Wounded Souls at the Edge of a Rain Forest: The Night of the Iguana at ART

Amanda Plummer, Dana Delany and Bill Heck (centre) in The Night of the Iguana at the American Repertory Theatre.
(Photo: Gretjen Helene Photography)

Amanda Plummer gives a wondrous performance as Hannah Jelkes in Michael Wilson’s new production of The Night of the Iguana at American Repertory Theatre. In Tennessee Williams’ 1961 play, set in a hotel at the edge of a Mexican rain forest in 1940, the protagonist, T. Lawrence Shannon – a southerner and one-time Episcopalian minister, now a tour guide for an American company – describes Hannah as a “thin-standing-up-Buddha.” In fact, she’s a Nantucket spinster who travels with her nearly-centenarian grandfather, a poet. He recites and she paints portraits; that’s how they live, traveling from hotel to hotel, though when they appear at the Costa Verde, run by Maxine Faulk, the recent widow of Shannon’s old friend and fishing buddy Fred, they’re distinctly on their uppers. Hannah possesses the sort of philosophical endurance that is indistinguishable from grace, though, she assures Shannon, who has worked himself up to a fine state of hysteria – he’s slept with a teenage girl on this latest tour, of Texan Baptists, and its supervisor, Miss Fellowes, is determined to get him fired – her serenity has come at a steep price. He is trailed by his “spook”; she fought a tense battle with her “blue devil,” defeating him at last because, she explains, she couldn’t afford to lose. Shannon finds an unexpected companion in Hannah, who is almost supernal in her perceptions and utterly non-judgmental of other people. (“Nothing human disgusts me,” she asserts.)

Plummer has been one of my favorite actresses since Lamont Johnson’s lovely, too-little-known 1981 western Cattle Annie and Little Britches, where, at twenty-four, she and sixteen-year-old Diane Lane played a pair of orphans who join Burt Lancaster’s gang of outlaws. Around the same time she took up the role of Jo in a rare New York stage revival of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and in both projects she demonstrated a poetic ferocity and gallantry that weren’t quite like anything I’d seen before. (God knows she came by her talent honestly – she’s the daughter of Christopher Plummer and Tammy Grimes.) Those qualities ought to be a perfect match for Tennessee Williams’ heroines, but the first time I saw her attempt one, Alma in Summer and Smoke at Hartford Stage in 2006 (under Wilson’s direction), oddly enough she couldn’t seem to get her mouth around the poetry – at least not until the epilogue, where Alma, once the eccentric of her small southern town, has become its scandal, picking up salesmen in the square. Plummer had been off track since the opening scene, but in that last five minutes she was exquisite; I couldn’t help thinking it a pity that she couldn’t start her performance all over again. But she did some fantastic work opposite Brad Dourif in Williams’ The Two-Character Play four years ago, and her line readings in this Night of the Iguana are quicksilver and often very funny and always, always unpredictable. And she’s radiant – a kind of earth angel with a sometimes unsettlingly level gaze.

Nineteen Eighty-Four Revisited

One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

– George Orwell, “The Politics of the English Language”

With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth...
– George Orwell, in a letter from 1944 (collected in George Orwell: A Life in Letters)

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

– George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

My first impression after rereading George Orwell’s harrowing dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is how much it reminded me of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. In this bleak, repressive country named Oceania people's lives are constantly on public display through the ubiquitous two-way telescreens. The protagonist, Winston Smith, seeks privacy, itself suspicious, and keeps a diary, a transgressive act deemed by the Party as intolerable because it suggests that a person can think for himself. Add in his decision to develop a sexual relationship and soon agents of the Thought Police are dispatched to hustle him away at night to the Ministry of Love. As a political prisoner, Winston is at the whim not only of the guards, but also of the privileged criminals. He, along with other captives, is disoriented, not knowing whether it is day or night, and is subjected to excruciatingly painful interrogation inflicted with truncheons, electricity, and the victim's greatest fear -- in Winston’s case, rats. No one is ever really free again. Even prisoners who have been released will eventually be re-arrested and “vaporized.” They will become “unpersons," every record of their existence obliterated in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, which sends all relevant documents down a “memory hole,” a job that Winston once performed. Substitute the Lubyanka in then-Leningrad for Orwell’s doublespeak euphemism and we have almost identical conditions to those that existed in the Soviet Union. Even the Thought Police are based on the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which actually used riled-up rats in their interrogations.

A renewed interest in the Soviet Union, of course, cannot explain the surging popularity of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The election of Donald Trump has been an impetus, yet I do not think that anyone can reasonably suggest that Americans are about to descend into the totalitarian conditions limned in the novel. But we are living in a time that does summon up ominous features that derive from the novel and the former Soviet Union. Consider President Trump’s almost daily “fake news” accusations against The New York Times, his counselor Kellyanne Conway’s coinage of “alternative facts,” echoing the linguistic inventions of Orwell's Ministry of Truth and by implication Trump’s blatant contempt for objective truth, and his -- along with his aides’ -- cascade of lies – from false accusations that journalists invented a rift between him and the intelligence community (when he compared the intelligence agencies to Nazis) to debunked claims that millions of unauthorized immigrants robbed him of a popular-vote majority.

Podcast: Interview with Author Angela Carter (1984)

Angela Carter, in 1984. (Photo: Alamy)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1984, one of those guests was British novelist and journalist Angela Carter.
  When I sat down with Carter in 1984, she had authored over a dozen books, including eight novels and multiple collections of short stories, and her acclaimed novel Nights at the Circus had just been published. Nights at the Circus went on to win that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. (In 2012, the novel would be honoured again when it was selected from among almost a century of winning novels as the Prize's "best of the best.") In 2008, Carter was ranked at #10 in The London Times's list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945." Angela Carter passed away in London, in 1992, at the age of 51.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with Angela Carter as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1984.

Neglected Gem #97: Hollow Reed (1996)

Joely Richardson, Sam Bould (centre), and Jason Flemyng in Hollow Reed (1996).

The ostensible subject of the 1996 English drama Hollow Reed is child abuse, but the writer, Paula Milne, the director, Angela Pope, and a superb cast move into deeper themes of isolation and the desperation for love. Martin Donovan plays Martyn, a gay doctor living with his lover (Ian Hart); his wife, Hannah (Joely Richardson), has custody of their son Oliver (the delicately expressively Sam Bould). When Martyn suspects that Hannah’s live-in boy friend Frank (Jason Flemyng) has been beating Ollie, the unresolved tensions close to the surface of these complicated lifestyle decisions – fear of abandonment, competition for affection, bitterness over old losses – burst through. And the boy, who’s become a magnet for these knotted adult impulses he can’t comprehend, retreats farther and farther. Pope’s handling of Ollie’s buried feelings, which he can convey only by indirection, is the most compelling aspect of the movie: it recalls the lacerating scenes with the little girl in Roger Donaldson’s classic New Zealand troubled-marriage picture Smash Palace.

Childhood's End: "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane"

A few months ago, director Ron Howard described his documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years, as an adventure story and a tale of survival, and he tells it as if caught up in the tidal drift of its momentum. Retracing the familiar tale of the meteoric rise of Beatlemania, Howard wastes no time in showing both the endurance and the astonishing skill of a young group of musicians who became the pleasure principle in an age of social and political change. Beginning with footage from November 20th, 1963, at Manchester's ABC Cinema where the group performs "She Loves You" and "Twist and Shout" to an ecstatic crowd, Eight Days a Week goes on to chronicle their growing international acclaim as live artists – while also contrasting those shows with the astonishing quality of studio album after studio album despite the band's having to swim daily in a sea of madness.

Howard, whose first documentary was 2013's Made in America, about Jay-Z's music festival of the same name, provides a few choice observations, including The Beatles' stand against racial segregation, while deftly revealing how they always stayed ahead of the cultural curve by making everyone else play catch-up. Although most people who didn't live through that era have today experienced their music in its totality, Eight Days a Week brings you closer to the evolution of their sound so that you hear how remarkably canny they were at resisting being derivative and never repeating themselves. By the end of the film, you can't imagine this feat ever being duplicated again. The footage both familiar and new still carries an explosive charge of adolescent exuberance. Yet Eight Days a Week doesn't shy away from displaying how that adoring adulation would soon turn turtle into the kind of violent fan worship that took the band off the road and later claimed the lives of John Lennon and George Harrison. As Devin McKinney pointed out in his Critics at Large review, however, Eight Days a Week doesn't go far enough into the shadow side of The Beatles' utopian spirit. But it does catch the jet stream of their impact with a full-force gale. Since it only deals with the touring years, though, Eight Days a Week doesn't delve into the radical changes that followed their departure from the road.

Night of the Living Dread: Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Daniel Kaluuya in Jordan Peele's Get Out.

 Note: This review contains spoilers for Get Out.
 
Jordan Peele, one half of the sketch comedy duo Key & Peele, has made his directorial debut with a comedy horror film that is not only a box office hit – taking in nearly $35 million on opening weekend on a $4.5 million budget – but an artistic triumph, too, approaching Robert Eggers levels of cinematic near-perfection on his first crack at bat. Comedy and horror are probably the two easiest genres to screw up (where one flat joke or failed scare can bring the whole thing tumbling down), but with Get Out, Peele walks that tightrope effortlessly, delivering a movie that is both terrifying and hilarious. That it’s also brilliantly smart is just icing on the cake.

I’ll come right out with it: I feel awkward talking about this film as a white critic. Get Out is deeply rooted in the so-called “black experience” (a phrase that is itself harpooned in the film), going to extreme lengths to express the fears, anxieties, reservations, and petty cruelties that people of colour live with every day when they interact with a predominantly white culture here in the Western world. It’s perhaps very appropriate that I feel awkward, because the well-intentioned yet tone-deaf approach that the film’s white characters take to interacting with the protagonist, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), are equally cringeworthy. But with that said – and with you now forewarned to take my view on the film with a grain of pure white salt – it’s undeniable that Get Out has mass appeal, because no matter its politics, it’s just a goddamn great movie.

Tectonic: The Quantum Paintings of Curtis Cutshaw

Stream by Curtis Cutshaw. (Oil Enamel, Earth and Rust on Multiple Birch Panels, 2016)

“We are gazing at the solemn geography of human limits.” – Paul Eluard

There is an undeniable elegiac quality to the elegant and enigmatic paintings of Curtis Cutshaw, a Calgary-based artist whose work over the last fifteen years has followed a deep and discernible trajectory exploring an organic interior dimension which is at once compelling for the heart and captivating for the eye. When he first began being represented by the Jennifer Kostuik Gallery in 2000, he was already investigating a hidden realm of seed-like forms and spore-like structures, through an almost mystical presentation of their patterns and formations. These early works seemed to hover in a shadowy neon domain, a powerfully theatrical stage set within which curtains of pure matter were being pulled aside to spectacularly reveal their atomic identities, often with the optical drama of scientific slides, providing us a glimpse of what takes place inside matter itself: they appeared to portray the secret life of energy. Even back then he was clearly establishing himself as a master of both physical depiction and metaphysical reflection, and as a purveyor of quantum paintings par excellence.

All the Criticism That's Fit to Print: Revisiting The Rolling Stone Record Review and The Rolling Stone Record Review II

Led Zeppelin (courtesy of Getty Images).

In March 1969, writer John Mendelsohn was given the assignment for Rolling Stone to review the debut album of Led Zeppelin, a high-octane blues-rock outfit that had just emerged out of the ashes of The Yardbirds – a popular British Invasion band with a string of hits behind them including "Heart Full of Soul" and "For Your Love." Although there were no great expectations that this new ensemble would make history, Mendelsohn's words came to suggest that they might just become history. Chalking up their sound to formula, Mendelsohn remarked that Zeppelin "offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn't say as well or better..." Robert Plant's "howled vocals" were described as "prissy" on their cover of Joan Baez's "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," and Mendelsohn went on to add that "[Plant] may be as foppish as Rod Stewart, but he's nowhere near so exciting." Jimmy Page gets complimented as an "extraordinarily proficient blues guitarist," but he's also singled out as "a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs." Criticizing them as wasting their talent on "unworthy material," Mendelsohn saw little from that first record that suggested that Led Zeppelin would be talked about fifty years later. "It would seem that, if they're there to fill the void created by the demise of Cream," he wrote, "they will have to find a producer (and editor) and some material worthy of their collective attention."

Penguins Can't Dance: APB

Justin Kirk and Natalie Martinez in APB on FOX.

We've now seen three episodes of FOX's new crime drama APB and I'm going to call it: APB is the most depressing seemingly upbeat show on television. Ostensibly following the now-too-familiar model of the independent consultant working with police detectives to solve crimes (Castle, The Mentalist, Numb3rs, etc.), APB is somehow so derivative and insipid that it takes most of its progenitor shows down with it – no easy feat!

Created by television writer and producer David Slack (Person of Interest) and developed by Matt Nix (Burn Notice), APB gives us a hero tailor-made for 2017: a "maverick billionaire" who is convinced he knows better than anyone how to fix what ills American society. In the series' opening scenes, tech mogul and engineer Gideon Reeves (Justin Kirk, Weeds) watches his friend get gunned down in a liquor store robbery in urban Chicago, gets frustrated by the slow response of 911 and the police, and decides that the best way to get "justice" is to take over the neighbourhood's underfunded precinct. He accomplishes this by publicly paying off the city's $89 million police pension deficit – with a personal cheque! – and by bullying/shaming the city's mayor and city council. Over a weekend, he brings in an eager young team of coders and engineers who upgrade the 13th District's obsolete equipment, providing (among other things) shiny new tasers, military-grade vests, and bulletproof squad cars. (Paperwork? Irritating, and apparently pointless. Tasks like logging evidence? Civil rights? Not in Gideon's district!) What follows is precisely what you'd expect if you've ever seen a single episode of Numb3rs: every week offers a new crime, and a new problem, that only our hero's unique talents can solve. Along the way, sure, Gideon learns a lesson or two about 'real' law enforcement, but ultimately the show never wavers on its basic premise that this is what we need to really fix our broken society.

Canada All-Star Ballet Gala: From Russia with Love

Svetlana Lunkina and Ruslan Skvortsov in The Pharaoh's Daughter.

There's a lot of talk about Russia right now, about its extraordinary influence on other countries' political structures and growing impact on world affairs. That talk resonates on the front pages of newspapers. And, recently, it could also be heard at the ballet, where a program billed as masterpieces of the classical repertoire – despite also being composed of works from other nations – was Russian to the core. It couldn't help but be. Canada All-Star Ballet Gala, a one-night only performance that took place at Toronto's Sony Centre on February 11, owed its grandeur and impeccable styling to the great choreographers schooled at Russia's Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg more than a century ago. Artistic director Svetlana Lunkina knows that tradition well.

Neglected Gem #96: Adventures of Don Quixote (1933)

Feodore Chaliapin as Don Quixote in G.W. Pabst's Adventures of Don Quixote (1933).

Adventures of Don Quixote is one of the true curiosities in movie history, and not only because it’s the one adaptation of Cervantes’ book by a major filmmaker that was actually completed. Orson Welles died without finishing his, and Terry Gilliam’s closed down early in the shoot when he hit one insurmountable difficulty after another (all of which are chronicled in the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha). This 1933 film is the work of the great German director G.W. Pabst, best known for his silent films with Louise Brooks, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. He filmed three versions of the novel, one in French, one in English and one in German; all three starred the great Russian opera basso Feodor Chaliapin, who turned out to be both a magnificent camera subject and a mesmerizing actor. He doesn’t get to sing Mussorgsky (Chaliapin was celebrated for his Boris Godunov), but he does sing, and even though the music by Jacques Ibert is mediocre, these abbreviated arias are among the movie’s high points. Chaliapin had appeared in a couple of silent movies, but Don Quixote was his only major movie role, and his last. (He died in 1938.) If his name rings a bell today, it’s probably because his son, who bore his name, played the marvelous old grandfather in Moonstruck who asks his dogs, with magisterial impatience, “Why do you make me wait?” before taking them for their evening constitutional. (Chaliapin Jr. died in 1992.)

Podcast: Helen Shaver on Sam Peckinpah (1985)

Rutger Hauer and Helen Shaver in a scene from Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend (1983).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields.

Earlier this week, film director Sam Peckinpah would have celebrated his 92nd birthday. It therefore seems appropriate to share this conversation I had with Canadian actress Helen Shaver very soon after Peckinpah's death in December 1984. Shaver had been one of the stars of Peckinpah's final movie, The Osterman Weekend (1983), and here she speaks about what it was like to work with the famed director.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the conversation with Helen Shaver as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard – Terror On The Bayou

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard was released by Capcom on January 24.

In my very first piece for Critics At Large, I bemoaned the state of the survival-horror genre, and the Resident Evil series of games in particular. Japanese developer Shinji Mikami, who helped to define the genre with the first Resident Evil game in 1996, had grown stagnant, straying in his design and philosophy from the core tenets that made that landmark game so popular. In short, his contributions to the series just weren’t scary anymore, and though his next (non-Resident Evil) effort The Evil Within was critically well received upon release, it too was lacking in imagination and innovation and is remembered now as a mostly forgettable mashup of earlier RE titles and other popular horror properties like Silent Hill. A shake-up was long past due – and apparently all it took for that to happen was Mikami's retiring from publisher Capcom so that others could take up the mantle, and achieve what he couldn’t.

Jazz in the Abstract: Strange Attractors by Ugly Beauties

The members of Ugly Beauties: Marilyn Lerner, Matt Brubeck and Nick Fraser. (Photo: Karrie North)

Back in the late 1940s, it wasn’t unusual to hear jazz at the Long Island house of American painter Jackson Pollock, who was inspired by the freedom and improvisational qualities of the music of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. In a way, it was his soundtrack to the changing face of post-war America. While he didn’t listen to music while he worked, his wife Lee Krasner said. in 1967, that he listened to jazz in marathon sessions in between projects: “He would get into grooves of listening to his jazz records…day and night for three days running until you thought you would climb the roof! The house would shake.” (From Helen A. Harrison's "Jackson Pollock and Jazz: Inspiration or Imitation?")

By 1950, as the form developed, bebop music provided an aural canvas within a framework. Parker, along with Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, only had about 3 minutes of recording time, on a typical 78-RPM record, to express a theme, improvise on it and then return to the theme and end the tune. Many of the Parker tracks, especially on the Savoy record label, swung hard with extraordinary musical ideas that broke with the past while exploring new possibilities in the music by way of individual expression. In a sense, then, while the tunes had structure with a beginning, middle and end, the solos were abstract: improvised riffs never to be repeated or written down. Bebop was fluid music – full of soul, surprise and risk, much like the art that Pollock created in his “on the floor” paintings, such as Number One, 1950 (Lavender Mist).

Electric Blues: Bette Midler in The Criterion Collection Blu-ray Release of The Rose

Bette Midler in The Rose (1979).

When Bette Midler takes the stage as The Rose in Mark Rydell’s 1979 movie of the same name, singing the rocker “Whose Side Are You On?,” her face, mashed up as she spits out the lyrics, is ferocious. She’s not trying to look beautiful; on the contrary, she’s owning her odd-duck looks, facing off the stadium audience, daring them not to love her for who she is. There’s no grandeur to her self-presentation, just fuck-you bravado and sexual aggressiveness, but then she makes a connection with a handsome young man at the edge of the stage and she breaks into an unexpected toothy smile, as if she’s found a date for the high school prom. At other times her smile can look voracious, even predatory. Her whole face seems to be pushed toward her nose, and both her dramatic eye make-up and her frizzy hair accentuate the bones in that face, though when Vilmos Zsigmond’s lighting attaints its softest neon glow, her hair is like an aureole that turns her into a pop Madonna. You can’t pin down her look, and God knows you can’t pin down her performance to one thing. When we first see her, stepping off the tour’s private plane, she’s dressed like Janis Joplin in a broad-brimmed hat with gauze dripping from the back and a thin, wavy pink dress and shades, and she’s so drunk that she can’t stay upright: she has to hold onto the railing, and she misses a step or two, as if the stairway were melting under her. This is the wayward, unmoored side of Rose. We see it again on the plane when she sings a cozy, growling, sloshed version of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” – a song she learned off a Furry Lewis side – with a muted guitar accompaniment, then peers out the window, disoriented, bursting into tears.  And again late in the picture, when her manager and promoter Rudge Campbell (Alan Bates) tells her he’s setting her adrift (it’s his way of scaring her into submission) and she looks away from him, her face wavering on the edge of another realm.

There Will Be Burgers: Michael Keaton in The Founder

When Michael Keaton made his memorable feature film debut in Ron Howard's agreeably funny 1982 comedy, Night Shift, he played Billy "Blaze" Blazejowski, Henry Winkler's high-strung co-worker in a New York City morgue, who described himself as an "idea man." Endlessly bouncing from side to side, as if hot coals were consistently biting at his feet, Billy Blaze was a whirligig of a hustler and budding entrepreneur, a frugging Sammy Glick, whose eyeballs popped out like headlights in a speeding car at the thought of inventing edible paper. His role in the film was to snap Winkler's sleeping nebbish back to life, and Keaton himself was wide awake, an endlessly riffing jack-in-the-box with the relentless beat of "Jumping Jack Flash" on constant repeat in his brain pan, sending comic bolts through the picture. As he plays Ray Kroc, an Illinois travelling salesman in the mid-fifties down on his luck trying to sell five-spindled milkshake machines to fast-food outlets across America, the blaze has gone out of Keaton's bluster and the beat has gone out of his step, but he's replaced it with the shrewd acumen of finely tuned opportunism.  Nipping religiously from a little flask, Keaton's Kroc is Billy Blaze with his headlights dimmed and Norman Vincent Peale setting the beat instead of The Stones, but his shark's teeth haven't lost their razor bite. When Kroc sets his eyes on a tiny burger enterprise in San Bernardino, California, run by brothers Mac (John Carroll Lynch) and Dick McDonald (Nick Offerman), who have begun to revolutionize the concept of fast-food service, he senses opportunity the way a vampire smells blood. Unlike Billy Blaze, who wanted to feed the world his teeming ideas, Michael Keaton's Ray Kroc wants to feed off the ideas of others and then take all the credit for himself. With a prowess that's canny, Keaton plays Kroc as a cipher magnate who, in time, creates a billion-dollar empire by branding an international restaurant chain that never had to bear his own name.

Half-Dead: FX’s Taboo

Tom Hardy in FX's Taboo.

On its face, FX’s new drama Taboo seems an intriguing proposition. It’s clearly modeled on the sorts of dark, thrilling narratives that have captured readers’ imaginations since at least The Count of Monte Cristo. However, this show, a collaboration between Steven Knight, Chips Hardy, and star Tom Hardy, falls short of its inspirations.

The Monte Cristo comparison springs to mind because, as with Dumas’s classic story, Taboo is about the return of a mysterious hero, long thought dead, and the unfolding of his plan for revenge. Hardy plays James Delaney, who surprises his half-sister Zilpha (Oona Chaplin) and everyone else from his past life when he suddenly returns to England for his father’s funeral. It soon emerges that Delaney’s father holds the deed to a small piece of coastline on the far side of the world (the Pacific Northwest, to be exact). Although this rocky, faraway plot seems worthless, a surprising number of people expresses interest in taking it off Delaney’s hands, including Zilpha and her husband Thorne (Jefferson Hall), the family lawyer (Nicholas Woodeson), and Sir Stuart Strange (Jonathan Pryce), chairman of the East India Company.

The Psychic Cost of Spying in Charles Cumming’s A Divided Spy

Author Charles Cumming. (Photo: Toby Madden)

“A part of himself dried up inside. I began to think he had a piece missing from his heart. Call it decency, call it tenderness. Honesty perhaps.”

– Charles Cumming, A Colder War

 
"The constant process of lying, of subterfuge, of concealment and second-guessing is exhausting. It is bad for the soul."

– Charles Cumming, A Divided Spy

The first epigraph refers to Thomas Kell, an on-and-off MI6 agent, the major protagonist of Charles Cumming’s engrossing trilogy that began with A Foreign Country, followed by A Colder War and the recently published A Divided Spy (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). The second epigraph is voiced by Alexander Minasian, a senior Russian officer of SVR (foreign intelligence), who played a minor role in A Colder War and is Kell’s principle adversary in the current novel. Kell holds Minasian responsible for the death of his girlfriend and fellow spy, Rachel Wallinger. Despite Kell’s desire for revenge, the two official antagonists have much in common, primarily a capacity for self-reflection and recognition that the price of spying, the burden of emotional baggage, is something they both bear. Kell admits at one point that spying is a “sickness that hallowed him out.” He has given twenty years of his life to the Service that costs him his marriage and his girlfriend and feels a seething anger not only toward the Kremlin but his own agency, which betrayed him when they suspended him from duty for his passive involvement in “the aggressive CIA interrogation of a British national in Kabul.” Although Cumming is acutely aware of the personal price of spying, he is not cynical about its value as he was in his early novels,when he patterned his fiction on John Le Carré. Cumming still regards his mentor in high regard – Kell references his work in Spy – but he is clearly finding his own distinctive voice in the Thomas Kell novels. I should mention that I read Spy prior to reading War, and I realize that although Cumming provides the reader with all the necessary backstory, reporting is not the same as experiencing. I knew that certain events would transpire in War but that knowledge was more than compensated by the pleasure of experiencing its fast-paced narrative about Kell’s search for a mole – perhaps stronger than Spy – and perceptive insights into the professional and personal costs of living a life in the shadows. Yet the novel under review is richly steeped in strengths that will reward the reader.

Talking Out of Turn #50 (Podcast): Lindsay Anderson (1984)

Lindsay Anderson and Malcolm McDowell on the set of If....

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, I did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it. 

Tom Fulton, host and producer of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (e.g., Doris Kearns Goodwin sitting alongside Clive Barker). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I were trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. The book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

During the eighties, England was going through the trauma of finding itself no longer able to maintain the power and the glory it once possessed when it was an empire. So, England elected a leader, Margaret Thatcher, who (like Ronald Reagan in the U.S.) promised to restore those "glory days" at any cost. Of course, ultimately neither Reagan and Thatcher came close to restoring anything glorious. But both were larger-than-life figures and both did change the political landscape dramatically. 

In this section of Talking Out of Turn, which looked at the political turmoil in England, I wanted to include individuals who predated Thatcher as well as those who were her contemporaries. At CJRT-FM, I was lucky enough to speak to a few artists who spanned those generations: authors Margaret Drabble (The Radiant Way) and Alan Sillitoe (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), and film directors Stephen Frears and Lindsay Anderson. Together, they helped flesh out the past and the present of Britain's years of political turmoil.

Like Sillitoe, Lindsay Anderson knew how to rail against the Empire with films like If.... (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973). Since he was of an older generation than Sillitoe, his look back in time (as a way of anticipating what was to come) has the virtue of giving us a unique perspective on what changed in England in his lifetime. Anderson passed away in 1994. In 2004, an edited collection of his writings, entitled Never Apologise, was published.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Lindsay Anderson as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1984.

Aesthetics of the Forbidden: The Photography of Thierry Kuntz

The following is a collaborative work by Donald Brackett and Thierry Kuntz. The text is by Donald Brackett and all photographs are by Thierry Kuntz.

Censorship has followed the free expressions of men and women like a shadow throughout history. In ancient societies it was considered a legitimate instrument for regulating the moral and political life of the population. The origin of the term "censor" can be traced to the office established in Rome in 443 B.C.E. In Rome, as in the ancient Greek communities, the ideal of good governance included shaping the character of the people. Hence censorship was regarded as an honourable task. We can easily explore its strange evolution throughout all the arts and culture fields in history: visual, literary, theatrical, cinematic, and political. Perhaps the first act of censorship was the ancient Greek condemnation of the philosopher Socrates, and among the most recent are the fatwas against author Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses. In between, it seems that we have long been told by the powers that be just what we can read or watch. We will ask the simple questions: why are certain things not allowed? and who gets to decide on our behalf what is good or bad for us?

This is a contemporary exploration of the emblem, an ancient communication device which combines words and images in order to convey usually moral lessons. Perhaps the digital internet age is an ideal time to reexamine human nature, our virtues and vices, in light of how much we have changed over time since the original emblemata books of the medieval age, and -- perhaps even more importantly -- how much we haven’t really changed at all.

Un’altra, Per Favore! – John Wick: Chapter 2

Keanu Reeves returns as John Wick in John Wick: Chapter 2.

John Wick: Chapter 2 is aptly titled. This sequel picks up exactly where the 2014 original left off, showing the titular aging assassin (Keanu Reeves) tying up the loose ends from his last scuffle with the New York Russian mob – which is to say, getting his 1969 Mustang Mach 1 back from them, in a garage-based action showdown that’s probably the most hardcore bit of table-setting ever shown in a sequel, before finally settling down for his much-anticipated retirement. Reeves makes it clear that Wick expects this to last about as long as we do: when a slimy Italian crime lord named Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) shows up at his door demanding that he honour an old pact, he doesn’t seem that surprised. Like the first film, Chapter 2 wastes no time whatsoever. Its brutally efficient storytelling style delivers exactly what fans of the first film have come to see, and then some. Chapter 2 feels like director Chad Stahelski, writer Derek Kolstad, and Reeves were given carte blanche to make a sequel that inspired, fascinated, and excited them, and they’ve clearly done so – it’s the Judgment Day to John Wick’s Terminator, and any action fan worth his or her salt will know how big a compliment that is.

Great Screen Matches: Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart

Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart in The Shop Around the Corner (1940).

Of the great Hollywood women of the 1930s, Margaret Sullavan is the forgotten one, though she was a staple in M-G-M pictures of the era. She had a firefly quality – a flickering glimmer – and the salient characteristic of her performances was the courage that kept her going in the face of her own fragility. She was a feast for the camera – her slender frame was ideal for both clinging, satiny gowns and fussy, elaborate get-ups, which she wore with a kind of gallantry. (“Gallantry” was the film critic Pauline Kael’s word for her, and it’s perfect: it expresses the exquisite tension between her tremulous lightness and her resoluteness in launching herself into the scary world.) Her voice was high and cottony, with an accent somewhere between New York and mid-Atlantic – the made-up accent, still taught in some acting schools, that’s supposed to stand for ambiguous cosmopolitanism in American performers – and the words always seemed to be pushing through some kind of obstacle, like honey dripping through the comb. 

Sullavan was brilliant opposite Herbert Marshall in The Good Fairy (directed by William Wyler, whom she later married) and opposite Henry Fonda (to whom she had been married) in The Moon’s Our Home, a marvelous romantic comedy partly written by the on-again, off-again couple Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell that cast Sullavan as a movie star and Fonda as a famous writer who meet and fall in love without knowing each other’s identity. It’s an inspired idea for a screwball comedy, since the premise of those pictures, borrowed from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, is the tension between the sexual and emotional attraction of the hero and heroine and their adversarial relationship. In The Moon’s Our Home, Fonda and Sullavan are biased against each other on principle – the pompous, posturing celebrity writer, the frivolous, narcissistic Hollywood baby – and can only see what’s beneath the surface if they can’t see the surface. But terrific as Fonda and Marshall were at partnering Sullavan, she was best with Jimmy Stewart, with whom she made four films between 1936 and 1940. 

A Universe All Its Own: FX's Legion

Dan Stevens and Rachel Keller in FX's Legion.

“Something new needs to happen soon.” – David Haller, in the first episode of FX's Legion.

I'm fairly certain no one has looked at the current line-up of television shows and thought, "What we really need are more superheroes." With multiple series airing on cable, network, and streaming channels, I'm not sure we've ever had as many competing superhero shows at the same time before. Ranging from the light, and sometimes emotionally stunted, stories of the CW's so-called Arrowverse (the best of which remains the consistently delightful Legends of Tomorrow), to the dark depths Netflix has mined for its growing stable of Marvel shows, to NBC's Powerless, an ensemble office comedy set in the bright palettes of DC's Silver Age, the shows themselves are as diverse in tone (and quality) as the vast sweep of contemporary television itself. In that vein, even the most dedicated comic book fan might not have noticed (or cared) that last Wednesday FX premiered another superhero series.

Created by novelist-turned-television-writer Noah Hawley (Fargo, The Unusuals), Legion tells the story of David Haller (Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens), a mutant who finally begins to accept the reality of his extraordinary psychic abilities after years in a psychiatric facility where he has been treated for his (perhaps) misdiagnosed schizophrenia. After escaping from the institution, he finds himself hunted by a secret government agency, which is intent on capturing him and harnessing his abilities to its own ends, until he falls in with a ragtag team of equally maladjusted mutants. So far, so familiar: on these terms, Legion would appear to be telling a run-of-the-mill superhero origin story – one character's struggles, internal and external, with his still untamed super-abilities – but this is also where the familiarity ends. Legion is indeed, as Haller himself wishes for aloud in the show's first hour, something new.

Finding Home: Lion

Dev Patel in Lion

Lion is a magnificent piece of humanist filmmaking, so powerfully affecting that you carry it with you out of the moviehouse, as if the protagonist, the transplanted Indian boy Saroo, were someone you knew personally who’d shared with you his strange and improbable life story. (When I reread my notes from viewing the film almost a month ago, I started tearing up all over again.) In fact, it’s a true tale: Luke Davies’s fine screenplay adapts Saroo Brierley’s memoir, A Long Way Home. The director, Garth Davis, made his name on commercials, and directed four episodes of Jane Campion’s miniseries Top of the Lake; aside from a documentary, Lion is the only feature film he’s done. But he’s had towering role models: the early section, with the luminous Sunny Pawar as the little-boy protagonist, suggests De Sica’s neo-realist classics – especially the 1948 Shoeshine – and the transcendent films of the Indian director Satyajit Ray.

When The Music Stopped: HMV Canada Goes Under

Nearly a year ago, I wrote an impassioned post about the closing of a branch of Queen Video, one of Toronto’s few remaining DVD rental outlets, and how that limited rental choices further for film buffs. Since then, another multifaceted DVD store, 7-24 Movies & More, has bitten the dust. It had a weekly 3-for-$8 Monday-Thursday special rental price, which beat its competition but, alas, it had to move because rent at its location had gone up precipitously and its (supposedly) loyal clientele didn’t follow it to its new location. Now HMV Canada has gone into receivership and all 102 locations of the chain (which sells CDs, DVDs, vinyl and collectibles) will be extinct, officially as of April 30, but likely sooner. Coming on top of other recent closures of fine music outlets in Toronto – Sunrise’s two downtown locations in 2014 (it still has ten stores in the province of Ontario, but only one in North Toronto); Vortex Records, one of the city’s best used emporia, in 2015; Refried Beats, the other great used CD (and DVD) shop in Toronto, in 2016; and now HMV – it’s clear that for fans of CDs, and the vast repository of music available in that format, the future is going to be very different than it is now. And not in a good way.

Neglected Gem #95: The Boy and the Beast (2015)

A scene from The Boy and the Beast (2015).

The Boy and the Beast (Bakemono no Ko) is the story of Ren (Aoi Miyazaki), a nine-year-old Tokyo runaway who abandons his family life when his mother dies in a car accident. After years of living as a homeless urchin, one day Ren stumbles out of the bustling Shibuya streets into a world of humanoid beasts called Jutengai, and becomes the reluctant pupil of an arrogant, lazy, bear-like beast-man called Kumatetsu (Koji Yakusho). The reigning Lord of Jutengai is preparing to reincarnate himself as a god, and a successor must be chosen. The two candidates for the job, selected for their strength of both body and character, are the noble boar-man, Iozen (Kazuhiro Yamaji), and Kumatetsu, whose fighting prowess is extraordinary but whose personality is sorely lacking. Ren – whom Kumatetsu names “Kyuta” in reference to his young age – establishes an instantly adversarial relationship with the blustering bear-man, who lacks the patience and compassion to act as a proper teacher. Neither knows, or could acknowledge even if he were aware, how desperately they need one another – but it’s instantly plain for all to see that these two loners, hardened by years of solitary survival, are a perfect pair. Only together do they have a chance of readying Kumatetsu for his match against Iozen, which will decide who rises up as Lord, and only together can they ready Kyuta to re-enter the world he left behind.

Piety: Martin Scorsese's Silence

Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield in Silence.

No question: Martin Scorsese's religious epic, Silence, is aptly named. Unlike his last feature, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), with its frenetic, speed-freak pacing, or the pilot of the HBO series, Vinyl, where the editing rhythms were so percussive that they became assaulting, Scorsese's new picture unfolds with a quiet and solemn reverence, as if we were in church, and the atmosphere is hushed. Silence has a lulling seductiveness going for it (the cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto is both lush and vibrant), so it's clear that the asceticism of Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel has drawn the director – once again – into a sojourn in search of spiritual values and truths, but the drama itself turns out to be no more substantial than in The Wolf of Wall Street. If the sensational highs of sex, cocaine and larceny were the driving force of that picture, rather than an attempt to bring the audience to a dramatic understanding of how Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) swindled his way to the top of Wall Street, the piety of religious faith becomes the drug of Silence, substituting for a rendering of spiritual belief. Scorsese may be aiming for the formalist poetry of Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951), where a man of God gets tested by those who reject him, but the result is actually closer to Carl Dreyer's Ordet (1955) where spirituality is reduced to pedantic dogma.

Tinariwen: From the Desert to our Hearts

The members of Tinariwen. (Photo: Thomas Dorn)

Mali is a land-locked country located in Western Africa – in fact, it’s the eighth-largest country on the continent. Its chief export is gold and, while its official language is French, it is also the host of over forty languages, one of which, Bambara, is generally heard on the streets of the capital, Bamako. Mali’s expansive regional diversity features a portion of the Sahara Desert to the northwest, which is the home, if you can call it that, of the Tuareg people, a partly nomadic group, often dressed in blue, that inhabits most of the Sahara from Niger to Tunisia, including Morocco, Algeria and Burkino Faso. But the Tuareg only account for about 3% of Mali’s population. Out of this tiny populace comes one of the most interesting and popular musical groups, Tinariwen ("deserts”), a nine-piece band featuring traditional Tuareg instruments mashed-up with electric guitars and percussion. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib formed the ensemble in the late seventies while living in exile in Libya. As world music started to spread across the continent and airwaves, to North American and European audiences, Tinariwen started making a strong impression. Their first album was released in 2000, with a brilliant cover featuring a photo of a red sand dune and a tiny figure with his hands in the air. By their third release, Water Is Life (World Village), we finally got a cover featuring the weathered faces of the group dressed in their native clothes. By 2012, following extensive touring away from Mali, the band released their most successful album to date, Tassili, which was recorded in a national park in Algeria without the use of electric guitars, principally to let listeners feel the Tinariwen sound as it originated around campfires and tents. That year it went on to win a Grammy for Best Album in the World Music category.

Shirley Booth: Only the Lonely

Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952).

Shirley Booth played the titular domestic on the TV sitcom Hazel for just five years, 1961 through 1966, but it so defined her that it obscured everything she had done before – twenty-five years of starring roles on Broadway and a handful of movies that included her Oscar-winning performance in Come Back, Little Sheba in 1952. It was that film that brought her to Hollywood, to recreate the role she’d played on stage two years earlier (which had won her the second of her three Tony Awards). Booth broke through in 1935 in George Abbott and John Cecil Holm’s comedy Three Men on a Horse; her stage work, varied and prolific, included The Philadelphia Story opposite Katharine Hepburn, Joseph Cotton and Van Heflin (she played the hard-boiled photographer Liz Imbrie), My Sister Eileen,Goodbye, My Fancy, The Time of the Cuckoo and Desk Set, as well as a trio of musicals: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, By the Beautiful Sea and Juno, Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. (When Hollywood optioned them, Hepburn took over the Booth parts in The Time of the Cuckoo – renamed Summertime – and Desk Set.) She had a long career – about half a century, though much of it remains inaccessible to us except through photographs.

Sliding toward Fascism in Jo Walton’s Counter-History Trilogy

Paintings of Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on display in Moscow at a party hosted by pro-Kremlin activists to celebrate Trump's election victory in November 2016. (Source: Twitter)

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

– George Orwell 

Recent events, not only in America but throughout Europe, have raised the possibility that liberal democracy, the relatively brief experiment – in terms of human history – is in trouble. For a generation, after the German Wall came down and the Soviet Union imploded, it inspired hope. Currently, however, it is threatened by the spectre of illiberal authoritarianism. Liberal democracy requires liberty and the rule of law, and celebrates pluralism based on gender, ethnic and racial equality. What knits these principles together is a respect for truth, a cornerstone principle that requires an independent vibrant media to hold power to account. Illiberal authoritarianism sanctions the powerful to define reality and possess a monopoly on truth. Rather than respect for others, authoritarian regimes set up a “we” – the ordinary, decent people – against the threatening others: “Mexicans and Muslims in the U.S., Kurds in Turkey, Poles in Britain, Muslims and Jews all over Europe, as well as Sinti and Roma, refugees, immigrants, black people, women, cosmopolitans, homosexuals, not to mention ‘experts,’ ‘elites,’ and ‘mainstream media’,” as the astute scholar andjournalist, Timothy Garton Ash, describes. He assails these developments as rampant Trumpismo.