The Talkies: Our Blissful Ignorance
Bowman, James
by James Bowman Our Blissful Ignorance I n the animated Prince of Egypt, a movie that was otherwise not nearly so bad as might have been expected, Moses (voice of Val Kilmer) explains to the...
...by James Bowman Our Blissful Ignorance I n the animated Prince of Egypt, a movie that was otherwise not nearly so bad as might have been expected, Moses (voice of Val Kilmer) explains to the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses (Ralph Fiennes), his boyhood chum, that he should let his, Moses's, people go "because no kingdom should be made on the backs of slaves...
...Although he is failing every class, he is head of almost every school club and society and an organizational genius...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS website—http://www.spectator.org...
...77 When the local council tears down the housing project where he lives, for instance, he refuses to move...
...Anderson's picture and historical study help us to see our world in relation to the real world without ever confusing them, as most American movies these days do...
...The sexual cross-currents and bitter disappointment all round when Dora mistakes a truck-driver's kindliness for romantic interest are almost too much to bear...
...You've Got Mail makes an even worse mistake by remaking one of the great classics of the 1930's, Ernst Lubitsch's Shop Around the Corner, and replacing the poor clerks in Mr...
...The story is one of the oldest there is: the boy's search for his father, said to be "thousands of kilometers away, on another planet" (occasionally the "Jesus" language is a little heavy-handed), takes place with the help of a (very reluctant) surrogate mother whose devotion to her own survival and indifference to everyone else's has up until that time been more or less complete...
...But then the mother is flattened by a bus in the street next to the station and Dora, who had found herself taking an instant dislike to the boy, is now his only living acquaintance among the teeming millions of Rio...
...And through it all he continues his criminal career, flaunting it in the faces of officialdom...
...Matuschek's leather-goods shop in Budapest with yuppie proprietors from the Upper West Side of New York...
...Or perhaps they thought that, in a nation of historical illiterates, who would notice...
...What else do we expect of a childhood and youth devoted to TV, video games, dating, and athletics...
...Max tells him: "Find what you like to do and do it for the rest of your life...
...We are the victims of a combination of a debased popular culture, a vast educational wasteland and the riches which protect us from the worst consequences of both...
...We can hardly help ourselves from rooting for Martin and his gang against the police —here represented by Jon Voight— and the more sinister IRA...
...Blume personifies the eternal adolescent of late-century America, permanently adrift on the sea of adulthood...
...Thus Mr...
...Why do you folks always come in the mornings...
...The General stars Brendan Gleeson as Martin Cahill, a real-life if legendary Irish outlaw who was assassinated by the IRA in 1994 and who was a rare modern example of the would-be Robin Hood, giving of the proceeds of his crimes to the poor ("It's my way of paying taxes, you know...
...Dora will send neither letter, but means to let them "stay in that purgatory" of her bureau drawer "for years...
...So he brings the money, in cash, into the bank, gets the check, and then, as soon as he is out the door, two of his henchmen rob the bank and take back the cash...
...In the relationship between them we see make-believe and reality, adolescence and adulthood, begin to merge until, at the climax of the film — a startlingly realistic presentation of a play written and produced by Max about the Vietnam war—they are indistinguishable...
...Blume, though a rich and successful businessman, is as lost a soul as only Bill Murray can make him...
...Even when the building is torn down around him, he gets a trailer to live in on the site...
...Central Station stars Fernanda Montenegro as Dora, a retired schoolteacher in her sixties who makes a living writing letters for the illiterate poor people who stream through the principal train station of Rio de Janeiro...
...Then she changes her mind and writes hopefully of coming to join him in the remote town where he lives, Bom Jesus...
...Maybe DreamWorks got to dreaming again and failed to notice that it had advanced the debut of this admirable, abolitionist sentiment by about 3,10o years...
...A proposal to drop Latin from the curriculum is defeated solely because the 15-year-old hero, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), mobilizes public opinion against it in order to impress the young teacher, Miss Cross (Olivia Williams), on whom he has a massive crush...
...James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JVBowman@compuserve.com...
...As twin Movies of the Month, then, I suggest an Irish (albeit by the American director, John Boorman) and a Brazilian picture...
...Their lives are symbolized in the starkly beautiful Brazilian landscape and the starkly ugly housing tracts in the newly settled northeast of the country where they look for the elusive Jesus...
...They do know it, but can't pin anything on him, partly on account of luck and partly because of the complete loyalty of his family and friends...
...My regular readers, whom I credit with the sophistication to understand the millennia worth of difference between "I wish not to be a slave" and "No man should be a slave," will recognize this as a familiar gripe of mine...
...next day, Uncle Sam decided some years ago to present the nation's children with the gift of leisure in which to enjoy themselves untroubled by serious intellectual, pecuniary, or moral disciplines at least until they were 21...
...Blume, though rich and successful, is as lost a soul as only Bill Murray can make him...
...It is a guilty pleasure to be able to laugh at the spectacle of a criminal getting away with it, and there are many such laughs in this movie...
...Many of the letters she simply throws away, knowing that the hopeless Brazilian post office will get the blame if they never arrive...
...She says this while riding on horseback with her two children along a ridge from which can be seen the extensive well-tended acres on which her large old Victorian house is set...
...It is a charmingly sardonic and only partly metaphorical representation of the way we live now...
...One of her clients is the mother of the charming nineyear-old Josue (Vinicius de Oliveira), who writes to the boy's father, Jesus, that "you're the worst thing that ever happened to me...
...he asks the party of police and council officials trying to move him off the site...
...W hen you think about it, it is an act of astounding arrogance to assume that even a romantic comedy can be altered in this way without being absolutely changed and its emotional kick removed, yet it is an assumption that Hollywood makes all the time...
...Though determinedly apolitical until politics caught and killed him, his sheer bloody-mindedness about opposing authority wherever it touched his life amounted to a kind of heroic anarchism with which it is hard not to feel sympathy.44 Mr...
...Like an indulgent papa who buys Junior a BMW for his 16th birthday only to see him smash it up the JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...since he, Max, seems to have "got it figured out...
...Don't you know I'm a night worker...
...No self-indulgence there...
...Neither Boorman's The General nor Central Station, by the Brazilian Walter Salles, is in the least false or sentimental—probably because both are about people who have never been insulated by wealth from the struggle for existence...
...Either way, it is safe to say that it would have been pretty much taken for granted around the factory that the company's commercial interests would be identified with the portrayal of a Moses whose thought processes were as close as possible to those of an American undergraduate of the logo's...
...He asks Max "What's the secret...
...The result has been a crop of admittedly mostly amiable ignoramuses who, you find when you invite them to listen to the story of the Israelites, have themselves become paradoxical but incorrigible Philistines...
...He wages a hilarious war against his sometime patron, Mr...
...For me it's going to Rushmore...
...The American Spectator • February 1999 65...
...Max, the late-life son of an indulgent barber (Seymour Cassell), is on scholarship and is in every way but the academic an ideal pupil...
...At one point he shows us without apparent irony Mom (Susan Sarandon) speaking disparagingly of Stepmom (Julia Roberts) by saying that "people who make a lot of money" are often those "who only Without perspective on life, why be blessed...
...As in The Godfather, our sympathy for family loyally in the face of outside hostility overrides, in spite of ourselves, our dislike of the criminality which happens to be the family business...
...The child is adorable and there are many touching and funny episodes along the way, but what I particularly liked about the movie was that the breaking down of Dora's long-erected and hitherto indestructible defenses is never treated as a matter of cheap uplift...
...64 February 1999 • The American Spectator think of themselves...
...Together the two of them represent a natural inversion of traditional expectations: Max is the premature grownup trapped in a world of schoolboy make-believe while Mr...
...Both Mr...
...Blume (Bill Murray), who is also his rival for the affections of Miss Cross...
...The trailer is burnt and he gets a tent...
...Both keep before our eyes images of foreignness that stay foreign—and so, like all art worth our attention, remind us of who we are...
...But one of the obligations wealth carries with it is not to indulge in sentimentality and pretense, or to suppose that life's stakes for the wealthy are the same as they are for their less fortunate brethren...
...Columbus takes his characters seriously when they spout the cant ("When you get older, your relationships get a lot more complicated") with which people of their age and class justify their practice of serial monogamy—and portrays their children as believing it...
...Both she and Josue must pay a terrible price for learning to love...
...Nowadays, to see anything that does not reek of the "values" and assumptions of the privileged classes of the east and west coasts of America, you have to go to foreign films...
...On one occasion Martin, whose only dealings with banks are to rob them, finds he needs a banker's draft, or cashier's check, for £8o,000...
...Both Stepmom and You've Got Mail, for instance, present us with what is recognizably the milieu of well-to-do professional people in New York, but both Chris Columbus and Nora Ephron, the creative intelligences behind them, are too close to that milieu themselves to be able to see it in relation to any human reality outside it...
...Such straightforwardness helps to establish that "The General," though a thief, is a very honest one...
...One of several reasons why I liked Rushmore, directed by Wes Anderson, is that it takes a familiar idea, that of the old-fashioned boys' prep school as a place of soul-destroying public regimentation and private bullying, and goes in a completely new direction...
...Even here the academic riches on offer are a mere irrelevancy...
...True, some of the great classics —for instance, The Philadelphia Story which, like The Shop Around the Corner, stars Jimmy Stewart—have been about rich people...
...Never mind that, until less than two centuries ago, nearly all kingdoms which have left their records to human history were built on the backs of slaves...
Vol. 32 • February 1999 • No. 2
