BEFORE: Happy birthday, United States! I'd offer you cake, but you look like you could stand to lose a few pounds, America, if I'm being honest. OK, have some cake, I know it's been a tough year so far, and it's not over yet. We're just past the halfway mark on the calendar, but since I've been putting in the extra time with movies, in just one week Movie Year 12 will be 2/3 over, believe it or not. So I've got to get working on finding those connections to get me to the end of the year.
It's birthday #244 for America, and she doesn't look a day over 235. Geez, if I hang in there just 6 more years I'll get to see big Birthday #250, which is called a semiquincentennial, I think that means halfway to a 500 year anniversary. What do you get the country that has everything? (Maybe a new president, that would be nice...). Hang in there, America, don't quit now when the semiquincentennial is so darn close! Geez, I'm so old I remember the bicentennial in 1976, and I was just 7 years old!
Adrian Martinez carries over from "Lady and the Tramp".
THE PLOT: A family of Irish immigrants adjust to life on the mean streets of Hell's Kitchen while also grieving the death of a child.
AFTER: This one's set back in the early 1980's, I think - back when the movie "E.T." was popular, the family goes to see the movie and also there's a plot point about trying to win an E.T. doll as a prize in a street fair. So you have to remember, the 80's were a very different time - for starters, we had a Republican President who was very old and many people thought he was senile or just plain crazy, and during the course of his Presidency he made an ally of the Russian premier. Also in that decade there was a mysterious illness going around that seemed to target urban populations and minorities the hardest, and at first many people didn't know how to protect themselves from it. Plus we had a lot of crazy music, and certain musicians became prominent in the culture for being gay or transvestite - very different, right?
Actually, the writer/director's original goal here was to set this back in 1982, but according to the trivia page on IMDB, that would have cost too much to pull off (hey, those 80's fashions were expensive, I guess. What, they couldn't have found a lot of them in thrift stores or something?). So they ended up setting this in the current day - 2002 - and by coincidence, the 20th anniversary re-release of "E.T." was playing in theaters, so that's what the family went to see on the big screen. I guess that makes sense, because I don't remember plush dolls of the E.T. character being a big deal when the film first came out, I think they came along much later.
So this is about immigrants coming to New York City from Ireland (they sneak in through Canada, and lie about being on holiday) and living in a terrible apartment building in Hell's Kitchen, one with a lot of junkies and squatters and stereotypical NYC troublemakers (like, say, artists) and really poor living conditions, at least at first. It's great that the family took the initiative and fixed up this living space, however this situation contains a number of contradictions - like, are they squatting in an abandoned building, or paying rent? Neither situation makes much sense - first off, squatting is not safe, especially when you consider the type of person they'd be living next to. It just wouldn't be safe to raise two daughters in an abandoned building, those other tenants would kidnap them and sell them for drug money at the first opportunity. So, then they must be renting - only what landlord would rent out such a decrepit space, with holes in the ceiling, pigeons living in the apartment, no running water, etc. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the director has somehow conflated two different experiences, because NYC had building codes, even back then, and while I know some people may have terrible apartments, or have some things in need of repair, I'd like to think that an apartment building just COULD NOT get this bad and still be considered rentable.
But I guess maybe that's the point, this family just in from Ireland has very little money, they're here illegally so their options were perhaps very limited, and thus they end up in the absolute worst apartment that NYC has to offer. But here, again, I find another set of contradictions - over time, they fix the place up, get an air conditioner (essential for NYC summers), paint the walls, get some nice furniture - but Mam works in an ice cream parlor, and Da's a struggling actor, so how exactly can they afford to feed the family, pay the rent AND have money left to do home improvements? It just doesn't add up. Later on, Dad works as a taxi driver, but he still seems to spend more time going on auditions than he does picking up fares. Then later still, the mother (Sarah) becomes pregnant, and it's a difficult pregnancy, so there goes the income from the ice cream parlor. This is a tough town, it's no place for people who mistakenly think they can do it all, like working one crappy job AND spending time with their kids.
What's worse is that the family is Irish, so they say "the girls HAVE to go to Catholic school". Umm, no, they don't HAVE to do that, that's a choice, plus, how are they going to afford the tuition on top of everything else? Now we're really straining the boundaries of credulity, because if they were that hard up, and Dad's acting career was tanking that badly, wouldn't the kids just end up in public school?
The family bonds with artist Mateo (aka "The Man Who Yells") who also lives in the building, when he's the only person who will open the door for the daughters on Halloween when they're trick-or-treating. Eventually they learn that Mateo is HIV-positive, and not doing well, he ends up in the hospital around the same time that Sarah's baby is due, and that's about the time when things got really confusing for me. I couldn't tell if this was some sort of circle-of-life observation, or if they were trying to imply that something magical or mystical was happening. I was also confused why a family who was already having trouble making ends meet would then try to have ANOTHER child, which would only make things worse, also then there would be an enormous hospital bill following the birth, plus it's a difficult pregnancy, so more bills. Why would they do this? Oh, right, silly Catholics don't believe in using birth control.
Some of this story is undoubtedly autobiographical, director Jim Sheridan has two daughters who share screenwriting credits with him, and he moved from Canada to NYC's Hell's Kitchen area in, you guessed it, the 1980's. So then why do so many elements here feel so hard to believe? Like there's a mistake when the father brings home an air conditioner with the wrong kind of plug, and he just goes and buys a new plug at the store and rewires it. But anyone who's ever bought an appliance should know that if a machine's plug doesn't fit in your outlet, that probably means that the device isn't wired for that voltage. Changing the plug won't change the voltage that the device needs - you might be able to find a converter that would connect THAT plug to THAT outlet, but you can't just cut off the old plug and splice another one on in its place.
Another NITPICK POINT is the depiction of a street fair game where each ball thrown to win the prize costs twice as much as the one before it - even in the toughest NYC neighborhood, this isn't how any carnival game would work. Even the worst-paying out carnival game would let you keep playing and build up wins to get a larger prize, but the price would never go up exponentially like this. What's more likely in a carny game is that you'd have almost NO chance of winning - like that game where you have to shoot out the red star with a BB gun, it's impossible unless you shoot out a circle around the whole star, but at that point the operator would probably invalidate your play. I've read enough about carnival games to know to NOT play them - even if you know the tricks involved, you're better off paying full price in a toy store for a stuffed animal, instead of ultimately paying three times that much in a fair booth.
The other thought I had was that part of the reason the father had such trouble finding work as an actor was simply that the family came here illegally - any legit stage production in NYC would be unionized, and in order to pay the actors, they'd need to see his paperwork. Without a work visa or a green card, any theater company could get in trouble for hiring him, and that's just not worth the risk. The animation companies I work for can't hire immigrants unless they have a work visa or a student visa, so I'm thinking this might have been part of his problem - and if not, then the story missed another point. I think there are exceptions made for some of the really top-name actors from other countries, but the whole point here is that this guy has no credentials, just a dream.
The immigration thing is such a divisive issue now, even more so than it was in 2002. So this is either about a naive family chasing their dream of living in America and raising their family in our great nation, or it's about a bunch of freeloaders who snuck in from Canada, took jobs driving a taxi and serving ice cream away from hard-working Americans, and then proceeded to have an anchor baby with no health insurance. I guess how you feel about this movie might depend on where you are on the political spectrum, then. I tend to side with those who say that "immigrants get the job done" (as per "Hamilton") but I also realize that the overall situation is very complex and that others have strong feelings about jobs going to immigrants - especially the ones they want to have. So it's tricky, I've had to take a hard line against anyone without papers working at either studio.
Also starring Paddy Considine (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Samantha Morton (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Sarah Bolger (last seen in "The Spiderwick Chronicles"), Emma Bolger, Djimon Hounsou (last seen in "Shazam!"), Juan Carlos Hernandez (last seen in "Against the Ropes"), Jason Salkey, Rene Millan, Merrina Millsapp, David Wike, Nick Dunning (last seen in "The Iron Lady"), Frank Wood (last seen in "Joker"), Michael Tighe, Jennifer Seifert, Jer O'Leary.
RATING: 5 out of 10 summer thunderstorms
No comments:
Post a Comment