ABRAHAM RE-INTEPRETED FOR MODERNS

“The Hunted” (2003) is presented as a version of the Abraham story in the Old Testament, but is more like Rambo versus Rambo with a bit of McGyver.  The rehabilitation of nature in the film as innocent and beautiful gripped me at once since the scenery is all familiar to me.  Silver Falls is a park full of waterfalls one can walk behind and my family camped and picnicked there many times.  Portland, of course, is where I grew up.

The opening, which is meant to justify the behavior of the younger “Rambo,” played by Benecio del Toro, is a gruesome hellish version of Kosovo in which the world is on fire, civilians are gunned to death, and then an innocent little girl walks through the bodies, rescuing a stuffed animal.  There are three versions of this innocent little girl: this one, one on what seems to be a train, and the daughter of a girl friend.  

The girl friend is one of two women built like storks with pretty faces and chin-length hair.  The other one is on the side of the military.  One shelters and saves Benicio and the other tries to kill him.  (Friedkin had three two-year marriages to film industry women and then one that persists, a marriage to Sherry Lansing.  His mother, whom he describes as a saint, was an Operating Room nurse.)

One is probably well-justified in finding the forces of the movie in the director’s life.  (He’s 81.)  Friedkin’s family, Jewish, escaped persecution in Ukraine.  Some biographers say he was ambivalent about his father, a lovable underachiever.  So this is not a movie so much about the father, Abraham, and his dilemma, as it is the son’s story.  And it is about impossibly strong and resourceful men in a situation of deep paranoia —except that they are really trying to kill Benicio and the instrument of death is his “father/teacher” played by Tommy Lee Jones.  The struggle between two men, very much alike, produced by the world horror of war that begs the question of the power of God, is the core of the film.  

War in “Kosovo” begins the story.  Then we go to Silver Falls where Benicio is hiding out in the way that old Steve Solovich  (see 12/28/04 post on this blog), various Vietnam survivors, and a few wanted criminals have done.  Parallel, Tommy Lee Jones appears to have a cabin in BC and saves a white wolf from a nasty wire snare.  This establishes his creds as a good man, though his job is to kill Benicio who has such an extreme case of PTSD that he has to be rubbed out.

He finds Benicio with no trouble and there is a struggle between the two men, equally matched and beautifully choreographed, ended by the arrival of “god” or the equivalent coalition of federal agents: CIA, FBI, etc.  Naturally Benicio escapes, goes to the girl friend’s house in NW Portland, not far from where Ursula leGuin lives.  (That's not a plot point -- she's not in the film.)  Now we have a choreographed car chase, lots of crashing.  The narrow, steep streets of NW make an excellent labyrinth.

Next he enters an underground industrial world worthy of the Brit trope of coal mines but evidently an excavation for a sewage system — this symbolism isn’t in the Bible, but it echoes D.H. Lawrence and “Lord of the Rings.”  Come to think of this context, the wrestling of the two men — and let’s face it, that near-homosexual love/hate struggle at Silver Falls is much like the infamous 1969 scene in “Women in Love” where Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestle naked on the hearth — and the underground mud brings to mind the troglodytes rolling out of the ditch walls in “Lord of the Rings”.  H.G. Wells exploited these ideas — that underground is bestial and filthy while going up high is a kind exaltation.

After an exciting episode on Portland’s light rail — the traditional running-down-the hurtling-train roof — Benicio takes to the sky by climbing a bridge.  It’s not the Golden Gate, but good enough.  He jumps and washes up at the rapids and waterfalls of Oregon City which also is full of major industrial debris because the rushing water was once what powered factories there.  He is able to transform steel straps into the symbolic knife of Abraham while Tommy Lee is busy flint knapping a more primitive stone version of the same shape.  Can the old man still "take" the son?

This is a spoiler: Tommy Lee does not turn aside to kill a ram.  He kills his “son.”  This is a modern cynical version of the story.  Film students and philosophers will have a fine time unraveling it all.  Most people, esp. kids, will simply enjoy the action, which is certainly well-done as is the acting of the two opponents, equally fierce and implacable.  Then there are the sophisticated reviewers, who found it just another retelling of the familiar.  Beyond that are those who value myth and much deeper social forces, like the hellishness of the industrial, the constant fascistic pressure of Homeland Security types, and the Antaeus redemption of Mother Earth.

From Wikipedia:  “The technical adviser for the film was Tom Brown, Jr., an American outdoorsman and wilderness survival expert. The story is partially inspired by a real-life incident involving Brown, who was asked to track down a former pupil and Special Forces sergeant who had evaded capture by authorities. This story is told in Tom's book, Case Files Of The Tracker.”

“The unusually realistic, brutal hand-to-hand combat and knife fighting in the film featured Filipino Martial Arts. Thomas Kier and Rafael Kayanan of Sayoc Kali were brought in by Benicio del Toro. They were credited as knife fight choreographers for the film.”

I loved seeing familiar places used this way, looking deeply into what is the ordinary for me, summoning up incidents from my family past, suggesting that they aren’t just local and personal but also the material of the arts, transformed by a vision.  This is not a film for the ages, but I think that for an action/horror movie it will age well.  Who among us does not feel a little hunted now and then — and hope for power?

FOLLOWING THE PATH TO HOME

The Homesman is a 2014 American period drama film set in the 1850s midwest produced and directed by Tommy Lee Jones and co-written with Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley Oliver, based on the 1988 novel of the same name by Glendon Swarthout. The film stars Jones and Hilary Swank and also features an ensemble cast that includes Meryl Streep, Hailee Steinfeld, John Lithgow, and James Spader.

This severe American prairie Western -- a genre that is often declared “over” and “clichéd -- is mostly about women -- which is another characteristic also often declared missing -- is strangely modern because the underlying subject is beyond gender roles.  At present many places on this planet are criss-crossed by migrating people, pushed partly by hope and partly by despair, across impossible landscapes.  Such migrations can be so massive that they change the planet.  On this continent, because the Euro diseases and empire builders had killed so many people, the climate was altered because the fires and fields of the autochthonous people were gone.  It had happened earlier when the Black Plague decimated Europe.  Today the climate has shifted because of too many people.  Some are getting crowded off the face of the earth.

Such huge movements are not just hard on bodies, but also minds.  The effects on men have been pretty much explored so far, but this film looks at American women displaced from their usual roles, dragged along in the service of their men, and tormented by the relentless production of babies.  The frequent deaths of the babies was one of the forces that drove them into the safety of insanity.  The were no meds, no vaccination, no awareness of the hormonal causes of postpartum depression which still -- even with meds -- can cause a woman to kill her babies.  It’s curious that Tommy Lee Jones and Clint Eastwood, who made their spurs portraying violent loners, have now picked up the archetype of the wagon train and the cattle drive -- the scout, the guide, the protector of those on the move.

Early Eastwood, novice cattle drover

Whenever there is a necessity to risk life in travel, there will appear conveyors of one sort or another.  For the homesteaders there were land locators and purveyors which is easy to understand, but also there was a need for Homesmen, who moved broken people back from whence they came, hopefully to families that had survived and would accept them.  Or maybe to madhouses or churches.  This movie is about a man and an unrelated woman who step up to the challenge without being corrupted.  They are anti-coyotes.  Counter-pirates.

Only in recent years have I been aware of people in similar modern jobs, returning stolen property like cars or children. (Children are often treated in the law as though they were simply property.)  When some of Bob Scriver’s Blackfeet artifacts were stolen, the law shrugged but provided paperwork when he privately paid for a deputy sheriff to go bring them back from the big Indian art purveyors in the SW.  Some things can’t just be packed up and sent in the mail.  

Tommy Lee Jones, sadder but wiser renegade

In one point in his life, a person I know would accompany children who had to be legally returned to family members, maybe because of kidnapping or maybe the death of a caretaker or because they are illegal immigrants.  Tribes sometimes legally demand that adopted tribal babies be returned.  Sometimes the law is smiling and sometimes it’s getting in the way or even punishing.  A person who fetches kids must be absolutely trustworthy and also deeply discrete.  The pay may not amount to much, esp. if a government entity is paying.  The best among such people are able to reassure the child, help sort things out.  Contacts are needed.  It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t demand a college degree but requires a long experience of the "off-the-books" life.

In real life, just as in ordeal movies, such a task makes a person think and feel differently than the ordinary going-along person.  Like law enforcement or emergency responders, they see things that are hidden from most citizens in order to keep the latter from worrying -- or wondering.  The very protectiveness of the secrets begins ironically to feed into a system of neglect and abuse, obliviousness caused by lack of knowledge, protecting evil.  How else could we tolerate so much suffering?  Opportunistic criminal pressure can be better opposed by strategy than by gunslingers.  Traditionally, ministers have been involved.  Church structure has made pathways for the oppressed, like the Underground Railroad north for slaves.

Gordon Swarthout

I have no idea how this 1988 novel by Gordon Swarthout became a 2014 movie, but it wasn’t his first.  That would be “Where the Boys Are,” which made Paula Prentiss a star in 1960.  The week she went to Hollywood, I had been searching at the Salvation Army for clothes that could be the basis for her costumes in “Auntie Mame” at Eaglesmere Summer Theatre.  She was most engaging in comedy, but her personal life was no beach frivolity.  Her sister died in prison where she was serving a sentence for attempted murder.  Plainly psychotic, she should not have been in a criminal facility.

That novel/movie was a far cry from the standard Fifties Westerns Swarthout had been writing, nor does “Bless the Beasts and the Children” sound typical though I’ve not seen the film nor read the book.  (It’s about teens rescuing buffalo.)  During much of his early life he was teaching at Michigan State University but the 1958 book/movie “They Came to Cordura” made enough money for him to move to Scottsdale.  His wife also became a successful writer, but until the couple moved she taught second grade in East Lansing.

Heroic acts do not depend upon virtue.  Rather it’s a matter of being in a certain place and time when idealism or necessity sweeps through as they did in the Sixties.  Major historic social movements like the re-populating of the prairies, anti-slavery, or today's emergency of relieving the incredibly destructive burden on boys everywhere, all sweep up individuals and small groups that can slip under or around governments and corporations.  But it’s also clear that the issues can pull movie directors, rock stars, and finally even millionaires into action.  Millionaires are helpful, but it’s people who can embody ideas who are most effective.

The great American grassland is well-understood to once have been the floor of an immense but shallow sea.  Today it is populated, but in 1850 it was a platform for dramatic and deadly tropes, intense and extended metaphors about what it means to be human in a place between cultures that normally buffer families or even curb renegade individuals.  Amazingly, sometimes small alliances -- even virtual families -- form, that through focus and grit manage to bring out the best in humans.  The final tone of this film is dancing drunk while sorrow slips into the river of time.  We laugh.  But we remember.