Transparent Things

When I went to see this play, one of the finest ever written, at this theater a couple of years ago, I sat enraptured for four hours with one twenty-minute intermezzo, so magnificent was the acting.  This is the exception.  If poems are the dalliances of youth and epics the diaries of age, novels plausibly fit the middle road.  They are complete but rarely epic; and their breadth is attenuated by motifs that, unless the author is of staggering talent, have to be repeated to have any substance.  What then of the novella, that undernourished cousin of the novel so relevant to the cinematographic attention span we have developed over the last couple of generations?  Eighty to one hundred sixty pages of leanness, streamlined prosody whose brief glimpse often allows for sustained lyricism?  Sometimes it will be wasted on a short story drawn out in excruciating detail (I will spare you the names of the countless culprits); occasionally, however, you get a work of divine perfection, such as this novella.

Our protagonist is a humble American fellow by the name of Hugh – Hugh Person, as is the running joke.  The most interesting things about Hugh (according to Hugh) are that he has a Ph.D., is a confirmed Esperantist, speaks fluent French and is half−Canadian (which influences his accent in French).  He is accompanied in this, his fourth trip to Switzerland, residence of the novella’s author at the time of its writing, by an especially wraithlike omniscient narrator who shadows his every step.  The narrator is soon revealed to be R., an established novelist already in the silver years of life and the subject of Hugh Person’s previous trip to Switzerland many years before.  On that trip, as happens in novellas, Person finds Armande Chamar (her surname not quite a “peacock fan” as she claims), a lecherous excuse for an eternal, knee-wobbling beauty who becomes his wife, his pain, and then the reason it takes him so long to return to the Alps with a clear conscience.

Nabokov connoisseurs, whose company I probably deserve, will often say that a Nabokov story without death is a rarity.  So it is the next trip that proves to be fatal, and who can pity Armande when the narrator states:

Was she faithful to him throughout the months of their marriage spent in frail, lax, merry America?  During their first and last winter there she went a few times to ski without him … While alone, he forbade himself to dwell in thought on the banalities of betrayal, such as holding hands with a chap or permitting him to kiss her good night.  Those banalities were to him quite as excruciating to imagine as would be voluptuous intercourse.  A steel door of the spirit remained securely shut as long as she was away, but no sooner had she arrived, her face brown and shiny, her figure as trim as that of an air hostess, in that blue coat with flat buttons as bright as counters of gold, than something ghastly opened up in him and a dozen lithe athletes started swarming around and prying her apart in all the motels of his mind.

After such behavior (we are informed that his estimates were not far off the mark), there is little to do with dear Armande except end her treachery in the manner that all stage villainesses see their comeuppance.  Once the deed is done, Hugh is sent back home frail, lax, but not particularly merry.  His respite is a quarter of his life lived hitherto, and he returns to Switzerland one last time at precisely the age of forty.

And what he comes back for is the mystery of the novella.  There is another girl named Julia who hovers like some succoring angel in and out of our condemned man’s life, and there are the machinations of R. who is everywhere and only really in Switzerland.  Nabokov’s prose, whose only fault is an overreliance on foreign words and parentheses, has rarely bloomed in such lilac shades as in this sad tale of revenge and love: one Person’s journey to a beautiful country of beautiful memories where nothing ever becomes transparent to anyone except R. and the reader.  And when all has been accomplished according to plan, there is night, “which is always a giant but [which] was especially terrible,” and not only because it is a “common grave of sleep.”

Frailty

What you believe and what you know: some envision these two sources in confluence like the twin mouths of a river.  Amidst the thankless difficulties incumbent upon those of us who do believe to prove that our beliefs are justified (belief by definition cannot be proven, but no one seems to listen to that argument), we are confronted by moments of terror and, I daresay, hallucinatory images.  For brief interstices in time we sense what is in others, what makes them tick, what they see as right and wrong; in short, we see their dreams, wishes, fears, and hopes.  These glimpses into our fellow men and women are necessarily rapid, almost flash-like.  Are they the truth about that person? 

This device is old hat in fiction, especially in short stories where characters are often defined by a single gesture, a repeated word, a facial expression when no one else is supposed to be looking.  And what do we think we see, deluded beasts that we are?  That will depend on a number of factors, most of which can be easily dispelled by modern science as irrational or unreal.  Perhaps that nice middle-aged neighbor who always sports a crooked smile in the window of her nice middle-aged house has a different agenda when handling her children, or talking to her sister, or dealing with the much younger and prettier woman who just pinched her husband.  And that high school dropout, a young man who listens to violent music and wears violent clothes, perhaps he is just a lonely soul in search of acceptance, even if acceptance means leaping into the bottomless cesspool of nonconformity.  Which of these two would law enforcement authorities have an easier time picturing as a criminal?  Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men?  Using a most original format, this film attempts to answer that strange question.

There are four characters of note, two brothers, Fenton and Adam Meiks, their widower Father (Bill Paxton), and the FBI agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe), who one warm night is approached in his office by a grownup Fenton (Matthew McConaughey).  Fenton has a rather nasty confession to make: he knows the identity of the serial murderer known as the God’s Hand Killer because that person is none other than his own brother.  The film alternates between flashbacks, as recounted by Fenton to Doyle, of the boys’ childhood with their Father and the present day, where the two men sit gaming details out of one another that could only be known by the police, the killer, or someone who, like Fenton, abetted his brother by not stopping him.  Doyle asks and receives pertinent information, but never considers the possibility that the person sitting in front of him might be much smarter than he is.  But the thought crosses our mind, as do other thoughts.  And knowing that we may be missing something, we turn our attention to the flashbacks.

This is where Frailty distinguishes itself from all other films of its genre, if it can fairly stuffed into just one pigeonhole.  Fenton tells Doyle about his Father, a man of great faith who was informed by God that he had a mission: to seek out those who have grossly violated divine law and to mete out punishment with an axe.  When their Father touches someone, he can see within their conscience and determine what if any crimes lie hidden.  The kicker is that Father Meiks also enlists his two young boys, who could not possibly wield as tempered a sense of right and wrong, to help him in his vigilante pursuits.  At this point, the viewer has a choice.  Either the Father is mad and we must look on this production as thinly-veiled satire or misled manipulation, or the director, writer, and protagonist (all of whom happen to be Paxton) are obsessed with showing us a side of man that is so primal as to be forgotten in our modern day of hedging, relativity, and cultural sensitivity: that of moral justice.  There is no trick dialogue or occultism.  What we witness is theurgy in its extreme form, as the film proposes a storyline ingrained in an impossible belief and then follows that trail into darkness from which there cannot be any return.  One image, an image above all other images, is seen towards the end that justifies the actions of one of the characters, and I have never been able to remove that image from my head.  Nor have I tried.

The English Patient

This succulent film, winner of a considerable number of awards, is probably one of those few cinematic adaptations which rise above their literary sources.  An unsurprising assessment given that the whole premise is standard modern novel fare: shortly after the Second World War, a severely burned patient (Ralph Fiennes), English only in manner and mastery of the language, lies in a hospital bed in an Italian villa and tells a tale of love lost.  His nurse (Juliette Binoche) indulges him knowing all the while that even in these pacific surroundings he will not last more than a month. The narrative unfolds in pieces, flashbacks of moments that mattered to the Patient, points of emotions and thoughts that seem now, in death’s proximity, essential to understanding his personality and soul.  There is nothing original nor offensive about such a premise, which is ultimately a diary composed by a mystery writer with aesthetic pretensions. The payoff will not nearly be as scintillating as the telling, but that we already know as well.

Over time we come to see that the so-called English Patient is really a Hungarian, Count László de Almásy, and that the love of his short life was a married woman called Katherine Clifton (Kristen Scott Thomas).  Katherine’s fate can only have been tragic in light of the apathy with which the Count faces his final days, but this again is no surprise.  Something so designed for disaster can only be redeemed by art, beautiful prose and ideas woven into lush scenery that spread like nymphaeaceae across a lake.  Speaking at length pains the Count, a devoted student of this Greek historian; so in good literary fashion he shrouds his desires and thoughts in paradigms lifted from books more real to him than the life he is about to relinquish.  In this type of situation even poems, the most touching that his mind could retain, would not be out of place.  But we do not get poems.  The film’s late director smartly substitutes pictures for scenes, especially between Katherine and her lover, and allows his talented cast to improvise on the standard forbidden wartime love theme that in lesser hands could easily have succumbed to some of cinema’s most tedious clichés.  Fiennes and Thomas are not only superb, they are convincing both as a couple (which is easy given their chemistry) and as individuals who will themselves towards doom all the while persuaded that what they have cannot be anything less than right.  The scenes in North Africa, where the real Almásy spent years researching ethnographic obscurities, are gorgeous and filled with just enough chiaroscuro to reinvent the patterns they loosely follow.  Predictably, Katherine’s husband (Colin Firth) is a pitiable creature who is the Hungarian’s inferior in every way; but Almásy is not without his faults.  For all his talent and culture he cannot see how destructive love can be when it becomes a matter of concealment and adventure.  You have nothing when you are not ready to or simply cannot show the world in whose arms you truly wish to die.  And he and Katherine, so in love yet so aware of how unfair life has been, have barely more than that.

Without huddling another work under this review’s shade, I should add that the strength of the film, Katherine and Almásy, is watered down in the book to an affair parallel to another love story, as if mimicking the quartet format made popular by this famous man of letters.  The nurse, whose name is Hana, spends a great deal of the novel intertwined with the sapper Kip (Naveen Andrews), an Anglo-Indian who provides a convenient postcolonial touchstone for the novel’s themes.  Kip is a wise and thoughtful figure, often brooding so that his mood matches the color of his skin – a horrific cliché which should tell you exactly how little effort was put into making him original.  Moreover, as a sapper, it is his task to remove the mines placed beneath the good earth by the barbarian Europeans whose languages he speaks and whose women he has loved.  I should and will leave the matter at that.  There is also another character of considerable force bearing the name of an Italian painter (Willem Defoe).  If the film were an engine, he would certainly be the wrench that derails the whole exercise and makes a few decisions that can only be described as cowardly.  The agenda of this Caravaggio, like that of art itself, is gain.  But while an artist wants to gain in talent and experience to achieve self-perfection, this Caravaggio has no qualms about selling people off for a handful of silver.  And maybe he keeps his hands stretched out towards the sky just a bit too long.

The Song of the Flying Fish

If you are familiar with my eating habits, you will forgive my repulsion at this story's most distasteful title.  As it were my disgust has no basis in fact, as the gilded gills in question are actually "eccentric and expensive toys" made of that most precious of metals.  They are also, for the time being, the property of Mr. Peregine Smart.  The elderly Smart is an indiscreet and wealthy collector of objects that might only interest similarly wealthy collectors.  No fewer than ten characters are sprinkled in the story's first three pages, one of whom is the humble priest and detective of the crime we assume will involve the titular species.  Almost all of these personalities, who cannot be explained in a short story without the thin film of stereotype, find themselves residing in close vicinity to one another in a provincial English town and, being men of some stature and financial freedom, begin to interact and share their theories of success. 

 

The most eccentric of these men is a certain Count de Lara, a French nobleman of Tartar countenance, who spares no effort to explain the 'mysteries of the Orient' to the more scientifically–minded of his colleagues.  Chesterton adores these types of debates, which are not really debates but opposing pamphlets, and to his credit always makes them shine with the gleam of novelty.  Of interest to the happenings in our story, De Lara includes several instances of thievery of a most baffling nature.  One particularly magnificent example takes place "outside an English barrack in the most modernized part of Cairo":

A sentinel was standing outside the grating of an iron gateway looking out between the bars on to the street.  There appeared outside the gate a beggar, barefoot and in native rags, who asked him, in English that was startlingly distinct and refined, for a certain official document kept in the building for safety.  The soldier told the man, of course, that he could not come inside; and the man answered, smiling: 'What is inside and what is outside?'  The soldier was still staring scornfully through the iron grating when he gradually realized that, though neither he nor the gate had moved, he was actually standing in the street and looking in at the barrack yard, where the beggar stood still and smiling and equally motionless.  Then, when the beggar turned towards the building, the sentry awoke to such sense as he had left, and shouted a warning to all the soldiers within the gated enclosure to hold the prisoner fast.  'You won't get out of here anyhow,' he said vindictively.  Then the beggar said in his silvery voice: 'What is outside and what is inside?'  And the soldier, still glaring through the same bars, saw that they were once more between him and the street, where the beggar stood free and smiling with a paper in his hand.

The superiority of the spiritual over the material needs no parable, nor is Chesterton's didacticism the least bit coy; but as he elaborates in this other book, a confession of his faith that has few parallels in English literature,  miracles only seem to count when something actually occurs or when some weirdness is perpetrated.  As his mouthpiece Father Brown quips, "all the supernatural acts we have yet heard of seem to be crimes."  

 

It is then of no surprise when we behold Mr. Smart "carrying the great glass bowl as reverently as if it had been the relic of a saint," because that is precisely the type of idolatrous appurtenance that Mr. Smart would worship.  In fact, one short paragraph brings together all the images necessary for Chesterton's symbolism:

Outside, the last edges of the sunset still clung to the corners of the green square; but inside, a lamp had already been kindled; and in the mingling of the two lights the coloured globe glowed like some monstrous jewel, and the fantastic outlines of the fiery fishes seemed to give it, indeed, something of the mystery of a talisman, like strange shapes seen by a seer in the crystal of doom.  Over the old man's shoulder the olive face of Imlack Smith stared like a sphinx. 

Imlack Smith, it should be noted, is a banker of a most bankerish disposition; what I mean by that I will leave to you to determine.  What happens subsequently is far beyond the reach of his tepid imagination, and yet well within the bounds of rational guesswork.  And while featuring one of the best short sentences ever written in English ("But the cold breath of business had sufficed to disperse the fumes of transcendental talk, and the guests began one after another to say farewell"), this is probably also the only story to contain both the phrases "spiritual burglary," and "a burst of taciturnity."  It is also, from start to finish, one of Father Brown's most exquisite adventures, and the competition Chesterton provides him makes that assessment all the more impressive.  There is far too much for me to praise in this square space, so I will leave to you to find a copy of this tale and relish every sentence, every analogy, every conclusion.  Pity that my aversion to seafood initially made me shun this gem in favor of more palatable options such as "The Doom of the Darnaways," and "The Three Tools of Death."  Those are, by the way, great stories.  Yet this special tale has something so powerful and yet so clear that our attention is seized and twisted into odd unfamiliar shapes.  Soothing, anodyne logic is provided in a race against an unbelievable crime; but sometimes "there are things even the police cars and wires won't outstrip."

The New World

In the opening scene of this visionary film, John Smith (Colin Farrell), the hero of American history textbooks, is spared.  I should rephrase that, he is not killed.  But he is left to die by his captain (Christopher Plummer) who quickly decides that he would be better served returning to England for supplies.  As the only professional soldier among the men who founded this colony that just celebrated its quadricentennial, Smith is given tacit approval to poke around the local forests and see whether he can’t find some trading partners among the autochthonous peoples.  There is even El Doradoan talk about a rich king up the river, a dangerous journey for which Smith is appointed.  But of course Smith, played with hungover hesitation by Farrell, finds something much more precious than a city of gold.    He finds love.

Love in the form of the native Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher), a young daughter of a menacing Algonquian chief.  This plot thread as well as the inevitable battle scene (which, to its credit, is wholly bereft of gore), are the only clichés of an amazingly refreshing interpretation of an old chestnut: the conflict between the colonists, who were not really colonists but refugees, and the natives, who didn’t regard themselves as landowners but as nomads and tribesmen.  The land of America, they would have argued, belonged neither to them nor to the Jamestown settlers.  It belonged to whatever animist deities guided their thoughts and provoked their cries.  Theirs is a culture of vigilance and mistrust, because they could be ambushed by any other tribe or any rogue animals.   There are numerous instances of the wildness of the Algonquians, and the film smartly permits conversation in misunderstood terms, exactly as it must have happened, with each side utterly flummoxed by the existence much less the words of the other.  In time, the parties acknowledge that a certain degree of cooperation will be necessary.  All that remains is determining who will give up more in order to secure mutual survival.  

History aside for the moment, we must understand the harshness of the interaction as grueling and repugnant, with gunpowder ultimately triumphing over war hatchets.  We know the outcome of this confrontation, of the absurd arrogance of the colonists who themselves were in great number victims of persecution in their birthlands.  As the captain declares to a lovelorn Smith:

This is Eden.  We have escaped the Old World and its bondage .... This is the place where a man may rise to his true stature.

But, as we also know, there is more to this story than colonial exploitation.  Director Terrence Malick, one of the most unheralded geniuses of modern cinema (owing in no small part to his sporadic activity) parallels the pointless gesturing and miscommunication of the armies with the inner thoughts of Smith and his love.  They speak in voiceovers that embrace the melodrama of Elizabethan soliloquies, and their hearts dive and spin around each other in shared yearning for escape.  Old Europe falling for New America, one would think.  But again Malick diverts our attention from these easy equations and sets it back on the simple intercourse of different humans with different perspectives.  The Captain and his cohorts have many Biblical verses to offer as justification for their actions, and Smith has little but the solace of the boundless nature of which he has just become part.  He notices and begins to worship the beauty of the earth, but he returns time and again to his Pocahontas, who in the film’s final third also catches the eye of a new character, the widower John Rolfe (Christian Bale).   

There is so much to commend, from the style and exquisite artistic restraint to the colors, the sounds, the freshness of every encounter and every word, translated, or, more often, left to buzz in our ear like the chirps of an unfamiliar bird.  The score alternates between Wagner and Mozart, an anachronism so perfectly sewn into a film that seeks artistic authenticity that one cannot help admiring its boldness.  Heavenly pieces of music do seem to drift in from another, higher plane, an Eden or a “place where man may rise to his true stature,” and they are fitting selections and repeated as leitmotivs.  Gradually, Malick informs us that we are watching neither a true love story nor a historical epic, but what a transcendent memory might retain of these first steps.  The way Rolfe looks at Pocahontas, whom he baptizes into his faith as Rebecca; the way she asks him simply, “Are you kind?”; the lyricism of each inner thought; the short and pensive shots of a world that seems microscopic because the colonists know so little about it; the promises exchanged and broken.  Even christened, married, and a mother, Rebecca cannot shed her gods, and for her family she thanks the sun.  “Give me a humble heart,” she mutters in the face of all these events.  In the end, we have the finest a film that eschews conventional plot can offer: a collection of memories strung together by purpose and desire.  And what memories!