The Looking Glass
by Jennifer Johnston
The Starry Night (1889), painting by Vincent Van Gogh
For the past few weeks I've been catching up on Academy Award-winning and -nominated films which I hadn't seen when I made my "fearless" (and pretty darned accurate) predictions of the winners in Goin' for the Gold ... or the Gold-Plated ... or Just Goyen, posted February 18, 2009. For the most part, I have been impressed, as well as moved and delighted in varying degrees by those I've seen.
I thoroughly enjoyed the designated Best Picture, Slumdog Millionaire, and have no quarrel with its selection. Although grim (and downright gross) in some places, there is such a delicious sweetness about the film ... a hopeful (and hope-filled) sense that despite so many bad things in the world, indeed in the universe, despite the often scurrilous acts we are capable of perpetrating against one another, we are also surrounded by love and good will and blessings which may accrue to us if we are prescient and open, if we grow and learn and strive, if we do our best to nurture and protect the helpless and the innocent ... and if we reciprocate and return the beneficences we receive. The musical number at the end of the movie truly inspires smiles as one walks out of the theater ... or in my case, toward the kitchen to feed our restless animals.
Milk was an excellent film, too ... based on The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, the book by Randy Shilts. It is a powerful depiction of the long, long struggle of our gay brothers and sisters for the equality, at law and in equity, to which they are Constitutionally entitled as citizens of our country. Dustin Lance Black's script was well written, and Sean Penn gave an absolutely fascinating portrayal of Milk, arguably the first high profile openly gay person elected to prominent office in the U.S., who was murdered in 1978 by deranged fellow San Francisco City Supervisor Dan White. Somewhere, I think Harvey Milk may be smiling at the great strides which have been made, and are being made in state after state now, toward granting gay people rights which many of us take for granted. Penn was richly deserving of his Best Actor award.
The Reader, starring the luminous Kate Winslet in a deglamorized part, and co-starring Ralph Fiennes (who along with Liam Neeson was robbed of the Academy Awards they should have received for Schindler's List in 1993), just blew me away. It was a stunning, stunning film on so many levels ... emotionally wrenching in parts, ameliorated and lifted by the insightful script, and by Winslet in her rendering of a character who might have been distasteful if not wholly repugnant without her nuanced performance which allows us to see the character of Hannah as a flawed, faceted being ... an ultimately human being. IMHO, there was not another nominee in the Best Actress category who came close to Winslet's performance.
Of the films I've seen, the only one nominated in the major categories which caused me to shake my head and wonder how it managed to garner so many nominations is Doubt ... and for the life of me, I just don't understand the hooplah. Meryl Streep was Meryl Streep. Philip Seymour Hoffman was good, as he always is ... but I just didn't see anything that really caught me as being outstanding ... that ever elevated his performance to compete with that of Frank Langella playing Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon. I thought Amy Adams and Viola Davis (particularly Davis, though in a tiny part) turned in fine performances possibly deserving of their Supporting Actress nominations. But I just didn't see anything predominant or truly provocative in the insinuating ambiguity and lack of resolution in John Patrick Shanley's script. Perhaps Shanley's acclaimed Broadway play simply didn't translate well to the screen ... or possibly he should have left the direction to more experienced hands. Anyway, suffice to say that Doubt left me in that very state, though of course there are many (including numerous critics who make a living doing just that) who think it was wonderful. Or maybe I sat through too many long nights watching my mother direct Little Theater productions of Ayn Rand's Night of January 16th to be overly impressed with the contrived ambiguity of the ending. But I digress....
F. Scott Fitzgerald, photograph by Carl Van Vechten
From Wikipedia Commons, public domain
Last night I watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ... and I have to say that of all the aforementioned films, it is my favorite. What a lovely, lovely theme and story (adapted from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald) ... so meaningful and resonant ... full of humor and charm, sadness and melancholy, joy and sorrow ... a trenchant allegory of life, and the love we find ... or miss, or fail to recognize, or leave behind in pursuit of some ephemeral fever dream or some halcyon but potentially soul-destroying ideal of what we are supposed to want. There were so many wonderful lines in the film:
"Your life is defined by your opportunities ... even the ones you miss."
"Sometimes we're on a collision course and we just don't know it. Whether by accident or design, there's not a thing we can do about it."
"Benjamin, we're meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are to us?"
Throughout our lives, most of us love many people (friends, children, parents, partners or spouses), in different ways, for different reasons ... and we lose people we love in different ways. Many of us will know the painful, wrenching loss of someone, or more than one someone, through death or divorce or desertion by that person or his faculties, or the all too human tendency to simply move on to something new and different. Still, no matter the means or the reason, it remains that most of those we love will one day leave us, in one way or another, whether or not they want to go. And we will be left with our memories and reveries of things that were and things that might have been. Some say we shouldn't think about things that might have been ... but I believe we should and must think about it ... how else will we know how we want it to be someday, and how we need to get there?
Love itself is not susceptible to definition or characterization by any one word, one feeling, one definition, one "label" ... nor by any single measure of time, nor by the amount of time spent together ... nor by any measures used to quantify that which by its nature cannot be quantified. Love is impervious to our often puny and endless efforts to categorize it. But the love, the affinity, the immortal bond between twindred souls, as the love between the characters Benjamin and Daisy in Benjamin Button, is deep, endless, immutable, often ineffable, ethereal as the first glint of a celestial sunrise, spiritual as the deepest star-tracked night, transcendent of time and spatial boundaries ... yet sometimes, in some circumstances, in some lives, for some moments it is wondrously, gloriously tangible and vibrant and alive, if only for a blink of the eternal universal eye.
Infrared image of the Milky Way galaxy, NASA image from Wikipedia Commons
In The End, the last song recorded by all four Beatles before their breakup, Paul McCartney (who composed the lyrics, though they are credited to Lennon/McCartney) wrote: And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make. McCartney was almost right ... but I believe it is not only the love you make, or the love you take, but also the love you give perhaps without expectation, but with growing clarity and surety ... followed by the answering incandescent radiance of love "beamed" back to you on tendrils of thought and affirmation ... that will one day softly and ceaselessly echo through the immortal universe in the mellifluous rhythmic sussurous of eternally conjoined beating hearts.
If you believe in love ... if you are blessed with or aspire to the realization and perfection of love in our often imperfect journeys through time and space ... I highly recommend that you see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ... and take joy and promise and understanding and succor in your silent tears tracing the corners of your smiling, upturned lips....
In the movie, even on the many occasions when they are parted, sometimes for long periods of time, Daisy and Benjamin always said good night to each other before falling into sleep. So, softly and sweetly....
"Goodnight, Benjamin." Goodnight Daisy." Or ... "Goodnight, Gracie." "Goodnight, George." Or ... Goodnight, beloved ... or fill in your own blank....
)O(
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