Happy Super Bowl Sunday
My beautiful wife, who has a big day tomorrow, has a new blog that I love:
http://arthistorymusings.tumblr.com/
Whenever the discussion of the greatest writers of all time comes up, one almost never hears the name Graham Greene bandied about. I can't imagine why. Everything I've ever read of his - the classics The End of the Affair and The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory, A Burnt-Out Case, Travels With My Aunt, Our Man in Havana - has challenged and stirred me on a deep level. Green plunks you down in thick, convoluted exotic worlds teeming with intrigue. His characters grapple with spiritual questions. Morality is muddled. Believing in nothing can be transformative, as defining, as believing in God, who is often a silent comedian. Almost everything you expect in a master writer, Green has in spades: comedy, irony, tragedy, abstruseness in plot, symbolism, flawed characters, redemption, knowledge of specific places (Africa, Cuba, London, Mexico) during specific points in time, and, of course, the ways and manner in which individual consciousness is shaped by the political. I finish a Greene novel often feeling burnished, spent, relieved, amused, wise. Greene never resorts to modernist tricks, but his style is very distinct.
As a way of steering our discussion, I need to mention Greene's work for cinema. Two of his short stories, he adapted for film: The Third Man, one of the greatest movies ever made, and, one year earlier with the same director (Carol Reed), 1948's The Fallen Idol. I'm spending this afternoon re-watching The Fallen Idol, and what a doozy it is. Booby Henrey is Phillipe, the young son of a diplomat, who's often away from their London home. Phillipe's idol is the butler, Baines (played superbly by Ralph Richardson), who entertains young Philippe with tales of his adventures abroad, including Africa. One day, Philippe follows Baines to a cafe where he sees Baines deep in conversation with a young woman the startled, chagrined Baines identifies as "his niece." (It's clear to the audience, though, that this is the married Baines' mistress). When Baines' own wife, a maid working in Phillipe's household, falls down the steps to her death, the only witness to the incident is young Phillipe. Was it Baines that Phillipe saw at the top of the steps, pushing his contentiousness wife to her death?
Greene is always fascinated by sin and this is a tight, penetrating examination of a young boy's introduction to it, in the guise of veddy British thriller, with plenty of fanciful, clever camerawork as young Phillipe often eavesdrops and hears conversations he doesn't quite understand. (I think it would make for a great remake, with maybe Ralph Fiennes in the role of the butler)
It's almost impossible to love Contagion. How can you love an unsatisfying movie? The film is well-shot, nicely scored (by Cliff Martinez), but it leaves a pit in your stomach. It has an amazing cast (Oscar nominees and winners all over the place - Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, John Hawkes, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Elliott Gould) but there are no amazing performances. Only Matt Damon is allowed to give his character a roundedness - his quizzical, muddled grief is palpable. The urgency of the first hour fizzles out by the end. By the end, you don't feel too much of anything; you just want more of something and you're not sure what. I though Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns did a nice job at showing how society would probably break down if an epidemic of this magnitude ever did occur, particularly in terms of political selfishness. But the movie is essentially all surface - not that that's a bad thing, but I actually enjoyed Outbreak more.
One final thing: Go Patriots!
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