L'art pour l'humanité: A Bread Factory, Parts I and II (2018)

George Young, Trevor St. John, and Janet Hsieh in A Bread Factory, Part One (2018)

The question of the power of art is an ancient one. Confucius said, “If you do not study the Songs, you will be at a loss as to what to say.” And Plato had such a powerful view of the performing arts that he banned all poet-singers from his ideal Republic for fear their work would override people’s reason. But under the utilitarian logic of our contemporary neoliberal society, the question “What does art do?” has been reduced to a mere shadow of its storied history: “What can art do?” Writer-director Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory (2018), four hours split right down the middle into two parts, ambitiously attempts to answer this question, not intellectually with auteur-surrogate characters spouting exposition, but performatively and cinematically, juxtaposing the contrast between bean-counting life and expansive humanist living in almost every one of his vignette-like scenes. Most audacious of all, the film doesn’t rest on its Manichean haunches; instead, it humanizes even the supposed antagonists, offering us the formal victory of art in the face of its thematic defeat.

Arthur Miller in New York and London: All My Sons and Death of a Salesman

Benjamin Walker, Tracy Letts, Annette Bening, and Hampton Fluker in All My Sons. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

All My Sons was the first play Arthur Miller had produced on Broadway, in 1947, and for me, at least, it’s the only one that works. Death of a Salesman, written two years later, makes loud proclamations about the American dream, but its argument is confused, and Miller is so careful about maintaining a vague Everyman quality for Willy Loman – choosing a symbolic name rather than an ethnic one, even though the rhythm of the lines sounds distinctly second-generation Jewish-American, and not even detailing exactly what Willy sells on those New England road trips – that the realism grows blurry. (One of the qualities Dustin Hoffman brought to the role when he played it on Broadway in 1984 was an embrace of the Jewishness Miller worked so hard to bury. He was brilliant, though the delicacy of the performance didn’t survive into the clumsy TV movie version directed by Volker Schlondorff.) Miller has big, Ibsen-like ambitions in All My Sons, which is no less than an indictment of the American way of doing business, which he pits against the values he believes were embodied in the sacrifices made by American servicemen in the Second World War. But he’s very specific about what Joe Keller does: he runs a company that manufactures key components in a variety of complicated mechanical items, and during the war he and his partner and neighbor, Steve Deever, turned out cylinder heads for bomber planes. When the process developed a flaw and a batch of the heads came out with cracks in him, the plant covered up the mistake and twenty-one pilots crashed and died. Joe put the blame on Steve, protesting that he was home sick with the flu that day and Steve acted on his own, out of fear of losing the government contract. And though in fact Joe told him exactly what to do, a jury exonerated Joe and sent Steve to prison. All My Sons is set during the twenty-four-hour period, three years later, when Steve’s daughter Ann – once the fiancée of Joe and Kate Keller’s older son, Larry, a pilot himself who went missing around the time his father came to trial – and her brother George return to the Midwestern town where Joe’s plant is now making more money than ever, and the truth is revealed.

Small Island: The National Theatre Works the Room

Gershwyn Eustache Jr. and Leah Harvey in Small Island at London's National Theatre. (Photo: Brinkhoff/Mögenburg)

This review contains spoilers.
 
Small Island, on the Olivier stage at London’s National Theatre, clocks in at three hours and fifteen minutes and feels more like a miniseries than a play. (Indeed it has been a BBC miniseries, starring Naomie Harris, Ruth Wilson, David Oyelowo and Benedict Cumberbatch.) Adapted by Helen Edmundson from Andrea Levy’s multiple-award-winning 2004 novel about Jamaicans struggling to make lives for themselves in World War II and post-war London, it takes the entire first act – an hour and forty-five minutes – to set up the parallel between its two protagonists, one black and one white. The black heroine is Hortense (Leah Harvey), an obstinate, intractable Jamaican schoolteacher whose mother gave her up to be raised by foster parents in Kingston, where she believed the child would have a more rewarding life. Hortense is so desperate to get out of Jamaica – to London, where she assumes she can land a teaching job – that she steals Gilbert (Gershwyn Eustache Jr.), who fought with the British Armed Forces during the war, from her best friend. She offers to pay for his passage to London on the Empire Windrush (which carried Levy’s own parents from Jamaica in 1948) on condition that he marry her and send for her once he’s established himself. The white heroine is Queenie (Aisling Loftus), who comes to London from the country in the late thirties to live with her aunt and work in her news-agent’s shop, marries the sexually repressed Bernard Bligh (Andrew Rothney) and moves in with him and his father Arthur (David Fielder), who emerged from the First World War so shell-shocked that he stopped speaking. When war breaks out and Bernard joins up, Queenie moves back to her parents’ farm in Lincolnshire and waits for her husband to return, but the army sends him straight to India in 1945 on a peacekeeping mission, where he disappears mysteriously. To keep solvent she opens her home to military boarders, including, at different times, Gilbert and Hortense’s cousin Michael (CJ Beckford), the earliest object of her romantic attention, with whom Queenie has a love affair that awakens her both sexually and emotionally. When Gilbert returns to England on Hortense’s dime in 1948, he moves into the working-class London area where Queenie has opened a boardinghouse, and that’s the cramped, seedy and largely xenophobic neighborhood to which he welcomes Hortense.

Last Night in Marienbad: Dancing the Elusive

Christopher House and Jordan Tannahill in Marienbad. (Photo: Ömer Yükseker)

To access Marienbad, a mesmerizingly teasing dance work whose week-long residency concludes tomorrow night (June 1), you enter Winchester Street Theatre through a side entrance instead of the usual front door. It’s the first clue that what is taking place inside the converted Cabbagetown church that for years has served as home to Toronto Dance Theatre has upended the normal run of things.

A two-man physical and psychological tour de force, Marienbad – likely named for the 1961 Left Bank film about an affair that may or may not have happened – unfolds not on the flat-floor black stage that normally serves as the romping grounds for TDT’s often sprightly dances. It stomps, jogs, zigs and zags down a cascading tier of stairs located where the audience typically sits.

The Flamingo Kid: Bare Bones

Alex Wyse, Jimmy Brewer, and Ben Fankhauser in The Flamingo Kid. (Photo: T. Charles Rickson)

In The Flamingo Kid, the new musical premiering at Hartford Stage, with music by Scott Frankel and lyrics by Robert L. Freedman, an impressionable Brooklyn teenager named Jeffrey Winnick (Jimmy Brewer) spends the summer before college – the summer of 1962 – as a cabana boy at a posh Long Island club. There he loses his virginity to a beautiful, grounded UCLA freshman (Samantha Massell) and gets swept up in the lifestyle and values of her uncle, a car salesman named Phil Brody (Marc Kudisch) who is legendary for his finesse at gin rummy. The book, like the screenplay of the 1984 Gary Marshall movie on which it’s based, pits Jeffrey’s real father, Arthur (Adam Heller), an honest, industrious plumber who wants his son to get a college education, against Brody, who is all flash and offers the kid the appeal of an entrée into the high life – though it’s clear to us that, to Phil’s brittle, unhappy wife Phyllis (Lesli Margherita) and the rest of the El Flamingo clientele, Jeffrey will always be “the cabana boy” (whose shapely ass the sex-starved women are forever ogling or pinching). The material, set firmly in the world of New York Jews, is all about class – and it’s rigged. We don’t have to be told that Phil cheats at cards just as he cheats on his wife, and that Jeffrey, who’s a good kid, will ultimately expose him (while he slaughters him in a legit card game) and choose his father’s square, unvarnished life over Brody’s superficial one, which is both morally and emotionally vacuous. If the seductive car salesman weren’t such a transparent phony and Jeffrey’s parents (his mother, Ruth, is played by Liz Larsen) weren’t so solid and decent – if we could sympathize with the boy’s restlessness with his Brooklyn roots and his fascination with Brody – then the musical (and the movie) might be more than a pat fable. But even Karla, Jeffrey’s girl, is drawn to the Winnicks the moment she meets them and appalled at his insensitive treatment of them.

Forest of Memory: The Provocative Art of Dana Claxton

Cultural Belongings by Dana Claxton, LED Firebox, 2016.

I'm influenced by my own experience as a Lakota woman, as a Canadian, a mixed blood Canadian, and then my own relationship to the natural and supernatural world. Taking that whole bundle of experiences, it all goes in to the artwork, I think that's where the multi-layering comes in, because I've had a very multi-layered life.

– Dana Claxton, 2007

As a person of mixed heritage, Dana Claxton is practically a living mirror of the nation superimposed over the existing nations that were already here in the first place, especially her own uniquely personal family history of indigenous displacement and migration. As such, perhaps her fascination with the hybrid nature of parallel realities comes to her almost as a genealogical birthright. This fact certainly helps to clarify our deep appreciation of her as someone existing at the heart of intersecting forces and the crux of competing cultures, and maybe it explains why she’s such an effective ambassador between seemingly disparate dimensions.

So when she picked up her first camera at the age of sixteen and began to view the world around her, it now seems only natural that she should have tried to bring into focus the many layers that formed her own character. Born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, and raised in Moose Jaw, Claxton is descended on her mother’s side from Kangi Tamaheca and Anpetu Wastewin, who were among the large group of Hunkpapa Lakota who followed Sitting Bull as he walked from the United States to Canada after the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876.

Sentimental Journeys: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, Burn This, Doris Day

Michael Shannon and Audra McDonald in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. (Photo: Deen van Meer)

I’ve been skipping productions of Terrence McNally’s two-hander Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune for decades – I didn’t see Kathy Bates with F. Murray Abraham or with Kenneth Welsh in the off-Broadway version in 1987, or Edie Falco with Stanley Tucci in the last revival, in 2002 – but I opted to see the latest one, on Broadway, with Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon. It’s a lousy play, an American variation on an English kitchen-sink drama that begins with a pair of lovers in bed naked, having sex, and then takes a couple of hours to show them opening up to each other in other ways. The (stock) idea is that they’re both desperately lonely but he’s willing to acknowledge it and she isn’t, and, attempting to persuade her that she should see him as more than a one-night stand, he’s got his work cut out for him because emotionally she’s closed down. It’s an unconventional courtship drama with the same basic structure as Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly (1980), which takes a far more inventive approach to the man’s effort to win over the cautious, distanced woman – and which has far more interesting characters. Talley’s Folly is a comedy with serious undertones; Frankie and Johnny tries for loopy romanticism but ends up glum and monochromatic, though with a sentimental ending.

The Museum Must Be Decolonized: The First Monday in May (2016)

A shot from The First Monday in May (2016).

The first Monday in May is when New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art holds its annual Met Gala to raise money for the museum, especially for its Costume Institute; the Gala also serves as the opening night of a fashion exhibition at the Met. The First Monday in May (2016) is a documentary about the preparation for the 2015 iteration of this event, when the exhibition was China: Through the Looking Glass, on the influence of China on Western fashion, in cooperation with the Met’s Department of Asian Art. It turned out to be a record-breaking exhibition.

Dust Bowl: Oklahoma!

 Rebecca Naomi Jones and Damon Daunno in Oklahoma!. (Photo: Teddy Wolff)

Daniel Fish’s new, stripped-down production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, which has moved from St. Ann’s Warehouse to Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre, is being hailed as brilliant and revolutionary, much like the original 1943 version, even though that didn’t do anything that the 1927 Kern and Hammerstein Show Boat (or for that matter, the 1940 Rodgers and Hart Pal Joey), hadn’t done before and better.

Revolutionary? Let’s start at the end: in this Oklahoma!, after the cast has sung the title song, our heroes, the bronco-buster Curly (played by Damon Daunno, so slight he looks like he’d split in two if he ever sat astride a horse) and Laurey (a very angry Rebecca Naomi Jones) are dressed in white for their wedding, when Jud Fry (Patrick Vaill) crashes in and offers Curly a gift, conditional upon his getting to kiss the bride. Jud and Laurey French-kiss, despite Jud's having previously tried to rape her and threatened her and her family. Curly opens the gift, and it’s a gun (not the booby-trapped “Little Wonder” traditional to stodgy stagings of yore). Jud then stands about ten feet in front of Curley and spreads his arms. Curly shoots him. Curly’s gun is rigged so that Curly (yes, Curly) is spattered with copious amounts of blood, his face crimson and dripping, his white (modern-dress) cowboy suit now mostly red, with a significant portion of blood spattering his bride. Jud is still standing. The rest of the eleven-person cast, who have been sitting around in chairs watching this, intone the next four or five minutes of dialogue with no affect. “Is he dead? He looks dead.” (Uh, he’s still standing, so no, he isn’t dead.) After too much of this, Judd goes upstage and lies down on the floor. Aunt Eller (the redoubtable Mary Testa) then bullies the local marshal and judge into a kangaroo-court trial that finds Curly innocent by reason of self-defense; the ensemble reprises the title tune; and as they sing of the grandness of the land they belong to and the new union they hope to join, Laurey sobs in sorrow, others writhe in misery, some stomp in anger, and Curly plays the guitar in his blood-stained clothes. All is corrupt, all is unclean, all is rot.

Wait, what?

Tootsie: In Name Only

 Julie Halston, James Moye, Santino Fontana, Lilli Cooper, John Behlmann in Tootsie. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

The new musical of Tootsie, with a book by Robert Horn and music and lyrics by David Yazbek, has “smash hit” written all over it. It’s slick and rapid-fire. The veteran director, Scott Ellis (who’s also represented on Broadway this season by the revival of Kiss Me, Kate at Studio 54), and his expert cast build the farce perfectly, so that the more complications that are piled on top of the premise – actor Michael Dorsey (Santino Fontana), whose temperament has made it impossible for his agent (Michael McGrath) to land him jobs, finally gets one by presenting himself as a woman, Dorothy Michaels – the funnier it is. Rather than set the story in the period in which the movie was made, the early eighties, Horn has contemporized it. There are #MeToo jokes – Michael’s wry aspiring-playwright roommate Jeff Slater (Andy Grotelueschen) quips that in an era when women are literally seizing power from between the legs of men, Michael is risking infuriating everyone by pretending to be female. There are jokes about sexual fluidity – when Michael, forgetting momentarily that he’s in drag, kisses his co-star, Julie Nichols (Lilli Cooper), whom he’s fallen for, instead of scaring her off since she’s not gay, she likes him so much that she decides to try to be gay. It’s all very up to the minute, and the audience at the Saturday matinee I attended screamed with laughter. I would be dishonest if I said that I didn’t have a pretty good time, too. But I haven’t the slightest idea what the hell this Tootsie is about.

Permanent Witness for the Defense: The Legend of K.

The ultimate anti-author, ca. 1919.

A review of the new book by Benjamin Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial, from Norton, Penguin/Random House.

“A book should be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us.” – Kafka, 1904

“Where faith is lacking, everything seems bare and frigid.” – Max Brod, 1920

If the subtitle of the fascinating new book by Benjamin Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial (from Norton, Penguin/Random House), about competing cultural agendas sounds like the name of a mystery novel about Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous defense attorney, that’s because it does almost read like a classic Perry Mason plot: “The Case of a Literary Legacy.” And indeed, there are even some characters in this real-life story of courtroom drama who feel like the erstwhile Mason, Hamilton Burger, Lt. Tragg, Paul Drake and even Della Street. There are detectives, combative litigants, accusations of false ownership, desperate pleas, outlandish nationalist claims, ill-advised decisions, questionable motives and selfish assumptions abounding.

From the Musical Theatre Canon: The Music Man, Kiss Me, Kate and Lady in the Dark

Ellie Fishman and Edward Watts in The Music Man. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

Meredith Willson’s The Music Man became a classic as soon as it opened on Broadway in 1957, with Robert Preston in the role of “Professor” Harold Hill, the scamming salesman who transforms a pre-World War I Iowa town – and himself – in the course of persuading the locals to purchase instruments and uniforms for a children’s band. Willson, who wrote book, music and lyrics, did as much to develop the archetype of the American snake-oil salesman as Eugene O’Neill had in The Iceman Cometh, though his version was sweeter and came with a bona fide happy ending. (Preston recreated his career performance in the 1962 movie version.) Revivals of the show are generally good news: Susan Stroman’s opened on Broadway in 2000 and ran for two years, and it was so glorious that I saw it twice, once with Craig Bierko playing Hill and once with Robert Sean Leonard, who was even better than Bierko. (Eric McCormack played the role between Bierko and Leonard.) I’m looking forward to seeing Hugh Jackman in the part next season.

In the meantime there’s an exuberant new production at the Goodspeed Opera House, directed by Jenn Thompson and choreographed by Patricia Wilcox, with Goodspeed veteran Michael O’Flaherty doing his usual yeoman service as musical director. The Music Man is the ideal show for Goodspeed – big-boned, spirited, infectious, with a lot of wonderful ensemble numbers that show off the way imaginative staging can make a limited space feel like it’s being expanded from the inside. The choreographic high points of this production are “Marian the Librarian” in act one and “Shipoopi” at the outset of act two. But even the staging of the barbershop quartet numbers, especially “Lida Rose,” counterpointed by “Will I Ever Tell You?,” the most tuneful ballad Willson wrote for Marian (Ellie Fishman) and introduced by the four men (Branch Woodman, C. Mingo Long, Jeff Gurner and Kent Overshown) strolling down the theatre aisle, is tremendously satisfying. The show moves from scene to scene in a graceful arc aided by the scenic designer Paul Tate dePoo III, whose inventions compensate for his single mistake, an unfortunate (and anachronistic) painted backdrop more or less in the mold of the American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton.

Art Therapy: Welcome to Marwen

Steve Carell and Merritt Wever in Welcome to Marwen.

The almost universal disdain with which Robert Zemeckis’s Welcome to Marwen was met on its Christmas release aroused my curiosity, but by the time I had a chance to check it out it had vanished. There had been no press screenings and though it was award season, no screeners were sent out. One might have thought that Zemeckis’s name or that of Steve Carell, who plays the lead, would have rescued it from its ignominious demise, but I had to wait until it came out on Amazon Prime to catch up with it. And it turns out to be so good that the stench around it seems like a bad joke. It’s based on the true story of Mark Hogencamp, who was attacked in 2000 by five men at a bar in his hometown in northern New York and abandoned for dead; he survived, but his memory was wiped and he had severe PTSD. His strategy for dealing with it was to construct a doll village on his property that he called Marwencol in which the characters, mostly versions of Mark and women friends from his life after the attack, are reimagined as Allied warriors of the Second World War holed up in a village in Belgium. Hogancamp became known for his photos of Marwencol – and they provided him with a livelihood. The story is familiar to art-house mavens from Jeff Malmberg’s memorable 2010 documentary Marwencol. What Zemeckis brings to it is real directorial finesse and invention – not to mention Carell, in a sensational performance that’s the best thing he’s done thus far.

Dialectics False and True: Captive State and A. I. Rising

John Goodman and Ashton Sanders in Captive State (2019).

Look, some films are just garbage; that’s just a fact. But sometimes when you go dumpster diving you find something that, when looked at from just the right angle, isn’t so much garbage after all.

Captive State (2019) is ambitious and has no lack of “the vision thing.” Writers Rupert Wyatt (who directed) and Erica Beeney attempt to portray a Chicago succumbed to alien colonization by telling the story of Gabriel (Ashton Sanders) and the morally murky father figure he doesn’t want at all, collaborationist Detective William Mulligan (John Goodman), embedding them within a larger plot about an insurgent cell bent on hitting the aliens where it hurts. But – here’s the thing – the audience identification is whipped around from Gabriel, who’s the actual non-collaborationist here, to Mulligan, who’s the hinge of both plots, and back, once Mulligan starts to shake down Gabriel’s apartment building to look for him.

Sound and Fury: King Lear

Jayne Houdyshell and Glenda Jackson in King Lear. (Photo: Brigitte Lacombe)

Of the thirteen or fourteen professional productions of King Lear I’ve sat through, the current Broadway revival, directed by Sam Gold and starring Glenda Jackson, repeating her London comeback performance in the title role, is the worst. It grinds on for a grueling three hours and thirty minutes without, as far as I could tell, any concept to unify it. Gold has given it a contemporary setting. The handsome set (by the gifted British designer Miriam Buether, whose recent credits include To Kill a Mockingbird, The Jungle and Three Tall Women) is black and gold, with a long banquet table midway up the stage that is meant to evoke the regal elegance of the various castles – Lear’s, Albany’s, Gloucester’s – where much of the play takes place, especially in the first half. Much of the time the actors, including those who are not called on for the scene at hand, sit at the table or, more often, on chairs around the periphery of the stage; this is certainly the most static Lear of my theatergoing experience. Gold hasn’t shown much talent for staging in the past, and with twenty actors on the stage he’s truly at sea. He lets them meander or shoves them into corners of the stage; in the opening scene, where almost everyone in the ensemble gathers to witness Lear’s division of his kingdom among his three daughters, the presence of a signer (Michael Arden) cues us that one of the actors is deaf but because he has almost no lines in the scene and he’s been placed in the middle of a clump of actors, I couldn’t tell which one until several scenes later. (It turns out to be Russell Harvard, playing the Duke of Cornwall.) When Lear wanders out into the storm, an abstract gold backdrop flies in. Since there are exterior scenes in the latter half of the play, after the backdrop has flown back out again, there doesn’t seem to be much reason for the shift beyond framing the heath and hovel scenes – and since, confusingly, this section of the play includes one exchange that takes place inside Gloucester’s castle, even that idea isn’t followed through.

The Interpretation of Dreams: On the Beach at Night Alone

Kim Min-hee in On the Beach at Night Alone (2017).

There seems to a a trend of metafiction in South Korean arthouse. Before Burning (2018) there was On the Beach at Night Alone (Bamui Haebyeoneseo Honja / 밤의 해변에서 혼자, 2017), by Hong Sang-soo and starring his real-life mistress (now partner) Kim Min-hee as Young-hee, a former mistress of a great Director (Moon Sung-keun). It’s also a slow burn, with the central affair merely hinted at for most of its running time. But Kim gets two stupendous set-pieces, all facilitated by alcohol, and she burns it all down.

The Real Tesla: How Visionary Eccentrics Transformed Our World and Why We Need Them to Do It Again, Please

Nikola Tesla’s lab in Colorado Springs, calmly making environmental electricity in 1901.

Review of the new book by Richard Munson, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern, released Fall 2018 by Norton, Penguin/Random House. 

Nikola Tesla could have been elected President of The Outsiders Club, if such a thing existed. One of the most gifted and strange individuals who ever lived, his inventions transformed our world and his visions have continued to inspire other great minds for generations. I guess given that is an affirmative review of a serious and important book about a grand thinker, I shouldn’t really start out with the crucial disclaimer that: This is about the real Tesla. This has nothing to do with that twerp Elon Musk who stole his name to brand his company, after more or less stealing the core notions of an electric automobile that Nikola had conceived ages ago, but to whom no one paid any attention. What the hell, there, I said it.

Us: Cheap Stuff

Lupita Nyong'o, Evan Alex, and Shahadi Wright Joseph in Jordan Peele's Us.

The first few minutes of Us, written and directed by Jordan Peele, before the opening credits are spooky and unnerving. A little girl named Adelaide (Madison Curry) wanders away from her family on the beach in Santa Cruz; she’s drawn into a fun house where she sees her mirror image – only the twin is facing the other away. This Magritte-like image is startling; it’s also the best thing in the movie by far. As soon as Peele catapults us some three decades into the future, where grown-up Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is back in Santa Cruz vacationing with her own husband (Winston Duke) and kids (Evan Alex and Shahadi Wright Joseph), and the home they’ve rented is invaded by malevolent, scissors-wielding replicas of themselves, Us sinks to that lowest common denominator of horror devices, a series of jump scares.

Jack of All Fates, Master of None: Mr. Nobody Ten Years On

Jared Leto and Diane Kruger in Jaco van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody (2009).

There’s nothing in the world more terrifying than a restaurant menu. I stick to a handful of oft-frequented establishments precisely to avoid the vertigo of too many options. It’s not that I’m afraid of ordering the wrong thing – just the opposite: Everything looks so equally good that I can’t pin down a standard against which to differentiate them. I often joke to new friends sitting across the table in exasperation that menus open up an existential abyss within me, forcing me to reconsider the very ideas of “choice” and “value.” I used to think that knowing what every dish tasted like would help me make a decision. Then I saw Jaco van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival to a ten-minute standing ovation a decade ago this September.

The Mustang: Soothing the Savage Spirit

Matthias Schoenaerts in The Mustang.

The first images of The Mustang, of a herd of wild mustangs racing vainly across a western expanse while choppers buzzing overhead round them up and vans cut off their escape route, is reminiscent of scenes from the great 1953 Albert Lamorisse short White Mane. It’s a hell of an opening: majestic and unsettling in equal parts. And it lays the groundwork for the story, which juxtaposes one of these magnificent wild creatures, a restless, apparently unbreakable horse named Marquis (pronounced “Marcus”), with a violent criminal named Roman Coleman (Matthias Schoenaerts, Gabriel Oak in the 2015 remake of Far from the Madding Crowd) who’s just been released into the general prison population at the Northern Nevada Correctional Institute after years in solitary. In his session with the prison psychologist (Connie Britton), Roman refuses to answer her questions; he looks like he’s about to implode, and he very nearly does – though she’s a veteran, firm and fearless, so his resistance to her doesn’t impress her. (Britton only has two scenes in the movie, but she makes the most of them.) Finally he gets out “I’m not good with people,” so she assigns him to outdoor work. Where he ends up is the Wild Horse Inmate Program, whose director, Myles (Bruce Dern), with the help of an inmate handler named Henry (Jason Mitchell), teaches prisoners to tame mustangs so they’re fit to be auctioned off for a variety of purposes, including border patrol. The Mustang is about how Roman and Marquis, in effect, tame each other – after a very shaky start. Roman gets so exasperated with the horse’s reluctance to let himself be subdued that, in an astounding scene, he beats him with his fists until Myles has him dragged off. Myles, not surprisingly, proclaims that he never wants to see this inmate again, but Roman manages to redeem himself in an emergency and is re-enlisted in the program.