Cynical Cinema

Becoming Jane is ostensibly the story of Jane Austen, considered by many to be the greatest female novelist of all time. Of course, we have to put the qualifier “female” in front of “novelist”, because it’s such a … well … novelty. Like “male stripper”. Never mind the fact that the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Margaret Laurence, Mary Shelley and Alice Walker have written some of the most enduring classics in literature, they are still “female authors”. And in Jane Austen’s time, being a “female author” was a pretty big deal. George Eliot clearly had to operate under a pseudonym (I actually have no idea what her real name was) because women couldn’t write stuff! Women cleaned and cooked and made babies! (It was a different time.) Now, as a big fan of Jane Austen and her novels, I know a good deal about her life. Enough to know how Becoming Jane ends. (I won’t tell you, in case you end up watching this film. And I hope you don’t.)

Becoming Jane, the DVD from Alliance Atlantis that comes out today, comes with a free coupon for Pennington’s. If you purchase 100 bucks worth of clothes, you get a 20 dollar credit - free! This should indicate something about the target audience for this film. Young women who just don’t know any better, apparently. Jane Austen, one of the towering literary figures in history, gets the Hollywood “bio-pic” treatment here. And like everything else in Hollywood, no great historical tale can possibly be told without cramming in a love story. No one in history was interesting unless they were in love with someone. Think Titanic, Pearl Harbor, and so forth. Jane Austen’s life was interesting only because of her love story, it turns out. You see, her family is trying to force her to marry a young, rich man so that they can have money and she’ll be happy, because marrying rich is a must, if it is possible. But Jane (played by Anne Hathaway here) has a MIND of her OWN, and SHE wants to marry for LOVE.

Wait…this is familiar. So Jane Austen had a life that almost perfectly mirrored that of several other movies I have seen? Movies like Titanic, The Notebook, The Princess Bride, My Man Godfrey, Van Wilder, Wedding Crashers, Sweet Home Alabama, Clerks II, and four hundred others I won’t bother listing? Of course she did! It’s a little known fact that Kevin Smith based his Dante character in Clerks II on the life of Jane Austen. OK, I made that up. All these movies have something in common. Or many things. The girl doesn’t want to be forced into a match, because she’s rebellious and independant and she has a mind of her own! The man she is being pressured to marry has money and property and wealth, but is either a complete jerk and cad no girl would ever like, or a simpering sissy no girl would ever want. Becoming Jane goes the “simpering sissy” route. The heroine then meets a lower-class, poor working man. Possibly a brutish sort who fights and drinks and doesn’t bathe or shave, but God help him he’s his OWN MAN! They hate each other straight away, but that hate quickly turns to love.

An aside - this is actually how I got together with my girlfriend. I didn’t bathe for weeks, I fought with everyone I met while in her presence, every time she saw me I was falling down drunk, and I called her many horrible names. I ran over her dog so we could start out on terms of “hate”, but I knew that that always leads to love, because I watch a lot of movies. Worked like a charm! At the end of most of these movies, the heroine of course marries for love. But we’re worried about her! How can she live so poor? She’s pretty, and pretty girls can’t be poor! So the guy usually ends up being incredibly rich, inheriting some money or winning the lottery or inventing a hilarious talking fish that proves to be lucrative. Now, she has the best of BOTH worlds! Thank God. She would really have regretted that whole “love” thing if she had to work for a living the rest of her days. She will be a princess after all.

These movies also suppose two things. First, that rich, high-class people are incapable of being fun and exciting without also being callous and evil. And poor people can never be intelligent and interesting unless they are also very good looking. In Becoming Jane, this interesting good-looking lower class peasant is played by James McEvoy (Last King of Scotland). The script wants us to know, constantly, that we are talking about JANE AUSTEN here, and so it makes Anne Hathaway into a rather irritating screen character. She speaks in gigantic words all the time, and is so condescending to everyone outside her immediate family that one takes an immediate disliking to her. It’s supposed to show her “rebellious, girl with a mind” nature, really it makes her officious and annoying. The seduction scenes between her and McEvoy are painful in their attempts to be dialogue-clever. I promis, Jane Austen did not talk like this in real life. And I wasn’t even there.

In the end, Becoming Jane is a movie every one of us has seen hundreds, maybe thousands of times (many of them with Anne Hathaway). It’s the oldest story in movies, and to pretend you’re talking about a real human being, a literary titan such as Jane Austen, is insulting to the viewer. And to Jane Austen. Are we to believe this romance shaped her entire life and gave us all her books? That she never existed outside the framework of this relationship? Remember - she’s a real person, we KNOW how this ends. Far more interesting would have been watching her attempt to become a writer! She is a woman, it’s 1795 - it’s going to be tough to get people to read her stuff, to publish her, to use her name, a female name, on the books! That would have been far more interesting than just taking the easiest story in Hollywood and trying to make a real person fit that story. Don’t watch this movie. Just read Persuasion and Mansfield Park and enjoy those.

I have long said that Roy Dupuis is the French Canadian version of Colm Feore. When you have a big Canadian icon that you want to immortalize on film or TV, you pick one or the other. Anglophone icon? Feore. (Pierre Trudeau, Glenn Gould.) A Francophone icon? Dupuis. (Maurice Richard, Romeo Dallaire.) And so there was no question in my mind when I heard that Shake Hands With The Devil was going to be made into a feature film as to who would play Dallaire. It was Dupuis, or the film would not have been made. By the way, in order to avoid those “do your research” and “get your facts straight” emails, I would like to state right now that I am indeed aware that Pierre Trudeau was a Francophone. But that movie was mostly English.

Dallaire’s book was a sensation in Canada when it came out. A tragic and devastating look at the genocide in Rwanda. It was later made into a documentary film, which helped make people aware of the horror a little more, and now this movie, which might help even a little more. The thing that made me saddest in watching this film was the fact that it came out so many years after the genocide was over. Same for the documentary and the book. Now, it’s not like Dallaire could have written his book while things were going on. But it’s sad to think that so many people pay attention now, and watch other films like Hotel Rwanda, and feel sad and mourn the tragedy and get enraged over things like “why didn’t somebody do something”. And yet, when we see those things on TV, on the news, in the papers, and we are aware it is taking place RIGHT NOW, we don’t do much. As Joaquin Phoenix says in Hotel Rwanda, we go back to our TV dinners and turn on the hockey game when the news is over.

Part of this, I feel, is because of the nature of the media. When genocide is taking place in Darfur, in Africa, way across the sea, it is treated as simply a news story. A two-minute piece on the horrors in Darfur gets as much importance as a two-minute piece on the possibility of the defeat of the budget in the House of Commons. Very often, it gets less. A school shooting is big news, front page on every paper, lead story in every newscast. That is a tragedy that hits close to home. But more people died in thirty seconds during the genocide in Rwanda than have died in all school shootings in North America combined. It doesn’t affect us. It is reported as “here’s what’s going on in a country that isn’t ours”, and is followed up with “a small town in France has outlawed public toilets!” and we forget all about it. Toilets! That’s hilarious! I think it’s safe to say that most of us know (myself included) know more about Columbine and Dawson College and Virginia Tech than we do about Darfur. Really, this isn’t exactly the fault of the media. This is really the way we want to be fed our news, and they are just complying with the wishes of the general population - you wouldn’t get many ratings if you showed machete massacres every night.

And so we get Shake Hands With the Devil, a movie that has been made only when it could be made, many years after the fact. And hopefully, it makes people aware that such things are still going on, or curious enough to find out. (Steven Spielberg has just pulled out of the Olympics in Beijing to protest China, feeling that they haven’t done enough to stop the genocide in Darfur.) And the movie is pretty good, as a movie. Dupuis is steely and tough as Dallaire, a man who carries himself with the utmost dignity and commands respect as a lifelong soldier. His supporting cast is for the most part excellent. Having just finished the book, I recognized most of the characters being protrayed just as I had imagined them. Especially James Gallanders as Major Brent Beardsley, who has a few tough scenes. This is a fascinating story, and that alone makes the movie worth watching.

But there is a little problem with the movie, looking at it solely in the context of a movie. It is a dramatization of real events, but somehow, it doesn’t feel dramatized enough. There are scenes taken directly from the book - a scene where Beardsley is confronted by a mob of machete-weilding Interahmwe, as he tries to get a wounded woman to safety, and he punches the man who stands in his way. In the book, the scene is tense, dramatic and poignant. In the film, it’s tough to tell what you’re seeing. Is that guy standing in his way…or not…or OK it’s over. Another scene where Dallaire and Beardsley are blockaded from a portion of the city and must get out of the car and walk through the barricade, as weapons are cocked and the bad guys say they will shoot. Again, in the book, this scene made me pretty nervous. In the movie, it is treated as a matter of course.

Doc hated Gone Baby Gone because he had read the book first, and he couldn’t reconcile what he saw on the screen with what he had imagined in his head when reading. I had the same problem with Shake Hands With the Devil, seeing scenes that were so familiar to me and yet not feeling their poignancy as much as I had while reading. But at the same time, I’m not sure anyone would understand this movie without having read the book first. There are so many factions and institutions - the RPF, the RGF, the Interahmwe, the president, prime minister, interim government, and countless others. Each with their own politics, their own attitudes, their own enemies and their own clandestine secrets. It is such a complicated picture that the movie can’t hope for a moment to make sense of it all in less than two hours. In the end, this film should be watched, and is certainly good, but if you had to make a choice, read the book.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a sequel to Elizabeth, which was a very good movie from 1998 that netted Cate Blanchett her first Oscar nomination. I suppose Oscar feels as though they ought to nominate her again, if her first performance in the same role was Academy-Award-worthy, then so too must this one be, right? Wrong. Not that Blanchett is bad. But last year, Helen Mirren was exquisite in her role as this very same queen, Elizabeth the First. And Mirren showed exactly what that role should be. She defined it. And one of the main reasons is - and much as I hate it when actresses do this - they uglied her up. If history tells us anything through pictures about Queen Elizabeth I, it is that she was fairly ugly. Mirren put on a fake nose and made herself look less attractive than she actually is. Charlize Theron did the same for Monster, and that was OK too. They were both playing real people. Real, ugly, people. Cate Blanchett is not ugly. She is, in fact, striking and beautiful. That this is historically inaccurate is insignificant. But if she were to look like Helen Mirren did, it would add a certain weight to the role that is just not present here.

Oh sure, she’s good. In fact, she’s great, and has been in every movie in which she has appeared in her illustrious career. But deserving of an Oscar nod she is not. Aside from the occasional mood swing and enraged outburst, little is required of Blanchett here except to have a pale face and appear queenly. The movie itself is not that good either. The first one was a breath of fresh air, it looked like something fairly new when I saw it back in the 90s. But now this sequel feels like just another period piece, like Becoming Jane which was also just released, and countless others. “Period piece” basically means people dress up in old-timey clothes and talk old-timey talk and do stuff that must have happened in old-timey times. Some are magnificent, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is not. There is of course, the prerequisite love story, this one between Blanchett and Clive Owen, who plays the famous adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh. Owen is decent in that role as well, bringing charm and old-timey manliness to the role, and Geoffrey Rush is terrific as always in his supporting role, that of Sir Francis Walsingham. But the whole movie feels a little forced.

And when it finally ends, and there is a bit of action, it feels tacked on, and too-little-too-late. The rest of the film had just plain bored me by then, and I didn’t care what happened to our heroes. Elizabeth: The Golden Age does what a period piece should do - have great costumes and convey the feel of that time period. But it does little else. And so does Cate Blanchett.

I have been attempting to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies as possible in the week leading up to the Big Event, but I have managed only to see those that are on DVD. And I have seen everything that is on DVD so far that is up for an award. Which means I have still missed out on dozens of films. I have seen all the Best Actor movies except for the likely winner, There Will Be Blood. I have seen only two of the Best Picture nominees, No Country For Old Men and Michael Clayton. In point of fact, the only categories where I have seen all five nominees are Sound Editing, where one of them is Transformers, and makeup, where one of them is Norbit. And I have seen only three of the Best Actress nominees. So far, I am rooting for Julie Christie to win Best Actress for Away From Her, simply because it’s slightly better than Marion Cotillard’s job in La Vie En Rose. But really, I am hoping for Anyone But Cate Blanchett This Year. She will certainly win others in her career, since she has that Meryl Streep thing going for her - she will be nominated for every movie she does for the rest of time - and she may well win Best Supporting for I’m Not There (another film that I regret to say I have yet to see), but she does not deserve it for this one. At least there’s a category for Costume Design. Oh, the prestige!

Speaking of costume design, and by extension period pieces, here is a brief list of the ten best period pieces ever made (and by brief, I mean ten items long):

10. The Piano (1993)
9. Raise The Red Lantern (1991)
8. Once Upon A Time in America (1984)
7. The Seventh Seal (1957)
6. Rashomon (1951)
5. The Duellists (1977)
4. Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World (2003)
3. Once Upon A Time In China (1991)
2. The Untouchables (1987)
1. The Seven Samurai (1954)

Hmm…two Robert DeNiro, two Harvey Keitel, two Toshiro Mifune. Maybe I need to diversify my taste some. But anyone who insists that Titanic should be on that list should be kicked in the leg.

There were certain roles in the history of movies that could be played only by Charlton Heston. Moses, Ben-Hur, Michaelangelo, and El Cid. Heston was never much of an actor when it came to emoting. He was quite the actor, however, when it came to puffing out his chest and speechifying. He was also very adept at looking heroic, twisting his face into furious and righteous anger, and talking justice with his deep, powerful voice and square, stoic chin. Very good stuff, these Heston epics. I’m going to go ahead and assume that everyone has seen The Ten Commandments, because it’s all over TV at Easter time. I will also assume that everyone is aware of Ben-Hur, because it is one of those all-time classics that is on TV so often that it is difficult to miss. Perhaps the same goes for The Agony And The Ecstasy. And I will further make the assumption that virtually no one has seen El Cid, since I have never come across this epic on television or in the video store. The reason it hasn’t been in the video store is that it was not available on DVD. Until this coming Tuesday. El Cid is being released by Alliance Films on DVD in a glorious three-disc set this coming Tuesday. And it is a must-have for any epic film buff.

This is one of those sets that comes with everything. A booklet detailing the massive preparations for shooting this massive epic. A comic book from the 60s that takes us through the entire El Cid movie, such that we don’t even have to watch the film if we would rather take ten minutes to flip through a comic book. And it also has a written introduction to the film by Martin Scorcese, and a bunch of postcard-sized movie posters that nerds like me enjoy putting up on their walls. The El Cid posters are now up beside the similar ones I got in the special editions of The Good The Bad and The Ugly and To Kill A Mockingbird. The three-disc set includes some very cool special features - interviews, behind the scenes stuff, and an endurance-testing feature-length commentary. El Cid is more than three hours long, which means the commentary involves talking for more than three hours straight. That must have been tough.

El Cid is the true story of a Spanish hero named Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, who managed to unite Christian Spain with the Muslim Moors in order to repel an attack against Spain by an evil warlord, Ben Yussef (played wonderfully by Herbert Lom). It is the sort of role Heston was born to play, and the supporting cast is good as well. Watching a young Sophia Loren in the role of Heston’s wife, as they go through a love-hate relationship, certainly lends credence to the idea that she really didn’t start getting really hot until she hit her forties. Sure, she’s attractive in this movie, but the Sophia Loren I think of is far better looking, and also far older. I could go through the rest of the excellent cast too, but there are way too many to mention. In the 60s, you see, there was no CGI, and therefore when you see a crowd of thousands of people, or a battle involving thousands of soldiers, it is actually thousands of actors and extras, and not computer-generated! And that really makes a difference, much as some technophiles would have us believe it does not. The musical score is terrific, and the panoramic battle scenes must be seen in HD or at the very least on a large television in widescreen.

El Cid is not quite the cinematic achievement that are some of Heston’s other best works. It does not quite reach the heights of Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments. Director Anthony Mann, while he was a very capable director, never really lived up to his promise, and this may be his best film. (Also excellent were The Bend In The River and Winchester ‘73.) But really, El Cid bears the imprint of Saumel Bronston, the producer, as much if not more as it does the talents of Anthony Mann. Bronston followed up the massive production of El Cid with a few great films, such as King of Kings and The Fall of the Roman Empire, and for a few years was the king of the sweeping cinematic epic. Heston will always be the number one star of the biblical epic and this kind of gigantic film, but Mann will never be considered among the greats of the genre. That title could well go to David Lean, the man behind Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Doctor Zhivago. (This run of three consecutive movies is likely unparallelled in the history of cinema. Perhaps only Francis Ford Coppola comes close, with The Godfather, The Conversation, and The Godfather Part II.)

El Cid is not an all-time classic, but it certainly bears watching. And this three-disc set would be a fantastic addition to the collection of any true movie fanatic. Don’t miss out - it gets released by Alliance Films on Tuesday.

Into the Wild is a terrific film. Sean Penn has now directed his first truly excellent movie, and Emile Hirsch has served notice that he is one of Hollywood’s next major acting stars. Hirsch plays Christopher McCandless, a young college graduate with his whole life ahead of him, who decides to go ahead and live that life. Only, his idea of living that life is much different from his family’s idea of living his life. In fact, it’s an idea far more in keeping with Henry David Thoreau’s idea of living life than it is for most of us. However, whereas Thoreau invented a large portion of his masterpiece, Walden, and did not necessarily spend several years of his life living in the woods at Walden Pond, McCandless really did this. He really did leave after graduating school, gave up all his money and his car and his family, and headed out across America to live in Alaska. Into the Wild is the story of that journey.

And it is a fascinating one. Along the way, Christopher does away with all his identification, changes his name to Alexander Supertramp (no connection to the band), and meets dozens of interesting people. Among them are Catherine Keener, who is terrific, Vince Vaughn, who is reliably great, Kristen Stewart, who is ridiculously hot, and Hal Holbrook, who is magnificent in the role that got him nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Of course, the scenery is beautiful, since this is the story of one man and his desire to be completely alone in the wild. But the dialogue is real and poetic, the actors all deliver first-rate performances, and the message really hits home. That message is not necessarily about the freedom that comes with abandoning all of one’s possessions and doing away with conventional society and a “normal” life. In equal measure, it is about the consequences of doing exactly that. The effect that McCandless’ disappearance had on his entire family, in particular his sister. And the effect that he has on all those he meets. This bright, engaging, attractive young man makes friends extremely easily, and creates lasting relationships in just a few short days.

However, he is doing it in large part because he is running away from that most lasting Relationship of all, Family. And toward the end of the film, he says to Holbrook “the joy of life doesn’t come from human relationships”. But that is the fundamental flaw in McCandless’ philosophy. HIS joy actually DOES come from human relationships. Of course, by the time he reaches this epiphany, it is too late, and he has set forth on a journey where he discovers himself, and answers all his questions, too late. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say he dies at the end - the trailers said as much. But as with most really good movies, it’s the journey that makes them worthwhile.

Jonathan Demme will always be known for one thing above all others.  He is the man who directed Silence of the Lambs.  Which, in the world of film, is much like being the guy who wrote The DaVinci Code.  It doesn’t really matter what else you’ve done, or if it’s any good, you’re still that guy.  And Demme has done some other excellent work, like Adaptation and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate.  He has also done some great documentaries, mostly music ones, like Stop Making Sense, about the Talking Heads, and Heart of Gold, the recent excellent film about Neil Young.  And now, he comes out with this terrific documentary about former president Jimmy Carter, Man From Plains.  The movie often makes reference to the fact that Carter is the 39th president.  Why are Americans so crazy about the numbers of their presidents?  We don’t do that here - it took me a long time to figure out what number Prime Minister Stephen Harper was…then I forgot before I came back to writing this review.  All that counting for nothing.

Carter was on The Daily Show last night, promoting his new book about his mom Lillian, “A Remarkable Mother”.  And I was so taken with Carter that I immediately watched Man From Plains the next morning.  And the first person to appear - is Carter’s mom!  On the Johnny Carson show in the late 70s, while her son was president.  Her appearance is awesome - such a funny, engaging elderly woman, and it sets the tone for the entire movie.  Because Carter is a lot like his mom.  He can be funny, he can be entertaining in an elderly, my-grandpa-makes-jokes kind of way, and he is always interesting and very well-informed.  The movie moves on right away to a barbecue near his birthplace where he blesses the meal.  This is one of the few Christian speakers who actually gets his voice heard while not being a total wing-nut.  His blessing is so very American, but good-American.  He prays for the soldiers overseas, and prays for the environment, calling the American people “custodians of the land”, and expressing the hope that they all remember this and work together to save it.

Then the film moves on to the meat of the story.  Carter’s new book (at the time) was called “Palestine:  Peace not Apartheid”.  It was a reference to Israel’s policies in Palestine, which are, in many cases, the same as apartheid, and in some cases worse.  (Apartheid, by the way, has been defined by the UN in the wake of the human rights battle in South Africa, and Palestine certainly qualifies, but people hate using the word to describe anything other than South Africa itself.  It’s would be kind of like people getting angry about the genocide in Rwanda being called a “holocaust”.  No, there was only ONE holocaust, and I’m offended!)  And the controversy over the title and content of the book is the main theme in the documentary.  Carter suggests, early on, that there is absolutely NO degree of objectivity left in the American news media, and watching the film, it seems like a pretty accurate statement.

The basic premise of the book is that in order to broker peace in Israel and Palestine and the Gaza Strip, Israel has to withdraw.  They are keeping the Palestinians behind a wall and enacting very apartheid-sounding laws to keep them opressed.  So his solution seems, on the surface, to be very simple.  Back off.  Let the Palestinians have their land.  Everyone wins.  The controversy arises when the Israelis and their supporters start pointing out the Palestinian acts of terrorism against Israel.  If the people in Gaza are walled in, the Hamas supporters can’t walk into Israel and detonate a suicide bomb.  So, we keep them in their cage so that innocent Israelis are not killed.  Which is an argument that also makes sense.  And while Carter decries the terrorism and suicide bombings in his book, he also says that they are not going to stop as long as their people are being, for all intents and purposes, kept in a cage.  The attacks on Carter become more and more venomous, accusing him of everything to plagiarism to outright lying, to actual anti-semitism.

Carter makes appearances on lots of shows, being interviewed by Jay Leno, Al Franken, Larry King, and the always-irritating Wolf Blitzer.  Callers ask him questions on radio programs, questions that boggle my mind - why were you such a sissy over the Iran hostage affair?  Why didn’t you bomb the s*** out of Iran then?  Wouldn’t we have a better relationship with Iran today if you had done that?  And Carter’s response is remarkably controlled, given the question.  Who still thinks this way?  Does this caller really think that thirty years from now, the U.S. will have an excellent relationship with Iraq?  Because they have destroyed it now?  Bonkers.  And what’s more bonkers is that you get the sense from peoples’ reactions, that had he come out totally one-sided on the Israel-Palestine issue, and it had been against Palestine, there would have been almost no controversy at all.  The U.S. has chosen a side already.  It is Israel.  And nothing more can be said on the subject.  Except, of course, when you are Jimmy Carter.

 Jimmy Carter is a wonderful man, a man who may well be doing more for America and the world after his presidency than he did while he was still commander-in-chief.  He’s 84 years old, he just celebrated his sixtieth wedding anniversary, and he is still making the rounds of talk shows, doing countless interviews, and working harder than maybe anyone else in the world toward peace in the middle east.  And I am going to assume that everyone knows what he has done to help Africa with disease prevention, and what he has done with Habitat For Humanity, building houses for people all over the world.  (Although my mom volunteers at Habitat For Humanity, and I’m not sure she knows the exact involvement of Jimmy Carter.)  Does anyone remember what Reagan did after he left office?  George Bush the first?  Gerald Ford?  They kind of disappear, rest on their laurels, and barely lift a finger again.  Bill Clinton has been working his tail off since he left office, doing dozens of speaking engagements at half a million bucks a pop.  Jimmy Carter doesn’t charge for his speaking engagements, and offers to give lectures at universities and hundreds of places across the U.S.  And, after this book came out, sometimes he was actually turned down.

In Carter’s administration, he aimed for less dependance on foreign oil.  From the time he took office until the time he left, U.S. imports went from 9 million barrels a year to 5 million barrels.  The States is now back up to 13 million barrels a year.  He suggests in this movie that the Bush government’s policy - which is not to speak to anyone in the world who doesn’t agree completely with the Bush government, is insane.  How can you ever see both sides of an issue when you won’t listen to anyone but yourself?  And Carter has the credentials to talk.  He is the one who did what many thought couldn’t be done in the 70s - brokered actual peace between Israel and Egypt.  A peace that lasts to this day.  Those peace talks are shown in this film, and Carter’s wife reminisces about that time in some pretty amazing scenes.  And the movie closes with Carter, as president, being both right and incredibly forward-thinking about global warming.

The one complaint I have about the movie is the soundtrack.  I like it - the songs are good, and interesting, like Djamel Ben Yelles, Alejandro Escovedo, and Neil Young.  They certainly fit the tone of the film, but the editing of the soundtrack is intrusive.  Rap songs, like one by Brother Ali, play while Carter is on the phone, so it becomes difficult to listen to both at the same time.  But it’s a small quibble.  Man From Plains is a wonderful film about a wonderful man.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a magnificent film. It’s the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), a man who had the world at his fingertips. He was the editor of French Elle magazine, rich and reasonably famous and with a great son and a series of hot women at his beck and call. Then, all of a sudden at the age of 43, Bauby was stricken by a sudden stroke that left him completely paralyzed. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t chew food, he couldn’t move a muscle in his body except for his left eyelid. All he could do was blink his left eye. His mind, however, still functioned as well as ever, and he was able to do something extremely remarkable. Through the assistance of several people, he was able to dictate his life story and memoirs through only the blinking of his eye.

In this movie, “diving bell” is a fairly non-literal translation of the French title, which is “La Scaphandre et La Papillon”, which means, more accurately, the diving-suit and the butterfly. The diving suit refers to the way Bauby feels, trapped inside his own body, like a deep-sea diver stuck hundreds of feet under the ocean. The butterfly is his escape from this hell, like a butterfly’s escape from a cocoon, through this work he is dictating. The movie is in French, and ought to be watched in French (with English subtitles if necessary). The letters he uses to dictate his work are far more effective when you hear them in the French language. And although this sounds incredibly boring (so much so that my girlfriend refused to watch this with me), a guy blinking for an hour and forty minutes, it isn’t. And although his dictation takes up the bulk of the narrative, the flashbacks to the scenes in his life that play out through his words are wonderful.

There is also (which is fitting for this character) an abundance of really hot women around him in his hospital room. Olatz Lopez Garmendia as his physical therapist Marie, Emmanuelle Seigner as his ex-wife Celine, Anne Consigny as Claude, the woman taking his dictation, and the luminous Marie-Josee Croze as his speech therapist, Henriette. Of course, having gorgeous women around him all the time, waiting on him hand and foot (and butt and armpit and pretty much his entire body) is the last irony to his life, since he can do nothing in response except blink. We hear his own narrative inside his head, and he develops a sense of humour about this situation and his frustration at being unable to use his body. He also develops a vivid imagination, imagining things he used to love, and on occasion imagining himself having affairs with all these women. So there are lots of naked boobs.

Of all the flashback scenes, there is one in particular that stuck with me. His new girlfriend (he has just left his wife and son for this woman) takes him on a trip to Lourdes, where she wants to be blessed by the holy water that apparently heals the sick and transforms people. Bauby, however, is a skeptic and an intellectual, and wants nothing to do with this holy water and religious mumbo-jumbo, and even less to do with the gaudy Jesus-and-Mary souvenir shop. When his girlfriend buys a horrible flashing neon Madonna, and places it by the bed, he decides that’s it, he’s got to leave her. The scene is a powerful one, because we wonder - is this what the movie is trying to say? That this happened to him because he rejected religion? But later we understand that this is just who he is, and he will always find religion to be amusing at best, and even in his decrepit state, he won’t succumb to that “finding religion” thing that people do under similar circumstances.

Max Von Sydow appears in the movie as his father, and gives a wonderful performance that really accentuates the dynamic between the father and his son, and casts a light on Bauby’s relationship with his own boy. There is a recurring theme in the film about the Count of Monte Cristo, in this case a book Bauby was planning to write based on that classic. In Bauby’s version, he was planning to make the lead character female, and create a sort of female-revenge novel. Of course, this never ends up happening, because of the stroke, but this idea he has gives us a window into his soul and into his brain. The Diving Bell and The Butterfly is absolutely magnificent, beginning to end. And it’s also one of the only movies I have ever seen where those obnoxious dream sequences actually work and make sense.