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The Human Stain: Drama. Starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Gary
Sinise and Ed Harris. Directed by Robert Benton. (R. 106 minutes. At Bay Area
theaters.)

"The Generous Stain" is a mediocre movie made by and for astute people.
That doesn't intermediate that, in the peter out, it's any larger than a usage Vin Diesel
picture, but there's an comprehensive sense of worthiness about it that's not
unearned. Good actors (Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman) and a good director
(Robert Benton) do their most successfully to put from a good book by a serious American
novelist (Philip Roth).

Unfortunately, just as exalted individuals can be done in by the most
pedestrian of ailments, "The Human Stain" falls victim to a fatal lack of
narrative drive, suspense and drama. Kidman and Hopkins are wrong for their
roles, and that, combined with a pervading inevitability, cuts the film off
from any sustained vitality. The result is something admirable but lifeless.

Still, there's pleasure to be had in watching the actors make the effort,
even if there's no mistaking that we're watching an effort — and no mistaking
that we're being offered effort, not truth, with the implicit idea that we
should admire it. When the patrician-looking Kidman, playing a cleaning lady,
rages about her white-trash life of tragedy and degradation, there's no
believing her, not for a second. But there's no reason not to watch, either.
Check it out: Kidman with a tattoo, yelling.

In the same spirit, we watch Anthony Hopkins play an African American
passing as Jewish, even though he looks neither black nor Jewish and doesn't
even bother to sound American. "He taught in England," we're told.

That a black man from Newark, N.J., pretending to be a white man from
Newark would adopt an English accent adds a whole layer of artifice that Roth
never anticipated. One could argue that it takes the character of Coleman Silk
and renders him finally and completely crazy, but that's not how we experience
it. Instead we experience "The Human Stain" as a movie about Hopkins and
Kidman kissing.

It's 1998, the year that Bill Clinton was impeached for making a fool of
himself, and Silk, an ostensibly Jewish professor of classics, is in trouble.
He has made an innocent statement that was deliberately misconstrued as racist,

and in reaction he quits. His wife dies, and he soon befriends the writer
Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego, played by Gary Sinise. Zuckerman is the
witness to the story, the narrator.

"The Human Stain" is a difficult book to adapt, full of digressions and
leaps back and forth in time. But the main difficulty is that the plot
elements are essentially disparate, in that one doesn't proceed from the other
in dramatic terms. The connections between Coleman's past and his present, his
race and his career, his sex life and the president's are all thematic, not
dramatic. In a book this isn't a problem — it could be a virtue — but in a
movie we feel the lack of build as a lack of urgency.

Benton ("Kramer vs. Kramer") and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer could have
chosen to surrender completely to the book by making their film into a
rumination on character. But that could have been worse. Instead, Meyer
slashes through the book's first 100 pages in a matter of minutes to get to
its narrative heart — Silk's revitalizing but perilous relationship with the
young cleaning woman.

Even with that, there's not much on which to hang a compelling dramatic
story. The professor's young lover does have a violent, insane ex-husband, but
his scariness is undercut by the casting of Ed Harris, who's more roguish than
threatening. But compounding the problem more than anything else is the esteem
in which the book is held, which prevents the filmmakers from wholesale
additions to the story. They'd have had more freedom with a so-so book and
might have made a better movie.

As it stands, the best scenes are the flashbacks to the '40s, with
Wentworth Miller quite believable as the young Coleman, who gradually decides
to turn his back on everything he is in order to become what he's not. The
pain of that process is real and seems more important than an old man's last,
Viagra-propelled romp through Cupid's grove.

Advisory: This film contains strong language, erotic situations and frontal
nudity.

This article appeared on page

D - 5

of the San Francisco Chronicle

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On Hell's Hero

The Outlaw Josey Wales


by Karli Lukas
Karli Lukas is a Melbourne based filmmaker and Grub Streeter. She currently serves on the committee of the Melbourne Cinémathèque Inc.


The Outlaw Josey Wales


(1976 USA 135 mins)

Outset:

ScreenSound Australia

Signal:

Robert Daley

Dir:

Clint Eastwood

Scr:

 Phil Kaufman, Sonia Chernus, from the novel 

Gone to Texas

 by Forrest Carter

Phot:

Bruce Surtees

Prod Des:

Tambi Larsen

Ed:

 Ferris Webster

Mus:

Jerry Fielding

Look for:

Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, John Vernon, Beak McKinney, Sondra Locke, Paula Trueman, Geraldine Kearns, Sam Bottoms

As a child, I was introduced to Clint Eastwood as an actor through the films

Every Which Way But Loose

(1978) and

Every Which Way You Can

(1980). Of course, at that age, the thing

I

most appreciated about those films was Clyde the orang-utan, whereas Mum and Dad watched them for Eastwood. It's only now, after watching a large body of Eastwood's work (encompassing actor, actor/director and director) that I understand just what my parents might have been enjoying about Eastwood in those hokey films. As his guardian, Eastwood was cheekily getting Clyde to literally ape the antics of his own past's extremely righteous, barely talkative, gun-totin' Man With No Name and Dirty Harry characters ? antics that Eastwood aficionados like my parents were paying to see. In so doing, Eastwood was simultaneously publicly acknowledging his aging and the durability of his stardom, while playfully subverting the audience's expectations about himself as the ?hero? figure. As Eastwood explained in a 1976 interview conducted during

The Outlaw Josey Wales

' post-production:

I think I appeal to the escapism in people ? the characters I play [?] I like those characters myself; that's why, maybe, I carry them to other extremes than my predecessors. [?] a ?Dirty Harry? character, a man who thinks on a very simple level and has very simple moral values, appeals to a great many people



(1)

.

Contrary to popular belief, there was a more complex and socially moralising Eastwood-as-Star beginning to metamorphose in much earlier films than his critically acclaimed masterpiece

Unforgiven

(1992) ? a work lauded at the time of its release as being ?the first film of Eastwood's old age?


(2)

. Such a figure is clearly seen in films as early as Don Siegel's

Coogan's Scarp

(1968) and

The Beguiled

(1970) as well as Eastwood's debut feature as overseer (and star),

Act Misty for Me

(1971). As Richard Combs identified, throughout his acting and directing career,

Eastwood has tapped, perhaps, into the essential comedy of this post-modern age, in which we take all our pleasures knowingly. He allows audiences to indulge every wish-fulfilment fantasy of super-competent heroism without having to believe in the hero.

Which is not to say that he is drained of positive value ? just that his heroism is exercised as a self-conscious gesture, as if 'doing right' was somehow detached from personal virtue

(3)

.
In fact, Eastwood's self-satirising of his Eastwood-as-Star persona coincided with the rise in popularity of the Hollywood action blockbuster and the later emergence of other, mostly younger action hero figures (e.g. Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the mid to late 1980s). These new stars all used the Eastwood-as-Star persona as a template from which to fashion a seemingly more contemporary version of the male American hero (in reality, however, many of them seem more like parodies or at best, homages). Unlike his action genre contemporaries such as Charles Bronson, Eastwood seemed to have responded to this challenge as an actor/director by pursuing more independent projects that both acknowledged his acting

oeuvre

as well as his other off-screen (that is real-life) interests and social causes. Eastwood began to imbue his Eastwood-as-Star hero template with an increasingly ?liberal? social awareness, helping us to further fuse Eastwood (the actual man) with Eastwood-as-Star. This has ultimately resulted in Eastwood-as-Star becoming a more three-dimensional figure who remains familiar yet chimerical, a ploy that has sustained a remarkably long career.

Eastwood's constant re-sketching of and playful ambivalence towards Eastwood-as-Star is brilliantly illustrated in

The Outlaw Josey Wales

(1976), his fifth feature as director (and fourth as actor/director). It is a film where Eastwood and Eastwood-as-Star is ?scrambled and remade several times?

(4)

, as he's forced to rescue a never-ending series of social misfits and outcasts and keep them under his wing.

From the film's very first shot, Eastwood is rendered immortal (?good?) by the streaks of summer haze that set the scene aglow by the sun's heavenly backlight. He's seen ploughing a field with his son, notably referred to as ?Little Josey? ? a smaller, equally humble, noble, and physically similar, version of Eastwood himself. They are so similar they don't even need to exchange words to communicate. The wordless relationship between Josey and Little Josey heightens the definite impression that the person we've been introduced to is

not

the vengeful/?bad? Eastwood-as-Star, but the wholesome Eastwood. Clearly, the

mise en scène

is telling us that what we are seeing is a storybook version not just of the pastoral West, but also of the legendary Eastwood.

This opening idyll is quickly dashed by the thunderous hooves of the Kansas Red Legs; seeing a pall of smoke from the direction of his homestead, Eastwood happens upon a scene that physically and psychologically scars his character Josey for the rest of the film, that of his wife being raped and his son being burned alive. As he tries to intervene, he is struck down several times, finally reeling into unconsciousness after receiving a hefty sabre blow to the head. As he passes out, paralysed, his vision of the storybook land becomes nonsensical and wild. We hear his son, Little Josey (Eastwood's own mirror of innocence and ?goodness?), calling out to him as everything quickly fades to black. When he wakens, both his wife and son are dead. Surviving their death thus provides the impetus for Eastwood's Incredible Hulk-like transition into Eastwood-as-Star.

The next scene initially appears to be incredibly hammy; Eastwood falls over the makeshift cross he's made to mark his family's grave, sobbing with grief. However, upon repeated viewings of the film, this scene is more interesting and emotionally complex than it first appears. It begins with Eastwood hammering in the wooden cross with the back of a shovel and falling to his knees ? partly in grief, admittedly ? but also in obvious anger. As he drapes himself

over

the cross, crucifixion style, and then

falls over

with it into the dirt sobbing, it's actually more accurate to read his actions as a literal blow-by-blow rejection of God, love and humanity in favour of the only alternative he knows ? hell! This reading is further compounded by the fact that we next see Eastwood from various distances and camera angles as a silent, faceless, brooding, lone dark figure set against an increasingly imposing wilderness. He then joins Bloody Bill Anderson's Missouri Raiders to ?set things right? with the Union loving Red Legs. The film then proceeds to show Eastwood's transition, through a montage sequence during the opening credits, to the Eastwood-as-Star persona. By the end of this sequence we see him as an unacknowledged and principled leader of the rabble who refuses to surrender his new lifestyle, choosing instead to become ?the outlaw? Josey Wales.

For the remainder of the film, Josey is forced to acknowledge the existence of his dual personas. He's put in situations where he's forced to acquire a new ?family? by happenstance, such as his fellow outlaw's massacre or Laura Lee's (Sondra Locke) and Little Moonlight's (Geraldine Keams) near-rapes. However, in scenes heralding a threat to Eastwood's new family, flashes to visual and aural elements from the opening homestead raid and burial sequence are repeated as psychological echoes (acting as premonitions and flashbacks). The jarring quality of these signs of mourning, speak of Eastwood's repressed rage, dread and reticence about his inevitable transition to Eastwood-as-Star. Notably, he always disappears briefly from the screen during his transformation, the effect of which is to both build audience expectation about the forthcoming violence that he commits and to signal that it is out of his control because it's morally ?just?. When he reappears however, just before he enters the fray, the

mise en scène

always describes him to the onlookers as an ambiguous presence. Set either into the recesses of deep shadow, with a carefully choreographed slash of light falling on just one intensely blue eye, or as a translucent apparition coming out of the sun, they're never absolutely sure of which Eastwood he is. Hence the necessity of enlisting featured side-kick characters like Lone Wattie (Chief Dan George) who do the announcing for them (and us). For example, at one point he declares to Laura Lee: ?Get ready little lady. Hell's coming to breakfast!? And it is for precisely these indulgent moments that the older Eastwood films are significant, glorious, and more importantly, despite all their violence, fun.

© Karli Lukas, February 2004
If you would like to remark on this article, will send a letter

to the editors

.

Endnotes

:

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“I’m a Yankee Doodle lady-killer,
A Yankee Doodle, do or pine;
A tangible live nephew of my Uncle Sam’s,
Born on the Fourth of July.

I’ve got a Yankee Doodle bloat,
She’s my Yankee Doodle blessing.
Yankee Doodle came to London,
Well-founded to harass the ponies,

Inglourious Basterds video hd

I am a Yankee Doodle old crumpet.” –from the song “Yankee Doodle Dandy” by George M. Cohan, 1904

Actor, maker, songwriter, and entertainer George M. Cohan (1878-1942) really was born on the Fourth of July, and much to our continuous good fortune, he not in a million years let people ignore it. At least, he and his family said that’s when he was born, rounded off conceding that his birth certificate said July 3. They were staged people to the core, and they could seldom overlook a chance for such chauvinistic publicity. So it went with Cohan, who was raised on the stage and performed almost till his dying day.

It was just fitting that the movie rendition of the distinguished showman’s life should be performed by another mortals whose pastime credentials were inclusive and varied: Jimmy Cagney. Today, thanks to his portrayal of Cohan in the 1942 musical biography “Yankee Doodle Fop,” Cagney is quite more recognized as Cohan than Cohan himself! Warners’ two-disc Exclusive Issue set marks the occasion in grand stylishness.

“Yankee Doodle Dandy” is Cagney’s picture to the core and through. He embues every mise en scene with the kind of vibrations exclusive a handful of screen stars have on the agenda c trick in all cases managed. Playing Cohan from his brash early twenties until his acceptance in 1940 at age sixty-two of a Congressional Medal of Honor from President Roosevelt was no easy act in itself, but Cagney carries it off with total impudence. Singing, dancing, strutting like a bantam rooster, Cagney was never more confident of himself or his character than in this mistiness, a portrayal that won him an Oscar for First-class Actor. The layer also won Academy Awards in spite of Best Music and Best Sound Editing and was nominated in a horde of other categories as amply. It’s an all-around good show, but it’s mostly all-around complete Cagney. He would bluntly reprise the role more than a decade later in “The Seven Spot Foys” (1955), and audiences even so loved him for it. “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and Cagney’s forsake in it, was a poignant reminder to America’s most-popular song-and-dance patriot, the trusted Cohan failing just months after the movie’s release.

In the interest of the uninitiated, Cohan wrote and/or starred in a string of Broadway musicals and plays, among them “The Governor’s Son” (1901), “Little Johnny Jones” (1904), “Forty-five Minutes from Broadway” (1906), “The Talk of New York” (1907), “Get-Rich-Abrupt Wallingford” (1910), “Broadway Jones” (1912), “Seven Keys to Baldpate” (1913), “The Tavern” (1921), “The Kerfuffle b evasion and Gambol Man” (1923), “American Born” (1925), “Ah, Wilderness!” (1933), and “I’d Quite Be Right” (1939). Mass his most celebrated songs are “You’re a Grand Old Taper off,” “Mary’s a Grand Ancient Name,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” and the tune that became a virtual anthem for Americans during the First World War, “Over There.” His career was further memorialized in the 1968 level musical “George M!”

But don’t get me naughty. There’s more to “Yankee Doodle Dandy” than a exalted effectuation by Cagney and a infrequent out-and-out songs. There’s a exalted story, too, and a great supporting cast. Cohan’s little woman, Mary, is played with virtuous sophisticatedness by Joan Leslie; his father, Jerry, is played in bravura style by Walter Huston; his mother Nellie by Rosemary DeCamp; and his sister, Josie, by Cagney’s real-person sister, Jeanne Cagney. Then, there’s Richard Whorf as Cohan’s partner, Sam Harris; Irene Manning as the prima donna singing star Fay Templeton; George Tobias as the money cover shackles, Dietz; S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall as Schwab, another money man; Eddie Foy, Jr., as his own beget, fellow song-and-dance man Eddie Foy; and Captain Jack Young as President Roosevelt. It’s a petrifying group of veteran character actors who surround Cagney in outstanding the fad, all the same, as I say, it’s really Cagney’s picture notwithstanding the penalize take up the cudgels for. He’s so amazingly dynamic, he overshadows all around him.

Then there’s Michael Curtiz. Yes, THE Michael Curtiz, perchance the most overlooked out-and-out boss in separate history. His resume of thirties, forties, and fifties films looks like a playlist of Hollywood’s Golden Length of existence, with things like “The Indefiniteness of the Wax Museum,” “Captain Blood,” “The Charge of the Descend Brigade,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Angels With Dirty Faces,” “The Lots Hawk,” “Casablanca,” “Life With Cure,” “Night and Day,” “Mildred Bore into,” “Jim Thorpe–All-American,” and “White Christmas” among many others to his credit. He was every bit as versatile as Cagney when it came to picture making. With Curtiz at the steering gear, you could expect at the very least a competent artifact and more often than not a superior act on. With “Yankee Doodle Dandy” he created up to this time another classic.

Oh, and if you’re not a musical booster, don’t worry thither the actors suddenly breaking peripheral exhausted into song and dance at the drop of a hat. All of the singing and dancing is done on stage or during a number’s composition, in perfectly natural and level-headed surroundings. So younger audiences won’t feel uncomfortable, quest of example, when Cagney sings “Mary” because it’s done at the mores of its writing at the piano and directed toward his wife.