The Classroom Conservative

Midnight In Paris

Having suffered through a busy autumn, I am a little late to the discussion of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.  Mr. Allen is at a point, after having directed more than forty films, where people simply ignore his projects when they do not work and draw great attention to those that connect with an audience.  He benefits from low expectations, perhaps lower than any current artist who has been so prolific and so successful.  For me, his last unqualified success was Match Point (2005), though it was, essentially, a retelling of my favorite Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).  I am level-headed enough not to buy the hype associated with the vastly overrated Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and to be disappointed with Whatever Works (2009).  Still, I can be charmed when stumbling across something I missed, like the forgotten Sweet and Lowdown (1999).  I acknowledge Woody Allen’s unmatched success through the 1970s, and I will admit to having asked for, and received for Christmas, a DVD of the charmingly nostalgic Radio Days (1987).

So, with some authority, I can say that Midnight in Paris is good, respectable.  It is something that can stand on its own merits.  Owen Wilson is a fine protagonist, and Rachel McAdams is deliciously shallow and mean as his fiancée.  Michael Sheen gets to imagine what the McLuhan “fan” outside the theatre in Annie Hall (1977) might have been like as a more-rounded character.  Marion Cotillard is the pleasant diversion she must be for the plot to move along.  If, like Chekhov’s gun, a firearm introduced in the first act must be fired in the second, Léa Seydoux proves that every pretty girl dwelled upon in an Allen movie must become a love interest.  The conceit at the heart of this film is that, having once gotten lost at midnight, Owen’s character Gil can find his way back to the same spot each evening in order to ride in a vintage automobile back to the 1920s.  Try not to think about it too much – after leaving Ernest Hemingway in a bar, Gil loses ninety years in a flash, but at other moments he can walk around Jazz Age Paris at will by himself – and you can have a lot of fun.  Allen allows himself the farcical touches that season his best work: Adrien Brody’s Salvador Dali, obsessed with rhinoceroses; Detective Tisserant pursued through Versailles; Gil outlining the eventual plot of The Exterminating Angel (1962) to a bemused Luis Bunuel.  Paris, present, past, and more distant past, is beautiful onscreen.

But the lingering question I have after watching Midnight in Paris has to do with the background an audience must possess to engage with art, a question interrogated by my class in the Fall as they struggled through the footnotes to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.  Obviously, to enjoy fully what Woody Allen is doing in this film you need, at minimum, to know that American writers spent profitable time in Paris between the world wars.  This is what motivates Gil.  It helps to know Scott Fitzgerald, though you might wonder if – “old sport” – he really spoke as did his most famous character.  Do you appreciate Hemingway, all puffed up and played as a caricature here, unless you know enough about him to know that Allen collapses three or four stages of his development into the mid-to-late-1920s?  If you know that much, you might know that he was not speaking to Gertrude Stein by this time, and so he would never take Gil to Stein’s salon, where he meets the brother from whom, in reality, she had been long estranged.  You will not catch Gil’s joke about Djuna Barnes being butch unless you know enough to know that Eliot would have likely slammed the door on him for complimenting, ten years later, the juvenilia that first made the poet, by this time turned to serious poetry of religious iconography, a sensation.

Look, I am not trying to be a “Paul,” the pedantic lecturer Allen has Michael Sheen play in order, for all I know, to deflect this kind of nitpicking.  By all means, as I said, suspend your disbelief and have some fun in an era I have studied for twenty years.  But, as I sat on the couch, thrilled at the unearthing of Bricktop while questioning the commercial value of certain modernist canvases before the Stock Market Crash, I marveled at how difficult it is for any artist to rely on an audience to bring some knowledge, just enough, but not too much, to get the most out of a work of the imagination.

Ron Sexsmith, Love Shines

I caught the Ron Sexsmith bug about ten years ago when I bought his Blue Boy album on a whim.  I remember very clearly hearing the horns on “This Song” and being a little put off by the overproduction of that first cut, but I was immediately won over by the simple brilliance of his lyrics: for “Cheap Hotel,” for “Just My Heart Talkin,” and for just about every other song on that CD, on all his previous recordings, and on each of the recordings he has released since.  Blue Boy, in some sense, was an anomaly: roots and country legend Steve Earle, from the producer’s chair, had Sexsmith work in a variety of genres, and yet the lyrics kept outshining everything else about the record.

Long Player Late Bloomer, Sexsmith’s twelfth album, has been out for a couple of months.  Produced this time by Bob Rock, the CD sets out to achieve for Sexsmith a big radio hit, a money maker.  The musical accompaniment is polished, and the vocals are robust.  But there is no evidence that Long Player Late Bloomer will rival Lady Gaga’s Born This Way.

Douglas Arrowsmith’s documentary examines the phenomenon of a Canadian legend, a critical darling, who cannot afford a washer and dryer for his home.  Love Shines sets out the contrast between critical acclaim and commercial success, but it ultimately fails to answer a fundamental question about how professional musicians make money.  Ron Sexsmith has had twelve albums, and his songs have been covered by artists who sell more records.  After Napster, after iTunes, CD sales figures seem quaint.  So what does Sexsmith have to do, practically, to be able to afford to bring his band on the road with him?  Even in the age of e-books, I know that you can support writers by buying a novel and buying a couple more to give friends.  How does the average fan support a favorite, underappreciated singer/songwriter?

What I found most interesting about Love Shines was the footage of Sexsmith in the studio with Rock and the session musicians.  Though a life-long music fan, I still find the process of record producing rather opaque.  It was interesting to see how Sexsmith would approach his producer with a lyric and a melody – and how Rock layered sound atop it.  It is clear that the words themselves are most important to Sexsmith and that he has always seemed open to packaging those words in a way that reaches more people.  It is not just about the money, he attests, and you believe him.  But you can feel the frustration of a man who has the admiration of some of the world’s greatest musicians but whose work lacks the cultural pervasiveness that would spell greater security.  Steve Earle is correct; Sexsmith is most fortunate that people even know his name.  Heck, Elvis Costello says that Sexsmith has revived for him “Every Day I Write The Book”!  However, Sexsmith needed a fortieth birthday gift in order to secure a piano, the tool of his trade, and, at some point, critical acclaim is not enough.

Paying For Previews

Back when I frequented the movie theatre regularly, back before ushers turned a blind eye to rows and rows of patrons talking back to the screen, I made sure that my friends and I always showed up in time for the previews.  (That is not true, strictly speaking: I recall as a kid being ten minutes late for Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Imagine going for years without being aware of the opening scenes of that film!)  I still figure that if you are going out, dodging bedbugs and pools of spilled soda, you owe it to yourself to get the full media experience.  As I sat in a dingy art house in Oxford in the mid-1990s, waiting for my weekly dose of kitchen-sink realism, I was blown away by ninety seconds of the upcoming Pulp Fiction.  My head was spinning!  What a reminder of the artistic range of film, itself.  Previews are essential to the theatre experience, much as they were essential to the experience of going to the drive-in.

Previews are not, however, essential to the home theatre experience.  Do you remember when your DVD had, in its main menu, a section for “Coming Attractions”?  If you fancied pretending that your living room was a movie theatre, you could always practice staying quiet…  Or you could choose to watch five or ten minutes of trailers.  Of course, these would be previews of other films from the company that produced your DVD and unlikely to be relevant to you in the same way, say, that the trailers for a horror film in the theatre would also be for horror films.  Now, however, if instead of going to the theatre, you choose not to wait for the movie network premiere, you can plunk down $25 for the Blu-Ray and be forced to sit through previews.  Press “top menu” and be told that “this function is unavailable.”

I accept fully that I have to be told, for the twenty-five thousandth time, that I could go to jail for copying the film I just bought, but I do not know why – for example – I have to be told, when waiting to watch The King’s Speech, that I should see The Fighter.  I saw it last month!

The principle, as I understand it, is that should you choose to take advantage of free (or cheaper) content, you have to put up with some inconvenience.  The free version of apps can have ads.  The free New York Times Book Review podcast should have advertisements: it makes the enterprise possible.  The basic cable version of films on AMC are butchered and bogged down by long segments of ads.  But if I pay a premium, I expect a certain degree of convenience.  My cable and internet bill is well beyond $100 a month.  But when I press display on my cable box, I see all the channels I do not get.  What is that if not an advertisement that runs 24/7?

How much money would someone have to pay to be exempted from the soft sell, that pressure to buy more even after we have been sold?

Adults, The Next Three Days, and Overdetermination

It is nice to think that Hollywood is still making films for adults.  I was struck by this thought as I sat in the dark, watching John Brennan (Russell Crowe) talk with lawyer Meyer Fisk (Daniel Stern).  Neither of these men were wizards; neither of these men were zombies; neither of these men were threatening to challenge the other to a dance-off.  The Next Three Days is a film made for adults, but where are they?  Made for $35 million, it grossed only $6.5 million on its first weekend.  Now, our theatre was packed on Saturday night, but I had to wonder if, perhaps, Harry Potter had simply sold out.  Many people arrived just as the film was starting, grumbling that there were no rows left with nine or ten vacant seats.  Between the conversations shared by the people sitting behind us, it sounded like they were actually putting their heads in their bags of popcorn.  But, no mind: even if people still cannot differentiate between screening a film at home and talking through one in public, The Next Three Days kept people rapt, for the most part, for its slightly over-long 122 minutes.

As the film opens, we learn that Lara Brennan (Elizabeth Banks) has had a row with her boss; the next morning, she tries to rinse an incriminating blood stain from her coat and is promptly arrested for murder.  But this film is no trial procedural: we next see Lara on remand, awaiting her appeal.  Though spared state prison, temporarily, her Pittsburgh jail is described as impenetrable, but that is mere inconvenience for John, a community-college English instructor with an internet connection and the stomach to troll the American underclass for the resources necessary to attempt a breakout.  Paul Haggis’s script is rooted in John’s planning, but its early pacing pales only in comparison with the masterful, breakneck last half hour.  The Next Three Days wants to be a film about priorities and about personal sacrifice, but for the sake of time it has to take too much for granted to develop those emphases fully.  John simply loves his wife and will do anything for her.

Now, of course, I will not tell you whether or not John is successful in breaking Lara out of jail.  You will discover that on your own.  But you will also discover whether or not Lara is actually guilty of killing her boss.  And my question remains: why do we really need to know?  John makes tremendous sacrifices for his wife; he is willing to sacrifice everything for her.  Whether or not she really deserves that kind of devotion seems beside the point.  I would have been happy never really knowing whether Mr. Brennan’s assumption of Mrs. Brennan’s innocence was valid.  If he did not care, ultimately, why is the audience satisfied only when everything is explained?

Its Business Model Flawed, Blockbuster Still Will Be Missed

I was on my way to Vancouver when I heard the news that Blockbuster had filed for bankruptcy in the United States. Though we are told that operations in Canada are separate, and the business here is solvent, I think the writing is on the wall. The next morning, I was watching CTV News in our hotel room, and some business analyst was dancing on Blockbuster's grave, recommending that its employees in Canada start sending out resumes. I have suggested here before that the video rental company has become some manner of private-sector media library, and I do think that, short-term, at least, we will miss the service Blockbuster offers. Bill Maher, on the other hand, worries for their only remaining "customer."

My wife and I would very much like to see Harry Brown, the recent Michael Caine film. It did not show on Cineplex Odeon screens in Lethbridge, enjoying instead a brief engagement at our second-run theater. For some reason, although it has been released to video, it is not available on Shaw's pay-per-view or video-on-demand services; so, after fumbling around in the junk drawer for our membership card on a recent weekend, we made our way to Blockbuster. There were three shelves covered with cardboard cut-outs of the DVD and Blu-Ray cover: all copies were signed out. In an attempt to lure renters, of course, Blockbuster lets you keep films for various lengths of time, and so there was no way to know, even, if any copies were soon expected back. This, in essence, is the weakness of Blockbuster's business model. Everyone wants the same movie during the first few weeks after its release, and then the store is stuck with more copies than it will ever need for its catalog. That catalog seems to have little rhyme or reason. Professors will scan those shelves in the first weeks of the semester to find old film versions of things related to their teaching: where else to find a copy of The Return of Martin Guerre or Orlando?

I own these titles, of course, because I set out to rent them regularly for my classes and the classes of my colleagues. And, as I have observed, the lesson seems to be increasingly that we should buy what we would like to watch: hence, the purchase price that rivals the rental price. But any thought that I should buy Harry Brown on spec is simply conspicuous consumption, the same logic by which I recently returned from the U.S. with a used copy of 44 Inch Chest. Otherwise, that kind of discretionary screening will be at the whim of big media companies who will decide what and how we will watch. No Harry Brown on Shaw? What about if one needed a specific title to teach or for a child's birthday party? Will copyright and licensing issues limit individual carriers?  Will we need new and awkward subscriptions to something?  How much bandwidth will we all need to secure for this brave new world? One thing is for certain: access will not be secured at the mom and pop operations Blockbuster drove out of business. As has been the case for some time, large companies will decide how many art house films it will be profitable to make widely available. Will they be more enlightened than Cineplex Odeon has been?

Culture Bought, Sold, and Borrowed

I read an article last week about the best movie twists of the past twenty years. One of the films discussed was Jacob's Ladder (1990), the early Tim Robbins vehicle. It has been about twenty years since I saw it. If I wanted to do so this week, what could I do?

Until recently, of course, I could go to the video store and rent it. Buried along dusty shelves were catalogue titles that were barely touched. New releases kept these stores open, but there was something quaint about the collection of older films, available for a week for a couple of dollars. It is bad enough that everyone started downloading new releases or renting them through the mail, but distributors began selling through retail outlets enough catalogue items for five bucks to hobble every rental outlet on the continent.

The video store business model is broken. It was never the greatest undertaking, of course. Everyone who comes in the door wants the same title in its first week of release, and the rest of the stock gets picked over slowly over months or years. But it has provided a valuable service. I am old enough to remember when, in a three-channel universe (or even a twenty-channel universe), the scheduled airing of an old movie was an event. On-demand expectations have changed that reality for many people and left other people behind.

Netflix, the American operation that got started in the mail-order rental niche occupied in this country by Zip, is coming to Canada to expand online services. If, today, I do not want to download Jacob's Ladder, tomorrow I will be able to stream it. But astute observers have already commented on how moving in this direction will require us all to upgrade our computer hardware and buy the capacity to access more content online. How will ISPs who also provide movie content deal with its customers who want more capacity in order to buy services from their competitors? And, as is the case with everything from digitized archives to online retailing, who is asking questions about putting our culture, with increasing exclusivity, into the hands of fewer and fewer for-profit media conglomerates?

I am not suggesting that our culture was in safer hands when copies of its artifacts were in corner stores. But through those years I, at least, chuckled at libraries collecting CDs and VHS tapes, believing it nothing more than a sop to potential library patrons that had no interest in books. Now, with our physical artifacts no longer surrounding us, I have a new respect for the archival function of multimedia libraries.

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.