Month: August 2013

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Big Bad Love by Larry Brown

big-bad-love-151

Grade: A

It’s not my intention to pigeonhole anything here, but when I think of the American Short Story my mind goes straight to Hemingway and his spawn. Writers of a dark masculinity that create poorly concealed autobiographical fiction where the men desperately search for their place in the world while acting terribly. They are womanizers and boozers, some are violent and most are emotionally unstable, but the catch is that they’re smart enough to understand the damage of their actions. The writing is unrefined and coarse, reflecting their working class characters. These are the Bukowski’s and the Carver’s of the world and Larry Brown deserves his place among them, both in style and skill. His collection Big Bad Love contains stories of men who are desperate for love and a human connection but will never get it because their understanding of it is so flawed and their choices so awful.

The stories themselves are all set in the south and all are written in first person. They have ever-present themes like poverty and violence and desperation. Most of the men in the stories are married, though some are divorced, and most of them too are either looking to cheat or are cheating, though some just live in agony as they try to figure out how to make their women happy. In “The Apprentice” the man’s wife is a struggling writer who he supports financially but secretly thinks she’s terrible at it and should give up, but he continues to support her through some obligation or maybe love. In the title story “Big Bad Love,” it’s less subtle. The protagonist can’t please with wife for physical reasons. The man spends time in the bar alone and laments “I just couldn’t do anything with her big Tunnel of Love. I could hit one side at a time, but not both sides.” If man’s inadequacy and inability to conquer the new world is your central theme than what better metaphor exists than a cavernous vagina? Sure, some could argue this collection is a bit on the sexist side, and they wouldn’t be wrong, but it’s honest in the portrayal of the existential crisis of these men.

The last half of the book is sort of a novella titled “92 Days” that is about a divorced man who dreams of being a writer. He sits at home alone and writes and writes and sends manuscripts out and awaits the rejections slips. If this sounds like Bukowski to anybody, it did to me too, but there’s one key difference. Bukowski never doubts his writing or his genius. Rejection slips mean nothing to him because being misunderstood is actually a good thing to him. Brown feels the horrible pain of every rejection, he’s honest that some of the things he writes are terrible. This is not a story about sticking with your dream and everything will work out fine (I’m not trying to say that’s what Bukowski was trying to do, for the record, but there’s a sort of inevitability to his writing that suggests eventually he will be recognized as great), but instead reads as a treatise on writing. About how it’s a passion that doesn’t go away simply because you’re not successful or it’s not really the smart way to live your life. Rejection slips pile up and the only solace is in the nicely written denial letters.

Larry Brown was one of our great writers. His stories, and novels, are dark and gritty and dangerous and punch you right in the gut. But there is also a humor in his writing that really makes it jump off the page. It’s as if he knows just how ridiculous the people in his world are but can’t help the fact that he loves them anyway. Nobody is all good, okay nobody is really very good at all, but nobody is all bad either. People are complicated and so are Brown’s characters, and all just desperately want to connect to another human being. If you haven’t read any Larry Brown, do yourself a favor and get on that. This collection and his debut novel Dirty Work are literary masterpieces that show both the ugliness and beauty of people.

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Fiend by Peter Stenson

Fiend

Grade: A

The zombie apocalypse is a pretty bleak affair. Not just because of the walking corpses perpetually trying to eat you, but because the entire world has turned on us. The nurturing planet we look to as our home and safe house has become hostile and bent on our destruction, the wonderful concept of humanity being created in god’s own image becomes only a cruel joke. The world has changed, forever, and has removed all hope. All that’s left is survival in the immediate, just a life of going from place to place. But none of this is new, we already knew all that, it’s been done. So how do you make the zombie plague even more soul-crushingly depressing? How about populating the world with drug addicts. In Fiend, author Peter Stenson uses the walking dead as a metaphor for the nature of addiction, in this case meth. The result is a terrifying look into not just addiction, but what people are capable of when survival is the only thing left worth anything.

The book follows Chase Daniels as he comes out of the tail end of a meth bender and, slowly, realizes that the people of the world are dead and have been replaced by zombies. He flees with his fellow tweaker Typewriter as they try to navigate the new hellish world while also trying to stay high. Their addict instincts take them to a cook known as The Albino, then to rescue Chase’s ex-girlfriend KK and her new dude. Things go badly and they flee to the Hmong end of town and hook up briefly with another cook, things go badly there and they flee yet again to find another safe house with yet another cook. These tropes are incredibly familiar within both the zombie genre and the druggie genre, yet nobody, to my knowledge, has ever thought to combine these two things before. Think about it for a second, there are really only two types of people in this world who truly exist only on a moment by moment basis: Drug addicts and those trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. Why not throw them together? The big twist on this book is that somehow the chemicals in meth are what keep the zombie plague at bay. This sets up an interesting scenario in that the only way to survive is to stay high. The junkies dream, and nightmare come true.

Fiend is written in the first-person, present tense, creating an immediacy and danger that makes the reader feel the same anxiety the characters feel. Stenson intimately understands the junkie’s mind and, refreshingly, cares little for zombie lore. We don’t know much about the living dead, and we don’t care, because they’re not really the point. His protagonist Chase comes off a little too educated for a druggie dropout, though. He consistently makes literary and classical allusions in his narrative to things like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hephaestus, respectively. These come off a little insincere and seem more like Stenson than Chase. Don’t get me wrong, Chase is intelligent, it’s why we’re able to follow him on his journey despite the horrible and despicable things he does to survive, both before and after the zombie outbreak, but intelligence and education are two different things. This guy would not have knowledge of literary greats and mythical figures.

Zombies terrify us because in them we see what we can become. They’re mindless creatures that only exist for one thing, their next fix. The junkie is obviously the same, and because these two shadows of humanity are all that’s left in the world, this novel contains zero hope. It strips all things good and triumphant away and leaves us with the true nature of the junkie: truly alone, with only their dope to keep them company. The threat of zombies is just one more thing they have to deal with in their quest to get spun. Love and friendship and human connection are only important when they don’t interfere with the procurement of drugs. When given the choice, the junkie will freely enter a world of zombies with no hope of survival just for the vague promise that he might be able to keep getting high for just a little while longer. For an already bleak genre, Fiend is a disturbing, terrifying, and soul-destroying addition.

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Beasts of the Southern Wild

beasts of the southern wild

Directed by Benh Zeitlin

Starring Quvenzhane Wallis, Dwight Henry

Grade: A

How does a single father, who knows he’s dying soon, prepare his young daughter to live in a harsh world all alone? Not harsh in the abstract, every day sense that we all battle with, but harsh in the sense that survival depends on strength and fortitude. At the heart of Beasts of the Southern Wild lies this question. Wink (Dwight Henry) tries everything in his power to prepare HushPuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) for a hard life on her own. They live in a tiny island bayou community known as The Bathtub, where the local icecaps are melting and flooding the village. He teaches her self-reliance on a daily basis and won’t allow her to ever wallow in any sort of self-pity. Somewhat ironically, the only thing he attempts to shield her from is having to watch her father die. If this is a simple father-daughter story, it would be one thing, but it’s also something else. I had trouble, initially, putting my finger on just what that something else is, until I realized it’s not that complicated. The setting, the bayou island, is both familiar and exotic, a reality we can latch onto and identify with the struggles and also a landscape totally foreign. This is what movies are capable of, they can transport us to worlds like this, into the lives of those we never think about. The cinematography is so beautiful and terrifying. This is what film has over the novel, the use of the visual medium to drive it’s story, rather than hiding behind it.

The plot is simple: Wink and HushPuppy live in The Bathtub. There is a small, but lively population that coexists with them, and the island community feels very much like a family. When a major storm hits, and wipes out most of the town, including killing several people, it gets things moving. For one thing, the government takes notice and they come in and take the survivors to a refugee camp where Wink is given medical attention. Everybody escapes, choosing to live and die on their own terms rather than be merely another gear in the government machine.

Quevenzhane Wallis, as HushPuppy, got a lot of attention for this role, becoming the youngest person ever nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. She deserves every ounce of praise she’s gotten, and more. She brings a natural strength that is necessary to a role that is at risk of drowning in all the pain. More importantly, she plays a kid. What I mean is that she’s constantly confused, in the dark, and scared. She’s by no means clueless, she understands her dad is sick even when he won’t tell her, but her confusion helps us, the viewer, to enter this world. Through her, The Bathtub doesn’t feel like a strange place, but rather a home like and unlike any other. Dwight Henry as Wink, plays her father as an incredibly hard man, and hard drinker. He’s a guy that has no patience for weakness, especially in his daughter. At one point he refuses to let her use a utensil to crack into a crab, she must instead use her hands and her mouth. Such is the nature of their life. Wink never loses his humanity though. Through all his tantrums, rages, and benders, there is never a second where his love for HushPuppy is doubted. He’s a widower, and a man that has known pain and loss all his life.

The setting and the feel of this movie, as much as the story and performances, are what separates it from anything else. It feels authentic and fantastic at the same time. That the movie ends with HushPuppy finding the strength necessary for her harsh life probably goes without saying, but it feels earned and it’s refreshing to have a big emotional ending without feeling manipulated. I say this with, hopefully, as little pretention as possible: Beasts of the Southern Wild is simply a gorgeous film.

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The Way Way Back

way way back

Directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash
Starring Liam James, Sam Rockwell, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, AnnaSophia Robb

Grade: B+

Story-telling conventions exist for a reason: they work. It’s pretty simple. We don’t gripe about clichés because they are inherently terrible, our ire comes from the fact that we’ve seen them too many times, presented in the same way, and our brain no longer is able to feel empathy or excitement. Modern movies, mainly of the independent nature, tend to spend a good deal of their efforts turning those conventions on their head, flipping them in some new direction so we can applaud them for their originality and we the viewers can pat ourselves on the back because we’re free thinkers and not slave to the Hollywood machine. The Way Way Back takes a different approach. Instead of twisting things around, the film instead chooses to remind us why those familiar tropes worked in the first place. Why we eternally seem to identify with the socially awkward, displaced teenager, why we want to befriend the older, eccentric loser who just may be the wisest man in the room, and why parental authority is just the worst.

The plot follows shy kid Duncan (Liam James) as he goes on summer vacation with his mother (Toni Collette) to her dickish boyfriend’s beach house. Duncan would rather be with his dad, but for reasons we immediately understand better than he does that is not going to happen. Mom’s boyfriend, Trent (Steve Carell) is an alpha male type and seems to be constantly establishing his dominance over Duncan, who in refusing to play the ridiculous mind game loses by default. Also along for the ride is Trent’s bitchy daughter (Zoe Levin) who is self-absorbed in that painful way that kids with self-absorbed parents are. The adults party, “it’s like spring break for adults” says Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb), the hot girl next door who inexplicably seems to be drawn to Duncan, and the miserable young man feels completely isolated from his family. In an attempt to escape, Duncan visits a local water park where he befriends the manager Owen (Sam Rockwell) who hires him. Owen is the kind of person that can only exist in the movies. He’s aimless, but smarter than he has any right to be and seems to have some sort of natural understanding of human behavior. He’s clearly got his own problems but he never projects them onto anybody else, instead only exists to help our young protagonist through his journey. As you would guess, Duncan learns to stand up for himself and gains the all important self-esteem because of his time at a job any sane person would deem shitty and soul-suckingly awful.

James brings a pure awkwardness to this role. The physicality alone is good acting, as Duncan constantly hunches over in that way that tall kids with no self-esteem tend to do. Being tall takes a certain level of confidence and when you don’t have it, you hide your size in an effort to not be noticed (I know this for all too personal reasons). His attempts at conversation with anybody at all are painful as he has no mastery whatsoever of social cues. The stand out performance is Sam Rockwell’s Owen though. He takes a character we’ve all seen a hundred times but delivers it so naturally that it feels fresh somehow. We buy his character probably because he’s the guy we’d really like to be hanging out with ourselves, and understand Duncan’s draw to him. The supporting cast is strong and littered with familiar faces. Rob Corduroy, Amanda Peet, a hilarious Allison Janney and the always dependable Maya Rudolph all lend this movie credibility where it otherwise would probably lack.

Steve Carell as Trent, though, is a failing of this movie. I get that he’s a dick, but does he have to just be a complete piece of shit? There’s not really a lot of depth to him other than that he’s a car salesman and he’s exactly what you’d expect a car salesman who’s dating your mother to be like. Carell doesn’t do a bad job with it exactly, it’s just kind of a frustrating character. The other weak point is Susanna’s interest in Duncan. The friendship I buy, as they’re both struggling with new family situations that more or less suck and they feel isolated, but the romance feels forced and unnecessary. Duncan’s victory should be that he made a friend and was able to communicate with a hot girl, but there’s no way she’d actually be attracted to him. He’ll get the girl later in life, but for now, let’s just stick with being able to have a conversation about something other than the weather.

The Way Way Back is corny and sappy and it knows it. I suppose it’s probably impossible to not watch this movie with some degree of cynicism nowadays as we’re all terribly jaded, but if you can get past that curmudgeony part of yourself, watch this movie and enjoy it. It hits all the right, if incredibly familiar, notes.

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Drive

drive

Grade: A

Violence is used in many different ways in film. Sometimes it’s a metaphor, sometimes it’s for shock-value, hell, sometimes it’s even used for laughs. In Drive, director Nicolas Winding Refn uses violence to suggest it’s an ingrained, and inescapable, part of human nature. Nobody in the movie seems particularly fond of hurting and killing, yet all ready to jump into it without a moment’s hesitation. The lead, aptly named Driver, played by Ryan Gosling, is a quiet, slow-moving, and deliberate man. That he works as a getaway driver for heists and a stunt driver for movies seems somewhat contradictory to his nature, until we realize it’s a cover for the rage monster that is constantly held at bay. When the situation calls for it, he explodes into a fury of violence, destroying anyone in his way. To say it’s a bad temper is to cheapen the frightening menace that is his true self.

The plot’s not new: a man with a questionable and checkered background meets a girl Irene (Carey Mulligan), and her son, who melt his icy heart and teach him about the value of human connection and all that. Matters get complicated when we learn Irene’s husband is getting out of jail and is coming home. When her husband needs his help to get out of debt from dangerous men, Driver agrees out of some stoic sense of honor and obligation. Things go wrong, and Driver channels his rage into revenge and protection mode and, needless to say, he kills fucking everyone. I trust that’s not a spoiler. If you’ve seen a noir film, you know that everybody dies. That’s not what important here. What is important is that all the players in this film know that they’re in a situation where everybody needs to die, there’s no other way out. They live in a bleak and hopeless world, and violence and death is really the only thing they’re capable of controlling.

The performances are what stand out in this movie. Gosling has made the stoic, silent, and dangerous character sort of his staple at this point. He doesn’t bring anything new to this role, but he does it well. Mulligan doesn’t do anything particularly special either, she just plays the scared and sad, two-note female that’s pretty much expected in this kind of movie. Bryan Cranston and Ron Perlman both have a lot of fun with their characters, a hard luck car guru and a criminal boss who loves being a criminal boss respectively. The most enjoyable far and away in this movie, though, is Albert Brooks. He plays Perlman’s crime partner, and a man who knows the requirements of his business but does not enjoy the things he has to do. Other than Driver, he’s the most dangerous character in the film, and it’s because, like Driver, he gets no joy from the violence. It’s simply something that’s ingrained inside him, a part of his world as necessary as anything else. Brooks is crass, yet tragic, and utterly dominates any room he finds himself in.

If there’s something in this film that doesn’t work very well, it’s the idea that any girl would be charmed by Ryan Gosling’s absence of personality. I get that he’s very good looking, but at some point responding with one word answers and unemotional smiles is simply not going to make you very many friends. It’s a small complaint, but one that enough movies make where I feel it’s acceptable to bring it up.

Drive uses stylized, hyper-violence to accentuate the absence of morality in its world. The fleeting glimpses of goodness we get are held onto so tightly that it becomes necessary to protect it by the most extreme measures. Driver is willing to destroy the world, and himself, if it means Irene and her son can live a relatively peaceful life. We never learn the origin of his violent ways, and the film is better for it. The only thing we need to know is that violence begets violence, until the world simply eats itself, and hopefully those left standing will know some small level of hope.