Cafe Society -- Film Review Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words -- Film Review The Innocents -- Film Review Genius -- Film Review

Cafe Society

Directed by Woody Allen

This is a feel good movie without a lot of depth.  It is simple and romantic.  The characters are cartoonish, without a lot of complexity.  Kristen Stewart is very compelling as Vonnie.  The character she plays is a sweet, vapid bubblehead, but she is quite attractive.  An uncle and nephew share her as a girlfriend and the uncle ends up with her.  But the nephew gets another girl who is very similar.  He and Vonnie remain attached to some extent, although not enough to make any meaningful difference.  There is not a lot of action.  It takes place in a romanticized past of probably the 1930s (without the depression).  These are affluent, white, mostly Jewish people in New York and Hollywood.  Woody Allen is going back to his roots, but in a rather saccharine, idealized, sanitized portrayal.  Even the gangland style murders have a remote, dreamlike quality to them.  They feel sort of abrupt and incongruous, but they are quickly passed over, like a small item you might scan in the newspaper.  Hollywood is rejected for New York.  The gangster brother is the only one who seems to be able to get anything done.  Everyone else in the family benefits from his criminality, but he is repudiated in the end by getting convicted and executed in the electric chair.  The plot is rather improbable, but it does hold your interest.  The film is not boring, but it is not very satisfying either.  I don't think I would want to take a date to this.  I would rather take a date to something with a little more challenge and a little more substance.  Technically, it is well put together and well crafted.  It is a triumph of traditional middle class values, except where the married man leaves his wife of 25 years to marry a younger woman.  But we don't see too much of the discarded wife or the turmoil or ennui that he was fleeing.  Everything seems to be rather civilized in this movie.  I can't say too much else about it.  There is not enough substance here to merit a lengthy discussion. 

Eat That Question:  Frank Zappa in his Own Words

Directed by Thorsten Schütte

This is Frank Zappa in his own words as he wanted to present himself.  It is a string of interviews, news clips, and film segments spanning his career, but weighted toward his prime years in his 30s and 40s.  The film is not chronologically or thematically organized.  It tends to wander all over the place.  Calling this a documentary is being charitable.  Zappa himself occupies at least 90% of the screen time.  His is the only perspective offered.  The film presents very little of his background or development.  He seems to have had no parents.  He is an American, but doesn't seem to come from anywhere.  He had a family, a long marriage, and four children, but we never see them and they are barely mentioned.  He had an early marriage that ended in divorce that was also not mentioned.  He seems to have had no friends or close companions.  He doesn't seem to have had any education, although he was very smart and very well informed.  There is very little about his long battle with prostate cancer, except for a few guarded responses in his final interview. 

This is not a presentation of Frank Zappa as a person, rather it is a presentation of Frank Zappa as a personality, as the public persona that he wished to project.  I don't think there was anything false about it.  Frank Zappa was authentic, straightforward, plain speaking, and very clear thinking.  He was attractive, both physically and personally.  He had a good sense for business.  He was highly intelligent, insightful, and iconoclastic in his outlook.  He was not a drug user and did not allow drug use among his entourage.  He was very even tempered.  Very adept at answering questions about himself and arguing his point of view.  He was a harsh critic of American culture, and his views I largely agree with.  He was not very popular in the United States.  He was much better known and much better liked in Europe.  In fact, it was Europeans who made this film.  He used to say, "In America I am famous, but nobody knows what I do."  His music was not popular.  It was not played on the radio very much.  I knew him better for his outspoken views on censorship and the public role he played in controversies over rock and roll lyrics and the extent to which the government should play a regulatory role in the arts.  I, personally, was not familiar with his music and after hearing a lot of it in the film, I've decided that I don't care much for it.  Zappa was interested in percussion, rhythm, and novel sounds and sound combinations for their own sake.  He liked to experiment with sound.  His tastes encompassed the broadest possible eclectic and pansonic expanse.  I was more interested in the piano and rock and roll.  He seems to have had a classical background and wrote a lot of music for full orchestra.  Weird stuff that seems to have been influenced by John Cage -- a musical direction and an artistic approach that I am not in sympathy with.  He spent a goodly chunk of his own money to enlist the London Symphony Orchestra in a venture to record some of his own compositions for his own personal satisfaction and enjoyment, lacking any commercial motivation or expectation. 

I share a lot with Frank Zappa in terms of temperament, outlook, values, and attitudes toward art, aesthetics, society, education, religion, politics, sex, America, and the quality of life.  The friend that I attended this film with said to me afterward, "As I was watching this, I was thinking that the person Frank Zappa most reminds me of is you."  However, this film is a very incomplete picture.  Frank Zappa understood performance and he understood public presentation.  He also knew how to hide behind all of that.  He was very conscious of himself as a public person, but he was also extremely protective of Frank Zappa as a private individual.  I think there was another Frank Zappa behind this public facade of the rock star that the film never touched.  So while the film was interesting and informative as far as it went, it fully cooperated with Frank Zappa the performer, the role player, the salesman, and didn't really show us much of Frank Zappa the man.  

The Innocents

Directed by Anne Fontaine

This is a very compassionate, human story about small side horror of World War 2.  Toward the end of the war in 1945 a Polish convent was ransacked by invading Russian soldiers.  The soldiers took up residence with them and spent several days gang raping all the nuns.  The result was many of them became pregnant and the Mother Superior contracted syphilis.  One of the younger wayward nuns broke with protocol and found her way to the French Red Cross and summoned help.  A young female doctor (Lou de Laâge) visits the convent and discovers the secret that they are at great pains to hide. 

The drama that plays out throughout the film is the clash between the attitudes and values of the Catholic Church and the human needs brought about by this extraordinary situation.  The Catholic outlook on life and its approach to dealing with the problem at hand does not fare too well.  The film portrays quite well the hopeless inadequacy of Catholic thinking and values for coping with human problems involving the body and sex, especially pertaining to women.  Its severity, its ultraconservatism, its cruelty, callousness, and intransigence are frankly presented with the stark consequences evident.  However, the nuns themselves are treated with great sensitivity and compassion.  Beneath the flowing habits and regimented life each nun is an individual with differing backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives on Catholic teaching and their own interpretations and struggles with their faith.  The fact that many of them are having babies in short succession creates havoc among this staid order. 

I liked that the secular female doctor and the Jewish male doctor emerge as heroine and hero of the story.  The Mother Superior, who represents the conservative traditional thinking of the Church, becomes something of a villain who kills a number of the newborn babies, while lying to the group that she had placed the infants with family members of some of the nuns.  Modern scientific medicine is decisively triumphant over Catholic methods of prayer and resignation to the will of God.  In every respect the Catholic outlook, values, and attitudes come off as inadequate, obstructionist, and even inhuman.  While representing Catholic nuns sympathetically as human beings caught in a monstrous situation that befell them quite unbidden, the film is severely anti-Catholic. 

There is another running subtext in this story, although not emphasized, and that is the matter of rape.  The nuns are repeatedly raped by the invading Russian soldiers.  (This was before the movie happened.)  Mathilde, the Red Cross doctor, is assaulted and nearly raped by the Russian soldiers who stop her at a roadblock.  She is rescued and sent on her way by a Russian officer.  The Russian soldiers are portrayed as animals, and many of them undoubtedly were.  But it was a Russian officer who delivered Mathilde.   Mathilde is also aggressively prevailed upon by her fellow doctor and colleague, Samuel Lehmann.  In the end she apparently concedes and cooperates, but there is resistance that is insistently overcome.  Is a message being presented that rape is an inherent element in male-female relationships that warfare only liberates and magnifies?  It is clear, and has always been the case, that the women of a conquered enemy can expect very little mercy from the conquering soldiers.  Conquering soldiers feel they are doing them a favor by not killing them.  They belong to the spoils of the battle and are a reward and a motivator of common soldiers.  Only very recently have political considerations begun to take a stand against this ancient practice of handing the conquered women over to the unrestrained lusts of the victorious soldiers.  I am not going to treat this issue at length because it would require an extensive discussion, and this film is not preoccupied with the matter of rape, but rather with its aftermath and the excruciating conflict it created in an ascetic order of nuns.  But it is there for those who are interested.  I merely wish to note it and not pass over it.  There is quite a lot of substance in this film, and in the characters portrayed. 

When Mathilde is driving back from the convent for the last time she comes upon one of the young nuns walking along the road at night who has decided to leave the convent and she gives her a lift.  She tells Mathilde that she has left her baby in the care of the nuns and wants to leave all of that behind.  She adds, "I want to live."  It is a telling remark.  The convent is a place for those who don't want to live, who have turned away from life.  They have withdrawn from life into this minimal existence of rigid structure, asceticism, and severe discipline.  The film captures it all very well, and comes down decisively on the side of the modern secular, erotic woman, whose life is filled with work, service to others, and sexual relationships with men.  It is an interesting, moving story very well presented.  It is in French, as well as some Russian and Polish, with subtitles.  

Genius

Directed by Michael Grandage

This is a very touching portrayal of the relationship between writer Thomas Wolfe and Max Perkins, his editor at Charles Schribner's.  It captures a lot of the ambivalence and contention in the relationship.  The relationship between an editor and a writer is always going to carry some uneasiness, but in the case of Wolfe and Perkins there was a psychological complementarity that ratcheted up the intensity to a considerable degree.  Wolfe, who was something of a lost soul, sought a father in Perkins, and Perkins, who had four daughters but no son, found a longed for ersatz son in Wolfe.  The problem was that Wolfe was probably a borderline personality who was careening out of control.  His writing was the mainstay of his psychological and emotional stability.  Indeed it might have been all that was holding him together.  Wolfe wrote copiously, obsessively, to the point where it is fair to say he was a workaholic on the one hand, and an alcoholic on the other.  These twin obsessions destroyed his relationship with Aline Bernstein, who seemed to have considerable psychological vulnerability herself.  Perkins struggled to get a grip on Wolfe, both on a personal level and in terms of structuring and condensing his voluminous writing down to something that could be published and sold to the public.  Perkins shaping of Wolfe's final published volumes is controversial among critics and scholars, and Wolfe had some regrets about it as well within his own lifetime.  It is thought to be a major reason why he left Perkins after the publication of Of Time and the River in 1935 and went to Harper and Brothers. 

However, an editor is an important element in the creative process.  And while it is true that an editor does put his stamp on a work to the extent that the finished product that is presented to the public may be far afield of the author's original vision for the work, it is not necessarily a bad thing.  George Martin created the Beatles and many other great rock and roll hits.  Sam Phillips was responsible for bringing many of the early rock and rollers of the 1950s to the public, like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and many others.  The lack of an editor is often a serious drawback for an author as in the case of Richard Wagner, who, having no check on his natural grandiosity, created these monstrosities that tend to be overbearing and oppressive to sit through.  Perkins undoubtedly sculpted and shaped the writing of Thomas Wolfe, but it is not necessarily negative, and the works might not have had the public appeal that they did without his hand in them. 

The film is a sympathetic portrayal of all parties and strives to present a balanced outlook on the rather seething ferment between all of these people.  I would surmise that the film leans a little toward the benign and soft pedals a lot of the harshness and roughness that undoubtedly characterized these relationships.  One does not get a good feel for the inner pain and emptiness that was driving Tom Wolfe to write like a maniac from morning till night for years on end, and the same for Aline Bernstein, who was on the verge of murder-suicide.  They are seen in some of their bad moments, but one does not get a sense that this is a pervasive condition of their existence.  It is also a little hard to get a sense of time and chronology in this film.  The film spans from about 1929 until after Wolfe's untimely death in 1938, but Perkin's kids don't seem to get any older. 

The film is extremely well made and well put together.  The entire cast is to be given high praise.  The characters are created very movingly and convincingly with special recognition for Jude Law as Thomas Wolfe, Colin Firth as Max Perkins, and Nicole Kidman as Aline Bernstein.  The cinematography and the recreations of 1930s New York are excellent.  F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway make appearances.  The whole film works superbly well.  This is a really good one.  Go see it.