Up in the Air, a movie that does not make sense

Up in the Air is a modest film that tries hard to say something profound and yet be light and bouncy. I didn't dislike the movie. I like George Clooney, the main character, and I liked his depiction of a man whose job it is to fire people, a man who must stay up in the air flying, always moving, striking and then flying again to the next spot unencumbered by family, possessions, or steady relationships. It's no coincidence that he speaks warmly of sharks in his motivational speeches to audiences of corporate managers.

In the movie, he seems to discover that he might want that family, possessions, and steady relationships after all. He sees his life as vacuous. He attempts to recover these things through Alex, a female flying shark. But it doesn't work out. We end the movie with George Clooney looking gloomy and unsatisfied, which is how I felt.

Up in the Air looks like it was shot over a weekend. I know that the director and screenwriter, Jason Reitman, gets a lot of hype for having serious film creds, but the filmcraft here is uneven. The sound ambiance is unchanging. Clooney is addressing a conference hall full of people, through a microphone, yet we hear his baritone voice no differently than when he speaks to his boss in an office. We don't hear the sound of an amplified voice, nor the room ambiance. Thus, the sound fails to contribute to the movie's emotions. Is this just laziness on the part of the director? An unforgiving deadline? The soundtrack consists of a few cheesy songs meant to mirror the plot. And there is the constant use of closeups. Clooney's face constantly fills the screen, as do the other characters. There's rarely a long shot showing a larger scene, or the relationships of the characters to each other. It's boring visually.

This is a movie about inner, spiritual turmoil. What should I do with my life? What should I do next? Yet, religion doesn't exist in the film. It doesn't exist in any American film I can remember. Priests and rabbis are generally either buffoons or rapacious hucksters, if they're depicted at all. Even the wedding in Up in the Air is devoid of religious scenery. Religion doesn't help sell movies, or the product placements (American Airlines seems to be the only airline in America, and a giant economy size A1 Sauce is naturally what a bachelor wants in his fridge). Yet, the movie can only make sense with some attempt to confront Clooney's spiritual and religious consciousness. And since that's absent, the movie does not make sense.

Richard Wright's Native Son is gripping and painful

Native Son (Harper, 1940), by Richard Wright . A novel on CD by Harperaudio.com. Excellently read and performed by Peter Francis James.

I have listened to more than half of the novel, and I am always sorry when I either get to the parking lot at work, or the garage at home, and I have to turn off the car.

Once Bigger Thomas, the young black man whose mind and thoughts and skin and sweat is detailed in the story, commits murder, I felt as if his nightmare were mine. I found myself imagining a different sequence of events for Bigger, that he would have found a way to control his fear when Mrs. Dalton appeared in the doorway, that he would not have suffocated Mary Dalton, that he would go on to work for the Daltons as their driver, that he would move his mother, brother, and sister out of the rat-infested room they live in, that he would make sure his brother and sister went to school -- a happy ending. But no, Bigger thinks out what he's going to do, and he does it, and it's not happy -- it means carrying a dead white woman down the stairs in a trunk, stuffing her body into a burning coal furnace. It's ghastly. It's depraved. It's hard to listen to.

All the characters act with an almost scary realism. The blacks and whites are as I, and I bet most other Americans who haven't lived sequestered lives, have known them to be.

The saddest line spoken anywhere:

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow"

- Macbeth (upon hearing that Lady Macbeth is dead)

He goes on:

"Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!...."

Macbeth -- a murderer goaded on to his crimes by his now dead wife.

Anderson Cooper's book "Dispatches from the Edge"

Dispatches from the Edge, by Anderson Cooper (Harper Collins, 2006)

Cooper's desire to see and be where the action is (usually natural and manmade disasters, wars, upheavals) propels him to work on the edge, reporting for CNN and others on the human misery he encounters. The book journals his coverage for the year 2005, and includes Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. His own misery (a retelling of his father's early death, and the suicide of his brother) is intertwined with the reports, though I'm not sure to what end.

His narrative of the behind the scenes activities reads as a somewhat repetitive amplification rather than clarification of the events themselves. There isn't a lot of insight. He's not really interested in illuminating the events and places. What he wants is to give us a sense of what it's like to be Anderson Cooper. He partly succeeds, though he probably doesn't need an entire book to accomplish this. The workings of the media are presented, and his groping to understand his role in it, but he doesn't turn much attention on his employers (perhaps because they are, after all, his current employers). We're convinced that he's a good guy, but that's not a big enough subject.

Cantalina's Sunday afternoon concert "Northern Lights"

Cantilena (a women's chorale) in a "Northern Lights" concert of Scandinavian choral music (Hovland, Grieg, Heiller, Sallinen, and others), Sunday, December 6, 2009.

It was a likable concert last Sunday afternoon. Their new director Allegra Martin looks like a teenager. We loved the Elgar, and the Sallinen Songs from the Sea. We thought the instrumental musicians were excellent, adding some tonal variety to the concert. The pieces they did with the choir were very effective. The Rautavaara pieces based on Lorca's poetry filled the place with an eerie, dissonant unease.

I can't say that I'd want to listen to an all women's chorus frequnently, but we enjoyed it. A surprisingly good crowd, probably more than 120 people.

An interesting note in the program book: the Scandinavian countries have a higher rate of participation in choral groups than any other nations. Perhaps 10% of Sweden's population sings in a choir.

Brookline Chorus's concert British Cathedral Sacred Works

We performed this concert last Saturday night (November 21). There were a number of short pieces, including John Tavener's acapella Village Wedding and The Lamb (the latter for which I sang as part of the chamber choir), and Hubert Parry's I Was Glad. The highlight was the Britten cantata, Rejoice in the Lamb. I came to love the Britten piece for its melody lines and evocation of music and the creation of music as an expression of the will to know God. The text (from a poem by Christopher Smart) sings that every creature with "the breath of life" searches in its own way to know God.

This was a well constructed program by our conductor, Lisa Graham. The shorter, more traditionally pious pieces contrasted nicely with the modern abstractly religious Britten cantata. In The Lamb, the young shepherd sings, "I a child and thou a lamb, we are called by His name" and the association is on a very personal, intimate scene. Later, in the Britten piece, we sing, "Rejoice in God O ye tongues, give the glory to God and the Lamb...." A much bigger focus on a panoply of lives and creatures.

The Huntington's earnest, instructive, and odd Civil War Christmas

The Huntington Theater's Civil War Christmas, a play by Paula Vogel.

A very earnest play. There are good bits of singing (bits only -- we don't hear the entire songs, which annoyed me). A procession of characters, many of them black, enter and exit the stage, acting out separate vignettes and narratives around Christmas Eve of 1864, around Washington D.C. It all seemed well-intentioned and instructive. Vogel and the cast did somehow make all the narratives intersect, and this is a respectable theatrical feat.

But the characters, aside from sergeant Bronson (the angry former slave, now a soldier, who vows to "take no prisoners" of the Confederates) are thin. There are so many stories going on, we just can't get to know them very well. It didn't add up to much of a theater experience for me.

I can't call such an earnest, heartfelt play a bad play -- we do care about the lost little girl and her mother in Washington searching for each other, we do care about the foolish young man who desperately wants to join up with the rebels to "serve my country", we do care about president Lincoln avoiding his kidnappers. The sentiments are certainly there (a little too much at times), and many of the scenes are skillfully constructed. I just wish Vogel had edited out some of the narratives and given us a more focused play.

Ernest Hemingway's awful yet lovable "Across the River and Into the Trees"

Across the River and Into the Woods, by Ernest Hemingway. Listened to on CD as I drove to and from work.

Harry, 50+ army colonel a few years after WW II, takes a holiday in Venice to shoot ducks, drink, eat, sleep with his 19 year old Venetian girlfriend (she's from Venetian noble family), talk nonsense with Italian war comrades who adore him for leading them in battle during WW I, drink some more, punch out a couple of sailors, squeeze the girlfriend, drink again, reminisce about Rommel and Patton, eat some venison and cheese...well, that all doesn't sound so bad, does it?

What kept my attention was that Harry is such a created character, a literary construction. Every conceivable aspect of the macho, world weary, hard bitten soldier is here in one man. It's absorbing and ghastly at the same time. The couple's relationship is at times howlingly funny (the language Hemingway used to describe their sexual groping in the gondola nearly killed me -- I shouldn't have been driving 65 mph on the turnpike).

But...it's still Hemingway. The torment described, and the will to move forward is still there, and still worth reading.

I read that E.B. White wrote a parody in the New Yorker, called Across the Street and Into the Grill. A good title. Hemingway deserved it. But I still liked the book.

Thea Halo's suprisingly gritty and intimate "Not Even My Name"

Not Even My Name, by Thea Halo (Picador, 2000)

Thea Halo surprised me. I expected a sad, sentimental biography of her mother, Sano Halo, and a sad, horrific re-telling of what her mother suffered in the death marches forced on Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians in the last years of the Ottoman empire, just before the final expulsion of the Christian populations from Turkey in 1922. Instead, Thea presents the characters of her family as she saw, heard, and experienced them, as both loving and hurtful, generous and petty. The book is full of scenes of intimate family dramas.

Sano Halo's girlhood in the Pontic Greek village of Iondone in Asia Minor glows in her memory like a kind of Eden. I've heard many old Greeks describe their villages in the same way.

The death march that Sano, her family, and the Greeks of her village endured under the whips and guns of Turkish soldiers is agonizing to read. How could people do such things to other people?

Thea Halo, the daughter who wrote the book, is a capable and intelligent writer. She knows her mother well, has heard and researched her life's story, and produced a readable and gripping book about a young girl's loss of her family. As the book's title says, even her name was lost, as she was placed as a ten year old with an Arab family in a desperate attempt to save her life and escape the fate of the rest of her family. Her eventual marriage to a harsh Lebanese-American man, Abraham, and their life together in America, made for surprisingly good reading in the tradition of becoming-an-American novels.

Sano's recalled narrative forms the center of the book. The beginning and end involve mother Sano and daughter Thea on a late 1990s trip to Turkey to find Iondone. The village had largely disappeared. All that's left were a few ruined foundations. Not unlike the empty villages you see in Greece, the remaining inhabitants old people, the young having left for the cities. Or America, or Australia.

The book is valuable if only for its many insights into village life in the Pontic Greek world, circa 1900. We read about how the villagers work, how the farms and animals are maintained, how the family grew their own food, how they cooked, how they subsisted on bare essentials -- and it's all fascinating. Sano's narrative describes clear-eyed depictions of family quarrels, village disputes, petty n, andeighbors, and the presence of threatening forces at the edges of their lives. (Sano refers to oddly dressed strangers, unexplained outsiders, who appear and lurk in the shadows of trees and rocks in the months leading up to the expulsion from the village by Turkish soldiers.)

I don't doubt the details of the death march, though they are written from a memory long past. They are too vivid and distinct not to have been lived.

The main story (from the village, to the death march, to life in America) is ostensibly told by Sano herself. Yet, I was aware of Thea, the creator of the book, with her literary gifts, taking on Sano's voice for her. The book might have been stronger had Sano been allowed more of her own speech, with her own inflections and vocabulary.

Abraham, Sano's husband (whom she married by an arrangement), can be a hard man to love, yet he seems noble and loving in his own befuddled way. Sano and Thea love him. I think there is a perspective here that illuminates the old immigrants from that generation-- rather than rejecting him for his obtuseness, his roughness, his obstinacy, for better or worse Sano and Thea love and protect him.

King Lear: more sinned against, but still quite a sinner

King Lear, by William Shakespeare.

I listened to the exceptional recorded CD set produced by Arkangel Shakespeare, and supplemented the performance with the Everyman Shakespeare edition of the play.

I loved the play and the production. I hope to listen or see it performed again soon.

There are lots of oddities and logical lapses, however, none of which prevented me from the loving the thing.

In the play's opening, when Cordelia fails to express her filial love for Lear in the exaggerated fulsome terms used by Goneril and Regan, Lear throws himself into a rage. He disowns her. Yet, isn't she his favorite daugher? She is. So he must already know how she feels about him. Dramatic foreshortening and all that aside, it's an odd premise that he decides to demand this kind of vocal fealty from the daughters. I suppose this establishes our view of him as an aged arrogant fool.

And Cordelia -- I don't quite understand her coldness. "Nothing" is her reply. We understand that she sees through the oily praise of her sisters, but isn't her reply needlessly cold? If she's the favorite and most loving daughter, wouldn't she express that love a bit more warmly?

So Goneril puts up Lear and his one hundred rowdy camp followers. They like to party. She can't take it any more. Well, who could? Put up a hundred fun-loving knights indefinitely? After three days the fish stinks, the Mediterranean saying goes. Hard to blame Goneril for clamping down on the old blowhard. It's hardly abusing him!

Of course, he does eventually understand what an arrogant bastard he's been, in those sad scenes out in the storm, in the open, and finally with the dead Cordelia in his arms.

The Huntington's Fences: what's great about August Wilson, and what isn't

In the first act of Fences, the main character Troy Maxson (in a big performance by John Beasley) radiates everything that is great in August Wilson's plays. He's enraged at the white world that denied him his chance to play baseball professionally. He's a dictatorial father who demeans and brutalizes his son Cory who dreams of playing pro football -- Troy doesn't want his son dreaming of anything other than a steady job. Troy himself is a steady wage earner (a trash collector in Pittsburgh) who loves his wife (or seems to). I felt as if Wilson had put everything he had into this man.

The second act crumbles into an odd melodrama. Troy reveals to his wife that another woman is about to bear his child. And he's not sorry. He demands that she and the rest of the world accept this fact, and him, and still love him. He throws Cory out of the house -- Cory can't take it any more.

I wanted the flawed hero of the first act to show us in the second act, to prove to us, why we should love him, why he really is heroic. He didn't do that. Instead, Troy makes a complete mess of his life and his family's. Troy dies near the end of the play, and I suppose that's supposed to absolve him. But all it does is prevent us from blaming him, which is what we want to do.

For a substantial and interesting review of Fences and August Wilson, read Thomas Garvey's article at Hub Review.

The Boston Globe's review (Doc Aucoin) was admiring but thin.

Loved Jame's Joyce's "Dubliners," even with its mundane passages

On my sometimes long drives to and from my new work location (Marlborough, thirty miles each way), I have started to listen to books-on-CD. The CDs come from the Watertown Public Library. The first book I listened to was James Joyce's Dubliners (published in 1914). I last read these short stories in college.

This was a a Caedmon CD. The stories are clearly and artfully read by a variety of Irish actors and actresses.

I was moved by many of the stories (I didn't get to The Dead, deciding that would be better read in a book than listened to). The small domestic dramas kept me listening, and imagining scenes from my life. They're pretty good listening for driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Here are the last lines from Eveline, in which a young woman, after much agony, has decided to go with her lover to Argentina to start a new life. Her life in Dublin is miserable, stifling, and yet she finds herself held by it. Here they are, at the station to take a steamer and begin their trip. He calls to her:

"Come!"

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.

"Eveline! Evvy!"

He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

I played the scene over and over in my head for days -- Eveline gripping the iron railing. The better Dubliner stories have that power.

Yet, I was surprised by how pedestrian some of the stories were, and how bland and drab some of the writing was. Some of it is cliched. Here is some text from After the Race:

The car ran on merrily with its cargo of hilarious youth...Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money. These were three good reasons for Jimmy's excitement. He had been seen by many of his friends that day in the company of these Continentals...The dinner was excellent, exquisite. Ségouin, Jimmy decided, had a very refined taste. The party was increased by a young Englishman named Routh whom Jimmy had seen with Ségouin at Cambridge. The young men supped in a snug room lit by electric candle lamps....

A cargo of hilarious youth -- these are cliches. You find them here, and sprinkled around some of the other better stories. It's sort or reassuring in a way -- even James Joyce occasionally passed off the mediocre as finished work.