Mud

Through the vagaries of 21st century film distribution, I happened to see Mud at one of Chicago's god-forsaken multiplexes.  This occurred after the heavy bombardment in Dolby Digital sound of coming attractions for the likes of Iron Man 3 and Pacific Rim practically shook the bones and before the more genteel trailers for Roadside Attractions - the company distributing Mud - followed:  a documentary from Sarah Polley; Joss Whedon's update of Much Ado About Nothing.

With writer/director Jeff Nichol's Mud, we're dealing with something far more subtle than most of those thundering mainstream films.  And yet, there's no lack of story with Mud.  Over the course of his three features, Mr. Nichols has established himself as someone who seems more of a skilled writer that directs than a director who just insists on filming his own stories.  Not a bad thing at all.  So Mud is ground in specifics of character and place as any good writer would do.  But Nichols has applied these distinct touches to a story that has timeless themes:  coming of age, first love, the loss of innocence, a yearning for a home lost or threatened.

Mud's story of a boy helping a man on the run from the law also seems somehow timeless, even a bit archetypal or mythic.  Perhaps that's simply because there is at least some resemblance in plot between Mud and Dickens' Great Expectations, so commonly known and absorbed that, like several of the English writer's works, it would seem to have found the permanence of  myth in the English speaking (and reading) world.  Closer to home and Mud's setting, there is also the obvious influence of Mark Twain, a writer admired by Nichols, whose stories replete with river lore, including Tom Sawyer, Mud's writer had in mind while long nurturing the  idea for his current film.

We are immediately immersed in both place and time as Mud begins.  The place is southern Arkansas, along the Mississippi River.  The time is more a matter of lifespan than calendar, focusing its story in both the pains and mysteries of adolescence and the regrets of middle life.  As for when in a broader sense the story takes place, that's a little harder to peg by the usual gauge of vehicles, appliances or dress, but a refrigerator calendar on the riverboat house of young Ellis (Tye Sheridan), reveals the setting to be the relative present day.

Like many a good storyteller, Jeff Nicols reveals much more than he blatantly spells out.  Just as there are vague tensions at work on that houseboat in which Ellis lives, there's a bit of dread hanging over a morning journey he takes with his best friend, Neckbone (Jacob Lofland).  So too in the frank, sometimes coarse language of the two boys, there's something a little rough, a little forbidding, whether they're talking about their river journey or the parts of the female anatomy that so preoccupy adolescent boys (and older ones).  But that roughness is largely a matter of the bluff typical of young men.  There's often more sensitivity than appearances might suggest.  And so it is with Ellis and Neckbone.

Tye Sheridan has some acting experience, having played one of the sons in Terence Malick's Tree of Life.  Arkansas native Jacob Lofland won the role of Neckbone where upwards of 2,000 boys were tried out.  Apparently, Nichols wanted to cast the roles with boys who could already ride dirt bikes and pilot boats.  That ease is  just one element in the natural and involving performances that the young men give.

If words like mythic or archetypal are too strong in speaking of Mud, there is at least something elemental at play, particularly in the early scenes in which Ellis and Neckbone skim along the surface of the river (apparently a tributary) out toward the more open water of the Mississippi.  Such boys might regularly employ a certain bravado at times as they try to navigate their social world, but their relationship with each other is honest enough that they can openly acknowledge some fear at approaching the expanse of the river and the (what they believe to be) the uninhabited island in its midst.  The focus of their quest is a boat suspended high above ground in a tree's branches on the island, apparently the work of a last big flood of the river.  I don't imagine it was in any way an inspiration, but the image of the boys drawn by the incongruity of a boat suspended in the middle of a forest (and river), reminded me of another great Southern story, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote's first novel in which a mule is found hanging in an abandoned hotel in the middle of a swamp.  

The boys are excited to claim the suspended and long-abandoned boat as their own, sort of the ultimate tree house.  Mud is a film that gets its details right, one of which is the physical state of the incongruously-moored craft.  This is true both in decay of the hull and equipment on board, as well as the detritus strewn about the interior.  It looks for all the world like a boat thus long and strangely dry-docked.  Unfortunately, among the objects that fascinate boys is something of more recent placement:  a plastic shopping bag which contains a loaf of bread and some other food.  The slight dread lurking over the boys' journey is made manifest both with that discovery and footprints found near their boat.  And then they are made aware of the somewhat wild figure of Mud, standing not far away on the beach, fishing reel in hand.

With Mud, the Matthew McConaughey renaissance continues.  Some of his best work, in addition to the titular fugitive here, has come in recent years with strong roles in Killer Joe (he was there the best thing in a very dubious film), Bernie and even Tropic Thunder.  This not to mention The Paperboy and Magic Mike, which I have not seen.  I don't know that we can yet say that Mr. McConaughey is a character actor, nor do I imagine he would be ready to accept the label.  Here, he's somewhere between movie star and character actor, something of a beautiful ruin.  In Mud, his appearance approaches the leonine with those prominent high cheeks, the nose pressed close to the face, the fairly wild mane of greasy curls.

The revealing of Mud's character - in the most thorough sense of that word - happens gradually through Mr. Nichols story.  At first, the boys seem rightfully alarmed by the man, dirty, on his own, full of strange eloquence.  Not to mention the pistol visible above the back of his jeans.  Mud tells the boys that he has claimed the suspended boat has his own, but will grant them possession if they bring him food.  Neckbone thinks both the idea and its source are crazy, but Ellis, questing after something he can't define, agrees to help the fugitive. 

We, like the boys, come to find out that Mud is being pursued by a well-to-do Texas family.  This for the killing of one of it's scions, after he did violence to the love of Mud's life, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon).  Our southern Quixote, forever trying to protect and love his Dulcinea, hopes to rendezvous with her and try yet again to make their hopeless love work.  But the family has Juniper's hotel staked out, bribes in place all over town and plenty of guns at the ready.  The patriarch of this clan (Joe Don Baker) bears a name redolent of southern lore and snakes:  King.  Even worse, as Mud warns the boys, with some justification it would seem, the avenging father is "the devil himself."  

Baker, not seen on screen in several years, is an ace casting choice as King, his once imposing bulk a bit withered by the decades, fitting to the sulphrous but aging patriarch involving his family in an internecine struggle that he seems to regard as some sort of  holy war (at his first motel room meeting with the seedy, motley collection of hired guns on hand to pursue Mud, he has them join hands in prayer).  

Lending Mud even more gravity are the likes of Sam Shepard, Michael Shannon and Ray McKinnon.  Shephard, looking very much the old coot with his nearly white hair shaped into a severe buzz cut, plays Tom Blankenship, former military sharp shooter and father figure to the self-defeating Mud.  Blankenship's proficiency with a rifle will prove invaluable when the forces of King and his men finally descend on Mud.  Michael Shannon, who starred in Nichol's first two features, Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, plays another father figure of sorts, Galen, uncle and guardian to Neckbone.  Mr. McKinnon is a man of many talents, a writer and director in his own right.  He did both for his 2005 feature Chrystal, while he and his late wife Lisa Blount (who starred in Crystal), won the 2001 Academy Award for their live action short, The Accountant.  McKinnon also has a character actor's face, particularly when its long features are made more severe within some growth of beard, as is the case in Mud.  

If there's any common thread through Jeff Nichol's three feature films, beyond his obvious feeling for Americans who are not exactly living large, it is of men who struggle to control themselves and their circumstances.  McKinnon, credited simply as Senior in Mud, is the father to Ellis.  He tries to eke out a living from the river at a time when that is increasingly difficult to do.  His situation is made more tenuous by the growing rift in his marriage and the fact that the family's houseboat is in his wife Mary Lee's (Sarah Paulson) name.  If they divorce and Mary Lee yield's possession of the house, it will be taken by the government and removed.

The lack of affection in his parents relationship seems one of the things driving Ellis to help Mud, struck by the extremes to which the outsider has gone to pursue and protect the woman that he loves.  And while Ellis tries help that forever doomed relationship along, placing himself in harm's way and even afoul of the law, he experiences his own first, abortive romance.  This an older girl named May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant), who's impressed enough with Ellis throwing a punch at a senior boy to protect her that she grants Ellis a first date.  And when that date goes well, when boy and girl kiss, it means they're a couple and in love, right?  This, of course, depends a great deal on perspective, whether that of the eager, innocent freshman or the jaded upperclassman.

Mr. Nichols apparently had his own high school heartbreak in mind in writing of Ellis' first painful attempt at young love.  It's one of several storylines that the writer/director deftly weaves into the overall narrative of Mud.  For all its attachment to something large and timeless in terms of story and theme, very little in Mud seems forced because Nichols so often gets the details of place, circumstance and dialog right.  One can certainly quibble with the manner, both how and where, the inevitable confrontation between Mud and the the small army pursuing him finally takes place.  But that unlikely flare-up of violence is gracefully enveloped in both the larger and smaller pockets of the story.  Much more typical of Nichols' good work in Mud is the role of Senior.  Ellis' father is revealed amid a mix of anger, bitterness, as well as tenderness, on the strength of Jeff Nichols' writing and Ray Mckinnon's performance.  Typical of the best acting, McKinnon's work seems effortless and transparent - more, not less powerful for it.  You believe that if you could find the particular small town in Arkansas, you might well encounter a pained, proud man like Senior.  And so you probably could.  

If not another storyline, there is an air of elegy that runs through Mud.  Beyond the obvious sadness of couples approaching middle age without much to show for their efforts, there is the more pervasive mourning for a way of life disappearing, the ability to find a livelihood on the river.  Twice we see Ellis being driven through the town in his father's pickup truck, looking with apparent wistfulness across the lot of a marine dealership and beyond it to a rust covered old mill or factory building.  It seems a couple of generations of what the town is, was, used to be.  All fading in their way, as such towns seem to slide down some invisible, inexorable grade from producing things to only consuming them.  One of the strengths of Nichols' storytelling is that such points, if made at all, are brief and matter of fact.  Through each of his three features we see people  who are not many paychecks or much of a bank account removed from poverty, but the writer/director knows that such conditions are simple facts of life for many people, and not the only facts that define them.

Mud has more than a bit in common with Debra Granik's Winter's Bone (2010).  Both are set in Arkansas of the present day, both a bit timeless and contemporary at the same time.  Winter's Bone was not Jennifer Lawrence's first professional role, but certainly served as her coming out party.  The same can be said for Tye Sheridan, perhaps even more so.  The character of Mud is obviously the catalyst of the film, but it is Ellis   who serves as the heart of the story, the eyes through which we usually see.  Tye Sheridan is every bit as sure as the formidable actors around him.

Despite the disappointments and disillusionment faced by Ellis, there would seem to be a good bit of resilience in his young heart as he faces his future.  Those of us with more experience -both "real life" and the barrage of thunderously-forgettable make believe - might take a more pessimistic view.  But at least in Jeff Nichols' Mud there is sound reason to feel encouraged, not only for American film, but for the renewal of a rich tradition of storytelling in this country.  Mud, like Mr. Nichols' previous features, Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, are films to seek out.

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The Place Beyond the Pines

Compares favorably to Drive.  Both Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive and Derek Cianfrance's Place Beyond the Pines have in common the laconic, handsome, blue-eyed presence of Ryan Gosling.   So, for that matter does the film at hand and Mr. Cianfrance's first feature, Blue Valentine, though Gosling's  physical appeal was somewhat muted in that film at the service of character.

The Place Beyond the Pines, in its rangy 140 minutes, is, to some extent two films in one.  There is the past (presumably) in which the film begins, with it's converging fates of motorcycle ace turned bank robber Luke Glanton (Gosling) and law school graduate turned policeman Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper).  Then we are taken to the place beyond the past, some 15 years on, when the film ascends (or tries, it seems) into the mythological, with its sins of fathers visiting sons and the younger generation's attempt to break away from or follow suit in their way.

Ryan Gosling and his satin jacket in Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive.

It is in that first part of The Place Beyond the Pines that the comparisons to Drive are numerous and generally flattering for the present film.  In both cases, Gosling plays expert drivers either abetting or directly committing heists, a kind of innocent among more corrupt figures, though capable of ruthless and efficient violence once provoked.  Mr. Cianfrace's aesthetics are certainly more satisfying than those of Refn, who draped Drive in - music, wardrobe, titles, etc. - the worst of the 1980's.  The soundtrack of Place Beyond the Pines is a good deal more varied and its palate usually richer.  There is a brief scene between Luke and his employer and eventual criminal partner, Robin (Ben Mendelsohn), in which the latter's skin appears almost indigo, picking up the color of his dark shirt and the unnatural glow of interior light.

The Place Beyond the Pines, like Drive, finds a good bit of its richness and grit in its outer circle of minor characters,  Mendelsohn's Robin Van Der Zee, perhaps the best among them.  Thanks to the writing of Ciafrance and his co-writers Ben Coccio and Darius Marder and the subtleties of Mr. Mendelsohn's work, Robin comes to life as one of those charismatic figures that materialize in life, perhaps the man who might stop to offer help when you're broken down by the side of the road.  You're not sure if the stranger will help you, kill you, or both.  Robin and Luke meet in a similar manner, though the motorcycle rider is offered a ride back to town when he doesn't need one.  It's not entirely clear if Luke has been recruited for his way with a motorcycle, to take the edge off the mechanic's loneliness, or perhaps some mix of the two.  The relationship almost hints at the homoerotic, at least on the part of Robin.  A brief scene of celebration after a successful heist sees the older man just awkwardly touch the younger, unsure how to express his mix of emotion.  So it goes with men, particularly those in Mr. Cianfrance's two features, unsure of what to do with the hands and certainly their emotions at times.  

Ben Mendelsohn as Robin Van Der Zee in The Place Beyond  the Pines.

What The Place Behind the Pines has that Drive lacked is a credible female character.  This Romina (Eva Mendes), who appears rather obviously bralessly at the carnival where Luke is employed as a stunt rider, one of three men on motocross bikes who zip around the inside of a metal sphere.  For the sake of equal opportunity, we get a fine gander at Mr. Gosling's physique as well.  The film begins in his carnival trailer, in which he's stripped to the waist, displaying a lean, muscular torso, which, along with arms and other free skin (a tiny dagger and drop of blood off the left eye) serves as a graffiti zone for images and cryptic verbiage.  An example of the latter is the word "THROB" up the left side of his next.  His bike, as it happens, THROBS too, until painted over in black for bank-robbing anonymity.  It may well be the Luke and the bike throb for one another, such the sometimes profound relationship between man and his machine.  As for Romina, much as her physical appeal is first announced to us as well as to the handsome carnival rider, most of what follows with the woman who is revealed to be the mother of Luke's child - product of their one-night relationship when the carnival was previously in town - reveals the relative complexity of her character.  She's trying to balance work, school and motherhood while pulled between the man with whom she lives, Kofi (Mahersala Ali), and Glanton.  Ms. Mendes expresses well all of the conflicting claims her character's affections and needs.  Unfortunately, once The Place Beyond the Pines flashes forward to address all the man issues, she's given little to do.  

Such is "Pines" commitment to character that even the that of Kofi, appearing but in a few brief scenes, seems fully formed.  And refreshingly, in a film in which the white guys from each side of the tracks are too distracted by ambition or a penchant for violence, too absorbed with their own needs to be competent parents, it's a black man who sticks around to provide a strong, wise model of fatherhood.  That, obviously, not exactly the norm for mainstream film or culture.   

The connection - after Luke Glanton exits stage left, or at least bedroom window center - between film past and present is the character of Avery Cross.  He's first seen as the nervous young policeman pursuing  Glanton after a bank robbery during which everything that can go wrong does.  The first glance of Bradly Cooper is of those  modest jug ears.  It's all we need to identify him; the only nonconformists among his sharp, contained, leading man features.  The result of his Cross' showdown with the bank robber, aside from a bullet to the leg, is the former's lionization as local and police force hero.  

There's some glory for Cross to savor, but the return to terra firma is quick, the landing unpleasant.  Before returning to active duty, a group of colleagues, led by Deluca (Ray Liotta) take him on a raid of sorts to the house of Romina and Kofi.  It's one of "Pines" more far-fetched scenes - not for the abuse of power, but what the police seek and how easily it is found.  But it's a disquieting scene, none-the-less. 

As with Bruce Greenwood's gravelly performance as the town's district attorney, Bill Killcullen, the Deluca character is another of those that so solidly fill out The Place Beyond the Pines.  Ray Liotta's sinister appeal has aged nicely, all the more effective for its petrification in graying hair, the hint of more roundenss of  countenance and figure of middle age.

The leap of 15 years takes us to a present day in which two other lives converge, those of teenagers Jason Glanton (Dane DeHaan) and AJ Cross (Emory Cohen).  Much of how this relationship begins and proceeds has a familiar truth about it.  The young Cross is brawny and full of bluff, his patched together persona a mix of East Coast machismo (he's usually to be seen in sleeveless white t-shirts) and a white kid's appropriated gangsterism.  Given that, and an unquenchable appetite for alcohol and drugs, AJ is not quite the ideal son to a father with state-wide political ambition (after the lapse of years, we find Avery Cross in the midst of  a run for New York Attorney General.).  As with that earlier meeting of Glanton and Van Der Zee, there might be a mix of motives when the troubled AJ, new to the local high school, spots the loner Jason Glanton in the lunchroom.  But whatever desire for friendship that might propel the young Cross to Glanton, he seems even more motivated to find someone who can score him drugs.  In a version of the sad,  immemorial tale of the unpopular kid trying to find acceptance among the rich and famous of high school society, Jason Glanton goes so far as to rob a pharmacy of Oxycontin to appease AJ Cross.  An unfortunate parallel, obviously, of his biological father's downward spiral.  

Both DeHaan and Cohen are good in their way, conveying their adolescents' mix of vulnerability and anger.  As Jason grows curious about his father, there is one of the stronger sequences in The Place Beyond the Pines, in which the son seeks out Luke Glanton's former employer and partner in crime, Robin.  As with every scene involving Van Der Zee, it's hard to say just might might happen, how darkly shaded the encounter might be.  What does transpire is Jason Glanton's touching reversion to an even younger boy than he his, trying on a father's garish old sunglasses, inquiring after some thing at which he excelled, attempting to cloth his lonely soul in something that might fit   

How satisfying one finds The Place Beyond the Pines might well rest on how willing one is to make that leap of 15 years.  To go beyond it's well rendered details to the rather fairly vague outlines of something more grand.  At the very least, there is the need to harness a good bit of imagination to work out how Avery Cross managed to survive, even thrive in a town in which he informed on a good portion of its police force. 

The film's climax, occurring after Jason Glanton discovers the connection between himself, AJ Cross and (especially) the elder Cross is not particularly plausible in its outcome and aftermath.  And Cooper, better more recently as half of the (sort of) crazy duo in Silver Linings Playbook, isn't quite as strong as he needs to be for the heightened emotions of this climactic confrontation.  As The Place Beyond the Pines really tries to stretch its wings and soar off into the big story, the big film it has been so intent on being, you either get carried along or you don't.  But even if it's the latter, there's much in the film's particulars to justify the investment of those 140 minutes.   

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The Sapphires

Sometimes, one can't help but imagine the pitch meetings.  In the case of The Sapphires, it could well have gone something like...think of Whale Rider meets The Commitments!  Or perhaps it was more a matter of Rabbit Proof Fence meeting Dream Girls.  And then they placed a conference call to The Commitments.  Though I suppose it would be Skype at this point.

What we have more specifically with The Sapphires is a film about a group of aboriginal young women whose musical aspirations converge with a shambolic soul-music-loving Irishman.  These charmingly disparate souls soon find themselves touring the war zone that was Vietnam in 1968.  All of this based on a play of the same name.  And based loosely, as is said (and quite appropriately, in this case), on real events and characters.

The 1968 timing is significant not only for all the upheaval that was occurring in the world, but for what was beginning to happen in Australia.  The country's 1967 referendum marked the beginning of its federal government's move to redress some of the long-standing discrimination and legal inequities that had been afflicting its aboriginal populations.  As an opening informational blurb explains, one of the most devastating of racist practices in Australia had been the ongoing removal of fair-skinned aboriginal children to institutions or white families for assimilation.  These the Stolen Children, or Stolen Generations.

Change might have been coming to Australia, but as The Sapphires begins, racial harmony has not exactly been universally achieved.  The aboriginal people we see are living together on what seems a comfortable reservation.  It's the Cummeragunja Reserve in New South Wales.  This being a film hell bent on feel-goodness, everyone we see is attractive and charming in their way.  The elders wise.  Very little strife that can't be quelled by a joining together in song.  No sign of the less savory details of life for those forced to live in such a manner.

But since the film is not set on the moon, we do have to be shown examples of discrimination in practice.  The first occurs when the girls, calling themselves Cummeragunja Songbirds, head into town to perform in a talent show.  The festivities are emceed with decided apathy by the aforementioned Irishman, Dave Lovelace (Chris O'Dowd).  We first see the Irish soul brother aroused from a drunken sleep in the back of his Hillman Husky station wagon by some local kids.  He wanders pantslessly into the bar where his is employed female proprietor, seeing occasionally to her sexual needs apparently one of his duties as assigned, beyond playing master of ceremonies for the show to which talent remains a stranger.

Until the Cummeragunja Songbirds show up, of course.  Their performance is a microcosm of all that is appealing and dubious about The Sapphires.  The black and white present in the story of the film extends beyond the various shades of skin on display.  It's plays out in the white Aussies who take the humble stage - all laughably bland - for whom the bored Lovelace can't even feign interest, to the Songbirds, who are, of course, great.  And indeed there is something beautiful about a group of aboriginal girls belting out Merle Haggard's "Today I Started Loving You Again."  So good are they that Lovelace pushes aside his glass of beer and provides accompaniment on electric piano.  In a film that takes no chances, none of the singing, even an intimate scene with the girls and their mother, singing the latter's favorite, "Yellow Bird," happens live.  It's all clearly being lip-synced from a recording.  Although Jessica Mauboy, who plays Julie, does sing on many of the soundtrack's songs and has a strong voice to match her  presence.  The singing sounds good, the young women have charisma.  Don't think too much and you're likely to have a good time with The Sapphires.  So it goes.


Not surprisingly, the talent show does not go the way of the Cummeragunja Songbirds.  When Lovelace expresses his incredulity at this travesty, he gets himself kicked out of the establishment along with Gail (Deborah Mailman), Julie (Ms. Mauboy) and Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell).  After a feisty kind of dalliance between group and the hapless Lovelace, and after the fortuitous failure to launch on the part of the station wagon, they decide to respond to a call for entertainers for American troops in Vietnam with the Irishaman as the Songbirds manager.  All head off to Melbourne for an audition, though not before Lovelace is admonished by one of those elders to take good care of the girls, all the while demonstrating his skill with a knife while gutting a fish.

There is a certain symmetry to this joining of forces between an Irishman and a few representatives of Australia's aboriginal population. This beyond the fact that there was in the family co-writer Tony Briggs an Irish uncle.  Briggs wrote the play version of The Sapphires.  His mother, Laurel Robinson, was one of two Koori (the indigenous Australians who occupied the parts of the country now known as New South Wales Victoria) women who did tour Vietnam in 1968.  Many Irish found themselves in Australia or Tasmania, where the English established penal colonies from the late-18th century, sometimes shipped to the antipodes for little more than being Irish (or daring to assert that the Irish should rule their own country).  There are common traces of suffering, much as some of those downtrodden Irish probably produced future generations who, in turn, behaved poorly toward the Australians who where there before them.  So it goes.

The Lovelace character, however, has no historical basis. Nor was he present in the play.  It's where the film version, in the words of director Wayne Blair, "...went a big Argo."  Well, yes.  It is when Lovelace is first considering the possibility of managing the group - asking them if they "sing anything other than that country and western shite" -  and later urging to girls to really sell the R & B songs he's gotten them to perform for the troops in Vietnam that The Sapphires does seem to be a film written while The Commitments was playing on a television in the same room.  At certain of these moments, Chris O'Dowd is left a bit pantsless himself and that ample Irish charm is sorely taxed.


To the story's credit, there's some time devoted to all of the characters of the young women.  This is true of the "original" trio of Gail, Julie and Cynthia, as well as Kay (Shari Sebbens), a sister brought back into the fold while the Songbirds are in Melbourne for their audition.  Kay was one of those light-skinned children of the Stolen Generations.  She's not pleased to see her aboriginal sisters appear unannounced while she's among white friends.  But before long, she joins her singing sisters, lest she also be sucked into the Tupperware generation among the other loudly-clad Melbourne women with whom she's been trying to fit in.  It is Kay who renames the group to The Sapphires during the audition, when the those holding the tryout prove no more capable of pronouncing Cummeragunja than does Lovelace on several occasions.  As with the talent show, the story line of Kay's character is The Sapphires at its best and worst.  There's a ham-fisted flashback that shows Kay returning to the reserve for a funeral and renouncing her family and heritage.  A later scene, no less contrived, shows the ritual of  Kay being welcomed back among her people.  The latter sequence is moving because Ms. Sebbens (herself of both white and aboriginal lineage) is so clearly feeling what she's supposed to be acting.    

The Sapphires also devotes increasing amounts of attention to the least glamorous- at least by Hollywood standards; I don't know how this usually goes in Australia - of the sisters, Gayle.  Gayle is played by Deborah Mailman, the one holdover from the stage play (in which she actually had the role of the youngest sister, Cynthia).  Lovelace makes the necessary though perilous decision to demote the formidable Gayle from lead singer before they hit the various stages in Vietnam.  And it would appear that Mailman is the least accomplished singer and dancer of the group.  But of all the women, she is clearly the most experienced actress, and it shows.  A perhaps quite inevitable relationship ensues between Gayle and Lovelace, the greatest barrier to which is not race, but the manager's drunken buffoonery.  And that annoying war, as it turns out. Clearly, the addition of the rising star that is O'Dowd was a casting coup for this relatively small film.  But just as Gayle is clearly the stronger of the two characters, the "mama bear" as the Irishman refers to her, Mailman's performance does a lot more the the heavy lifting in the film.  

As it goes with these "based on a real story" films, there are yet more of those informational blurbs before the credits roll, telling us what became of the real women who inspired The Sapphires.  It's nice to read that they all remained in or returned to Australia to advocate for their people(s) in one way or another.  This also serves to tie up the entire package of the film with a pleasing bow.  What we're not told is that two of the original three singers did not choose to travel to Vietnam, because they were opposed to the war.  Screenwriter Tong Briggs mother, Laurel Robinson, apparently did go.  And if you're at all inclined to think about what you're seeing as you watch The Sapphires, you might wonder whose interests were best served by the group performing for troops during the war.  And who, for that matter, is best served by the film.  These are fair questions since The Sapphires goes to some pains to tie itself to the real story and sets its late-60s scene by a montage of images and soundbites, which include various demonstrations against the war and excerpts of Muhammad Ali's famous questioning of the same, wondering why he should go to serve in Vietnam when his own people were being denied basic human rights in Louisville.

The Sapphires succeeds on its appealing surface, breathing life into some generally familiar R & B nuggets performed in the film, no small task given how often we've heard the likes of I Heard it Through the Grapvine flogged on radio and elsewhere.  With the major adaptations that have occurred from life to stage to screen, the attempt to tie any of this to the greater suffering of Australian aboriginal peoples (or African Americans) is not one the film would seem to deserve.  But it's easy enough to enjoy the work of these particular women of aboriginal or mixed-race heritage.  And if this is a point of pride for the Koori, if this does any social good in Australia or elsewhere, all the better.


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Kiggins - Vancouver

I was done with Seattle the night before.  Perhaps a bit of road weariness.  Certainly too much walking around in the dark in the southern extremes of the Capitol Hill neighborhood (or perhaps the north end of First Hill), trying to read my guidebook under dim lamplight like an idiot, an advertisement for street crime.  We didn't find the pizza place for which we were looking and wandering, but were able to find a a booth in a crowded Pike Street bar where there was pretty respectable thin crust (it's utter apostasy for someone living in Chicago, but I much prefer New York style pizza) to be had.  But not even the life-giving slices and a couple of pints could restore the excitement I had felt to be in a new city just the day before.  

Good then, that I was traveling with someone of more sanguine outlook.  At her prompting, we decided to check out both Capitol Hill's Washington Park and the neighborhood of Fremont before we quitted Seattle.  Across the hills of the city, over the river of the I-5 we went and finally located the Japanese Garden, tucked along the southwest side of the greater park.  Not a bad way to start one's day, walking about such a peaceful place.  The spring was obviously beginning to arrive in the Northwest,but not quite everything was in bloom.  And the Koi fish seemed rather lethargic, as if not quite in mid-season form, gliding ever-so-slowly through the murky water of the garden's pond.  But perhaps that's just the way they roll.  Or swish.  

Fremont, just east and south from Ballard, once a city in its own right (named after the Nebraska hometown of its founders), has a counter-cultural history trying to hold its own against gentrification.  At this point, the results are more interesting than is the case in Ballard.  The neighborhood, which to some goes by "The People's Republic Of Fremont," is home to quite a few large-scale works of public art.  Most controversially, there is a Lenin statue, rescued from Slovakia after the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 by a Washington resident who was there teaching English at the time.  Apparently, he mortgaged his home to help  pay for the transport of the statue to Seattle.  Although you certainly won't find any statues of Lenin there, Fremont's attempt to be a "People's Republic, " or "Artists' Republic," reminded me of Uzupis, a great neighborhood we visited in Vilnius, Lithuania last year.  The neighborhood declared itself The Republic of Uzupis on April 1, 1997.  Uzupis has gone so far as to create a constitution, which is posted in several language on brass plaques along one of its streets.  You can read more about Uzupis here.

Perhaps most entertaining of all the large works of sculpture in the neighborhood is the Fremont Troll, built beneath an Aurora Avenue overpass.   Note the Volkswagen Beetle being crushed by the troll's left hand.  I like public art which affords kids (of whatever age) to crawl around on it, whether the Fremont Troll or the Chicago Picasso.   

To think that I might have missed the Kogi Tacos.  Horrifying thought.  Lucky's Pho arrived in Fremont only four years ago.  But this, my friends, is progress to believe in.  Great little joint, unpretentious, inexpensive.  And lordy, the tacos.  If you remember nothing else of what I speak, remember the tacos.  Never before had I tried them.  I was on the verge of opting for a Vietnamese sandwich, of which I am also a fan.  But  my companion, in a gesture for which I am still grateful, pointed out the Kogi Tacos.  We enjoyed some relatively high caliber food on our trip, but I think the offerings of Lucky's Pho were my favorite.  Whether this reveals more about the tacos or me, I can't say.  

And so it came to pass that I left Seattle with a much better taste in my mouth - in every sense, obviously - than would have been the case had I simply checked out of the Ace and moved sullenly on.  

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Vancouver Washington lies just across the Columbia River from the Portland area.  Convenient enough for a short drive to Portland airport the next morning.  Before that sad task, a chance to check out the 30's deco of Vancouver's Kiggins Theater.

Getting our routine down just in time to end the trip, we actually arrived in downtown Vancouver with time to spare.  Time to relax and then walk the short distance to the town center for a dinner before the theater's later screening that night.  We made the happy choice of a Middle Eastern restaurant called The Jerusalem Cafe, whose menu promised, "Mediterranean delights brought to you by 2 brothers from  the North Shore of Galilee."  True enough.  We were served by one of the brothers, a no-nonsense but fairly charming gentleman, who has still not grown accustomed to the often sun-deprived climate of the Pacific Northwest.  It was the second straight evening we shared a conversation with an exile from his homeland.  Our taxi to the Egyptian the previous evening was driven by a soft-spoken kid from Somalia, who has spent a considerable portion of his life separated from his family and native country.

I'm a bit spoiled by my location in Chicago, living essentially around the corner from several of the city's best Middle Eastern restaurants, along with three Arab sweet shops.  But the Jerusalem gave us a few things we had not quite encountered in Chicago, from appetizers through dessert, the later a kind of hirsute baklava to which our host treated us, the normal bar of phyllo, nuts and honied goodness topped with shredded wheat.    

   

Beyond it's colorful red upright sign, The Kiggins' 30s facade, of that period in deco between the zigzag of the 20s and the streamline which was soon to follow, is a reminder how elegant, how pleasing a building's exterior be with just minor decoration and a few setbacks.  It doesn't actually take that much.  

Inside it's red doors, the Kiggins gives you a good step back into what some call the "classical moderne" sub-period of Art Deco.  Of course, all these terms came after the fact, not the least of which was Art Deco itself.   More subtle than both the heady glamour of the zigzag that preceded it and the sleek streamline that found expression through the 30s and into the 40s, the classical moderne is what you'll see in a lot of public buildings constructed in the 1930s.  And some theaters, like the Kiggins.   Despite whatever renovation that have taken place - I've seen pictures to that effect - the theater interior seems unspoiled enough by the decades.   The grey and red auditorium was relatively plain aside from its changes in contour, the shallow setbacks built into the ceiling.  Such a relatively quiet palate, as it were, allows things like detail of its grillwork and light fixtures (original to the building, I would guess) to better stand out.  

It all makes for a fine place to see a film, to better emphasize the passing into another world or reality for a ninety minutes or so.  Unfortunately, intruding upon this other, happy world of the cinema, were piercing fragments of conversations from outside the auditorium, easily invading through the curtains which serve as the only barrier to the lobby and beyond.  I assumed some sort of meeting or gathering was taking place in the upstairs bar, which I had read was created by the conversion of a former second floor lounge.  

I didn't begrudge the intrusion as much as I might usually have, grateful as I was for the theater to find some revenue wherever they might.  Not a great deal was pouring in from ticket sales that evening, as only about eight or ten of us were gathered for the 8:20 screening of Emperor.  

I also didn't mind being distracted from the film.  I know a good part of the challenge theaters like the Kiggins is programming, competing for and getting interesting films.  It doesn't help that the last four years have not exactly been a golden age in American film.  So you find yourself screening something like Emperor.  An interesting enough premise - ruined Tokyo during the first days of the American occupation; should the emperor be spared or tried for war crimes; etc - brought tepidly to the screen.  And the curious casting of Tommy Lee Jones as Douglas MacArthur.  And the decision to cast Matthew Fox at all.  I stayed for most of the 98 minutes and then excused myself into the quiet Vancouver evening.  

I had scouted the half dozen or so bars in the downtown area before I went into the movie theater.  This being the one evening of the trip when I was left to some bachelor roaming by night, I thought it might be nice to howl at the moon a bit.  But the belly was still full of Middle Eastern goodness and the requisite 55 gallon drum of diet soda that I consumed at the Kiggins.  

So I walked the brief distance back to our downtown hotel, sifting the mixed emotions of the last night of being on the road.  Mainly sad at lacking the wherewithal  - time, money, perhaps even temperament - to go on.  I walked by an apartment or condominium complex.  Whether confining their lives to Vancouver or commuting the relatively short distance into Portland, I assume most of the 165 thousand (or so) residents of the city are spread out in largely suburban areas.  It's not exactly hopping of a night - a Monday night, to be fair - but there seemed some solid signs of life in the city center, including what looked like a relatively new and sleek downtown library.  And as I walked by the apartment complex, I was surprised to see here Porsch, there a Mercedes.  

Drawing people with luxury cars is certainly not the most noble, it can't be the only goal of a a city aiming at some sort of sustainable vitality.  But at the very least, I hope that investment or interest in downtown Vancouver means that I might find the Kiggins open and showing films several years down the road.  

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Egyptian - Seattle

Oh, what's in store for breakfast?  So one wonders in establishments where any sort of morning meal is promised.  Of course, we've all been around the block enough times to look askance at the promise of a "Continental Breakfast."  Sort of like browsing for some mid-century antique on eBay and realizing that every object from the time of Ramses II through something produced last week in China is characterized as "Eames Era."  Who has not been left wondering what's so continental about a second rate bagel and some watery orange juice?

So, we crept down to the Ace's lower level meal room wondering what and who we might find.  There was the essential - coffee, respectable as you might expect in Seattle and at such a hotel.  And the makings of a simple, satisfying breakfast.  Plus waffles.  This seems to be a thing in Washington hotels just now.  Or the out of town guests have been clamoring for them.  Hard to say.  So, among the other options, there was  rack with cups of waffle mix that one could pour into the waffle maker.  While we were breakfasting, a waffle finished cooking, but no owner could be found.  As if in such feverish demand that the waffles cook themselves.  There will be waffles!

The young gentleman who discovered the stray waffle was half of a pair of skinny twenty-somethings taking their breakfast at the same time.  With his knit cap, beard and scarf wrapped jauntily over his sweater, he looked to me like a hotel prop.  Like he belonged to the place.  Makin' waffles, hangin' out, whatnot.  Exuding Aceness.  But he seemed perfectly nice.  We appreciated that he wanted to turn off the plasma screen t.v. over our heads, for the sake of everyone's morning peace.  

The only other person in the breakfast room was an older woman who had come down in her white hotel robe.  I didn't really feel self-conscious being at the Ace, but as with Chicago concerts at which one is considerably older than the median age, where one, in fact, could be the father of the median age, it's nice to know you're not the most ancient thing about.  

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Visitors must, by law, visit the Pike Place Market in Seattle.  Especially if you're staying just down 1st Avenue from the famous market.  So we went.  

And there is plenty to enjoy among the covered stalls.  The displays of all the varied seafood, the fruits, vegetables and flowers.  And a number of lovely old neon signs.  The fish tossing thing seems a somewhat empty tourist ritual, but to each his own flying salmon or cod.  

Fish heads fish heads, roly-poly fish heads....

Belltown and the area around the market are pleasant enough.  No doubt enviable to your less vital urban precincts.  And there are some interesting old buildings along the much-plied streets.  But little about the taller buildings thrown up in Seattle in recent decades are likely to set architecture lovers craning their necks upward.  

More peaceful and architecturally interesting we found the Pioneer Square area to the south.  Particularly the Smith Tower.  The Smith in question is Lyman Cornelius Smith, whose companies produced typewriters (eventually becoming the famous Smith-Corona) and shotguns.  Seeing what a marketing boost that New York skyscrapers provided for the likes of Woolworth and Metropolitan Life, Smith's son convinced him to commission something rather more ambitious than originally planned.  The tower upon a tower rises to nearly 500 feet and was for several years the tallest building west of the Mississippi.  Taking advantage of the clear day in Seattle, we rode the shiny Otis elevator (conducted by an actual operator; a rare bird these days) to the 35th floor Chinese Room, outside of which is an observation area.  For me, it was that day's fear of heights therapy, though legs were not rendered all that weak, since there's an anti-suicide fence round the whole thing.   

The striking Smith Tower

Arctic Building, Seattle

However great the trip might be, there are those intervals when the blood sugar begins to dip, the legs grow weary, the feet begin to throb.  At such times one is not nearly at one's best.  One can actually become quite disagreeable.  Or so I have observed.  So I have been told.  Me, I'm never less than delightful.....

Yes, where was I?  Well, okay.  I was growing a bit peevish.  The simplest decisions about what to do next were beyond me.  I needed a doughnut.  Though I had never patronized the chain in my life, I had decided that I needed Top Pot doughnut.   It became an idee fixe, the sort of obsession with which many a parent saddled with bratty child can identify.  And to be completely clear, I am the bratty child in this scenario. Fortunately, our northward wandering finally brought us to the 5th Avenue Top Pot.  I ordered a classic cake covered with chocolate.  And it was good.  It was very good.  The fact that my inhalation of this sublime ring of goodness occurred in a sleek, mid-century-inspired (this flagship store is little more than a decade old, I believe) cafe, only added to pleasure.  To stave off any possible afternoon doughnut emergencies, I purchased a large, glazed apple fritter to go.   

At least somewhat fortified, we felt able to venture out into one of the outlying neighborhoods of the city.  After following the monorail north to the Space Needle, after standing about cluelessly at a couple of bus stops, a kindly resident directed through the sprawling Seattle Center, including the unmistakable waves of its Franky Gehry designed component, to a stop at which we could catch an express bus to Ballard. 

Unfortunately, the D bus brought us to Ballard several years, or perhaps a couple of decades late for my taste.  They may be trying to do some good things in terms of urban sustainability, but any notion of escaping to a different, throwback Seattle was dispelled quickly enough.  Of course, the mere idea of getting to some classic version of a city or neighborhood is itself a chasing after illusions.  They're living things, ever-changing, cities and their discernible divisions.  The version of a neighborhood that one or two generations remember so fondly at some point might well have replaced someone else's idea of what that piece of land and water should be.  But as we go forward - in time if in no other way - and neighborhoods gentrify, there's an inevitable sameness which descends, however gleaming that sameness might appear.  

It was interesting to see the Chittenden Locks, which were built about the time of the Smith Tower downtown and connect the salt water of Puget Sound with the nearby fresh waterways of lakes Washington and Union.  Amusing to see civil engineer Hiram Chittenden cast as something of a hero in the visitor center display.  And there are some fine old buildings standing and converted to modern use along Ballard Avenue.  

Among the newer, tony eateries of Ballard, we found our way to a lovely old diner called Vera's.  A friendly, unassuming oasis.  Our waitress, taken aback by my request for a cheeseburger with just catchup and mustard, asked twice if I wanted nothing else with the sandwich.  Certain of my strange proclivities, she assured me that she would bring me a cheeseburger "plain and dry."  I found it neither.  

Aside from a few grand old buildings, the main reminder of enduring personality in the Ballard we saw were a couple of colorful (at least their exteriors) taverns.  Sometimes when a neighborhood changes, a few such places survive, almost as mascots of a kind.  There was the alluring Sloop Tavern which I eyed as we walked back and forth on Market Street.  But we never did ford the many lanes of that busy street.  Instead, we stopped for a pint at the Lockspot Cafe, quite near, as the name suggests, to the Chittenden Locks, before catching a D bus back to the city center.      

As with the Harvard Exit the night before, we took in a movie that evening at a theater which is the result of a building conversion.  The Seattle Egyptian is actually a former Masonic Temple.  This despite the fact that "Fine Arts" is emblazoned in gold atop the building's facade on Pine Street.  Apparently the Mason's allowed the larger of the facilities two auditoriums to be used for wrestling shows in the 1970s.  By the 80s, the Seattle International Film Festival was using the converted theater as its home.

I had assumed the venue was another of such themed theaters built in the 1920s, when the country got a bit carried away with things Egyptian.  But the the decorative scheme was actually applied in the 1980s.  Given what was often going in that decade in terms of theater decoration, those responsible for the Egyptian's current look could certainly have done worse.  Much worse.  

A couple of reminders of The Egyptian's Masonic past....

We took our places among a few other people and a lot of empty seats for a screening of On The Road. Director Walter Salles, who had already directed an appealing road picture with The Motorcycle Diaries, was probably a good choice to finally bring Jack Kerouac's sometimes overheated novel to the screen.  It's not a masterpiece, but Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera make a pretty good run at it with their episodic film.  English actor Sam Riley, so good as Ian Curtis in Control, seems just a bit off as Sal Paradise.   But Garrett Hedlund is a charismatic surprise as Dean Moriarity.  Otherwise, On The Road offers something of an all-star cast, Viggo Mortensen perhaps best among the luminaries as Old Bull Lee (William Burroughs).

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