Romeo and Bella and Edward and Juliet

So anyway...

It's been a while, but I'm back. Lots to do in these past few weeks and I have not posted for quite some time. So, what issue of world-shattering importance drags me out of my self-imposed mini-exile? Would you believe the Twilight Saga? 

I know, and you're right: Twilight is a pretty slight entertainment. It's likely that many of you don't even like it, deeming Meyer a less than capable author, and it is also reasonable to assert that she (like Rowling before her) began with a story rather than any discernible unique skill set. Still, it's a cool story (even if these vampires do sparkle for no appreciable reason). And I am an incurable romantic--and a teenage girl at heart--so I readily admit that I read all four books and watched all four movies and enjoyed all of them.

But why bring it up now? It's over! Even the last movie is yesterday's news.

Well, here's the thing:

Bizarrely, I found myself on facebook this weekend doing something I never imagined I would be doing as a 56-year-old writer/English teacher: spending over a hour of my time defending the honor of Twilight and its characters! (I don't wish to go into the whys and wherefores here; it was a tired old internet meme that seeks to equate 100+ year old vampires protecting human girls from dangers they cannot possibly foresee with hypercontrolling, creepy, abusive boyfriends, and in my mind it is ridiculous. Edward Cullen is not Adam on "Girls.") The point is that, in doing so, I found myself actually thinking deeply--God help me--about the Twilight Saga.

And this is what I wrote at one point:

Ultimately, this is a story of the same kind of obsession that drove Romeo and Juliet. One look is all it took to seal them for life. For Bella, this may have been something in her teen nature. For Edward, perhaps it was a fragmentary remnant of his humanity; who knows? For both, it is clearly impetuous, as it is dangerous and forbidden. They should never have embarked on it, but once they did they could not stop. In Meyers' version of the story, as the dangers of the world seek to destroy them, they discover that they are the only thing each other needs, but also the only thing causing the danger to each other. 

Edward, being the older, wiser and stronger, tries to break it off, but in the end he is too far gone and, as do Romeo and Juliet, in Book Two they both find themselves crying and bemoaning their forced separation until, in Book Three, they are brought back together to be wed. Once wed, though, a whole new manifestation of their trouble occurs: in R & J, that is personified by Tybalt; here, is comes in the form of Renesmee. Book Four, as Acts Four and Five of the play, is the playing out of the inevitable climax of all of this drama. 

That Meyers elected to keep her heroes alive is more a matter of playing to her teenage modern audience than anything else; I would like to think that something inside of her would have liked them to die and leave the baby to Jacob and the Cullens, united as the Capulets and Montagues after the final sacrifices. I even suspect (hope?) that, somewhere, a draft of that version exists.

Now I have not read New Moon in many years, and I was utterly unaware when I wrote these lines that the novel actually begins with the following epigraph:

These violent delights have violent ends
And in the triumph die like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume.

These lines come from, of course, Romeo and Juliet.  With a bit of internet research today, I see that Meyer did in fact consciously pattern her second book after that play, even (and I did not recall this either) having Bella and Edward watch and discuss the play and its lovers within the text. I do not feel here the need to rehash what has already, it turns out, been thoroughly hashed elsewhere, so I'll merely make my own point.

Meyer has acknowledged her intentional pattern in her second novel, but I think that the entire series is built on the Shakespearean story. While one can certainly find within the plot arcs of New Moon the story of Romeo and Juliet if one wishes to do so, I would argue that it is not that simple. The fact is that it is the first novel that takes us through the first two acts of the play. For Act One of the play, you truly need to read the original Twilight, in which the dangers are established as well as the uncontrollable infatuations, as in Shakespeare. Twilight takes us through the Act Two balcony scene as well, in which they pledge themselves to each other despite all odds, though Edward remains sullen (Cullen?) even after this because he knows too much of the danger he and his life bring to her. He is in fact both Romeo and Mercutio--though he lacks both characters' wit--and he knows it. He fears the darker Mercutio side of himself and all that attends it. And then it concludes with a violent battle that signals the impossibility of the life they are planning for themselves.

The reason many people are unhappy with New Moon--and I know many who are--is that Bella spends the whole novel whining and doing little else. But if you look at this novel as a microcosmic exploration of what happens in Act Three of Shakespeare's play after Romeo kills Tybalt, but before the ultimately catastrophic plan with Friar Laurence is concocted, you might better understand it. In that section of the play, Romeo, having done that deed, is banished from Verona and his "three hours' bride," Juliet. Our lover's response to the punishment?

Banishment? Be merciful, say death
For exile hath far more terror in his look
Much more than death. Do not say "banishment." 

Meanwhile, Juliet spends her time crying so deeply that she cannot be comforted, and the excess of her tears is so dread that her father, mistaking them for grief over her dead cousin, decides to speed up Juliet's marriage to the County Paris from a month from now to two days from now, bringing about even more fits and sobbing.

Oh, shut the door, and when thou has done so
Come weep with me, past hope, past care, past help.

It is Romeo and Juliet in this mode (and this mood) that Meyer is showing us in her second novel. Once Edward decides, with finality, that they are "past hope, past care, past help," and tells her so, Bella lapses into a despondency so deep that she cannot come out of it, much as Juliet did upon losing Romeo to the Prince's proclamation. Juliet would do anything to see her lover again:

Chain me with roaring bears
Or hide me nightly in a charnel house,
 O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls...
And I will do it

For Bella it is much the same. She begins to have visions of Edward everywhere, but discovers that they appear to her only when her life is in danger. So she determines to put her life into more and more danger, even at one point diving recklessly from a high cliff into the sea, her actions mimicking a line of Juliet's--"O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris / From off the battlements of yonder tower"--and at the same time fooling the clairvoyant Alice into believing she is trying to kill herself and ultimately setting into motion a sequence of events that leaves Edward believing her to be actually dead so that, like Romeo, he determines to kill himself as well.

Of course this is where Meyer swerves off the Shakespearean path at very high speed in a bright yellow Italian sports car. Bella rushes to stop her lover's suicide and succeeds at the very last minute, and they both live to see another act of the saga. But this is all Meyer jumping ahead of herself: we were mired in Act Three and she simply skipped ahead to the ending of the play. Whatever happened to Act Four and the rest of Act Five? Easy: Eclipse and Breaking Dawn.

With the Volturi now a huge threat, Bella and Edward must marry, so the third book is a giant tease, making it a perfect metaphor for Act Four, which in any Shakespearean play is the Great Holding Pattern between the climactic Act Three and the denouement of Act Five. During Eclipse, events (intense though they may get) just play out to get everything in place for the monumental occurrences of Breaking Dawn, when all hell will potentially be unleashed.

So now we are nearing the end, and we finally get the big bold wedding that Romeo and Juliet never received, complete with invitations to the Capulets (Jacob/Tybalt and the werewolf clan).We've momentarily jumped backwards in the play to that brief scene before the lark sings its morning call and disrupts the young married couple from their one blissful night together, which I suppose is fair since New Moon jumped right to the end of the play. After giving them their bliss, though, a new enemy arises, and it comes from within: Renesmee, the baby who at first threatens to kill her mother from the womb and then threatens to kill all of the Cullens through her mere existence.

Death does indeed take our young Juliet--as it does in the play--as she attempts to give birth to her half-immortal baby. It is only through the supernatural interference of vampire blood that she is saved, and her salvation is uncertain for awhile--as is the case in the play as well. Our despondent Romeo, though, this time has his family with him as well as his new baby, so he is safe at least for the moment. And besides: Meyer has already played out that ending and has a completely different one in mind.

She has carefully set up two possible scenarios: one in which Bella and Edward do not survive, and one in which they do. (Giving Jacob his own narrative section in the final book was perhaps the best authorial decision Meyer made in the entire saga.) But, as this is a commercial and not an artistic series, there is really no doubt as to which she will choose. As I said in my little blurb above, I really hope that somewhere there exists a version of the end of Breaking Dawn in which the fight with the Volturi that we witnessed in the film (the stand-in, of course, for the chaos that reigns at the conclusion of Romeo and Juliet, but which this saga is missing) actually happened, and Edward and Bella die valiantly in it, leaving Jacob with his child/lover and the knowledge that

A glooming peace that morning with it brought.
The sun for sorrow would not show his face.
The internet would yap of what was wrought
Some wishing Jacob could take Edward's place.
There'd never be a tale with more tears shed
Than this of Bella, and her vampire Ed.

Oscar Sunday

So anyway...

So I am home from the second (and last) day of the 2013 Oscar Showcase and I have now seen all nine nominated movies, and I am ready to give you my choices on my own mythical Oscar ballot:

Best Picture: Silver Linings Playbook* Argo
Best Director: Steven Spielberg Ang Lee
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis 
Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence 
Best Supporting Actor: Robert De Niro   Christof Waltz
Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway
Best Score: Life of Pi
Best Song: Skyfall
Best Editing: Argo
Best Animated Feature: Brave
Best Cinematography: Life of Pi
Best Original Screenplay: Django Unchained
Best Adapted Screenplay: Argo
Best Foreign Film: Amour
Best Animated Short: Paperman
Best Costume Design: Anna Karenina
Best Make-up/Hairstyling: Les Miserables
Best Production Design: Lincoln
Best Visual Effects: Life of Pi
Best Sound Editing: Skyfall and  Zero Dark Thirty
Best Sound Mixing: Les Miserables
Best Documentary Feature: Searching For Sugarman
Best Documentary Short: Inocente
Best Live Action Short: Dream of a Shadow Curfew

*Please note that I believe that Argo will win; I'd just cast my vote for SLP. I do believe it could pull an upset, though. :-)

Let me say a few words about these choices.

First, the minor category selections are based on what Ii have read in various critical sources. I have not seen most of the films in the short subject and documentary categories, for example.

As to the main events:

Before I saw anything at all, I was ready to be utterly wowed by Lincoln, and I was. The movie is vast in scope, gloriously accurate in its recreation of the era (hence my nomination for Production Design), and brilliantly acted by a gifted cast led by everyone's odds-on favorite to win best actor, Daniel Day-Lewis. (If he does not win, I think a sinkhole may open up and swallow the Dolby Theatre.) No actor has ever won three Best Actor Oscars; Day-Lewis will become the first. But he is only the tip of the iceberg, as the cast is solid from Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln and Tommy Lee Jones (a Supporting Actor frontrunner as a leading House advocate for the 13th amendment) right down to the child actor playing Lincoln's son, who is given a powerful and emotional moment near the end and hits it perfectly. This is an amazing film, and Steve Spielberg deserves the Best Director Oscar he will very likely receive, even if it appears that the award is his only because Ben Affleck is not nominated.

(On that: Ang Lee or David O. Russell could win Best Director, and neither would particularly surprise me. I just think it will be Spielberg.)

Yes, Lincoln wowed me as expected. And Argo was every bit as good as advertised: a dynamite bit of serio-comic film-making that offers a tremendous recreation of a harrowing moment in much more recent American history and a behind the scenes look at one of its lesser known heroic endeavors. I truly enjoyed this movie, with its cast of mostly unknowns telling a harrowing story of survival and escape. It too was brilliantly directed; Affleck has been rightfully rewarded (though I think he may have been a bit aided by the Academy slight). But the movie overall, as great as it is, did not leave me with the emotional high that I felt at the end of Lincoln, and I suspect that the reason has little to do with the story or with Affleck the director; I think it has a lot more to do with Affleck the actor. I don't dislike him as a performer, but he does tend to be dark and clouded in his films, and here, hidden behind a beard, dark and clouded too often equaled (for me) unreadable. I wonder if Day-Lewis might have brought more life into this character.

I loved Beasts of the Southern Wild and Life of Pi as much as I thought I would, but I never thought I would feel that either of them would be Best Picture material. I just thought that each of them, in its own way, would be spectacular, and they are. Beasts goes from outrageously beautiful scenes to incomprehensibly horrific scenes as an island below New Orleans is devastated by a hurricane. What makes it work is strong direction, a dynamic lead performance by the then-6-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis as a spunky island girl named Hushpuppy, and a sense of magic that springs from the core of the world she inhabits, a magic that "breaks" when the hurricane hits and is only repaired by an act of faith and acceptance on her part. Pi follows the book faithfully (as far as I can remember), though it exaggerates--or invents??-- the role of a writer to whom Pi is telling his story. It's the cinematography that makes this one incredible, as anyone who has seen any of the trailers already knows. If Lee should win for what he did with this allegedly "unfilmable" book, absolutely no one will complain. 

Django Unchained won't win and shouldn't, but it is undeniably a fun movie, a typical Tarentino bloodfest with great performances by Jamie Fox and Christoph Waltz (who could take Supporting Actor, but I don't think he will). What it should win (unless Lincoln does) is Best Original Screenplay. Amour won't win either, but it will emerge with an Oscar anyway, as it is a shoo-in to win Best Foreign Language Film. Emmanuelle Levy could pull an upset in Best Actress--at 84, the Academy may feel, she won't get any more chances--but I don't think so.

Two more films that had early Oscar buzz but faded were Les Miserables and Zero Dark Thirty. (The former is the only one of the nine that I had seen before.) I went into both expecting to like them a lot and wondering if I'd think them worthy of Best Picture. Well, I did like them a lot, but neither is Best Picture this year. Les Miserables, on second viewing, suffers from a grievous flaw: the casting of Russell Crowe as Javert. I was able to look past it the first time because the spectacle of the rest and the magnitude of Tom Hooper's accomplishment with his live on set singing to create more dynamic performances overwhelmed me--I've never cried so often during this musical (which I'd seen more times than I can recall)--but not this time. Crowe's ineffectual singing was, in a word, offensive. Javert is supposed to be able to provide a counterpoint to Valjean, and Crowe simply is not up to the task. (Some fault Hugh Jackman's singing too, especially on "Bring Him Home," but I cut him slack there: even Colm Wilkinson said he should not try to do it the way that it was done originally but rather make it his own.) So I ended up being moved and impressed by the film but held back by its serious flaw.

Zero Dark Thirty was a bit of a different story. I admit that the torture thing was off-putting, but I disagree that the film appeared to be endorsing it. In fact, it appeared from the film that no actionable intelligence was gained from the torture scenes, so if the film was doing anything it was condemning torture. No, this was a strong film of a ten-year long quest for an elusive and hated man, and who cares if it is completely accurate or not? It's a movie. Like Argo or Lincoln, it's accurate enough. This is an excellent movie in almost every way, with an outstanding performance by Jessica Chastain (whose Best Actress star has inexplicably faded). But it, too, has a flaw that keeps it out of my consideration as Best Picture. At its core, this movie is a procedural. And as a procedural, it is filled with long, slow stretches of dull bureaucracy at work. This one happens also to be filled with repetitive scenes of people being tortured. The combination is not healthy for a movie, and although it is undeniably exciting in its last half hour, there is a lot of territory beforehand that I ended up wishing had been covered differently.

Which leaves me with one:

David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook, when I first heard of it, seemed as if it would be a fun movie, a good entertainment for an evening, and a vehicle that would allow Jennifer Lawrence to be nominated for the Academy Award they would never give her for The Hunger Games. I had no clue, before seeing the nine nominees in the Showcase, that this film would be The One. And yet...

Of all of them, it is Silver Linings Playbook that stays with me. It is this film that sticks to my gut and won't let go. It feels very real and honest even while it tells a story laid out in romantic comedy fashion. Its handling of mental illness is no holds barred. The family at its core is severely flawed but loving and lovable. The two main characters, brilliantly performed by Oscar nominees Bradley Cooper and Lawrence (who should take the trophy home), become endearing by being exactly the kind of characters that, in another movie, you might find utterly annoying. Cooper and Lawrence infuse them with dark and manic energy, and the resulting chemistry is explosive whenever they are onscreen together. In addition to them, fellow nominees Robert De Niro (my choice for Best Supporting Actor) and Jacki Weaver create such a memorable family for Cooper's character that the side stories here become every bit as important as the main one. 

By the time I saw this film, I had read that it was a sleeper possibility as an Oscar upset. I can tell you right now that I'll be rooting hard for that possibility. Argo and Lincoln are strong films, but Silver Linings Playbook is, without a doubt, the Best Picture of 2012.

film review: two dragons

Two Dragons: 
A Comparison of Fincher's and Oplev's Versions of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"

Two questions have haunted David Fincher’s much-anticipated American version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: will it be worth the wait? and is there really a reason to make it in the first place?Well, now that it is here, it’s safe to say that the answer to the first is that it most definitely was worth the wait: it is a relentlessly dark movie about relentlessly dark people with mysterious and dark histories. And it is brilliant. As to the second question, which begs the notion of whether Fincher could add anything new to the visualization that the 2009 Swedish version did not (other than a far greater budget), I was willing to bet that America’s greatest stylist could manage to make it his own in some sort of way. And I think I’d win that bet also.

Fincher’s take on the first book of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy turns out to be less Se7en and more Zodiac, not so much the thriller as the pulsating, slowing unwinding, inexorable mystery, which is exactly what Larsson’s book, with its vast complexities of financial malfeasance, familial discord, and cryptic clues, is in the first place. The director begins, as the book and the Swedish film both do, by presenting the acute reason for trying to unravel a cold case now 40 years old, the arrival of a birthday gift. What follows this brief moment is a title sequence, over Karen O’s cover of “Immigrant Song,” that is surreal and haunting and rather frightening as it sets up some of the uglier backstory in enigmatic, Rorschach images. Once free of this nightmare, though, Fincher moves somewhat more conventionally.

Using a palette of white and gray and light gray and dark gray and several other shades of gray, (to which he generously adds some sepia when he moves indoors) Fincher shows us a part of Sweden trapped in a never-ending frozen state that one character not too inaccurately calls “the North Pole.” Niels Arden Oplev, director of the Swedish film, opted for a less restrictive palette, even allowing (gasp) sunshine to penetrate his Hedeby Island. Not so Fincher, whose island is in a snowstorm when Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) arrives at the behest of the patriarch of the powerful Vanger family, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to try to solve the mystery of his niece’s disappearance forty years ago and it never seems to stop. The one notable exception to the dull color scheme is the bright, modern sharpness of the home of the Martin Vanger, the missing girl's brother, and Fincher has his own ironic reasons for that choice. The otherwise ubiquitous dull gray is reflected in the life that the Vangers are living, shut up on what might once have been their island retreat but now has become more of a prison: practically none of them likes any of the others and no one speaks to anyone else, the perfect self-punishment for what Henrik calls “the most detestable collection of people that you will ever meet.” It also reflects the painstaking search for the answers here. They do not swoop in conveniently: they are pieced together slowly from old photographs and opaque diary entries and decades-old hotel receipts. This is real investigative journalism, even if it is aided by a tech whiz with access to anything she wants.

Plummer does what he can with an undemanding role, and Stellan Skarsgård shines as one of the members of the Vanger clan, but Craig’s performance is revelatory. In every film he is in we see his strength as well as his vulnerability, and both are at play here. Blomkvist comes to Hedeby on the heels of a trumped-up libel conviction, and in Craig’s face and eyes can be read his character’s ambivalence about whether he even goes on writing. While Michael Nyqvist portrays this character well in the Swedish film, his performance remains oddly distant from the viewer: we do not get a chance to live inside of Blomkvist’s mind as we watch him go through his difficulties (which include attempts on his life). The result is something that we can believe and appreciate and even enjoy, but that does not seem complete. Craig’s far more emotional, more vulnerable performance gives us that intimacy. When he has been shot, the audience can feel the pain of the wound. When he realizes—too late—that he has made a terrible mistake, it only takes a glance at a knife to show us the horror he is feeling.

The biggest question going into this film, of course, was whether Rooney Mara’s performance as emotionally damaged hacker extraordinaire Lisbeth Salander could be anywhere near as strong and memorable as the already-iconic one created by Noomi Rapace in the Swedish version. The answer, with no offense to Rapace, is absolutely yes, but it is complicated. The two actresses and their directors create the character in very different ways. Rapace, who allows more of the natural feminine of her face to remain visible and unshadowed, for all of her smallness and thinness stays distinctly female throughout the film. Even in the most horrific scene (in both films), the rape and revenge sequence with her “guardian,” she manages a small feminine smile as she finishes her revenge telling him not to move or what she is doing to him “won’t look nice.” Her vulnerability comes from being a young woman in a man’s world, a woman who has been hurt many, many times by many, many men. When she gives herself to Blomkvist in one scene, it is a brief, entirely sexual encounter, over the second it is complete.

In contrast, Mara hides more of her face in shadow through the angles in which she turns her body, behind her forbidding piercings, and (most notably) behind an ever-morphing head of hair that either pulls attention away or covers part of it intentionally, leaving herself more unknown, more of a mystery. She is a riddle: her clothing gives nothing at all away of gender; her lifestyle gives nothing away of the genius she possesses. The only part of Mara’s Lisbeth that lives on the surface is her anger. It is always right there, waiting to explode. Mara’s Lisbeth is a wild animal keeping herself in line by sheer strength of will. She has developed a tremendous capacity for compartmentalization; otherwise she would certainly be institutionalized. It is never clearer than in the revenge scene. Rapace’s Lisbeth cannot wait to zap her assailant with a stun gun; Mara’s has a plan and will carry it out as dispassionately as possible…until she gets him trussed and vulnerable, the way he had her. Then she can let the animal loose. And no sweet tones in her voice when she tells him not to move or it won’t look good. She practically hisses it.

Nonetheless, within a few scenes, she’s in bed with a woman. And within not too many more scenes, she’s in bed with Blomkvist. Compartmentalizing: it has become as natural to her as her photographic memory or her hacking skills. It helps her survive. It can be argued that Rapace shows this capacity too, but not to this extent. And that is one of the defining distinctions between the characterizations.  Another is the sheer urgency of Mara’s characterization, as well as her clear vulnerability, which comes out in many places during the film. Mara’s Lisbeth is vulnerable for a different reason than Rapace’s though: she has methodically destroyed the feminine within her unless she wants it there, so now she is vulnerable because she is the unwanted. What she has made herself into is exactly what society does not want. Both actresses are small and thin, though each shows herself capable of putting up a good fight, and it seems clear after watching both of them that whicheverhad come first would have been seen as the archetype for the character.

I’ve read reviews online that find fault with Fincher for his use of the book’s final chapters (which bring to a conclusion the convoluted and fairly arcane financial matters that got Blomkvist into trouble at the book’s start), which Oplev’s version merely glossed over. But, although it does seem a bit of an anticlimax, I won’t fault him for this. I’d rather fault Oplev for cutting the entire relationship between Blomkvist and his partner at Millennium magazine, Erika Berger (Robin Wright), an error that caused no end of havoc in the subsequent films of the series. I might question a pretty significant alteration to the ending that readers of the book with notice right away and wonder why Fincher felt it necessary. (Oplev managed it.)  But the bottom line is that this big budget American version of the Swedish popular novel is well worth seeing, whether or not you’ve seen the Swedish version. Here's hoping audiences reward Fincher's effort so that we can see what he does with the considerably less confining storyline of the second novel.