A Few Words About Robin Williams

The best metaphor I have for the death of Robin Williams is that a note just dropped out of the bass line of modern entertainment. Some people are entertainment icons because they are towering presences in their field – Williams always felt more like a constant presence. Somehow the worlds of acting in general and comedy specifically were better because he was out there, a seemingly inexhaustible resource of silliness and brilliance. And he was prolific. The Internet Movie Database lists over 100 entries for Williams as an actor alone.

As a performer, Williams came across as an inch deep but a mile wide. Sure, his output was uneven (there was The Birdcage, say…but also Death to Smoochy), but, God, was there a lot of it. Williams played silly, he played sad, he played evil, he played supernatural, he played alien, he played loud, and he played soft. But he always played. There was a sense of fun about whatever he did. I’ve heard that the late actor George C. Scott evaluated others’ performances on whether or not the actors seemed to be enjoying themselves. Williams invariably passed that test, whatever he was in. And his energy was contagious. I defy anyone who watched movies or TV from the 1970s until now to tell me that that some Williams performance or appearance didn’t move you to laughter or tears or a wonderful mixture of both.

Personally, I was always in awe of his improvisational abilities. There’s quick-witted…and then there was Robin Williams. Anything, and I mean anything, could be grist for his comic sensibilities when he got going, and Williams was always going. Consider the “Inside the Actor’s Studio” bit now justly making the Youtube tribute rounds where he takes a scarf from someone in the audience and riffs with it, putting the crowd and usually self-possessed host James Lipton in stitches. Practice? Sure. But that’s a gift. Robin Williams had a mind for comedy. It’s just how he worked.

The circumstances of his death are especially tragic. There will be a tendency to view his career through the lens of his end, and his reported depression: “That mix of laughter and tears onscreen…that’s what was going on in his soul, man!” But I think that’s unfair. Depression is awful and life-destroying. Neither of those are words I would choose to attach to Robin Williams. Plus, we have no way to know what was ever in his mind as he performed. It’s enough that the tragedy ended his life without also letting it define his life.

I instead will remember a man who gave a lot of joy to the world. My personal favorite performances? His Oscar-winning turn in Good Will Hunting, with its mixture of hurt, wisdom, and humor; and his madcap turn as the Genie in Aladdin, where animation liberated Williams’s machine-gun wit from even physical constraints. I confess I am not really a fan of Dead Poets Society, which many people are referencing in tribute, but there does seem to be something right about connecting – as that movie did -  Williams to Walt Whitman. Whitman also was infinitely observant, voluble, big-hearted, individualistic and yet fond of an audience. “I am large,” he wrote. “I contain multitudes.” So did Williams: multitudes of characters, multitudes of words, multitudes of emotions. It was our good luck that he decided to share them with us.

Stories We Tell (2012)

It starts with a man speaking, saying something unusually profound about stories. Then you get the citation – Margaret Atwood. The man is quoting a famous writer. The man himself is an actor, with some fame in Canada. He is Michael Polley, father of actress Sarah Polley, who created and directed Stories We Tell, a documentary – this documentary—about her own family. The next shot is Sarah installing her dad in a fancy recording studio, to do the voice-over for the film. He wrote his lines himself. But is the Atwood epigraph his, or Sarah’s? She’s on camera, too, joking (maybe) that this is both interview and “interrogation.” Stories We Tell claims to be a documentary. Yet here we have started with two professional actors, on camera, speaking words they have thought about beforehand. That’s not deception; it’s a signal. Stories We Tell is more than it appears to be…but of course, the stories people tell always are.

What it appears to be is a documentary about Sarah Polley’s family, focusing on the life and untimely death (from cancer) of her mother, Diane. The film comprises a collection of home movies, pictures, and interviews with “storytellers” (as the credits call them) from Polley family history. These are Sarah’s father, her siblings, some aunts and uncles, and also various colleagues of Michael and Diane (both worked in show business). Sarah, too, is heard asking questions and seen in both archival and present-day footage. Her opening gambit with the storytellers is always the same, however: tell what you know “from the beginning.” The beginning of what? Not Diane’s life, exactly…more, perhaps, their family life. The story seems to really begin when Diane and Michael meet. The children and friends predictably begin with characterizations of the couple; Michael begins with his tale of their meeting. The film is then off and running on a rather predictable track, especially for anyone who follows show-business marriages. What makes Stories We Tell interesting is that it will, in fact, jump that track. How it does so and why I dare not reveal. I will only say that the ground on which Polley’s documentary appears to rest shifts several times over its running. Remember those opening signals…

All this may make it sound like the film is some sort of trick. It isn’t. Some of its surprises are, in some ways, hiding in plain sight. Polley’s aim is not to cheat or disorient, but rather to point up the complexity of any given narrative. Any story is, by its very nature, an act of interpretation, and it is that act of interpretation, rather than any mystery around her mother, that seems to have captured Polley’s attention. She never ducks the fact that her “documentary” is itself a carefully shaped and constructed work of art. At least two interviewees, in fact, call her on it, on camera. And note the way we get “pre-interview” scenes with the family storytellers, self-consciously preparing to talk. One sister is sweating so much with nerves that she changes her clothes. Two of the brothers clearly love the idea of being filmed as raconteurs; they joke and twinkle their way through their sections the way Shelby Foote and Wynton Marsalis did for Ken Burns. Other storytellers object, hesitate, or simply lapse into silence. These moments are important, for the people themselves are at least as much of the story as what they say. 

In the end, Sarah Polley has produced something that is less a documentary of a life than a meditation on many lives, and how those who lived them (including herself) have made narrative sense of them. Does the movie reveal what “really” happened to and with Diane? Maybe. By the end, I didn’t care. The movie instead reveals something more slippery and profound about stories and families and the human experience. It asks us to accept the stories its participants tell not because the movie presents them as solidly true, but because each teller believes them to be true. If some of them are telling lies, well, they are lies that the tellers themselves believe…which means they’re actually versions of truth.  A hashtag I see occasionally online these days reads “#nofilter.”  Stories We Tell cries foul on that notion. While the truth it first seems to be about dances farther and farther away, it slyly hands us another truth: in the stories we tell, there is always a filter. The filter is us.

Locke (2013)

Locke is a strange film. That’s not a criticism. I guarantee that you have never seen anything else like it. It focuses on one actor who stays (except for a brief opening shot) entirely in one location, even though that location moves. The location is the inside of a nicely-equipped BMW, traveling to London from a site roughly two hours north. The actor is Tom Hardy, who plays the title character, Ivan Locke. Locke is a construction foreman who, in the late evening before an important job, takes a phone call. In London, a woman with whom Locke had a one-night stand months ago is giving birth to a child – Locke’s child. Locke, a diligent, competent worker and devoted family man, decides that he must be there for this birth, tossing all else to the wind. The film follows him on his journey more or less in real time as he uses the hands-free cell phone in his car to communicate about his decision to his boss, coworkers, family, and the mother of the child.

This is the sort of thing that is often described as “high concept,” but it is part of Locke’s appeal that it makes the concept seem perfectly ordinary. In today’s ultra-connected society, after all, a businessman phoning nonstop while he drives is nothing unusual. Given the list of contacts he scrolls through, it probably isn’t unusual for Ivan Locke, either. What is unusual is the particular situation he is in, the way in which he chooses to respond to it, and his reasons for doing so. It is best to leave the revelation of those things to the film itself. I will only note that Locke, like any master builder, starts from a carefully-laid plan but finds that he must deviate from it as circumstances warrant, and also that his reasons for heading to London lie farther back in his past than a few months.

90 minutes in a car may not seem like all that much fun, but Locke is engrossing throughout its running length. Writer-director Steven Knight is better known for the first half of that title, and for good reason. Locke is a textbook example of how to reveal character and plot entirely through dialogue and detail. This is especially impressive when you realize that only one actor involved—Hardy—is visible. The other characters exist only as voices, but each is distinct and fully realized. There is, of course, only so much plot to be had here, but Knight allows events to unspool at a pace that builds suspense without ever seeming unrealistic. There is no melodrama here—no cheap shots or cut corners. And the dialogue can be just plain good, with just enough poetry to remind us that this is a constructed work of art. Listen, for example, to Locke’s rhapsodizing about “the piece of the sky we will steal” with a well-made skyscraper, or his wife’s noting how the concrete Locke tracks home hardens into stone footprints on the floor. The visual touches in the movie don’t quite match the verbal ones—Knight probably fades in and out of a few too many shots of headlights and taillights, for example—but the ones that hit home, such as the shots of Locke’s GPS screen with blank spaces ahead and Locke’s particular use of his rearview mirror—only enhance what is written.

The movie’s strongest asset, understandably, is Tom Hardy. Locke is a chance for Hardy to essentially put on a clinic, and he does. I’ve seen Hardy play everything from an aggrieved spy to an alien to a comic-book terrorist, and one thing his performances all have in common is a kind of solidity. However outlandish whatever is going on around him is, Hardy always seems to belong. That quality serves him very well in Locke. All Hardy has to work with is the upper half of his body, and yet Ivan Locke emerges as a complete character, complete with motives and, yes, even body language. The things to praise about this performance are many. There is, for example, the way the calmness in Locke’s voice is never quite matched by an equal calmness in his eyes, or the slight difference in tone Hardy uses when Locke is speaking something he’s rehearsed rather than something off the cuff, or Hardy's expressions on the occasions when Locke cannot speak at all. It’s not the least of the compliments I can give the actor that he simply held my attention, all alone, for an hour and a half in a theater. Those on the other end of the phone have less to carry, of course, but their contributions are still important. Ruth Wilson, as Locke’s wife, proves to be the emotional opposite to her measured, deliberate husband. Tom Holland and Bill Milner, as Locke’s sons, have some gut-wrenching exchanges with their father. The most fun, however, is had by Andrew Scott (most famous as Sherlock’s creepy-crazy Moriarty) as the good-hearted but high-strung subordinate Locke trusts with continuing the construction job in his absence.

I saw Locke two days ago, and the film has stayed with me. It’s a thought-provoking piece of work, for both (to steal a distinction from the late Roger Ebert) what it is about, and how it is about it. The concept never overwhelms the characters, and the characters find themselves in interesting places. There are existential questions here (the dialogue name-drops Waiting for Godot) about what makes a person who they are, and how much change is possible or acceptable. There are social questions here about the ways we are connected to each other, and how those connections can be strained or pay off in trying situations. Finally, there are moral questions here as we see Locke struggle to do good and do right, and have to face the fact that those may not be the same things, or even mean the same things to different people. Locke is well-written, nicely shot, and very well-acted. It’s a construction of which its meticulous title character would be proud. If you can, I recommend letting it steal a piece of your time. 

Noah (2014)

      Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is three different movies at once. It’s a kind of film everyone’s making these days – the sci-fi/fantasy adventure – wrapped around a kind of film everyone used to make – the Biblical epic – itself wrapped around a kind of film hardly anyone makes – the kind that deals with real, deadly serious questions of religion and the human condition. That these three don’t always coexist seamlessly is not really a surprise; the surprise is that they mesh as well as they do. I’ve seen Noah described as weird, epic, flawed, ambitious, fantastic, and scary. It is, in its way, all of these things. It also offers over two hours of riveting cinema.

     Noah of course has its roots in the Book of Genesis. The bare outline of the story is familiar and simple: dismayed at the wickedness of humanity in the generations after Adam and Eve, God decides to start over. A great flood will cover the earth, destroying all life. A man named Noah and his family are tasked with building an ark to contain enough of every animal to repopulate the world after the waters subside. This they do. Biblical narrative, however, is famously spare, and to fill out the story, Aronofsky and his co-screenwriter Ari Handel have dipped into a number of traditions. One is the Jewish literature of midrash – writings by rabbis which attempt to fill the frustrating gaps and bridge the puzzling inconsistencies of the scriptural text. The filmmakers have said, in fact, that they see their film as belonging in its own way to the midrashic tradition. At the same time, however, Noah also partakes deeply of cinematic tradition, absorbing the work of artists such as DeMille, Kurosawa, James Cameron, and Peter Jackson. This is not, in other words, a Bible storybook put in motion. Noah is, instead, an attempt to bring the story of God’s flood and Noah’s clan’s survival to cinematic life, with all of life’s ups and downs and tragedies and deep questions.

     So it is that we are treated to a tale of two clans: the line of Cain (the first murderer) and the line of Seth. Cain’s line, led in this generation by Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone) has systematically despoiled the earth for raw materials, building a great industrial civilization at Creation’s expense. Seth’s line consists at this point of Noah (Russell Crowe), his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly), and their sons Shem (Douglas Booth), Ham (Logan Lerman), and Japeth (Leo McHugh Carroll). Filling out the edges of the family are Ila (Emma Watson), an orphan rescued and raised by Noah, and Noah’s wizard-like grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins). This clan lives close to the land, gathering plants to eat and protecting what parts of creation they can. In a dream, the Creator (the movie’s only name for a ruling deity) warns Noah of the impending destruction of the world by water. Aided by narcotic tea cooked up by Methuselah, Noah has a further vision setting out the nature of the ark he must construct to survive the deluge. He is helped in this task by the Watchers, a troop of fallen angels whose punishment is to have been encased in the rock and mud of the earth they loved too much. Noah is opposed, naturally, by Tubal-cain and his followers, who rather understandably fail to see the fairness is the Creator’s sparing of only one human family. Adding tension are some intra-family squabbles in the Noah clan. Shem and Ila seem made for each other – but what of the other two sons? Are they to have families after the flood? As Noah comes to increasingly despair of the wickedness of the Cain tribe, the answer seems more and more negative. By the time the family enters the ark, in fact, Noah is actively planning the end of his own line, telling his youngest son he will be “the last man.” However, other forces are at play, including a vengeful, stowaway Tubal-cain and the magic operations of Methuselah.

     At this point it may sound like there is, as critic Joe Bob Briggs used to say, too much plot getting in the way of the story. In fact, these many plotlines all serve as variations on a theme, a series of concentric circles around the idea of justice. Should the Watchers be punished for giving divine knowledge to humankind? Should the descendants of Cain really pay for their wicked use of Creation with their lives? And if something in human nature is to blame, why should anyone – even the less wasteful Noah – escape? Why does the Creator “speak” in visions to Noah, but to no other men? Is Noah being used as an instrument of wrath, or of mercy? The film tracks Noah as he becomes increasingly angry at his own kind, and his desire to save creation gives way to a related desire to eradicate the humans he sees as creation’s enemy. Against Noah’s principled zealotry, the movie pits Tubal-cain’s humanist pragmatism (he sees the Creator’s gift to humanity as dominion over Creation, and fails to understand why humans made in a god’s image should not behave in godlike ways) and Naameh’s earthy optimism (it is she who pushes for wives for all the sons, and believes in life itself as good). Caught in the middle are Noah’s children, who must decide when to follow their father, and when to go their own ways.

     There is a lot of substance to Aronofsky and Handel’s script, but in the end it’s deeper than it is smart. Some of the dialogue is a bit tin-eared, and many narrative beats will be predictable to those with some knowledge of cinematic rather than Biblical lore. Like the Creator Noah follows, Noah speaks more powerfully in images than in words. Aronofsky has always been a very visually-oriented director, and much of what makes Noah compelling is in what is literally up there on the screen. A mythic tale like that of Noah and his clan, set in a nebulous scriptural prehistory, gives the director full license to embrace a sort of magical realism, in which fountains and forests sprout from a single seed, hordes of animals march freely into the ark and curl up in ready-made pens, stone-bodied angels clomp about like Ray Harryhausen creations lit from within by sparklers, and the forbidden fruit beats like a living heart. At the same time, the world of Noah is dirty and violent and replete with the depravity of desperate people. These are men and women of myth, but they exist as real men and women –by turns faithful, doubtful, hopeful, vengeful, awful, and beautiful. A film like DeMille’s The Ten Commandments gives us something of the grandeur of Biblical narrative; Aronofsky’s Noah seems more intent on showing us something of the narrative’s humanity.

     After the visuals, the movie’s greatest assets are its characters. They are few, of course, but this allows those who are filled out to actually achieve some resonance. Winstone’s Tubal-cain, for example, is no stock villain. He’s a ruthless man, to be sure, but his concerns are quite fair: why does the Creator choose to kill some of those creatures made in his image and spare others? Like Noah, he wishes to survive – he is simply willing to go to different lengths to do so (it is in keeping with Aronofsky’s visual style that Noah and Tubal-cain often mirror each other in look and manner - variations on a theme again). Connelly likewise is allowed to make Naameh not some long-suffering spouse, but an equal and differing personality to her husband’s, also willing to do unusual things to pursue her vision of the future. Also of note is Lerman as the conflicted Ham, who respects his father, but not all of his father’s ways. The mystical, eccentric Methuselah is a role very much up Hopkins’s alley, and he makes the most of it (the character’s curmudgeonly nostalgia for the ripe berries now mostly missing from a despoiled world provides some of Noah’s few real moments of comic relief). Noah is Crowe’s movie, however. He must essentially play Noah as three men – the hopeful, pre-vision family man; the ark-builder driven by conviction and divine fiat; and the mournful, guilt-wracked survivor of what is essentially world-wide genocide, looking for consolation. This is not an easy journey, but Crowe has long excelled at principled men backed into tight spots, and he uses that to great advantage as Noah. Noah is not a nice man, nor even really a holy one – but Crowe plays him as someone who wants to be a good man, even as he comes to fear that good men are an impossibility. It’s a riveting performance. After all – what would it be like to really be in Noah’s shoes, in the moment, letting millions die while you and your family float to safety? What would it really feel like to be deeply and seriously tasked with responsibility by the Creator of all that is?

     When the film focuses on these human aspects of the Noah tale, it captivates, and these moments make it easier to forgive some of its more indulgent ones (the protracted battle for the ark, for example…but, then, wouldn’t those outside fight to get in? Wouldn’t you?). The movie is about something (which is always admirable), and is about it in a way that often goes for broke (which is its own kind of admirable). Noah’s visuals provoke comment, and its themes provoke thought. It is not a movie for everyone’s taste, and, despite the omnipresence of cuddly Noahs in nursery décor, it is not a movie for young children. For those inclined to struggle with a good story, however, Noah represents an intriguing voyage.

PS – I should say something about the midrashic nature of the film. I believe I’m plain above that Noah takes liberties with the straight Biblical account – some sanctioned by Judeo-Christian lore and tradition, some not. All film adaptations of texts, whatever their genre, make changes simply as a matter of shifting from written to visual storytelling. This is true for scriptural adaptations as well as fictional ones – as true of The Ten Commandments as Ben Hur. I distinctly recall a Jewish professor of mine in graduate school explaining to a Christian questioner that his tradition taught him to argue with and struggle with the scripture. Aronofsky,  a “cultural Jew” by upbringing, has put Noah in that tradition. It adds and interprets, but it does so in a deeply serious way. Midrash was done in an attempt to maintain the integrity of scripture, because the rabbis were uncomfortable with the ideas of gaps and inconsistencies in their sacred text. Obviously, the answers were there to be found, and could illuminate the message rather than obscure it. Aronofsky’s film proposes his own questions and answers about the story of Noah, but, I believe, in a way that he feels highlights and deepens the wisdom and challenge of the Genesis account. Nothing in the film, for example, questions the existence of the Creator, nor the fact of His judgment – rather, the film and its characters wrestle with the nature of the Creator and His judgment. The film depicts Noah in some ways he is not often shown, and some are disturbing. But a story of a world-drowning flood, and of a God who would despair of His own creations is, by nature, disturbing. Noah goes to the heart of that disturbance, and looks for meaning and, ultimately, hope there. That it does so with some of the trappings of a Hollywood blockbuster will strike some as remarkable and others as unfortunate. Both are legitimate responses, with their own justifications. For the record, however, I fall in the former camp.