1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 40: Kingpin

I wonder if, when they made The Big Lebowski (1998), the Coen Brothers deliberately set out to one-up the Farrelly Brothers.

Nice comedy, I imagine the Coens saying. But here’s where Kingpin goes wrong.

A bowling movie should be about the LOOK of the sport.

Balls.

Pins.

Wood.

Those props deserve to be lavishly displayed.

Kingpin’s visual treatment of them is perfunctory.

Well – the Farrellies might reply – your own bowling movie isn’t really a BOWLING movie.

It has no sense of sporting drama.

WE showcase the slow tumbling of the pins.

The satisfying sound of the strike.

The agony of the 7–10 split.

Why aren’t THOSE things front-and-center in The Big Lebowski?

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Not that the Farrellies are bowling purists. Kingpin takes the slum-sport formula of movies like The Hustler and The Color of Money and lampoons it.

Bowling, not billiards. Otherwise, the elements are the same.

The general squalor.

A down-and-out virtuoso (Woody Harrelson).

The dame (Vanessa Angel).

The virtuoso’s pupil (Randy Quaid).

But Kingpin has a wild card: the pupil is a nice, strapping Amish farmer who is forced to hide his bowling from the disapproving community. This is what makes Kingpin original.

Other stuff – e.g., Bill Murray’s performance as Harrelson’s over-the-top nemesis – is funny, but it’s been done before.

And yes, it’s funny but unoriginal that the Harrelson character is a bowler with a maimed hand. 1996 was a good year for that sort of thing. Happy Gilmore and Shine are two other movies in which a precocious young man is mentored by an older virtuoso with a maimed hand.

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Anyway, what’s wrong with a little recycling? The Farrellies even recycle their own material. There’s a confrontation at a roadside diner that is pretty similar to a scene from Dumb and Dumber. That’s OK: in both movies, it works.

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Some viewers might take offense at the movie’s portrayal of the Amish. I think Kingpin is a pretty good satire of other cinematic portrayals of the Amish. Two of the funniest scenes – the milking scene and the barn-raising scene – are sly digs at Witness.

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I wish to conclude by praising Vanessa Angel. I don’t remember seeing her in anything else, but here she holds her own against Harrelson, Murray, and Quaid. You can watch those guys in plenty of other movies. Kingpin is Angel’s movie.

A far-right political party

Samuel has good and bad days. On Monday, we again tried to use cloth diapers on him. He cried every waking minute, except when held. Today he cheerfully spent hours playing with his toes. I was able to wash the dishes that had been stacking up since the weekend.

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I viewed a couple of Oscar nominees that I missed when I was younger.

Elizabeth wasn’t great.

The Pianist, which I saw yesterday, was much better. It concludes with forty-five minutes of shattering quietness. As in Shine – another movie of music and Holocaust survival – a sort of love, or at least fellow-feeling, blesses the protagonist.

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I also saw Elizabethtown for the first time in over a decade. I realized I’d overlooked that Claire, the Kirsten Dunst character, is, in fact, a spirit sent to coax the protagonist into choosing to live, like the angel Clarence of It’s a Wonderful Life. (I’m not the first to notice this: this guy already has. Not that I agree with him about all the particulars.)

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A northern-hemisphere-style, far-right party has formed in Ecuador. According to El Universo,

Más que por los postulados que defienden, se apasionan por lo que rechazan. Reivindican los valores cristianos, la familia, la vida, la corrección moral, el libre mercado, el porte de armas, la propiedad privada y la hispanidad. Y, con la misma o mayor vehemencia, rechazan cualquier atisbo de izquierda, feminismo, ambientalismo o, lo que llaman, “internacionalismo infantil”, refiriéndose a los Organismos de derechos humanos de la ONU o la OEA.

Which I translate:

They are stirred less by the principles they accept than by what they reject. They affirm Christian values, the family, the sanctity of life, moral fine-tuning, the free market, arms-bearing, private property, and Hispanism. And, with equal or greater vehemence, they reject any hint of the left, of feminism, of environmentalism, or of what they call “infantile internationalism,” referring to such human rights organizations as the United Nations or the Organization of American States.

Their flag is like those of Alabama and Florida in showing a red saltire on a white background. Specifically, it shows the Cross of Burgundy, a Hispanic symbol (Hispanic in the narrow sense of European Spain).

This is an odd development for Ecuador. I suppose one could explain it as an extreme reaction to the “pink” government of the last dozen years, though it strikes me as yet another foreign import totally out of step with the broader national culture (not unlike the extreme free-market emphasis of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, where many of the pelucones and would-be pelucones study).

It’s odd, yes, but there’ve been similar and more alarming developments in, e.g., Brazil.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 22: The English patient

There was an unconventional Hungarian aristocrat named László Almásy who explored the Sahara in the 1930s. He had love affairs and died before he was old, but not in the spectacular fashion of Count Almásy of The English Patient.

The fictional Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) finds himself rolling across the desert in a (proto-) jeep with young Mrs. Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). She is talkative. He is quiet. She asks: How does a count make his way from the castle to the desert? Almásy replies:

I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn’t speak for nine hours. At the end of it, he pointed at the horizon and said, “Faya.” That was a good day.

His answer is evasive. He already is in love with Katharine, whose husband is assisting him with his geographic expedition.

Almásy does what he can to keep himself at arm’s length from Katharine. Then they are caught in a sandstorm. It gathers quietly in the distance, obscuring the stars. Minutes later, Almásy and Katharine are forced to shelter together for the night while the sand beats against the jeep’s windows.

It is too much for Almásy. He strokes Katharine’s hair.

ALMÁSY: “Let me tell you about winds. There is a whirlwind from southern Morrocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. And there is the ghibli, from Tunis …”

KATHARINE: “The ghibli !!!”

ALMÁSY: “The ghibli, which rolls and rolls and rolls and produces a rather strange nervous condition. And then there is the harmattan, a red wind, which mariners call the Sea of Darkness. And red sand from this wind has flown as far as the south coast of England, apparently producing showers so dense that they were mistaken for blood.”

KATHARINE: “Fiction! We have a house on that coast and it has never, never rained blood.”

ALMÁSY: “No, it’s all true. Herodotus, your friend. He writes about it. And he writes about a wind, the simoon, which a nation thought was so evil they declared war on it and marched out against it. In full battle dress. Their swords raised.”

There are scenes of such poetry all through The English Patient. Some of it is verbal; much is visual. The desert is a frequent backdrop. It is likened in different scenes to a human body, to a rumpled bedsheet, a slab of rock, a strip of parchment. As Shine is obsessed with the different appearances and meanings of drops of water, The English Patient showcases sand dunes and grains of sand.

Like Shine, again, The English Patient shifts backward and forward through time. Almásy’s moments with Katharine are deathbed recollections. He has been severely burned, and his lungs are failing. Mistaken for an Englishman, he is in Italy at the close of the Second World War, being cared for in an abandoned villa by Hana (Juliette Binoche), a French-Canadian nurse who has dropped out of her British military convoy to see this patient through his last days. Hana’s lover has just been killed; in Almásy, she recognizes a person similarly bereaved. She asks for his memories, which he divulges intermittently – as they return to him – or perhaps as he chooses to let others know them.

The villa gathers more occupants. Two are bomb disposal experts (the land is littered with mines). Another (Willem Dafoe) is a shadowy figure who calls himself Caravaggio. He, too, urges Almásy to recollect his past.

It is an international group, most of whose members are Britons in name only. Just one of the bomb disposers is fully English. The other (Naveen Andrews) is from India. He serves his colonizer with a certain wariness. Hana is more French than British. Caravaggio, ostensibly another Canadian, turns out to have spent most of his life in North Africa. Almásy, of course, is not an Englishman at all but has merely been taken for one. (In other circumstances, he has been taken for a German – no small matter during the Second World War.) Almásy himself hates the idea that countries claim ownership over land and people. It becomes clear why he might have chosen to leave his castle for an unmarked, largely ignored patch of desert.

This is an extraordinarily rich movie, splashing romance and history over startlingly scenic canvases. At one pole of the story is Hana, Almásy’s nurse, who freely gives of herself (in her first scene, she kisses a wounded soldier just because he asks her to). The other polar character is Almásy, who hates the idea of ownership, of being owned by others. It might more cynically be put that he believes in his absolute ownership of himself. What has been said of John Locke (by D.A. Lloyd Thomas) might also be said of Almásy: he is

perhaps one of those people who wish to protect a private place from everyone else. He [is] jealous of his independence and autonomy, and not only intellectually committed to the doctrine that persons own themselves.

The English Patient is one of the best artistic studies of this type of person. It is one of the very best movies in a good year.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 1: Shine

The Oscars were given out earlier this week. I hadn’t seen any of the nominees. Not a one!

I take that back. I’d seen Icarus, one of the documentaries (actually, I slept through most of it).

I gather that the Best Picture winner was something called The Shape of Water. Whenever I hear of such a title, I can’t help but recall THE FLOWER THAT DRANK THE MOON, the title of a (fictitious) movie lampooned in Ghost World.

I think that I may be “all out of love” with the movies – at least, with new ones. The only movies that still affect me came out many years ago. Most of them were released when I was a teenager.

Last night, I showed Karin Shine, which was released in 1996. That was the year of the many “indie” Oscar nominees. The others were The English Patient, Fargo, Jerry Maguire, and Secrets & Lies. I’ve watched all of them many times, and I know them by heart, or nearly.

I shall discuss them in the next few months, as well as other classics from 1996 (and maybe a few from 1995 and 1997).

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Directed by Scott Hicks, Shine is about a musician. It is most successful, however, in what it does for the eye rather than for the ear. This isn’t entirely surprising. Two excellent movies directed by Hicks’s fellow Oceanian, Jane Campion – Sweetie and An Angel at My Table – are Shine’s visual predecessors. The visual power of these movies is less the result of composition (i.e., the spatial balancing of different elements) than of concentration upon this or that colorful, textured object. The viewer is led to focus, in succession, upon such objects as a broken picture frame … broken eyeglasses … a pair mismatched of shoes … a pair of purple-pink gloves with the fingertips cut off … a purple-pink feather boa … a tape recorder whose tape has run out … a cigarette with ash dangling from it … a rain-speckled car hood … a death mask … and many, many pianos, elegant and shabby (there seems to be a different piano in Shine for each life change undergone by the protagonist).

I don’t know if I need to repeat the story. Talented young David learns music under the tutelage of his overbearing father; the strain eventually causes David to break down. He plumbs the depths. And then, seemingly out of nothing, he finds love. It’s this third act that catapults the movie into greatness. The suddenness with which David’s life is reclaimed would be jarring in any other story. Here it feels natural: David always has had in him the capacities for profound misery and for profound joy.

David grows up being told: you must be strong. You must win. Only thus will you survive.

But only when love is extended to him does he “shine.” He takes to love quickly and voraciously, like a plant finally flourishing for having received water.

Noah Taylor, the great depicter of Australian youth, shows us the early David: clever and modest, torn between hope and despair.

The mercurial older David is portrayed by Geoffrey Rush, never again so compelling as he is here. On screen only a few minutes, Rush manages an Oscar-inevitable performance.

Two elderly characters – a poetess, played by Googie Withers, and a music teacher, played by John Gielgud – passionately encourage David. The viewer is convinced of the value that these two people recognize in David.

David’s father is played by Armin Mueller-Stahl, a specialist in depicting oppressive patriarchs. He dominates his scenes; then he is absent; then he reappears, like Caesar’s ghost to Brutus. His performance mixes horror with tenderness.

Finally, there is Lynn Redgrave, in a small but impactful role at the end of David’s story. She is the one commissioned by the heavens to bring David fully back to life, and she leaves the viewer with no doubt as to why she would.