Random Acts of Observation

Around this time of year, I like to check out the lists of films that were nominated for Golden Globes and Oscars, and see if there are films I haven’t seen yet, but want to. This year, the two films that struck me as belonging in that category were Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri and The Shape of Water.

And I found both, in different ways, disappointing. I’m going to discuss why, and that will involve plenty of spoilers, so if you are spoiler averse and haven’t seen these films yet, you should probably stop reading.

First, Three Billboards. Yes, it was brilliantly acted. The performances of all the significant cast members were truly works of art. And the story was a profound expression of a woman’s rage, which was both timely and well handled for the most part, although it did wander between the genres of realism and black comedy, making the actions of some of the characters - particularly when the police station is firebombed - more than a little farcical. It’s as if a serious exploration of grief and rage kind of ran away from itself and went way over the top.

What did not sit well at all was the way that casual racism and ableism were presented as quirks that might give a character complexity but did not play into the evaluation of the character’s moral compass. We are led to believe that the sheriff is both wise and good, because he loves a good joke and is a decent father, husband and lover. Even though he allows, perhaps even encourages police brutality in his jurisdiction, and seems to play distinct favourites with who gets police service and who doesn’t. As the dying sage, he gets to appoint the next hero to be, and that would be the most racist and least competent cop on the force, who proudly acknowledges torturing “people of colour” and throws people he doesn’t like out the window. But the dead sheriff says he’s basically a good person, and so he must be.

And that’s what’s disappointing. Racism is not just a cute character flaw, it is a lack of empathy and a misalignment of one’s moral compass. Being cruel to other people - and even the protagonist is cruel, to the “town midget” played by the badly under-used Peter Dinklage - is the film’s short cut to signalling that these are real and complex people, but as long as their heart is in the right place, it doesn’t make them less heroic.

And next, The Shape of Water. While watching it, I had the odd feeling that I was actually switching back and forth between two very different films, which happened to have a few overlapping characters. One film was a romantic fairy take, about a poor girl who finds a special bond with a magical beast and turns out to be his princess, and a swan, to boot. The other was a grim and vicious dystopic look at toxic masculinity, aggression, and abuse of power, told in the form of a classic 1950s science fiction story, but from the perspective of the bug-eyed monster. One film had well-rounded snd realistic characters, the other, a cast of cartoon villains and cardboard supporting characters. I could have enjoyed either film immensely, but the fusion of the two was unsettling and distancing. It was as if two different films had been shot and edited together.

Imagine my surprise to find that del Toro has been accused of plagarism, of having taken most of the elements that fit into the fantasy romance from a 1969 play called Let Me Hear You Whisper, about a cleaning woman who saves a dolphin imprisoned in a too secret military research centre. Let me make this perfectly clear - I don’t think del Toro committed conscious plagarism, particukarly since one of the seeds that grew into this film apparently came from a lunch meeting with another writer, and del Toro optioned that ideas from him properly and legally. But I would not be surprised if one of the two men, somewhere, somehow, heard about the storyline of the play and it drifted in the back of their mind until it crystallised during this conversation. I’ve also read that once upon a time, del Toro pitched an idea about a film based on Creature of the Black Lagoon, but told from the perspective of the creature. And if you blend the two stories, what comes out is indeed The Shape of Water.

Maybe even recognising that they are two different stories, at some basic level, is why there are two strands, with two different tones (even the musical choices of the two storylines show a different aesthetic) and two different acting styles. Elisa, Giles and Zelda are realistic characters, while Strickland, his wife, The General, and even the Russian spies (with lovely if over-the-top performances, especially from Nigel Bennett) are caricatures, more like characters from Doctor Strangelove. The sleeper agent Hoffstetler is part caricature, part realistic. And the merman is all mythos.

Despite being somewhat distanced from it by these disjunctions, I loved the story. Or stories. Both had very real things to say about empathy and humanity, love and compassion, transcending boundaries through love, and the moral vacancy at the heart of militarism and toxic masculinity. A good film, but not a great one.

I’ve been watching movies on DVD lately, because I am on vacation and have the time. A few of the one’s I’ve watched have been, I think, worth commenting on.


Stranger than Fiction: This was not only funny – which I expected – but highly thought-provoking (which I had thought it might be but wasn’t too sure, given the state of much North American cinema today). It’s an exploration of the relationship between art and life, the creator and the created. Of power and responsibility. Of ethics and aesthetics, and the long debate over which should take precedence. Of predestination and free will. It’s narrative and metanarrative and discussion of the relationship between the two all at once. It’s also a touching love story with some truly side-splitting comedic moments that ends up delivering a profound and serious message.


Twilight Samurai: A beautiful film set in the period of transition between the Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji restoration – the end of feudal Japan and consequently the end of the traditional samurai. The main protagonist is Seibei, a very junior retainer to the head of his clan, a widower trying to support his dying mother and two young daughters on the minimal income of a samurai at the bottom of his social class. There is little fighting (though what there is, is wonderfully choreographed) but much examination of the winding down of a way of life. Seibei is called the Twilight samurai by his associates, because he always goes home in the evenings to take care of his family rather than going out drinking with them, but he is also living in the twilight of the samurai way of life, trying to uphold traditional ideas of honour in a time where the codes of social conduct he has learned to revere are unravelling. The focus of the film is his developing relationship with Tomoe – a childhood playmate who has fled an abusive relationship with a powerful samurai of his clan – and his struggle to be true to his sense of what is right as the world he knows crumbles around him.


Keeping Mum: This is a delightfully dark British comedy about family values gone very wrong, with deadly hilarious results. It’s hard to review without giving away the crucial plot twists, but the plot centres on the family of a sincere but oblivious country vicar (Rowan Atkinson in an uncharacteristically underplayed role) who pays more attentions to his sermons than his family. His wife is lonely, bored and spending way too much time with her obnoxious American golf pro, his daughter is rebellious and determined to find a partner who is everything her father is not, his son is being harassed by the school bullies, and his new housekeeper (the brilliant Maggie Smith) has some very unconventional approaches to taking care of problems. And that’s just the set-up.


The Curse of the Golden Flower: Some reviewers have dismissed this film as visually stunning but ultimately “hollow spectacle.” I must disagree. It is true, I think, that the film is not the gorgeous action genre film that viewers of House of the Flying Daggers might have been expecting. To be sure, there are some delightful fight sequences, but this is not an action film. Rather, it has to me a similar feel and power to that of the great familial/dynastic tragedies of Sophocles – with themes and conceits that are Confucian (given my limited understanding of Confucianism) rather than Hellenic.

It is set during the end of the Tang dynasty, during the rule of a fictional emperor. The turmoil, corruption and reversals of the proper relationships between husband and wife, father and son, mother and child, brother and sister are a microcosm of the confusion, corruption and rebellion consonant with the disintegration of a great dynasty. The chorus of palace officials sounding out the hours counts down the destruction of a royal family as surely as the passing of months and years leads toward the fall of an empire. At its heart, the movie seems a profoundly moral tale – the relationships and rituals that would otherwise lead humans to harmonious living, with all members of the family/society in their proper places and giving to each other the proper respect and duty, have been corrupted, and all is disharmony, leading to destruction.

Well, it didn't get any Academy Award nominations, but the other night I saw a really good movie: Saving Face. I understand it made somewhat of a name for itself at the Sundance and Toronto International Film Festivals, and deservedly so.

The focal characters are Wil, a single, Chinese-American woman who is a doctor and a closeted lesbian and her mother, a widow who has lived her life exclusively within the Chinese community. The film revolves around their relationships with each other, and with the members of their family and community - including an aspiring dancer, Vivien, who seems determined to get Wil out of the closet and into her life.

Delightful story with several quite unexpected plot developments, well acted, with several relative newcomers and the divine Joan Chen playing the part of Wil's mother, with powerful but subtle direction from Alice Wu, who also wrote the script. And lots of fun.