There's a kind of staple of postwar American film (you could even, I suppose, hark back to Dinner At Eight if one wants to be hardcore), the awkward dinner party film. An outsider, a stranger, comes to the table of a group - usually wealthy and successful - and imparts some truth telling realness that shakes their complacency and up-ends their (usually) safe insular world.
Beatriz at Dinner has the makings of a potential offbeat classic - well known stars with solid acting chops; a fairly dynamic, if a bit Crash-y, premise; and some juicy scene chewing by John Lithgow as a showy Master of the Universe. Sadly, the whole project comes down to a bit of a fizzle... an interesting idea that doesn't seem to have ever come together as a finished script.
Salma Hayek drabs it down, way down, to play Beatriz, a massage therapist and general non-western medicine guru who leaves her day job at a cancer clinic to minister to a wealthy Newport Beach matron, played by Connie Britten. When Beatriz's iffy VW won't start, our hostess insists that Beatriz stay for a small "business dinner" between her husband, a client (Lithgow) and a mouthy lawyer and their respective wives.
If you can tell where this is headed... it's not hard. This is a movie built on discomfort, particularly the discomfort of the pampered folks in gated communities with fancy rides, and making the audience squirm is only a side effect of the seat shifting on display.The movie meanders over the courses of a catered meal, desultory small talk and awkward silences, enlivened by the wild card of Beatriz and the "I'll be the one to say it" bomb throws of Lithgow, whose character surely thinks Trump will solve the immigrant problem with that great big wall.
What the movie lacks in subtlety - hence the same sort of easy liberal virtue selling as Crash - it makes up for in quietly skewering everyone's particular hobby horse. Britten's well meaning rich girl earnestly tries to have things all ways at once, a champion for the less fortunate living the high life on the profits of her husband's questionable business partners. Beatriz, too, is no saint - the movie looks askance at her new age bromides, she spends much of the movie in drunk soliloquizing, and positioning herself as a truth teller doesn't make her virtuous. As I said the movie has some deliriously rich makings of sublime social commentary lurking in it, somewhere.
Still, for whatever reason, director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White (who previously teamed on the even more disturbing Chuck and Buck) can't figure out where all of this is going. Is Beatriz meant to confront the complacency of the well to do? Is she yet another delicate flower crushed on the wheel of corporate progress? Are we rehashing Bunuel? Who can tell - the film drifts drearily from imagined mayhem to realistic drab downer endings, settling on metaphorical rebirth, none of which feel fully earned or convincing in any way. And Hayek, by the end, seems thoroughly lost.
Like many a promising picture, Beatriz at Dinner is vastly more frustrating for all the promising elements on display than for never even offering any promise at all. It's ridiculously cruel and wasteful to engage a sly thinking woman's movie star like Chloe Sevigny - doing some of her best unheralded work as the young couple's wife - and leave her absolutely nowhere 2/3rds of the way through. Britten, too, has developed a warm, engaging presence that deserves more than what she gets here. Indeed, a film which observes so much about women and their roles across class structures seems unable to commit to exploring the idea in any thoughtful way at all. Hayek can thrown on a bad wig, wipe off the makeup and suit up in badly cut pants all she likes, but nothing, really, betrays her striking good looks and intense presence on screen. Beatriz benefits from that intensity... but the scariest thing is that no one involved here seems to know what to do with her.
It says something - and something not especially attractive - about where our culture is right now that one of the most highly anticipated adaptations to film is the upcoming version of Fifty Shades of Grey, in which a woman discovers the joys of bondage and humiliation. Somehow, that's how it always goes, isn't it? A woman breathlessly discovering she likes it rough, as long as she's getting roughed up? Highly derivative - not only of S&M Bondage material, but the book began as a "slash" fiction story online derived from Twilight - the book struck a nerve and reignited old questions of the attractiveness of S&M to a wider audience... of women.
Sadism derives its name from the Marquis de Sade, whose writings about inflicting pain and sexual torture are usually shocking to even the most jaded. Masochism derives its name from Alfred Sacher-Masoch and his work Venus in Furs, ostensibly about a man who finds pleasure being sexually humiliated by a woman. And both, really are more about power than sex - the power to hurt and humiliate, or to be humiliated. And tellingly, neither was initially advocated by a woman.
David Ives took Sacher-Masoch's work and transformed it into a fascinating play, which won rave reviews and a number of awards when it played on Broadway. Now Roman Polanski has created the film adaptation and for all his baggage, Polanski remains a remarkable, visionary director, ably adapting a talky two hander into a largely riveting performance piece. Venus in Fur is a striking, if often problematic achievement.
In a small, dilapidated French theater, a writer is preparing to leave after a disastrous round of auditions for the female lead of his adaptation of Venus in Furs when a woman arrives ate, pleading to audition. Her name, she says, is Vanda, the same name as the main character. Against his better judgment, and struck by this woman's determination and range, they embark on a reading. And between the lines of the play, they wind up playing out a similarly intricate dance about power and gender roles.
This is an intimate piece, and its perhaps unsurprising that Polanski uses his wife Emmanuelle Seigner as Vanda, or that she makes a perfect fit. Indeed one can imagine a similar skill for the role from an older Sharon Tate, had she lived. Vanda is a complicated part, where several motivations often coexist at once, and Seigner plays out all the ambivalences beautifully. She is helped immensely by the fact that Ives is less interested in merely depicting masochism and more in examining the notion that sexism, and mistreatment of women can be found just as easily on the bottom as the top, or vice versa. Playing a character who is sexual and confrontational is, on the one hand, simple; but Ives imbues Vanda with the awareness that power that is given can be taken away, and she adroitly analyzes Sacher-Masoch, and the fact that the novel's twist amounts in the end to a denial of all that's come before. And always, it's the woman who pays.
Mathieu Almaric has the harder, less showy role, and he's entirely up to the challenge of playing a smart, sensitive writer who doesn't seem to entirely understand the sexual minefield he's created, or how to emerge from it unscathed. It's a particularly well realized performance in that he makes a man choosing submissiveness viable and believable... yet also something of its own personal power play.
Polanski's had a long history of adapting theatrical works, exploring dark themes and toying with sexual perversions, and Venus in Fur certainly suggests no signs of slowing down on his part. Pulling out every lighting and camera trick (not to mention sound editing that's fairly brilliant), he easily manages to create a stagebound piece that never feels especially hemmed in or small. But Polanski can only work so many miracles - there is a lot of dialogue here, and not all of it feels essential. At some point, there's only so many ways to look at gender roles, sexual expectations, and the kinky pleasures of an uneven balance of power. There's plenty here to chew on and mull over after watching... but just as surely, there's not much there.
Still, I wouldn't discount a movie that has Seigner capering around in little more than a fur throw, reenacting the crucial moments from The Bacchae, with her male costar tied up in lipstick and heels. How you get there is what makes Venus in Fur worth the journey. That you get there, and not somewhere else, is reason to wonder why go at all. Still, I feel like that's a better, more complete journey than we'll ever get out of Fifty Shades of Grey. Why settle for grey when you can have the full on darkness of basic black, leather or otherwise?
Did Theresa May miscalculate her chances in an election when she called the UK General Election six weeks ago? Sure; it seems now she overestimated her appeal and that of her party, or at least underestimated the perception of Labour as unable to sell themselves better than the last go round. Probably more to the point, no one could have anticipated two horrific terror attacks in the two major cities of England - the Manchester bombing of an Arianna Grande concert, and a subsequent runaway van attack on London Bridge.
May is shaping up to be a complex presence in British leadership - people who don't like her or her policies, I think, underestimate how well her image of well dressed competence plays nationally and on the world stage. Yet she's presided, at best, over middling Tory governance - bobbling a problematic economy, health care woes in the NHS, tensions with immigrant communities and of course, the bumpy road to Brexit. That should, honestly, have led to even more of a drubbing for Tories than the fairly modest total loss of 12 seats, and something than other than a 5% gain in overall votes.
Though the election is being portrayed as a disaster for May, from a distance, I'd say wait and see. Sure, the internal tensions of the Conservative Party may want to punish her... but we got May because David Cameron flopped spectacularly on his own push for a No vote on Brexit, and it was in the temporal flux of replacing Cameron that it became abundantly clear that the Tories had a leadership bench problem. That problem, roughly a year later, isn't necessarily much better, and nothing shows that more thoroughly than the fact that about the only prominent alternative May faces is... Boris Johnson, one that will be hard for many to take seriously.
Moreover, as I said, May only lost 12 seats. Bad, sure, but it left her with a 57 seat plurality over Labour, and needing only a small number of seats to get a working majority, something she fairly easily accomplished adopting the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland - who are, yes, hardline conservatives with some extreme views, but as one might say, they'll do in a pinch. The election increased the total Tory share of the vote. And May was resoundingly successful in Scotland where the Conservatives were the main beneficiaries of the collapse of the Scottish National Party, the leaders of the Scot secessionist movement who had themselves soared into a major 3rd party role by fueling Labour's collapse - and the Brexit vote - as Labour lost dozens of seats last time. This time, they crawled back in Scotland, but still nowhere near their old dominance.
Indeed, the collapse of Scottish secession, paired with the death throes of UKIP, the anti immigrant hard right party that had driven the Brexit vote, are probably the real stories here, both signalling the end of hardline, dead-end revolts against the status quo. UKIP was never able to translate votes into seats, but their 10% decline in total votes was the biggest drop of Britain's major parties, just as the SNP was the largest single loss of seats. Together, they fueled the vote gains of both Labour and Conservatives, and Labour's total gain of 25+ seats, as well as offsetting the Tories losses to Labour in British urban areas.
Much has been made of the overall success of Jeremy Corbyn in growing and consolidating gains for Labour, and there's a lot of positive takeaways to be drawn; but Labour remained a fairly distant second, with no path to forming a government as a way to stop May. Much is being made of the youth vote and a Sanders-like hard left agenda. I tend to think pinning one's hopes to younger voters is illusory - we are in a phase of angry young voters who just want to be told what they want to hear (shades of their older right wing Uncles and Grandpas), and who don't like to contemplate the hard work of translating big ideas into workable policy. Corbyn, like Sanders, sold a dream of free college, public jobs and expanded supports for the poor, all laudable. All, likely, impossible to make real. Further, Corbyn is pretty much no one's idea of "tough on terrorism" and although he made some hay pushing for expanding police hiring, in the wake of the terror incidents, there was no move to him over May. For a population where terror threats are very real, perceptions of Labour as weak won't help.
What hurt May, though, was the links between Brexit, the hard right in Europe and Donald Trump. It surely hurt May that Trump kept inserting himself into the terror news in all the wrong ways, most of all in a needless fight with the popular Mayor of London. Nor did it help that May, as Home Secretary, was directly involved in decisions to identify and deal with terror threats. Yet, despite that, she still returns to Number 10. While liberals here and over in England mutter darkly about May doing hardline measures to attack terrorism, there's little left that's harder than what the UK already has and does with cameras and a more intrusive state. Calling this a "referendum on Trump" or some other rejection of conservatism is both obvious and inaccurate. May, more than anything, represents sticking to what they're already doing, because they don't know what else to do, and that, after all, won the day, if less enthusiastically than anyone might have thought.
And that, Brexit included, is why putting too much stock in the revolution or Labour's future prospects seems misplaced. May might go, but Conservatives remain in control regardless. Majorities voted for her approach to terror and her approach to Brexit (and, just remember too, Corbyn supported Brexit - that's part of how he replaced Ed Milliband). There was, and is, deep dissatisfaction with economic opportunity that yes, mirrors our own - and, interestingly, UKIP's deserting voters seem to have been a big part of the run to Labour, along with the young. More than before, the UK divides between depressed urban centers and smaller towns and countryside areas that don't want to abandon traditional notions. Both parties have a struggle to get past about 40% appeal - but Labour's additional headache is that concentrated voters in urban areas make it hard to get the spread needed that translates into dozens more seats in Parliament.
It also probably doesn't help that in some more upscale urban areas, the real gains were made by the Liberal Democrats, who bounced back, if mildly, from their own drubbing in the Brexit vote - Bath, Oxford and other areas showed gains, suggesting that the Lib Dems still attract the educated professionals Labour ought to be able to count on for themselves. That can't help. And like Sanders, I'm not convinced Corbyn represents a way to broaden out Labour's appeal beyond where he got it this time. Arguably, the deep losses Labour endured in the Brexit vote overstated the extent of discontent, and Corbyn has presided over a natural reassorting that returns Labour to its natural, but secondary, status. The road from here to majority status isn't actually clear.
The problem for May is governing in a way that shows she gets it - there needs to be some changes, some renewed sense of opportunity, some better assimilation and adaptation to the changed world of immigrants in the UK. One easy fix, after all, would be making Corbyn's call for expanded police into her own strategy. Grows jobs, addresses safety, shows a commitment to public service. Actually managing Brexit and translating the vague and frightening prospects still hanging over the UK and Europe into coherent policy would also help. My guess is May's better positioned to do this than many realize, even if, policy-wise, she's been thoroughly lackluster. Her way may be playing it overly safe - but the real lesson of the election, for now, is that, so far, she's the only game in town. Corbyn's successes may give him some heft, and May could get tossed. But the world she made - a world of Brexit, uncertain threats, and economic discomfort will still be there. No one, it seems, likes that world. And that's no answer at all.
Jim Comey, apparently, is the most powerful man in the world.
I mean, honestly: who helped decide this past Presidential election more? Who is now in a position to provide the evidence that will get the man who won it removed? Who said, at his testimony this week "I thought maybe if the memo got out, we could get a Special Prosecutor"? And whose leaked memo did precisely that? And not only that, seems to have gotten him the Special Counsel he actually wanted all along, Bob Mueller.
Outside of J. Edgar Hoover, I'm not sure we've had a head of the FBI who managed to place himself so centrally at the nexus of law and politics and power in this country... and in that sense, bear with me, Donald Trump firing him, while idiotic and venal, may have achieved a goal that may never have been achieved by anyone else for years: Comey is no longer wielding immense power in a way that guarantees he cannot be touched.
What was remarkable at Comey's hearing with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was just how chastened he seemed - which is to say, not much, but just, somehow, enough. No longer ennobled by his Cloak of Official Power, Comey teed up on his new sworn enemy (he's clearly no fan of the President, not now) and provided a series of exceedingly direct, and even revealing answers of the sort he'd likely have avoided were he still Director of the FBI. Power, after all, lies not in what you know, but how and when you let others know. And Comey's power, now, rests in letting the knowledge run free, not in carefully hoarding it.
The terrifying thing, after all, is how boxed in those who would nominally be in charge of Comey were, or would be, were he still in charge. President Obama had myriad calls to relieve Comey, and seemed, by the end of his term to have realized the buyer's remorse of appointing him to begin with. But there was no way Obama coul fire him without looking like a partisan protecting Hillary Clinton. And had Clinton been elected, she certainly would have been in a similar box. And then there's Trump, who should have understood that while he might have been able to fig leaf firing Comey right upon taking office as a "necessary housecleaning" would look atrocious, and dumb, to fire Comey as the drip drip drip of revelations began regarding Flynn, Russia and a hose of questionable contacts and acts by his campaign and nascent Administration (actions and contacts, which, despite conservative mythmaking, seem to clearly point to a major, troubling level of meddling in US affairs by a foreign power).
That Trump's firing of Comey will likely lead to his undoing - impeachment, resignation, charges, jail time... whatever - doesn't negate the serendipitous side effect of separating Comey from the absoliute power that was clearly getting out of hand. The kind of power that had him overruling a sitting Attorney General in the conducting of the Clinton investigation - behavior he continues to justify, even as he admits that there's literally no there there with the case. The kind of power that left Presidents beholden to his whims. The kind of power that made people quake when he merely said "I cannot confirm or deny..." whether vaguely made allegation of wrongdoing was under investigation.
There's a healthy, even necessary conversation we ought to be having about this kind of power. About the problematic history of the FBI, and the uneasy compromise we've made that projects the shadow of Hoover and his tactics over American life long after he's left the stage. "Director of the FBI" is the federal government's strangest made up role - there's nothing in the Constitution that suggests a federal role in law enforcement - and we accept, somehow, that it's real and deserves to be left with virtually no direct control... and we wonder, often, how that power winds up being corrupting.
Without Comey, we're avoiding that conversation. Any Trump appointee - assuming, absurdly, one can be confirmed - will be damaged goods, an instant question mark, an easy scapegoat. The power of the FBI willl be checked, in part, because Comey ran amok, and because without him, this Administration's options to run amok seem worse. We will not have Comey's FBI, but we will want an FBI that's strong. And in that contradiction lies so much about who we are as a nation. The conversation can wait... but it shouldn't. We'll wait, and somewhere, down the road, we'll probably get another person drunk on power who can't quite be stopped. Just don't pretend we don't know that this can happen. Or why.
As for Trump, our hopes really do rest on... well, Jim Comey. Not just on those revelations he shared and what is left to reveal, but the discipline and effectiveness of the organization he shaped and now leaves behind. It rests in all of us - the ones not in the tank for Trump - continuing to insist that questions be asked, laws be followed, and justice be swift and sure. He may not be the ally we wanted... but he is the most powerful man in the world. Stay thirsty, my friends.
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