By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of LBJ and
Take Every Wave
LBJ“All the Way with LBJ.” Theaters that show double-bills – how many are left? – can now echo the 1964 campaign slogan with a fine pairing: All the Way (Bryan Cranston as Lyndon B. Johnson, 2016) with LBJ (Woody Harrelson, 2017). Granted, neither grapples with his big, ruinous mistake: Vietnam. But each is a powerful lesson in the charisma of political power incarnated. Of the two I’d vote, by a narrow margin, for Harrelson’s. Rob Reiner, surely no LBJ fan when he was the “meathead” son on All in the Family, directed this Johnson tribute to embrace him without fawning. The details, richly packed, provide a discerning view of the 36th president (1963-69) as, in high prime, a brave and very impressive figure.
Cranston’s excellent performance came from a stage play, Harrelson’s by way of Joey Hartstone’s script. Over half of the picture uses flashbacks from Nov. 22, 1963, when Vice President Johnson, believing his political future was over, was vaulted into power by the killing of President John F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan, credible). That it happened in LBJ’s Texas tossed a deeper shadow on Johnson, furthering the bitterness of Robert Kennedy (febrile Michael Stahl-David). The venom of the relationship came mostly from Bobby. Johnson also had to deal with a nation in shock, and JFK’s legacy left unfinished. The movie focuses on how Johnson turned away from his Southern roots and the bond with his Dixie mentor, Sen. Richard Russell (excellent Richard Jenkins), by reviving the ideals of his New Deal youth and his heartfelt concern for American blacks (the neat peg to personalize that is his esteem for his cook, a black woman).
Johnson championed Kennedy’s
civil rights bill with a canny, ruthless urgency that JFK never summoned, using
the fallen leader as the key to force overdue change. LBJ climaxes with his first speech to Congress as president, one of
the greatest in our history. By then we have gobbled the feast of his willful
drive, foxy wiles, pushy charm and vulgar bravura (to hear him call Sen. Strom
Thurmond “an asshole and a moron” is rude poetry).Woody Harrelson doesn’t have
the full Johnson height, and is a little boxy in the jaw, but he has nailed the
Johnsonian juggernaut humanly. Even John Wayne, who hated Lyndon, might have
saluted.
LBJ is not a
work of art like Pablo Larrain’s Jackie,
about Mrs. Kennedy in trauma, and yet it gets nearly all the essentials right.
Old footage and new join well, and expert acting includes Jennifer Jason
Leigh’s nurturing, twang-true Lady Bird Johnson. Given the current manure pile
in the White House, you can come away from this film believing that Johnson was
heaven-sent (until Vietnam). For the total saga, the full Texan typhoon, go to
Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography.
Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton
Many years in San Diego never
led me to surfing. I’ve only seen Laird Hamilton in movies which have a Big
Kahuna whiff of “Surf’s up!” But once you fathom the immense range and danger of
his aquatic empire, you realize that Hamilton is one of the greatest modern
athletes, repeatedly putting body, health and life on a liquid line. “Awesome” has
become an exhausted word, but it fits him like a wet suit. At 53 he has conquered
just about any wave he chose to ride (and even board-paddled across the English
Channel with a pal).Little Laird’s mom, soon single, moved the tot to Hawaii, where waves fill the horizon and where his blond bod became propulsively hydraulic. Rory Kennedy, director of Take Every Wave (and also the fine Last Days in Vietnam), is not an icon polisher. He reveals that Hamilton was a bratty white rebel fighting native Hawaiian boys, chose a surfing step-dad whose “tough love” bordered on abusive, hated school but found in the Pacific a turbulent university of risk and reward. Riding giants of crushing power, he became the loner-leader of other surf gods. Distaste for authority and judgment made him disdain contest surfing, and quickly ended his dude posing for photographer Bruce Weber, also starring in cornball beach movies.
This has not won universal affection
from other wave masters, some resenting Hamilton’s willfulness and celebrity.
There are acute testimonies, but inevitably the film is about Laird in action,
including his breakthroughs in tow-surfing, sailboarding and foil boards, and his
topping, gutsy gambles off Hawaii and Tahiti. On land he remains the brash jock,
hard-muscling past age and injuries (down moods nearly lost his beautiful wife
Gabby, who is like an Aphrodite clone of Laird). At sea he is the master, the kin
and king of any wave that curls in his direction.
SALAD (A List)
Worthy Movies About U.S. Presidents:
The Crossing, 2000 (Jeff Daniels as George Washington); The President’s Lady, 1953 (Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson); Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939 (Henry Fonda as Abe); Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 1940 (Raymond Massey as Abe); Lincoln, 2012 (Daniel Day-Lewis as Abe); Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!, 1975 (James Whitmore as Harry Truman); Truman, 1995 (Gary Sinise as Harry); 13 Days, 2001 (Bruce Greenwood as John F. Kennedy); All the Way, 2016 (Bryan Cranston as Lyndon Johnson); LBJ, 2017 (Woody Harrelson as Johnson); Secret Honor, 1984 (Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon); Frost/Nixon, 2008 (Frank Langella as Nixon) and Southside With You, 2016 (Parker Sawyers as young Barack Obama). .
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
One
of the many superb shots in Citizen Kane
is a deep-focal view past prone, suicidal Susan to Kane bursting into her room,
yet Welles later found it hard to watch: “It was a very dark scene until the
door opens and I come in – and then
you see this bracelet I had on by accident, because I had a girlfriend who made
me wear it. Every time I think of that scene, I think of my reaching down and
you see this awful love charm – nothing at all to do with Kane.” (Welles to
Peter Bogdanovich in the book This Is
Orson Welles. It’s hard to imagine that anyone made him wear a charm
bracelet, until you realize that the girlfriend was almost certainly his
luscious Latina love, Dolores Del Rio.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
My
“declaration of principles” (and method): “My text wears no academic robes of
canons, semiotics, formalist analysis, etc. Every writer has a temperament of
taste, ‘each work entrusts the writer with the form it seeks’ (Borges), and
newspaper ink lubricates my prose. Taste is important, but if you are constantly
polishing marble in your personal Pantheon, you become a frieze. I agree with
Ross Macdonald that ‘popular culture is not and need not be at odds with high
culture, any more than the rhythms of walking are at odds with the dance.”
(From the Introduction to my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available at Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Abe (Henry Fonda) take his leisure in Young Mr. Lincoln (20th Century Fox, 1939; director John Ford).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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