306. Dead Man Walking

Song - Suzanne (Herman van Veen)

Movie: Dead Man Walking (Tin Robbins, 1995)

After years on death row, Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn) is to be executed in a week for killing two teenagers. He maintains that he didn't pull the trigger, but archive footage from the trial paints a different picture, and his current behavior doesn't point to a remorseful innocent either. When his appeal is rejected, Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon) is, on her own volition, assigned to be his spiritual adviser for his final days, a job she is not entirely cut out for. The film directly connects her faith to her opposition to the death penalty and her belief that even the worst people deserve dignlty, but it also connects her vocation to her naivety. Her conversations with the grieving families are an early example of the film's thorny greatness. Robbins lets Sarandon mostly listen as the parents dig out their deepest feelings to discuss their kids' final days, their love for them and the hurt the killings have caused. It becomes impossible to judge them for desiring Matthew's death, a desire that may well have been strengthened by Helen's own actions and sensibilites. She has never known romantic love or thought much about the feelings associated with its causes and consequences. At times, it seems as if she finds it easier to sympathise with Matthew's fear of death than with the victims' families' anger about their children being taken away from them. Susan Sarandon won an Oscar for her role and is really great. The film is as much a righteous condemnation of the death penalty as it is a portrayal of Helen discovering what it means in practice to act according to her beliefs. It's wonderful to watch Sarandon be surprised and startled by the responses to her, and think about how to settle herself in a context where she is slighlty more out of depth than she expected. 

I also enjoyed Robert Prosky, portraying Matthew's lawyer as a Southern raconteur whose jovial demeanor softens his (and the film's) moral indignation. He is the most obvious mouthpiece for Robbins' opposition to the death penalty, but his argumentative asides always play more like eccentric character touches. Still, it can't be denied that Dead Man Walking does ocassaionally veer into the kind of stodgy didacticism politically minded actor-turned-directors are sometimes prone to, but such missteps will be long forgotten once we reach Matthew's final day, and especially his confession to Helen that he did murder one of the teens and raped the other, finally heeding her lessons that redemption (whatever form that may take) is only possible if he confesses and takes responsibility for the truth and his sins. Sean Penn is good here, but the scene belongs to Sarandon, portraying the Sister's religious trance as her own version of experiencing sexual/romantic pleasure. Robbins' stylistic choices follow suit and the scene is essentially played as an exuberantly triumphant moment that has finally earned Matthew the love and dignity he was either way receiving from Helen. 

What follows is an even more provocative sequence, crosscutting between the execution process and the murders commited by Matthew many years ago. At one point the film cuts right from Sarandon's redshot eyes watching Penn get injected to the fearful eyes of his victim awaiting the fatal gun shot. It's a chilling match cut that utlimately goes beyond placing the executioners of the law on the same level as cold-blooded killers. The latter at least have no delusions about what they are doing, their inhumane conduct and unconcealed, vicious cruelty entirely fits their actions. The state on the other hand creates a sanitised ceremony where correct, perfectly scheduled formalities (the final goodbyes with the family, the final dinner, the final words, the guard screaming out "Dead man walking", the careful, orderly preparation of the tools used for exectuon) whitewash what's going on, while extending the agony of the person about to be murdered. You may question whether spiritual redemption is enough to turn a racist rapist into a profile in courage; death row will do the job anyway. 

305. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Song - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles)

Movie: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Michael Schultz, 1978)

I've never had strong opinions about Bob Dylan, but do find DIamonds & Rust to be one of the great love songs. By extension, I absolutely loved A Complete Unknown, which is more interested in capturing how it feels to be artistically and romantically moved, than in being a straightforward biopic. In the process, director James Mangold gets two of the best performances in recent times out of Monica Barbaro and Edward Norton (playing respectively Joan Baez and Pete Seeger). They are beaming with love and admiration in their many closeups, always informed by the notion that it is incredibly good to feel that way about art and about other people. As a result, the film evokes both a really passionate romanticism and a fuzzy comforting warmth. One of the highlights is Dylan's 1965 performance of The Times They Are A-Changin' at the Newport Folk Festival, a wonderfully compelling depiction of the connection between an artist and his fans, with Mangold ramping up the sound of both the performance and the delirious excitement of the audience everytime Dylan calls out a different group for failing to understand and keep up with the changing mores of the youth. The next year Dylan returns to the Newport Folk Festival, decides to "go electric" and is aggressively booed and jeered off the stage by an audience that would prefer that everything stays the same. No scene will ever explain better the existence of Michael Schultz' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

This movie's villains are unspecified developers driving around in a van equipped with a futuristic screen that allows them to spy on the world outside. The screen is surrounded by techy buttons, often operated by clumsy robots making whirring sounds. Once these strange creatures pass the streets of Heartland, USA, its farmers' market is transformed into an arcade hall where modern youths hang around rebelliously, mom-and-pop stores get into the hands of big business, families are torn apart, and the town gets swamped by uncollected waste. "Restoring decency" is only possible if the homegrown country bumpkins making up Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band return from big time Hollywood for a benefit concert. It's a remarkably odd storyline for a Beatles jukebox musical, especially one centred around songs from their Sgt. Pepper album. The Beatles were instrumental in turning the kind of youth, urban culture this movie rails against into the mainstream, and Sgt. Pepper was a musical revolution that many of its fans saw as a signal of a broader societal revolution. It became an icon of the counterculture, psychedelia and the idea of looking forward. I've always liked the story of the 1974 anthropologists who found a skeleton that was key to a better understanding of how and when humans evolved from apes and named it Lucy after Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, intertwining scientific and cultural progress.

Sgt. Pepper imagines the possibility of enjoying the Beatles' music in a pre-Beatles world where the cultural changes the group brought don't exist. Sgt. Peppers' band (consisting of the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton) plays its songs in a farmhouse surrounded by pigs, goats and chickens or in the town's main square just outside the city hall, surrounded by churches, historic houses and a retirement home. Their audience consists of well-dressed, mostly white, people of all ages dancing with the joyous, yet respectful, understanding that they are following a communal tradition going back to the First World War, when the original Sgt. Pepper had a brass band that entertained the soldiers in Europe. All along, the old, kindly mayor (played by George Burns) commands respect as he narrates the scene and observes his citizens with great contentment. All is right and orderly in this town where "I get high with a little help from my friends" simply means that if you trust your fellow townfolk you can even fly a hot air balloon. 

It's quite understandable that the Beatles weren't too fond of this movie, but it does make you appreciate their music even more. Their songs work even in a context that is antithetical to their intentions and values. In some cases, they work even better. Get Back is notably sung by a black magician restoring the town to its former glory, completely taking away the song's potentially mean-spirited subtext. I've known about the other Beatles being dumbfounded and annoyed by Paul McCartney's insistence to record Maxwell's Silver Hammer, but had never actually heard the song. It really only works when sung by Steve Martin playing a deranged plastic surgeon cutting assembly line patients in his surrealistic office. It's not a surprise that surrealism is the main aesthetic of all antagonists, including Aerosmth who sing a brilliant cover of Come Together on a stage of giant coins stacked upon each other, signifying the greed of the modern world. The best performance comes from Earth Wind & Fire's Dianne Steinberg, performing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds as a billboard come alive against the Los Angeles night sky. I also rather liked Sandy Farina (and was surprised to find that this was her only movie) who, playing Peter Frampton's true love is tasked with selling the film's wistful nostalgia. She succeeeds, partly because her performances of Strawberry Fields Forever and Here Comes the Sun are quite affecting, partly because she is the only one of the main actors who knows how to handle a dialogue-free performance (with the exception of the Mayor, nobody has any lines that aren't sung), evoking sweetly mousy heroines from the silent film era. In the end, the Bee Gees get the short end of the stick. The film turns them into a square Beatles cover band that gets the least interesting scenes. 

304. The Wiz

Song - Fantasy (Earth, Wind & Fire)

Movie: The Wiz (Sidney Lumet, 1978)

There is some good stuff here, but you can't have Michael Jackson and Diana Ross star in a two-hour-plus musical produced by Motown and end up with just two (Ease On Down The Road and A Brand New Day) memorable songs. Musical theater is far removed from the sound that made Motown one of the most important record labels in America, but I had expected that there would at least be some interesting experiments here that would try to combine the two styles. Instead, we mostly get fairly standard Broadway songs, often with terrible lyrics espousing 'inspirational' self help messages unsuccesfully pretending to be allusions to black emancipation struggles. The ending is preceded by the Good Witch Glinda (Lena Horne) telling Ross' Dorothy that 'if we know ourselves, we are always home, anywhere," setting up a final song where every single line is a similar hollow bromide about believing in yourself. As it keeps going on and on, it's almost impressive when it finds a way to turn the patronizing up another gear with the lyric "Go ahead, believe in all these things, not because I told you to." 

In the stage version Dorothy was played by relative newcomer Stephanie Mills, presumably a better fit than Diana Ross, who actively lobbied to be cast in the movie. At the time, Ross was 34, way too old to be Dorothy and already a certified legend who never feels right to portray a timid, naive wallflower. Her duets with Michael Jackson play like a completely embarassing waste of everyone's time, even if Jackson wasn't yet on her level. The Wiz did push him in the right direction - on set he bonded with Quincy Jones and the rest is history. That history doesn't work in the film's favour when watching two of the most confident, cool performers in the world act towards each other with wide-eyed sincerity and an explictly pronounced lack of poise, pretending to be 'hilariously' uncoordinated dancers. Moreover, our current knowledge of the bizarre disbalance between Michael Jackson's stage presence and his actual self makes the whole thing only more grating; his performance as the Scarecrow demands him to emphasise the same simple-minded childishness that made his personal life so thoroughly unpleasant to follow. 

Bringing to the foreground all the things that are completely offputting about Michael Jackson, while neutering everything that made him the most popular man in the world is not a recipe for a succesful musical. The Wiz does however work decently well as an urban fantasy. Lumet is interested in making places that symbolise urban rot come alive with Oz essentially being an unnerving version of New York. A lot of the aesthetic elements (e.g. brownstones, street waste, construction sites) that are usually used (often by Lumet himself, for example in the opening montage of Dog Day Afternoon) to signify New York and its bustle are here placed outside their usual context and given a fantastical, lightheartedly dystopian spin. We find the Tin Man in a defunct theme park among scraps of metal and rusting roller coasters, key songs are staged in abandoned concrete-filled playgrounds situated below street level, and the film's best scene takes place in an empty subway where our heroes are attacked by garbage cans (wherever they go, Dorothy and co. are surrounded by trash) and platform pillars disconnecting themselves from the ceiling. The film would have benefitted from more of that kind of absurdity; the life-sized humanoid microphone Dorothy talks to when trying to reach the Wiz is a great example of what could have been.

303. Never on Sunday

Song - Roxanne (The Police)

Movie: Never on Sunday - Pote tin Kyriaki (Jules Dassin, 1960)

Homer (Jules Dassin) walks into a Greek bar...and is utterly out of place. The boisterous locals sing, shout, drink and smash their glasses, while he skittishly scribbles in his little notebook. And when he orders a coffee, the waiter admonishes him; "real men drink ouzo." Real men also dance after drinking ouzo, to Homer's enthusiastic applause, a gesture the dancing drunk doesn't appreciate. His 'pertformance' isn't intended for an audience, he does it for his own delight, not because he seeks to satisfy the needs of a strange man "like some sort of circus animal." It's a clever little bit of screenwriting - Never on Sunday is about Homer's futile attempts to re-educate Ilya (Melina Mercouri), the most popular prostitute in Piraeus, into a better life. The film makes clear in many different ways that Homer's efforts are wrongheaded, highlighting that Ilya doesn't want or need to be saved,. It stops just short of explictly presenting prostitution as a potential form of feminist self-expression, but it doesn't take the most attentive viewer to see what the angry dancing drunk is a metaphor for.

Never on Sunday is a less succesfull Pygmalion-inspired story than Educating Rita or My Fair Lady. Both of those movies end up complicating their basic premise, questioning the idea that a working class girl will neccessarily be better off embodying the qualites/characteristics of elite society. And they do so by revealing that their supposedly sophisticated mentor is to some extent a phony. However, that only works because they put in the effort to sell a genuine belief that their heroines could potentially really be better off if they are taken under the wings of these somewhat eccentric/flawed professors. In Never on Sunday, Dassin wastes no time in making clear that Homer is a bumbling fool and that Ilya is pretty much the most resourceful citizen in all of Piraeus. The rest of the film keeps reinforcing these points, and as a result the story and characters don't really have anywhere to go. It may theoretically be pretty ironic that in trying to save Ilya (who remains an independent contractor throughout, choosing her clients herself depending on who she likes more, regardless of earnings) it's Homer who ends up being on the payroll of the town's main pimp, but it is entirely in line with what we know about Homer or Ilya. There is no real one-upmanship here, and the film, in particular Dassin's performance, is also too broad to really work as a sharp satire or parody. 

Still, the film is not without its charms and is at times quite funny. Jules Dassin is clearly a good director who has a lot of fun with shooting group dynamics around Ilya. Whenever there is a difficult situation in town he stuffs the frame with exasperated, slighlty overweight men wating for Ilya to find just the right thing to do or say. She usually does except when she has to interpret a Greek tragedy. She finds happy endings in the stories of Medea and Oedipus, driving Homer to insanity. Although the film presents these misinterpretations as comically naive, it also lets Ilya explain how she gets to them, pointing out to Homer the story elements that make her view these tragedies in her own way. It's a nice contrast to Homer's purely encyclopedic knowledge - he knows Medea is a tragedy, but has never made up his own thoughts on it. It's interesting too that this discussion takes place in an amphiteater on top of the town's acropolis, the one remnant of the classic Greek culture that Homer came to find. He is at his place here, but so are many of the Greeks from the bar and the seashore. The folks we have seen get drunk on ouzo and walk around in half-ripped dirty undershirts are now well-dressed for a theater performance of Medea they watch with great attention. They need no Homer to educate them.