The Talkies/Black and White in Color
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES BLACK AND WHITE IN COLOR El or weeks now, a movie theater near my home has been playing Glory, the much-lauded movie about the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first black regiment in...
...But the highway episode runs counter to everything else in Driving Miss Daisy...
...We encountered vodka once before, at the Paradise in Brighton Beach (TAS, December 1988...
...The whole point, I should think, is that these soldiers are not fighting for glory...
...If it isn't made in samovars (another discovery of my high school reading) it's not for lack of equipment, for there are several dozen samovars filling strategic shelves on the restaurant's walls...
...Only another Russian could understand the reactionary and Sovietophile blend presented by the pseudo-colorful Komarovs . . . " Sorry I asked...
...Only another Russian" is a mistake, though...
...Two small criticisms...
...Partly it's the color scheme: the walls, what you can see of them between paintings and samovars, are a deep, piny green...
...We don't know what will become of the Soviet Union...
...And the kids laughed, too, when the seemingly hard-hearted Rip stood up, on the eve of battle, and, choking back tears, told his fellow soldiers that he loved them...
...A less intelligent movie would've ended the sequence with all three of them—Miss Daisy, Boone, and Hoke— at the King dinner, basking in their bold and righteous interracial solidarity, challenging all Atlanta to reproach them...
...And what unforgettable characters they are...
...Having floundered, in recent years, in one insipid comedy after another, the sometime Blues Brother proves himself here to be a very fine light character actor in the Jack Carson mold...
...Petersburg...
...Take the Martin Luther King dinner sequence...
...If it does, it will find some good drink recipes waiting for it left of Carnegie Hall...
...When Trip tormented his fellow soldier Thomas (Andre Braugher), an intelligent, Emerson-reading Bostonian, the kids hooted delightedly, showing no empathy whatsoever for Thomas's poignant, acutely ironic position as a privileged member of society who has relinquished his cherished freedom only to find himself in the company of fellow blacks who seem thoroughly alien to him...
...Second, there'sa short scene, about midway through the film, whose implications are unfortunate...
...he laughs readily, finding amusement where he can, laughing less at Miss Daisy, per se, than at the ironies and absurdities of life itself...
...This kind of thing pops up all the time in Nabokov: the Komarovs (a professor and his wife in Pnin) "would throw Russki parties every now and then, with Russki hors d'oeuvres and guitar music and more or less phony folk songs—occasions at which shy graduate students would be taught vodka-drinking rites and other stale Russianisms...
...First, the movie's focus tilts toward Miss Daisy—and reasonably so, since Hoke is the constant here, and she's the variable...
...If the Baltic states are allowed to secede, will the restaurant hop over the concert hall to the other side...
...In a time of war and space epics, of super heroes and big-budget special effects, it's nice to be able to say that the most profoundly satisfying movie in a long, long while is a quiet, unpretentious story about people and what they can mean to each other—a film about the brief, luminous moments that add up to a life...
...It didn't seem to matter to them who was being sliced and diced, or for what cause, so long as there was a generous display of blood and guts...
...America, to consider our own past, went through a period known as "the twenties...
...It's an unapologetically "small" story, the sort that is often swallowed up helplessly on the big screen—and the ultimate testament to its power is that it fills the screen at every moment...
...And the exemplary costumes and art direction do a phenomenal job of making one feel as if this is pre-Peachtree Center Atlanta...
...The car drives off, and one lawman quips: "An old nigger and an old Jew woman taking off down the road together—that is one sorry sight...
...The other day, in an attempt to test Hertzberg's theory, I went to see Glory at a little past noon on a weekday...
...Schematically routine though their parts may be, Washington, Braugher, Kennedy, and (especially) Freeman all turn in riveting, beautifully shaped performances, lending depth and nuance to characters that might easily have been rendered as caricatures...
...The chicken Kiev (the menu calls it by its Frenchy name, cbtelette de Kiev) is very nice, but when your waiter slices it open for you, the butter flows like the Dnieper...
...Miss Daisy, also a declared King fan, chides Boolie for not going, but balks at his sincere proposal (hardly that of a redneck...
...When Trip (Denzel Washington), a truculent ex-slave, began to deliver the movie's obligatory and improbable Big Speech, in which he expressed a prescient skepticism about postbellum race relations and proclaimed stirringly that he was fighting not for the white man's Union but for himself, the high school kids who were seated all around me grew bored and rambunctious, and jabbered noisily among themselves...
...Would he have pegged Miss Daisy as a Jew...
...curved booths along the wall, success in New York...
...The following story is hearsay, but I had no reason to doubt the teller...
...she finally mentions the suggestion to Hoke when the two of them are in her car, headed for the dinner, and does so in an oblique, unintentionally insulting way, provoking a rare outburst of indignation on the part of Hoke, who would clearly like to have been asked...
...Certainly the film's worst failing is that Shaw—thanks, largely, to Broderick's lack of range, presence, and moral weight—never grows as a character...
...But all the decorations in the world wouldn't give the place a holiday air if the food and drink weren't copious, with that festive abandon that a Westerner, anyway, associates with Russian dining...
...The film's other major roles, by contrast, are remarkably well served by 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 the performers...
...Like Tender Mercies, however, Driving Miss Daisy is miraculously affecting—and I mean miraculously...
...That's a lot of weight to put on a restaurant, especially when the fare is so substantial to begin with...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990...
...Hoke is also blessed with a marvelous sense of humor...
...Miss Daisy resents Hoke, and for a while refuses to get in the car with him...
...Some other Russian would have a slightly different fight to pick with them...
...Along the way, one of the servants in the entourage remarked that the area through which they were passing rang a bell of some kind: didn't they own an estate in the neighborhood...
...So no Russian has to come here...
...E Scott Fitzgerald, not James Branch Cabell...
...Yep, you heard right: at a time when American schools—especially those in the inner cities—are graduating kids who can't read, write, or find the United States on a map, teachers (in New York City, at least) are hauling their classes to the movies during school hours...
...But one does wish one knew as much about Hoke as about her...
...In my experience, East European émigrés are extraordinarily bristly when it comes to any topic having to do with their homelands...
...when she finally does relent, she nags him mercilessly about his driving...
...The only portions of the movie that drew as enthusiastic a response as the pre-movie soft-drink commercial—inwhich an eminent basketball player leaped up and, to the cheers and applause of the entire audience, slam-dunked a six-pack of Coke into a treehouse—were the hideously graphic battle sequences...
...It was not an affair to warm a Hertzberg's heart...
...And he has pride—real pride, the sort that's grounded in a quiet and amply justified sense of self-worth, that makes moral distinctions but doesn't lash out at each perceived slight, that's able to recognize and forgive human frailties for what they are...
...The Russian Tea Room is on 57th Street in Manhattan, just east of Carnegie Hall...
...for though it moves modestly and unhurriedly from episode to episode, taking care that every word and gesture comes across as utterly natural and unmagnified, it packs an unprepared-for punch at the end that does seem rather magical...
...Nabokov should have written, "Only one other Russian...
...She is, rather, an outsider in her society, a thoroughgoing Southern lady who nonetheless, simply because she's Jewish, will never seem completely Southern to her fellow born-and-bred Atlantans...
...The unpleasantness is never resolved...
...If the contrary point of view belongs to a fellow emigre, expect tornadoes and hail...
...And, if so, would he have considered the spectacle of her, Hoke, and their huge, shiny car a "sorry sight...
...Driving Miss Daisy, the Oscar-nominated film which has been adapted by Alfred Uhry from his play and directed by Bruce Beresford, is as gentle as Glory is brutal...
...And Freddie Francis's cinematography makes striking use of light and mist and shadow without being either too overpowering or inappropriately pretty...
...T he trouble with deciding how 1 "real" the copiousness of a place like the Russian Tea Room is arises from the fact that everything in it has been plucked out of time, and preserved wholesale...
...Plainly, they hadn't enjoyed anything so much since Rambo...
...If toughness is Miss Daisy's weapon against the pain of exclusion, laughter is his...
...There is, moreover, an oddly mechanical, low-voltage quality to the way the film's writer, Kevin Jarre, and its director, Edward Zwick, set up and resolve these conflicts...
...THE TALKIES BLACK AND WHITE IN COLOR El or weeks now, a movie theater near my home has been playing Glory, the much-lauded movie about the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first black regiment in the Civil War...
...It comes as something of a surprise, toward the end, when he turns out to have a granddaughter...
...and this implication, to my mind, is unfair to the many white Protestant Southerners who, despite their often deeply ingrained notion that political equality for blacks would represent a threat to their own precarious socioeconomic position, have helped in the last few decades to make the South (in the eyes of many observers) a less racially polarized place than, say, New York City...
...My favorite is the Pavlova, a creamy concoction which is the color of the thighs of the corps de ballet, and which tastes like mother's milk, but isn't...
...Partly it's because the management leaves ornaments on the chandeliers all year round...
...If she's grown a tough hide, it's because she's felt a need for it...
...There's nothing wrong with these goals, I suppose, although (a) making history come alive for kids is hardly of any use if they don't also learn the facts of history and come to understand them, and (b) pride in something over which one has no control—whether it's one's sex, race, ethnic background, or national origin—seems to me a less meaningful commodity than it's sometimes cracked up to be...
...It's a textbook demonstration of the fact that, even in the most notoriously immoderate of all genres, less can be more, and that—given an honest, humane, and intelligent script, a company of dexterous and discerning actors, and a sensitive, compassionate director with a first-rate eye for illuminating detail—a film's paucity of incident can be more than compensated for by a credible and captivating richness of character...
...Far from making them think, a movie like Glory, with all its grisly combat sequences, is experienced by them as simply one more raucous, belligerent, visceral event...
...He was an elderly Englishman who claimed to have heard it from a schoolmate of his, a young Russian emigre from a once-wealthy family...
...Indeed, while the gradually shifting tone of the relationship between Miss THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 35 Daisy and Hoke can be seen as a metaphor for the developing relations between the races in the South from the forties to the seventies, the filmmakers don't press this interpretation upon us...
...An American with an opinion is a different matter...
...amount of . . . curricular victimology...
...I hate this kind of movie...
...What's truly dismaying about this scene, though, is that since these two cops are the most prominent gentile Caucasians in the movie, their encounter with Miss Daisy and Hoke appears to imply that affluent Jews are black people's natural allies against ignorant, less well-to-do white Protestant Southerners...
...Vacaby Richard Brookhiser tion over, they headed back to St...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES THE RUSSIAN TEA ROOM Iwonder how many people learned that Russians drink tea out of glasses the same way that I did, from the Signet Classic edition of The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories...
...Exile is enforced nostalgia, comprehensiveness imposed by history...
...Tea at the Russian Tea Room is drunk out of tumblers too...
...Uhry and Beresford prefer, sensibly, to keep the characters believable—human, not saintly...
...she declared...
...The movie is doing very good business there, and much of the credit should doubtless go to the New York City Board of Education: for whenever I walk by that theater at noon or thereabouts on a weekday, I find myself in a crowd of high school students, mostly black, who are waiting to see the picture...
...I've never succeeded yet...
...It sits in a townhouse, scrunched by larger neighbors...
...Or maybe New York's high school teachers have been reading Hendrik Hertzberg, who in a recent issue of the New Republic wrote passionately about the experience of seeing Glory in "the cozy screening room of the Motion Picture Association of America...
...And that's pretty much it...
...Presumably, the idea behind these midday movie-theater trips is to use Glory as an educational tool—to make history come alive for students, and to give the black kids pride in their heritage...
...Over her objections, her son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd), who runs the lucrative family cotton mills, hires her a wise, easygoing black chauffeur named Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman...
...The kids savored these episodes: they relished every thrust of a bayonet, every bullet in a chest, every exploding shell, every flying limb...
...The waiters, even the obvious Hispanics, all wear blouses which are meant to suggest Cossacks...
...The reason you've come here, alcoholically speaking, is vodka...
...Though Boolie claims to admire King, he decides not to attend because he's worried how his fellow businessmen will react...
...The tea was really like beer," I read, "but I drank a glass of it.*" At the foot of the page, the helpful mate of the asterisk explains: "*Tea in Russia is usually drunk out of tumblers...
...There is something Christmasy about the place, which makes it always delightful to visit, but which can also be a bit of a shock when you come in off 57th Street in August...
...The 24-year-old leader of the regiment, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick), whose parents are longtime abolitionists, is uncomplicatedly earnest and upstanding—a regular little Eagle Scout—and the obstacles he has to overcome are predictable: the jeers of white soldiers (which, of course, turn into cheers by film's end), the unwillingness of a narrow-minded supply officer to provide his men with shoes, the disinclination of the War Department to send black troops into battle...
...This is not to say that Glory is without merit...
...The story couldn't be simpler: it's the late 1940s in Atlanta, and a feisty, seventyish Jewish widow, Mrs...
...Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), has reached the point at which she can't drive anymore...
...Inside the door, the general impression is one of great depth, as in a sumptuous bowling alley...
...The camerawork often reminds one of Francis's equally impressive work in The French Lieutenant's Woman...
...If anything, he'd be envious...
...Tandy brings to her performance as Miss Daisy the same capacity for tight-lipped toughness that, forty-five years ago, made her such a magnificently shrewish spouse to the long-suffering Gregory Peck in The Valley of Decision...
...Gradually, however, she comes to like and respect him, and to rely upon his companionship...
...The eye-opener here is Dan Aykroyd...
...It seems unlikely...
...But Miss Daisy is no shrew...
...American ignorance upsets them the least...
...It may break back into time, and become Russia once more...
...So, for that matter, do Hans Zimmer's jaunty, good-natured score and Peter James's radiant photography...
...If I've gone on so extensively about the audience reaction to Glory, it's because this film has been acclaimed—not only by Hertzberg, but by many well-meaning white liberals—for something other than its artistic or entertainment value...
...Just one question: Why is this movie called Glory...
...ings on the walls, which hang wherever the management forgot to put a samovar, are supposed to suggest the stuff the Hermitage sent over from its post-Impressionist collection...
...When it comes to the question of race, the characters contradict and deceive themselves just as in real life...
...Hertzberg came away convinced that Glory, by illustrating "that the Civil War was a revolutionary war, that black soldiers were freedom fighters in that war, and that they were all the more heroic because they not only fought but had to fight to fight . . . could do more to alleviate the alienation of young blacks from the 'mainstream' than any Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...Both Tandy and Freeman are splendid actors—but we already knew that...
...that she take Hoke as her escort...
...On the contrary, it's part of by Bruce Bawer the problem: these kids' lives, as a rule, are already tragically circumscribed by rap music and slasher movies and MTV, by aggressive sounds and images with little or no thought content...
...The pecking order of tables seems to be: tables in the middle of the floor, lowest...
...she's on guard in a way that the good-natured Boolie, who was born into wealth, is not...
...In addition to Washington's Angry Young Slave and Braugher's Genteel Negro, the 54th contains one Wise Old Trooper (Morgan Freeman) and one Good-Natured Innocent (Jihmi Kennedy...
...It is true, however, that the only surprising thing about this film is how thoroughly unsurprising it is: the characters, the conflicts, the big scenes are all exactly what you'd expect...
...Youcan order vodka from a dozen lands, as unlikely as Ireland and Israel...
...The price on the cover of my copy is 95 cents, so I learned it a long while ago...
...they're fighting for a cause...
...Bigot or not, would an Alabama highway cop really have said such a thing...
...No one seemed to know, but they asked around until, sure enough, they found a property, unvisited for years...
...But time, when it has a chance to unfold naturally, selects and winnows...
...Indeed, if it weren't for the wonderfully staged and highly charged battle sequences, one might confuse Glory with one of those solemn, plodding biographical dramas, with titles like "Galileo: A Man and His Telescope," that you run across now and then on educational TV...
...and the film itself, excessively mindful of its Good Intentions, too often shares his empty earnestness...
...Nostalgia short-circuits the picking and choosing of time by preserving everything, down to the salt shakers...
...In 1966, King comes to Atlanta to speak at a gala fund-raising dinner to which Boolie and Miss Daisy have purchased tickets...
...The retainers who had been maintaining it, as surprised as the travelers, opened it up, and the family rested from its journey...
...Asked what kind of a name Werthan is, Miss Daisy explains that it's of German extraction...
...To be sure, there were demurrers...
...she's also a rich woman who can't ever forget that she was born poor...
...They're smart enough to recognize that the value of Driving Miss Daisy lies in its particularity, in the precision with which it attends to the lives and personalities of these two individuals...
...Nabokov, if you calmed him down, would have understood...
...I wonder what a Russian would think of the place...
...he suits the film perfectly...
...they've celebrated it largely because, like Hertzberg, they figure it must be inspiring to blacks, especially to disaffected young members of the "underclass...
...That was a legitimate form of it: sheer alcohol, honest and efficient as a lube job...
...Slightly to the left of Carnegie Hall," was how their cutesy radio ads used to put it...
...unless it coincides exactly with the emigre's, the social barometer drops ominously...
...For one of the most commendable things about the film is that, its concern with race relations notwithstanding, it recognizes that where the ethical constitution of ordinary people is concerned, nothing is (if you'll excuse the expression) black and white...
...Be smart, and order one from Russia or Finland...
...You can eat well here too, but be warned—you won't have to eat again for a week...
...A plate full of butter is several orders of magnitude less extravagant than an extra house, but both, it seems to me, convey the same spirit...
...There are no surprises, no sensational turning points, no grand sentimental scenes: along with Beresford's Tender Mercies (1982), this has got to be one of the most spare, understated movies ever made...
...The glass it comes in arrives nestled in its own bowl of ice, looking like some sort of science experiment (cold fusion...
...When the movie ended, a girl sitting near me shook her head at all the carnage...
...Sixty years later, only certain things from the twenties have survived—Bix Beiderbecke, not Paul Whiteman...
...sometimes, they even take it with good grace...
...This is true, too, of Rawlins, Freeman's otherwise very different character in Glory...
...Far from it...
...Ten pages into "The Kreutzer Sonata," the narrator and the man who killed his wife are settling into a long train ride side by side, and the killer offers the narrator some tea...
...The Russian Tea Room takes a more differentiated approach, for there is actually a vodka menu...
...and over the years (for Miss Daisy and Hoke stay together for a quarter of a century) a genuine affection develops between them...
...Hoke has strength, too...
...But popular culture is not going to save these kids...
...Has that changed, in the Age of Gorbachev...
...The family had been vacationing some place in the south of Russia—perhaps Yalta...
...During an excursion to Mobile in the 1950s, Hoke and Miss Daisy pull over for lunch, and are confronted by two patrolmen who demand to see their papers...
...You can also order a number of vodka drinks with Russki names...
...But her exotic status has made her vigilant and wary and distrustful...
...the paintRichard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer...
...banquette seats along the wall, next...
...The samovars look like ornaments too—some big as diver's helmets, some small as traveling hair dryers, all metal and all gleaming so brightly it looks as if the spigots were winking at you...
...This is not to say that she is ashamed of her erstwhile poverty, or that she—like Florine, her snobbish, social-climbing Georgia-JAP daughterin-law—tries to hide her Jewishness...
Vol. 23 • April 1990 • No. 4
