David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
Note: Nosh 154 will arrive on Friday, May 31.
APPETIZER (Reviews: Tolkien and Ask Dr. Ruth)
Tolkien
Peter Jackson’s Lord
of the Rings saga wore me down with its tick-tock metronome of epic
violence and long intervals of dialog (I relished more the inventive Harry Potters). Tolkien has now made me admire Jackson’s source writer. In its
elegant construction of times past, Dome Kurokoski’s movie has some pious glazing,
yet it stirringly revives the youth of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. We follow him
as a poor, bookish, then orphaned lad, taken from a Hobbit-worthy countryside
to the industrial vistas of Edwardian Birmingham, and then that fearful English
furnace of snobbery: the male boarding school.
The film echoes the old Ivory-Merchant mix of crafty, nostalgic
display and earnest plot pacing, yet life takes charge as Ronald bonds with
three schoolmates of higher “breeding” but artistic interests. With good actors
in each role, the sense of testing rivalry and comradeship is beautifully
developed (no American teen movie compares to their interests and talks). What
saves Tolkien from turning into a rather
insular schoolboy drama is the struggling evolution of brilliant but insecure Ronald.
After childhood, actor Nicholas Hoult takes over the role with solid sincerity (he
resembles the mid-century American actor Jeffrey Hunter, of The Searchers and King of Kings). Ronald’s rich imagination finds its mate and goad in
Edith Bratt, an artistic orphan and lady’s companion played by Lily Collins,
who was so good in Warren Beatty’s daring but little-seen Rules Don’t Apply. Collins is both very sane and very fanciful. The
virginal romantics join their fates in a scene of backstage infatuation with Wagner’s
Ring Cycle (a seed for Tolkien’s Lord of
the Rings novels).
At Oxford University Ronald’s other raft arrives: the
linguistics master Prof. Wright, whose rapt, eager speech comparing trees to
language and culture is a career capper for Derek Jacobi. There is a fine
curlicue touch, when he is thrilled to find Finnish roots in Ronald’s made-up
fantasy language – director Kurokoski is Finnish, and did a movie about the
gay-porn icon Tom of Finland. But Tolkien
reaches well beyond academics, as it heads into the terrible test of Tolkien’s
generation, World War I, for which each of the four friends volunteers.
If the Somme battle hell seems to combine aspects of Jackson’s
Lord of the Rings, Spielberg’s War Horse and old service-buddy
pictures, it also tallies the tragic reckoning with true power. In its last 20
minutes Tolkien becomes one of the
most heartfelt, beyond sentimental memorials to the Lost Generation of 1914-18.
Ironically its best companion came out recently, and from Peter Jackson: his
amazing documentary on Britain’s wartime sacrifices, They Shall Not Grow Old (see Nosh 143, by scrolling down).
Ask Dr. Ruth
Good documentaries, even those of minor artistic interest,
show us something valuable. If they center on a strong personality, all the
better – as in Ask Dr. Ruth. Ruth
Westheimer will turn 91 next month, and on the evidence of Ryan White’s film
she is still the best German-Jewish, Israeli/American powerhouse of concentrated
vigor that modern media has clad in limelight. If she and Judge Ruth Bader
Ginsburg could be inserted together into one of those giant super-colliders of
particle physics, Einstein’s coveted Unified Field Theory might finally emerge
as a fabulous new equation: E=2R3 (Energy equals two Ruths cubed).
A towering four feet, seven inches under a frothy mane
of hair, Westheimer delivers opinions with a Teutonic crunch, but also the salt
of the smartest old dame in a kosher kitchen. The middle-aged Ruth, a strenuously
educated émigré, gained fame on New York talk radio in the ’80s as a sex-advice
guru. She was always frank but gracious (imagine Howard Stern minus all the crude
guy guff). She’s still a ringing anvil of good sense and goodwill about dating,
love tactics, protection, abortion and (above all) two-way affection as the sexy
nexus of satisfaction. Ruth was a beacon of humane sanity during the early,
anti-gay AIDS years. Like some other short, Jewish, willful and verbose
intellects (Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, Ayn Rand), Ruth doesn’t entirely welcome
the accolade “feminist” (too au-courant or political?), probably due to flinty individualism. But a feminist she is.
The movie’s heart, eclipsing all the media jive with
Johnny, Jay, Howard, Merv, David, Arsenio and other gone or aging yakkers, is
in the often tragic backstory: little Karola Ruth Siegel, losing her close,
happy family in Frankfurt to join one of the last kindertransport trains from Hitler’s Reich; lonely years in a Swiss
orphanage; parents killed in the Holocaust; postwar revival in new Israel
(nearly killed in the 1948 war); hard, studious Paris years, then New York. Two
brief marriages to handsome studs left few scars, then came lasting devotion
with her beloved Fred Westheimer, an engineer (“I still remember those first
kisses”) and children. To fill in much of that, Isaac Rubio’s animation
sequences can be criticized as too golden with light (as if to fend off Nazi
shadows). I found them intimate and moving. Ruth, who has seized life with great
courage, infuses this movie with her very special self.
SALAD (A List)
Strong Films
About Real, Strong Women
In order of arrival (with subject and star):
The Passion
of Joan of Arc (Joan, Marie
Falconetti), Queen Christina (Christina
of Sweden, Greta Garbo), The Nun’s Story
(Sister Luke/Marie Louise Habets, Audrey Hepburn), Coal Miner’s
Daughter (Tammy Wynette, Sissy Spacek),
Gorillas in the Mist (Dian Fossey,
Sigourney Weaver), What’s Love Got to Do
With It (Tina Turner, Angela Bassett), Elizabeth
(Queen Elizabeth I, Cate Blanchett), The
Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (herself), Erin Brockovich (Julia Roberts), The Passion of Ayn Rand (Helen Mirren), Frida (Frida Kahlo, Salma Hayek),
My Flesh and Blood (Susan Tom,
herself), Fur (Diane Arbus, Nicole
Kidman), Sophie Scholl (Julia
Jentsch), Agora (Hypatia of
Alexandria, Rachel Weisz), The Iron Lady
(Margaret Thatcher, Meryl Streep), Finding
Vivian Maier (herself), Joy (Joy
Mangano, Jennifer Lawrence), Marie Curie:
The Passion of Knowledge (Karolina Gruszka).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Probably
film’s finest escalating speech is the stunning reply of Kane (Orson Welles) in
Citizen Kane, after his cold, rich
guardian (George Coulouris) tells the novice publisher that he’s wasting his lavish
inheritance:
“The
trouble is, you don’t realize you’re talking to two people. As Charles Foster Kane, who owns 82,364 shares of
Public Transit Preferred – you see, I do
have a general idea of my holdings – I sympathize with you. Charles Foster Kane
is a scoundrel, his paper should be run out of town, a committee should be
formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down
for a contribution of one thousand dollars … On the other hand, I am also the publisher of the Inquirer. As such
it is my duty – I’ll let you in on a secret – it is also my pleasure, to see to it that the decent,
hard-working citizens of the community aren’t robbed blind by a pack of
money-mad pirates, just because they haven’t anyone to look after their
interests. I’ll let you in on another little secret, Mr. Thatcher. I think I’m
the man to do it. You see, I have money and property. If I don’t look after the
interests of the underprivileged, maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody
without any money or property.” (Thatcher
sputters that Charles is losing a million a year, setting up the squelch
supreme.) … You’re right, Mr. Thatcher, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million
dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a
year, I’ll have to close this place in … sixty
years.” (Any chance we can get Mr. Kane to run against Trump next year?)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
No
one else discerned the special flux and tang that director Robert Altman got
from actors quite like critic Pauline Kael: “He has abandoned the theatrical
conventions that movies have generally clung to, of introducing characters and
putting tags on them. His approach entails losses (like) some plot holes that
don’t get filled, (but) the inconveniences are inseparable from Altman’s best
qualities.” Square viewers “were used to the Broadway sound where you get a
line and then a dead space. What Altman did was get rid of the dead spaces.” (From
the Elliott Gould/The Long Goodbye chapter
of my book Starlight Rising,
available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
In a bad portent of their future, guardian Walter P. Thatcher (George Coulouris) greets new ward Charlie Kane (Buddy Swan), under the gaze of mom (Agnes Moorehead) and dad (Harry Shannon) in Citizen Kane. (RKO Pictures, 1941; director Orson Welles, photography by Gregg Toland).
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