Nosh 124: 'Woman Walks Ahead,' 'The Bookshop' & More

By David Elliott

    

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Woman Walks Ahead and The Bookshop

Woman Walks Ahead

The tote board of American white guilt (mostly male) is lengthening, though it seems likely that All the Trump’s Men and the “white nationalist” rabble will only add some ragged stupidities. The issue of black justice, dragging chains of slavery and Jim Crow, is our supreme haunting. But with Marlon Brando gone only 14 years, and Russell Means just six, let’s not forget the national birth mark of shame: our wretched record for killing, infecting, starving, addicting and corralling on sad reservations the American Indian (or Native American). Numerous movies have dealt with it, to minor effect. The latest decent, earnest one is Susanna White’s history-derived Woman Walks Ahead.

 

Jessica Chastain, maybe the whitest woman to star in movies until Amanda Seyfried arrived, plays Catherine Weldon, a painter recently and happily widowed. In the late 1880s she comes from New York to the Lakota Sioux Reservation in South Dakota to paint a portrait of the retired chief of Little Big Horn fame, Sitting Bull (big, imposing Michael Greyeyes). She is crudely abused by whites, eager for a new “treaty” that will steal over half the natives’s surviving homeland. Sam Rockwell plays a tracker and killer, toxic with racism. Weldon springs back, even learning to ride a white horse given Sitting Bull by Buffalo Bill. The horse’s “dance” is the most elegant, resonating moment in this saga of pathos. As in other Indian Westerns, the beautiful landscapes serve as a rebuke to white conquest, beyond the opaque presentation of Indian lore and rituals.  

  

Chastain and Greyeyes are touchingly credible, although his simple paintings (on hide) are more revealing than her stiff tribute on canvas. There is a nuanced performance by Bill Camp as Gen. George Crook, a fabled “Indian fighter” who admires Sitting Bull and misses the buffalo days. Crook knows the fix is in and more night is coming. The story takes liberties. There was no U.S. Vice President named Buckley, Catherine’s name was really Caroline, and she had a break with Sitting Bull before she left (the movie suggests a wistful Platonic love). Not shown is the awful  Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. Shown, with full implication, is that whites can take the blame for the gret majority of criminal tragedies. Casino gambling is not, of course, adequate compensation.

The Bookshop

Some films are so very British that self-parody looms, subversively. Movies like The Remains of the Day, Tom and Viv, Separate Tables and The Go-Between (Robert Altman had stylish fun with the type in Gosford Park). Add to that clump of crumpets The Bookshop, director Isabel Coixet’s devout adaptation of Penelope Fitgerald’s novel. Emily Mortimer plays Florence, book-loving widow who opens a humble bookstore in an English coastal town in 1959, twilight of the Terence Rattigan stage era and the fubsy but often fab Ealing comedies. The “drama” here is opposition from a devious, soul-frosted moneybags (Patricia Clarkson), who carries on as if gentle Flo had launched a beer hall celebrating Germany’s contribution to the Blitz. The story pitter-pats some literary narration, wistful trees in the breeze, darling kids, sneaky gossips, and a lazy playboy (James Lance) who preens his dry wit like a show dog on a short leash.

Bill Nighy is Brundish, a reclusive squire whom Flo nudges from his shell for parched conversations, delighting him with Ray Bradbury books and Nabokov’s scandalous Lolita. Their friendship attains the demure heat of a lace doily nuzzling a tea cozy. Nighy, perhaps the best aging man in British movies since the senior sprints of Alastair Sim and Ernest Thesiger, infallibly delivers lines like “She (Clarkson) wants a damned art center! As if art could have a center.” Still, even Nighy’s slow-drip suavity can only help The Bookshop turn its pages, while stifling a yawn. Consider a Brexit to the exit.

SALAD (List)

Twelve Ace Female Roles in Westerns
In order of release: Marlene Dietrich as Frenchy, Destry Rides Again (1939); Linda Darnell as Chihuahua, My Darling Clementine (1946); Anne Baxter as ‘Mike,’ Yellow Sky (1949); Geraldine Page as Angie, Hondo (1953); Joan Crawford as Vienna, Johnny Guitar (1954); Gail Russell as Annie, Seven Men From Now (1956); Barbara Stanwyck as Jessica, Forty Guns (1957); Angie Dickinson as Feathers, Rio Bravo (1959); Julie Christie as Constance in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971); Katy Jurado as Mrs. Baker in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973); Amanda Plummer as Annie, Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981); Suzy Amis as Jo, The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), and Annette Bening as Sue, Open Range (2005).  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The genius of Orson Welles was never more maverick than in filming his last true Hollywood movie, Touch of Evil in 1957: “His major strategy for maintaining control of the picture was to move out of the studio to quaint Venice, outside Hollywood. Secretly, he intended from the first to remain there until finishing most of the shooting (and often) shot at night. ‘They really didn’t know what was happening,’ Janet Leigh said of the studio … (and he was always) rewriting the script. When everyone else was asleep, Orson seemed always to be working on it. Assistant director Terry Nelson: ‘He assumed absolute creative control by rewriting constantly so that nobody really had a firm fix on all the requirements except Welles.” (From Barbara Leaming’s fascinating Orson Welles: A Biography.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The frequent scene-topper in Treasure of the Sierra Madre is Walter Huston’s veteran prospector, Howard. Unforgettably “the old boy breaks into a guffawing dance. Huston had learned it from Eugene O’Neill, and Tommy Lee Jones does a fair approximation of it in 2014’s The Homesman. Viewing the film on TV years later, John Huston again savored his dad’s dance: ‘The goose flesh comes out and my hair stands up.” (From the Bogart/Treasure of the Sierra Madre chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Burt Reynolds, who died on Sept. 6, had a late career peak as porn auteur Jack Horner, seen here directing phallic star Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) in Boogie Nights (New Line, 1997; director Paul Thomas Anderson, cinematographer Robert Elswit).

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