April 2014 book and film review

BOOKS


PURGATORIO (The Divine Comedy vol11), by Dante Alighieri. Having descended into the pit of Hell, our intrepid pilgrim now climbs Mount Purgatory, still accompanied by his guide and mentor Virgil. Here, to his considerable relief, he discovers that God's justice may be tempered with mercy and compassion. In Hell he found sinners of various colours, condemned to the eternal torments of that dread place. And he found that the fraudsters, the traitors, the atheists, have no recourse to any "letters of mitigation" that might reduce their sentence. God's judgement appears to be absolute and unwavering. But now, in a climb which takes several days (in Hell he was in and out within 24 hours), he finds that redemption is possible as long as there is true repentance, and only after a sometimes lengthy process of purgation.


Once again we can fly in our time machine back to the dawn of the 14th century and hear the words of one of the greatest poets who ever lived, though we will require detailed explanations via footnotes to have much idea of what he was on about. In this case, actually too much detail is supplied by my edition (Oxford University press), which threatens to interfere with the magical flow of the rhyme and metre of the poem, to say nothing of the electrifying story it tells. In my edition, the footnotes are five times longer than the text, and that, I have to say, is TMI. Even so, I can hardly wait for the climax of the tale: Paradiso. Watch this space.


OMEROS, by Derek Walcott. On the Caribbean island of St Lucia, former slaves live out their lives under the gaze of wealthy tourists and a handful of ex-pats. One of these ex-pats is a retired British soldier who, to fill his time researches his ancestors who fought over the island two hundred years earlier.


Fast forward 680 years from Dante to find another master-poet, creating an epic tale for the ages. Yet despite the huge interim, the parallels are extraordinary. Dante's great hero was Virgil, whose Aeneid  is essentially a re-telling of Homer's Iliad. Derek Walcott has drunk deep from the same well. Omeros is the Greek name for Homer, and his Odyssey is here the inspiration for an amazing story of lust, betrayal and redemption set in the Greater Antilles. Walcott, already established as a major literary talent before Omeros appeared, sealed his reputation with this poem: shortly afterwards, in 1991, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Permit me to quote just a few tercets (yes, Walcott used the same verse structure as Dante for much of it) from this wonderful poem: Here he describes a hurricane hitting the island:


The cyclone, howling because one the lances
of a flinging palm has narrowly grazed its one eye,
wades knee-deep in troughs. As he blindly advances,


Lightning, his stilt-walking messenger, jiggers the sky
with his forked stride, as he crackles over the troughs
like a split electric wishbone. His wife, Ma Rain,


hurls buckets from the balcony of her upstairs house.
She shakes the sodden mops of the palms and once again
changes her furniture, the cloud-sofas' rumbling casters


not waking the Sun. The Sun had been working all day
and would sleep through it all. After their disasters
it was he who cleaned up after their goddamned party.


The word genius is overused today. The Divine Comedy is unquestionably a work of genius. And so is this.


FILMS


OUT OF SIGHT  (1998) D- Steven Soderbergh. An improbably good-looking bank robber (George Clooney) threatens to ensnare an even better looking FBI agent (Jennifer Lopez) tasked with bringing him down. Will she fall hard, or will she do the professional job she is trained for? Moderately enjoyable, extremely slick production which pushes the boundaries of credibility. Do we really care what happens? Perhaps not, but we kind of have fun while we're deciding.


THE JOKER IS WILD (1957) D- Charles Vidor. A young singer stands up to the mob but nearly loses his life in the process. His voiced damaged in a knife attack, he turns to stand up comedy and carves a new career for himself. But self destructive elements in his personality threaten to do an even better hatchet-job on himself than the mob ever did... Starring Frank Sinatra, the film is based on the life of real-life entertainer Joe E. Louis. Louis, who collaborated in the film is reported as saying Frank had a lot more fun portraying his life than he had living it. The result is a great success, and shows conclusively, were any additional proof needed, that Sinatra was truly one of the great talents of the 20th century. Powerful.


THE GREAT GATSBY (2012) D- Baz Luhrman. In 1920s New York, a young man is seduced by the charisma and vast wealth of his friend, Jay Gatsby. But how did Gatsby acquire his money, and will he finally snag the one woman who seems impervious to his charms? All will be revealed, if you can be bothered. Fitzgerald's "masterpiece" has been filmed many times, perhaps most notably in the 70s with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, and although that film wasn't any great shakes, it comfortably outdoes this effort, which is redolent of glitz and glamour, but very little else. Look out. Baz will probably turn to Henry James next, with a result even more garish and trite than this.


IL DIVO (2008) D- Paulo Sorrentino. Being the life and times of Guilio Andriotti, one of the key figures of Italian politics in the post war era. He served in high office in most of the dozens of governments that country has had in the last sixty years, several of them as prime minister. And although accused of wrongdoing of various kinds over the decades, was never convicted of anything. Like a sort of combination of all the best (and worst) features of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Ghengis Khan and Peter Mandelson, you just couldn't keep him down. Absorbing.


BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR (aka The Story of Adele chapters 1 and 2) (2013) D- Abdellatif Kuchiche. An adolescent French schoolgirl struggles to find her identity until she finds another girl who finally gives her life meaning. But the path of true love never runs smooth. Adele has a casual screw with a man, and when her girlfriend finds out, throws her out on her ear. Can she survive this reverse? A  sort of sprawling epic portrayal of young love which, despite its three hour running time, captures the attention throughout. Loosely based on the writings of the 17th century French metaphysician Maliveaux, this film is as French as they come, which can sometimes be difficult for us, but they loved it, awarding it the Palme d'or at Cannes last year.


I WANT TO LIVE! (1958) D- Robert Wise. A beautiful young woman (Susan Hayward) has a difficult live on the fringes of society and makes what social workers like to call "poor life decisions", including getting in with a gang which undertakes a poorly planned burglary, pistol-whipping a woman to death in the process. The gang are soon apprehended, and they all blame Barbara Graham (there was a real-life Barbara Graham, on whom the film is based) for the beating. Found guilty, she is condemned to death...


Hayward won the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of the tragic "heroine", and deservedly so. The film really comes into its own in the death row sequences towards the end, where her feisty, uncompromising personality wins everyone over, right down to the warden, who finally realises they are going to kill a very special person. Wickedly good cinema.


ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (1959) D- Robert Wise. An ageing crim (superbly portrayed by Ed Begley) persuades a couple of younger hoods, namely a hard-bitten Robert Ryan and a rather strangely cast Harry Belafonte (though perhaps not; his company co-produced it) to rob a bank in a "foolproof" heist. Foolproof? Ha! What follows owes something to an early Kubrick effort Killer's Kiss and even more to Rififi. It initially promises to be something special, but in the event fails to live up to the drama and impact of Wise's previous movie I Want to Live! But that was a hard act to follow...


THE LONE RANGER (2013) D- Gore Veduski. Tonto (Spanish for stupid) is a Native American Indian of indeterminate tribe who, through a series of events even he does not fully understand, becomes teamed up with a masked seeker of justice in the Old West. Think a sort of Batman precursor, though Robin Tonto is most definitely not. Oh, the larks they have!


Re-telling fond myths is a dangerous pursuit, as the makers of this film soon learned. Perhaps because of this it seems that the film has gone down better outside America than within its own borders, and has actually lost money there. Personally I sort of enjoyed its irreverence, and especially Depp's typically idiosyncratic performance, though I suspect it will not linger long in the memory.


HAROLD AND MAUD (1981) D- Hal Ashby. A strange young man from a wealthy family becomes obsessed with death, perhaps as a way of attracting attention from his vacuous mother. His elaborately staged suicide attempts may actually work one day and end his life, but then he meets an even odder person than him: Maud, an elderly lady of anarchic spirit who loves life as much as Harold appears to hate it. Together they make a "perfect" if rather dangerous couple...


Hal Ashby had made some brilliant films by the time he came to Harold and Maud: The Last Detail, Shampoo, and here he makes one of his most personal and intimate offerings to a public which in 1981 may not have been ready for it. I was warned the film may have dated badly in the 30-plus years since it was made, but in fact it retains its bite pretty well. The film was never a big commercial success but instead became a "cult" favourite, which is one way of ensuring its immortality. Intriguing even today.