the female gaze: by the sea and the private lives of pippa lee

By the Sea: (2015. dir: Angelina Jolie Pitt) In what appears vaguely to be the 1970s, two beautiful people, married 14 years, languish at a secluded Maltese resort by the sea. She (Jolie) wilts gracefully across divans and sloths around on deck chairs; he goes down to the local, chats up the folks, tries to write, drinks himself into sloppy rudeness only to be forgiven by the generous old man who runs the joint. We can see their marriage is dissolving in icy distance, and there is some allusion to a past crisis which cannot be discussed. One of the great strengths of the piece, in fact, is that we don't know the nature of the crisis until late in the day. The film would have been all the better had it been left a mystery indefinitely, since the instigating event is not, ultimately, important, just the emotional and psychological fall-out from it, and naming it makes commonplace and simple what might have remained a tentacled monster of vast and Lovecraftian proportion.

Jolie captures well the strangeness of marriage, and how cataclysmic abysses can open between two people who know one another too well, an estrangement seemingly against both partner's wills, seeming to have an avalanche life of its own, gaining weight and matter as it gains speed. Mostly, though, the pace here is so unfailingly languid, and the clinching moment, the fulcrum upon which the climax turns, depends on so second-perfect an accidental encounter, that it feels forced and writerly.

*SPOILER ALERT*: In the end, we are told that her "tragedy" is that she is barren, but it is simple for us to see, although the characters never do, that her true tragedy is a lack of vocation. She thinks herself into dire maelstroms because she has no purposive action, no direction for her energies. We are told she was once a dancer. When asked why she stopped, she acidly says, "I got old." When he (Pitt) holds forth about the good old times to the tavern-keeper, he recalls himself having been once a great writer, and she a dancer with a great body; whether she had talent is not of value enough to mention. Like Scott with Zelda, he will own all the genius in the family, and she, like Zelda, finds herself a dancer whose access to the stage has been stripped away by the prejudice of the world against a woman aging.

Mostly, though, it's beautiful to look at, with great cars and perfect, groovy songs, reminiscent of a certain mid-20th-c. European ouevre.

the Private Lives of Pippa Lee: (2009. dir: Rebecca Miller) Miller directs her own script, and communicates truths about womanhood and the subtleties of the roles we play: how much of it is chosen, how much decreed for us? Maria Bello is startlingly good as the speed-freak mom, Robin Wright shines in the lead, a tougher, subtler role, as a woman whose tamped-down energies are pushing volcanically to the surface without her permission. Alan Arkin does that wonderful Alan Arkin thing, bringing his ever-spry intelligence to every line. Winona Ryder takes some furious glee in milking her own crazy-girl image, and Keanu Reeves shows up as the magical animus figure who cannot lie, and will save the day in the end.

It's a good movie, don't get me wrong. The characters are shifting and complex, Miller's interest in the main character, a rich, New York housewife, is true and unflagging and keeps our own interest piqued. Here's an idea, though: how about a movie in which a woman busts out of her old life, and DOESN'T have Keanu Reeves waiting to drive her away into the Mojave? Where's the movie about the woman who loses or gives up everything, then faces a life of solitude and the challenge of living it creatively? Where's the updated version of the Ellen Burstyn character in Grand Isle? And remember My Brilliant Career? Female audiences were unsettled by the Judy Davis character's decision to choose creative solitude over domestic servitude in marriage to the man she loved -- this was set at the turn of the twentieth century, mind, so there was no birth control. Had she married her man, she'd have given up her writing to launder nappies and, yes, have some glorious sex, but she would be giving over the tiller, surrendering her autonomy, and STILL the women of 1979 were threatened by her decision. Here it is, thirty years later, and Pippa Lee still can't just drive off into the desert by herself; even today, it's considered too hard and selfish a choice for a woman to make.

But, really, how difficult would it be to drive off into the desert with Keanu freaking Reeves? Does she really need a stockpile of courage to make that choice? In a sense, unless he is just symbolic of her own internal masculine side, how is it not its own cop-out, switching dependence on one man for another?

recent russell crowe double feature: the water diviner and a winter's tale

the Water Diviner: (2014. dir: Russell Crowe) Directing yourself is never easy, and Crowe does his best to avoid problems by keeping his performance simple and straightforward. The story is mixed: the interesting part tells the flip-side of the Gallipoli story, a deep scar in Australian history, an ill-conceived WWI campaign in which 36,000 ANZAC troops were lost or wounded. If you're American, you learned about it from the Peter Weir movie. If you're Australian, I assume it's ingrained in you as cultural heritage from earliest youth. This story looks at it from the Turkish angle, beginning in a trench where soldiers are preparing to die, but it's a trick, a mirror image of Weir's trench in which the Australians are pinning their photographs and final letters to the shorings before they run to their deaths: this time, it's the Turks doing the same thing, but when they reach the crest of the hill, they find the enemy has retreated.

It's the story of a farmer, a sensitive autodidact and preternaturally gifted water-dowser, who has lost all three sons on the Turkish peninsula and his wife as a later casualty of the same battle. In deference to her last wishes, he travels to Turkey to find the bodies of his sons and bring them home.

The story incorporates magical realism, as when he "intuits" the final moments of his boys as he walks across the ground which drank their blood, this without the film actually committing to a vision of reality in which there is an invisible dimension. The suggestion is, rather disturbingly, that this farmer loves his children more fully and successfully than us mere mortals do, and that's why he's able to follow their long-buried traces, while the rest of us are plagued by unanswered questions when we lose our own loved ones. The visuals are heightened into hyper-reality, as well: when he reaches Istanbul, the scarlets and yellows are saturated to an extreme, as if everything has been carved out of saffron and turmeric.

Most of the movie's flaws and saccharine sentimentality (there's an adorable Turkish urchin who has two jobs: to provide a conduit through which his ridiculously gorgeous mother falls in love with our aging, unprepossessing hero, and to administer the emotional blackmail that underhandedly plucks at our heartstrings) might be forgiven when weighed against the good (the bits about war feel fully and well done), except for the unforgivable love story. There is good acting in this movie (Yilmaz Erdogan, particularly, as the Turkish officer, and Ryan Corr as the eldest son), but not, alas, by Olga Kurylenko, whose character, in her defense, may be unplayable as written.

She is a Turkish war-widow who accepts that her dead husband's brother has the right to wallop her, and yet is a Strong and Independent Woman, as trademarked by Hollywood. There is probably a bridge between the two extremes, but Kurylenko and Crowe either could not find it, or failed to communicate it if they did. Crowe takes cliched shortcuts in mapping the Woody Allen-flavored romance (Crowe was 5O at the time, Kurylenko 34, and she looks younger than that, upping the ick-factor): syrupy music over a candlelit supper, at which my boyfriend wryly pointed out that if she were really a widow at the close of World War I, she wouldn't waste a hundred candles on a single supper, even if she had a hundred candles. The amorous brother-in-law who begins as an obstacle magically vanishes by the end, and with him any cultural obstacles, like, say, that the Turkish men, who are still at war against Britain, would kill our hero and probably her as well for sleeping with the enemy rather than allow the romance. You have to figure that even if our hero managed to spirit his lady-love and her absurdly cuddlesome son back to Australia, the union would still be villified by his own people in their postbellum xenophobia, and is this Strong and Independent(TM) Muslim woman going to be happy in the Australian bush? Yikes. Not likely. A happy ending, as someone wise once pointed out, is a story that's not finished yet. This one, though, just feels forced and false.

a Winter's Tale: (2014. dir: Akiva Goldsman) Ah, true love, true love. Always predestined, immediately recognizable, instantly cleansing away the flaws and sins of those who find it. The altar at which Hollywood worships.

This is a New Age fairy tale, lifted soggily above a slough of saccharine hogwash and held there, barely, by good performances and some lush photography. Its theology is dunderheaded, because in Hollywood, the only way to experience God is through true romance or parental love. The only third option is disinterested samaritanism, but Hollywood is uncomfortable with it and tends to make those folks into angelic figures.

It's long and slow, but Russell Crowe has some fun finding the tics and nuances of his villainous demon, and the only performance that falls flat, interestingly, is from Will Smith, who is an entirely unconvincing Lucifer, possibly because he can't help exuding so powerful a nice-guy charisma.

I do dig it at the end, when the bad guy turns into ice. Nice effect.