Madeleine's Madeleine

Director Josephine Decker

 

The director chats with Ashley Connor about shooting a scene

 

Actress Helena Howard with director Josephine Decker

 

MADELEINE’S MADELEINE                    B+                  

USA  (93 mi)  2018  d:  Josephine Decker

The emotions you are having are not your own, they are someone else’s.  You are not the cat — you are inside the cat.

―opening line spoken in a blur

This is a workshop film, developed out of innumerable improvisational rehearsals, most leading nowhere, but at some point something clicked.  Revitalizing the outdated mode of Living Theater, apparently drawing the lines of what appears to be a Redux version of Rivette’s Out 1 and Jacques Rivette R.I.P.  (1971), a mammoth 775-minute epic work that evolves out of theatrical rehearsals, never really preparing for the staging of a live performance, but simply putting in the work to examine one’s commitment to process, where theory supersedes reality, which takes a backseat in this film.  Instead this entire film takes place between the lines, real or imagined, exploring what’s taking place inside one’s head, enamored with the idea of creation itself, with ideas spewing out of a vacuum of nothingness, drawing upon personal experience, encouraging people to reach deep within, then overpraising the outcome, pleased with the theatricality of the moment, offering rewards for the improvisational effort, though not necessarily for any meaningful breakthrough that connects with the audience.  Instead it’s a series of moments, each broken down into collaborative improvisational workshops that highlight and accentuate the personalized nature of what they are doing, drawing attention to the creative process, but not necessarily leading us anywhere.  It’s a unique form of theatrical experimentation, where the courage of conviction is impressive, though it’s extremely limited in terms of having an overall impact.  Instead it builds a stream-of-conscious collective that is constantly changing, yet evaluated and reflected upon throughout, where the audience is intrinsically engaged, even if they don’t know how.  While Rivette throws a narrative bone to the audience, using a clever board game whodunit style mentality, offering clues with accompanying detective intrigue throughout, Decker (a performance artist turned filmmaker) refuses to use any compromise measures, remaining narrative free, allowing free association techniques to weave their way through the entire film, including dramatic mood swings and more than a few queasy moments, creating a cinema of discomfort, challenging the audience to see through a maze of illusion, only occasionally offered strands of connecting tissue.  Something of a head trip, people are continually placed outside their comfort zones, including the audience, but most especially the central characters who are urged to expose their innermost insecurities and fears, creating a dark palette, often overshadowed by a bold sound design that brilliantly counters what we see onscreen, offering a counterpoint, with brash percussive music composed by Caroline Shaw that includes choral music, where the film largely accumulates multiple layers of an untold story, arguably the best edited film of the year, casting a web of intrigue, emphasizing the confusion and personal horrors associated with things we feel but cannot see.      

Helena Howard is Madeleine, a precocious biracial teenager who may suffer serious mental health issues, stressed out by her overprotective relationship with her mother Regina (Miranda July), causing huge mood swings of depression and futility, feeling like a caged bird that can never fly, frustrated at home, disconnected at school, hoping to find her voice through an experimental and culturally diverse theatrical troupe led by an ambitious and very pregnant white director, Evangeline (Molly Parker), who attempts to establish some degree of order through the inflicted group chaos, acting out troubled feelings as a kind of group therapy, using facial masks to hide their identity, finding situations that don’t fit, like animals that can’t speak, or people in distress that can’t escape, creating a kind of unified dance choreography, each mirroring the other.  But where this all leads is unclear, as Evangeline nurtures Madeleine while continually changing her mind about how she envisions their mission, often baffling her own troupe, who work hard establishing character, only to throw it all away for something as yet unknown.  The continuing thread throughout it all is Madeleine, the newest and youngest member, who seems to have the most emotionally invested, constantly encouraged by Evangeline, like a teacher’s pet, who is clearly a substitute for her own mother, yet places her in dangerous and potentially unhealthy situations.  What isn’t clear is how much if this is imagined and how much is real, recalling Spike Jonze’ Being John Malkovich (1999), as the entire film could be taking place inside the mind of a distressed teenager, who is acting out her innermost feelings in imaginary ways, perhaps inventing an alternate reality, but filled with real instead of imaginary people, always placed in difficult situations, like a labyrinth, where she’s forced to find her way out.  What’s real in the film are the internal feelings causing the distress, something most can easily relate to.  How it’s handled, on the other hand, is starkly unique, delving into a deeply disturbing interior world, then offering untried art therapy solutions that may or may not be beneficial, much like evaluating a Montessori school against a public school, as one rigidly relies upon grades and test scores, while the other accentuates a more free-form individualized approach.  Like falling into the fever dream of a rabbit hole, this impressionistic mosaic of a fractured psychology describes the many levels of artistic intent, including anxiety and self-doubt, yet underneath is a fierce independent spirit yearning for expression, inhibited and throttled somewhere along the way, growing distorted and disfigured, even grotesque, searching for a missing ingredient or healing path that wipes all obstacles out of the way, becoming a swirling symphony of voices all searching for the purity of that one grace note, like a cleansing breath, an uncluttered thought, or a moment of clarity. 

Her mother shows concerns that Madeleine’s out of control, off her medication, becoming more and more unreachable, prone to making poor decisions, like an instance when she invites a few young boys into the basement to watch porn movies.  All of this suggests she’s crying out for attention, growing ever more desperate, resorting to any means necessary, where the theatrical troupe becomes a means to express the inexpressible, becoming a surreal, nightmarish adventure, much like Bergman’s HOUR OF THE WOLF (1968), which is itself a struggle for personal sanity, using dreams that rise to the surface in an examination of the creative forces within.  In Madeleine’s eyes, her mother, and perhaps all authority figures, are synonymous with the overcontrolling Nurse Ratched from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a cruel, overbearing, and nitpicking force of cruel dehumanization, eventually taking radical measures to drive her out.  This power play may all be taking place in the deep recesses of Madeleine’s mind during a recent hospital visit to the psych ward, perhaps sedated into a state of powerlessness, where the film is a recreation of her mixed emotions, with layer upon layer of competing forces all fighting for expression.  What’s perhaps most surprising is Evangeline’s interest into delving into Madeleine’s admittedly damaged personal life, making that the feature attraction of the entire troupe, which feels not just personally invasive, but more like theft, delving into racial appropriation while calling it a “group” collaboration.  Yet she is thrust into the spotlight, even when it appears unhealthy to do so, where the expression of pain and disappointment is often written all over Madeleine’s face, plunged into extreme depths of emotion, from the giddiness of her first kiss to being a loner, an outcast, a primal screamer, cruelly forced to share the limelight with her own mother, immediately overshadowed by her unwelcome presence, inappropriately invited to join the theater group by Evangeline, catapulting into centerstage status, becoming the new class darling, pitting mother against daughter, forcing Madeleine to take extreme measures to claw her way back into favor.  Along the way it’s a bumpy road, a glimpse into personal crisis mode, where survival instincts kick in, yet we sense an acute vulnerability, especially her degree of loneliness and isolation, often struggling with identity and self-esteem, and fighting to overcome overwhelming odds.  Like Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), this unflinching autobiographical journey may initially be misunderstood, though it’s likely to be considered among the more creative efforts in recent memory, a bold declaration of fierce independence, which feels like fighting your way out of a dream.  The film is daring and unconventional to be sure, but to what end?  In some ways it’s reminiscent of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color (2013), in particular the mindboggling narrative incoherence, relying upon a stream of impressionistic imagery mixed with a completely mysterious sound design, producing something obtuse and phantasmagorical, which may make sense to a few, who will love it, while the rest will simply tune it out as indecipherable.  Not sure where this will end up, as it’s received much critical acclaim, but viewers are sure to be baffled by what it’s all about. 

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.