Movie break: Females’ odysseys, Part 3 of 3: Black Swan (2010): A ballerina’s breakdown/breakthrough, with a sop for Joey Beer Ball

[Some edits done 10/2/12 and on 10/18/12. Not sure if more may come.]

I. Intro from an “Establishment stiff”

This whole three-part blog entry may have struck you a mix of ways, positive as well as negative. It certainly turned out more complex and consuming to put together than I expected. But this echoes the nature of the stories—indeed, the life challenges, not just the edited stories—of young women with their troubles such as these movies try to treat. And part of the problem of these pictures of troubles—whether you field them in real life or consider them “from afar” in a well-told story—is that they are simply complex, and require empathy, patience, resourcefulness, and (not least) an important sense of where you stand. This matter means how confident you are in yourself; what troubles of another you are willing to help out with, and where you would draw the line; and so on.

I have mentioned the term borderline personality disorder, which is difficult enough to explain to people in contexts in which it is ordinarily relevant (in a psychological clinical setting; a psychological support group; or one-on-one talk); I have consciously referred to it only in passing, and some may argue it doesn’t so neatly relate to some of the movies to which I’ve related it. For further information on this disorder, if you are interested, you can consult Jerome Kroll, M.D.’s The Challenge of the Borderline Patient: Competency in Diagnosis and Treatment (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1988). I have returned to this book again and again, and as dry as it may seem at first look, it is quite elegant and wise when you use it to help organize your thoughts about people with this disorder, when you have been embroiled in dealing with them. A more accessible book, with useful information, is a paperback: Jerold J. Kreisman, M.D., and Hal Straus’s I Hate You—don’t leave me: Understanding the Borderline Personality (New York: Avon Books, 1989).

The movies in this series of blog posts, of course, aren’t meant to be clinically based treatises, and of course these movies can be criticized for taking artistic liberties, for fumbling certain “typical details,” and so on. But we accord the appropriate level of credibility to a given work, or choose to use it as a measure, based on what standards for depicting an issue we have learned to apply, and here we are dealing with a set of movies that are not all in accord in terms of what they want to say about certain problems, what they should say about them, how to comment on something else outside them; and the problems of young women in particular that are looked at here are by no means regular in their manifestations or easily understood by significant others.

Of course, if you feel I am too much an amateur in this area, you can always seek out a bona fide communications professor at the college of your choice, and audit a few courses if you can on relevant topics: she may be a chubby sort who earned her Ph.D. with a 400-page dissertation titled Etymology, Ontology, and the Eternal Quest for Meaning: The difference between “where I’m at” and “where I am” in the lyrics of K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s song “I’m Your Boogie Man.”  (Go easy; this is fictional—a joke.)

The rest of us can pause a bit to review: in Marnie we saw how a young woman’s criminal and sexually frigid personality was hard to portray in Hitchcock’s old, “pure cinema” kind of works, but in that movie we saw a mother whose own sordid past left a traumatic mark on the character of Marnie, and Marnie’s mother’s “complex” about men (over the long term and also the more short-term) impinges on Marnie in terms of hindering the latter’s growth in some way. In Rosemary’s Baby: a waif in the big city comes to terms with insidious evil in her life, with a relatable actress making this credible. Cuckoo’s Nest: meaning about life in general can be gleaned from an ostensibly “mere psych-patient” story, albeit one with obvious political points to make. Thirteen—this one seems to me most relevant to Black Swan: a young woman breaks down without realizing it, and seems a vivid cautionary tale about parents’ being attuned to their children’s wrong paths in passing through puberty (or shortly after). White Oleander: a sympathetic young woman’s story of growth in trying circumstances is helped by an intelligent and emotionally articulate actress’s making her character relatable through thick and thin. Rachel Getting Married: a young recovering substance abuser offers an actress (Anne Hathaway) the same challenge as for Alison Lohman in White Oleander, except that here we are awash in spontaneity, color, noise, and a mix of emotional agendas, and we are challenged to piece together “what it is with this girl, and what we are willing to make common cause with” in order to get what we should get out of the movie.

In Black Swan, a young woman is so dedicated to her art of ballet, that in meeting the demands of a newly assigned, hugely challenging part (which she is determined to master), her plate—and the movie’s—is quite full: the trope of a vicariously living and intrusive mother; the relative waif of a girl who must prove at least equal to her challenges; the director’s aim: a moral truth about life is to come out of an ostensibly smaller-scale story; and, not least, a good actress (Natalie Portman) gives us a handle to hold onto to allow the story to speak to us as needed.

But this story, unlike the more “slice-of-life” stories of Thirteen and Rachel Getting Married, has a number of agendas braided into the tapestry that it is, and I don’t think they all work well together. And one of the agendas, that of appealing to a mass audience, I think corrupts what could have been a quite good artistic statement.

II. My somewhat bitchy review

Darren Aronofsky makes “indie”-type films and works to be artistic rather than big-budget, etc.; though he’s made several films, the only other one I saw is The Wrestler (2008), a “cinema verite” type of affair following an over-the-hill professional wrestler who makes the rounds on the lower-tier, “chitlins-circuit” level—whatever you want to call it—in which boxers, apparently has-beens and/or less capable, ply their trade to avid fans in small venues, the whole scene being on the tawdry side, almost like cockfighting. The situation is made worse by the wrestling—which is seen as ludicrous even in cleaner venues—apparently being more apt to be violent and degrading on the lower level. Mickey Rourke, looking like a refugee from such a world already, plays Randy Robinson, a wrestler who aims for a kind of comeback in the form of a rematch with someone he vied with in the 1980s, which is scheduled in a future that becomes foreclosed career-wise after he has had a heart attack; and yet he returns to wrestling, and keeps the rematch date, after frustrations on the interpersonal/family-related level. (Evan Rachel Wood plays his estranged daughter, with whom he has a brief rapprochement.) Long story short: famous for his move the “Ram Jam,” with which he jumps off the ropes onto his opponent for one final crushing blow, Randy, who has a heart attack about midway through the movie, maintains his dedication to his art so far that, in his final self-launch into one more Ram Jam, we fear he is going to have a heart attack that will kill him.

It’s been said (I think by Aronofsky) that Black Swan is a thematic companion to The Wrestler, and in a way this is obvious. Not only are both movies filmed in a sort of “real-time, ‘you are there’” style with the camera following the dogged protagonist, but both concern an artist who is so dedicated to his or her art that he or she engages in self-harm, if not even risking death, in pursuit of some kind of perfection or self-transcendence in this art. Black Swan is a sort of female, upscale companion to the male, blue-collar Wrestler.

I was impressed with Black Swan when I first saw it, though I had some reservations. When I re-viewed it, its flaws became more apparent. As with White Oleander, positive reaction to this movie would appear to split along generational differences. Leonard Maltin (who seems generally to reflect baby boomer tastes) gave it a mere two stars, and called it overwrought; Videohound, which seems to reflect the taste of a demographic of about 30, gave it three and a half stars (or “bones”). The movie does have a saturating esthetic style, with rich visuals and dense sound editing (not just with music, but with musical-type accents underneath visually conveyed, short-term reactions, or underscoring the mood meant to be understood as generally accompanying a certain character).

A ballerina basket case; thematic goal is set

The lead character, a young ballerina named Nina Sayers and played by Natalie Portman, not only is fanatically attached to her art, but appears to have personal vulnerabilities played on by the demands made on her by a newly assigned part: the “Swan Queen” in a performance of Swan Lake being prepared for. She both drives herself and is driven (to some extent, too heavily) by her coach (whatever you call the equivalent in a ballet company) Thomas, played often with a mentorly power by Vincent Cassel; she also has a rival for her position, Lily, played by Mila Kunis, about whom Nina’s paranoia seems to have grounding and reality, and yet not.

In the process of training leading up to the big performance, Nina appears to slowly disintegrate, briefly hallucinating (e.g., seeing her own face on a number of other people), and getting worse in some symptoms of anxiety (or worse) such as a rash on her back that she scratches; and self-cutting of a sort (such as opting apparently to rip a loose cuticle, and ending up ripping a long strip of skin off her finger)—I think this movie handles the topic of cutting less well than does Thirteen (the latter seems to acknowledge that cutting, as it generally is, is an unhealthy means to reduce stress or a sense of self-dislike or “deadness,” while Nina’s version is a little hard to understand as to cause). And Nina even engages in what looks like purging associated with bulimia, if not simply an aptness to puke due to nerves.

I don’t know ballet, and I don’t know Swan Lake, but I think the movie explains these enough to set up premises that really allow the story to be about Nina’s challenge: can she summon up a certain “dark, sensual side” that will allow her to play the Black Swan, to go with the goodly White Swan whose style and moves she has already mastered? As Aronofsky explains in a DVD extra, the movie is about duality of character; and I think one need not understand this in a way so stupid as “split personality” as in this way: the two sides of human nature that Nietzsche called the Apollonian (rational, calm, etc.) and the Dionysian (the impulsive, dark, etc.)—how can we negotiate with both sides in ourselves?

The movie thus sets up a fairly ambitious (and also not terribly original) theme to this extent, but in conformity with the theme of The Wrestler, the question is raised about whether Nina is right to pursue her art as she does even if it means her deterioration. And what, if anything, does she learn by the end?

Movie’s swim through minutiae gives it originality, but raises problems

With the ballet setting and the classical liberal arts theme, this movie could end up coming off as arty-farty, maybe pretentious, but because it delves into the day-to-day of a struggling young person’s life, it would seem to be a sort of riveting look at middle-class striving as well as the theme I have repeatedly visited here, a young female’s personal crisis. We can accept these two latter ideas as a theme (leaving aside the advisory given with some reviews—to the effect of, “This movie is hard to watch,” presumably for the dark theme; I personally don’t have a problem with this sort of thing, never did, but have to prep myself for a specific run through it). We’ve seen how movies like Thirteen and Rachel Getting Married handled “slice-of-life” portrayals of women under strong personal crisis: how well does this movie do? I think a lot of its problems have to do with ambiguity, which to some extent is an important part of its strategy, but which I think it overdoes.

For example: you want to depict dreaming, or someone “seeing something” that isn’t there. Movies have typically handled this adroitly, so the audience knows what is being meant. After all, if a character dreamed something, and this fact is important to the story, it is best to know this as soon as possible, whether it sets up surprise, a laugh, or whatever.

In Rosemary’s Baby, an experience of hypnagogic dreaming is handled in a way that today seems old hat but may have seemed European-edgy in 1968: Rosemary is lying in bed, looking unable to sleep, apparently troubled by the recent suicide of an apartment-house mate; next-door neighbor Minnie Castavet’s voice comes, “Sometimes I wonder how you’re the leader of anything,” but it appears to come out of a nun’s mouth. The image disappears; about here there’s an image of the deceased, bloody neighbor being covered with a sheet; Rosemary is looking restless as she turns over. Minnie continues in an increasing rant, and then a richer image is shown of a nun complaining, in Minnie’s voice, pointing to window-bricking-up work in a church or other Catholic building; as the nun rants, a male repair worker comes solicitously over toward Rosemary, who is again lying in her bed as in the awake scene, and she starts anxiously explaining apologetically to the worker, as if she mistakes him for a church functionary: she seems to explain out of a guilty conscience.

I think one big problem Black Swan poses is that we can’t always tell what Nina dreamed or imagined, especially when it would be crucial to understanding where the story stands. If it turns out she has imagined more than one would like the story to contain as real, then it makes her look more psychotic (growing so) than it would seem best for the story.

Script-based stuff is OK: basic milieu and characters

I recall that Olympic athletes at one time were analyzed for their “narcissism” (as if work toward achievement didn’t involve some kind of heightened self-concern); whether this is a fair assessment to make about ballerinas, certainly the movie takes it as a given that the potential for this is there. The movie is good, I think, in portraying a world that seems cloistered, if not claustrophobic, while being much about self-image (striving for a certain perfection in oneself). To this end, mirrors are key to imagery; while mirrors are a hackneyed method in movies, as Aronofsky admits in commentary, he aimed for a more original use of them, and I think this is (when not involving digital retouching) one of the more effective uses of “special effects” in the movie. Many scenes use mirrors that tend to add a certain beauty and sense of space, and yet also suggest fragmentation, dislocation—heightening a sense of claustrophobia. This I applaud as a method. And an early scene introducing us to Nina and colleagues, with quick-cutting amid sometimes-catty talk about the aging star Beth, shows how mirrors can create excitement and articulate the orienting “drama” helpfully.

Things get weird with the mirror method late in the movie, when a repeated mirror image shows Nina to be in a different position/motion than she really is—which is meant to reflect her fragile psychology. This gets to pile on this thematic motif a bit thick, but it’s tolerable.

Barbara Hershey, looking definitely 25 years older than she did in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, is the doting (if not suffocating) mother—a bit trite as the mother who couldn’t make the big time in ballet, so she’s vicariously living her dreams through the struggling Nina. (The music that accompanies her is a somewhat odd, rhythmic, Middle Eastern type, almost suggesting “the atmosphere freezes when the intense Mother Dearest is on hand”).

Winona Ryder, who is about 40, plays Beth McIntyre, the over-the-hill ballerina whom Nina idolizes, and who is struggling with the twilight of her career through drinking (turning up in Halloween-face mascara in a large reception hall, to confront Nina with soused voice—Ryder still has that girlish timbre to her voice). Beth ends up with broken leg in a hospital after running into traffic following the drunken reception-hall scene. Sometimes in a hospital bed she looks like an at-repose version of the dark spook she ends up becoming when the movie takes a turn for the more horror-like.

So Nina doesn’t lack for a range of standards-imposers, if not foils/stumbling blocks with their own ways of threatening her own prospects: fawning, sometimes grumpy mother; jealous trailblazer on her way down; and Mila Kunis’s competitor for the Black Swan role. Add the random other ballerinas who engage in their own competitive bitterness toward Nina. Nina’s not only hemmed in by mirrors but by other females whose motives regarding her do not comprise all unconditional love.

The dramatic quotient is high, and Nina’s health problems certainly come in spades; in fact, you begin to wonder—as you didn’t with the broken-down Randy of The Wrestler—why, if the Swan Queen role is creating such a nervous mess out of Nina, why doesn’t she drop out of it? Are ballerinas really that fanatical?

Lead actresses, here, invigorate roles of younger women

So, the movie lays it on thick: Nina’s problems, Nina’s striving—and I haven’t even looked at, and will defer discussion of this, how Nina seems perpetually packaged as a “girl” by her significant others: bedroom full of stuffed animals, “depersonalizing” ballerina on a music box (used somewhat tritely in a symbolic way), people calling her “sweet girl.” Nina’s role model Beth was called by Thomas “Little Princess,” about as ambiguous as to whether it’s endearing or degrading as is much else per the agenda of this film, and it seems (to at least one in the story) as if maybe Nina is up for this “title.”

And the visual style could be called equally “thick”: almost kaleidoscopic imagery, musical touches sometimes seeming like overdone rouge: to a large extent, the heavy esthetic approach of this film may be a matter of taste, appealing more to the young than to the older.

It’s been said the performances are worth seeing, if nothing else: and Natalie Portman is good; indeed, all generally are. Portman has the hardest role and handles it well. I’ve seen her in several movies, including Zach Braff’s Garden State and the first Star Wars episode (I am not a fan of that franchise). She is an intelligent actress, and of course attractive; but she has always struck me as a little remote—as if she would always be good to play a smart graduate student, but not a sexpot, or a routinely degraded young woman, or a tough old horse keeping kith and kin together, or anything else that might seem unlikely in a capable upscale sort. Here, her “remote, pretty” aura suits the role: we seem almost not to be seeing a heroine whose pain (or sensuality) binds us to her readily, but to be seeing a lovely young girl, like a fragile knick-knack, who is about to break.

Also, though Portman’s role—and that of Mila Kunis—seem to be those of a hopeful 21-year-old, Portman (age about 30) seems a little old for the part. She sometimes looks tired in the way of a thirty-something. Kunis, who is about 29, seems a little old for her part, still gets away with it with her youthful air. Portman (check out the DVD interview) seems like the kind of young woman who can wow you with a dissertation on Flaubert, while Kunis seems much more equipped to throw the good party (though her speedy talking in a DVD spot makes her seem as if she’s on her 10^th can of Jolt).

Sexual theme—in its minor respect

The biggest problem with this film, I think—and what really inspires me to want to come back to it in the future to reassess it (because I’m increasingly inclined to agree with Leonard Maltin on it)—involves its sexual themes, which I presume the producers and maybe Aronofsky saw they had to weave heavily into its tapestry to get a big audience—a reflection on our times, I think, showing how far we’ve come from the casual and relatively unpretentious aims of Thirteen in 2003.

The issue of a “work mentor” or “career mentor” sexually coming on to a young female underling—whether or not some “didactic” objective is intended, such as to “spur the Black Swan in her”—is tricky. Of course, if this were the type of work environment as a bank or government office or the like, then if Thomas stuck his tongue down Nina’s gullet under the guise of being an innovative mentor, Nina (or her equivalent) would slam him with a sexual harassment lawsuit so fast, his dance tights would snap like a banjo string. But the arts fields—and even more “professional” media workplaces—are a little different. Of course, how much one is apt to engage in a little sexual boundary-crossing depends on the individual, with more general excuses about how “the arts are apt to make such juices flow” only going so far (depending on who wants to buy into them). Does the depiction of Thomas trying to jump-start Nina’s “inner Black Swan” with come-ons deviate from how it really is in ballet? I don’t know. Does the movie probably take it a little far, to carry a sort of prurient interest? Probably. I don’t want to sound like a prude, and again, this may reflect generational differences in taste, but I think the sexual aspect so far in this film seems a little heavy.

Sexual theme in its major respect: a big lapse?

Where things really go out of bounds, in my opinion, concerns the character of Lily, “filling in from San Francisco” (one of those “likely-story” plot expositions, huh?). This flaw occurs with regard to both (1) the movie’s technical obsessiveness with playing on illusion-versus-reality and (2) its way of pandering to an audience with a certain “big plum for those who like that sort of thing.”

OK, Lily is a competitor with Nina; Nina becomes afraid Lily is trying to take the Swan Queen role away from her. Lily seems so much a natural for the Black Swan role, as Thomas un-subtly points out to Nina.

When Lily invites Nina to a night out—as coincidence would have it, playing on Nina’s wanting to get out from under her mother’s suffocating embrace—we first are in a dim club: dinnertime, chitchat. Kunis as Lily is good in basic-American young-woman-speak: meanings not just with simple words, but an imploring tilt of the head, or a change to wordless skepticism. White capsules of uncertain provenance come out of a cigarette case. Nina begs off. Time passes, circumstances change; Lily with two guys, drinks, another imploring to come and party; “You want to go home to Mommy?” Then we are in Thirteen territory. Sweaty palms, Nina cozying up to Lily (lesbianism?). Colorful/strobe-lighted dance floor scene…Nina making out with a fella in the can. Nina and Lily hurrying out into the cold night to a taxi.

Once home, Nina, drunk or whatever, brags to her mother about her sexually adventurous night. Slap in face. Nina to her bedroom, with Lily in tow; two-by-four is placed to keep door closed. Then comes what for some is the movie’s piece de resistance.

Shakespeare wasn’t merely whimsical in spicing some of his plays with the likes of penis puns; he had to keep the attention of the blue-collar types of his time, the ones munching on chestnuts in the pit or whatever contained the rabble at The Globe, to keep the books balanced. So it has gone since, movie-makers knowing this all too well: however artistic the tapestry, it must contain a thread of sex or violence to endear itself to those who are less like Henry James and yet still with money to spend.

Indeed, Black Swan raked in $329,398,046 (the latest available figures, and worldwide, I assume), according to a Wikipedia article. This is several times the box office totals for all of White Oleander, Thirteen, and Rachel Getting Married, combined, according to their respective Wikipedia pages.

So when a small-budget indie film’s distributor is the likes of Fox Searchlight, owned by Fox, obviously some marketing types are going to want to know what to season this kind of film with, in order to be able to shake the shekels out of Joey Beer Ball, Tyler Mosh Pit, and Jared Mouth-Breather. So…the famous lesbian sex scene—

OK, it fit with the obvious themes of the double, with Nina’s fear of being replaced by her rival…but did we have to have such “you are there” sound effects that they make you think, “I’ve got to go, you girls need your privacy”? I watched this whole scene once, but with subsequent viewings of the movie, I chose this scene to be when I went to use the plumbing, or put the laundry in the dryer. Call me a wimp, but not my cup of tea.

(By the way, Lily’s line, after she has spoken as if Nina only had fantasized about her, an avid “Was I good?,” brings the only bark of a laugh from a watcher of this film—but it also echoes a George Carlin joke from the early 1970s.)

Redeeming features, remaining qualms

This I felt was lacking in taste, or was a blunt marketing sop. The other feature of the film I thought was odd was (via special effects) having Nina turn into a bird—with backwards-jointed legs at one point, and stretching neck at another, and her rash turning into growing feathers near the climax, so when she completes the Black Swan dance, she looks positively ready for photoing by the National Audubon Society. This seemed to me a concession to the current obsession with fantasy figures and tropes, across all sorts of arts genres, that I don’t think suits this film. (It’s as necessary a putting a cod piece on top of someone’s head, I think.) I think we understand Nina’s emotional breakdown and the burden of the Black Swan role without the full complement of CGI feathers. (You know what should be a small art film is in a little trouble when the DVD extra about the earnest CGI programmer talking about how he made the feathers for the film seems more interesting in its way than it does as an element of the film.)

By the end, Nina has apparently killed Lily—her dark rival—which somehow has set off her final achievement of the Black Swan “spirit”—and then she finds Lily is still alive. Well, where did the piece of broken glass go? Into her own stomach, it turns out. Hence her White Swan costume glows unseemly red with her draining blood. The artist has reached what she feels is perfection by the end of the premiere performance, but lying on the mattress to which she has dropped in her character’s death, she seems almost to be dying as Nina. “I felt it—I’m perfect. … I was perfect.”

And when she discovered that the glass was in her own stomach, Portman gave her a poignant sense of realization that—I think this is the most “spiritually edifying” point the movie conveys—Nina has reached her goal of perfection on a stubbly road of self-harm: a paradox, yet—as we know from some schools of thought in psychology (such as Kleinian therapy), a return to integrity and resolution of a breaking-down personality comes with a shift from the “paranoid/schizoid position” to the “depressive position” (Kleinian terms)—a state of greater compromise or adjustment to the world, and reached by allowing yourself to feel pain. In one form or another, the latter part of this--the restorative nature of pain, or getting to truly feel your pain--is an old theme, not just within psychology but also within literature.

But did the movie have to have so many special effects, ambiguities, red herrings, and so on to get there? And did Nina really have sex with Lily or not?

An interesting film, worth probing for its meanings, but with a little too much tinsel of atmospheric underscoring, ambiguities, and red herrings…and with a sex scene that strikes me as a big lump of indigestible dumpling in the stomach after an otherwise intriguing meal.

Maybe I’m getting too old. Maybe Thirteen was suited to my standards of what makes a stirring story of a young Odyssey-pursuer in murky conditions, but Black Swan is for the younger set still ripe for mixing it up sweatily on the dance floor, more into “sound and fury” than into signifying…whatever.

Black Swan takeaway: a densely sensual look at young woman’s severe personal trial, amid a history of the damaging-and-exalting relation between an artist and her artistic ideals, is compromised by pornographic elements meant to appeal to the “lowest common denominator” in its audience, and by a lame-brained fantasy aspect.

New movie theme entries to follow:

Movie break: Win Win (2011), Tom McCarthy’s pleasant look at a lawyer’s life

and

Served. Witnessed. Have a Nice Day: The Coen brothers’ edifying portrayal of practicing lawyers in their movies

Movie break: Win Win (2011), Tom McCarthy's pleasant look at a lawyer's life

[preliminary words—a sort of musical “false start”]

This little review is not the place for me to dilate on the many negatives we can observe of the practiced legal profession; there will be a time for that in this blog. Practicing lawyers comprise one area where an observant artist—whether writer or filmmaker—can find a lot to articulate, and make grounds for comedy or more sober drama. To some extent, a lawyer in his dealings with others is an actor. And to us laypeople, we can learn a lot about what a lawyer does by simply observing—not just the people, of course, but also the abstract material they work with: books of statutes, case reporters, reference works detailing requirements for legal processes, and so on.

There are two main aspects to practiced law, and this also means there are two types of people: there is the abstract side of law, entailing the general notion of law and all the high-mindedness (and, in more pathological instances, delusional tendencies) that notion implies—where law is a sort of ether surrounding us everywhere, which the lawyer as “officer of the court” is a sort of exclusively licensed custodian helping to support, add to, protect, and so on. And there is the practical side of the law, entailing the tons of paperwork and reading, filling out forms properly, formatting documents properly for submission to a court, following the six million rules of court and rules of professional conduct, etc. This bifurcation of law into the abstract and the practical also means you find two kinds of personalities: for instance, municipal attorneys can seem like either a “judge” type (employing fancy language even in addressing small issues) or a “clerk” type (a whiz with addressing the details fairly much on the details’ own terms).

Another aspect of lawyers gets more into territory I would rather delve into when I look at the Coen brothers’ treatment of lawyers in their movies: how lawyers have a set of presuppositions—about who they are and what they do—and practical heuristics that tend to lead them to being the following “aloof” if not disgustingly self-centered way, which I’ve concluded to after dealing with them for many years with many different issues, though the fact that a lot of the issues have involved the peculiarities of the media industry defines this to a large extent: they never (or very rarely) as much as meet you halfway to understand your line of work or the industry you’re in, while to get something out of them or their field, you have to go more than halfway to understand them and their field. If people think I really want to be a lawyer, they are wrong—I don’t; but what I want is for my own sorry ass’s legal rights to be respected, and lawyers are amazingly consistent in failing to meet this demand in my own experience, so I have to learn how to function in their own area, acting pro se a lot of the time. Or, to put it in the slightly edited words of George Harrison in his song “Not Guilty,” “I’m not trying to be smart / I want only what I can get.”

But back to the difference—under normal circumstances—between the abstract and the practical in lawyers. Add to this the fact that a solo practitioner attorney can be said to be the loneliest type, the one most pressed to keep himself together for the sake of his practice and of whoever is/are his dependent(s), and you realize that a lawyer may need to be someone who not only is a seemingly obsessive-compulsive, who knows how to dot every i and cross every t, but is like any small businessman: he has to wear a number of hats as he attends to the many aspects of running a business: being his own equipment repairman; making sure his secretary is well provided for in terms of employment basics (salary plus “bennies,” help in troubleshooting certain business-logistical issues, etc.); and not least, scouting up new business (while, in the attorney’s case, there are ethical limitations on how to do this).

As I get older, I find it interesting how solo practitioners find creative ways to bring in a little income when the cases aren’t rolling in as thickly as needed (to help with their estimated tax payments, or the like). Years ago, in 1981, I (as the only college student, I think) was among a small group of high schoolers and others who helped an attorney sell Easter flowers on the streets near Philadelphia to drag in a few bucks. (My sister linked me up with this opportunity—it’s a bit of a weird story how this came about….) The attorney and his middle-aged helper got the most, I think, and we kids split the rest. (I was too young to know why the attorney did something so peculiar; you hypothesize about the motivation later—unless in his case he had a drug habit.)

Some attorneys have their office on a lot including another source of revenue that they own, which some businessperson may lease from them: a seedy motel or a diner that (maybe minimally) meets local health-department standards. Some may lease out parking space to park-and-ride commuters, or pull in rent from another tenant in the office building they own.

Tom McCarthy’s movies, well crafted and very detail-oriented, are mainly about the emergent richness of human relationships that manifest as, because of unusual conditions, people are newly given the opportunity to help each other out, or otherwise address each other’s needs, in which we see the full complement of what it means it be a person: generosity, pain, occasional missteps, and so on. His The Station Agent looks at how a random constellation of suddenly-thrown-together people are supports to one another while two of them are in stages of grief. In The Visitor, a bereft professor finds a new (more richly emotional) side of himself when he finds, day by day, a way to help out a couple of illegal immigrants who he finds were fraudulently led to lease his city apartment.

And in Win Win, an attorney gains entrée into helping out a couple strangers, in different ways, because of a different kind of “being in grief”: as an attorney specializing in elder law (showing what a sort of low-key, modestly self-defined lawyer he is), his business is falling on hard times—yes, it’s a post-2008-financial-crisis story—and instead of (early on) becoming a bartender to help make ends meet, he does something ethically questionable to bring in an extra steady check, and this leads to a cornucopia of new opportunities to help others and himself, as well as thorny complications.

Paul Giamatti as this attorney, Mike Flaherty, shows how he deals with this all as both a respectable enough hustler of a small businessperson and a well-meaning paterfamilias who tries to drag in new business because, with all else, he has young mouths at home to feed.

[Full review to come before long, I hope.]

Movie break: Films about young females’ psychological odysseys, Part 2 of 3

More clinical tales, or stories of immersion in personal instability or growth

Girl, Interrupted (1999), Thirteen (2003), White Oleander (2002), Rachel Getting Married (2008)

[This was edited mainly for errors, 2/22/12 and 7/31/12. Edit 7/30/13.]

Prefatory note

A quickie note: my discussion of Marnie in Part 1, which stepped into psychological discussion and terminology (including “borderline personality” relationship), made reference to one 1994 study in what was meant to be a helpful way that also suggested I knew what I was talking about. But it may have seemed too dense, opaque, tossed-off. So, for something you might find a little clearer (perhaps), try:

“The most striking feature of the borderline family is that the mechanisms of splitting and projective identification are not displayed simply by an individual but pervade the parent-child subsystem,” the latter being a subsystem because the borderline family, as the authors explain in the previous paragraph, typically encompasses three generations. Later in the paragraph, the authors say, “This splitting distorts the family’s perception of reality in such a way as to cause them to experience both internal and external events or issues as either ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ ‘black’ or ‘white.’” From Craig A. Everett and Sandra S. Volgy, “Borderline Disorders: Family Assessment and Treatment,” in Froma Walsh and Carol Anderson, editors, Chronic Disorders and the Family (New York: The Haworth Press, 1988), 55.

Also, as it turns out, my look at the final movie, Black Swan, has to be saved for a third blog installment.

1. A “girlie” Cuckoo’s Nest, and then some: Girl, Interrupted (1999)

[Comment not provided; unable to re-view movie—last saw it years ago. This is too bad, because the heroine of the story, which I understand is nonfiction, and played by Winona Ryder, was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.]

2. A Primal Scream version of early-teen’s rough transition: Thirteen (2003)

I saw this movie for the first time in 2007, and I watched it several times and was electrified by it. I eventually wrote the first version of the review below, which I’ve edited for this version. I was moved by the movie almost to being unbearably shaken by the end, partly (I think) because I had lived through a variety of its story, when a relative went through a few-year phase of seismic druggie/delinquent changes that shook the family as Evan Rachel Wood’s character Tracy Freeland does her own family in this film. (My relative did turn herself around and go to college and eventually raise a family.)

Also in 2007, I was (unwittingly) finishing my several-year involvement with support group activities, with all the immersion in troubled-female business that entailed, so I perhaps was more vulnerable to the kind of shaken sympathy I had for this film. Since then, cataclysmic changes in my life—and the change for the more paranoid in American society as effected by the shocks of the 2008-09 financial crisis and sequelae—may temper my view of this film (I hope not changing it to the curmudgeonly) if I saw it again. And certainly fewer young American families, awash in the middle class shallow-optimism and denial that are arguably brought on by the slow financial recovery, may find Thirteen to be less their cup of tea than apparently found it in 2003.

One thing is probably as true now as in 2003: however much the statistically minded (and bureaucratically aloof) would say this movie’s story “is not how it is with everyone, or many kids at all,” the point should be forcefully made that, sometimes, a phenomenological look at just how bad it can get is more to the point than barfed-up pieties based on statistics. Show us the Jimi Hendrix conflagration, and then maybe we can talk about the issue more soberly, once we’re stirred into caring.

Causes for pause four years ago; but movie packs a wallop

When I first saw this movie, it was approaching four years after it had been released. In 2007, I remembered when the ads for it when it was in theaters in 2003, and in 2007 I was in the middle of dealing with support-group issues amid people some of whose behavior was reminiscent of some of the people in this movie. But all I saw were the sketchy ads and the rather interesting articles in relation to the movie, and I felt the movie might be on the pretentious side.

One thing in particular that gave me pause was that one of the lead actresses, Nikki Reed, who was also one of the writers of the movie, was all of about 14 when the movie was made, and it was about experiences of hers from shortly before in her life (when she was about 12-13). That made me hesitant to see it, I think; but I’m not sure why I held off for a number of years. I also recall the news of Holly Hunter being nominated for a supporting actress Oscar for her role in the film, which piqued my interest a bit in the film. But circumstances, my priorities, my taste, and/or whatever else intervened, and I only semi-casually picked up the film in a DVD rental in 2007.

This movie hit me like little else when I saw it. I saw it a number of times and eagerly watched or listened to the extras. A couple things in little doubt are that the movie does contain depictions among putative 13-year-olds that the rating system does not allow such an audience to see without a parent or guardian. The movie also affects you rather strongly, which is key to the various things, whether not approving or approving, that have been said about it.

I won’t recount the plot or give away the powerful climax to make a few comments. That the movie was partly written by a young woman who was about 14 at the time of filming (in 2002) is a source of its strength as well of its weakness. And the story in its bare outlines is nothing new: teens going to hell due to peer pressure, societal temptations, self-identity issues, etc. I wrote a story somewhat like this when I was all of 15, almost 35 years ago, called “Another Fallen Woman,” and it was partly inspired by what affected me as the grievous falling from a sort of youthful grace of a relative and probably others I knew.

The movie has a punch due to its quick, busy, semi-impressionistic recounting of the flow of life events of a 13-year-old “good girl” student who is turned into a rebel of sorts by a seductive peer at school, who is both edgy in a sort of newly-sexy/rebellious way and popular in a sense. And with the wide-eyed honesty of an un-judgmental witness in a teen who has “been there and been part of it,” the story presents its events with a tumultuous and un-reconsidered quality that reflects both the type of experience its recounts and a sort of amplification done out of a sort of moral lesson-making (that is, like the recovered alcoholic seeming to put his life of drunken debauchery in starker, more rueful terms than the facts may warrant).

Some (or most? all?) of the teen-decline behaviors are spot-on: the nightmarish bitchiness; the insane snobbery of the likes of, “I hate your store-brand food!”

Adults and technology helped condition the story

Of course, director Catherine Hardwicke rewrote and/or added to the story, and costar Holly Hunter tweaked some features of it. Probably the story had changes essential to it be made lest it seem too much the work of a callow person. (Hardwicke has also done production design in movies, which is why the color scheme of this one changes to the increasingly murky and lurid as it reaches its end, a technique interesting in its underscoring mood and atmosphere. I believe she also directed the first Twilight movie, which also had color manipulation or some similar high-tech production feature.)

The extras of the DVD are interesting for showing the enthusiasm and dynamism of what it took to make this movie; and its low-budget style and the vividness of its acting (which latter seems to reflect the crushingly short production schedule) add a certain veracity of so many middle class lives in this country: noisy action, questionable values-embracing at times, confusion or alternating between more banal and more noble actions, somewhat sordid living conditions, etc.

A technical note: the hand-held camera work sometimes was a little too disorienting to me, but that is just me; on the other hand, the director of photography handling the camera did well in capturing sometimes complex, multi-location action in the movie’s tight-budget-condensing way.

What moral resolution does this film give us?

As a work of obvious “popular art,” one asks how much a movie would be expected to offer a catharsis of a more noble sort than it would a sort of instigation of strong reaction. And what kind of catharsis suits what story? If we see teens going to pot (literally and figuratively) in a shockingly rapid and colorful way, what kind of resolution and deliverance from sorrow, anger, and whatever else do or should we expect? Is that what the movie should deliver?

One answer is that if the movie is meant to be a didactic work, something on the order of Sinclair Lewis decrying the injustices of meat-packing plants early in the twentieth century, or the morally pointed 1970s movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar, then all we would expect is for the movie to rub our nose in “what sad states our sisters and brothers are coming to,” leave us crying (or otherwise disturbed) at the story’s outcome, and then follow the exhortation, as one commenter in a Thirteen DVD extra earnestly says, “Parents, talk to your kids!” If this is all the movie is meant to do, then it succeeds on the simplistic level it thus operates on. And it also happens to be something you’d expect a 14-year-old to write about the depredations that she and her peers have fallen into.

Wood’s breakout role is movie’s main anchor

But this movie is a little more than that. It does stand up under multiple viewings, and one thing that makes it work is the consistently good performance of its other teenage star, Evan Rachel Wood, who of the two lead young women is the real actor. This movie, which won awards at the early-2003 Sundance festival, seems to have been her breakout role in major feature films. Since then she has appeared in films as varied as the Beatles celebration Across the Universe, the quirky comedy The King of California, the low-budget The Wrestler, and the Woody Allen film Whatever Works (I have seen all except the last). Nikki Reed, attractive enough in Thirteen, obviously shows her acting chops relative to Wood’s in that she’s appeared in few films of note (not like Wood), and has lately turned up in the movie ghetto of the Twilight franchise.

Wood’s performance in Thirteen—which various resources on the Web have suggested is reflective of her portraying deviant personalities she has seen and not of her own personality—is good in a way that has to be seen. The still photos of her may make her seem unremarkable, or emotionally a little flat, but her performance shows her to be one of those people who “photograph better in action than as a still.” And the climactic scene near the end of her being confronted by others—one of the few scenes that the tight schedule allowed a whole day of production on—has to be seen for you to appreciate Wood’s capability as an actress and what the movie as a whole has to say.

Thus, I would sum that it could be debated whether the movie is more—though with unusual punch—a sort of ABC Afterschool Special (you might remember those from the 1970s; the 2002 film White Oleander, looked at below, seems like this too). Or maybe it’s a sort of minor tragedy. But whether it offers a strong, if crude catharsis that shocks you into thinking more about our teens’ visions and destinies, or is simply a sort of folk song played with loud fuzz guitar—impressively noisy, but as shallow as it is dense with sensations. Or maybe it is the work of a teen who knows a little more than the insulting assessment made by adults, “All youth knows is youth”—that is, it knows the pain and cause for moral anguish that materialistic and hedonistic American teens can encounter—but it doesn’t know enough to show what its steered-wrong heroine Tracy Freeland would become if she started to look at her condition and become more healthy in herself and in her relations with family.

What kind of depth does the movie offer into troubled personality?

I think a critical remark that I read about it is that it doesn’t look at enough of the depth of its main character(s). It certainly shows enough of the symptoms of distress, and it parades an awfully busy collection of them. Well, in real life, sometimes that’s all many parents seem to become aware of—hopefully, not before it’s too late. Maybe when it comes to teens, this is part of the point: the only way we know something is wrong is by seeing the flash, and feeling the pain, of excessive behavior.

Of course, in the old days, people would have said “it’s just a phase she’s going through.” As it turns out, the fact that young lives going through a drastic downturn are really just going through a painful “detour” has been acknowledged by psychologists for decades. One of Freud’s disciples, Erik H. Erikson—just to take an example from one of the more “classic” talk-therapy theorists—had a more optimistic view of humanity than did Freud; while Freud focused on determinism and blunt destiny arising from “accidents” in early life, Erikson focused on purpose or aimed-for destiny and healthy phases of life. Here are a few things Erikson had to say in general terms, which maybe can stand for what Tracy Freeland may exemplify, manifestation of a sort of borderline personality:

“Young patients can be violent or depressed, delinquent or withdrawn, but theirs is an acute and possibly passing crisis rather than a breakdown of the kind which tends to commit a patient to all the malignant implications of a fatalistic diagnosis.” (Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1968], p. 17.)

And: “...where role confusion joins a hopelessness of long standing, delinquency and ‘borderline’ psychotic episodes are not uncommon.” (pp. 131-32) And: “What under prejudiced scrutiny may appear to be the onset of a neurosis often is only an aggravated crisis which might prove to be self-liquidating and even, in fact, contributive to the process of identity formation.” (p. 163)

This movie is detailed enough that it even looks at the phenomenon of cutting, which is seen in borderline personalities. Tracy’s doing this in the cramped WC while plaintively telling people hold on, she’s coming out, or the like…is affecting, and this type of vignette will reappear with the character Nina in the movie Black Swan.

Last notes

I’m a little dissatisfied with the movie’s very ending. In a sort of poetic coda, Tracy is shown on a little merry-go-round…you’ll see. The director explains in DVD commentary why this scene was inserted. I didn’t know if this glimpse was meant to be symbolic—if it reflected Tracy’s state of mind at some point, her future, or her past.

But at least if you wanted a movie to show you just how sensationally badly American teens can hurt, and how they might end up dealing with their troubled sense through sex, drugs, petty crime, rudeness, and so on, this movie does it with a riot of not only eye-opening behavior, but a Mardi Gras variability in color, jazzy kinesis from a  hand-held camera, and easily affecting music.

Thirteen takeaway: lurid story of teen’s descent into delinquency, sexual experimentation, and drug use, at the insidious behest of a charismatic friend, depicts a certain kind of middle-class tragedy made vivid by a good actress’s performance. Lesson? Parents could communicate with their children more sensitively, perhaps.

3. A young woman’s growth despite a deviant mother: White Oleander (2002)

I won’t comment too much on this movie here; I should re-view it again, but have seen it several times. It’s sui generis in a way; based on an apparently interesting novel that I haven’t read, it’s a complicated story boiled down into movie form in a series of episodes, showing how a young woman grows up despite the attempted (and actual) influence of her mother, a beautiful artist (and, it turns out, criminal unafraid of her antisocial act—murdering an unfaithful boyfriend—which gives her a sort of Nietzschean edge). This movie, like Black Swan, seems to divide critics by age group, at least to judge from a look at Leonard Maltin’s review versus the take in the VideoHound yearly compendium of reviews; Maltin likes it better than VideoHound, and I would agree with him.

Michelle Pfeiffer plays the mother; Alison Lohman (as Astrid) plays the daughter, and it is really her film. As the movie progresses through Astrid’s being lodged in various foster homes with an occasional stay in a sort of juvenile holding center, Astrid (and Lohman) is really the one who makes us care about this story, with its seemingly disjointed episodes. The longest, and first, foster-home episode has Robin Wright Penn as a born-again but trashy mother housing a number of foster kids. Here, Astrid’s sexual involvement with Penn’s live-in boyfriend leads to a blowup that preludes Astrid’s placement with a suicidal stay-at-home wife (played by Renee Zellweger) of a traveling actor; and later, Astrid’s placement choice of a tacky female Russian street hustler of sorts who sells clothes scavenged from garbage, with the aid of a number of seemingly homeless young women. (This loosely summarizes Astrid’s series of sad, random versions of home.)

The story may seem like something out of the old TV-movie series ABC Afterschool Special, and it does have something of that flavor.

Lohman, whose major breakout role this was, is what makes the movie worth watching (in addition to the overall drama, which some might find too shallow or cursory in some ways). Through stylized shots (the movie may annoy with its fashion-mag way of depicting many of the main actresses), Lohman’s Astrid grows from a seemingly impressionable girl, who has artistic aspirations of her own, to an apparently increasingly crusty and jaded older young woman, who reacts with mixed signals at first to the entreaties of a young orphan male (who practices comics-type art) who takes a liking to her (they later become a couple).

Near the movie’s end, Astrid is dressed in Goth girl style, actually rather shocking given Lohman’s usual appearance; and at this point she is suitably hard in questioning her mother in the last of the series of rich prison conversations (with Astrid increasingly mature through them) that alternate with scenes of Astrid’s episodes of foster-home adventures. In this last conversation, Astrid has been led by her mother’s attorney to try to work up an agreement with her mother to lie in court so that her mother’s sentence may be shortened, or the like.

After the showdown-type conversation between the two, with Astrid compromising to say she’ll lie for her mother, Astrid later finds in court that her mother has agreed to stick with the longer sentence, in the process having obviated Astrid’s testifying on her behalf. Pfeiffer’s character is led off to her cell, and Astrid is free to pursue her life as an independent; with reuniting with the male who has courted her, she becomes an apparently balanced (and attractively styled) adult who honors her mother in her own artwork.

Lohman was one of the actresses who became a noteworthy up-and-comer around 2002-03, in the wake of 9/11, along with Evan Rachel Wood, Lindsay Lohan, and several others, that made movie fans like me wonder, Is one of these women going to be the next Meryl Streep? Lohman is somewhere between very pretty and beautiful, and is short (camera angles often hide this). She can handle changes in personality from almost-waif-like girl to Gothic beast in White Oleander, which acting feat apparently recommended her to those who cast her in the interesting Matchstick Men, an overlooked 2003 film directed by Ridley Scott.

In Matchstick Men, a visually stylized (and richly sound-edited) story of con artists, Lohman again plays a woman who at first seems younger than the actress’s years; this movie’s main character Roy—played (with your patience for his character's quirks decreasing with repeated viewings) by Nicolas Cage—thinks her character, Angela, is his long-lost daughter. One way this movie is interesting is that it shows actors playing at being actors—to the extent they play temporary con-artist roles. Lohman appears in Matchstick Men’s coda as a supposed young adult (with an ugly hairdo), though this age transformation is less effective, I think, than in White Oleander. While Cage’s performance may grow thin with repeated viewings, only Lohman’s performance and that of the restlessly hip Sam Rockwell (as Roy’s partner) always seem on point.

In short, with these two movies, Lohman seemed like an actress quite capable of nailing a variety of young-female personality styles. She can portray stark anger and (in other circumstances) bitchiness, yet it often seems like Lohman in general is a little too nice for this, and (sometimes) has to press herself to do it.

The only other movie I’ve seen Lohman in (at least where she had a major role) was Drag Me to Hell (2009), Sam Raimi’s sometimes self-parodying, un-subtle horror movie [I've also seen Where the Truth Lies (2005), on which I hope to have a review soon]. Here Lohman was cast to play an inveterately nice young woman (with an ambitious streak as a bank employee); her nice-woman mannerisms, to me, were consistent with her personality in roles from years before. Thus, as an actress it seems her ability is generally limited to that sort of thing—a nice young woman. It could be argued that as Drag Me to Hell showed, Lohman is like Shelley Duvall (as shown in The Shining) and Tippi Hedren (as shown in The Birds): an actress of some solid appeal but with (arguably) limited acting range, who can perform up to snuff in a horror film if leaned on (rather mercilessly) by its director.

In White Oleander, she plays the daughter of a Scandinavian woman, and accordingly her eyebrows are colored blond in some scenes (but, continuity problem! Lohman’s dark eyebrows are seen in other scenes). (Lohman, her hair previously cut very short for a previous movie production, wears wigs through this movie.)

This is an interesting, rather touching story, with Lohman the main attraction and doing what I would call a solidly nice job with a demanding part. But whether this movie tells you a lot of the ins and outs of such a young woman’s odyssey is open to question. Definitely worth a look in this series of films I’m discussing, but not your first choice.

White Oleander takeaway: a young woman’s foster-home odyssey while she is in the orbit of a demanding, rather conscience-lacking mother, is affectingly enough handled within the constraints of this movie, whose inevitable length may be too short to do justice to the book.

4. Mixed homecoming for a just-post-rehab substance abuser: Rachel Getting Married (2008)

This movie got good reviews when it came out; I think I first saw it on DVD in 2009. What struck me when I first saw it, and I think strikes me the same way now, is that what seems splendidly revealing and “real” in the cinema verite presentation of a wedding-weekend, variegated-ethnic-groups family drama wears a little thin on repeated viewing. That is, at first viewing, the family members of Kym Beckman, played by Anne Hathaway, seem to be reasonable (or understandable) enough in their reactions to her as “wet blanket” enrollee of a several-month rehab program (she has done nine months and will return for more). But on later viewing, they seem on occasion more cheap-spirited and not-complex-enough. Meanwhile, Hathaway does a great job—she is the only one deeply acting—as Kym in her newly puritanical quality as sober (to a fault, you could say), accountability-seeking, and mourning.

Rachel, played by Rosemarie DeWitt, is getting married to her boyfriend Sidney Williams (Black; played with quiet humor by musician Tunde Adebimpe), from whom she turns out to be pregnant, and a slew of people—friends, family, others—are to be at the non-traditional wedding, along with a casual group of rather-exotic-sounding musicians practicing inside and outside the house throughout the weekend, like a bunch of wandering, Middle Eastern-flavored troubadours who stopped by to hang out. This is (along with being a typical wedding where just about any attendee can fairly ask, “Who are some of these people?”) very much a New York metro-area type scene, with mixed marriages and all sorts of ethnicities (in terms of cultural activities, whatever else) congregating and mutually celebrating with liberal ease. (Bill Irwin, as Rachel and Kym’s father Paul, I think is miscast, as he admits—in a DVD extra—to suspecting when first offered the role; he seems to me a little wimpy to be the father of such a family, but as an actor he seems a great sort to be colorfully effusing on a New York stage.)

As you might guess, the movie presents a milieu and set of people (with their values) that are not to all tastes, but even in this it exemplifies how, when you treat the issue of “the recovering substance abuser in our midst,” such a person’s problem can happen in all families, and one key to having some ameliorative influence in the matter—as a relative, lay helper, whatever—is to know how to, or try to, build bridges between you and the “miscreant.” Taking a stand on who you will or will not relate to, or endlessly pointing a finger, does not help.

This movie, with planning and such going on well over a year before it was filmed in 2007, embodies a fairly casual filming style similar to that specialized in by Francis Coppola, of having actors actually live the situation they are also supposed to act (they are thrown in with a host of others, and to a good extent expected to respond naturalistically to the event at hand). (This is actors having to be real people at turns, unlike movies in which actors may play at being actors, e.g., in depicting con men.)

So a variety of viewers can take in this movie, enjoy the (sometimes distracting) hand-held camera casualness (and appreciate the editing that captures good nexuses—or nexi?—of drama), and see what they think: does this movie speak to them about what it is like to deal with a self-recognizing substance abuser in the family?

I think the script may be a bit naïve in how it captures the long-term family emotional complexity, a complexity compounded in the short term for occurring on the weekend of a big wedding, what is supposed to be a happy time—an event that yet always carries its anxieties (and dredging up family resentments/old issues). Rosemarie DeWitt, I think, disappoints me more than some of the other actors, because while she depicts the happy bride-to-be—cheerful with Kym on the latter’s arrival when they peal with playful sister talk—and later talks alone with her birth mother, played by Debra Winger (who is adequate but in a small role), she seems fine. But sometimes in facing off with Kym with the latter’s bringing up her own coming-to-terms issues, DeWitt’s Rachel can seem shallow and even a bit self-absorbed in her own way (even if it is her wedding weekend). I would think that sisters who otherwise would have been pretty close would mean that Rachel would show more complex emotions than DeWitt does here, even when she is trying to fend off Kym’s dour, sometimes bitchy “intrusions” on the wedding weekend with her 12-Step agenda.

One nice paradox is, about midway through the movie, Kym’s scorning Rachel for the latter’s putatively dry and remote understanding of psychological issues with her obtaining an advanced degree in this field, while Kym actually lives febrile psychological issues. I appreciate this in more ways than you might imagine.

Hathaway, of course, is the central attraction of the film, regarding her character and in her burden as an actress. Hathaway, I’ve thought, is attractive, but her dark eyes are big, like two oversized headlights; her mouth can seem too big when open; and she has a small nose. Her face is as if someone wanted to sculpt a really beautiful face, and got interrupted (by the phone or something), and never finished. But, with any notable actress, whatever career entrée her looks give her, her emotional wealth is key. The edginess of Kym starts with her straight, black, hedgecutter-chopped hair, looking like a big red slash across the face, as if she would say “I dare you to question my appearance.” In short, Kym starts as someone from whom you know you expect some kind of trouble, but don’t know precisely what pyrotechnics you’ll get.

With Kym, Hathaway maybe sometimes comes on a little strong with her turns at sour self-centeredness; sometimes in her flat-voiced, intently rapid talking (I’ve seen Hathaway shows flashes of this even in such a goofy movie as the ~2009 Get Smart), she sounds like “a mouthy pain in the ass, New Jersey subtype.” The fictional family appears to be (at least partly) Jewish, and while Hathaway gives glimmers of (when disagreeable) some Jewish-shrew style, I didn’t find her to be thoroughgoingly this way. (I’m quite familiar with the varieties of Jewish personal style and manners, both because of my long experience in the New York area publishing world and, more fun, because of my time at my college, GWU—or “GW”—which visiting speaker—and famous Yippie—Abbie Hoffman in about 1984 jokingly—and with the largely Jewish audience’s ready sympathy—referred to as “Jew Double-Jew.” GW had a large commuter segment to its student population, but the population of its dorm system was about 60 percent Jewish at that time. Don’t know where it stands now.)

While I’ve never attended an AA meeting (though some of its ritual usages turned up in less-rigorous support groups I did attend), the AA and rehab subculture (as well as other recovering-addict requirements) seems well represented in this movie: for instance, the undignified spectacle of peeing in a cup for tests; and the rap-group meetings, whose depictions seem surprisingly on target. Among the more sober drama, a scene in a hair salon, when Rachel overhears some inadvertently revealed, preposterous assertions Kym had made years before in a rap group context, is well staged, played, and edited.

Fun scenes also lighten the mood, like a dishwasher-loading contest between Rachel’s father and his son-in-law-to-be. More emotional richness comes with a later scene where Rachel bathes Kym on her wedding morning after Kym has come home disheveled and wounded by a car accident; this is touching and, per the proper taste, quietly handled. It is just right for the overall arc of the drama.

The firefights of family quarrels are to be seen, and are affecting; and the movie balances things out with an extended musical sequence with the wedding brood partying to a variety of musicians after the unusual ceremony. Kym punctuates this with occasional brooding about one central feature of her “fierce inventory of self” and so on that are integral to 12-Step self-discipline, the fact that she accidentally killed a younger brother whom she was baby-sitting, when she was driving him home and lost control of a car. She strikes me as, while needing to mourn this event and take responsibility for herself, to dwell on it a little too much (sometimes, of course, in confrontations with family members).

One scene, a pre-wedding-day rehearsal dinner, in which each person gets a turn at the microphone to toast Rachel and Sidney vis-à-vis their coming nuptials, at her turn Kym rather self-indulgently takes the opportunity to do what she probably feels is appropriate, a sort of coming-to-terms (in AA “fierce inventory” style) with what she owes her sister, including a straight apology, and she rambles a little long, with the camera showing all the bored, or embarrassed, faces (no one spares such an ashen reception). I don’t know but what this is a bit overdone. Maybe it was meant to be an episode of the kind of when-needed droll humor that seems intrinsic to the complex topic of this film; but it seems to end up lapsing into patience-trying banality, both as an artistic depiction and as seeming to overdraw Kym’s own lapse in taste. Maybe I’m wrong on this.

This movie, with its mainly tracing an event typified by joie de vivre, of course ultimately addresses—here in braided form—both quintessential emotional veins of family life: the sad/angry and the joyous-and-forgiving. A lot of this story is to be seen to be appreciated. You might leave it feeling, “Cool, but I don’t know if I would see it again,” but it’s a good portrait of the way an individual’s substance abuse can be like soot in the engine of a privileged family.

Rachel Getting Married takeaway: sister comes home from heavy-duty rehab to attend older sister’s wedding, and the seemingly spontaneous movie richly displays clashing emotional agendas of (1) a “miscreant’s” need to establish accountability, mourn, and begin to make amends and (2) the prerogatives of those embracing a joyous, forward-looking occasion.

Part 3, to come: Black Swan (2010): A ballerina’s breakdown/breakthrough with a sop for Joey Beer Ball

New movie theme entries to follow:

Movie break: Win Win (2011), Tom McCarthy's pleasant look at a lawyer's life

Served. Witnessed. Have a Nice Day: The Coen brothers’ edifying portrayal of practicing lawyers in their movies