The Conversations: Barry Lyndon

Just in time for some weekend reading, the latest edition of The Conversations has posted at The House Next Door. This time around, Ed Howard and I discuss Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon – a film that has been celebrated, ignored and just plain overlooked. Although an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel, Barry Lyndon is a distinctly Kubrickian work, unfolding at a deliberate pace with warm, naturally lit images that contrasts with the director’s familiar cold remove. This was my first time watching Barry Lyndon, which had always managed to elude me, and Ed was returning to the film for the first time in several years. Head on over to The House Next Door and read The Conversations and join the discussion.

The Men Behind the Curtain: The Ides of March

Near the beginning of The Ides of March, two political operatives are having drinks with a reporter named Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei). One of them is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Paul Zara, the veteran campaign manager whose gray hair and ample waistline are symbols of the wear and tear of his chosen career. The other one is Ryan Gosling’s Stephen Myers, a young, good-looking crackerjack strategist for whom politics hasn’t lost its shine. Paul is a lifer; if he weren’t employed by this campaign, he’d be chain-smoking his way through another one. But Stephen, while not new to politics, is still in search of his dreams. He doesn’t want his candidate to win because he’s on the campaign; he’s on the campaign because he wants his candidate to win. The candidate in question is Governor Mike Morris, played by George Clooney, who also directed the picture, and while Paul no doubt sees in Morris the opportunity for political success, Stephen sees in him the opportunity to bring about Real Change. Morris must win, Stephen argues, because the country needs him. But Ida isn’t buying it. The system is the system, she argues, and politicians are politicians. “He’ll let you down sooner or later,” she says. And unless your only exposure to politics is The West Wing, you know she’s probably right.

The Ides of March is a throwback to 1970s films about political disillusionment that seizes on the emotions of the moment. Direct comparisons of Clooney’s Morris to President Obama are problematic, but Gosling’s Stephen is an effective stand-in for so many educated young(er) people in this country who thought Obama was change we could believe in. Stephen brags that at 30 he has more political experience than most people 10 years older, but his affection for Morris blinds him to all the lessons that he must have already learned – first and foremost of which is that politicians are more alike than they are different. (The rest of the review contains spoilers.) Because we know politics, and even more because we know politics movies, it’s of little surprise that Ida’s warning proves prophetic. Adapted from Beau Willimon’s Farragut North – a play with a title that’s sexy only to those inside the Beltway – The Ides of March is yet another movie in which idealism is snuffed out by the inherent corruption of the system. It’s a storyline we’ve encountered many times before, both at the cinema and in life, and yet it possesses a hint of originality: If at first glance Stephen appears to be a victim of the system, a closer look reveals that he was a wheel of the machine all along.

A Positive Prognosis: 50/50

Are there too many cancer movies, or not enough? It’s tempting to say the former. Each year it seems there’s at least one new movie about someone getting the disease, fighting it and – depending on whether its an uplifter or a tear-jerker – surviving it or dying from it. There are no surprises anymore. The arc of the cancer movie is as familiar as the disease itself. Yet it isn’t anywhere near as prevalent, and maybe that’s the actual problem. When one considers that half of men and one third of women are expected to develop cancer (of various significance) in their lifetime, it’s clear that cancer is underrepresented at the movies. The result is that cancer rarely factors on the big screen outside of full-blown Cancer Cinema. Just as mainstream American movies about homosexual romance tend to be more about homosexuality than romance, movies that include cancer are inevitably about the disease. In Cancer Cinema, the afflicted subject never starts a new business, solves a murder mystery, pulls a casino heist or does anything else that might suggest cancer was just an element of life. No, the disease must define them. To a Hollywood screenwriter, not obsessing over a character’s cancer would be like ignoring Superman’s ability to fly.

50/50, written by Will Reiser, doesn't offer much of an exception to the trend. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cancer Character – his friends call him Adam – it has all the hallmarks of the too familiar sub-genre, starting out with the fact that Cancer Character is 100 percent healthy until all of a sudden he isn’t (Cancer Characters are never smokers, you might have noticed). Quite predictably, 50/50 has scenes in which Cancer Character receives the bad news and then spreads the word to people who don’t know how to respond. It has scenes in which Cancer Character is bravely yet tragically upbeat about the diagnosis, refusing to acknowledge the anger inside him. It has scenes in which Cancer Character, who of course is bald by this point, goes to counseling sessions that borrow from the equally familiar Help Me Help You sub-genre wherein Adam goes from stonewalling, to storming out of a session in anger, to purging all those inner demons in a moment of triumphant catharsis. And so on. Even when 50/50’s narrative goes somewhere slightly novel, replacing the usual dutiful girlfriend with the selfish, irresponsible lying bitch girlfriend, its intentions can be spotted a mile away. We know instantly that Cancer Character’s girlfriend Beth will flake out on him because 1) she has creepy eyelashes, 2) she’s played by Bryce Dallas Howard, 3) she promises to stick by him when he initially gives her an out and 4) she doesn’t like to give head. And yet for all the ways that 50/50 is like so many cancer movies we’ve seen before, it differs in one ultimately redeeming way: Cancer Character’s biggest problem isn’t that he has cancer. Not quite.