreveport, Louisiana, my brother and his wife had their Kerry-Edwards lawn signs stolen, and when they repeatedly replaced these, the community culprits, à la KKK, burned the signs, jeopardizing the Gruneses’ home, their lives and the lives of their pets.) There is more to this possibility of communal outrage. Solipsistic (like his stepfather), Chris seems oblivious to Jamie’s reality, even as he attempts to reconnect with her following his homosexual seduction by a court-appointed psychologist. (We never know what offense Chris committed.) But we think we know something that Chris doesn’t; it is at least possible that Jamie herself is working her way through to a fuller understanding of her own sexuality. The “Bush-Cheney” sign in her window, then, may be a reflex of denial or an attempt to protect herself from judgment in her community. It’s ambiguous. I don’t know. I like not knowing, because human nature is ambiguous, and because Jamie herself may be at an indeterminate point in a process of self-discovery. But that’s me; I also like not hearing all the dialogue with perfect clarity, because I don’t find it necessary to hear every word when the human emotions involved come through clearly enough. The friend with whom I saw the film, also a fan of Jost’s work, did not feel the same way.

Given the film’s postscript (sober and straightforward, unlike the poetical postscript, say, that ends Jost’s otherwise tremendous 1990 Sure Fire), we can find nothing ambiguous about how Jost feels about the war. As I do, Jost opposes the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, whose motive, he believes, was the enticement of Iraqi oil. I would add only that George W. Bush was as interested in lining the pockets of cronies in the Texas oil industry as he was in meeting the energy needs of a nation that has been slow to develop alternative sources of energy. I quote from Jost’s online journal (May 19, 2004): “Meantime[,] the news pours forth the ugly truth which our moralizing President, a self-claimed Christian busy doing God’s work, so he would claim, has set into motion. America has, again, become a spawning ground of violence, inflicting horrors on others while piously claiming otherwise. In blunt words highest members of our government—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bush[—]are in any legitimate sense of the [term] war criminals, and should be tried no less than those who were tried in Nuremberg or Tokyo, and should be sentenced appropriately. Mr. Bush, known for his eagerness to use the death penalty in Texas, would certainly be eligible for such a sentence. In the meantime[,] impeachment is more than in order.”

Jost’s Homecoming isn’t polemical, however. It doesn’t thrash out, overtly, the American quarrel over a war that, coupled with Bush’s obscene tax cuts for the rich, has drained the nation’s financial resources to a level of astounding (and record) budget deficits, in addition to creating a high number of American casualties and murdering 150,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children. Days before Bush’s 2004 election, because of the repeated lies of those in his administration, especially a truly demonic vice-president, 62% of Americans still wrongly believed that deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had participated in some way in the planning of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. in 2001. In the film, we hear on the radio about the capture of Saddam Hussein. A soldier who participated in that event has come home to his family—alive, unlike Steve. The ridiculousness, the horror, the unfairness of war thus all comingle.

This is a beautifully acted film, but I can’t tell you who plays what part because I’m unable to locate any cast list. Those who play Mattie and Chris give the film’s two best performances. It is a bonus that the actor who plays Chris looks like a young Tom Cruise, because this adds a persistent jab at the kind of movies in which Cruise appears. The person who plays Chris, unlike Cruise, can act. Here is the cast listing: Ryan Harper Gray, Kathryn Sennella, Keith Scales, Kateri Eastman, Steve Taylor.

Homecoming was shot using digital video. Video is looking a whole lot better than it used to.

Homecoming is the best American film of 2004.

DRIFTERS (John Grierson, 1929)

Commercial fishing is a humble occupation, and herring fishermen are among the most humble of the humble. What I love most about John Grierson’s poetic (not poetical) documentary about North Sea herring fishermen—Britain’s Grierson, incidentally, coined the word documentary—is that it so well reflects the humility that Santiago feels vis-à-vis Nature in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Showing people just doing their job is a good way to express this humility and to keep it free from taint of rhetoric. Grierson doesn’t exploit his fishermen; he doesn’t “Sovietize” them with grandiloquence.
     Drifters is a silent film. (Turn off the sound of your television if tacked-on musical accompaniment threatens to rob the film of an important dimension: a suggestion of the silence of time that swallows up us all.) Its opening extreme long-shot is magnificent: an overhead view of the fishing village in which the twittering of birds in the sky, moving screen-left, ironically comments on the illusion of human permanence that a sturdy man walking at dawn, screen-right as if in denial or indifference, projects. A closer long-shot shows a quartet of fishermen walking screen-left to their ship to recommence their labor. Other fishermen join the four. Shots of the sea’s tumultuousness, and close-ups of birds fishing for breakfast, follow. By associating the birds with the fishermen, Grierson subtly transfers the ephemeral impression from the opening image of birds to the humans. Grierson edited as well as directed.
     The rolling rhythm of the sea, in which the ship and its laborers participate, is one aspect of the film; onboard, the division and concert of labor are two other aspects. Grierson harmoniously unites our divided engagement; we identify, imaginatively participate, and we objectively observe. We’re onboard the ship and in our seats.

FIVE STAR FINAL (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931)

Joseph Randall, city editor of the New York Gazette, is instructed by its owner to revert to sensationalism in order to bolster sales. The revival of coverage of a twenty-year-old murder trial ends in a double suicide and assorted wrecked lives.
     From a play by Louis Weitzenkom, Mervyn LeRoy’s Five Star Final is, regrettably, still timely. It alternates between the riveting realism of the newspaper building, including Randall’s office and the always-active newsroom, and the stagebound melodrama of the suicidal couple who want only to obliterate the past and keep their daughter free of its taint. LeRoy makes the most of some scenes and can do nothing with others. In one scene, in Randall’s office, where the film is generally at its strongest, LeRoy errs badly by omitting a reaction, whether visible or, if off-screen, audible, from Randall’s secretary, Miss Taylor, when a phone call to Randall brings the news of the twin tragedies. Miss Taylor has assumed the role of Randall’s carping conscience, and LeRoy’s omission leaves us hanging in anticipation.
     But this is a tough, entertaining film, one that is sparked by a motif: Randall’s frequent, compulsive washing his hands in the small restroom attached to his office. LeRoy provides closeups of this activity. We immediately grasp that Randall is trying to wash his hands of the “dirt” that his job plunges them into; but, later, the image seems to carry more weight as the earlier soapiness is replaced by sheer water. Randall seems to be washing his hands for all of us.
     Edward G. Robinson is dynamic as Randall; but somewhat stealing the show is spirited Aline MacMahon, who plays Miss Tyler, who never gives up on the man she not-so-secretly loves.
     Alas, Boris Karloff is ludicrous as a sleazy reporter.