Modern has ideal film to begin New Year
The “flowering of one’s better nature,” as Roger Ebert has phrased the phenomenon in describing a new film from Clint Eastwood, figures fairly widely in the stanbard crop of holiday-season movies. The general-release Eastwood picture, Gran Torino, might seem the antithesis of festive feel-good filmgoing, but it also is one of the more uplifting jobs on view just now — a caustic polemic with political correctness that also states a persuasive case for common decency against the formidable odds of reciprocal bigotries.
A film of similar leanings, Anthony ByrneÂ’s How about You?, will play Jan. 2-4 on an exclusive run at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Like Gran Torino, EastwoodÂ’s thumb-of-the-nose to advancing age and its arthritic social biases, How about You? casts an unaccustomed light upon the value of connections among the generations.
The premise is an essence of family conflict: Kate (played by Orla Brady) runs a home for the aged — an inherited responsibility that she does not particularly appreciate. Kate’s sister, Ellie (Hayley Atwell), arrives in search of a job and an unlikely reconciliation. The sisters are not close — mildly put — and their inmates are a mixed lot of cranky and self-centered types.
Joan OÂ’Hara plays one such oldster, harboring memories of romantic longings. Vanessa Redgrave plays a long-retired actress, still hungering for the spotlight. Two sisters, played by Imelda Staunton and Brenda Fricker, are chronically at odds with one another. Joss Ackland plays a disgraced, long-retired judge who misses his late wife more so than he misses the bench or the booze habit that drove him from it.
A family crisis over Christmas finds Ellie left in charge of the place. At first believing herself incapable of dealing with the array of crabby personalities, she soon learns to connect with the residents on levels that neither they nor EllieÂ’s resentful sister could have comprehended. Ellie is no pushover, and the residents must learn this the hard way.
By turns pleasant and irritable, the film itself takes a confrontational route to the discovery of the mysteries of the aging process, reaching some affirmative and insightful conclusions without schmaltz (poignancy, yes; schmaltz, no) or forcible wholesomeness. The Christmas-season setting is as ironic as it is timely to the booking.
The mixed hassles and advantages of aging also figure in David Fincher’s new The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt as a fellow who ages in reverse — from decrepitude at birth to the flower of youth in advanced age. The paradoxical fantasy seeks to make a historical epic out of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but nonetheless manages to remain captivating and provocative.
More efficiently provocative is EastwoodÂ’s Gran Torino, which contrasts EastwoodÂ’s lean and energetic screen presence against the backdrop of a middle-class Detroit neighborhood gone to rot as a consequence of encroaching poverty and youth-gang activity. As retired autoworker Walt Kowalski, Eastwood seems the embodiment of bigotry until it becomes plain that he is an equal-opportunity race-baiter, longing for frank openness in place of walking-on-eggshells political correctness.
A vain heroic streak of vigilantism asserts itself any time Kowalski senses a trespass — he is as ready to protect his own property from interlopers as he is to defend a new-neighbor Asian girl (Ahney Her, in a fine no-nonsense performance) against a bunch of gutter-punk hoodlums.
Longtime admirers of Eastwood will be delighted to see a glimmer of Dirty Harry in Walt Kowalski — but Eastwood has a great deal more on his mind than nostalgic self-parody. Gran Torino is a polemic, indeed, on several fronts, calling out the myth of race, the myth of “growing old gracefully,” and raising issues of health and self-preservation and questioned faith to an extent sufficient to fuel many hours of after-show discussion and argument.
The wrap-up of Gran Torino plays out a bit too neatly for the characterÂ’s greater good, but the film is about so much more than a pat resolution that the finale scarcely matters. Thin-skinned adherents of political correctness are best advised to take a Pasadena on this one, but those of open minds and questing intelligence will find Gran Torino a challenging pleasure.
Meanwhile at the Modern, coming weekend art-film attractions will include a fascinating Hindi mystery called The Pool (Jan. 9-11); and the acclaimed Czech seriocomedy Beauty in Trouble (Jan. 16-18).
On the Web: www.themodern.org
Contact Price at mprice@bizpress.net
