Memories of a major early job: Marvin Center Days, Part 1 of 13

[Edits done 2/17/13. More may come soon. See bracketed editorial notes at start of Part 2, for important qualifications regarding some statements below. More edits 2/25/13.]

Subsections below:

The game room—a good start

The “student manager” level—a definite step up

The business structure of the MC—not what you’d expect

The big administrative staff, and some “ancillary” other workers

What’s next

A job I had when I was a college student and for well over a year after my graduating looks better with age. This was being an “assistant [building] manager” at the Cloyd Heck Marvin Center, or “the Marvin Center” as it was usually called (and which I’ll nickname “the MC” here). As I ponder changing my career, it occurs to me that I could try to reprise something of what I did at the MC years ago—except I know that, in general, the college culture and its related “infrastructure” have changed somewhat, and if I opted for such a job today, my type of MC work—on the audiovisual, technically-support-an-event side, especially—would require me to know more than I do of various computer platforms (something like PowerPoint would only be a slight start).

You may ask what I mean about how college culture and its related infrastructure have changed. Actually, I don’t have a big “database” on this right now; but from what I gather from various sources—such as things tied to my nephew in college, or stuff I see at a local county college, or things I read in the newspaper—there seems to be quite a bit more of what I would call “hand-holding” of students in college, and not dissimilarly, more amenities that reflect the rising tide of increased tuition and college’s currying favor with families with big incomes. One thing a lot of my MC anecdotes will convey is, a mere 30 years ago, how much less hand-holding there was, especially when it comes to what we paid student workers were sometimes expected to deal with or shoulder.

This multi-part account of an old work period of mine will serve several purposes—including such topics with relevance today as dealing with people with imposing mental illness or substance abuse, which I’ll look at in anecdotes. This Part 1 may seem on the dry side at times, but it’ll give a baseline for tasty anecdotes. Also, for those who find some of my workplace accounts a little too focused on details, the benefit of this MC stuff (in future parts) will be like an old 1980s video, when you’re in the mood for it: the vagaries of memory will mean that some of the recollections are fuzzy and a little blurred on details, like an analog video whose photography is such that you don’t care if it seems like it was done in murky water.

A couple bits of history are in order. First, my work history at the MC, sketched.

The game room—a good start

I started out as a game room attendant, on the fifth floor of the MC. (Actually, it was the sixth floor, but it was named the fifth floor; we’ll get to an explanation of that.) The “game room” actually encompassed a bowling alley—10 or 12 lanes, I think (the MC was known to have one of only two bowling alleys in Washington, D.C., if I recall)—and, on the other side of the floor’s main corridor, a room containing pool tables and video games. There were also a few video games in the bowling alley. In those days, video games consisted of (in large stand-alone consoles) Pac Man, Space Invaders, and I think the first iteration of Donkey Kong, among others. There were also pinball machines.

The game room attendant was largely a cashier, who did other small tasks. You handed out shoes to bowlers, and took them back (and I don’t recall in what way bowlers paid anything—a deposit for shoes was necessary, and maybe there was a small set fee for playing). For those who wanted to play pool, you handed out sets of pool balls; people were charged for length of time playing, I think. Cues were already in the room. And there was some handling of cash. A lot of what we cashiers did was make change for those who wanted quarters for the video games. On occasion there was someone who would plunk down a $10 bill for a whole roll of quarters.

The game room was one of the few facilities in the MC where a cashier was an important worker who had to follow rigorous procedures for handling cash (the “Information Desk” on the ground floor was another; its nickname was the “Info Desk”). Cashiers got cash bags at the start of their shifts, and returned cash bags with that day’s take, and followed certain rudimentary accounting practices, all under the aegis of the MC’s accounting department (headed by Johnnie ____—I forget his last name). Other “concessions” in the MC—especially the food facilities, cafeterias on different floors—were independent of the MC’s accounting/business functions. For one thing, the food concessions were run by Saga, a large food service that had concessions in other parts of the city. Not surprisingly, Saga was routinely derided by students, especially for its facilities that were in, I think, two dorms—one was Thurston Hall (which big dorm provides a lot of stories in its own right, but I hold off on that).

I will get into the business structure of the MC shortly—this will be important to understand other, staff matters. The game room attendant was someone whose most important function was as a cashier (as was obviously the case with cashiers at retail facilities that college students could work at in a myriad other places), but he or she had other details to attend to: watching for trouble, picking up gaming equipment left behind, closing up the facilities at night’s end, whatever. It was a good starting job for me and the others (students, mainly) who did it.

The game room was headed by a Bob Case (probably deceased now); he had been a professional, or longtime amateur, bowler, and he was able to fix the Brunswick bowling-pin resetting machines that frequently broke down. That was another thing we game room attendants had to troubleshoot with, who were able; I did this and learned some of the ways of the temperamental pin-resetting machines. (Boy, those days go long back.)

I had that job for three semesters: both freshman semesters, starting in October 1980, after I had been at college about a month; and my first sophomore semester, September-December 1981.

The “student manager” level—a definite step up

I became aware of “student managers” or “student assistant managers”—there were different technical names for the job, depending on how casual one would be about it—who sometimes swung by the game room. They “managed” the whole building (and it was a massive building). By what particular means—whether someone individually helped me, or I just applied—I  don’t remember, but I became a “student assistant manager” starting in January 1982. I would then have the student form of this job every semester until I graduated in May 1984, and including summer 1983 (I went home for summers 1981 and 1982).

Then in May 1984, after having applied for it (among whoever else), I landed the permanent version of the job I’d had, assistant building manager—and my particular slot for the new staff job was the weekends, Friday through Sunday, about 4 p.m. through closing (this was usually 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday, and about midnight at the end of Sunday). I think I had been working the weekend slot in my last one or two student semesters there, hence the permanent slot was a good fit; but student managers could be scheduled for all kinds of shifts through the week—whatever their class schedule allowed, along with staff managers’ discretionary heeding of their preferences.

In general, there were three shifts for building managers: about 7 a.m. through 4 p.m., which obviously dealt with daytime activities and ran into more “traffic” in terms of students using the building for meals, lunch being by far the biggest in terms of traffic (student managers had nothing to do with the meal activities, which Saga was responsible for). The second shift, 4 p.m. to usually midnight, dealt with evening activities, where the assistant managers’ roles usually were more extensive, because we provided ad hoc and usually pre-outlined audio-visual and other such technical support for activities in the building, which could range from simple lectures or meetings to large parties or mini-concerts in the MC “Ballroom.” More on all that soon. Assistant managers also oversaw what the “Housekeeping” staff did—this was a staff of permanent workers who set up furniture, cleaned, etc. (all blue-collar-type work)—and usually we didn’t have to direct them; only sometimes was there some technical glitch we had to consult with them on.

The last shift, midnight to 7 a.m., was usually handled by a permanent staffer, Zak Johnson, who rigorously turned up for work but sometimes needed a substitute, and it was a student who could sub for that shift. Once in a while I did it, either as a student or as a permanent staffer, I believe. We’ll talk more about Zak soon, too.

The business structure of the MC—not what you’d expect

Let’s look at what kind of “student union” the MC was.

A “student union,” to my surprise in later years in my experience related to those entities (say, through 1987), was usually a wholly student-run affair (and for convenience, I’ll use the past tense for now): it comprised a central facility, a building, that provided a forum for special events, like a concert, or some assembly; and it provided food and/or entertainment (gaming) amenities. It was a sort of one-stop facility for those events and services of importance to students that were outside the realm of pure academia (the latter facilities being classrooms, labs, etc.).

In the case of George Washington University (which in more recent years calls itself “The…,” but I’ll call it by the name I knew it), which was a very large university (total student population, including those living in the dorms as well as commuters and night students, was about 15,000, I believe), was apt to have a large student union. This meant the student union was a large building, and because the school was located on city streets—i.e., over blocks and blocks (somewhat like NYU)—where real-estate footprints are expensive, it meant a multi-story building.

The MC had six floors for student use: the ground floor (which actually had the smallest available space for student use, though it also led to the book store, which was an essential amenity, located under the big MC theater, and run by an independent business entity), and the first through fifth floors. There also was a level above the fifth floor, which housed furnaces, “chillers” (huge contraptions meant for air conditioning), and other such stuff as you would usually see in the basement of a building. And there were levels of parking space in about seven levels under the building (each not as tall, floor-to-ceiling, as the floors in the building). Altogether the MC had about 13 or 14 levels, and I ended up being on every one, for one reason or another, during my several-year tenure there. (And believe it or not, even at the end of the bottommost parking level, seeming almost good enough for a bomb shelter, was yet another storage room where the administrative office kept some old files.)

I was even on the roof of the MC one time. (I can no longer do that so easily; I have more of a fear of heights than I used to.)

This building—which obviously had to have the structural integrity to have almost train-engine-sized furnaces and chillers in what was the equivalent of its attic—was designed by a civil engineer named Donald Cotter, who, after the building was erected by about 1969, was hired to be among its permanent administrative staff. When I knew him, he was about 50 and was the kindly supervisor of us building managers. I think he was hired at first in order to work out whatever bugs appertained to the new building’s settling in to being sufficient, infrastructure-wise, to what its many patrons wanted out of it. He ended up being the head of us building managers (mostly students), who usually did nothing that had to do with civil engineering (though I found I could report to Mr. Cotter, whom my nightly reports importantly went to, on a physical-plant oddity such as how the air conditioning was faring in one part of the building—this latter exemplifies what I’ve found in the many years since, that when you spend a lot of time alone in a building, you learn about its elaborate personality—how it handles weather, etc.).

Mr. Cotter, a Black man, was—in a glimpse at the administrative culture I’ll return to, and don’t mean to be snide about—a homosexual (among the numerous who worked there) who lived as a bachelor. He also had a bad hip, requiring his occasional use of a cane and always making him limp a bit, whether he used the cane or not. Whether due to his bad hip or something else too, he seemed dour in a way that might be off-putting if you didn’t know what a generous person he was. He died some years ago; I last saw him in, I believe, 1994, when I visited the university for a class reunion, and I stopped by the MC, where its administrative structure had changed quite a bit.

Here’s the quirky administrative structure: Unlike at usual student unions, where a council or body of students (not usually the college student government, I think) would run things, the MC housed (but was not run by all of) three “equivalents” (very roughly speaking) of such a council:

* the administrative staff, which was a paid staff (and the university charged a “Marvin Center fee” to all students attending, and the MC also took in money in other ways, as we’ve seen some of) [2/25/13 edit: But I must emphasize that the MC was run by its administrative staff, not the PB or student government discussed below];

* the “Program Board” (PB), which was a group of students (how they got on it, I don’t know; I think people ran for election to that, as did those running for student government) that managed special events like major concerts and appearances by big names (in those early 1980s days, Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno were still touring stand-up acts, and they appeared; The Clash was a rock group that was booked by the PB, which appeared in the not-huge sports arena that was the venue for the school’s basketball team, among other functions). The PB had offices in the MC, but the events it arranged often weren’t in the MC (now I believe at smaller schools, whatever student group ran their student union would also arrange to have name-brand speakers, musicians, etc., appear there).

* The third “rough equivalent of a student union board” was the student government, though I could be wrong about whether the student government at other colleges ever has a role in the running of the school’s student union. In any event, GW’s student government had its own responsibilities and enterprises, and it also had an office in the MC (in fact, Robert Guarasci, who was GW student president for, I think, two years, was friendly—in fact, roommates—with a fellow student manager, Jeffrey [sp?] Barth, and (in New Jersey, in much more recent years) I’ve known Bob—not closely—since he started and has had a varying presiding role in the New Jersey Community Development Corporation, located in Paterson, for about 18 years. Sometimes we assistant managers were called to let a student government member into the group’s office, or do some other minor service. My artificially describing the MC administration, the Program Broad, and the student government as somehow on a par isn’t quite so flaky in one connection: Julie Levy, whom I’ll talk about more below, was a student government member for some time, and seemed serviceable and unpretentious in her role, but when she graduated (in 1984, as I did), she was hired by the MC to run a new amenity on the first floor that had some Info Desk/PR aspect to it—though the old Info Desk on the ground floor remained—and she struck me as being strikingly self-promoting or at least “boisterous” in her getting this new amenity off the ground. I’m a little at a loss to describe what this new amenity was about, other than providing a new “information conduit,” but her way of handling it did strike me as presuming, which went hand in hand with a general change in culture in things relating to my job there—there would be numerous more changes in the future—that veered away from the culture I’d known from 1980 to 1984.

From another angle, there were two “student leader” councils—the Program Board and the student government—and neither ran the MC, and meanwhile the MC was run by a paid staff. (This situation changed by 1994, in that there had been a merger of the Program Board and the MC staff; this surprised me when I found out. I don’t know how well this ended up working.)

I think a lot of students who were at GW when I was didn’t really understand the way the MC had its own sizable paid administrative staff; and certainly we assistant managers, with our walkie-talkies on our belts, struck some students as seemingly self-important and/or puzzling. But all this helps set the groundwork for some of the colorful anecdotes I will offer.

The big administrative staff, and some “ancillary” other workers

The administrative staff of the MC included, as I recall (and I don’t think these people would mind my using their names, since this is so long ago, and many may have moved on, if not have died). I will include “B” to indicate the person is Black, partly to show the racially ecumenical nature of the group, and I will also include “D” to indicate his or her hours were usually daytime:

Boris Bell (D), the director (the highest-level staffer)—a kindly man and fairly close to retirement then (he retired in 1987);

Donald Cotter (B; D), operations director (whatever title he had);

Johnnie ____ (B; D), the accountant—who could be a tough bird; once, when bags from cashiers’ posts were turning up short of the cash that was supposed to be there per the accounting forms in the bags, he threatened to take the shortfall out of the relevant students’ pay, and I think this actually happened; that sort of move wouldn’t fly today, I think;

Jim Pritchett (B; D), who was the daytime staffer in charge of what “assistant managers” did—he set up and took down AV equipment as needed, and also wrote out plans for us night workers as to how equipment would be laid out. A very nice and approachable guy—he had been a pre-med student, and left that route; he also played good electric guitar, and I have a cassette tape of me and him playing guitar together in his office—with him good, me stumbling a bit;

Thelma Riggs (I think her last name was) (B; D), a staffer who was head of the Housekeeping staff—I rarely interacted with her;

Carolyn Jefferson (B; D), nicknamed “C.J.,” who was a sort of “broad-picture” events-attractor and –scheduler—she was fairly frequently criticized there by numerous coworkers, and she is most subject to reassessment by me today, because I didn’t fully comprehend the main reason for her job, though there were plenty of times she let us night staffers down with some oversight or mistake that she had made in her daytime job; she was also a single mother with a daughter, Nkeisha (yes, I believe that’s the spelling). There is a blog entry on her here;

Janet Scott (D), a sort of admin who worked under Carolyn—a steady, quiet, professional sort, but I think she had a minor stroke at one point, and I don’t know if she had some other health issue that led her to be a somewhat somber, inscrutable sort;

Wilfred V. DeGrasse (B), one of the few nighttime staffers we assistant managers regularly worked with; he had weekday nights (while, little overlapping with him when I was a staffer, I had weekend nights). He was a colorful character, a short, stocky man who was a minister in his “day job”; he was married but unable to have kids (due to some physical issue his wife had), and he was originally from the Caribbean. He had a somewhat loud, deep voice, which at least one student manager attributed to his having been a chief petty officer in the Navy [corrected 2/25/13], or such. He flirted with female student workers at the MC—and as a result, one of them, Angela White (B), who worked at the Information Desk, called him “Snake in DeGrasse.” There are a few colorful stories to tell about him. I am fond of his memory—I don’t know if he’s alive now (he had bad high blood pressure in 1985). I’ll do a separate entry on him--info on him is viewable in the second half of this. [See first bracketed editorial note at start of Part 2.]

Zak Johnson, the third-shift building manager, also another of the homosexuals [see second bracketed editorial note at start of Part 2]. With a fun sense of humor. And one time he invited a few of us student managers (including me) to some farm house in Virginia he was renting. I’m kind of foggy on details, and it’s a little hard to explain what that farm house situation was about (I didn’t go for a party or anything else hedonistic)—but I did use a walk through a cornfield there as a “template” for one chapter of my novel The Folder Hunt.

Jim Becker (D), another of the homosexuals [see second bracketed editorial note at start of Part 2], was hired rather late into my tenure at the MC, maybe in late 1984 or early 1985. He was an assistant to Mr. Cotter, I think, but I never understood what the necessity was for his job. At times he overlapped with me in dealings, and he generally wasn’t hard to get along with, but I think at rare times, there was a bit of a meddlesome flavor to what he did with me.

There were other staffers who were hired in about 1984, the year I was hired as a staffer, but they weren’t part of the MC administrative staff itself, though they might attend some of its meetings. There was Andy Moskowitz, who managed the theater (first as a student, then as a staffer), and a Julie Levy, who, as I said above, had been on the student government and then became head of a new facility on the first floor whose name now escapes me and was in full bloom in later 1984 and through 1985. I’ll try to remember more of that facility and stories appending to it, later (I believe it was called the Info Center; a separate entry on it will come). One student worker at this facility was Diane Hockstein, whom I might have things to say about in a future entry. Diane became an attorney, but was in her junior year (but was pre-law, if I recall), I think, when I was last there in 1985.

There were plenty of student workers, differing over years, whether “assistant managers” or workers at the Info Desk or the game room whom I interacted with over the years. There was also a small record store on the ground floor that, I think, deposited its register cash-bag at shift’s end in the administrative office (entailing my, or another assistant manager’s, occasional involvement with its staffers), but otherwise I had very little to do with it. At least two student workers there tried to start an alternative literary magazine for GW in 1984, with me contributing some creative help, but it didn’t get off the ground due to lack of support from the school board (comprising faculty and students, if I recall) responsible for approving such an enterprise (because it sought school funding, I think).

There were a few temporary workers who were hired in late 1984, I think it was, to start a cumbersome process (meant to be time-limited) of transferring room-scheduling records from their paper form into a computer database, which at that time involved a Wang computer that occasionally had technical problems. Even I was involved in doing data entry in that project for a time.

One person involved with this was a Jessica Emami, who was an assistant to Janet Scott and who I think was paid as a staffer (Jessica might have started as a student worker, and have become a regular staffer) and ended up doing more than just the emergent data entry. She was an Iranian-American student of GWU, of about 21, who was nice and, once or twice, impressed me with her ability to speak on the phone to a relative or friend and swing back and forth between English and Farsi as if turning on a dime. One memorable thing about her is that she suffered a depressive breakdown in 1985, and had to be hospitalized at Georgetown University Hospital; I visited her there (or tried to) one time. When she returned to work, seeming stilted as an aftereffect of her breakdown/treatment, I had a bit of talk with her about whatever she was willing to discuss of her ongoing issues. She spoke about wanting to get a gun, because of ongoing petty crime she was aware of down the street from where she lived. (Today I would advise someone in her position against getting a gun.) I was very much a novice with her type of health situation, then.

There was another woman who, in 1985, was an assistant to Janet Scott, or such, whose name escapes me but whose face I can picture. I think she had also had some psychiatric issue at some point, but this had been prior to her working at the MC. I don’t recall if she was a student; she may have been a grad student. Can’t remember. She was still working at the MC when I was in the process of leaving the Washington, D.C., area in early 1986.

What’s next

This was a big facility, with a big staff (among which was a variety of personalities you had to square with, as some of them had to square with mine—I was pretty pliant in those days, but asserted myself with enough good taste on the basis of experience), and a wide array of all sorts of contingencies to deal with:

* setting up AV equipment and lights for a dance (one piece of equipment was the “disco system,” a behemoth of a contraption with two state-of-the-art turntables, big stand-alone speakers, and long cables to hook up);

* dealing with demanding regular users of the building (like the “Israeli Folkdancers”—actually, a group that practiced Israeli folkdancing, but they were American Jews, and headed by a doctor whose face I remember and name I forget—they could be quite demanding at times);

* emergencies like, yes, the possibility of phoned-in bomb threats we managers (as were the Info Desk staff) were taught how to handle, and the occasional fire or an elevator getting stuck with multiple people on it; occasional criminal acts, including some particularly sordid ones involving the bathrooms I’ll touch on in a future entry;

and much, much else.

Here is a projected set of themes, some provisional, that future entries on the MC will deal with (these do not all necessarily reflect entry headlines):

Part 2, Becoming a regular staffer, and occasional “reactions” to my regularly filed reports; and a profile of Mr. DeGrasse

Part 3: The [pros and cons] of “C.J.,” Carolyn Jefferson

Part 4: The Gay People’s Alliance and their Halloween party, among other colorful occasional events

Part 5: The time I let some homeless people sleep in the theater, and I stayed overnight to watch them

[The following are unnumbered, because even more formative:]

Fern K., a schizophrenic woman who became something of a spectacle on campus

The “bathroom gays”—a tacky topic, but an important component of the jobs of a number of us there

Andy Cohen—a lively personality, and a mystery man

Why I left, starting in later 1985 (this was a multi-stage process)

What’s ahead for later February and March, and after

[Edits 4/15/13.]

There are a few items in the works:

1. Movie reviews. There are more movie reviews, some of which have been contemplated or in process for some time.

2. Last Skoder entry. The set of things I did on pseudonymous Skoder in the fall seemed potentiated or stimulated by Hurricane Sandy and the havoc it caused, though in principle I’d wanted to do something on Skoder for some time beforehand. Also, Eugene Mulvihill’s unexpected death provided an obvious occasion for delivering some of the Skoder stuff, along with the fact that I thought local news coverage on his passing was inadequate (almost patronizing) and some politicians’ comments on him were myopic at best. Anyway, there’s only one more entry on Skoder—and I think I owe this to some readers, since my November 6 entry on Gene Mulvihill has come to have one of the biggest numbers of links (by far) of my whole set of entries (and I heralded this Part 2 anyway, here).

This coming entry will be “Fraud in the Caymans (1970s), News-Editor Bias (1989), Part 2 of 2,” following an entry I did in December. It will focus on some very interesting stuff that happened in summer 1989, when I did stringer reporting in Vernon Township for a few weeks. I have been holding off on writing it for a number of reasons; why I would pursue it is largely to give some interesting insight on Mr. Mulvihill, because it will show how, in all fairness to him, he was hounded by people who were skeptical (in an especially strong way at the time) of what he was doing on a mountaintop with his company Great American Recreation and what his motives were. I was assigned a story by who was the editor of The Vernon News at the time, Skoder, and this project turned out to be complicated, not least due to the weird way in which it was assigned (i.e., in its original conception). [Update: Due to a change in priorities, the final set of entries will tend to focus more on Skoder than on how Mulvihill was hounded.] The actual 1989 story that I drafted (it is in typescript form) is worth a look in its own right, though it is written in a somewhat crude way (in terms of journalistic technique, not tone; it reflected that my experience at the time did not feature much journalism, nor has traditional journalism ever been an aim of mine); it also is unedited. But it isn’t unreadable for all that.

The article includes snippets from an interview I had with Mr. Mulvihill. In working on the Part 2 blog entry “Fraud…,” I will also look anew at my notes from the 1989 interview with Mr. M.—I will decide what items I will use (if any) and why—but he made one very earthy comment (not included in my 1989 story draft) that showed how frank he could be about, from his perspective as a real estate developer, a local environment that he probably regarded, understandably enough, as a vast pain in the ass (and with his frank comment, he knew that in me he was talking to a stringer reporter). This worst part of the Part 2 blog story concerns Skoder herself, who showed herself in 1989 to be starkly unprofessional, and this to other people, not just me. It will be necessary to recount some of this to show what a bearish situation this 1989 reporting assignment was. (Partly as a result of this, I have generally never counted my paid editorial work to have started with my brief tenure at The Vernon News in 1989.) So be patient—this very interesting story will come, but I won’t rush into it. [Update: It appears as a set of entries, one entry on my other blog and the rest on this blog.]

3. “Marvin Center Days.” One short series I have started producing concerns my years of working at my university’s (George Washington University’s) Cloyd Heck Marvin Center, the large student union building, in Washington, D.C. This won’t just be a reminiscence, but it will partly reflect my, so to speak, developing a case for a future career, or at least show how my career aims have developed within the contexts of very different industries over 30+ years. There are a lot of colorful stories from this time (1980-85), and it has the benefit of being pretty free from the pettiness and pointless competitiveness and infringements that have plagued my work in publishing in New Jersey over the past two decades.

4. “Radium Days.” Another item I’ve been warming up to doing is an account of a famous set of events in 1986-87, tied to the State of New Jersey’s plan to dump radium-contaminated soil—actually, mix it in with soil already here, and laying it down on the ground—in a portion of Wawayanda State Park, in Vernon Township (in Sussex County). The contaminated soil had come largely or entirely from Essex County. A series of public protests—some quite creative—erupted in Vernon Township (there was also activism in the nearby village of Warwick, N.Y.), with the eventual result that the New Jersey state plan was reversed (the contaminated soil was eventually shipped out of state). I had written an outline and narrative things on this business (one done about 25 years ago, maybe), and I have considered doing a non-online “package” of material on it for distribution via mail. The big sticking point is that I have photographs I took of some of the public activism, and so far, I can’t find them. (And even if I did, I would have to transform them into Internet-usable photos.) So this interesting feature will come together somehow; just don’t hold your breath.

5. “Pentimento pause.” Another feature I have considered, which will be very sporadic and at my discretion, will be future entries that will assess, or update, things I said in my blog entries from 2012. A pentimento, you might know, is a painting or otherwise pictorial artist’s redoing a section of a work, such as painting over something with something else. I believe Lillian Hellman wrote a book titled Pentimento, but I don’t know much about it at all.

Movie break: Encountering Bill Murray in dramatic mode, a derivative girl swims in an upheaved world: Lost In Translation* (2003), Part 1 of 2

[*Copy editor–type note: The i in In in the title is capitalized here, following the opening titles appearing in the movie proper. In the DVD packaging, it is lowercase, as would be the usual style per most sets of style rules for a preposition in this kind of use. I follow the convention used in the opening titles in the film, but it is technically incorrect.]

[Edits done thru 2/15/13; one important for understanding a sentence is between * *. Additional edit 2/20/13. Another edit 2/25/13. Edit 7/9/13.]

This film was hailed when it came out—it certainly marks an improvement over director Sofia Coppola’s previous work, the interesting but odd The Virgin Suicides (1999), an adaptation of a novel—and Lost In Translation got four-star reviews and related plaudits that today sound a little hyperbolic. (Note: Her Wikipedia bio suggests she made a film before The Virgin Suicides, in 1998. But I will assume for this discussion that this is incorrect, for a few reasons: the article is inconsistent on this [note the omission of the 1998 film on the list of what films she directed, toward the end]; as far as I know, she has never been noted outside Wikipedia as directing something before Suicides; and she seems routinely to take about three or four years between films.)

Today, while LIT is still definitely worth a look, I think it shows more what a small film it is—meaning, a game effort on a little budget where luck played a partial role in its making (with all else). Yet it still treats some important themes with good taste.

For one thing, it is nice as a mood piece, and while its values of taste (such as in music or certain lifestyle things) may in some instances be a bit dated (like a perfume that was big five years ago) or somewhat objectionable to the pro-proletariat sorts in Obama’s America, I think the aspect that has aged the least is Bill Murray’s hearty and good-sport performance, which is as interesting for its comic bits as for its serious side, which latter was lauded in 2003.

Scarlett Johansson, the one other “big star” here (she is a bigger deal now), seems strikingly girlish and not fully seasoned in LIT. (Note how she’s on Broadway now for a Tennessee Williams play, and has had a string of high-enough-profile films for some time—she even did three pictures with director Woody Allen. She seems to have accumulated a beefier oeuvre than has, say, Evan Rachel Wood, who I think many would say is a better actress.)

When we look more at the themes Ms. Coppola wanted to treat as she wrote on them, we will see how strong, or not, this film is.

A summary peek at Bill Murray, a comic-acting veteran

Bill Murray is the only member of the 1970s Saturday Night Live ensemble (he joined in the second season) who is still a going concern as a movie actor. (Even Dan Aykroyd has lain low for some time [update: Garrett Morris is active, but on TV's 2 Broke Girls; on that, see this blog entry of mine].) Murray showed he could branch out into films with the cult favorite Caddyshack (1980), the critically panned Meatballs (1979), and the more esteemed but not great Stripes (1981). The first of these was directed (as his first directing effort) by Harold Ramis, who like Murray came out of the Second City comedy troupe (a brother of Murray’s also helped in the writing or producing of Caddyshack). Murray later hit comic high points with the esteemed and loved Groundhog Day (1993), also directed by Ramis, and What About Bob? (1991), directed by Frank Oz.

In about 1998, with the Wes Anderson–directed film Rushmore, Murray started accumulating a record as a worthwhile dramatic actor; he did similar work in Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001; see my November 25 review). Today, in dramatic terms, he has made it all the way to portraying Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson (2012), which is up for an award or two. Over the long term, he may be seen as permanently colored (for better or worse) by his Saturday Night Live/comedy persona (and such entertainments as the 1980s Ghostbusters films), and (from what I’ve found from more than one source) he is idiosyncratic for the movie industry in not employing an agent and in taking work offers via an 800 phone number. But he is a recognizable asset that has had a surprising staying power, given the many changes in Hollywood, wrought not least by technology and changing tastes and marketing strategy, over the past 35 or so years.

Murray’s somewhat oddly shaped face—his head is a little like a misshapen pumpkin or somewhat round squash (with his pock-marked skin, you could say, echoing the uneven surface of a squash)—has long seemed to go with his sly humor, which features sudden irony or a sophisticated wryness. He is like an advance on the old hippie/rebel humor that was big with, say, George Carlin or the Smothers Brothers—Murray adds a sort of “hip” class to his see-through-illusions type of comedy. His somewhat “post–baby boomer” perspective suggests he is not someone of George Carlin’s generation, still fighting Nixon or (today) quite alienated from the world of smart phones, or (alternatively, not-liberal) like that subset of Vietnam vets who are still fighting Jane Fonda. (Even Murray’s Vietnam-combat-related humor in Caddyshack seemed like secondhand riffing with “found folk wisdom,” not like the product of someone who had actually partaken of the crucible of demonstrating in Washington, D.C., or cursing Presidents Johnson and Nixon within the period from 1964 through 1973 or so.)

Nowadays, with more subtlety and seriousness to his performances, he no longer seems the practiced, well-known clown, but someone passing through older age—now he has white hair, his puffier face all the more suggesting a skeptical wryness that goes with older age—with his spontaneous humor adding grace notes to a sort of stoical air. He could be considered a sort of poet of the “postmodern skeptical romantic” (gee, I’d better cut it out with trying to do this kind of analyzing—I might get hired to do cultural criticism somewhere, and then I would get writer’s block).

Lost In Translation I think marks the most publicly recognized phase of his transition from comic actor to a more serious one—he actually seems used by director Sofia Coppola in a fairly star-struck way, as if his being a known brand helped beef up his character without much writing work on her part. And here he shows (despite his intentions, perhaps) how his performance really presents the most heart of any character in this film, as seen (in part) in his shifts between both humor and more dry/sober delivery. While some might feel his performance isn’t seamless in this regard, he definitely shows how he looks down both corridors of his career (whether or not at the time he was conscious of this “divide in the road”)—the plucky comedy of his past, and the dry seriousness (or a slightly sweetened version of this) often featured in his future roles.

Some production-personnel (and actors) background

This film, while often tasteful and with decent enough comedy (when it scores; sometimes it doesn’t), is quite a bit an early effort: Ms. Coppola’s writing is rather undeveloped/immature at times, and often the film seems like a well-photographed effort by a small, earnest group that sometimes snatched some footage on the fly. Moreover, this is a family-business product of a sort that would almost turn me off, if it weren’t for the sense of a simpatico/tasteful mentality behind it. Ms. Coppola is, of course, the daughter of director Francis Ford Coppola. (She was, I understand, the baby in the christening scene at the end of The Godfather [1972], and turns up as the four/five-year-old squirt in Hearts of Darkness [1991], the documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now [1979]. She also made a famously panned debut as an actress in The Godfather Part III [1990], as Michael Corleone’s daughter.)

Francis (as he is widely known), with longtime producing associate Fred Roos (who early in his career was a casting director, such as in Five Easy Pieces [1970]), executive-produced Lost In Translation. Ms. Coppola also co-produced the film with Ross Katz (I don’t know anything about him). The family tradition aspect even shows up in, during the making-of doc, a depiction of what Francis used to do at the beginning of productions, supposedly for good luck: to have the whole production team join hands and chant a nonsense word: “Fu-abba, fu-abba, fu-abba!”

Stars include Giovanni Ribisi as John, the photographer husband of Johansson’s Charlotte—he is so busy shooting a rock group and doing whatever else that his freelance-seeming job requires of him in the Tokyo stay that he inadvertently neglects Charlotte. For her part, Charlotte, as a more long-term issue, seems to be in a melancholy state of “not knowing what to do with herself next,” which potentiates her emotional (not sexual) fling with Bill Murray’s visiting old star Bob Harris. More on all of this later.

Anna Faris makes an appearance as a bubble-headed action star named Kelly (it’s interesting how few characters in this film have last names [though we find out from a DVD extra that Kelly's surname is Strong]). There are also contributions by numerous Japanese players, including one who plays a supposed friend of Charlotte’s named “Charlie Brown.” The Japanese production company Tohokushinsha Film helped produce this movie, as an apparent sine qua non (including maybe having fake “Bob Harris”/Suntory ads appear on a building or on a vehicle on the road).

Though I can best make this remark after I review Apocalypse Now, it’s kind of fun to see LIT as not only, thematically, a small sachet “coda” to Sofia’s father’s Apocalypse Now—as in, “What do Americans do when they visit the Far East now? They come as emotionally put-upon tourists, not wage war on the locals.” But also, there were mini-challenges for LIT that echoed some of her father’s, such as a typhoon that came to Tokyo in the midst of production (though this didn’t damage things for the film, or the city, as did the typhoon hitting the Philippines in May 1976 during production for Apocalypse Now).

The issue of a sort of ethnocentrism to LIT is spelled out in the film’s Wikipedia article. In fact, both Apocalypse Now and LIT seem to potentially offend East Asians with their depictions of those races, though in AN this could be excused on the grounds that in any war activity, especially when the war is against members of another race, the “other side” is looked at in a demeaning if not dehumanizing way. In LIT, the “racism” is less excusable, because Bob Harris, Charlotte, and the others are privileged, mostly educated people who ought to know better; but I suppose you could “excuse” the racism to the extent that the film is largely about American tourists dallying in a foreign land, under the influence of severe jet lag and maybe a few too many visits to the hotel bar. And, after all, you can get fair enough views of Japanese “in a complimentary light” with the courteous bows and deferential manners, as well as sophistication, in passing scenes. (Meanwhile, the impression of the Japanese as aggressively verbal, if not verbose, comes out especially strongly—or is pilloried conspicuously enough—in the scene in which Harris is filming the Suntory commercial.)

Assessing LIT

To a large extent, this is a film to be watched for its esthetic pleasures; yapping about it critically doesn’t do everything for appreciating it. The photography is very good; the composition of shots (when not simply taking advantage of a beautiful view that fell in the crew’s laps) reflects a particular modern school of art that I can’t name, which I think was alluded to in professional criticism of the film in 2003.

On an emotional level, often helped by the soundtrack music, the film is suffused with a sort of “sweet melancholy” of the kind that might come to people not only with their own ongoing personal causes for “being down/at a loss” but also due to extreme jet lag in a culturally very different country (and one that, amid people who are courteous enough to often give little bows, is rather “manic” in its PR effluvia, at least in the city). Its sort of emotionally “twilight” mood is conveyed visually and in the rich sound, including Tokyo-derived hooting and ringing effects (with sound collage wrought by Francis Coppola associate Richard Beggs). In one respect, LIT is somewhat like Girl, Interrupted (1999; see my April 19, 2012, review)—in that, as with the earlier film, an ongoing emotional background—which could be more deliberately evoked in a literary work—may not always be obvious to viewers, due to their own temperaments.

In other words, with Girl, Interrupted, in order for you not to see the women in the mental hospital as acting-out brats, you have to understand that they all, in their respective, peculiar ways, have an ongoing “undertow” of grinding depression, “intrusive thoughts,” and/or the like coloring their consciousness of things. Similarly, with LIT, you have to understand Charlotte and Bob Harris—who do both comment, twice, on being unable to sleep—as being in weird states of mind because of “getting used” to a vastly different time zone, with all else. This mental dislocation helps you understand why they drift through the emotional mist to the mini-affair they have—with their own lives also more-objectively featuring causes for discontent anyway (Charlotte has doubts about her new marriage; Bob Harris, to use Sofia Coppola’s very trite word employed in the script, is undergoing a midlife crisis—which I’ll talk about more responsibly shortly). As it happens, the “fling” they gravitate to really is only a matter of “partying together” and dating at a restaurant. It is an emotional dalliance, not sexually consummated.

Importantly, in a scene just past the middle of the movie—which Murray comments on astutely in a DVD extra comprising a talk by just Coppola and Murray—Charlotte and Harris are in a bed—in the last moment, strangely postured, as the shot has it (suitable for maybe a Rolling Stone cover)—and talking about her (for lack of a better word) ennui and concerns about her future life. Harris, from his twice-as-old perspective, gives her some advice. The words of wisdom, overall, are telegraphed briefly, suiting the casualness of the scene and yet economically attuned to the higher-interest theme of Charlotte’s issues. And I think the scene is very good in that it shows them really just having a “talk affair,” not a sexual affair. Murray apparently had to throw his weight around a bit during production to get this scene this tasteful way, and I think that was a very good choice.

(For those who wanted plain blunt sex, there is a wears-thin scene where Bob Harris deals with an escort of sorts—a woman sent [by the people producing his commercial/photo-shoot gig] to supply him with “premium [role-playing] fantasy.” For more “stimulating” visuals, there is the scene in a sort of strip-dance club at which, by some poor-taste choice within the story, Harris and Charlotte have been arranged to meet Charlie Brown and friends. This is the sort of sequence that moved the film’s rating to R, and it can be blinked over—or, for the squeamish, made an occasion for a quick trip to the john.)

The emotional sojourn of Charlotte

            Generalities

Part of this entry’s headline includes the clause “a derivative girl swims in an upheaved world,” which as a theme I like and want to do right by, but I don’t know how well it fits this film. Granted, Charlotte, a recent college grad (majored in philosophy) and newly married to her busy photographer husband, is feeling as if her life is stagnating, and/or she doesn’t know what to do next career-wise (and seems, judging by the bed conversation just mentioned, to have hankerings but uncertainties regarding the issue of having children). To me, Charlotte is the least well-developed character in the film—actually, only two characters count as to their rich development: her and Bob Harris. And while Bob is pretty richly drawn thanks to Murray, Charlotte’s seems skimpy and unsatisfying, due in part to Johansson’s performance (not a total disappointment) and due in part to the writing. (This role was noted as Johansson’s first adult one, along with that in another ~2003 film, about a Vermeer painting.)

On one level, it may be all that Sofia Coppola wanted was for Charlotte to exemplify a typical early-twenty-something’s “major life challenge,” once all the hard schooling and kissing-up-to-elders is over for now, and the threshold to productive adulthood is underfoot: along with a more objective side, this can mean dealing with issues of, on the psychological level, what has variously been gotten at by ennui, alienation (more a 1950s term), acedia (a medieval concept) or “weakness of will” (a hoary philosophical concept), or “bad faith” in the sense of Jean Paul Sartre (this doesn’t mean “bad faith” in the more normal sense, including ill-intentioned, but more exactly “a lack of good-faith effort to reverse ongoing stagnation,” or such). (This is not meant to be a definitive set of comments.)

This is the ongoing character issue for Charlotte. Add to this her emergent jet-lagged state, with (left idle by her husband) her sometimes being relegated to sitting like an elf on a window ledge looking idly outside (while entrancing music adorns the soundtrack); and all in all, she is not helped with her condition of melancholy.

            The rambling phone confession-of-sorts

In one scene that seems almost very well-done, after she has visited an evocative shrine, complete with monks and tolled bell, she is on the phone home with a friend and she talks somewhat ramblingly about having gone to see a shrine, where there were “monks chanting, and [she confesses] I didn’t feel anything. … [I] even tried ikibana [sp?], and John is using these hair products…. I don’t know who I married”—and she is interrupted by her listener, who goes off the phone for a minute.

This is a classic sort of moment, with a young-twenties sort, where she “protests” her confusion and wish for connecting the dots and getting more of a sense of satisfaction and direction, and only ends up seeming to unwind a series of disconnected thoughts. As often happens in such a situation, her listener momentarily gets bored, or vexed or whatever, and leaves the phone in a way that seems rather rude; and then, “refreshed,” the listener comes back on and shows there is real life she has to attend to, has to go, etc. Charlotte, brought back to reality with this (not entirely as suits her), voices some sense of apology/thanks, and is quickly off the phone (maybe feeling rebuffed, or not quite), and dissolves into increasing teariness. The writing here may be a bit crude, but what the scene accomplishes, and its intent, is noble enough and sets up Charlotte’s aspect of the story—where she is coming from—well.

In short, at least with regard to her new husband, she has not simply “lost that loving feeling” (per the Righteous Brothers), but is starved for some kind of meaning and direction. A lot of us have been there….

            Making the connection with Bob Harris

One of the scenes that work best is when Charlotte and Harris first talk together at a bar at the hotel. This not only sets up, in the characters’ action and interrelation, the direction they will take for the rest of the film, but is one root for why Bill Murray was lauded for his performance as he was (he was nominated for an Oscar, though he shrugged off the accolade—bless his heart; he knows himself). Charlotte actually seems more in control of her life than usual when she initiates the bar-side conversation, and Harris—with Murray employing a sober voice that is about as warm-and-cuddly as the raw voice of someone just picking himself up from a cataclysmic physical accident, though he isn’t being cold or brushing-off—is frank about things, only in a measured way interweaving occasional Bill Murray–style ironic humor.

With the dialogue spare, but the comments forthcoming enough to paint the various emotional aspects, we see how these two people gradually sidle up to one another for whatever value each brings to the other in their emotionally fraught situation. (Sorry if this sounds like a second-rate version of critic Michiko Kakutani.) Interestingly, the film’s flawed nature turns up here, too—in its writing: one of the most wince-inducing lines is Charlotte’s saying “You’re probably just having a midlife crisis” (for me, I would say a midlife crisis is not much different from crises you have in your youth, except you’re readier for them emotionally), and adding, “Did you buy a Porsche yet?” This is the kind of upscale-brat joke that would make me spit if I were in Murray’s (or Harris’s) position. But Murray saves the scene from banality by employing his sly humor: “You know, I was thinking about buying a Porsche.”

Party time

When Charlotte finds that her husband is going away for a photo shoot until Sunday (we assume the current moment is several days earlier in the week), she is free to entertain herself more richly with Harris. John has given his blessing to the idea that Charlotte can hang out with “Charlie Brown” and “those guys,” but Charlotte will rope Harris into the deal.

A scene where Harris comes to her hotel room with a dorky T-shirt on, and decides to turn it inside-out—and hence needs a label cut off—introduces an interesting little moment. While some turns in this film are amateurish, other moments show especially nice insights. After Murray/Harris has sat down for Johansson/Charlotte to cut the tag off, the actors do something that may be as much due to the personalities of the actors rubbing against one another as to any intended “revelations” of the fictional characters. When they chat about some pretentious philosophical CD she has, Murray seems to express some vexation at Johansson, including a brief look at the camera. Then a shot focused on Johansson, finishing up with cutting the label off, shows her semi-roll her eyes, as if reacting to something minorly obstreperous in Murray. This almost might seem too trivial, except the shots keep these displays of emotions in—and I think Sofia Coppola, like her father, was too aware of the value of stray shows of emotion in actors *not* to include such a take displaying something incisively revealing rather than another that doesn’t include it.

In relationships with love developing, or at least rising a little to the occasion, the opposite impulse can arise in people too: they may be attracted to each other, but there is something that, passingly, repels them too. This particular “counter-love” phenomenon (you might temporarily call it) is seen in the more consciously thought-out Hitchcock film Vertigo (1958; I still haven’t fully reviewed it, and may not), which is admittedly less normally “romantic” about love than LIT is. In Vertigo, when Scottie has finally gotten Judy to dress up as his beloved Madeline, and they kiss in her apartment, there is an air of extreme rapture, with the soaring Bernard Herrmann music (seeming almost too powerfully Wagnerian for the scene), and the characters are seen as the camera seems to move around them. The scene of the stable, where some glorious epiphany about Madeline had earlier come to Scottie, is shown in the background as they kiss for a long moment. Then the music takes a weird turn, suddenly enters a strangely toned canter, as Scottie pauses and parts a bit from Judy/Madeline, as if wondering what he is doing, what is going on. There is a rupture in the rapture. Then he goes back to kissing her.

“Counter-love.” There are a lot of interesting facets of the pros and cons of love relationships in a book I hope to quote from before long (and if you think it’s nerdy to talk drily about this, I agree; I have a hard time delivering this rock ’n’ roll).

Anyway, after Charlotte has cut off the label, and she and Harris have reacted briefly negatively to each other, they are out the door as eager as two schoolkids, with the soundtrack music gearing up for party time.

Then comes montage. Scene of a dance-hall-like place, with fireworks projected on big balloons. Murray shows he dances dorkily; we can’t get everything from our big stars. One quiet group of youth has the Japanese version of a pothead—with tattoos including that of a pot leaf. A later scene is of a cramped club of some kind, where some kibbitzer from behind a bar starts shooting some weird toy gun, and chases Harris, Charlotte, and a few others out. Outdoors scene, bottle thrown and breaks. Harris and Charlotte run through a phantasmagoric arcade. [Added 2/25/13: A little thing: The order of the pothead scene and the toy-gun scene is the reverse from what is said here.]

Eventually comes the famous karaoke scene, with the party group in a high-rise singing room with a fishbowl-like view of the outdoors. Murray sings “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” the Nick Lowe song made famous in a recording by Elvis Costello. Murray’s hoarse, hearty singing, done as much for hammy play as in any serious effort at true singing, brings a jolt of fun. How can you go wrong with this sort of treat from Murray? I don’t think you can.

Later, Johansson, sporting a coy pink wig, sings the Pretenders’ song "Brass in Pocket" (which includes the refrain “I’m special”), and shows she doesn’t have the singing voice Murray has, even if he varnishes it with hamming.

Still later, Murray—given a shot of more Hit Me Again by someone (Coppola?) off-camera—sings Roxy Music’s “More Than This”—which was interpreted by critics in 2003 as bringing home some of the meaning of this scene.

In a future entry, I will discuss the last concern: Charlotte as a weak character and more to blame in her “emotional fling” with Harris, and the question/theme: “The position of Bob Harris: Dirty old man? And the dyadic nature of generation-spanning, brief romantic liaisons: Let’s grow up, critics.”

Movie break (Quick Vu): A brilliant con artist meets his match (and savior) in an intrepid G-man: Catch Me If You Can (2002*)

*This film was released on Christmas Day 2002, but I think it did most of its business in 2003.

[This is meant to be a sketchy review, and maybe I’ll add to it if I see the film again soon.]

This film depicts the 1960s with flavorful soundtrack—“The Look of Love” for a call-girl scene, “The Lady from Ipanema” for another scene; The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” for a raucous party scene. Are we back in innocent times? Not quite. Threading his way through 45-year-old history—pretending to be an airline pilot (in the days in which consumer air flight had a newly prestigious aura); later pretending to be a doctor in Georgia; etc.—is a young man, Frank William Abagnale, Jr., whose con artist skills (in ~1967) seem to make him decades ahead of his time. He pulls off cons that determine the rest of his life (prison, and later more or less “pressed” service in designing check security for banks, with him paid millions for the effort, according to end titles), all by age 19.

Leo DiCaprio as a nimble Frank, with Walken as a sort of loyal father

Leonardo DiCaprio has a sort of feline way of handling his gait at times, but he depicts the male complexities of Frank in his character arc from young kid pulling off stunts (~1967) to more jaded crook in shackles (1969). Even his voice changes. Earnest and youthful when he’s young, he sounds more like a bit of a punk with a hardened-character Long Island accent in his 1969 incarnation (along with style-of-the-times long hair).

Christopher Walken, with his typical pause-rich style of speaking making him one of the true weirdos among U.S. male actors who’ve been around 30 or more years, is Frank’s father. With a Long Island–ish accent and a stab at Italian flavor to some of his speech, this father seems to try hard to support his family—the one other member is his French-born wife, whom he met during his service in World War II (and his being the only American to take her home as a mate is a landmark event the family seems to make a ritual of noting on occasion). Later in the movie we find he runs a stationers’ store.

But he seems to run afoul of the “financial authorities”—he has an ongoing battle with the IRS over back taxes (actual tax fraud, we hear about), alluded to in the film in a few places. He gets frustrated enough (and has enough moxie) to want to sue the IRS. Early on, the family must “downsize” their lifestyle—get rid of the old Caddy, move into a more affordable home. Eventually the mother and father split (she will eventually marry an associate of the father’s from a Rotary Club in Long Island [New Rochelle, to be precise]).

Yet Frank and his father seem “of a piece” in terms of their talents for not entirely playing by the rules. When Frank, alienated in a new school, pretends to be a substitute French teacher for some days, and the parents are called in by the principal to discuss the prank, the mother is suitably disapproving, but father and son share an appreciative chuckle.

It would appear that the parents’ split precipitates Frank’s life of con-artist crime. This is suggested in the film’s Wikipedia article. In real life, apparently, Frank Abagnale never saw his parents again after the running away shown at the end of the first ~25 minutes of the film. But in the film, Frank returns to his aging father a couple times—as if to try to win approval, especially in his interest to show he’s trying to “get it all back.” He means their middle-class lifestyle they’d originally be at or within grasp of.

These might seem small people (though maybe not by everyone’s standards today), and Frank’s con-game life might be darkly amusing as true-crime stories can be, especially one depicted in a sort of light/sometimes-comic way as this one is. But what’s really interesting is how the G-man after Frank tails Frank doggedly determined to get his man and, more interestingly, as can happen in such situations, the G-man and Frank come to bond in the way that can happen between law enforcer and someone living outside the normal rules of society. The G-man will later be key to Frank’s rehabilitation.

Frank also, we see, is a talented man—his attention to detail, so important to a forger, show up early: noticing the staining of wine on his parents’ carpet getting smeared in; or finding on the sofa the club pin of a man his mother is apparently having an affair with.

Tom Hanks in a tour de force performance

Tom Hanks provides a lot of color to his character, Carl Hanratty (according to the film’s Wikipedia article, there was no FBI agent Carl Hanratty in the real case, but there was an FBI agent named Sean O’Riley who was after Abagnale). Dressed in humorless, plain black “Establishment” pants and jacket (rather like a Blues Brother), Carl is truly a “square” individual, even if he develops a sort of “hip” fondness for Frank. (By the way, costumes were designed by Mary Zophres, the Coens’ preferred costumer.) Carl is humorless enough that his associates on the Abagnale case once make note of his humorlessness, to which he responds with a harsh joke.

But Hanks really plays up the workaday-stiff quality. You see him stand watching the clock, toward the end of the movie, when Frank isn’t in to his new job yet. He has that sort of bowed-out-belly, slightly splayed-feet look that a man gets whose posture is a bit like a rooster’s, when incidentally he no longer cares how un-sexy he looks. Or check him out when he is at the wedding party, helmed by the Louisiana lawyer played by Martin Sheen; in one brief scene, Hanks, Sheen, and the woman playing Sheen’s character’s wife are standing out in front of the big Victorian house, and Hanks’ Carl is moving around like a robotic chicken, nerdy/dignified/polite, each move squared. So even at a party, he is a stiff. He reminds you of the remark some commentator made a few years ago of Nixon seeming like someone who wore his wing-tips to the beach.

At other times, Hanks—usually so serious as Carl—can exhibit passing humor of a somewhat savage kind. When he and his associates are seated with Frank’s mother in her new household’s living room, and one associate hesitatingly keeps reaching for a fork and calling off the move, suddenly Carl intervenes and gets him a fork, then hands it to him as if he’s going to stab him with it. Hanks has been called an actor like a Gary Cooper (I guess, meaning with some wide, Everyman appeal), but it seems to me he can inhabit a character, quirks and all, so deeply that you almost don’t see how much he’s taken it upon himself to display someone else’s un-Hanks-like panoply of traits.

Details of the story arc

* DiCaprio’s Abagnale is a charmer, as I suppose con men so often are—he can get people into cooperating with him through friendly small talk, compliments (especially to women), and such little ploys as presenting a necklace he says he found in a parking lot, and it “must have slipped right off your neck!”—a trick he learned from his father. This trick doesn’t work equally well on everyone, but it does do well enough in one case to get him a rather “advanced date,” so to speak, with an apparently “easy” airline stewardess.

* Jennifer Garner turns up as a call girl Frank encounters one night in the corridor of a big hotel. The two young people show they are, sort of, peas in a pod in terms of being charming operators, and after he has invited her into his room—she is no dummy—and they are negotiating over what to pay her for a night, Frank ends up having her accept one of his bogus checks, with some cash back ($400 in change) out of her bosom-area “wallet.” (This could be said to exemplify something we can say characterizes an unsettling amount of U.S. business today: you don’t know who’s screwing whom.) But with her Jennifer Garner–style charm laminating a probable tough-operator personality, you figure Frank ought to be careful he doesn’t encounter her again. Her stiletto heels look like they could puncture a truck tire with one kick. (Ironically, this scene is intercut with glimpses of Carl Hanratty in one humdrum episode of his own nerdy life: lumping his time away in a Laundromat, getting his white shirts stained from some red whatsit that crept into his laundry from the woman using the machine next to his.)

* “You didn’t just call to apologize. You have no one else to call!” This line from Carl as he has a frank conversation with Frank (sorry for the pun), with Frank having apologized for tricking Carl at a Southern motor lodge, shows that an isolation Frank is in, and the sheer closing-in side of the chase relationship, is leading Carl to become a new father figure for Frank. This is a very interesting psychological component of the film. I defer commenting on this more, either as to this film’s specific handling of it or as to the phenomenon generally. Something of the same thing is seen in the fact that, in torture contexts, a sort of emotional identification, paradoxically, forms between the tortured and the torturer. This is a more violence-borne phenomenon that I would need to prepare even more to discuss. The bonding between Frank and Carl is one more borne of Frank’s neediness, and is a more innocuous kind. But in both the criminal and torturer situations, the bonding happens partly because the relationships are radically outside normal social norms.

* In a relatively late scene, Frank is at the Louisiana home of his girlfriend, a rather innocent nurse Brenda (played by Amy Adams) whom he has met at a Georgia hospital. At one point, a Sixties-era homey moment pops up like Jiffy Pop when Mitch Miller (do some of you remember him?) is on the TV, and it’s time to sing along with some old Irish ditty. Frank tries to play along, maybe sadly envious of such innocent family fellowship. Martin Sheen, as Brenda’s father, shows how courtly and fatherly he can be after his (Sheen’s, not the character’s) strenuous decades-old work in the likes of Apocalypse Now (1979). Frank has a somewhat similar “epiphany” when some old tune is on the radio and the nurse’s parents are in the kitchen, swaying enjoyably to the music. Frank sees the precious family life he has lost when his parents separated, and which in some desperate, devious way he is trying to recover (or replace) with his rich series of cons.

* I won’t say much about the cute repeated motif of the story about the two mice that “fell into a bucket of cream,” which Frank is first impressed with when his father uses it at a Rotary meeting. The father poignantly uses it later at a lunch that he and his “newly on the make” son have; and still later, Frank uses to an inadvertently humorous end, as a form of saying grace at Brenda’s family’s dinner table.