The Classroom Conservative

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.

Some DVD Wishes for (Next) Christmas

The delightful Warren Clements recently ran a column in the Globe and Mail discussing film and television titles not (yet) available on DVD.  It often amazes me that in a society driven, largely, by leisurely consumption, there is anything we cannot get.  Still, there were some genuine surprises in the column, like John Huston’s The African Queen (1951), for example, but none of my Christmas DVD wishes made his list.  So, here, in no particular order, are a few things I would like to see available before Santa Claus starts thinking about next year’s gifts:

   

1. Far From the Madding Crowd (1967).  John Schlesinger directed this beautiful, sweeping adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel more than forty years ago.  Julie Christie is the most stunning woman in the world in her portrayal of the frustratingly shallow Bathsheba Everdene, and Terence Stamp is sufficiently smarmy in playing Frank Troy, the bad boy she should ignore.  Peter Finch is memorable as the jilted William Boldwood, driven beyond the edge by Bathsheba’s shabby treatment.  But Alan Bates steals the show as the unbelievably loyal Gabriel Oak who shows us the value of persistence – and a short memory.  The scene when Fanny Robin is brought home and mourned is haunting.

   

2. The Sound and the Fury (1959).  The DVD age has not been kind to Yul Brenner, a huge screen star of the 1950s and 1960s.  This is only one of his notable performances not available on home formats.  This adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel about the dysfunctional Compson family does not do justice to the greatest work of American prose of the twentieth century, but its absence from library shelves is still mourned by generations of students looking for a quick crib.  Sadly for them, and for us, director Martin Ritt appears to have misunderstood Jason Compson’s obsessive, controlling nature, softening just a little too much Brenner’s complex, tortured performance.  Joanne Woodward makes a captivating (girl) Quentin.

   

3. Leave it to Beaver (1957-63).  One of a handful of indispensible American situation comedies of the fifties, Leave it to Beaver saw two seasons recently hit the market with considerable aplomb.  Unfortunately, claims of “rights issues” that have postponed indefinitely the last four seasons suggest to me unsatisfactory retail numbers.  Thus, we may be a long time catching up with the later antics of the Cleaver family, and that is a shame for Tony Dow, whose Wally came increasingly to steal the show from his brother Beaver (Jerry Mathers).  Hugh Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley set an impossible standard as parents to two precocious boys, showing contemporary viewers that American culture has long established for itself ideals steeped in nostalgic longing – even in a period now viewed nostalgically.

   

4. Hatching, Matching, and Dispatching (2005).  God bless the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  The bigwigs at Fort Dork, thus coined by television critic John Doyle, are torn between showing us what we are and showing us what they think we should be.  As a result, Canadian programming is often sanitized, politically-correct pabulum.  Occasionally, when those bigwigs at Fort Dork fall asleep at the switch, we get some genuine television.  This happened most recently in 2005 with Mary Walsh’s vision of outport Newfoundland, Hatching, Matching, and Dispatching.  The Furey family is the dynasty of Cats Gut Cove, controlling ambulance service, wedding planning, and funeral details.  The resulting humor is dark and irreverent, and it represents perhaps Walsh’s most complete vision ever.  The supporting cast is a virtual who’s who of Newfoundland talent, and even Ron Hynes, the most talented Newfoundlander ever, contributes theme music.  C’mon, byes, Jesus!  Would a single disc series retrospective kill ya?

   

5. Plonsters.  It is no surprise that adults like television programming for children.  Spongebob Squarepants, anyone?  Long after the kids grow up, the slackers amongst us make up a profitable audience for the DVD release of original episodes.  The Plonsters are a German creation, three clay monsters who can shape shift at will.  The two (older?) characters never wish to play with the third, but they always end up getting taught a life lesson by him, anyway.  The premise is simple, the execution utterly brilliant.  To appeal to an international audience, the Plonsters talk a gibberish language sure to appeal to the same young adult crowd who watch, say, the Aqua Teen Hunger Force.  Canadian television used to get stray vignettes, but the series has a real following in Australia.  Check out this YouTube link to see what I am talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crx_X4Y-7G4.  Someone in North America could make a mint marketing this stuff.

Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

When I was a boy following baseball closely, I used to imagine that I was a general manager assembling a team of all-stars.  In those early days of unrestricted free agency, long before salary caps, I was able to field in my imagination, at least, a murderers’ row of sluggers that would strike fear in the heart of any opposing pitcher.  I never stopped to consider how these fellows might function as a team.  Could these guys have fielded worth a darn?  How might they have run the bases?  Who knows if their individual egos would have brought the whole thing crashing down?

   

I wonder if producing a film is like being a baseball general manager.  Director Tim Burton has brought together his dream team for a screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: Johnny Depp, who has done his best work under Burton’s direction; Helena Bonham Carter, who bears his children as well as his gothic quirks; Timothy Spall, who rides in with a deserved reputation as the best supporting player going; Sacha Baron Cohen, whose outrageous pedigree threatens the unpredictable; Alan Rickman, who has played some of contemporary film’s most memorable villains.  Such a cast cannot miss, and they do not.  Sweeney Todd has love and song, revenge and gore.  But if utter perfection is its aim, it falls just short.

 

Depp is the title character, the alter ego of Benjamin Barker, wrongly imprisoned by Judge Turpin, who lusts for the innocent man’s wife.  Returning to London, Todd seeks revenge by resuming his trade as a barber, aided by the widow Mrs. Lovett, whose struggling meat pie business is revived through her new tenant’s ability to secure fresh protein.  Both Todd and Lovett are blinded, he by a longing for revenge and she by a longing for love, and the story teaches us, ultimately, about the perils of obsession.

   

Johnny Depp acquits himself well in his singing, though his vacant stare is cribbed from Edward Scissorhands (1990).  The wonderful Dan Savage, writing in The Stranger, takes serious issue with Bonham Carter’s voice.  She tends to be shrill, but I found her presence magnificent.  In fact, both Depp and Bonham Carter are so captivating that they overshadow entirely the love story between Johanna, Benjamin Barker’s daughter, and Anthony Hope.  Baron Cohen delivers the delightful goods, but he gets his scenes stolen from him by newcomer Ed Sanders, playing knavish youngster Toby.  My problem is actually with Rickman and Spall, who for whatever reason are not nearly menacing enough.  As Judge Turpin and Beadle Bamford, respectively, they just cannot match Sweeney Todd.

   

But who could?  If you don’t like blood on the big screen, the songs won’t quite compensate for this experience.  I recommend strapping yourself to the barber’s chair for one of the most unique couple of hours you will spend at the cinema this Christmas.  The look of the film is, itself, worth the ticket price.

No Country for Old Men, Novel Edges Film Adaptation

Cormac McCarthy is perhaps the most important novelist writing in the United States today.  While Oprah Winfrey has famously recommended his dystopic The Road (2006) for her book club, many people see the gothic Blood Meridian (1985) as his masterpiece.  I first confronted his genius in tackling his “Border Trilogy”: All The Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998).  Though McCarthy there has a big canvas on which to sketch some of his favorite ideas, I have always been impressed with how those books define his style.  The novelist, for example, describes well the sweeping landscapes of Mexico and the American southwest.  But McCarthy also has a more elusive skill in detailing the intricacies of simple processes.  I have always believed that an affectionate parody of Cormac McCarthy might be a five-page description of a man replacing a lightbulb.

   

The recent release of the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men, McCarthy’s 2005 novel, presages upcoming film versions of The Road and Blood Meridian.  Where All The Pretty Horses, helmed by Billy Bob Thornton in 2000 with Matt Damon and Penny Cruz, got bogged down in detail and is virtually unrecognizable in its two-hour bowdlerized version, No Country for Old Men is almost pitch perfect.  Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin in his best performance to date, discovers more than two million dollars, the detritus of a drug deal gone horribly wrong.  Moss hits the road, trailed by hired killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who makes the transition from page to screen as this generation’s most memorable psychopath.  The Coens alternate between scenes of Chigurh’s depravity and cat-and-mouse pursuit between the killer and Moss.  That the climax of this pursuit does not even involve Chigurh speaks to the apparent randomness of life, but it also proves what one might suspect: the story is really about Sheriff Ed Bell, a role Tommy Lee Jones was born to play.  Bell discovers that the United States, a decade clear of the idealism of the summer of love, is no country for him, but he also concludes that there is now no other place where a traditionalist might feel at home.

   

I enjoyed the film a great deal: the Coens share McCarthy’s eye for landscape, think Raising Arizona (1987) or Fargo (1996), and the scene here where Moss wounds Chigurh is as gripping as anything in Blood Simple (1984).  But while Javier Bardem gives the killer a singularity of purpose appropriate for an embodiment of pure evil, the script gives us only glimpses of the profundity that makes him truly resonate in the novel.  I also wondered about a relatively minor choice that had, for me, a significant impact.  In the book, Llewelyn Moss befriends a young runaway, and even his brief exchanges with this girl provide a contrast to his muted relationship with his wife.  Carla Jean Moss is a most interesting character: she is done to instead of doing, her fate decided, indirectly, by a conversation between her husband and the man who seeks to kill him.  Carla Jean concludes, incorrectly, that Llewelyn is unfaithful.  And by not writing into the film the character of the runaway, the woman behind this complication, the Coens lose the opportunity to explore the tragic poignancy of misunderstanding.  There is plenty of other tragedy here, of course: we see that we cannot control our own lives, let alone the lives of others.  But, for me, McCarthy’s novel still edges out a fine effort from the Coens; McCarthy is sure to remind us that, in a random and indifferent world, we cannot control what people think about us, either.

Pierrepoint, The Last Executioner – Or Timothy Spall, Unlikely Movie Star

I watched last weekend Pierrepoint, The Last Executioner.  It was a “new release” rental; I am not sure it ever played at the wonderful Globe or Uptown theatres in Calgary, so there was never any chance of it playing at our unimaginative multiplex in Lethbridge.  The Adrian Shergold film gives us another example of excellent British storytelling as we follow the adult life of Albert Pierrepoint, a grocery deliveryman who became the most trusted executioner in England.  I was fascinated to see how one might have become a hangman, “learned the ropes” quite literally; I was fascinated to see how capital punishment might have been handled in the British justice system.  It seems as though Pierrepoint was able to compartmentalize his feelings on overnight trips to various prisons, maintaining a steely determination until called upon to hang an acquaintance.  By emphasizing Pierrepoint’s cold-bloodedness, The Last Executioner sets out a potent argument against capital publishment, but it is never dogmatic in its politics.  After executing the most vile Nazi war criminals, Pierrepoint is treated as a celebrity, for example, though his renown turns to infamy as public opinion turns against executions in England.

   

Here, Timothy Spall is brilliant once more in the role of Albert Pierrepoint.  He is nothing less than a legend in British cinema, distinguishing himself in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (1996), Topsy-Turvy (1999), and All or Nothing (2002).  If you are unfamiliar with these excellent films, you might know Mr. Spall from his work as Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter movies.  A plain and stout man, he is an unlikely matinee idol.  But Albert Pierrepoint did not look like Matt Damon, and so there is little use in casting, say, Jude Law or Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the role.  Indeed, Pierrepoint appears to have been a fairly unassuming man whose fame and later notoriety demanded some accommodation on his part.  One must wonder if Mr. Spall ever feels this way.  There is no obvious equivalent to Mr. Spall’s popularity in England amongst North American actors.  If Paul Giamatti, who parlayed his unlikely success in Sideways (2004) into meaty parts in Cinderella Man (2005), The Illusionist (2006), and The Lady in the Water (2006), attained a position of affection akin to Jimmy Stewart, he might get close.

   

I do not want to suggest that there is no celebrity culture in Great Britain.  They have a ferocious tabloid press, and everyone reading these words will remember how Princess Diana was fed to it.  London has a legitimate claim to being the most glamorous city in the world.  But England also has interesting remnants of its age-old class system, perhaps best summed up by the phrase “a place for everything and everything in its place.”  Britain has regular folks who aspire to being regular folks, and you can even see some of them on television and in magazines.  With our celebrity obsession in North America, does it ever seem like all our regular folks aspire to be celebrities?  Thanks to our plastic surgery epidemic, we can all look like celebrities, at the very least.  The “American Dream” promises us all that we can accomplish anything if we put our minds to it, and so any failure to be rich and beautiful must be our own.  No wonder we are uncomfortable with any role model who hasn’t walked off the pages of GQ.