Joker (2019)

After reading reviews for this film, I found it difficult to distinguish reviewers' annoyance with the film itself from its promotion on social media, referred to, cautiously, as "discussion" and "conversation." Having seen the film, though, I understand their displeasure. Joker isn't very good.

Joker is comparable to Batman Begins, the first film in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight series, wanting to be a kind of psychological investigation, an answer to the question of how this villain comes to be who he is. It's an interesting "take" on the superhero film -- where the superhero protagonist is presented as a real person, so to speak.

The Dark Knight series questions the idea of the hero. Are our heroes wholly virtuous? The answer, of course, is no. Batman, or Bruce Wayne, is the dark night, not the white night. He makes, arguably, villainous decisions. So if the hero makes villainous decisions in the Dark Knight series, we might expect the villain in Joker to make heroic decisions. Unfortunately that's not the case here.

Arthur Fleck is mugged and jumped. He is the victim of child abuse. He is the butt of the joke on a late night talk show. Such scenes, it would seem, are intended to drum up sympathy for our villain. And perhaps they do -- which I believe is what the topic of social media discussion -- but it only works to a certain point. The emotional work is much more than putting a bandage on a puppy: we might feel bad for the puppy but the bandage doesn't make the puppy any more compelling. It's weak, incomplete characterization.

Why incomplete? Arthur Fleck lacks what workshop and craft discussions call "redeeming qualities." He lacks the intelligence and appetite for mayhem of the Joker that we've seen elsewhere. 

One of the better scenes in the film, I thought, was when detectives pursue Fleck on the subway. Fleck hits someone in the back and runs to the next train car. When the person turns around, he sees the detective and assumes the detective hit him. A brawl erupts on the train. This, if it weren't unintentional, would be the kind of trickery we expect from the joker.

Joker attempts -- rather artlessly -- to portray the development of Fleck's emotional and psychological state. It gives, unfortunately, no attention his intellect or intelligence, which might serve as a redeeming quality.

Summer Hours (2014)

What is your favorite film? This is a question I have a hard time answering. I like so many. It's impossible to pick one. But if you really pressed me -- if you were to ask me what's the best film I've seen lately, I'd have to say Summer Hours.

Summer Hours is elegant and timely, quiet and charming, touching and wonderful to look at. It doesn't try harder than its narrative requires. And best of all, you might say it has a happy ending.

The plot is simple. Helen, 75, owns a country house stuffed with a collection of art and antiques worthy of France's best museums. As her health begins to fail the dramatic question emerges: what will happen to the estate when Helen dies? It will be up to her three adult children to decide. Their decision is complicated by the fact that one lives in America, one in France, and the third in China.

As I said, Summer Hours is beautiful to look at. The country estate is lush, verdant. The camera lingers on the treasures within the house, many of them authentic, having been borrowed from the Musée d'Orsay. It's a feeling of reverie. I felt pleasantly displaced, as if in a daydream.

I also like the film's approach to character. Helen, the matriarch, is clear-eyed about her health. She confronts her three adult children (on her birthday, no less) with the difficult question of how her estate will be handled. When she dies, her children are equally steely.

Because Frederic and Adrienne both live outside of France, it's Jeremy who must look after the estate, a task he's knows he's incapable of given the demands of his career and family. In the course of events, the characters deliberate rationally. They're not treacherous -- they don't scheme or deceive one another. It's an uncommon choice, given the stakes, for a dramatic story -- uncommon yet refreshing.

The characters suppress their emotions, which means the plot is relatively flat. No character is inspired to act in a dramatic fashion. There is no explosive confrontation. As the story approaches its end, we await big drama, the usual law being that the more feelings are pushed down the larger their re-emergence will be. So, it's an awfully tense final scene, then, when Jeremy allows his teenage daughter to have a party at the house.

In this beautiful house, with its antique effects we've learned will be donated to museums, teenagers are drinking, smoking, dancing -- all the things that fill adults with fear. Yet, in a stroke of genius, the camera lingers on these teenagers as lovingly as it did the house itself. It's an awfully uplifting -- yet extremely tense -- way to say good-bye. 

One thought I have about failed happy endings, the bad kind, the kind that make us groan, is that they try to convince us that things will be happy forever after. The prince marries the princess. Paradise is restored. And so on. Summer Hours avoids this. We see the house being enjoyed as we know it once was but it's not happily ever after because we know the house will be sold.

A thought about good or successful happy endings, then, is that they won't try to convince us things will be happy forever after. That is, like in Summer Hours, they might be both happy and sad. We're happy to watch teenagers enjoy themselves, we're terrified something will happen to the house, and we're sad knowing the house will no longer remain in the family. 

I was reading an essay by Tom Grimes in Tin House's The Writer's Notebook recently and he analyzes the ending of The Catcher in the Rye. Grimes writes: "Salinger's genius was to end his story and yet not end it, to give the reader a sense of closure while leaving the future mysterious and alive." I think that's close to how I see the ending of Summer Hours. We get a sense of closure from watching the teenagers enjoy the house and we aren't sure what the future will bring.

Exhibition on Screen: David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts (2018)

It's been a while. I'm happy to be back. In the meantime I've been watching more movies than ever, still thinking about them in the same way. That is, what can I learn from them?

Over the weekend I saw Exhibition on Screen: David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts. The film presents two exhibitions, A Bigger Picture (2012) and 82 Portraits and One Still Life (2016).

A Bigger Picture features large-scale paintings inspired by England's East Yorkshire landscape. To prepare for these paintings Hockney drove to the countryside to do some drawings. What surprised me was that he drew on an iPad. Those drawings are also featured in the exhibition.

Why an iPad? The advantage is speed. The screen is smooth, meaning the stylus doesn't encounter the same resistance as a pencil on paper. For a draftsman, Hockney says, speed is everything.

Hockney's relationship with technology is perfectly balanced. He sees technology as neither good nor bad. In gaining something you lose something else. Hockney recounts attending the launch of Photoshop in 1989. After the conference, he felt he encountered the death of film and chemical photography. Photography, from then on, he says, is a craft.

I was struck by this, by the demotion in status the word craft implies. Craft is the term fiction writers, in workshops and in books, use when speaking of the work behind their writing. Sometimes you hear substitutions, words like technique or form. Technique feels somewhat different than craft -- perhaps more experimental -- while form, for the most part, is preferred in academic discussions.

So what I take from Hockney's remark is a feeling for a difference between craft and technique. My feeling is that craft tends toward the tried and true, what has proven generally to work. Technique, then, searches for solutions craft cannot solve.

Discussions hinging on a distinction between old and new, traditional and experimental, conventional and innovative might seem trite. They might seem controversial and divisive. They don't need to be. They are controversial when we assume old is bad and new is good, or vice versa. Seems to me we might want to approach such discussions -- and our art as well -- as does Hockney, who, at 82, is both a master of his craft and a champion of experimentation, who, in the same project, draws on an iPad and paints en plain air.