Une Vieille Maîtresse

It is said that every man has one woman who destroyed him; what this destruction precisely entails and whether or not the man is the better for this havoc is left to the imagination of the listener.  What is interesting about such an observation is that it has held true despite the overt sexual liberation of the postwar period.  Once upon a time a poet's soul was devastated by a princesse lointaine who remained lointaine; now it is a unclothed body he cannot forsake.  The reasons for such mutability are probably many, but the most likely is man's desire for a muse.  Of the two genders, men are most definitely the greater idealists, with the fact that they endure fewer reminders of their mortal frame throughout a lifetime contributing to this luxury of perspective.  Men will write an ode to a woman's beauty, or her voluptuousness, or the love that he cannot overcome or replace, and that woman will more often than not still be in the throes of youthful perfection, every curve unjagged, every corpuscle unblemished.  With this repining for glory gone comes a certain nonchalance towards present time actions, namely relationships following upon this destruction.  In fact, his thralldom to a former mistress might provide him with a convenient excuse for his lack of commitment, or worse, for his lack of faithfulness, which in most of us is nothing more than a fear of commitment.  Old themes, yes, but nicely packaged and ribboned in this recent film. 

The plot is simplicity itself, which in these types of tales is usually a good sign. 1835, Paris: a dashing young rake, Ryno de Marigny (first-timer Fu'ad Ait Aattou) has been chosen to marry the delicate, virginal and unmistakably wealthy Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida).  Before the wedding, Hermangarde's grandmother decides to have a fireside chat with Ryno regarding his past affairs and smartly leaves her whole night unbooked.  Ryno proceeds with his studied guile, flirting gently with the woman almost three times his age, and finally avers that he could not marry Hermangarde if he did not love her so passionately.  The grandmother and the viewer know, however, exactly what passions Ryno has been harboring: according to rumor and the brief scenes that preface this long conversation, Ryno has been involved for ten years with an illegitimate Spanish woman (Asia Argento) who, in the year of our Lord 1835, is now thirty-six and past a respectable age for that type of behavior.  She is a product of the previous century ("the age of Laclos," quip a few characters at different junctures) and therefore not subject to the same rules and expectations that might bind, say, the artless Hermangarde.  Ridiculous details are added as they become available: the mistress, known only as Vellini, was born to a Spanish bullfighter and an Italian duchess, and is married to an old English nobleman whose failing hearing and sight make her extracurricular activities that much easier.  Ryno's first encounter with her has the touch of cinematic coincidence, and the sudden hatred that can only yield to carnality also suggests more modern conduct.  Yet we are convinced in the film's first half (the wedding comes exactly at the midway point) that our story has been garnished with the details that all storytellers permit themselves to amuse their audience.  Moreover, the grandmother, an old fool who is madly taken with Ryno and his full Roman lips, has already made up her mind to allow the two to wed well before Ryno concludes his story at daybreak with the avowal that he has not been with Vellini in a very long time.  She is completely satisfied, but we are not.  After the wedding, a somber and drab interlude with a hurried reading from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians on the place of women, Hermangarde and Ryno retreat to the seaside to one of her family's many stations and plan a life without Vellini or anyone else.  A third act with a couple of twists convinces us, however, of the validity of that aphorism about old habits.

Unsurprisingly, this wealth of absurd detail has led many critics to deem the film pornography in period piece guise, which is both rash and as absurd as the tidbits they feel sully the screen.  And while we quickly catch on to the simple dichotomy in this author's novel on which the film was based – good girl, bad girl; sexless, sexpot; nice, naughty (all Ryno gets to do to Hermangarde before they are wed is plant a wet kiss on her raised brow) – our expectations are challenged by the format the film assumes.  There are admittedly a few scenes of candid intimacy; but given the subject matter they are interspersed between verbose narratives which seem to feed off one another like the near-incantations of this famous storyteller.  There is almost no violence, no hysterics (other than upon the sudden death of a child), no pulsating passion that would resolve itself in more conventional films into an ungodly amount of bloodletting, no pretension towards sublimating the film into some sort of moral tragedy backed by a cloying soundtrack.  In fact, every scene is longer, simpler and closer than we expect.  Widely praised for her performance by the film's admirers, Argento overacts continuously because her character is the epitome of overacting: she is compensating for the fact that she is neither beautiful nor rich nor intelligent nor, as it were, particularly interesting.  What she does offer is a lull from the icy rituals of everyday life among the elite, but she could never be someone a person of right mind would want to keep as his own.  Is that a reason to criticize the film?  Not at all, it is a reason to applaud the casting.  Had Vellini been a true knockout, there would have been no appeal whatsoever to Ryno, who has seen and done everything with everyone.  If she didn't have two curls like intertwined lovers or some satanic symbol on her forehead; if she didn't pray one minute and cackle in defiance the next; if she didn't disguise herself as the devil to a masked ball by dressing exactly the way she always does; if she didn't remind us of another unstable Spanish girl who might be the harbinger of doom, we would not be inclined to believe that ten years of lovemaking (with the "average marriage in Paris nowadays lasting only seven") could be at all riveting.  "I am afraid of a part of my destiny," says a beleaguered Ryno at one point, but we don't believe he's afraid of anything except his own weakness.  And more than once in the film are we reminded of an old Arabic proverb: only the scorpion gives things for free.

The Visit to the Museum

Upon strolling recently through this exquisite museum, one of the New World's finest, I could not but recollect the happy childhood memories of other museums and books about museums that seemed so much more enthralling the less I knew about the world.  As much as learning remains one of my great passions, museums tend not to interest me.  The simple reason is that they now house things that have no business being in museums, much less meriting our admiration; the more complicated explanation is that they have lost their pedagogical flair.  Modern art, that bastion of mediocrity, fraud and alleged democratic ideals, has polluted the walls and catalogs of museums for so long that we yearn for the day when someone actually had to have talent to get his works exhibited.  Yet we also yearn for the systematic coherence that is the hallmark of civilization.  If you were to visit this northern palace, this vessel of ancient wisdom, or this jewel amidst Florence's alleyways and fountains, your experience would be one of awe not only in the genius of homo sapiens, but also in the commonalities over which man has always obsessed – time, space, God, love, death, nostalgia, revenge, betrayal, and the unifying denominator among all these topoi, truth.  Art, great art, is the truth within our souls.  When one pair of eyes can perceive even for a moment the truth behind another's work and be edified by this revelation, the ultimate goal of art has been achieved.  But as we know not all museums feature art; some are merely collections of empires from bygone days, which should inform our reading of this famous story.

Our Russian narrator is going to a place named Montisert, when a friend of his in Paris, equally Russian and equally without a homeland (this is, after all, the 1930s), asks him for a curious favor: drop by the local museum and try to purchase "a portrait of his grandfather by Leroy."  The narrator accedes to this request if only to humor his friend as well as because he "had always had doubts about [his] friend's capacity to remain this side of fantasy."  The setup in stories of this ilk, even from a master plotter like Nabokov, is the unpleasant comeuppance of someone who assumes that the dreams of others cannot be realized through the performance of small gestures of kindness.  The narrator, an educated man by his allusions and diction, proceeds as planned to the museum where he encounters a caretaker who tries to dissuade him from being too interested in any type of acquisition.  It takes a good survey of the odds and ends contained in this "building of modest proportions" before he finds something of greater interest than "old, worn coins resting in the velvet of their compartments," a Chinese vase, or "a red-and-green map of Montisert in the seventeenth century":

At once my eye was caught by the portrait of a man between two abominable landscapes (with cattle and "atmosphere").  I moved closer and, to my considerable amazement, found the very object whose existence had hitherto seemed to me but the figment of an unstable mind.  The man, depicted in wretched oils, wore a frock coat, whiskers and a large pince-nez on a cord; he bore a likeness to Offenbach, but, in spite of the work's vile conventionality, I had the feeling one could make out in his features the horizon of a resemblance, as it were, to my friend.  In one corner, meticulously traced in carmine against a black background, was the signature Leroy in a hand as commonplace as the work itself.

In a more traditional narrative we would expect a bustle over negotiating the transfer of the work, and our narrator would either shun inferior art in favor of his own good taste or come to understand that the nostalgic plainness of his friend's memories is a harmless trifle in a world teeming with ogres and demons – but this is hardly a traditional narrative.  Unable to have the caretaker authorize the half-desired transaction and aware of the bureaucratic mechanisms at work, our protagonist promptly asks to see a supervisor.  He is directed to the museum's director, a certain Monsieur Godard:

[He was] a thin middle-aged gentleman in high collar and dickey, with a pearl in the knot of his tie, and a face very much resembling a Russian wolfhound; as if that were not enough, he was licking his chops in a most doglike manner, while sticking a stamp on an envelope, when I entered his small but lavishly furnished room with its malachite inkstand on the desk and a strangely familiar Chinese vase on the mantel.

There is no chitchat as a prelude to the matter at hand.  According to the director and his trusted catalog, the picture in question is The Return of the Herd, not, as our narrator claims, Portrait of a Russian Nobleman by Gustave Leroy.  He offers the director the full sum his friend extended to him to verify what is looking more and more like a delusion or artistic imposition of the sort that Nabokov exploits in many other texts.  Nevertheless, once the two reach the museum, it turns out that the narrator and his odd friend have been correct in their assumptions and observations.  And this is where the narrator wanders into another wing of the museum and comes across several other items that he did not expect to find.

Why this tale is collected in books of ghost stories is not immediately evident, although there is certainly something otherworldly to its dénouement.  Our narrator is soon abandoned by his host and sees that troupes of other visitors with unlike goals have entered the museum and, by their very presence and commotion, are in the midst of tearing it asunder.  He sees, inter alia, marble legs, grand pianos, alembics, copper helmets, a room "radiant with Oriental fabrics," the entire skeleton of a whale, large paintings, aquariums, and a "bright parlor tastefully furnished in Empire style."  But perhaps most important are those other visitors:

All was not well at the museum.  From within issued rowdy cries, lewd laughter, and even what seemed like the sound of a scuffle.  We entered the first hall; there the elderly custodian was restraining two sacrilegists who wore some kind of festive emblems in their lapels and were altogether very purple-faced and full of pep as they tried to extract the municipal councillor's merds from beneath the glass.  The rest of the youths, members of some rural athletic organization, were making noisy fun, some of the worm in alcohol, others of the skull.  One joker was in rapture over the pipes of the steam radiator, which he pretended was an exhibit; another was taking aim at an owl with his fist and forefinger.  There were about thirty of them in all, and their motion and voices created a condition of crush and thick noise.

Someone more prone to disclosure might deem this scene the perfect allegory for modern art as symbolic of Soviet kitsch.  Old Russia then becomes the object of extensive museum exhibits, an effect of endless richness and artistic grandeur that can be beheld in this spectacular film shot, amazingly enough, on one take.  Like in that film, the narrator progresses through the development of Russian art and culture: from the simple cow herds and noblemen (the basic fiefdoms of yore) to the latest developments in science, art, technology and culture.  All this, of course, is obliterated by the Soviet machine.  But, I fear, such a dearth of subtlety has no place in a museum.

The Kreutzer Sonata

He shook my hand and smiled at the same time, a smile which seemed unabashedly mocking, and then began to explain to me how he had brought the notes to prepare for Sunday and that they were in disagreement as to what to play: should they tackle something more complicated and classic, namely Beethoven's violin sonata, or resign themselves to smaller, trivial pieces?

In the last century and a half – since, as it were, the dawn of science's urge to explain everything – we have come to impute our irrationalities to faults of nature.  No longer are we responsible for the evil thoughts we harbor (childhood anxieties writ large) or the actions that we take against the freedoms and rights of others (we only care about ourselves, anyway), nor the crimes for which we are ultimately tried and acquitted because we are insane.  Insane has come to mean irrational, and anyone who is irrational is clearly not in control of what he may inflict upon his fellow humans and their environment.  I cannot speak for all my readers, but you may want to consider what part of your day you actually spend in unadulterated rationality.  Are the caffeine and alcohol you imbibe or grease you consume helping you live longer and in better health?  The casual encounters with persons whose sexual histories could not possibly be known to you?  The wild thoughts scattered throughout your day about promotions, raises, sports teams, past relationships, annoyances, physical tics, and other neurotic trivialities that seem to be the hallmark of modern societies of privilege?  If we were truly rational, we would be very careful with what we eat, choose one mate and stay with her forever, exercise regularly, stop worrying about whether we will make our payment on our car or home, and be nice to everyone and everything, because over time most intelligent people come to see that so-called 'rational behavior' comprises only caring about your survival to the possible detriment of everyone else's.  Yet for people of faith, faith and rationality are synonymous.  They are synonymous not because we are too foolish to think for ourselves, but because believing in something greater than yourself becomes, with the proper spiritual insight, the most rational thing you could ever do precisely because there is no reason to do it other than itself.  Belief is how we form friendships, think of country, nation, and heritage, and, perhaps most importantly, how we love.  We love without evidence, because there can be no evidence for the intangible twine that binds one soul to another.  I may believe someone loves me, but I am guided in my belief by a covenant that what that person and I have is sacred and can defeat time, space and every other obstacle to immortality.  A fine way to segue into this controversial novella.

The narrator and the reader will spend their time fascinated by one lowly man, Pozdnyshev, whom the narrator meets in a train compartment as marriage and love are being discussed.  The time is the late nineteenth century and Romanticism has been replaced by railroads, distant love by the all-too-familiar commute of the factory worker.  What love used to be – wild, enchanting, a font of salvation – has now become a series of morose gestures packaged in the understanding that we must continue evolution from amoeba to ape to human to enough humans to conquer the globe with the breadth of our immediate desires.  And Pozdnyshev has indeed been very unlucky in love.  His views stem from a long marriage to a woman he once loved and the five children she bore him.  They married when he was still young and after he had had his fill of public houses, and they quickly settled into the habits of a typically haute bourgeoisie household.  Soon all aspects of what should have been love and affection begin to shrivel and flake, and it is, surprisingly enough, family life and marriage that are to blame.  Pozdnyshev comments that, "the attraction to children, the animal need to feed, nurture, and defend them, was present in my wife as in so many women as nothing more than precisely an animal instinct and the complete lack of imagination or reason."  The reproduction of the human race is exactly what Pozdnyshev sees as its downfall: an attempt to immortalize the flesh instead of the soul, a very topical retort in the late nineteenth century.  But this is not the crux of his issue with his family.  No, his problems commence when his wife decides to return to playing the piano.  

Little by little, it is this common if somewhat privileged life (the Pozdnyshevs reside in a much more splendid house than your average city dweller) that Pozdnyshev comes to see as a "vile lie."  And with his whole existence now subject to scrutiny in every detail, it is hardly remarkable that he hears more than one layer of meaning in his wife's everyday statements:

She began thinking of another love, one pure and new, or at least that's what I thought.   And here is where she began looking about as if in expectation of something.  I noticed this and could not help but feel an onrush of panic and anxiety.  She would talk to others, people she would happen to meet or accost, and I understood that what she was saying was actually directed at me.  She expressed herself boldly with nary a thought for the fact that merely an hour ago she had endorsed a wholly opposing position; she spoke half in jest about a mother's concerns – and any mother who says she doesn't have such concerns is lying – about devoting herself to her children while she is still young and while she can still enjoy life.  She looked after the children less, but not with the despair of before, and spent more and more time tending to herself, to her appearance, although she tried to hide this, as well as to her pleasures and her self-perfection.  It was then that she returned to the piano with great interest, the piano which she had once completely abandoned.  This is where it all began.

Whatever one may think of The Kreutzer Sonata, this passage contains its essence, but not in the form assumed by the cursory reader who might believe that Tolstoy is valuing family over individualism.  Once upon a time, a rakish and rather immoral young Lev regaled himself on the sweetness of life, on Wein, Weiber und Gesang, as Pozdnyshev himself comments, and forgot his greater purposes.  After a long, troubled, and fecund marriage to a woman who simply could not compare to his interest in writing, Tolstoy abandoned everything and condemned both facets of his previous existence: that of a Lothario and of a family man.  Neither one is praised because both in tandem represent the two easy options for modern human beings, be it the comfort of home and its concomitant security, love and plain living, or the lascivious freedoms and lightness of a life without any responsibility to anyone except yourself.  What Tolstoy comes to advocate is a life of abstinence and self-discovery in unison with one's spiritual beliefs – a noble cause if one taken to an unnecessary extreme by a mind that was always prone to extremes.  Pozdnyshev has lived both parts of Tolstoy's life and, while it is unproductive to weld fiction to fact, has decided on the basis of one important event to join his creator in hermitage.  That event is the arrival of the music teacher Trukhachevsky.

His father was a petty merchant; he was the youngest of three boys and the only one sent to his godmother in Paris to study at the conservatory.  And yet Trukhachevsky wasn't even a professional musician, but a "semi-professional."  He was not particularly handsome, but he did not need looks to attract a woman, he needed music.  And to Pozdnyshev there was something positively demonic about music:

They say that music has an elevating and sublimating effect on the soul.  Untrue!  Utter nonsense!  It most certainly has an effect, a terrible effect, not of sublimation nor of denigration, but one of disturbance.  How should I put it ... music forces me to forget myself, my true position in life, and under music's spell I seem to feel what I actually do not feel and understand what I don't really understand, and be able to do what I in fact cannot.  I would explain this phenomenon by saying that music acts like a yawn or like laughter; I am not sleepy but I yawn looking at someone yawning; and there is nothing to laugh about and yet I laugh when I hear someone laughing.

In other words, music, because of the rigidity of its form and the ineluctability that is its nature, must be understood by the common man as something to be understood, something that is done, something that everyone does.  It is, for Pozdnyshev, the bellwether of common values, easy morals, and plain decisions that shape the vast majority of human lives, and his wife is about to be cheapened by all these banalities and perhaps slip into that most banal and horrific crime of all, betrayal.  This is why Pozdnyshev finds the most insufferable circumstances that plague men of jealousy to be "those well-known bourgeois conditions in which the great and dangerous proximity of man to woman is permitted."  These circumstances are numerous: doctor's visits, balls, art lessons, and that most pernicious of all situations, music.  His wife's return to her piano, her neglect of her children (in her husband's estimation), and most of all, her interest in something greater than herself and her family all damn her to a crime that she may or may not have committed, although on more than one occasion we are presented with some ocular proof and left to ponder the ending without either possibility being confirmed.

Yet this story is not really about jealousy, it is about the decisions of man.  While his monumental novels are widely praised, Tolstoy is the type of writer who thrives on two great facets for short story writers: directness of characterization and a certain momentum that gets derailed in longer narratives.  In that vein, many have quibbled that The Kreutzer Sonata is one of his weaker works, owing in no small part to the moral framework that seems superimposed.  But the work must be commended on its clarity: the concatenation of small details of jealousy, one of the easiest emotions to write about because it is, with hatred, one of the most consuming, is made more remarkable by how similarly most tales of jealousy progress.  Jealousy allows one to find everything wrong and nothing right; to depict the world in conspiracy against you; and to portray the greatest crime of all, the one for which Judas and Pilate were sentenced to the last circle of hell.  There are many stories that start with ridiculous, almost insane premises, but very few follow them to their illogical ends.  More often than not, the reader is emotionally manipulated into seeing a world that appears far removed from contemporary reality and then provided with a last minute explanation for this odd state.  But bold is the tale that shirks the need for a comprehensive ending and sticks to its guns.  Or, in this case, its daggers.

The Ring of Words

The last ten years have borne witness to a revival of interest in the works of this author, whom I first encountered at the merry age of ten when my school's curriculum obliged me to read this novel.  At the time the stuff was well beyond my capacities; but unlike other mature books that I tackled while very young, I felt no glorious anticipation of future re–readings (which I certainly experienced when, at fourteen, I first read this author's entire oeuvre).   So, when I returned to The Hobbit and even leafed through the Rings trilogy, I expected to be bored, and not only because I am no fan of science fiction or fantasy.  There is something ultradense about Tolkien's style, an abstruse concinnity usually found in obscure humanities journals that doesn't so much as bore as distract me.  When you read a great writer, especially someone with particularly clear ideas and morals, you get (if you have a proclivity for it) an undeniable urge to compose.  Even small samplings of Melville or Chesterton suffice to make our minds race through fictive scenarios searching for another allegory for art.  And there are other writers who are learned if a bit dull and best enjoyed in non–fictional settings, such as this text describing Tolkien's work and passion for languages.

 

Being a student of Old English and Old Norse, I am most appreciative of Tolkien's contributions to lexicography.  As was mentioned a few thousand times during the revival of his trilogy, Tolkien's first means of financial support was as an editor and researcher for the greatest dictionary in the history of the English language.  I do love dictionaries but wonder whether I might become disenchanted from having to research every last form for a limited section of one letter's entries (Tolkien's expertise in the Germanic languages got him the assignment of "W").  Well, however bored the young scholar might have been, he certainly made use of his time.  Tolkien's work on these entries, including marvelous intuitive speculation on an old name for this evil bird (one of my favorites), is detailed by the authors in the first part of The Ring of Words.  The second and third parts go over Tolkien's own fashionings of brave new words for his warriors and warlocks.  Now, if you are knowledgeable about the aforementioned ancient tongues and Norse mythology in general, the whole endeavor of hobbits, ents, silharrows, and weapontakes loses much of its luster (much as a knowledge of Russian impedes any enjoyment of this ballyhooed novel).  That a child would find these words magically new and exciting tells you how much puerile enthusiasm is required to fall in love with Tolkien's inventiveness and unswervable desire to inject into his religious parables some very old blood.

 

What are the best selections from his lexicon?  Weapontake (exactly what it looks like, although its historical sense is the subject of some complicated logodaedaly) and silharrow (an ethnonym for "men of the south") are exquisitely beautiful, as are dwimmerlaik (practice of occult art or goety),  north–away and south–away (in those directions), mithril ("grey brilliance," or "silver"), hame ("coat" or "skin," as Old Norse's hamfarir means "magical travel in the shape of an animal") and kingsfoil (a plant).   Tolkien sticks to the old saying that writing well in English means using native Germanic (and often shorter) words rather than the foreign Latinate borrowings, ideally with a fine balance between the two.  His world is an unabashed satellite of Asgard, Midgard and Valhalla, broken off and spinning in revolution to the same days and nights and seasons of the Norse gods that Tolkien, a very Christian man whose books are at once very Christian and very Norse, fell in love with as a child and worshiped as a man.

 

A strange and deep concurrence runs between Thor and Odin and Christian beliefs that I have never been able to explain.  The Norse deities are structured in a similar hierarchy to the Greek pantheon but their stories are unique and far more compelling, perhaps because instead of interfering in and laughing at the pathetic lives of mortals, the Gods themselves are doomed to perish.  You will understand my disappointment when I returned to Tolkien after almost twenty years of indifference only to find that, while worthy themes were being acted out by worthy men, there was little more to these stories than complex, verbose parables.  The Ring of Words offers insight and a wonderful slew of definitions you will never find anywhere else.  It also maintains Tolkien's reputation as a first–rate scholar sidetracked by heavenly aspirations about lowly creatures be eldern dawes, "in the days of our forefathers."         

About a Boy

Some works resonate in your consciousness not because you are expected to enjoy them, but from some strange constellation of human detail.  When a film is made about this composer with a superb cast, first-rate director, and compelling script suggesting conspiracy, we expect nothing less than the sustained bliss of true art.  When a gifted writer describes love, death, passion, betrayal, seduction, curiosity, or nostalgia, the results cannot be anything less than sublime – and if they aren't for some reason, then you will hear no fouler vitriol.  Most of what we experience, however, is located well outside of this ivory prism, even for those of us for whom ora et labora represents a quaint summary of our daily work.  Some will impute this plainness to the banality of existence itself; but there is another explanation.  For the vast majority of us – and this is neither a rebuke nor a compliment – life tends to be a struggle for what we need or some existential puzzle involving what we might want.  We are either beggars or choosers, but rarely both.  In more privileged countries where all the basic necessities of society have long since been attained and surpassed, we are left with the most basic of quandaries, that of time.  What does a good life mean?  If you truly are free, and freedom means doing whatever you want without compromising the freedom and rights of others, what constitutes a productive day?  What is the purpose of all our days, if such a chain were to be concatenated?  What will a person who has everything he could possibly want do with his precious hours and minutes?  How will he structure his relationship to the rest of the world?  Despite its simplistic posturings, this film provides a rather fantastic answer.    

Our protagonist is named, appropriately enough, Will Freeman (Hugh Grant), a double evocation of pure independence.  He is thirty-something, handsome, charming, pleasingly sardonic, and sufficiently thick of wallet to eschew work's daily grind.  The source of his income is even more amusing: his late father wrote one of those terrible Christmas songs that victims of temporary amnesia come to adore once a year for about a week, a fact that permits Will to afford a roomy bachelor pad in Clerkenwell.  It is from this battlement that Will determines how his life will evolve.  He divides existence into units, half-hour segments in which he bathes, does exercise (mostly billiards), eats at the same posh little bistro every day, rents videos and mixes cocktails (usually on high holidays), and chases whatever pretty and amenable young females greater London has to offer.  When a couple that he knows wants to make him the godfather of their unborn daughter, Will suggests that this may be a bad idea since he would likely wait until she was eighteen, get her plastered, and recommend that she practice making bad late-night decisions.  One may suppose that the majority of men would switch places with our Freeman in the blink of one of those long, luscious eyelashes that always seem to notice him, and a lesser film would steer us on a straight moral path to recognizing the waywardness of such a life.  Yet this is precisely what does not occur.  Even if Will's life is morally unjustifiable, we see it as rather fun, especially since we are along for the ride for only two hours.  It's true that Will lies, cheats, and steals to get under the next skirt (even stooping so low as to pretend to be a single parent to entice single moms; why single moms suddenly enthrall him should tell you exactly why this is an unusual movie), but the effect is wickedly amusing, not appalling.  And that is when a boy appears, a twelve-year-old outsider with a good heart named Marcus (Nicholas Hoult).

Marcus only has a mother, and a rather neurotic one at that (Toni Collette), who indulges him without ever teaching him right from wrong.  Yet Marcus is intelligent enough to figure things out for himself.  He understands that money will solve none of his problems, nor will calling attention to himself by singing his mother a serenade in his school's talent show, nor will avoiding the structure and discipline of schoolwork, although he violates each one of these truths.  Unlike the staggering majority of his coevals, Marcus understands that many adults have never really been children nor understood the intrinsic cruelty, insouciance, and oneupmanship that distinguish more "popular" children from their classmates.  He also knows that many adults remain ensconced in these memories, times when they didn't have to care and could take advantage of the world and the meek who will inherit it.  Even for someone like Will, a person who was probably more indifferent than sadistic as a teenager, the world is a facile model of predatory hedonism.  Marcus and Will become fascinated with one another, but not with the mutual envy – Will of Marcus's youth and Marcus of Will's carefree adulthood – typically promoted in polar opposites in modern cinema, nor, it should be said, out of pity.  No, Marcus and Will become friends because there is some odd connection that binds them together and hints at a pleasant future.  Perhaps they become friends because neither one wants or needs to judge the other.  Friendships of this nature normally arise from greater commonality – age, nation, employment, or belief system – but sometimes, wonderful to relate, there are other means by which humans can share their lives.  Marcus may need a father and Will may need an outlet for all the responsibility he has shirked over the years, but that would be a formulaic solution to the most bizarre of problems: who should be our friends and why, which brings us back to the problem of man as an island.

Will is not only a metonym of choice – and, after all, he has every choice in the world at his fingertips.  He also represents  the necessity of leading a life with a purpose higher than oneself.  This purpose needn't be a religion or vocation, but simply a set of rules of how life should look if you and everyone else fulfilled their potential.  The idealism inherent in such an approach allows children to dream and artists to refashion, and for a few brief seconds this prophetic vision seems more attainable than the drab daubs of commercial reality we all must confront.  That last observation may seem strange given the background of the author on whose book the film is based, but it is nevertheless true.  At various moments throughout About a Boy we are given the option of easy popular solutions, wistful tunes that sell a million copies and yet are supposed to be portals into our very being.  As much as I feel sorry for adults for whom sweet radio anthems pave the path of their best memories, children without such connections are poorer still.  So when Will finally meets the woman he is destined to meet, Rachel (Rachel Weisz), another single mother, we are supposed to believe that Will Freeman shall blossom into that most famous of Wills, and his blithe attitude shall allow him to provide Rachel with something that eludes most adults, namely the sincerity to ask for what they really want.  And while the original title of the film might draw your attention to Marcus, some translations (such as the Spanish Un gran chico, "a big boy") alert the viewer to another type of tale.  At which point we remember that, for children, freedom means not having to become an adult.