Film review

  • The Bridges of Madison County

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clint Eastwood (1995)

    Robert James Waller’s 1992 romantic novel The Bridges of Madison County, a huge bestseller, was despised by many readers, including Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep.  Eastwood eventually agreed to direct and star in the screen version on condition that Streep was in it too.  ‘She said she had a problem with the book,’ Eastwood told David Gritten in a 1995 interview in the Daily Telegraph, ‘and I said well, join the club, but look at the script and see what you think’.  With Richard LaGravenese (who gets sole screenplay credit), Eastwood had reworked the structure and focus of Waller’s novel.  Its story of the four-day, mutually life-changing affair between a National Geographic photographer and a Midwest farmer’s wife was now ‘told from the woman’s point of view’ instead of the man’s.  Streep signed up.  The result was a critical success, as well as a commercial one.

    The time is 1965 and the place Iowa, where Francesca Johnson (Streep), who came to America as an Italian war bride, keeps house for her husband Richard (Jim Haynie) and their teenage children (Christopher Kroon and Sarah Kathryn Schmitt).  Richard is solid and affectionate though, like the kids, he takes Francesca for granted.  She’s left on her own for a few days when the other three make a trip from Iowa to neighbouring Illinois for the state fair.  Soon after their departure, a jeep pulls up outside the farmhouse.  Robert Kincaid (Eastwood), in Iowa on an assignment to photograph the covered bridges of Madison County, has lost his way and asks directions.  This is the starting point of a relationship that develops so quickly and strongly that, by the eve of her family’s return, Francesca is planning to abandon the homestead and run away with Robert to travel the world with him.  In the event, she can’t bring herself to do so and Robert leaves alone.

    The Johnsons’ family life resumes with Francesca’s husband, son and daughter none the wiser about her brief encounter.  Until, that is, her death, some twenty-five years later.  Her now middle-aged son Michael (Victor Slezak) and daughter Carolyn (Annie Corley) are baffled to find that their mother left instructions in her will to be cremated, rather than buried alongside her late husband, and for her ashes to be thrown from the covered Roseman Bridge in Winterset.  In a safe deposit box, Michael and Carolyn discover photos Robert Kincaid took of Francesca, letters he wrote to her, and journals, in which she recorded in detail the events of their four days together.

    The Bridges of Madison County is essentially a two-hander and it’s a pity it’s not actually a two-hander.  With a couple of exceptions – Francesca’s husband and Lucy Redfield (Michelle Benes), a local woman ostracised by the community for having an affair with a married man – the minor roles aren’t well written or played.  A framing device for the main narrative may have been necessary but the scenes that involve Michael and Carolyn, describe their shifting reactions to what they discover about their mother and cause them to reappraise their own less than satisfactory marriages, are heavy-handed and banal.  They’re also the main reason why the film (at 134 minutes) is overlong.

    If the source material is as bad as the Telegraph article and comments on Wikipedia suggest, the able Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King, Behind the Candelabra and plenty more) wasn’t faced with an easy task in smartening it up.  But Clint Eastwood would have done better to cut most of the Michael-Carolyn stuff and give Francesca more farm work to do while she’s on her own, especially since she’s one of Meryl Streep’s most physicalised creations.  As it is, the heroine appears not only to have time on her hands but to forget, after its appearance early on, there’s still a family dog – a golden retriever – to feed.  When Francesca’s husband returns home and they do a household shop together, it’s a relief to see this includes a big bag of Purina dog chow.  The retriever must be starving.

    The film opens with some good scene-setting shots of landscape, foretelling what will be a strength throughout:  the director and his DP Jack N Green build up, in an unstressed way, a strong sense of place (aptly given the National Geographic connection).  But the early, pre-flashback scenes in the farmhouse are, even by the standards of a Clint Eastwood movie, clumsy and overacted – as Carolyn, Michael and his wife Betty (Phyllis Lyons) respond to Francesca’s surprising post-mortem wishes.  Once Streep and Eastwood are on screen together, however, The Bridges of Madison County turns into something more singular than the clichéd scenario leads one to expect.

    The two leads are certainly an odd couple – he with his minimal acting, she with her maximal.   Eastwood had recently directed the quite well-received A Perfect World (1993) and, before that, Unforgiven (1992), still his biggest succès d’estime.  Streep had been through what was, for her, a lean patch.  The interval between her Academy Award nomination for The Bridges of Madison County and the previous one, for Postcards from the Edge (1990), is the longest in an Oscar nods CV that runs from The Deer Hunter (1978) to The Post (2017).  She clearly decided that playing an Italian woman was a chance to go to town on the arm and hand movements, which are very elaborate.  Otherwise, she cuts a physically credible, interestingly sturdy figure; there’s a sense of vitality subdued in her plain yet somehow assertive walk.  While some of Francesca’s laughter as she listens to Robert’s funny stories of his globetrotting career is a bit too much, Streep is vocally inventive and convincing.

    Francesca is conspicuously agitated very soon after Robert’s arrival.  There’s arguably a rationale for this:  she’s bored enough with her life to be instantly sensitised to the charms of a new man in it.  On the other hand, this could simply be Streepian embellishment.  As a director, Eastwood, like others before and since, seems so in awe of Streep’s technique that he lets her do what she wants, which is sometimes too much.  As an actor, though, he seems inspired by sharing the screen with such a lavishly gifted player.  How else to explain his uncharacteristically animated and appealing performance?  Robert Kincaid – a slightly opaque loner, a world traveller yet a man from nowhere – aligns with the tradition of Eastwood’s Western strangers-in-town.  But he brings to this role an unaccustomed emotional alertness too.

    Since there’s no danger of either star being upstaged, it was unkind of Eastwood to cast some of the supporting roles in the way he did – as if to vindicate at every opportunity Francesca’s disenchantment with Iowa and its natives.  This isn’t such a problem with her neighbour Madge (Debra Monk), a plump and oblivious chatterbox, who’s in only one short scene.  But the appearance of the forty-something version of Francesca’s son, a more prominent figure in the story, is borderline cruel.  Victor Slezak is the embodiment of the pompous windbag Michael evidently is – living proof that a new generation of Iowans is as narrow-minded as the one that oppressed his mother.  That comes through in bit parts too.  When the scandalous Lucy (Michelle Benes is a distinctively delicate presence) goes into a Winterset diner, the waitresses’ hostility towards her is crudely overdone.  An older woman, who sits a couple of seats away from Lucy and stars at her curiously and silently, is more believably offensive.

    The exchanges between Francesca and Robert become less engaging as the script ratchets up her conflicted angst.  The de luxe love scenes get to be a drag.  I’d seen The Bridges of Madison County once before, probably around twenty years ago, but didn’t remember it in much detail.  It’s acquired the reputation of a classic weepie but, as it entered the home straight, I was wondering if the waterworks weren’t all on screen.  Meryl Streep does a good deal of crying.  Even Clint Eastwood sheds a tear.  The last time the lovers see each other, in a store car park, it’s pouring down.  Lachrymal rain courses down the windows of the Johnsons’ car.   Eventually, though, the movie lived up to expectations.  The woman to my immediate left was discreetly but persistently fiddling with a tissue.  The sounds of nose-blowing and male coughing were everywhere to be heard in the BFI Studio.

    The scenes I found affecting weren’t the climactic heartbreak ones or the last sequence, when Michael and Carolyn, not only reconciled to their mother’s wishes but wiser and stronger people after reading her journals, scatter her ashes as requested.   The emotionally potent sequences are those featuring the older Francesca – caring for her dying husband, later receiving delivery of a box of Robert’s cameras and other memorabilia, along with news of his death.  Jim Haynie has a fine moment when Richard, on his deathbed, tells Francesca how much he loves her and says sorry for being unable to give her the life she dreamed of.  But the power of these scenes is down chiefly to Meryl Streep, and further evidence that part of her genius is the imagination she brings to playing women in old age.

    Her breakout stage role in 1974 now seems to predict this particular talent.  At the age of twenty-five, she played the octogenarian ‘translatrix’ Constance Garnett, in a Yale School of Drama production of The Idiots Karamazov by Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato.  In The Iron Lady (2011), her interpretation of the elderly Margaret Thatcher, her failing mental powers intruding on her obdurate personality, remains one of Streep’s greatest achievements.   What she does as the seventyish Francesca Johnson is much smaller scale but, with the help of Roy Helland’s skilful make-up, highly persuasive.  The gestures that earlier in the film sometimes looked artificial are now attenuated and fully absorbed into the movements of the woman Streep foresees Francesca becoming.  The emotions she expresses as she looks through Robert’s bequest are eloquent and true.  Meryl Streep had her seventieth birthday in June this year.  She’s approaching an age where she no longer needs to imagine what it’s like being old.   That makes you appreciate her geriatric portraits of yesteryear all the more.

    1 September 2019

  • Hail Satan?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Penny Lane (2019)

    The Satanic Temple (TST) started life in America in 2013 with a handful of founder members.  By the time Penny Lane was making this documentary about the movement and its development, TST had grown to around 50,000 people.  While Hail Satan? indicates the inception date and current membership numbers, it’s frustrating Lane doesn’t supply more facts and figures.  Perhaps TST is now so high-profile in the US she thinks them unnecessary.   Armed with a good supply of scandalised, worrying but laughable representatives of the Religious Right and well aware of how easily entertaining her material is, perhaps she wants to avoid anything that might interrupt the flow.  Though, as Ava DuVernay showed in another recent documentary, 13th, it doesn’t take long to put key statistics on the screen.

    Whatever Lane’s reasons, the result is lack of clarity about TST’s geographic scope and exactly when certain events are taking place.  She makes clear that, and how, the Temple’s political activism has expanded in the few years since it began.  She gives little attention to how much this was influenced by, or whether membership rose exponentially in the light of, Trump’s election.  An interview with Lane used as the BFI programme note, in combination with the Wikipedia entry for The Satanic Temple, filled in some of the gaps:  I’ve had to draw on these sources to piece things together for this account of Hail Satan?

    As with 13th, a particular clause of the US Constitution is central to Lane’s film.  In this case, it’s the First Amendment[1].  As the question mark in the title suggests, TST doesn’t believe in Satan as a supernatural entity; nor, for that matter, does the Church of Satan (CoS), founded in California in the mid-1960s, from which TST definitely distinguishes itself.  Although they make use of traditional Satanic iconography and rituals, both constituencies are largely atheistic, or non-theistic.  They view Satan, rather, as the archetypal adversary to the powers-that- be.  TST soon grew however, to espouse a more political programme than CoS.   It was created in reaction to what its co-founders, Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry, saw as the theocratic tendencies of the George W Bush administration.  Although its first initiatives seemed jokey, it always positioned itself as a faith-based organisation that, in Jarry’s words, ‘met all the Bush administration’s criteria for receiving funds, but was repugnant to them’.  The Temple has taken, and continues to take, a stand against the increasingly evident convergence of politically right-wing and fundamentalist Christian agendas.

    According to Wikipedia, TST has chapters in 13 US states and Canada.  The film’s settings are entirely North American, except for one brief, puzzling detour to London.  This could be London, Ontario (the screen indicates just ‘London’) but the young man interviewed in the group there has an English accent.  Confusing as his presence in the narrative is, what he says touches on a central issue.  He explains that he was born and raised a Muslim, became an atheist, then decided that atheism ‘wasn’t enough’.  His remark anticipates what lawyer Stu De Haan, the most seemingly honest TST spokesperson among Lane’s talking heads, says when she asks him why the movement doesn’t present itself as non-religious.

    De Haan replies that he’s reluctant to define himself in terms of something he’s not.  He acknowledges too that, in order to claim the religious equality rights enshrined in the First Amendment, TST has to be a religion.  Its official branding has certainly proved effective in securing its financial position.  In April 2019 (three months after Lane’s film premiered at Sundance), TST ‘officially received tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, being classified as a “church or a convention or association of churches”’ (Wikipedia).  Whether TST has risen above defining itself in terms of something it’s not, is more arguable.

    Controversies covered in the film revolve largely around the installation of Ten Commandments monuments.  In 2012, one was erected in the grounds of the Oklahoma State Capitol.  In 2015, TST campaigned successfully for its removal on secularist grounds, invoking a provision of the Oklahoma Constitution prohibiting the use of state resources to promote particular religious views.  According to Lane’s narrative, this wasn’t, however, the Temple’s original plan.  They first sought to erect their own Satanist monument in the form of a statue of the demon lord Baphomet.  After Oklahoma, the Ten Commandments were installed in Arkansas State Capitol grounds, with Republican State Senator Jason Rapert a prime mover in the project.  In the climax to Hail Satan?, TST’s Baphomet statue is unveiled in close proximity to the Arkansas Commandments, albeit for a very temporary stay.

    It’s understandable that TST has opted for headline-grabbing tactics to raise public awareness of its mission, and that Lane gives much attention to Baphomet, with its strong visual impact.  (It’s also amusing to learn the sculptor of the angel-winged, goat-headed demon based its torso on Iggy Pop’s.)  But the focus on Jason Rapert reflects one of the film’s most striking features:  the minimal disparagement by TST of religions other than Christianity.  Beyond the evidence of a clip from the Cecil B DeMille movie, there’s no suggestion that the Ten Commandments derive from Jewish scripture – just as there’s virtually no acknowledgement that Satan is a figure in the Abrahamic religions generally.  TST member Mason Hargett, having declared himself an atheist, goes on to say he’d like to see emblems of many different faiths erected in public places.  At first, I wondered if Hargett was a loose cannon within the movement.  The picture that Lane proceeds to build up gives the impression that he’s not.

    In order to major on the confrontation between TST and the Religious Right, Hail Satan? largely skates over other secularist casts of mind.  A brief clip of a TV discussion programme shows David Silverman, then president of the American Atheists association, inveighing against conventional religious objections to the Temple.  It would have been helpful to hear from other practising non-theists, though:  it’s hard to believe they’re all comfortable with an outfit whose modus operandi depends on the continuing prominence of organised religion and takes issue with only the Christian version of it.

    When the Arkansas Ten Commandments was first installed, it lasted no more than a day:  a man called Michael Tate Reed rammed his car into the monument (live-streaming what he was doing).   Lane skimps on information about Reed in a different, more surprising way.  The film mentions that he claimed to be a theist but disagreed with the public promotion of particular religious beliefs that the monument represented.  It doesn’t mention that he’s been a serial destroyer of monuments of this kind and that, ‘According to … mental evaluation by state doctors, Reed has regularly acted out [sic] at the direction of various voices that he has believed to be divine, among them God, angels, saints and spirits, although some of the voices came from demons and false prophets’ (Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 1 June 2018).

    Two Christian women interviewed in Arkansas have sharply differing views of what The Satanic Temple is up to.  The first woman refers disapprovingly to its attempts to preserve the separation of church and state – a perfectly respectable objective and not a battle that TST is fighting alone (although Lane doesn’t allude to this).  The Arkansas Ten Commandments monument ‘was challenged by the ACLU as being a violation of clauses in both the Federal and State constitutions prohibiting the government from favoring any religion’ (Wikipedia).  The second woman interviewed says, ‘They’re just doing it to annoy’.  Her dismissive tone does no justice to the energy and diligence with which TST members promote their cause but you see why she thinks what she does:  the particular imagery of their initiatives is calculated to offend Christian sensibilities.  In spite of which, the press and TV report excerpts included in Hail Satan? suggest that plenty of Americans, rather than being alarmed by the Temple, persist in seeing its members as a bunch of pesky anarchic hoaxers.

    The documentary is at its most instructive in describing the historical context of TST’s struggle against a Christian monopoly.  It seems the Ten Commandments installations of today have their origins in political and commercial phenomena of the 1950s.   The affirmation of national Christian values in public places assumed a new urgency in that fearfully anti-Communist era.  Cecil B DeMille promoted his 1958 movie by placing Ten Commandment monuments in American cities as a publicity stunt.  An epidemic of anti-Satanic hysteria in the last years of last century – which railed against, inter alia, Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons – has also made and left its mark.

    Hail Satan? does well to show too how TST, in spite of its subversive cachet, is, like any organisation, having to deal with dissidents within its own ranks – thereby risking accusations of itself suppressing freedom of expression.  This has led to the expulsion from the movement of Goth motormouth Jex Blackmore – a main contributor to the performance art side of TST activities.  On the evidence of the film, Blackmore’s creative output is noisy, boring and sometimes bizarrely confused.  At an anti-anti-abortion event, adults wearing nappies and foetal masks are led round on chains.   Blackmore sees this as a vivid illustration of the Pro-Life campaign’s fetishisation of the unborn child.  In effect, the sight of enchained foetuses is ambiguous, to say the least.  Blackmore’s expulsion, however, is the result of a performance rant that advocated various aggressive action, including killing the President.  TST is fundamentally opposed to violence, as reflected in its codification of seven basic tenets, which blend humanism and humanitarianism[2].

    In the end, though, you have to wonder how fairly Penny Lane represents the Temple of Satan.  In her interview with David Morrison reproduced in the BFI note, she says she sympathises with the views its members hold and the things they do:  ‘I felt like here’s a religion that I really believe in,’ she says.  Lane is taking ‘religion’ to mean ‘an interest, a belief, or an activity that is very important to a person or group’ (Merriam-Webster) rather than ‘the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods’ (OED).   Fair enough, except that, in doing so, she ignores the question of what ‘religion’ means in the context of the First Amendment.  After all, it’s the ‘prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]’ part of the clause that TST have homed in on, rather than the broader freedom of speech part.

    If Lane doesn’t convey the political seriousness of TST, perhaps Lucien Greaves is complicit in this.  Greaves, who looks to be in his forties, is by some way the most interesting character in the story told here.  His identity and appearance encourage the idea that he’s the leader of a crazed insurgency – but as if to make fun of the idea.  His pseudonym (not, he says, his only one) is a few letters away from Lucifer Graves.  His somehow damaged right eye emblematises a sinister occultist.  But he talks quietly, reasonably and often humorously.  A quick look online at some of Greaves’s pronouncements, including his statement on the (for him) vexed question of religious organisation tax exemption for TST (quoted on Wikipedia) confirm his high intelligence.  At the same time, you get the sense that all-publicity’s-good-publicity thinking led him to go along with Lane’s entertaining but shallow approach, signalled by  Brian McOmber’s jocose music, which opens and closes Hail Satan?  Neither Lane nor Greaves (in the film, at least) is prepared to wrestle with the irony that TST, for all its resourceful opposition to Christianity, is parasitic on it.

    28 August 2019

    [1] ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievance’

    [2] In January 2016, the online publication Progressive Secular Humanist asserted that, as moral statements, these tenets compared favourably with the Ten Commandments.  It’s worth adding that, as noted by Stephen Brown in his perceptive Church Times review of Hail Satan? (22 August 2019), ‘The organisation’s Seven Tenets comply closely with what many a liberal Christian would subscribe to: compassion, justice, respect, etc’.

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