Romancefest 12: A Streetcar Named Desire

I read this play when I was 16 or 17, before I knew anything.

Now that I know some stuff, but not much, I've watched the movie.

Guess what? It's good.

Marlon Brando basically creates film acting in this film as the abusive clod Stanley Kowalski, a dude who has tricked a classy broad into marrying him only to have her sister come along and threaten to point out what trash he is. Luckily, she's crazy.

This is Blanche DuBois, as played by Vivien Leigh, who has been forced to move to New Orleans and stay with her sister, Stella (Kim Hunter) after losing the family plantation in the south.

Despite her squalid surroundings and the fact that she's living off of the reluctant charity of her sister and brother-in-law, Blanche attempts to continue conducting her life as a spoiled southern queen. Part of this is probably an attempt to cover up her own insecurities and deal bravely with the rough hand she's been dealt. Another part is probably denial and delusion.

Actually, most of the plot is made up of characters attempting to cover up their insecurities. Stanley abuses his wife and everyone else around him in an effort to assert his place as king of the castle, precisely because he's worried he might not be king of the castle. Stella devotes herself to Stanely because she secretly fears she hates him. And Blanche plays mind games with everyone around her because she's afraid her mind is playing games with her.

I'm not sure why the American Film Institute placed this film on their "100 Years, 100 Passions" list. Sure, the characters are passionate, but the subtitle of the list is, "America's Greatest Love Stories." Okay, STREETCAR is definitely about about relationships but I don't know if I'd call it a love story. It's more of a hate story. I can see where, like Tennessee Williams' other works, this story is driven by lust of a certain kind -- it's basically about that x-factor that makes abusive relationships attractive, and it does a good job of attempting to make the audience sympathetic to that mystery. But love? Naw.

Still, it's considered one of the greatest films ever made, and it's about time I watched it.

Romancefest 11: Two for the Road

This one was kind of a downer. TWO FOR THE ROAD is the story of the deteriorating marriage of Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) and Mark Wallace (Albert Finney). They met once upon a time on a carefree hitchhiking tour of Europe, and now they're stressed out, pissed off and bitter.

The story is told through a series of intercutting time lines made up of maybe four or five road trips around Europe during different points of the couples' relationship, starting with the couple in the latter days of their worn out marriage and proceeding through their first meeting, their first child, some career developments, and a couple affairs.

The best thing about the movie is how modern it is -- it was made in 1967 but uses many of the conventions that we're used to today, mostly in the editing. We never stick with one shot too long, the story line jumps around, the audience is asked to fill in some of the details. We're not spoon fed everything.

The problems, then, come from the very premise of the film -- we start out knowing the marriage is going to deteriorate, so even when we get the early flashes of brightness and joy from the relationship, we have our knowledge of future events looming over us. I guess this is basically the point of the film, but there's no arguing style -- either you buy the premise or you don't. And, I guess I didn't.

I've seen other films that were anatomies of break ups. In fact, films like ANNIE HALL and ETERNAL SUNSHINE are among my favorites. So, why does this one rub me the wrong way?

I guess it's all Audrey Hepburn's fault. I don't want to see her in an unhappy marriage. I don't want to see her bitter and jaded. I don't want to live in a world where a woman with those eyes and that smile and that voice can end up in a dead end marriage. What else can be more depressing, barring murder, rape and war?

There's a glimmer of hope at the end of the film, but at two hours it out-stays it's welcome and belabors it's point a little too much. I can only see Albert Finney look for his passport so many times before it gets old.

Romancefest 10: An Officer and a Gentleman

AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN is a good example of how a movie can be a crowd pleaser and still a legitimately good film at the same time. We get an engrossing story with satisfying pay offs while also getting an insightful look at seemingly real lives.

Richard Gere stars as Zack Mayo who is entering Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School outside of Seattle, WA. It's revealed in early flashbacks that he hasn't had an easy life -- his mother committed suicide when he was still a child and he was forced to move to the Philippines to live with his Naval officer father (Robert Loggia) an unabashed alcoholic and womanizer. Raised in this harsh environment with this dubious role model, Mayo grows up to be a loner with few choices.

Mayo soon meets local girl Paula (Debra Winger) who may or may not be just another girl looking to hook up with an aviator so she can be set for life. It's easy -- trick a guy into getting you pregnant, then tie him down. It didn't seem to work for Mayo's mom or Paula's mom, both left by their Naval officer boyfriends, but the girls in town still seem to hope it will work for them. Paula isn't so sure -- she wants romance and excitement, and is attracted to Mayo, but doesn't know if she can bring herself to the desperate measures other girls of her type have resorted to.

The other most significant relationship Mayo has is with his drill instructor, Sgt. Foley. This is Louis Gossett, Jr. in an Oscar winning performance, and boy did he deserve it. The script doesn't betray Sgt. Foley's true feelings about Mayo one way or the other, so Gossett is left to show his characters' feelings with body language. As Foley tries to break Mayo's independence and Mayo grows to become a man who can confront Foley, the relationship is made that much more touching based on the way they don't talk about it. Almost none of their relationship is on the page -- it's all in the audience's mind. Watch the scene were Foley pushes Mayo to the point that he finally snaps and exclaims, "I've got nowhere else to go!" This scene is all the more satisfying because of the contrast this high emotion has with the guarded feelings of the rest of the film.

The same could be said about Mayo and Paula's relationship: part of the reason it rings so true is because of the way the characters attempt to hide their feelings from each other. As an audience member, you can tell they're clearly in love. Mayo knows he loves Paula, Paula knows she loves Mayo, the audience knows they love each other, but they still have to try to out-cool each other in a one-up contest to see who can pretend to care the least. I've been there. You've been there. This movie is smart enough to know that.

So, when Mayo finally sweeps in to carry Paula off at the end, it's that much more meaningful, instead of simply being sappy.

Romancefest 9: The Shop Around the Corner

I'd heard of THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER before, always referenced as the inspiration for the 90s romantic comedy YOU'VE GOT MAIL. But, I never saw it until today.

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER is a great romantic comedy, full of good cheer and great humor. The sparring romantic leads, Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart, are great but the real strength in the movie is that it doesn't rely on just the two of them. They're surrounded by a great community of ensemble characters who each get a good amount of screen time and have unique gifts to add to the story. This movie understands that life isn't about plot in service of one character -- life is made up of, as Miranda July would say, you and me and everyone we know.

Jimmy Stewart stars as a clerk at a shop in Budapest, though it may as well be America. He's recently entered into a pen-pal romance with a woman he's never met, who happens to show up looking for a job. Margaret Sullavan, as the unemployed secret pen-pal, starts off on the wrong foot, constantly verbally sparring with Stewart, who is her superior.

Meanwhile, the owner of the shop, Mr. Matuschek (Frank Morgan) is mysteriously preoccupied with a troubled marriage, and takes it out on Stewart, who has become so close with Matuschek over his 9 years of employment that they almost have a father/son relationship.

This movie has so much heart, and most of it lies with Frank Morgan as Matuschek. I know Morgan best from THE WIZARD OF OZ, where he played the wizard (along with a few other characters). It's interesting to see him in another role -- I've seen THE WIZARD OF OZ so many times and it's so well-ingrained in my consciousness that I sometimes forget the cast of that movie exists outside of that world. At a certain point I stopped thinking of Morgan as a talented actor and comedian and just saw the Wizard himself. So, it's nice to see Morgan bring the same magic to another role -- actually, a more complex role, as Matuschek is a well-drawn three dimensional character, allowed moments of comedy and warmth, along with darker moments of frustration and sadness.

The rest of the shop workers make up the great ensemble cast -- my favorite was Felix Bressart as Pirovitch, though it was kind of an understated role -- he was the guy who Stewart trusted the most, who worked the closest with him in his attempts at romance, and who was clearly the second (or third) in command, though he shied away from taking definite stances against Matuschek.

My next favorite was William Tracy as Pepi -- he starts out as a delivery boy and ends up as a clerk, and his journey from one to the other is probably the most successful series of side jokes the movie has to offer.

Then, there's Joseph Schildrkraut as Vadas -- he's not likable but he does an adrmirable job with a slimy, no-good role, making sure the audience loves to hate him.

The nice thing about this movie is that is knows people have to work. It knows people have jobs, that they have to try to keep their jobs, that they have to learn how to work with their co-workers, whether they like them or not. Too many movies take jobs for granted, as if everyone is guaranteed a living and their life goes on no matter what. This movie understands the characters have to make a living, and have to plan their lives around their living -- there is no plot that can't be put on hold for work hours. And, that makes this movie real.

The movie doesn't dwell on it too much, but it brings up the idea of the person we are on the outside as compared to the person that we are on the inside. A bumbling idiot in person might be the most romantic person you've met, on paper. The trick is to get it off the paper.

Romancefest 8: Now, Voyager

Much has been said about Bette Davis' eyes, but as beautiful as they are, I'd say it's the rest of her face that makes her perfect for the lead role in NOW, VOYAGER.

As a repressed, shy, introverted, beat-down daughter of an over-protective socialite, Davis' somewhat pinched-up features, drawing her mouth, cheeks and nose into a little diamond in the middle of her face, allow a glamorous woman to look like she's always on the verge of cracking.

Davis has the gift of always looking like something's going on inside her head, which is part of the strength of NOW, VOYAGER, an early foray into psychological drama. Davis' young character, Charlotte Vale, of a prestigious Boston family, is driven to a nervous breakdown by her over-bearing mother (deliciously awful Gladys Cooper) and sent off to spend some time at a rest home run by Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains). In his limited screen time, Rains does his usual job of being effortlessly likable, and Charlotte comes out the other side of the rest home a woman ready to take on a South American cruise in an effort to prove her new found independence and new set of social skills.

On the cruise, she meets Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid of CASABLANCA fame), an architect in an unhappy marriage complete with a troubled teenage daughter. They hit it off together on a series of misadventures, and while Charlotte learns to open up to Jerry, Jerry sees a little of his own troubled daughter in Charlotte and grows emotionally as a result. Of course, when the cruise is over, so is the brief romance, and Charlotte returns to Boston a renewed woman, ready to do battle with her mother and take on Boston society in an attempt to find a suitable husband and start a life for herself.

This is where the unexpected third act starts, and it's the best part of the film. Anyone who thinks they know Hollywood formulas will be surprised by this passage, I think. Or, I might just be totally gullible. Even if you're not surprised by the final developments, the maturity and depth of them is so unique and sort of "above and beyond" for a film like this, that you can't help but be taken in.

A quick word on Paul Henreid: up until now, I'd only really seen him as the "other guy" in CASABLANCA, cast in a losing battle royale surrounded by cinema's greats -- Bogart, Bergman, Lorre, Rains, Veidt, Greenstreet. In that cast, and in his saintly, somewhat thankless CASABLANCA role, Henreid comes off as somewhat bland, almost an afterthought -- a character who is important to the plot but who doesn't make much of an emotional impression. In NOW, VOYAGER, freed of the political intrigue of CASABLANCA, Henreid is able let his charm work for him, and he comes off as a sort of Ralph Fiennes-ish character -- laid back, somewhat laconic, but all around nice -- his very effortlessness is what makes him attractive.

This movie doesn't have some other gimmick to get it from point A to point B. There isn't a crime or mystery thrown in, there isn't an important historical backdrop. It's simply the tale of Charlotte's growth as a character, and that's it. And that's refreshing.

Finally, NOW, VOYAGER has one of the greatest final lines of Cinematic history, a sentiment most people could stand to learn from:

"Don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars."

Romancefest 7: Out of Africa

OUT OF AFRICA is one of those movies that has meant something to me almost my entire life even though I never really sat down and watched it until recently.

One of my earliest movie-going memories is the time my parents took me to OUT OF AFRICA when I was either 4 or 5, much too young for a grown up drama that's just shy of 3 hours. I guess they couldn't find a babysitter. According to my mom, I was well behaved. I imagine I must have just slept through it. But, I lived most of my life with a vague memory of the film, formed well before I knew who the stars Meryl Streep or Robert Redford were.

If I were to romanticize or mythologize my life, I'd say my parents taking me to movies most parents wouldn't have taken their kids to was a direct cause of my life long interest in the art of filmmaking. So, in that sense, OUT OF AFRICA is more important to me than it really should be.

Anyway, it's the second Sydney Pollack directed / Robert Redford starring romance I've seen this month and the fourth one in which one of the main characters dies. By the way, I finally realized what makes Redford so attractive. He turns every sentence into a question. This makes him seem all mysterious and silent and humble all at the same time. You can ask him a yes or no question, he'll turn the answer into a question.

"Hey, Robert Redford, do you want to go to McDonald's?"

"No?"

See.

The story concerns a wealthy Danish Baroness, Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) who fears she'll never get married so she strikes a deal with her friend Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer) to enter into a marriage of convenience in order to free up some of the old family money. The film takes place right around the beginning of the first World War when there was an influx of European settlers and colonists traveling to Africa to tame the frontier. Karen and Bror travel to Africa with the agreement they'll start a cattle farm, but it ends up being a coffee plantation.

Once in Africa, Bror reveals himself to be somewhat shiftless and given to partying, drinking and running around with women. He spends most of his time out of the house and makes it clear he's not planning to help with the farm. Karen tries to make things work and busies herself setting up the farm, getting the local tribe to help her out along the way.

It's not long before rugged individualist Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) shows up. He makes a living as a big game hunter, and later as a tour guide. As Karen falls in love with Africa, she also begins to fall in love with Denys, whose romantic reverence of the wilderness and whose own independence attracts her. Denys is drawn towards Karen, as well, as she proves to be more than a match for her new environment and pretty much the only industrious colonist in the entire film. But, he's also drawn to the wilderness and doesn't want to settle down.

I guess there are two romances here. The first one is really between Karen and Africa. She falls in love with the whole country, at least as she sees it, and in her narration and the performance by Meryl Streep, the movie does not shy away from the complex issues here. When you fall in love with a place, you want to learn everything about it. The more you learn, the more you love. But, you're still an outsider. When do you become a part of the place you love instead of being a tourist? Will the place every love you back? Is it indifferent to you, with its own customs and stories, not really needing you to come along and idealize it? Does it matter?

Two of the most effective sequences in the film deal with Karen leaving Africa: there's a montage early on in which Karen is forced to leave the country for medical treatment. Instead of following her home to Denmark and showing scenes of Karen missing Africa, we see shots of familiar settings in Africa, only without Karen -- her dressing table, the grounds of the plantation. Without her there, it doesn't seem the same. Later, towards the end of the film, we get a drawn out series of farewells, but the saddest farewell is between Karen and Africa in which she wonders -- will the people remember her? Will the land remember her? Will she ever mean as much to Africa as it meant to her?

But, there's also the romance between Redford and Streep, and that one seems to be mostly about independence. It's summed up in the following exchange:

Redford says, "I'm getting used to living with things."

Streep says, "I'm getting used to living without things."

Each of their personal growth deals with their attitude towards their independent selves -- they have to decide whether or not their identities are defined by other people. Redford has to learn not to be alone, Streep has to learn that being alone is okay. They meet briefly in the middle and then blow by each other. I think they see themselves in each other, even if they might not want to admit it or maybe even don't realize it. I guess that's how a lot of relationships are -- like looking in a mirror while trying not to be caught looking in the mirror.

After all this typing I still haven't mentioned the music (John Barry) and the cinematography (David Watkin) -- both beautiful. And, the central performances are good, along with a few standout supporting actors, most notably the stoic steward, Farah (Malick Bowens) who quietly becomes one of Karen's closest friends and has a few of the most heart breaking scenes in the film, saying a lot with very few lines and an expression that attempts to avoid betraying emotion.

But, Africa does most of the heavy lifting, itself. The cinematography wouldn't be so beautiful without the scenery -- neither would the music. When the plane flies over the water and the flamingos take flight, you have to thank Africa for making that possible. When the lions lounge in the grass, when the sun sets, same thing.

I was surprised to learn the film is based on the life of a real woman of the same name as the main character who lived all of these adventures and then wrote stories about them. She must have been a hell of a lady, which I guess means Denys was one hell of a man.

Romancefest 6: On Golden Pond

ON GOLDEN POND has a quality that's a little more rare than you'd imagine in most movies:

It's nice.

I don't mean to be patronizing using a word like "nice." I felt the same way about WHIP IT, which bears almost no resemblance to ON GOLDEN POND, but which I liked so much last year just because of how nice it was. Nice, honest, true, open. That's ON GOLDEN POND.

The movie stars Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, both in the twilight of their careers, as an elderly couple spending yet another summer at their cabin on Golden Pond. Hepburn's cheery and optimistic while Fonda is cranky and seems obsessed with death, which to him seems to be right around the corner. The movie opens on the eve of his 80th birthday, with Hepburn on the verge of 70.

Their somewhat estranged daughter, played by Fonda's real life daughter, Jane Fonda, shows up with her fiancee (Dabney Coleman) and his son (Doug McKeon). I say somewhat estranged because it seems to be mostly an emotional estrangement -- no one has been disowned, there haven't been any major fights. Jane Fonda's character simply feels a distance between her and her father, and her mother to a lesser extent, and doesn't like the way she regresses into an insecure childhood when she's around them. She's grown up and in control in her new life in Los Angeles, why can't she seem to be at ease with her parents in her childhood home? So, she doesn't visit as much as they might like, but the parents, to be fair, also don't make it easy -- Mom is quick to dismiss the past in hopes of moving forward and Dad uses insults and mean-spirited jokes to avoid discussing anything real or meaningful.

The best passages of the film begin when Jane Fonda's character announces she's going off on a month long vacation with her fiancee and asks if her parents wouldn't mind taking care of 13 year old Billy for a while. The elderly couple agrees, and Billy and Henry Fonda's character take their first tentative steps towards a meaningful relationship, mostly based around their endless quest fishing the lake for a legendary trout named Walter. Billy's attempts at shocking the old man with his adolescent use of four letter words actually turns out to be a natural match with Fonda's characters' crotchety and antagonistic personality, and there's a touching scene in which the kid tells Fonda he won't be around much longer, meaning the summer is almost over, and Fonda says he won't be around much longer, either, meaning his life is almost over.

The kid says, "I'll miss you," under his breath and Fonda pretends not to hear. Then, they get back to the business of catching fish.

There's some beautiful cinematography from Billy Williams and some nice, although sometimes intrusive, music from Dave Grusin. But the real strength is in the script by Ernest Thompson, adapting from his own play, which manages to be a crowd pleaser while also not coming off as fake. Part of this is also thanks to the great acting, but you get the refreshing sense that these people really do love each other and really do want things to work out. They're not just slaves to an arbitrary plot.

This is the first movie I've seen this month to feature an old, seasoned couple who has been through a lot. Most of the other ones have been about youth, so far. But, this one is still kind of a coming of age story, as young Billy is thrown in to teach the old man a little bit about himself. My favorite dialogue exchange, which I'll paraphrase, is between Katherine Hepburn and Billy after Fonda throws a fit and misdirects his anger at the kid.

"He's just trying to find his way," Hepburn says. "Just like you."

It's a valuable lesson. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our own minds that we forget stuff is going on in other peoples' minds, too. Whether they're younger than us or older than us, everyone is constantly going through changes and adapting to life, no one has it figured out.

Chances are, if you're trying to figure out what your relationship is supposed to be with someone who matters in your life, they're probably trying to figure out that same thing about you.

Sometimes people act tough when they're afraid to be weak, and sometimes people act grumpy when they're just shy.

So, be patient.