1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 67: The secret of Roan Inish

This gentle movie is the closest I’ve seen to a live-action My Neighbor Totoro or Ponyo. Set and filmed in Ireland with Irish actors, it’s not just Irish. It’s based on a book set in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland; the book’s Canadian-born author, Rosalie K. Fry, lived in Wales. The movie’s director, John Sayles, is from the United States. His movies explore social issues. This one is more primal. Its protagonists are citizens of the sea.

They dwell on a sparsely-peopled coast. They aren’t outcasts or recluses or separatists; they’re pulled spiritually – or naturally (the distinction is blurred) – toward the water. Their numbers have dwindled, and they’ve moved to the mainland, deserting their native Roan Inish (“seal island”). They pine for their old home. They occasionally paddle their fishing boats over to Roan Inish, where the abandoned huts still stand, disheveled but sturdy.

Seals have long frequented this island and communed with the people. Legends say that some of the islanders were born of Selkies (seal-women). Selkie traits have been passed down. Some of the people are fair, some, dark; the dark ones are especially seal-like.

A golden-haired little girl, Fiona, whose family has moved away from the community, returns to live with her grandparents. (Her mother has died and her father is drowning his sorrows in the taverns.) The movie is especially Totoro-like when it observes the child exploring beaches and meadows, gathering mussels, and stirring liquid boat-tar for her grandfather. She listens to the locals’ wondrous tales: Seals save a youth from drowning. A man captures a Selkie and makes her his wife. A baby – Jamie, Fiona’s brother – is pulled out to the sea, by the tide, in a wooden ark-cradle; from time to time, the islanders glimpse a cherubic little boy bobbing on the waves in his cradle or running along the beaches.

These stories are told as if they might be true. Fiona accepts them as true.

The tellings are haunting, as achingly beautiful as any scenes in any movie. The movie is visually beautiful: It was filmed by the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler. The land and sky and sea are beautiful. So is Fiona, the serene little girl.

There is a tradition of literary criticism that says that stories fall into patterns of universal archetypes, and that these patterns can be arranged by season: romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), satire and irony (winter), and comedy (spring). (Never mind that not every culture recognizes the same seasons.) One season leads to the next. Children begin with romance. Romance fixes its gaze on a world apart from ours, idealized and inaccessible (at least right now). Edenic literature is romantic literature.

People outgrow Eden; or, rather, their injuries and sins bar them from it. They move on to sadness, then to cynicism. If they’re fortunate, they’ll achieve comic rebirth. To this end, it may help them to retain some picture of Eden, to acknowledge rather than disavow the imaginative role that romance plays in the cycle.

This is the kind of picture that The Secret of Roan Inish gives us: a picture of innocence, of the most absorbing and hopeful moments of childhood, of natural beauty, of a lost home worth seeking. A romance for adults.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 48: Lone star

Before there was No Country for Old Men … before there was Hell or High Water … there was Lone Star, in which a thoughtful Texan sheriff goes around asking questions. Not philosophical questions about death or evil or moral responsibility – though there’s some of that, too – but about relationships that are more comfortably left unscrutinized.

The movie isn’t very interested in its bad guy. He is a corrupt, sadistic former sheriff (Kris Kristofferson) whose bones and badge are found during the opening scene, in the desert, by a couple of clownish metal scavengers who are not so unlike the gravediggers in Hamlet. And the movie is only slightly more interested in who killed the bad guy. Mostly it just shows what life is like for the ordinary people who live in fictional Rio County just north of the Mexico-U.S. border. (Supposedly, Del Rio, Texas, is in the vicinity.) These people include Hispanic and Anglo Texans, illegal and legal Mexican immigrants, and a few Indians. Also, due to the presence of an Army base, more Blacks reside in Rio County than is typical in this part of the state.

These groups all keep their identities strictly separate, at least in theory; in practice, the locals are intermixed and interdependent. Flashbacks show how the bad old Anglo police used to frequent the Mexican restaurants … while loudly complaining about Mexican food … while happily scarfing it down … while collecting extortion payments and bribes packed in with the tortillas. In the movie’s present day, the Anglo–Hispanic dealings are more polite but just as clandestine. Hispanic businessmen handpick Anglo officials for the public to employ: preferably, ones who’ll support a bid to build a lucrative new prison. More overtly, Anglos and Hispanics on the school board squabble over how to teach Texas history. One of the most likable characters – a high school teacher (Elizabeth Peña) – is criticized by all parties because she wants to tell a complicated story about the past. By the movie’s end, the complications of the past will have made her own happiness impossible. “Forget the Alamo,” she says, bitterly. “Forget them all.”

So, this movie is all social commentary, and it’s pretty straightforward and unadorned, unlike, e.g., Robert Altman’s Nashville. There’s nothing visually or rhythmically distinctive about Lone Star. Just lots of characters and conversations. These, often, are wryly insightful. The two “clowns” I mentioned earlier perform this exchange:

I never thought I’d see that a buddy of mine would be dating a woman with three bars on her shoulder. [The woman in question works for the Army.]

I think it’s beyond what you’d call dating.

You’re gonna get married?

Maybe.

You met her family? Think her family’s gonna be OK that you’re a white guy? [She is Black.]

They think any woman over thirty who isn’t married is a lesbian. She figures, they’ll be so relieved that I’m a man …

Yeah, it’s always heartwarming to see a prejudice defeated by a deeper prejudice.

And there’s a brilliant little discussion, which I won’t quote, between two Black soldiers – a colonel and a private – about why a poor, young, Black woman would wish to join and remain in the Army.

A lot of this is interesting; and yet, arguably, it’s lamentable that for all the emphasis on locality, the insights aren’t specific to South Texas. John Sayles, the writer-director, sets his movies all over the map (New York City, New Jersey, Florida, Louisiana, Chicago, Ireland, etc.). Lone Star isn’t alone in inhabiting a regionally realistic place that isn’t a real place; most conspicuously, City of Hope, filmed in Cincinatti, is set in an unspecified city in New Jersey. Contrast this with one of Sayles’s first movies, The Brother From Another Planet, in which it actually matters that a particular scene is set on a particular New York subway line. Brother is less tightly constructed than Lone Star but, scene-by-scene, more compelling. Or so I recall. One might also criticize Lone Star’s casting. The main Anglo characters are played by Texans (Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey) or by people with Texan heritage (Chris Cooper); but the main Mexican-American roles are filled by a Cuban-American (Peña) and a puertorriqueña (Míriam Colón). Good as they are, their un-Mexicanness would be distracting to some viewers. The movie’s “authenticity” extends only so far, and it is racially unequal. But maybe I’m judging too harshly, especially considering how movies were cast in the 1990s.

Besides, to dwell very closely on the actors’ appearance, speech, etc., is to miss one of the movie’s main points, which is that in Texas – and, more generally, in the USA – Anglos and Hispanics are more interconnected, in all sorts of ways, than most observers can tell just by looking. I was reminded of this classic commercial by Aeroméxico:

See also: Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States; and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.