Young Adam

YOUNG ADAM               A-            

Great Britain  France  (98 mi)  2002  ‘Scope  d:  David Mackenzie

If ever anyone says to you, “You can put that where the sun don’t shine,” think of this film, a deeply probing, excessively gloomy adaptation of Scottish beat author Alexander Trocchi’s novel.  Ambiguously set in postwar Scotland, this is a tense, sexually explicit lower class version of Polanski’s KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962) with a brilliant cast, the ménage à trois, Les and Ella, played by Peter Mullan and Tilda Swinton, an unhappy couple with a young son onboard who transport post-WWII fuel rations on a barge up and down the narrow canals from Glasgow to Edinburgh, who take on hired help in the form of Ewan McGregor who plays Joe, a chain-smoking, handsome lothario, a self-absorbed character largely based on the author himself, who was a heroin addict with squandered talent.  Filled with an attention to detail, few words, and an endlessly gray mood, the film opens on the docks as they sweep a woman out of the harbor dressed only in a flimsy petticoat.  Shortly afterwards, Joe is staring at Tilda Swinton’s every move, sharing close quarters underneath the decks of the barge, concealing little from her husband.  In this film, no words are needed, and after a brief sexual escapade outdoors on the grassy slopes, when Joe tries to say something, Ella cuts him off quickly, “You’ve said enough for one evening.”  In a series of well-placed flashbacks, Joe is seen meeting and romancing the drowned woman found in the water, Cathie (Emily Mortimer), picking her up on the beach, moving away onto the concealment of rocks where they have sex, learning more about their deteriorating relationship but only as the film progresses, where it seems to be moving in slow motion backwards and forwards, all at the same time.  The style is absorbing, moody, incredibly detached, but extraordinarily focused on each single moment at hand, which when gone, seems to have never meant very much to anyone at all, as if all is lost in a deep abyss of an existential void.  Easily comparable to the most famous barge movie of all time, Jean Vigo’s L'Atalante (1934), which also happens to be the name of the barge (The Atlantic Eve), this lacks the surging romanticism and optimistic feel and instead embarks upon a more somber and fatalistic mood that is diametrically opposed to Vigo, a downbeat depiction of working class social realism that accentuates physical intimacy, where Joe screws every woman he meets, with the audience sympathies and overall view of his character slowly deteriorating over time.  The story moves to the murder trial of the drowned girl, becoming a morality tale, as the police seem to be accusing the wrong man, which sparks the interest of Joe, who slowly, but surely, falls farther and farther from grace.  With an intriguing soundtrack by Talking Head’s David Byrne, the title, one assumes, refers to original sin.  To quote Michael Wilmington, “This is an unvarnished, pitiless look at real life by a man who knows his character is deeply flawed and does nothing to disguise or excuse it.” 

Interesting parallels exist between Vigo, whose life was cut short by tuberculosis, actually directing part of L'Atalante from a stretcher, and the author Alexander Trocchi who wrote his novel from the drugged stupor of a lifelong heroin addiction.  Instead of believing in love, the underlying power of Vigo’s film, this is all about sex, viewed as a short-term substitute where there is no possibility of love.  One main difference in the film is the lack of an inner narration, which is provided by Joe in the book, instead the film wordlessly sees the world through his eyes.  A gritty depiction of working class life, this parallels the poetic realism of Vigo’s film, both offering sumptuously beautiful cinematography (in this case Giles Nuttgen), but this film couldn’t feel more claustrophobic, as the cramped quarters inside the boat are squeezed right next to each other, with paper thin walls offering no privacy to speak of, with Joe using reading a book as an excuse not to go into town with Les, or cuts his visits to the pub short, as his real purpose is to have moments alone with Ella, growing used to each other after a while, even bored, as is suggested when he watches a fly sitting atop her naked breast, which holds little interest anymore.  Simultaneously, Joe is seen staying at home attempting to write on a typewriter while Cathie works all day, but he fails miserably, a writer with no inspiration, usually in a sour mood when she gets home, or drunk, treating her terribly, at times like a sexual predator.  This picture of domesticated bliss is always soiled and stained, a picture of opportunities wasted, yet she yearns for the stability while that most of all is what feels like its breathing down his neck, suffocating him, offering him no relief, eventually making a quick exit.  This failed relationship is what leads him to Les, seeing him throw his typewriter away into the river, offering him a job on the barge, where Joe is viewed as just another drifter.  There’s another scene in the film that’s not in the book, a moment when Ella’s young son falls into the canal, with Joe jumping in headfirst to save him, perhaps offering a bit of sympathy to this otherwise wayward character, suggesting he’s capable of moral decisions even as he openly flaunts behavior that suggests otherwise, having regular sex with Ella right under the nose of Les, thinking only of himself, taking advantage of every opportunity, showing no regard for others.  Pretending to express little interest in the ongoing investigation surrounding the drowned girl, the seemingly unflappable Joe is fooling no one, least of all the audience, while Les just wants to see his name in the papers.  Their closeness is revealed, however, in a scene scrubbing each other’s backs, wiping the coal dust off their bodies, which is done without an ounce of pretense, where it’s simply viewed as a necessity.  Along with trips together into town to visit pubs, this friendly male bonding on the one hand and willful sexual promiscuity with his wife on the other reveal the moral divide that actually defines this picture.    

Moody and extremely atmospheric throughout, while there is an idealized freedom that comes with the barge, with no set hours, no punching the clock, living on the river away from the noise and traffic of the city, the film does an excellent job revealing a near-documentary view of ordinary life traversing the narrow bridges and locks along the river, loading and hauling a variety of commodities.  None of the other characters have much character development, though Swinton makes Ella proud and self-aware while Cathie completely surrenders her dignity and self-respect, instead focusing upon Joe’s sexual exploits, showing little affection and even less responsibility.  Through a series of flashbacks Joe’s despicable inner character comes more prominently into view, in particular a defining scene that reunites Joe with Cathie, accidentally running into one another sometime after they split up, where they strip naked and have sex in the dirt and grime under a truck, hardly a romanticized view, as instead it’s just another depiction of loveless sex.  When she announces she’s pregnant, Joe grows alarmed and immediately defensive, angrily suggesting he may not be the father.  And while she acknowledges having another lover, a likeable plumber named Daniel, there is no question in her mind who the father is.  Gathering his things to walk away, she chases after him and slips along the riverbank falling into the darkness of the river with no sign of her afterwards.  Seemingly paralyzed into inaction, Joe gathers all her clothes and throws them into the river as well, wiping his fingerprints from anything he can recall touching.  Taking an avid interest in the trial afterwards, as Daniel is being charged with murder for the death of Cathie, the film takes a turn into social injustice, as a wronged man is condemned to die, yet it’s just another day in the ordinary lives of a working underclass, making their positions clear in the crowded pubs where gossip takes center stage, eager to equate sex with criminal intent, becoming morbidly intriguing to Joe who listens transfixed to what is being said without ever uttering a solitary word, witnessing a developing lynch mob mentality ready to convict this innocent man.  Joe on the other hand conveniently runs away, away from himself and his conscience, like he’s always done.  And while the book may be an existential critique of a disconnected bourgeois society that is no longer in touch with its own moral values, the film is more of a psychological study of Joe’s own moral failings, expressing a near pathological indifference inherent with his own failure to adjust to the constantly changing world around him.  Far from innocent himself, his crimes are those of narcissistic indulgence, apathy, and self-disgust.  Joe’s connection to the corpse is intentionally withheld until the latter stages of the film, allowing viewers some clue into the kind of man he is, a morally irredeemable character, where any Dostoyevskian guilt or anguish are simply beyond his grasp. 

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.