Ticket to the Dark Side: Catching Hell

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light.
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville – mighty Casey has struck out.

Published in 1888, Ernest Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” is designed as a portrait of utter baseball catastrophe. As the poem opens, failure is imminent. The home team is down two runs and facing its last out. But then two men get on base and the club’s power hitter comes to the plate, and suddenly hope swells again. Mighty Casey watches one strike go by. Then he watches another. And then he swings … and misses, and the game ends, and the poem ends, and we’re left with the aching feeling of what might have been. For 115 years, this is what baseball heartbreak looked like – victory within reach, fans daring to believe, and the hero in the uniform failing to hit it out of the ballpark. On October 14, 2003, baseball heartbreak got a new face. This time around there was a foul ball within reach. The time fans dared to turn on one of their own. This time a Little League coach in a turtleneck and a Walkman had to be escorted from the ballpark for his safety. This was the night that mighty Casey’s place in baseball infamy was surpassed by a quiet, unassuming fan named Steve Bartman.

If you’re a baseball fan you know this story, which is the subject of Alex Gibney’s Catching Hell. Or do you? Gibney’s film is about the events of October 14, 2003, but just as much it’s about our selective memory of that night. So before you watch the film, which premieres tonight on ESPN at 8 pm ET, ask yourself: What do you remember? You remember the play, certainly: A foul ball slicing down the left field sideline at Wrigley Field; the crowd standing up and reaching to catch it; Chicago Cubs left fielder Moises Alou leaping up along the railing, trying to catch it, too; and the ball bouncing off Steve Bartman’s hands in the front row, preventing Alou from making the play. You also remember the aftermath: Alou throwing a temper tantrum that Lou Piniella would have found excessive and Bartman sitting motionless in his seat as Chicago’s finest screamed at him, and worse. You probably also remember the stakes: the Cubs were trying to get to their first World Series since 1945 in hope of winning it for the first time since 1908. You might even remember how many outs stood between the Cubs and the Series at that point, Cubs fans certainly do: five. But do you remember anything else? Do you remember the score at the time or by the end of that inning? Do you remember the other muffed catch that followed Bartman’s? Heck, do you even remember the Cubs’ opponent that night? Chances are good you don’t. In memory, the event is distilled into three images so tight in their geography that it’s easy to forget there were eight other Cubs on the field at the time. Flash! We see the hands of fans reaching. Flash! We see Alou screaming. Flash! We see Bartman dejected and stunned still, the loneliest man on the planet. It’s that last image that really lingers, like the last five words of Thayer’s poem.

A VORP of 16.3: Moneyball

“It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball,” Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane says more than once in Moneyball. Truer words have never been spoken. Sports thrive on sentimental idealizations – unconscious efforts to tie what happens on the field to our values off it. We want our sports heroes to look like the Greek gods we make them out to be. Even more, we want them to be good people. We want losers to be jerks receiving their comeuppance. We want to believe that victorious teams have chemistry and camaraderie, and that they win because they want it more and work harder for it. Beyond all of that, many of us want to believe that we matter, that the team couldn’t do it without our support, and that the position in which we sit as we watch the game, or whether we watch it at all, affects the balance of the force that decides the outcomes of the games. Moneyball opens with a shot of Beane sitting in Oakland’s dark and empty stadium listening to his team take on the New York Yankees in a postseason game 3,000 miles away. Beane flips on the transistor radio sitting on his knee to get an audio glimpse of what’s happening. Then he flips it off. Then he flips the radio on again. Then he flips it off. Oakland’s season has come down to this moment of this game and yet Beane avoids listening – not so much because he can’t bear the stress of elimination but because he’s fearful that his listening might somehow hurt his team’s chances of coming through in the clutch.

Moneyball is about the effort to demythicize baseball, to see it for what it really is. Based on the tremendous (if imperfect) book by Michael Lewis, it tells the tale of Beane’s efforts to keep Oakland and its subterranean payroll competitive against the likes of New York and its money-printing machine. Beane realizes that for as long as the A’s try to beat the Yankees by playing their game – acquiring the consensus premier talent that fetches baseball’s highest salaries – it will forever be playing from behind. In order to close the gap, Beane and the A’s must redefine what talent looks like, starting by accepting that the naked eye is an imperfect judge of talent. Beane’s idea is to embrace the philosophies of Bill James and assess talent through the stat sheet and, just as important, let a computer determine which stats are worth paying attention to. This all seems fairly logical when read on the page, but when put into practice Beane receives everything from puzzled looks to hostile objections from baseball’s romanticists. In their eyes, Beane is suggesting the A’s should pick whom to date based on a computer algorithm, with aesthetic beauty and chemistry thrown out the window. In their eyes, Beane is shitting on romance.

Deadwood: Honoring Cocksuckers and Hoopleheads

As anyone following me on Twitter knows, I purchased all three seasons of Deadwood without having seen an episode. I was drawn by three things: 1) the buzz I’d heard about the series, 2) the fact that it was a Western (they don’t make many of those anymore) and 3) the 50-percent off deal that was too good to pass up. From late spring into early autumn I went through all three seasons, coming to the end last night.

In lieu of a traditional review, of an episode, a season or the series, I’ve decided instead that the best way for me to honor this decidedly character-driven series is to rank its many characters, while mentioning some favorite moments along the way.

I’m sure this goes without saying, but the following is written with the expectation that readers have watched the series. Major spoilers ahead.

There’s Something Inside Him: Drive

Given that he wears a white jacket with a big gold scorpion embroidered on the back, and at one point alludes to the parable of the scorpion and the frog, it’s tempting to compare Ryan Gosling’s character in Drive to the clawed venomous arthropod he so clearly reveres. Yet the more I reflected on the film, the more Gosling’s character reminded me of a shark. He’s silent, dangerous and seemingly indifferent to the world around him. He’s streamlined, with a sharp nose and unrevealing eyes. He’s forever moving forward, as if he has no fear of what’s in front of him, as if he has no concept of what it would mean to stop. And underneath a sometimes docile exterior, he’s hardwired for violence, a toothpick dangling from his mouth as if ready to remove the flesh of his victims from his maw. It was only by thinking of Gosling’s character this way that I remembered the seemingly innocuous scene that explains him. Early in the film, Gosling’s unnamed character sits on a couch with the young son of his neighbor and watches cartoons. “Is he a good guy or a bad guy?” Gosling’s character asks in the direction of the TV. “A bad guy,” the boy answers without hesitation, “he’s a shark.” Gosling’s character chews on that analysis. “There are no good sharks?”

That’s the rhetorical question that unlocks this film. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive is a stylish throwback to Michael Mann’s Thief, with potent doses of Manhunter, Heat and Collateral mixed in. It’s a mood picture, frequently unfolding under the glow of the Los Angeles skyline (as eerily magical here as ever), or in romantically lit hallways and garages. One notable scene plays out in a strip club dressing room in front of topless dancers who sit statue-still in front of their makeup mirrors while a man is gruesomely beaten a few feet away, careful not to ruin the aesthetic by moving. The film’s soundtrack is a mix of earnest ‘80s-synth-inspired tunes and original pieces by Cliff Martinez (Solaris) that remind of the Tangerine Dream soundtrack for Thief and some of the Kronos Quartet pieces from Heat, respectively. Like many a Mann film, in particular Heat and Public Enemies, the sound design emphasizes the noise of violence, be it the firing of a gun, the slashing of a knife or, in one ill advised case, the slapping of a face. But for all the ways that Refn’s film stirs memories of Mann like a Quentin Tarantino picture evokes Sergio Leone, it lacks the same depth of character. Mann’s films, for all their style, are always powerful examinations of men wrestling with themselves; internal dramas brought to life through physical action. Drive nods in that direction, but it never commits, which is why Gosling’s character’s motivations are best understood only in retrospect. He’s profoundly unknowable.

Come On, Everybody! Clap Your Hands!: The Help

The villain in The Help, a film that one way or another is about racial inequality in the American South circa 1963, is a young woman of means named Hilly Holbrook. Played by the fare-skinned, redheaded Bryce Dallas Howard, Hilly is raging racist and an equal opportunity bigot. She refuses to share a toilet with her black maid. She shuns her ex-boyfriend’s wife for being white trash. And when Hilly’s mother dares to laugh in her direction, Hilly ships Mom off to an old-folks home as punishment. Hilly is a bitch to the extreme, and a monster, too. And so when Hilly gets into her car and speeds over to the house of the film’s free-thinking, compassionate white heroine in order to confront and threaten her, you might expect that Hilly’s journey would be accompanied by an ominous tune in the spirit of the “Imperial March.” Instead, the music on the soundtrack is Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again,” joyfully upbeat and playful. If you want a clue as to the spirit with which writer-director Tate Taylor approaches his material, based on a novel by Kathryn Stockett, look no further. The Help never avoids that there is evil in this world, but at no point does it allow a shadow of despair to ruin its sunny, redemptive outlook.

Given the film’s setting and subject matter, this is a precarious position from which to operate, and, not surprisingly, The Help has been the target of scorn from those who feel it overly sanitizes the very hatred it’s attempting to rebuke. In a wide-ranging condemnation of both the film and the novel, The Association of Black Women Historians point out that for all of Hilly’s unblinking villainy, The Help suggests the grimmest hardships a black woman encountered in the Jim Crow South were tongue-lashings, humiliation and potential unemployment – not physical and often sexual abuse, or even death. Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan is never even name-dropped in The Help, and the white men of the town are largely absent or passive. On the flipside, however, the film’s supporters can’t help but notice that, sanitized though The Help may be, there’s no doubt about its stance against hatred in general and racism specifically. And while the ABWH suggests that the film “reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it,” in fact the opposite is true. The Help makes it clear that, contrary to the myth, the "Mammy" had more in common with the plantation cotton picker than with Alice on The Brady Bunch, thus mostly demystifying the old stereotype. What's really at issue, then, is whether it’s acceptable for a dramatic film to portray the Jim Crow South and have a good time doing it.

Infamous & Elusive: The True Story of Jesse James

The following is my contribution to the Nicholas Ray blogathon, hosted by Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder.

Nicholas Ray’s examination of notorious outlaw Jesse James opens with a bang. The setting is Northfield, Minnesota, circa 1876, and the James Gang is in the midst of the proverbial One Last Job. From an initial shot of a tranquil thoroughfare, the action announces itself with the sound of offscreen gunfire and the sight of a Northfield citizen scrambling for safety crying, “It’s a hold-up!” Over the next frenzied minute, the gunfire seems to come from all angles – from men on horseback and balconies – the editing deliberately amplifying the chaos through rapid shifts in perspective. As Jesse and his brother Frank ride out of town, the shootout ends as suddenly as it began, but the intensity of the opening doesn’t cease. In the next scene we find an agitated lawman giving orders to the town’s telegraph operator. “Tell ‘em to round up every man with a gun and head them off,” the sheriff barks, not yet knowing who he's after. It’s then that another man informs the sheriff that one of the robbers was named Jesse. “Tell ‘em it was the James boys,” the sheriff says, turning back to the telegraph operator with even more urgency than before. “Tell ‘em he’s 400 miles from his own stamping grounds. Tell ‘em it’s a chance of a lifetime to get Jesse James!” In this opening pre-credits sequence, through the excitement of the gunfight, the intensity of the sheriff’s orders and the wide-eyed interest of on-looking townfolk, Ray conveys that Jesse James is more than an outlaw. He’s a celebrity and the subject of fascination. And he’s as elusive as a ghost.

So just who was Jesse James? As the title suggest, that’s what the rest of 1957’s The True Story of Jesse James is all about. But from the outset it’s clear that there will be no simple answer to that question. Prior to the gunfight, a title card suggests that James was both a symbol of and a product of the Civil War – a “curious mixture” of good and evil. The screenplay by Nunnally Johnson and Walter Newman revisits Jesse’s life through the perspectives of those who knew him, or only thought they did, both confronting and entertaining the various myths about the man. Ray’s means of transitioning in and out of these recollections is corny at best – dissolves to and from pink-hued clouds meant to mark the leap back in time and suggest the fogginess of memory – but the Rashomon-esque narrative design adds multidimensionality to what is a fairly flat performance by Robert Wagner as Jesse (more on that in a bit). In the eyes of his mother, Jesse is the victim of crimes perpetrated against him by northerners. In the eyes of his wife, Jesse is a committed family man who acts ruthlessly only out of devotion. In the eyes of the public, Jesse is the action-figure of pulp adventure stories, whether playing Robin Hood or wearing the black hat. To his own brother, Frank (Jeffrey Hunter), Jesse is a man who loses perspective and control, letting his violent streak drive his ambitions. In our eyes, watching the flashbacks leading up to the Northfield hold-up and the present-tense shots of Jesse on the run, he’s all of these things. And yet for all his mysteriousness and complexity, Jesse isn’t very compelling.