Cover of Equus

1977 was a bad year for cinema.  Sidney Lumet‘s film version of the Peter Shaffer play, Equus, didn’t make it any better.

In Equus, we witness what amounts to a religious passion, for a nonexistent horse-god, and the morose psychiatrist (in the film, Richard Burton) who cures this passion.  But John Simon was right when he complained that the work “falls into that category of worn-out whimsy wherein we are told that insanity is more desirable, admirable, or just saner than sanity.”

The movie is dramatically underwhelming in a way the play, bad as it is, is not.  This fits in with how dismal it all is:  a nudity-filled, finally bloody piece of balderdash, this.  And if Simon was correct that it’s possible to read Equus as “a thinly veiled paean to pederasty,” it does not surprise me.  The most important character is a boy, and heterosexuality is not the most fulfilling thing in the world here.

Cover of The Palm Beach Story

Born into a rich family, director Preston Sturges was inspired to supply in The Palm Beach Story (1942) some generous millionaires and billionaires who help a financially pinched married couple, Tom and Gerry Jeffers (Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert).  So pinched are they, in fact, that Gerry sees herself as a financial albatross (and inadequate wife) for Tom and flees to Palm Beach for a divorce.  Really, though, the two love each other and so Tom pursues his misguided wife, only to find she now has a rich suitor (Rudy Vallee), led to believe that Tom is Gerry’s brother.

Colbert is charming and grounded in this unusual farce (whereas McCrea is strictly by-the-numbers) wherein Sturges again exhibits his love of slapstick.  Not only that:  he loves it when amusing lies are conjoined with heartwarming—or amusing—truth-telling.  Possibly this is because he knows there is consistent lying in fiction’s representations of romance; The Palm Beach Story is a romantic comedy.  What is also clearly true is that Mr. Preston knows how to lie like truth, which he does not do all the time but it is pleasing that he does do it.

Family Law (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Derecho de Familia (2004), a.k.a. Family Law, from Argentina, Perelman Sr. (Arturo Goetz) practices law.  His son, Perelman Jr. (Daniel Hendler), teaches legal ethics at a university, although he too practices law as a defense attorney.  That filmmaker Daniel Burman presents the vocational spheres of these two men, father and son, is the most agreeable thing about Family Law.  Otherwise there is nothing exceptional here.  Nothing new is being said, nothing particularly compelling is done.  It’s just a well-made film about a family.

What is being said?  A message about the burden of transience; the idea that grown sons recognize themselves in their fathers (as daughters do in their mothers); that anguish has a way of sneaking into any given father-son relationship.  Again, nothing new.  In truth the film is more intelligent than, say, Cronicas but is less challenging, less gripping, than that South American picture.  By no means do I wish to discourage anyone from seeing it, but I must wrap it up by asking a question:  Does Burman disapprove of Perelman Jr.’s unwillingness to degrade or embarrass himself in certain public activities involving his little son Gaston, e.g., dressing up as a clown?  If so, why?  Granted, like Perelman Sr. Perelman Jr. is not an ideal father but he isn’t a bad one either.  He has a lot to learn but . . . what is Burman getting at?

(In Spanish with English subtitles)

Great Expectations (1946 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A 1946 British film directed by David Lean, Great Expectations is a civilized and scintillating adaptation, with acting ranging from extraordinary to ordinary—most of it the former.  Consider Finlay Currie as Magwitch and Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham.  Almost needless to say, GE is visually finer and emotionally deeper than most of the Old Hollywood adaptations of classics, nifty as these can be (e.g. Cukor’s Little Women).  Granted, its simple humanitarianism is boring now, but at least the film avoids moralism.  And it itself isn’t boring.

I was worried that Martin Scorsese‘s Silence (2016), based on the fine Shusaku Endo novel, was ready to deem Christian apostasy no more unfortunate or dismaying than Christian commitment, but happily it refuses to do so.  The honest and truthful content in Endo’s book about tortured and executed Catholic believers in 17th century Japan is properly transferred to the film—making it a soberly Christian film—though perhaps with too little understanding of the inclinations of the faithful.

Two Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) sail to Japan to find a missionary padre (Liam Neeson) said to be “lost” to the Church.  This man, Father Ferreira, was a real-life figure driven to apostasy by torture, albeit before his death he supposedly recanted.  When Ferreira tells Father Rodrigues (Garfield) that Japanese converts who are martyred die not for Christ but for the ministering priests, it does not ring true at all.  Yet there is no one in the film to positively belie this.  To me this is a flaw, but at any rate Silence is benignly spiritual and winningly profound.  Its concerns must be respected.  The inhumanity and suffering are relentless, with one of those concerns being the silence of God while His servants are agonized.  The Japanese authorities might as well be ISIS or (possibly) the North Korean government.  But, truth to tell, it is Christ Who subtly prevails.

Scorsese’s movie is just as notable a work of art as the novel.  Its 165-minute length underscores that time keeps bringing to the Christians the necessity for making hard decisions, for thinking how to stave off further horror.  There is, sadly, much to figure out.