tidwell85 Reviews

Gosford Park (2001)

We shall never find that lovely land of might-have-been.

[9/10 · 6 September 2015]

Jeremy Northam's voice instantly hypnotizes the cooks, maids, and footmen at Gosford Park. He lifts their spirits, they forget themselves, and for a moment all work ceases. The irony here is that because they're so entranced they fail to grasp the song's meaning, which is about hopeless longing and dreams unfulfilled. It puts smiles on their faces anyway, but has no effect at all on the upstairs guests, who spend so much energy posturing that they can't seem to recognize the value of any of the many graces offered to them. The downstairs staff certainly appreciates the entertainment, since they toil day and night over details like the distance between the knife and the fork, and whether strawberry marmalade will suffice when the raspberry jam runs out. 'The perfect servant has no life,' declares Mrs. Wilson, and while her pride is admirable, her sacrifice is tragic. What a shame, giving all of your time away to dote on people who don't themselves seem to know how to live, either.

The super wealthy can't be entirely blamed for their plight, which I think stems from loneliness. People tend to behave oddly around the rich and famous—they get nervous, begin putting on an act, or trying so hard not to that they clam up. Like a highway patrol cop in traffic, the presence of esteem inspires everyone close by to alter their behavior. It makes sense then that the rich prefer to surround themselves with hired help who are paid to behave respectfully rather than go out into the world and live their lives in public. Their wealth affords them the illusion of a public life in a private and controlled setting. The danger is that after spending years dealing primarily with one's own servants, one might become incapable of dealing with anyone else… even, say, an inspector who needs help solving a murder.

Consider the inspector's interactions with the guests. They treat him like the pizza delivery guy. They talk at him flippantly, begrudge him a moment for questioning, and fail to summon a shred of helpful information. This apparent insubordination is more out of apathy than defiance, and the inspector isn't blameless either. He treats witnesses with kid gloves, allows himself to be interrupted but never himself interrupts. I imagine that he would have more vigorously interrogated potential witnesses had the murder occurred in a poor or middle class district, but he behaves submissively when dealing with the guests at Gosford Park.

Attending a shooting party like this one is an exercise in straddling that line between intent and image. Image obscures intent, so it must be hard, being a wealthy host, to trust whether guests are attending out of true friendship. We, the audience, can certainly be sure that they are not because of the film's fly on the wall point of view. We quickly become aware of their disparate natures, that they only harmonize in their collective effort to remain in the good graces of Sir William. To open up to each other is to risk exposure or embarrassment, so distance is crucial to maintain a safe proximity. These aren't friends; these are satellites in tow. I makes sense, then, that when Sir William is killed and an inspector starts asking questions, no investigative headway is made. This is because as far as the guests are concerned, with Sir William gone there is no longer any need to engage. It's time to float away, like debris in outer space.

The idea of behavior obscuring motive is relatively foreign to Americans. I recently hosted an English traveler who needed a couch to crash on, and he told me that in English culture, protocol of behavior is of the utmost importance. "We can enslave entire cultures, but we'll do it with a stiff upper lip, while we have our afternoon tea," he said. I believe Americans tend to flaunt our motives more overtly, embody them. It's seen as a sign of virtue when a salesman embodies salesmanship, an athlete competition, a computer whiz nerd-dom. I feel (and this is pure conjecture) that to embody 'good manners' is valued but not to the degree that it is in Europe, particularly England. In America, we are almost suspicious of those whose intentions aren't clear. Consider the way characters in reality shows interact. Their behavior is motivated by primordial urges—chiefly, the urge to impose their personality. The line 'I'm not here to make friends' seems to be a reoccurring catchphrase. Gosford Park operates by almost opposing values: America's brand of 'reality' is best concealed so that the surface always appears squeaky clean. I would guess that even a non-English speaker, having spent a weekend with the casts of any of the new 'real world' shows, would walk away with a pretty good understanding of who those people are simply because the personalities are so unabashed. Yet I feel as though a fellow English speaker, even a thoughtful and aware individual, could spend a weekend at Gosford Park and walk away thinking only of how charming the affair was, but having no clue as to what was really going on.

Despite all of this I can't agree with the film's outlook, an outlook I would call altogether cynical. The alternative to the lifestyle of affluence is a lifestyle of needs-based living. For years I lived minimally, considering excess a burden and ambition a form of avarice, and you know maybe I wasn't wrong. But if we must rise with each new day, I don't see the harm in striving for some form of highness, even if illusory, as long as an attempt is made towards balance. This film is about the imbalance, the extremity of Postbellum English aristocracy. It emphasizes the evils and the folly that wealth and servitude cause without acknowledging that wealth is simply the end result of something inherently good. It doesn't express the reality that if we didn't posture whatsoever, we would be left crawling.

The New World (2005)

We can't all be dreamers.

[8/10 · 6 September 2015]

Captain John Smith and his men are weary, starving, and outnumbered during the early days of Jamestown, but Smith has more on his mind than survival. He also seems uninterested in higher walls and deeper mines, yet the men insist that he preside over the colony. While his superiors believe he has the makings of a great leader, I feel it's the dreamer, not the leader, in Smith that gets Pocahontas' attention. So the well-known legend goes that she throws herself on his lap and insists his life be spared at the moment her tribe is about to execute him. I'd say the rest is history, but as far as Smith and Pocahontas are concerned the rest is fiction. Pocahontas may have in fact pardoned him from execution, but in real life they were never a couple. No matter, though. We like the story of Pocahontas and John Smith sharing something original and wondrous, teaching each other the ways of the East and the West, becoming one. Suppose our nation had evolved that way.

The New World wants us to suppose that the two of them may have been in love, or at least dreamed that they were for a time. Or maybe they both just dreamed, but dreamed together. It struck me how right Malick was for this story, because of his ability to evoke wonder. He reminded me that the founding of Jamestown, while grotesque for the founders, must have been magical for some of the Powhatan tribe. So magical that of course it was a ten year old girl who was best able to really believe it, and to keep up with it. The rest could only gawk, and commence killing each other as they struggled to grasp what was going on.

There is a brief scene where Smith invites a tribesman into the fort to let him look around. As the warrior wanders about, the colonists ready their weapons. But Smith assures them that he's harmless. 'Mad,' he says. The Powhatan indeed has a crazed look in his eyes, but I questioned if he was in fact crazy. It could be that he simply displayed bewilderment commensurate with how astonishing the arrival of the English must have been. I certainly can only begin to imagine being a Powhatan and seeing massive sailing vessels emerge out of the mist. Were they floating islands? And what about the masts? Were they animal skins? What animal was so large that skinning it yielded an entire mast? And weapons… from what sorts of trees did the English whittle rifles? What was armor made from? Silver tree bark? What did it feel like to run through a forest of of silver trees? And if the trees were silver, then what was the grass like, in that distant land they called England?

For most of the English, though, discovering the Powhatans must have been a far less interesting experience, I daresay. The early settlers were workers hired to extract resources and create trading opportunity, not unlike ditch diggers paid by a big box corporation at the outskirts of a suburb. What interests me is the rift in perspective between the one who's there with a specific mission in mind, and the other who was there already, and is now, all too suddenly, witnessing the arrival of aliens more great and terrible than the imagination could have prepared them for.

So it was the Indians, not the settlers, whose imaginations were open-ended. That's why Pocahontas played the part she did in American and English history. Being a ten year old princess, she was simply the most open to the English not as a business partner or a threat, but a culture, a people, a person because it is our awareness that allows us to dream. I recently read an article about the regrets of the dying. According to the nurse who recorded the most common laments, the number one regret of patients was that they lived the life expected of them, not a life true to their self. Expectations can enhance, but also cloud experience because subjectivity is both powerful and precarious. The motivations we carry around with us can be our friend or our enemy. For the English, motivation was a blinder.

Maybe this belief of mine is why I tend to live spontaneously. Planning isn't a big part of my life. But I find that my experiences are most vivid when I don't know what's coming next. Maybe this is why vacations are stressful for the parents, magical for the children. Controlling what came next was Smith's job, and it distracted him so much that he failed to see what he had.

So what did he have, other than a lucrative investment? In my opinion, the English had an opportunity to create something truly new. Not a new version of England, but an original nation. They had an ancient civilization there to compliment their own. They had the potential to grow and evolve with the Indians the way that differing tribes had learned to coexist in flux with one another over centuries. Had both sides, the natives and the aliens, just been able to keep their fear, greed, and pride in check, the two cultures might have found themselves in love with one another. They might have seen that potential.

Pocahontas saw it, embraced it, and lived what I imagine to be the the greatest experience life has to offer: the waking dream. And I believe she lived that dream for the rest of her life. I think that John Smith embraced it, too, if only for a minute. He soon woke up, though, and got back to securing the future of the English stronghold. After all, that's why he was there to begin with. We can't all be dreamers, all the time.

Margaret (I) (2011)

Spring and Fall

[10/10 · 6 September 2015]

"Spring and Fall" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you will weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow's springs are the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

This poem gives me chills. Kenneth Lonergan was destined to give Matthew Broderick the opportunity to read it, and the film would have been worth producing if only to create that opportunity. Lonergan and Broderick are old friends, and Broderick had quite the brush with death back in the 1980's. You can Google it if you're unaware. A more profound poem about death I have never heard, and based on what little I know about Matthew Broderick's life, I imagine that he must have very strong feelings on mortality. And I wonder not with any disdain or rhetoric but with simple empathy, how does the man live with himself? Well, differently than he would have, surely, had he not gotten in that terrible car wreck. If you look at his films, there's something different about him after 1987. Something is diminished. Something deeper is augmented. Hopkins, in his poem, teaches us very plainly that when people see death, they mourn, but in the process of mourning they look upon themselves in a new way, and this opens up new wisdom.

I myself have dealt with death in more ways than one, though it took me a long time to discover what I had gained. I spent years inside a cage that I had created for myself. doubting that I had any control over my life, wallowing in self-made isolation. I would open my eyes and smile on occasion, but only for a moment at a time. Then my eyes would close once again. The nightmare would ensue. That time, for me, was a key part of growing up.

Struggling students are taught to be masters of a trade, while promising High School students are taught to be master of their fates. I was seduced by the idea that I had no limits. Once I caught a glimpse of them, I was too stunned to get up. I lay there like a slug, my weeks and months peppered with brief, desperate attempts to grasp this merciless new reality. Maybe I focused too much on the negative, because powerlessness soon took over, and finally isolation. Having emerged from that place, I now like to think about my life in terms of the infinite potential of the human spirit and the grace of the universe. While I really can't say that either truly exist with any certainty, I feel as though I might as well believe in believing.

I empathize with Matthew Broderick because I feel I can somewhat relate to how he must have felt when that terrible accident occurred at the height of his popularity, having been immortalized in America cinema at the age of twenty-four. I also empathize with him because he is a good actor. I'm moved by Lonergan's film, which deals with his old friend's loss. As a teenager, I experienced great adversity and subsequent success. As a young man, I watched my world crumble around me. I now have wisdom, and this film reminds me of that which I know deep in my bones.

Ten years ago, I would have written on this subject with great ease. Words and ideas would have flowed from me, and I would have been proud of those words. But I don't think I would have said anything from a place of knowledge. Writing now, I feel not so much a sense of pride as a sense of care. I don't want to prove to myself that I'm brilliant. Rather, I want to know myself more. I genuinely want to improve as a person… and not because one has to, but because one should, and because I have yet to be satisfied.

I often fear that as I lie there on the floor for years, waiting to be saved by something external, a part of me slowly died, or at least became diminished beyond retribution. Margaret encourages me. It reminds me that I have only myself to master. The drama, the dance, the struggle, the story began and ended not with the issues I grasped at, but with me. Go back and read the poem. Go back and watch the scene where Anna Paquin and J. Smith-Cameron throw self pity at each other like darts. See? See how easily we can weep, and not know why? While as a boy I believed life to be miraculous and limitless, as a man I must add that it is fragile as well. It needs to be nurtured. Try to control it, and we'll kill ourselves in the struggle.