I Need to Get Right with God

I find The King a truly fascinating and overlooked film from Milo Addica, who we learn plays a very convincing pizza delivery manager. William Hurt is a shiny-shirted, creatively-bearded Reverend Sandow who once knew a black-haired Yolanda. Ergo Gael Garcia Bernal’s Elvis, fresh off the good shop Athena, a washed-out boy off to find his father. His immediate, pure malevolence plainly contrasts the true preacher’s son, Paul Dano, in what I imagine was his first role as a young religious zealot.

The King’s Corpus Christi, Texas is made of the same colors as the summer Detroit suburbs of The Virgin Suicides—faded peach and scrubby white—even the church lawn greens are shocking, sickly. Preacher’s daughter Pell James (Mallorie) is not quite there but in the vein of young Sissy Spacek, opening her green eyes at the spookiest times. She is led down the path by Elvis with a line so clichéd it’s perfect:

“I have a car.”

Her answer, “What kind?” takes us to “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” without the unfortunate presence of Joyce Carol Oates, Laura Dern and, especially, Treat Williams. The inevitable Elvis-Mallorie relationship is minimally spoken—like Badlands Malick we go from her “Do you believe in God?” to “Water is so beautiful” to dripping-hem-school-girl-skirt sex.

I was moved most by two absolute showstopper scenes. In the first, Mallorie puts a fresh-cut deer head and a handful of purplish entrails into a bucket (animals WERE harmed!) and mops up with Cinderella-rote motions as her brother gestures to his bow: “don’t touch this.” In the second, the revelation of the incestuous nature of Elvis and Mallorie’s sex has opposite effects on the couple, sitting in a dilapidated burger joint: Elvis calmly folds placemats to make himself a crown and we pan to Mallorie, muttering an empty: “we’re going to hell.” Elvis merely closes his eyes and bows his head as if receiving a divine gift. And, in the wide-loving scope of his heart, Reverend Sandow invites Elvis into his home.

I particularly like that, as Elvis ingratiates himself into the family, as the narrative becomes almost unbearably perverse, the comedy is ratcheted up. We have the nicely domesticated Elvis weeding the backyard, padding to his half-sister’s room in suede slippers, generally hilarious. And after his last act of malice he walks into his father’s office and tells the man exactly what his Christian ears need to hear:

“I need to get right with God.”

English Period Woody Allen

There are these sorts (perhaps many such sorts) who say Woody Allen has lost it. And in the Jason Biggs-era I had to agree with them. But now I feel something stirring. As things have gone astray on the comedic side, he has just increased the body count. He takes a handsome men or two and one full-lipped beauty that acts at being a terrible actress and makes them murder each other. Watching Match Point, Scoop and Cassandra’s Dream in succession I felt so comfortably 3½ stars about everything. Sometimes it is enough to like films.

The films I’m calling the English Period Woody Allen are more attempts than accomplishments, but I love the ping-pong banter of Johansson and Rhys meyers in Match Point, almost up to speed with Stanwyck and MacMurray in Double Indemnity (a very aggressive game—someone needs a spanking).

And if it doesn’t take we can look at Scarlett again in Scoop going after some young Hepburn gee-gosh-golly.

And a jaw dropper or two. 90% of the dialogue in Allen’s English Period could have been written anytime between the 30’s and the present day, making the images all the more impactful. Some of the anachronisms here are delightful. Scoop is a film that asks the question: in the history of the cinema have there ever been more patently unneeded eyeglasses? I can only think of Cary Grant’s specs in Bringing Up Baby as competition.

Not to focus only on the distaff side I’ll say I found Colin Farrell in Dream and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Match Point both sexy and brilliant. Farrell’s problems mount on his eyebrows, Rhys Meyers’ on his lips.

I took in Cassandra’s Dream (a mediocre name for a film but a hell of a name for a greyhound) with relish—the slightly scratched title music, the left-slanting title O’s. Beforehand I’d heard mostly about how the leads’ accents were “wrong.” This kind of inane criticism vexes me—like when all I heard about Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke didn’t look enough alike to be brothers. It’s a film for Christ’s sake—it is actually made up for our entertainment and we walk outside into a world where Hoffman and Hawke are not, in fact, brothers. But back to the Woodman’s latest. In the Scarlett (sex) role we have Hayley Atwell who, as it turns out, does not look exactly like Diane Keaton in a tie.

I wish I had more of a full profile view—that tie more closely resembles a toddler’s legs hanging off a high chair. But the first vista of Atwell is sheer classicism from Woody—the woman under the hood of the car on a summer’s day. Everything irresistible. She has less to say than Keaton ever did but this picture could just as well be silent—at this point Tom Wilkinson gets out bed looking like he is devising a murder and McGregor and Farrell emote like they’re trying out for The Passion of Joan of Arc.

But I liked the film for the same reasons I liked the others—pith, English country landscapes, heaving breasts.

And I’ve already heard murmurings of a “Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson sex scene” in Woody’s Spanish venture, which is a strong indicator that I might just find the time to see the film. Though critics will probably say Scarlett’s accent is all wrong (if not Cruz’s and Bardem’s—my God what if they are more Andalusian than Catalan? What will we do??).

But there might also be more of timeless moments, as in Scoop, when Woody tells Hugh Jackman that he heard Scarlett drowning and, “I finished my cup of tea and came right in.” That reminds me of a 40+ Michael Jordan hitting his iconic turnaround jumper for the Washington Wizards. Old masters still move me.

Drawn from Nature

I began my research of John James Audubon shortly after receiving a Christmas card of his cardinals and reading Anne Carson’s poem “Audubon,” which begins: “Audubon perfected a new way of drawing birds that he called his. / On the bottom of each watercolor he put “drawn from nature” / Which meant he shot the birds / And took them home to stuff and paint them.” In this rare instance, my research went beyond the Wikipedia and the Google Image Search and into a museum of “history and industry.”

Behind those wood-grained double-doors I learned that Audubon was a sensationalist. I witnessed static rattlesnakes coiling around a mockingbird’s nest, peregrine falcons desiccating a duck corpse and king snakes opening their mouths to end the life of a chuck will’s widow (some of the vines are red with blood-drop-blossoms). The melodrama continues even in his less impressive quadrupeds of America—the river otters rear and snarl. The leopard marmot is sly, just as I would imagine in a Wes Anderson-Big Lebowski sense.

But the birds. The birds are lush color and small and life-sized in the reproductions of his original double-elephant-sized printing. A complete set of Birds of America brought down $8.8 million at auction “recently” (I learned this watching a VHS-grain recording—nice that the PBS from the 80’s already has its own crackly, classic patina). One of Audubon’s major breakthroughs was hiring a 13-year-old assistant to do the background branches. J.J. solved the main problem of natural bird painting by shooting them and taking them home but I guess he needed a sketchy little friend to recreate exactly where stuffed birds last twittered.

The most important Audubon quote: “I want to comprehend all that I see.”
Quite a bar to set for oneself but he did make the Birds of America more awake than I had expected. I think it is somewhere in the detailed underside of those feathered throats—I’m dumbly impressed with their texture as if they are still swallowing air below those bright shiny eyes. More Anne Carson (if only she were available to write this whole post for me):

he built flexible armatures of bent wire and wood
on which he arranged bird skin and feathers—
or sometimes

whole eviscerated birds—
in animated poses.
Not only his wiring but his lighting was new.

Audubon colors dive in through your retina
like a searchlight

I spent a long time over his fastidiously detailed whip-poor-wills. The leer out, beaks gaping, in choice between moths and caterpillars patterned in 70’s browns, oranges and white that exactly matches the birds’ own feathers. Beautiful, cannibalistic fabric swatches.

Audubon believed in his shadow-less epics so much that he went on a double-elephant tour, peddling the Birds of America in Edinburgh and farther afield:

this Haitian-born Frenchman
lit himself

as a noble rustic American
wired in the cloudless poses of the Great Naturalist.
They loved him

for the “frenzy and ecstasy”
of true American facts

And here she reaches it—regardless of where he was born, we love Audubon because he brought us American truth, which is always separate from natural truth. Rattlesnakes might not slither up trees to eat mockingbirds that cast no shadow, but I saw a print of it that was beautiful.