The Anatomy of Harpo Marx

by Wayne Koestenbaum

UC Press, 2012

336 pages

It's no secret that scholarly books on cinema can be deadening, and any play-by-play of 13 movie comedies sanctioned by a university press might reasonably seem like one to avoid. Not so The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, from the poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, and published by UC Press, which has the nerve not to be just another impersonal, theory-glazed boredom generator. Instead it's a zesty and deeply literate joy to read.

Just as his previous nonfiction work, Humiliation, seemed like an apotheosis of new literary possibility in the age of overshare, so Koestenbaum's new book reinvigorates film studies. There's no special trick to it, really, just his own eruditely intimate way of seeing in the silent Marx brother a profound physical presence.

"As Andy Warhol filmed a man sleeping, and called it Sleep," Koestenbaum writes, "I want to commit media-heist, to steal a man from his native silence and transplant him into words, if only for the pleasure of taking illusory possession of a physical self-sureness that can never be mine." By casting his project in such confessional terms, Koestenbaum makes a sort of pact with subject and reader alike. He proceeds not just as an insightful scholar but also as a brainy, randy, vulnerable flirt.

Unpacking the famous screen comedian's nonverbal lyricism is of course a worthy academic undertaking, and Koestenbaum's subjective musings neatly disguise his rigor. It's his alertness to "foreshadowings that appear when we view earlier artifacts in hindsight" that allows Koestenbaum to coin the phrase "Kristallnacht Preview" for a given moment of 1933's Duck Soup, in which "Harpo apprehends catastrophe." Later, he writes, "I will lean on the Nazi theme; Harpo leans on it too. Harpo was a comic genius before the Third Reich came along, but the Third Reich gave Harpo's anarchy extra pointedness." And of course those retrospective foreshadowings continue into subsequent epochs; in 1937's A Day at the Races, for instance, "he has the traumatized expression of Jackie Kennedy on Air Force One as LBJ is sworn into the presidency."

Obviously that analysis may be subject to debate; what matters most is the peculiar and palpable force of Koestenbaum's investment -- the "ecstatic clarity" to be had from studying a screen persona through one's own history-sharpened lens. Diaristic and deceptively digressive, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx becomes a secondary celebration of context itself. Yet it never loses sight of the endlessly watchable man, and the endlessly meaningful mannerisms, in all those movies.

If Koestenbaum seems like exactly the right writer for this job, it's as much for the refinement of his appreciation as for his recognition of what makes something appreciation-worthy to begin with. As he rightly puts it, "Harpo beams upward at you, whoever you are."

Geoff Dyer: Zoning In

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room

by Geoff Dyer

Pantheon, 2012

240 pages

Last spring, an interviewer asked the British writer Geoff Dyer which movie he would choose to live inside. In retrospect that seems like a leading question; obviously Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker was the only possible answer.

Stalker is a long, slow, metaphysical Russian film from 1979. (“Andrei Tarkovsky” in Russian means “long, slow, metaphysical, film.”) It involves three men on a trip to a forbidden place, each for private personal reasons. Stalker is the name of the character who leads expeditions to this place -- a Room, inside a Zone -- where the deepest of desires are said to get fulfilled.

Today, what’s so special about the film, aside from it being a great cine-poet’s mesmerizing road movie of the Soviet twilight, is the fact that Geoff Dyer has written a book about it. Dyer is one of those rare geniuses who writes well about everything because he always winds up writing about himself. The navel into which he gazes is the world’s as well as his own. Thus is he, somehow, very possibly the only English-speaking person alive who can hold forth at length on Tarkovsky without boring the hell out of you.

Zona, the newest of Dyer’s nimble nonfiction category-busters, describes itself as “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.” It is that, and also an essay on wish fulfillment, the management of time, and the variable likelihood of perception-expanding cinema, among other art forms, to exist in our distraction-addled lives.

“At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky time,” Dyer writes, “and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky time toward moron time in which nothing can last -- and no one can concentrate on anything -- longer than about two seconds. Soon people will not be able to watch films like Stalker or to read Henry James because they will not have the concentration to get from one interminable scene or sentence to the next. The time I might have been able to read late-period Henry James has passed, and because I have not read late-period Henry James I am in no position to say what harm has been done to my sensibility by not having done so. But I do know that if I had not seen Stalker in my early twenties my responsiveness to the world would have been radically diminished.”

In short, Zona is a characteristically digressive memoir of what this one movie has meant to this one man, which turns out to be a lot. (Meanwhile a whole alphabet of other art-house darlings -- Antonioni, Buñuel, the Coen brothers -- come in for parenthetical skewering.) Dyer’s carefully articulated stake in Stalker, one asymptotic quest to comprehend another, proves an invigorating counterforce, if not an antidote, to the very atrophy of attention he laments. The book is not long, but it is one in which several pages may pass with footnotes taking up more surface area than the body of the main text. Dyer sees it as “a catalogue or compendium of proposals for potentially interesting studies,” and he’s right about that, and nobody these days can get away with such a book in quite the way he can. Which is not to say it’s unprecedented. Writing in defense of writers, like himself, who offer commentary “without seeking to disguise the vagaries of their nature, their lapses of taste and the contingency of their own experiences,” Dyer speaks to and for the spirit of the original essayist, Montaigne.

And of course Dyer is to Zona as Tarkovsky is to Stalker: the contriver of a work through which he explores himself. Contriver, that is, as gainfully apart from originator; true, only Dyer could write this book, but not without Tarkovsky’s film, just as only Tarkovsky could make something “synonymous both with cinema’s claims to high art and a test of the viewer’s ability to appreciate it as such,” but not without Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic to inspire him.

“Would we regard this landscape of fields, abandoned cars, tilted telegraph poles and trees as beautiful without Tarkovsky?” Dyer asks. “And could it have been brought into existence by any medium other than film?” There’s a beauty, too, in the asking, and a satisfaction from seeing that beauty brought into existence by this particular asker.

It helps that the intensity of his attention is not attenuating. Tarkovsky’s film is easy to recognize in Dyer’s prose, even for the reader who has never seen it. Here a character “has the knack of imbuing the simplest task with grudge,” there a color scheme exudes “a kind of submonochrome in which the spectrum has been so compressed that it might turn out to be a source of energy, like oil and almost as dark, but with a gold sheen too.” Everywhere, “the most distinctive feature of Tarkovsky’s art: the sense of beauty as force.” And the best way to grasp the movie’s essential slowness is simply to luxuriate in Dyer’s insanely companionable zeal.

In his nonfiction especially, Dyer’s education -- autodidact by way of Oxford -- seems useful; he seems to have seen and read everything, deeply. His habit is to refer unabashedly back to earlier gleanings. “John Updike reckoned that America was a vast conspiracy to make people happy,” Dyer writes, fortifying his own speculations about Soviet unhappiness. Or: “The light, which has been silvery and dank, glows gradually golden and warm, then fades, Turrell-ishly, to dank and silver again.” If you haven’t yet had a go at Stalker, you can look forward to recognizing that highly Tarkovsky-ish moment, here so Dyer-ishly described, the very instant you see it.

The Dyer Name Drop could be a cocktail. It is hard to get right. Even he occasionally flubs the proportions, making his own literacy seem merely like compulsive indexing. Mostly, though, it goes down very smoothly, giving pleasure and encouragement. Rather than torture his references into submission, he lives in them, inviting frequent reader visits. Writing on couture for Vogue, for example, Dyer has handy an observation John Cheever made about Persian carpets. That must be because he did that great piece on Cheever’s journals, the reader thinks, already feeling quite at home and a little tipsy.

Writing on Tarkovsky for the hell of it means bringing on a serious buzz: “Stalker is framed against a green so dark it is almost black -- what Conrad, with his irresistible urge to over-egg any and all puddings, would have called an impenetrable darkness. This darkness makes Stalker’s face and blue eyes burn more brightly as he speaks. With what? With the intensity of his belief, but also -- and it is this which distinguishes him from jihadists and born-again Christians  -- with the intensity of his despair. The Zone is not simply a source of solace, the heart of Marx’s heartless world, it is a source of torment, a system of traps that constantly tests, teases and threatens not just his clients but Stalker himself.”

It’s tempting to keep quoting because here Dyer is only a few sentences away from bringing Werner Herzog into the huddle, but one must learn to pace oneself.

Historically, Stalker was a beleaguered beast, heavily rewritten, reshot, and at one point relocated to just downriver of a chemical plant whose toxicity may later have caused the filmmaker’s fatal cancer. Tarkovsky also had a heart attack during postproduction, and was prone, as Dyer gently puts it, to “megalomaniacal uncertainties.”

Aren’t we all? One of the real joys of reading Zona, thanks to its peculiar candor, is the privilege of picking up on how even Dyer’s most enthused engagement still can feel like fidgety misgiving. Another member of Tarkovsky’s trio is a washed-up writer seeking inspiration. “Maybe by going to the Zone he’ll be rejuvenated,” Dyer writes. “Man, I know how he feels. I could do with a piece of that action myself. I mean, do you think I would be spending my time summarizing the action of a film almost devoid of action -- not frame by frame, perhaps, but certainly take by take -- if I was capable of writing anything else? In my way I am going to the Room -- following these three to the Room -- to save myself.”

Dyer’s own stalkers surely will have noticed Stalker references piling up in his previous writings, and maybe they felt a whole book coming on. But then, who ever knows? He’s flighty. One of Dyer’s earlier books is called Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. Another, Out of Sheer Rage, is a biography of D.H. Lawrence by an author who couldn’t be bothered to do it. (Of course, in the end, he did. Sort of.) One essay in Dyer’s recent collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, extemporized a proto-proposal for yet another book, Great Pastries of the World: A Personal View. Was that just a quip, or a promise?

And Everything Is Going Fine

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG9RajVgnaI[/youtube]

A Tribute to Spalding Gray by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh’s new film does not ask: But who was Spalding Gray, really? That’s a nonstarter, if only because the asking act is best left to Gray himself.

Yes: an act, as in a bit of business -- or a performative personal literature, by which the audacity of sitting alone at a table on a stage and telling stories of self was refined into art. In those cozy dark hours just before the dawn of our era of online oversharing, Gray was the last great confessionalist.

And Everything Is Going Fine takes its title from an ironic leitmotif in one of Gray’s many monologues, whose intimacy and singularity the film has been designed to evoke. It’s a memorial scrapbook of archival Spalding Gray materials, arranged by Soderbergh and editor Susan Littenberg with affectionate attention and good organizational intuition. The images accrue not chronologically but in Graylike narrative zigzags: We see him getting older and younger and older again, moving through fluctuations of flannel and coif and footage formats. But the bigger picture, the story of his life, makes its way from a recognizable beginning toward an expected end. It’s the perfect one-man show: eccentric, hilarious and only boring to those already predisposed against him.

The rest of us are invited to cherish him once more, and to reflect. What a peculiar cultural figure, this doomed, delectably artful digresser. He was like a different make of David Foster Wallace -- the tone of his voice both intellectual and vernacular, the subject both himself and everything, the suicide both impossible and inevitable. The film does not directly acknowledge that Gray took his own life -- that’s the consensus, anyway -- in 2004, at age 62. It seems to presume that anyone who would be watching already knows this, and will not be able to forget it. Thus does hindsight become foreshadowing: We learn, or are reminded, that Gray’s mother’s mental illness was fatal; that after reading Freud he worried his unconscious would compel him to throw himself out a window; that he took a role in Soderbergh’s King of the Hill partly in order to explore a fantasy of self-induced death.

Expository concerns are handled as Gray handled them: forthrightly, yet discursively. There is no narration, except of course his own. The only character witnesses are his occasional interviewers and very occasional interviewees -- whose ranks include strangers gathered up from his audience and his own father. Otherwise, aptly, it is all Spalding all the time.

Gray recounts his experiments with sex, theater, family and fame. He charts the discovery and cultivation of his technique, which he came to describe as both “creative narcissism” and “poetic journalism.”

He says, “I like telling the story of life better than I like living it.”

Blame Yale: A Brief Todd Solondz Q&A

You’ll be glad to know that writer-director Todd Solondz is not finished rummaging through the inner lives of depressive perverts. That puts it more cruelly than Solondz would, which is part of his charm. With Life During Wartime, a quasi-sequel, as he has called it, to his 1998 film Happiness (i.e. “the one about the pedophile”), Solondz revisits the variously troubled characters from that earlier film, and even recasts them. Instead of Philip Seymour Hoffman, we get Michael Kenneth Williams (who played Omar on The Wire). Instead of Jon Lovitz, we get Paul Reubens. And so on.

What remains is an arresting affinity for suburban dysfunction. You might call it the Solondz touch. You might call it an inappropriate touch. Here’s what the filmmaker has to say for himself.

Do people stop you in the street and say, “What’s wrong with you?”

I mean, people have been nice...to my face. I don’t quiz people. I don’t interrogate them. When people say nice things I say thank you. So no. I have to say it says something good about human nature that many people do stop and say nice things to me, actually. On the street, in the subway, what have you. But I know there are just as many people who hate everything I do. And they have the good discretion and good tact never to assault me.

I mean this as a compliment to you both: If Paul Reubens deserves to be in anyone’s films, it’s yours.

I’ve always loved him. He read for me years ago. So I had a sense of what he could do, and we both took a leap of faith in each other here. With Paul of course there’s an extra layer of pathos or poignancy because of the whole history that the audience is aware of with him. And also, no one has any idea that he’s even capable of such a performance. And that’s all very exciting. And I’m very playful; in my head the character probably even has his own Pee Wee Herman doll.

That’s something to think about. How did you first discover cinema?

I went to Yale, and they didn’t have a film major. But that’s where I first thought of the idea. I think because I was socially shy or awkward and felt intimidated. When I went, we had VHS tapes, they had film societies. It could be a Howard Hawks double-bill, followed by Maya Deren, followed by Bergman, Garbo. Every night, many options. And I went out all the time. In part to escape the pressures, the social pressures, and in the process I fell in love with movies in a way that I hadn’t taken seriously as a child. I mean, I can remember I was 16 and my mom came home, and she said, “I saw a movie, Todd. What a movie. It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” I said, “Oh, I want to see that.” And she said, “No, no, you’re too young.” So I was very protected, in what I saw growing up. It had to be rated G. And then things changed in college. I didn’t have to understand a movie. I just let it all wash over me.

So at what age would the younger you be old enough to see the movies you now make?

I have a different viewpoint from my mom. I think children have built-in censors. I think parents are always worried about, “Oh my god, the sex, the violence.” But I can remember, as a kid, anytime they started kissing, I went for the Jujubes at the concession. I took a break. No interest. And I think usually the more anxious the parents are about that stuff, probably they don’t realize they themselves are the main source of whatever nightmares these kids are having.

What will be your next movie?

The title is Dark Horse. And I can tell you there’s no child molestation, rape or masturbation in it. But I’m afraid those are the only details I can share at this point.

Those are useful details.

It’s an abstraction, really, until it’s made. You have all sorts of plans; nothing ever turns out the way you plan it. If I were maybe smarter, wiser, I would maybe have a real career. But I’m not interested in that. I just make movies that interest me in my own way. I don’t pay attention -- I can’t -- to what I maybe should do. A lot of times I think, “Oh this could make a lot of money, I have a very marketable idea.” But then I end up writing something unmarketable. I listen to whatever compels me to put pen to paper. I don’t have a strategy. I’m very fortunate. When I look back, I say, “Oh my god, someone gave me money to make these movies.” It’s amazing. But I never presume that I will get money again. I have to be zen about all of this. I mean, you can just get depressed and jump out the window. But I have a sense of humor about it all.

A Single Man

Directed by Tom Ford, from a script by Ford and David Scearce and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood

It's hard not to notice that A Single Man's timing seems a little awkward. For starters, there's that inevitable confusion with the Coen brothers' A Serious Man, and the fact of both movies having to do with horn-rimmed sad sacks who feel trapped in the peculiar quicksand of 1960s Americana.

What's more, maybe it's just too late now to get a great film from Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel of one day in a closeted man's suddenly lonely life. Certainly director Tom Ford and co-writer David Scearce seem to take that seminal gay-lib text for granted. An established fashion designer who made his name peddling erotically flamboyant luxury, Ford sees A Single Man as sedulous diversion: just one long and lovely and carefully struck pose.

In 1962, as Soviet missiles are piling up in Cuba and college kids are giving up in Los Angeles, Colin Firth is George Falconer, quite clearly the best dressed professor of English ever to have walked the Earth (although in that regard he is not without competition). Having just learned of his lover's death, George has taken to radiating sartorially magnificent grief, thinking suicidal thoughts and trudging around in his splendid home. He has a support system of sorts, cobbled together from a fetchingly boozy best friend (Julianne Moore), a flirty student in a fuzzy sweater (Nicholas Hoult), and a full-on come-hither hustler (Jon Kortajarena), but nothing quite lights George up like the memory of his soulmate, who's played in flashbacks by Matthew Goode.

In fact, Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau take that lighting up very literally, setting it off as a periodic efflorescence from their meticulously pallid status quo. As if Firth's face, here a marvel of emotive subtlety and control, somehow weren't enough to get the point across. That's really the best and most confounding thing going on in here: an extraordinary central performance without which the whole movie, flan-like confection that it is, might completely collapse. It's astonishing to see how nimbly Firth navigates the simultaneous numbness and volatility that mourning can bring. And it's frustrating to see him, along with every other shrewdly self-possessed performer in his supporting cast, not so much directed as tastefully arranged within the frame.

Given the milieu of a hazy, uneasy neverland somewhere between conservative cultural nostalgia and foundational progressive mythology, it's no surprise that Ford should want to reduce all of A Single Man's feeling to a languid fashion-mag swoon. (Is that moment set in front of a billboard for Hitchcock's Psycho actually meaningful, or just something the filmmaker saw in another movie once?) But his characterization of the dapper, depressive George risks reinforcing a mopey and preening stereotype -- the core of queer vanity behind a veil of hollow flair -- that Isherwood sought preemptively to peel away. Funny, and sad, how times have changed.

Ten films of the past ten years that I’d like to mention now

Best? Top? Favorite? I don’t know what to call them. I had enough trouble narrowing it down to as many movies as years. These annual reflective round-ups always confound me (and you, probably), but the tyranny of ten becomes even more outrageous when dealing with a decade’s worth of material.

So there’ll be no proselytizing here, just a sort of blurred time-lapse snapshot of one man’s (evidently rather arty) moviegoing disposition.

You’ll notice a lot from Europe. And one American film set in Europe. And another that’s a documentary about an American made by a European. What can I say? By the time you read this, I’ll have left for a European vacation. I doubt that will get it out of my system.

You may also spot me feeling wistful about the relentless march of time. Well, as someone in a movie once said, “Memory is a wonderful thing if you don’t have to deal with the past.”

Alphabetically:

1. Before Sunset (2004). Writer-director Richard Linklater reunites the couple played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in his 1995 film Before Sunrise, with profound and moving results.

2. Caché (2005). A perfect little thriller that also happens to be a timely parable on colonial blowback and the inverse proportionality of surveillance and disconnection. Typically excellent actors Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil rise to a typically pitiless challenge from the austere Austrian auteur Michael Haneke.

3. Grizzly Man (2005). This exquisitely appropriate union of artist and subject--German madman moviemaker Werner Herzog reflecting on doomed Alaskan bear-watcher Timothy Treadwell--has been haunting me for years.

4. Let the Right One In (2008). If I could see only one vampire movie ever again,  or one coming-of-age movie, both would be Tomas Alfredson’s film of John Lindqvist’s script of his own novel. (Which is also to say that, Richard Jenkins notwithstanding, I can do without the forthcoming American remake.)

5. Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). My first experience of writer-director-performance-artist Miranda July’s inspired, invigorating feature debut ranks high among decade-best movie memories. Its faith in artfulness and fellowship has since been guiding.

6. Russian Ark (2002). At last, a film that Russian history buffs and tracking-shot fetishists can agree on. Filmmaker Alexander Sokurov’s technically and poetically astonishing stroll through St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum is a virtuosic correlation of content and form.

7. Saraband (2003). The late, great master Ingmar Bergman reunites the couple played by Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann in his 1973 film Scenes from a Marriage, with profound and moving results.

8. Sexy Beast (2000). Gangster chic had gotten tediously shabby when director Jonathan Glazer’s sinewy feature debut came along and revitalized it. Ray Winstone gives this brilliant black comedy its savory soul, and Ben Kingsley gives it a live-wire jolt. To borrow a line from the latter, “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

9. Touch the Sound (2004). You might expect a documentary about a deaf percussionist to get gimmicky or shamefully schmaltzy. But Thomas Riedelsheimer’s innately cinematic portrait of Evelyn Glennie takes its subject’s example and defies all conceptual limitations.

10. You Can Count On Me (2000). With serene intelligence, genuine warmth and great roles for great actors Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney, playwright/screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan’s directorial debut sets a new standard for intimate character-driven drama.

The tale of Roland Emmerich’s “2012,” as told in 10 lines of its own dialogue

“Nutrinos have mutated into a new kind of nuclear particle. They’re heating up the earth’s core.”

“It’s the biggest solar climax in recorded history.”

“Don’t you see the signs?”

“California’s going down!”

“All our scientific advances, our fancy machines! The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago.”

“Daddy!”

“We’re gonna need a bigger plane.”

“It’s a brave new world you’re heading for, and the young scientists are gonna be worth 200 old politicians.”

“The director of the Louvre was an enemy of humanity?!”

“Everybody out there has died in vain if we start our future with an act of cruelty.”

A Serious Man

Written and directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

As an exercise in futility (a Coen-brothers-appreciation primer if ever there was one), let’s imagine what might have happened had A Serious Man been made by gentiles, or, Hashem forbid, by Arabs.

Under those circumstances, it might be called the most anti-Semitic film of the year.

Hashem, by the way, is the name that characters in A Serious Man say instead of God, because they are serious Jews. They are funny too, the film suggests, but only because they’re so serious. As in not laughing with, laughing at.

Not that religious seriousness ever was the Coens’ first priority. It has been reported that Ethan wrote a philosophy thesis at Princeton in which he described belief in God as “the height of stupidity.” Later, he and Joel wrote Blood Simple and Barton Fink and Fargo and The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and all the rest. Earlier, they endured suburban dullness and spiritual desperation in mid-’60s Minnesota--or so A Serious Man, set there, suggests. It’s the story of a schlemiel who hopes to be a mensch, but only suffers for his efforts. Is the suffering his own fault? His family’s? His neighbors? Hashem’s?

No, it’s the Coen brothers’. They’re pitiless. They’re like children torturing a small animal. For an audience. Of unpleasant Jews.

Timidly put-upon middle-class assimilate Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of physics, lately has begun to observe the allegorical implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Larry seems to have become derailed from his tenure track. His wife (Sari Lennick) plans to leave him for a sanctimonious goon (Fred Melamed). His daughter (Jessica McManus) is stealing his cash to save up for a nose job. His son (Aaron Wolf) just wants to get high and watch F-Troop or listen to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school. And his mopey, unemployed, cyst-afflicted gambler brother (Richard Kind) lives on the couch and monopolizes the bathroom. Also, Larry has been fielding increasingly irritated calls from a collections officer of the Columbia Record Club. It goes on like this. Eventually, the stoned nude-sunbather next door (Amy Landecker) asks, “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?” Larry doesn’t really know what to say.

Mostly he hoists his eyebrows, yanks down the corners of his mouth and diminishes his voice with a grating quaver. He does turn for guidance to a series of three rabbis, each less helpful and more monstrous than the last. The middle rabbi tells Larry a (brilliantly edited, Jimi Hendrix-enhanced) tale of a Jewish dentist who discovered a coded Hebrew message engraved inside a goy patient’s teeth. But the tale leaves Larry unfulfilled and well within his rights to reply, “It sounds like you don’t know anything. Why even tell me the story?” Once the delight of an expectation-defying punchline has abated, the same might be said to the filmmakers by their audience.

What seems to matter most is the suffering, and the spectacle. A Serious Man makes room for characters both sebaceous and phlegmatic. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is as skillful as always, but the way the camera looks at these people is like leering and also like staring them down.

It’s illuminating to have A Serious Man in theaters at the same time as Where the Wild Things Are, whose own menagerie of hairy, enormous, personal-space-invading grotesques derives from Maurice Sendak’s child’s-eye view of his old-world Jewish relatives. That view could be glaring at times, but would not now be so familiar to so many of us were it not also so fundamentally humane.

The Coens’ gargoyles, on the other hand, are universally loathsome. Not just ugly, they all tend to be morally or at the very least temperamentally repellent too. It’s fair to say they seem rather less likely than Sendak’s and Spike Jonze’s Wild Things to cement parent-child bonds and inspire several generations worth of proprietary affection. Not that the Coens even care about that.

What do they care about? What had they hoped to extract from this particular plot of personal history? Maybe they did intend a satirically affectionate commemoration, or even a Voltairean denunciation of faith-based optimism, but in any case what they’ve made seems more like some sort of long-deferred, highly disciplined tantrum.

So, phew, it’s a good thing they’re not gentiles or Arabs.

For the Young Gentleman’s Information: A Bachelor’s Guide to 'Bright Star'

The young gentleman might think he has made a capital move by purposely taking his date to see that film about the tubercular Romantic poet whose muse enjoys sewing and butterflies. Quite. But the young gentleman also should be advised to proceed with caution, for the tubercular Romantic poet in question, John Keats, was among the finest of his kind. It is not merely Keats’ series of influentially sensuous odes that this film exists to commemorate, but also his exceptional gift for the art of the love letter--with which the young gentleman, Heaven help him, may yet be invited by his date to compete. Keats died broke and obscure and devoted at 25, by the way; it will be no contest. The beneficiary of those letters, Bright Star reminds us, is Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), literally the girl next door. A skeptic according to her somehow arousingly impassive disposition, she knows fashion--and indeed even makes her own clothes, with taste and visionary flamboyance--but does not know poetry. Yet she registers the immortal lines, such as Keats’ “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” and finds herself intrigued. Eventually, she’ll be called upon to erupt with sorrow at his death, and the power of that moment will be bracing for its forbearance of movie convention. A woman so gorgeous as Cornish in a performance so gorgeous as this is certain to leave the young gentleman feeling beguiled. It is important that he not defeat his own purpose by neglecting his date--most certainly a young lady of sensitivity and intelligence and independence of thought herself, as he would be wise to remember.

Similarly, the young gentleman is cautioned not to fall in love with Keats either. This important ancestor of all wispy tousled emo darlings is well cast with Ben Whishaw, who also recently has portrayed movie versions of Brideshead Revisited’s scandalously self-debauching Sebastian Flyte, plus Bob Dylan and Keith Richards. Here, it is entirely understandable that Keats’ smugly protective friend and Hampstead flat-mate Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider, also terrific) should consider Fanny a rival for the poet’s affection. “Your writing is the finest thing in my life,” Charles tells him once, with such naked, disarming awe that the young gentleman had better prepare himself for a flush of embarrassment.

The writer and director of Bright Star is Jane Campion, whom the young gentleman possibly will recall as the maker of The Piano, a film he may have glimpsed accidentally when much younger and not yet a gentleman, and before that An Angel at My Table, which he shan’t be expected ever to have seen but which did establish that no other living filmmaker better understands how to photograph such romantic atmospherics as cherubic red-headed little girls and moss. Such details, along with blooming flower fields and the aforementioned butterflies, abound in Bright Star--the rare 19th-century period piece that’s ultimately too airy to be stuffy. The young gentleman needn’t even fully comprehend how these things can move him so. He need only have faith in what Keats called "the holiness of the heart's affections," without which surely he will remain a bachelor forever.

Fred Astaire

By Joseph Epstein (Yale University Press, 2008)

One doesn’t read Joseph Epstein’s most recent book, Fred Astaire, to learn new things about Fred Astaire. One reads it to see what the former editor of The American Scholar and author of Snobbery: The American Version, the wittiest essayist alive according to William F. Buckley, might do with a self-described “slender disquisition” on this question: “Whence derived Fred Astaire’s sublimity, his magic?”

One reads for sport, in other words, and at one’s leisure. Published almost a year ago with no apparent occasion other than the luxury of intellectual indulgence, Fred Astaire today remains as fresh as a book that puts on such airs possibly can be. It is timelessly unhip.

That’s not to say the book lacks charm. In fact, it has an entire excellent chapter on charm. And it has eleven other chapters, or “acts,” as Epstein calls them, all of which just breeze right along. With mature appreciation and lucid verve, Epstein stays mostly on the surface, studying the face, the clothes, the moves, and the cultural context in which the dancer became iconic.

He makes short work of establishing Astaire and Gene Kelly as the Apollo (“classic and understatedly calm”) and Dionysus (“romantic with high-banked fires”) of movie dancers, although Kelly’s own comparison—he called them the Cary Grant and Marlon Brando—made even shorter work of it. Epstein also supplies a nimble cross-referencing of Astaire’s and Ginger Rogers’ respective autobiographies, and a rather reproving survey of the other literature on his subject. “The amount of penetrating writing about Fred Astaire is less than overwhelming,” he writes. Too bad that line might also be used against him, to describe the contents of his own book.

The emerging answer to Epstein’s operating question has a lot to do with discipline, and one starts to wonder if removing all instances of the word “perfectionist” would render Fred Astaire only a few paragraphs long. But the point is well taken: Astaire, in Epstein’s estimation, was not a genius, necessarily, but rather a hardworking “unconscious artist” of exacting high standards, who brought transcendent joy to popular entertainment.

To prove it, one could do worse than spend an afternoon with a comfy chair, a stack of DVDs and a couple hundred pages of slender disquisition.

Adam

Written and directed by Max Mayer, Fox Searchlight Pictures

Adam is a new movie about a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome. The guy’s name is Adam.

Before we continue, I would like to say that except maybe in the case of Aladdin or Hamlet or Gandhi, it’s automatically lame when a movie’s title is just its main character’s name. In the case of Adam, all we get from the title, aside from a little bit of Biblical confusion, is a dispiriting premonition of writer-director Max Mayer’s laziness.

I would also like to say that in the case of Adam, Asperger’s Syndrome seems an awful lot like just another way of saying wish fulfillment for callow, sensitive dudes who can’t be bothered to get better at relationships. Or maybe for the girlfriends who can’t resist mothering them? I’m sure we all can agree that it is more enjoyable to watch such things on the big screen than on Lifetime.

By day, Adam is an electronics engineer living in Manhattan. By night, he’s still an engineer, but with elaborate interests in astronomy and Central Park raccoons. Other important Adam facts: His father has just died; he subsists on a diminishing supply of neatly stacked boxes of mac-and-cheese; and he is more than just a neurological disorder, thank you very much. In fact, he’s a token non-threatening movie version of one. It helps a lot that Adam is very well played by Hugh Dancy, last seen as an altogether different kind of boyfriend material -- namely, the ideal -- in Confessions of a Shopaholic.

Adam’s new neighbor, Beth, is played by Rose Byrne, and she's lovely -- all sassy boots and cheekbones. More importantly, she’s tolerant. Beth teaches kindergarteners, and aspires to write books for them. “My favorite children’s book is about a little prince who came to Earth,” she says very early in the film, invoking Antoine de St. Exupery’s classic and possibly striking a cautionary note about unrealistic expectations. Beth’s other boyfriends, and her father (Peter Gallagher), have proven unreliable. How so doesn’t really matter, except to establish the emotional circumstances by which Adam’s literalism and tendency to stare into the middle distance might appeal to her. If nothing else, she could be his life coach. Beth is pretty much the movie-poster girl for neuro-typicality.

And that’s about all there is to it. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the tonally characteristic scene in which Beth asks Adam if he can give her a hug and he doesn’t understand that she means right now. In another scene, Beth brings Adam a box of chocolates, and he says, “I’m not Forrest Gump, you know.” That’s true. Forrest Gump got out more. Also, Forrest Gump didn’t have an autism spectrum disorder. But if Beth had brought him a box of toothpicks and spilled them on the floor and expected Adam to count them, and he’d said, “I’m not Rain Man, you know,” that just wouldn't have the same magic. Such as it is. Anyway, it takes Beth a moment to figure out that he’s making a joke. Now who has trouble reading emotional cues, eh? Well, yes, that would still be Adam, who also has trouble making jokes, but we’ve got to hand it to him for trying.

Conquest of the Useless

By Werner Herzog; translated from the German by Krishna Winst (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2009)

In the annals of moviemaking catastrophe--from Apocalypse Now to Cleopatra to Heaven’s Gate to Waterworld--perhaps no famously troubled production has been more copiously documented than Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

Maybe it’s because, in that case, the making-of really is more interesting than the movie itself. Or maybe it’s because they tell the same story. Fitzcarraldo is a tale of one man’s nearly ruinous obsession with bringing opera to the Amazon jungle. Its backstory is a tale of one man’s nearly ruinous obsession with the first man’s obsession. So the annotation of Herzog’s 1982 movie, much of it from the filmmaker himself, just seems to flow like a--well, like a great, majestically indifferent tropical river.

You’ll find it in Herzog’s commentary on the Fitzcarraldo DVD. And in his 1999 documentary My Best Fiend, about his nutso leading man and nemesis Klaus Kinski. You’ll find a lot of it in Les Blank and Maureen Gosling’s exceptional documentary, Burden of Dreams, whose Criterion Collection DVD edition even comes with a book gathering Blank and Gosling’s journals from their experience of Herzog’s production. And now you can read the maestro’s own journal of the event, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, originally published in 2004 and newly available in English from Ecco Press.

In his preface, Herzog writes: “These texts are not reports on the actual filming--of which little is said. Nor are they journals, except in a very general sense. They might be described instead as inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle. But even that may not be entirely accurate--I am not sure.”

Uh, OK. And after 306 pages, he doesn’t seem much surer. Could anyone else get away with this? The book covers a very dreamlike two and a half years, through which Herzog remains mesmerized by his own restless tenacity. Only the most committed readers will do likewise, of course, but that’s exactly how the empathy of obsession is supposed to work.

Herzog’s narrating voice is an acquired taste. (Here’s his entry from July 20, 1979, in its entirety: “San Francisco. Emptiness.”) But you already knew that. The real fun to be had with Conquest of the Useless is in the cross-referencing.  Blank’s account of April 12, 1981, for instance, begins with instant coffee and vultures perched on a hotel roof. Herzog’s begins with a drowned workman and whiskey and card games. Consensus: Doom is in the air.

Those of us who remember Herzog’s comments on the obscenity and “overwhelming misery” of the jungle in Blank’s film, or his assertion that “I love it against my better judgement,” at last can have this clarification, of sorts, from April 14, 1981: “The Grand Emotions in opera, often dismissed as over the top, strike me on the contrary as the most concentrated, pure archetypes of emotion, whose essence is incapable of being condensed any further. They are axioms of emotion. That is what opera and the jungle have in common.” The next day, according to Blank’s account, “He expressed his intention to end his life if he failed to complete the filming.”

Rest assured, he did complete the filming--and apparently has yet to complete processing the experience of completing the filming. Maybe he never will.

Having lost her job teaching music at Yale, she quit drinking and adopted a psychopath...

Last week, for duty’s sake, I caught a matinee of Orphan, the disposable but not entirely deplorable new horror flick in which a troublemaking tween adoptee seems strangely wise beyond her years and psychopathic beyond her means. Some people have suggested that Orphan perpetuates the baseless stigmatization of orphans. Maybe. I have an adopted sibling myself, and he too was sort of a disinformation specialist in his day. But never was there any bludgeoning of nuns at the side of the frozen road, thank goodness.

So I would like to ask, instead, if Orphan perpetuates the baseless stigmatization of Connecticut. Maybe. I had a treehouse myself, and it too concealed some evidence of mischief in its day. But never was it quite so treacherously high off the ground, thank goodness.

Maybe I’m overreacting, or just feeling homesick, but I can’t help but wonder what the movies of recent years have been trying to tell me about my birthplace. I know this much: It’s not good.

And I know that before it was in the movies, it was in the books--influential ones, like Revolutionary Road, The Stepford Wives and The Ice Storm. None of which have happy endings. Or beginnings or middles. But--lately, anyway--the Connecticut-set movies really seem to be piling on.

Although it’s already rather a grim exercise, I’ve begun cataloging common elements, and correlating them with recent films in which they occur. I’m sure there are more. Help me out here.

A) Aggressive upper-middle-class anomie B) A disillusioned professor C) An architect living in a fancy but gloomy house D) Actor Martin Donovan living in gloomy house E) A well-heeled but quite solemn story with the word ‘road’ in its title F) Implications of incest, deleterious self-medication and the misuse of a family piano G) At least one injured, dead or dead-inside child H) At least one very troubled marriage I) At least one shattered family J) A graphic miscarriage K) No point, really

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009): F, H, I The Ice Storm (1997): A, G, H, I The Life Before Her Eyes (2007): A, G, H, I Orphan (2009): A, C, F, G, H, I, J The Quiet (2005): A, C, D, F, G, H, I, K Rachel Getting Married (2008): A, G, H, I, Reservation Road (2007): A, E, G, H, I, Revolutionary Road (2008): A, E, G, H, I, J The Stepford Wives (1975, 2004): A, H, I The Visitor (2007): A, B The Women (remake, 2008): A, K

Having lost her job teaching music at Yale, she quit drinking and adopted a psychopath...

Last week, for duty’s sake, I caught a matinee of Orphan, the disposable but not entirely deplorable new horror flick in which a troublemaking tween adoptee seems strangely wise beyond her years and psychopathic beyond her means. Some people have suggested that Orphan perpetuates the baseless stigmatization of orphans. Maybe. I have an adopted sibling myself, and he too was sort of a disinformation specialist in his day. But never was there any bludgeoning of nuns at the side of the frozen road, thank goodness.

So I would like to ask, instead, if Orphan perpetuates the baseless stigmatization of Connecticut. Maybe. I had a treehouse myself, and it too concealed some evidence of mischief in its day. But never was it quite so treacherously high off the ground, thank goodness.

Maybe I’m overreacting, or just feeling homesick, but I can’t help but wonder what the movies of recent years have been trying to tell me about my birthplace. I know this much: It’s not good.

And I know that before it was in the movies, it was in the books--influential ones, like Revolutionary Road, The Stepford Wives and The Ice Storm. None of which have happy endings. Or beginnings or middles. But--lately, anyway--the Connecticut-set movies really seem to be piling on.

Although it’s already rather a grim exercise, I’ve begun cataloging common elements, and correlating them with recent films in which they occur. I’m sure there are more. Help me out here.

A) Aggressive upper-middle-class anomie B) A disillusioned professor C) An architect living in a fancy but gloomy house D) Actor Martin Donovan living in gloomy house E) A well-heeled but quite solemn story with the word ‘road’ in its title F) Implications of incest, deleterious self-medication and the misuse of a family piano G) At least one injured, dead or dead-inside child H) At least one very troubled marriage I) At least one shattered family J) A graphic miscarriage K) No point, really

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009): F, H, I The Ice Storm (1997): A, G, H, I The Life Before Her Eyes (2007): A, G, H, I Orphan (2009): A, C, F, G, H, I, J The Quiet (2005): A, C, D, F, G, H, I, K Rachel Getting Married (2008): A, G, H, I, Reservation Road (2007): A, E, G, H, I, Revolutionary Road (2008): A, E, G, H, I, J The Stepford Wives (1975, 2004): A, H, I The Visitor (2007): A, B The Women (remake, 2008): A, K

Harry Potter and the Ignorance

I've been seeing headlines about how Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince made something like 50 trillion dollars just in the time it took me to type this sentence. And 25 trillion more just now. And so on. Curious. Apparently there is series of books about a schoolboy who is also a young wizard. And this revenue-record-breaking film is said to be adapted from the sixth of those books. Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson star, along with other, less famous but more established actors, and David Yates directs.

Do I sound detached? Well, listen. I have something to confess to you. And now seems like as good a time as any to say it. I have never seen a single Harry Potter film, nor read any of the Harry Potter books.

You may think this strange given the cultural ubiquity of Harry Potter. And stranger still given that I've been working for several years as a movie critic and a book critic. It is strange. I really don’t know what to tell you.

Maybe it's like living in New York and somehow never managing to go to the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty, and always saying how funny that is and you really should do it, like when a friend or relative is visiting from out of town so you have a good excuse, but still letting the years go by without actually doing it.

Except it's not like that.

I'm not trying to be funny, or contrary, or crass. It's not a boycott. I can't say that non-exposure to Harry Potter is a personal goal or an explicit priority. But neither, apparently, is exposure to Harry Potter.

I have sometimes wondered how culturally illiterate this makes me, and how much my cultural illiteracy matters. But I’m starting to think that at this late stage I might just have to let it go. I mean, assuming this stage is late. How many Harry Potter books and movies are there? I don't even know. Well, the stage is late in the sense that I'm getting old. I don’t mean old as in, "Damn kids today, with their wizard movies; in my day, we had Star Wars!” It’s more like, “Wow, life really is short, and there really is so much to read and see.” Such as all the stuff that came before Star Wars. I'm still not even halfway through all that stuff.

Anyway, if I change my mind, or find the time, I know Harry will be waiting for me. Making trillions all the while.

On vengeance and fallenness

As I write this, the hour is late, and I’ve just seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I prefer to call it TROTF, because that sounds funny when you say it aloud. In print it doesn’t look so funny. It looks more like the abbreviation for one of those anxiety-inducing, soul-destroying, opportunity-preventing standardized tests. By comparison to which, the movie is quite enjoyable. Otherwise, though, it’s exhausting. So if I seem a little punchy, you’ll understand why. The summer’s second loudest movie about giant robots to date, TROTF does at least have the advantage over Terminator Salvation, and everything else, of being the first stupidest. To make it, the dubiously distinguished Wesleyan University alumnus Michael Bay pointed many restless cameras at Megan Fox, Shia LaBeouf and the computer-rendered shapes of several confusingly configured machines, then blew a bunch of stuff up.

Does saying these things make me seem old and spiteful? I’ll have you know I’m squarely within the TROTF target demographic. For I, like many of my kind, was a child of Hasbro. In fact, without Transformers toys, I don’t know what my middle-class Clinton boyhood would have been like.

Probably better socialized, for starters. During the transition from grade school to middle school, the Transformers became a wedge issue when a friend who’d outgrown me--or maybe just wanted to seem to have put away childish things himself--let it be known with derision that I still played with them. Well, it hadn’t occurred to me to stop. Anyway, I can’t remember if the stigma took (uh, it’s not like I’d been cool to begin with), but I know the betrayal stung.

And so to him I now say: Yeah, well, the joke’s on you, dude, because now Transformers is an enormously lucrative motion-picture franchise and a worldwide sensation--and plenty of people our age are still playing with them.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to say again to a certain young woman, wherever she is, that it was indeed rubber cement she found on my desk that one day in fifth grade--not, as she so reprovingly suggested, boogers. That false accusation still incenses me. For what does a man have if not (his memories of Transformers and) his reputation? To think that I’d have left my own boogers just lying right there on my desk. No. I’d have eaten them. Duh.

But I digress. It’s late. I’m punchy. Back to TROTF, and the joke being on my former friend.

No, OK, you’re right: The joke still is on me, because for all my emotionally retarded proto-adolescent fixations, I somehow lacked the presence of mind back then to imagine a future in which emotionally retarded proto-adolescent fixations would sustain 144 minutes of moviegoers’ attention, plus a few more minutes of mine, too long into the evening thereafter.

Had I known better, and played my cards right, maybe I could have met Michael Bay while he studied at Wesleyan and my father taught there, then written my own loud, long, stupid Transformers scripts and sold him those. Then I’d have the last laugh, and I dare say it would be an even more satisfying laugh than the one I get by saying “TROTF!” aloud to myself at the kitchen table in the middle of the night.

“My upbringing was pretty weird," says David Bowie's son

I know. You're thinking, "No WAY." But sure enough. Or so Duncan Jones, the artist formerly known as Zowie Bowie, told the New York Times last week.

Jones was recalling the formative years during which his father introduced him to the likes of George Orwell, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, and let him hang around the set on movies such as Labyrinth. The occasion for these revelations was a publicity push for Jones' feature film directorial debut, Moon--an impressive piece of work, not least because its general disposition is so steadfastly down to Earth.

Sam Rockwell stars as a near-future moon base laborer who for three years has spent his days alone mining the lunar soil's rich supply of Helium 3, with which his far-flung corporate overseer claims to be solving Earth's energy crisis. Alone, that is, until an entirely unlikely visitor arrives and turns out not to be good company.

In recent years, Rockwell has been building a fine body of work by wondering how men live with themselves, and Moon is all about that. It’s hard to discuss in detail without giving the whole plot away, and of course the plot--developed by Jones with screenwriter Nathan Parker--is pretty ridiculous. Let’s just say that it takes place on the mysterious frontier between space madness and corporate malfeasance, and that my disbelief was suspended.

I like the movie’s peculiar personality, its way of being a functional assembly of nice touches--like Clint Mansell’s driving score, or the deliberate tactility of the production design, or the obligatory omnipresent talking computer being voiced by Kevin Spacey, whose performances always strike me as facsimiles of humanness anyway.

Most of all, I like that it's not ever too peculiar. As a conscious throwback to the unabashedly philosophical, pre-CGI science fiction of Jones' youth, Moon also has just enough astronomical distance from his famously spaced-out dad. If we want to call Jones' good taste an inheritance, we should allow that so, too, is his discretionary independence.

Summary Observations: The Movie

Aside from intellectual property attorneys, who really knows where to get good movie ideas? Julie & Julia, due in theaters this August, is Nora Ephron's movie of Julie Powell's memoir (originally a blog) of the year she devoted to making every recipe in Julia Child's famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Starring Amy Adams as Powell and Meryl Streep as Child, it is said to be the first wide-release movie developed from a book developed from a blog developed from a cookbook. And it just goes to show that potential entertainment properties are lurking everywhere. What most interests me, though, is its implied confidence in the supremacy of storytelling. If this film succeeds, it might inaugurate a whole new cinematic subgenre of movies dramatizing the doing of things described in instructional books.

Is an adaptation of Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why finally at hand? If so, what would it require? Perhaps the enterprising screenwriter might invent some twenty-something everyman, poised on the brink of self-actualization, and cross cut his intellectual development with telling formative vignettes from the life of Bloom?

Already I can picture our young, book-addled hero, sitting in an uncomfortable chair and contemplating “the vagaries of our current counter-Puritanism,” with the camera swirling and the music swelling around him; or standing by his apartment window, gazing out into the dusk and bearing in mind that “Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you to blaze forth as the scholar of one candle.” It began with Jason Schwartzman in contention for the part, but now I’m seeing Michael Cera.

So OK, it’s looking like this will be a Ron Howard picture, dumbed down just enough for mainstream safety and perhaps controversial in its casting of Tom Bosley as Bloom (certain members of the blogorati having lobbied in vain for Martin Landau). A box-office success? Maybe. An Oscar magnet? Well, sure, as long as it gets across the notion that “We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.”

And if that doesn’t work out, there must still be a good movie to be made from How to Complain for Fun & Profit: The Best Guide Ever to Writing Complaint Letters, by Bruce Silverman. Or at least from The Garden Primer, by Barbara Damrosch.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

Directed by Kevin Rafferty (Kino, 2009)

Let it not be said that 1968 lacked fodder for eventual back-in-the-day documentaries. Even now, it all seems like too much: Vietnam in bloody chaos, King and Kennedy in coffins, Nixon in power, Black Panthers in the Olympics, Beatles in India, and — oh yes — two academically elite yet athletically average college football teams in a tied game just outside of Boston.

This last is the subject of former Michael Moore cameraman Kevin Rafferty’s new film, which, if nothing else, has the chutzpah to suggest that maybe even the most tumultuous years are only as good as their diversions. So if we’re going to go ahead and call this a contender for the Best College Football Game Ever award, in the category of Well, Ivy League, Anyway, we might as well also consider nominating Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 as the Best Football Movie Ever, in the category of Well, Documentary, Anyway.

The title comes from the next day’s Harvard newspaper headline: Both teams went in to this storied game undefeated, but the Bulldogs’ superiority was so unanimous, and the Crimson’s comeback so astounding, that a tie counted as a Harvard victory. And with that in mind, it’s fair to say the movie lives up to the title.

It mostly consists of old game footage and astute not-so-instant replay from the robustly aging players, whose educations clearly inclined them to philosophizing. Rafferty, himself a Harvard man, seems also inclined to characterizing his own tribe as fashionably progressive working-class fellas, and the Yalies as clueless aristocrats, but most of them are too clever and charming — and maybe wised-up from being satirized in the incipient Doonesbury by Yale’s Gary Trudeau — to abide it. After all, the reason they’re here now is to commemorate a common defiance of oversimplification: What began that day as a rote Boomer crucible of solidarity and self-actualization became a dramatic epic of improbable turnovers.

Speaking of which, this was also the first historically significant contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, in that their respective roommates happened then to be facing off on the gridiron. (Yale cheerleader Bush may or may not be among the lads seen here botching halftime stunts and blasting cannons from the sidelines.) Gore’s roommate was of course Harvard lineman Tommy Lee Jones, today as magnetic a talking head as you could hope for, summoning his memories with pregnant hesitations and much actorly gravitas.

It’s just the extra nudge Harvard Beats Yale needs to secure a place for this apotheosis of recreational rivalry among the most inherently movieish moments of 1968. That’s also the year Kubrick’s 2001 was new in theaters, so why shouldn’t the Crimson pep band strike up the commanding first notes of Thus Spake Zarathustra during the game? If Rafferty doesn’t call attention to it, maybe that’s because the mythology of otherworldly grandeur already has been established.

Jonathan Kiefer, a film critic, writes here.

Two New Works on Roman Polanski

“Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired”Directed by Marina Zenovich THINKFilm, 2008

“Polanski: A Biography” By Christopher Sandford Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Probably no one would dispute the three most important facts of Roman Polanski's life: First, in 1943, the concentration-camp incarceration of his father and murder of his pregnant mother by the Nazis — from whom Polanski, then still a boy and essentially on his own, escaped. Second, in 1969, the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson family — to whom many journalists wantonly presumed the director, then most recently of Rosemary's Baby, somehow was connected. Last, in 1977, the “unlawful sex” he pleaded guilty to having with a 13-year-old girl — whose subsequent forgiveness still doesn't change the corollary fact that Polanski has since been a fugitive from American justice, self-exiled to Paris indefinitely.

Nor should it be controversial to suggest that these episodes remain inescapably significant to Polanski's filmmaking, just as his work remains inescapably significant to American movies. So what can any new biographical treatment, be it a detail of the life or a full survey, on film or in prose, possibly hope to add? And what does it say that the two most recent efforts get by quite nicely without even interviewing the man himself?

As if faintly anxious about requiring extra justification, both Marina Zenovich’s recent documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, and Christopher Sandford’s new book, Polanski: a Biography, flash their credentials early and often. As it turns out, Sandford’s formerly sealed court transcripts aren't any more revelatory than Zenovich’s familiar ones are cinematic. Yet neither of these new journalistic endeavors seems superfluous, and we're left to decide whether in the final analysis that’s to Polanski’s credit or our shame.

Not so long after the Manson murders made him a pallbearer for American innocence, Polanski found himself officiating the unholy marriage between American jurisprudence and celebrity journalism. Meanwhile he’d managed both to catalyze the visionary, personal filmmaking of 1970s Hollywood and arguably to pilot its irrevocable descent into indulgence. Thus our stance on the man basically comes down to which application of Jack Nicholson we consider more significant to American culture: directing him in Chinatown or borrowing his hot tub to dope and sodomize a minor.

With that in mind, Zenovich wants simply to reiterate that regardless of Polanski’s guilt or guile, his trial was a mockery of justice. That’s thanks especially to absurd encouragement from the testily star-struck judge Laurence Rittenband, for whom the filmmaker proved a formidable goad. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired has much damning evidence to present against the media circus.

And Polanski: A Biography has more. One scene Sandford describes is so visually concise that it could have been a cartoon in The New Yorker: “Amidst the commotion,” he writes, “one enterprising young man stationed himself at the front door, selling T-shirts inscribed with the slogans ‘FREE POLANSKI’ and ‘JAIL POLANSKI’.”

In both Zenovich’s film and Sandford’s book, Polanski comes across simultaneously as libertine and fatalist; as outgoing trouper and proud, brilliant creep; and as a major artist superbly matched to the technically sophisticated showmanship inherent to his chosen medium. Both of these accounts, while not approving, necessarily, or even entirely charitable, seem protective of their subject. Which is a little silly: if there’s one thing Roman Polanksi always has been able to do, it’s stand up for himself. This is a man who took it upon himself to clandestinely investigate his wife’s murder, suspecting his own friends enough to gather forensic evidence from them and send it to experts for analysis. This is a man who then got his memorably graphic production of Macbeth bankrolled by Playboy magazine while the actual murderers went to trial. No, we don’t need new biographies to tell us Polanski is chutzpah personified, but of course that’s why he still and always interests us.

As to a context of his films, Wanted and Desired puts forth a few choice clips, then turns the task of synopsis over to the prim Mormon prosecutor Roger Gunson, whose preparation for the Polanski trial included a retrospective of his work — from which Gunson reasonably adduced a thematic through-line of “corruption meeting innocence over water.” (It’s probably as brilliant an aesthetic summary as anyone prosecuting a hot-tub sex scandal will ever hope to contrive.)

Sandford necessarily allows a broader view: “As well as two satanic-cult pictures, his canon includes psychological thrillers, faithful adaptations of Shakespeare and Dickens, a costume melodrama, matinee swashbuckling, Hitchcockian suspense, Thirties noir, excursions in absurdism and soft porn, sometimes concurrently, and a deranged Dracula spoof in which a Jewish vampire hunter, played by Polanski himself, repeatedly peers through a keyhole at a naked woman who happens to be Sharon Tate.” Not to mention an adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman’s 1946 memoir, The Pianist, for which Polanski became the oldest director ever to win an Oscar, in 2003. Arguably it was precisely that film’s Polanskian detachment that inoculated it against Spielbergian mawkishness.

But by then, Sandford writes, Polanski “enjoyed the kind of public opprobrium not seen since the time, thirty-seven years earlier, when John Lennon had remarked that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus.’ A few rather desultory public burnings took place of books and posters of The Pianist, though these put the perpetrators in the morally equivocal position of vandalizing what was in effect a memorial to the Holocaust.”

Such is the peculiar power of Polanski, a survivor so tenacious that he overstepped the American myths of survivorship, and accordingly became, as Sandford puts it, “Hollywood's ogre–that necessary figure.”

And so, in both Wanted and Desired and in Polanski, any pretext of new hindsight or of adjusting a cultural reputation seems, however innocuously, specious. Maybe it’s enough just to affirm Polanski’s irresistibly analyzable, ultimately inexhaustible mystique. As the director himself likes to say, in his exaggeratedly exotic accent, after what everyone else on set always figures is a final take, “Fandastic, fandastic! We go again.”

Jonathan Kiefer’s reviews are archived at jonathankiefer.wordpress.com. He reviews for many publications, including SF Weekly and The New Republic.