Movie Review: Captain Fantastic

With all the hoopla surrounding last Sunday's blunder at the Academy Awards, it’s easy to forget that the primary purpose of the ceremony isn’t to hand out prizes, but rather, to celebrate and promote movies. Tucked inside the glam of glistening dresses, monotonous speeches and coveted trophies is an opportunity to consider films that one might not have otherwise. For me, this year’s Best Picture nominees did just that, as I went out of my way to watch movies that normally wouldn’t have been on my radar (Moonlight and Hell or High Water, just to name two). But Jimmy Kimmel inspired me to take things further. During his monologue, he cracked the following joke aimed at actor Viggo Mortensen, the star of Captain Fantastic: “Too often the Academy only recognizes movies that people have seen.”

That inspired me to go beyond the Best Picture nominees, of which I’d seen eight of nine, and extend my viewing to other films that were up for awards. First for me was the aforementioned Captain Fantastic. In this film, Ben is raising his six children in the relative isolation of a Washington forest, where they grow and hunt food, learn self-defense as well as literature, science and math, and stick to a strict routine of exercise and chores. Ben is demanding, and his children are up for the challenge, exhibiting signs of impressive strength, intelligence and camaraderie. In short, the family is living a sort of Utopian existence in a wilderness paradise.

When the children’s mother kills herself after an extended mental illness and lengthy hospital stay, Ben takes his children into town to visit his sister’s family, and we get a unique opportunity to see the world through the eyes of kids who’ve been raised apart from our modern society. Suddenly, the endless stream of shopping malls, overweight people and fake food appear especially tragic, and teenage access to violent video games utterly preposterous. The message isn’t subtle, but it is illuminating.

Unfortunately, writer and director Matt Ross continues to paint in such broad brushstrokes that as enjoyable as the film may be, little of it is believable. Ben’s sister’s family is naturally a stereotype, with overly protective parents when it comes to real life tragedies (i.e., the suicide of Ben’s wife) but who allow ample access to violent video games and whose kids are bumbling idiots. Ben’s kids, of course, are the kind of angelic children any adult would be privileged to raise: strong, confident, intelligent, knowledgeable, loving, musical and kind, all brilliantly portrayed by talented young actors and all desperately two-dimensional, a modern day version of The Sound of Music’s Von Trapp family. But Captain Fantastic isn’t a musical. Our belief is suspended just enough to enjoy the film, but never enough to swallow it whole.

If Ben and his family show any dimensions at all, it appear to be in spite of Ross’s efforts, rather than because of them. Scenes apparently meant as comedic relief instead show an ugly side to Ben. He eschews his father-in-law’s wishes for them not to attend his daughter’s funeral. Fine. But they arrive late, making a grand entrance that would be disrespectful under any circumstances, and Ben wears a red suit that cries for attention, until he interrupts the pastor’s sermon and unilaterally demands attention. In this scene, and in another that has the family employing a ruse to steal food from a grocery store, the outcome isn’t comedic at all, but rather a glimpse into a very flawed human being.

Still, the movie shines when it concentrates on the family enjoying each other’s company. When Ben’s daughter describes a book she’s reading as “interesting,” he demands she try again, claiming the word has no meaning. She does, with success, and it reminds me of all the times I use words that come easily to me instead of searching for the correct ones. 

The conflict in this movie is minimal, and I applaud Ross for not taking the easy way out in this regard. It brings to mind Chef, a film that could have gone down so many Hollywood tropes, but stuck the its central purpose – the relationship between a father and son. Similarly, Captain Fantastic succeeds most when it allows us to watch this unusual family interact with each other. I found the last scene, as understated as it may be, as touchingly brilliant.

Thomas Dolby's Autobiography

A friend of mine sent the following email to me a few weeks ago:

Thomas Dolby did the synth on Waiting??

He was referring to Foreigner’s 1981 hit, “Waiting For a Girl Like You,” and yes indeed, Thomas Dolby of “She Blinded Me With Science” fame played synth on the tune, including the intro that drummer Dennis Elliott categorized as “massage music.” In Dolby’s crafty autobiography, The Speed of Sound: Breaking the Barriers Between Music and Technology, he credits Foreigner with saving him from his stint performing for tips at Parisian Metro stations, though he admits that he was disappointed to learn that it wasn’t Mick Jones of The Clash who came calling. Instead, Dolby was whisked away to New York to record with Mutt Lange and the other Mick Jones, where he earned enough money to kick-start his solo career.

Before reading The Speed of Sound, I knew nothing about Dolby save for his big hit and for an erroneous belief that he or his family had had something to do with Dolby noise-reduction found on tape decks. It was actually the other way around. Born Thomas Robertson, Dolby acquired his nickname due to his propensity to play with gadgets that included a cassette recorder. In 1986, Dolby Labs actually filed for an injunction to prevent Thomas Dolby from using the name, and though the lawsuit was eventually dropped, Dolby took a financial hit that led to him to move permanently to California, where he spent the next two decades in the tech industry. A tinkerer at heart, Dolby formed his own company, first writing soundtracks for computer games and helping develop software that allowed nonlinear compositions to interacted with the user, then striving to discover ways to send music over the Internet in real time, ultimately achieving great success with ringtone software and content.

Particularly fascinating in The Speed of Sound is witnessing the technology boom through the eyes of someone living in the moment. Dolby is careful not to give us the benefit of hindsight: he places us squarely in the period when home computers and the internet were just beginning to flourish, websites were not entirely understood, and when tech companies were sprouting up by the hundreds, all hoping to stay ahead of the curve. No one was sure how it was going to play out, even bigwigs like Bill Gates. When Dolby attended a digital media conference in 1994, a guy named Marc Porat prophesied that one day PCs wouldn't be needed at all because “all your work will be in a sort of cloud.” Gates went ballistic. It would take a while, but Porat’s words proved prescient.

Though there were all sorts of discoveries for me reading this book (his playing with Bowie at Live Aid and with Roger Waters at the Berlin performance of The Wall), the most fulfilling one was learning of the English pop band Prefab Sprout, whose second album Dolby produced in 1985. I’d never even heard of the band before, never mind their music, but a quick listen on YouTube demanded that I buy the CD on eBay that same evening. It’s a gem.

Why isn’t such a great band better known? If Dolby were to summarize the reasons, he would probably say that the record industry “is rotten to its fucking core.” He takes us into the industry's underbelly, where money is laundered, artists are exploited, and support is taken away without notice. Dolby’s career as a recording artist was frustrating, though he managed to release four albums over a decade before finally calling it a day. Things looked bright for a moment when EMI released him from his contract and Virgin Records came calling, but six months later EMI purchased Virgin. Such was the music industry in the early 90s.

Unlike the Springsteen autobiography I just finished reading, Dolby devotes most of his writing to his career and eschews getting bogged down in his personal life, a wise move for an artist whose career isn’t as well understood as someone like Springsteen’s. Too many musicians and producers who embark on authoring a book don’t understand this, and for this reason most of their writings fall flat. Sure, for a megastar whose work you memorized long ago, you may want to know what makes him tick and learn details about his childhood and time away from music. For Dolby, it's enough to understand his journey from synth-pop hit-maker to a tech company founder (and now, a professor of music and film at Johns Hopkins).

It’s a great read. Highly recommended.

Springsteen's Autobiography

At various points while reading Bruce Springsteen’s recently published autobiography, Born to Run, I wanted to tell The Boss to relax. It’s only rock and roll.

Not to Springsteen. Rock and roll isn’t just his career – it’s his passion, his religion and path to salvation and redemption. When it comes to his music, he analyzes, he ruminates, he wrestles with, he composes and discards and rewrites and exerts energy that would exhaust a normal human being. Springsteen’s commitment to his music is inexhaustible, his drive indefatigable, his work ethic bordering on the obsessive, and he fully admits in his 500+ page book that his musical pursuits kept him from living a life for much of his first four decades. For Springsteen, his blessing is also a curse.

Not so for his fans, who now get to enjoy a book that benefits from the same commitment Springsteen applies to his music. There are two things about this book that make it stand out from among so many other musician biographies: first, the guy can write. No ghost writer required for this biopic. Springsteen effectively changes tenses, alternates between story and insight, offers a fairly chronological account of his life while still assembling topical chapters and is just self-deprecating enough to keep the reader rooting for him. (e.g., “I know I’m good but I’m also a poser. That’s artistic balance!”)

Second, Springsteen is an extremely curious person, eager to analyze his past, his surroundings, his parents, his bandmates, his storytelling, what music means to our society, etc., and as such opens up much more than many other musicians are willing to while never falling into the tell-all abyss. He doesn’t shy away from confrontations and weaknesses, but he’s also careful not to say too much. His well-known grievances with manager Mike Appel are mentioned but not dwelled upon, his at-times difficult relationship with Steve Van Zandt and Danny Federici are addressed without going into detail, and his first marriage’s demise is handled deftly and respectably.

Unlike, say, Keith Richard’s entertaining but shallow Life, or Elvis Costello’s coy, self-indulgent and muddled Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Born to Run is both an exercise in good writing and in reflection. Consider the following description of how a snowstorm can make you feel. Where others might have simply said, “I love a good snow,” Springsteen writes:

No work, no school, the world shutting its big mouth for a while; the dirtiest streets covered over in virgin whites, like all the missteps you’ve taken have been erased by nature.  You can’t run; you can only sit.  You open your door on a trackless world, your old path, your history, momentarily covered over by a landscape of forgiveness, a place where something new might happen.  It’s an illusion but it can stimulate the regenerative parts of your spirit to make good on God and nature’s suggestion.

Nicely done. Yes, there are times when Springsteen’s ruminations get a tad tiresome, but I’ll take a book with too much reflection than too little any day. And while much of his book is about his troubled relationship with his father and Bruce’s own path to overcome some of the traits he inherited (including a forthright revelation about his own mental illness), the book is a fairly effective balance between Springsteen’s music and his personal life. I would have preferred a few more anecdotes about recording and performing. I imagine he could devote an entire book to such an endeavor, and perhaps one day he will, but as a musician I’m often confounded with how little musicians write about…well, MUSIC. 

Oddly absent are any mention of Springsteen’s 1991 releases, Human Touch and Lucky Town.  Every other album is discussed in some detail, but for reasons unknown, he doesn’t even mention the album titles or the process of composing or recording for them. He does reveal how disappointed he was that 2011’s Wrecking Ball album didn’t reach the audience he’d hoped for, and concludes that “In the States, the power of rock music as a vehicle for [political] ideas had diminished.” That may be true, but probably more important was the fact that Wrecking Ball, as I’ve written before, was a bore. Bruce’s writing simply hasn’t progressed that way it has for, say, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne or Joe Jackson.

One high point of the book is a short chapter devoted to his performance at the 2009 Super Bowl, an event that makes even Springsteen nervous. “It’s not the usual preshow jitters or ‘butterflies’ I’ve had before. I’m talking about ‘five minutes to beach landing,’ Right Stuff, ‘Lord, don’t let me screw the pooch in front of a hundred million people’ kind of semiterror.” This chapter more than any other helps us see performing through Bruce’s eyes.

He writes, “It was a high point, a marker of some sort, and went up with the biggest shows of our work life. The NFL threw us an anniversary party the likes of which we’d never have thrown for ourselves.” The show was only two weeks after President Obama’s first inaugural address. The feelings of excitement, of rebirth and celebration were in the air. It’s hard to imagine this type of feeling emanating from any performer these days. Lady Gaga did a fine job last night at Super Bowl LI, but times look bleak, our capacity for celebration diminished.

In, 2009, Springsteen ended his Super Bowl performance with "Glory Days.”

Glory days, indeed.

The Lure of Isolation

I recently spoke to a 47 year-old bachelor friend of mine who calculated that he’s lived alone for two straight decades, and as much as he’d one day like to have a lasting relationship, he’s not sure he’d ever be able to adapt to having to live with someone aside from his dog and one-eyed cat. Old habits die hard. Twenty year-old habits die harder. His idiosyncrasies and routines are ingrained.

Or so he thinks. I have another friend who didn’t get married until the ripe age of 60, so my bachelor buddy may be more capable of change than he gives himself credit for.

His calculation of years of solitude caused me to do a quick calculation of my own. Although I’ve spent countless hours alone, I have never actually lived alone. Not from the early years as the last addition to a family of five to the most recent years, when my own family of five shed a few from our humble abode. (The Sesame Street song – so anachronistic today for so many Americans – runs through my head from time to time: “I’ve got five people in my family, and there’s not one of them I’d swap…”) Sure, there were a few months in grad school when my roommate’s fixation on a new girlfriend resulted in a period of my coming home to an empty apartment, but he’d be back for days at a time, his name was still on the lease, and this was grad school, when every day and every evening was brimming with social activity. If anything, I was relieved to have a few moments to myself.

For me, solitude is one of two essential ingredients for creativity (the other is time), and during my formative high school years, I had it in spades as my two siblings ventured to college and my mother worked crazy nursing hours. It fed my creative pursuits and allowed me to understand who I am. It’s something I’ve gotten used to, and I’ve found it to be a blessing. As the Dr. Seuss book says, “Whether you like it or not, alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot.” It is, and I’m comfortable with it (I’m alone right now as I write this piece, and I couldn’t be happier). But I also recognized early on as an adult that my need for solitude is offset by my need for human interaction on a daily basis. If I don’t have both, I’m a wreck.  The human contact I experience doesn’t always have to be extensive or particularly meaningful – a nice talk with a dog-walker on the street might be sufficient – but it does have to be there. 

I’m currently reading Bruce Springsteen’s biography, Born to Run (review forthcoming), and he spends quite a few pages exploring his opposing desires for solitude and ample human contact. He writes that early in his role as a father, when one of his children released him from his attention, “I’d often breathe a sigh of relief and run back to my fortress of solitude, where as usual I felt at home, safe, until, like a bear in need of blood and meat, I’d wake from my hibernation and travel through the house for my drink from the cup of human love and companionship.” 

I’m of a similar makeup. Just as my bachelor friend can’t imagine living with someone, I can’t imagine living without someone. If circumstances relegated me to a period of time in an empty house, I believe I’d last about three days before experiencing a mental breakdown. And this leads me to think of my mother, who, when I left for college, lived alone for the first time in her life. She was forty-eight, the same age I am today. And I wonder if she was no more capable of handling that transition than I would be today. 

One of my favorite albums as a teenager, and one that still holds my attention today, is Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I didn’t really understand its themes when I devoured the record during middle school, but today I find it ironic how an album about how isolation results in mental decay was probably enjoyed most often by lonely guys in their bedroom. The lure of isolation, of comfort, control and safety, is ultimately a road to ruin. For a society that’s never been more connected, I believe we are becoming more and more isolated, resulting in the chaos that’s currently ensuing nationwide and globally. Nationalism and hatred breed out of isolation.

We best leave our shells behind, individually and collectively, or we’re all going to be in deep shit.

Adding to One's Life Story (part 2)

Last week, with the help of several literary references, I wrote about the ideas of life achievements, mediocrity, and living out one’s life as epilogue rather than story (kudos to Vonnegut, Jr. for coming up with this one). The concluding question was this: if you haven’t achieved the goals you set out for yourself early in life, does that mean you’re living a life of mediocrity? I answered by saying that while you’re life might in fact be mediocre, it needn’t be.

In the film Manchester by the Sea, the lead character played by Casey Affleck is living an epilogue. His life story is over, and now it’s merely a waiting game until the finish line. Though his case might be an overly drastic one, I do occasionally observe people living out their epilogues and doing little to further their life story.

But more often I see the opposite: people doing extraordinary things that might not exactly constitute the lives of grandeur they’d envisioned for themselves decades ago, but are still impressive achievements, significant contributions, or interesting pursuits that give their lives meaning. Hell, on my block alone, we’ve got a man who opened up a toy museum, plays in excess of 100 gigs a year, wrote a book about the Chicago music scene in the 60s and 70s, and collects and sells antique toys worldwide. His life story is far from epilogue even if he isn’t gracing the cover of Rolling Stone.

Four years ago I met a man who learned a trade as a teenager, started his own business in his 20s, raced cars in his 30s, competed in Ironman Triathlons in his 40s, and THEN, at the age of 50, decided that he’d like to learn an instrument. He learned two. I now play keyboards for his classic rock band of 15 years. Oh, and last year he opened up a restaurant in suburban Chicago. Tell me his life is epilogue. Or mediocre. Or anything other than amazing.

Another friend of mine has been called a Renaissance Man. He built his own brick oven in the backyard, brews his own beer, quilts, cooks, plays the flute, builds his own drones, and runs triathlons.

Another buddy memorizes Shakespearean sonnets, studies philosophy in his spare time, plays a wicked violin, taught his daughters their respective instruments (one of whom is going pro), teaches Sunday school, serves on the synagogue Board and runs marathons.

(question: what is it with high achievers running marathons and competing in triathlons. I don’t get it)

The list of people whose lives I admire goes on and on. Average people publishing books, raising money for charity, driving political change, helping those in need, writing songs, building furniture, embarking on amazing home improvement project, traveling to interesting places. There is no shortage of impressive people in our midst. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

As someone who dreamed big as a child, I’ve done a fair bit of analyzing and rationalizing my current state of affairs. Like George Bailey, I haven’t quite achieved what I set out to back in my early 20s. About a decade ago I wrote the following lyric, supposedly for a friend of mine, but in retrospect aimed squarely at me:

(from “Grounded” off of Pause)

The truth be known, my friend
There lies a noble end
But it’s a million miles away from where you’ve been
You’ve been on cruise control
Without a lofty goal
And every day begins and ends and ends where it begins
I believe there is something grand you’re ready to achieve
It’s not so out of reach
After all
There are lesser souls than you to heed the call

My youngest child was about to start Kindergarten, and it was time for me to explore other aspects of my life more fully. I wouldn’t classify my life as anything exceptional, but when I’m feeling a little down about things I recognize that while my life story may not be a bestselling page-turner, it isn’t a dull textbook either. It certainly isn’t epilogue. I’ve accomplished much since writing that self-inspiring lyric.

The reality is epilogue never has to happen, even if you live to be a hundred. And the converse is true as well. The characters of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road were already living epilogue in their 20s.

Learn. Explore. Volunteer. Start a hobby. Help others. Learn an instrument. Love, and experience joy with the ones you love. Learn a craft. Grow something. Learn a language. Have fun with friends. And perhaps most importantly, enjoy the little miracles around you every day.  As James Taylor wrote, “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.”

Which leads me to the ending of the Monty Python film, The Meaning of Life. Michael Palin says, “Now here’s the meaning of life,” is handed an envelope as if announcing the winner of an award, and says: “Well, it’s nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

It degrades quickly from there in inimitable Monty Python fashion, but it starts out nice enough!