Photo caption: Stellan Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve in SENTIMENTAL VALUE. Courtesy of NEON.
Sentimental Value opens with Norway’s top stage actress, Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) on the verge of an epic stage fright meltdown on opening night. Afterwards, she and her historian sister Agnes (Inga Ibdotter Lilleaas) try to get through the funeral of their mother. Unexpectedly, their estranged father Gustave (Stellan Skarsgaard) appears at the family gathering to pay his expects…and perhaps more. Having seen little of their father since they were young girls, Nora and Agnes find his surprising visit to be less of a comfort and perhaps even a provocation. Nevertheless, Gustave plods forth, trying to make nice.
Gustave is a famous European art film director at the end of his career. He’s now ready to make his final film, and he’s written a screenplay for Nora to star in. Still, raging at his decades of emotional neglect, Nora refuses.
Gustave persists hanging around, and lucks into casting the major Hollywood star Rachel (Elle Fanning) as his lead. Awkwardly, Gustave still owns the family home, which never got transferred during the divorce. Now he plans to use it as the shooting location for the film.
Both Nora and Agnes were traumatized by their parents’ breakup. Nora’s anxiety and attachment issues are more obvious, but Agnes’ life has been affected too.
Gustave is self-absorbed, stubborn and often emotionally tone-deaf. But what made him that way? Writer-director Joachim Trier reveals the history of the Borg family home, through flashbacks and through Agnes’ research. What happened in the house to Gustave’s mother molded her. And what Gustave saw of his mother molded him, too. Now, the family dominoes have continued to fall on Nora and Agnes.
Joachim Trier is one of contemporary cinema’s greatest story-tellers, as he has demonstrated in his breakthrough film Reprise, the grievously overlooked Louder Than Bombs and his Oscar-nominated The Worst Person in the World, which also starred Reinsve. Here, we think we’re watching a conventional family drama about a long-absent father, until Trier pulls us into a study of inter-generational emotional damage.
Reinsve and Skarsgard have justly received loads of recognition for their superbly nuanced performances. I was just as impressed by the work of Inga Ibdotter Lilleaas as Agnes, who becomes more and more central as the story evolves.
Trier, Skarsgard and Reinsve will be in the hunt for Oscar nominations for their work here. Sentimental Value is in theaters.
Photo caption: Shi-Yua Ma in LEFT-HANDED GIRL. Courtesy of Netflix.
In the wonderful family dramedy Left-Handed Girl, a family moves back to Tapei. The single mom Shu-Fen (Janet Tsai) opens a noodle stand in a boisterous night market. The teen daughter I-Ann (Shi-Yua Ma) takes a job in a very dodgy betel shop. The five-year-old daughter I-Jing (Nina Ye) starts kindergarten and finds adventure zipping around the night market on her own. Shu-Fen, the mom, is exhausted all the time, and we learn that she’s experiencing grief and shame, too. Each of the three independently faces her own deeply stressful situation, until the revelation of a family secret, in the most awkward of circumstances, brings catharsis.
The extended family lives in Taipei, but offer little support. Shu-Fen’s adult sisters all bicker, Grandma makes international runs for a trafficker, and the grumpy Grandpa insists that I-Jing’s lefthandedness is the work of the devil. (I-Jing takes Grandpa seriously, and unwelcome results ensue.)
All of the angst is leavened with humor, and there are lots of laughs in Left-Handed Girl. The extended family is funny, as is Johnny (Brando Huang), the good-hearted, goofy owner of the gadget stand in the market, who is sweet on Shu-Fen. And there’s Goo-Goo, an unexpected mammal in the story, which I will not spoil.
You may not have heard of Left-Handed Girl’s director, Shih-Ching Tsou, but you’ve seen her work. She met Sean Baker in film editing class, and the two have since collaborated as filmmaking partners. They co-directed their first film, she produced his Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket, and Baker and Tsou co-wrote Left-Handed Girl.
Left-Handed Girl brings us a slice of working class life in urban Taiwan, and family foibles that we all recognize. It also is a pointed critique of traditional gender roles in Taiwan. Although everybody except the grandpa wants to move on from the old-fashioned superstition about left-handedness, they’re all obsessed with saving face and marrying off the daughters so the generational wealth can pass to the son.
The child actor Nina Ye is adorable, and all the is acting excellent. Shi-Yua Ma is superb as what we first see as just a selfish, surly teen, but who grows into a much more complicated character as the story evolves.
Left-Handed Girl is a triumphant directorial debut for Shih-Ching Tsou, and one of the Best Movies of 2025 – So Far. It is streaming on Netflix.
Photo caption: George Clooney and Adam Sandler in Jay Kelly. Courtesy of Netflix.
In the witty and poignant Jay Kelly, the famous movie star Jay Kelly (George Clooney) is having an end-of-career crisis. Jay has two grown daughters and never leaves the house without an entourage led by his longtime manager Ron (Adam Sandler).
His younger daughter (Grace Edwards) is taking a pre-college trip to Europe, which causes him to assess the relationships he has with his daughters. Jay impulsively decides to surprise her in Europe, so he heads off on a private jet with his team of manager, publicist, hair and makeup person, personal assistant and security guy.
Jay is finally forced to face the sharp reality that his daughters have experienced. It’s true, of course, that, as a parent, he has no privacy from fans and paparazzi and that he must leave town to make movies. But it’s clear that Jay hasn’t tried to forge family and personal connections by working around those obstacles. Although he refuses to admit it, he has been content to accept the tradeoffs.
At the same time, the members of Jay’s entourage question how Jay returns the devotion that they give to him. Ron, in particular, must ask himself whether Jay, after a decades-long partnership sees him as a friend. The film could have been aptly titled Jay and Ron.
Jay Kelly is very, very funny throughout, as it sends up the pretensions, narcissism, disloyalty, and hypocrisy that Hollywood is known for. The screenplay was co-written by the film’s director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story) and the actress Emily Mortimer (her first feature screenplay). (Mortimer has a small role as one of Jay’s minions.)
Interestingly, Jay Kelly is not a stand-in for a George Clooney-type A-lister but is more of a Tom Cruise-type action mega star.
George Clooney, who doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously, is perfect as a movie star who does. Adam Sandler is very affecting as Ron. The entire cast is excellent, especially Billy Crudup as an old acquaintance of Jay’s. 84-year-old Stacy Keach plays Jay’s dad, and, unsurprisingly, he’s a hoot.
The most compelling performance is by Riley Keough as Jay’s elder daughter, who is determined to survive the emotional damage she has suffered.
This is an enjoyable comedy with substance. Jay Kelly is in theaters now and releases on Netflix on December 5.
Photo caption: Liz Larsen and Michael Strassner in THE BALTIMORONS. Courtesy of IFC.
Here’s the perfect film for the family to watch on Thanksgiving Weekend (after the littlest kids have gone to bed). In the goodhearted and witty comedy The Baltimorons, a cracked tooth sends a guy to an emergency dentist and launches them into a nighttime adventure through Baltimore that could result in romance. It’s a funny movie about second chances.
Each of them faces a very problematic invitations. Cliff (Michael Strassner) has been sober for a few months, but he hasn’t found work. His lack of resources and his failed suicide attempt have left him in an unhealthy power imbalance with his girlfriend. He’s got to choose between his promised appearance at the girlfriend’s family holiday gathering and the chance to perform again at a pop-up comedy show organized by his buddies. Problem is, he is terrified that he can’t be funny without drinking.
The dentist Didi (Liz Larsen), in contrast, has a strong business and owns a nice home. But she’s personally reeling from her divorce, which has left her lonely and gashed a hole in her confidence. Didi is suffering the humiliation of a courtesy invite to the Christmas party hosted by her ex-husband and his new wife. So, we have two talented people in moment pf vulnerability and recovery. An impounded car sends them out together, and comic situations ensue.
What happens is funny, but The Baltimorons succeeds because of its humanity – we really care about Cliff and Didi.
Cliff and Didi would make an unlikely romantic pairing. He’s already in a serious relationship, after all. She is significantly older, and more well-educated. She’s highly functional, and he’s a floundering goof.
The Baltimorons reflects the sharp comic sensibility of writer-director Jay Duplass. With his brother Mark, Duplass wrote and directed Baghead, Cyrus and Jeff Who Lives at Home, and has since been busy directing/producing in television and acting (Transparent, Lynn Shelton’s Outside In). This is the first feature he has directed since 2012. At its world premiere, The Baltimorons won the Best Narrative Feature award at SXSW.
I saw The Baltimorons at its third public screening, at the SLO Film Fest with Jay Duplass in attendance. It won the SLO Film Fest’s Best of Fest. It’s now available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.
Photo caption: Ebrahim Azizi (right) in IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT. Courtesy of NEON.
The powerful (and often funny) drama It Was Just an Accident begins with a minor driving incident that triggers memories of traumas Those memories spark a new life-and-death situation.
Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) is a workaday auto mechanic with a dodgy back. We later learn that he was locked up by the Iranian government and repeatedly tortured. Vahid was blindfolded during his ordeal, but he remembers the voice of the secret policeman who tormented him and the squeaky limp of his prosthetic leg. Now he hears what he believes is that voice and that squeak – and he impulsively kidnaps the man, intending revenge.
Problem is, the guy (Ebrahim Azizi) denies being the torturer and his explanation of his prosthetic leg is plausible. So Vahid tracks down former fellow prisoners to confirm the guy’s identity.
Vahid and his peers were not dissident ideologues, but just factory workers who complained about not being paid for months. Nevertheless, they were all severely traumatized by their experience, and each of them really, really hates their torturer.
Their suspect is sedated and trussed up inside a box in Vahid’s van, as Vahid picks up each of his witnesses. All of them have different personalities. Vahid is impulsive (obviously), and the photographer Shiva {Mariam Afshar} is clear-headed and decisive. One of them, Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), is in her wedding dress for a photo session and comes with a bewildered would-be groom (Majod Panahi). The most volatile one, Hamid (Mohammed Ali Elyasmehr) seems to be seriously mentally ill.
Mohammed Ali Elyasmehr, Majid Panahi and Hadis Pakbaten in IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT. Courtesy of NEON.
The motley group faces a moral question – is it just to kill the man who committed atrocities against them? Or would that act of violence lower them to the moral level of the hated regime?
And Vahid’s impulsiveness has presented them with a practical problem. There is the matter of kidnapping, whoever this guy is, so could they get away with letting him go? Would it be suicidal to release a vicious killer who knows where Vahid works? There doesn’t seem to be any way to put the toothpaste back into the tube.
As they careen around Tehran in a van with a live body in a box, circumstances get unpredictably more complicated – and absurdly funny – all the way to the emotionally devastating ending.
Mariam Afshari in IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT. Courtesy of NEON.
Written and directed by the acclaimed Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident is a harsh critique of the Iranian government, both for its worst human rights violations and for its petty corruption. Making this film was an act of incredible courage by Panahi. Remarkably, Panahi shot this movie secretly, including even some scenes in in plain sight on the streets of Tehran.
Panahi is a critical and industry favorite because he is persecuted by the Iranian government. By supporting Panahi, the cinema world supports free expression and human rights in Iran.
He’s also a damn fine filmmaker, the only director to win the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, the Golden Lion at Venice, the Golden Leopard at Locarno and the Palm d’Or. How Panahi shot a movie this great IN SECRET is miraculous.
It Was Just an Accident won the Palm d’Or at Cannes and is high on my list of the Best Movies of 2025 – So Far. It’s now in theaters.
Photo caption: Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck in NOUVELLE VAGUE. Photo credit. Jean-Louis Fernandez; courtesy of Netflix
With Nouvelle Vague, one of America’s greatest filmmakers, Richard Linklater, pays tribute to the French New Wave, which invigorated global cinema and inspired generations of American indie filmmakers. Nouvelle Vague, Linklater’s first film in French, tells the story of Jean-Luc Godard making his first film, the groundbreaking and influential Breathless. And it’s a hoot.
The French New Wave was a period when the young film writers at a cinema magazine got to direct their own movies. Basically, this was a time in the late 1950s when a bunch of movie nerds got to create their own cinema, resulting in a burst of freshness and originality. Godard’s peers Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol had already transitioned from film critic to movie director, but Godard still hadn’t directed his first film, and he was itching to get started.
With all the arrogance of a 29-year-old novice who is certain of his abilities, Godard famously proclaimed that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. This is that film.
In Nouvelle Vague, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) gets the casting gift of a famous Hollywood starlet, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), to team with his boxer buddy Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin, who is an acting novice. Godard leads his cast and crew on an anarchic 20-day shoot that Godard makes up as he goes along, with no script and no shooting schedule, which challenges the mental health of his producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfurst). No one can tell if the film, if it gets finished, will be any good.
The key here is the character of Godard himself (brilliantly played by Marbeck in his feature debut), who is posing as an important artist even as he tries to become one, wearing sunglasses day and night. A subversive trickster, he is strong-willed and self-confident for sure, but is he just a narcissistic dilettante? Is his artistic vision just a delusion? So, the making of Breathless is a wild ride, one turns out to be interesting because we know that Breathless will turn out to be an artistic success and an important, influential film.
Linklater fills the Nouvelle Vague with a Who’s Who of French New Wave figures and plenty of jokey references to that style of filmmaking. LInklater even shows the last scene of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, with its indelible freeze-frame, reflected in Godard’s sunglasses.
So, can you enjoy Nouvelle Vague even if you’re unfamiliar with the French New Wave, and haven’t seen any Godard films? Yes. The madcap nature of the shoot, and the other characters all reacting with amusement, frustration and disbelief to Godard’s outsized personality are plenty entertaining.
But, if you a cinephile, then Nouvelle Vague is a Must See. Linklater’s references are delightful. The actors physically look just like the real people they are playing, and Zoey Deutsch looks phenomenal in Seberg’s iconic blonde pixie cut and Breton stripes. Not many faces resemble Belmondo’s but Aubrey Dullin’s does; Dullin perfectly captures Belmondo’s rogueish charm and working class lack of pretension.
This is the Jean-Luc Godard of his early masterpieces (Breathless, Contempt, Band of Outsiders), before his arrogance made him into a tiresome polemicist. That later insufferable Godard is satirized in Godard, Mon Amour by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), which would make a fine second feature on the double bill. (I have found all of the Godard films since 1967’s Weekend to range from disappointing to completely unwatchable.)
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: Jennifer Lawrence in DIE MY LOVE. Courtesy of MUBI.
In perhaps the year’s best onscreen performance, Jennifer Lawrence delivers an astonishing portrait of a young woman’s mental breakdown in Die My Love. Lawrence plays Grace, a writer who marries Jackson (Robert Pattison), whose job requires him to be on the road for days at a time. They move into Jackson’s inheritance, a ramshackle house in Montana outside the town Jackson’s mom Pam (Sissy Spacek) lives in. And they have a baby.
Grace is playful and imaginative, and she adores her baby. But she’s isolated at home with no relief from the grind of the baby care. She has lost her interest in writing. She becomes tired, irritable and down in the dumps. Jackson is selfish, clueless about Grace’s changing needs, and has a knack for doing exactly the wrong thing, like bringing home the most annoying pet dog on the planet.
Grace’s mother-in-law Pam, who likes Grace, sees that she is struggling and tries to help. But Grace slides into depression with ever more alarming symptoms and decompensates. Finally, Grace’s behavior shocks Jackson, who starts doing everything he can think of to help, but he is ill-equipped, and it’s too little, too late.
Many actors would love to portray an explosive meltdown, and Lawrence makes you lean back in your theater seats when Grace goes off. But Jennifer Lawrence’s genius is most apparent in the moments that she is just BEING in her condition and in the moments that she is trying to hold it together for others. As Grace’s psyche evolves, this is a performance of astonishing texture and nuance.
Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence in DIE MY LOVE. Courtesy of MUBI.
Pattinson is excellent as Jackson, who the audience initially sees as a shit, but who becomes very sympathetic as he struggles to help Grace get right, before her illness destroys him, too. Sissy Spacek, is perfectly cast as Pam, who has her own struggles with grief and aging, but brings her good heart, intuition and common sense to become the audience’s surrogate.
What’s going on with Grace? I think The Wife was correct is suggesting that Grace came with an underlying bi-polar disorder which was exacerbated by the postpartum depression. Early in the movie, we see Grace as playful, but maybe that playfulness is a bit frenzied. Of course, it’s fun for Jackson then, but she’s destined to become way more than he can handle. Late in the movie, we see flashbacks from their wedding, and the signs are there.
Die My Love was directed and co-written by Lynne Ramsey, who seems to specialize in madness (We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Here). Ramsey keeps us off-balance by keeping us unsure about whether what is onscreen is Grace’s real experience or a dream, delusion, or hallucination. Both a black horse and the LaKeith Stanfield character appear to Grace multiple times, but perhaps only once each in reality. It’s just not always clear. After the movie, The Wife and I actually had different views about which of the ending scenes really happened or were imagined. This is smart, artsy filmmaking, which works to keep us guessing.
So, should you see Die My Love? It’s an epic acting performance in a well-made Feel Bad movie, so there you are. Die My Love is now in theaters.
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?
