Bystander Effect: The U.S. and the Holocaust

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, via PBS.

Ken Burns’s newest film, The U.S. and the Holocaust, is the most timely, dark, and politically charged of his career. It takes as its subject the restrictionist policies of the U.S. government toward immigrants in the decades leading up to the Second World War, and the country’s refusal to provide safe harbor for scores of refugees who sought asylum from Nazi eradication. Well aware of the hatred and persecution Jews were suffering at the hands of Hitler, the federal government—and the public-at-large— remained opposed to any exceptions to the quota system that had effectively closed America’s borders since the 1920s. Not until late into the war did the U.S. initiate a coordinated effort to rescue people trapped in Europe. By then, almost all the victims of the Shoah had been murdered. With trademark craftsmanship and respect, Burns sheds light on this overlooked episode of the country and the genocide. The three episodes leave you enlightened, distraught, and deeply anxious.

I.

Over the course of thirty-five pictures, Burns has achieved elevated stature as a chronicler of American history. His audience at PBS consists of a distinctly middle-brow type—educated, liberal, critical of the country yet committed to its inherent goodness. It’s a viewership who believe that the arc of the United States—not just the universe—bends toward justice, that the nation can bring about a more perfect union if only it can recover its founding ideals (which are read as endorsements of progressive politics). In this, they echo the views of Burns himself. At 69, the New Hampshire native has maintained an almost willfully naive belief in the American Dream, precious (one might say embarrassing) for a man of his years. His vision of our shared narrative—etched onto the collective consciousness through films like The Brooklyn Bridge (1981), Lewis and Clark (1997), and The National Parks (2009)—is essentially a liberal’s guide to American exceptionalism.

Born of the optimistic side of the Civil Rights movement (the MLK of 1963, not 1968), this story basically holds that while America has had troubling, even wicked, episodes, they’ve been overcome to yield a better future. It preaches “a kind of baseline optimism, expressed in complex accounts of contested and contingent events that ultimately lead to progress,” as historian Matt Karp puts it in Harper’s. “In lesser hands,” he continues, “the liberal narrative can slide toward complacency—or worse, the construction of an American story in which each act of brutality (colonization, slavery, Jim Crow) somehow only sets the stage for the triumphant advance to come (nationhood, emancipation, civil rights).” Such a construct is under assault today from two sides: the fascist nightmare of the Trumpian right, in which America was born perfect (read, white Christian) and has gotten better ever since; and its doppelgänger on the woke left, in which America was conceived in racial sin, about which we’ve done little and from which we can never escape. Though not morally equivalent, both challenge the assumptions of the dominant liberal discourse (while refusing more broad-minded alternatives like Colin Woodard’s American Nations thesis).

Opposed to the growing influence of these contenders, Burns’s documentaries are a bulwark of whiggish history for the upper class. After all, what could be wrong with a five-part, ten hour documentary on PBS, that most venerable of institutions? The credibility and authority of these pictures derive from the director’s patented (and much imitated) aesthetic: poetic closeups of photographs; stentorian narration of august scripts; notable actors voicing the departed; and the imprimatur of handsomely-filmed historical contributors. Burns earns his influence by how his films feel as much as by what they say—the romantic mystique they exude that seduces your senses and your reason.

And it’s this romanticism that makes them so dangerous. His schoolboy infatuation with the country frequently gets the better of him, the earnest innocence often turning (as in his 1994 film Baseball) maudlin and bathetic. He’s said that critics take issue with his movies for their lack of irony. But that’s not the problem—the problem is their bias. As historian Timothy Snyder puts it, every nation develops a myth about itself that it teaches as historical fact. Most people living in this version of Plato’s cave never escape. At his worst, Burns is one of them. His commitment to American grandeur easily leads to whitewashed, if comforting, portrayals of the past.

Take, for example, the series that made him a household name (and about which I’ve written before): The Civil War (1990). Thanks in large part to the prominence it gives to novelist and Confederate sympathizer Shelby Foote, the film trafficks in Lost Cause tropes, omits Reconstruction, and indulges a nostalgic tone that redescribes what was an existential conflict between vastly different societies over into a tragic story of the fracturing of the white American family (one in which Black folks play little part). In this it comes close to the revisionist views of historians like Charles Dunning from the turn of the last century. The Civil War was a catastrophic success, the film says—not because it freed 4 million souls from bondage, but because it resulted (illogically) in a unified nation on its way to greatness. In fact, the series was so troubling that Columbia University’s Eric Foner—dean of Civil War historians and one of the many scholars Burns didn’t interview—put together a volume of critical essays in response. Yet to this day, the director sticks to his discredited thesis: that the war was caused by a blundering generation’s failure to compromise (rather than the anti-slavery movement’s success at changing Northern opinion).

The Civil War is the most egregious example of Burns’s temperamental issue, but hardly the only. The same sentimentality undermines 2007’s The War, where he peddles nostalgic notions of the “Greatest Generation” and its “Good War,” popularized by Tom Brokaw and Steven Spielberg in the previous decade. And it makes for a noticeable flaw in his 2017 picture, The Vietnam War. As our late friend and editor Kevin Courrier wrote, upon viewing it you find yourself “so emotionally devastated by the experience that you won't find it easy to sum up its impact.” Yet bookending the series are dubious claims that the U.S. began its involvement in Vietnam “in good faith,” and (more shockingly) that the war’s rectitude is still an open question. The first of these might be up for debate, but the second?

Burns puts contrasting judgments of the conflagration side-by-side in a strained attempt at evenhandedness. But that’s like airing competing assertions about climate change—1) it’s real and catastrophic vs. 2) it’s sensationalized and trivial—and pretending they enjoy equal weight in the scientific community. Fortunately, the first-person accounts of participants keep these films tethered to the ground. In The War, this effect comes through the philosophical erudition and realist (even jaundiced) perspective of Paul Fussell and Sam Hynes—veterans and scholars of the literature of war. Likewise, The Vietnam War is anchored by gut-wrenching interviews with subjects on both sides of the conflict, including soldier/writers Karl Marlantes, Tim O’Brien, and Bảo Ninh.

The best films of Burns’s oeuvre, in fact, have emerged from topics that defy his melodramatic tendencies and elicit the very irony he combats. The Tenth Inning, his 2010 epilogue to Baseball, dropped the mawkish tone and mysticism of the original as it peered into the sport’s doping scandal (while still recreating the drama of the Yankees’ dynasty and Red Sox’ glory). The Central Park Five (2012), which he made with his daughter, combines a hip street vibe with moral outrage at criminal injustice. For once, his point of view is from the margins. And in The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014) and last year’s Hemingway, he isn’t afraid to take the audience to the shadow side of his subjects.

The leaders of German American Bund give the Nazi salute, August 1937 in Yaphank, New York. (Photo: Bettmann/CORBIS)

II.

With his latest picture, though, Burns plumbs the depths of human depravity—and American shame—as never before. Just when you think you can’t possibly learn something knew about the Holocaust, this three-part series (co-directed by Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein) proves otherwise. It’s chief contribution is to connect the domestic politics of the United States in the 1930s and ‘40s to Europe’s—to demonstrate how the xenophobia and antisemitism of America allowed, in part, for the murder of some 6 million men, women, and children. Such bigotry, rather than a mere aberration, goes to the core of our national character. “I think Americans have a very hard time deciding what kind of country they want to have,” historian Peter Hayes says at the outset. “We all tend to think of the United States as this country with the Statue of Liberty poem, ‘Give me your tired, your poor.’ But in fact excluding people—shutting them out—has been as American as apple pie.”

For most of its history since 1776, the film relates, the U.S. had open borders—migrant workers came and went freely. Hayes observes that when his Irish patriarch arrived in Boston in 1860, he filled out a simple landing card and was on his way. Most newcomers were from northern and western Europe until that time. After the Civil War, however, the exodus shifted to the south and east, as cheap American wheat (and the Panic of 1873) undercut global markets and drove farmers into indigence. Between 1870 and 1914, 25 million people arrived from countries like Italy, Poland, and Russia, driven by economic and political insecurity. Among them were 2 million Jews.

The first episode traces the backlash to this flood of arrivals. Prejudice against Blacks, Asians, Catholics, and Jews pervaded society in the Gilded Age—from Southern good ole’ boys to Yankee WASPs. Burns treats the rise of eugenics, germ theory, and social Darwinism as the intellectual cover for state-mandated sterilization and fear of demographic contagion. This nativist wave crested with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, which established strict quotas, required immigrants to obtain entry visas, and made no exception for refugees. The film draws attention to how American racism inspired its European counterpart—including a failed Viennese art student named Adolf Hitler.

The former German Army corporal saw the displacement, killing, and internment of Native nations by the United States (not to mention its enslavement of millions of Africans) as a model for his own dystopia. His dream, spelled out in Mein Kampf, involved a similar racial subjugation—of the east, though, not the west. Once in power, the Nazis modeled their 1935 Nuremberg Laws on the Jim Crow statutes of the deep South. Their regime “saw us as a model of how racial superiority is supposed to work—the superior race exterminates the lower,” explains Snyder. “If anything, Hitler’s attitude toward the U.S. before the war was one of admiration.”

Burns underscores that Americans—not just their government—had information about Nazi policies from the start. Over three thousand stories of the crackdown in Germany ran in American papers in 1933 alone. Yet public opinion remained opposed to asylum seekers in general, and Jews in particular. The far right surged at home, led by demagogues like Fr. Charles Coughlin, William Dudley Pelley, and Charles Lindbergh. Burns shows just how much the famed aviator and his America First movement rivaled Franklin Roosevelt for influence. As Snyder says, FDR was a globalist presiding over an isolationist society. Lindbergh’s wild conspiracy theories about attempts to lure the U.S. into another world war met a ready audience.

Others denounced the President’s “Jew Deal” and tagged him “Frank D. Rosenfeld” because of the many Jews he placed in his administration. In Europe, meanwhile, tens of thousands of desperate people applied for refuge in the United States to escape the German vice, their wait times growing to three years thanks to Johnson-Reed. Yet even after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Congress refused Roosevelt’s request to increase the quotas—in fact, it preferred to eliminate immigration completely. When he called for a “quarantine” to stop the march of fascism abroad, his opponents demanded his impeachment

Against this torrent of intolerance, Burns showcases the everyday Americans who came to the aid of Nazi targets. Rabbi Stephen Wise of the Reform Free Synagogue in Manhattan organized relief efforts and held mass rallies in Madison Square Garden (as did, however, the fascist German American Bund). Political leaders such as the Irish Catholic Al Smith spoke in support. As one country after another fell to the Werhmacht in 1939 and ‘40, Jewish organizations like the National Refugee Service and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society coordinated loans, procured tickets, and landed jobs for thousands of asylum seekers. They worked alongside the YMCA, the Unitarian Service Committee, and the American Friends Service Committee. In 1940, journalist Varian Fry founded the Emergency Rescue Committee with the support of the First Lady. Along with the American vice consul in Marseille, Hiram Bingham, he rescued some two thousand people from Vichy France—until Secretary of State Cordell Hull put a stop to it.

German soldiers check identification of a Jew in the Kraków Ghetto.

III.

The situation changed drastically, however, with the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In a span of weeks, millions of Jews living in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Russia proper fell under the German jackboot. The series puts these regions at the center of the narrative, thanks no doubt to the contributions of Snyder. In his seminal works Bloodlands (2010) and Black Earth (2015), the Yale scholar gives prominence to the Nazis’ obsession with the east. Hitler imagined the earth as a cramped space of limited resources, with races locked in an eternal struggle for survival. Jews were not a race but a subhuman pestilence that sapped the strength of every nation in which they lived. “Hitler says Jews are responsible for any idea that allows us to see ourselves as people,” Snyder tells Burns, “rather than members of a race.” Concepts like God, conscience, and human rights were—according to the dictator—alien ideas with which Jews had infected the world.

His vision, such as it was, involved a war in the east at once colonial and anti-colonial—colonial in that the Germans would subjugate the Slavs, anti-colonial in that they would overcome the Jews (whom he fantasized leading a world order both capitalist and communist). Just as white Americans had raised their standard of living through territorial conquest and ethnic cleansing, so too the Germans would win Lebensraum for themselves by invading the U.S.S.R. The plan had four parts: First, a lightning victory would destroy the Soviet state, after which some 30 million people were to be starved in a “Hunger Plan” (inspired by Stalin’s famine in Ukraine, with the English-made famine in Ireland during the 1840s as another touchstone). Jews, on the other hand, were to be removed from the continent; survivors would be killed or enslaved. The regime would then raze all cities and industrial centers to the ground and settle the lands with Germans. As the late Tony Judt argued, there was nothing original in Hitler’s proposals—empires had carried out programs of colonization and genocide for centuries. The novelty lay in applying such policies to Europeans, in their own homes.

With Operation Barbarossa, this nightmare began to take shape. Burns doesn’t directly address the debate around the origins of the Holocaust—the “functionalist” vs. “intentionalist” theses. But the film suggests a combination of both. The elimination of the Jews from their midst was the animating principle of Nazi ideology from the beginning, Hayes says. By expanding eastward, however, the Germans ensured they would absorb millions of such people into the Reich. What to do? Thousands of Poles had already been shot over the previous two years by the Nazis and Soviets, the country’s Jews herded into ghettos. But the occupation there at least had some semblance of order. In contrast, Hitler considered the Soviet republics to be lawless lands presenting no juridical barriers to his barbarism. Within days of the June invasion, the film states, Hermann Göring asked SS leader Reinhard Heydrich for an overall “solution” to the Jewish question.

Because of Britain’s control of the sea, the original plan (from May) to deport Jews to Madagascar was scrapped. Containing them in a colony inside Poland or Siberia was also deemed impractical. Mass killings began shortly thereafter, with Einsatzgruppen, gangs of locals, and German order police shooting tens of thousands of Jews in places like Babi Yar. Over the coming months, some 2 million would be massacred. Burns tends to this event with great care, guided by writer Daniel Mendelsohn, whose 2006 memoir The Lost chronicles the tragic fate of his relatives in the east. His uncle, Shmiel, and cousin were hidden by a schoolteacher, while Smiel’s eldest daughter joined a band of partisans in the forest. All were eventually discovered and shot. Mendelsohn bemoans the collective loss of their memory and that of everyone who died in the “Shoah by bullets.”

In his books, Snyder argues that the gassing of the rest of Europe’s Jews was a perverse consolation prize for the Nazis once they realized—with the shocking Soviet counter-offensive in December 1941—that they couldn’t win the war, nor carry out the full extent of their program. But the film claims otherwise: that the Final Solution was decided by September and October of that year, as experiments with mobile gassing vans took place. Here it stands in agreement with historian Christopher Browning. (Curiously, though, Browning was not interviewed, nor Nazi experts Richard Evans and Ian Kershaw.)

Browning explains the drive towards industrialized killing as the result of Germany’s premature euphoria the previous summer, when its blitzkrieg captured or destroyed entire Soviet divisions. (Some 3.5 million Soviet prisoners would be starved or shot over the ensuing years, in a modified version of the Hunger Plan.) Drunk on the prospect of victory—especially once they took Kyiv and encircled Leningrad that October—the Nazi high command lurched from elimination to extinction. German Jews began to be deported to the east. The building of the first death camps started on November 1. Chelmno commenced operations a month later.

The film also makes clear that Hitler did not opt to murder the Jews in revenge over America’s entry into the war (as the deluded blogger Michael Tracey has been arguing). The infamous Wannsee Conference (dramatized to chilling effect in the 2001 film Conspiracy) had been scheduled to occur just two days after the surprise attack on Hawaii. And when it finally took place on January 20, 1942, it merely coordinated plans that had been hatched the previous fall. Far from enraging him, Pearl Harbor delighted the Führer, who’d pressured Japan to attack so as to tie down the U.S. in the Pacific. Weakened by Jews, Blacks, and love of lucre—and facing an invincible foe—the Americans would be unable to fight on two fronts.

Henry Morgenthau and Franklin Roosevelt.

IV.

He was wrong, of course. But three-quarters of his victims were murdered before a single G.I. set foot inside Europe—all in a span of just twenty months. Ninety-percent were killed in the northeast quadrant of the continent, out of reach by Allied aircraft until 1944 (the series takes an agnostic view on whether the Allies should’ve bombed Auschwitz at that point). The film’s contributors stress that the U.S. could easily have publicized information, organized resistance, and launched rescue operations. For almost a year and half after learning of Hitler’s plan, though, the government sat on its hands—even longer since reports of atrocities appeared in newspapers during the spring of ‘42.

Much of this negligence was due to the machinations of the State Department. Under Hull and Assistant Secretary Breckenridge Long, it quashed reports of Nazi intentions and lied to prevent agitation on the subject. Yet blame went all around. The administration believed any relief operation would detract from the war effort, and the virulence of American bigotry cowed FDR from giving even the appearance of sympathy for Jews. Far from fighting to stop the genocide, military personnel were kept in the dark about it, lest the knowledge somehow damage morale. And even as they waged war against the racist German regime (in segregated units, no less), Roosevelt interred their own Japanese American countrymen in camps. “We do rally as a nation to defeat fascism,” Daniel Greene tells Burns. “We just don’t rally as a nation to rescue the victims of fascism.”

It wasn’t until January of ‘44 that Roosevelt, at the urging of his Hyde Park neighbor and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, created the War Refugee Board—the only government agency instituted to save Jews by any of the Allied nations. Led by John Pehle of Treasury, it engaged in myriad clandestine operations. Aid packages were sent to Europe, licenses streamlined, and millions of dollars transferred to procure guns for the resistance and bribe border guards. Its greatest success came in Hungary, where some 120,000 Jews were rescued through a coordinated international campaign that involved the military, the press, and foreign envoys like Swedish attache Raoul Wallenberg. Almost all the major rescuers in the Holocaust, Snyder points out, were diplomats. Jews living in places where the state provided a buffer between them and the German occupiers had higher rates of survival. Bureaucracy enabled the Nazis’ plan. It also thwarted their success. A piece of paper from a routine functionary meant the difference between life and death.

Given the state’s capacity to obstruct the machinery of death, America’s refusal to help, an evil all ours, is more than a blot on our national record. It’s an oil spill. While the U.S. welcomed more refugees from Hitler’s Europe than any single country—some 225,000—and saved thousands more from the grave. But the fact is that in the two decades leading up to the war, it could’ve taken in more people by orders of magnitude. As Deborah Lipstadt (current U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combatting Anti-Semitism and subject of the 2016 drama Denial) tells Burns, the time to stop a genocide is before it happens. Our complacency “is not one of the things that will go down in the long annals of good things America did,” she says. “It goes in a different book.” Indeed, scholar Nell Irvin Painter reminds us (as images of the Klan, MLK’s assassination, and Civil Rights riots flash before our eyes) that white supremacy and anti-semitism form a major current of American history: “The stream is always there. And we should not be shocked. We should not think, ‘This is not America.’ It is.”

Jewish refugees aboard the St Louis as it docks in Antwerp, Belgium, 1939.

V.

The failure of the U.S. to mitigate the Holocaust becomes all the more unconscionable when you hear the stories of survivors. Burns selects five eye witnesses to history’s greatest crime, who represent distinct types of victims. Sol Messinger grew up in Berlin and was a passenger on the ocean liner St. Louis in May of 1939. Along with his family and nine-hundred other refugees on board, he was denied entry into the States and was forced to return to Europe. While he did eventually make it over, all of his cousins perished during the war—just a few of the 1.5 million children who were killed. Susan and Joseph Hilsenrath, brother and sister from Bad Kreuznach in Germany, on the other hand, got sponsored to come to America. Joseph’s tearful description of seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time—after years of fleeing Nazi goons—will move even the most hardened cynic. 

Günther “Guy” Stern grew up in Hildesheim to a cultured, literary family. After Brown Shirts assaulted his father, he was sent to relatives in the States in the fall of 1937 with the help of a merciful American consul. From there, he hoped to secure papers for his parents and siblings. But no one would hear his plea. In an astonishing reversal of fortunes, he returned to Europe as an Army intelligence officer and interrogator, and in that capacity was present at the liberation of Buchenwald. As he put it, he fought two wars against the Nazis: America’s and his own.

But the most harrowing testimony belongs to Eva Geiringer. A native of Vienna, she watched in terror as her neighbors greeted the arrival of the Germans with ecstasy. Her family managed to get to Holland, where they lived on the same block as Anne Frank. Like the Geiringers, the Franks had applied for visas to the United States. None came. Instead, they were all deported to Auschwitz. Her account of survival is shattering, her soft voice and gentle countenance contrasting with the inky images of the camp that Burns provides. When she describes climbing into a bunk with her sick mother to huddle against the cold, it shatters you.

Even after the camps were discovered and stories like Eva’s made public, a quarter of a million Jews languished without a home for years—as late as 1952. When asked whether the U.S. should allow more refugees in than it had before the war, only five percent of Americans said yes, and more than a third said the number should be fewer. The quotas continued to be enforced until 1965, when Lyndon Johnson signed a new immigration law that abolished them. Burns rightly celebrates the millions of newcomers who’ve journeyed to these shores since.

But as he points out, the generous policy has never applied to migrants from the Americas, nor to refugees.

And he omits more damning data. Deportations of undocumented workers have trended upward since the Reagan administration, including over 3 million under Barack Obama. Even before Donald Trump instituted a ban on Muslim emigrants and his cruel family-separation policy, the United States let in a pitifully low number of asylum seekers, fewer than 100,000 on average each year. Through the entirety of the Syrian civil war—during which some 5 million souls fled the country—America welcomed only 18,007 of them to its shores. This amounts to less than half the number of Canada, and a drop in the bucket compared to Germany.

Likewise, the film’s treatment of the Nuremberg Trials and other tribunals that brought war criminals to justice is too narrow. Burns secures an interview with the American lawyer Benjamin Ferencz and highlights his prosecution of twenty-two commanders of the Einsatzgruppen. While he was successful, the series leaves out some inconvenient truths: That most perpetrators of the Holocaust (like the leaders of the Confederacy) died in their beds. That the U.S. is one of just four countries to declare that it never intends to become a party to the International Criminal Court, which Ferencz helped set up. And that Ferencz himself has argued that George W. Bush and his administration committed war crimes in Iraq. This kind of American exceptionalism Burns is reluctant to discuss.

The defendants in the dock at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. (Photo: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of John W. Mosenthal)

VI.

The sheer fact that survivors like Stern and Geiringer are still with us, and in good health, unnerves you. A full human lifetime has barely passed since the Holocaust. Yet at this moment, the nations of the world are again falling to fascism—Italy, Brazil, even Sweden. It’s here that we can take Burns in for a tougher critique. The series provides some context for the rise of the Nazis: humiliation from defeat in the Great War, the instability of Weimar, and the scourge of the Depression. It points out that Hitler was offered the chancellorship by conservative elites as a way to crush the Left (which he promptly did). “The people who brought Hitler to power,” Snyder says, “were conscious and aware and desirous of doing away with democracy.”

Burns fails, however, to explain the elements of fascism as a political ideology and psychological disposition, what its adherents say and do. He focuses on Hitler’s specific beliefs, which are important, but doesn’t draw out the parallels between his movement and similar ones, like Mussolini’s. This oversight is conspicuous, since the series wants us to recognize the parallels between the populist movements of the 1930s and now. Any honest observer can see them, but many people refuse because today’s far right doesn’t look, talk, or act exactly like the Nazis. An expansive taxonomy of fascism, like Robert O. Paxton’s, would’ve sealed Burns’s argument. At one point, he includes an excerpt from a letter by a G.I. telling his father that it’s not enough to defeat fascist regimes—their philosophy itself has to be eradicated. How can we do that if we aren’t taught what it is?

Any successful film about the Holocaust leaves you with emotions you can’t resolve. Burns’s picture is no different—it gets under your skin, haunts your mind, and robs you of sleep. He takes us to the edge of the abyss, thanks in large part to the staccato strings that play on the soundtrack like a horror movie. Yet the film, in the end, lacks the requisite righteous anger, and he pulls back from contemplating the enormity of 6 million murdered Jews—not to mention the the 6 to 8 million others killed by Nazi policies. Whether this is to prevent emotional numbing (an understandable concern) I’m unsure. Nevertheless, as the series progresses with its weighty inevitability, you feel a gnawing sense of the familiar.

History does not repeat itself, the saying goes, but it does rhyme. Godwin’s Law not withstanding, the siren songs of the 1930s and our own time rhyme too well. The conspiracy theories of Lindbergh more than echo ours, the insidious arguments of America First matched by today’s apologists for Putin and his rape of Ukraine. Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ recent dumping of refugees onto the streets was a page right out of the fascist playbook. Mendelsohn reminds us that the conventions of civilized behavior are fragile. The perpetrators of Nazi depravity were ordinary men and women, no different from us: “You look at your neighbors, the people at the dry cleaners, the waiters in the restaurant. That’s who these people were. Don’t kid yourself.”

Burns ends the final episode with an explosive montage, shots of Charlottesville, the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, and January 6 cascading together in a deluge of fear. Trump’s face never appears, but his voice—mixed as a demonic cacophony—hangs ominously in the air. The Holocaust is a story of the recent past, the sequence suggests, and a warning of a possible future. Snyder in particular emphasizes this lesson: “If we’re going to be a country in the future, then we have to have a view of our own history which allows us to see what we were. Then we can become something different. And we have to become something different if we’re going to make it.” That’s a tall order, based on what Burns reveals. For once, he finds no silver lining, and refuses cheap succor. “We have seen the nadir of human behavior,” Stern says, “and we have no guarantee it won’t recur.” After the screen faded black, I lay in bed a long time, staring into darkness.

– Nick Coccoma is a writer and culture critic. His newsletter, The Similitude, is available on Substack and you can follow him on Twitter @NickCoccoma. His essays on movies, religion, and politics have been featured in Full-Stop Magazine, New Politics, and The Washington Examiner. A native of Cooperstown, NY, he studied theatre, philosophy, and theology at the College of the Holy Cross and Boston College. He lives in Boston, where he's worked as a teacher, hatter, and chaplain.

White Knight: The Batman

Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman and Robert Pattinson as Batman in The Batman. (Photo: Jonathan Olley/Warner Bros.)

In his 1957 architectonic study Anatomy of Criticism, structuralist Northrop Frye sketches a taxonomy of literary heroes. Those of the Mythic mode, he argues, are gods: they’re superior in kind to other characters and to their environment. They defy the laws of nature and possess divine gifts. Examples include Zeus, Bacchus, and Shiva. In a tragic narrative, they die. In a comic one, they rejoin the heavenly realm. (The Christian narrative is neither tragic, nor comic, but ironic: Christ is crucified, yet raised to the Father on the third day.)

The heroes of the Romantic mode are superior to others and their environment only by degree. Their actions are marvelous, but they themselves are human beings. In tragedy, their deaths are elegiac and tied to the decay of the created order (think Beowulf). In comedy, they ride off into a pastoral setting (e.g., the cowboy in a Western).

Following this schema, contemporary superheroes dwell in a gray area between the Mythic and Romantic modes. Some, like Superman, are gods – different from us in kind. Others, like the X-Men, are mortals but possess mutations that give them supernatural powers. And still more, like Iron Man, don’t have genetic enhancements so much as advanced technology, making them more Romantic than Mythic.

Headtrip: Everything Everywhere All at Once

from left: Stephanie Hsu, Michelle Yeoh, and Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Theories of the multiverse go as far back to ancient Greek philosophy, though we associate them today with the hard sciences. Part of the discussion, historically, involves speculation about whether ours is the best of all possible worlds. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (one of the most important early modern philosophers) made this idea the cornerstone of his work The Monadology. There, the German polymath addresses theodicy, or the problem of evil. He speculates that the world we inhabit must be the best of all possible worlds, since God – who is good and who could have chosen to make any world he wished – made this one. The presence of evil, then, must have some mysterious, salutary effect – perhaps contrasting goodness for us, so we appreciate it all the more. In a world without evil, he surmises, we wouldn’t be able to recognize goodness, since it would just be the banal, uniform state of affairs. A fish doesn’t notice water unless it’s thrown on land.

Movie Artists: The Worst Person in the World & Cyrano

Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World.

Socialists are quick to point out that we’ll still have problems after the revolution – they’ll just be more interesting. With our material conditions satisfied, we’ll have the time and means to engage more passions, take more adventures, and pursue more lovers. Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s latest film, The Worst Person in the World, gives us a tantalizing window into this world. Its vision is a society where young people can afford sleek, modernist flats, pursue fulfilling avocations, and indulge the varieties of self-expression – all while holding jobs in the service sector. Who needs heaven when you can have social democracy? With this picture, Trier brings his Oslo Trilogy to a poignant close. The series began in 2006 when he and co-writer Eskil Vogt released Reprise, a Joycean exploration of artistic ambitions between friends that introduced audiences to Anders Danielsen Lie. Lie’s become something like Trier’s muse: the actor’s appeared in each of the Oslo pictures – devastatingly so in the second, Oslo, August 31st (2011). There he portrays a heroin addict who journeys from rehab to fatal relapse in the course of a day. Along the way, Trier folded in elements of existentialism and phenomenology that created a haunting mood of angst. He deepened that philosophical exploration with Louder Than Bombs (2015), an American film that explored the death of a photojournalist through the fragmented consciousness of her kin.

Exposure: Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog

Benedict Cumberbatch in The Power of the Dog, currently streaming on Netflix.

Reading the rapturous reviews of The Power of the Dog is a bit like talking to an anti-vaxxer. The experience is so disorienting – the depiction of reality so inverted – that after a while you begin to question your own sanity. I forced myself to sit through the movie a second time, just to be sure I hadn’t missed something. I hadn’t. Jane Campion has made a pretentious, incoherent, excruciating adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name. Many audience members may feel similarly, I suspect, but raising questions can invite gaslighting from critics ready to anoint the film. Witness Slate editor Jeffrey Bloomer, a self-described Campion fan, who found the viewing experience “absolutely miserable.” In response to his heresy, the poor man is led by reviewer Dana Stevens through some kind of struggle session to get him to recant his view and assent to the picture’s inscrutable wisdom. Watching them try to decode the movie like an ancient rune is disturbing. It seems every year brings us an empty art house film that the chattering classes adore. But The Power of the Dog has to rank near the top for eliciting such an Orwellian campaign of misinformation. 

Escape Artist: Paul Rudd and The Fundamentals of Caring

Paul Rudd in The Fundamentals of Caring on Netflix.

With his compact frame, large head, and pliable facial features, Paul Rudd has endeared himself almost to every audience since his priceless work in Clueless (1994) and before. Even in pictures that fail to live up to their reputation, he finds a way to rise above. In the Judd Apatow's Knocked Up (2007), which pushes an interesting idea too far, Rudd steals the show with his portrayal of Seth Rogan's brother-in-law to be. Now he's heading into movie star territory, after his pitch-perfect performance in the under-appreciated Ant-Man from last year. While Rudd's range has yet to be tested, his relaxation, timing, and emotional intelligence make him irrepressible.

In the Netflix movie The Fundamentals of Caring (from earlier this year), Rudd escapes disaster yet again—barely. Rob Burnett's adaptation of the Jonathan Evison novel is a heaping dose of corn served on a platter of schmaltz. As Ben Benjamin, a caregiver to a young man with muscular dystrophy, Rudd is the only thing in the picture that holds your interest. And he alone among the actors emerges unscathed. That he does save his neck is a wonder, given the film's near-shameless sentimentality. We meet Benjamin at the movie's outset as he finishes a social work course and lands an interview with Elsa (Jennifer Ehle), the mother of the aforementioned boy. Trevor (Craig Roberts), her teenage son, is wheelchair-bound and in need of a daytime provider while his mom's at work. Despite Elsa's anal-retentive qualities and Trevor's scare tactics, Ben successfully pleads for the job—he's an unemployed writer who's wife's filing for divorce after a two-year separation.

States of Mind: Joachim Trier's Louder Than Bombs

Devin Druid and Gabriel Byrne in Joachim Trier's Louder Than Bombs.

Joachim Trier's previous movie, Oslo, August 31st, offered the devastating depiction of one day in the life of a heroin addict, Anders, as he journeyed from rehab to relapse over the course of twenty-four hours. Along the way, the Norwegian director folded the audience into Anders' conscious experience – his mental states and feelings – in uncanny fashion. Moods of depression and alienation drenched the picture as Anders encountered various persons from his past in disconnected moments. The director displayed a mesmeric ability to create conscious experience through visual, aural, and linguistic means. In one scene, Anders sits alone in a cafe filled with patrons. As Trier slowly zooms in on the man, he begins listening in on the conversations of his neighbors, their chatter coming in and out of our hearing like station frequencies on a radio. He looks through the window at young professionals passing by in all their seeming success, and we sense his resigned envy. His own troubled consciousness imprisons him even as it affords him imaginative empathy with others. But Trier follows each of these people, and we see flashes of the rest of their day and the sadness and alienation that assails them, too. No one is happy. At the end, as Anders lies in oblivion, a montage of the places he visited that day appear, empty now. A similar montage shows up at the end of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, but there the image of each place held the memory of romantic magic. Here, only that of emptiness, futility, human vapor.

Louder Than Bombs, which opened last spring in the U.S., finds Trier exploring the realms of phenomenology, depression, and alienation even more deeply. And it reveals a greater mastery of surrealism, point of view, and narrative construction on his part. The film, penned by Trier and his recurring co-writer, Eskil Vogt, concerns the Reed family: Gene (Gabriel Byrne), the father, and his two sons, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) and Conrad (Devin Druid). Jonah is a professor of sociology, married, and a new father. Conrad still lives at home, finishing high school. Their wife and mother, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a famous war photojournalist, died in a car wreck three years earlier. Now, we find the men at their family home outside New York, still groping their way through the emotional aftermath. That process grows weightier when they learn that Isabelle's colleague, Richard (David Strathairn, ever welcome), plans to publish a lengthy retrospective on her in The New York Times. And, more consequentially, that he intends to reveal that, rather than accidentally driving into an oncoming semi, Isabelle actually killed herself. Other than Richard, only Gene and Jonah know the truth of the matter – they've kept Conrad in the dark. And when Gene learns what's coming, he wrestles with how to tell his younger son, even as Jonah insists on keeping the teenager innocent of it.

Still Bourne: Paul Greengrass' Jason Bourne

Matt Damon in Jason Bourne.

Jason Bourne is the fifth installment of the espionage franchise and the third in which Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass have teamed up (the fourth, a spin-off, saw Jeremy Renner in the lead). It's been an exhilarating partnership so far, producing the most taut chase scenes, desperate hand-to-hand struggles, and precision minimalist acting from an ever-expanding cast of characters. I'm happy to report that the latest film retains these features. Greengrass' action direction is uncanny, with several bravura sequences that will leave you slack-jawed. In one, Bourne races through the streets of Athens on a motorcycle in the middle of a full-scale popular uprising, replete with Molotov cocktails, tear gas, fire hoses, and pitched battles between rioters and armored police. It is a staggering, visceral piece of direction. Your sensory apparatus can hardly register the kinetic movement. The only thing I've ever seen that surpasses it is the final minutes of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men and perhaps Joe Wright’s Dunkirk sequence in Atonement. Damon continues his disciplined approach to the role; Tommy Lee Jones effortlessly steps into the shoes of the villain, nefarious CIA chief Robert Dewey; and Alicia Vikander gets the acting style of the franchise just right in the role of Heather Lee, Dewey’s protege.

But despite this craftsmanship and professionalism, Jason Bourne lacks the human conflict that lay at the core of the previous Damon films, a struggle that connected all of the movies’ elements into a tightly congealed ball. If you recall, the first movies trace the story of how Bourne--suffering from amnesia--comes to remember his past life as a CIA assassin even as he evades the Agency’s desperate attempts to eliminate him. His identity crisis was a moral crisis--he wanted to know the truth of his life so as to atone for the murders he committed. The problem was, he couldn’t escape being an assassin--he kept being forced to use his deadly abilities on the various black ops agents that came after him. Despite his desire to lead a quiet life, he had to keep killing, for the those agents would never have arisen if it weren’t for Bourne himself. He was the prototype, the first experiment in Dick Cheney’s 'dark side' operations. And so killing those agents and exposing their superiors was the only way to undo his painful legacy. That it fit in with his identity quest is what made the movies deeply compelling. This emotional weight lent a further urgency and excitement to the action sequences: the stakes were high.

A Parting Glance of War: HBO’s Band of Brothers

Today marks the seventieth anniversary of V-E Day, the official surrender of the German government that brought the Second World War to a close in Europe. Such a round number of decades, bursting rather rudely into the centennial memorial of the Great War, reminds us yet again of the inextricable links that bound the two conflicts together. In their causes, personalities, strategies, and consequences, the world wars were two shoes that dropped from the same nationalistic European corpus. And they landed on the globe with catastrophic impact. Walt Whitman famously said of the American Civil War that the real war would never make it into the books. That declaration would apply even more fittingly for World War II. Over 60 million human beings died in the conflict, one person every three seconds for six years. The proportions of the war’s scope, chaos, brutality, and moral stakes seem to exceed all categories of meaningful expression.

Still, dozens of movies have taken the war as their subject, many made right in the midst of the conflagration. HBO’s miniseries Band of Brothers aired almost fourteen years ago now, and the decade and a half since has solidified its standing as one of the finest World War II films around. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced the show, deciding to adapt historian Steven E. Ambrose’s book of the same title after the critical and commercial success of their movie Saving Private Ryan in 1998. Ryan and Ambrose lay at the center of the nostalgic wave for the war that swept the nation in the Nineties, as the country reckoned with the rapid disappearance of the generation that served at home and abroad. Ambrose placed an emphasis on oral histories in his methodology, underscoring the experience of the common soldiers, sailors, and airmen in his writing. In Band of Brothers, he follows a small group of infantrymen, E Company of the 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, from their training at the war’s outset through their fighting in Europe until the war’s close.

Long Day's Stay in Nothing: The Second Girl

MacKenzie Meehan, Kathleen McElfresh, & Christopher Donahue in The Second Girl. (All photos by T. Charles Erickson)

Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night may well be the greatest American tragedy ever written for the stage, so when I read the premise of The Second Girl at the Huntington Theatre Company, my curiosity was piqued. Irish playwright Ronan Noone has crafted a drama about the most unlikely of characters—the domestic help at the Tyrone household in Connecticut during the fateful day that O'Neill's autobiographical play chronicles. It takes a lot of balls to piggyback on O'Neill like this. How do you compete with the intensity and dramatic precision of the Tyrone tragedy? One successful approach would be to adopt a totally different style and genre, the way Christopher Durang parodies the play in his absurdist comedy The Idiots Karamazov. Another would be to siphon the tragic elements of O'Neill into the companion piece. Noone opts for neither approach, instead attempting a social commentary play that bears precisely no relation to the dramatic world it inhabits. The results are baffling.

If you're going to write a serious drama set in O'Neill's landscape, you have to follow the rules of engagement he sets down. Long Day's Journey is the archetypal family and barroom play, dramatizing with brutal honesty how relations simultaneously love and hate each other the most. During the titular day in the Tyrone house, Mary relapses into morphine addiction while her younger son, Edmund, is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Around and around the four Tyrones go in accusation and recrimination, dredging up old wounds and creating fresh ones in the process. The play's replete with symbolism—the fog off the Connecticut River, signifying illusion. Mary's misplaced wedding dress, representing the youthful happiness she's lost in her marriage to James. Mary herself, at once an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary and a drug-addled whore, at least in Jamie's mind. On that note, O'Neill employs his standard dramatic accouterments (booze, dope, whores, etc.) and themes: sin, nothingness, and man's inability to reconcile with himself and those around him so as to find peace.

Mood Disorder: Two Days, One Night

Two Days, One Night—the latest offering from the Dardenne brothers of Belgium—feels about as long as that, despite clocking in at a little over ninety minutes. The filmmakers have made realism their trademark approach, seeking to give voice to contemporary society's flotsam and shed light on their plight. In this attempt, they mean to channel the neo-realism of De Sica and his fellow Italians. His Umberto D. follows one elderly man as he loses both his Rome apartment and his pride, forced to beg on the streets for rent money. The Dardennes's film also tells a basic story, that of one Sandra (Marion Cotillard), a French wife and mother of two who's being forced from her job at a small company. But De Sica suffuses his film with a tone and technique that flushes out fellow feeling for the titular character. He was a humanist: Umberto Ferrari's character is fully formed and dignity affirmed in our eyes, even as he's debased in the eyes of others. The Dardennes brothers miss this streak. Two Days, One Night lacks a compelling central character, which leaves its simple narrative and conflict moribund.

Knight of Light: Gordon Willis in Retrospective

A scene from Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), shot by Gordon Willis.

Near the opening of his 1977 film Annie Hall, Woody Allen (playing Alvy, a version of himself) anticipates a rendezvous with the title character in front of a movie house. She’s running late, however, and during the interlude two wise guys accost him, recognizing his face from television comedian appearances. Unnerved beyond even his usual neuroticism, he practically runs to Annie when she pulls up in a cab at last. “I’m standing here with the cast of The Godfather!” he blurts out as they duck inside. This must rank as one of the great meta-references in cinema. For Diane Keaton, who plays Annie, of course was in the cast of The Godfather, in the role of Kay. You can’t get a better entrance. But it’s actually a double joke, for Annie Hall shares not only a great actor with those movies, but a great cinematographer as well: Gordon Willis. Willis died last year, and he stands prominently among the film luminaries we remember in looking back at 2014. So important was his impact on the art form, in fact, that the Brattle Theatre here in Boston offered a seven-film tribute to him late last summer. And while good doesn’t describe all of those pictures, Willis’ style is so distinctive that worth seeing does.

Biblical Bore – Exodus: Gods and Kings

Christian Bale as Moses in Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings

Director Ridley Scott’s latest epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings, makes Moses the second biblical patriarch to have his story butchered by Hollywood this year. The first, of course, was Noah in Darren Aronofsky’s deluded treatment last spring. Scott’s film doesn’t punish its audience with caustic melodrama the way the second half of Noah did. He’s a better craftsman than Aronofsky, and his visual palette more sensible – the movie’s landscape has the craggy wildness you associate with the Old Testament universe. But it matches its predecessor for clouding the meaning of the central narrative themes and injecting bizarre, half-baked spirituality into them. The result is a rare feat: a movie that’s at once both bloated and a fiasco.

Heart of Darkness: Foxcatcher

Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo in Foxcatcher

Bennett Miller’s 2005 film Capote started out as a literary biopic about the novelist that became something more: an unsettling examination of the title character’s jealousy, self-absorption, and manipulative relationship with Perry Smith, the chief subject of In Cold Blood. His follow-up picture, Moneyball (2011), had a comic tone that belied a similar interest in a solitary male figure – in that case, baseball general manager Billy Beane. With Foxcatcher, he brings these two movies together in a sense, borrowing the dark mood and material from the former, the athletic subject matter from the latter. The film treats Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), an amateur wrestler who won gold at the 1984 Olympics; his brother and coach, Dave (Mark Ruffalo); and the twisted connection they develop with blue blood millionaire John du Pont (Steve Carell). The picture’s really not a sports movie. If Truman Capote’s neuroses came to overshadow the enjoyment of his writing, here the warped psyches of the main characters – especially Mr. Carell’s – occlude the thrill of athletic glory entirely. The film is a picture of a Freudian nightmare. It works by mood and feeling, needling under your skin and leaving a corrosive taste in your mouth.

The Price of Truth: Kill the Messenger

Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb in Kill the Messenger

If last summer’s scenes from Ferguson, M.O. – the corpse of a black man lying in the street; cops armoured up like special forces; residents rioting in a failed neighborhood – drew our outrage, they didn’t earn our surprise. The whole affair was just yet another installment of the forces of law and order versus America’s poor and marginalized – those pictures could have been L.A. in the wake of Rodney King, or the whole country after the killing of Dr. King. With Kill the Messenger, director Michael Cuesta shines the spotlight on a particularly appalling chapter of this saga, telling the story of Gary Webb, a former reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. America’s “War on Drugs” ranks as one of its most self-destructive and inept policies in history; through it, criminal law has led to social engineering, as entire urban enclaves have crumbled due to the cycling of its young men of color in and out of prison on possession charges. Through Webb, Cuesta revisits an even darker wrinkle in this narrative. But what starts out as a moderately compelling investigative thriller turns into an even more thoughtful, ruminative portrait of a crusading reporter, his private battles, and what it means to have integrity.

Soul Mates: The Skeleton Twins

Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig in The Skeleton Twins

In director Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig play twins who’ve grown apart as adults after life’s taken them in different directions. But after a suicide attempt at the film’s outset lands Milo (Hader) in a L.A. hospital, the pair find themselves under the same roof again. Maggie (Wiig) insists that he recuperate with her back at their childhood hometown in upstate New York. She’s returned there upon marrying, and the movie charts the ways in which our place and family origin serve as both a haven from the wider world’s chaos and the ongoing cause of a different, deeper turbulence. Casting Hader and Wiig—two crack comedians—proves a stroke of genius. After seeing The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I knew Wiig could make a comic-dramatic turn. But I had no idea she was capable of the range of expression she displays here, nor the kind of psychological character study she puts on. Even more so with Hader, who has the more complex role and riskier scenes. And with Johnson and Mark Heyman’s first-rate script at their disposal, the pair is by turns hilarious and affecting. The Skeleton Twins is a funny, poignant, deeply touching look at the complicated way our siblings can become our best friends in adulthood—those who uniquely understand our pain and help us sort through the mess we make of life.

S&M: David Fincher’s Gone Girl

Ben Affleck stars in David Fincher's Gone Girl

This review contains major spoilers for Gone Girl.

“It was long. It was awkward. It had a terrible ending.” So one fellow patron declared at the conclusion of Gone Girl, the latest offering from David Fincher. I might nuance the first statement a bit. Fincher’s movie clocks in at two and a half hours, and though you don’t feel every second ticking by, you certainly sense the lugubrious pace by the second half. As to the ending, it’s insane for sure. The truth is, though, that the wheels fall off this bus well before the finale—about the same time the minutes start to hit you like a bag of rocks. And finally, some might dub the film’s feeling as awkward, the go-to adjective of we Millennials. But I would reach for a stronger descriptive. Sadomasochistic, for instance. Despite these quibbles, the tenor of the moviegoer’s opinion I’d agree with. Fincher’s taken Gillian Flynn’s novel and rendered it into a narrative that not only lacks almost any dint of crime genre thrills, mystery, and tension, but also exposes the shoddy character of the author’s writing. Not having read the book, I don’t know if these problems derive from the source material or Fincher’s direction. What I do know is that Ben Affleck’s performance as Nick Dunne saves this movie, even as it turns the filmmaker's intent on its ear.

Not a Contender: The Drop

James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy in The Drop

When The Godfather opened in 1972, Pauline Kael wrote of the terrifying light it shed on the dark underbelly of American society. Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) had got it wrong, she remarked—Terry Malloy didn’t clean up the docks, after all. The mob had only gone into hibernation, gestating into the new and more virulent mutation that Coppola unleashed two decades later. But though The Godfather and Kazan’s film each concerned itself with organized crime, their characters and setting couldn’t differ more. Coppola treated his gangsters as patrician nobility; Kazan’s were street toughs and longshoremen. Michael Roskam’s new picture, The Drop, draws a closer connection, conjuring up Kazan’s milieu on the gritty, befogged docks of Brooklyn. And he’s even resurrected Terry himself in the person of Bob Saginowski (Tom Hardy), the bartender of a watering hole used to stash the Chechen mafia’s dirty money. But despite its feel of authenticity and enticing beginning, the movie’s ultimately undone by writer Dennis Lehane’s damnable propensity to preposterous climaxes and deflating character revelations.

La Dolce Vita: The Trip to Italy

Movies like Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip (2010) elude the reductive marketing categories of studio advertising. The trailer pitched the film as a buddy flick and a road movie, which was certainly true. But those qualities, and the loose-limbed improvisational humor from Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, belied its directorial craftsmanship and thematic depth. Winterbottom put on this front intentionally, letting the easy pleasures of the comic structure seduce you into the serious philosophical question at play: Namely, what makes for the good life? Coogan and Brydon traipse around the countryside of northern England, taking in coldly beautiful vistas, fine French cuisine, and precious fraternal companionship. Yet only one of them, Mr. Brydon, actually enjoys the manifold pleasures surrounding them. Mr. Coogan can’t get out of his own egotism. He stumbles through the excursion in haze of pot, career ambitions, empty one-night stands, and narcissistic self-pity. Everything’s a competition with him, even their leisurely impersonations of Michael Caine and James Bond, and you winch at how he squanders relationships – including that with his good friend. For a moment, standing on a cliff of prehistoric rock formations, he steps outside himself and beholds the scene’s grandeur with wonder. But it’s short-lived and he quickly snaps back into his unhappy prison. Winterbottom contrasts him with Brydon’s simpleminded joviality and stable family life, and the picture ends with the question it secretly begins with: Why are some people blissfully content and others impossible to satisfy?

But if the studio execs didn’t know what to make of this character study last time, they’ve got a second chance with the release of The Trip to Italy, Winterbottom’s follow-up (both began as BBC series before morphing into feature films). And he’s made it easier for them, requiring less critical thinking and more pleasurable imbibing. The director and his two actors cut right to the chase (or the road as it were) repeating the premise of the first installment: The pair are to review a series of meals they share on holiday, this time in Italy. In a flash, they’re cruising Piedmont mountain roads in a Mini Cooper and dining on the culinary delights of the Cinque Terre. The ribald banter is back, even more uproarious than before: Coogan and Brydon mind meld into a withering parody of The Dark Knight Rises, the latter yelling inaudibly into his mouth in mockery of Bain before switching to an absurdly hoarse Christian Bale. Coogan matches and even exceeds him later in Capri with an impossibly dead-on imitation of Brando’s Don Corleone. But his is done in reverence; their skewering of Christopher Nolan is mercilessly accurate. Winterbottom also quickly dispatches the question of what a second movie, using the same structure as its predecessor, could have left to say. The boys take jabs at bands who succumb to “second-album syndrome,” after a successful debut; the self-awareness here disarms you with ease.

The Pride of the Yankees: Derek Jeter's Final Bow

Derek Jeter in 2008, after his 1,270th hit at Yankee Stadium, breaking Lou Gehrig's record (Photo: Barton Silverman)

No start to a sporting season garners the kind of response from observers that baseball elicits. The 2014 contest is halfway over; back in April, commentators everywhere greeted the return of pitch and catch with the kind of paeans reserved for myth. The link between baseball, spring, and eternal youth is made much of, and that mysticism never fails to register in my heart at some level. It's impossible to grow up in Cooperstown, as I did, and not feel a spiritual connection to the game unique among Americans. But this season's especially poignant for me as Derek Jeter – captain of the Yankees, hero to legions of New Yorkers – bids baseball farewell. In the shadow of his retirement, this season's symbolized not just the rebirth of hope, but the ending of an era – for a city, for a team, for me.