Hi all;
Hope everything is well with each of you. Haven’t had much spanky muse these days, blech, not even the motivation for any quiet alone time either. Uncharacteristic for me, I know. Ah well such is life. Started working on Lindy’s choice Chapter 3 again, but didn’t get too far. I had to go back and reread chapter 1 & 2 to try and keep it linear, that put the kaibosh on making much progress with chapter 3 this weekend. We’ll see what this week brings.
I watched two movies I’ve been wanting to see this weekend though, so the time hasn’t been a total loss. Thought I’d share a bit about them, ok? “Breech,” the fictionalized movie loosely based on the two months leading up to the arrest of Robert Hansen, “the worst spy ever in US history;” and “Junebug” a quirky independent film about family dynamics. Both movies were great.
***
I always like watching Chris Cooper’s characters. In Breech, he is again an amazing chameleon, taking on and bringing out such recognizable human nuances of the characters he plays. The bad guy in this movie, being based on a real life man who is reviled, had to be a challenge to make whole. Cooper’s performance makes the movie more than I expected it to be.
His portrayal of the spy is powerful and multidimensional, though I suspect the man Cooper portrays for the audience, is much more sympathetic than the real Hansen is capable of being. As I said, the movie is highly fictionalized. The ‘wanna-be-agent clerk’ character played by Ryan Phillippe is a complete fabrication, and the script was written more for drama than accuracy. Even so, it is a well written and well crafted character study. I appreciated the way the man’s *self* disintegrates as the conflict between who he wanted to be, what he did, and who he ultimately ended up being comes to a crisis point. I could feel his simmering anxiety boil to panic as the world he once ruled and controlled began to progressively uncover his secrets.
There’s a subtle sense that he’s actually partly responsible for his own capture; that some of his angst, most of his arrogance, and maybe even the initial motivation to choose the path he did, comes from festering resentment. The message is clear, that the very changes in practice and policy he has been advocating for his whole career would have caught him a decade earlier had they been recognized and implemented.
Cooper plays Hansen as a jaded, hard, guarded and cold man prone to go on the offensive, yet his character’s arrogance, the thing that could have made him completely unsympathetic, is belied by a subtle, ‘ruined-man’ vulnerability. It is the flaw that destroyed him, in the beginning and in the end. He’s a an aggressive, opinionated, misogynistic Catholic, who is a hypocritical closet consumer of pornography, and who, unknown to his submissive dutiful and very proper wife, posts stories and videos of their apparently quite active “rough” bedroom life on the internet using her real name. He’s actually almost desperately guarded emotionally, resisting displays of interpersonal connections with his clerk on the job, and yet he spends a whole night searching and printing literature about the clerk’s mother’s illness. He gets along with no one, yet his grandchildren, children and wife think he walks on water. Cooper effectively portrays a completely corrupted and flawed individual, yet in spite of all the unforgivable, despicable things he’s done, at the end there’s a palpable and poignant sense of relief. The end left me with a sense of hope that the decent man inside him, a man he has ruined and crushed, is actually freed by his capture.
All that said, I think Chris Cooper would make a good DD husband character, though I’d prefer to see Laura Linney play the role of his wife than his adversary. *grin*
***
Junebug is another character study that I think is well crafted and nicely put together. It starts out a bit off, but quickly turns into a comfortable ‘nice’ story about a young man whose new wife’s job – snapping up a hillbilly savant folk artist’s work - brings him back home. Be aware though, the first few scenes aren’t well connected to the flow, and it’s not until the end that you get a sense for what’s going on and how they were relevant to the story. Actually, if I had watched the movie at the movies or on TV instead of the DVD, where I was able to watch a few of the deleted scenes I might have missed some of the subtle but key early messages altogether.
It’s a very human study of a family of nice, but flawed, ordinary people. There’s the golden boy oldest son who, for unspoken reasons, has made a deliberate choice to get as far away from home as possible; the passive-aggressive younger brother whose resentment of his brother has fed what seems to have become a brooding apathy possibly born of a lifetime *being* second. Their mother, though strong, has become worn by life and is seemingly trapped at a protective arm’s distance from the people around her; her husband initially seems almost catatonic in his passive existence within his family. Their family home and local community flesh out as powerful entities in their own right. Every room in the home has it’s own living-breathing character and I loved the way the director brings out a fundamental stability in spite of the potentially divisive disparity within the family by lovingly portraying their home and each room in it, as unique and both occupied and empty.
Older brother George, who has established himself successfully in Chicago (doing ?), met and married a sophisticated avant guard older woman and has been married six months before his wife’s business forces him to disclose his marriage to his family – this is one element you might miss if you don’t listen carefully to the dialogue. Younger brother Johnny fell in love/lust and married before graduating high school and now works as a laborer in a wholesale retail shipping department. Two years later, with his his very pregnant wife, he has moved back into his parents home. His wife is a quirky effervescent presence in the home. She welcomes George’s new wife with excited, childlike, open arms. George’s ‘outsider’ new wife’s integration into/acceptance by the family initiated by Johnny’s wife, while an important theme in the movie, is really a means to underscore something never actually brought up and that’s what happened to compel him to leave and why Johnny resents not being able to leave. (note: the actress playing Johnny’s wife snagged several independant film awards as well as an academy award nomination for best supporting actress for her portrayal in this movie last year).
I love the way the seemingly least ‘capable’ individuals in the family, Johnny’s pregnant wife, and the quiet passive father, end up being the unifying and stabilizing forces in the family. I won’t give away all the special nuances in the movie on you. It will make you cry and smile. It’s a quiet gentle dramedy.
One of the highlights in the movie for me is when the pastor compels older brother George to get up and sing one of my favorite hymns during a church supper. (the George Jones version I’ve linked for you is fair but kinda slow). As he sings acapela (with back up from a father and son singing harmony) the camera cuts away to his family’s faces. Much is said with the words of the hymn and the expressions of each person at their table. Regrets about the realities of choices - to stay home, to leave home; sadness about, and at the sametime the beginnings of the resolutions of, old conflicts, lost time and inevitable change in their lives…
Hope everyone is well. Hope my spanko muse picks up some steam, cause I think I sure could use one…. LOL! p.s. Ann Murray & Alan Jackson do Softly and Tenderly very well on iTunes, but not as well as the acapela version in this movie… IMHO…
