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“Hope Springs” A PeaceBang Review

I am in shock.

I just saw a mainstream summer Hollywood movie that treated sex as an expression of intimacy in a committed relationship. Furthermore, this movie is about marriage. Marriage. Not marriage and murderous revenge after the wife gets kidnapped. Not marriage and drug addiction that winds up with the wife becoming a prostitute. Not marriage and infidelity that winds up with the husband betraying his family and running off with the daughter of a Mexican drug lord.

Marriage of a very ordinary middle-aged couple from Omaha, Nebraska. Arnold and Kay. She works at Coldwater Creek and shops at Barnes & Noble. He works in finance and watches golf. They go for intensive couples counseling in a picturesque Maine town called (permission to groan granted) Hope Springs. Steve Carrell plays the therapist. Guffaws ensue, right?

Nope.

What ensues is a series of intimate scenes between a very fine pair of actors, Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, played not for laughs but for honesty. Pastors and counselors who see this film will recognize the authenticity of Vanessa Taylor’s straightforward screenplay, where Dr. Feld asks Arnold in a measured, kind and professional tone, “Is that the best you can do?”

The dialogue is page after page of real-to-life questions and responses familiar to anyone who works with long-married couples. Dr. Feld doesn’t leave enough time for his clients to respond, sure, and he emphasizes sexual intimacy far more than most couples counselors do, but that’s as far as the Hollywoodization of this process goes. Steve Carrell gives a beautifully serious performance, making Dr. Feld someone whose name you wish you had in your Rolodex to refer parishioners to. This man clearly cares, and the cheezey set-up threatened by casting such a gifted comic in the role and setting the action in a small, seaside Maine town where one might reasonably expect a “wacky Down Easters teach the repressed Midwesterners how to loosen up!” plot to develop — doesn’t develop. It’s a minor miracle.

The movie was greatly hampered by a noxiously overbearing soundtrack of “GET THE MESSAGE” pop tunes, but that couldn’t destroy its integrity. It’s a strange little movie, really — not truly a romantic comedy and not a drama, either. There are no comedy shenanigans — no one sprains a muscle trying a creative sex position and needs to be carried out of the hotel room on a stretcher. There are no tragic revelations: no one turns out to be keeping a painful secret or keels over of a heart attack before the last act.

What there is is recognizable people dealing with recognizable and familiar pain. Arnold and Kay are no more articulate than the average American of their generation.  Their grievances against each other, revealed in one of the rare scenes where they actually speak freely and without walking on eggshells of Midwestern politesse with each other, are as petty as your own grievances with your spouse of 31 years. Kay’s loneliness is not expressed in any particularly eloquent way. She is an ordinary woman and she speaks in ordinary, and even dull, terms. I would have preferred to see a less showy actress in the role than Meryl Streep, whose technical brilliance is sometimes a bit much for this simple woman, but Tommy Lee Jones was perfect in the role and had fantastic chemistry with Streep.

This isn’t a great movie. It isn’t very entertaining and it’s not at all exciting. It’s a slice of life about people like you and me, written, directed and acted with respect and care. And that’s special enough that I highly recommend it to you.

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“Call Me Maybe”: A PeaceBang Review

Sometimes you hear the kids talking about something — or complaining about its overexposure — so frequently that you know you need to check it out. It could be a book you need to read, or a TV show you need to see, or a movie, or a song. Please lock me in the Home for Irrelevant Ministers if I ever become one of those NPR-Only Unitarian Universalist clergy. You know the kind. They’ve never seen a reality TV show, they don’t know what’s on the radio because they’re entirely devoted to streaming Pandora mixes of Peter, Paul & Mary and old Woody Guthrie social justice songs. Oh, wait. No they’re not. Because they don’t know what Pandora is. You won’t catch them dead reading “Twilight,” let alone attending the movies and getting a guilty delight out of watching all those vampires and werewolves have at it.

I don’t want to get like that. I want to be able to knock around with the kids and be part of their conversation. It was with this in mind that I found the insanely popular hit single “Call Me Maybe” on YouTube and watched it.

What a wonderful, happy surprise!! I have hope for our kids! I am ready to break into a Whitney Houstonesque power ballad about the children being our future! Because this video is a ton of fun. A TON. It is also evidence that things really have changed since my teen years, when music videos were brand new and consisted mostly of footage of bands like Styx  playing “Babe” to a live audience.

(Digression: My father was actually one of the original imagineers of MTV. This is a true fact. Carl D. Weinstein was part of the earliest conversations about a channel devoted entirely to music. When he floated the idea to me and my siblings, my brother and sister were very enthusiastic. I, the bookish, classical music-loving child, said snottily, “What a dumb idea! Who wants to have sit and WATCH  your favorite musicians play their music when you can just listen to the radio or a tape and do something else like read or study?” My father responded with prophetic words. He said, “Well, I think what would happen is that musicians will start to make little movies of their songs that are a production of their own. It will give them a whole creative opportunity for sharing their vision of the songs they write.” Dad invited me and a group of my friends to his office in New York City to view one of the first MTV videos — footage of Styx singing “Babe.” My friends were PSYCHED. I was bored and thought the whole idea would die a quick death. You may laugh loudly and derisively in my face now, if you like. P.S. My father never received a penny for his contributions to MTV. He was the kind of guy whose brain people liked to pick, and he offered his opinions and insights generously and gratis. We have this in common. He died in 1983, just as MTV was taking off).

So anyway, “Call Me Maybe” is performed by an adorable lass named Carly Rae Jepson, who I must assume is a product of the country music scene – otherwise the industry bigwigs would have renamed her, wouldn’t they have?

The video is classic girl-hankers-after-hot-boy-next-door narrative, with a refreshing reverse of objectification that is usually reserved for such attractive young ladies as Ms. Jepson. In this iteration, it is the girl who remains clothed throughout the video and the Hunk Next Door who strips his shirt off to be ogled. But it’s all very wholesome. He’s mowing the lawn, you see, and then working on his car. These kids are clean cut suburbanites, and there’s no grinding or mashing or dimly-lit scenes that show them in tawdry nightclubs or in perilous dreamscapes. In other words, it’s not a Lady Gaga video.

I laughed out loud at the mocking of the tired old “hot girl washing her car to get the guy’s attention” trope. In this case, Ms. Jepson soaps up her car hood, and poses awkwardly on it as an obviously inexperienced seductress. She almost immediately falls off the car and bangs her head on the ground, where she loses consciousness and has visions of herself and her love interest wearing hilarious big hair wigs posing for the cover of a Harlequin Romance. Clever. The guy looks like a riot as a youthful Fabio (God, remember FABIO?).

In the final scene of the video (and the lyrics are as innocuous as anything you’d want your pre-teen daughter incessantly replaying in the car or on her headphones), a couple of other young guys show up to play music with Carly Rae. One of them, a cute blonde guitarist, is approached by the Hunk Next Door, who hands him a folded piece of paper. The flummoxed guitarist opens the paper, which bears a phone number and a message: “CALL ME.”

The Hunk Next Door is gay! The song ends with Ms. Jepson looking at the camera with a “just my luck” expression, and…. scene. I laughed out loud. It’s charming, catchy, light-hearted and certainly true to my own teen experience. When I was a teenager we simply didn’t have songs or videos like this. Girls in videos were dangerous, sultry, slutty, and entirely second banana to the rock star guys who dominated the industry. Women that did make it through were too bubble gum or Disney cutesy for me to relate to, or else they were Madonna, who eventually became an industry all of her own.

And we certainly didn’t see any depictions of out gay teens! The rare young gay male characters featured in our shows or songs were inevitably tragic, marginalized, and wimpy. They were not muscular dreamboats who confidently passed their phone number to other hot guys. Progress!

Here’s the video if you’d like to view it for yourself. Enjoy.

Here’s the USA Olympic Swimming Team’s version. Very cute.

Here’s Cookie Monster doing his own version. Hilarious, except for this doesn’t sound enough like the original Cookie to me, so it makes me a little sad.

 

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PeaceBang Reviews “Meek’s Cut-Off” (2011)

 

I finally saw “Meek’s Cut-Off,” a 2011 film by Kelly Reichhardt, who apparently made another movie that was so well-received that critics were prepared to assign a whole lot of dramatic import to this film as well. The glowing reviews (and here) are an exercise in willful movie viewing: although “Meek’s Cut-Off” is beautiful, it is also painfully boring. The sound is so bad that most of the dialogue is inaudible — but you won’t have missed anything, because the dialogue never reveals anything important about any of these characters, all of whom are cliches with all the life and verve drained out of them: perky pioneer gal, noble savage, garrulous con artist, hysterical young wife. I don’t mind cliched characters done well, but these were Cliches on Clonopin. I know they were all tired from walking and walking and walking across parched earth, but isn’t it the filmmaker’s job to bring something to life, not to put the viewer to sleep?

The premise is simple: three pioneer families heading west to Oregon leave the wagon trail under the guidance of Stephen Meek, who doesn’t know where in Sam Hill he’s going but who has convinced them that he knows a short-cut.  Guess what happens next.

They get lost. They get thirsty. They have small arguments, that many reviewers seem to find intense and powerful, and that I found less far dramatically engaging than the average church coffee hour.  They encounter a Cayuse Indian (Ron Rondeaux) and take him captive. Michelle Williams sews the man’s shoe, uttering one of the only interesting lines in the movie, “I want him to owe me something.” Nothing ever comes of this premise. The Cayuse Indian is merely Mysterious Other. Meeks thinks the group should hang him. No one else finds this suggestion reasonable and at the only moment of real tension in the film, Michelle (see? I can’t even remember her character’s name) protects the Cayuse man from being shot by Meeks. Nothing whatsoever happens as a result of this confrontation. The pioneers just keep walking and keep being thirsty, and keep being lost.

There is an accident with one of the wagons, which is described by one reviewer as “terrible,” but that seems merely like a sad inconvenience to the characters. They’re more like sleepwalkers than pioneers. Did they take Valium with them on the trail?

Bruce Greenwood plays Stephen Meek in a horrible fright wig and fake beard — something I am amazed none of the reviews felt obligated to mock, but I will — he looks like he just rolled off the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and onto the Oregon Trail. He overacts sumpin’ terrible but his dialogue is such garbage, why not?

Michelle Williams is good. She’s good in everything. She is also the only character with a discernible pulse.

Shirley Henderson, a wonderful British actress who was the main reason I wanted to see this film (Shirley Henderson! In a leading role! Yay!) is utterly wasted as Glory, a largely pregnant and silent sufferer in the unmerry band. They wasted SHIRLEY HENDERSON? They stuck her in a calico dress with a pillow under it, hid her behind a big, floppy bonnet and gave her nothing interesting to do or say?

Paul Dano, a young actor who managed to hold his own against Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood,” another parable of Manifest Destiny, is practically invisible here. He’s one of ten people on the screen for two hours, so it’s a testament to the dullness of the plot and characters that the credits roll and you rouse yourself out of your stupor and recall, “Oh yes, Paul Dano. He was in this.”

Now, don’t tell me I just can’t appreciate a good, slow-moving, elegiac movie. That’s not true. I loved Terence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” and “The New World,” and I’m the kind of gal who can find something profound to reflect upon while watching a cat sleep. I know that the wagon trail was slow and dull and I get that, and thank you, Sound Man, for the incessant squeak of the wagon wheel. Nice touch.

But if I’m going to commit myself to the viewing of a feature-length film, it should not require me to do all the heavy lifting by way of filling in the empty spaces left by skimpy plot, undeveloped characters, and one of the laziest, most cop-out WTH endings in recent cinematic history.

I should have gone with my guts and Cut-Off Meek after about twenty minutes.