Hitchcock's Rear Window

With Oscar night right around the corner, movies have been on my mind, and last week I happened upon a particular episode of the fabulous podcast Filmspotting, in which co-hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen pitted Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window against his 1958 film, Vertigo. The former has long been in my top three movies of all-time (along with Avalon and Cinema Paradiso), and after watching it last spring for maybe the 20th time, I determined that it was conclusively my favorite film. I was curious to see where Adam and Josh would land on these two films, especially given that Vertigo has long been touted as one of the top two or three movies of all-time on many lists. I needn’t have worried. A few minutes in, I learned that Josh’s default answer for his favorite film has been Rear Window for quite a while.

Not that I needed the validation. I first saw the film at summer camp in Madison, Wisconsin, between my sophomore and junior years of high school, where my fellow music nerds and I would gather in the cafeteria at night to watch movies. Rear Window and Psycho were on the docket that summer, and from that point on, I was all in. For the next half a decade or so it was all Hitchcock, all the time. I rented every movie I could find (oddly, the nearby Sentry grocery store had virtually all of Hitchcock’s 1950s films available for rental on VHS), borrowed several books from the local library (eventually purchasing the wonderful book of filmmaker François Truffaut’s interviews of Hitchcock), and eventually used my newfound knowledge to write a paper for Mrs. Kossoris’s senior English composition class. I was kind of a Hitchcock bully for a while, subjecting many friends to a movie rental night of a subpar film (Topaz and Torn Curtain come to mind) after likely forcing the critical decision at the video rental store.

My enthusiasm for Hitchcock films has been tempered only somewhat since my teenage years, mostly because I started with the best. Rear Window was the first one I saw, and it is indeed his masterpiece. Others have been a hell of a lot of fun: The Lady Vanishes, Lifeboat, Notorious, North by Northwest, Psycho – but nothing rises to the same level of Rear Window, not even Vertigo. That film is wonderful for its creepiness, its pacing, its dreamlike atmosphere and swirling score, not to mention the superb acting of Jimmy Stewart yet again, but there are more holes in Vertigo’s plot than there are in a Chinese checkers board. Suspension of disbelief is sometimes required when watching film, and I love Vertigo, but I never finish the movie feeling entirely satisfied, similar to how I feel after purchasing a new car and wondering if I’ve been taken by the sales guy.

With Rear Window, the only lingering feelings are those of pure delight. When I first viewed the film in 1984, I was positively captivated by Grace Kelly, enthralled with the comedic banter between her, Stewart and the amazing Thelma Ritter, and stressed out beyond belief at the film’s climax. Unfortunately, suspense can’t really be easily duplicated after multiple viewings, and though I may no longer fear for Lisa Fremont’s life when she’s caught in Lars Thorwald’s apartment, Hitchcock’s deft direction and the smart dialogue of screenwriter John Michael Hayes keeps this movie from getting stale even after several viewings. Hayes may not be a household name – I had to look it up for this blog – but he hit the ball out of the park on this one, not just for its entertainment value, but for its larger themes of voyeurism, isolation, loneliness, and what it means to be a neighbor, issues that sadly feel as on-point today as they likely did in 1954.

Other films I’ve seen have knocked me off my feet for a variety of reasons: Broadcast News, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Goodfellas, Beginners, High Fidelity, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Witness for the Prosecution, The Big Short, Charade, Parasite, Holiday, Amadeus, Schindler’s List, Elf, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Searching for Sugarman, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Get Out, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Roman Holiday, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, I Tonya, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Wall*E, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tar, Finding Nemo, Fiddler on the Roof, Long Shot, Michael Clayton, Magnolia, The Great Escape, It’s a Wonderful Life, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense…

But if I had only one film to live with for the rest of my life (not counting trilogies and the like), Rear Window is tops for me.

Now, onto the 2024 Oscars!

Jeanne Dielman: a Film Review

You may have recently heard about the 1975 movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles, as it was declared the greatest film of all-time by the esteemed British film magazine Sight and Sound, a slot formerly held by Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo and the 1941 Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. Jeanne Dielman may be unfamiliar to many movie lovers, as it was for me, and despite it running over 200 minutes, I felt compelled to give it a viewing last week (it’s currently streaming on HBO Max and Prime). It was directed by the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman who died by her own hand in 2015 at age 65, but not before dedicating her life to portraying women’s lives through dozens of feature films, short films and documentaries. And indeed, Jeanne Dielman, which Akerman directed at age 25, is astounding if for no other reason that it’s almost exclusively about a woman (played by Delphine Seyrig) doing household chores, not the stuff of most cinema, especially in 1975. The movie is almost universally praised by critics and has even garnered an audience approval rating of 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not too shabby for a long film with little plot.

But if I’m being honest, I found the film to be a slog. I know, it’s supposed to be a slog, as it depicts a widowed housewife whose days are spent doing menial tasks such as peeling potatoes, running errands, dusting chotchkies and preparing meals for her teenage son, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the slog is worth it.

According to some of the contemporaneous and modern reviews I’ve read, the film is meant to portray the oppressive nature of women’s existence, which boils down to serving men, whether they’re husbands, sons, bosses and – in Jeanne Dielman’s case – clients who pay to have sex with her, a different man visiting her apartment each afternoon. And look, if the film is meant to capture three days in the life of one particular woman who’s clearly suffering from depression, then okay. I can buy the premise and its conclusion, but that doesn’t mean I particularly like it, that I wasn’t bored when the main character peeled potatoes for not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven, but for eight minutes, or that I’ll ever watch it again, but okay. The film is completely unique. The subject matter is completely unique. And the artistry of the framing and motionless camera cannot be denied.  

But the problem for me is that others claim that the movie has a more general insight about women’s plight everywhere, and for me that’s where the film falls short, as if Akerman supposed that because she was depressed and alone that women everywhere must also be. Akerman is said to have based the film on the post-World War II generation of women that she observed in her younger life. If that’s truly the case, then I not only stand corrected, but I’m truly sorry, because Akerman must have been surrounded by a bunch of sad sacks. But I honestly don’t buy it.  Yes, many women over the decades have been completely justified in their dissatisfaction with living life as homemakers, but that doesn’t mean they lived like robots, absent of all feelings, sleepwalking through life.

The character Jeanne Dielman is a joyless, expressionless, friendless dud. A complete and utter pill. She shows no joy toward her son. No joy toward an acquaintance she runs into while running errands. No joy in music. No joy in receiving a letter from her sister in Canada (indeed, she reads it aloud with the same intonation one would use to read a cookbook recipe). No joy toward a neighbor’s baby, whom she watches for five minutes each day (this, to me, was the most revealing. How can you look at a baby and not smile and engage?). She admits to not having loved her husband who died six years ago, marrying him mainly to leave her parent’s home. And she apparently has made no friends over the years, which is odd. She is alone, lonely and depressed. Oh, and instead of getting a job where she could earn some money and be part of society, she chooses to prostitute herself (I have a hard time imagining how she found her clients, given how socially inept she appears to be. How exactly did the word get out? And how do men find satisfaction in what is — in essence — screwing a mannequin?).  

And this is meant to portray women’s experience everywhere? I don’t think so. The only things that ring universally true are the necessity to get married in order to leave home and to be in charge of housework by default. I get that. In the 1960s, my mother had aspirations of being a doctor, but coming from a modest family at a time when women “didn’t become doctors,” that dream was denied her. She married my father after a very brief courtship. At that time that was what women did. Either that, or they were stuck living in their parents’ homes, life suspended without the aid of a man. And I know she wasn’t entirely satisfied with being a mom and with running a household. But neither was she joyless. She still had some agency in her life, some control of her aspirations and how she viewed the world. She still played. She got together with friends. She dated after my parents split. She worked at a place of legitimate employment. Despite the similarities of their plights, my mother bears almost no resemblance to Jeanne Dielman.

In the film, the main character’s son says almost nothing throughout and offers not a finger of assistance to help his mother. In an episode of the wonderful podcast Filmspotting the hosts — both of whom love the movie— admonish the son and how unhelpful and ungrateful he is. What they fail to highlight is how uninterested Jeanne is in her son. In a revealing scene at the end of the film’s second day, Dielman’s son finally opens up to her, practically begging her to sit down and have an actual conversation. Instead, she’s impatient and dismissive, offering a quip and telling her son to go to sleep. You can chastise the son all you want, but if Dielman’s current disposition is any indication, her fatherless son has never actually been loved, merely tolerated. No wonder he shows no love for his mother and no propensity to help her with tasks.

The parent-child relationship in Jeanne Dielman reminds me of the parents in the film Revolutionary Road played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who view their kids at best as a nuisance and at worst as obstacles to their true ambitions. I liked that film quite a lot, but I reject the notion that somehow it represents American suburbia in the 1960s. Yes, it beautifully portrays the isolation and dissatisfaction associated with being a suburban mother lacking in agency. But the mother also failed to see the beauty right in front of her.

So no, I didn’t particularly like Jeanne Dielman, and like many highly-praised films, I fear that many people claim to love it mostly because they’ve been told to. For me, give me Rear Window or Goodfellas or Beginners or Eternal Sunshine or loads of other films any day of the week. I will not be watching Dielman again.

The film TÁR

The best sermons are ones that leave you with something to chew on, something to apply to your life or someone else’s life, to ponder, to wrestle with.  Something more than just a trifle to forget as soon as it ends.  The same applies to film.  And while I may not rush out to watch Todd Field’s TÁR a second time, I can’t stop thinking about it.  And really, what more could you ask of a work of art?

Cate Blanchett inhabits roles like few others, and her portrayal of conductor, composer and author Lydia Tár is no exception, a mesmerizing tour de force, as she employs not only her prodigious acting talents, but also skills she acquired for the role: conducting, piano playing, and speaking German.  Honestly, it’s ridiculous.  As Vogue writer Taylor Antrim concluded in his review of the film, “Just give her the Oscar.”  I couldn’t agree more. 

The film dives deeply into the world of music, and it helps to have some knowledge of the language of music when watching Tár.  My non-musical wife may have enjoyed the journey, but not as much as I did, and I probably didn’t enjoy it as much as my classical musician friends will, all of whom I immediately texted when I finished watching the movie.  It’s not often that the world of classical music is portrayed on film so thoughtfully and thoroughly, and I think they’ll get to experience Tár on an even deeper level than I did.

But at its core, the world of classical performing is like any other business: there is politics, jockeying for position, mind games, personality conflicts, concerns about marketing and money, and wrestling with loyalty, legacy, family, power and control – and it’s these universal qualities that allow the film to be appreciated no matter what expertise you may or may not bring to the table.  That is, as long as you can handle a running time of 158 minute.

But time in film can stretch and contract just like tempo in music can ritard or accelerate (much like Tár describes in the opening scene of the film when she’s interviewed at a public gathering). What’s amazing is how much time Field spends on the slow build of Tár’s journey, as we learn about her musical expertise, her celebrity, her home life with wife Sharon and adopted daughter Petra, her struggles to tune out extraneous sounds that hamper with the more important tasks at hand… and how little time is spent on the earth-shattering changes that occur within the last half an hour of the film.

This is where Field’s expertise really shines, as he tells us just enough to draw our own conclusions, but not so much that he hits us over the head with an unambivalent outcome (the way, say, Everything Everywhere All at Once did last spring, somewhat marring an otherwise excellent movie).  Other deftly-written scenes lack ambiguity but are amazingly efficient at telling us what we need to know with very little.  I won’t spoil anything, but there are two brief scenes – one in a PR firm’s office, and one in Lydia’s childhood home – that both last no more than 30 seconds and illuminate so much about her life without getting bogged down in the details.  Honestly, Field could have made another film – Tár 2, if you will – expanding the last twenty minutes into a 2-hour feature film.  There certainly would have been enough intrigue to coax me back into the theater (and this film must be seen in a theater if you have the opportunity).  Instead, he speeds up the last half an hour of the film, just as composer might for a symphony’s climax. 

As it is, the film leaves me with questions, something I appreciate in a good movie. Why does Tár throw out a book she receives as a gift, a book adorned by an artistic pattern similar to one on a metronome in her home and to one her daughter makes with clay?  I don’t know.  I suspect there’s something I missed.  Is the scream Tár heard in a park really happening or is it in her head?  What exactly is she guilty of, and were the consequences of her actions just or unjust?

I don’t know.  But I can’t wait to ask my friends about it after they see the movie.

Just like a good sermon.

The Film, Avalon

If pressed to name my favorite movie of all time, I’ll either answer Rear Window, Hitchock’s 1954 suspense thriller, or Avalon, Barry Levinson’s 1990 family biopic. The latter barely registered at the box office when it was released during my final semester of college, but its absence from Best Picture contention a few months later was – in my mind – a glaring omission. I thought it was cinematic perfection, the very reason we have “the movies.” It’s also the kind of film that is no longer made. But back in 1990, Levinson, riding high after his Oscar win for Rain Main two years earlier, was largely given free rein to write and direct whatever he wished, and drawing from his own childhood, he struck gold with Avalon, a tale about the fragmentation of the family – and perhaps of society itself – after the rise of television and suburbia.

My roommate Mark and I had seen a preview for the film on TV, and we decided to devote a weekday evening to watch it at the theater near the capital in Madison, Wisconsin. The addition of a couple of young women – one of whom was transporting us to and from the movie – initiated a mild debate about which film to see: Avalon or Welcome Home, Roxy Charmichael. The latter wasn’t without merit: the poster offered an enticing Winona Ryder dressed in a hot pink dress, revealing quite a lot of leg, but cooler heads prevailed, i.e., Mark and I had made our decision and we weren’t budging, a dangerous position given the potential ridicule we might have garnered if the movie was a dud. Fortunately, by film’s end, all four of us were either suppressing tears, or – in the case of one of the women we were with – outright blubbering. It was one of those movies that struck a chord, with its themes of family, loss, and legacy.

No less important than the film itself was the haunting score by Randy Newman, which, although nominated, didn’t earn Newman his first Oscar win, however deserved (he could have just as easily won for his score for Awakenings that year, but that wasn’t nominated, and his first Academy Award win wouldn’t occur for another eleven years). The music from Avalon stayed with me for months afterward, actually waking me from dreams, all without the aid of additional viewings. I’d heard the score once, and my subconscious remembered it. It was that good. 

I didn’t see the movie again until the fall of 1992, when I recorded a VHS tape it off of cable, and I purchased the soundtrack on CD around the same time, eventually transcribing some of the themes from the score into a “piano highlights” piece that I still have. Nearly thirty years later, while shopping at a record store in Columbus, Ohio, my son came across a vinyl copy of the soundtrack, and I came to learn that Reprise Records released the record in 2020 as part of its “The Sound of Movies (…and Television!)” series, a noble endeavor for the movie/vinyl enthusiast. I now own Avalon on CD, DVD and vinyl, and the movie poster adorns my basement wall. I’ve seen in probably twenty times or so, and over the years I’ve enjoyed showing it to my children and a few friends who I felt might respond well to it.

In 2015, Levinson and Newman were interviewed about the film during its 25th anniversary, and it’s well worth a read if you’re a fan of the movie or the score, or both.

Here’s hoping the movie gets more recognition in retrospect than it did upon its release.

The Year of the Small Movie

If you like “small” films, 2020 was your year.  Next week the 93rd Academy Awards will take place – with people present, no less – celebrating the movies of 2020, a strange year in so many ways that it seems fitting that the film industry wasn’t exempt.  With theaters closed or sparsely attended in 2020, many movies were held back for release in 2021 or were released with little fanfare on streaming services.  I missed seeing previews – often the biggest indicator for me on what to see – and instead had to trust that I was getting wind of good films despite abbreviated or non-existent theatrical runs. Ultimately, I watched twenty-two movies released in 2020, including all eight Best Picture nominees, and while many of them were really good, the mood and feel of many of them were – for lack of a better word – “small.”  I was struck with a maddening desire to watch some honest-to-goodness plot-twisting Hollywood creations, words I never thought I’d utter. 

In 2018 when I saw The Florida Project, I was blown away.  I wrote then, “The Florida Project is one of those rare films that I gravitate toward – short on plot, long on characters and realistic slices of life.”  And while that’s still true, it turns out that if you watch a dozen Florida Project-type films in a row, suddenly small slices of life don’t seem so novel anymore.  In fact, they can seem downright infuriating.

In quick succession I watched Mank, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, One Night in Miami, The Forty-Year Old Version, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Dig, Malcolm & Marie, Sound of Metal, Supernova, Nomadland, Minari, First Cow and The Father.  Goodness.  Some of those films are excellent – of these, I liked One Night in Miami and The Forty-Year Old Version best – but by the end of that run I was practically begging for a plot.  A development.  A murder.  Something!  Something more than two guys surreptitiously milking a cow!  Too much of a good thing can in fact be too much of a good thing.

In the midst of all of these films, my wife and I also watched Promising Young Woman and Judas and the Black Messiah, and both of these nailed it.  Excellent films, and for us, a breath of fresh air to kick off the dust of our plotless movie run.  Sadly, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things and The Forty-Year Old Version garnered no Oscar nominations, and One Night In Miami was ignored for Best Picture and Director.  That’s the way these awards shows always go.

But when reviewing this year’s films to last year’s, it seems like a lifetime ago when we were cheering on Parasite, Ford V Ferrari, Jojo Rabbit, 1917 and Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood (plus Uncut Gems and Knives Out), a better batch of films than this year’s, in my opinion.  I’m holding out hope that the 94th Academy Awards will celebrate a terrific set of movies both small and large.