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.

Bathtime; speech patterns; Orwell, pt. 2

Sick kids today. Right now they’re feeling OK; they’ve been medicated and bathed. Samuel has been granted six more minutes in the tub. I don’t want him to drown, but I don’t want to sit by the tub all that time, either. I’m a busy guy.

Sing to me, I tell him.

(I want him to make noises while I’m out of the room.)

No.

Sing “The Greatest Adventure.”

No.

(Alas, Samuel is no bathtime Pavarotti.)

I keep suggesting songs for him, he keeps saying no, and then it’s time for him to get out of the tub. That’s one way to do it.

Now the boys are chowing down on sandwiches. They wouldn’t eat the chicken noodle soup I cooked earlier tonight.

I usually drain the water out of it, says Karin.

Indeed.

Uh, says Daniel.

He means Ziva. He’s picked up the habit of saying only final syllables (or, in some cases, vowel sounds). If I put him to bed, he’ll say er, meaning pacifier. Suppose he’s talking about planets. He’ll say Nus. I’ll have to use contextual clues to figure out whether he means Venus or Uranus. He knows how to say full words; he’s just awfully casual.

Samuel, on the other hand, distinguishes every word, every syllable, every audible letter, with the utmost care. No “Mairzy Doats” for him.

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More Orwell. I’ve reached his Spanish Civil War essays. Not having read Homage to Catalonia – or any survey of that war – I find myself pretty badly out of my depth as to what all the different parties were trying to achieve. But then, Orwell’s point seems to be that the conflict was largely misunderstood outside of Spain, and that the few who did understand it used it for their own ends, as propaganda.

Interestingly, as the volume’s content becomes more complex and abstract, Orwell’s tone gets angrier. Traveling to Spain and fighting with a haphazardly chosen militia must have been a whole other kettle of fish than going, soused, into the clink for a few hours with burglars and embezzlers.

My bracket, pt. 2; Beast; Orwell; the clink

Out go Nebraska and New Mexico, my underdogs. I’ve fallen from ~250,000th to ~400,000th place.

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I saw Beast (2017), set on Jersey in the English Channel. The leads are Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn. I was going to say, Flynn is one of the best young actors; but he’s forty-one; he’s been playing good and bad young men for almost two decades. In Beast, he’s a suspected serial killer. Is he guilty? And how is this possibility regarded by the turbulent woman (Buckley, even better than Flynn) who’s drawn to him “as a moth to the flame?”

Critics say this is a Badlands- or Bonnie-and-Clyde-type story. I think it’s more like Chabrol’s La cérémonie or, especially, Le boucher. Anyway, it’s an old story.

Much of Jersey seems manicured for tourists. But there are unkempt places. Buckley and Flynn climb cliffs, swim in the sea, roll in the dirt, tramp through forests, shoot rabbits.

Buckley wounds one. Flynn tells her to finish it off. It’s kinder, he says. As if kindness were the motive.

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I found a cheap copy of the large volume of Orwell’s essays and have been reading through them. He was a fine blogger from the get-go (“journalist,” I guess you’d call him). What essay are you reading, Samuel asked. “The Clink,” about how Orwell gets himself jailed for drunkenness, I said. Samuel built an enclosure with blocks and soon was playing that his action figures were in the clink.

My bracket; Mitfords, pt. 7

Well, obviously, I picked: (1) UConn, to repeat (one of every three bracket-fillers has done so); (2) Creighton – UConn’s conference rivals – to reach the final; (3) Nebraska, because wouldn’t it be silly if two teams from that state reached the Final Four; and (4) New Mexico, so that the UConn Huskies might compete against other “canines” (it was a toss-up between New Mexico and Nevada).

When these four pieces have fallen into place, the windfall will be mine.

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Daniel tipped himself headfirst off the bed, but I caught him just in time. I had been absorbed in Mitford novel no. 6, Love in a Cold Climate; when I lurched after Daniel the volume flew out of my hands and across the room, landing hard.

“My book!” I cried out.

“See, your father loves you dearly,” Karin told Daniel, “he dropped his book to save you.”

I rushed to my book; the landing had cracked its spine. But not fatally.

More marriage-woes in Mitfordania. Jane Austen has her detractors, notably Mark Twain; I think she’s fine to read, but not by herself (not even within her narrow field). N. Mitford is a necessary corrective.

Warning: oblique spoiler (but no worse than on dust-jackets).

Think of LCC as if the respectable Jane Bennet, not Lydia, were to have run off with Wickham – not Austen’s dashing Wickham but a dowdier one, more like Mr. Collins, with pedophilic urges.

Body-text fonts, pt. 25: Berthold Baskerville

This is useful:

“Irish Names You’re Probably Saying Wrong and How to Pronounce Them” (CNN).

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This morning I was lured to a clickbait essay about Microsoft Office’s new default font, Aptos. The thesis: Aptos isn’t bad. The argument: (1) Aptos is wider than Calibri, and (2) the “l” has a curved bottom.

Gratuitous insults were hurled at Papyrus and Comic Sans.

The author, a breezy ignoramus, deserves no greater remuneration for this “analysis” than the cost of one McDonald’s double-cheeseburger.

I’d like to think that my own amateurish font discussions are better. But they, too, probably scrape the depths of witlessness. So I apologize.

Not all amateurs are hacks. John Baskerville was no seasoned pro in 1757 when he printed a book with his new typeface. The work was so good, Cambridge University commissioned more printing by him.

Alas, rival printers denigrated him, and he charged high fees, so his designs fell into disuse. But in the twentieth century, they became ubiquitous. Many variations were developed.

Here is a sample of Güntar Gerhard Lange’s 1961 version for the Berthold company.

The top-heavy “C” distinguishes Berthold’s from other “Baskervilles,” as does the less conspicuous “R” with its beautiful, flowing tail (compare with this later “Baskerville” by Lange).

See also Lange’s version of Garamond, discussed previously as URW Garamond (it was issued first by Berthold).

P.S. The above passage is from Lois Duncan’s Stranger with My Face, the creepiest young-adult novel I’ve read. One could do worse than to work through Duncan’s oeuvre. Beware, Hachette editions from the 2010s have been modernized; the protagonists use e-devices. Not cool.