For Blake

     My best friend, one of my only two subscibers (and my heartiest supporter), died a year ago today. He enjoyed the few posts I made and always encouraged me to write more. A lot has happened since his passing. And even more since I wrote my last post here. So today, on the day he went Home to Jesus, I sit down at this keyboard and type a blog entry in his honor, and in hopes of keeping up with it (for real) this time.

     Blake was a fighter. He fought three battles against cancer. And though he lost the last, he won the war. He never quit, and he finished what he started. In my last post I said that I had a hand written review for Following (a film Roger never reviewed). I still do indeed have it, but in lieu of my recent move to a lovely apartment where I live with my partner, it is boxed up somewhere. Frett not, it will be posted when I fish it out of its box. But for now I wanted to post something else...

     In many reviews and blog-posts past, Roger has expressed a sentiment that I want to echo (in paraphrase): It is not just the story that is told, but the way in which it is told. "The way in which" lies almost primarily in the hands of a films' director. A screenplay will come to life (being either helped or hurt) through his or her vision. With Golden Globe noms coming out tomorrow and the Oscars right around the corner, I have been in thought about directors who have escalated their movies' screenplays and made them more than they ever could have been just living a lifetime on the page. I am not neccessarily championing that they all be nominated for Best Director, but I want to explore what they have done in their respective films through wise casting, stylistic decisions, and that adding of their "personal touch".

     These directors and their films are as follows: Mike Mills who both wrote and directed Beginners, Lynne Ramsay who co-wrote and directed We Need to Talk About Kevin (not yet reviewed by Roger, I'll link it when he does), Jeff Nichols who wrote and directed Take Shelter, and Nicholas Winding Refn who directed Drive. One can note that all but one of these 4 directors either wrote or was involved in writing their own screenplays. Those three must have had clear visions in their minds of the films they wanted to make since two of the three scripts are extremely sparse in dialogue, and the other (Beginners) is filled with dialogue that could have been so easily mishandled.

     I had the privilege of seeing Beginners at the Sarasota Film Festival long before its eventual release. Mike Mills was in attendance and hosted a Q & A after the screening. I was fascinated to find that the film I had just watched was based on his personal experience of when his elderly father came out of the closet. I have always said that regardless of story or style, if one populates a film with fully fleshed out characters in every role (even supporting) and gives them the freedom to make real decisions not bound by the confines of a contrived script, that I will love the movie. I loved this movie for that reason and coming to the understanding that the majority of what I had seen was real, it made that much more sense. Being so close to the source material obviously gave Mills an adavantage, but lets explore some of the more unexpected directorial decisions he makes...

     The film is a comedy of sorts. Being so close and emotionally involved in his own story, Mills could easily have made a grittier film marred with the sorrow of his father's passing to cancer. Instead he makes the stylistic decision to make his story a cinematic fairy tale. He embraces the film-fairy-tale cliches of the wise old father, the naive ingenue, the strapping young hero. He employs such devices as a "meet-cute" and the classical "love-story-music-montage" and even a cute puppy to aide his hero. But Mills never seems confined by the parameters of "romantic comedy", but rather floats freely inside them -sowing a story filled with pain, confusion, and reality. Thus reaping a harvest from the soils of "romantic comedy". Soils that never seemed capable of yeilding such a crop. It was so unexpected to find my "fully fleshed out characters" existing untethered in a genre where characters are so rarely free.

     Mills takes his film further still though through another wise directorial decision. His film, so deeply personal, could have simply been a great character study living in an unexpected genre. But Mills takes his film off "the island" (allow me to explain).

     "Island films" are something that readers of the blog will hear about frequently. They are films that are good to suberb in their own right, but are contained to themselves (like an island). They have nothing to say about our world or the nature of humanity, or who we've become as a country, or what brought us to the state of existence we live in. "Island films" may even have something to say about the very real human emotions of their OWN characters but they remains just a character study of those SPECIFIC characters -never synecdoch-izing (the verb form of synecdoche that isn't actually a word, but I will use frequently in this blog) their stories to the the bigger story of our humanity.

     Back to Beginners, being a personal character study based on his own life, Mills could have stayed within the specificity of his own story, but instead he synecdoch-izes (there it is again) it to who people are as a whole. He inserts voiceovers that play over shots of old-time America and explain that these shots were America in say 1965 for example, these shots showed men in 1965, these shots showed women. And these shots showed love. Then there would more shots but of the present and with voiceover explaining so. These short breakaways from the plot (one opens the film, and they appear throughout it) broaden its story from being confined to the people in it and the time in which it took place. They open up the experiences of the films specific charcters into becoming the experiences of all who have coped with issues of identity and the question of how to love when one has never seen how to.

     There are three more directors to go, I hope you'll tune in next time. It's good to be back, and it's been a pleasure typing this in Blake's honor. I'll end with a film recommendation, one that like Beginners synecdoch-izes its story to the greater human experience. This one was Blake's favorite: A Serious Man. Blake, I'll never stop trying to be a serious man. This blog's for you.