By David Elliott
APPETIZER: Reviews of I,
Daniel Blake and Paris Can Wait
Note: The next tasty Nosh will appear on July 14.
I, Daniel Blake
“Old
age,” said Charles de Gaulle, “is a shipwreck.” Of course, he ran a ship of
state, France’s Fifth Republic. The more humble shipwreck of Daniel Blake, 59,
is that his hard, proud life as a carpenter has been suspended by a heart
attack. He’s caught between a medical system that doesn’t want him to work, and
a welfare regime that stops providing survival checks, for opaque reasons. Britain
has a famous social net, but nets have holes, and it appears that one may
swallow Daniel.
Ken
Loach, 81, has been directing movies about the British working class, poverty, protest,
endurance and families since the 1960s. I,
Daniel Blake, set in rough Newcastle, stars Dave Johns as widower Daniel (a
few sly timings indicate that Johns made his mark as a comedian). The film’s big
prize at Cannes last year was probably a career honor for Loach, the good ol’ lefty
of British cinema. He scrapes away style. His rooted actors make us forget
acting. Here we have the gentle but not meek excellence of Johns. And fine
Hayley Squire as Katie, a woman fled from over-priced London and failed
romances. She raises two kids alone, virtually starving herself while lonely Daniel
helps her. The film pulses a Dickens heart in an Orwell body.
The
key “story” is how Daniel deals with the maddening system’s arcane rules and plodding
officials, who are not quite demonized (one even tries to smuggle him some sympathy).
The movie is made moving by the pain and grit of its humanity, above all Daniel’s
innate, resilient kindness. His one cathartic protest is forlorn. Loach’s enemy
is the faceless machine of control that serves itself, its powers swollen by computers.
Daniel, an old-tools guy, finds the Web a torment. Watch the film and you get a
gut sense of why Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party did better than expected in the
recent election.
Paris Can Wait
Eleanor Coppola’s Paris Can Wait is like something served with
dinner (five courses, three wines) on a Viking Cruises boat trip. You can watch
entirely without thinking, simply savoring the tourist vistas of France,
between Cannes and Paris. On a road trip the lovely, married Anne (Diane Lane),
an American “of a certain age,” receives the very French attentions of her
driver, Jacques (Arnaud Viard). He knows every luscious site and gourmet
restaurant along the way. A retro word for Jacques is “gigolo.”
Anne’s busy-biz husband (Alec
Baldwin) has been called away to Budapest. She keeps her honor (in the old
sense), while savoring Jacques’s blandishments (in the old sense). Their trip
includes brioches, strawberries, roses, elite wines, Cezanne’s famous mountain,
a picnic (homage to Manet), ice cream, a huge basket of cheeses, Mozart, “Venus
nipples” (chocolates), a cathedral, Roman monuments and lots of meat (Jacques,
smiling: “This is the best time of year to eat young animals”). Paris keeps
waiting. Jacques keeps smoking. Anne seems to be powdering her ego.
The
core weakness of this pretty trifle (about a thousand miles from I, Daniel Blake) is that Viard’s relentless
charm wears thin. No Yves Montand or Michel Piccoli, he’s more like Danny
Aiello hoping to be Maurice Chevalier. And couldn’t Lane help to spark the
conversation? She floats, in a nicely lighted daze of demure ambivalence.
Coppola is now 81, her movie most likely tapped personal memories. Like the
late works of her husband Francis (Youth
Without Youth and Tetro), there
is the aura of a pet project near parade’s end.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Herman
Mankiewicz, once a New York journalist, later the key writer of the first draft
of Citizen Kane, usually gets credit
for giving Welles the idea of W.R. Hearst as Kane’s template. But maybe Orson
grabbed the seed from another source, Aldous Huxley, whose 1939 novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan was a
witty roman a clef about Hearst, his
castle and mistress, and whose Hollywood party Orson attended that year: “In
town only nine days, still settling in at RKO, Welles was a very busy man … but
he couldn’t pass up Huxley’s invitation, bringing the first real gesture of
friendship (in L.A.). Huxley was as intrigued by Welles as Welles was impressed
to meet the famous novelist. The two celebrated artists went off by themselves
(and) the new novel of course came in for a good share of comment, with Welles
showing considerable interest in its link to Hearst.” (From Walking Shadows by John Evangelist
Walsh).
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“The
famous often felt invaded by Diane Arbus’s camera. Mae West vehemently
protested her Arbus images. Feminist firebrand Germaine Greer had a close
encounter of the Diane kind at the Chelsea Hotel: ‘It was tyranny, really tyranny. Diane Arbus ended up straddling
me, this frail little person kneeling, keening over my face. I felt completely
terrorized. I decided, damn it, you’re not going to do this to me, lady! I’m
not going to be photographed like one of your grotesque freaks.” (From the
Nicole Kidman/Fur: An Imaginary Portrait
of Diane Arbus chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, to be found at Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
As Brady, Robert Mitchum travels the Tex-Mex border in The Wonderful Country (United Artists, 1959; director Robert Parrish, cinematographers Alex Phillips, Floyd Crosby).
As Brady, Robert Mitchum travels the Tex-Mex border in The Wonderful Country (United Artists, 1959; director Robert Parrish, cinematographers Alex Phillips, Floyd Crosby).
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