Sentimental "Education": The Story of a Bored, Brilliant, Before-Beatles Young Girl

AN EDUCATION

directed by Lone Scherfig
starring Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Cara Seymour, Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike, Olivia Williams, Emma Thompson

“An Education” is that rare breed of film, a throwback that still manages to be delightfully fresh. At its most basic level, it’s a tale of a young girl, hungry for life, who meets an older, worldlier man she thinks is the answer to everything she wants—only to discover he really, really isn’t. Nothing new here, except the particular character of the girl. But that, as it turns out, makes all the difference.

The movie takes place in 1961, when Britain was at its squarest, dullest, and grayest—or so it seems, anyway, to Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a bright 16-year-old stuck in a prosaic corner of London with her loving but hopelessly bourgeois parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour). Jenny yearns for a world filled with high culture and sophistication, in the form of fine art, music, and films (preferably French ones), and, in her words, “people who know lots about lots.” Her one hope lies in gaining admission to Oxford. For she’s the star of her class at her prep school, and she’s got the full driving force of her parents, especially her anxious, status-conscious father, behind her.

Then Jenny meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), an attractive man in his 30’s who seems to offer her a much quicker, pleasanter path to her dreams. His occupation and background may be a bit mysterious, but she knows right away that he’s just the kind of people whose society she craves, with his easy, agreeable manners and his air of cultivation, his expensive car and his superlative taste in music and flowers. Before long he’s squiring her to classical concerts, fashionable West End supper clubs, and high-end art auctions—never alone (he’s too canny for that), but in the company of his affable, beautifully dressed friends (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike). David is so smooth he even convinces Jenny’s parents that he’s a man of influence who can help elevate their beloved daughter to a better class. It’s all an act, of course, that eventually, inevitably comes crashing down, forcing Jenny to learn that there are no shortcuts to the life she desires.

That description makes “An Education” sound preachier than it actually is. In fact, the film’s almost too enjoyable for its own good. Based on the memoir of a British journalist, Lynn Barber, as adapted by Nick Hornby, Britain’s best-known comic chronicler of British boy-men, and the Danish director of “Italian for Beginners,” it maintains a lightness of tone and gentleness towards its characters that tend to gloss over the darker aspects of Jenny’s story. This breezy acceptance occasionally strains credulity: in particular, Jenny’s parents seem absurdly naive in the face of David’s predations, even if one understands why they might have incentive for willful self-deception. And though the movie doesn’t avoid showing David’s unsavory side, including the shady business ventures that fund his courtship of Jenny, it doesn’t dwell on their uglier social implications; they merely serve to confirm the basic point we already know—namely, that David’s a scoundrel.

What gives the film depth and grounding is the quality of the acting, which helps fill out the underwritten characters and render the unlikely developments more plausible. Molina makes the often frustrating character of Jenny’s father surprisingly sympathetic, while Sarsgaard, as David, strikes a careful balance between charming and slightly creepy. Olivia Williams is also excellent as Jenny’s concerned English teacher, and the great Emma Thompson pops up briefly and entertainingly as the headmistress of Jenny’s school. It’s always a pleasure to see Thompson on screen, even if her role here borders on caricature.

But it’s obviously Jenny who makes the movie, and thanks in large part to Mulligan’s vivid, confident performance, she emerges as one of the most fully realized young female protagonists to appear in any movie this year. Virginal but not artless, precocious but not wise, winsome but never cloying, she’s ultimately too smart and too resilient to be crushed by David’s perfidy, her parents’ foolishness, or her teachers’ disapproval. Mulligan, who’s been picking up a lot of well-deserved Oscar buzz, sparkles in a wholly believable way: watching her, we can only believe that her Jenny will take this experience just enough, but not too much, to heart, and become all the stronger for it. Here’s hoping the same holds true for Mulligan as an actress.

GRADEL B+

"Mad Men" Season 3 Finale: Made of Awesome!

“Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, how may I help you?”
–Joan!

That, right there, says it all. After an often-punishing season that seemed to be building to the collapse of the “Mad Men” universe and much associated misery, Weiner & co. instead presented us with a holiday basket of a finale. I don't know if I'd call "Shut the Door. Have a Seat" the best MM episode ever, but it was without a doubt one of the most satisfying and purely enjoyable. A corporate gut-and-run that plays like a ’60s heist film! Don, Bert, and Roger allies again! Peggy, Pete, and Joan back in the SC fold! Add to that Don having to give Peggy, and even Pete (admittedly under duress), the props they deserve, Lane Pryce throwing in his lot with the Yanks and finally telling PP&L where to get off, and plenty of guffaw-inducing lines to go around (golden pork chops! nervous poodles!), and there’s really not much more that any MM fan could desire.

In fact, the Great Sterling Coup was more than most fans probably imagined even in their headiest dreams. Who among us can honestly say we saw it coming? While I recall some speculation from a few particularly prescient folks that Don, Roger, and Bert might try to buy back Sterling Cooper, I doubt anyone could have foreseen that Don and Roger would set aside their grievances with one another, that Bert Cooper would get his mojo back (a beautiful thing to see), that Pryce’s indeterminate position would prove vitally useful, and, perhaps most importantly, that Don would finally swallow his pride and acknowledge the need to make others feel valued. It was like a tonic to see the fun side of “Mad Men”—which we haven’t really seen in a while—and all of our favorites together again, humming like a newly refitted machine. Well, all of our favorites minus Sal (who seems permanently uninvited from the party, given the continued importance of Lucky Strike) + Harry Crane, who continues to stumble his way up the career ladder. Does the man’s dumb luck never run out? Personally, I’d swap him out for Paul, who at least gives me a good laugh now and again, and whom I felt a twinge of sympathy for in the moment he realized, once again, he was being left behind.

Of course we don’t get to this point without an obligatory trip to Don’s dark side. The other major storyline of the episode—the Draper divorce—not surprisingly got overshadowed by the rebirth of Sterling Cooper. Yet the two plots are integrally related, as the implosion of Don’s family life causes him to reevaluate and take new direction in his professional life. The realization doesn’t come easily, to say the least: Don’s confrontation of Betty about Henry Francis was nakedly ugly and scary, not to mention hypocritical, and his goodbyes to Sally and Bobby heartbreaking. But ultimately he seemed to accept that that phase of his life, like his time at Sterling Cooper I, is over, and it’s time to start building a new one.

As for Betty and Henry, I find their pairing somewhat more interesting than most MM viewers seem to, but not so much that I want to see it front and center next season. That said, if they do end up marrying, I wouldn’t mind seeing them pop up occasionally as a rising power couple.

Which brings me to the broader question for MM: What next? And when next? Truthfully, I have no idea. I don't know whether season 4 will pick up a few months or a few years in the future. I don't know if the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce will hit the ground running or flounder initially, or how much of the growing pains we'll see. More generally, I’ve been wondering for some time whether Don Draper—and by extension Sterling Cooper—will move forward with the sea changes of the ’60s, or be left in their wake. I’m still wondering. But they have Peggy, and they have Pete, and they have a reenergized Don. And to me, that means the world is theirs for the taking.

Some favorite moments (there were so many!)

-Trudy signaling to Pete - from another room, no less! - that he's going off the rails ("Peter, may I speak to you for a moment?"), followed by him shuffling his feet like a little boy and Don smirking. It's official, I'm on team Pete & Trudy. Though it'll be interesting to see what sharing a desk will do to the Pete-Peggy dynamic.

-Pete's nervously loud "Hey everybody, Harry Crane is here!"

-Bert Cooper threatening to lock Harry in the storeroom

-Don kicking down the door to the Art Dept.

-"Very good. Happy Christmas!"

-Every line out of Roger's mouth. Does John Slattery ever not kill in his delivery?

-Every moment involving Joan

-Every moment involving Roger & Joan

-This exchange:
Roger: Peggy, can you get me some coffee?
(A beat)
Peggy: No.

ETA: Did Don really say to Peggy "I will spend the rest of my life trying to hire you?" I heard "won't." But "will" makes more sense in context, and makes that scene, in retrospect, quite moving.

This Blanche-tt Doesn't Need Our Kindness, Thanks

NOTE: I've finally posted reviews of "Where the Wild Things Are" and "Bright Star". I also saw "An Education" yesterday, but am letting it jell a bit before I write the review.

The other night, I saw Cate Blanchett play Blanche DuBois at the Kennedy Center in D.C. She’s the marquee name in a touring production of A Streetcar Named Desire staged by the Sydney Theatre Company (which Blanchett and her husband co-direct) and directed by Liv Ullmann (aka Ingmar Bergman’s muse).

Blanchett aside, it’s a solid, perfectly respectable, unexceptional production. The staging isn’t particularly imaginative, but then Streetcar isn’t a play that needs much visual pizzazz. Joel Edgerton is quite good as the crudely territorial Stanley; the rest of the cast is competent, though some of them struggle a bit with the accents.

But what about Blanchett? Was she an iconic Blanche?

Well, she gave a strong performance. “Strong,” indeed, may be the operative word here: as an actress, Blanchett radiates such natural strength that I wasn’t sure how she’d play a woman I think of as, if not weak, certainly fragile and very, very damaged. She got around that difficulty by choosing to highlight Blanche’s theatricality – not a bad choice, considering the character is nothing if not the textbook drama queen. But as a consequence, her Blanche flies her freak flag a little earlier than I was expecting. This may well be by design; I’m just accustomed to thinking of Blanche DuBois as a woman who unravels by degrees, and is finally pushed over the edge when she sees her last, slender hope dashed. Blanchett does effectively capture her character’s caged desperation, though her voice would occasionally take on a steely resonance that, while thrilling, I couldn’t help thinking would easily cow even the most brutish Stanley Kowalski. In the end, of course, she’s broken, even though the rape scene isn’t staged as an unambiguous rape. One touch I liked was a brief tableau, shortly after the deed, showing Stanley passed out and Blanche sitting on the far side of the bed, her back to the audience. The slump of her shoulders in that moment conveyed more than the entire final scene that followed.

All in all, it was an impressive star turn by an impressive actress, if not quite the interpretation of the character I had in mind. When she was on stage, it was impossible to take one’s eyes off her—and isn’t that all that ultimately matters?

"Mad Men" Ep. 3.12: "The Grown-Ups"

And so, despite suggestions in interviews that he would not deal directly with The Assassination, Matt Weiner chooses to tackle it head-on in the penultimate episode of the season.

More than most shows, the episode titles for "Mad Men" provide a ready-made framework for analysis of the show. This week's episode bears the title "The Grown-Ups," which immediately posits the natural question: Who are the grown-ups here? In an episode where a father figure consistently avoids or denies reality, a little girl comforts her mother rather than the other way around, and the most senior characters put immediate social obligations ahead of a national crisis, that answer is left deliberately murky.

I haven't anything to compare the JFK assassination with other than 9/11, but based on my memory of the latter and what I've read and heard about the former, I found the depiction of that day and its aftermath quite effective, if not especially original, and the reactions of the various characters 100% believable. (I wonder what the veddy British Pryce made of the whole thing?) Everyone behaved pretty much within character, from Roger's angry, almost comical bemusement ("Someone go buy a cake!") at his daughter's ghost town of a wedding reception - partly mitigated by a great toast - to the sight of distraught Carla sinking down on the sofa next to an equally distraught Betty and lighting up (two things you can bet she'd never do on any other day), to the growing solidarity of Pete and Trudy, who were totally awesome for flipping Sterling Cooper the bird...though I have to say Trudy looked a-ma-zing in that blue dress and I was sorry she didn't get a chance to show it off. And, of course, Peggy's shock upon realizing that Duck withheld the news from her so he could still get his "nooner." (tm Paul Kinsey, who made the most of his two lines in this episode.)

But the person whose reaction struck me the most was Don's, whose instinct to deny, deny, deny, and offer the one assurance he couldn't possibly back up - that "everything will be all right" - only led to the rapid crumbling of his universe, which had already started to buckle in the last episode. This may have been the first episode in the entire run of "Mad Men" in which I felt totally, completely, unreservedly sorry for Don, even though in so many ways he had it coming to him. It crushed me to watch him trying to be a good father in the beginning, to connect with Betty on the dance floor when her mind was clearly elsewhere (and really, Betty, how could you be so unresponsive to the look he was giving you? I melted, and I've been a longtime skeptic of the Irresistible Sexual Powers of Don Draper), and, near the end, to prevent her from running off to meet Henry Francis. And you could feel his utter devastation when Betty delivered the bombshell line: "I don't love you anymore." (And, of the kiss: "I didn't feel a thing." Ouch!!!) From the look on his face, I'm forced to conclude he loves her after all, or at least thinks he loves her. More likely, he just loves what she represents to him. But still. It hurts. It hurts to be told you're not loved. And what makes it most painful, to quote a poster on Television Without Pity,

This was exactly his worst nightmare - that, in seeing his true self, Betty would not love him and he would lose everything. Of course, it was a self-fulfilling prophesy. By lying to Betty all these years, and seeking solace outside of his marriage, he pretty much guaranteed this would be Betty's reaction. But it is something I think could break him.

I hope not. I like vulnerable Don Draper much more than imperious jerk Don Draper, but I don't want to see a broken Don Draper. I thought it was interesting that he didn't think to call or visit Suzanne, though I was bracing myself for it. OTOH, it was frustrating, though not unexpected, that he immediately fell back into his default mode: Deny. But of course it isn't working, as even the children noticed the next morning. Or at least, Sally did.

As for Betty, it's hard to tell what her next step will be. Notice she didn't tell Don she was leaving him....yet. Will she go for Henry? His proposal might seem like it came out of left field, but ever since he first appeared, I've always gotten the vibe that he might want more than a mere affair, notwithstanding hints that he's had plenty of those in the past. I just hope Betty's learned enough from her first marriage not to spring into another with a man she barely knows.

I also thought it was interesting that the writers once again chose to put Betty and Pete - two characters who don't directly intersect very often - on parallel tracks. Betty's own pause on the brink of a huge decision mirrored Pete's own dilemma after realizing that he has no place at SC. Will he take the plunge, now that Trudy's signed off on it? Will he go work for Duck? (Will he find out about Duck & Peggy?)

All this remains to be seen. Still one more episode this season to find out!

ETA: Alan Sepinwall makes the same observation about the Betty-Pete parallel, but I swear I didn't cop it off him.

Random notes:

-The demarcation between grown-ups and children may have been blurred, but in some instances it was very clear, e.g., the Sterling family. Good lord, but Margaret is a brat in need of a spanking. Mona, however, was fabulous, as even Roger acknowledged.

-That AquaNet ad will have to be revamped, though Peggy seemed to be suggesting it wouldn't?

-Best line, from drunk Jane, re: JFK: "He was so young and handsome...And now I'll never get to vote for him!"

"Mad Men" Ep. 3.11: "The Gypsy and the Hobo"

"I'm not saying a new name is easy to find ... But it's a label on a can. And it will be true, because it will promise the quality of the product inside."
-Don to Annabel, the dog food princess

"And who are you supposed to be?"
-Neighbor Carlton to Don, Halloween night

What's in a name? Everything and nothing, as Don Draper a/k/a Dick Whitman discovered in the terrible, wonderful moment his wife finally smashed through the crumbling but still formidable wall that separated his two lives. She's crossed over - the wall may be doomed - yet the person, the self, the life he presented to her, that they shared together, hasn't, as he feared, dissolved in a plume of smoke. Incredibly, to him, it's all still there the next day.

But it will never be the same again, as Don realizes when he wakes to see his box of secrets on his bedroom dresser, strangely innocuous-looking in the morning light. (Didn't you feel him wondering, just before that point, whether it had all been a dream?) So what now from here? Will Betty decide that the man she married was the same quality all along, irrespective of the name he assumed - the name that's now tainted by association with stolen identity, perhaps a criminal violation? Or will she have the same delayed reaction as those fatuous dog owners once they realized that their dogs were enjoying horsemeat?

Too early to tell as yet. But if there's anything this episode drove home once and for all, it's never to underestimate Betty Draper. She was smart enough to figure out the full implications of Don's box, and steely enough to nail his balls to the wall when he tried to wriggle out of telling her the truth. She also showed startling insight into Don's psyche with her comment about his wanting her to discover her secrets, and his not really understanding money. At the same time, she was compassionate enough to show what looked like genuine, if tentative sympathy towards him when she realized her question about Adam touched on his deepest wound. It's not for the first time, either, that Betty's been responsive to Don's showing his vulnerabilities (remember when Don told her about his father beating him as a child?); she may be no Suzanne Farrell (for which I'm rather thankful), but we've had plenty of hints that she does want Don to let her into his inner life. Of course, now that he finally has, the result may be a textbook case of being careful what you wish for. Still, the early signs suggest she isn't running away, at least not just yet.

But what about Don? Does he still think the Draper brand is what warranties his best qualities? Or is he going to try to incorporate his Dick-ish self (no pun intended) more fully into Don Draper's life? There were so many moments in the revelation scene - easily one of the best written, acted, and directed scenes in the history of MM - when I thought Don/Dick might bolt and hightail it for the car, where Suzanne was waiting. (Or, far scarier, that Suzanne might come knocking on the Drapers' front door.) That he didn't do this is telling, though of what, I'm not quite sure.

(I have to say that except for the delicious suspense and extra layer of tension her unseen presence lent the Betty-Don confrontation, I remain unimpressed by the Suzanne storyline, and really hope we've seen the last of it. Though I suspect it ain't quite over, yet. But I did feel for her, for just a moment, at the end of this episode.)

As if the Don-Betty developments weren't stupendous enough, we also got a plummy dose of Roger Sterling like we've never seen him before. A jilted young lover! A carefree Hemingway-wannabe! And, in the present, a faithful husband (to Jane) and loyal friend (to Joan)! It's a credit to John Slattery that in an episode dominated by Jon Hamm's phenomenal acting, he more than held his own. He sold every single new facet we glimpsed of a character I used to dismiss as hopelessly one-dimensional. It was pleasant to see Roger acting like a mature adult for once, even if I suspect his rejection of the dog food princess was due as much to residual resentment as to love for his silly wife. The juxtaposition of that very awkward meeting with his reconnection with Joan was interesting, though I hesitate to read it to mean Joan was Roger's "One."

As for Joanie, her thread was the slenderest of a particularly dense episode, but in many ways it was the most satisfying. Not that I'm condoning violence, even towards a putz like Dr. Butterfingers Rapist, but I confess I whooped when she clocked him with that vase. And kudos to all who predicted that Butterfingers would join the army. That can't possibly end well, but at least it should get him out of Joan's life for a while. Now let's hope Roger lands her a nice job that will keep her squarely in the MM universe.

Funniest line: "I can't turn it off, it's actually happening!"
-Peggy, re: dog food focus group

"Mad Men" Ep. 3.10: "The Color Blue"

BETTY FOUND THE BOX!

But how much of the truth was she able to piece together?

Don, back away slowly from teacher lady. Also, teacher's brother ≠ do-over of Adam. Further involvement with the Farrells will only make your life even messier than it already is - though that might be a minor concern once Betty blows the lid off your secrets. If she does. She has to, doesn't she? Great closing shot of Betty gazing at Don during his acceptance speech. Hitchcock would have drooled.

Peggy was pure awesomeness this episode. I especially liked that she stuck up for that wanker Paul (sorry - couldn't resist), whether or not he deserved it.

Sterling Cooper is for sale again? Then what exactly was the narrative point of the British invasion? It didn't even get Lois fired.

I am, not for the first time, horribly behind on work I need to do for tomorrow, so that's it for now. I once again defer to Sepinwall, among others, for much more judicious thoughts on the episode's themes, esp. those to do with perception. It really seems like no one on this show is seeing the same color blue. But hasn't that been an ongoing pattern on MM for some time now?

"Where the Wild Things Are" - In Our Subconscious, Of Course

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

directed by Spike Jonze
starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, voices of James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper, Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker, Paul Dano
adapted from the children's book by Maurice Sendak

Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” is an ambling, shambling, unlikely wonder of a movie. By all conventional measures it shouldn’t work at all. It’s based on a slender picture book that has maybe ten lines of narrative. It’s formless, almost plotless, and at times so leisurely in pace it borders on soporific. It’s been slathered with the kind of facile pop-psychoanalytical coating that no doubt gives most psychologists fits. Yet for all that, I still fell in love with it at first sight. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being my favorite film of the year.

I don’t remember when I first read Where the Wild Things Are, but I do remember the part of the book I loved the most. It’s the moment when the bedroom of the main character, Max, begins to transform into a forest. Though as a child I couldn’t articulate precisely why this image fascinated me so, I know now it was the liminality of the moment—the sense it evoked of being on the cusp, of having one foot in one world and one foot in another.

This scene doesn’t exist in the movie. And you know what? I didn’t care. Because the entire movie is about liminality; it’s about a boy just beginning to form a vague conception of adolescence and, beyond that, adulthood, but one that’s still colored by a child’s instincts and desires. It’s this theme, in fact, that gives the film much of its emotional power.

None of this, of course, is in Sendak’s original text. Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers lay the groundwork for it by creating a bit of back story for Max. Their Max is a boy of about eight or ten who lives in a nameless wintry suburb with a single mother (Catherine Keener, looking harried but still luminous) and an older sister, Claire. As in the book, Max is a restless bundle of energy, but the movie also sends clear signals that he particularly craves the attention and affection of his family. We see him attempting unsuccessfully to engage his sister, who’s too occupied with her own teenage world to notice him anymore; when he tries to draw her friends into a snowball fight, they end up destroying his snow fort before decamping, taking an indifferent Claire with them and leaving behind a furious, tearful Max. Mom, while more responsive than Claire, is also distracted—first by her job (though there’s a beautifully tender moment in which she sets aside her work so that Max can tell her a story), later by a boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him appearance) who comes over for dinner. Max, in his grey wolf suit, tries to assert his dominance, but only succeeds in literally wounding his mother. In the one major departure from the book, he then runs out of the house before he can be punished, finds a boat on a bank, and sets sail, eventually arriving at the land of the wild things, whom he persuades to crown him king.

Some viewers may complain, not without justification, that this is where WTWTA loses momentum that it never really recovers. There’s not much shape or direction to the events on the island; in fact, there aren’t really “events” at all. Bursts of fitful activity are interspersed with long stretches of desultory walking and talking and occasionally surreal interludes, while the overall trajectory is a movement towards general disillusionment among the beasties with Max’s leadership, as he proves unable to keep their various discontents at bay. But this lack of structure doesn’t feel aimless so much as reflective of the soupy state of Max’s subconscious mind.

For it’s hard not to notice that the subjects and actions that occupy King Max echo the experiences and observations of Boy Max during the day. Max’s ill-fated igloo is reconfigured, multiplied, and magnified—first as a population of little homes that we first see one of the beasts, Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), wantonly destroying, evoking both the destruction of the igloo and the revenge Max takes on his sister, then later as the mother of all forts, a wondrous conical thing that in the end can’t “keep the unhappiness out.” The snowball fight is transmuted into a dirt-clod fight, with even more destructive consequences, and Max, forced into the role of disciplinarian, bellows the identical words he last heard directed at him. Even the fanciful story Max told his mother reappears, as does his subliminal fear—roused by a chance remark by his school science teacher, early in the film—that the sun will die out some day.

The beasts, meanwhile, quickly take on aspects of Max’s psyche. Carol, with his violent storms of rage, jealousy, and grief, most obviously represents Max’s uncontrolled id, but also channels his wistful, creative side; while the smallest beast, the goatlike Alexander (Paul Dano) is the one who sulks because no one will listen to him. Some of the beasts seem to stand in for the people in Max’s life that he’s lost or fears losing: a disaffected girl-beast, KW (Lauren Ambrose), who always seems to be leaving the others to seek the company of a pair of squawking owls, is pretty clearly a projection of Max’s feelings about his sister; and depending on your best guess as to why Max’s parents split up (the movie gives barely any clues on this), either Carol or the quieter bird-beast, Douglas (Chris Cooper) could also be a stand-in for Max’s dad, and KW, who takes care of Max, could just as easily represent his mother as his sister.

But it’s best not to try to draw too literal a correlation between the beasts of Max's imagination and people or elements in his "real" life. The relationship between those two planes of his consciousness is far more fluid and diffuse, as it is in dreams. Indeed, there’s something altogether dreamlike about Max’s entire sojourn among the wild things, which is shot in a soft, almost hazy focus that gives the forest glades, desert expanses, and quiet beaches an otherworldly glow. Even the beasts look softer and fuzzier than Sendak’s illustrations; at the same time they feel remarkably tangible, probably because Jonze used real, live actors in giant beast suits, though the faces were filled in—to marvelously expressive effect—with computer animation. The overall effect is at once appropriately fantastical and wonderfully organic, in a way I haven’t seen in any other animated or partly-animated films.

And that, ultimately, may be why the movie struck such a chord with me: it feels like the product of a real kid’s imagination. (It helps that the boy who plays Max, though cute, has the demeanor and body language of a normal kid, and none of the studied self-consciousness of a trained child actor.) I’ve seen some complaints that WTWTA is a movie for hipsters, not kids, but other than the Jonze name (and I haven’t been much of a fan of his previous work) and the indie-ish soundtrack by Carter Burwell and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, I don’t see it. There’s nothing precious or snarky or knowing about this film. Quite the contrary, there’s a purity of spirit that shines through and reminds even the oldest and most jaded viewer of a time when growing up was a kind of betrayal and the destruction of a snow fort the end of the world.

GRADE: A-

"Mad Men" Ep. 3.9: "Wee Small Hours"

Well, that just may have been the most unpleasant episode of "Mad Men" ever - at the very least, it was one of the most difficult to watch.

I'm trying to finish drafting something for work that's due tomorrow, so I'll have to make my thoughts relatively brief.

First and foremost, my heart bleeds for Sal. What will he do? How long can he keep Kitty in the dark? And how sad that his first full-on sexual encounter with another man (I'm assuming) is going to be with some nameless, faceless dude in a park.

Second, do we still need proof that Harry Crane = useless? How much longer can he get away with such schmuckitude?

Third, Don is officially dead to me. It's not that he didn't save Sal, coldblooded as that decision was - I don't think he was exaggerating the importance of the Lucky Strike account, and he may very well have believed he had no choice. But the manne of his dismissal! The disbelief that Sal was blameless. The cynical suggestion that Sal (or a girl, had she been in that situation and of a sufficiently slutty disposition) should have acquiesced to Client Thug. And then those two words, dropped like a bomb: "You people." And everything they implied, underscored by the contempt on his face.

We're supposed to see this brutality, I guess, as Don's reaction to losing control at work - a motif that's also been developing in his increasingly imbalanced relationship with Connie Hilton. Connie's demanding and a bit kooky, no doubt, and it was painful to see Don visibly deflate and crumple as his most prized client literally asked for the moon. But I had no sympathy for him at that point, between his treatment of Sal and his insane pursuit of teacher-lady. In fact, by the time he finally closed the deal with Miss Farrell, he was so ugly to me I couldn't see anything objectively attractive about him anymore - to my eyes, he was practically leering at her. There was nothing sexy about that tryst. Desperation and stupidity are not sexy. And the feeling of inevitability just made it all the drearier.

Fourth, a lot of viewers probably got bored and/or frustrated by Betty's handling of Henry Francis, and there's no question she behaved like a spoiled child when he refused to show up & play the part she assigned him. But I sympathize with her drawing back from a "tawdry" affair, esp. when juxtaposed with Don's rolling around & covering himself in all kinds of tawdry. Betty doesn't want an affair - she wants to be loved. I can't blame her for that.

Fifth, re: Betty's comment to Carla about the civil rights movement - though it made me cringe, I couldn't hate on her for it. Someone happened to make an almost identical comment to me about gay rights earlier in the day, which just goes to show that where a social inequity is still deeply enough entrenched, you can be a well-meaning person who says "not yet, it's not time" and just doesn't get it. Betty's remark was simply not on par with Don's "you people" because there was no malice behind it. Betty's undeniably self-absorbed, but she isn't cruel. Especially not compared to just about every other major character on the show.

Sixth and finally, Carla knows all and sees all. And probably wishes she didn't.

"Bright Star": She did not fade, though he had not his bliss

BRIGHT STAR

directed by Jane Campion
starring Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw

… Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon in death.

John Keats was obsessed with love and death. In that respect he was hardly unusual as a poet. What was unusual was the intensity and richness of his response, particularly in the last years of his life—a response no doubt heightened by the knowledge that he wasn’t long for this world. Keats was only 25 when he succumbed to consumption in 1821, younger than Mozart and Schubert were when they died, and certainly younger than any of the great English poets he’s commonly ranked with today. But he wasn’t too young to understand the oddly symbiotic relationship between his two obsessions, nor too young to feel, with both, the conflict between their palpable, almost painful, immediacy and their fundamental elusiveness as objects he could truly grasp and possess—even as they threatened to possess him.

There’s only a whisper of these complex tensions in “Bright Star,” Jane Campion’s gorgeously pensive film about Keats’ relationship with Fanny Brawne, the woman he met and fell in love with only a couple of years before he died. But then “Bright Star” is really less about Keats (Ben Whishaw) than about Fanny (Abbie Cornish, calling to mind a younger, sturdier Nicole Kidman), to whom death could only be the enemy, never the source of fascination it was for her lover. The movie begins and ends with Fanny, and for the most part we only see Keats from her point of view: that of an intelligent but not especially literary-minded middle-class young woman who at the outset is merely curious about the mysterious young man staying with one of her neighbors. The neighbor, Mr. Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), she despises; his guest, however, has a moody, sensitive look that piques her interest. Both men call themselves poets, though Brown acts more like a caretaker of Keats’ poetic soul, which he guards jealously against Fanny’s advances. Keats, for his part, goes from not knowing what to make of Fanny to becoming besotted with her.

The story obviously doesn’t end happily, though “Bright Star” is surprisingly quiet, almost muted, in its depiction of the obstacles that part the lovers. There’s concern, rather than outright opposition, on the part of Fanny’s family, who like Keats but see him as too poor in health, means, and prospects to marry her; and somewhat pricklier disapproval from Brown, who views Fanny as a shallow flirt and a drain on his friend’s emotional and creative energies. (Whether other feelings for his friend, or even, perhaps, for Fanny, underlie his hostility is left open to debate.) The difficulties are enough to prevent the young couple from consummating their affair—though their interactions are so filled with longing that even the touch of a hand or their first kiss, or their recitation to each other of Keats’ haunting ballad “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” carries more erotic charge than the most torrid sex scene ever could.

Despite these moments, the film as a whole isn’t the easiest to enter into, mainly because of the pacing, which can feel unhurried to the point of sluggishness and at the same time strangely fitful, almost jumpy. Campion films have an idiosyncratic rhythm all their own, in which dialogue serves more as a counterpoint to silences rather than the other way around. The love story emerges less through those fly-on-the-wall snatches of conversation than through an abundance of breathtaking visual imagery: Fanny reading a love letter amid a sea of bluebells; Fanny’s little sister, with her glorious curly mop of flame-red hair, wading through sunny fields and dells like something out of a pre-Raphaelite painting, while the lovers trail behind her, stealing kisses; a room full of fluttering butterflies that Fanny cultivates with feverish animation and then lets die when Keats’ letters stop coming. There’s much to enjoy about all this, even if it does feel a little too on the nose.

As a romantic heroine, Fanny is terrific material; as a Campion heroine, however, she isn’t a natural fit. She doesn’t really rebel against the societal constraints that bind her, and she isn’t threatened with violence, unless it’s the violence of her own grief. (Any easy feminist licks may be reserved for a relatively minor subplot that doesn’t involve Fanny, and even that comes to an unexpectedly gentle conclusion.) Nonetheless, Campion does her best to sketch Fanny as an independent-minded woman before showing her in love. “Bright Star” begins with a close-up of Fanny sewing, a posture she returns to frequently throughout the movie—but not just stitching humdrum buttons and pillowcases. No, we see her making—and later wearing—clothes for herself, clothes with bright colors, eye-catching ornamentation and stylistic innovations that she herself proudly points out as real accomplishments. When the sardonic Brown dismisses her work as just so much trivial frippery, she resents it keenly: practically her first words in the film express her resentment. Her attitude, and the film’s emphasis on it from the get-go, conveys an unspoken assumption that her own creative instincts are what allow her to be receptive to Keats’ even if she doesn’t much care for poetry, at least initially. I’m not sure this particular take on Fanny quite works, though it’s hard to articulate why. For whatever reason it feels forced, and at the same time a little underdeveloped. But it doesn’t affect what does work about the film: the chemistry between its two leads, and the ache of their separation.

In the end, “Bright Star” is no more and no less than what it purports to be: the love story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne, filtered through Fanny’s perspective. It’s not—nor is there any reason it needs to be—a study of the tyranny of societal expectations or gender roles in early 19th century Britain, or of how Fanny shaped the poetic vision of Keats, a man “half in love with easeful death.” Though as to the latter, all viewers should stay through the credits to hear Ben Whishaw’s wonderful reading of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” arguably his finest poem. It says everything about Fanny’s one great, and ultimately victorious, rival that the movie could not.

GRADE: B+

"Mad Men" Ep. 3.8: "Souvenir"

Wow, that was...beautiful. And incredibly sad.

As a general rule, I don't tend to enjoy episodes of TV dramas that take the action completely away from the main setting of the show. But I found myself really enjoying "Souvenir," despite having only one brief opening scene in the office and absolutely no follow-up to the dramatic events of 7/23.

Perhaps that's because the episode focused so heavily on Betty and Pete. I know I'm in the minority on this, esp. as regards Betty, but those two are, if not my favorites, the characters who interest me the most. Not because they're better or more complex than the others, but because in their different ways, they don't seem altogether fully formed...and I refuse to write either of them off as cases of arrested development. To me, they're still evolving, in the sense that they're fumbling towards a higher state of consciousness. They're a good ways away, but I'm still invested in seeing them get there and what will happen if/when they do.

Did they get any closer to that self-awareness in tonight's episode? Betty, definitely; harder to say for Pete, who just went back on my shit list, and probably everyone else's too, for obvious reasons. I'm not going to pontificate on whether what he did was technically rape; it's enough that he was in a position of power and took advantage of it in the basest way. All the more disturbing that up till that point he had been acting like such a little child - ripping his shirt off because of the heat, watching cartoons, telling the au pair girl to hang the dress back up & blame it on the kids. And even afterwards, his look of guilt and his plea to Trudy seemed more like a child's appeal to his mother than a grown man admitting horrible transgressions to his wife. That said, he at least seemed to realize that he can't be by himself because he's his own worst enemy.

Betty, on the other hand, seems to be approaching the realization that she might, just might, be happiest and most fulfilled when she's by herself. Or maybe not. She definitely needs an audience to blossom - that is, an audience that's not her husband and kids. I think she was supposed to dazzle in this episode, and she did...and not only because she looked even more drop-dead gorgeous than usual. We saw more sides of Betty in this hour than we've seen so far this entire season. Energetic & purposeful in her efforts to save the reservoir, giddy afterwards at her success (how cute was her little twist and "We won, we won, we won"?), her euphoria tinged with guilt over Henry Francis (that slick old smoothie), then projecting her attraction and excitement on to Don.

And then: the return of Betty the Model-Sophisticate in Rome. "La Dolce Vita" is still on my Netflix queue, so I don't know how Fellini-esque those scenes were; all I know is they were languorously seductive, and Don & Betty ridiculously hawt. But also ineffably sad, with their overarching sense of the ephemerality of their fantasy. Seeing sexy, happy Betty return to unhappy-wife Betty just hurt, esp. with Don so obviously trying to preserve some of their Roman afterglow. I liked him better than I have for a while, esp. coming after his caddishness in "Seven Twenty-Three." Still, when Betty finally started to articulate her misery - "I hate this place. I hate our friends. I hate this town” - I actually wrote down, "Finally, she says it." That's one small step for womankind, one huge leap for Betty Draper.

I've been undecided on January Jones' range as an actress, but this episode, if nothing else, reaffirmed my conviction that she was ideally cast for the role of Betty. It was amazing to see how swiftly the warmth could evaporate off her face - in the moment after Henry Francis kissed her, in the post-vacation conversation with Francine - and leave the Nordic Ice Princess we've grown to know too well.

I live in hopes of seeing Betty's spark rekindled - but it's becoming increasingly clear that Don's not the one to keep it lit.

Funniest lines (there weren't many):

Sally, on her "first kiss": "But I already did it. It's over." Bwah! Betty's response, OTOH - "Every kiss after that is a shadow of that kiss" - was just sad.

Pete: "Of the Republic of Dresses!"

Francine, to Don and Betty: "From what I hear, you two must be very tired." (With the exact same arch look that she gave Betty when leaving her alone with Henry Francis. No wonder Betty hates her.)