Beginnings and Endings

Movie: The Long Good Friday (John Mackendrick, 1980) (Criterion Collection).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Holiday Baking Championship: Ultimate Holiday Party (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Maid: Sky Blue (Netflix); Station Eleven: A Hawk From a Handsaw (HBO Max). 

Every actor has to start somewhere, so it's fun to see Pierce Brosnan as "1st Irishman" in The Long Good Friday, a role that gives him no lines but a couple of key moments in the unfolding of the plot. It was only his second screen appearance and his first in a theatrical film, but it's clear to see that the camera loves him. He's cast as a killer, seducing and stabbing a gay henchman of London mob boss Harold (Bob Hoskins). The plot of The Long Good Friday is complicated in the manner of such noir thriller writers as Raymond Chandler: Harold wants to go semi-straight with a property development that he bloviates will make London the capital of a new Europe, but he needs funding, so he invites a New Jersey mafioso, Charlie (Eddie Constantine), to attend a big presentation of his plans for the project. Somehow, however, things don't go as he hoped. In addition to the murder of his man Colin (Paul Freeman), Harold's mother narrowly escapes death when her Rolls-Royce is blown up, killing the chauffeur. And when he tries to take Charlie out to dinner at a pub Harold owns, it blows up just before they arrive. There's no Philip Marlowe on hand to figure out who's out to get Harold, so he has to do it on his own, with the help of his mobsters, one of whom, of course, is disloyal. The plot twists eventually involve the IRA, some stolen money, and a corrupt cop, among others. Hoskins is wonderful in the role, and the ending, in which he finds himself hoist with his own petard, is a tour de force: an extended closeup in which Hoskins's face reveals the range of emotions he's experiencing, from fear to frustration to desperation. Helen Mirren is cast as his ... I suppose "mistress" is the word, a role that doesn't give her enough to do, but she does that little bit brilliantly. 

Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren in The Long Good Friday (John Mackendrick, 1980)

Maid's conclusion was as much of a happy ending as the series could properly allow: Thanks to a somewhat unconvincing change of heart on Sean's part, Alex and Maddy are able to leave for Montana and their new life. For a bit it looks like Mama is going to join them, but as usual nothing she decides is set in stone. I liked the series -- it kept me coming back for more. But it needed a little more grit to offset the sentiment. Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet in earlier episodes, Angelina Pepper in the last three) is a little too winsomely precocious to be entirely credible as a child tossed around in a dysfunctional marriage. 

Station Eleven jumps 20 years ahead in its second episode, with Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) grown up and touring the pandemic-blighted landscape with a touring group of Shakespeare players. But the series keeps jumping back to the days of the outbreak, with young Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) living in the high-rise apartment of Jeevan (Himesh Patel) and his brother, Frank (Nabhan Rizwan). There's a stunning sequence in which Kirsten plays Hamlet with the company, her lines triggering flashbacks to the moment when she learned of the death of her family. This is shaping up to be a rich and often weird series. 

In the Pink

Movie: Ma Vie en Rose (Alain Berliner, 1997) (TCM).

TV: Holiday Wars: Santa's New Ride (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Hawkeye: So This Is Christmas? (Disney+); Maid: Sky Blue (Netflix). 

Gender dysfunction has become such a familiar topic that Ma Vie en Rose (aka My Life in Pink, mainly to keep American audiences from confusing it with the 2007 Edith Piaf biopic) sometimes seems tonally off-base, frequently taking a humorous view of matters that we now commonly regard more seriously -- particularly the treatment of young Ludovic Fabre (Georges Du Fresne) by his parents. Would any movie made today, for example, treat Ludovic's suicide attempt as casually as this film does -- i.e., more as misbehavior than as a lacerating cry for help? The ending, in which Ludovic, the boy who wants to be a girl, meets a girl who wants to be a boy, and his family unites behind him after moving to a less pretentiously affluent neighborhood, seems a little cooked-up. Still, Ma Vie en Rose mostly succeeds as satire on bourgeois convention and homophobia because of its exaggerated characterizations and its pop-culture fantasy sequences. And there are often some funny-sad moments, as when Alex decides he must really be a girl because he has a stomach ache, which he has learned is something that girls have when they get their periods.

Georges Du Fresne in Ma Vie en Rose (Alain Berliner, 1997)

About the only thing Ma Vie en Rose has in common with Maid is the sometimes uneasy balance of substance and style. The ninth and penultimate episode, titled "Sky Blue," is not so wildly eventful or soap operatic as the previous one. It begins with Alex back where she began: a captive of Sean. What follows is a recapitulation of the beginning of the series: flight, refuge, rehabilitation. While the episode is mostly a triumph for Alex, it ends with a disturbing note, as Alex, rejoicing in her anticipated escape from Sean and move to the writing program in Montana, discovers that her mother is apparently living in her truck. Tune in tomorrow.

I liked Hawkeye, the latest Marvel miniseries on Disney+, though not as much as I did WandaVision or Loki, with their fantastical and often wacky settings. I find that some of my own fun is spoiled by all of the series catering to the fanboys, the Marvel mavens, with in-jokes, Easter eggs, and surprise characters that I don't get because I'm not steeped in the lore of the movies and the comic books. When did pop culture become so esoteric? 

Fighting Vainly the Old Ennui

Movie: La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1989) (Criterion Channel).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Buddy vs. Duff, Holiday: Winter Wonderland (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Maid: Bear Hunt.

Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider) are types familiar to viewers of French films: lovers with too much time on their hands and not enough to occupy them. He's a failed novelist who has tried to get his life back on track by giving up alcohol and going to work for an advertising agency, and the two of them have been together for two years -- or two and a half, as he insists, perhaps a little touchily, when they're asked. Now they're on vacation in a villa on the Riviera, where they don't seem to do much but lounge around the titular swimming pool, make love, and occasionally quarrel a bit. But then they're visited by Harry (Maurice Ronet) and his 18-year-old daughter, Pénélope (Jane Birkin). Harry was a kind of mentor to the younger Jean-Paul and he was also Marianne's lover for a while. in this leisurely sun-drenched paradise they don't have much to do other than pick at one another. Pénélope is the image of boredom as she slinks around the pool, never going in. When she picks up a book, it's a mystery novel she's read before. (Jean-Paul tells her who did it. She replies, "I know.") The sexual tension relieves itself with Harry and Marianne reigniting their relationship and Jean-Paul hooking up with Pénélope, a state of things that eventuates in murder. But the murder is backgrounded to the exploration of the principal characters in a kind of morality tale about the dangers of dolce far niente. A less skillful director than Jacques Deray or a screenwriter other than Jean-Claude Carrière might have begun with the murder and based the plot on discovering the killer, but La Piscine is more about why this particular killing took place -- what led Jean-Paul to drown Harry in the pool. The bit of detective work that's shown almost outs him, but the complexity of motivation is up for the viewer to piece together. The film ends with Jean-Paul and Marianne ambiguously together. 

It has to be said that a lot of the film's effect has to do with its stars and their own pasts: Delon and Schneider had been lovers, the delight of the French gossip press, some time before they reunited for this film. Birkin had come to prominence as a model in the Carnaby Street era of Swinging London. And Ronet was known for his performances as haunted men in Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows (1958) and The Fire Within (1963), not to mention the previous film in which he was offed by Delon, Purple Noon (René Clément). 

Alain Delon and Romy Schneider in La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1969)

Then I turned from a tale of the bored and the beautiful to the further tribulations of Alex (Margaret Qualley) in Maid, a story which still treads lightly above the pit of soap opera. Things look up for a bit in Bear Hunt as Mama (Andie MacDowell), gets committed to a mental facility. But she has made a disastrous choice by sleeping with her ex, Sean (Nick Robinson), which angers the kindly but also horny Nate (Raymond Ablack), who essentially forces her to move out of his house. And then she not only loses her job with the maid service but also the car that Nate had loaned her when Sean, who has fallen off the wagon, returns it to Nate in a jealous snit. Meanwhile, she's offered a scholarship in the creative writing program at the University of Montana, but Sean protests about her leaving the state with Matty. Moreover, Mama is sprung from the hospital by her ne'er-do-well husband, Basil (Toby Levins). If all of this weren't so sensitively told and finely acted, it might have been called The Agonies of Alex instead of Maid. 

Vivat Academia!

Movie: Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000) (Cinemax).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, edited by Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Holiday Baking Championship: Behind the Buttercream (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Landscapers: Episode Three (HBO Max); The Witcher: Kaer Morhen (Netflix). 

I've been having flashbacks to my days in academia lately. I mentioned a couple of days ago that some of them had been triggered by reading Anthony Trollope's The Warden, with its somewhat snarky allusions to the Pre-Raphaelites and mild satire on Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens. I might have missed those if I hadn't spent so many years long ago trying to become a specialist in Victorian literature and culture. But I really think the nostalgia for the old university scene was touched off a few months ago by the Netflix series The Chair, which had fun with the tempest-in-a-teapot quarrels of a college English department. It brought to mind what's known as "Sayre's law," that academic politics are especially bitter because the stakes are so low. 

My latest surge of academic memories comes from having finished The Warden and turned my attention to re-reading Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. I had a heavy dose of that story in graduate school not only from a course in Renaissance literature, but also from the earlier version I read in my Chaucer course. But what tugs at my memory is what happened at my Ph.D. orals: One of my inquisitors was the professor from that Renaissance course, for who I wrote a paper about Shakespeare's Troilus. I don't remember much about the paper except that it was something about the self-consciousness of the title characters of the play. But then, a couple of years later, as I stumbled my way through my orals, the professor (who had given me an A, or maybe an A-, on the paper), thought he was doing me a favor by asking me questions about the play. At least I think he did it out of kindness -- I hadn't slept for two nights before the exam, and it must have shown -- but I couldn't remember a thing about Troilus and Cressida. It was agonizing, but somehow I passed anyway. 

Granted, T&C is one of Shakespeare's stranger plays, often rhetorically difficult, with ambiguous, dislikable characters and lots of classical allusions that go over the heads of contemporary readers or viewers of the play's comparatively infrequent performances. But I feel it my duty to bone up on the play once again, which means reading the academic prose of the Arden edition's introduction. I haven't gotten to the play itself yet; I'm still plodding through Prof. Kenneth Palmer's discussion of its parallel structure and other features of interest mainly to scholars -- of which I am no longer one. 

My other dip into academia lately was watching Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys last night. It's set in a college in Pittsburgh, where Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), a novelist teaching in the English department's creative writing program, goes through a variety of improbable but funny trials and tribulations, some of which pivot on his affair with the college's chancellor, who happens to be the wife of the English department chairman. The movie was well-received by the critics, especially Douglas's performance, but it bombed at the box office. I had seen it before and remembered being amused by it, but I have to say it feels a little dated. For one thing, the sexually predatory edge to the gay editor played by Robert Downey Jr. looms a bit larger than it might have 21 years, and our ability to respond with laughter to his "transvestite" girlfriend has shifted a bit toward discomfort. Still, it features some good performances by Douglas, Downey, Frances McDormand, and Tobey Maguire, as well as Bob Dylan's Oscar-winning song "Things Have Changed." They have indeed. 

Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys (Michael Chabon, 2000)

I also watched the latest installment of HBO's beautifully performed "true crime" drama, Landscapers, which is being eked out slowly with a new installment every Monday. I don't understand why it's being released this way, as it's not a particularly suspenseful drama. Maybe HBO is just counting on our waiting eagerly for another chance to watch Olivia Colman and David Thewlis create fascinatingly complicated characters. 

On The Witcher, Geralt (Henry Cavill) and Ciri (Freya Allan) make their way to his home, which is full of other witchers who wind up fighting this week's monster, which has possessed one of their own. Great special effects, but I haven't quite figured out what's going on in the other plot of the series that involves Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), who falls in with a bunch of elves.