“Hereafter” is Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial effort, with a rather unexpected subject matter, a love story intertwined with the question of life after death. I knew going in that it was about tricky subject matter; but it wasn’t quite what you might expect or what that title might imply. Eastwood was very sly how he approached his theme; he doesn’t force any religious hokum down your throat and is more concerned with three individuals in an emotional and metaphysical crisis. His primary interest is showing the development of character. First there is George, the psychic (Matt Damon), who views his gift as more a curse than a blessing. And there is one episode in the story that demonstrates what he means. He gets involved with a woman he really likes, but when she insists he do a reading for her it ends in a disaster, for some sexual truths she didn’t want to hear were revealed. George never saw her again. Secondly, there is Marcus, a 10-year-old boy who has lost his twin brother, Jason. He runs through several pretenders and fakes who prey on the naïve and the desperate folks trying to connect with dead loved ones who left without resolution about something or other, which is driving the survivor nuts. Marcus is disconsolate over his loss, until finally he tracks down George. At first George runs from the boy but finally gives in and gives the boy a reading. Once he identifies Jason by holding Marcus’ hands, he tells the lad Jason said he couldn’t come home and Marcus is on his own now and he has to accept that. The contact provides Marcus with a closure. The third party in this triangulation is Marie, a successful anchor on a political television program in Paris. Her near-death experience happened in Thailand when the tsunami hit the coastal towns. She is swept away and when a board knocks her out she drowns or appears to drown, but two men pull her out of the water and perform CPR on her, and lo and behold she wakes up, spits out the water and survives. However, while “dead in the water” she had visions of a brightly lit but foggy otherworldly dimension that was filled with people who drift by. She is unable to return to her old political self, as she is haunted by the vision she had. Finally, she meets a psychiatrist who has collected records of others that have had similar experiences. She writes a book about them titled HEREAFTER. A confluence between George and her happens at a book fair in Paris. Marcus plays a role too in the confluence by telling George what hotel she is staying at. She is not in but he writes her a two-page note that explains his gift and background, saying they must meet. She reads the note and leaves eager to meet him. Both feel like an invisible hand has made sure they cross paths. They embrace like lovers who have finally found the proper soul mate. Their connection solves both their estrangement and isolation, and delights each for they know they are grounded in the same reality. Thus the movie ends on a very high note.
There’s one more thing I should comment on and that’s the opening sequence of the tsunami sweeping through the town off the coast. It’s entirely CGI and it is brilliantly handled, very convincing in every way, including her body underwater after she’s knocked out. Awesome is a word overused but, by god, it’s the only word that fits the scene.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Deatn, the Sublime
2011_5_2 Death, the Sublime
“Departures” is a story about an ex-cello player from Tokyo, Daigo, who returns to his hometown in rural Japan, Yamagata, to start over in the house his mother left to him when she died. His wife Mika was quite willing to leave Tokyo, or at least she tells him she is. Later we learned differently. He needs employment of course, so not long after they settle in he goes to an establishment he thinks is some kind of Travel Agency called DEPARTURES. But it turns out the owner was looking for a trainee for encoffinment, a person to perform the ceremony of preparing a dead body for its “send off,” which is performed in front of the family. It is a practice that has largely disappeared from the big cities of Japan but is still alive in the rural areas. He of course is horrified at the very idea of working with dead bodies, but he needs a job quickly so he decides to take it but keep it secret from his wife, which works for a little while; but when she finds out she is repulsed by him, because he’s touched dead bodies. His employer and mentor on the job had told Daigo “You were born to do this.” He has begun to believe it. Since he refuses to look for other employment she up and leaves him, going to live with her mother.
His journey from an ex-cello player who performed in concerts to a master of enconffinment is fraught with doubts, upsets and gradual improvement in his craft, as it eventually connects with his artistic bent. The first body he cleans, a very pretty young woman, shocks him by having a penis; the second is an old women who has been dead for two weeks, which makes him retch; and in another case he gets caught in a family squabble about the victim’s death.
The owner of the business, Sasaki, a man in his fifties, befriends Diago and considered him his apprentice and brings him along slowly and patiently, being a very understanding mentor to the young man who never expected to be in this circumstance. He keeps telling Daigo he was born to preform this service. The owner isn’t a warm and fuzzy kind of guy, but he is soberly caring and affectionate in his fashion. He shares a meal with Daigo and tells him to remember “the living eat the dead.” He is obviously pleased with how his young apprentice treats the deceased, reverently, with grace, and utmost skill and sense of beauty and ritual. He will make the grade. Eventually Daigo sees himself as “the gatekeeper to the next stage.” As William Blake said as an old man, “Death is like moving to the next room.”
I loved the movie for dealing with a taboo subject, for its sensitivity, and for portraying the Japanese aesthetic sense, which permeates everything to one degree or another.
“Departures” is a story about an ex-cello player from Tokyo, Daigo, who returns to his hometown in rural Japan, Yamagata, to start over in the house his mother left to him when she died. His wife Mika was quite willing to leave Tokyo, or at least she tells him she is. Later we learned differently. He needs employment of course, so not long after they settle in he goes to an establishment he thinks is some kind of Travel Agency called DEPARTURES. But it turns out the owner was looking for a trainee for encoffinment, a person to perform the ceremony of preparing a dead body for its “send off,” which is performed in front of the family. It is a practice that has largely disappeared from the big cities of Japan but is still alive in the rural areas. He of course is horrified at the very idea of working with dead bodies, but he needs a job quickly so he decides to take it but keep it secret from his wife, which works for a little while; but when she finds out she is repulsed by him, because he’s touched dead bodies. His employer and mentor on the job had told Daigo “You were born to do this.” He has begun to believe it. Since he refuses to look for other employment she up and leaves him, going to live with her mother.
His journey from an ex-cello player who performed in concerts to a master of enconffinment is fraught with doubts, upsets and gradual improvement in his craft, as it eventually connects with his artistic bent. The first body he cleans, a very pretty young woman, shocks him by having a penis; the second is an old women who has been dead for two weeks, which makes him retch; and in another case he gets caught in a family squabble about the victim’s death.
The owner of the business, Sasaki, a man in his fifties, befriends Diago and considered him his apprentice and brings him along slowly and patiently, being a very understanding mentor to the young man who never expected to be in this circumstance. He keeps telling Daigo he was born to preform this service. The owner isn’t a warm and fuzzy kind of guy, but he is soberly caring and affectionate in his fashion. He shares a meal with Daigo and tells him to remember “the living eat the dead.” He is obviously pleased with how his young apprentice treats the deceased, reverently, with grace, and utmost skill and sense of beauty and ritual. He will make the grade. Eventually Daigo sees himself as “the gatekeeper to the next stage.” As William Blake said as an old man, “Death is like moving to the next room.”
I loved the movie for dealing with a taboo subject, for its sensitivity, and for portraying the Japanese aesthetic sense, which permeates everything to one degree or another.
To Kill or Be Killed
2011_6_06 Kill or Be Killed
One of the great features of NETFLIX is it helps you catch up on films you missed when they were first released. “Descending Angel” was a HBO film that was released in 1990. I have no recollection of it at all, even though it stars George C. Scott and Diane Lane, a very lovely actress. I decided to order it to check it out and I am sure glad I did but for reasons I hadn’t anticipated. It was a story that looked back at the Second World War, and it reminded me of the novel by Jonathan Littell, THE KINDLY ONES, especially the opening chapter called “Tocata,” where a justification of the Holocaust was offered by an ex-Nazi, a German Officer, who managed to blend end with population at the end of the war. The main character of “Descending Angel,” Florian Strola (George C. Scott) who made it to the U.S. after the war, becoming a very successful antique dealer, was a Romanian Nazi collaborator and a now a prominent member of the local Romanian community. He has successfully covered up his past, just like the German officer of the novel, to the degree even his adult daughter, Irina (Diane Lane), knows nothing about it, seeing him as a survivor of Buchenwald, and that’s all, which was the story he has spun to cover his tracks. But trouble comes in the form of Michael Rossi (Eric Roberts), a young man Irina has fallen in love with and who she brings home to meet her father, hoping to get his blessing. The two men do not hit it off. He then meets a bitter survivor of the camps who witnessed the truth about Florian and his Iron Guard: he actually participated in the slaughter of local Jews. The Bishop at Florian’s church opens a file in the basement of the church and let’s Rossi read it; it further implicates Florian. When Rossi finds out the truth of Florian’s background he confronts the older man who explains what he did this way: “ Things were different then. I was in a world where there were only two kinds of people, those who killed and those who were killed. You have to understand that!” But Rossi finds the old man’s attitude a moral outrage; he has no patience with the old man, as such a rationalization turns his stomach. But it is exactly the explanation offered by the German Officer, albeit with more detail and shrewdness. When I first read the justification, which was so thoroughgoing and stated with such certainty, I was blown away by it. How could the human mind be so morally wayward as to accept the conditions of the Holocaust?
For the sake of comparison with Florian here is a portion of his explanation of why he did what he did.
“What I did, I did with my eyes wide open, believing that it was my duty and that it had to be done, disagreeable or unpleasant as it may be. For that is what total war means: there is no such thing as a civilian, and the only difference between the Jewish child gassed or shot and a German child burned alive in an air raid is one of method; both deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by as much as a second; but in both cases, the man or men who killed them believed it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who’s to blame...I do not regret anything; I did my work, that’s all…I probably did go little far too far toward the end, but by that point I was no longer entirely myself, I was off-balance, and anyhow the whole world was toppling around me. I wasn’t the only one who lost his head…”
And like Florian, the German Officer became respectable, married, had a family and became a successful businessman in, of all things, lace manufacturing.
The rest of “Descending Angel” was rather predictable, with Florian paying a heavy price for his big lie. But the main point of the movie for me was the monstrous justification both characters offer for their actions during the war. Yet, I would not like to be caught up in a similar circumstance. How do I know for an absolute certainty that is a killer isn’t hidden inside me? I don’t. We all have to recognize this as a possibility.
One of the great features of NETFLIX is it helps you catch up on films you missed when they were first released. “Descending Angel” was a HBO film that was released in 1990. I have no recollection of it at all, even though it stars George C. Scott and Diane Lane, a very lovely actress. I decided to order it to check it out and I am sure glad I did but for reasons I hadn’t anticipated. It was a story that looked back at the Second World War, and it reminded me of the novel by Jonathan Littell, THE KINDLY ONES, especially the opening chapter called “Tocata,” where a justification of the Holocaust was offered by an ex-Nazi, a German Officer, who managed to blend end with population at the end of the war. The main character of “Descending Angel,” Florian Strola (George C. Scott) who made it to the U.S. after the war, becoming a very successful antique dealer, was a Romanian Nazi collaborator and a now a prominent member of the local Romanian community. He has successfully covered up his past, just like the German officer of the novel, to the degree even his adult daughter, Irina (Diane Lane), knows nothing about it, seeing him as a survivor of Buchenwald, and that’s all, which was the story he has spun to cover his tracks. But trouble comes in the form of Michael Rossi (Eric Roberts), a young man Irina has fallen in love with and who she brings home to meet her father, hoping to get his blessing. The two men do not hit it off. He then meets a bitter survivor of the camps who witnessed the truth about Florian and his Iron Guard: he actually participated in the slaughter of local Jews. The Bishop at Florian’s church opens a file in the basement of the church and let’s Rossi read it; it further implicates Florian. When Rossi finds out the truth of Florian’s background he confronts the older man who explains what he did this way: “ Things were different then. I was in a world where there were only two kinds of people, those who killed and those who were killed. You have to understand that!” But Rossi finds the old man’s attitude a moral outrage; he has no patience with the old man, as such a rationalization turns his stomach. But it is exactly the explanation offered by the German Officer, albeit with more detail and shrewdness. When I first read the justification, which was so thoroughgoing and stated with such certainty, I was blown away by it. How could the human mind be so morally wayward as to accept the conditions of the Holocaust?
For the sake of comparison with Florian here is a portion of his explanation of why he did what he did.
“What I did, I did with my eyes wide open, believing that it was my duty and that it had to be done, disagreeable or unpleasant as it may be. For that is what total war means: there is no such thing as a civilian, and the only difference between the Jewish child gassed or shot and a German child burned alive in an air raid is one of method; both deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by as much as a second; but in both cases, the man or men who killed them believed it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who’s to blame...I do not regret anything; I did my work, that’s all…I probably did go little far too far toward the end, but by that point I was no longer entirely myself, I was off-balance, and anyhow the whole world was toppling around me. I wasn’t the only one who lost his head…”
And like Florian, the German Officer became respectable, married, had a family and became a successful businessman in, of all things, lace manufacturing.
The rest of “Descending Angel” was rather predictable, with Florian paying a heavy price for his big lie. But the main point of the movie for me was the monstrous justification both characters offer for their actions during the war. Yet, I would not like to be caught up in a similar circumstance. How do I know for an absolute certainty that is a killer isn’t hidden inside me? I don’t. We all have to recognize this as a possibility.
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