Bernie -- Movie review Elles -- Film Review 17 Girls -- Film Review Off Label -- Film Review
Bernie
Directed
by Richard Linklater
See the movie first.
This is a revealing discussion and is intended for those who have
already seen the film.
This is a well made, well acted story about a murder in the
East Texas town of Carthage. It is based
on a true story about a man who moves into the town taking work as an assistant
funeral director. He befriends an older
widow and ends up shooting her four times in the back with a rifle in her own
garage. "Based on" is the key
phrase. The movie presents a very
coherent, seemingly plausible interpretation of the characters and events, but
I just don't buy it. What is most
convincing and plausible is the character of Mrs. Marjorie Nugent (Shirley Mac Claine),
a hateful, mean-spirited, vulnerable, pathologically needy, elderly woman, who
is very wealthy and universally disliked even by her own family. Plausible, but somewhat less convincing, is
the character of the prosecutor, Danny Buck Davidson (Matthew McConaughey), a
vicious, vindictive, merciless prosecutor.
Least convincing, and the more I think about it, less and less so, is
the character of Bernie Teide (Jack Black), the leading figure who commits the
murder. The movie would have us believe
that Bernie Teide is the next thing to a saint.
He is multi-talented and highly accomplished; he is generous, caring,
and kind; he is fervently dedicated to God and community; he is a benefactor to many local businesses,
community organizations, and individuals.
But he had one fault, one misstep.
He killed this spiteful old woman in a moment of extreme weakness and
distress -- a forgivable failing in the eyes of most residents of the
town. But my opinion is that Bernie
Teide is a con artist of the highest caliber.
He is the master of the mask and of ingratiation. The movie's portrayal of him does not ring
true. It did not look deeply enough at
him, just as the people of Carthage who were benefiting from his largesse were
not looking closely at him either. There
is nothing in the film about his background.
He came to the town as an outsider (he was hired by the funeral director
over the phone without meeting), but quickly curried favor with everyone he
came in contact with. The film portrays
him as being highly accomplished in skills related to the arts: cosmetics,
embalming, acting, singing, directing, food preparation, etc., and the casting of
a multi-talented, well-trained, top level performer like Jack Black to play
Bernie makes this aspect of his character seem very impressive and
convincing. I suspect, though, that Jack
Black is a much more polished artist and performer than Bernie ever was, so one
has to keep in mind that one is watching Jack Black and not Bernie Teide. I wonder how adept Bernie really was in any
of those crafts. He was clearly very
smart and a quick study. Bernie was a
guy who knew how to wing it and fill in the gaps later. And he was playing to an audience of simple
people in a small town. Lloyd Hornbuckle
(Richard Robichaux), Mrs. Nugents stockbroker, and prosecutor Danny Buck were
his only critics, but they were implacable.
If it hadn't been for them, he would have gotten away with it. I wouldn't be surprised if he had scoped out
Mrs. Nugent even before he applied for the job at the funeral home, and that
the whole project of moving to Carthage, taking the job at the funeral home,
and becoming the popular man about town was a very well planned enterprise with
Mrs. Nugent as the ultimate target. No
one ever asked how it was that he
decided to come to Carthage. The
film would have us believe that Bernie Teide did not have a darker side. He just slipped up one time in an otherwise
exemplary life. This is what does not
make sense. Shooting an old woman four
times in the back with a rifle and stuffing her body in a freezer to hide it has
to have some antecedents. Beneath all
the kindness and generosity, Bernie Teide was a man full of rage. Mrs. Nugent happened to be exactly the kind
of person to elicit it from him and bring it to an explosive cataclysm. It is an extremely tragic, dark story, which
the film treats rather superficially and lightly. I feel bamboozled, cheated. I feel like I've been served up a very
appealing, but misleading, incomplete version of this incident. This film has taken a tragic story of
exploitation, deceit, rage, and murder and made light entertainment out of
it. I suppose it is within the
legitimate purview of art to do that, but one has to keep in mind that this is
fiction. Fiction without
conviction.
Elles
Directed
by Malgorzata Szumowska
This film is both good and ridiculous at the same time. Americans aren't going to like it, especially
women. We don't understand commercial
sex in this country, and furthermore, we're not even curious about it, even in
a prurient way. It's too repugnant to
even contemplate, let alone take seriously.
In the theater where I saw this film, there were maybe ten people. The film is in French with subtitles, and as
an American, I never forgot for a minute that I was not watching Americans. This
film wouldn't be made in America, by
Americans. It is too frank and candid
about sex, the sex is explicit, and the whores are sympathetic, likeable people. They're just wholesome, middle class girls
who are going to school and living at home, but they have a sideline that they
have to keep quiet about. (I don't like
the word 'prostitute.' It has too many
syllables, and it is at once euphemistic and disparaging. I prefer 'sex worker,' or 'whore.' 'Sex worker' is descriptive and
neutral. 'Whore' is plain, rough, and
earthy.) Anaïs
Demoustier, as Lola, is particularly captivating, because she is a young
looking girl with freckles and sweetness: not the stereotypic hard-edged American whore. The encounters between the girls and their
clients are warm and humane, and sometimes even passionate. They
seem to be enjoying themselves in their work and there is an atmosphere of good
feeling. The film enables one to see
that whores are not that different from any girl one might meet. Girls can have another side not readily
visible. Americans don't like to hear
this. We want a hard line between
"whores" and all other women, so that they can be despised without
mitigation. This film erases that line,
and thus it won't be popular in America because it challenges our simpleminded
stereotypes.
If you are not an American reading this, or you have not
spent considerable time in this country, then you cannot fathom the impact that
the last century of criminalization of commercial sex has had on relations
between men and women in this society.
Relations between men and women here are abysmal. Most people's sex lives are dull, unexciting,
troubled, or nonexistent, whether they are married or not. There are many exceptions, or course, but the
rule holds. No one comes to America for
sex tourism -- unless they are men looking for a gay scene. American
women are not known for being sexually forthcoming, and this tempers the
atmosphere of social life throughout society.
One thing commercial sex does, and it can be seen in this film, is that
it opens many avenues of communication between the sexes. Sex is fundamentally communication, and sex
facilitates communication on many levels between people beyond the satisfaction
of lust. Lola remarked that what
surprised her about her clients was not their sexual preferences, but how
freely they talked. She learned about
their jobs, their wives, their worries and fears, other interests they had, and
many small facts about them apart from sex that she never expected to learn. Sexually they are bored with their
wives. Their marriages are emotionally
dead, but the men are not, so they reach out to a young girl, even if they must
pay her. But it is mutually
advantageous. The young girl needs the
money and the independence it brings, and the older man needs the sex and the
companionship of a female. But paying
for sex makes it simple and easy; it limits the relationship between the
partners, and this is a great advantage if you happen to be married. This is the positive side of commercial
sex. It provides some relief and
diversion from the grim reality of most marriages, and it gives young girls a
chance to become economically empowered and independent from their families.
There is a lot of food preparation and eating in this
film. I wish there had been more sex and
less eating. The film is too long and
slow moving, but little by little, it does make its case. The moral of the story seems to be that
marriage is sexually dull, and if you want to want to have a good sex life, you
need to go to a whore or be a whore.
That's the ridiculous part of the film. The film presents a bleak picture of marriage,
which may indeed be representative, but is not necessary or inevitable. I don't know what the facts on the ground are
in France regarding marriage. In the
United States marriage is in decline. (If
you happen to be in a good one, you don't know that.) The divorce rate is around fifty percent.1,
2 In fact for the first time in
history we have more single people in the United States than married.3, 4
About a quarter of the U.S. population
lives alone.3 The reasons for
this are not only economic. There is
warfare between the sexes in the United States.
Government policies suppress sexual desire toward women and young girls,
and the disenfranchisement and criminalization of commercial sex is its most
visible cultural manifestation. Marriage
between one man and one woman is the only socially legitimate venue for sexual
expression, and that must be kept strictly private. Gay people are currently challenging this
against great resistance. But rolling
back the ban on commercial sex does not even occur to most Americans, and it is
an extraordinary omission in a country that commercializes everything in sight and
measures the value of any activity by the revenue it can generate. Legitimizing commercial sex would make sexual
activity an acceptable form of conduct and an acceptable way to relate to other
people in a broad range of situations.
Legal commercial sex would make sex a much more visible part of daily
life and a much more accessible part of daily life for most people. This would facilitate communication between
the sexes -- not necessarily understanding,
but communication. Currently
communication between the sexes in the United States is distorted and
confused. Men and women are
misunderstanding each other in so many ways, and it is rooted in the animosity
toward male desire that has been institutionalized in our legal system for
about a century now. Ending the hegemony
of asceticism over American social life would begin to break down the walls of
paranoia and estrangement that are so pervasive in this society. It is the most obvious and straightforward
way to improve relations between the sexes in this country and the quality of
our social life generally.
Let me elaborate on this with an example. One time I went out with a woman from
Argentina. She had not been in the
United States long, perhaps a couple of weeks.
Somewhere during the course of the afternoon she abruptly said,
"Can I ask you something?" "Sure." "Why is it that
when I walk down the street here, no one speaks to me?" "What?" "Yesterday I went to the De Young
Museum. I was there for three hours and
not one person spoke to me. Why is
that?" I didn't know what to
say. The question completely stymied
me. Americans who live in cities do not
expect strangers to speak to them in public places. If they do, we immediately become suspicious
and defensive. That's perfectly
normal. A woman who expects and welcomes
banter from strangers in public places is definitely not an American. It illustrates the extent to which paranoia
(and its constant companion, asceticism) dominate American social interactions
to the extent that we don't even notice how strange it is. American women are naturally skittish and
reserved in the presence of men. They
instinctively realize that sexual desire and animosity are lurking just below
the surface of any slight interaction. Keeping
the lid on that simmering volcano requires considerable avoidance and heavy
handed social pressure. It has taken us
a long time to establish those barriers to the point where they seem normal and
civilized. Legitimizing commercial sex
would radically alter that low temperature social culture that prevails in the
United States. This film, although in
French, contributes toward this in a modest way by removing some of the myths
and nonsense Americans have in their heads about commercial sex. But few American are going to watch this
film. It's too good for us.
The film did not emphasize the vulnerability of the girls
and the hazards they face as sex workers.
It touched on it a little bit, but the girls did not display a sense of
imposing vulnerability. In America women
who try to engage in sex as an entrepreneurial venture are extremely vulnerable
to (male) criminal organizations. This
is because it is illegal and not protected by the police and the judicial
institutions of society. In America, if
you engage in commercial sex and you have a problem, you're on your own. Thus the need for pimps and organized crime,
and the result is that commercial sex is forced to the darker margins of
society and remains ever stigmatized. In
France, commercial sex is legal, but there are numerous restrictions, and in
recent years government policies are becoming more repressive and the influence
of organized crime over the trade is consequently becoming greater.5
The married older journalist (Juliette Binoche) who is interviewing
the girls for an article in the film slowly evolves into a whore herself. This is another ridiculous aspect of the
film. The implied merging of wife and
whore is a popular myth among sex workers, but marriage and commercial sex are
very different kinds of relationships and very different social positions. The journalist's marriage is ruinous and she
seems to find respite in her association with the two whores with whom she
seems to become friends -- just as men in bad marriages find consolation with whores
also. She seems to envy them and moves
toward identifying with them as the film progresses. It tends to imply that the lives of sex
workers are better than the lives of married women. This is nonsense. Sex work is not better than marriage. Marriage is generally better, but sex work is
also valuable and a necessary adjunct to marriage. This is what French society seems to know, but
American society fails to recognize.
Men need both their wives and their whores. Both should be equally recognized, equally
legitimate, and equally protected by social institutions. We are unfortunately living in a time when
the values of asceticism dominate our law and our social life. But I have the sense that that long dreary era
is ending, and this film, although flawed, does help to dispel some of the
myths and popular nonsense about commercial sex.
1. Kreider, Rose M. and Jason M.Fields, 2001. Number, Timing, and Duration of
Marriages and Divorces: Fall 1996.
Current Population Reports, P70-80. U.S.
Census Bureau, Washington, DC.
"In summary, the general marital pattern for the last
half of the twentieth century can be described by both delays in marriage and a
period of a rapid increase in the likelihood of divorce." (p. 3)
2. National
Vital Statistics Reports, Volume 58, No. 25. August
27, 2010. U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for
Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System.
3. Hobbs, Frank. Examining
American Household Composition: 1990 and 2000. U.S. Census Bureau. Washington,
DC. August, 2005. "Householders
living alone had become the most common specific household structure in 2000."
(p. 1) More than a quarter of the U.S.
population lives alone (p. 6)
4. Daphne Lofquist,
Terry Lugaila, Martin O’Connell, and Sarah Feliz. Households
and Families 2010. U.S.Census Bureau, Washington, DC. April, 2012.
"In 2010 less than half of all
households (48 percent) were husband-wife households, down from 52 percent in
2000 and 55 percent in 1990. This is the first time that husband-wife families
fell below 50 percent of all households in the United States since data on
families were first tabulated in 1940." (p. 5)
5. John Lichfield, The Independent. March 21, 2005
17 Girls
Directed
by Delphine and Muriel Coulin
Talk about girls gone wild.
This is adolescent rebellion at its most primal. Seventeen girls, 16-17 years old, in the same
high school decide to deliberately get pregnant to affront their parents, their
school, and society. It is based on a
true story that occurred in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 2008. However, this is a fictionalized
account. The filmmakers did not
investigate the seminal incident in any great depth beyond public accounts. This film is an interpretation, not a documentation of what happened in Gloucester,
Massachusetts. It is an important
distinction.
It is not terribly unusual for teenage girls to use
pregnancy to make a statement or to be disruptive. There were roughly 130,000 births to girls
between the ages of 10 and 17 in the United States in 2009.1 There were additionally about 200,000
abortions to girls 19 and under in 2007.2 These were not all accidents. What is interesting about the case portrayed
in the film is not the rebelliousness of the girls against their parents and
their social milieu, but rather its conspiratorial nature. The girls used pregnancy as a way of bonding
amongst themselves. Pregnancy was the
mortar of female group solidarity. It makes me wonder if such pregnancy pacts are
not more common among teenage girls than is realized.
We could try to analyze the reasons why the girls did this,
although the film did not. They were
clearly rebelling against their parents; they were clearly attempting to create
love in an environment where they did not feel very much of it. They were alienated from their school. They were anxious about their futures. But mostly they wanted to be part of a group
that affirmed their identity as adult females.
It was a rite of passage which they wanted to make together to bond to
one another as girls. Gloucester,
Massachusetts, is approximately 97% white and 80% Catholic, which might explain
why adolescent sex is repressed, especially for females. Birth control is frowned upon and likely unavailable,
and abortion was not considered a viable option. It adds up to an environment that fosters sexual
rebellion, either through accident or deliberation.
But the film was not preoccupied with this. The filmmakers took this story out of its
social and historical context in the United States and displaced it to
France. That in itself probably made the
story and the attitude of the film toward the girls more humane and
compassionate than they would have been treated in the United States. The film is not prudish, and it is not
moralistic. I liked the beginning where
the girls are shown standing in a group in their underwear awaiting a health
exam at school. All you pedophiles and
predators out there, heads up, there is a goodly portion of young female flesh floating
around in this film. The filmmakers
actually cast mostly unknown high school girls, some of whom had no prior
acting experience. But the semi-nudity
is not gratuitous. It emphasizes the
full fledged sexuality of these girls despite the fact that society does not
wish to recognize it. There is no
question that these girls are sexually desirable and sexually capable, which
they are about to prove to the whole world in a very undeniable fashion, and it
is delightfully visible in their unclad bodies.
Louise Grinberg, who played the lead girl (Camille), reminded me of the
young Mariel Hemingway.
There is an undercurrent of impending danger throughout the
film that gives it a suspenseful edge.
One keeps dreading some catastrophe that frequently seems
impending. I won't tell you if it
actually occurs. One such scene occurs in
the latter half of the film where some of the girls and a few boys are on a
beach late at night around a campfire.
They start kicking a flaming soccer ball around. They seem joyously reckless and oblivious to
the danger. The scene perfectly reflects
what they are doing throughout the film in all of its heedless immaturity: playing with fire.
The girls are naive, short-sighted, inexperienced, perhaps
even delusional by any practical common sense measure. But on an emotional level they are profoundly
right, and they go forward down their precarious path with steadily firming
resolve and without regret. It is
similar, I think, to the bonds males form amongst themselves when they go off
to war in military campaigns that are often even more naive, short-sighted, and
delusional in their hopes. It is a way of dealing with collective anxiety. Emotionally and psychologically the girls'
attempts to bond to one another through shared sex and shared pregnancy is
unquestionably right, and the girls deepening conviction of its right direction
grows throughout the film in spite of the obvious danger and hardship that
forebodes. However, the realities of
"civilization" and modern society do not support this kind of idealistic
vision.
There is a lot that is not in the film that one would like
to know: What about the boys and their
relationships to the girls, both during the pregnancies and after? What was the social context in which this
occured? Why didn't they have adequate
birth control? Why weren't they educated
to experiment with sex in constructive, safer ways? What happened to the girls in their
deliveries and after? What became of the
female bonds that they formed during the pregnancies? But the film had enough to cover with seventeen
girls, so it is fair to excuse some omission.
They had to narrow the focus or risk it becoming too sprawling. The film is very well constructed
throughout. It is smooth and seamless. There is nothing superfluous. The craftsmanship of the filmmakers is
excellent.
There was a discussion after the showing I attended, and I
asked Delphine Coulin if they are planning a sequel, and she said they would
love to. I hope they get the backing
they need. The sequel will give us a
verdict on part one that could be even more interesting and controversial. If
they still teach sex education in schools, this film should be shown to
teenagers. It sympathetically depicts
the sexuality of young girls, and it teaches young people the realities and
hazards of sex and pregnancy, as well as some of the backlash from the adult
world that it will draw. I thoroughly
loved it. It should upset some
people. It is in French with subtitles. Seen April 30, 2012, at the San Francisco
International Film festival, Film Society of San Francisco Theater.
1. National Vital Statistics Report. Center for Disease Control and Prevention,
United States Department of Health and Human Services. December 21, 2010, Table 2.
2. U.S. Census
Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2012, Table 102.
Off Label
Directed
by Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher
This film is a good idea on an important topic that doesn't quite
come off. I am very sympathetic to the
objectives of these filmmakers. I've
been a long time opponent of the "chemicalization" of psychiatry. Pharmaceutical companies are pushing
psychotropic drugs on the American people in staggering numbers through
psychiatrists and general medical practitioners where they are unnecessary,
ineffective, and very often harmful. But
mental illness is fertile ground for making money. However, the money is not in taking care of
people and providing them with love and support, which is what they really
need. The money is made by selling them
pills that numb and neutralize them as human beings. The marketing of these many drugs is aggressive,
corrupt, and deceptive. The clinical
research that is part of the approval process for these drugs is highly corrupt,
and that is one of the primary interests of this film: the abuse of human
guinea pigs who are either paid or coerced to participate in clinical trials by
agreeing to take the drugs for a price. The
film features several of these luckless participants: marginal people, barely functioning, selling
their bodies to the drug companies in a last ditch defense against homelessness. Their plights evoke sympathy, but these few
people, miserable as they are, do not make the big case that the filmmakers
want to make. They definitely illustrate
what is going on, but they are much too small fragments to understand this big
iceberg. My favorite interviewee in the
film was the former drug rep, Michael Oldani, who had made the rounds to
doctors' offices selling and promoting pharmaceuticals to doctors. His comments were insightful and informative
and did provide an outline of the big picture.
It is unfortunate that the film did not develop the information he
presented. A good documentary could have
been built around his testimony, but these filmmakers seem to be lazy about
doing research and they do not seem to be interested in creating the big
picture with clarity and definition.
They take pictures of a few trees and say, "you get the idea of the
forest from these." But you only
get a vague idea, and each of these small fragments is problematic in its own
way, so the case is not made decisively in a well substantiated
presentation. Sergeant Andrew Duffy's
case was another missed opportunity to show the collusion between the VA and
pharmaceutical companies to chemically quell the effects of PTSD in returning
veterans. Sergeant Duffy's case was very
interesting, touching, and had far reaching implications that unfortunately
were not pursued. It was just one more
piece of this loosely stuck together collage.
The film wanders back and forth between these different sympathetic protagonists. One gets to know them by the end of the film;
one is touched by their struggles, and some of their flaws and inadequacies
start to become apparent as well. The
film is too long and probably could have been cut by about a third without
losing very much. It was inspired by a
series of articles that appeared in the September-October 2010 issue of Mother Jones by Carl Elliott. If you are interested in this topic, I
suggest you read his articles. They are
much more informative and much better constructed than this film. He
also has a 2010 book White Coat,
Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine that carries
forward with this topic. Elliott seems
to be a capable researcher, who presents knowledgeable, well-reasoned arguments. But you have to go to the trouble to read
something, as opposed to sitting back and letting it pour into your head off a
film screen. I wish I could recommend
this film, but it is not up to its aspirations and it is not up to what is
needed. I do recommend the topic, and I
hope that a better film treatment of it will come along.