The Classroom Conservative

John Hillcoat's The Road

The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel, has been my most anticipated film of the year. Its release was delayed: to position it for the Academy Awards? to refashion its ending so that it appears less bleak?

Because he is one of the few novelists whose works I buy, immediately, it has been three full years since I read the story. I knew as soon as I learned there would be a film version precisely what the problem would be. McCarthy is a master of description: he has the unique skill of detailing mundane processes with a precision that readers would need should they hope ever to replicate those acts. How does one hope to film such detail? Billy Bob Thornton tried to do so in his All The Pretty Horses (2000), but the 116 minutes that came to cinemas gave viewers but a hint of the epic achievement of that novel.

Like No Country For Old Men (2005), The Road presents a more modest canvas. The focus of the latter gives filmmaker John Hillcoat a fair chance, and like the Coen Brothers' adaptation of the former the new project benefits from superb casting.

So, did I enjoy it? I did, absolutely. I was taken, particularly, by Viggo Mortensen's depiction of "Man," who, essentially, could best be described as "Father." Looking out for his son in the wake of apocalypse, "Man" shows a steely determination and focus that has defined many of Mortensen's best characters. In fact, Mortensen (working from Joe Penhall's screenplay) makes even more vivid one of McCarthy's most salient points: how blind we are to good, when we protect ourselves and those we love from the evil in the world. I put down the novel, three years ago, in awe of our collective will to live. This is contrast played out between "Man" and the character played here by Charlize Theron. But Mortensen is good enough to lend nuance to a role fully stripped bare.

As with No Country for Old Men, everyone should absolutely read The Road. As horrible as is "the cellar" in the film, your imagination will make it worse. But I cannot claim to have been disappointed in any way with this adaptation.

Julie & Julia

Is the belief that movie-going was ever a simpler experience just the product of middle-aged nostalgia? The complication with screening Julie & Julia last night was presented by its apparent target audience, older fans of Julia Child who perhaps bought her Mastering The Art Of French Cooking in its first edition. At the very moment the film began, the cinema was besieged by people who, I assume, had not been to the movies in years. While scaling the stadium-style bleachers was a problem in the dark, there is solace to be taken in the general behavior of these older patrons who, once settling in, did not behave as if they were watching Julie & Juliaat home. We have a copy of Julie Powell's book in our house, and so I have to assume that people somewhere are seeing this film as an adaptation of a blogger's tale of cooking her way through Child's cookbook in a year. The hybridity of the story -- dividing itself between Powell and Child -- is both its greatest strength and inherent weakness, though not, as reviews have suggested, by contrasting the performance of Amy Adams with that of Meryl Streep.

Like so many films these days, we know far too much before entering the theater. (There was, for example, a preview for The Stepfather last night that revealed what appears to be the whole plot.) The advance media suggested that the Powell segments would be brief, an interruption exacerbated by Adams' pedestrian performance. The film, in fact, is rooted in Powell's experience as an unfulfilled, low-level bureaucrat, and Adams is far more than skilled. (Okay, it is no Junebug, or even Sunshine Cleaning, but the material does not grant her this latitude.) The alternating segments are structured to show the similarities in human experience, and while you are left in awe of Streep's acting, I needed to see no more of these flashbacks. The truth is that the Child segments are lacking almost any conflict. When she faces intolerance at Le Cordon Bleu, for example, we know she will prevail; when her husband Paul, played brilliantly by Stanley Tucci, is suspected of unamerican activities, we know that Joseph McCarthy will be discredited; when no one will publish her behemoth of a cookbook, we know that Knopf will see her brilliance. We are left, in the end, with the wry wit of Streep's representation of Child, and that is well worth anyone's time.

But a classic film it does not make, and the problem has everything to do with Powell's story. Perhaps, in the internet age, we simply know too much about the chronic problems in Powell's marriage to buy a happily-ever-after tale of misunderstanding and reconciliation between the author and her husband, Eric. The arc of her learning is just too modest. Eric is supportive and not at all judgmental as the couple comes to terms with Powell's underachievement. He helps her set up the blog that will, over the course of a year, preoccupy her beyond distraction and give her creative life new direction. And, when she neglects anything and everything but Julia Child, poor Eric does nothing more than sleep one night in his office. Director Nora Ephron is not subtle: in the hilarious scene in which Powell has to boil lobsters, she has Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" on in both the car and the apartment, and, if you missed it the first two times, Eric sings over the song as "Lobster killer, q'est-ce que c'est?" But the larger question of what it might mean to call oneself a wife in the twenty-first century when compared with that role in the 1950s and 1960s becomes more of an incidental matter, and one suspects that this shortcoming is what prevents this film from ever being much more than a pleasant diversion.

Synecdoche, New York

I have a new favorite film of all time, but it has sadly split my household right down the middle. I can certainly appreciate that such a profoundly figurative work as Synecdoche, New York is in some sense unwatchable. What plot there is exists only to support the central conceit of the film. Philip Seymour Hoffman is Caden Cotard, a lovelorn theater director who hopes to find meaning in his life and to secure his professional legacy by staging an ambitious play. But the story, how Caden loses one wife and daughter and runs out on another, how he navigates the pitfalls of intellectual snobbery in the art world, is less important as plot than it is as vehicle for writer/director Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) to interrogate the nature of tropes themselves. It is, then, a movie about not literally meaning what we say and about thus saying more by so doing.

I would never presume to offer an interpretation of the film. Instead, here is a list of some of the things that most interest me about it.

1. Comparing Caden with Adele, his estranged wife. The scale of Caden's ambition is huge. He seeks, through his play, to direct, to manipulate everyone in the stage version of his life that he starts to develop. Adele, on the other hand, paints miniatures, paintings so small that they can be seen only by magnification. She is the one who, for all we can see, achieves something approaching fame, and she develops a show based on her impressions of the women who have been important to her. Both Caden and Adele are forty years old at the start of the film. On the verge of middle age -- like me, that is why I like this so! -- she takes a risk and makes her name while he wallows in his narcissism.

2. Death of a Salesman. For some people, Arthur Miller's tragedy is the most important play of the twentieth century. Caden stages it with young actors, to demonstrate, he claims, the inevitability of aging and death. Adele rejects the work as pandering to the suburban dinner theater crowd, but she also suggests that there is something profoundly fraudulent about performing the works of others. This reveals all kinds of implications for...

3. Caden as writer and director. He is unfulfilled when working on Arthur Miller, and his response is to seek truth by using his surroundings as his inspiration. Miller is author of Salesman, but Caden collaborates by directing. Writing and directing his own life, Caden assumes both roles, but he finds that he is less of an author than perhaps he imagines. The characters persist in behaving as they will, and the different layers of the story overlap: the "real" characters interact with the "actors" and another layer must be introduced. Is God thus frustrated by our free will?

4. Olive. She is the child of Caden and Adele's marriage. She is, in a real sense, the artifact of their union. She is a work of art, as even her "leavings" are found to be olive green, a manifestation of her metaphor. She grows up to become a kind of performance artist, embracing tattoo art and exotic dancing. Her diary, left with her father, is always a reflection of what she is doing, seemingly writing itself.

5. Caden's hypochondria. Mr. Kaufman engages the middle-aged stereotype of hypochondria. Caden seems to have problems with his teeth and gums; he endures a nasty bump to the head that gets him referred to an opthamologist and a neurologist. He suffers unexplained pustules and seizures. But as he embraces his "play" and, eventually, ages fifty years, all this disappears. Why does his health improve in old age?

6. Hazel and her house. Played by Samantha Morton (Minority Report, In America), box office clerk Hazel is, to me, the most interesting character in the film. She is the one who shows the qualities we covet -- playfulness, ambition, loyalty, and the ability to learn -- but she may be most distinguished by her house: 2200 square feet and perpetually on fire. It is the most surreal element in Synecdoche, New York, but it is also the literal manifestation of an expression meaning "frenzied." It is also a reminder of how she is running out of time, of how we all endure menace daily.

Milk

I recognize that I am a little late to the discussion here, but simply because Gus Van Sant's biopic of slain San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk did not enjoy the widest theater distribution across Canada last winter does not mean that it should not receive more attention now that it is on video. It was, after all, nominated for best picture.

The film begins with the reporting of the protagonist's murder, and so the plot has a sickening inevitability followed through to the graphic shooting scene in which rival politician Dan White crawls through a window, seeks those individuals against whom he holds grudges, and starts shooting. For some people's taste, the film lacks pace and seems "documentary-like." I found that the impending dread helped maintain focus, and while I have never liked Van Sant's pacing, I found this film a return to his earliest and best form, from films like Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991). From the technical perspective, I was most impressed by Van Sant's vivid representation of 1970s San Francisco, where the Castro became a nurturing enclave for the gay community, under the watchful eye of an intolerant police force.

Because the film is Milk's, though, the screen belongs to Sean Penn. We see the character go from a disgruntled, semi-closeted cubicle dweller to outspoken gay rights activist by degree. The story follows him to California, where prejudice forces him to agitate, where the opportunity to influence a wider range of people sees him seek greater respectability. Cutting his hair and eschewing bath houses are personal milestones.

Generally speaking, I prefer the directing work of Sean Penn. His Into the Wild (2007) and The Pledge (2001) are two of my favorite films of the past ten years. When given a canvas this big, I find that, as an actor, he tends to chew the scenery. He goes all I Am Sam on us. He does well in ensemble casts, like when he played Jimmie Markum in Mystic River (2003), or in supporting roles, like when he played David Kleinfeld in Carlito's Way (1993). But Penn is in virtually every shot here, and the performance is captivating. There is the tendency to treat Milk as a saint, and so I appreciated the attempt to portray him as a more complex, nuanced politician.

What I thought was lost was the promise of the supporting cast. Emile Hirsch, so dynamic as Chris McCandless in Into the Wild, is utterly muted as Cleve Jones. The same is true for Josh Brolin, though he received his own Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Dan White. It is possible in these stories that the assassin can take over the screen, though that is never a concern here. The tortured depths of White are only ever suggested. The one exception might be James Franco's excellent performance as Scott Smith. While the "type," the neglected political spouse, has been done to death, Franco's inherent likability makes Smith sympathetic, even if he too is underdeveloped.

This film is not about same-sex marriage, per se, but its present context was thus framed by Dustin Lance Black, when he accepted his Oscar for best screenplay. "... If Harvey had not been taken from us thirty years ago," Black said, "I think he'd want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches or the government or by their families that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and very soon, I promise, you will have equal rights, federally, across this great nation of ours."

I am reminded, at such times, about how much my life has been enriched by people who suffer persecution simply because of their sexual preference. Gay people are responsible for many of my favorite books, many of my favorite poems and plays, many of my favorite albums, many of my favorite films. There are many ways to approach a human rights issue, a minority rights issue. This is simply how my personal thinking has developed. I have come to feel, increasingly, as though I have used these people while remaining complicit in their mistreatment. Hardly a taught course goes by without me thinking about Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein's partner for forty years, who suffered great poverty after Stein's death simply because she had no right to inherit the lucrative art collection they gathered through the first half of the twentieth century. I respect traditionalists, and I respect religious people. But while I believe this film has flaws, I could not help but be moved by its wider messages.

The Canadian media is currently enduring another insufferable debate about what "makes a conservative." As I have said many times in this space, a conservative, for me, is someone who does not simply throw out what works well because something new comes along. A conservative should protect what is best about who we have been. In this case, all conservatives can look back and examine how marriage rights have been extended in the past and just do the right thing.

W.

With a little more than two months remaining in the presidency of George W. Bush, Oliver Stone is quick off the mark to offer what will surely be but the first in a long line of post mortem analyzes. The surprising result is a movie that avoids a number of consistent weaknesses across Stone's oeuvre, but it is also one that fails to deliver some of the best things we have come to expect from an Oliver Stone film.

The enduring strength of W. is the performance of Josh Brolin, of course. Although he does appear to be the world's oldest Yale freshman in flashback scenes, and although he slips into caricature during the dramatization of a press conference that is supposed to act as the film's climax, he carries admirably a film in which he appears in virtually every scene. That is no small achievement. But the best part of W. for me is the examination of George W. Bush's relationship with his demanding father. James Cromwell's portrayal of the first President Bush is careful to avoid any caricature. He never slips into Dana-Carvey-like "didn't wanna do it" folksiness, and the viewer comes away with a new respect for the steadiness of Bush pere. Cromwell's performance contrasts with that of, say, Thandie Newton as Condie Rice, an impersonation that could have been pasted in from an SNL sketch. The desire to mimic historical figures is never so pronounced elsewhere, but it does occasionally infect much of the rest of the cast from time to time. Luckily, they seem able to shake it off before the whole drama slips into parody.

Oliver Stone has never before been so hamstrung by a self-consciously ironic soundtrack, by an inability to frame his story properly. Although I am thankful that he resisted giving this story the epic treatment, it clearly suffers from the exclusion of Bush's second term. But building on the construction of a family dynamic so often lacking on his broadest canvases, Stone is able to interrogate the empty ideology of Karl Rove, shown as the "genius boy" who makes Bush fils by narrowing his message and keeping him on it. I can accept that Rove is the political Al Davis - "just win, baby!" - but, unfortunately, Stone is less able to communicate the geopolitical strategy of true believers like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. It is simplistic to suggest that these men thought only that seizing oil in the middle east would reestablish American power for a century, and yet this is partisan conclusion drawn from interminable scenes of cabinet room debate. I much prefer the subtlety of the scene showing W. in Crawford, Texas, leading his cabinet through the brush in a shot eerily similar to that of Death leading the actors away at the end of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

If George W. Bush led his people astray, it has surely not been as a result of his misunderstanding the politics of oil. More interestingly, and not fully considered in spite of all the bluster, is the question of W.'s faith. One gets the sense here, as one does from the last eight years, that Bush fils feels his faith profoundly. Undoubtedly, he is surrounded by some people who feel similarly, but he is also surrounded by others who see religion as a wedge issue, something Mr. Rove could fashion and refashion in order to manipulate the media. The United States and the world at large has suffered religion under George W. Bush's presidency, and our collective inability to cherry pick the best of faith in the face of heightened religious intolerance should, I suspect, have played a larger part in Mr. Stone's analysis.

Ghost Town

I hate the determinism of contemporary culture. We know who has won an election based on "exit polls," even though all the polls have not closed. We know that a film is a "bomb" based on one night's receipts. The latter was the fate of Ghost Town, Ricky Gervais' big screen star turn, a film whose word of mouth was silenced by nothing more than the bad press bought by a cool start. Undeterred, stubborn, we marched off to the matinee last weekend: we paid ten bucks each, even though we knew that the second run theatre would have a print within a fortnight. Take that, contemporary culture!

The premise is familiar. Grumpy dentist Bertram Pincus (Gervais) can see dead people, and while they do not want to eat his brain, they really, really need his help. The most persistent of these spooks is played by Greg Kinnear in a complex comedic performance; he is Frank Herlihy, a womanizer whose style is cramped by a speeding bus. The chemistry between Gervais and Kinnear is solid, as the latter convinces the former to intervene and stop the widow Herlihy (played with surprising appeal by Tea Leone) from marrying again. There are charming little touches, as for example when the awkward Pincus is caught wearing the pricetag on the shirt he bought to impress. What is clear is that Gervais makes better those around him: Aasif Mandvi (from The Daily Show) and the wonderful Kristen Wiig (from Saturday Night Live) are polished to a fine shine in supporting roles. In the end, the movie turns on a love triangle that leaves Kinnear's character, deliciously, out in the cold. The other notable point is how appealing Manhattan looks in its depiction here: this film could have been made by the New York tourist bureau.

I will understand, at this point, if you wait to rent Ghost Town, but you would be missing out if you missed it, entirely.

Can We Really Blame It All On Mr. Blandings?

I do not care for Are We Done Yet? and The Money Pit is mediocre. But the original version of this film, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), is a movie classic. Cary Grant is lured to Connecticut in order to escape, with his wife and two daughters, a Manhattan apartment grown too small for the average American family. The Blandings fall in love with an old house on a windy plot, and in the end the house proves uninhabitable. Having pulled the old structure down, the family designs the home of its dreams - and Mr. Blandings watches the bills pile up.

From the perspective of sixty years, the Blandings' ambitions represent the beginning of a civilization losing its way. The family's move to the suburbs led to sprawl. An inconvenient train journey for Mr. Blandings would become, over the subsequent decades, an automobile commute over a tangle of interstate highways. At the end of the film, in fact, Mr. Blandings wonders whether the dream of owning a home was already out of reach for average Americans, as the flurry of real estate activity instigated by the family inflated prices.

But Mr. Blandings got one thing right that we get wrong: he was very concerned about debt. An advertising executive, Mr. Blandings made $15,000 a year, roughly equal to a salary of $135,000 today. He hoped, originally, to keep construction costs below the equivalent of $90,000 today, and when they balloon to more than $300,000, he is beside himself. Imagine, Mr. Blandings is uncomfortable with paying twice his annual salary on his dream home, a structure his wife hopes to pass along to their children. In the midst of the sub-prime loan crisis, how many people in the United States were financing homes at ten times their annual salary?

In my lifetime, I can remember when qualifying for a loan was a big deal. For awhile there, everyone was getting one. I hope the banks have drawn in their horns and we might, as a people, be a little more cautious ourselves about borrowing.

Sex And The City

I ran from the theatre. 

   

On a few occasions over the years, I have walked out of a film before it finished, but this time I stayed until the end.  Then I ran.

   

I hated Sex and the City.

   

Now, I know what you are going to say: this was never a film meant for me, and I had no right to be there in the first place.  Maybe you are right.  There were four women sitting behind me, kvetching about their husbands, and the half dozen to my right had cellphones, pagers, and screaming children.  I was outnumbered, but I came to the theatre interested.  I was not a fanatical follower of the HBO series, but I respected what the program tried to do in upsetting the tedious pabulum of network television.  I like Sarah Jessica Parker, and I think her Carrie Bradshaw character is complex and watchable.

   

This film is neither.

  

The conflict is created by her fiancee’s cold feet.  Goaded into goading Mr. Big into marriage by her increasingly shrill and unsympathetic friend Miranda Hobbes, Carrie is left at the altar.  The problem is that this development takes forty-five minutes to present itself, a tedious period taken up with the veneration of fashion labels so central to the success of the series.  Unfortunately, it has never been so blatant, never such a distraction from the plot.  The remaining hour-and-a-half churns its way towards an inevitable happy ending by introducing us to a new character, Carrie’s assistant Louise, played without charm by Jennifer Hudson.  No one behind the paper-thin script sees fit to integrate Louise with Carrie’s circle of friends, and her scenes are thus oddly disjointed.  As for Miranda, Charlotte, and even Samantha, their storylines could not hold your attention for even a segment of an episode of the old series.

   

But worst done by of all are the men, of course.  Chris Noth (as Mr. Big) and Evan Handler (as Charlotte's husband Harry Rosenblatt) play to type, and we get only a hint of the complexity of the former, even as his life is shaken and shaken again.  David Eigenberg (as Miranda’s Steve Brady) gets to revisit something like an old storyline, and Jason Lewis (as Samantha’s Smith Jerrod) is eye candy without the opportunity to put his wares on display.  Gilles Marini (as Samantha’s neighbor Dante) gets the only exposure one will remember.

   

The only justification for making this film, beyond the big windfall for all involved, would be if Parker and her peers had one more story they were dying to tell.  There is no such story here.  I cannot imagine that people who felt betrayed by the “conventional” ending of the series will feel vindicated here, though I could hear sad reprisals of 90s “grlllpower” echoing behind me as I made it to the door.

Reconsidering The Politics Of Juno

Diablo Cody has her Academy Award for original screenplay, and the media has moved on to obsess over Ellen Page’s personal life.  Juno is out on video; as a matter of fact, it is now available on pay-per-view.  With the dust settled, it seems like a good time to look again at the politics of the film, the most interesting of its many interesting topics of discussion.

   

In the weeks leading up to the Oscar ceremony, much was made of the film’s treatment of teen pregnancy.  What did progressives make of Juno eschewing abortion?  Was Ms Cody demonstrating the “choice” in “pro-choice,” or was she simply ridiculing the nonchalance of the receptionist in the women’s health clinic?  Was she lampooning the tone of Su-Chin’s public, “pro-life” demonstration to contrast the personal, yet ultimately similar, conclusion Juno draws about her abortion?  Some people to the further right of center were ultimately uncomfortable with what they saw as a normalization of teenaged pregnancy.  While it might be common, it is fraught with problems only suggested in a ninety-six minute romantic comedy.  I can say that these issues were discussed on the Charles Adler radio program weeks before they hit the print media, and the conclusion was that Juno was a surprisingly complex film, politically.

   

But it now occurs to me that Mark Loring, the would-be adoptive father played with skill by Jason Bateman, might be in fact the film’s most “political” character, his experience providing the most interesting point of discussion.  Loring’s utter boredom with a life that is little more than an extended adolescence, his fear of adult responsibility, is entirely consistent with a central critique pursued by Mark Steyn in his America Alone.  Steyn is concerned with demography, primarily, with the ways in which we have chosen to live our lives that imperil our way of life, entirely.  But the point is that a delayed coming of age is a negative thing, not something to celebrate and pursue, and this is something that young Juno recognizes herself, in a scene in which she tells her father that she has been out dealing with things “beyond her maturity level.”

   

Initially, I had a lot of sympathy for Bateman’s character: I believe you are supposed to have it.  His wife, played by Jennifer Garner, relegates his hobbies to the basement.  But, through the course of the film, you discover that Mark Loring does not see music and films and comic books as hobbies, they are his main passions, and when he reveals himself as being less emotionally mature than Juno, herself, the audience has its bombshell.  Well, it is not like the pregnancy could be so: it is revealed in the first five minutes!

   

I am not sure that Mr. Steyn would see Juno as a conservative classic, but I am certain that Ms Cody did not set out to write one.  What she obviously did set out to do was write a deceptively simple story with hidden complexities.  And, as its meaning continues to evolve over time, it becomes clearer and clearer that this is her profound achievement.

A Vote for Gordon Pinsent

With the Oscar nominations set to be announced tomorrow, amidst speculation about what kind of awards ceremony Hollywood can muster under the circumstances of a writers’ strike, I would like to register my vote early for the man most likely to be overlooked: Gordon Pinsent.  Mr. Pinsent is my countryman, and by saying this I mean he is a Newfoundlander, not just a fellow Canadian.  He was born nearly seventy-eight years ago in Grand Falls, about a two hour drive from where my mother grew up.  As a result, it feels as though I have always been aware of him.  His career had its start in typical Canadian venues before he experienced an initial “Hollywood” phase.  Through most of my life he has been a revered statesman of the arts in Canada, playing in everything from The Rowdyman (1972) to John and the Missus (1987) to the The Red Green Show,  but I’ve seen him in person only once: at the provincial drama festival in St. John’s in 1997.  This was before another celebrated Hollywood turn in The Shipping News (2001), where his Billy Pretty character steals the movie from a languid Kevin Spacey.

   

The current performance drawing acclaim is his portrayal of Grant Anderson, the husband character in Away from Her.  As more than one reviewer has pointed out, the story unfolds from Grant’s fretful experience.  When his wife Fiona, played with Oscar-caliber aplomb by Julie Christie, begins to exhibit early symptoms of dementia, Grant must work through the full implications of what is happening to them both.  When Fiona’s inevitable institutionalization opens her life to a new, unexpected act in a time reserved for closing credits, it is Grant who must come to terms with the legacy of a life spent and, sometimes, misspent.  This is not to diminish at all the suffering of Alzheimer’s, nor is it meant to disparage Ms Christie’s performance.  But this tale of suffering needs its teller, and it is Mr. Pinsent’s understated presence that lends an epic lens to the narrow experience of everyday existence. Ms Christie is likely to receive a Best Actress nomination, and she has an excellent chance to get the associated statuette – even if, because of the writer’s strike, it might be couriered from a press conference in California.  While it is possible to argue that the two best lead performances this year may be found in a single film, the truth is that Fiona carries with high drama what Grant is entrusted to establish.  I suspect that the heights Ms Christie achieves – not to mention stiff competition from the likes of Daniel Day Lewis – may overshadow the weight of what Mr. Pinsent has done.

   

Away from Her is, at the level of narrative, an unassuming story brought to the screen conscientiously by Sarah Polley, who has been staking her own claim to the status of Canadian national treasure over her twenty-year career.  Whatever muted Oscar spotlight possible this year will surely shine on Ms Christie and this film.  But when this inspires you to take a look at this picture, savor the performance of Gordon Pinsent, a professional actor whose studied assurance reminds us that life on the stage and the screen is both an art and a craft.