Day 71/75 - Joe Gould's Secret (2000)

I have always felt that Stanley Tucci is one of our great and undervalued American actors. In Joe Gould’s Secret (2000), which he also directed, Tucci plays Joe Mitchell, a writer for The New Yorker, who becomes fascinated with the story behind Joe Gould, Professor Sea Gull, (Ian Holm) a Greenwich Village street person, who claims to have written the Oral History of the World, a1,200,000 words long book filled with the conversations he has overheard on the streets of New York.

The film becomes a kind of love story of two very different writers.

As Mitchell introduces us to his New York, he says:

In my home town, I never felt at home. In New York, New York City, in Greenwich Village, down among the cranks, and the misfits, and the one runners, and the has-beens, and the might-have-beens, and the would-bes, and the never-wills, and the God-knows-whats, I have always felt at home. (imdb.com)

Set in the early 1940s, the film is rich with period details.  Tucci peoples his film with some of my favorite character actors—Susan Sarandon, Hope Davis, Patricia Clarkson, Celia Weston, Alice Drummond, Nell Campbell, and Steve Martin—some names you will recognize, all you should know.

As the story begins, the owner of Jefferson’s Coffee Shop defends the smelly, disheveled, homeless Gould when a cop says he’s a freak. “We’re all freaks, Mike, truth be known. We’re all freaks together.” 

Gould says of himself, “Please don’t think I’m stupid just because I’m unclean.”  

As Mitchell interviews and in some ways woos Gould, he learns of his extensive past—a Harvard grad, author, famed among the New York intellectuals. He even meets artist Alice Neel who painted Gould’s nude portrait complete with three penises. Gould attends parties and holds court in spite of his antisocial tendencies.

When Mitchell’s writing about Gould is published in The New Yorker, homeless Joe becomes a celebrity and begins getting money from admirers. A patroness even surfaces who pays for his room and board. Mitchell is warned by The New Yorker receptionist that “the story doesn’t end just because the writer has finished writing.”

At first wanting Gould’s companionship to write about, Mitchell finds Gould latching onto him as over-frequent companion. The rest of the story involves Gould, his disappointments, the search for the Oral History and the resolution of the two-Joe’s history. Gould’s secret changes all of the characters.

In one of Joe Gould’s writings he muses:

The insane person is a victim of self-deception. Yet in a measure, we all have this virtue. One is his own imaginary creation of himself. If we could see ourselves for what we really are life would be insupportable. Hence, I would judge the sanest man to be him who most firmly realizes the tragic isolation of humanity, and pursues his essential purpose calmly. (imdb.com)

Joe Gould’s Secret teaches us about the need to relate and the power of those connections—and ultimately the responsibility necessary to sustain those connections. Ian Holm and Stanley Tucci are both worth watching.

Joe Gould’s Secret (2000) **** (on Netflix streaming)

The first nine minutes of the film

Day 51/54 - Robot and Frank (2012)

When I teach Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, my students watch and discuss Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Among the questions that always comes up is the question Prof. Hobby asks at the beginning of it. “Could a human learn to love a robot.” Spielberg is very clever in that he has personable Haley Joel Osment play the robot David and since David looks like a real boy, it is easy to learn to care for him.

 Robot and Frank, like A.I., takes place in the “near future.”  Frank (sensitively played by Frank Langella) lives alone in New York state, as a retired second-story robber who is losing more and more of his memory. His daughter travels, but his son Hunter (James Marsden) travels five hours once a week to come and see how his father is. Against Frank’s wishes, he one day brings a humanoid robot to help care for him. The robot looks like an abstract human wearing a white space. He is programmed to cook and care for Frank and try to bring him, and like iPhone’s Siri (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard), he can hold conversations with him.

One of Frank’s joys is reading books from the local library where he is also attracted to the librarian. Since books are now passé, the library has been sold and is being refitted to digitize all books and become a multimedia “library experience.” Librarian Jennifer (Susan Saradan) shows Frank some special books that will be saved. One is a Dore illustrated copy of Don Quixote (the book, if you remember, about a man who becomes lost in a fantasy world of knights and quests). The project director Jake acts patronizingly toward Frank. When the librarian invites Frank to a fundraiser for the library, Frank decides to steal Don Quixote as a gift for Jennifer and an insult toward Jake. There is a poignant moment at the fundraiser when Frank finds he and Jennifer surrounded by people his children's age. No older people are wanted.

We suddenly find ourselves in a funny and charming heist picture. Robot (Frank never names him) knows laws and the idea of stealing, but has no Asimov morality programmed into him. After the first heist is successful, Frank plans an even bigger heist to steal Jake’s wife’s diamond necklace and gold jewelry. We root for the two to succeed. And we see their relationship grow, even as Frank begins to confuse the robot with his son.

Robot cooks creatively and gets Frank to change his diet. He succeeds in learning to create a tomato garden. Frank teaches him the finer points of picking locks and becomes invaluable cracking a safe.

At one point Frank and Robot talk about life; Robot tells Frank that he knows Frank’s alive because he thinks. Robot on the other hand knows that he is not alive; and if he were turned off, he would be merely turned off. Erasing his memory would mean nothing because, he stresses, he is not human.

For me, that discussion moves the film into much more than a simplistic heist film or a film about the difficulties of aging. I began thinking about the concept of what does indeed make us human. I also began to wonder what I will feel when the libraries of most of my life are no longer places where books reside. What if there was never again the need for a physical book? Frank looks at the Don Quxote and strokes a Dore illustration. That tangible tactile sensation seems  lost forever with an iPad or Kindle.

The technology of the film is subtle but pervasive. Robot is near future, but also now. I have seen his prototype a couple of years ago on You Tube. Frank’s phone rings and as he speaks to it, his son and daughter appear on the flatscreen above his fireplace. Both he and his son carry phones that are clear with images projected on one side—much like I have heard future iPhones might work. 

But as the technology looks to our future, the film suggests there are some things we cannot change. The detereiation of the mind and the aging process are inevitable in “the near future.” Frank’s plight may well be helped with robot companions. And we as human beings have an inherent need to bond that technology will never be able to change.

Intelligent script, Frank Langella and Susan Sarandan, and ideas to think about. I loved the film.

Robot and Frank (2012) *****

Day 46/49 - Little Women (1994)

Is there any film more joyfully Americana than Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women?

In 1933, “women’s director” George Cukor directed a black and white version with Katharine Hepburn (Jo), Joan Bennett (Amy),  Jean Parker (Beth), Frances Dee (Meg), Spring Byington (Marmee), and Douglass Montgomery (Laurie). Costumes were by Walter Plunkett, who later designed the award-winning Gone with the Wind and Singing in the Rain.

In 1946 David O. Selznick began a production to star Jennifer Jones (Jo), Diana Lynn (Amy), Bambi Linn (Beth), Rhonda Fleming (Meg), Anne Revere (Marmee) and John Dall (Laurie), but because of the ordeal of filming Duel in the Sun, the property and script were sold and the film was scrapped.

 In 1949, Mervyn LeRoy directed an MGM color version with June Allyson (Jo), Janet Leigh (Meg), Margaret O’Brien (Beth), Elizabeth Taylor (Amy), Mary Astor (Marmee), and Peter Lawford (Laurie).  Again costumes were designed by Walter Plunkett in lush but often anachronistic 1860-1870s costumes. (In one of the scenes, a zipper closure can be seen in the back of Marmee’s dress). The script changes the birth order so that young Margaret O’Brien can do the Beth death scene. The film is in the broad MGM classic style. In many ways, the early scenes of the film are the most memorable, especially the Christmas scenes which look like early Currier & Ives prints. [Note how the same musical theme has been reused from the 1933 film.]

Today, I rewatched one of the latest incarnations of the book, directed by Gillian Armstrong in 1994, and starring Susan Sarandon (Marmie), Winona Ryder (Jo), Trini Alvarado (Meg), Kirsten Dunst & Samantha Mathis (Amy), Claire Danes (Beth), and Christian Bale (Laurie). Sarandon makes a strong Marmee and although Ryder seems a little weak in her role, the ensemble acting works. Danes gives a touching death scene.

The last version of the film expands on the book and becomes truly a woman’s perspective of the Civil War Period. Women throughout the film are seen naturally doing women’s activities: folding clothes, baking and cooking, sewing, living with and loving cats and little dogs, gardening, arranging flowers, admiring fabrics, tending children, painting china and later oil painting, writing, entertaining themselves. The film is filled with period quilts, dolls, historically faithful clothing, glorious attics and parlors, and Concord, Massachusetts, environments. The set interiors of the house are patterned after Louisa May Alcott’s family home, Orchard House.

According to the IMDB article on the film regarding Colleen Atwood's costumes:
Costumes are handed down from older sister to younger, to underline both the family's poverty and the connections between sisters. Jo's red plaid dress worn to the ball where she meets Laurie is worn the following Christmas by Beth when she comes down the stairs after being ill; Jo and Beth are close to each other, as Meg and Amy are close to each other. Meg's blue striped dress that she doesn't end up wearing to Belle Gardiner's debut ball is worn years later by Amy in the scene where she announces she's going to Europe with Aunt March. 

I have seen this version at least five times, and find I continue to enjoy it more each time I see it.

Little Women (1994) *****