Class consciousness and Whit Stillman movies

Whenever my sense of 99 percenter outrage gets the better of me, I try to remind myself of two things. The first is my college roommate Adam, a Wharton wunderkind who now surely makes more at his private equity firm in a month than I will in my entire life, and who I know to be a decent person. And I think about how much I love Whit Stillman movies.

If one of the reasons we make art is to get a window into the lives of others, and to understand and appreciate our common humanity, then the so-called "Yuppie trilogy" -- Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco -- must be considered an amazing achievement. And so I'm very excited that after all these years, Stillman finally has another movie on the way, and strenuously disagree with the way that the times have moved on, and he's been pegged in the wrong place.

What's always surprised me about Stillman's movies is that they are about everything I should hate -- characters from affluent family backgrounds who never worry about student loan payments, people with the space to fret about nonsense and never worry about their lives sliding out of view. But by laying out the story on their own terms, Stillman invites you to sympathize with them. Or not, no big deal -- but you'd have to have a hard heart to still want to see their heads lopped off.

Around last Christmas I saw Metropolitan again for the first time in ages. I like it more each time I revisit it. The story is slight, about a week or so in the lives of a circle of affluent New York college-age kids, but it clicks as a sound comedy of manners. It's larded with class assumptions which it doesn't hide or apologize for. At its heart, it is an almost sentimental tale of passing youth -- a graceful story about passing through the best moments of your life, with all the foreboding notes in the right place (there's a remarkable scene at the very end when two of the characters meet their future selves).

You could just leave it at that. But for me, when put in context, Stillman pulls off something only F. Scott Fitzgerald could do -- to surgically puncture the nonsense that America is a noble meritocracy, and suggest the mix of hate and envy that we look upon whose who live unearned, better lives. This is why Fitzgerald is one of our best novelists -- he has the guts to point out that Americans are just like anyone else. That we are not, as contemporary Republicans odiously suggest, a cheerfully deluded nation of haves and soon-will-haves.

So I couldn't disagree more that his movies are light and simple. They are the opposite of adorable, cuddly, or quirky. Which is why the idea that somehow he is some godfather of twee, is offensive. I've seen the trailer for Damsels in Distress, and yes, it does seem rather "quirky." Yet the capsule review of Metropolitan would also make me wince. And I might say he has let his approach be influenced, rather than the other way around.

My 2011 'list'

I love year-end "best of" lists -- most of us are too busy with everyday life to keep up with everything we would like to, and this is our one chance to catch up before the whole caravan moves on. Since we can't be a fanatic fanboy about everything we'd like, we have to accept we're all amateurs now. 

I'm at that point in life where I can't even keep up enough to offer a whole list of my favorite cultural production of the year. There are just a few things I want to rave about before the calendar flips...

MUSIC I think it is amazing that a serious, unflinching examination of the English experience of the First World War would be the year's only album that matters. PJ Harvey's Let England Shake doesn't compromise much, in its allusions, its poetry, or its assessment of the vast dangerous gulf between the language of valor and patriotism and the blood and terror of war. By wisely looking through the lens of a distant trauma -- the trenches and fields of a war a hundred years ago -- it meditates on the deep social costs of what we can politely call "conflict" in a way I can't remember anything else in recent memory has.

I've never been great at writing about music, so I can only fumble around for the right words about it. Much of the haunting, relentlessness appears to have something to do with the autoharp, and her particular singing style of late -- that choking, high shriek I believe she debuted on White Chalk that some of her long-time fans find grating. Her choice of samples ranges from the cliched -- that bugle in "The Glorious Land" -- to the inspired -- a new generation of listeners has now met Niney the Observer thanks to "Written on the Forehead." But one thing that is consistent is the way she can still make your skin crawl, as in "All & Everyone," which with little sentiment or irony imagines what it was like to die at Gallipoli.

But what's more interesting is how this album fits in Harvey's catalog. It seems crazy to say it about sometime whose first album I remember hearing in high school, but this album puts her in that exclusive company of artists like Dylan and Lou Reed and -- for some reason the analogy always springs to my mind -- Neil Young. These are all artists who came to sudden, youthful fame in a particular genre -- folkie, art rock, country rock, and the riot grrl whatever -- but were so talented and brave and devoted to their craft and vision that they had to grow and evolve with each subsequent album. Through the years, they've managed the unique task of growing up to become interesting adults, and you reach a point where the brand is so strong you pay attention to whatever they come up with. I can't wait to see what Polly Jean creates next.

MOVIESThere was a moment maybe halfway through Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life when I realized just how well conditioned we are as viewers these days. We expect every scene in a film to be busy, to be working. But there was one moment in Malick's film when one of the brothers is sitting at a table painting. As is Malick's meditative style, we linger around for a few beats longer than we expect. The scene is meaningless out of context, it only "advances" the story in the context of the dozens of other scenes around it.

Why, I would like to know, are filmmakers so terrified of taking their time? Why do they insist on assuming we have no memory, no patience, no attention span?

Actually, don't answer that. I saw a preview of Jack and Jill before I saw Tree of Life at the Mammut shopping mall near Moskva Ter, which managed to make me shrink into my seat in shame, even in a dark room where no one could know I was American.

And of course, it isn't hard to find the reasons that a movie like Malick's is a tough sell. As I left the theater, I heard two young women speaking -- in English, oddly -- about the movie. One was complaining about how she couldn't figure out what this and that "signified." This inability to handle the idea of a sweeping, non-linear, subtle movie has become part of this film's lore already. There is the story about the theater posting that it wouldn't be giving refunds if you asked for one because you couldn't figure it out. The quotes from Sean Penn about how he couldn't figure out what he was doing there (frankly, neither did I, his performance was rather statuesque).

I wanted to patiently tell her not to pull a muscle trying to figure it out. A movie isn't a math problem, for crying out loud.

Sometimes, you have to just buy the ticket and take the ride. That's the charm of film -- you give your time and your attention and you get taken someplace. It requires a great degree of trust, and Malick more than earned it. A few others have for me too. Stanley Kubrick, for example, is the same way for me.

The easy knock on these filmmakers is that they are pretentious, and self-absorbed and obtuse. But really, that's just ambition. And there's a reason I dropped my 1,200 forints to watch this instead of Jack and Jill.

There's nothing wrong with understanding that film can be poetry and it can be prose. And hell, it can be painting, and it can be music.

BOOKS

I like books. Quite a lot. And I feel I should have something clever to say about the year in literature. But still after all these years, I continue to to be aware that there were hundreds of years of great literature before 2011. I'm still catching up.

So, to borrow James Wolcott's appropriate phrase, I haven't spent much time this year "preparing Joan Didion's reliquary [or] fawning over the latest literary genius farted aloft from the borough of Brooklyn."

Woody Allen chugs along to Paris

I always like say that my Russophilia killed my Francophilia. I grew up a young man with a Romantic streak, a fascination with Europe and travel, and all kinds of cultural aspirations. But after long experience with Russia, somehow Paris has become very quaint and safe, a bourgeois fantasyland.

So I started to tune out of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris sometime during the first real scene of dialogue, as Owen Wilson mooned to Rachel McAdams about how inspiring and perfect the whole damn place is. Especially how breathtaking it is in the rain. The rain, for some reason.

A few quick points:

-- Woody Allen, more or less, has been functionally retired to me since 1997. I think a great number of the fans of his early work would draw that line at different points. But at the very least, the guy has got to slow down. There might have been an interesting movie in here, which with some patience and teamwork and at least another year in the oven, it could have emerged into something really valuable.

-- There's really nothing wrong with rehearsal. Allen's way of having actors interact has become a mannered charade of how late 20th century New Yorkers interrupt each other, say "Really?" in a forced way, and awkwardly try to purposefully look at one another when they aren't yapping. Loved it all when Diane Keaton did it, but man, every new generation that tries it out just looks dumb.

-- Woody needs to have a drink with an actual conservative every now and then. I love making fun of wingers as much as anyone, but even I cringe at the caricatures Woody routinely trots out to get a few cheap laughs from the Upper West Side crowd.

-- I love the "Lost Generation" -- far more than most do. So I enjoyed all the imitations of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dali. But I realize they were cartoons, and I think I was kinda laughing at them, not with them.

-- "Prufrock is like my mantra!" ... Really? this line got through a rewrite?

-- I know everyone thinks it when they see it... so I'll say, *SPOILER ALERT* that you should do the math and figure out the age difference between the last two characters on the screen. (okay, I checked IMDB, it's 17 years). It's just gotten creepy already. Is he really so surrounded by yes men that he doesn't realize this? If this movie had any emotional honesty, Carla Bruni (one year older) should have appeared at the end.

-- So, New York, London, Barcelona, Paris... someone wake me up when he gets to St. Petersburg.

When Stalin went Hollywood

Turner Classic Movie has been running a fantastic series called "Shadows of Russia" about Hollywood's changing image of Russia. I haven't caught enough of it, but I did get to see last month the rarely shown wartime film Mission to Moscow, a Warner Brothers production from 1943 that answers the strange question of what it would have looked like if Hollywood had to spin Stalinism. Just before I saw it, I happened to read James Agee's review of the film in The Nation in May 1943, which sums up its weird appeal...

"It is indeed... a mishmash: of Stalinism with New Dealism with Hollywoodism with journalism with opportunism with shaky experimentalism with mesmerism with onanism, all mosaicked into a remarkable portrait of what the makers of the film think that the American public should think the Soviet Union is like -- a great glad two-million-dollar bowl of canned borscht, eminently approvable by the Institute of Good Housekeeping. As such, it is as rich a subject for diagnosis as any other dream."

The film tracks the increasingly peripatetic shuttle diplomacy of FDR's ambassador, Joseph Davies, in the years leading up to the war. He pledges to go with an open mind, and travels the USSR meeting a surprising number of factory workers and peasants who speak very good English. He also encounters scheming diplomats from the Fascist powers, and spineless diplomats from the western democracies who are more suspicious of the righteous Soviets than the Nazis. As the world rushes to war, he begins to hear about strange things, like acts of sabotage at weapons factories, which culminates in the most stylized portrayal of the Show Trials one could imagine. Here is Bukharin, Radek, Tukachevsky, all revealed as enemies of the people taking orders from Trotsky to engineer an invasion by the Fascists to overthrow Stalin. Agee is fascinatingly even-handed about this, which reflects how things are black and white only in hindsight. Even for an avowed liberal anti-communist -- Agee was already good friends with Whittaker Chambers at the time -- the facts were murky:

"About the trials I am not qualified to speak. On surface falsifications of fact and atmosphere I might, but on the one crucial question, whether Trotsky and Trotskyists were or were not involved with Germany and Japan in a plot to overthrow the government and to partition the country, I am capable of no sensible opinion. I neither believe nor disbelieve it. I neither believe nor disbelieve evidence to the contrary. I am unable to trust the politicians of either camp or of any other to supply, the world in general, or even their closest associates, with the truth.... It may be that this painful impotence is an impotence merely of my own spirit; it may be that I am immobilized, rather, by my conviction that a primary capacity for telling or discovering the truth is possible, today, to few human being in few types of occupation or allegiance. In any case I can attempt to learn the truth, and can defend, or attack, only in areas where I can rely in some small degree on the hope of emergent truthfulness in the material and in those who are handling it."

It is a fascinating, somewhat uncomfortable thing to watch. Especially when they neatly present the thoroughly bogus Soviet version of the Nonagression Pact of 1939 and the invasion of Finland