1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 36: A midwinter’s tale

Another Hamlet; or, rather, a tale of a theatrical production of Hamlet …

by a troupe of sad sacks …

in midwinter …

in the country …

in an old, run-down church.

Filmed by Kenneth Branagh, in black and white, one winter before his “honest-to-goodness” Hamlet.

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You will have gathered that this tale is a comedy.

It’s the spiritual ancestor of Toast of London. To be sure, everything in the history of British stage, screen, and radio is an ancestor of Toast of London, but, in this case, the ancestry is immediate. One of the main characters in Toast of London is Jane Plough, the mephistophelian-but-flighty theatrical agent. Jane Plough is lifted out of A Midwinter’s Tale. In that movie she is named Margaretta D’Arcy and played by Joan Collins.

(I hadn’t known this about Toast of London. The more stuff I watch, the more that show makes sense.)

Margaretta D’Arcy’s hapless client is an actor named Joe Harper. He is played by Michael Maloney. (Along with Richard Briers and Nicholas Farrell of A Midwinter’s Tale, Maloney reappears in Branagh’s “honest-to-goodness” Hamlet.) Joe has nearly exhausted his career prospects. He could direct and star in this obscure Hamlet, or he could hold out for a role in a lucrative Hollywood science fiction series.

He opts for Hamlet – for the purity of it, and because he doesn’t trust his luck to get the Hollywood role.

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I suppose that much of what happens in A Midwinter’s Tale is more or less obligatory. There is the sequence in which the actors are cast for Hamlet. Those who audition are hilariously unsuitable. One of them (John Sessions) insists on playing Queen Gertrude in drag, which is not so un-Shakespearean, but his style is of the campiest sort. Since there are no better candidates, he is hired. He goes through the movie saying things like “’Tis a far, far better thing I do now than I did that night with the sailor and the artichoke.” As in Toast of London, there are literary and theatrical references galore; most of them are not quite so gratuitous, and if you’ve read and seen enough, you will enjoy them very much.

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Mainly, though, A Midwinter’s Tale is a fond look at what it’s like to be an actor in a small production:

the intensity of focus …

the sense of being closed to the rest of the world …

the forging of deeply-felt bonds with other members of one’s troupe.

I haven’t experienced this, but I do remember how, in high school, the kids who were rehearsing for Anne Frank spent a night locked up together to feel what it was like to hide away from the Nazis (and everyone else). It affected them profoundly. For a while afterward, they were very close to one another. One gets the idea, watching A Midwinter’s Tale, that certain performers seek out this kind of experience again and again: the dimmer their own prospects, the lowlier the production, the more it satisfies their craving.

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Branagh was very successful by the time he wrote and directed A Midwinter’s Tale, which he also funded. For him, this was a labor of love: of theatrical culture and history, of performing, of one’s fellow performers. Love shines through even in the most satirical, most This Is Spinal Tap-like scenes.

Only recently have I become very interested in Branagh as a director. Not so much for his technical abilities – which do appear to be considerable – but for his enthusiasm for sources and traditions.

He says, in an interview, that he became much more religious because he listened to Laurence Olivier reading the Bible when he was studying to play Olivier. It sounds like a joke, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true. Performance is what Branagh lives and breathes. Missionaries say that people often are gripped by the Bible when it’s presented in a relatable context. Branagh’s context is the actor’s world, the world of A Midwinter’s Tale. As this movie shows, it’s not always, or even usually, a glamorous world; it’s one for sad sacks.

Some people compulsively philosophize or do experiments or make up stories. Actor-scholars like Branagh compulsively act out scripts, making them their own, appreciating how others have made them their own.

This is such a delightful little movie. I look forward to watching it again.

Some lessons in geography

Today was warm and dry enough for strolling – Samuel was pleased.

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I’ve been watching Capitani (Netflix). It’s a typical cop show, but the episodes are just 24 minutes long. That’s about all I can view without having to pause to look after Samuel.

The show’s location isn’t obvious at first. The language is sometimes like French, sometimes like German.

Switzerland?

No, not mountainous enough.

(The land is hilly and lushly vegetated, like my beloved upstate New York.)

Then I figured it out. Luxembourg. Aha.

Apparently, there are stark regional differences in that nation. The show’s “northerners” and “southerners” constantly disparage one another. So do city and country folk.

This show is set in the country. Village life is comfortable and modern. Houses aren’t especially rustic.

The army is always conducting maneuvers in the forest.

Everyone knows everyone else. Even so, it’s possible for citizens to disappear from the police.

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Disoriented from this excursion into such a vast and untamed land, I put on some YouTube videos of San Marino, another country I’d never visited on TV or in the flesh. San Marino is easier to comprehend.

The government is seated in a castle at the top of a mountain – the country’s highest point. From there, one can easily gaze out, across ten Italian kilometers, all the way to the Adriatic.

Also, there are tourists everywhere.

I look forward to viewing the cop shows of San Marino.

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It would be remiss not to also mention Un mundo inmenso, my favorite geographical YouTube channel (Samuel is fond of it, too).

Finally, I recommend these photos of a yellow penguin. HT: National Geographic.

A religion of losers

It’s in the 40s (F) again – a most welcome change. There’s still too much snow everywhere to take Samuel strolling. But a lot has melted.

As I said, I welcome the change; but I also feel blue about it. Apparently, there’s a kind of seasonal affective disorder that is triggered when the weather improves. Maybe that’s what is bothering me. Or maybe it’s that I like having the snow around while I read Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

And, of course, C.P. Snow.

This month’s Strangers and Brothers novel, Corridors of Power, is about Whitehall – the world of British politicians and civil servants. What an awful, soul-sucking scene that is. One’s every word (deed, gesture) is assessed in terms of whether it will cause one to go up or down the ladder – and climbing the ladder is pretty much zero-sum. Of course, there are parallels to this in every government, in every company. As I read, I recall the two or three ladders I’m personally acquainted with. That is plenty depressing, too.

Two things bring comfort. One is the Bible. Simon Leys writes:

The famous multi-billionaire Ted Turner made a remarkable statement some years ago. He said he disliked Christianity, as he felt it was “a religion of losers.” How very true! What an accurate definition indeed!

The other is Winesburg, Ohio – “The Book of the Grotesques” – which I’m rereading after twenty-odd years. That is another book in which losers are treated with compassion.

More snow, more Seuss

I spent a grueling day figuring out how to access certain TrueType font ligatures.

Last night, I tried out our new “snow blaster.” With snow this deep, this machine is easier to use than a shovel. But it is more unwieldy than, say, a lawn mower or a vacuum cleaner (not that I would use those things to clear snow). Sweeping the sidewalk around two sides of the house while trailing a long extension cord is no joke. Last night, the cord wrapped itself around a fire hydrant, a parked car, and various snow mounds; also, the prongs of the extension cord seemed to fit rather loosely into the “blaster’s” socket. The machine must have come unplugged fifteen or twenty times.

I decided to call the contraption …

Voom!

… after the mysterious snow-clearing force (or spirit, or what have you) in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, which Samuel and I have been reading. That book, obviously, is about Matthew 12:43–45:

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none.

Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished.

Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

The narrator blames the infestation of cats on the one with the hat, but I wonder if he is just diverting blame away from himself, like the narrator in the horror-noir Detour. Are the children, Conrad and Sally, really as dutiful as they say they are? Where is the prophetic fish who guided the children’s morals in the earlier book? Is Conrad even who we think he is? His name, appearance, and behavior seem to change from one story to the next.

Who is to say that these children are not really Jay and Kay, the not-so-conscientious siblings in One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish?

That which is hidden in snow

I guess you could say we’ve been conducting our own little dig here in Mishawaka.

It snowed all weekend, and this morning it was almost thirty (Fahrenheit) degrees below freezing. We’ve tried shoveling the driveway and sidewalks – Karin, especially, is an impressive digger – but 2–3 inches of snow and ice remain stuck to the ground.

The good news is that we ordered an electric “snow blaster,” which UPS just delivered.

It doesn’t store its power, so we’ll have to use an extension cord. Ours is long enough for all but ten feet of the sidewalk. Perhaps the cord on the “snow blaster” will make up the difference.

Last night, Karin couldn’t bring her car all the way up the driveway and into the garage. We shifted as much snow as we could, and we scattered salt to melt the snow and cat litter to improve the traction. I pushed the car; Karin drove it several feet; but, inevitably, it’d hit some thick patch, and the tires would spin in place.

In the end, we decided to leave the car in a section of the driveway we knew Karin could maneuver out of.

All of this took an hour. I would periodically return to the house to check on Samuel, who had gone to sleep eating his supper.

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After we went inside, we heated some food, crawled under our blankets, and watched four episodes of Det som göms i snö – The Truth Will Out, or, literally, “That Which Is Hidden in Snow” – an excellent Swedish crime series. It seemed appropriate.

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The polar vortex reaches down to Texas, where many are without electricity, including Ana, David, and little Ada. Until recently, they were sleeping all bundled up inside their cold house and spending waking hours in their heated car. (The hotels were full.) Then someone lent them a cottage. It is unpowered – but it is heated.

The dig

Poe wrote “A Valentine” …

But, for a more affecting Valentine’s Day poem, see the previous entry.

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For our own Valentine’s Day, Karin & I watched The Dig, a new Netflix movie about the excavation at Sutton Hoo upon the eve of the Second World War.

(Was the theme of searching in Britain’s “lonely earth” suggested by the TV show Detectorists? The actor Johnny Flynn is a link between the two productions.)

The Dig is an imperfect movie with some transcendent moments. Its success is due to its two lead performers. Ralph Fiennes plays a humble “excavator” – he lacks an archaeologist’s formal training – and Carey Mulligan is the widow who hires him to dig on her land.

He is a true craftsman who works for the love of his art, expecting to pass unnoticed, uncredited.

She is a person of steely resolve. Even so, she is unsettled by a presentiment of death – of oblivion.

The recovery of the ancient gravesite has existential resonance for them both. So does connection with the past. They live in a moment when their culture faces a terrible threat.

Artifacts turn up; other interested parties jump in. The dig becomes a bit of a circus. Fiennes and Mulligan retreat into the background. This is a letdown after the beautiful simplicity of the opening, in which the two lonely principals together survey this bleak land under its striking sky.

But the supporting characters – some of whom are cultural gatekeepers and preservers, others whose lives will be upended by war – do reinforce an important point. Oblivion beckons to civilization, also. The threat recurs above the level of mere individuality.

This is an anxious time in our own history. Not only are things very bad, the old foundation seems about to disintegrate. Though The Dig is a period piece, it feels up-to-date; it takes the pulse of our moment more cannily than most new movies do.

February’s poem

Poe, “To My Mother”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,

The angels, whispering to one another,

Can find, among their burning terms of love,

None so devotional as that of “Mother,”

Therefore by that dear name I long have called you –

You who are more than mother unto me,

And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you

In setting my Virginia’s spirit free.

My mother – my own mother, who died early,

Was but the mother of myself; but you

Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,

And thus are dearer than the mother I knew

By that infinity with which my wife

Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

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Meanwhile, in Ecuador …

On Sunday, Ecuadorians voted.

Andrés Arauz is the candidate of the correístas, the followers of that notorious ex-president, Rafael Correa. Arauz received the most votes of all the candidates, but not enough to win outright. A runoff election on April 11 will determine who becomes the new president.

Arauz’s opponent – Sunday’s runner-up – is TBD.

There are two contenders. One is Yaku Pérez, of Pachakutik (the indigenist party). The other is the 2017 runner-up, the banker Guillermo Lasso, who trails Pérez by less than one percentage point.

(Only the top two vote-getters will qualify for the next round. The rules are explained here.)

El Universo’s map of results shows the election playing out along ethnic lines. Pérez leads in virtually every province that has a large percentage of indigenous voters. Elsewhere, Arauz leads. Lasso is ahead only in Pichincha (the capital) and in sparsely populated Galápagos.

(Votes, not provinces, are what matter. Looking at provinces just helps us to understand regional and demographic trends.)

My hunch is that if Lasso were edged out, his supporters wouldn’t turn to Pérez in large enough numbers for Pérez to surge past Arauz in the next round (though Lasso himself would endorse Pérez over Arauz). Similarly, should Pérez fail to qualify for the runoff, his voters wouldn’t likely favor Lasso enough for Arauz to be defeated.

I have left thirty percent of the voters unaccounted for: those who didn’t choose any of the top three candidates. There is reason to think that those favoring Xavier Hervas, the next highest vote-getter, would migrate to Pérez (Hervas’s fellow lefty). Even so, I believe that Arauz will win in the second round.

I’m not at all optimistic about the correístas’ ability to govern. In the past, they have practiced gross patronage. Their economic strategy has been to take oil from indigenous peoples’ lands in order to pay for handouts and public works (and white elephants).

Anti-correístas, though, are in the curious position of having to promote aspects of both the free-market agenda (Lasso’s) and the ecologically-minded, “plurinationalist” agenda (Pérez’s) over that of Arauz, who is arguably the centrist among the three candidates. This is because any joint effort to defeat the correístas will have to bring opposite sides together.

Meanwhile, the international press seems not to have as much to say as in 2017. My mother did send this rather bizarre story from The Guardian detailing the connections between a smear campaign, birdsong, and Colombian guerrilleros. And this report from CNN gives a sense of the appeal of Pérez, the election’s dark horse.

A bookish lad

I suppose it was inevitable that, in my second year as a father, this blog should have become an inventory of children’s books (and children’s music, movies, and TV).

Yesterday, reading “The Sneetches” to the boy, I had an epiphany:

This is the story that explains the oeuvre of George Saunders.

He has long been producing variants of “The Sneetches.”

I also knew why the actor Kurtwood Smith has always looked familiar. He is the spitting image of the Zax. Even his nude scene in Cedar Rapids owes a great deal to the Zax.

We went to the library this afternoon. Samuel loves it there. His face lit up when I took him to the sale aisle. Then he cried when I took him away, but he forgot his sorrow when Karin permitted him to explore the stacks.

Foxes

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A fox has been slinking around in our neighborhood. I saw it last night, and Karin has seen it a few times. Foxes are among her favorite animals.

Samuel owns many toy foxes:

• Edward Fox
• Emilia Fox
• Frankie Fox
• James Fox
• Megan Fox

They’re all named for actors (except Frankie Fox, who already had that name when he came out of his package). I suspect that the next fox I pull out of a drawer or closet will receive the name Michael J. Fox – or Kerry Fox, if she’s a vixen. And after we have used all the Fox names, we’ll help ourselves to the names of various Foxxes.

Samuel just loves all his little animals. He loves the kitties, too, though they don’t often let him get near to them.

He screeched delightedly a couple of nights ago when we watched My Neighbor Totoro. Since then, I’ve been carrying him around the house and dancing to the soundtrack: