Konsum: Stalling Woodpecker Edition
March 16th, 2008
None of the movies I saw this week thrilled as much as the conclusion to the first part of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. After 200 pages of young Wart’s education, we finally get to the part about the sword in the stone. It’s Merlyn’s final lesson, presented in a hallucinatory passage that feels as if Walt Disney adapted Revelations and laced it with zen wisdom:
“Oh, Merlyn,” cried the Wart, “help me to get this weapon.”
There was a a kind of rushing noise, and a long chord played along with it. All round the churchyard there were hundreds of old friends. They rose over the church wall all together, like the Punch and Judy ghosts of remembered days, and there were badgers and nightingales and vulgar crows and hares and wild geese and falcons and fishes and dogs and dainty unicorns and solitary wasps and corkindrills and hedgehogs and griffins and the thousand other animals he had met. They loomed round the church wall, the lovers and helpers of the Wart, and they all spoke solemnly in turn. Some of them had come from the banners in the church, where they were painted in heraldry, some from the waters and the sky and the fields about–but all, down to the smallest shrew mouse, had come to help on account of love. Wart felt his power grow.
“Put your back into it,” said a Luce (or pike) off one of the heraldic banners, “as you once did when I was going to snap you up. Remember that power springs from the nape of the neck.”
“What about those forearms,” asked a Badger gravely, “that are held together by a chest? Come along, my dear embryo, and find your tool.”
A Merlin sitting at the top of the yew tree cried out, “Now then, Captain Wart, what is the first law of the foot? I thought I once heard something about never letting go?”
“Don’t work like a stalling woodpecker,” urged a Tawny Owl affectionately. “Keep up a steady effort, my duck, and you will have it yet.”
A white-front said, “Now, Wart, if you were once able to fly the great North Sea, surely you can co-ordinate a few little wing-muscles here and there? Fold your powers together, with the spirit of your mind, and it will come out like butter. Come along, Homo sapiens, for all we humble friends of yours are waiting here to cheer.”
The Wart walked up to the great sword for the third time. He put out his right hand softly and drew it out as gently as from a scabbard.
I also enjoyed a Greek feast at Zenon Taverna with Jordan and Ann, ramen at Menchanko-Tei, swung a cow in Rayman Raving Rabbids, and installed a brand new operating system. Saw a few movies, too:
Blind Mountain/Mang shan. Li Yang, 2007. ***
Funny Games. Michael Haneke, 1997. **
Funny Games U.S. Michael Haneke, 2007. **
Love Songs/ Les Chansons d’amour. Christophe Honoré ***
My Blueberry Nights. Wong Kar Wai, 2007. ***
Sleep Dealer. Alex Rivera, 2008. **
Water Lillies/Naissance des pieuvres. Céline Sciamma, 2007. **
plus The Wire. Season 2 **** and Prime Suspect 5 ****
The Straight Story
October 23rd, 2007
Walt Disney Pictures distributed this 1999 film by David Lynch, and that fact — along with G rating, a plot that centers around an old man riding a lawnmower across Iowa, and a certain amount of pigheaded snobbery on my part — are the reasons I never gave The Straight Story a chance. Surely, this couldn’t be the Lynch Lynch fans crave? Grave mistake.
First of all, the movie is marvelous to look at and really drives home what a loss it is that Lynch won’t work in 35mm again. I like INLAND EMPIRE better than most, and the low-grade DV does have its charms, but if you compare it to the pristine, every-frame-is-an-art-print visuals of this movie, you can only grumble.
Grumbling is something you won’t get from Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), the proud and stubborn 73-year-old who, after hearing that his estranged brother has suffered a stroke, decides that it’s time to reconcile. The brother’s in a hospital across the Wyoming state line, and Alvin can’t drive a car — in fact, he can barely walk or see, and he doesn’t want the help of his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek.) So he gets on his riding mower and heads east.
What follows is indeed a straight story, following the lines of the highway and the well-delineated demands of the hero’s journey (but then again, so does INLAND EMPIRE, if you know what to look for.) Alvin meets a runaway girl, a throng of bike riders zip by, and he almost gets killed going down a hill. The way the Oscar-nominated screenplay by John Roach and Mary Sweeney manages to wring meaning and humanity from the simplest situations is a masterclass in drama: one early scene had me biting my nails because Alvin, in the slipstream of a passing 18-wheeler, lost his hat. Talk about high-stakes adventure!
How much Lynch is in all this? Apart from the absolutely beautiful cinematography by Freddie Francis, devoted Lynchians will find the master’s fingerprints all over the details: Alvin’s reckless smoking and taste for strong coffee matches Lynch’s own. The clipped but profound and folksy dialogue sounds like it could’ve come straight from his mouth, the small towns all have more than their share of small town weirdos, and in the final scene, Lynch regular Harry Dean Stanton shows his rugged face.
The Straight Story doesn’t enter any of the surreal dream spaces we’ve come to associate with Lynch’s work, but it nonetheless succeeds in taking us into a unique world that follows its own rules. The performances by Spacek and Farnsworth are top-notch. Farnsworth became the oldest actor ever to get an Oscar nomination for Best Actor; he was ill with cancer during the shoot and took his life the following year. I’ll have to rewatch this soon because I suspect it may merit a fifth star.
The Straight Story. David Lynch, 1999. ****
YouTube has a great clip in which Alvin meets the Deer Woman (Barbara Robertson):
