The Fugitive Kind

The Fugitive Kind is an antique masterpiece.

Adapted for the screen by Meade Roberts and Tennessee Williams from Williams' play, Orpheus Descending, it's an oldie from 1959.

Watching it on DVD has been a searing, consuming, unforgettable experience.  Parts were so affecting that I watched them again and again.  The brilliance of the performances can't be overstated.  Finally, I've seen Marlon Brando at the peak of his talent and can fully understand the acclaim he's accorded.  Anna Magnani was spellbinding, perfect for her difficult role.  She and Brando are this film.

A young Joanne Woodward has a showy, perhaps overplayed role of near madness, a Tennessee Williams staple.  Victor Jory is malevolently perfect, and Maureen Stapleton is memorable in her small role of then-atypical kindness and compassion.   

Anyone reading this will rightly conclude that I'm old (in body, not in mind, I hope), and I readily admit that this film probably won't interest you unless you're of a certain age, or are a film buff.  The time and morality that is its backdrop will be emotionally unknown to anyone young, but it is a perfectly crafted window into another time and societal place, one that was rigid, cruel and judgmental; one I grew up in.

The film begins with the arrival of Brando's quiet, guitar-carrying character in a small, insular town.  He finds employment, reluctantly forms or is drawn into relationships, and ultimately unleashes powerful, cataclysmic forces.

The stories - for really, there are several - evolve in undulating, entwined layers which are striking in their depiction of complex human emotion.  The abundance of interrelated themes, woven subtly into the narrative, move me still.  You see, the film depicts a time when females were "owned" - oh, not as overtly as in horrific slavery -but in effect, just the same - we were possessions.  It began for females with our parents; then, as we grew older, it became a collective communal thing until marriage when husbands took up the bonds.  Morality and social convention were absolute and vicious.  Women, blacks, natives, minorities, Jews, outsiders - we were all kept in our place and God help those who dared overstep.  Brutality, both emotional and physical, was entrenched, even celebrated.  Unimaginably cruel things were said and done then, even within families.

Tennessee Williams' brilliance has always been in his ability to see and reflect the suffocating confinement, delusion, hypocrisy and complexity of human personalities living within those times.  No one presents the myriad aspects of human emotion better or more courageously - even in their stark ugliness - than Tennessee Williams; and all were in play in this film.

The Brando we see here is a beautiful man blessed with sensual magnetism and charisma that defies description.  His character is quiet, yet commands the screen.  He is Williams' Orpheus.

The Illustrated Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology describes Orpheus as a musician of such power and sweetness that even the wild creatures would gather to listen to him. ... He is best known for his visit to Hades, when he tried to recover his dead wife [Eurydice] from the shades. ... His music, and his grief, so touched Persephone that she pleaded with her grim consort on his behalf, and Hades agreed to let Erydice return to earth.  But he made the condition that Orpheus must believe that Eurydice followed him - and not look back.  But in his agony of uncertainty that Eurydice really was following him Orpheus did look back, and saw her slip away from him forever.


The Fugitive Kind is powerful, quiet filmmaking from a more restrained era.
An early brief sequence, non-visual, exemplifies the now-abandoned cinematic art of evoking deep emotion without graphic depiction.  The mind alone can create a powerful image.

There is raw emotional truth here, in addition to a profoundly engaging and timeless story.  It dwells in my mind and memory as no other movie ever has.


Update - May 24, 2010

Although I viewed this film on a bare-bones DVD, Criterion restored and released it as a Special Edition, Double-DVD set this April, 2010. 
http://www.criterion.com/films/17998-the-fugitive-kind

and here's a must-read essay on it by David Thomson:
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1449-the-fugitive-kind-when-sidney-went-to-tennessee


ADDENDUM - September 23, 2011

Found a 1965 book titled Tennessee Williams and Friends, An Informal Biography, at a flea market.  It was written by Gilbert Maxwell, a writer-friend who says this, among other things, in his Foreword:

With Tennessee and me, however, time and talk were to form a relationship rooted in something far deeper than the circumstance of our having mutual old friends from down home--for we were to find there was an eerie likeness in our family backgrounds, as well as in certain events of our childhood.

From the dust jacket:

This book is unique:  a series of recollections -- immediate, palpable, human -- by a writer who has known Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Tennessee Williams since the very beginning of his career.  It is a fellow author's personal and highly sensitive portrait of the most successful and controversial playwright of our time.

Following is the second-last chapter of the book.  I reproduce it here for devotees of Williams' work, and to hopefully entice the unfamiliar into exploring it.
      

Now (as I have said before) though it has not been my intention to criticize or discuss the work of Tennessee Williams in these memoirs, I feel impelled to state his message as it has come across, personally, to me.

In his plays and stories he has repeatedly used as a theme the unjust cruelty of man toward his fellows because he has been haunted, first, by nightmarish fears that his sister may have been subjected to harsh and terrible treatment in sanitoriums, and secondly because, obsessed with a fearful revulsion at the thought of deliberate cruelty (Blanche du Bois speaks of it as "the one unforgivable thing"), he has been impelled to face it unflinching as he has grown older, and consequently to cry out in the loud voice of a possessed reformer against it. In portraying scenes of abominable, outrageous beastliness, he has been fighting fire with fire; and surely with such a motive, he has been justified in shocking the prudish, the hypocritical, the stubbornly blind or misunderstanding members of his audiences--at least for a space of three hours--out of their habitual apathy, their acceptance of intolerable things as they are in the world today.

It will probably be true, of course, that the majority to whom he cries out will be disturbed for no more than a matter of hours, but there is also, always, the hope that some few may have heard and heeded what he has had to say. He has tried to drive home his basic message, as in "Orpheus Descending", by such devices as posses of bigoted men mobbing an innocent victim with blowtorches and blood hounds, and with gossiping, ignorant women destroying a man or a woman's character; with a wretched neurotic (Blanche du Bois) paying all her life for having, with one awful accusation, driven her young husband to suicide; with the police in "Camino Real" attacking homosexuals and the street cleaners trundling them out in ash cans; with self-righteous, corrupt, powerful, small-town citizens castrating a simple, mixed-up boy in "Sweet Bird of Youth"; with the naked, starving children devouring the corrupt poet Sebastian in "Suddenly Last Summer".


He has done all this--and more--and he has never done it to be sensational, to shock the good citizen or, through flamboyance, to become notorious, famous, or rich. He has done it because he was impelled to shout (and let the damned chips fall where they may) to a selfish, self-centered, materialistic audience of millions everywhere, "This is your world, and here is what happens within it each hour that you live, going deaf, dumb, and blind about your personal affairs, self imprisoned in your own thick skins. This is your world, which you made, so now, if not for the sake of that kind, omniscient God you no longer believe in, at least for your own sake, try to do something about it.

An Unfinished Life

In this film, a past tragedy has determined the present trajectory of related lives. 

Moving, tender, and quiet, it's a film about family; about grief and blame; acceptance and forgiveness; friendship and freedom.

Filmed in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, and set in a wide valley with surrounding mountain ranges, both the photography and scenery are breathtaking.

Particularly admirable is its theme of respect for nature, how wild things should remain free, and how we humans should understand and accept the inherent nature of wild animals.  To quote a line, "Bears should not be punished for doing what bears do."  Simplistic and out of context here, nonetheless, the line reminds us of the countless times we've seen wild things caged or degraded or killed for behaving exactly as we should have expected them to behave.

Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez and Morgan Freeman play the main characters with a remarkable little actress, Becca Gardner, playing Lopez' and Redford's 11-year-old daughter and granddaughter, respectively.

In the DVD bonus features, Morgan Freeman made very complimentary remarks about Jennifer Lopez.  He said she was a wonderful actress and "It isn't her fault she has so many gifts.".  Watching him speak, I had the impression that he was amazed at her acting talent. 

What a wonderful experience it was to sit and watch this touching story unfold.  Its style and content are from a kinder, gentler era; yet it's painfully realistic, a movie for mature souls who've had some life experience.  I'm surprised it was green-lit so recently.  It opened in 2005.

An Unfinished Life is a Lasse Hallstrom film, (Chocolat; The Cider House Rules; The Shipping News) which says it all for film buffs.  Swedish Director Hallstrom said with a self-deprecating smile, that he could relate to the people and emotions in this novel-based film because they were such that "even a Swede could understand".

An Unfinished Life is bittersweet, and lingers gently in the mind.

Doubt

Doubt:  Used as a noun it means uncertainty; as a verb it means to question, to hesitate to believe, or to distrust.  All usages apply in this namesake film.

Two cinema greats, Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, engage in a complex war of wills that involves suspicion and the challenging and abuse of authority.  Doubt depicts how their individual belief systems, personalities and tenacity shape and filter their interaction with each other within the early '60s strict-but-changing confines of the fiercely hierarchical Roman Catholic Church.  A third character's related, but unimaginable, belief eventually implodes within this conflict.

Doubt contains brilliant dialogue, but austere sets, which reflect its stage-play origin and its occurrence within a Catholic school.  Streep plays the Catholic school principal, an authoritarian nun who suspects school-associated priest Hoffman of sexual abuse of a student.  Streep's character verbally engages the priest in continual thrust and parry, challenging his manner of student interaction and hoping to provoke him into self-incrimination.  Amy Adams plays a youthful, uncertain nun who is Streep's sounding board.

We who enjoy stage plays appreciate minimal settings and the power of dialogue, but the sparse and bleak surroundings in this film, while appropriate to the story, may present a challenge for some movie fans.

I have one criticism, and it concerns the portrayal of Streep's character as unrelentingly cold, self-righteous and arrogant.  For me, the film would have been more effective had it accorded her slightly more warmth and, yes, doubt.   However, nuns like this did exist, and I know this from long-ago personal experience. The playwright, John Patrick Shanley, adapted his play for the screen and directed the film, so I must assume the characterization was deliberate. 

Doubt is provocative, disturbing and challenging.  It will stay with you long after the ending, which I found satisfying but without mystery or ambiguity, unlike others who've seen it.

For those who enjoyed it, or have an interest in the mysteries of faith, I suggest another movie, Agnes of God, adapted for the screen by John Pielmeier from his play about a religious concept and a crime within a remote Quebec convent.  It features Jane Fonda as a court-appointed psychiatrist; Anne Bancroft as Mother Superior of the cloistered order; and Meg Tilly as Agnes, a devout young nun. 

The intense verbal sparring between Fonda's character and the Mother Superior is intellectually and religiously challenging.  It causes the logical, skeptical mind to question and wonder: "If we believe it happened once, why not again?"  I've pondered and searched for the conclusion the playwright intended us to reach, but it remains beyond my grasp, even after all these years and many repeat viewings.  Perhaps this was his intention.  Doubt and logic vs. faith.

Directed by Norman Jewison, Agnes of God is riveting.  Superb in acting, story-telling and cinematography, this 1985 film is honest, fair, provocative and powerful in its presentation of suspicion and doubt.

Chinese Box

Regrettably, movies like this aren't made anymore.

The opening credits played against a background of objects which have significance in the story, and just as they were ending, a beautiful lacquered box - a Chinese box - was shown slowly closing and then being slid, drawer-like, into a larger box which then closed, wooden-flap-after-wooden-flap.

According to Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, this film was released in 1997 and was a Japanese-French-USA production.

It features one of our greatest living actors, Jeremy Irons, in the leading role, together with a small cast who are unknown to me. Densely populated, sophisticated 1996-to-early-1997 Hong Kong is a central, omnipresent character.

This is a movie for intelligent, mature people for it engages both the heart and the mind.

It begins on New Year's Day, 1996, and ends on June 30, 1997, one day before Britain formally hands over sovereignty of their former colony of Hong Kong to China.

Jeremy Irons plays a British journalist living in Hong Kong, whose job has been to send political reports back to the English magazine which employs him. He's become distracted by, and immersed in the complex politics and culture of Hong Kong. To further complicate matters, he's fallen deeply in love with a Chinese woman who, years earlier, fled China to Hong Kong with a Chinese man who has become very successful and powerful in Hong Kong society.

These dynamics play out against several other simultaneous storylines, all set against the larger, momentous changes coming to Hong Kong and its citizens. The brilliance of this complex movie is that it's never confusing. Somehow all the concurrent stories are seamlessly woven together so the viewer is never confused. I marvelled at this, since the movie incorporates and portrays overlapping cultural, political and societal differences.

Given the current political dialogue about the conceptual differences between our western democracy and those of the Middle East and elsewhere, it's striking to hear the Jeremy Irons character discuss these very issues, and their looming impact on the impending surrender of Hong Kong to the Chinese, long before they came to current foreign policy prominence.

Already, even before they'd assumed control of Hong Kong, repressive China was revoking important democratic liberties which had existed under the departing British: the right of assembly and of protest. Some desperate Hong Kong citizens were committing public suicide in protest.

I was moved by the evolving tragedy of Hong Kong - citizens being handed over from freedom to tyranny as though they were possessions of government. Lives symbolized by a Chinese box ... lives being enveloped and contained, even as they fiercely sought love and meaningful life within their own circumstances.

It's a haunting film, one which I think would have pleased the late, great writer/actor/director Sydney Pollack, who said his greatest hope for a movie is that it make you think about it afterward and remember it.

I loved it.