As the film opens, members of The Commune, as they call themselves, barely make a living doing improv before small audiences in New York City. They live together in a makeshift space in the lower east side, waiting for their big break — that is, being hired by the film’s version of Saturday Night Live.

The catch here, obviously, is that the odds of any one of them being selected are grim, and the possibility of their all being hired is preposterous. But they cling to that hope, being young artists trying to maintain both cohesion and ambition.

The film gently reveals the dissonant, delicate coexistence of loyalty to each other and to personal ambition. The group nearly falls apart when one actor miraculously gets the big break but is unable to get the others hired. His being hired is another defeat of their hopes, and a crushing one.

Did he succeed against the odds because of his greater talent and imposing physical presence? Or was it because he occasionally strayed beyond the team-first concept into self-promotion? Hardly matters, because he has, however tenuously, achieved his big chance.

The others still await their own discovery. But they are getting too old for this. Their meters are running, and even artists cannot ignore reality forever. Before the world discovers them, they will have to discover themselves.

Don’t Think Twice

The title was nicely chosen. We are told in the film that a rule for doing successful improv is don’t think, to rely on spontaneity and to work impulsively off of what has just been said. This works for The Commune on stage, but their personal lives eventually require a little thought.

The theme, you ask?

On a plot level, this unassuming film is about aspiring artists, but its universal subject seems to be group social cohesion, not just its rewards but a group’s unwillingness to let one go, and the difficult of leaving. One actor’s success is an occasion for congratulations, of course, but also of resentment.

That is not unlike a group of 13-year old friends, boys or girls, when one by one their members discover the opposite sex and drift away from the group.

Gore Vidal is usually credited with the often repeated observation that “whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Francois de la Rochefoucauld surely had that thought, and probably wrote that thought, long before.

Resolution

Don’t Think Twice ends moderately happily, not with the triumphant happiness of most films, but with the happiness that comes to ordinary people when they throttle back their plans. The sort of happiness that seems a contemptible sell-out to young artists with big dreams of commercial success and celebrity status.

By the end of the film, the group has settled for a modest goal, and resettled in a bucolic Pennsylvania. The death of one group member’s father has extended the life of the group. They now have an assured venue, even if it is a grimy former strip joint.

How long that all will happily last seems less important than the moment’s acceptance, a relief from stress and self-delusion. The improv actors seem like the commuter in Richard Wilbur’s wonderful poem, “The Smoking Car,” because failure, the longed for valley, took them in.

The ethical dimension

The central subject of Eye in the Sky is not drone warfare per se, no matter what some reviewers say, it is the calculus of military operations in the presence of civilians.

Military operations are intensely complicated by the presence of civilians, even for a realpolitik pragmatist who ignores the ethical and legal dimensions. Senior American military figures with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan have repeatedly warned that some operations create more jihadists than those operations kill.

This is one of the many lessons we should have learned in Viet Nam, if not before.

A couple of characters’ comments made during the tense deliberations in Eye in the Sky do allude to this inescapable and unmeasureable counter-productive consequence of military actions in cities.

Unfortunately, the film slightly downplays this problem by referring to it as the propaganda war rather than as a recruitment war.

On the other hand, the characters can be forgiven for not pursing this issue, because it cannot be quantified, and we all desperately want to make decisions based on quantification (consider some people’s comfort in judging schools and teachers by student test scores).

In the film, the targets are quantified, and ranked: The numbers 1, 4, and 5 terrorists on the East Africa target list, two British nationals turned jihadists, one American citizen, two suicide bombers, and one bomb maker.

Balancing that juicy target gathering are the estimates (necessarily unreliable despite being doubtless based on carefully researched blast effects) of the civilians likely to be killed if the suicide bombers detonate their vests in public. Apparently the default guess is 40 victims per bomber.

The weakness of guessed quantification, and the pathetic limitations of basing operational decisions on dodgy numbers, is demonstrated when a colonel intimidates a sergeant into fudging his calculations. In part trapped by established doctrine and in part protected by that, a politician will authorize or abort a deadly hellfire strike depending upon whether the chance of a particular child’s dying is said by a sergeant to be 45% or 50%.

Does that seem absurd? Yes, of course, absurd but probably inescapable in real life. Ted Cruz and dozens of barflies might fantasize carpet-bombing the middle east, but military professionals and their civilian superiors have to thoughtfully solve real problems with whatever options are least bad.

Civilians

Gone is the outrage felt in England and the United States when Germans bombed British cities in 1940. That outrage died when the allies began their own bombings of German cities in 1942, often prettified as “anti-morale” raids intended to shut down German war industries by destroying workers’ housing — which sounds much nicer than saying it was to destroy the workers and their families.

Gone are the days when a Curtis LeMay, aided by a Robert McNamara, could conduct incendiary bombings intended to destroy whole cities. Robert McNamara late in life acknowledged that he abetted incendiary bombings that probably killed 800,000 Japanese, mostly civilians, without contributing to the end of the war.

Of course, those were citizens of enemy countries, who get little sympathy. When a Ho Chi Minh or a George Bush declares that every citizen is part of the victory effort, he unwittingly helps justify attacks on civilians.

Fortunately the world still feels outrage at the direct abuse and killing of civilians (rather than as unavoidable loss attendant to legal military operations).

Just War theory, international law, and to some extent military doctrine require that military operational decisions consider proportionality, an essential principle but one not easily applied.

One girl as symbol

Audiences would doze through any film that failed to provide an individual character to stand in for a large group, and so Eye in the Sky includes a winsome child to represent the innocent civilians at risk by both radical Islam and western military strikes. To paraphrase an idea often attributed to Joseph Stalin, one death is a compelling tragedy but a million deaths are a boring statistic.

The film intensifies our concern for Alia, because her loving parents see to it that she can both play and learn, even though she is endangered if seen by the wrong people while having fun or reading a school book.

Alia is not just any civilian we want protected from violent terrorists. She is especially vulnerable as a child and as a female, and her family promotes the enlightened values that George Bush once assured us would sweep Muslim societies once our military ousted or killed Saddam Hussein. Demographics aside, Alia is sweet, cute, employed, and dutiful.

The inescapability of arbitrary numbers

In Eye in the Sky, American politicians have a breezy disinterest in ambiguity and delay, while UK politicians and public servants show moral unease, career fear, and a feckless insistence that the numbers offer plausible deniability.

All of society depends upon arbitrary or largely arbitrary numbers, of course, simplifying matters such as mandatory sentencing, speed limits, tolerable pollution, and official poverty levels. That inescapable reliance on the arbitrary contributes to the whiffs of absurdism in Eye in the Sky.

False comfort

Like most films intended for commercial profitability, Eye in the Sky is reassuring, telling us what we want to hear. What western audiences want to hear is that our militaries exercise scrupulous caution in carrying out drone strikes and care deeply about civilian casualties. The film also tells us that civilian casualties are unavoidable, and that the bad guys eventually get blown up anyway.

At the end of the film, we are again shown Alia dancing with her hoop, as if she had not died after all. This is comforting in the way we are comforted by happy photographs set on a coffin in the funeral home. The film reassures us that Alia, or girls like her, will play and laugh freely again some day.

What’s it all about

45 Years shows the fragility of close relationships, and their vulnerability to what used to be called problems in communicating: withheld experiences, inattention to what the other person is saying and implying, insensitivity to emotional pain other than one’s own, and failure to offer clarifying reassurance when reassurances are requested. It is in part about general relationship obtuseness in men.

The primary function of the few minor characters seems to be to articulate the larger themes rippling from this marriage of Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay).

A woman friend of Kate’s explains the disparate attitudes of men and women, broadly seen: men foolishly think that career success and accomplishments matter most, while women know that relationships are far more important.

That friend should have firmly told Geoff, too, but in this film’s world such a friendly dope-slap is not possible. You can remind someone else’s husband that he will have to deliver a speech at the party, but that is about the limit of involvement. Kate is mostly on her own.

The idle and ailing Geoff laments not having a purpose any more, but all the time he is complaining about this void, his purpose is nearby making his dinner.

The primacy of personal relationships means that relationships must be constantly attended to by the women in the film, since the men cannot do this well. They are hardly aware that it needs doing or is being done for them.

Reminding men to shave and driving them to town are fine symbols of larger care, but they are not just symbols. Relationships involve practical, quotidian support.

Kate’s friend believes that some public rituals, like wedding anniversary parties, must be used to get men to cry, i.e. to realize that they care and to show that caring in public.

A letter arrives

The inciting incident is a classic: an unexpected letter arrives. Like verbal communications in this film, the letter is opaque (because Geoff’s knowledge of German has never been good).

The inciting incident deeply affects Geoff, but the film is far more interested in Kate’s evolving reaction to his reaction. That’s good: Kate is more interesting than her brooding, uncommunicative, and self-absorbed husband. Geoff’s feelings are never fully articulated, so that like Kate the audience is at various moments sympathetic, concerned, perplexed, wary, suspicious, hopeful, and annoyed.

Throughout 45 Years, the camera pays the close attention to Kate’s subtle facial expressions that Geoff should pay, but does not. Charlotte Rampling is an accomplished actor who enriches and inflects both dialog and silence, so the lingering closeups are rewarding.

The fundamental question

Geoff is almost as dense as the cement his former employer made, and so he does not make clear to Kate (or the audience, or himself) whether the news from Switzerland prompts him to grieve for his former lover, or for his own lost youth and his own mortality.

This matters. If he is grieving for The Other Woman, Kate is justified in feeling angry and estranged. But if he is grieving for himself, Kate is acting like a jealous teenager. My sense is that Geoff is grieving for himself, but his blundering explanations plausibly convince Kate that he grieves for his former lover.

Kate’s most horrifying understanding, or misunderstanding, is that she has been a surrogate for Katia (Katya?). She seems to first suspect this when she learns that their hair was the same color (if you can trust Geoff’s distracted answer). They have no children, perhaps a decision he pushed because he cannot have children with Katia. Maybe he chose the breed of their dog as a symbolic replication of Katia’s dog.

Now those possibilities would be a serious blow to one’s ego and one’s certainties: what if much of this marriage was a continuation of the earlier affair by other means? Kate prefers classical music, but Geoff still listens to pop music from his and Katia’s youth. The possibility of intentional parallelism is creepy, insulting, and destabilizing, worse than a similar trope in Vertigo.

Then again, Kate might be all wrong about that parallel business. Lots of women have brown hair, and apparently Geoff did not obsess about Katia’s death until the letter arrived.

Right, wrong, we’ll never know. But Kate believes she has been a make-do surrogate for Katia. In her own way, Kate too slides unexpectedly down an icy crevice, and she takes the marriage with her, as Katia took the baby.

Accepting change

In most people, youthful self-centeredness gives way to the understanding that we are all equals in some regards.

Geoff seems to still struggle against the big and little insults of the passage of time, but the wiser Kate has already reached acceptance. In the first scene, she asks a former student to call her “Kate” since she is now just another person, not a superior in a school hierarchy. Planning the party, she wants no “top table” like that of her wedding, because she is now an equal to all the others in the room.

Geoff’s speech

Kate’s suspicions and anger peak just as the party starts. The audience knows that this party is a show-down, the big test, the crisis that will restore or end the marriage. We have been told that Geoff must deliver a speech, and we know exactly what should be said.

We also know (from hearing wedding and retirement speeches gone awry) that there are as many don’ts as there are dos. When Geoff says that he has not written or prepared a speech, that it is all in his head, our alarm bells are going off. At least he shaved.

The speech itself is a masterpiece of well-intentioned blunders and ambiguity. Kate’s final gesture tells us her reaction, a symbolic act that reminded me of one made by the young Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).

As cinema

While the scale and intimacy of 45 Years suggests a stage play, director Andrew Haigh knows how to show not tell. He has given us some quietly wonderful frames, some of which subtly suggest Kate’s increasing movement away from Geoff. I am looking forward to a second viewing, and I suspect that this film will last, as both a well-made film and as a cautionary tale.

Forget the tepid New York Times review — this is a good film. There are pleasures here well beyond recognizing scenes and lines from classic films, and beyond the clever, subtle sexual innuendo in dialog and dance.

One viewing is never enough with a good film, either to understand it or to get all of its pleasures, or for that matter to comprehend all of the dialog.

One viewing of Hail Caesar is more than enough to suggest that this film is a coherent depiction of our need to believe (a need that Hollywood is eager to satisfy) and a fresh take on the old, old story of appearance vs. reality.

A dim-witted star’s sudden devotion to a utopian political idea parallels his character’s sudden devotion to Jesus, and he is dressed in Roman garb at all times. Such credulities are sharply drawn in contrast to other characters’ cynicism.

The shifts back and forth between the real-time plot and sound stage scenes are marvelous, with even the real-time actions being depicted in Hollywood style, evoking, for example, film noir, WWII films, and Alfred Hitchcock. All this with a hard-boiled detective voice over suggesting Raymond Chandler.

To be honest, I would have preferred briefer depictions of Hollywood musical cliches, the Esther Williams/Busby Berkeley number and the dancing sailors (echoing South Pacific’s “There is nothing like a dame.”).

But those scenes are pleasures, too, reminders that we are all suckers for spectacles, as we are all suckers for ideas.

While Brooklyn is said to be about the quintessential immigration experience, it seems to be more about the quintessential romance novel experience: a winsome heroine, Eilis, torn between two admirers, one relatively affluent and one working class. In this quiet variant of the romance formula, neither man acts caddishly and each is too vapid to harbor dark secrets.

The only bad people are a mean-spirited old Irish woman shop-keeper, whose worst vices are gossiping and tyrannizing shop-girls, and Eilis’s mother, whose own needs prevent her from emotionally supporting her daughter.

Eilis’s voyage from Ireland to the United States seems far safer to us than to her. She has a place to stay upon arrival, a promise of employment, a community of other Irish, the resources of the church (including expensive international telephone calls), and the personal protection of a benevolent priest. Perhaps I felt that her emigration was rather easy because I watched Brooklyn while countless thousands of Syrians and others were fleeing war and oppression without resources.

Sentimentality

The theater lobby placard exclaimed that this film has “not a touch of sentimentality.” That is true only to the extent that it is true to say “Ireland has not one rock,” since it has tons rather than just one. This is the most sentimental film that I have seen in years.

Ethnic conflicts? What ethnic conflicts?

Most remarkably, this 1950s Brooklyn seems devoid of ethnic suspicion, let alone turf wars and ethnic slurs. The romance between an Irish lass and an Italian plumber never triggers a Montague-Capulet fight, and the only obvious rivalry is between the Dodgers and Yankees. The most difficult cultural divide to overcome is inexperience eating spaghetti without splattering.

The historic hostilities among various nationalities and ethic groups in New York, notably including Irish-Italian, is finessed. The device is clever: have the hostilities voiced not by young men with switchblades, but by a precocious Italian child. When he says provocative lines like “We don’t like the Irish,” you just want to chuckle and squeeze his plump cheeks.

Generational conflicts

Like historic ethnic conflicts, the eternal tension between generations is dealt with gently.

Hilariously, in fact. The boarding house dinners are the most delightful scenes, mostly because of the brilliantly drawn boarding house keeper, who insists on a decorum and civility that her vacuous young boarders find amusing. Kids today!

Another universal generational conflict is the old folks’ pressure for a young woman to marry money if she can, while she prefers to follow her heart.

Spoiler alert here: there is little drama about Eilis’s choice of men, since she is courted by the Irishman on a trip back to Ireland while secretly married to the Italian-American. Nothing about this feel-good film suggests there is any possibility of her abandoning her Irish Catholic attitudes toward marriage, or of her abandoning her new homeland. The film shows us not the suspenseful drama of Eilis’s indecision, but the embarrassment of her being found out. Eilis is reluctant on her first trip to America, but she undertakes her second trip with alacrity, more to flee scandal, it would appear, than to see Brooklyn again.

Holding the film together is the iconic Peggy Guggenheim, an interesting eccentric whose candor and anecdotes make up for her apparent lack of gravitas and aesthetic acumen.

A patron, not an expert

At several points the film mades discreetly clear that Peggy Guggenheim did not possess any particularly astute taste or instinct. She says herself that after some bad initial art purchases, she learned to trust not her own instincts, but the advice of others. Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian — they knew art. Peggy Guggenheim might not have been able to recognize great future artists, but she was smart enough to discern who could.

Peggy Guggenheim recalls believing that Jackson Pollack was a terrible artist until Mondrian told her otherwise. Then she championed Pollack, and is now sometimes credited with having made him the superstar he became. As one interviewee says, that credit really belongs to Life Magazine, a dominant popularizer. That recalls the fact that Allen Ginsberg’s career took off thanks to Time Magazine, not his San Francisco beat connections.

Shopping in Europe

While Guggenheim was sailing to Paris, Joseph Duveen and other dealers sought out art for wealthy American industrialists who knew how to make a fortune, but did not know how to judge trophy art. Those intermediaries traveled around Europe, buying many of the great art works that we now see in The Metropolitan and other great museums. But they went for the classics that newly rich industrialists in Pittsburgh and Birmingham would understand. Guggenheim went for the avant garde, and not as a dealer.

As Duveen said, Europe had the art and America had the money. Peggy Guggenheim’s story seems a classic Henry James novel plot, except for the louche parts: new American money in search of art and validating social connections, finding many Europeans eager or at least reluctantly willing to sell.

Was Peggy Guggenheim taken advantage of?

Late in the film an interviewee mentions that some artists exploited Peggy Guggenheim, and I do wish that the film had shown more about that. Who could doubt that some painters chose to exploit this wealthy young woman who compensated for having no art background and for being socially insecure by utterly devoting herself to finding, bedding, and supporting artists.

The film suggests to me that Peggy Guggenheim bought her way into an exciting Bohemian crowd, all that art-revolution excitement, hot jazz, sexual liberation, and the smiling attention of handsome and charismatic art cafe celebrities.

I am sure that other rich men and women also bought their way into the wild Bohemian world, but without the nuisance of rescuing art or artists from the Nazis, something that Peggy Guggenheim accomplished. She sold art when necessary to keep her galleries open, but she mostly kept her purchases. That secured them from dispersal into myriad private collections. Eventually, whether she planned it or not, those works would end up available for the public to see.

Some reviewers find the film shallow

Gary Garrison says the film “never really seems to discover the woman at its core.” David Bax understandably laments the lack of introspection by Guggenheim, but it seems unfair of him to say that the director was “more interested in repetitious mythmaking” than in deep insight into her subject’s psyche.

I for one am content that Lisa Immordino Vreeland focused on Guggenheim’s remarkable historic role rather than speculating about her psyche. The film offers plenty of anecdotes and remarks from which we can form our own opinions. Perhaps Peggy Guggenheim is too complex for a single judgment, perhaps too shallow. There might have been no there there.

At the end of the film Guggenheim is asked about what she misses most from those extraordinary days in Paris, and it isn’t discovering unknown artists: she misses sex. Her autobiography, she says, “is all about fucking.” In her 70s she and a friend quarreled because they both lusted after the same young Italian plasterer working on her Venice palazzo. I wish Tennessee Williams had written a play about that.

These personal details, and the absence of insightful remarks about art, suggest that her youthful support of artists was indeed partly about buying her way into a fun lifestyle that would annoy her stuffy, rich relatives, not just about supporting and promoting extraordinary artists.

But what hedonist or socially awkward introvert ever contributed as much to the world as Peggy Guggenheim did?

Private art and public art

Many of her purchases ended up in The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, a popular museum in Venice. That happy ending raises the interesting question of how art moves between private and public ownership.

Much art now sequestered by wealthy owners is likely to end up on public display eventually, as estates are settled and heirs find that they cannot, like Solomon, propose an axe to divide one work among three or four descendants.

A grim alternative possibility to having privately owned art become public is that the 1% might finish accreting everything of value to themselves, and public museums might begin de-accessioning in earnest to keep the lights on.

De-accessioning meets strong resistance these days, but times change. The British Museum has far more Greek urns than seems necessary, and there are plenty of new millionaires in China and Russia who might effect a new Henry Jamesian dynamic when the National Health Service is really in crisis.

Post WWI taxes forced some wealthy families in England to sell off dusty paintings, but taxes on the wealthy in America seem to only go down. American tax laws can actually help preserve some private collections, as some collectors have discovered, by creating tax-advantaged non-profit art museums on their estates, without public access.

The importance of the patron

In this film Marina Abramovic explains the importance of art patrons, compared to art collectors: they support projects that might not be commercially viable. Both patrons and collectors give artists money, but patrons do not expect works of art in return.

I understand that role for patrons, and I do not quarrel with it, and I wish that I had a patron myself. Painters need to buy groceries, and someone has to pick up all those bar bills. Jackson Pollack should not have to do office work 9 to 5 in order to buy paint.

But on the other hand I sometimes feel nostalgic for the idea of artists creating art without too much thought about how much money they can make on it. Paintings are not screenplays or operas or symphonies, which no one writes without hopes of selling them.

An artist could not ask for a better patron than Peggy Guggenheim.

The film’s strength— its successful depiction of an era and two of its most important political issues — is to some extent weakened by a somewhat flat characterization.

The fiend who manages the women at the laundry is almost comically evil, and reminded me of some Perils of Pauline villain, twirling his evil mustache. Unfortunately, such an over-the-top sexual predator allows the audience to associate 1912 employee sexual coercion with utterly debased monsters, and how many of them could there be?

Suffragette would have revealed the vulnerability of poor women better if the manager seemed rather ordinary, except for politely forcing his attentions on women who could not afford to be fired. That would suggest that sexual coercion was probably fairly commonplace, not an aberration.

I admit that a film revealing a heroic struggle against oppression is no place to have completely balanced characters. Audiences applaud one set of beliefs and admire its adherents, and we abhor the other. Films are not debates. In wars, wearing a uniform or flying a flag is adequate reason for thousands of others to want to kill you without regard to whether you, personally, are really a nice guy.

But even dedicated, visionary revolutionaries have personality flaws and quirks (some people might say that three possible flaws are identified in this very sentence). Heroes are still people.

And even some pompous defenders of exploitation along class and gender lines probably have some redeeming qualities, possibly including doubts and awareness of their own hypocrisies. Surely even the densest British government officials in 1912 could not read their Times at breakfast without a touch of dyspepsia at having their empire’s hypocrisies constantly pointed out to them between the lines in news stories.

Our protagonist Maude Watts has no serious character flaw, but (fortunately for audience interest) her being reluctantly, adventitiously, swept up in the Suffragist movement allows for continued inner conflict. Most of Maude Watts’ conflict arises only out of  her personal situation (wanting to keep her son and avoid prison), rather than from reflection on the ethics of tactics, the eternal problems of ends and means.

All revolutionary movements experience internal fights over tactics and principles, and I wish that the screenwriter had allowed the women in Suffragette to argue better. Instead, they simply follow Emmeline Pankhurst’s exhortations with the unthinking obedience of a Tommy Atkins in Lord Kitchener’s army — although they treat her like a god, not a general.

The more one learns about the endless, labyrinthine ideological debates among Russian revolutionaries in the early twentieth century, the more one marvels that they found any time at all to clean rifles or cook dinner.

Conservatives and religionists defend the status quo, but revolutionaries have a dizzying array of options. The Tea Party and the Occupy movement doubtless have wonderfully intense internal debates, and any films about them should show that.

Gender and class

In Suffragette, the primary doctrinal conflicts are not discussed with any realpolitik or ideological detail, but are tidily encapsulated in Emmeline Pankhurst’s insistence on “Deeds, not words.” In the film, no one debates the range of acceptable “deeds,” a vague term that encompasses both quiet prayer and explosive assassination. The slogan itself suffices.

Maude Watts is asked, “If you got the vote, what would you do with it?” Maude does not know. But in the film, the vote stands as a proxy for women’s equal participation in government and thus their greater power to end their abusive second-class citizenship at the workplace and in the home.

In Suffragette, class and gender oppression are manifested in the burly police surveillance specialist, a calm brute experienced in hunting bomb-throwing anarchists, revolutionary Irish gunmen, and ordinary women who just want to vote, please. He develops a slight revulsion at the brutality of prison forced feedings, but we are given no motivation for this hinted inner conflict: no beloved daughter, no memories of mother, no remorse about collateral damage from any prior police work blunder.

With very few edits for sex and violence, this film could be an afternoon special. It promotes values nearly everyone now espouses, has a likable and reluctantly courageous protagonist, and provides a vivid visual sense of life in a particular historic era.

Parallels today

For an audience alert to historical parallels, Suffragette offers a bracing implicit evocation of some contemporary issues we should all think about more —  such as the poverty inherent in income inequality, sexual exploitation, forced feeding at Guantanamo and in domestic prisons, wage slavery, and secret police surveillance of non-violent political groups. Every serious art work set in the past inescapably says something about its own time.

Seeing Suffragette two days after the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, the audience I was in might have felt to some extent aligned with the film’s ordinary 1912 Londoners, women and men, who were most interested in just not getting accidentally caught up in postal box bombs or mounted police beatings. But Suffragette encourages our emotional identification with ordinary people who speak or act against repression, exploitation, or injustice. Ordinary people, until they see or experience enough abuse to take extraordinary measures.

The film is also visually dark, using an appropriately bleak palette to show the cold north of Russia, one of those landscapes that by itself suggests struggle and vulnerability.

In a derelict northern Russian fishing town, the corrupt mayor wants to use eminent domain to seize at a steep discount for his personal use a prime spot occupied by Kolya, a mechanic living on the edge both financially and psychologically. Like all tyrants, the mayor is helped by apparatchiks and goons.

Koloa’s stubborn streak, alcoholism, and idealistic insistence on fairness compound the problems imposed on him by the state. As David B. Levine has noted, heavy drinking in the film is about “cultural alcoholism, not a character issue.”

The land seizure stands symbolically for the rapacious acquisition of wealth by people in power after the fall of the USSR, but in the context of Russian literature Leviathan seems to be primarily about the human condition, as Dostoevsky understood it.

The court pronouncements are especially demoralizing, with their mocking veneer of justice and wisdom, their haste, their legalisms. Outside of the ruling circles, men have it bad, women have it worse, and good luck to the children.

I’ve been enjoying (if you know what I mean) Victor Serge novels about corruption, oppression and survival in early Soviet Russia, and not much seems to have changed except for the national flag.

The director’s Elena (2011) also impresses me, another film built around corruption and corner cutting in post-Soviet Russia. Elena ends ambiguously, with a fine sense of moral compromise being justified by necessity, maybe even made a quietly positive act of individual resistance.

Unless the subject matter or mood of despair puts you off, Leviathan is far too good to miss.

The Wolfpack is an interesting and engaging documentary, intriguing in what it shows and intriguing in what it intimates.

The Wolfpack is what six brothers name themselves, in homage to Marvel Comics and Hollywood, when they finally venture out into New York City after spending almost their entire lives inside a cramped public housing apartment, watching and re-enacting movies.

A captivity narrative

The film is essentially raw material for a psychological study of a family under a particular kind of stress. New York City offers stress in more flavors and combinations than Pinkberry ever dreamed of, but the stress of the Angulo family is all about claustrophobic living conditions with little contact with the outside world, a family reclusion imposed by a repressive father and abetted by a helpful but helpless mother.

Yet somehow, mostly because of certain decisions by the director, this seems by the end to be a feel-good movie. The emphasis seems mostly on how well the boys are able to begin getting past their distorted upbringing, with the ominous signs muted. Yes, they will likely have problems adjusting to social involvement and compensating for a possibly non-existent home schooling, but the film emphasizes their joy at first experiencing walking on a beach, lying on park grass, and picking apples.

The brothers

Despite their virtual captivity and frightening father, the siblings apparently maintain their cheeriness, playfulness, and cooperation. No sibling rivalry is apparent here, and the boys seem devoted to their mother.

One might think that so much film viewing would make the exterior world irresistibly attractive to the boys, by glamorizing myriad experiences and places and things, by showing the richness of human interaction with strangers and friends, and by having real girls.

But the boys focus less on the worlds that feature films depict or invent, and more on the films themselves qua films — films as screenplays, archetypal and mythic scenes, story sequences. Their time-consuming transcriptions of dialog while watching films over and over, and their laborious re-enactments of films, suggests that they are happiest in mediated experiences, happiest being other people.

That makes them artists, I guess. What matters is how something is imaginatively transformed, not how it actually is to a literalist.

In acting out film re-creations, their preference is for violent crime and superhero films. That taste is probably natural for growing boys, not to mention true for contemporary American adult males, who have a bizarre interest in watching films with comic-book heroes, films that a few years ago would have bored anyone over the age of 12 or 13.

But the boys’ relentless interest in gunfights and macho gangster tough talk also suggests that they are unconsciously paralleling their father’s fear of the external world, and their mother’s vague distrust of social contacts in schools.

Home schooling

Our understanding of the family largely depends on the editing, of course, on what footage we are given. The film offers no details about how family gets money (presumably some combination of public assistance programs) or what home schooling happens.

None of the scenes suggests that any real “home schooling” actually happens, unless (thinking as a family lawyer rather than as an educator) you assert that the boys’ activities are “self-directed, project-based theatre studies.” The parents seem unlikely teachers, to say the least.

The boys are charming, but their frequent smiling while mentioning discomforting facts is unsettling. Is that a submission-signal defense mechanism developed in the presence of a repressive and sometimes drunk or violent father? Is it a sign of inadequate socialization?

Documentary style

The Wolfpack has no voice over for continuity or for expressing the director’s viewpoint, so it is mostly observational, but some family statements are clearly responses to interview questions, not spontaneous, and family members sometimes talk to the filmmaker or a second person behind the camera. The Wolfpack is non linear, a time-shifting mix of home movies and Crystal Moselle’s footage, some re-creating the boys’ earlier re-creations of films, and some following their forays into the city.

If everything is political, what is political here?

The family would doubtless infuriate Tea Party viewers. The father is an immigrant who refuses to work and prevents his wife from seeking work, who fathers seven children, and who apparently subsists on public housing and a few other forms of welfare.

I do not think that most Tea Party viewers will be at all mollified by the fact that the father rationalizes his refusal to work as defiance of government (which he says wants to turn everyone into robots) or by the children being theoretically home schooled.

That is quite an irony: the father’s repression of the family on the grounds that he is sheltering them from government repression. The father insists that he wanted his sons to find out who they are, but retarded that discovery. Rather than discovering themselves, they spent time learning film roles.

Bringing Hollywood DVDs home is no substitute for encouraging contact with people and nature, and how is anyone going to understand himself or herself without experiencing the rest of the world? Bringing home a computer and some books would help.

By the end of the film we see the boys barely beginning their self discoveries. We all wish them well, but we also know better than they do how ill prepared they are.

The film’s sci fi premise, scale, and CGI are relatively modest, as films go. The central story is not new: a brilliant Silicon Valley type coding and invention genius has secretly created not just breakthrough Artificial Intelligence coding, but robots as well.

Nathan is akin to Dr. Frankenstein in wanting to create life, although he does this with cynicism and tech industry hipness. Nathan is a genius, but an evil genius, without the crazed look and wild hair of 1950s film evil geniuses, once you begin to see his robots as humans, worthy of human rights, empathy and protection. That takes about three seconds of film time.

Yes, but what is the film about?

Ex Machina could just be another film speculating on whether Artificial Intelligence devices will eventually out-think humans and work their treacherous will on us. But there seems to be more.

Ex Machina also seems to want to be a sort of allegory of the status of women over centuries They start out dehumanized (the women in this film are, after all, robots) and under a man’s complete control. They have been programmed to serve, to be obedient, and in one case to be mute. Hello, history and culture.

David B. Levine disagrees: “I think it was basically another computer nerds-as-supermen go berserk“ film that is “classically anti-feminist.”

Corporate culture

A second thematic motif will be immediately obvious to cubicle farm dissidents and Adbuster-reading corporation foes. The film depicts an authoritarian tech CEO playing god, programming his programmers, manipulating and discarding employees, and in general imposing an Orwellian dictatorship.

Back to gender

But the film still seems to me mostly about gender, since all of of the robots are women, and the two ostensibly autonomous humans are men. All the robot women are attractive and the film has a lot of nudity, surely in service to box office appeal rather than necessary to support a thematic point. Any imaginative panelist at a Popular Culture Association convention could easily explain all that sexuality as thematically intended to show the sexualization of women, but I think the robots’ sexualization diverts attention from the larger historical exploitations and repressions of women.

In Ex Machina, myriad glass walls seem to replace the glass ceiling. Women/robots are not just kept from advancement, they are kept from leaving. The tension of the plot resolution is primarily about whether the robot Ava will effect an escape, but also about whether or not she will help him escape, too. We also want to know if Ava has cleverly deceived Caleb, in the traditional manner in which powerless people quietly exercise some power.

The male characters

If the film is about the evolution of the status of women, the two male characters in the film seem archetypal.

Nathan is a misogynist who might easily represent the repression of women throughout history. He is simultaneously an aggressive cave-man, autocratic family patriarch, insensitive frat boy, womanizing rich playboy, and exploitative employer.

Caleb is a modern nice guy, shy around women, who sees women as actual humans and who comes to want to help them escape their oppression, not that he understands his actions in those lofty terms. He takes bold steps without thinking big ideas, just feeling sympathy and love flutters and maybe traditional male protectiveness.

Fearing the future

Paralleling the conventional sci fi fear that Artificial Intelligence robots might turn on humans, viewers (those who see the film as a allegory of the changing status of women) might expect the ending to suggest whether liberated women will finally turn on males. If a viewer thinks that the film poses that question, and that the plot ending answers it, then David Levine is right, the film is classically anti-feminist. Unlike conventional thrillers and conventional sci fi, though, Ex Machina offers the complexity and ambiguity of art, not the simple thematic points of mass entertainment films. Surely audiences have enjoyed this film without paying the slightest conscious attention to theme.