plot head's Open Salon Blog

Family Cinematherapy

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:02:27 -0500

Yesterday I watched Parenthood (again) and was blown away by how tight it is, moment to moment, about family dynamics. Parenthoodhttp://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi452264729/ There's a telling dinner scene involving the picture of modern American familial promise: three grown and gainfully employed white adults gathered for an evening with their parents and their own children. Suddenly, the wild card youngest son shows up unannounced with his illegitimate biracial child named "Cool," the fruit of his alliance with a Vegas showgirl. Just for a moment the camera focuses on a smug-faced Martha Plimpton, cast as a willfull high school senior who hides her boyfriend under the bed and thinks her mother (who attended Woodstock) is a hopeless square. Plimpton, who made a career in the eighties for playing the she-smart-ass, sums it all up with her smile, and Ron Howard does a service to the movie for giving us her s0litary sense of split-second righteousness. Because, of course, her sense of knowing it all is overturned-- a recurring theme in this refreshing and entertaining film (1989, Ron Howard). Growing up and growing older, the film tells us, means being able to get over yourself long enough to forgive, other people as well as yourself.

Watching it again as a parent, some twenty years after it came out, I am reminded by how much extra we can get out of a text as our situations in life change. When Plimpton's character runs away from home after an argument with her mother, the mother (played beautifully by Dianne Wiest) does the conventional and prideful thing of telling her daughter never to come back again before she comes to her senses and runs out onto the lawn chasing her daughter. But it is not the chasing after that's as important as what she says, which is more or less, "I'll always be here if you need me... You can always come back." Wiest's words are unabashed yet woeful. She shouts out what she has to, knowing her girl's gonna keep running, and then, as the camera leaves her there in a distanced shot, says to herself "bye." I thought this scene was nuts when I first saw this film, as a kid watching with her Indian parents on a Sunday evening. What kind of mother would let her kid runaway, I thought?

Today I think Wiest and Plimpton's relationship in the film is a paragon for mother-daughter relationships. Maybe it is that only an ex-hippy who went to Woodstock would know how to respect her almost adult daughter's boundaries, but if there was ever a film to give you a how-to on dealing with teenage rebellion, the later scenes with Julie and her mother (after the boyfriend has now become the husband) are key. "Well, she wants Todd, and I want to help you get whatever you want," says Helen (Wiest) to her younger son after he asks why she has helped the young newlyweds stay together.

Wiest's performance also reminded me of the other memorable (and mostly good) mothers she has played, including in The Birdcage, Edward Scissorhands, and my personal favorite-- the much older matriarch in Dan in Real Life. She has it in her range of understated emotions to play the kind of quick resources and flexible patience that mothers in difficult positions need. As I watched her simply accept who her daughter was and wanted to be, I also ruminated over other exemplary film mothers, some of whom are not given enough scope in their mothering scenes to exhibit this optimally (like Dianne Keaton in Something's Gotta Give). Two films which come to mind are both indie, though one is well-known (Kissing Jessica Stein). http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi4209181465/ The other is a more recent film about Thanksgiving I saw recently on netflix instant entitled Familiar Strangers, 2008, which has in it parents who have more typical gender roles , are Wasps, and are severly strapped for the emotional resources their children need individually. http://www.netflix.com/WiSearch?hv=i3b2lH4c767ZYeaLcs7Bje9NnRE%3D&oq=&v1=familiar+strangers&search_submit=Search Yet, by the end of the film, they have managed to do and say exactly what their kids need to have done and hear.

The climactic and confessional mother-daughter scene in Kissing Jessica Stein may be my favorite instructional scene on how to parent for a long time. Tovah Feldshuh plays the emotionally-involved, vivacious yet nurturing mother, and in the scene I am thinking of, her character goes through almost the same type of metamorphisis that Jessica's does through the course of the film. Judy Stein, sitting on the swing with her daughter on the night before her son's wedding, graciously gives up her dreams of having Jessica marry a succesful Jewish man. She quickly comes to terms with her daughter's inner conflict and unhappiness. What I love most about this scene is its esoteric quality; there is something about it that allows you in to understand that there are things only a mother could know about her daughter, but it also holds us apart as if to suggest that there are things deep in the heroine's core that the mother has learned to detect and identify without commenting on or trying to change.

As for fathers, I'm still working on that. Steve Martin plays a good one in Parenthood, though what's more interesting is how expertly the film showcases the changing and more valuable role of fathers and "co-parenting" that began as a result of second-wave feminism. In this film, he is the fictional prototype of all the real and fathers I see around me today.

Mature Tastes

Fri, 5 Feb 2010 11:02:47 -0500

Thursday afternoon... 5 Media Units Consumed in 48 hours, not including Sesame Street or the opening scenes of Steel Magnolias (end of the movie too sad to watch any more than that).

I've always considered my film preferences to be pretty refined, but there are still days when I need a good dose of "reality-lite" narrative. It may be that I've become more honest about the fact that my "favorite films" are different from "my favorite films to watch." I love Amelie, for example, but I just can't watch it all that often because of the incidental depression that then sets in because I am not really European. Plus, watching someone else be lonely (even if there's payback at the end) is not always easy to do. http://www.movieforum.com/features/festivals/tiff01/features/amelie800x600.shtml This is why I keep a copy of The Royal Tenenbaums and As Good as It Gets around. It makes me happy to know they are there, should I want to invest in the entire process of catharsis. But in a pinch, I'm always slipping films like Runaway Bride or The Parent Trap (remake) into the DVD player instead.

So after we finished Ship of Fools (a smart and psychologically epic film by Stanley Kramer, 1965, http://www.dvdmg.com/shipoffools.shtml just a few years before he directed Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?), needless to say, I had to decompress: Immediately, we put on Loverboy (1989) through Netflix's watch instantly function.

http://www.netflix.com/WiSearch?hv=i3b2lH4c767ZYeaLcs7Bje9NnRE%3D&oq=&v1=loverboy

Partaking of this type of entertainment requires one to turn off one's brain. Old habits die hard, though, and within time, I was comparing the cinematic pathos rendered in black and white with the slapstick bufoonery of a young and scrawny Patrick Dempsey.

Ship of Fools is the kind of visual experience that levels you with private yet distancing moments of beauty (the Cuban laborers on the lower deck enjoying their dehumanizing hose-bath; the unraveling hair of the Flamenco dancers as they step it up; the doctor's heartbreak and subsequent heart attack while he is alone on the top deck). It never ceases to amaze me how these two poles of the same artistic enterprise can co-exist and even claim the same fans. The title alone lets you know that you're in for a parable of sorts. Then, within minutes of watching people get on a gang plank and board a luxury liner, one of the passengers-- a "dwarf" wearing a tweed coat played by Michael Dunn-- comes up to the camera with a knowing smirk and hints at philosphical truths.

My favorite scene involves the heart-to-heart between Glocken, the dwarf (the moral center of the film), and a soused American ex-ball player, who is describing how much his life has been ruined by not being able to hit "a curve ball on the outside corner." The dwarf, watching intently and compassionately, gives this wonderfully impassioned speech about the bigger picture-- about how almost a billion people in the world don't even know what a curve ball is. The ball player, played by Lee Marvin (who spends most of his scenes with his lower-lip hanging open) glares at him for a moment and then accuses the dwarf of being "a sawed-off intellectual." Then, they both erupt in laughter. Good stuff. Much better of a resolution than say the end of Loverboy, where Randy introduces his live-in girlfriend from college to his parents (a relationship he was too frightened to tell them about before) after having spent the summer as a male prostitute and having unwittingly convinced his parents that he is gay. You've all seen 80's movies: you know the way the scene ends. Randy's father pats him on the back and tells him how relieved he is.

Somewhere along the way, the line between artistry/talent and visual effects gets blurred. There are plenty of entertaining car chases, punch-out scenes and laugh out loud moments in Loverboy, (when the body-builder cuckold husband of Carrie Fisher discovers the "pizza delivery" bill for $200-- "And she hates pizza..."), but it's obvious that without the comedic timing of actors like Kate Jackson, Kirstie Alley and even Dempsey himself, this stuff is just swill. I can't figure out if it's a good thing for the genre of unserious films to have this pool of talent to tap into or a bad thing for the actors and crew to have to do them. More importantly, I can't figure out why I need to watch them.

I'll resist the need to analyze it too much and just point to a gnawing concern that it might be due to the ready supply of erasure available to us, an erasure that I'm not really ready to condemn, even though I wonder if it is ultimately damaging for us to be able to wipe off the effects of a truly good film. For those who are prepared to be blown away by deeper realities, like, say, the first stirrings of terrible social and historical developments that occur in the world (the rise of the SS and the advent of World War II) while people continue to think there's nothing to worry about, here's a link to watch Ship of Fools instantly.

http://www.netflix.com/WiSearch?hv=i3b2lH4c767ZYeaLcs7Bje9NnRE%3D&oq=&v1=ship+of+fools

Plothead: Media fixes in the winter of our discontent

Tue, 2 Feb 2010 19:02:32 -0500

I've been mediacating big time these days. Mediacating. Not medicating. I hope people catch that. Medicating through media, basically.

Most of us do it, but how many of us can hold onto the buzz, can summon up the anticipation of visual or narrative balm in an evocative frame of film or a few pleasing lines of prose on a daily basis? I can and do, and I've decided to embrace this pathology and call it what it is-- an addiction that is, so far, manageable, a jonesing for a drug that, aside from the occassional ups and downs in book banning or film boycotting, will always be available and legal.

When things are just a little more than irritating or hard these days (being awakened again by the diurnal slams of the shower door in the townhome next door, or parsing out the subtext of my two-year-old's characteristically random fit of morning rage, or struggling to stuff both my children into their winter coats and shoes without knocking them down by the bulky heft of my own jacket and then clicking these rugrats with my chapped fingers into their carseats while they howl about their fallen "toys"--chewed up straws from the illicit fast food runs my husband makes with them--, or realizing that my coffee has gone cold for the third time while I was lotioning up those dry little noses and I now no longer have the energy to get up and reheat it in the microwave) these are the times when I think about some exemplary media bites and consider sampling them in my off-time later on in the long day. Here are just a few examples: 1) the passage towards the beginning of Nick Hornby's 1998 novel, About a Boy, which sets up the "date" between Marcus's mother and Will, wherein Will is musing about the state of individual attractiveness and how it probably correlates with how much an individual thinks about sex (and how Albert Einstein, under this logic, probably didn't think about it too much); 2) the moment in the film Almost Famous where the sister (played by Zooey Deschanel) leans down to her little runt of a brother and her face takes up the whole frame as she tells him, "Someday, you will be cool."; 3) the winter shot of Elizabeth reading a letter from Jane in A & E 's Pride and Prejudice (I know, I know) as she sits in a windowseat alone while the snow comes down outside. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112130/trivia These passages or shots have lingered in my mind and draw me back to these texts through the promise and nourishment of good (and, yes, maybe wholesome, but certainly rich and comforting) stories. (Skeptics, please note that I did not bring up Colin Firth and the copper bathtub.)

In my former life as an English professor, we would have called this a passion for narrative. But that sounds dull, doesn't it? No nonacademic wants to talk about "narrative," no matter how convincing of an argument one can make about its power over our individual and collective consciousness. No matter how shrilly one might point to our compromised understanding of history as stemming from badly written elementary school textbooks, no matter how emphatically one might make the case that all of us zoning out to CNN newsfeeds contributes to reductive national and cultural narratives-- not even then.

So, I will be focusing instead on "plot," or "plots," one common element between the world of books (my former professional life) and old films and television series on DVD (my current life of escapist-based consumption). But, I want to clarify that I'm not one of those readers or viewers who cares too much about plot in general. I didn't really understand the movie The Sting, and no matter how many times I've seen it, I still don't understand how the boys get the money out of the Andy Garcia-character's vault in Ocean's 11. I don't like to read mysteries, and I've never read Michael Crichton. Plot-fixation can be relative. Strong character change or atmosphere details can be central to plot, and petty motivations such as the oneupsmanship in a Seinfield rerun, can be masterfully fleshed and plotted out. (I'll never forget the way my father, not a big reader, waxed rhapsodic about an Everybody Loves Raymond episode involving a suitcase left out on the stairs, for example).

Before I get carried away with the temptation to get geeky and academic about pop-culture, I should say a simple word about my current life, which is not glamorous, nor even technically inspiring in terms of "plot."
My current situation in fact may be most responsible for my recent hyper-dosage in media, this need to shut everything down and get lost in a good and often absorbing story. I am now a stay-at-home mother/generally unpublished writer of two children under the age of five. But I should add that quitting academia and volunteering to stay home with my kids for awhile was my idea, one which I find myself still foaming at the mouth to defend to people who ask what on earth could have possessed me. It might also help you to know, for context, that this winter will be the third time I've found myself in this position of not having foresightfully or successfully secured backup help from preschool or nannies, that the Holiday-high has worn off and fizzled out into the torpor of being trapped indoors with artificial heating, that my husband and I are frustratedly and unsuccessfully trying to relocate to a new school district in order to have a do-over in this enterprise called The American Dream, and this month I will be sitting down and excising 200 pages out of a 550 paged novel I wrote over the past two years, an exercise whose larger potential for rejection and futility (as you might imagine would be true for anyone who decides to write a story about a bunch of Indian American kids in this economy) threatens to be punishment enough. It is for all these reasons and many more that simply watching or reading something for the fun of it is no longer possible. Like a doctor with a prescription pad, an apothecary with his pill drawers, I struggle to get my remedies just right. The dose has to draw the most noticeably positive impact on my mood in the quickest amount of time. Sometimes I miscalculate and the effect is anesthetization or too much self-pity (like if I watch too many episodes of The Gilmore Girls in a row). To top it all off, as any parent knows, I now have the most meagre reserves of free time that I have ever had in my entire life.

But I will persist, nevertheless. Tonight I will finish watching the 1965 film, Ship of Fools, (based on Katherine Anne Porter's novel of the same name) and stop kicking myself for no longer being able to remember what else Katherine Anne Porter published and was known for. I will focus on other, more simple observations, like the performance of Vivien Leigh, and how much her work as an embittered middle-aged woman might have been instrumental in Shirley MacLaine's portrayal of "Ouiser" in Steel Magnolias. http://www.imdb.com/media/rm404262400/tt0098384 What do you think? Am I way off base here or what?