The Cold, Harsh Landscape of "Nebraska" (the movie, not the state)

The stark and stoic film Nebraska sees the elderly Woody Grant insisting on making his way from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska as he looks to collect the million dollar sweepstakes prize he is convinced he has won. Shot in black and white, the movie meditates on aging, powerlessness and the kind of legacy we leave behind, specifically by one father to his son, and more generally by one generation of a nation to the next.

Bruce Dern is excellent as the father of deteriorating faculties. Will Forte, whose previous works include the hard-hitting MacGruber movie based on the SNL skit, plays his son David with subtlety and pathos as he decides to humor his distant father’s whim while taking the opportunity to spend some time with him. On the road they end up staying with extended family in Hawthorne, Neb. This family’s silence and inertia are just stifling. That is, until they catch wind of Woody’s delusional prize winnings, and they believe it too.

Director Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants) is a master of capturing the innate humor of physical movement. Each movie of his that I have seen have been centered on a man living in quiet desperation, who at some point breaks out into a run, or at least an energetic walk. You really can’t get a better visual for quiet desperation than Hawthorne, Neb., in the snow, in black and white. Payne captures that feeling perfectly.

If nothing else, Woody and his wife Kate might make you thankful for your own parents, as they are a shrill and argumentative couple. But the characters don’t stay stuck in a one-note rut; each one is rounded out with continuing glimpses into their motivations and strengths. They are also surprisingly vulgar sometimes, which seems to be the modern elderly stereotype.

I'll also give Payne props for casting a very normal woman to play David's possibly ex-girlfriend, Noelle. In fact, most of the people are very normal looking, to the point where some of the minor characters are actually just people from the town of Hawthorne.

The Great Plains do not always come off well, characterized by dying small towns and populated by the aging and the adolescent. Shooting in black and white keeps any hint of fertility and life at bay. However, there is a note of hope as father and sons become closer and family draw strength from each other. Each camera angle is a work of art, and quirky humor adds to the story. Bob Odenkirk has a small but effective role as David’s older brother, Ross.

At dinner after the movie, my husband and I spent a lot of time discussing the different characters, what they were really after, what the movie was trying to say. So, while I found the movie to be bleak and somewhat depressing, I appreciated that it offered us plenty to talk about.

Philomena: Guilt and Grace at the Movies

Philomena Lee, played by Judi Dench, had a child when she was a naïve teenager who had never had reproduction explained to her. She gave birth at the convent she’d been sent to, and her son was put up for adoption as part of the deal. Fifty years later she still thinks of him constantly and wonders if he ever thinks of her.

Enter Martin Sixsmith, a former BBC reporter who took the fall for a scandal, though he wasn’t at fault. Martin agrees to help Philomena track down her son.

Martin is a jaded, worldly guy who is condescending about the beliefs and ideas of the older woman he is helping. He is writing Philomena’s situation as a human-interest story as a way to get back into reporting. He is angry about what happened to him, and his general bitterness only becomes more inflamed by Philomena’s story.

Philomena, on the other hand, has no axe to grind, in spite of the suffering she endured at the hands of the nuns in her youth. She just wants to know her son.

These two travel together (in reality they just talked on the phone a lot, but that’s hard to turn into a movie) following up leads. Philomena struggles with her own guilt over her son, while Martin is utterly annoyed that she could be feeling guilty when he sees all of this as the fault of the Catholic church.

His atheism and her devout Catholicism make for an interesting combination as he seeks retribution while she espouses forgiveness.

I really loved this movie and it has stayed in my mind. Judi Dench is fabulous, as is to be expected, and Steve Coogan portrays Martin with a great blend of coldness and undesired compassion. The movie asks hard questions about faith and forgiveness, but it leaves room for redemption and grace.

 

Deglamming the Big D in "Dallas Buyers Club"

So. Dallas Buyers Club. I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts about this movie for a week now, but I can’t seem to come to a cohesive take on it. This may come out as a rather disjointed review, but here goes.

First off, what is it? Matthew McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof, a blue collar, womanizing cowboy from the Dallas area who unexpectedly finds out that he is very ill, and that, in fact, he has AIDS. After just a few minutes of watching the movie, it does not seem all that shocking to viewers, because he is appears to be having a lot of very casual sex (and be prepared to see it in action), not to mention a lot of drugs and drinking. But he is surprised, because it’s 1985, and straight white guys don’t think that the AIDS epidemic has anything to do with them, no matter how depraved their lifestyles may be.

From the moment he wakes up in the hospital, we are reminded of what it was like in the early days of AIDS. The doctors wear gloves and masks, and they keep a bit of a distance as they rather coldly tell this man that he has about 30 days to live. His friends turn on him, and he becomes an outcast.

In the next bed is a transgendered man, living as a woman, named Rayon. (Side note: At one point Rayon is wearing the very rabbit fur coat that I coveted from my 8th-grade classmates. Just thought you should know.) Rayon is also an AIDS patient, and he reaches out in a friendly way to Ron, a friendliness that Ron is utterly unable to accept. Eventually these two become business partners in the Dallas Buyers Club, a backroom organization that brings in unapproved drugs for those who can’t acquire or tolerate the AZT that is being tested in the Dallas hospital.

Matthew McConaughey is on fire this year. And in this movie, he is also unrecognizable. As is Jared Leto, who looks a far cry from Claire Danes’ dreamy crush on “My So-Called Life.” Both are fantastic in their roles, going far beyond the change of look for each of them. A friend asked me if Matthew managed to be unattractive, and I had to respond that I honestly found him unappealing in every way. But then, ropers never were my thing. There was one scene where he smiled, and I thought, “Oh yeah, those are his teeth.” Other than that, yup, he achieved unattractive very well.

An effective aspect of this movie is that I don’t necessarily like either Ron or Rayon. I sort of expected that the Ron Woodroof character would not look too good, but I wondered if Rayon’s character would be played up to martyrdom in an effort to promote tolerance. I don’t like it when any character is sainted too much to believe. This was not an issue at all. Each of them definitely showed weakness and brokenness, though Rayon is certainly a more sympathetic character than Ron.

I actually like the movie more for not making the main characters overly likeable, because it reinforces the fact that we don’t reserve love only for those people who we like or who have it together or who live the way we think they should. And these two do not become saints—they continue on in their respective habits and weaknesses. These are people living on the margins of life, albeit completely opposite margins.

Jennifer Garner plays a doctor who shows more heart than the rest, and I felt a bit like she was a glimpse of Jesus in the midst of it all. Compassionate, caring for each person as an individual in spite of the stigma of the disease and in spite of the fact that they were extremely different from herself, she walked the journey with her patients. Those patients were most definitely the modern version of the lepers that Jesus touched, cared for, and healed.

Part of my interest in this movie was that I lived in the Dallas area in the 80s, and I wondered what the movie’s perspective would be. I was a bit nervous that the church would come off very badly, as many conservatives shouted down AIDS victims as people receiving the just rewards of their sins. Actually, the church has very little presence in the movie at all. That might not reflect so well on the church either, but at least we didn’t get bashed.

And maybe we should been. One church that I know of was offering classes on the rather large gay population in Dallas. I’m not sure if the intention was informational or to offer ideas on how to evangelize. As an early teen, I read through the photocopied study guide, and if there was anything spiritual it was lost on me. What I got was an eye-opening account of what was purported to happen in gay bars and bedrooms, and the purpose of including all of that could only have been to raise fear in the conservative Christian mind. If I were gay I might feel the same way about straight people if someone presented a handbook to me that detailed all the perversities that a certain segment of straight people engage in at bars or behind closed doors.

Beyond my curiosity about how Dallas in general, and “my people” there in particular, might be portrayed, there is another reason I wanted to see it. In January of 1982, I was 13 and going through my second of three major hip operations. At home after surgery, I started having agonizing pain in one leg and I was brought to the hospital by ambulance. I had internal bleeding and had lost a lot of blood. The doctor told my parents afterward that I really had needed a transfusion, but they had decided not to do it. He sort of hesitated, and then he didn’t really explain that any further.

Over the next year, we started to hear more about AIDS. It wasn’t until 1986 that all blood in the U.S. was tested for HIV, and one study says that by then 60% of America’s 20,000 hemophiliacs were infected from transfusions. If I had gotten that transfusion, I could very well have suffered the way that young Ryan White did, being barred from his school, threatened, and avoided. It was very early in the epidemic, and people were just terrified. So it hits close to home, knowing that I could easily have joined the ranks of the victims.

Dallas Buyers Club is a very gritty movie that traces the arc of a man from fearful hate to tolerance and compassion. But for me, all three of the main characters demonstrate in one way or another the kind of love we need, and often fail, to show—a love that comes not from our regard for an individual’s achievements or moral compass, but a love that stems from valuing each person as a beloved creation, formed in our Father’s image.

"Frozen" Offers Warm Holiday Fun

The new Disney offering, Frozen, will not leave you cold, unless you are very coldhearted indeed. Yes, this is yet another princess story of two beautiful, tiny-waisted, enormous-eyed princesses whose parents, alas, have gone the way of most Disney parents. Disney parents have a notoriously high mortality rate. And there is a handsome prince, and true love, and a faithful reindeer, and a goofy snowman sidekick.

Yet, in spite of those clichés, Frozen delivers a funny, beautifully animated story with lively music, and it even addresses some higher-minded issues.

Elsa, the older of the two princesses, has the power to make snow and ice. She doesn’t have a lot of control over it, and fear makes her dangerous. Her parents keep her away from others and teach her one basic life lesson: Conceal. Don’t feel.

When they pass on, Elsa is left to the throne with no experience outside of the castle. She gets upset after the coronation, loses control, and the kingdom is covered in ice. Then she flees to the mountains where she can be free to be herself.

Her younger sister Anna, the less graceful, more naïve sister, is really the main character, as she sets off on a quest to bring her sister back to the kingdom to make things right. Anna’s job is to convince Elsa that it is possible to be herself and still come back home.

I appreciated the storyline because I see a lot of young women (and some older ones too) who are working so hard to preserve a perfect image of themselves, unable to allow for weakness or vulnerability. Elsa’s desire to present the perfect queen, the good girl, leads to anger and fear and unleashes terrible consequences. As a Facebook and Twitter user, I know the temptation to present myself as someone other than who I really am, and it’s a temptation we all face—possibly more in the church than anywhere else, which is exactly the opposite of what we are called to do.

So I found it both entertaining and somewhat meaningful, and I had a certain 14-year-old next to me who also enjoyed it very much. The animation is amazing—made me want to build my very own ice palace, and I’m always cold!