In Bill Forsyth‘s film “Housekeeping” (1987), following the suicide of their mother, two young sisters begin life anew, often discontentedly, with a friendly but eccentric aunt, Sylvie. The piece is thoughtful and never pretentiously directed or acted. I don’t know what Marilynn Robinson’s novel, the movie’s source, is actually about, but the film is about lives that are threadbare. This is a theme, and so is that of self-improvement which life of the young understandably demands. . . Forsyth said the movie is “a commercial to get people to read the novel.” A humble opinion. But despite its story not being consistently expert, “Housekeeping”‘s acting by Christine Lahti (Sylvie) and other thespians makes it rather more than such a commercial.
Jake, a black pastor in The Second Chance (2006), is abrasive and insulting, although at other times he is too good to be true. Not a well-drawn character.
Ethan, a white associate pastor, is poorly acted by Michael W. Smith. Steve Taylor’s Christian movie doesn’t work. It has a good feel for inner city life, but is sometimes less than credible: e.g. Ethan doesn’t seem to be secretly hoping other people are watching him give alms in the ‘hood, and yet this is what mean Jake repeatedly accuses him of.
Cover of The Second Chance
Early in the film “Outcast of the Islands” (1951), the Englishman Willems (Trevor Howard) is rejected by one person after another, including his wife. A thief and a swindler, the man is then given a second chance by the decent Captain Linguard (Ralph Richardson), who hires Willems for work (?) at a trading outpost near the coast of Indonesia. Finely, luminously made by director Carol Reed and his team, the film is an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad novel which I’ve never read. The near-message is: Once a reprobate, always a reprobate.
Willems develops an intense sexual desire for an island girl named Aissa (Karima). The two get together. Willems is masculine enough but also whiny, rather puny. Indeed, in primitive Aissa’s eyes he lacks manly honor; she can only have contempt for him. Yet she is isolated with him, underscored in a powerful final scene. “Outcast” is about man as pariah. Too, there is the theme of humanitarianism (Linguard’s) vs. treachery (Willems’).
Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi was a devout Catholic who wrote and directed a movie about devout Catholics at the end of the nineteenth century. These people are peasants, enacted by actual peasants living in Italy’s Bergamo province. Olmi’s rumination of them, in “The Tree of Wooden Clogs” (1978), is almost sentimental but Christianly kind and respectful too. Children are plentiful; most of the adults are true Christians, and the film’s religiosity, its spirituality, is real and felt.
The peasants seem mainly unconcerned with politics; they’re concerned about surviving. A widow with several children will be done for if she does not receive a miracle of recovery for her sick cow, and after praying she does receive it. The people here work and they love God. The film shows the real-life killing of a pig which is an act the peasants would do anyway for sustenance. It’s rather captivating: there is a God-man-animal hierarchy in “Tree.”
Olmi died in 2018, leaving behind a prodigious number of feature films and shorts. “The Tree of Wooden Clogs” is one of his best.
(In Italian with English subtitles)
In the 1950s, the New Jersey restaurant of two Italian brothers, Primo and Secondo, is failing badly. This—part of the premise of the 1996 movie “Big Night”—is sad, but also evident is that Secondo (Stanley Tucci) is failing badly morally. For one thing, he cheats on his girlfriend Phyllis (Minnie Driver). Secondo is an undeserving immigrant and businessman; not so Primo. Does it matter if he fails? On the other hand, his Italian-American competitor, Pascal (a perfect Ian Holm), is also undeserving, but successful.
The cast of “Big Night” is sapid and endearing. This includes Campbell Scott, who co-directed the film with Tucci. It is a very good food flick, like “Eat Drink Man Woman”—good because artistic, and not without the Right Music on its soundtrack: “Buona Sera” and “Oh Marie” by Louis Prima, “Tic Ti, Tic Ta” by Claudio Villa, “Don’t Take Your Love Away” by Keely Smith, etc. Delicious.