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Category: Movies
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 Title: Film Review - Atonement  | views:424 |  Review by John L Ng Feb 08
The movie Atonement is typical British; it is slow, understated and detached. Rightly so. Those involved are British – its director, Joe Wright, its screenwriter, Christopher Hampton, the novelist, Ian McEwan, and the actors. The setting is a British family in an old country estate. The pastoral surroundings can not disguise the family’s repressive undersurface. Its members are properly trimmed in dinner jackets and evening dresses. Their conversations are restrained with stiff upper lips. A periodic outburst is judged with askance. All smoke habitually with deep inhales and long exhales. Their long glances are etched with quiet tension and emotive repression. Much is unsaid but noticed. Cecilia, played by Keira Knightley, discovers that she is in love with and loved by Robbie, James McAvoy, a family servant’s son who dabbles in gardening. The presence of Cecilia’s unhappy brother, Leon, and his arrogant friend, Paul Marshall can only heighten the quiet tension.
Whispers of a sexual scandal stirring are overheard but faintly. Cecilia and Robbie’s covert courtship is covertly observed by Cecilia’s younger sister, Briony, Saoirse Ronan. Briony’s lonely and penetrating eyes are precocity in adolescent confusion. After a series of false assumptions and misunderstanding, she witnesses their coitus in the house library and is troublingly incensed. Before the family and the police, she perpetrates false accusations against Robbie that results in catastrophic consequences.
The rest of the movie is the unfolding pain of that catastrophe. Sin is always slow and pervasive. It is indiscriminate. It concerns not with what is true and who suffers. In this case, the sin of Briony’s false witness procrastinates and stews into an unjust ruins for Cecilia and Robbie. But they are not the only ones who suffer. Because of one long lie, a torrid of pains floods all who are involved with pains of guilt, of falsehood, of longing, of unconsummated love, of separation anxiety, of war’s wounds, of failure and of unforgiveness. Abraham Hershel, the eminent Jewish theologian, once wrote that pain atones us for our sins. Pain is not just the wages of sin. Pain often times is necessary to amend our sinful ways.
The backdrop in the movie’s second half is the advent of World War II. Perhaps a prolong war is the best scenario for suffering atonement. For war, like sin, is ruthless. It cares not who dies or who is maimed. The horrific images, with long panning battlefield shots and close-up scenes in the hospital, are an inescapable reminder of war as the crucible of atonement. Robbie is a soldier lost, wandering aimless in soul and body. Cecilia and Briony, who is grown, are volunteer nurses. They are also lost as well in the pain of war. Briony’s nun habit like uniform seems to suggest that charity and chastity are her means of atoning for her youthful indiscretion. She has repented of her erring way but repentance is powerless. It can never right what she has wronged. No matter how persistent Briony tries, the painful consequence of her sin lingers to the final end. Since her adolescence, Briony has always aspired to be a playwright. Perhaps the only atonement for her sin is her adult imagination. But even here, there is the undeniable pain of helpless virtual reality. Willful sin is that mighty. |
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| Review submitted: 2009/2/27
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| Category: Movies
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| Title: Film Review - Michael Clayton | views:256 | John L. Ng 2/08
Michael Clayton is a good movie about a bad world that is messy and untidy. It is a story of ethical, or rather unethical, choices corporate masters make in quiet desperation and silent paranoia. Michael Clayton, played by George Clooney, is the cool fixer for a high price law firm. He is the ‘janitor’ who cleans up messes his firm’s respectable clients get into. As jaded as his sleepless face looks, he sweats not and raises his voice not. The firm’s top litigator, Arthur Edens, while defending a giant chemical company in a class action lawsuit, comes across an in-house document that proves the company’s guilt in fatally poisoning its customers. While deciding to blow the whistle, he suffers an emotional meltdown. Clayton is sent to mop up Edens’s media nightmare. The company’s chief counsel, Karen Crowder, played by Tilda Swinton, seeks to stop Edens at all cost.
As Clayton is cool, Crowder is cold. Their protagonist and antagonist interplay provides a study of flawed humanity in a messy world. Clayton is the embodiment of imperfect decency. He longs to do well and make good but has an insatiable gambling habit, messes around with the mob and owes them a lot of money. He takes delight with his young son and sticks his neck out as Edens’ loyal friend but can’t find forgiveness for his feckless brother. He finds solace coming home to family only wanting to escape its tormented dysfunctions. In contrast, Crowder is the embodiment of banal evil. We know almost nothing about her. She has no personal past or social present. Sexless and joyless, she is without family or friends. Her mere existence seems to consist only of her grimy corporate world.
To watch the movie in a temperature controlled theater, the temptation is to judge their in white and black according to our convenient jurisprudence. But a rabbinical proverb cautions us: judging is done in heaven, but fixing takes place in this world. Two scenes tempt us sorely to usurp heaven’s prerogative. While getting dress in her hotel room, Crowder rehearses her public statements to cover their falsity with cool blandness. All the while, underarm perspiration stains her silk blouse in quiet desperation. We disdain her. In another scene, Clayton, having been awake all night to help Edens, drives along a winding country road. He comes to a clearing and sees another day dawning. He gets out of his car to walk the hill toward a new day’s fresh light. Unlike the phatic noises in Crowder’s hotel room, Clayton’s walk is in prolonged and profound silence. We like Clayton for the choices he has made.
The film is about making moral choices by desperate and imperfect people. The world Clayton and Crowder live is also darkly cynical and sinister. Banal evil is lurking behind every corporate grin and whitewash euphemism. The evil they face are real and constant. Some, like Crowder, embody that evil, some, like Bach, Clayton’s boss, cater to it and others, like Clayton, try to face up to it. Our simplistic jurisprudence urges to make them all into cardboard thin caricatures. We simply want to root for Clayton and boo Crowder. But the wise reminds us that it is not our place to judge. Judgment is reserved for heaven. Like Clayton, we are all but janitors trying our best to fix things when they are broken. Clayton is our hero because we realize very well that it is all he can do. At the end of the day, all he has are choices he made, as imperfect as they and he are. We feel good about Clayton because he survives. The choices he makes turn around and make him. Crowder also makes some choices. And they turn around to unmake her. We feel good about that too.
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| Review submitted: 2008/4/2
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| Category: Movies
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| Title: Film Review : A Serious Man | views:86 | Review by John L Ng Nov 09
Something is amiss when this strange movie begins with a quote from the medieval rabbi Rashi – receive with simplicity everything that happens to you, and a stranger parable set in an Eastern European Yiddish village about how a righteous person might be a ghost (I think!). Then there are the lyrics by the ’60 band Jefferson Airplane – when the truth is found to be lies / and all the joy within you dies / don't you want somebody to love – that permeate the movie. A Serious Man, produced, directed, written and edited (under a pseudonym) by Joel and Ethan Coen is about a serious man Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) who seeks to do right but is wronged.
In the fullness of time, his shalom of prairie existence in suburban Minnesota is vandalized by a gang of random circumstances. Slowly a series of existential inconveniences mutates into ontological miseries. One of his students protests a class grade and tries to bribe and sue him. His tenure committee receives anonymous malicious letters regarding his disqualification. A mail order music company harasses him for non payment. His unemployed and live-in brother slips down physical, mental and moral precipices. The bickering rivalry between his son and daughter irks him with daily distractions. His wife decides to leave him for a pompous older widower.
But unlike the story of the Biblical Job, we get no preface glimpse of why these wrongs happened to Mr. Gopnik. At least in first chapters of the book of Job, we are told that the horrific calamities came upon Job because there was a bet between God and the Adversary in heaven. In his travails, Mr. Gopnik is undeterred – he seeks the counsel of not one but three rabbis. First, his synagogue dumps a naïve junior rabbi on him. The young rabbi in earnest seeks to convince him that reality is a matter of perspective. Things aren’t bad if you frame it with imagination.
Then Mr. Gopnik sits before a second rabbi, respectable but pretentious. He tells a story of how Jewish dentist encountered a kind of epiphany in the mouth of a Gentile patient. The dentist searched for meaning in futile agony. At last he went back to his mundane life of weekly golf with friends and daily meals with spouse. At wits end, Mr. Gopnik finally begs for the wisdom of an aged rabbi. But the eminent rabbi’s contemplative life is too busy to have time for him. Once again, his existential questions are left to himself, unanswered.
The movie is ubiquitously Jewish. Some of its cultural and religious references fly over this Gentile’s head. Yet the notion of God’s and life’s incomprehensibility strokes the ruffled perplexity in us all when we witness what seems to be senseless and random evil. More than a few times, Mr. Gopnik laments: I’ve tried to be a serious man. I’ve tried to do right. The incongruity of his desire for right and what ends up as unexplained wrong is troublesome in any thinking person of faith. But there are no answers, even to a person of faith.
The movie is also opaquely funny. A truism from the old Catskills vaudeville days may explain the movie’s humor. Many great comedians are Jewish because the Jewish people suffered so much in history. Mr. Gopnik laments again: Why does He (Hashem, Hebrew for ‘the name’ referring to God) fill us with questions if he doesn’t answer. Here I turn to the third book after Job in my bible. Maybe Ecclesiastes’s counsel is the wisest practice – at day’s end, there is one thing left to do: eat, drink and find happiness wherever we are and what ever we are doing.
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| Review submitted: 2009/11/24
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| Category: Movies
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| Title: Film Review : Disgrace | views:24 | Review by John L Ng June 10
Disgrace is not an easy movie to sit through. Much of its many scenes and dialogue is difficult and ruffles our shared sense of jurisprudence. The film is an adaptation of J. M. Cortzee’s novel of the same title. The story centers on David Lurie, a professor of poetry in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa. David (played hauntingly by John Malkovich) recites fine poems and sips finer wine. He likes to believe that he is refined man. He also likes to bed women, irrespective of whether they are prostitutes, other men’s wives or his students. His sexual instinct is indicative of his unbridled arrogance that no one can fault a human for pursuing his primal desires.
After he is exposed for seducing a troubled student, David pleads guilty to the charges but unrepentantly refuses to defend his behavior. Humbled by his dismissal but not ashamed, he retreats to the farmhouse of his estranged daughter, Lucy. In the countryside, soon his self imposed solace and amoral conviction are shattered when three black youths viciously attack him, sexually assault his daughter and brutally shoot her dogs. (Dogs are prominent in the movie. Perhaps a pervasive reminder throughout that if their primal instinct is no different from that of human’s, then humans are no different from dogs.)
The converging reactions of people near David to the gang crime are a meditative study of morality and being human. Lucy accepts the thugs’ violation of her body as justifiable for the injustice caused by those long years of her country’s apartheid. She refuses to report the crime to the police. Petrus, Lucy’s handyman, waxes incoherent platitudes about a new world order in post apartheid South Africa without acknowledging that the incident is criminal, admitting that one of the youths is a relative. Bev, who runs an animal clinic and sleeps with David, shows sympathy for Lucy but passively resigns to things as they are in a world she has little say.
As David struggles to come to terms with their reactions, especially Lucy’s rationale, he retreats within to the question of his amorality. If there are no right and wrong in human instincts, then why is he so morally outraged by the youths’ crime against him and his daughter. The mere notion that David is capable of righteous anger means that he is above primal desires. Toward the end, there is profound but ambivalent self awareness that leads to personal remorse. He inexplicably visits the family of the student he has wronged. The father lets him in his home but only to warn that ultimately it is God David has to face. David kneels with his head bowed before the mother seeking forgiveness in utter humiliation and repentance.
After a long sweaty walk along the dirt road back to his daughter’s farm, David quietly resigns to accept his new country and consequences of his personal action. “How humiliating, to end like this,” he laments, perhaps rendering a commentary of what it means to be ‘disgraced’. Human behavior has both personal and societal consequences. David’s uncontrolled lust has ruined his personal honor and communal respect. Lucy’s choice to escape the privilege of urban living in white Cape Town to a simpler life style in the barren plains of East Cape has its own risks. Apartheid has reaped what it sowed. Much of the violence in the movie is off screen (in contrast to the novel’s graphic details), as if to suggest that we can look away but not avoid. It does not negate the personal and social consequences of being an inhumane humanity before God. The psalmist acknowledges that God has made us a little lower than angels and has crowned us with glory and honor (Psalm 8). With that glory and honor comes moral responsibility.
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| Review submitted: 2010/7/1
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| Category: Movies
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| Title: Film Review : Jindabyne | views:456 | John L. Ng 10/07
Jindabyne, the title of a little independent movie directed by Ray Lawrence and loosely based on Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water So Close to Home”, is also a sleepy resort town in Australia. Claire (Laura Linney), an American, lives there with her Australian husband, Steward (Gabriel Byrne), and their son, Tom. Dark memories of things past between them have damaged their marriage. In brokenness, they do their best to move on but with quiet desperation. Hurting and hurtful emotions beneath their thin veneer are sipping out slowly.
What flushes their latent desperation to the surface is a gruesome discovery Steward makes while on a fishing trip with his buddies. He finds a murdered young Aboriginal woman on the river. Though horrified, inexplicably the men go back to fishing after they tie the corpse to shore with a fishing line. A day and night pass before they report it to the police while on their way home. The repercussions from the men’s depraved indifference expose a more pervasive desperation among all those involved. The story confronts us with a troublesome question: What is the moral obligation of people in community, even toward the dead? Each character reacts differently. With fresh grief and anguish, Claire, being typical American perhaps, wants to bring closure by facing the incident openly. Her Australian husband and friends, with suppressed shame and opened fury only want to move on. Meanwhile, the Aborigines in their own quiet desperation cry racism and injustice.
These varied reactions seem to suggest that gender, culture and race determine our sense of moral responsibility. As the story unfolds, a more profound pathology undergirds all those involved. Being human that they are, each is flawed with moral weakness and social blind spots. No one seems capable of perceiving reality with adequate understanding. Worst, although they mean well, each person is somewhere irresponsible in their relationships with one another. Claire and Steward live with their friends. They eat, drink, laugh and play together in community. Yet beneath the laughter and horseplay, everyone, unhappy with one another, senses that something is not quite right among them. The incident forces their true self to the surface, sometimes explosively with anger and resentment.
The movie, as an analogous to life, is painfully slow. Every frame broods slowly and begs for pathological reflections. The lingering shots of Australia’s beautiful but bleak landscape bear witness to our quiet desperation. In the opening scenes, the unexplained evil of a local electrician who murders the woman further adds to our collective pathology. The notion that his murderous motive is unexplored or unexplained contributes to the dark mystery of our flawed humanity.
Jindabyne is a somber and sobering movie. To appreciate its many dark layers, it should be watched in solitude, as I did in the middle of the night. The movie’s slow brooding allows me to brood along with contemplation. Claire and Steward in their quiet desperation are just like us. Or rather, we are just like them. They try hard to be responsible members of their community. But their shared pathos fails them. The tortured and confident words of St Paul come to mind: What a wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! Romans 7.24-25.
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| Review submitted: 2007/11/11
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