Norma Rae (Martin Ritt, 1979)

If Norma Rae were made today (which it wouldn't be), it would have to end with the owners closing the textile mill after the pro-union vote and shipping the jobs to Sri Lanka. Only two years after the movie was released, Ronald Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers, giving impetus to the anti-union movement that persists to this day. Which is not just to say that Norma Rae is dated -- it was a bit that way at the time -- but that it persists in the memory largely because of Sally Field's breakthrough performance. It won her her first Oscar, and a well-deserved one: She carries the movie as few actresses have done before or since, freeing her from the trap that the TV series Gidget (1965-66) and The Flying Nun (1967-70) had caught her in. She had proved herself with the 1976 TV miniseries Sybil, for which she won an Emmy, but nothing demonstrated her ability to hold an audience in her grasp like Norma Rae. The screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. also earned an Oscar nomination, but it's scattered and sketchy, only touching lightly on the many elements of union organizing in the South -- racism, political chicanery, violence -- which are probably more important to understand than what the film focuses on: the grit and determination of one young textile worker and one stereotypically lefty Jewish organizer (Ron Leibman). Field has spoken of the difficulty faced by an actress even after she has won two Oscars -- her second was for Places in the Heart (Robert Benton, 1984) -- in finding challenging roles, and the career of Hilary Swank is a solid confirmation of that.

Once (John Carney, 2006)

Once is an entirely likable little movie with some good music, pleasant performances by unknowns, and a setting (contemporary Dublin) that hasn't been overworked into familiarity. It's also a film with a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which means that out of 154 reviews surveyed by the site, 149 of them were favorable. That gives it a higher rating on the Tomatometer than No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007) which won the best picture Oscar the same year that Once just took home the Oscar for best original song ("Falling Slowly"). It's also a better ranking than last year's critical hit and Oscar winner Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu), and is right on par with the current critical favorite, Spotlight (Tom McCarthy). On IMDb, Once currently has a 7.9 ranking (on a scale of 10), and is the 1,651st most popular film of all time.  I mention all this because we seem to have gone a little crazy with critical ranking systems. Sometimes films come along that capture critics' hearts because they are simpler and don't mount an assault on the senses that the effects-laden blockbusters the critics are obligated to watch do, which is why Once succeeds for them. But is Once a great picture just because it asks less of a viewer? Criticism today is part consumer guide and part serious analysis. So as a consumer guide, I would have no hesitation recommending Once to anyone who asked if I'd seen anything good lately, but it's a nice little movie that does nothing challenging to its viewers, which is why I will probably have forgotten it by the time someone gets around to asking me that question. On the other hand, I would hesitate to recommend to just anyone some of the movies I've watched lately that will stick with me for a long time  -- I mean films like A Man Escaped, Andrei Rublev, Fists in the Pocket, Jeanne Dielman, Leviathan, or Mamma Roma.

Bernie (Richard Linklater, 2011)

Imagine Bernie without Jack Black, but with, say, Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role. Hoffman would have played the hell out of the part, which is one of the reasons he is so sorely missed, but the tone of the film would have been very different. What Black brings to the role is a very familiar image, that of a scamp, a mocking presence in almost all of his previous movies. But here he's cast against type, as a sweet-natured possibly gay man who manages to capture the hearts of a small East Texas town, and more particularly the shriveled heart and deep needs of a wealthy widow (Shirley MacLaine). It's the tension between the manic imp of his earlier films and the good-hearted (if naively lethal) Bernie that gives this movie its acerbic tone. I had forgotten that Richard Linklater also directed School of Rock (2003), Black's first big hit in a starring role after stealing High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000) out from under the nose of John Cusack. It's to Linklater's credit that he sees more in the actors he works with than others do. Small town East Texas is an easy target for satire, and I understand the critics who liken Bernie to Fargo (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1996), which did similar things with the easily caricatured accents and mannerisms of the deep plains states. Having grown up in the South and lived in Dallas, on the fringe of East Texas, I have known a few Bernies: somewhat effeminate men who don't fit the good-ol'-boy stereotype of the region, but are tolerated by the good-ol'-boys and especially doted upon by their wives and mothers. Black captures the Bernies to perfection, perhaps because Texan Linklater and his co-scriptwriter Skip Hollandsworth, who wrote about Bernie Tiede first for Texas Monthly, know them well, and know how (as the Coens likewise did in Fargo) to transcend the merely satiric for something more humane and interesting.

Two Norma Shearer Silent Films

Norma Shearer meets Norma Shearer in Lady of the Night

Lady of the Night (Monta Bell, 1925)
Molly Helmer/Florence Banning: Norma Shearer
David Page: Malcolm McGregor
Miss Carr: Dale Fuller
"Chunky" Dunn: George K. Arthur
Judge Banning: Fred Esmelton
Chris Helmer: Lew Harvey

Director: Monta Bell
Screenplay: Alice D.G. Miller
Based on a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns
Cinematography: André Barlatier

Norma Shearer and Johnny Mack Brown in A Lady of Chance

A Lady of Chance (Robert Z. Leonard, 1928)
Dolly Morgan: Norma Shearer
Steve Crandall: Johnny Mack Brown
Bradley: Lowell Sherman
Gwen: Gwen Lee
Mrs. Crandall: Eugenie Besserer

Director: Robert Z. Leonard
Screenplay: Edmund Goulding, Andrew Percival Younger, Ralph Spence
Based on a story by Leroy Scott
Cinematography: J. Peverell Marley, William H. Daniels

I confessed in an earlier post that I really like the young Norma Shearer, especially in her silent films. But I can see from these two movies what led her astray in her later films: She loves the camera too much -- more than she does her leading men. Granted that neither Malcolm McGregor (Lady of the Night) nor Johnny Mack Brown (A Lady of Chance) is much more than a handsome presence on the screen -- not quite enough to act with when you've got Shearer's talent -- she still seems to hog these pictures, especially when she's playing tough girl. In Night she has a double role: the hard-bitten Molly Helmer and the sweet rich girl Florence Banning. She's surprisingly good as Molly -- and totally unbelievable as Florence, who decides to sacrifice her chance at marriage with inventor David Page (McGregor) because Molly had him first. But the incredible part is built into the story by Adela Rogers St. Johns, who churned out this sort of stuff for movies on a regular basis. In A Lady of Chance, Shearer has a role that would later be perfected by Barbara Stanwyck: the tough grifter with a soft heart. The story is nonsense again: She falls for her mark, a Southerner she thinks is a rich man, even after he takes her home to Alabama and she learns that she has jumped to the wrong conclusion. Stanwyck does it better in Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) and The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941), but Stanwyck also had better directors than the prolific but undistinguished Robert Z. Leonard. He allows, or perhaps encourages, Shearer to mug and pose endlessly; at first she's delightful, but a little of that sort of thing goes a long way. A Lady of Chance also contains an embarrassing heap of period racism, when Shearer and Brown are being wheeled along the Atlantic City boardwalk by a singing black man, and Brown remarks that it reminds him of "the darkies singing on the plantation back home."

Fists in the Pocket (Marco Bellocchio, 1965)

In other hands than Bellocchio's, Fists in the Pocket could have been a horror movie, or perhaps a black comedy. (Push Momma From the Cliff?) Instead, it's a bit of both, but much more. Alessandro  (Lou Castel) is a psychopath, but his family isn't much better: Only his mild-mannered retarded brother, Leone (Pier Luigi Troglio), seems to be blameless. Like Alessandro, Leone has a neurological disorder that causes seizures. Both keep them under control with medication, but Leone needs constant attention to make sure he stays on his meds, whereas Alessandro sometimes goes off of them just for the hell of it. Their sister, Giulia (Paola Pitagora), is just unstable, while their older brother, Augusto (Marino Masé), approaches normality, but with a weary cynicism that makes him ineffective. All of them are in service to their blind mother (Liliana Gerace), with whom they live in a shabby-genteel villa in Northern Italy. We get an efficiently presented glimpse of the family's various modes of dysfunction in a dinner table scene near the beginning of the film. Bellocchio uses this family as a vehicle for satire on the pieties surrounding the family, including reverence for ancestors and for the church. It's one of the most effective attacks on sentimental portraits of family life this side of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, which in many ways it resembles.

The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)

The Crowd begins with the birth of John Sims (James Murray) and the prophecy that he will be somebody, a belief that he clings to 12 years later, on the day his father dies suddenly. And then there's a jump to 21-year-old John arriving in New York City, still fired with ambition. The jump leaves an odd hole in the narrative: We expect his father's death to have made an impact on his expectations -- to have shown him, for example, the threat of the unexpected or the value of hard work. But 21-year-old John is a bit feckless, a dreamer who can't quite get in gear to succeed. He falls in love too easily, and is soon married to a woman named Mary (Eleanor Boardman), because the John-and-Mary trope is a little too hard for Vidor and his co-scenarists John V.A. Weaver and Harry Behn to resist. This is a 20th-century Everyman story. If the hole in John's backstory is obvious, however, Vidor makes the father's death a visual motif by an expressionistic shot of young John in the stairwell of his house when he learns of the death, a remarkable image of entrapment that Vidor echoes throughout the film: The skyscrapers of New York, for example, loom in the same funnel-like way as the stairwell. But most celebrated image of entrapment in The Crowd is the web-like rows of desks in the insurance office where John finds work but not fulfillment -- an image frequently imitated, most notably by Billy Wilder in The Apartment (1960). (It's worth noting the work of cinematographer Henry Sharp here, as well as the set designers Cedric Gibbons -- who may or may not have done actual work on the sets, since as head of MGM's design department, Gibbons had his name put on every film -- and A. Arnold Gillespie.) As a parable about modern work, The Crowd is an enduring film. John gets what little satisfaction he has from creativity -- in his case, entering contests to write advertising slogans -- and not from what he has to do to earn a living. Murray turned out to be a case of life imitating art: He was an alcoholic who, like John Sims, had trouble staying employed, but while the movie ends on an optimistic note for the character, the actor died at age 35, in a drowning that was possibly a suicide.

John Sims, age 12 (Johnny Downs), learns of his father's death.

A skyscraper echoes the stairwell scene in The Crowd.

The insurance office in The Crowd.

Away From Her (Sarah Polley, 2006)

Inevitably, because both films deal with Alzheimer's, I want to compare Away From Her to Still Alice. Both contain extraordinary female performances: Julianne Moore won an Oscar for the latter and Julie Christie was nominated for the former -- she lost to Marion Cotillard for La Vie en Rose (Olivier Dahan). Of the two films, I think Away From Her is superior, in large part because its screenplay (by Polley, who was also nominated for writing it) has a strong source: Alice Munro's story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." It also has a remarkable supporting cast: Much of the movie is carried by Gordon Pinsent, a Canadian actor not well known enough in the States, as Grant Anderson, whose wife of 40-plus years, Fiona (Christie), insists on being institutionalized when the symptoms of the disease become too pronounced. But he is not allowed to see her for 30 days after she enters the nursing home: It's explained to him that the patients need time to adjust to their new surroundings, but a sympathetic nurse (Deanna Dezmari) suggests that this policy is more for the convenience of the staff than for the patients. I don't know if it's an actual policy in nursing homes for Alzheimer's patients, but it proves disastrous for Grant because by the time he is able to see Fiona again, she has formed an attachment, perhaps as more caregiver than lover, to a fellow patient, Aubrey (Michael Murphy), and treats Grant as if he's an acquaintance she can't quite place. It's an interesting if somewhat contrived situation, especially when Grant seeks out Aubrey's wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis), who not only resents the relationship of Aubrey and Fiona but also removes him from the nursing home to care for him herself, partly because she is unable to cover the expenses. Dukakis gives a fine, astringent performance as the initially hostile Marian. ("What a jerk!" she says after Grant visits her.) It helps to undercut the drift toward sentimentality that could so easily swamp such a movie. Christie is, as always, impossibly beautiful, and her careful delineation of Fiona's initial distress and disorientation, and her eventual decline, is easily as good as Moore's in Still Alice. I have the same reservations about Away From Her that I did about that film: that Alzheimer's is portrayed as a problem particularly hard on affluent, educated white people, though this movie does touch on the financial difficulties that apparently even Canadians face because of it.

An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990)

Kerry Fox in An Angel at My Table

Janet Frame: Kerry Fox
Janet as a child: Karen Fergusson
Janet as a teenager: Alexia Keogh
Mother: Iris Churn
Father: Kevin J. Wilson
Myrtle: Melina Bernecker
Isabel: Glynis Angell
Leslie: Natasha Gray
Miss Botting: Brenda Kendall
Frank Sargeson: Martyn Sanderson

Director: Jane Campion
Screenplay: Laura Jones
Based on books by Janet Frame
Cinematography: Stuart Dryburgh
Production design: Grant Major
Costume design: Glenys Jackson
Music: Don McGlashan

Three years before The Piano (1993) earned her critical acclaim and an Oscar for screenwriting as well as a nomination for directing, Campion made this film, originally as a TV miniseries. It's an account of the life of New Zealand author Janet Frame, told in three segments. Writers' biopics are difficult to bring off, in large part because writers' lives are usually less interesting than the things they write. Their chief function is typically to give us insight into the personal experiences that shaped their art, which in Frame's case included growing up in a working-class family in rural New Zealand, having a mental breakdown while she was at teachers' college, and being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and institutionalized for eight years at an antiquated mental asylum where she was treated with electroshock therapy. But during her stay at the hospital she wrote a series of short stories that were collected and published, receiving acclaim that eventually resulted in her release. Campion's film is based on three volumes of autobiography by Frame. I have to admit that I've not read any of Frame's books or stories, so I'm not qualified to judge whether the film adds substance to either the autobiography or the fiction, but the screenplay by Laura Jones and the performance by Kerry Fox as the adult Janet Frame (she is played by Alexia Keogh as a teenager and Karen Fergusson as a child) are compelling enough in themselves. I also admit that I had trouble understanding the New Zealand accents, so I lost out on some of the dialogue.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Yves Bical. Screenplay: Chantal Akerman. Cinematography: Babette Mangolte. Art direction: Philippe Graff. Film editing: Patricia Canino.

Jeanne Dielman (to shorten its unwieldy title) is a film experiment (which is not at all the same thing as an experimental film). Akerman tests the medium to see whether a story can be told without melodrama, without the usual editing cuts that shift point of view within dialogue, without excess camera movement, without a music soundtrack, without all the cinematic techniques that we have come to rely upon. She also tests the audience, to see if they will sit through a 201-minute film in which minutes go by without anything more interesting happening than a woman taking a bath, washing the bathtub, peeling potatoes, preparing dinner, eating it with her son, washing dishes, and so on -- all in long takes with no cuts and no apparent forward narrative drive. The answer as far as the medium is concerned is an emphatic yes, a story can be told that way. As for the audience, that's a difficult question to answer. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't have a high tolerance for cinematic riddles, or who can't sit raptly looking at a painting in a museum for minutes on end -- for this is a film that draws on visual patience in the way that great works of painting do. Most of the scenes are filmed straight on, as if looking at them through a frame. In short, Akerman treats a kinetic medium, motion pictures, as if it were a static medium like painting. Is it the greatest film of all time, as has been claimed? I think it's at least a great film, but I don't have any urgent desire to see it again soon. What it did to me was make me aware of watching, of patiently waiting to see what image would be presented to me next, what piece of the puzzle that is Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) would fall into place. It takes place over the course of three days, on the first of which Jeanne presents herself as a supremely capable and precise person, going through the motions of her daily existence (which include receiving a man into her bedroom, because she makes a living for herself and her son by discreet prostitution) with calm efficiency. On the first two days, we don't follow her into the bedroom with her client, but the camera lingers in the hall, looking at the bedroom door, until the light fades enough to indicate a passage of time, whereupon she and the man emerge from the bedroom and go to her apartment door, where he pays her and indicates that he will see her again in a week. She then goes to her dining room and puts the money in a blue-and-white tureen, whose lid makes  a satisfying clink when she covers it. (In the absence of a music track, ambient sounds take on a greater role.) Later, her son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), comes home from school and they have dinner, listen to the radio, go out for a walk, and come back home to rearrange the living room furniture so he can unfold the sofa for his bed. They go to sleep. But because many of these incidents are presented in real time, we are allowed to examine them in detail, to notice the furnishings of the apartment and the lack of affect of both mother and son, who have settled into a routine. We also notice the way a blue light, apparently from a sign outside their apartment, bounces off the surfaces of the furniture: It flashes and flickers in a way that suggests a rhythmic repetition but never quite resolves itself into a pattern. In that regard it's unlike Jeanne and Sylvain, who clearly have a pattern to their lives. And that's why it's a shock on the second day -- which begins about an hour into the film -- when Jeanne fails to do up a button on her housedress, something that Sylvain brings to her notice. Or later, when other elements of the pattern of her life don't fall in place: She burns the potatoes she is preparing for dinner; she forgets to switch off a light when she moves from room to room; she fails to put the cover on the tureen after putting the money from the second day's client into it. In any other context than the one established by the first day depicted in the film, these details would be insignificant. But Akerman makes them significant, even troubling, by having made us aware of the cold precision of Jeanne's routine. That this eventually builds to a remarkable climax (I use the word advisedly but not facetiously) is made possible by the mastery with which Akerman has set up her film. I kept wondering what Alfred Hitchcock, the master of voyeurism in cinema, might have made of Jeanne Dielman, a film that makes voyeurs of us all.

Love and Anarchy (Lina Wertmüller, 1973)

Lina Wertmüller was a big deal 40 years ago, when I saw Swept Away (1974) and Seven Beauties (1975) in the theater. The latter earned her the distinction as the first woman ever nominated for the best director Oscar. (She lost to John G. Avildsen for Rocky, and the less said about that the better.) I remember thinking that her films were wound a little too tight, and seeing Love and Anarchy rather confirms my opinion. The performances are ratcheted up at times to near-hysteria, and things that could be said are shouted. But even when Wertmüller's cast is milking it for all it's worth, it's clear that she has a point of view and the means to express it, especially with the two actors on whom she frequently called during her directorial heyday. As Tunin, the "bumpkin" who has taken on the task of assassinating Mussolini, Giancarlo Giannini plays a complete dramatic arc, from the wide-eyed, almost comatose naïf who finds himself lodged in a Roman brothel and then goes through stages of passion, fear, disgust, commitment, and a final martyrdom. Mariangela Melato as the prostitute Salomè doesn't have such a grand arc to traverse, but somehow she manages to let traces of humanity show through the flamboyant façade she has adopted. Eros Pagni as the odious Fascist Spatoletti and Lia Polito as Tripolina, the winsome prostitute who wins Tunin's heart, are also good, though their roles verge a bit on caricature. The handsome cinematography is by Giuseppe Rotunno, who at one point expresses the divisions in Tunin's character by a tricky, brilliant shot that shows Giannini and his reflections in two different mirrors.