I’m rereading Chaim Potok’s excellent novel My Name is Asher Lev right now, and last night I stayed up way too late reading. These two passages really caught my attention and merit putting somewhere that I’ll be able to find again.
He said to me one day in the second week of July, “Asher Lev, there are two ways of painting the world. In the whole history of art, there are only these two ways. One is the way of Greece and Africa, which sees the world as a geometric design. The other is the way of Persia and India and China, which sees the world as a flower. Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso paint the world as geometry. Van Gogh, Renoir, Kandinsky, Chagall paint the world as a flower. I am a geometrician. I sculpt cylinders, cubes, triangles, and cones. The world is a structure, and structure to me is geometry. I sculpt geometry. I see the world as hard-edged, filled with lines and angles. And I see it as a wild and raging and hideous, and only occasionally beautiful. The world fills me with disgust more often than it fills me with jooy. Are you listening to me, Asher Lev? The world is a terrible place. I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I see them all around me in my sculpture and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they were not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world. You do not understand me yet, Asher Lev. My little Hasid. My sanctifier of the world. My half-naked painter with dangling payos and a paint-smeared skullcap. One day you will understand about the truth of feelings.”
Then, two pages later.
The following week, the third week of July, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We walked through centuries of Byzantine and Western crucifixions. He showed me the development of structure and form and expression, and the handling of pictorial space. I saw crucifixions all the way home and dreamed of crucifixions all through the night.
I told him the next day that I did not think I wanted to see any more crucifixions. He became angry.
“Asher Lev, you want to go off into a corner somewhere and paint little rabbis in long beards? Then go away and do not waste my time. Go paint your little rabbis. No one will pay attention to you. I am not telling you to paint crucifixions. I am telling you that you must understand what a crucifixion is in art if you want to be a great artist. The crucifixion must be available to you as a form. Do you understand? No, I see you do not understand. In any case, we will see more crucifixions and more resurrections and more nativities and more Greek and Roman gods and more scenes of war and love – because that is the world of art, Asher Lev. And we will see more naked women, and you will learn the reason for the differences between the naked women of Titian and those of Rubens. This is the world you want to make sacred. You had better learn it well first before you begin.”
These passages stand alone – but that last sentence was a dagger to my heart. Do I have the strength to learn the world well? Most Christians do not. They do not see the reason to expose themselves to the horror of the world, but in being afraid to do that, they are never able to speak to that world.
I want to avoid that. It sounds like a long long path, but I’ve already taken the first steps…
Marc Webb’s debut film finally made it to Nashville last night, as part of the Nashville Film Festival (which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, very cool). The trailer bills the movie as a story about Boy Meets Girl, but not a love story, and the trailer is accurate, thank goodness. We don’t need another romantic comedy, and this film doesn’t attempt to give us more of what we don’t need.
Instead, the film, in its light-hearted and whimsical style, is concerned with what exactly love is in modern times. Both of the main characters come from homes with divorced parents, but Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) believes in true love and finding “the one” while Summer (Zooey Deschanel) does not believe in any of that stuff. Their story; told in a great non-linear fashion that examines the 500 days that Summer is in Tom’s life, examines whether either of their ideas about love hold up in reality.
Much has been made in early reviews about Webb’s experience with music videos, probably because there is a dance scene and the music is heavily tied to the visuals in the film (look for a great split-screen sequence with Regina Spektor’s song Us), but I think most of those reviewers missed the subtle touch that Webb brought out in the post-film Q&A last night. The narrator that we hear in the trailer is the narrator of the film as well; a deep, soothing voice that sets the tone for a storybook-ish movie. By beginning with the narrator giving us the setup – Girl doesn’t believe in love, boy does believe in love, and boy knows that girl is The One at first meeting – the film gives the viewers the normal cues of a fairy tale story.
But the film isn’t intending to be a fairy tale, nor is it intending to subvert fairy tales by setting your expectations and destroying them. Rather, it is questioning and wrestling with my generation’s takes on love – the fear of labeling relationships, the generation of kids who’ve grown up after divorce, the desire for some concrete idea of love but the complete lack of any model or definition. By using fairy-tale aspects, 500 Days of Summer did well to ask the questions that I’ve heard lots of friends ask (that I myself asked), and while the film didn’t really have any good answers, it wasn’t willing to forsake all hope in the idea of love.
I identified with the movie a great deal because I’ve been in those positions before; finding someone who I thought was the one, being with a different someone who just really really wasn’t the one, and finally finding The One who I’m now happily married to. I still don’t know exactly what love is; but I’m a lot closer and I do know a litany of things that it is definitely not. This movie, rather than being a “happy ending all things tied up neatly but nothing of substance provided” Hollywood film, successfully (to me) asked some questions and wrestled with them in a way fitting its characters and story, then ended on a note of hope. It wasn’t a perfect film, but it was far better than anything that Hollywood normally produces on the subject of love, and I hope it has a great deal of success at the Box Office.
Off Topic:
And I think that somewhere down the line there is a critical essay waiting to happen about how this film identifies another shift in culture; with Summer being representative of this generation’s wrestling with the 70′s generation (which might be defined as Spring – the birth of free love and love as a self-centered, self-seeking concept). If I were to write said essay, I would place the modern generation right at the end of 500 Days of Summer (which I won’t spoil), and explore the themes of the film as suggestions of ways that culture is changing. But that’s just me.
(I posted about this film right after we saw it, but I thought I’d go ahead and write a proper review.)
Round this time of year many people watch a higher percentage of old films than they do on a normal basis. They drag out old VHS copies of White Christmas, Holiday Inn, It’s a Wonderful Live, and let these films play a number on the sentimental and nostalgic parts of their brains. Watching those films, we can’t help but think of the “good old days.” Now, arguably, these movies represent very little about their respective time periods, but with their overriding optimism and upbeat plots, we can’t help but dream a little dream about how things used to be better.
Mike Leigh’s latest film is not a musical and probably will never stir up much nostalgia, but it does paint an accurate portrayal of Now that will attract film watchers for years and years. The film is not an immediate classic, nor does it have any overwhelming strengths that make people talk or ensure its success as a indie phenom (no hip pregnant teens, crazy families in classic vans, or sex dolls posing as girlfriends). Instead, Leigh has crafted a film that is grounded in reality, to the extent that it is hard to remember these are characters and this is fictional.
Happy-Go-Lucky centers on Poppy (Sally Hawkins), an upbeat, eternally optimistic school-teacher who lives with her best friend in London. Hawkins brings Poppy to life in brilliant ways, from the boots she continually wears to the sneaky smile that is ever-present. We meet Poppy riding her bike through London, her bright clothes standing out even in contrast to the various hues that pepper the city streets. Soon after this scene her bike is stolen, and with only a mournful “We didn’t even get to say goodbye,” Poppy moves on, not to be discouraged by this crime.
As we follow her to work, to driving lessons, and out to her pregnant sister’s house in the suburbs over the next few weeks of her life, we find out that nothing is able to discourage Poppy. And as we realize this, we expect Hawkins’ character to get really annoying really quickly. But the subtlety of Leigh’s writing and the strength of Hawkin’s acting combine to reveal that Poppy is not naively living on a planet of her own making but choosing to navigate reality with a smile on her face.
This does not mean she succeeds in bringing that cheer to others – a bookstore clerk that she meets in the first scene is unmoved by her obstinate attempts at communication and as the film progresses she fails and meets other obstacles, and with each one we see deeper into who Poppy is and find out more what it is that drives her eternal optimism. I found myself expecting to find cracks in her psyche; surely she is running from something. But Leigh and Hawkins reveal, through Poppy’s encounters with a strong supporting cast that the optimism is not a defense mechanism, instead it is revealed to be a sure-footed strength, a confidence that Poppy carries with her, undefiled by the sin rampant in the world. Poppy is not traversing the world unaware, instead she is wise to the problems and tragedies of life and courageously smiles through it all, insistent that even if she can’t make everyone smile, she at least ought to try.
Eddie Marsan puts in a wonderful performance as Scott, the driving teacher who is exasperated to no end by Poppy’s enthusiasm and happiness. But in Leigh’s film, no character is a prop or a cartoon, and Marsan puts in a performance that turns on a dime and opens our eyes even further into what it means to live as Poppy does.
As most Americans enter into the holidays, it is a shame they won’t take time to go find a theater showing Happy-Go-Lucky. Because, unlike those classic holiday movies which sugar-coat problems with singing and frosty windows, Happy-Go-Lucky’s strength is that it dwells in the mundane yet tragic reality of modern life. It is only because of Poppy’s unwavering exuberance that we remember we too have a choice in how to respond to reality, and acceptance of it does not mean cynicism or pessimism.