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| Wednesday, February 23, 2005 11:33 AM |
| Finding Mediocrity and Morbidity |
 by Fëanor |
- On Sunday, continuing my annual plan to see all films nominated for a Best Picture Oscar before the Oscars are aired (I could run out of time this year before I manage to see the last two, but we'll see what happens), I went to see the last of the films that I actually had an interest in seeing before it was nominated: Finding Neverland. This one attracted me because it had Johnny Depp in it, who is awesome, and its story--a fictionalized re-telling of the part of J. M. Barrie's life during which he conceived of, wrote, and produced the play Peter Pan, which blends fantasy and reality and blurs the line between life and fiction--sounded quite interesting. And indeed, the story is engaging and moving, with some neat dream sequences and emotionally affecting drama, and Depp is fine in the part, even managing a nice Scottish accent. But the film is also disappointingly clumsy, obvious, and maudlin--it's got the kind of melodramatics, important lessons about what's really important in life, and weepy death scenes that the Academy loves, and that often make me want to be sick.
Finding Neverland also is, I suspect, an extremely white-washed version of Barrie's story. In the movie, his relationship with Kate Winslet's character, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, is unbelievably pure and beautiful. Barrie, though married, turns to Davies and her four young boys for friendship and to feed his imagination. He becomes a father-figure/fellow playmate to the boys, but the movie stops short of suggesting any kind of infidelity between him and Davies. The characters never speak directly of the possibility of love between them, and only once or twice do they even touch each other.
The relationship between Barrie and his wife also seems a bit unbelievable. They do split up over Barrie's friendship with Davies, but during the final meeting between Barrie and his wife, she seems almost ridiculously understanding.
Basically, the movie seems to go to great pains to smooth out any of Barrie's faults and portray him as the typical artist-lost-in-his-art character; the boyish man-child who never grew up. He is, in fact, as the young Peter Llewelyn Davies finally gets around to saying near the end of the film, Peter Pan.
Yeah. The movie gets a little too obvious at times like that, slapping its metaphors and themes down on a platter for us and then slamming our faces down into them, just to make sure we don't miss them.
Despite these faults, Finding Neverland did squeeze some tears out of me, though not nearly as many or as heart-felt, and without nearly as much firm artistry, as Million Dollar Baby. It was an okay way to spend an evening. But certainly not Best Picture material.
- Moving on: Here's another movie I'd like to see--Downfall, the first fictional film to be made in Germany about Hitler--he's still kind of a touchy subject there, understandably. Specifically, Downfall covers the last days of Hitler, when he was holed up in the bunker with Eva Braun. Playing him here is an actor I rather like named Bruno Ganz. I came across the film after reading an excellent review of it in Salon. They stress in the review that this film takes the rather controversial and dangerous tack of portraying Hitler as a human being whom at some moments in the film you can even sympathize with.
It's a horrifying idea, and one that many Jewish groups have fought against for years. They protest that any account of Hitler must stress his inhumanity, and portray him as a complete and utter monster. I understand their feelings. But it is Hitler's humanity that is the most frightening and important thing about him. It's essential that we remember that a human being--perhaps not a normal one, but a human being nonetheless--did those terrible things; that many other perfectly normal human beings followed him and did his awful bidding. Hitler may have been insane and evil, but he was not some freakish monster. He was a person like us, and if we allow ourselves to forget that people can be like that, we open the door for another Hitler to arise amongst us.
Along with the article in Salon on Downfall, there's also an interview with the last man still alive who was in the bunker with Hitler during his last days--Hitler's bodyguard, Rochus Misch. The interview is totally fascinating, and really of a piece with the review of the movie, especially since Misch also stresses Hitler's humanity:Hitler, to me, was always a completely normal person. He spoke completely normally to me. I lived together with him for five years. I only knew him as a wonderfully good boss, right? I could talk with him. He was always satisfied with us.
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We just had a wonderful boss. We couldn't have wished for better. When I was married he had a case of champagne delivered to my house, this one we're sitting in.
....
Well, history is history -- whether it's bad or good or criminal, it doesn't make a difference. An act, a deed, remains part of history forever. You can't change a story, just by blathering on about it, and make it into something other than what it was. - My final item for this post is not about Germans, or Peter Pan, but about the Japanese, and Peter Payne. Specifically, it's about a little web company called J-List that was founded by Peter Payne, an expatriate American now living in Japan. I've visited the site a few times and purchased one or two odd products from it. Due to my patronage, they began sending me emails about their new products, etc. I considered unsubscribing, but each email also comes with a little note or story about Japanese culture by Payne. These notes are often informative, interesting, and kooky, so I decided to keep receiving and occasionally reading the emails. The latest one had a particularly creepy and amusing bit of info in it:
Graves work a little differently than they do in the U.S., too. For one thing, a grave is really part of a household, and there's only one for the whole family. When a woman gets married and comes to live with her husband, she's erased from her father's family register and moved to her husband's. When she dies, she'll be buried in her new family's grave (unless she gets divorced), and a famous if old-fashioned way to propose to a woman is to say "Let's be buried in the same grave together" (onaji ohaka ni hairimasho).
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