The Dresser

While seeing a live theatrical performance, a story that has been told thousands of times over again is what you see, but what is happening behind the stage?  Are there squabbles, tensions, people on their last nerve just inside the curtain?  Sometimes the fresh human story about the production you’re seeing is not on stage.

Sir (Albert Finney) is the aging leader of a traveling Shakespearean theater troupe during WWII.  Norman (Tom Courtenay) is his dresser.  While Sir is the face on stage and hold the ultimate power within the troupe (proven when he simply commands a train to stop), it is Norman who enables him.  Sir is at the center of Norman’s universe and he has sacrificed his better years to getting Sir ready for the stage.  But the stage is what creates Sir’s massive ego and he takes Norman for granted.

Hours before a performance of King Lear, Sir has a raging, ranting drunken fit in a marketplace.  Norman takes him backstage to his dressing room to nurse Sir back to health where he sings while making tea, gives him pep talks, brandy and makes sure no one sees Sir until he’s fully recovered and in makeup.  The energy Norman pours into Sir is astounding; while Sir is a half conscious mass man way past his prime, Norman is running around backstage reassuring the rest of the troupe that the show will go on.  If Norman was any less attentive to Sir, there’s no way he could have gone on that night.

These scenes with Norman preparing Sir are also wildly hilarious at times.  I had to pause the film to stop laughing after Norman finds Sir putting on the wrong makeup for the night.  When Sir is trying to remember the first line of the play, he starts reciting lines from all different plays.  And the way Norman deals with all this is like he’s helping a toddler who is on the verge of a huge mess.  His character is so exuberant and lively that he is just funny to watch.  I mean that in the dearest of ways, Sir is only lit up on stage, but Norman is on all the time.

The tensions on whether the show will go on are not just within Sir and Norman, but all around the theater.  It is WWII and just before the curtain is to rise, the air raid sirens start to howl.  Earlier in the film, there was a theater reduced to rubble.  We can only wonder if all Norman’s work to get Sir ready will be blown to pieces in the blitz.

One of my favorite moments in the film is the storm scene in the play.  While Sir is on stage, reciting his lines into the fury of the storm, backstage Norman and the troupe are creating the storm.  They bang kettle drums, create rain and thunder with props but Sir wants more, louder.  Soon they’re beating the hell out of those drums, creating so much noise no one would even notice a bomb hitting the theater.  When the scene is over, the backstage hands are out of breath and seem to be riding the high of the storm, but Sir yells at them, “Where was the storm?!”  Such a wonderful moment, it seems he’s never satisfied.

While on the surface of this film is the worry over the play and hilarious humor, the story is of a simple human relationship.  Norman believes he is the center of the troupe, always making sure Sir is ready and pouring his whole self into his work, but in the end Sir cannot be bothered by Norman’s little cry for gratitude.  It’s an amazing moment to see someone realize how little they are appreciated and in that final scene Tom Courtenay is simply astounding, in my mind, worth of Best Actor.

I promise I haven’t given too much away.  This is one of those films I could tell you all about, but the experience of seeing it is what really matters.  If you love theater, Shakespeare or not I completely recommend The Dresser.  By huge margins, I have picked this film as Best Picture for 1983.  Huge margins.

“227 Lears… and I can’t remember the first line.”

The Right Stuff

One day, about six years ago now, I got a little bored waiting for a class to start and wondered the corridors of Grissom Hall.  When you’re a student at Purdue, everyone gushes about Neil Armstrong, Amelia Earhart and even Orville Redenbacher but Gus Grissom seems to be just a dusty figure on the back shelf.  In this hall there were plaques, pictures and other memorabilia to remember one of our most important graduates yet I wondered what rock I’d been under not realizing Gus and I were united by our school.  I knew my space exploration history alright: Gus being one of the fist astronauts to orbit the Earth, yadda yadda yadda, let’s get to the moon landing already.  For some reason it wasn’t until bored little Freshman me wondered around until I really realized that if it hadn’t been for Gus and his six other Project Mercury astronauts there would be no reason to remember Neil Armstrong.  Suddenly, I had a new favorite alumni.

The Right Stuff encompasses all that was great about the space race and the beginnings of NASA: the spirit of adventure, thrill of flight, the men who dared to pushed the envelope beyond basic flight and rocketed into the unknown of space.  To get all this into a film, it has to be three hours long.  It starts in 1947, where test pilots are dropping like flies in attempts to break the sound barrier ends in 1963 with the end of Project Mercury, you can’t cram that amazing time period of so much advancement in flight and the entire space race into just two hours.  So before you strap in, have an extra bag of popcorn handy.  Though it is long, it’s worth the time.

The dangers and sacrifices of flight are one of the first things we see in the film.  Wives get a dreaded visitor, there’s a burial in a lonely desert graveyard for the pilots and they become a picture on a barroom wall.  Every man flying over that desert knows they could be next, yet they continue to push the envelope.  Eventually, it’s Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) who breaks the sound barrier, the first major achievement in the film.  After that, it seems Chuck keeps racing to stay the fastest man alive.

There’s also Fred Ward as Gus Grissom, Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper, Ed Harris as John Glenn and Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard.  Unless you already know all your astronauts it can be hard to keep them all straight for three hours.

When the Russians launch Sputnik, (Russian achievements are quick shaky scenes of a rocket launching and a man laughing behind the fumes, looking like an evil Russian wizard or something sinister), suddenly America has to scramble around to catch up.  They decide to try to be the first country to send a man into space.  When choosing the first astronauts, they first think about sending acrobats and daredevils, but thankfully come to their senses and seek out test pilots.

This is when the fun astronaut training begins and we see all the strange tests scientists put the prospective astronauts through, from blowing in a tube to keep a ball floating, to more odd and intense tests you may have never imagined.  All these tests go to determine the seven original astronauts chosen for Project Mercury.  Then the film goes into the attempts of launching rockets, the humiliation the astronauts face when NASA decides to first send a chimp and finally into sending men into space.

It’s a long haul to finally get out of the atmosphere, but it’s all worth it and you’re never bored.

The music is wonderful.  I’ve never heard Holst’s Planet Suite put to better use.  I’ve always found it uplifting and an audio representation of adventure and passion.  But it sounds like achieving such a brilliant score wasn’t so easy for composer John Barry when director Philip Kaufman tried to describe how he wanted the score as “sounding like you’re walking in the desert and you see a cactus, and you put your foot on it, but it just starts growing up through your foot.”  By that description, the soundtrack could have been pretty trippy.  Somehow Barry wrote a beautiful score around Holst’s Planets and incorporated a piece from The White Dawn and a few other classical favorites of Kaufman’s to send us to the stars and back.

If you have any interest in space exploration, the early history of NASA, of flight or you’ve ever dreamed of being an astronaut, this movie is for you.  Even if you’re not an astro nut, the drama is captivating enough to keep nearly every kind of movie goer interested.  There’s no technical jargon to make you feel stupid and you’ll probably learn a thing or two.

“Monkeys? You think a monkey knows he’s sittin’ on top of a rocket that might explode? These astronaut boys they know that, see? Well, I’ll tell you something, it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that’s on TV. Ol’ Gus, he did all right.”

Tender Mercies

While Terms of Endearment is your quirky girl-time tear-jerker that mothers and daughters can paint their toes to, Tender Mercies is your stronger, quieter type of family drama that the men won’t immediately flee from.

Robert Duvall plays Mac Sledge, a broken down middle-aged man who was once a great country singer.  The first image we see of him is a drunk silhouette in a motel room fighting over a bottle of booze, then we see his greasy bald head pass out on the floor.  It seems that somewhere on that floor, Mac realized he was nowhere and needed to get back up.  He’s got no money and nowhere to go, so he humbly asks the motel owner Rosa (Tess Harper) if he can work for her.  She’s a kind woman and they can help each other out.

This little motel on the side of a dusty road is in the middle of nowhere under the big Texas sky.  It looks like one of the loneliest places in the world, and maybe it is.  It’s just Rosa and her son Sonny (Allan Hubbard) who live there and they’re all the family each other has.  Sonny’s father was killed in Vietnam when he was just a baby, leaving Rosa a widow at eighteen.  And Sonny is getting to a curious age where he’s asking more and more questions about the father he never knew.

As Mac works for Rosa, he becomes part of the family.  It’s nearly odd how Mac so quietly becomes a part of Rosa and Sonny’s life.  We’ve hardly seen a conversation with Rosa before Mac asks to marry her.  But maybe that’s just how it is here in dusty lonely Texas, there’s no need for long winded conversations and you can really hear the few people your around much better.

Mac and Rosa are married before we even know about Mac’s troubled past.  He was once married to Dixie (Betty Buckley) who’s still a successful country singer and they have a daughter who’s nearly eighteen.  Mac writes a new song, gives it to Dixie hoping she can make some use out of it and hopes to see his daughter.  When Dixie throws the song in Mac’s face and refuses to let him see his daughter, it nearly drives Mac to the bottle again.

While this is a story about Mac getting his life back together, it seems he’s not always ready to just plunge into the waters.  When his daughter comes out to the motel to meet him, it’s not exactly hugs, tears and sweeping violins.  The air feels stifling in that little yellow living room as she tries to share her life with Mac.  She tells him about her boyfriend, how her mother disapproves and asks if it was him who used to sing her a certain lullaby.  Mac lies and says he doesn’t remember it, like he’s just not ready to be that fond memory for her.  Yet in the field across the street, under the wide blue sky, Rosa and Sonny talk easily.  Maybe they just have more air to breathe.

Now, there are a few things you can probably guess will happen in this film, but there are a few sucker punches that make this film feel real, not like some after school special.  This is a bleak, spread out and lonely world where second chances don’t come along so easily.  It seems that girls get married too early and it never works out.  Many dads never come back home and leave kids with so many questions.  So you can’t ask for much and you’ll only be disappointed if you expect too much.  In Tender Mercies, you’ve got to hold onto whatever little happiness you can find.

“I don’t trust happiness. I never did, I never will.”

Terms of Endearment

The summery on this little Netflix slip began with something cheesy like daughters are from Mars and mothers are from Venus.  I groaned, realizing I was in for mother-daughter weepy feelings time, where most people reach for the tissues, I grab a bucket.

Aurora (Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter Emma (Debra Winger) are very close.  The father died when Emma was still a little girl, so they’re instantly closer than your average only child family.  In those first few minutes where we watch Emma grow up, it seems that Aurora is sometimes more of a friend than a mother, but maybe that’s just what happens as a single parent.  The night before Emma is going to marry Flap Horton (Jeff Daniels) Aurora puts her mother face back on and tells her straight that marrying Flap will be a mistake.  “You are not special enough to overcome a bad marriage.”

Well, with that whole Mars-Venus thing Emma doesn’t listen and the main story is her and Flap’s married life from kids, Flap’s crappy job moving him across the country, money problems, marriage problems and all the juicy stuff Emma shares on the phone to her mother every day.  Emma’s life makes for some good gossip, if it were less quirky and didn’t have any good hearted laughs it would be daytime television material.

Jack Nicholson plays the retired astronaut who lives next to Aurora.  The character’s name is Garrett or something like that, but it doesn’t matter because this is Jack’s usual character and he quickly became the entire reason I started to enjoy the film.  He enjoys getting drunk, hitting on inappropriately young girls and driving too fast in his silver Corvette, so obviously prim and propper Aurora thinks he’s horrible.  One day Jack asks Aurora out on a casual lunch date, but doesn’t accept it until a few years later, during her third 50th birthday party.  Sounds to me like Jack is just a little lonely and Aurora wants to feel young again.  These two are much more interesting than Emma and her pile of dumb decisions.

So that’s basically it; mother-daughter long distance relationship, issues with their men and then some tragedy.  Throw in some laughs and Jack Nicholson to keep those who don’t sponge up the dripping estrogen entertained and this movie isn’t half bad.  I wasn’t moved or enlightened and no, I did not cry.

Even before considering the slew of Oscar noms (11) and five wins (Jack Nicholson, Shriley MacLaine, and James L. Brooks for Director, Writing and Picture), I understand how this film can work into one’s heart and into the Best Picture slot.  But it just felt too conventional to me.  Maybe it’s a generational thing where I found the music cheesy and reminiscent of an afternoon special.   Perhaps I’m just a cold-hearted fool who thought Emma was an idiot for marrying Jeff Daniels in the first place.  And I couldn’t believe that there was anyone in the world who wouldn’t enjoy getting drunk with Jack Nicholson and driving that Corvette along the beach.  Seriously, I’d put a brick on that pedal and climb up top with him.

I think you can tell what my favorite scenes from Terms of Endearment were:

“-You’re just going to have to trust me about this one thing. You need a lot of drinks.
–To break the ice?
-To kill the bug that you have up your ass.”

The Big Chill

After Alex commits suicide, his old friends from college get together for a weekend after his funeral.  They discuss the past few years, what they do, what they wish they did and where they wish they could be.  Some have families, others prestigious careers and some haven’t amounted to much.  They discover that what they really need is just each other.

Yes, that is so vague and yet it seems like I’ve given away the ending.  This film is so full of rich characters and ideas that I’ve given away nothing.  At times it’s like the Breakfast Club’s twenty year reunion, but there’s more to it than that.

Most people have a group of old friends that try to get together now and then but slowly drift apart.  This one includes Jeff Goldblum as a journalist for Time Magazine, Tom Berenger as an actor in an action television show, Mary Kay Place as a disenchanted lawyer, Glenn Close and Kevin Kline are a happily married couple and William Hurt as a former talk radio personality.  Like a whole fruit basket from one college.  Throughout the weekend, new motives are revealed and old histories spark new life.

The topic of their late friend is touchy.  There are slight images of how each of them grieves their friend, whether crying alone or making a joke they immediately regret.  Eventually, they’re able to talk about him and bring new life on to themselves at the same time.

The soundtrack to this movie is wonderful.  Just a few artists featured are The Temptations, Three Dog Night and Aretha Franklin.  Maybe I’m going on about the music since I’ve been watching films from the ‘30’s lately.  Still, I don’t know anyone who hates good old classic rock from the ‘60’s.

On the surface, you could think this would be a great movie for when old friends get together, but you might just end up questioning which of your group will off themselves first.  No, it’s hard to suggest a good setting for The Big Chill, but I encourage you to give it a try.  Sorry to keep it so brief, but this is a difficult to review without revealing too much or getting all over analytical.

“Amazing tradition. They throw a great party for you on the one day they know you can’t come.”