Matt Dillon‘s drug addict and thief in the 1989 film, Drugstore Cowboy, declares that no one can talk a junkie out of being a user.  The pic is so dark that apparently this includes the junkie himself: he is incapable of such a feat.  It is not so much the drug life DC‘s script is bleak about, although it is, as life itself, a vision director Gus Van Sant delivers with fey, carefree poetry and brittle humor.  It is the best Van Sant film I know of.  Only standard-issue acting emanates from Kelly Lynch and Heather Graham, but Dillon is outstanding.

Cover of Drugstore Cowboy

David O. Russell’s Joy (2015) may do a better job of showing the difficult struggle of building a manufacturing business than any movie in history, but to me it gets rather boring and colorless during its second half.  It’s less interesting, in fact, than Atlas Shrugged Part 2, another film about business.  And it’s assuredly unprofound.  Russell directed it in an imaginative and resonant way, though.

In the early 2000s, a right-wing website propounded that Catholic seminaries possibly around the world had become havens for homosexual men.  If this is true, it is hardly the biggest shocker one could hear that out of these havens came priests who were pedophiles opting to sexually molest young boys (albeit girls were molested too) such as all those the movie Spotlight (2015) steadily refers to.  Only boys are referred to as the Boston Globe reporters interview the men who, as youths, encountered the perverted priests.

No, Spotlight is not a documentary, but rather a drama about the Globe‘s reportage on the molestation and Church cover-up scandal.  The vile Father John Geoghan is there, briefly, in the film’s prologue, after which, well over 20 years later, the Globe‘s new editor (Live Schreiber) proves curious about the Geoghan legal case.  Some of the best scenes in the movie feature the lawyers of victims as they speak to the reporters.  They are played by Stanley Tucci and Billy Crudup, and both they, and the scenes’ dialogue, are grabbers.  The engrossing, humorless screenplay is by the director, Tom McCarthy, and Josh Singer.  McCarthy and his cinematographer keep the fancy visuals out of Spotlight, with camerawork that is almost flavorless.  They know the spectator’s attention must be on the Globe‘s discoveries, on the deadly serious subject matter.

Memorably is the newspaper team enacted by John Slattery, Brian d’Arcy James, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo (who is superb), and Michael Keaton (as deep and effective as he was in Birdman).

Apropos of the 2008 book, The Believers, by Zoe Heller, who are the “believers” in this novel?

Well, Joel and Audrey Litvinoff are fervent believers in left-wing politics, as well as staunch atheists.  Their daughter Rosa, like her parents an ethnic Jew, is very slowly embracing orthodox Judaism, while the couple’s other daughter, Karla, is different.  She too is a left-wing believer but only because mom and dad are, and at bottom Karla believes in nothing but her own happiness.  Like her father Joel before a stroke leaves him comatose, she becomes an (unlikely) adulterer.

Heller does not question the Litvinoff’s politics, although she does make the progressive Audrey an extraordinarily nasty person—and one who smokes weed.  Joel, as I said, philanders.  The couple’s adopted son Lenny has been a drug addict.

As surely as Karla questions her marriage, however, Heller does thoughtfully question Judaism, and yet this is a religion Rosa ultimately wants.  Politics itself, the novel tells us, cannot be a religion, unable as it is to provide a sense of cosmic meaning.  Cosmic belief is in our midst, and the liberal and the illiberal alike—Audrey is quite illiberal in her conduct—don’t understand it and see it as a threat.  Even so, usually it is that which threatens our relationships with other people that hurts and worries us the most.  The characters believe in their own happiness, but without being as limited in their vision as Karla.

If The Believers is not quite faultless, it is, I think, close to it.  It is a fluidly written good read.

Cover of The Believers: A Novel

Of course, modern times in the 1936 Modern Times, by Charles Chaplin, means the Depression.  Chaplin’s Tramp and Paulette Goddard need work, and although they find it, they unexpectedly lose it.  But then find it again.  The objective is to stay one step ahead of hunger.  However, modern times means something else as well: that the world of industry dehumanizes workers for the sake of profit.

To bring the theme to the present, is this not what goes on today with wage theft?

The harried Tramp suffers in the satire, even being driven to a zany nervous breakdown.  He recovers, though, in what is a socially conscious but hilarious and very charming comedy.  Unfortunately, the film is pretty anticlimactic, but by the time the anticlimax is reached I’m tired of all the slapstick anyway.  That’s how I am about slapstick.  This despite my enjoyment of Modern Times, one of Chaplin’s best.

Cropped screenshot of Paulette Goddard from the trailer for the film So Proudly We Hail!. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Charlie Chaplin The Tramp debuted in 1914 — pre-1923 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)