A Tale of Tales signifying nothing.

In the ‘extras’ on the DVD of Matteo Garrone’s film Tale of Tales Toby Jones is asked why he wanted to be in the movie.    Of course he was excited to work with the director of Gamorrah, the impressive realist Italian Mafia movie.  Add in the challenge of a script adapted from 17^th century Italian folk tales  and the pleasure of working with Salma Hayek and Vincent Cassel and of course he was keen.  But I wonder if the question comes back to haunt him now.

I admit that Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian is quoted on the DVD cover saying it is a “visual delight…fabulous in every sense” but of course we do not know the context from which these seven words were lifted, or what else he said about it.   And it is a visual delight,  shot by Peter Suschitzky who did splendid work on Star Wars; The Empire Strikes Back, A History of Violence,  Eastern Promises and Mars Attacks.   The score is by Alexandre Desplat, so much in demand that I see there have been fifteen scores from him this year, plus those to The Danish Girl, Suffragette, The Imitation Game, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Tree of Life and Zero Dark Thirty.   In fact he has scored  fourteen of my favorite films of the last twelve years.    But this is not one of them.  

It is fabulous, but only in the sense of being absurd and based in fables.    Sadly the three stories interwoven here are neither funny nor instructive.   Giambattista Basile wrote them down at about the same time that Shakespeare was working, but he was not a Shakespeare, a Perrault nor a Grimm brother.   (Basile is sometimes credited with an early version of Cinderella, or Cenorentola, but as Marina Warner  tells us in her authoritative From the Beast to The Blonde there is an early second century tale in which a virgin’s sandal is carried off by an eagle as she is bathing and dropped at the feet of  the Pharoah, who vows to find her and scours the country to make her his wife.  It was also written down in 9^th century China and has been told and changed through many different cultures and centuries. )   

 The cast do their best with a banal script and try to invest their characters with some depth or interest.   Toby Jones, bless him, seems to work the hardest, but I had no sympathy for any of them.  

I applaud Garrone for not trying to repeat his Gommorah, and wanting to do something radically different, as he also did in his 2012 comedy drama Reality, and I will look out for his next film, but this DVD goes on my reject pile.

Jane Got a Gun.

It seems that Jane God a Gun had a troubled production.      The Scottish Director Lynn Ramsay left while shooting it, and  Michael Fassbender, Jude Law and Bradley Cooper had already pulled out.   This left Gavin O’Connor to take up the directing, plus Natalie Portman (who co-produced) and Joel Edgerton (who contributed to the script) to work with Ewan McGregor and Noah Emmerich and bring it home.   The film was given a limited release in the US January (a dead month for movie goers) and seems to have lost a lot on money.   Many reviewers thought it was too slow, too somber, and that Portman’s Jane was not dynamic enough.

But I liked it.     It is a slow burning Western with a female lead, and concerned with human relationships as much as with gun-play.   In fact the ‘gun’ that Jane has to get to help her protect her family is a man, her former lover, played by Edgerton, an actor I much admire.   When I watched The Great Gatsby again I had to reconsider the character of Tom Buchanan, as Edgeton’s performance revealed subtle depths to it on second viewing.   Here also,  in what may seem to be a straightforward part,  he reveals layers of complexity as flash-backs reveal more and more of the history between him and Jane.    

Nor did I miss the kind of ‘anything you can do I can do better’ female gunslinger beloved by some.   Jane is a rotten shot with a handgun – and why would she have ever needed to be otherwise? – but she is a crack shot with her rifle, used to shooting rabbits and coyotes rather than men.   Of course Jane is very good looking and well turned out for a prairie wife, but there is little Portman could do about the former without resorting to silliness, and she does wear pretty much the same (period and practical) outfit throughout the movie.    It is good to see subtly in a Western.   The music is understated – for the most part -  and the direction unfussy, unspectacular and unobtrusive.     It looks as if O’Connor simply got on with shooting the script rather than imposing himself on it. 

The DVD I watched ‘Jane’  on also had  trailer for The Keeping Room, another Western with female leads – and a female point of view - that did not do well at the Box Office.    That starred Brit Marling, Hailee Steinfeld and Muna Otarus.   I will look out for it.    

I have remarked elsewhere that the pov of vampire movies has changed in the last ten years or so,  to consider what it would be like to actually be a vampire (Thirst, Let the Right One In, Byzantium, Only Lovers Left Alive).   In some recent films, such as the two mentioned here plus The Homesman, Meek’s Cutoff, True Grit and Cold Mountain, we are invited to wonder what it would have really been like to be a woman in the 19^th century American West.   The answer ?  Often much tougher than for the men, coping, as Lindy West  has pointed out in The Guardian,  with the combination of societal lawlessness and personal vulnerability.    Is this Revisionist?  If that means seeing in a new way I welcome it.    

The Captain may not be Fantastic, but good enough for me.

Captain Fantastic.  

The Captain is Ben Cash living deep in the American North West forest,  well off the grid, teaching his six children the skills of hunting, first aid, climbing, armed and unarmed combat along with vigorous daily exercises.   It this Captain a rightwing Survivalist or Evangelical?  No, he teaches his children to celebrate Naom Chomsky’s birth rather than Christ’s and provides a deep home education in philosophy, literature, science,  civil rights and left wing politics.  He encourages his children to argue their opinions and to hear each other’s arguments.  

Ben, played by Viggo Mortensen,  thinks he is saving their lives from the disaster of modern society,  and it seems that their mother agreed, at least before her hospitalization.      But when she dies the family suddenly have to deal with her parent’s more conventional ideas and those of society in general.   

So first of all we see the utopian ‘alternative’ lifestyle in an extreme form, with the family almost totally separated from society, entire unto themselves for food, education and entertainment,  living out a clear, if rigorous, vision.   But then they have to deal with the children’s grieving maternal grandparents, Jack and Abigail (played by Frank Langella and Ann Dowd).   They are rich retirees, living in a huge house on a golf-course, and Jack is severely critical of Ben’s life choices, seeing them as physically dangerous and emotionally abusive.   After the funeral Ben and Jack clash furiously.   The family’s response to this precipitates another crisis, one that forces Ben to reconsider his stance.   Will he now will retire alone, leaving all six children with their grandparents?     Or what?

Despite his mainstream success in the Lord of the Rings  and lead roles in Hildalgo, A History of Violence, Easter Promise, A Dangerous Method, and The Road Viggo Mortensen is, I think, unappreciated by  the Hollywood establishment (how he could not even be nominated for his role in The Road is beyond me)  but maybe that’s because he does not fit the Hollywood convention of a Star.   Here he is as persuasive as ever,  tough enough  and intelligent  enough to make the Captain credible.   I will also add, for those interested, that he appears full frontal naked in one scene.    And for those easily offended by language;  you will be.  

He is wonderfully supported by Frank Langella and the younger cast members playing the children; George MacKay, the English/Australian actor (who I last saw in How I Live Now) plays Bo, the eldest boy, working his way though the various dimensions of Marxism (he was a Trotskyite, now a Maoist)  but seeking to escape the Arcadian forest for Academia.     Rebellious 12 year old Rellian (Nicolas Hamilton),  Samantha Isler (Keilyr)  and Annalise Basso (Vespyr)  are convincing teenage twins, alongside the younger Shree Crooks (Zaja) and Charlie Shotwell (Nai).   All the children have been given unique names, reflecting their uniqueness as human beings.   

The children are taught the value of dialectics, and this movie is certainly dialectic.  The point of dialectics is that the clash between  a hypo-thesis and its anti-thesis  leads to a new thesis, in this case a new way of being.    By the end of the movie the dialectic is resolved.   Not hypo-thesis A or anti-thesis C but, we presume,  an acceptable B (or maybe D?)    We are not shown or told how the grandparents – or children -  come to agree with this resolution,  or define the essentials of living it out, and that is a shame, but I can see how detailed negotiation in the last reel would defuse the dramatic tension.  

The film may end with a rather conventional solution,  and not everyone will find it satisfying, but at the very least it comes about after an engaging, often amusing and sometimes rather moving argument and narrative,  one that visits the horrors of modern American (and increasingly the Western) lifestyle, with its waste, obesity, rampant consumerism and alienation from both the natural and philosophical realms, but also points out the isolationism, desocialisation, and ultimately dysfunctional nature of the extreme survivalist/back to nature impulse.   We do need to find a way to live ‘in this world’, even if we do not want to be ‘of this world’,  being properly dismayed by many aspects of it.      

I was, however,  disappointed by the way Ben teaches his children to utterly dismiss Christianity.   I think there are many informed reasons to criticize the Church, but Ben’s does not seem to be informed, chucking the essential Christian baby out with the polluted waters of the Church.      Ben’s children have been taught, however, that we should be defined by our actions rather than our words, and no matter how comforting it would be for Christians (such as myself) to separate the body of the Church into distinct parts and claim that we have nothing to do with the actions of the parts we see as deluded, ignorant, un-biblical, populist, right-wing, abusive, greedy for riches and power, theologically and intellectually corrupt, or even blasphemous (do add your own ecclesiastical bêtes noir) it is still hard to find a theology to support this consoling tactic.     At the end of the day I think The Church is The Church is The Church, no matter how much I dislike so much of it.   

The photography  is sumptuous.   Stéphane Fontaine previously shot  A Prophet (2009) and the amazing Rust and Bone (2012).  The soundtrack includes an original score is by Alex Somer, and music by Sigur Ros, Bob Dylan, Bach and Chopin and provides an intelligent and sometimes satirical commentary.   El Hilo de Ariada  was written by  Viggo Mortensen and George MacKay,  and the whole  family join together to sing throughout the film.

The good Doctor Kermode has also pointed out the relevance of the lyrics of Bernie Taupin and Elton John’s  song  Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy and even though the writer says he made no such connection they really do fit (read them again when you have seen the film).   

Captain Fantastic, raised and regimented, hardly a hero

Just someone his mother might know

Are there chances in life for little dirt cowboys

Should I make my way out of my home in the woods

For there's weak winged young sparrows that starve in the winter

Broken young children on the wheels of the winners

And the sixty-eight summer festival wallflowers are thinning

For cheap easy meals, hardly a home on the range

Too hot for the band with a desperate desire for change

We've thrown in the towel too many times

I do encourage you to see this movie.  It certainly made me think and that is enough for me to give thanks for, even without the engaging performances in this film.    The Captain may not be truly fantastic, but  it is, I think, individual, thoughtful, moving and amusing.