Closing credits

Merry Christmas!

Rejoice, rejoice, daughter of Zion,

shout aloud, daughter of Jerusalem;

for see, your king is coming to you,

his cause won, his victory gained,

humble and mounted on an ass,

on a foal, the young of a she-ass.

He shall banish chariots from Ephraim

and war-horses from Jerusalem;

the warrior’s bow shall be banished.

He shall speak peaceably to every nation,

and his rule shall extend from sea to sea,

from the River to the ends of the earth.

Zecharaiah 9:9–10 (The New English Bible – the translation I read this year).

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Farewell, for the time being, to my step-grandma, who has gone to live with her daughter in southern Illinois; and to my grandpa (R.I.P.).

“He is not God of the dead but of the living” (Matthew 22:32).

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Welcome, Abel Barnaby, my littlest son. How celebrated he is, everywhere we take him.

Daniel and Samuel seem untroubled by him. The cats seem downright unaware of Abel, although Abel himself, so young, sounds like a cat (that’s how I distinguish him in a crowd of children).

Karin said today that she had one aim this year, which was to have this child. Abel, so-called, has been with us a short time. As “Pip,” however, he was ever-present in our talk.

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Samuel has begun school spectacularly. We’ve been given to understand that he’s popular – a shock to us. His classmates look out for him. One friend follows him around and pulls his sagging pants up for him.

If Samuel is our introvert, Daniel is our good-natured scene-stealer. He’s the one with whom librarians and store clerks chat.

Winsome or taciturn, whatever you are or do, do it for the Lord.

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Sports. Ecuador finished with a great victory that cast a nice glow over a frustrating year. (Indeed, this summer’s Copa América showing was rather good.)

At the club level, Moisés Caicedo and Piero Hincapié proved their worth.

Our Olympians also triumphed.

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Politics. Ha!

Exercising. Ha!

Music. The song I listened to the most, by far, was “Style” by Taylor Swift: both versions: hers (re-recorded), and the original with copyright ajeno. I’d often choose “Style” as my lead housecleaning song.

I listened to almost nothing else by Taylor Swift.

Honorable mention: Dettinger.

Viewing. I subscribed to the Criterion Channel.

I’d often fall asleep viewing true crime shows on Tubi. I may write about Australian vs. Canadian crime.

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Reading. I joined a club and was forced to read books I’d never choose so that I might force others to read books they’d never choose. This is salutary. Everyone needs reminding that there are other consciousnesses in the universe. “We read to know we’re not alone” (misattributed to C. S. Lewis). More like, we join book clubs to learn that, alas, one is not alone.

That said, what follows has to do with my private reading choices. I read two or more titles by these authors:

• E. M. Forster
• Jon Fosse
• C. S. Lewis
• Nancy Mitford
• Anthony Powell
• Peter Temple
• J. R. R. Tolkien
• Laura Ingalls Wilder

They’re all good authors, but whom you mightn’t’ve read but really should is Mitford. And, for linguistic virtuosity, Temple.

I’m probably the last grownup among my blood relations to have finished reading The Lord of the Rings. I made my first attempt in the fourth grade. That year, my parents bought me an extra birthday gift – a t-shirt – on the condition that I’d finish Tolkien’s series. That albatross has finally been cast off. It was necessary, first, to outgrow the shirt; to obtain the Ph.D. and sire three children; to read through the Bible several times; to read Beowulf, and the eleven Strangers and Brothers novels (for a better feel for Oxbridge). To learn to slog. It was no small victory, gaining the knowledge and courage and endurance to leave the Shire and cross Middle Earth.

Proust is on the docket for 2025, once I’ve finished Powell; after Proust, possibly Trollope or Balzac. But I doubt I’ll ever read The Silmarillion. Too few hobbits; too many elves.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 73: Angela

Ray Bradbury wrote a story, “The Miracles of Jamie,” about a boy with a sick mother, who believes that he has the power to heal: indeed, that he’s the second coming of Christ. I thought of it as I was watching Angela; and yet there’s a crucial difference between these stories.

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Down by the bay

Where the watermelons grow

Back to my home

I dare not go

For if I do

My mother will say

Did you ever see a _____ (goose kissing a moose)/⁠(fly wearing a tie)/⁠(etc.)

Down by the bay

Six-year-old Ellie sings this during the opening credits. Perhaps she’s subconsciously thinking of her unwell mother (Anna Thomson – the scarred prostitute in Unforgiven) who alternates between despair and mania. But Ellie could just as easily be singing about Angie, her ten-year-old sister and de facto mother. Angie, too, is perturbed. She has visions of Lucifer, who supposedly lives in the cellar and intends to drag one of the family away with him. To stave him off, Angie and Ellie wander around their town and its environs, performing rituals of purification.

Their father neglects them. He is busy caring for their mother. Not a believer himself, he takes the family to church, hoping that it will have a calming effect. Instead, church provides Angie with the materials for building an alternate reality.

Dread suffuses this movie. Ellie re-enacts one of Angie’s rituals and sets a curtain on fire. Later, she and Angie drift toward menacing strangers: a sleepwalker, and a pedophile prowling a fairground. Angie is convinced that these people are angels. Amusingly, this belief is not unprotective. The pedophile is about to harm the girls when Angie’s religious fervor frightens him away. Angie attends a baptismal service. The baptizer, played by the ghoulish Vincent Gallo, dunks Angie in the river three times. Do it again, she insists. This is too much, even for Gallo.

Angie creates her own symbols, and the movie employs symbols I don’t understand. The girls find a white stallion in a field and lead him through the town. They visit a mechanic’s shop where all the workers are named Frank. Their babysitter suddenly goes into labor; Angie delivers the child. Angie and Ellie visit another family with many children. It’s announced that the cow is about to calve. The other children drop everything and leave to watch – but not Angie and Ellie, for whom birthing is old hat. Much of this is quietly funny. There’s dread, but there’s gentle humor, too. Even Lucifer, pale, handsome, and forlorn, is amusing, because he’s in his skivvies.

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A review of the Criterion DVD says:

The commentary track … works much like a crossword puzzle’s answer key: It gives everything away, effectively ending the interesting part of the puzzle, but it’s still nice to know it’s available to provide closure. The 1995 debut feature of writer-director Rebecca Miller … is more enigmatic and open to interpretation than a crossword puzzle, however, and her decision to clearly lay out all the answers is a little surprising.

Miller is interesting. I enjoyed her performance in Carroll Ballard’s Wind. I’ve not seen Personal Velocity, her most famous directorial effort, but I’ve seen The Ballad of Jack & Rose, in which an isolated girl insists on maintaining a very unconventional life for herself and her sick father.

Angie and Ellie are socially, if not spatially, isolated because their family has to keep moving (the mother keeps getting into trouble). The children may sporadically attend church and pick up some religious ideas, but no one checks whether they’re orthodox; for example, Angie never learns that one baptism suffices. The consequences of not grasping this point are disastrous. (Incidentally, my church held a baptism this morning, and our pastor explained what our church teaches about that practice. It was very clear. The Devil wasn’t mentioned. Curiously, he is mentioned in baptismal scenes in movies, like this one. I don’t know if any actual Christian baptismal tradition refers to the Devil.)

I doubt Miller is trying to say much about orthodoxy, but she certainly cares about making one’s belief system, and one’s way of life, authentically one’s own. The most obtuse adult in Angela is the father. Responsible and genial, he effaces himself to support his family. As a corollary, he placates his daughters and wife without taking them seriously; he ends up breaking promises and exploding in frustration. (Yet it’s hard to see what else he might have done.) His wife, an expressive type who used to perform onstage, may be breaking down, but she’s determined not to go a way that isn’t hers. Slender, sad-faced Thomson gives the movie’s best performance; is she supposed to recall Marilyn Monroe, who was married to Miller’s father, the playwright, Arthur? (I hope this rather crude speculation isn’t downright disrespectful.)

As for the children, Angie seems to be authentically following a vocation, however confusedly: saving her family from Lucifer. It involves real anguish. She fears someone must be sacrificed, and she struggles to accept that she might have to surrender herself; this is where the story differs from Bradbury’s. Finally, Ellie is the person for whom the sacrifice is made; the movie begins and ends with her.

Have a blessed Easter.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 63: Secrets & lies

Is this the best movie of 1996? I think so. It has as much heart as Shine and as much cinematic virtuosity as Fargo. Secrets & Lies is a high-wire act, a controlled outpouring of uncontrolled emotion and verbiage with close-ups of tears, glares, and twitches.

When serious acting so outrageously violates the “less is more” principle, it has to be very, very skillful to come off as well as it does here.

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Hortense’s adoptive parents have died. Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a young optometrist, makes an appointment with a social worker (the great Lesley Manville, one of director Mike Leigh’s regular actors). If you want to contact your birth family, the social worker tells Hortense, consider using our agency: We’re professionals.

The social worker is full of words but also, somehow, distant. She’s an energetic bureaucrat going through the motions.

Hortense chooses to find her birth family on her own.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

One discovery surprises her. Although Hortense is black, the birth records show that her mother is white. Of course, as a matter of genetics, that’s not unheard of, and Hortense and the other characters accept it readily enough.

What shocks Hortense’s biological family is that Hortense should exist at all. The mother, Cynthia (the spectacular Brenda Blethyn), kept quiet about her first child, whom, as a teenager, she gave away without having seen.

Hortense easily finds Cynthia, who still lives in the same grubby East London house where she grew up. She’s had a hard life, working in a factory and raising a second daughter – who is white – the scowling street-sweeper Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook). Cynthia also cared for her father, now deceased, and her younger brother, the gentle, affable Maurice (Timothy Spall).

Cynthia often quarrels with Roxanne but seldom sees Maurice, who has moved with his class-anxious wife, Monica (Phyllis Logan), into a large house in a richer part of town. Maurice has “made good.” He runs a small but prosperous photography studio. He shoots weddings and portraits. He often plays peacemaker with his subjects, as he has been forced to do for Monica, Cynthia, and Roxanne.

He exudes goodness. So does Hortense. Either would make a worthy hero. Arguably, however, the hero of this story is the least reasonable person: the lonely, volatile Cynthia. She may be difficult to live with, but she has given her all.

It took many viewings for me to decide that Cynthia is the hero.

A Mike Leigh protagonist is multifaceted. He or she might seem wonderful upon one viewing and beyond-the-pale awful the next time. Or vice versa.

Who is the hero of the Book of Ruth? (God, of course; but which of the humans?)

Is it the young titular character, who bravely throws in her lot with her griefstricken second mother? Is it the hospitable Boaz?

Or is it old Naomi? She doesn’t just rest in the unexpected love of her new daughter. Instead, she sets up a proper home for Ruth by contriving – perhaps rather desperately and comically – to fully incorporate her into the family.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As in Fargo, there’s one memorable sequence in Secrets & Lies that bears a significance that isn’t immediately obvious.

Maurice photographs a beautiful young woman in his studio. A hideous scar runs across one side of her face. She is a car crash victim. The photographs are for her insurers – she has lost her job as a beauty consultant – and also, perhaps, for use in a lawsuit. The woman is consumed by bitterness.

Someone always draws the short straw, Maurice reflects (and not for the first time).

As soon as the woman leaves, a disheveled man crosses the street and walks into the studio. He is the previous owner. Years ago, he sold the business to Maurice and moved to Australia, where he failed to establish himself. Now he has returned. He, too, is bitter.

There but for the grace of God go I, Maurice reflects.

These two characters have no influence on what happens between Hortense and her new family. Why are they in the movie? The implicit contrast is with Cynthia, who also “drew the short straw.” Like these people, she is lonely and sad and desperate. But she isn’t consumed. She’s still able to love and to be loved, and that’s what saves her and her family.

Not that they don’t have bitterness or meanness to overcome. The movie is called “secrets and lies,” after all. There is the secret of Hortense, Cynthia’s first child; and Monica and Maurice have a secret of their own.

I’m not doing justice to this rich movie.

P.S. When I first saw it, as a teenager in a Quito cinema, the color looked washed out – as in the above image. It looked washed out every time I saw the movie on VHS or DVD. Now the color is vibrant. It seems to have been touched up for the movie’s re-release through Criterion. The movie is beautiful to look at; it’s not only a balm for the soul.

Sjöwall & Wahlöö

In spare moments, I’ve been reading The Terrorists (1975), the last book of Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s crime series.

It begins with a scene of grotesquely comical political violence in South America.

My favorite policeman in the series, Gunvald Larsson, is on hand for the occasion. A fastidious dresser, he’s delighted to find that the banana republic he’s visiting has excellent tailors. (Apparently, tailoring is no longer practiced as a skilled craft in Sweden.) He commissions a new suit to be made for him.

This suit is, of course, ruined during the political upheaval.

A little later, in Stockholm, a young woman is brought to trial for robbing a bank. It’s proven that the “robbery” was a misunderstanding. All the young woman had done was to ask for money and to place a bag on the teller’s counter for the money to be put in. The teller had interpreted these actions as extremely threatening.

These facts are drawn out through the testimony of two other recurring characters, the bumbling patrolmen Kristiansson and Kvastmo.

Next, a famous pornographer is fatally coshed in his mistress’s house. The now very high-ranking detective Martin Beck is assigned to the case. He and a junior detective, Benny Skacke, spend a morning watching one of the pornographer’s movies, Love in the Midnight Sun.

At first, the junior detective winces uncomfortably at all the nudity. Then he yawns. The movie is very boring and unerotic.

This is clearly a lampooning of those Swedish “masterpieces” of the late 1960s, I Am Curious (Yellow) and I Am Curious (Blue), which are now in the Criterion Collection. (No, I haven’t watched them.)

As I’ve read through its ten books, Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s series has reminded me of something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something with lots of recurring, cartoon-like characters and scenes of wry screwball comedy.

Now I know what it is.

It’s Tintin.