Thursday, December 24, 2015

Brooklyn, the movie: is Toibin's novel this formulaic?

Brooklyn, a movie directed by John Crowley, starring Saoirse Ronan, about a 21-year old Irish girl in 1952, who comes to live in Brooklyn. Based on a novel by Colm Toibin. Script by Nick Hornby.

The story of Eilis sailing to American, overcoming her homesickness, finding love, and being called back to Ireland by a tragic death in her family is a good story, one that I felt drawn to as a Greek-American. We found good things in the movie, mainly in the actors and their ability to translate the slight plot into bits of suspense, and to generate interesting questions: will Eilis overcome her homesickness? Why did she agree to leave home in the first place? Does she really love Tony the Italian-American plumber? Why doesn't she tell her mother on returning to Ireland that she has married Tony? Why does she lead on that fellow Jim, who courts her in Ireland? The movie stays with me, and I keep thinking of Eilis and the others.

But mixed in are a lot of frustrating bits, and the frustration centers on the characters and their actions being formulaic and sanitized. No doubt there were kindly, knowledgeable Irish priests who miraculously knew what an immigrant girl needed. No doubt there were irascible, stern Irish women who owned boarding houses for girls who had motherly hearts of gold. No doubt there were church dances as chaste and staid as the ones depicted here. No doubt there were Italian American families who ate dinner (the adults with the requisite juice glass of red wine) that were as polite as this one and had as clever a smartaleck younger brother as this one had (as if the actors got their cues from Leave it to Beaver). No doubt there were moments in Brooklyn where the streets were as quiet and suburban looking as those in this Brooklyn. And perhaps on the beach on Coney Island, there were instances where scattered black families sat on the sand mixed in among white families in 1952 (in my memory, beaches were often the scenes of racial conflict). I could go on.

To put all these formulaic characters in one film, without exploring the dark hard-edged realities of life, is risking overt sentimentality, and undercuts the story. The film often has the feel of being made for television (with the slow, thoughtful pace of Masterpiece Theater). The people are well scrubbed, coiffed, and clean shaven, even at the end of the day. The dresses and pants and shirts are perfectly wrinkle-free and clean and stylishly placed. Always. Just as in television.

I did find some scenes that were endearing and moving. I liked Eilis and Jim Farrell (played by Domnhall Gleeson), the young Irishman who courts her. Eilis comes across as a very practical girl who's trying to figure out what she wants. We found ourselves questioning her actions and motives -- and that's great. Except that what we often questioned was the logic of the story and its depictions. I found myself wondering if Toibin's novel had the same formulaic elements.


Monday, December 21, 2015

The Blue Star: Jim the boy is still a boy

The Blue Star, by Tony Earley (Little, Brown and Company: 2008)

After reading Earley's novel Jim the Boy last year, I eagerly wanted to read the continuation of Jim Glass's story. I think he was eight years old in that novel. I liked being with Jim in the little town of Aliceville, North Carolina -- he was innocent, and his life and character reflected a supposedly more innocent time. I liked him, his single mother (his young father had died before Jim was born), and his three good-natured bachelor uncles.

And I wasn't disappointed in The Blue Star, which picks up with Jim as a high school senior, about to fall truly in love with Chrissie, a girl who has a somewhat complicated past (complicated, at least for Jim). The novel focuses on this young-love drama and its small cast of characters. It's really a small family drama, with Uncle Zeno playing an unexpected role. There's longing, innocent and not so innocent, unrequited love, bad luck, and ultimately the incursion of events larger than Aliceville, when Jim is drafted for the army and World War II.

Jim is young, and he loves Chrissie with a pure sense of self-sacrifice and honor. In fact, he's honorable throughout. I think we wouldn't want him any other way. And yet I found myself questioning the book's somewhat sanitary approach to its characters and their actions. Even the intimate scenes (for example, Jim with his former girlfriend in the back seat of a car) have a kind of cleaned up, abstract feeling about them, as if Earley is writing for a young audience that he wants to protect from messy details. The book verges on sentimentality, without actually falling into it. Earley is a good writer, and the narrative has enough real truth in it to present Jim as a real flesh-and-blood young man.


Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Constantine -- the first Christian emperor, yet disturbingly cruel

Constantine: Unconquered Emperor, Christian Victor, by Paul Stephenson (London: Quercus, 2009)

Stephenson's account of Constantine's life is deep in detail about the ceremonies and rituals of pagan Roman religion, particularly in regards to its employment in the Roman army. Simply put, the religious rituals of pagan life were essential in shaping and expressing a soldier's loyalty to the army. A soldier publicly swore allegiance to his commanders and mates via the scheduled rituals and deity worship. How the focus of this allegiance switched from the Roman gods to Jesus Christ in the course of Constantine's lifetime is a good story. You had to been very brave to be a Christian soldier in the early days, and to ignore the pagan rituals of your unit -- you could be jailed or executed for that. Apparently, many soldiers quietly worshiped Christ in private while publicly attending the army rituals, an expedient that made the spread of Christianity within the army easier.

Stephenson elaborates that it was not necessarily goodness, humility, and peaceful love of mankind that motivated Constantine's devotion to Christ, but victory and conquest. Before the battle of the Milvian Bridge (in a civil war between Constantine and another Roman general, for total control of the empire), Constantine reportedly saw light in the sky in the form of the cross, with the inscription, In Hoc Signo Vinces or "with this sign, you will conquer". And he did conquer -- he emerged victorous over his Roman and barbarian enemies repeatedly. And he apparently credited his victories to his belief in and acceptance of Christ.

Constantine ended the persecution of Christians in the empire, and made possible the spread of Christianity, which no doubt benefited the empire. Yet this saint was also astoundingly cruel. Throughout his career as emperor, he eliminated his political enemies and their families with murderous thoroughness. He erased all traces of his victims. Did he really order the murder of his young wife and his own son? Apparently so. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, we celebrate the day of Constantine and Helen (his mother). Yet, I can't think of him in a noble light after reading this book.

Stephenson is candid about not trusting the various histories and sources -- many were propaganda tracts controlled by Constantine or his allies, or were the opposite, anti-Constantine narratives by pagan historians. Thus, an intimate portrait of the man never emerges in the book. What was he like in conversation? Was he quick to anger? Did he like dogs? Did he like good food? What were his friends like? None of the details are there, and that's pretty frustrating.

This is a meticulous book, and seems excellent if you want to understand how Christianity emerged in the Roman world. It's interesting to read that the Christian practice of attending to the sick and dying during the plague greatly increased Christianity's appeal, partly because of the moral virtues displayed by Christian doctors and aides, and because those helpful Christians who survived built up immunity to the plague, something which their pagan cousins missed out on as they fled the cities (and thus carried the plague with them to their pagan families in other villages and cities). The book might be a bit too deep for some readers in the details of Roman army camp rituals, the significance of the images on minted coins, the meaning of carvings and plaques. I found myself wishing for less of that, and more about the man Constantine, and his reforms and actions.