American Pastoral

AMERICAN PASTORAL                C-                   

USA  (126 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  Ewan McGregor               Official site

We are against everything that is good and decent in honky America.  We will loot and burn and destroy.  We are the incubation of your mothers’ nightmares.

—John Jacobs, Weathermen co-founder, December 1969  

A downward spiraling, extremely exaggerated sad and somber affair, and clearly an overreaction to the failed ideals of the tumultuous 60’s, which provides an underlying context for the film, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning 1997 novel by Philip Roth, suggesting what lies underneath the outward veneer of human behavior remains an unending mystery, something no one ever seems to get right.  Coming out of the optimism of the postwar WWII generation that saw new and expanded economic opportunities, the film reflects the tragedies of an American Dream gone sour, where living the perfect life takes on new meaning, as the ungrateful offspring turned on the economic prosperity enjoyed by their parents, blaming them for all that is wrong with the world, suggesting too much comfort and complacency allows societal horrors to continue unabated, similar to what happened in China, by the way, in their Cultural Revolution happening simultaneously from 1966 to 1976, where children turned government informants on their parents, with dire consequences, exiling their parents to agricultural farm re-education camps, like some kind of Twilight Zone episode, except it really happened.  While this isn’t quite so dire, it is a variation on the Paradise Lost themes, suggesting the journey that began with the riots and racial unrest of the 60’s Civil Rights movement and the anti-war fervor against the Vietnam War led to the Black Panther Party and the radical acts of the Weathermen, eventually exposing the lies and cover-up of the Watergate scandal, which led to the subsequent anti-government cynicism that plagues our nation today, where one can only conclude America’s age of innocence is over.  This film takes a look at one middle class family that chose to live in a beautiful old stone house out in the country in Old Rimrock, a fictional pastoral community a half hour from Newark with a history that goes back to the Revolutionary War, where the small town becomes a microcosm for the larger issues affecting the nation, as described in the novel: 

Let’s remember the energy. Americans were governing not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan.  The war-crime trials were cleansing the earth if its devils once and for all.  Atomic power was ours alone.  Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; in an explosion of self-assertion, auto workers, coal workers, transit workers, maritime workers, steel workers—laborers by the millions demanded more and went on strike for it.  And playing Sunday morning softball on the Chancellor Avenue field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the boys who had come back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets full of separation pay, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they could not have imagined possible before the war.  Our class started high school six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history.  And the upsurge of energy was contagious.  Around us nothing was lifeless.  Sacrifice and constraint were over.  The Depression had disappeared. Everything was in motion.  The lid was off.  Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together.

What’s never made clear in the film, though it’s the book’s central premise, is that the protagonist Seymour Irving Levov, played by Ewan McGregor, who also directs the film, does not look or behave like a Jew, one of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in the 1940’s from a preponderantly Jewish public high school in Newark, New Jersey, who became known as “the Swede” for his blond hair and athletic stature, star of the baseball, football, and basketball teams, often leading the school to city and state finals, becoming the envy of everyone in his high school and a legend throughout Newark, spawning fantasies almost as they imagined Gentiles, where you could forget about work or building a career and instead place all your hopes on athletic prowess.   The opening narration comes from Nathan Zukerman (David Strathairn) while attending his 45th high school reunion, as he still idolizes the Swede even after all these years, never really knowing what happened to him, but at the reunion he runs into the Swede’s younger brother Jerry Levov (Rupert Evans), who had just attended the Swede’s funeral.  Rather than the dream of what was supposed to happen to him, filled with all manner of heroism and success, we learn from Jerry what actually happened to the Swede, which plays out in a flashback.  Despite being a natural at sports, defying the Jewish stereotype that Jews are not athletic, the Swede passed up an opportunity to play professional baseball with the New York Giants and instead, like a responsible Jewish kid, went to work in his father’s business, where almost effortlessly he becomes equally successful manufacturing women’s gloves.  Yet the embodiment of his success is marrying a shiksa, Dawn Dwyer (Jennifer Connelly), a good Catholic girl who is also a beauty queen, named Miss New Jersey in 1949, where the pre-nuptial, face-to-face discussion with the Swede’s father Lou (Peter Riegert, boldly honest, easily the best thing in the film) about how to combine the mixed faiths on birthdays and holidays is positively hilarious, as they wrangle about “making concessions” like it’s some sort of business deal.  In order to enjoy their success, where we assume he’s a millionaire, he moves out into the country to lead that perfect, idyllic existence that most Americans can only dream about.    

The apple of his eye is Merry (Ocean James as an 8-year old), a Daddy’s girl, his over-privileged daughter and the source of parental pride and continual extended family satisfaction, although she speaks with a stutter.  As this appears to be more than a phase, they eventually seek professional help from a speech therapist, Sheila Smith (Molly Parker), who believes the problem stems from deep-seeded psychological issues where she’s expected to live up to the idealized perfection of her mother, a beauty queen, suggesting the deck’s stacked against her, a rather amusing and unexpected personalized diagnosis that leaves both parents squirming in denial.  All this happens in the opening fifteen minutes of the film, a beautiful set-up, but it’s all downhill from there.  By the time Merry (Dakota Fanning) reaches adolescence, she hates her mother, hates their upscale life, and rages against the capitalist exploitation of the mostly black workers in her father’s factory, becoming a budding radical who lines her bedroom with political posters and slogans.  When Newark goes up in flames from the race riots of 1967, with roving gangs destroying much of the city, most white businessmen bail out during the rising tensions, but not the Swede, who keeps his factory open, maintaining the jobs of his workers.  But this isn’t enough for Merry, inspired by radical groups in New York, waging war against America’s war in Vietnam, “bringing the war back home,” an infamous Weatherman slogan, where she’s the lead suspect in a local 1968 bombing of the Old Rimrock post office that killed an innocent civilian, disappearing afterwards where she’s not heard from since, apparently joining the Weather Underground.  While her parents continue to deny their 16-year old privileged, upper middle-class daughter could have anything to do with this, this incident shatters their life and their marriage, blowing to smithereens any concept of the American Dream.  The actual timing is out of whack, as posters discovered in her room suggest Merry is following the rhetoric of the Weathermen a year before they were actually formed in the summer of 1969.  While there’s reason to believe a lot of students and workers around the world felt this way, for more on that, please see Chris Marker’s definitive work The Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de L’Air Est Rouge) (1977), but Merry is simply a stand-in for others, Mark Rudd, Katherine Boudin, and Jane Alpert, all in their twenties, Jewish, middle-class, college-educated, yet somehow turned violent in their anti-war radical stance committed to revolutionary action, and determined to change the direction of the United States government.  While this may seem unfathomable even to this day, the film’s trajectory simply defies belief in attempting to explain this “abnormality,” growing more pathetic with each subsequent scene, yet Roth, the author of the book, remains equally perplexed, where he goes so far as to suggest the Swede was destroyed because he wasn’t a very good Jew, that he passed for a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) in society, something that in his mind he could not escape, opening him up to God’s wrath, inflicting a terrible Job-like punishment.  These are all terrible reactions that miss the mark, as they still fail to understand the underlying context of what drove the radicalization of the 60’s.  Believe me, it was not God’s wrath, and might be better understood by reading Frantz Fanon.     

Night Moves (2013)

NIGHT MOVES       B                       

USA  (112 mi)  2013  d:  Kelly Reichardt

There’s East coast weirdness, like Sean Durkin’s exposé of the lingering psychological aftereffects of cult paranoia in Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), and then there’s West coast weirdness, like Antonioni’s acid trip reflection on the radical 60’s in Zabriskie Point (1970), where this film is more reminiscent of the latter, a modern era, eco-terrorist version of the 60’s Weather Underground.  All dialogue is kept to a minimum, allowing only a scant outline of a story to develop, where Reichardt’s interest is delving under the surface, probing into the restless psychological territory, where the film is really told in two parts, the events leading up to the incident, and what comes afterwards, where both are given equal treatment.  Once again examining souls living on the edge of society, pitting man against nature, the film is shot once again in the lush interior forest regions of Oregon, Reichardt’s fourth consecutive film shot there, where there’s no question that the stunning landscape is the feature character.  Humans are little more than ants that play a minimalist role in determining its fate, curiously disinterested in the land and how to use it, or developing any concept of global sharing, where according to this film, science suggests the toxic damage currently being done to our global ecology is rapidly outweighing any attempts at curative effects to stave off what amounts to catastrophic outcomes, where at current rates the oceans may lose nearly all its fish within forty years.  There’s an interesting movie within the movie shown to environmental activists in the region that suggests the future is overwhelmingly grim, leading one lone individual to feel pretty hopeless, yet they are encouraged to do what they can to save the planet.  Given that reality, with no more backstory, we follow the lives of three dedicated individuals who have already decided upon a course of activism to blow up a hydroelectric dam, though like Fassbinder’s THE THIRD GENERATION (1979), certainly part of the intrigue is seeing how ridiculously amateurish and unprepared this group is in considering likely outcomes and possibilities, where they are thoroughly unprepared, sometimes comically so, to deal with real consequences. 

Jesse Eisenberg as Josh is playing totally against type, as he’s known for his Woody Allenesque rapid fire dialogue, but here he barely utters anything, convinced of his cause, where there’s nothing to discuss.  Living on the grounds of a food coop, he is rooted close to the land, making a statement by his chosen lifestyle.  Dakota Fanning is Dena, running an upscale women’s spa out in the woods, where she helps women find their inner harmony, complete with flute music along with other tranquil sounds playing throughout.  These two set the stage, as they live nearby and are apparently friends, seen buying a boat with a live-in captain’s quarters (called Night Moves in homage to Arthur Penn’s taut 1975 post-Watergate thriller starring Gene Hackman), before they set off to find their third partner, driving a good part of the day and early evening just to get there, where who else but the always slightly unhinged Peter Sarsgaard plays Harmon, an ex-Marine who is a trained explosives expert.  Drinking beer to calm their nerves, each has their own agenda, where Harmon questions the need for Dena, as she’s not as tight as these two comrades in arms who have probably pulled off other underground acts together, but this is obviously a step up.  Dena handles herself admirably the next day, however, thinking quickly on her feet, pulling off the sale of 500 pounds of ammonium fertilizer without providing appropriate identification, seen mixed with the 1000 pounds Harmon already had afterwards, treated and loaded into the boat, driving to a nearby campsite by evening.  The centerpiece of the film is nicely structured, set in the calm and quiet of the night, underlined by soft piano music from Jeff Grace, as the tense atmosphere is driven by the meticulous detail of the planning, much like the wordless bank heist sequence of Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI (1955), where what’s supposed to go perfectly starts out as a well-precisioned machine before things start to unravel.  The actual incident is never shown, but can be heard from a distance offscreen, where the audience is immediately attuned to the paranoia seeping in as they make their getaway, remaining on high alert for the duration of the film, where fear is palpable as their nerves are tested by a variety of circumstances, each one accumulating more underlying dread, becoming an existential drama on Crime and Punishment.

Shot almost like a silent era film, this is largely a study of facial expressions and interior reactions, where the dire moods of Josh, never once breaking into a smile, exude the intensity of the moment, where the food coop employees and their families are crammed around a computer screen the next morning following the news, where the reaction is interesting, as the most radical member among them, perhaps the one Josh most wished to impress, is Sean (Kai Lennox), the guy running the coop, yet he’s the one least impressed by the actions, calling it “theatrical,” as it doesn’t go far enough to have any meaningful or longlasting effect, while the kids are more electrified by the subversive nature of the terrorist act happening in their neck of the woods.  The focus is again on Josh, as the camera never leaves his face, where the constant presence is burning a hole through his skull, penetrating his psyche, where his calm exterior belies his trepidation, where he is completely at odds with his natural surroundings, where kids all around him are playing with the animals and having fun, but he’s overly consumed in work, where every noise sets off the thought of a potential police visit.  Almost immediately, their agreed-upon phone silence is violated, especially after word gets out in the news that a nearby camper has been missing since the blast.  One by one, their frayed nerves unravel, where it only takes one to set off the others, causing a chain reaction of exacerbated horror that only increases the terrifying fear of being exposed.  Reichardt balances this growing instability with the routine farm chores of the day, along with banal chatter and ordinary conversations, where Josh is petrified, feeling lost and helpless, growing worse when it’s discovered that the missing man is found dead, pushing them all over the edge in justifying any idealism in their actions.  Instead, like the 60’s Weathermen who took great care in bombing buildings, not people, the unexpected can happen, as people can be where you least expect them, and tragically, what’s meant to convey human outrage at despicable corporate practices becomes little more than murder.  This increasingly troubling thriller shows the effects of idealism gone wrong, where instead of elation, the participants are filled with guilt and regret, as the dilemma rises to unforeseen heights, where the fear continues to escalate, never really going away, much like the panic at the end of Martha Marcy May Marlene where cult escapees are forever looking over their shoulders to see if someone is following them.  Reichardt’s method is more minimalist and understated, where instead of revealing any grand political motivation, everything is implied, where it’s up to the audience to infer their own motives.   

    

The film does recall an op-ed piece written by former Weatherman William Ayers, "The Real Bill Ayers" in The New York Times, December 5, 2008: 

In the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.

I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing. 

With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.

Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation. 

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education. 

I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long. 

The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret. 

We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war. 

The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.

President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better. 

Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.