Certain Women (2016) : When flatness of affect turns leaden, and less could have been more

This is a critique of Certain Women (2016) – as against what it could have been

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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6 March


Spoiler alert - to talk of the film, as here, it is almost necessarily full to the brim with them

This is a critique of Certain Women (2016) – as made, as against what it could have been (work in progress)

There is an approach in cinema, which is almost as much a state of mind for us, as viewers, as for the depicted places and persons, that is best characterized by citing Once Upon A Time in Anatolia (2011) – though, for those with no patience or feeling for mood and reflective space, Sokurov’s much, much shorter Mother and Son (1997) will seem more of an endurance than around three hours ?

Certain Women (2016) runs to 107 mins, and - for those who love the flat affect and drab tone and look of the first two stories - that's OK. pic.twitter.com/loMd6IiMVg

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 6, 2017

In Certain Women (2016), no such ethos is evoked, but there is a flatness of affect to it from the very opening shot :

A train heads towards the bottom left-hand corner (and, there, the plant that is the only thing in focus). (Even the table-top mountain – and unmoving clouds – look as if unrealistically let into the background to the rail-road in the foreground, and the expanse behind it [i.e. done unconvincingly in post-production].) Then, of sorts, a mood is generated, but not pervasively, by a man dressing post-coitally, extreme right and in another room, and a woman seen just from below her knees, putting on socks – it is the height of trying to create a frisson of dullness around Laura, despite taking time in her lunch-break for an affair.

Laura (Laura Dern) goes on to be, if she were to have survived in the profession for any time, an implausibly malleable attorney (and Fuller, doing the manipulation, a claimant – they are still called plaintiffs in the States – to resist and reject whose demands, with dignity and justification, she seems quite unused, unsuited, and unskilled). The lingering question why Fuller feels aggrieved may deliberately only ever be given in snatches that are interrupted, and so partial, but, then, this is because the story decides to foreground the element of unreasonable expectation / unreasonable acquiescence – just as the opening image does the train, in motion – and leaves the looming question how he actually could have compromised his injury case for peanuts*.

Maile Meloy, in the stories that are Certain Women’s basis, may have evidenced better understanding of real law (practice and procedure), rather than the pretend variety that litters film and t.v., but it is not here. The boring fact of the matter (i.e. the mountain that, after the fact, has not so artfully been grafted in behind) is that attorneys specifically need and have the protection of standard protocols (because, for one thing, their professional indemnity cover would insist on following them) for dealing with clients who ill-advisedly wish to accept settlement offers that, without being as derisory as this one seems to have been, no one with a duty to advise them could recommend accepting.


That may be uncharitably against the unrealism of scenarios with a client and an attorney, and it could equally miss something in the kindred setting of Nebraska* (2013) to ask for strict verismilitude, but making a compromise with the tenable has to be for good reason (not just that it is simple to make up and fake). Whereas this story, told with unutterable flatness as if it is a virtue, and with Laura even being casually manipulated by the law-enforcement officers to endanger herself for no good reason, made one long for Steve Coogan’s take on such matters in Alan Partridge : Alpha Papa (2013) : yes, Laura is one of these ‘certain women’ of the title, and she has a particularity, but it is only of not being persuasive that she could, if twisted thus, survive in legal practice, when client-work is ever full of inter-personal traps.

Even so, the story, even in its own terms, is just as much about Fuller, which means that the film has hindered its own credibility, by making scant sense of Laura’s role as his legal adviser (none of which is much assisted by off-hand remarks from one or two others, who suggest some merit in his feeling aggrieved). Even if one shelves Laura, sitting on the floor in the middle of the night and reading out his case-file to him, onto the level of the symbolic, doing so effectively side-lines issues of whether she did right by him, if the court and she in any way wrongly facilitated a settlement that precluded considering the effect of a prognosis where a provisional award for damages was likely to be better : good law, but a poor story - which should counsel against not adapting the story in film ?


The second story takes up some more screen-time (it would have been interesting to have noted how much the first and second occupy in relation to, and before we get to, the third – after two indifferent segments, one with production values that are not just per se better, but wholly quite other, with qualities of performance / presence / poise, cinematography, editing, sound-design…).

Put more briefly, some awkwardness, along with much more flatness, in a couple’s buying (or being given), some building-stone from a man of 76, whose connection to them is wholly unapparent. (Everyone calls the material sandstone, but it little resembles what that term usually refers to, and more resembles granite ?). The wife (whose wife is she, i.e. who is he ?¹), Gina (Michelle Williams), is the moving force behind asking if they can buy it – yet, at best, it seems to be acquired for no better reason than, as she reasons to herself, if they did not take it, someone else would, because there is somehow too little left, of what was once a school-house, to do much with.


(Apart from a bit of bogus ambiguity whether Albert, the 76-year-old, feels cheated, a story about precious little, although someone somewhere must believe that it said more : it is as if, on a recommendation that one increasingly doubted, one newly started watching New York Stories (1989), but Scorsese’s incendiary opener ‘Life Lessons’, with Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette, had just been substituted by another segment as trite and unchallenging as what follows it, Coppola’s ‘Life without Zoe’.)

What we hear said plenty, but in emotionally largely even terms, is to care for Gina, because she does so much for them (e.g. negotiating this pile of building material, with which little can be done ?). Yet the only moment in the whole section that really spoke of anything that seemed felt was when her husband¹ makes a long reverse down to the gate, which she has opened for him, and. in doing so, he talks to their daughter Guthrie (Sara Rodier) in a monologue…

* * *

From a review by Leslie Felperin for The Hollywood Reporter :

Yet while there’s no doubt this is the work of a filmmaker entirely in command of her craft, there’s something a trifle academic and dry about the whole exercise, and slightly lacking in narrative cohesion given the nature of its origins. Unlike, say Robert Altman’s Short Cuts or other films adapted from collections, this feels like three discrete works laid alongside one another, like pictures in a gallery, not a triptych.



Post-script :

There is now another perspective to share, after chatting the film over, with someone who – on another day – just happened to have seen the film (this is the stuff of being at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse) – not just during Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest)).

After agreement that the second story seemed (for want of the words used at the time) inadequately substantial (though leaving the interlocutor keen enough to read the original short stories), there was more interest in Laura, and less being distracted by the plausibility of her career in law : the suggestion is that she is a small-town lawyer, used to small-town matters, and that, when she took on this this compensation case, she had found herself out of her depth, and thus her inability to parry the demands from Fuller results from something different. Maybe…


To some, the title also appears to offer another way of understating the word ‘certain’, beyond that familiar in some forms of narration (or one could naturally say ‘certain types’), such as ’Now there were certain Greeks among those who went up to worship at the festival. Reading Certain Women this way would imply that one can ascribe acting decisively to the behaviour of the women, and – except to the extent that most films depend on something happening – might one look for that quality of certitude in vain ? (It is only essential to find if, if one wants to say that each woman acts with certainty, and that there doing so is important to the film. Words [from a review ?] that are being used to promote the film begin 'Three strong-willed women'.)


End-notes :

¹ One forgets, but state or federal law takes the usual position further that a full and final settlement should not be accepted when the prognosis has not resolved, but an interim payment : here it appears that an employer that makes a payment in settlement binds the employee against the person who might have been sued. It is vaguely enough there in the story, but really skated over.

² As in the past, IMDb, lets us down here : the last character in Laura’s story is Amituana, it then lists Gina, her daughter Guthrie (Sara Rodier), Albert (Rene Auberjonois), but not Gina’s husband, as the next character is The Rancher (Lily Gladstone), and that is the third story…

His rating comes out at 5 / 10 :https://t.co/LgO647xnzi#UCFF concurs with that, in this assembling critique :https://t.co/s51EIxOA32 https://t.co/EsZMJ1RzPQ

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 7, 2017

However, as looked to be the case at the time - but how does one confirm it (in a Montana ID parade, one big man with a big beard, briefly seen, looks much like any other) ? - Neil White (@everyfilmneil) clarifies, in his review : The lawyer's hook-up (James Le Gros) turns out to be the husband of a businesswoman (Williams) who goes on a weekend family camping trip and visit to an elderly man they know.

³ It would be good to have confirmation of this perception (as screen-time is not always possible to judge accurately), but the running-time of the third story may nearly equal that of the other two combined : with reprises of the latter feeling as if they have been tacked on at the end to provide a sense - not a very good one - of a frame. (Plus locating in Laura's law office in the place where Lily Gladstone's character, in the third story, drives to and makes speculative enquiries).

'Her unassertive appeal has rarely been harnessed to more beguiling effect.'

In #UCFF's view, Certain Women (2016) should - even at the likely risk of making the run-time 70-80 mins - have confined itself to this one story*.

* Rather than having its three strands.

2 / 2 pic.twitter.com/DHejHicBlr

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 18, 2022

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You’re just a sore loser

This is a review of Rams (Hrútar) (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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9 February

This is a review of Rams (Hrútar) (2015)

Of course, though there are sheep in the film, those are not the rams – but no one, even without having seen the film-poster, need feel complacent for that realization…


Film references :

* Addicted to Sheep (2015) [interview with director Magali Pettier]
* Burden of Dreams (1982)
* Fitzcarraldo (1982)
* Iona (2015)
* It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
* Kosmos (2010)
* Life in a Fish-Bowl (2014)
* Nebraska (2013)
* Rear Window (1954)
* The Field (1990)


However, there are some puzzles in the film – asking ourselves, as we try to be intelligent observers, Why is he doing that ? [meaning, usually, Gummi¹], and intractably getting no answer in at least one case – and they require our patience. There must also be half-a-dozen times when, through things such as reflections, our attention is drawn to the fact that Gummi is looking at the world through a window : in one shot, we almost have more streaks of light featuring across the image than the image itself, and at a moment when we are really watching Gummi watching (or the character playing him, pretending not to expect what he sees), and not just first being shown him at the window, then what we know that he is seeing.

They are still there, but writer / director Grímur Hákonarson does not overdo it with beautiful views of Iceland, and there are two sorts of shots that he has cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen distinctively employ : external long-shots with a static camera-position, allowing us to take in what we see, and which may include an element of movement to which we can give our attention (not least if we are asking ourselves the question Why are we being shown this ?), and internal medium shots, again static, that let us take in Gummi, sitting, or with someone else, where there is a landscape painting above him, but what the window is framing is at least as worth looking at (a point of connection with the previous paragraph).

Those who invite us to see this film on the basis that it is 'deadpan comedy', executed extremely well, seem to see that as sufficient reason in itself, but no film is under an obligation ‘to be about’ what it appears to be about – and this one does not even seem to be about the sheep (even if there is enthusiasm akin to that of Tom and Kay Hutchinson in Addicted to Sheep (2015), and the passion and love for, and for breeding, the prize-winning favourites). When Gummi delivers Kiddi to the hospital, we might stop to consider where the humour comes from (even if it may elicit an amazed snort, rather than a belly-laugh - though there were pockets, in the screening, of those fervent to derive much amusement from their viewing) :

In constructing the scene, Hákonarson first of all effects a misdirection (which derives from the manner of the delivery, and in relation to an earlier scene²), and it has already been noted how, as a quiet way of subverting our perception, he has us react to what we expect, e.g. early on, when Gummi does not receive first prize, and what he is then about outside (a moment whose implication drives the whole story on, but which looks like sabotage).

By the time of this part of the film, Hákonarson has already set up a polarity, where our time is very clearly with Gummi (as well as our sympathies), not Kiddi, and what works here is the incongruity between action and the duty that informs it³. (A little, as it turns out, with Tom and Jerry, we may be worried about Kiddi, taken to and left in the surprised care of those who have half a mind that their attention should be on the unknown driver, but Kiddi soon turns out to bounce back (as those characters do), in a way that belies our fears.)


We need to spot, but only to set aside, the patent theme of obsession, for this is not the desire-at-all-costs of Richard Harris (as ‘Bull’ McCabe) in The Field (1990) (or of Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), though, at times in Burden of Dreams (1982), we might ask whose mad obsession the film is about), despite arising from the issue of ‘the last of the Bolstadur stock’.

Artfully, then (and with the wise investment in using no fewer than four translators to care for its foreign-language viewers), the film is a lot more to do with an obsession that actually speaks and treats of notions of identity and personhood (as in Nebraska (2013)), which is exposed, on one level, when the government official / lawyer tells Gummi You’re the one who’s responsible. If we mentally stay with its arc (and never quite credit, per se, this conceit of deadpan comedy, any more than we can / should with Lars and The Real Girl (2007)), Rams has laid foundations⁴ so that, led by Atli Örvarsson’s score, we build in the last ten or so minutes to what is actually the heart of the film, with excellent sound-design, visual-effects and situation.

Right at this moment, where we may misdirect ourselves as to what is taking place, we might just puzzle a bit about what happens after the black-out at the end (and leave, saying so loudly, and what a good film it was)... Or we might consider what, in us, has made us doubt what we see, both in this film, and in the world outside : what challenge, in other words, the film might mean for our lives, when we construct realities of the world, and of - and for - people who are in it, both those whom we write off, and those whom we credit.

Still from Lars and The Real Girl (2007)

And, for those who also stay for the credits, there is a chance to reflect on how the theme for piano sounds now, when reprised, and to note that Örvarsson played it, as well as the organ and accordion, with the session musicians.


End-notes

¹ It is only a diminutive nick-name (as is Kiddi), but, if we did not note the full name in the film, IMDb (@IMDb) does not know, and cannot tell us after the event…

² As well as by the look of some of the shots (characterized above), one is reminded of the powerful close of Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross) (2014), but also of the brothers, driving around in Kosmos (2010).

³ Contains spoilers * Not unrelatedly, it is as if Gummi is feeling required to kill the fatted calf, but his heart is elsewhere – and by no means rejoicing – when he does it (a little as with George Bailey, and his life ?), and from this way in which Hákonarson has Gummi (hardly for the first time that we know of) care for Kiddi, but without according him any more dignity than a bag of potatoes. A treatment grotesquely exploited, at length, by John Cleese and Connie Booth with ‘The Kipper and The Corpse’ in Fawlty Towers.

At times, the film reaches beyond itself to accounts of Isaac and Esau, or even Cain and Abel, to name but two :https://t.co/m0anVDln38

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 17, 2016

There's certainly 'mere oppugnancy' (Troilus I.iii) in Rams (2015), yet is It's a Wonderful Life (1946) closer ? :https://t.co/m0anVDln38

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 12, 2016

⁴ In a way that Iona (2015), set on the island of that name, just fails to, wishing to seem genuinely portentous (as if it had the emotional pull of Greek tragedy ?), but only being bogus and hollow. (In a similar way (though less unsuccessfully), Icelandic film Life in a Fish-Bowl (2014) wants to nestle big themes, such as those of the Icelandic banks, amongst domesticity, as if it were another Chinatown (1974)...)


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Henry James in Poland ? (Part II)

This is a follow-on from a Festival review of Ida (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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23 November (updated 25 November)

* Contains spoilers *

This is a follow-on from a Festival review of Ida (2013)

Some reviewers have made claims for the strength of the film’s cinematography*, and comment has already been made (in Part I) about how the monochrome makes the convent look and feel. Outside that setting, one hoped for uses of the medium that would match the power and rare presence of the landscapes in Nebraska (2013), but there are very few moments of such cinematic beauty (all of which feature trees, and two movement), and instead the film-makers choose to alter the aspect ratio, as if to suggest moments of ‘widening out’** :

* A misty rank of trees on the sky-line

* Leaves (which appear to have been added by CGI) falling in an avenue (which we come back to)

* Trees to the side of the moving car, which, through persistence of vision, create a pattern


In Nebraska, as in Frances Ha (2012) for that matter (and despite some banal critical assertions made about both films and other uses of monochrome), its use here felt integral to the project. In Ida, except when she is framed on a diagonal, or fellow novices and she are decorating Jesus (on a plinth) and then – through the snow (more CGI ?) – carry not so much their cross as his***, nothing remarkable is going on with the composition (one hoped for it - it was not there).

As to what the images in the heart of this film denote, unearthing past events – not least in the Nazi period (when motives and actions had necessarily been mixed) – is almost bound to be compelling (please see below), and doing so is with Wanda to the fore, again necessarily. Three times (before the cock crows three times ?), Ida absents herself from the scene of her aunt’s apparent endeavours on her behalf (we go with her) :

* To the cow-shed (with the parental stained glass) (during the interrogation)

* To bed in her habit (rather than go down to the jazz with Wanda – Wanda, Ida somehow thinks (so she says), cannot really be there to find out what happened, if she wants to dance)

* To the street (when Wanda starts breaking into the flat (of Szymon Skiba ?))


Discovering the fate of her own sister, Róża Lebenstein, is possibly too close to home and so what Wanda has been assiduously avoiding in the years when she was acted as a prosecutor and since : however Wanda survived the war, Ida’s own Jewishness seems to have either been disregarded or overlooked by her peers (although Mother Superior and the authorities must have known all along, if they now know Wanda ?), so maybe Wanda’s asserting that it is not there was part of her life, and has become essential to it.

After all, her first impulse is to greet her niece coolly with I know who you are, with facts about her history (We were from Lublin), and to brush Ida off quickly, after what she insultingly describes as ‘our little family reunion’. If the film really gave us space to contemplate Wanda’s position, her attitude to the past, and what it means to her, it would be good to feel that that one really could do so alongside Ida’s exploration of her equivalent of The Old World and its ways, which she can barely know.

When, for example, Wanda is asked on their travels Who are you ?, and replies I used to be someone once, it is not even as if, self-pityingly or otherwise, her response is really allowed to hang in the air. Yes, it is Wanda’s style to utter things casually and then act as if she did not say them, but, here, nothing stems from her comment, nothing depends on it, and, having had her say it, it is as if she makes (perfectly psychologically) as if the hurt is healed over :

Since we seem influenced to concentrate so much on Ida, since she lost the parents whom she was thus never to know (not only a sibling), and, just until now, her fate resulted from what happened to them (as Wanda’s patently did not). Granted, the film is in translation, and a Polish viewer might gain a different impression.

Even so, the film - named after Ida, after all - seems to have the flaw (unless that can be seen as a strength, of some sort ?) of placing us in alignment so often with her point of view (see above for the three points where we leave Wanda, going with Ida). In the shot in question, we are far more with Ida at the wayside shrine (than with Wanda in the car), looking – in those Jamesian terms – out from The New World at what is happening. These are not the casual religious observances that travellers on the road might make out of habit or ritual, but part of her life and / or identity.

As to Wanda's more uncertain identity, we learn that she is Wanda Gruz (Red Wanda is her nickname) and that she used to be a State prosecutor (so, until we learn that she is a judge, it is unclear what panel she still sits on, when we momentarily see her), and now her status still gets her released (after a delay, when they realize that, as she says, she is a judge) from an incident of drink driving that takes the car off the road. To try to find out the truth about her sister, she is aggressive, and threatens I can destroy you, whereas, when with Ida, she makes idle references (which will not be understood) such as to Gone with the Wind.

Then again, Peter Bradshaw, in his review for The Guardian, suggests that he knows more (but where, even if it is in the press-pack, is this information in the film ? - such layers of bogus description, posing as interpretation (if not vice versa), just obscure what is to be seen or heard) :

In @PeterBradshaw1's review of Ida (2013), he says that Wanda 'owing to misdemeanours, is reduced to [...] judging petty quarrels' - script?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 26, 2014

[...] Wanda Gruz, tremendously played Agata Kulesza: a worldly hard-drinking woman who lives on her own, and who is evidently something of an embarrassment to the authorities.

Wanda was once a high-flying state prosecutor and former zealot of the communist state who, owing to misdemeanours, is reduced to being a magistrate, judging petty quarrels between neighbours. [...]


That said, despite having determined that dancing is inconsistent with searching for (the truth about) her parents (the arbitrary law of the excluded middle), we still cannot much identify with whatever hang-ups Ida has about going down to listen to the music with Wanda – and the film, even in its own terms, then wants to have Ida assimilating jazz (by osmosis through Wanda's comment about the sax in the car ?) when she has never heard it before (irrespective of who is on alto).

Fortunately, the tune played, when Ida’s curiosity gets the better of her, is the Coltrane of ‘Naima’ (as she is told – his ‘Equinox’ is also used****), not Ascension, from three years later ! As to the authenticity, in Eastern Bloc Poland, of jazzers travelling around the countryside to gigs, one does wonder…

At its touching core, at the burial-place, we have Wanda and Ida united (just for now, anyway) : they have passed through trees that we are almost sure that we saw on their journey, one with headscarf, the other with the head-dress of her habit. All of which has been rooted in the ground of temptation, family-feeling, and discovering what people did in the recent past (but have so soon concealed, forgotten). Undeniable, powerful material, but does it sit that well with (let alone with Wanda's deeper motivations and thoughts) an exploration of the territory of The Last Temptation of Christ, taking as its seeming starting point this exchange (quoted in >Part I) [the last utterance is paraphrased] :

Wanda : Have you had impure thoughts ?

Ida: Yes.

Wanda : Carnal ?

Ida : No.

Wanda : That’s a shame. (Slight pause.) How do you know what you are giving up ?


Henry James writ large enough, but in a story that wants to yoke together not only a dichotomy of The New World / The Old World, but also guilt and retribution, what one did in the time of war and why, the lure of the alto sax, and even what makes life worth living. Realistically, too many calls on a run-time of around 80 minutes ?


End-notes

* For example, Linsey Satterthwaite for New Empress Magazine :

Ida […] is also one of the most stunningly shot films to emerge this year, very much to the credit of cinematographers Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal. Director Pawel Pawlikowski presents a masterclass in black and white imagery; each scene is assembled with mesmeric precision. Every shot looks like a piece of art, as Ida explores the outside world anew concealed in her habit, it is like a Vermeer painting has come to life.


Well, yes, the cutting between the different scenes, contexts and lighting conditions makes for an interesting montage of Ida, determinedly pressing on towards we know not what (though not art - and nothing but her head-dress to invoke Tracy Chevallier's wretched Girl with a Pearl Earring : as to whether she has anything to 'explore' is doubtful, since she is just crossing rural terrain, back-roads and the like).

Everything else being equal, it would seem like a good place to part from her, leaving us at last in doubt about what she intends, after a couple of all-too-human minor reversals of action - yet is it now a cop-out, suggesting that more has emotionally been captured in Ida than bears rational examination ?

Would we even think such things, if this were not 'evocative' monochrome ? Just compare this with the resolution and conclusion found with Bruce Dern in Nebraska...


** The format is variable, between nigh square to rectangular.

*** Even here, the symbolism felt a little heavy handed, let alone when we explored our Jamesian dichotomy (please see Part I) of ‘being in, but not of, the world’. Compare this with the limitation of an entirely static camera in all but three of the fourteen scenes of Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg), which might sound wholly artificial and sterile as an idea. However, the effect of this limitation was very and surprisingly full – quite apart from the riches of the script and performances.

**** As are, prominently, Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 (‘Jupiter’) and Bach’s Chorale Prelude Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ BWV 639 (from Das Orgelbüchlein) – beloved of Tarkovsky ?


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A little ponder about Nebraska (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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28 December

A continuation from here

My ponder is confirmed to have validity by reading Patrick Ogle's (@paogle's) review :

Go to see #AlexanderPayne' "#Nebraska" if you love film. It is a masterwork of cinematography and more. http://t.co/cs0DjZOrwU
— patrick ogle (@paogle) December 23, 2013

What I am homing in on (pun intended, as one reads on) is this :

He heads out, on foot, from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect his reward. Everyone knows there isn't any reward (except perhaps Woody).


This is where the film opens, with the given of Woody (Bruce Dern) determinedly walking, and being pulled over by a cop car.

What is he doing ? Has he really never seen a scam like this one before - or has his wife Kate (June Squibb) always ferreted away such disquieting items of mail in recent years ?

The film does not invite us to dwell on this - we are straight there in media res, and it does not behove us to upset the apple-cart and ask Why now ? Why this ? Why not before ?

We don't really even think to question whether he seriously purposed to set out on this journey as we see him, but what if he did - or, more to the meat of things, what if he did not ?

A superficial - maybe facile - reading of the narrative has it that he is addled by booze, deluded, and impervious to reasoned argument. But what if this is a cry for help, a latching-onto this letter because it comes from the capital of the state where Woody grew up ? For it is also a given of Nebraska that we start in Montana, but nothing, then or later, tells us why Kate and Woody are there (except that she acquired him, won the prize).

In what unfolds, there is a searching for worth and value, which, with David's (Will Forte's) insight, the $1,000,000 symbolizes - until he gets there, Woody expresses no enthusiasm for his home town, wanting to press on to Lincoln to claim his prize, a little, maybe, as Paul talks about in his second letter to Timothy (4 : 7 - 8) :

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.


On the level of symbol, of Nebraska as another place, Woody is seeking something outside himself, just as Paul concentrates on a heavenly realm and considers his earthly life to be a race that he has run and which is now finished. Woody, in turn, is summing up who he is and what he means, and having a reckoning, and without the journey (pretext or not), that would not have happened.

Returning to Billings is the least of that, so the film does not have that in its ambit once the business in town has been addressed. Nor does it really matter what the gestures that David makes at the end signify in actuality, beyond the fact that they uphold his father and his status - Woody has had his homecoming and has found himself, and that is what matters.


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Really shot in Wyoming !

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7 December

89 = S : 14 / A : 15 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 13 / F : 15

A rating and review of Nebraska (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



* Contains spoilers *

It may not only be true of lesser films (well, not true of The Third Man (1949)), but Bel Ami (2012) fails at attempting to pass off London as Paris, and On the Road (2012) is a film that, as this one does, features landscape - just nowhere near, reading the credits, where the various journeys were supposed to be happening.

It is an interesting choice to present this film in black and white, because it really adds almost nothing to what we see except the views of the scenery, which are faultless. With Frances Ha (2013), it worked, it did enhance the film's cinematic qualities, but here - apart from the obvious suggestion that much of life in states such as Montana and Nebraska is being presented as lacking a dimension - it was only the fleeting longer shots in transit that benefited, but, then, so much that I would not have had the film any other way.

And this is a film that says something about acceptance, though that does not mean that I have to accept this highly inaccurate account of it from IMDb :

An aging, booze-addled father makes the trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son in order to claim a million dollar Mega Sweepstakes Marketing prize


I see no evidence that David Grant (also unwillingly known as Davie / Davey, and played by Will Forte) is estranged from his father Woody (short for Woodrow, and acted by Bruce Dern), and it is he, rather than his brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk), who comes for him when he has been picked up by the police at the start. The other descriptions beg the question : what life has Woody led that he is as he is, and can his wife Kate (June Squibb) exculpate herself ?

The course of the film takes us to Hawthorne, where Woody grew up, and where there were at least two women in his life. One, sympathetically and with great naturalness brought off by Angela McEwan, is Peg, whose humanity is evident, and says that Woody knew that she 'would not let him touch all the bases' - by implication, the highly judgemental Kate, his wife (Squibb with great ease makes us dislike her), would. (There is a grim scene in the Lutheran graveyard (Kate is nominally a Catholic), where she calls a dead member of Woody's family a whore for having had sex from the age of fifteen.)

It is here that, bit by bit, we can piece together the influences that have worked on Woody, such as the death of a brother with whom he shared a room, being shot down in Korea when being transferred, and the age at which he and two other men from the town were sent to war, and how he returned from it. The laughter at Woody's expense seemed to have died down by this stage (and, in this respect, the film has the pattern of Philomena (2013)), but where it laid things on a little too thickly was with the vacant relatives, who, for example, are querying the journey-time from Billings, Montana, and even infect David with it, who asks Ross how he travelled over.

At Mount Rushmore (another place that Woody did not wish to see), in what he has to say about the monument not looking finished (which. with his critique, it did not), we are given the insight that how he relates to the world does not mean that he is ignorant and foolish, and, in his way, he just as much speaks the truth as he sees it as Kate does. (Indeed, we hear him dub other drivers idiots, and tell a mechanic that he is using the wrong wrench.)

I think that the script suitably covers objections to some of the things that happen for the purposes of the plot and which get us on the road, and that it works well enough as an exploration of the goals that we set, or expectations that we all have, without needing Woody's background and circumstances - the things that we think that we must have, when really something else (or lesser) might do.

In emotional terms, rather than those symbolic of setting out on a quest (and feeling that compulsion), the film resolves itself - and rights some wrongs - right at the end (even if we do not quite know how it can be done, and maybe it is a bit too pat). What is clear is that David has also been in need of healing from the childhood that he had where he is likened to a girl or a prince, and called beautiful - to assert himself, not least as he does, albeit with a fist, with Woody's former business partner Ed Pegram, and to believe in his worth.

The quest itself turned out to have to be completed, even if it was just to be told that it had not garnered anything except an ironic cap, but probably for other reasons by then. As for having to live with the disparaging Kate, nothing had changed that, and her threats of putting Woody in a home, and she had only defended him out of self-interest, both not to have relatives clamour for money, and to have him as her own victim - except that David certainly has more respect for his father, and in that there is hope...


As for the review on IMDb (by Steven Leibson) that calls this a hilarious comedy, well...

However, I quite liked Mark Kermode's review in The Guardian, so here it is (or gu.com/p/3yvcg/tf, if you wish to share).


There is now a little follow-up piece here...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)