Mr. Lincoln Goes to Hollywood

Abraham Lincoln's posthumous relationship with Hollywood is explored by Smithsonian Magazine, including a look at the new film by Steven Spielburg, starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

On the set everyone addressed Day-Lewis as “Mr. Lincoln” or “Mr. President.” “That was my idea,” Spielberg says. “I addressed all the actors pretty much by the roles they were playing. When actors stepped off the set they could be whoever they felt they needed to be, but physically on the set I wanted everybody to be in an authentic mood.” He never did that in any of his 49 other directorial efforts. (“I couldn’t address Daniel at all,” says Kushner. “I would send him texts. I called myself ‘Your metaphysical conundrum,’ because as the writer of the movie, I shouldn’t exist.”)

Henry Fonda in Young Mister Lincoln (1939) might as well be a youngish Henry Fonda, or perhaps Mister Roberts, with nose enhancement. Walter Huston in Abraham Lincoln (1930) wears a startling amount of lipstick in the early scenes, and later when waxing either witty or profound he sounds a little like W.C. Fields. Day-Lewis is made to resemble Lincoln more than enough for a good poster shot, but the character’s consistency is beyond verisimilitude.

Lincoln, 6-foot-4, was taller than everyone around him by a greater degree than is Day-Lewis, who is 6-foot-1 1/2. I can’t help thinking that Lincoln’s voice was even less mellow (it was described as high-pitched and thin, and his singing was more recitational than melodious) than the workable, vaguely accented tenor that Day-Lewis has devised. At first acquaintance Lincoln came off gawkier, goofier, uglier than Day-Lewis could very well emulate. If we could reconstitute Lincoln himself, like the T. Rex in Jurassic Park, his looks and carriage might put us off.

Day-Lewis gives us a Lincoln with layers, angles, depths and sparks. He tosses in some authentic-looking flat-footed strides, and at one point stretches unpresidentially across the floor he’s lying on to stoke the fire. More crucially, he conveys Lincoln’s ability to lead not by logic or force but by such devices as timing (knowing when a time is ripe), amusement (he not only got away with laughing at his own stories, sometimes for reasons unclear, but also improved his hold on the audience thereby) and at least making people think he was getting into where they were coming from. (Read entire article.)

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When the Mask Slips

This article is from a few weeks ago but it is worth pondering today.

But is Obama worried?  Not for a second.  He doesn't care.  Because that's not his job.  Obama is merely the pretty face for the über-left monster.  Let's face it: Obama is merely a figurehead.  A happy face for the anti-American, anti-individual, anti-capitalist revolution.  He's a movie star, nothing more.  He's an impressive façade with nothing behind it, like a Hollywood set.  But the American people should be concerned about his puppet masters: Reverend Wright, George Soros, Bill Ayers, and a cabal of Islamic supremacist Muslim Brotherhood operatives.  That's who's running the country.

Obama is implementing and instituting everything on the radical, socialist, and Islamic supremacist wish list, without compromise.  As far as Obama is concerned, it's up to them to deliver him.  It's up to the culture, it's up to the media, it's up to J-Lo and the other soulless airheads in Hollywood.  Obama is merely the face that the monster is wearing.

So is he worried?  Not on your life.  His contempt for the American intellect has been demonstrated.  He doesn't think his constituency is even watching.  They get their talking points from the mothership -- whether it's Media Matters, the Center for American Progress, or MSNBC.  Goebbels-style talking points devoid of logic, accuracy, and fact.  Obama goes on The View, Letterman, and Jimmy Kimmel, and he would even go on Romper Room if it were still on the air, exuding cool, hip, and groovy vibrations.  And all is right with the world, even as U.S. embassies are attacked, our ambassadors are killed, jihadi revolutions overthrow our secular allies, and the economic machine that empowers this magnificent nation is routed, and the Saturday Night Live band plays on.  What, me worry? (Read entire article.)

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The Tree of Life (2011)

Mrs. O'Brien: Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.~from The Tree of Life (2011)

I watched the DVD of Terence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011) with my mother, who declared at the beginning of the film: "I hope this is not one of those weird French movies." While not a "French movie" per se, it was what some people would call avant garde, and what others (such as my mom) would describe as disjointed and confusing. There was a lengthy sequence showing volcanoes, suns, stars, jellyfish and dinosaurs, rather like a bizarrely spliced television special by National Geographic. We were about to give up on it, when suddenly we found ourselves in a small southern town in the 1950's at the home of an Irish Catholic family named O'Brien. Since both my mom and I love movies about small southern towns (in any decade) and Irish Catholic families, we decided to persevere to the end.

While hard to follow at times, The Tree of Life is a collage of sin, loss, beauty and redemption, dealing with the struggle between nature and grace, as well as the confrontation between Darwinism and the Christian faith, as experienced by one family. To quote from the Cannes 2011 review in The Guardian:

Terrence Malick's mad and magnificent film descends slowly, like some sort of prototypical spaceship: it's a cosmic-interior epic of vainglorious proportions, a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy, a meditation on memory, and a gasp of horror and awe at the mysterious inevitability of loving, and losing those we love.

Sean Penn has a central but minor role as Jack, a careworn 21st-century corporate executive who is now disenchanted with his life. At the moment of crisis, he is carried back to an ecstatically remembered 1950s boyhood in smalltown America. He remembers his relationship with his demanding, disciplinarian father, played by Brad Pitt, and the brother who died at the age of 19: the news is brought to his distraught mother (Jessica Chastain) via an official communication – the telegraph delivery boy thrusts it into her hands and walks quickly away – so he appears to have died on military service.

Jack realises that time, far from healing the wounds of loss, only makes them more painful. Along with the dream-lit tableaux from his childhood, he is vouchsafed extraordinary visions of geological time and the unknowable reaches of the universe, in comparison with which his loss is meaningless. And yet meaning has to be found if the pain is not to be unendurable. In a sense, the purpose of these gigantic visions is to anaesthetise the pain of being alive and not understanding.

Brad Pitt dominates the bulk of the film as Mr O'Brien, who appears on the face of it to be a God-fearing family man with a button-down shirt and crewcut, brusquely but sincerely in harmony with his gentle, beautiful and profoundly religious wife. Chastain has a voiceover at the very beginning asking her sons to prefer God's grace to the beauties of nature, as the truer path. But O'Brien is far more complex than first appears: he is angry with his boys; he respects the severity of traditional churchgoing belief, but aspires to riches and worldliness, taking out patents in the aeronautics industry and dissipating the family's means in the process.

He challenges his boys to hit him, to toughen them up, and does not hesitate to hit them for disobedience and discourtesy. He plays the organ in church and is a disappointed musician; his frustration and rage simmer from every pore. His boys feel fear as well as love: Malick shows how they have fused into the same emotion. They are encouraged to respect his violence and secretly to feel contempt for their mother's gentleness....

Steve Greydanus' review brings further coherency to the kaleidoscopic story-telling:

Occasionally, with certain films, I find it helpful to step back and look through a sociological lens rather than a critical one. For instance, what does the phenomenal success of a film like Titanic tell us about the society that embraces it? With The Tree of Life, I find myself stepping further back, contemplating it through an anthropological lens, as much as an artifact as a work of art. The riddle of existence is not a riddle the universe poses to us, but one we pose to ourselves, as Malick does in The Tree of Life. We are the riddle, and the very fact that we ask the questions we do is one of the best clues we have to the answers we seek.

The questions in The Tree of Life are posed in Malick’s trademark inner monologue voice-overs, with characters carrying on a running cross-examination of God: “Where were you?” “Who are we to you?” “Why should I be good if you aren’t?” Early on, a telegram arrives bringing word that one of the O’Brien boys, now 19 and perhaps in the military, has been killed. In a flashback we see the O’Brien brothers as children dealing with the accidental death of a playmate. What sort of God presides over such a world?

The first question, though, comes from God himself. An opening epigraph asks, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? ... When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4,7).

This withering cross-examination, taken from the beginning of God’s response to Job’s complaint, anticipates the film’s most remarkable movement: a lengthy sequence, accompanied by soaring choral work (including Zbigniew Preisner’s Lacrimosa or Requiem), contemplating the formation of galaxies, stars and planets, as well as the origins of life on earth, from microbes to jellyfish to dinosaurs.

The sequence highlights the “tree of life” in the Darwinian sense, a tree whose branches eventually bring together the O’Briens (an earthy Brad Pitt and an ethereal Jessica Chastain) and produce their three boys.

Yet The Tree of Life strains toward something beyond Darwinian ruthlessness. “The nuns taught us there were two ways through life,” Jack’s mother notes in the film’s first minutes, “the way of nature and the way of grace.” Nature “is willful; it only wants to please itself, to have its own way. … It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it.” Grace, by contrast, “doesn’t try to please itself; it accepts being slighted, accepts insults and injuries. … No one who follows the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.”

For Jack O’Brien (played as a boy by terrific newcomer Hunter McCracken and fleetingly seen as an adult played by Sean Penn), his mother represents the way of grace, while his father is the way of nature. Jack’s early life is seen through a scrim of Edenic glory, an aura of bliss and play in which his mother’s joyful personality dominates. Eventually, though, his father’s sternness dominates his life. Mr. O’Brien is the lawgiver: Here is the line between our property and the neighbors’; don’t cross it. You slammed the door; now close it gently 50 times.

Mr. O’Brien says grace at meals, prays in church and mentions tithing every week. Yet his worldview is essentially Darwinian; more than once he tells the boys that you can’t succeed if you’re “too good,” since people will walk all over you. Even his play is Darwinian: He teaches his boys the hand-slapping game and forces them to learn to fight. His real god may be money, and his faith is self-determination. As his professional aspirations slip away from him, he quarrels with his wife and terrorizes his children. When business takes him out of the house, it’s like a holiday for the boys and their mother.

It’s harder to say how Mrs. O’Brien embodies the idea of grace. She’s an archetypal mother, gentle and forgiving, but also passive. When tensions boil over in one excruciating family supper and Mr. O’Brien lashes out at his sons, his wife is unable to protect them or restrain him; instead, he restrains her. It’s queasily persuasive, but we seem to be firmly under the boot of nature, with no sign of the transcendent power of grace.

Young Jack likes his mother better than his father, but as time goes by, he finds more and more in himself what he hates in his father. An inhumane act involving a frog; bullying games with his unprotesting younger brother, whose gentleness mirrors their mother as Jack’s cruelty mirrors their father — these moments sting like guilty childhood memories, all the more in connection with the younger brother, destined to die at 19. (Much of this may be autobiographical; the director grew up in Texas and had a brother who died.)

Malick’s camera wanders and swoops restlessly through these vignettes, capturing moments of power that never coalesce into a narrative or create a sense of characters transcending the individual scenes. The individual moments have only the power of the archetypal situations they evoke. Take any one of them out of the film, watch it in isolation, and it would play exactly the same. (Read more.)

The final scenes are like a vision or dream sequence in which the grown Jack and his family mystically accept the reality of  the death of the youngest brother. It is never clear how he dies and one assumes his is a soldier's death. However, it should be kept in mind that Malick's brother committed suicide in Spain at age nineteen. We do not know if perhaps this happens in the movie and if it is Mr. O'Brien's harshness which leads to the ultimate tragedy. We do see Mrs O'Brien comforted by a woman in white robes (the Virgin Mary?) as she raises her eyes heavenward and says: "I give him to you. I give you my son." The trustful surrender to the will of God is the final triumph of grace.



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Hunted Priests

Father John Gerard's memoirs.

Reading his memoir of his time in England as a missionary priest, I can see why--and in this Year of Faith, he provides a magnificent example of absolute trust in the Providence of God. As Father Gerard hides, finds places for other priests to hide, wears disguises, works to convert fallen away Catholics and sympathetic Anglicans, he is always reliant on God's protection and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He describes his efforts to convince potential converts as never being his own successes, but inspired by the Holy Spirit. Father Gerard endures torture, experiences danger and discomfort, and enjoys comfort and safety, all with the same spirit of faith in God, love for the Church and the people he converses with, and hope that everything he does in the mission for the good of others will be rewarded with success. Father Gerard is even concerned for the wellbeing of the gaoler when he escapes from the Tower, doing all he can to divert blame from the man and his wife! He writes vividly and directly of his efforts and also of those who suffered martyrdom: St. Anne Line, Blessed Edward Oldcorne, St. Nicholas Owen, and several others. His memoir also highlights the Catholics who suffered fines and imprisonment, arrest and questioning, especially the many women who ran their households as safehouses and often yearned for the religious life (for which they had to go into exile, of course.) (Read entire post.)

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Nicole Kidman as Princess Grace

Nicole Kidman plays Grace of Monaco

A new film is in the works.

The biopic, titled Grace of Monaco, tells the story of the Philadelphia-born star, who made it big in Hollywood before she married Price Rainier of Monaco in 1956. Helmed by La Vie en Rose director Olivier Dahn, and with a reported $30million budget, the film also co-stars Parker Posey and Milo Ventimiglia. Grace of Monaco is scheduled for release some time in 2014. (Read entire article.)

The Real Princess Grace

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Music and Laughter from the Past

A phenomenal discovery.

Last night at the GE Theatre in Schenectady, New York, an audience of about 200 people sat and heard the sounds of a someone playing the cornet, a man laughing, and a recitation of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Old Mother Hubbard." It is believed that this event was the first time that any public audience had heard those sounds since they were captured by a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878.

For years the audio was trapped on the piece of foil you see above. There was no device that could play it and even if there had been, doing so would have likely ruined it. This summer, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, physicist Carl Haber and his team were able to create a 3D picture of the foil whose topography could then be translated into sound using techniques of mathematical analysis and physical modeling to calculate how a needle would have played the recording. They were able to do so "without physically having to touch them," he explained to me. "And that's kind of the key issue, because these things are so old and fragile and torn-up, broken, and delicate that in many cases it just would not be possible to play them back in any of the more standard ways." (Read entire article.)

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Prince Felix du Salm-Salm

From the Mad Monarchist:

It would be hard to imagine many other soldiers in the service of the Mexican Emperor having a more colorful career that Prince Felix zu Salm-Salm. Throughout his career he was to fight for the King of Prussia, the Emperor of Austria, the President of the United States and the Emperor of Mexico. He was born Felix Constantin Alexander Johann Nepomuk Prinz zu Salm-Salm at Schloss Anholt in Westphalia on December 25, 1828; the youngest son of Prince Florentin zu Salm-Salm. His first military service commenced on April 2, 1846 when he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Prussian cavalry, first with a Guards Kurassier regiment and then with the 11th Hussar regiment. He saw action for the first time during the Prussian-Danish War at the battle of Aarhuus on May 18, 1849. Although only an ordinance officer, Prince Felix took a handful of hussars and attacked a powerful troop of Danish dragoons on his own authority. This wild act of bravado left him wounded, a prisoner of the Danes and on the bad side of his superiors.

In 1854 Prince Felix left the Prussian army for the Austrian Imperial Army and fought in the Franco-Austrian War in 1859 in Italy. Afterwards, he made the mistake of running up huge gambling debts, a fault which the conservative Emperor Francis Joseph found particularly aggravating and he was dismissed from the army for conduct unbecoming an officer. While his father dealt with his debts Prince Felix decided to see what opportunities lay open in the New World and he sailed to the United States, arriving just in time for the outbreak of the Civil War. During the course of the war Prince Felix was to gain two very valuable things; a better reputation and a devoted wife. He met the German General Louis Blenker who gave him the rank of colonel and made him his chief of staff. He also fell in love with a beautiful and spirited redhead named Agnes LeClerq, the daughter of a Canadian colonel. The two married in secret on August 30, 1862 because her Puritan family did not approve of a Catholic wedding, but the new Princess Agnes was totally devoted to her husband and hated being apart from him. (Read entire post.)

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W.E. (2011)

Wallis Simpson: Darling, they can't hurt you if you don't let them.
~from W.E (2011)

I don't care for the work of Madonna, as a rule. I never have, not even back in the 1980's when she was young and popular. I don't like her for the same reasons I don't like blasphemy or vulgarity. I was therefore  pleasantly surprised when I saw Madonna's film W.E. I was surprised and happy that someone capable of so much ugliness could also be capable of beauty. W.E is a film of subtle loveliness; each scene crafted with a stunning play of light and color. The romance of Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson is presented in a most original fashion for while showing the irresistible nature of the love affair, it also shows the downside of the relationship, and there were many downsides.

 Let me just say that I never saw the David/Wallis liaison as particularly romantic; it always seemed seedy to me, especially since it involved both a dereliction of duty and compulsive adultery. I find George VI and Queen Elizabeth to be the hero and heroine of a truly great love story, for they stood together with their country in the midst of disaster, while David and Wallis were picnicking in the South of France or sunning themselves in the Bahamas. What Madonna does is carefully yet searingly underline the despair and emptiness that was the lot of David and Wallis, who became a prince and princess without a country, without a family, with nothing but each other and their legend.

Onto the story of Edward the VIII and Wallis Simpson is spliced a secondary story about a desperate modern woman in a morbid situation. Her name is Wally because she is named after Wallis Simpson. Like her mother before her, she is obsessed with the story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Her life is so empty that she looks to Wallis and David as examples of how to live and I must say that compared to young Wally,  Mrs. Simpson appears to have it all together.

As The Telegraph says:

 Madonna (who also co-scripted with Alex Keshishian) has fashioned a split-level story of two couples: the Windsors, and the growing attraction between Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a contemporary Manhattan woman, and Evgeni (Oscar Isaac), a handsome Russian working security at Sotheby’s.

Wally, married to an eminent shrink who isn’t above slapping her around, desperately wants children. (He doesn’t.) Worse, she has inherited her mother’s and grandmother’s obsession with the Windsors (Andrea Riseborough, James d’Arcy) and doggedly researches their lives, seeking clues about how to live her own. In extreme moments, Mrs. Simpson actually appears to her.

In comparison to the lost modern girl, a notorious woman like Wallis becomes the epitome of class, elegance, and integrity. (That is how bad things are now.) I must say Andrea Riseborough is the best Wallis ever; she actually has the manner of a socialite  from Baltimore; her warmth and easy, earthy charm are all we need to see to understand why David is enthralled with her. David is played by James D'Arcy who did a fine job although he is too tall for the part.

To quote The Hollywood Reporter:

Rather more flavorful is the story of Wallis, played with distinction and an almost poignant sense of resignation by Andrea Riseborough. First glimpsed in Shanghai in 1924 before entering London society in 1931, she is slowly pried from the hold of her burly military husband into the gangly but nonetheless tenacious grasp of Prince Edward (or David, as he was called by intimates). Surprisingly for the truth or dare adherent, Madonna is bashfully silent on the rumored intimate reasons why the king-in-waiting could not bear to lose this ordinary-looking woman.

Rather, looking at the dilemma more from female side, the filmmaker reveals a dynamic in which Wallis, her intimacy with Edward slowly morphing into unwanted isolation, soon becomes a pawn (never to be a queen) on the royal chessboard, virtually helpless to resist being moved about by forces far more powerful than she. This feeling of inevitability, backed up by snippets of Wallis' own letters registering feelings of being trapped, and her and Edward's eventual sorry fate as “the world's most celebrated parasites,” is the one aspect of the story that rings true on a human level and is appealing and almost touching for that.

Wally's choice of the Russian security guard as the solution to all of her problems seems odd for a person so obsessed with the Duchess of Windsor. At least Wallis had a prince and her house in Paris. I mean, I hope Wally finds true love with Evgeny but considering she hardly knows him one cannot be sure. In spite of the confusion of the character she plays, Abbie Cornish is an exquisite actress and she does the best she can with the part of Wally. On the whole, while the movie is not among my favorites, it is both entertaining and thought-provoking. For those who enjoy films with lavish vintage costumes, sets and scenery as well as a look into the sorrows of the rich and famous, W.E is especially worth seeing.

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A Poem for Saint Marianne Cope

By Robert Louis Stevenson.

To the Reverend Sister Marianne,
Matron of the Bishop Home, Kalaupapa.

To see the infinite pity of this place,
The mangled limb, the devastated face,
The innocent sufferers smiling at the rod,
A fool were tempted to deny his God.
He sees, and shrinks; but if he look again,
Lo, beauty springing from the breasts of pain!
He marks the sisters on the painful shores,
And even a fool is silent and adores.

 (Read more.) Share