A “promotion to glory”; 1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 59: Matilda
Today, two entries in one. The reason is an unexpected death.
R.I.P. Frank Payton of the Ithaca Corps, perhaps my dearest friend in that city. He worked as a Salvation Army officer in Pennsylvania, Argentina, the Bronx, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Jamaica. With his wife, Yvonne, he had five children, as well as grand- and great-grandchildren. In retirement, he befriended orphans, widows, aliens (yours truly), and outcasts (yours truly).
The acknowledgments section in my dissertation ends like this:
Frank was the youngest and quietest of the brothers. Ernest and George made friends through force of will; Ernest, especially, could be terrifyingly jolly. Frank was unassuming. He would simply listen; or, if there was nothing to listen to, he’d humbly and persistently talk about himself to draw out the other person. He came to know, and to genuinely sympathize with, almost everyone in the church. (I knew his sympathy was real because I’d hear him speak of other people when they weren’t around.) He also was my guide to Ithaca and its environs, touring waterfalls and gorges with me and driving me around Cayuga Lake.
Moreover – and this is a quality that I appreciate in a missionary – he really knew his Spanish, though perhaps not as well as Yvonne, who once translated during a meeting with Fidel Castro. Like the apostles in the Book of Acts, Yvonne and Frank and their siblings had a knack for meeting important people without especially trying or wishing to do so. They knew almost every Salvation Army General. They knew Pope Francis when he lived in Argentina. Some modest people are like that.
This photo is from Ithaca.com:
I think he looks rather good.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Matilda
Now, as planned, this month’s movie review.
The grotesque parents of little Matilda Wormwood never read books. They only watch the worst dreck on TV. They brag about how accomplished and stylish they are (they are neither accomplished nor stylish). They block themselves off from whatever normalcy and beauty there is in the outside world, and they try to ensure the same for Matilda (Mara Wilson) and her older brother. With the brother, they appear to be succeeding.
Roger Ebert cuts through to the heart of this hyperbolic children’s story, asking: Why is this director a match for this source material? What does this movie have in common with the director’s other movies? Watch just one movie directed by, or starring, Danny DeVito, and you’d mistake it for a bit of bleak but insubstantial fun. Look at more of his work, and you can identify a current with real pull having to do with families and how they wound.
There are different ways of wounding. Matilda’s parents wound her by misunderstanding her. They are not innocent; their misunderstanding is the predictable consequence of willful, selfish myopia.
“You’re the only daughter I ever had,” says Matilda’s mother, Zinnia Wormwood (Rhea Perlman), when they are about to part forever. “And I never understood you, not one little bit.”
This sounds like an acknowledgment, but it’s of a piece with the mother’s selfishness. It’s an expression of self-absolution, of self-pity. It ignores the fact that she never tried to understand her daughter nor, indeed, anything apart from her own comfort.
It is, in effect, the last in a long series of accusations that Matilda is un-understandable. It is a parting blow, whether or not it is intended as such. And it is unfair.
Actually, Matilda in Roald Dahl’s book is rather un-understandable. She is blandly calm and self-possessed. (At least, that’s how I remember her from the book; certainly, that is how Quentin Blake draws her.) She is alarmingly calculating in her dispensation of retribution.
DeVito’s movie seems less keen on dispassionate retribution as such. Matilda has no wish to aid the FBI agents who clumsily spy on her father, Harry Wormwood (DeVito), a stratospherically dishonest used-car salesman. She acts from feeling. She reads books because she loves them. When she rebels against her parents, it’s because she’s hurt: you can see it on little Mara Wilson’s face. When Matilda rebels against her school’s monstrous headmistress, Agatha Trunchbull (Pam Ferris), it is to defend her classmates and their kind teacher, Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz), whom she loves.
The worst misdeed of Matilda’s parents is that they casually deliver her into the clutches of “The Trunchbull.” It is interesting to note what this character has in common with the disgusting, sadistic Nazi prison warden in Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties. Physique, certainly; dress, certainly; depravity, certainly. Cunning, no. The special cruelty of Wertmüller’s Nazi is that she makes her prisoners complicit in attrocities committed against themselves and each other. “The Trunchbull” only succeeds in uniting her victims against her. Even so, she’s pretty bad. She swings a little girl by her pigtails. She forces a fat boy to eat an entire chocolate cake. She throws disobedient children into a spiked closet called “The Chokey.” She howls and yells and stomps and berates. She terrorizes Miss Honey. If Matilda’s parents personify Neglect, “The Trunchbull” personifies Abuse. One of these evils opens a door for the other.
This gutwrenching material is watchable because the vile characters are so ridiculous and the children – the victims – are half-amused and have a decent measure of control over their situation. (As in Carrie, Matilda even has telekinetic powers.) All things considered, this is a gentle satire of terrible things (which, perhaps, is unsettling in itself). But how else might these themes be treated? How else to put them into children’s fiction, which is where they belong, since the victims are children? Show these wrongs with unblinking realism, and they’d be unbearable; better to do as this movie does. It’s like a Grimm Brothers tale in U.S. suburbia. (Dahl’s book is set in Britain, but the change makes little difference.)
R.I.P. Frank Payton of the Ithaca Corps, perhaps my dearest friend in that city. He worked as a Salvation Army officer in Pennsylvania, Argentina, the Bronx, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Jamaica. With his wife, Yvonne, he had five children, as well as grand- and great-grandchildren. In retirement, he befriended orphans, widows, aliens (yours truly), and outcasts (yours truly).
The acknowledgments section in my dissertation ends like this:
Many people prayed for me. I can’t list them all. I do, however, wish to name some generous members of Ithaca’s Salvation Army Corps. During my seven years in Ithaca, these friends made it their routine, on Sundays, to buy lunch for me; and though we tended to disagree about politics, they always encouraged and accepted me. This dissertation is lovingly dedicated to four retired “officer” couples:I’d regularly go to Frank & Yvonne’s for Thanksgiving, the Super Bowl, and other events. We got to know each other’s families. I’d do the occasional shift of Christmas bell-ringing with Frank. In my last two or three years in Ithaca, after it had become reasonable for the Salvationists to assume that I wasn’t a thief, I helped Frank and his brothers, Ernest and George, to gather money from the Christmas kettles and straighten out the bills for feeding into the bill-counting machine. (The brothers called themselves the “Bill Straightener Sergeants” or, for short, “B.S. Sergeants”; actually, one was a Major and two were Colonels. That’s Army humor for you.) We’d eat donuts and listen to music that the brothers would allow me to choose: had they done the choosing, it would’ve been nonstop brass band music.
- “Sunshine” and Walter Guldenschuh;
- Ernest Payton (d. 2017) and Joan Payton;
- George and Grace Payton, who asked to be acknowledged here;
- and Frank and Yvonne Payton, who are my favorites.
Frank was the youngest and quietest of the brothers. Ernest and George made friends through force of will; Ernest, especially, could be terrifyingly jolly. Frank was unassuming. He would simply listen; or, if there was nothing to listen to, he’d humbly and persistently talk about himself to draw out the other person. He came to know, and to genuinely sympathize with, almost everyone in the church. (I knew his sympathy was real because I’d hear him speak of other people when they weren’t around.) He also was my guide to Ithaca and its environs, touring waterfalls and gorges with me and driving me around Cayuga Lake.
Moreover – and this is a quality that I appreciate in a missionary – he really knew his Spanish, though perhaps not as well as Yvonne, who once translated during a meeting with Fidel Castro. Like the apostles in the Book of Acts, Yvonne and Frank and their siblings had a knack for meeting important people without especially trying or wishing to do so. They knew almost every Salvation Army General. They knew Pope Francis when he lived in Argentina. Some modest people are like that.
This photo is from Ithaca.com:
I think he looks rather good.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Matilda
Now, as planned, this month’s movie review.
The grotesque parents of little Matilda Wormwood never read books. They only watch the worst dreck on TV. They brag about how accomplished and stylish they are (they are neither accomplished nor stylish). They block themselves off from whatever normalcy and beauty there is in the outside world, and they try to ensure the same for Matilda (Mara Wilson) and her older brother. With the brother, they appear to be succeeding.
Roger Ebert cuts through to the heart of this hyperbolic children’s story, asking: Why is this director a match for this source material? What does this movie have in common with the director’s other movies? Watch just one movie directed by, or starring, Danny DeVito, and you’d mistake it for a bit of bleak but insubstantial fun. Look at more of his work, and you can identify a current with real pull having to do with families and how they wound.
There are different ways of wounding. Matilda’s parents wound her by misunderstanding her. They are not innocent; their misunderstanding is the predictable consequence of willful, selfish myopia.
“You’re the only daughter I ever had,” says Matilda’s mother, Zinnia Wormwood (Rhea Perlman), when they are about to part forever. “And I never understood you, not one little bit.”
This sounds like an acknowledgment, but it’s of a piece with the mother’s selfishness. It’s an expression of self-absolution, of self-pity. It ignores the fact that she never tried to understand her daughter nor, indeed, anything apart from her own comfort.
It is, in effect, the last in a long series of accusations that Matilda is un-understandable. It is a parting blow, whether or not it is intended as such. And it is unfair.
Actually, Matilda in Roald Dahl’s book is rather un-understandable. She is blandly calm and self-possessed. (At least, that’s how I remember her from the book; certainly, that is how Quentin Blake draws her.) She is alarmingly calculating in her dispensation of retribution.
DeVito’s movie seems less keen on dispassionate retribution as such. Matilda has no wish to aid the FBI agents who clumsily spy on her father, Harry Wormwood (DeVito), a stratospherically dishonest used-car salesman. She acts from feeling. She reads books because she loves them. When she rebels against her parents, it’s because she’s hurt: you can see it on little Mara Wilson’s face. When Matilda rebels against her school’s monstrous headmistress, Agatha Trunchbull (Pam Ferris), it is to defend her classmates and their kind teacher, Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz), whom she loves.
The worst misdeed of Matilda’s parents is that they casually deliver her into the clutches of “The Trunchbull.” It is interesting to note what this character has in common with the disgusting, sadistic Nazi prison warden in Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties. Physique, certainly; dress, certainly; depravity, certainly. Cunning, no. The special cruelty of Wertmüller’s Nazi is that she makes her prisoners complicit in attrocities committed against themselves and each other. “The Trunchbull” only succeeds in uniting her victims against her. Even so, she’s pretty bad. She swings a little girl by her pigtails. She forces a fat boy to eat an entire chocolate cake. She throws disobedient children into a spiked closet called “The Chokey.” She howls and yells and stomps and berates. She terrorizes Miss Honey. If Matilda’s parents personify Neglect, “The Trunchbull” personifies Abuse. One of these evils opens a door for the other.
This gutwrenching material is watchable because the vile characters are so ridiculous and the children – the victims – are half-amused and have a decent measure of control over their situation. (As in Carrie, Matilda even has telekinetic powers.) All things considered, this is a gentle satire of terrible things (which, perhaps, is unsettling in itself). But how else might these themes be treated? How else to put them into children’s fiction, which is where they belong, since the victims are children? Show these wrongs with unblinking realism, and they’d be unbearable; better to do as this movie does. It’s like a Grimm Brothers tale in U.S. suburbia. (Dahl’s book is set in Britain, but the change makes little difference.)
