The Talkies
Bowman, James
REINEEMEM by James Bowman Take Physic, Pomp it oor naked wretches," cries King Lear when he finds himself stripped of everything and reduced from the power of kingship to the level of Poor Tom,...
...There is also a malign old lady who tries to blackmail the others into a bigger share of the loot and a subplot involving a thwarted romance between Pig Finn (James Nesbitt) and the comely greetings-card poet and single mother, Maggie (Susan Lynch), who loves him but can't bear the smell of pig on him...
...62 January /999 • The American Spectator ly an exercise in ignorance, obscurantism, Luddism, and protectionism...
...I had hopes that Ringmaster, which stars Jerry Springer as, essentially, himself, would have something to say about the arrogance of poverty in our time, but it does not...
...Yet Tony Scott's film does little or nothing to exploit the residual fear we all must have of being stripped like Lear, not just of our property but of our very identity as civilized human beings...
...It may even offer some of the benefit that Shakespeare imagined from contemplation of the poor...
...Then Annie realizes that one invited guest did not come...
...It is a moment of blinding revelation, perhaps the first moment of real self-knowledge in his life, and a kind of redemption is prefigured when he says: 0, I have ta'en Too little care of this...
...There is one moment in the movie where the too-simple peasants (who look as if they belong to the 1630's instead of, as they are supposed to do, the 1930's) contemplate what they will do with their new wealth...
...Although its tale of trailer-trash willing to do anything for "a fantasy and trick of fame" on TV has its amusing moments, instead of laughing at them in the end Jerry and Neil Abramson, the director, are only inspired to a bit of demagoguery about how "elitist" it is to object to the poor for exposing their revolting private lives to public view when the rich do it all the time...
...When Shakespeare's Edgar takes his clothes off to pose as Poor Toni, his strategy is to blend into the crowd...
...The American Spectator • January 1999 63...
...James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JVBowman@compuserve.com...
...She even hints at the fact that this peasant revolt against "neoliberalism" (i.e., free trade, or what passes for it under the bureaucratic auspices of NAFTA) is realPoor movies we will always have with us...
...But it is damned inconsiderate of the naked wretches of the world to have prevented us from empathizing with them by clothing and feeding themselves, however disgustingly, and buying house-trailers to live in and old cars to drive...
...But Mr...
...Wild's camera catches the comedy of the revolutionary demandas posted on the Internet, a brass band of guerrilla soldiers playing in ski-masks, a church congregation singing "Blowin' in the Wind" in the local Indian dialect or the Subcomandante posing with pipe and ski mask for a Marie-Claire photo shoot...
...Jackie buys drinks at the pub and Annie makes meat pies for likely candidates...
...If it weren't for the pigs I'd marry you tomorrow," says Maggie wistfully, remaining adamant against his suit even though he is sure that he is the father of her young son, now growing up without a father...
...It is a magic moment, illustrative of the speed with which unaccommodated man may become (to use Lear's terminology again) "sophisticated...
...Having been "performing a serious function" as a teacher, she says, she has now "become the kind of woman I have always hated...
...The writer and director, Kirk Jones, has given us a film that is both more touching and funnier than Woody Allen's...
...For us now to have some sense of the poor, bare, forked animal we are at bottom, we have to turn to a period-piece like The Inheritors, an Austrian film directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky about a group of peasants who unexpectedly inherit the farm where they work...
...B ut who cares while there are still honest poor people in the world, capable of presenting us an inspiring example...
...Today, art must represent unaccommodated man as someone like Robert Dean (Will Smith) in Enemy of the State, who loses his job, his wife, his home, and his credit cards but never for a moment is so panicked as to believe that he might be counted for any extended period of time among the poor naked wretches of the earth—if there were any for him to be counted among...
...for honor, is as much the province of the elites today as it is of the trailer trash —as the example of Bill Clinton teaches...
...Eventually they realize, not without a certain amount of relief to their consciences, that they have to let the whole village in on the scheme, in order to support the fiction that Michael is Ned, and split the pot fifty-one ways, which still produces a tidy sum per capita...
...But one can't help feeling that anopportunity has been missed...
...Such a fear is perhaps too remote from us...
...Jackie O'Shea (Ian Bannen), a 6o-something living in the Irish seacoast village of Tullymore, population 52, finds that someone from the village has won the lottery jackpot and sets out, with the help of his wife Annie (Fionnula Flanagan) and his best friend, Michael O'Sullivan (David Kelly), to find out who it is...
...Nobody willingly dies on behalf of so modest a cause, so the revolutionary spokesman here says that the guerrillas don't want to overthrow anything— just to be "heard...
...Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just...
...And I'm happier...
...She wants an umbrella...
...Wild's sympathies are obviously all on the side of the cam pesinos of the Zapatista movement led by Subcomandante Marcos in southern Mexico, but they do not prevent her from seeing some of the curious incongruities of the movement...
...For us, the passage is also a reminder of how, compared with the most ordinary people in our own time, even the greatest and wealthiest of previous ages have lived their lives cheek by jowl with utter destitution...
...This makes the Chiapas rebellion what the New York Times has called "the world's first postmodern revolution," and Ms...
...Jackie and Michael concoct a scheme to persuade the lottery officials that Michael is Ned Devine, so that the two of them can collect and split the more than six million Irish pounds in the jackpot...
...You might even make the case that having your credit cards refused is a rough modern equivalent of the prospect of imminent death from exposure and starvation faced by Poor Tom...
...Even in Chiapas they're not that wretched...
...Oh jaypers, the chickens and the whiskey were wasted," Jackie cries forlornly...
...Then she pauses...
...This is the funniest and the most entertaining picture I have seen this year and one that everyone should see for sheer heart's ease...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS website—http://www.spectator.org...
...Or maybe I do...
...It's not every day that you see one of those...
...One of them, an old woman who has lived at the barest subsistence level all her life, says, "I never needed anything before and I don't now...
...REINEEMEM by James Bowman Take Physic, Pomp it oor naked wretches," cries King Lear when he finds himself stripped of everything and reduced from the power of kingship to the level of Poor Tom, "the poor, bare, forked animal" he calls "unaccommodated man...
...These various plot strands are skillfully woven together and finally tied up in an unexpected and altogether pleasing way at the end...
...In a driving rainstorm in the middle of the night, Jackie goes down to the cottage of Ned Devine (Jimmy Keogh) to take him his chicken dinner—and finds there poor Ned, dead in front of the television set with the winning ticket in his stiffened fingers...
...Look for example at the documentary, A Place Called Chiapas, by the Canadian liberal filmmaker Nettie Wild...
...when Enemy's Mr...
...The shock of winning has killed him...
...Smith takes his clothes off it is (partly) to stand out from the crowd...
...Actually, as your basic chase movie, Enemy is not bad: tightly constructed, well-acted (Gene Hackman also appears), and suspenseful, it is a genuinely thrilling thriller...
...These peasants want a Common Agricultural Policy like the EEC's, whereby inefficient farmers are protected in their inefficiency forever at the expense of the rest of the community, who pay up to avoid inconvenience...
...Not only are we denied a real spiritual benefit from the economic memento mori they used to provide us with, but we are forced to experience them not as needy fellow creatures but as the mere simulacra of civilized human beings, thrusting the crude and tasteless amusements of their overabundant leisure time upon the rest of us...
...Some of the most honest are to be found defrauding the Irish government in the Movie of the Month, Waking Ned Devine...
...The physic, or medicine, urged upon "pomp" is a dose of exposure to the animal essentials of our nature, and its purpose is to treat the sickness of self-deception which has brought Lear to his present state...
...Here are the wretched of the earth making revolution by merchandising, with toys, dolls, T-shirts, and a bumper sticker that reads: "Yo V Marcos...
...Suddenly the umbrella represents to her all that she never had and never could hope to have but now finds within her grasp...
...It's not as if you have to be a conservative, sympathetic to the Church or the rich or both, to come up with something more interesting than that...
...Ruzowitzky proves to be too intent on his boring and hackneyed political point—about how the bourgeois farmers, in alliance with the Catholic Church, will not allow the peasant farm to survive—to follow it up...
...He has a point there, I suppose...
...The clandestine but all-powerful government agency, headed by Jon Voight, that is hunting him down cannot carry out its oppressive function with the world watching, and nowadays the world watches a naked wretch...
...Its emblematic moment comes when Judy Davis's character, ex-wife of the Allenesque central figure (Woody mimicked by Kenneth Branagh as his tribute to celebrity), comments on being made the hostess of a tawdry TV show about the rich and famous in New York...
...Everything, as they say, is relative...
...Quite probably, Woody Allen himself is a divided character like this, loathing the whole celebrity machine of which he himself is obviously a part, but at the same time loving it—and hating himself for loving it...
...heads of noblemen stuck on pikes and all their property confiscated...
...At last they give a chicken dinner for everyone in the village, "in case the winner was hidden among them," but still they are baffled...
...Shakespeare for the forgetfulness and vanity of power and wealth was never far to seek...
...Meretricious celebrity, the poor man's substitute Scott's film does nothing to exploit the residual fear we all must have of being stripped like Lear...
...This is also the point of Woody Allen's Celebrity, which, like so many others of his movies, is often very funny but with a corrosive nihilism that takes the enamel off your teeth...
...The physic prescribed by Dr...
...In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was not unusual to see the JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...This is a passage so often quoted by socialists and others interested in "redistribution" of wealth that it is easy to forget that it was intended as an encouragement not to the demands of the poor—it was scarcely comprehensible to Shakespeare's time that the poor could have demands—but to the spiritual health of the rich...
Vol. 32 • January 1999 • No. 1
