Four from 1983

I read a new nonfiction book and watch four pictures from 1983, one of them among the worst I've ever seen.

I’m still progressing through, and frequently being floored by, the back end of the Kafka story collection. I also read a brand new book that I plucked from the display shelf at the public library, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby, who is apparently best known as an actor and television producer but turns out to be quite a good prose writer as well. I mentioned in an entry in June having read a great book on a narrower aspect of the Israeli topic by Adi Schwarz and Einat Wilf called The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace, and back in 2019 I read Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by the distinguished historian and analyst Daniel Gordis, a book longer and more detailed that Tishby’s with a reserved and scholarly style where Tishby’s is jocular and acutely personal. One might gather that Tishby is less conventionally qualified to write a book of Zionist and Israeli history, but this is not a conventional history book and Tishby’s upbeat sense of poise, deep familial connections to the history of her country and professional background as a dramatist and storyteller make her book a better entry point than Gordis’s for those who want to start to become less ignorant about an important and engrossing but nuanced and widely misunderstood subject. And while she’s weaving much of her own and her family’s lore into the proceedings, Tishby, like Schwarz, Wilf and Gordis, meticulously cites her sources. Very good and useful book.

Meanwhile I’ve been watching four movies that were released in 1983.

Rumble Fish was directed by Francis Ford Coppola in the midst of a career pivot away from the four ingenious, weighty films he cranked out in the Seventies toward more scaled-down, intimate and experimental projects, beginning with One from the Heart. I haven’t seen One from the Heart but I read about its production in a biography of Tom Waits, who appears on-screen in Rumble Fish in a highly Waitsy role as a philosophizing beatnik soda jerk and short-order cook.

Rumble Fish marks the second consecutive time in the same year that Coppola adapted a novel by S.E. Hinton into a film featuring Matt Dillon and Diane Lane. The one just before Rumble Fish was The Outsiders, which covers similar turf and which I have never seen in its entirety, though like a lot of people I read the novel as an assignment in middle school. Rumble Fish is not only markedly different from the four Seventies Coppola films that I adore but is also one of the most bizarre and unique mainstream movies I’ve ever seen, something like a smash-up between Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story and A Clockwork Orange refracted through the lenses of German Expressionism and Italian Surrealism. A decade before Spielberg utilized the technique to clever but questionably melodramatic effect, Coppola chose to present all of Rumble Fish in crisp, stark black and white except for a single recurring visual and narrative component, the titular fish with which Mickey Rourke’s character The Motorcycle Boy is obsessed. In addition to being cool as ice and evidently functioning on some imperturbably placid spiritual level which Rourke plays better than anyone else could have, The Motorcycle Boy is color-blind and can’t hear well, which is partly why everything in the universe of the film except the fish is portrayed monochromatically. (This movie is deeply weird and you have to see it to understand why these choices make any kind of sense, if indeed they do.)

The Motorcycle Boy is a local legend and older brother to Dillon’s protagonist Rusty James, a young hoodlum and gang-leader who has languished in Tulsa while The Motorcycle Boy has been riding out to California. Rourke is divine and Dillon is solid, as are a strikingly beautiful young Diane Lane, a well-cast Dennis Hopper and William Smith as a taciturn, mustachioed policeman who looks to have been transplanted from a Tom of Finland comic and whose smirking, watchful presence is one of the more peculiar things about a film draped all about with peculiarities. This film has the same problem as the two other American films on this week’s list with a lurching, rudderless narrative structure, but it has a lot going for it that neither of the others do, especially a daring and uncompromising visual style with excellent photography by Stephen H. Burum that is unlike Coppola’s other work and makes every minute of the watch worthwhile. Coppola and his collaborators evince a spirited willingness to make unexpected narrative and aesthetic choices and bluff them through with a straight face, including an angular, percussive score by Stewart Copeland which reinforces the feeling that this movie is meant to keep the viewer at arm’s length and that the Coppola of Rumble Fish will settle for being admired rather than liked or understood. (Actually that describes The Motorcycle Boy too, so I guess Coppola knew precisely what he was doing.) The vaguely silly narrative material and meandering story keep this from being one of the best movies I’ve seen, but it’s certainly one of the oddest and most interesting.

Nothing like that can be said of The Big Chill. This picture was directed by Lawrence Kasdan, an accomplished writer who worked with Coppola’s friend George Lucas on some of Lucas’s biggest (Star Wars) and best (Raiders of the Lost Ark) projects before becoming a director in his own right. I love Raiders of the Lost Ark and have a charitable affection for Kasdan’s winking, solicitous 1985 meta-Western Silverado.

I’m choosing these next words seriously and intentionally. The Big Chill might, just might, be the worst piece of shit movie I’ve ever seen. I’ve skirmished in a few older entries with the question of just what makes a movie “bad,” but the depths of awfulness plumbed by The Big Chill compelled me to approach it from a new angle (new for me; I’m sure better writers have mapped this terrain). I guess my current working theory has to do with the deficit between a movie’s evident or stated intentions and how effectively and entertainingly it realizes them, a gulf which can appear narrow but can cascade down into depths of tedium and self-important cringe which so-bad-it’s-good legends and camp classics can rarely approach.

This one is about a cohort of people hovering around the age of forty who were all close-knit friends as undergraduate students and are reunited for a weekend by the suicide of one of the old gang. This character is never seen alive on camera but from all that is said about him he seems to have been the most interesting of the group (more on that below). Once they are all together for the weekend the survivors promptly start ejaculating their neuroses, disappointments and personal and professional failures (or their failure to be failures, which for some reason they regard as the worst misery possible) all over one another in various permutations. It turns out that these characters, some played by capable if overrated actors like Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt and Kevin Kline who have all done serviceable work in better projects, were insufferable campus radicals in the cultural maelstrom of the Sixties and have grown into insufferable careerist yuppies in the stultifying “chill” of the Eighties. As far as I can tell this is all meant to be the stuff of insightful comedy and affecting drama, and maybe it’s understandable how it might have felt like either or both of those things to…well, to anyone who was precisely the age and demographics of these characters when the film was released, though even that feels like a stretch for me to imagine. But the movie plods from one excruciatingly boring set-up, stillborn joke and unearned dramatic confrontation to another while the characters grow increasingly self-absorbed and their choices increasingly implausible. And increasingly uninteresting. And increasingly implausibly uninteresting and increasingly uninterestingly implausible. When all else fails, which it does with reassuring regularity, Kasdan shoves a beloved soul or rock hit on the soundtrack and someone lights a joint or bullies someone else for sex. The narrative threads you don’t care about get pruned and tied off and the movie peters pathetically and mercifully to a death rattle.

From what we hear about the dead guy Alex, he was a scientific genius who turned his back on a prestigious career in academia to amble from one odd job to another, perhaps in search of a way off the rat race treadmill that has the other characters so cynical and malcontent. Alex seems to have been interesting, intelligent, principled and attractive; it tells you much of what you need to know about The Big Chill that the one character you’d actually want to watch a movie about is dead before the opening credits roll. The whole picture is grating, overwrought, self-indulgent silliness with an insultingly disproportionate sense of its own profundity and significance. You really have to see it to appreciate how terrible it is. Which I don’t advise you to do.

Terms of Endearment, directed by James L. Brooks, is another one that unfolds in strange fits and starts without ever cohering into a sensible structure. It’s as banally conventional as The Big Chill and even covers some similar ground with issues of family, mortality, lust and career bewilderment. But in contrast to Kasdan’s suffocating web of relationships, these exploratory musings are built out from a central pillar of interplay between just two main characters, a mother played by Shirley MacLaine and adult daughter played by Debra Winger. Brooks writes these individuals as quietly proud Texans and builds a combination between geography and identity into his story, with MacLaine’s character staying in her Houston house and Winger’s character traversing state borders to pursue her relationship and family goals. Before getting to any of that Brooks tells you much of what you’re supposed to grasp about this picture in an incisive opening sequence in which a very young adult version of MacLaine’s character can’t let the infant version of Winger’s character sleep and would rather rouse the baby into crying as a way of making sure she’s alright. Here Brooks is sagely and subtly foretelling a mother-daughter relationship that will never be straightforward or easy and will always be marked by deep and sincere love.

MacLaine’s character becomes a widow when her daughter is a young girl and both women spend the rest of the film pursuing and deflecting troubled relationships with men, the mother with a mischievous, womanizing retired astronaut neighbor played by Jack Nicholson and daughter with her professor husband played by Jeff Daniels and, in an odd narrative diversion that never pays off, a nice-guy paramour played by John Lithgow. The story progresses across decades as these characters come to terms with their various personal problems and mistakes and cling stubbornly to their desire to be good to one another at all costs. It’s inoffensively uninteresting stuff and it all rings a little hollow for me; Brooks wants to provoke a genuine emotional reaction and make you marvel as you reflect how tears of grief and tears of joy are, like, all the same tears or something. I can’t say he doesn’t pay dues to get there, taking you on a winding journey through the lives of these characters, but the conclusions at which he arrives just aren’t interesting enough to feel profound, or even cathartic.

Lastly I watched El Sur, directed by a Spanish director I’d never heard of named Victor Erice. In fact I’d never before heard of anyone involved in this production or of the film itself and had no firm sense of what I was in for, which is the ideal way to go into a movie, especially a movie as good as this one. It’s a quiet, intimate, well-structured story of a precocious girl in the north of Spain gradually growing to develop a more nuanced view of her complicated father whom she idolizes but doesn’t quite understand and who may or may not possess some vaguely supernatural powers. The protagonist has a loving and intelligent mother whom, it is explicitly stated, suffered some kind of political reprisal after the Spanish Civil War while, as we eventually learn, her physician father fled his upbringing in the Spanish south of the title due to irreconcilable political differences with his Franco-supporting father, vowing never to return and leaving behind a mysterious woman with whom he is still in some kind of love. The idealized and exotic conception of the sunny, culturally vibrant south of her War-scarred country becomes a fascination for the protagonist as she matures from her First Communion into a near-adult. As she and her father lovingly and persistently try to open up to one another she comes to accept that she must confront and explore the south of Spain as she traverses the precipice into adulthood (though we are ultimately left to imagine what happens when she gets there).

With quiet, painterly exterior compositions, lush chiaroscuro interior lighting, exquisitely good casting and a fine storyteller’s instinct for how the depths of human experience can be probed tellingly in a relatively short film, Erice and his people aced this one. It’s short, interesting, evocative and entertaining and I couldn’t help but think of it as a precursor to Guillermo del Toro’s fine films The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, both of which examine aspects and effects of the Spanish Civil War with the aid of supernatural components (though both are more brash, explicit and ambitious that the warm, reserved El Sur).

El Sur also has a film-within-a-film sequence in which the father character goes to a theater alone and sits through a key scene from a cheap B-movie that has a deep personal resonance for him, which for a movie nerd is a relatable experience that in itself felt very personal and resonant.

To review. The Big Chill is really, utterly terrible. Terms of Endearment isn’t good enough to recommend or bad enough to disavow. Strongly recommend El Sur as a complete work and Rumble Fish as a flawed, fascinating oddity.