Film

Men Who Eat Biscuits

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 1 Comment

I watched Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart (2009) Saturday night, and was awed by his performance as a 57-year-old alcoholic “has-been” country singer trying to find a reason to live.  Bridges won the best actor award for this role last year, and I was remiss in not seeing this sooner. 

Jeff Bridges as Bad Black

Bridges is one of my favorite actors, and is a man who (much like my beloved husband) cannot disguise a core of masculine beauty, despite his best efforts.  His character, Bad Blake, somehow manages to shine glimmers of someone uniquely special and attractive, even grizzled, overweight, and covered in his own vomit.  To some degree it feels like he is trying to become as unappealing as possible to repel human interest so he can drink and die in peace, yet he is failing miserably.  Everywhere he goes, the people he encounters still want his attention and his story.  Part of the trouble is that he is encountering fewer and fewer people. 

The movie bills itself as about Bad’s ongoing struggle to deal with the success of a young man he once mentored who now is a mega-star out of Nashville playing to crowds of thousands, while Blake is playing bowling alleys.  I didn’t see this angle as key.  It was mildly interesting but seemed to be only a vehicle to drive dialogue about Bad’s real issues.  He abandoned a young son 24 years prior, and hasn’t written a song in decades.  He has almost no money, and what he does have he drinks.

Crazy Heart is the second movie I’ve seen in which the male lead is drinking himself to death.  The first was Leaving Las Vegas (1995), with Nicolas Cage.  Cage’s character Ben utters one of the most poignant statements on alcoholism I’ve ever heard when he says, “I can’t remember if I can’t stop drinking because my  wife left me, or if my wife left me because I can’t stop drinking.”  In contrast, the line Bad delivers that stuck with me after the movie was his statement to a four-year old boy, “Whole worlds have been tamed by men who ate biscuits.”  This was delivered with humor, but was like a laser cutting through all of his dysfunctional garbage.  Inside, this character clearly was still a gem who would get out if he could, he had just lost his way and had no idea where the door was anymore.

Both films are Oscar winners, and both use alcoholic disintegration as a lens into human pain and struggle.  LLV is a powerful movie, one that successfully explores some very difficult elements of the human condition; but it also presents a man who has no interest in disconnecting his life from alcohol.  It is very dark, and very depressing, and Ben’s problems seem so self-absorbed and self-centered it was difficult for me to have true empathy for him.  The human condition can surely be dark and depressing, but it can also be much more inspiring, and Crazy Heart shows a man on the edge of losing his options who grabs control of his life back in a very intentional and resurrectional way.  Directed by Robert Duvall, Crazy Heart shares some thematic relationships with The Apostle.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I won’t ruin it for you with much more detail.  I will say that it does one of the best jobs I’ve ever seen of honoring characters who make unexpected choices, and of following them through the fallout from those choices to a thoughtful conclusion.  If you love character as the real story in film, you will like this movie.

What DO Women Want? Go ask a vampire.

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 8 Comments

Literally consumed with desire….

They say confession is good for the soul.  So here goes…….yes, I just watched Twilight.

And then I watched Twilight: New Moon.  I’m like a crazy person, and God help me apparently there is another one out there.  But I felt a need to know more about this pop cultural phemonenon.  I remember how much I admired an octogenarian who used to come to state 4-H camp and talk to the kids, and they actually listened.   She had her own subscription to Seventeen magazine at age  80.

After I first shared my guilty secret in private, a friend sent me this YouTube video, which is just hilarious and is narrated by a guy who struggles mightily with,“Why do all females like this terrible, terrible formulaeic story line?”  This question apparently torments a lot of people.  I don’t think his little video is all wrong, but I do think it is missing the mark.  He still doesn’t quite get what the crack cocaine element of the whole thing really is.

I’ve seen the first two of these movies, and one thing is abundantly clear:  The most addictive and persistent element in the Twilight franchise is relentless wanting of the female lead in a range of ways by nearly every character in every scene.

Some want to kill her.  Some want to be her friend.  They want to be her lover, her confidante, her father figure, her mother.  They want her to be their prom date, their sibling, their punching bag, their teacher, their student, their lunch.  But no matter what it is, everyone wants her all the time.  I’m talking all the time.

The pervasiveness of this theme might not have been so clear to me as the true addictive element if I hadn’t read an article in the New York Times several months ago titled simply What Do Women Want?.  (This article is “not suitable for work” and may be offensive to some readers.  Regardless, it spent a long time as one of The NYT’s most commented and emailed articles.  It’s anything but dull.)

Sigmund Freud famously told a female student, “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”  Deep into the 8-or-so page online article, one researcher suggests that what women want, above all else, is to be wanted.  The brain chemicals that release in the female mind around stories, images, fantasies and realities around being the focus of desire apparently are quite powerful, and can be distinctly separated from what any individual woman may want in “real life.”

There is a whole lengthy and responsible discussion about the difference between arousal and desire that may very well be the Rosetta Stone long lost to Freud.  Not shockingly, it seems female scientists are discovering important dynamics that tend to live in this huge male blind spot.

So sure……Robert Pattinson has a great truly romantic look.  And yes, vampires pluck at some weird psyche strings and have for centuries. Add that the idea of undying love is very appealing, especially when the whole world seems hell-bent on squashing the devotion and fidelity out of every last human relationship — with glee, I might add — and you’ve got some nice icing for your cake.

But it’s just the icing.  I’m pretty sure the cake is the wanting.