Candy Mountain

CANDY MOUNTAIN                   A                       

Switzerland  Canada  France  (91 mi)  1988  d:  Robert Frank    co-director:  Rudy Wurlitzer

Once more before I go, out to Killarney
Once more before I go, beg me to stay
As the wind blows across my grave, I will be calling
Once more before I go, once more for ever more

—“Once More Before I Go,” by Al Silk (Tom Waits)

From the depths of the archives of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, who allegedly hold copies of Robert Frank’s entire cinematic output, comes yet another undiscovered gem, and while it was made in the late 80’s, remains one of the best films to effortlessly express the complexities and ambiguities of the 50’s and 60’s, refusing to be defined or labeled, searching through unchartered waters for that inexpressible meaning in life, whatever and wherever that may be, taking all circuitous detours on the road, living off the grid, studying everything around you, while living in the gray matter of your young and all too impressionable mind.  Perhaps what ultimately matters in this film is that Frank was a recognized artist before he became a filmmaker, so an artist’s sensibility runs throughout the picture.  Knowing the personality of the foreign-born director adds to a greater understanding of his works, as like many migrants before him, he arrived in this country filled with hope and optimism, where he was first and foremost a photographer, remaining fascinated with American culture, but his views changed, where the optimism of the 50’s led to a disparity in wealth and unmistakable realities of class and racial differences, finally viewing the country as an often bleak and lonely place.  He met key figures of the Beat Generation in the late 50’s, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, making his first impromptu movie with them called PULL MY DAISY (1959), which was written and narrated by Kerouac, based on a play by Kerouac and featured the beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, as well as painter Larry Rivers and actress Delphine Seyrig, made a year after he published his most famous work, The Americans, a collection of photographs that could be described as a prototypical road movie with Kerouac writing the introductory text.  Sean O’Hagan writes from The Guardian, November 7, 2014, "Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won't look back":

Frank was 31 in 1955 when he secured the Guggenheim Grant that financed his various road trips across America the following year with his wife and his two young children in tow.  He shot around 28,000 pictures.  When Les Americains was published by Robert Delpire in France in 1958, it consisted of just 83 black and white images, but it changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it.  Published in the United Sates as The Americans by Grove Press a year later, it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century. […]

Frank’s America is a place of shadows, real and metaphorical.  His Americans look furtive, lonely, suspicious.  He caught what Diane Arbus called the “hollowness” at the heart of many American lives, the chasm between the American dream and the everyday reality.  With his handheld camera, Frank embraced movement and tilt and grain.  Contemporary critics reacted with a mixture of scorn and outrage, accusing him of being anti-American as well as anti-photography.  A review in Practical Photography dismissed the book’s “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.”  The Americans portrayed a place and a people that many Americans just could not, or did not want to see: a sad, hard, divided country that seemed essentially melancholic rather than heroic.  As Jack Kerouac put it in his famous introduction, Robert Frank “sucked a sad poem out of America.”

Frank was an outsider by temperament and design.  Born and raised in Zurich, where he trained as a commercial studio photographer, he fled his solidly bourgeois family in 1947, tired of “the smallness of Switzerland.”  In New York, he landed a job at Harper’s Bazaar, where famed art director, Alexey Brodivitch, had hired the likes of Cartier-Bresson and Bill Brandt, but deadlines and the dictates of magazine work quickly wore him down and he set off for South America, shooting in the towns and villages of Bolivia and Peru and living hand to mouth.

These journeys set the tone for much of what was to follow as Frank traveled through England and Wales before embarking on his road trips across America.  Though he rejected Walker Evan’s more formal approach, he learned much from the older photographer, whom he accompanied on shorter trips after they met and became friends in New York.  Their differing attitudes to photography – and to life – were essentially generational: the impeccably well-bred Evans once asked Frank, “Why do you hang out with those people, Robert?  They have no class.”  He was referring to Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, whom Frank had recognised as fellow iconoclasts in search of another wilder America that matched their outlaw imaginations.

Their influence would seep into Frank’s later work like a virus: the freeform flow of his fly-on-the-wall short films and the uncompromising diaristic style of the infamous Cocksucker Blues, a documentary about the Rolling Stones 1972 tour of America that caught the boredom and dissolution of life on the road in a grainy verite style that was way too revealing for the group.  They sued to prevent its release and sent a sheriff to his door to confiscate his copy of the film.  Legend has it that Mick Jagger acknowledged the film’s greatness but told Frank: “If it shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again.”

Frank met screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer in the 1960’s, as both were living in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, about as far from the all-consuming bright lights of Los Angeles as they could possibly get, both living in the shadows to survive, while also keeping in touch in New York’s Lower East Side, growing more inspired by his work with Monte Hellman in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Sam Peckinpah’s last western, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), initially working together on the film KEEP BUSY (1975), an absurdist glimpse at a group of artists in Cape Breton, and ENERGY AND HOW TO GET IT (1981), a near 30-minute short funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a documentary spoof about a lone engineer who believes in free energy butting heads with an Energy Czar, played by William S. Burroughs.  The best fusion of their talents, however, is this Canadian co-directed film, largely improvised and open-ended, combining Frank’s abstract, narrative free artistic vision with Wurlitzer’s cryptic dialogue in near apocalyptic road journeys to nowhere, where on the DVD commentary track of Two-Lane Blacktop, Wurlitzer is quoted as saying, “The horizon is everything that the rear-view mirror isn’t.  It’s the unknown.”  Despite its rambling style, often feeling lost and incoherent, the film is one of the better extensions of the 60’s counterculture, with plenty of autobiographical references, described by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (The Countercultural Histories of Rudy Wurlitzer | Jonathan Rosenbaum) as “the deliberate relinquishment of power, a key aim of 60’s counterculture, (and) represents the closest thing in his work to utopia,” arguably resonating more deeply than Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), for instance, both de-glamorizations of Hollywood culture, but considered standard-bearers and among the first counterculture films to be viewed by a mass audience, while this film, made nearly twenty years later, is nearly forgotten, sent to the trash heap, barely mentioned, if not omitted from an actor’s resumé, and only available in an obscure European Region 2 DVD format.  While it continues Wurlitzer’s meditations on the myths of the American frontier, it uses a music format to do so, not just on the eclectic soundtrack, but in the use of interesting glimpses of musical figures of the 70’s and 80’s who populate the film as actors, all of whom share an undeniable artistic integrity and creativity, each figuring prominently in the storyline, adding a special appeal, wry humor, and a hint that their appearance brings an alternative universe (and subversive meaning) into nearly every scene. With so many singers and musicians appearing in the film, who may or may not have been under contract at the time, one of the reasons the film may be so endlessly lost in a legal quagmire of limited distribution is no one has attempted to untangle the complicated rights issues involving the various artists and their music, which is heard throughout, but largely uncredited, as it’s incorporated into the overall narrative. 

While the film is, in effect, a rejection of trendy American culture, especially how musicians are literally owned by record labels and measured by capitalist dollar signs, with death only increasing their value, as we witnessed when a slew of iconic 60’s rockers (Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Keith Moon) died before their time, reduced to having their names emblazoned on marketable merchandise, lost in a land with an overriding obsession with money, where the film title is a fictional place mentioned in a depression era song, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a hobo’s dream of paradise on earth, “where the jails are made of tin / and you can walk right out again.”   Nonetheless we begin our journey on the mean streets of New York, following the exploits of a dreamer protagonist throughout, a not so bright but idealistic and ambitious young kid who wants to be a star, Julius Book, Chicago-born Kevin J. O’Connor, who was stuck with the label of being the next James Dean and is simply brilliant throughout, the son of a Chicago cop, more recently seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012), and a recurring character in the TV-series Chicago P.D. (2014 to present), a stand-in for the pursuit of the American Dream, as he dreams of breaking into the music business, but thinks only of success and money.  Initially, however, after walking off his job, he can’t even get his guitar back from Mario (Joe Strummer, punk icon of the Clash) and his strange cohort, Arto Lindsay (New York no wave group DNA), who instead sends him on a non-paying gig with Keith Burns (David Johansen, aka Buster Pointdexter of the New York Dolls), appearing here with a group of musicians, including his drummer, Tony “Machine” Krasinski, but Burns ridicules his playing ability during a band rehearsal.  Instead he picks up on Burns’s obsession with Elmore Silk guitars, supposedly the finest handmade guitars on the market, each worth more than $20,000, but made by a recluse who has all but disappeared from sight, making his guitars even more valuable.  Julius gets Burns’s attention by pretending to know the man, claiming he can track him down and get him to sign an agreement to sell Burns a few of his guitars.  Julius, it turns out, lies through his teeth, claiming experiences he doesn’t have, where mostly he’s a shiftless music wannabe with coiffed hair and a black leather jacket, where he’s got the look but not the talent.  Yet with the stroke of a pen, Julius hits the road, receiving wheels and an advance of $2000, where the free-wheeling style of the film really kicks into gear, featuring the ever-widening, open expanse of Swiss cinematographer Pio Corradi, whose credits list 100 films, yet none are remotely recognizable, which only adds to the film’s charming allure. While Frank’s photographic eye captures the striking beauty of vast natural landscapes, isolated roads, and lonely characters who haunt the texts of so many American poems and songs, yet over the course of his journey, there are many who remind the aimless Julius “the road ain’t what it used to be,” turning this into a kind of anti-road movie, where Wurlitzer seems to be commenting on this generation, which has been sold a bill of goods about freedom and the mystery of “the road,” having heard about Kerouac or Easy Rider, but never reading the book or seeing the movie, where instead they’re nearly incapable of actually learning anything from the experience. 

Early on, Julius is given a sage bit of advice from a toothless truck driver (Rockets Redglare), “Life ain’t no candy mountain,” before being bilked out of money.  In an amusing series of vignettes, Julius meets Al Silks (Tom Waits), Elmore’s upscale brother, like a character out of a Buster Keaton movie, a rich man living in opulence (“There are rooms in that house that I haven’t even been in,”) whose advice to Julius, as he practices on a putting tee, is that “You should be playing golf.  You’re young.  You should be playing A LOT of golf.”  Both getting soundly drunk, Julius takes a nap to the sounds of Waits gravel-filled voice, cozied up next to a piano singing “Once More Before I Go,” Tom Waits in Candy Mountain - YouTube (7:15). Interestingly, in the same year as the film’s release, Waits released Frank’s Wild Years, the final in a trilogy of albums that included Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs, music that had absolutely nothing to do with the 80’s music scene, instead enveloping the idea of absolute freedom of creation, which lingers through the cracks as a prominent theme of the film.  When Julius wakes, Silks offers him his 60’s T-Bird for half his cash, claiming Elmore is living with his daughter, who in stark contrast, is living in a disreputable trailer park.  By the time Julius gets there, he discovers Alice (Laurie Metcalf) lives with her paraplegic husband Henry (Dr. John, who plays no music) in a wheelchair, both fighting like cats and dogs, with Henry especially incensed to learn Elmore’s guitars are so valuable and he missed out on an opportunity to make money on them, leaving him with nothing, as instead they literally drove him out, and in no time we can see why, as they are a hilarious picture of turmoil and constant dysfunction, Dr. John in Candy Mountain YouTube (6:31), but take the T-Bird off his hands for a broken down VW Van and a forwarding address in the remote hinterlands of Canada.  The VW breaks down almost immediately, with Julius trading it in, along with some cash, for a pickup truck that takes him into the snowy landscapes of Canada.  Running throughout the film is a recurring motif involving automobiles, as every time Julius arrives in a new place, he leaves in a different vehicle.  Similarly, as he discovers people from Elmore’s past, Julius is stripped of his cash and all material possessions, yet inevitably stumbles forward on his quest for fame and fortune with his same ideals intact, while remaining oblivious to his surroundings.  None more apparent than a drunken encounter that leads him into the hoosegow, as falling asleep at the wheel, he happened to veer his car into the property of an extremely pious and sanctimonious Justice of the Peace (Roberts Blossom) and his equally eccentric constable son (Leon Redbone), and is unable to pay for the damages, spending days locked up in an adjoining room of the house, Leon Redbone in Candy Mountain YouTube (10:19), but eventually his freedom is celebrated with a spirited (and drunken) father and son rendition of “On the Road to Nowhere.” 

Easily the most poignant stop along the way is his visit to Cornelia (Bulle Ogier, a French actress who’s worked with Rivette, Fassbinder, Chabrol, and Buñuel), one of Elmore’s former loves, a moving sequence filled with a haunting pathos, like a memory of a forgotten incident, where she couldn’t be more graciously tender and accommodating, even inviting him into her bed, informing him “Elmore wants to step off the edge of the map,” but Julius is hell-bent on finding him.  It’s only when he appears to be at the end of the road that the film comes together, where we’ve learned bits and pieces of information about Elmore along the way, creating a near mythical status before he ever makes an appearance.  While the film is oddly amusing throughout, it perhaps shouldn’t surprise us that when he finally discovers Elmore’s home, there’s a message written on a mirror in the living room, “You owe me one.”  When Elmore (Harris Yulin) finally does show up, located at the farthest point of Cape Breton, Julius thinks he’s hit the jackpot, clueless to what’s taking place before his eyes, as Elmore actually takes him under his wing before walking out the door, perhaps reminding him of his own carefree youth, suggesting he stick around and soak up some of the surroundings, “I say freedom doesn’t have much to do with the road, one way or the other.”  What this underlines is that there is no secret to happiness, and the farther you run away in pursuit of your authentic self, you’re no closer to finding it, as we soon learn Elmore cuts his own deal with a mysterious Asian buyer (Koko Yamamoto), and as part of the deal, destroys all his other guitars while pledging to never make another, enormously jacking up the prices of his existing works, enough for him to live on comfortably for the rest of his life, which turns out to be no problem for him at all, with Julius strangely helping him burn his remaining inventory.  In the end, perhaps stomping on earlier dreams and promises made, the last vestiges of earlier hopes abandon us as we approach our own mortality and even the best of us are prone to sell out.  While the finality of it all is a bit surreal, and somehow magical, viewers are treated to a magnificent performance by Cape Breton’s First Lady of Song, Rita MacNeil singing “Everybody,” Rita MacNeil in Candy Mountain YouTube (3:12), as authentic and big-hearted a voice as you’ll ever find, conveying in one song a lifetime of honesty and sincerity, where she may as well represent the true artistic inspiration of the film, what Julius keeps hoping to find, but once again ignores.  A celebration of marginal characters and a moving evocation of poets, vagabonds, and loners, the fleeting beauty of the brief musical interludes reminds us of their significance in our lives, where this is a rare film that on one canvas captures that rambunctious yet elusive spirit of freedom while also demonstrating a unique flair for an appreciation of beauty.  Made on a limited budget for next to nothing, this is the real thing.     

Paterson

 

PATERSON               B                    

USA  (118 mi)  2016  d:  Jim Jarmusch

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.
Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom
seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations
drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river
animate a thousand automations. Who because they
neither know their sources nor the sills of their
disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly
      for the most part,
locked and forgot in their desires-unroused.

—Say it, no ideas but in things—
  nothing but the blank faces of the houses
  and cylindrical trees
  bent, forked by preconception and accident—
  split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—
  secret—into the body of the light!

From above, higher than the spires, higher
even than the office towers, from oozy fields
abandoned to gray beds of dead grass,
black sumac, withered weed-stalks,
mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves-
the river comes pouring in above the city
and crashes from the edge of the gorge
in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists-

  (What common language to unravel?
  . . .combed into straight lines
  from that rafter of a rock's
  lip.)

A man like a city and a woman like a flower
—who are in love. Two women. Three women.
Innumerable women, each like a flower.

                        But
only one man—like a city.

—Paterson, by William Carlos Williams, published in five volumes, from 1946 to 1958, From Book I, Paterson by William Carlos Williams - Famous poems ...

A return to a cinema defined by small moments of existential reverie, feeling more like fables or fragments of dreams, as expressed in Jarmusch’s earlier film COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (2003), though this film has a more cohesive plotline that holds all the material together, but otherwise it’s similarly structured around a series of vignettes, where a rhythm of life is established by following a single character, a bus driver aptly named Paterson (Adam Driver), who goes about his daily routines in the town of Paterson, New Jersey, a city made famous by an epic series of poems by William Carlos Williams.  While this is among the more understated films on record, it isn’t without several elegiac moments, yet, much like another recent film Fences (2016), an adaptation of an August Wilson play set in Pittsburgh, the film fails to transcend its working class existence, where people are boxed into claustrophobic realities, where race is an economically restrictive component for Wilson, while poetry is presumably the way out of similar suffocating restrictions for Paterson, yet he is similarly confined by mind numbing work routines that make it exceedingly difficult to rise above the regimented parameters demanded by the job, as evidenced by another bus driver Donny (Rizwan Manji) who incessantly complains about the daily grind that often feels overwhelming.  Not sure there won’t be more viewers identifying with Donny’s plight than Paterson’s seemingly unflappable demeanor, as most would find it hard to get past the accumulated rigor and more demanding aspects of work that take its toll over time, preventing workers from having a greater sense of independence.  There are only a few that reach utopian pleasure from work, turning it into a positive environment where they literally thrive from being constantly replenished on a spiritual level, yet that is the main thrust of this film, where it defies social realism and instead becomes a provocative imaginary treatise on the way it could and perhaps should be, but unfortunately isn’t for the mass majority of human beings on the planet.  Inhabiting a dreamlike structure, the film exists in an imaginary world, where the economic and social pressures that consume us on a regular basis simply don’t exist, where we’re instead free to collectively pursue our dreams in a utopian world where life is as we imagine it instead of the way it is.

While it’s a challenging premise, it’s also interesting that Adam Driver has been associated with what might be called other mind-altering works, as he’s a significant player in the supernatural Jeff Nichols film Midnight Special (2016), where in each he seems to have the capacity to channel interior worlds most of us are incapable of seeing, as here he plays an everyday, ordinary man, yet he finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, tapping into the world around him, in keeping with the daily rhythms of life, writing existential poetry that finds beauty in the banal, where “Only one man like a city” can see what most of us do not.  Jarmusch remains faithful to the poet Williams’s most famous tenet:  “No ideas but in things.”  Remaining grounded by a working life, much like William Carlos Williams, a practicing physician throughout his entire life, Paterson keeps a notebook by his side, collecting thoughts and bits of overheard conversation while continuously tuning into the world around him as he jots down free verse poetry.  Shot over a week’s time, identifying each new day, the film uses an Atom Egoyan-like structure from his film CALENDAR (1993), where a repeating overhead tableau camera shot opens each day of the week, as we find Paterson snuggled closely in bed with his wife Laura, Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani from My Sweet Pepper Land (2013) and 2015 Top Ten List #10 About Elly (Darbareye Elly), checking his watch for the time, sometime between 6 and 6:30 am, affectionately kissing his wife, as both start each day in each other’s arms.  It’s important to consider the quirky individuality of Laura, an excitable girl, who is like the perfect imaginary wife, always loving and devoted, yet consumed by weird idiosyncrasies that not only keep her occupied, but elated by each and every day, where she’s literally thrilled when he gets home from work each day, spending time in the kitchen preparing some culinary surprise, yet she’s fascinated by so many things on her own that it’s impossible for the relationship to grow stale.  Mind you, Paterson rarely shows any emotions or excitability, but remains passively contained, reserved, and within himself at all times, so it’s his wife that provides all the emotional outbursts, displaying a childlike enthusiasm for the world around her, whether it’s painting, decorating the house, learning to play the guitar, or making cupcakes for a farmer’s market, her upbeat demeanor expresses a woman who is not only satisfied and content, but filled with joy. 

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams | Poetry Foundation

Paterson reads this poem to his wife, at one point, finding joy in the everyday, like miniature haiku impressions, where this might be described as a film where nothing much happens, a stark contrast to the excessive violence that prevails in most American films, instead it’s filled with small moments that reflect the passing of each day, as Paterson sits at the breakfast counter each morning and eats his cereal before heading off to work, lunchbox in hand, as he walks to the bus depot, usually without a word to anyone.  Sitting in his bus before he starts his rounds, he scribbles lines of poetry in his notebook that appear onscreen as he speaks them out loud, finding beauty in small things and day-to-day moments, yet reflecting a casual grace in expressing a natural rhythm of time, where he seems to drift through life completely insulated by his observations, which are actually the work of Ron Padgett, an esteemed New York school poet, editor, and translator whose many honors include winning the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 2014.  Each night, after dinner, Paterson walks his dog, a distinguished bulldog named Marvin who has an amusing habit when left alone during the day, as he runs out and attacks the mailbox stand, knocking it off kilter, where it is noticeably tilted and ajar by the time Paterson gets home from work.  This running joke between a man and his pet seems rooted in some unknown irritation known only to Marvin, who may object to Paterson’s habit of tying his leash to a post outside a bar he visits every night.  Inside he chats with Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley), a black bartender and familiar face, with photos of Paterson celebrities on the wall (including Lou Costello, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, and Sam Moore of Sam & Dave), where Paterson sips on a single beer before heading home.  One night he witnesses a lover’s quarrel, where the rejected lover (William Jackson Harper) takes matters into his own hand, pulling out a gun, with Paterson quickly taking it out of his hand, discovering it’s only a plastic toy.  This is as violent as the film gets.  Walking home from work one day he encounters a young 10-year old girl (Sterling Jerins) waiting for her mother, discovering she’s also a poet, reading something from her “secret notebook” called Water Falls, that begins with the lines, “Water falls from the bright air / It falls like hair / Falling across a young girl’s shoulders.”  While the poem was actually written by Jarmusch, an English major at Columbia who was fascinated by the poetry of William Blake in Dead Man (1995), Paterson has a habit of meeting various poets along the way, where the viewer is not sure if this is happening only in his imagination, as each time it carries a dreamlike quality.  In the evening after dinner, while out walking his dog, he overhears a man spouting free verse in a neighborhood laundromat, Cliff Smith (Method Man), suggesting poetry is to be found in all walks of life, thriving in the hidden corners of our society.  Finally, sitting at his favorite spot in front of the Passaic Falls, a visiting Japanese poet, Masatoshi Nagase from MYSTERY TRAIN  (1989), appears as if out of a lingering daydream, revitalizing his creative spirit.  As the only white adult in a cast composed of black, Indian, Iranian, and Japanese actors, Paterson internalizes his role, living on the outer fringe of society, mixing with, yet keeping a comfortable distance in order to best maintain an artist’s gaze.