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Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women

“With my own memories to draw upon, you would think would have an easy time of it. But it was very hard for me to relive my girlhood terror and at the same time to transform the reality of my feelings into the role I was acting. In memory, I still looked at my experiences with the eyes and emotions of a girl, but the role demanded that I see them with the eyes of a tortured woman.”  –  Sophia Loren

The title of Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women sounds so simple.  Two women, mother and daughter, who love each other, enduring difficult, terrifying and heartbreaking circumstances. But the simplicity of that potent word: Women is rendered more powerful by the age of the fascinating females  – one, the mother, about 35, the other, a pre-teen on the precipice of what comes with being a woman, nearing that lovely but often confusing and vulnerable age of 13. How she becomes a woman is not necessarily how she becomes a woman, it’s how society might view her as she crosses that threshold, it’s what many tell you makes you a woman, but that her choice towards one aspect of womanhood is taken from her, and taken from her violently (and with her mother enduring the same) gives Two Women an extra dose of sadness and, touchingly, strength.

It would have been a bit different, though certainly horrifying, had the movie followed the novel by Alberto Moravio, more to-the-age, and cast its original pondered-upon leads. Moravio, who also wrote the “Il disprezzo” (turned into Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt) and “Il Conformista” (adapted into Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist), wrote “La Ciociara” featuring a full-grown 18-year-old daughter and a 50-something mother.  Most assuredly, these are two women. The book, purchased by producer Carlo Ponti, was originally set for George Cukor to direct with Ponti’s young wife Sophia Loren attached. There was the thought (decision? One never knows what to believe entirely based on various sources of production history) of casting Anna Magnani to star as the mother and Loren as the gorgeous daughter. Wouldn’t that have been something? Cukor left the project and, reportedly, Magnani didn’t want to play Sophia Loren’s mother (though she blamed Ponti for losing the part, citing that Moravio preferred her for the role). De Sica entered the venture with, based on what he’s stated, the clear intention of casting Loren (who won an Oscar for her performance) as the protective mother. Adapting the novel with his frequent and important collaborator Cesare Zavattini (who also wrote De Sica’s most influential, now classic works of neo-realism, Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan and Umberto D.), the ages were changed  – then 25-year-old Loren would play about 35, her daughter (12-year-old Eleonora Brown) would be the young, almost 13-year-old daughter.

Girls grew up faster back then or were required to be adults earlier (though all girls seem to grow up a lot faster than society even realizes), but the age difference was a point to De Sica, for “greater poignancy.” The girl was still a girl. And she’s stated as a girl, a pretty girl, it’s pointed out many times in the picture and by her mother’s adoring eyes, mama showing her off to those not perceived as threatening, laughing and proud. But she’s still a child, and her shielding mother will throw a rock at you if you get too close. De Sica said of the age change: “If in doing this we moved away from original line of Moravia, we had better opportunity to stress, to underline, the monstrous impact of war on people. The historical truth is that the great majority of those raped were young girls.”

That a brutal rape will occur, two, in fact, hangs over the picture with such tension, that even with all the danger of the bombs, soldiers walking the hills, the leering men asking for a bit of leg or the process of surviving with enough bread to eat, the extra terror that comes with being a woman, and two women on their own, follows these characters throughout the movie with a perceptible dread. So much that, at times, Two Women almost feels like a horror film, just as Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring did enough to inspire one (The Last House on the Left, though Bergman’s masterpiece is decidedly sadder and more horrifying). Two Women is famous enough now (still, surprisingly little discussed and less revered within De Sica’s canon) that viewers know what they’re going to see, but the moment nevertheless feels shocking, not surprising necessarily, though it happens so quickly it does take one aback, almost unexpectedly, but devastating, terrifying. The way De Sica and cinematographer Gábor Pogány shoot this dreadful moment (the movie is beautifully shot in black and white), how swiftly these women are surrounded, the multiple points of view, the setting in a church), never fails to distress me. It leaves a mark.

That the horror occurs when they believe they may be safe, when the war is ending or supposedly over, punctuates how terrible life can be. Indeed, that this mother and daughter have been struggling through the entire movie to be safe, makes this all the more angering over what they must suffer. Loren’s young widow Cesira, a shopkeeper during WWII Rome, leaves the city with her 12-year-old daughter, Rosetta (Brown), to protect her. Enough!  The young mother can’t stand the constant fear, the Allied bomb blasts, causing Rosetta to quake and cry. In a stunning, intriguingly shot seduction scene with the married Giovanni, one that at first feels dangerous to Cesira (“Did you hurt yourself?” he asks) and then erotic and interesting (“You didn’t kill me” she says), Cesira sleeps with the lusty man before leaving. Cesira might love him, she’s sad to wave goodbye on the train, she’s happy to receive his letters, but she also needs him to look after the store – the act is both sexual and sensible – and not for one moment does De Sica judge her for this. She heads out for native Ciociaria, up in the mountains, back with the peasants, teaching little Rosetta how to walk with a suitcase on her head the way regular folk do.

They’re vulnerable out there alone, but they laugh and talk and Cesira seems strong  –  protective. Before, Giovani (Raf Vallone who in real life served with the Communist resistance in World War II) asked Cesira why she married a man she didn’t love; she asserts she didn’t like being poor. “I married Rome,” she says. But returning to her roots doesn’t make Cesira overly proud, she knows where she came from, and she listens to the young intellectual Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo) talk of how the peasants are superior to city dwellers these days (“They are the evil ones”). Michele, whom we grow to love, and who loves Cesira (she thinks he’s too young, Rosetta adores him) is the overtly political voice of the movie, overjoyed when learning Mussolini has been jailed, angered by anyone’s apathy or willing to take whatever happens at least if the war just ends, but sympathetic and sweet to his family. Still, he says, “If the Germans win I will kill myself.”

It is with Michele that Cesira witnesses one of the film’s saddest, most disturbing moments: they enter a war-torn village seeking food and come across a dazed woman, still young, and in an interminable state of grief. Before realizing how stricken the woman is, Cesira inquires where she can buy food. “Some fruit? Some honey? Little sugar?” The woman looks at the two curiously, and then tells how she was shot at by Germans, making a desperate, dismaying sound of shooting guns. She then opens her dress and pulls out one of her bare breasts. She says: ‘”You can have this milk if you like. I don’t need it anymore. What for? They killed my baby. Who do I give it to? You want it?” Michele but mostly Cesira backs away horrified as the woman starts exclaiming to anyone who will listen among the rubble: “Who wants milk? Who wants my milk?” The merging of broken motherhood with a potential sexual plea, a selling of her body, even if she means her breast for sustenance (the men and soldiers she’ll meet along the way will likely not look at her breasts for food) is surely too heartbreaking for Cesira to even think about, her healthy maternal bond with daughter is everything to her. The ravaging of motherhood, that it means anything to anyone during wartime, works as a portent of things to come. And it’s heartbreaking.

Cesira can’t possibly want to remember that moment. Her sexuality and motherhood is healthy. She knows men desire her, she even likes the attention at times, she knows Michele yearns for her, but she’s more interested in taking care of her daughter. Love will come later. Now, it’s survival and watching her daughter grow up into a beautiful woman with eyes “like stars.” I’ve red some criticism that Loren was too beautiful, too sexy, for this role. That it went against De Sica’s neo-realistic way of inverting glamor – through artifice – like the stark contrast of the lush, but paper Rita Hayworth posters plastered up among the poverty-stricken of Bicycle Thieves. Juxtaposed against such dire conditions, lovely Rita is an unattainable absurdity. But I disagree that Loren would at all mirror paper Rita, or that late De Sica (this was 1960, after his masterpieces Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. employed not only non movie stars, but non actors) was resting on her glamour.

I think her sexiness, not glamour, but her beauty and eroticism – the way Loren can simply recline on the grass with the knowledge of how enticing she must look, but at other times, have no idea or concern with what men want – shows both how self aware and selfless Cesira is. She was a peasant, yes, but why would a peasant not be beautiful? Or even as beautiful as a movie star? Young girl Loren did not begin as a movie star. We all start somewhere. According to Loren’s biographer Warren G. Harris, De Sica told Loren, “You have actually lived this story yourself, Sophia. You survived the war. You know all there is to know about it. If you can become this woman, without any thought as to how you look, without trying to restrain your emotions, letting everything flow into this character, I guarantee that you will give a wonderful interpretation of it.”

And she does. By the time the rape occurs, we’ve grown to love and admire both mother and daughter, feel warmth and compassion, and we worry for Michele who is taken away by German soldiers. As the war nears its end, mother and daughter feel safe to return to Rome, even amidst the chaos of soldiers and deserters and god knows what else. As vulnerable as they are, they walk along and decide to rest in a church. The bombed-out church is clearly symbolic – this will not be a place of worship, nor of sanctuary nor of peace. Earlier in the film Cesira asks Michele: “Isn’t there some safe place in the world?” He answers: “You can’t escape. And it’s better so.” Perhaps better so because you must know everywhere is dangerous – even a church. Cesira finds some old pews and dusts them off for her and Rosetta to nap on. Rosetta, about to sleep, gazes up at the busted ceiling, her face looking momentarily worried, eyeing such a strange sight. Cesira readies for her nap but spies a man in the room and quickly wakes Rosetta to leave. It’s too late. They are ambushed by a group of men, running and scurrying like cockroaches. The overhead shot is horrifying – we know there’s no way they’ll possibly get away. Gang raped by Moroccan soldiers of the French Army, we see from different perspectives, daughter screaming, mother screaming, and the daughter’s face, close up, eyes wide, in shock, penetrated. De Sica films this so quickly, but with lasting impact, and with such chaos and disjointed intensity that it never leaves you. You can see that Rosetta’s face has literally died inside. After the brutal attack, mother and daughter are alive, but Cesira turns to see Rosetta, a shaft of light from the broken roof shining down on her, dress raised up. She is lifeless, like a doll. They must move along, even after this horrific attack, and walking along the road, Rosetta clutches near her pelvis in pain, wanders to a stream to wash her delicate areas. You just didn’t see scenes like this in movies at that time – the after affects of rape – and De Sica films this unflinchingly but with empathy.

And this is where the other woman comes in. Rosetta is now numb, but out of anger or ingrained cultural expectations, or just shock, she later that evening goes out with a man who buys her stockings. Like a woman. This enrages her mother, worried the act has now thrust her daughter into adulthood too quickly, or that she’ll become a whore (which the movie would never judge), or perhaps that Rosetta will never enjoy love or sex or men in a healthy way. The only thing that finally breaks Rosetta’s traumatized spell is hearing of the death of Michele, and mother and daughter are now nearly in the same position as when the picture started – holding each other, crying, bonding. One could read this as some kind of happy ending, that maternal order is restored even in tragedy, but I tend to agree with French critic André Bazin’s assessment of De Sica; how one can read his pictures. He’s discussing movies like Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. but I believe Bazin’s thoughts fit in quite well with Two Women:

“It would be a mistake to believe that the love De Sica bears for man, and forces us to bear witness to, is a form of optimism. If no one is really bad, if face to face with each individual human being we are forced to drop our accusation as was Ricci when he caught up with the thief, we are obliged to say ‘that the evil which undeniably does exist in the world is elsewhere that in the heart of man, that it is somewhere in the order of things… De Sica protests the comparison that has been made between Bicycle Thieves and the works of Kafka on the grounds that his hero’s alienation is social and not metaphysical. True enough, but Kafka’s motifs are no less valid if one accepts them as allegories of social alienation, and one does not have to believe in a cruel God to feel the guilt of which Joseph K. is culpable. On the contrary, the drama lies in this: God does not exist, the last office in the castle is empty.”

Or, again, as Cesira asked Michele, “Isn’t there some safe place in the world?”

From my piece written for the New Beverly.

Kill Or Be Killed: Two Savages

Out now! My essay in the newest Ed Brubaker "Kill Or Be Killed" # 6 all about the 1962 "Naked City" episode starring Rip Torn & Tuesday Weld. Art by the great Sean Phillips. Order here.

Young and beautiful oddballs Tuesday Weld and Rip Torn -- together -- in sickness and in health. Underscore sickness. Madly in love, madly in lust, the actors play two recently married, demented hillbillies in heat like ardent caterwauling kitties -- cute as hell but dangerous to disrupt lest you’d like your eyeball torn out of your socket. Gorgeous, wild-eyed sociopaths driving down from the hills of Arkansas and into the mean streets of New York City, they yell about traffic, argue over dolls, fix their sites on wedding rings, grab guns and gobble frog legs cooked up by Torn in their dingy motel room. After child bride Tuesday playfully antagonizes Rip, laughing and hitting him with a pillow, they fall to the bed in a haze of pillow feathers, picking feather from hair, lip and eyelash... 

Read the whole savage thing ... pick it up here.

Happy Valentine's Day: True Romance

From my interview with the late, great Tony Scott in 2006:

KM: This question is asked so often and hard to answer, but I am curious: Do you have a favorite film?

TS: “True Romance.” I love all my films but “True Romance” was the best screenplay I ever had. And all that was Quentin. It was so well crafted. But I did change the end. Originally in Quentin’s version [Christian Slater dies] and Patricia [Arquette] pulls over on the freeway and she puts a gun in her mouth [she doesn’t die]. I shot the film in continuity, so by the time I got to the end of shooting the movie, I had fallen in love with the two characters. It was a love story. I wanted these characters to live! 

There’s a scene early in True Romance in which Patricia Arquette’s call girl Alabama (not “a whore, there’s a difference!” she insists), is so full of love and feeling and guilt, that I’m always (I mean, like every time I watch it) taken aback with emotion. She’s just so moving, so sure to prove her ability to “come clean” that you want to reassure her it’s all going to be OK. And when you first see the movie, you’re a bit worried for her. How will he (Christian Slater’s Clarence) react? Is he going to be angry with her? It’s a moment of truth where a macho ego might lash out at a woman who’s just pretended attraction, romance and compatibility (though she’s not pretending, she realizes, to her delight and fear). It’s also the kind of scene many critics take for granted because, well, it occurs in what would be termed a pulpy action movie. A brilliant pulpy action movie and now a classic and an influential one, notable for the excellence of Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay, but not a movie in which people win Oscars (but of course they should – listing and discussing all of the exceptional, oddball, sometimes brilliant performances in this movie could fill a book).

And though True Romance (directed by Tony Scott) is a lot more than action, and was certainly praised, and Arquette did indeed receive kudos by many, still, within confining categories, her skill of showing such complex feeling in the picture is not recognized enough. Not in the way, again, an Oscar-seeking performance with a big “important” speech would be praised. Well, Alabama hasa big, important speech because she’s a young woman in a seedy, dangerous profession (lord knows how she got there) and now she’s overwhelmed with a passionate purity of feeling – love. And that’s terrifying. She also wants Clarence to know she’s not a habitual liar or “damaged goods” or a bad person after revealing to him that their dream date was actually paid for by his boss. How will he react? Refreshingly and wonderfully (it feels so progressive watching it today), he’s not mad:

Alabama: I gotta tell you something else. When you said last night – was one of the best times you ever had – did you mean physically?

Clarence: Well, yeah. Yeah, but I’m talking about the whole night. I mean, I never had as much fun with a girl as I had with you in my whole life. It’s true. You like Elvis. You like Janis. You like kung fu movies. You like The Partridge Family. Star Trek…

Alabama: Actually, I don’t like The Partridge Family. That was part of the act. Clarence, and I feel really goofy saying this after only knowing you one night and me being a call girl and all, but… I think I love you.

It takes a great actress and a clever, expressive screenplay to balance all of those feelings with such romance, fun and sadness (what has Alabama been through before that?) and Arquette’s angst and relief that Clarence isn’t going to haul off and smack her is so palpable, the viewer buys her insta-love without a doubt. And you buy his love towards her, and not just for her blonde hair and big boobs. The girl’s got heart, as James Gandolfini says as he beats the shit out of her (I’ll get to that other powerful Arquette moment later). “I think I love you.” Hey, that’s the best Partridge Family song (she may not even know that since she doesn’t even like them). But, boom! They are married.

Their swoony beginning seems too good to be true but their chemistry cannot be denied – it’s real. But their future? That’s where the fairy tale is amped up and enters, not just mythic Bonnie and Clyde terrain but the world of the Brothers Grimm or L. Frank Baum – Oz with bullets, cops and mobsters as flying monkeys. Detroit is not Kansas but neither is Hollywood and so their love, writ large, the kind that makes a person crazy and brave and stupid, mirrors the fantastical dominion they’re driving into. And Clarence is nobly stupid at first. Or perhaps he’s nobly stupid throughout the entire movie – he’s clever and cool and even admits he’s an amateur – but he’s as lucky as fuck. Thinking he’s nabbing Alabama’s clothes but is, in fact, actually stealing a suitcase full of cocaine from her Big Bad Wolf pimp (the hilariously, terrifying thinks-he’s-black Gary Oldman), and then kills him, Clarence figures they can sell the goods in L.A. and escape their lives, forever.

And then all… of … this: He says goodbye to his comic book store job, his papa ex-cop (a moving Dennis Hopper, whose Sicilian speech with consigliere Christopher Walken is now famous), drives off with Alabama in his beat-up classic Cadillac, meets up with his L.A. actor pal with a stoned roommate (Michael Rapaport and a scene-stealing Brad Pitt), gets in contact with a Hollywood producer (Saul Rubinek) and his nervous actor/assistant (Bronson Pinchot) and… the insanity begins. Actually, the craziness started back with Oldman, Walken and Hopper, but Clarence and Alabama aren’t entirely aware of all of the layers and levels and twists and turns that are and will happen, culminating in a showdown at the Beverly Ambassador Hotel – cops, bodyguards and mobsters all in a standoff.  This is one hell of a story – so vividly written, so smart and hilarious, so violent and nuts, that yes – this is how love can feel too.

It all winds together and explodes in an exhilarating, surrealistic swirl through the unabashedly entertaining, hyped-up and artful direction of the late, great Tony Scott and a poetic, perfecto Tarantino. As I said, I see it as part fairy tale, but also part splashy Hollywood satire about movie people who pile in the coke while making pulpy war pictures, and struggling actors audition for “T.J. Hooker” while their lovable loafer roommates recline on the couch all day, smoking out of honey bear bongs. With that in mind (and if you live in Los Angeles) it’s not even that unrealistic. Like Mulholland Dr. and The Big Lebowski after it, you’ll recognize this Los Angeles on those days when the air feels chemically off  – and all of this heightened chaos and absurdity crashes down on you. (I know some of you readers know exactly what I’m talking about) Tom Sizemore screaming/directing Bronson Pinchot’s Elliot, a now wired-up narc with, “You’re an actor. Act, motherfucker!” is a sublime metaphor of how on edge “talent” feels in this town.

Clarence’s negotiations with the coke-buying producer resonates for multiple reasons. Is Clarence ass-kissing to get the deal done like every Hollywood jerk? Yes. But, no, he’s not. He’s genuinely sincere in his admiration of the producer’s movies. Even his guide, the ghost of Elvis Presley (Val Kilmer, post Lizard King) in a bit of sublime fantasia during which the movie again, recollects the dream of Oz – Elvis as Glenda the Good Witch – reassures him he’s not being an asshole. And Clarence, the Sonny Chiba-loving movie fan, talks to the producer almost as if he’s talking about the real-life film he’s currently found himself in:

“You know, most of these movies that win a lot of Oscars, I can’t stand them. They’re all safe, geriatric coffee-table dogshit… All those assholes make are unwatchable movies from unreadable books. Mad Max, that’s a movie. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, that’s a movie. Rio Bravo, that’s a movie. And Coming Home in a Body Bag, that was a fuckin’ movie.”

And Tony Scott well understood that speech. Scott, who mysteriously, tragically took his own life in 2012, was a popular but supremely underrated director (among critics), one who was often accused of being a lot of flash and crass. He certainly indulged action, sex, explosions and quick cutting (fantastically in many pictures, from The Hunger to The Last Boy Scout to Man on Fire to Unstoppable), but he had wit and intelligence, a dark view of the world met with a smile. His films could be brutal, but they never lacked humanity.

He told me in a 2006 interview: “I have no regrets. I love the fact that people will continue to employ me and pay me to do what I want to do, which is attempt another world. That’s what so great even about this. I get the opportunity to do new things. I get the chance to do the research, educate myself and I get the chance in… touching this word.”

“Attempt another world” and “touching this world” – what a beautiful way to explain his artistry and love. And he as he expressed to me and others, he loved True Romance – he loved Tarantino’s superlative script and he loved all of those brilliant performances. You can feel it in every inch of the movie, right down to the smallest roles. From Oldman to Pitt to Samuel L. Jackson to, of course, James Gandolfini. Which brings me back to Arquette as Alabama and her showdown with Gandolfini’s hitman. It’s a painfully violent, terrifying scene, and Scott and Tarantino spare Alabama no comfort – but they also don’t exploit or condescend to her. Her ferocity in fighting back, her loyalty to Clarence, even the way she breathes and lunges and screams, blood dripping down her face, smiling in his face, middle finger extended high, fills the viewer with a range of emotions, much like her angst-filled confession of love on the rooftop. She’s surviving, and it’s bloody as hell, but it’s supremely moving. When I asked Scott about this scene, he was thrilled by my admiration, stating it was “multi-layered in terms of charm, humor and violence at the extreme. Patricia is unique,” he said. “She’s got this angelic childlike quality yet, she’s got this strangeness.”

Indeed she does. And her sweetness and strangeness match the picture’s pulpy lyricism. When composer Hans Zimmer’s Badlands homage chimes in, at both beginning and end, and Arquette’s loving, haunting narration is heard, an ode to Sissy Spacek, you feel a wistfulness that, though a cinematic hat tip, belongs to Clarence and Alabama as well. They’ve earned that music. And after all the guns and coke and blood and Hollywood craziness, it leaves one with a feeling that bad times are behind you, and hopefully love is in front of you (though one can never be sure). Alabama watches Clarence run on the beach with their child in a final scene that looks like a dream from heaven – as if their character’s never made it out alive, and Clarence really, truly got to meet Elvis. But they do make it out alive. It’s a movie. And, as Scott would say, they’re attempting “another world.”

 

Tatum & Ryan: Paper Moon

“There was a part in the script and I asked my dad to help me with it, I was still learning to read… and it said that I had to say: ‘I love you’ to him in the movie… And I looked at him and said, ‘I can’t say that! They don’t want me to say that! Why would I say that?’ I wasn’t the kind of kid who went around saying ‘I love you’ to many people, or at least to my dad. I mean, which little girl wants to say ‘I love you’ to their dad? Well, at least this kid didn’t. But anyway, they cut it. And so you’ll see that I never do say that in the movie.” – Tatum O’Neal, 2011

“Tatum has lived more than any 10 people three times her age. I want the best for Tatum, because she has lived through the worst.” – Ryan O’Neal, 1974

Tatum O’ Neal’s nine-year-old face in Paper Moon is the face of thousands of little girls, pissed off at their broken families and their absent dads. It’s a tough little face that’s resilient and smart, because in the movie, life has made her grow up fast (her mother just died, she’s gonna be sour), and it’s a lonely face, yearning for her dad to at least reveal himself. And yearning for him to stick around, not so she can simply hug him and blubber in his arms, but so she can yell at him. Yell at that son of a bitch! Where the hell have you been? Oh, and I want my 200 dollars!

In the movie, we never do truly learn if O’Neal’s daddy, played by her real-life daddy, Ryan O’Neal, is indeed her pops, but they got the same jaw. And they both have a talent for grifting. And she’s so good at trickery that her talent mirrors Tatum’s first-time acting ability – she’s a goddamn natural. Director Peter Bogdanovich (on the advice of his brilliant production designer and ex-wife Polly Platt) was canny and perceptive enough to cast the O’Neals: already wizened tomboy Tatum and her divorced, weekend father (who didn’t see her enough weekends) who were working through their relationship in real life. As Ryan O’Neal said in a 2011 interview alongside Tatum, “I was separated from her mother. So I only knew her on the weekends… But we had good weekends together, really good weekends. I thought that maybe if Tatum and I worked on this picture, it might seal our doom, or our bond. One or the other.”

Doom? That is some tough stuff (read Tatum’s autobiography “A Paper Life” if you want to dig further into this and her entire, tumultuous life). But they are so perfect together, that Tatum, not Ryan, as great as he can be under the right director utilizing his specific talents (see my piece on Stanley Kubrick and Barry Lyndon), is the one who lifts him up to a higher level here. This is one of his greatest performances. I don’t care if she was reportedly a pain in the ass on the set. She was a child. And she breaks through the screen with such charm and charisma and the camera loves her so much that it’s like what Billy Wilder said of working with the brilliant Marilyn Monroe: “She was a pain in the ass. My Aunt Millie is a nice lady. If she were in pictures she would always be on time. She would know her lines. She would be nice. Why does everyone in Hollywood want to work with Marilyn Monroe and no one wants to work with my Aunt Millie? Because no one will go to the movies to watch my Aunt Millie.” Exactly. And viewers and critics liked watching Tatum so much that she won an Oscar for it. Striding on stage in her little man’s tuxedo with bow tie and short hair (GODDDESS), she not only deserved that gold statue but she gave a fantastically brief, no-bullshit speech that adults should learn from: “All I really want to thank is my director, Peter Bogdanovich, and my father. Thank you.”

In Paper Moon (adapted by screenwriter Alvin Sargent from Joe David Brown’s novel “Addie Pray”), Tatum, playing depression-era scruff Addie Loggins, spies her maybe dad Ryan’s Moses Pray when he shows up at her mother’s funeral. He chucks some flowers on the casket and intends to high tail it out, but suspecting adults believe him to be orphaned Addie’s father.  He insists he is not, but agrees to deliver Addie to her aunt’s house in Missouri. You can’t slip a trick past this kid, however, so when she hears Moses collecting the two hundred dollars from the man who accidentally killed Addie’s mom, she starts demanding her money. And she demands it loudly while he stupidly thinks a Coney Island is going to shut her up. Nope.  They end up becoming a team – the con of charging Bibles to recent widows for their dearly departed husband’s gifts, never ordered for them. Preying on the idea-lie that someone would love you enough to buy a bible with your name imprinted inside is a nicely cynical reminder of this little girl’s own thinking about life. No, everything may not turn out OK with her Aunt (who seems like a real nice person in their brief moment they share at the end of the picture), this liar is surely my dad but we’ll never say so, this “Miss Trixie Delight” he picks up (a hilarious and, in a lovely, honest moment with Addie, touching, Madeline Kahn) is an operator. Well, she wants this guy to be her dad. Who says “family” has to be normal? Or even honest? It never is anyway.

All of these thoughts flicker across Tatum’s face, even when she’s not speaking her mind (which is a lot), but in beautiful little moments – like when she’s all Leo Gorcey-tough guy, sullenly smoking in bed, or posing pretend ladylike in the mirror, or smiling to herself in the car after getting the better of Moses. There’s many sequences in the movie so expertly shot by Bogdanovich that not only show Addie’s sharp little mind at work (her scheming with Trixie’s put-upon maid, Imogene, played by a terrific P.J. Johnson is hilarious, impressive and genuinely moving for the fate of Imogene too), but the stand-out is an uninterrupted argument between Tatum and Ryan in the car. The amount of dialogue, the comic timing, the way the disagreements flow from “But they’re poorly!” to “Frank D. Roosevelt” to complicated directions on a map, is so expertly handled by Tatum and Ryan, that you’re left a little breathless by it all. These two were made for each other. And that makes these deceptively light moments extra poignant.

Also adding emotional complexity is the gorgeous, effective deep focus black and white cinematography by László Kovács – it isn’t handled in some self consciously old-timey manner.  The stark landscape and Dorothea Lange-looking faces have been compared to Bogdanovich’s hero, John Ford, and specifically his work with Gregg Toland on The Grapes of Wrath. And you certainly see and feel that in this picture, but it also achieves a modern European look as well. But then, maybe it’s just a Bogdanovich  “look” and I shouldn’t label it as anything else. For as much as Bogdanovich lovingly harkened back to the past with Paper Moon andThe Last Picture Show, he wasn’t merely aping it, or reveling in nostalgia – as touching and as gentle as those pictures are, there is a harder edge to these movies. These were not the “good old days” because Bogdanovich was not only old enough to know better, but he was enough of a film historian to know that old movies never thought the days were so great either. Again, 1940’s The Grapes or Wrath is indicative of this, as well as plenty of pre-code pictures from the 1930s (and how about the 1950s and Elia Kazan and… I could go on an on). Paper Moon is a sweet road movie but it’s also very sad. And timeless –  fathers and daughters (and surrogate fathers and daughters) will have strained relationships until the end of time.

And Bogdanovich trusts his actors to know this. With the O’Neals especially, he trusts their own real-life bumping up against the written word. And they know it too. And they and Bogdanovich know that the future is a mystery. Taking the time to look at their faces and wonder what else they’re thinking, or what is down the road or around a corner adds an extra visually potent unknowability about what will happen to these two. When Addie arrives at her Aunt’s house at the end, it’s a nice house, and yet there’s something incredibly depressing about the place. In spite of what any sensible person would say, you want Addie to leave it, and to go back on the road with Moses. And you want her to get that 200 dollars. And you want Moses to be her dad. Who knows if that’s the happy ending?

From my piece on Paper Moon for the New Beverly

Adrian Lyne's Lolita

From my piece written for the New Beverly

“Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes – for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate – while we moan and die.” – Vladimir Nabokov

Adrian Lyne’s Lolita? At the time, the very thought made certain cinéastes and academics shudder. How could the “vulgar” white-gauzy-sex director of Fatal Attraction, Flashdance and Indecent Proposal ever think he could match the brilliance of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 tragi-comic adaptation? And one starring a Dolores Haze (our great teenage wonder of cinema – Sue Lyon) whom Nabokov himself approved of? Furthermore, could Lyne even touch the poetic resonance, the linguistic ingenuity, the slyly sad and humorous pedophilic venerations of Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov’s magnificent novel? One of the greatest novels ever written (says this writer, and many others). How could Lyne cover Lolita without getting all 9 ½ Weeks on us? Sadomasochistic role-playing and erotic food-feeding next to an open refrigerator, copious milk guzzling, white cream sliding all over Kim Basinger’s pillowy lips? Basinger is a grown woman. She can guzzle milk and let it run down her face like metaphoric sperm. But a young teenager?  Well, a fridge does happen in Lolita: the girl alone at night, spied on by an older man as she enjoys a midnight snack next to the open ice box, eating raspberries from each hand and sucking them off of her fingertips. Lyne likes a good fridge scene.

That young teenager and older man are lovely, scary, heartbreaking, sardonic and powerfully perverse through the written word (a captivating and gorgeously written novel), and were handled with wit, sadness and irony in Kubrick, but with Lyne? At the time, naysayers likely shook their heads or rolled their eyes and, in the case of freaked-out censors attempting to quash its release, wagged their fingers. But both were asking, albeit for different reasons:  where does this Adrian Lyne get off?

Getting off is an appropriate/inappropriate question. Given that the film’s controversial source material – a pedophile (technically, an ephebophile) who falls in love with and beds a 14-year-old “nymphet” was such a taboo tale, surely to be made more titillating through imagery, and during a time (1997, when the picture was released), when people were arguing over the photography and, in some cases banning the work of the great Sally Mann or Jock Sturges, eyebrows were raised the moment filming was announced, no matter who the director was (though Lyne had directed the great 1980 teen film Foxes, with a casually Humbert-like character in Randy Quaid). Brooke Shields’ Pretty Baby beauty would not be tolerated or acceptable to admit as sexy then or now (check out Shields’ “The Brooke Book” from 1978 – much collectable now, probably by many creeps), and yet, teenagers and men were ogling 16-year-old Britney Spears a year later dancing in her Catholic school girl uniform to “Baby One More Time.”

But here’s what Lyne did  – he made a visually stimulating portrait, a heartbreaking work of lyricism highlighted by two sensitive, provocative performances by Jeremy Irons and Domique Swain (aided by an exquisite, heart-aching score by Ennio Morricone). Yes, the movie lacked the more trenchant humor of both Nabokov and Kubrick (who brilliantly amped it up to metaphorical levels with Peter Sellers’ Claire Quilty as a hilarious, bedeviling double of Humbert), but Lyne’s Lolita was still indeed funny, though subtly so. And Lyne went directly to the tragedy and the romanticism, which felt even creepier, but in the way that it should. He also made Irons’ Humbert watch Lolita, and really watch her, eroticize her, yearn for her. Constantly. In Kubrick’s introduction to Lo, Shelley Winters as mama pronounces that bulls-eye double entendre with “My cherry pies” as Sue Lyon, clad in a bikini, gives James Mason’s Hum-Baby an alluring look-see, Nelson Riddle’s “Lolita Ya Ya” taunting him. She seems to know her power in the moment and what that dirty old man Mason is thinking (read my essay on Kubrick’s Lolita for more on this).

In Lyne’s introduction, Lolita lies in the backyard grass in her own world, looking at pictures of movie stars, a sprinkler spraying near her white, wet dress, which clings to her young body like a perfected David Hamilton image (considering the charges against the now dead Hamilton, this seems even more disturbing a comparison). She looks up at him and smiles, retainer in her teeth. She doesn’t appear to know what he’s thinking; she looks like a pretty adolescent placed in a haltingly erotic composition through the lens of Lyne (and cinematographer Howard Atherton). She will soon know what he’s thinking, but at that moment she’s just relaxing in the grass, and Humbert just stares. He utters the word “beautiful” to her mother’s admiration of her “lilies” (beautiful is obviously meant for another lily), and again, he stares. And stares. You wish he’d stop. But you can’t stop staring at him staring. This is from his point of view and the movie makes no bones or excuses about it. All that discussion of the male gaze, as if females don’t gaze in similar ways (we do), this is a male gaze movie by a man with a problem. And that’s part of the point.

But we also get to understand and see Lolita, her humor, her rambunctious energy, her sexual curiosity, her power, her innocence and the consequences of losing her “innocence,” and we eventually see her pain. After a later sexual encounter with Humbert, she places two pillows over her head and begins to cry. She’s confused. What did she do this time, even if she did it another time? I can think of many girls who will understand this confusing moment very deeply. You feel for her and you loathe Humbert at that moment. And you root for Lolita when she either irritates Humbert or screams at him (“Murder me like you murdered my mother!”) There’s much pleasure in watching Swain’s Lolita drive Humbert to such angry annoyance (he wanted a teenager, he’s got one). In Lyne’s version, it well matches Nabokov’s novel:

“Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off – a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth – these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had.”

So, even as eloquent as Humbert speaks and writes, we occasionally tire of his utterances of such dramatic proportions that they play sick, ridiculous and romantic all at once. As Irons narrates: “Gentlewomen of the jury. If my happiness could’ve talked, it would have filled that hotel with a deafening roar. My only regret is that I did not immediately deposit key number 342 at the office and leave the town, the country, the planet, that very night.”

He’s talking about the doom of Quilty (Frank Langella), who shows up at the hotel Humbert and Lo are staying after her mother, Charlotte (Melanie Griffith – serviceable – no Shelley Winters), dies. Unlike Peter Sellers impersonating a police officer (and various other characters), Langella’s Quilty is like an elegant devil, saying things Humbert thinks he’s hearing, but is not (or is he?). He’s maddening. And he’s sinister. If Sellers was the vulgarian double, Langella is the predatory evil double in a proper suit, the black pit of jealousy, the voices and scenes one hears and envisions in one’s head while imagining their lover embraced by a man turned demon-man. Both men Humbert would not dare consider himself to be (Sellers or Langella), but in a part of himself (indeed many men)…. he is. That soils his romanticism and riddles with the darker recesses of his conscience. He loves Lolita. This is a love story. This is not obscene!

The movie begins with the famous words: “She was ‘Lo’, plain ‘Lo’ in the morning standing four-feet-ten in one sock. She was ‘Lola’ in slacks; she was ‘Dolly’ at school. She was ‘Dolores’ on the dotted line. In my arms she was always Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lolita.” And continues with the point of his obsession, “But there might have been no Lolita at all had I not first met Annabel. We were both fourteen. Whatever happens to a boy during the summer he’s fourteen can mark him for life.” You see, the refined, intelligent and attractive Humbert, a professor of French literature who is so consumed by his sweetheart Annabel dying when he was 13, has maintained a fixation for pubescent girls. And, so, he has remained a frustrated and romantically empty man, even if he’s had his moments. In the novel, Humbert states:

“Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears for breasts… I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. The human females I was allowed to wield were but palliative agents. I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world.”

But, then, that fateful day in a quiet New England town, 1947 (Lyne’s movie, closer to the novel, places it back in the 1940s), where Humbert has taken a teaching job at the local university, he, again, spies Lolita on the grass and falls instantly in love with 14-year-old Dolores Haze. While Lolita’s mother, Charlotte (Griffith) romantically pursues her boarder, Humbert preys on, and in his mind, slyly courts his Lolita. Though eye-catching, she is a typical adolescent: mouthy, cute and flirtatious. But to Humbert she is so much more – she becomes his daughter, his orphan, his lover, his traveling companion and his downfall. Lyne’s quiet, alluring and disturbing direction maintains the claustrophobic feel of Humbert’s fate with a soft chokehold that is not necessarily exploitative but rather, fearlessly, complexly erotic (I’m sure people will disagree with me) or, at times, grossly obvious. With sensitivity, style and soul, Lyne slowly strangles both protagonists to a heartbreaking, cathartic submission that, as Nabokov intended, could only lead to doom.

Judging neither character as simply saint or sinner, Lyne’s Lolita will displease both those who are quick to condemn any depiction of this union (statutory rape) and those yearning for pornography. While the film presents images that have become, in most cultures, standard turn-ons for barely legal porn, or fashion or video imagery, or for women who think merely holding a copy of “Lolita” is “sexy”: white socks on young, awkward legs and illicit sexual activity between young and old, it’s not simply getting off on those details, it’s putting them all out there, yes, but you have to think about that fetish while watching it. Particularly because Lyne shows (very carefully filmed when you study the picture’s production history) Humbert and Lo consummating what is often a role-playing fantasy. And you do think about the girl on the other end of it (I do). As a result, it is haunting, horribly sad and sometimes sickening.

Though Lyne triumphs with his picture (it’s one of his best, and this is from a writer who likes Lyne, even his supposed trash), writer Stephen Schiff’s screenplay is potently mournful, a perfect pairing with Lyne’s moody imagery. And Lolita’s stars – Irons and Swain – their understanding and intelligence, no writing or photography could have made the picture as powerful as it is without them. They carry the film. Not a stranger to deviants, Irons (and his eyes, his voice, that voice) plays Humbert as a handsome, helpless, depraved and, at times, a sympathetic character. But he’s also the quintessence of tormented compulsion. And he works wonderfully off Swain, who is an ideal Lolita. Though lovely, she resembles Nabokov’s depiction of a girl whom Humbert views a semi-vulgar adolescent with those “certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers.”

Showing an inventive and well-timed humor as well as an apt understanding of her role and its emotional complexities, Swain is different but equals her predecessor in Kubrick’s picture – the hilarious, sexy-smart Sue Lyon (some critics who admire Lyne’s film think Swain betters Lyon). Swain’s Lolita is a complicated siren/victim. She’s enchanting but exceedingly normal. She uses her wiles to manipulate and control but, much like Lyon, it’s for survival rather than pure sexual teasing. Lolita is aware of her sexuality but not certain of its morality or what that even means (even as she’ll scream at Humbert for being a sick pervert – and deservedly so). One moment she is embracing the game and the next she is crying herself to sleep. Swain has Lolita in a defensive position but not a pathetic one, and not one many a woman can’t understand herself. Embracing the illicit, running from it and towards an even more deviant predicament, she is what the picture so achingly dissects: the confusion and darkness of a young girl’s sexuality which can, in the end, become heartbreak. And through Humbert’s all-gazing eyes, which get right into how men frequently look at girls as they grow into teenagers, with lust or with discomfort, sometimes averting their gaze to be decent, and girls see this. Humbert is all out there, and he acts on it. This leads to doom – a doomed love or a doomed obsession.

Lolita then, with its more openly sexual scenes, presents difficult questions; it probes your own creepy turn-ons and, for some, makes you recollect your own teenage past. Lyne never shying away from the kissing, the lovemaking, the legs wrapped around the back, puts viewers in a unique, uncomfortable position; making us complicit with Humbert while rooting for Lolita. Lolita has some control and no control (though, what does that control mean, exactly, and it won’t help her in the end), and Humbert both admires and resents it. As Nabokov wrote: “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame in order to discern at once the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized to them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”