Photo caption: Wagner Moura in THE SECRET AGENT. Courtesy of NEON.
The Secret Agent is both a superb movie and an unexpectedly original immersive experience. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho embeds his slow burn thriller into 1977 Brazil, and Mendonça creates an unsurpassed sense of time and place, which is absolutely absorbing.
Wagner Moura plays a man traveling under an assumed name, making his way across the country in a VW Beetle. Eventually, we learn that his name is Armando, and he’s returning to his home city of Recife. He’s on the down low now, on the run from something, but when he later learns the particulars of the threat against him, his flight becomes increasingly urgent and cloak-and-dagger.
In the first scene, at a rural gas station, Mendonça tells us three things about the setting. Disorder reigns. Life is cheap. The police are unabashedly corrupt.
Mendonça doesn’t paint a picture of a regime like Pinochet’s Chile, where th state itself is hunting down its perceived dissenters and eliminating them by imprisonment, torture and extra-judicial execution. Rather, Mendonça’s 1977 Brazil is chaotic, where the government, casually and without much organization, tolerates or even perpetrates murder at the private whims of the rich. While the rich and their henchmen call their targets “communists”, this isn’t ideological, it’s for the most personal of interests, such as revenge and greed. Indeed, Armando isn’t a dissident activist; he’s a technology professor whose success at his job has become inconvenient for a crooked industrialist.
The cops are portrayed, often comically, as vulgar louts; the ongoing feeling of menace in The Secret Agent stems from their unaccountability. The Secret Agent simmers with tension until Mendonça brings the story to a boil with Hitchcockian suspense in a humdrum government office and an explosively thrilling chase through the sidewalks and alleys of Recife.
In juxtaposition to the life-and-death stakes of Armando’s story, it is Carnival time, and the population at large is embracing boisterous partying and carefree sensuality. The local media has created a fantastic bogeyman to sell newspapers, which Mendonça hilariously brings to life. There are recurring themes of sharks, dismembered legs and movies.
One of the movies (also shark-themed) is Jaws. Besides the movies and popular music, Mendonça brings us the cars and the dress of 1977, down to details like a Nadia Comaneci poster in the background. I have no idea how he filled the street of Recife with hundreds of extras, all dressed as in 1977 fashion. It’s very, very hot, and the men wear their shirts open, or not at all.
We’re jarred when we see an iPhone on a tabletop, Mendonça’s clever tipoff that he has jumped the story 48 years into the future.
The plot is about what will happen to Armando, and Mendonça reveals the answer in a surprisingly non-exploitative way. It’s underplayed, and it’s really perfect.
Wagner Moura carries the film, emanating Armando’s unusual decency, intelligence, and determination (and maybe too much stubborness for his own good).
As good as is Moura, The Secret Agent astounds with its amazingly deep cast and pitch-perfect performances. We come to know even the most minor characters as distinct individuals without tereotypes, and there are over 20 indelible performances. In particular, the child actor Enzo Nunes, playing Armando’s six-year-old son, gives a strongly textured performance reacting to Armando’s explanation of his mother’s death. Their are eight villains, each loathsome in entirely singular ways. This is the first year that the Academy Awards are granting an Oscar for casting, and The Secret Agent is justifiably nominated.
Mendonça had a US arthouse hit in 2016 with the Sonia Braga showcase Aquarius. That film was critical of the political status quo, and the Brazilian government’s refusal to submit it for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar created a controversy, detailed in this New York Times article.
The Secret Agent is nominated for four Oscars: Best Picture, Best International Picture, Best Actor and Best Casting. It should have been nominated for Best Director. You can stream it from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.
Photo caption: Amanda Seyfried in THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Let’s get this out of the way at the outset – I don’t care for movie musicals, and, beforehand, I didn’t know that The Testament of Ann Lee was a musical. But I did not walk out on The Testament of Ann Lee because it is a musical – I walked out because it is a dreary, self-important musical.
This is a biopic of the woman who came to lead the Shaker religious sect in 18th century England, seen by followers as a female Christ, and founded the utopian Shaker settlement in America.
The talented and ever appealing Amanda Seyfried stars as Ann Lee, and this is the third feature for Mona Fastvold as a director. Fastvold co-wrote Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux and The Brutalist, and Corbet co-wrote The Testament of Ann Lee. with Fastvold. In trying to make a compelling portrait of spiritual zeal, the filmmakers had to address two challenges – the life of Ann Lee itself and the Shakers themselves – and they failed.
First, Ann Lee grew up in Manchester, England, in the mud-1700s, where even the families of artisans lived in what we would see as squalor. Already a religious non-conformist, Ann kept getting impregnated by her husband’s inconsiderate rutting, resultng in the birth of four babies, each of whom died before the age of one. Then, she was committed to an asylum. It’s no wonder that this experience would prompt Ann to lead her sect into celibacy. All this (sexual abuse, grief, depression, renouncement of sex) is not fun to watch.
Second, the Shakers were so named because they moved their bodies during worship to express ecstasy (“shaking”). These movements are depicted by the filmmkaers, well, oddly. The film opens with a group of women dressed like Pilgrims doing what looks like spastic Tai Chi. Later, it becomes clear that the Shaker’s movements are choreographed like Broadway numbers. The Shakers make up for their celibacy by rhythmically thrusting their arms instead of their hips. I am familiar with how spiritually euphoric Pentacostals act and even recently experienced Whirling Dervishes in Turkey. But Fastvold and Corbet’s Shaker “shaking” begins as offputtingly contrived before it lapses into the unintentionally funny.
The music, by Daniel Blumberg, who justifiably won an Oscar for The Brutalist’s score, is throbbing. Most of The Testament of Ann Lee was filmed in Hungary with mostly Hungarian technical crew. This is a technically well-crafted film, and the verisimilitude of the 18th century settings is excellent.
In a courageous and fully committed performance, Amanda Seyfried captures both Ann Lee’s suffering and her charismatic self-confidence. And Seyfried sings very well.
Nevertheless, unless you are convinced that you are Christ, stay away.
Photo caption: Seymour Hersh in COVER-UP. Courtesy of Netflix.
Cover-Up is a biodoc of the hard-charging investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib abuses, and reported on the Nixon-Kissinger secret war in Cambodia and Watergate. These were important stories, and Hersh demonstrated remarkable resourcefulness and determination in his work.
He was a hyper-competitive practitioner of gotcha journalism, who himself was once gotten when duped by a salacious forgery
In Cover-Up, we hear about Hersh’s life and career, chiefly from Hersh himself, so we get a flavor of the man. I thought I was familiar with the My Lai massacre, but we hear about details that emerged after the initial sensation – details that I wish that I still didn’t know.
Today, we have a 24-hour news cycle, publication of gossip and fabrications, facts denied as fake news, media empires that are essentially propaganda, infotainment and so-called news obsession with celebrity. Seymour Hersh is an important figure in an era of journalism – the Woodward and Bernstein Era – that we have have moved past., IMO for the worst So, his story, while a notable episode in US political history during the Vietnam War, just isn’t that relevant today.
Cover-Up, which may interest some Baby Boomers, is streaming on Netflix.
Photo caption: Caleb Landry Jones in HARVEST. Courtesy of MUBI.
The artsy allegory Harvest is a period piece, and it takes a while to figure out just what period of European peasant history we’re in. The look of Harvest immediately reminded me of The Return of Martin Guerre, set in 16th century France. But Harvest’s story takes place in Scotland between 1750 and 1860, in the Highland Clearances; in this period, landowners switched to more profitable, less labor-intensive agriculture, thereby depopulating huge swaths of Scotland.
The central character is Walter (Caleb Landry Jones), who is, unusually, a peasant by choice. He had been manservant to a landowner, but fell in love with a rural woman and moved to her village. Walter is more cosmopolitan than his neighbors; although he isn’t familiar with maps, he quickly grasps the concept.
Walter’s former boss and current landlord is Master Kent (Harry Melling), a gentle soul adrift as he mourns his late wife. Kent is not just a kind landlord, he is laughably lenient as he overlooks bad behavior by his peasants.
But as Kent’s wife estate is settled, he is replaced by the ruthless, smirking relative Jordan (Frank Dillane of Urchin), who can’t wait to get rid of all these inconvenient peasants so more sheep can graze. There is, of course, nothing the peasants can do about it.
So, Harvest seems to be an allegory about the inhumanity of unbridled capitalism. That shouldn’t take two hours and 19 minutes to tell, but that’s how long Harvest drags on.
I was eagerly anticipating Harvest because of my admiration for its Greek director, Athina Rachel Tsangari. Her Chevalierwas one of my Best Movies of 2016. (In 2011, Tsangari brought her hilariously offbeat Attenberg to SFFILM.) Harvest is Tsangari’s first English-language feature, and she used a different co-writer this time, which did not help with the resultant film.
If you must stream it, Harvest is available on AppleTV.
Photo caption: Matthew McFadyen in DEATH BY LIGHTNING. Courtesy of Netflix.
In the four-part Netflix miniseries Death By Lightning, Mike Makowsky (Emmy winner for Bad Education) creates a cracking good story out of an exceedingly obscure segment of our history. In a boring history class, this would be a period in which one President (James Garfield) served only six months and the other (Chester Arthur) was never elected President in his own right, with the big political debate being about patronage versus civil service. But there was also political intrigue, corruption, double crosses, a down-to-the-wire election, madness and murder – and Makowsky makes the story pop.
I’ll be commenting on the series itself, and then the history, and finally a personal perspective from my own life in politics. First, Death By Lightning itself. It’s 1880, and the Republican Party, desperate to keep control of the White House, faces a three-way race between the political heavyweights of the time; none of the three can muster a majority, and, after 33 ballots, the delegates settle on a compromise choice who wasn’t even running – James Garfield (Michael Shannon). And, they choose a guy with a completely conflicting political profile, Chester Arthur (Nick Offerman) as Garfield’s running mate; Arthur hadn’t been running, either. Now the fractured party has to reunite behind the unexpected standard-bearers, refill the empty party coffers and navigate though the minefields of controversy.
Most of us have heard of Garfield and Arthur because they were Presidents, but the most powerful and visible leaders of the age were James Blaine and Roscoe Conkling – political giants and personal rivals with a visceral hatred for each other. Death By Lightning accurately shows how Garfield and Arthur try to make their way within the overall battle between Blaine (Bradly Whitford) and Conkling (Shea Whigham). It helps that Conkling was an outrageous, venal, womanizing character with a unique haircut that Whigham gets to flaunt. Whigham’s colorful portrayal of Conkling is reason enough to watch Death By Lightning.
The other best reason to watch Death By Lightning is the performance of Matthew McFadyen as the series’ real main character, Charles Guiteau. Guiteau was a highly functioning schizophrenic narcissist who saw himself as deserving of high office and deluded himself into thinking that he had great value as a political advisor. Guiteau, in his grasping for status, also showed himself to be a cunning fraudster and an audacious compulsive liar. Guiteau’s frustration was that everyone he met saw through his harebrained scheming, crank ideas and pathetic pretensions. As insignificant as was Guiteau, he managed to significantly impact history as a presidential assassin. In Death By Lightning, as Garfield, Arthur, Blaine and Conkling engage in real political competition, Guiteau flits around as a crazy pest – and as a ticking bomb.
The acting in Death By Lightning is superb. Shea Whigham, one of my favorite character actors, and Offerman get the flashiest roles, because Conkling and Arthur were such scallywags. Shannon has both gravitas and reserved magnetism as Garfield. Other standouts include Paula Malcomson as Guiteau’s fictional enabling sister, Betty Gilpin as Lucretia “Crete” Garfield and Dominic Applewhite as a young, idealistic party activist.
But the soaring, award-worthy performance is Matthew McFadyen’s star turn as Guiteau. McFadyen (Tom Wambsgans in Succession) is able to show how Guiteau could opportunistically turn on a dime as he reached for the influence he thought he was due, and how Guiteau just couldn’t keep it together when his lies were exposed. Ever watchable, McFadyen’s Guiteau never fails to entertain.
Incidentally, Death By Lightning was shot in Hungary on Hungarian sets with a Hungarian technical crew, but everything passes for America in 1880-81.
Shea Whigham and Nick Offerman in DEATH BY LIGHTNING. Courtesy of Netflix.
The history (contains some spoilers)
Death By Lightning is fictionalized, but accurately captures the politics of the day and the overall arc of the Garfield/Arthur/Conkling/Blaine/Guiteau story.
Even major American political figures, like Presidents and presidential candidates, had no real security at the time. People of the period must have thought of the Lincoln assassination as an awful, unthinkable one off. A regular person could approach and get up close to any politician or elected official, including inside the White House up to the door of the president’s office; (the Oval Office hadn’t been built yet.)
Unlike today, when all the regular government employment is civil service, essentially all federal jobs were appointed politically. So, if you wanted to be a small town postmaster or a clerk in the Interior Department or consul to Naples, you needed to ask the President (or somebody else who could ask him) for the job. Indeed, that meant that the President of the US himself was always swarmed with job seekers.
Guiteau definitely had historical encounters with Blaine. I couldn’t find documentation of Guiteau meeting Garfield, Arthur or Lucretia Garfield, but those encounters depicted in Death By Lightning are all plausible, especially for someone as devious and persistent as Guiteau, who was always on alert to ambush famous people.
Other things that Death By Lightning gets right historically:
Arthur did feel compelled to reverse himself and enact Garfield’s program, which he had initially opposed.
Crete Garfield was indeed a key White House advisor of her husband’s. It’s not depicted in Death By Lightning, but the Garfields’ marriage became close after a very rocky first few years, as you can read on Crete Garfield’s Wikipedia page.
Guiteau really did join (and get kicked out of) a “free love” sect, the Oneida Community. The creeped-out women, who were having sex with the other men in the sect, did nickname him “Charley Gitout”.
All the details of Guiteau’s capture, trial and execution, including his expectation that President Arthur would pardon him in gratitude, his attempts to monetize his notoriety and the song he composed for the gallows, were EXACTLY as they happened in real life.
Roscoe Conkling really was that arrogant and flamboyant and really did sport that haircut with the curly locks on his forehead.
But this IS a fictionalized account:
Death By Lightning portrays Garfield as some sort of citizen farmer who was reluctantly involved in politics. In 1880, Garfield had been in Congress for 17 years and had risen to become the Chairman of the Appropriations Committee and then the Republican Floor Leader in the House. He was a professional politician and a national figure. This was a guy who had been elected to the State Legislature in his 20s, was able to recruit his own Civil War regiment at age 30, serve with distinction and rise to Major General rank by 34.
In Death By Lightning, Guiteau has a good-hearted, gullible sister Franny who enables his misadventures. In real life, Guiteau had no sister, but had a father who didn’t cause Charles’ mental illness, but who used corporal punishment and toyed with the Oneida Community himself, which certainly didn’t help.
Roscoe Conkling really did blunder his career away by resigning from the Senate, but I couldn’t find any source attributing his defeat to the combined efforts of his wife and his mistress.
It’s also not depicted in Death By Lightning, but Garfield, who was both a classics scholar and ambidextrous, would astound folks by writing in Greek with one hand and Latin with the other SIMULTANEOUSLY. Best Presidential party trick ever.
The politics (contains some more spoilers)
I really enjoyed Death By Lightning, and, as a history buff, especially as a student of American political history, I am admittedly a sucker for historical movies. But I also have spent four decades as a political professional, so I frequently DISLIKE movies about politics that I find naive, simplistic or implausible. So, please pay attention when I heap praise on Death By Lightning for capturing how people in politics really behave – especially those at the margins of politics.
Politics draws a lot of hard-working, ambitious people who are motivated by idealism, duty, hunger power, need for attention, and all kinds of reasons. But American democracy is, by definition a public process, and the high visibility attracts lots of mentally unstable people, too. Every politician – from school board member to presidential candidate – has been surprised by some unbalanced person with a crank fixation or worse. It;s the worst in California, where the Brown Act allows anyone to address any local government body on any topic, resulting in psychotics ranting nonsense at their captive audience of elected officials.
Of course, politicians WANT to be visible at public events. In what’s called the grip and grin, it’s traditional for candidates and their surrogates to get their photos snapped (and now we’re in the Selfie Age) with anybody, even those unknown to them. One anonymous guy who got his picture taken with First Lady Roslyn Carter turned out to be serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
While often a person immediately presents as crazy, sometimes you get a ways into the conversation before it happens. What I really love about Death By Lightning are the scenes with both Blaine and Lucretia, where Guiteau eventually makes the one overreaching remark that causes them to instantly recognize, oh, this guy is a crank.
What people didn’t understand in 1880 was that Guiteau hadn’t opposed Garfield, as John Wilkes Booth did with Abraham Lincoln. Guiteau was a huge Garfield fan, who was disappointed when Garfield’s team found Guiteau too crazy for them to hire. (It was also crazy for Chapman to shoot Reagan in an attempt to impress Jody Foster.) I have spent my life in politics, and I can verify that there are a lot of Guiteaus out there.
Makowsky even takes shot at a contemporary politician; he has Garfield proclaim, “No matter how long America stands, there will still be Roscoe Conklings.”
The exceptional American Experience biodoc Kissinger brings a balanced perspective to one of the most visible and important figures in 20th Century US history, Henry Kissinger. It neither canonizes or vilifies Kissinger, but presents a clear-eyed, unsparing look at his career. That’s important, because Kissinger’s genius at public relations may have exceeded his formidable diplomatic skills and distorted his image during his lifetime.
Kissinger is solid, well-sourced history. We hear directly from several former Kissinger staff members with an intimate, inside view of Kissinger the man and his work, We also hear from Kissinger’s son, who adds insightful personal stories about his father. And, of course, we hear and see archival footage of Kissinger himself, although perhaps never candidly. Kissinger is told in two parts over three hours.
Kissinger emerged into American public consciousness seemingly fully-formed in his mid-forties, a Harvard brainiac with a heavy German accent. Kissinger brings us his German childhood, family emigration to the US and the WW II and college experiences that molded him.
Naturally, Kissinger details the two great foreign affairs triumphs of Kissinger’s partnership with President Richard Nixon. First, there was the historic opening of relations with China, a hitherto mysterious and sinister closed society, The story of Nixon’s original idea, of the ping pong diplomacy and Kissinger’s secret trips is still exciting.
Second, once Nixon and Kissinger had established a relationship with China, they had outflanked the Soviet Union. That resulted in detente with the USSR and the SALT negotiations leading to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the first limitation of the proliferation of nuclear arms.
These were real, groundbreaking achivements that sprang from Kissinger’s brilliance, but also his sense of realpolitik. He was all about superpower positioning, which he prioritized above other considerations. Along the way, Kissinger found tradeoffs acceptable that had undeniably momentous consequences.
In the decade from 1965 though 1975, American society was torn apart by the Vietnam War. Taking responsibility for the war in 1969, Nixon and Kissinger based their policy on “peace with honor”, which meant they wanted to avoid the unpleasant optics of Vietnam falling to the Communists. But, from 1968, at the latest, it was always apparent that the Republic of Vietnam would fall to North Vietnam as soon as the US abandoned their South Vietnamese allies. Wanting to avoid the PR consequences of South Vietnam’s ignominious collapse, Nixon and Kissinger extended the war for another six years. That six-year extension of the cost 38,094 American and countless Vietnamese lives, all to achieve exactly the same outcome as a withdrawal in January 1969.
Kissinger references, but does not emphasize something even worse – that Kissinger and Nixon encouraged the Vietnamese Communists NOT to settle with the US in 1968, but to hold out for a better deal with Nixon.
Kissinger does document, in the greatest detail I’ve seen, the Kissinger-Nixon secret war in Cambodia, and their paranoid and unconstitutional concealment of it. And it covers Kissinger’s role in the overthrow of Chile’s leftist, but democratically elected government, leading to decades of human rights violations by the repressive Pinochet regime. Kissinger also presents voices from Cambodia and Chile, pointing out how, over fifty years later, the two nations remain traumatized by Kissinger policy.
And then there’s Watergate. Kissinger shows how the Nixon Administration’s secret wiretapping of Americans was started b.y Kissinger, wiretapping his own staff suspected of leaks to the press. Of course, the paranoid and vindictive Nixon took it from there. Ironically, this led to Nixon’s downfall, while Kissinger remained at the heart of US foreign policy in the successor administration. Of course, Kissinger was always Teflon to Nixon’s Velcro.
While in government, Kissinger’s public image was shaped by his sickening manipulation of the press, who made him popular celebrity. The public thought of Nixon’s War in Vietnam and Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, while ,lauding Kissinger for diplomatic wins with China and the USSR. It culminated with Kissinger actually winning a Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that he had extended for six years. The guy with whim Kissinger negotiated, Le Duc Tho, turned down his Nobel, rightfully noting that the war was still going on, albeit with Americans having left.
So, Kissinger lays out the history and lets us connect the dots and assesses the legacy of Kissinger’s pragmatism and opportunism. We are able to talk with the Chinese government today, although the relationship is wary at best. We were able to avoid a nuclear showdown with the USSR up to the disintegration of the Iron Curtain in 1991, although Russia remains our most volatile foreign enemy. But at what cost?
If your goal is to project American influence around the world, it’s a fair question to ask, just what does America stand for? If you think that America stands for democratic values, why destroy a democratically elected government? If you think that America stands for freedom of thought and expression, why persecute Americans for their advocacy?
Photo caption: Russell Crowe (left) and Rami Malek (right) in NUREMBERG. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
The psychodrama Nuremberg pits the Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe) against the American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) in a high stakes battle of wits. It’s the end of WW II, the full extent of the Holocaust is just being revealed and the Allies are ready to hold the world’s first war crimes trial.
With the suicides of Hitler and Himmler, Goering is undeniably the highest ranking and highest profile surviving Nazi leader. He and other top Nazis are in a military prison run by the US Army, where Dr. Kelley is assigned. The Army’s interest in the defendants’ mental heath was not primarily humanitarian – it was in preventing their suicides so they could be executed by hanging.
Kelley’s intellectual curiosity, though, is alive with the opportunity that any behavioral scientist would envy – probing the psyches of the men with the worst ever human behavior; these are the men who thought the unthinkable and acted to realize it. (And, more prosaically, he hopes to garner material for a profitable book.)
The lead American prosecutor is US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon), who has to make up the jurisdiction and rules, even the charges, for the trial as he goes along. Nuremberg reminds us that the trial was about more than criminal justice; perhaps even more importantly, the trial was a vehicle to show the world, especially the German people, the extent of the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity, a term coined by Jackson for the trial. Accordingly, the Allied prosecutors made and showed films documenting the extermination camps. These images were not yet widely viewed at the time, and Malek shows Kelley’s revulsion at seeing the atrocities for the first time.
Nuremberg also reminds us that trying Nazi leaders would come at some considerable risk – the possibility that some of the defendants could make themselves sympathetic or martyrs, or, worst of all, even get off scot-free.
Kelley immediately tags Goering as a narcissist, a diagnosis which Goering himself does not dispute. Goering is uncommonly crafty and sly, tempering his his characteristic arrogance with a jovial charm that even threatens to seduce Kelley. Indeed, climbing to the top of a pyramid of back-stabbers was no mean feat, and Goering’s skills at political infighting and social climbing are formidable. Similarly, he possesses a gift to read the room and accordingly flatter and insinuate. Goering even has the hubris to believe that he will be able to manipulate his way out of a conviction.
With some hubris of his own, Jackson is eager to win a match of wits with Goering, planning to break him on the stand. Kelley, who has seen Goering’s charm and intellect up close, thinks that Jackson is likely to lose a frontal assault and perceives that Goering’s vulnerability lies elsewhere.
The Allied officials, including Kelley initially, intuit that any person who committed such monstrous acts must be some unique kind of monster. In 1946, the concept of the banality of evil was still fifteen years away from being coined by Hannah Arendt at the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann. Kelley meets all of the Nuremberg defendants, who Nuremberg accurately depicts as the motley group they were – this one a hoodlum, that one a psychotic crank. Rudolf Hess is depicted as befuddled (or ACTING befuddled as he faked amnesia for the second time). Of course, the Nazis were bullies, and bullies are always less fearsome when they are held to account.
The people who committed the most horrific acts in human history are surprisingly, even disappointingly, ordinary. For every deranged megalomaniac who comes to power, there are plenty of opportunistic thugs who go along for the ride.
Similarly, Kelley finds that Goering is such a greedy, attention-seeking asshole, that he was happy to play along with exploiting racial hatred, even to the point of genocide, just to become richer, more famous and more powerful.
In an impressive performance, Russell Crowe captures Goering’s narcissistic entitlement, magnetic charm, manipulative sociopathy and seemingly unshakable self-confidence.
Kelley starts out with his own hubris, confident that he holds all the cards vis-a-vis Goering, who is not himself a trained psychiatrist and is, after all, locked in a prison cell. Malek is able to portray Kelley’s sense of himself as far more fragile than one would expect, with the potential to become a tragic figure.
John Slattery is very good as a straight-ahead Army prison commander, as is Colin Hanks as an unapologetically venal rival shrink.
In scenes intended to reveal Kelley’s own humanity and manipulations, the character of Goering’s wife Emmy (Lotte Verbeek) is written with too much sympathy for my taste. In real life, Emmy Goering was a real piece of work, who vied with Joseph Goebbel’s wife to outdo Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun as the most prominent figure in the Nazi Reich and who was an enthusiastic looter of Jewish-owned fine art.
The 2023 The Zone of Interest was a masterpiece on the banality of evil. On this subject, I also recommend Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary and, for the Indonesian version of banality of evil, the wonderful documentary Act of Killing. For sheer gall that supassed even Goering’s, there’s another documentary, Speer Goes to Hollywood, in which we hear recordings of Albert Speer pitching a Hollywood movie to rehabilitate his image.
Even casual students of history know that Goering didn’t escape conviction, but Nuremberg, in the tradition of fine courtroom dramas, is able to keep the audience hooked on how Goering, Kelley and Jackson will perform at the trial, and whether Goering will destroy anyone else. Nuremberg open in theaters this Friday.
History is a compendium of individual human stories, oft caught up in a world event. That’s what drives the riveting documentary Last Days in Vietnam, which chronicles the desperate attempts of many South Vietnamese to escape before the Communist takeover in 1975. Over 140,000 got out in the initial exodus, including 77,000 through the means depicted in this film – mostly compressed into just two panicked days.
As if there weren’t enough American folly in Vietnam, the first evacuation plan didn’t include any non-Americans, even including the Vietnamese dependents of Americans. Then there were evacuation plans that were never implemented because of the blockheadedness of the US Ambassador. In the final week, young American military and intelligence officers took matters into their own hand, and began a sub rosa evacuation – ignoring the chain of command, breaking immigration laws and risking career-killing charges of insubordination.
Last Days in Vietnam is directed by Rory Kennedy (daughter of RFK), who recently made Ethel, the affecting bio-doc of her mother. Kennedy does a good job of setting the historical stage for those who didn’t live through the era, and then letting the witnesses tell their compelling personal stories.
The talking heads include:
the six-year-old who jumped out of a helicopter and then watched his mother drop his baby sister on to a ship’s deck;
the US Navy vet who plays the taped diary that he sent home to his wife after the fateful day;
the CIA analyst who unsuccessfully tried to convince the deluded US Ambassador that the end was at hand;
the college student who managed to get over a wall inside the embassy, but found that his freedom was not guaranteed;
Ford Administration officials Henry Kissinger and Ron Nessen, who relate the White House view of the events.
One heroic young American officer managed with ingenuity and chutzpah to get out hundreds of Vietnamese. In the film’s most poignant moment, it falls to him to tell the final American lie to the 400 Vietnamese remaining in the US embassy, for whom there were no more helicopters.
I saw the movie in San Jose with an audience that was about half Vietnamese-American, some of the age to have lived through this period. San Jose’s 100,000 Vietnamese population is largest of any city outside Vietnam, and many Vietnamese-Americans still memorialize the subject of this film as Black April. The exit from the theater was somber.
Last Days in Vietnam is a PBS American Experience film, and there are many clips, images and audio on their site; the entire film can be streamed from YouTube.
Photo caption: Irina Starshenbaum and Douglas Booth in SHOSHANA. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.
The thriller Shoshana is a historical drama set in pre-Israel Palestine that revolves around a love story between two people on different sides. The Jewish journalist Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum) is a committed Zionist and a supporter of the paramilitary group Haganah. Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) is the Assistant Superintendent of Criminal Investigation for the British authorities.
All of the significant characters in Shoshana were real people, and the story takes place from 1933 to 1944. We don’t see many movies set in this time and place. The Ottoman Empire had ruled Palestine for 400 years, until the Ottomans were expelled by the British in WW I. The British then took over governing Palestine, with its majority Arab population and small Jewish community, under an international agreement – the British Mandate – and with a policy that there should be a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Arab residents have been living with a few Jews, but are horrified by the specter of mass Jewish immigration, and they revolt. Tit for tat murders begin between Arabs and Jews, which the British try to suppress. Soon there are rival Jewish paramilitary organizations, each with a different take on how to deal with the British, with the Arabs and with each other. When the British sharply limit Jewish immigration and frustrate the efforts to form a Jewish-majority state, the Jews react with anger against the British.
It becomes a lethal gam of three-dimensional chess. Shoshana does a pretty good job in helping the audience track who is who – and who wants to kill who. Shoshana was directed by the veteran Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, Jude, The Claim, A Mighty Heart and The Trip movies).
Thomas Wilkin and Shoshana Borochov forge an 11-year relationship in an environment that becomes more stressful every year. But Thomas is unwilling to stop being a British policeman, and Shoshana is unwilling to put aside her Zionist beliefs. They love each other, but not enough for either to abandon deeply-held values or their personal identities.
What could doom their relationship is not just arguing politics at the dinner table, but something more ominous – there are plenty of players who want each of them dead. The situation is explosive – often literally. And neither can hide in a Tel Aviv still small enough that everybody knows each other.
The British are trying to cope with what we now know as asymmetrical warfare. A British officer sneeringly asks a Zionist terrorist why he is blowing up women and children, and gets the reply “Because we don’t have the resources that you do“. Ironically, the British in Shoshana are themselves employing mass reprisals, extrajudicial executions and torture that would clearly be considered war crimes today.
Of course, British colonial rule was known for arrogant, racist, and culturally tone-deaf twits, and they are represented by Shoshana‘s villain, police official Geoffrey Morton (the fine actor Harry Melling).
Arabs and their cause may not be depicted in depth in Shoshana, but are shown as victims of both Jewish terrorism and British atrocities.
The historical events constitute the origin stories for both the nation of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The British throw up their hands and fal to provide for Palestinian self-determination within the borders of Palestine. The Jewish organizations in Shoshana later evolved into the two major Israeli political parties of the past 75 years, and the Haganah morphed into the Israeli Defense Forces. Israel has since become a military power and now faces its own asymmetrical warfare.
Given the impact of this history upon the current day, we might have expected more films about this period. After all, there are a zillion films about the Holocaust and a lot set in post-1948 Israel. In 1960, Otto Preminger made the blockbuster film Exodus from the 1958 Leon Uris novel which was the biggest best seller in US since Gone With the Wind. Exodus was set in the period between 1946 and 1948. (My parents saw Exodus at a drive-in with me as a small boy in the back seat.) No less than the pioneering Zionist leader and Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion said of the novel, “as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel“.
Shoshana is far more clear-eyed and nuanced than Exodus. Shoshana reflects a historical setting that was complicated, and tells the story of lovers’ inner conflicts amid a dynamic and perilous external conflict. Shoshana, which I reviewed earlier this year for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, is now streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.
Photo caption: Irina Starshenbaum and Douglas Booth in SHOSHANA. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.
The thriller Shoshana is a historical drama set in pre-Israel Palestine that revolves around a love story between two people on different sides. The Jewish journalist Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum) is a committed Zionist and a supporter of the paramilitary group Haganah. Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) is the Assistant Superintendent of Criminal Investigation for the British authorities.
All of the significant characters in Shoshana were real people, and the story takes place from 1933 to 1944. We don’t see many movies set in this time and place. The Ottoman Empire had ruled Palestine for 400 years, until the Ottomans were expelled by the British in WW I. The British then took over governing Palestine, with its majority Arab population and small Jewish community, under an international agreement – the British Mandate – and with a policy that there should be a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Arab residents have been living with a few Jews, but are horrified by the specter of mass Jewish immigration, and they revolt. Tit for tat murders begin between Arabs and Jews, which the British try to suppress. Soon there are rival Jewish paramilitary organizations, each with a different take on how to deal with the British, with the Arabs and with each other. When the British sharply limit Jewish immigration and frustrate the efforts to form a Jewish-majority state, the Jews react with anger against the British.
It becomes a lethal gam of three-dimensional chess. Shoshana does a pretty good job in helping the audience track who is who – and who wants to kill who. Shoshana was directed by the veteran Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, Jude, The Claim, A Mighty Heart and The Trip movies).
Thomas Wilkin and Shoshana Borochov forge an 11-year relationship in an environment that becomes more stressful every year. But Thomas is unwilling to stop being a British policeman, and Shoshana is unwilling to put aside her Zionist beliefs. They love each other, but not enough for either to abandon deeply-held values or their personal identities.
What could doom their relationship is not just arguing politics at the dinner table, but something more ominous – there are plenty of players who want each of them dead. The situation is explosive – often literally. And neither can hide in a Tel Aviv still small enough that everybody knows each other.
The British are trying to cope with what we now know as asymmetrical warfare. A British officer sneeringly asks a Zionist terrorist why he is blowing up women and children, and gets the reply “Because we don’t have the resources that you do“. Ironically, the British in Shoshana are themselves employing mass reprisals, extrajudicial executions and torture that would clearly be considered war crimes today.
Of course, British colonial rule was known for arrogant, racist, and culturally tone-deaf twits, and they are represented by Shoshana‘s villain, police official Geoffrey Morton (the fine actor Harry Melling).
Arabs and their cause may not be depicted in depth in Shoshana, but are shown as victims of both Jewish terrorism and British atrocities.
The historical events constitute the origin stories for both the nation of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The British throw up their hands and fal to provide for Palestinian self-determination within the borders of Palestine. The Jewish organizations in Shoshana later evolved into the two major Israeli political parties of the past 75 years, and the Haganah morphed into the Israeli Defense Forces. Israel has since become a military power and now faces its own asymmetrical warfare.
Given the impact of this history upon the current day, we might have expected more films about this period. After all, there are a zillion films about the Holocaust and a lot set in post-1948 Israel. In 1960, Otto Preminger made the blockbuster film Exodus from the 1958 Leon Uris novel which was the biggest best seller in US since Gone With the Wind. Exodus was set in the period between 1946 and 1948. (My parents saw Exodus at a drive-in with me as a small boy in the back seat.) No less than the pioneering Zionist leader and Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion said of the novel, “as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel“.
Shoshana is far more clear-eyed and nuanced than Exodus. Shoshana reflects a historical setting that was complicated, and tells the story of lovers’ inner conflicts amid a dynamic and perilous external conflict. Shoshana releases into theaters this weekend.
