BEFORE: These days I've got so much time on my hands that watching a movie each day is very easy, and writing about it isn't that much of a struggle, either - since I'm still not back to work full time. It's harder for me when I have to skip a day - I've got 22 films to spread out among the 30 days of September, for example. So, no more than 5 or 6 a week, unless I want to have a big gap at the end of the month.
I took a look ahead at the schedule, and there's one film coming up that seems like it wants to be on Labor Day - but that meant watching only two movies in four days, just to get that one to land on Monday - so no movie yesterday, and no movie tomorrow. Guess I can always watch 4 episodes of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" instead, and come closer to getting one more TV series off my list.
Glenn Close carries over from "Cookie's Fortune". I forgot that she appeared a few times earlier this year, like in "Tarzan 2" as the voice of a gorilla. She's a pretty late entry vying for the top spot this year, but I don't think she can win it. She still might make the top ten, though, when I add up her earlier appearances with this chain of four of her films in September.
THE PLOT: A wife questions her life choices as she travels to Stockholm to see her husband receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
AFTER: I took this film (and the two other Glenn Close films coming after it) out of the February line-up, because the linking demanded it - I needed material to help connect the back-to-school films, since they weren't connecting to each other. Relationship-driven films like this one could have a place during February's romance chain, because even a film that depicts two people on the verge of a break-up is still a valid topic to explore - "romance" is just code for "relationships" in some ways, so this could have counted as a February film, but you know what? I've got a ton of romance/relationship films, in September I'm focused more on preserving the chain with solid links. I didn't link 8 months of films together this year just to allow the chain to be broken in early September, not with this year's horror chain coming up in just a few weeks.
I suppose I could have saved "Cookie's Fortune" to be the outro from the romance chain, but everything here in this month, right now, is serving a purpose, even if the movies are terrible - the chain is telling me what to watch, and every day I get closer to the end of regulation play 2020. I'll have plenty of time in November and December to review the damage done to February 2021's romance chain, plus the hole I created by removing three films, and see if there's still a good plan to make a connected chain with whatever's left. But that's a concern for another day, and I've got to get there first.
The title character here is Joan Castleman, whose husband, Joe, has just been chosen for a Nobel - and if the film had just concerned itself with an insider's look at that process, that might have been enough. You have to travel to Sweden, you have to participate in a ceremony where you have to bow several times, and then you have to give an acceptance speech in a separate ceremony - unless you're Bob Dylan, in which case you can decline to participate but still get the honors anyway. The Castlemans bring along their son, David, who's just starting his own writing career, and like many people, the son doesn't always see eye to eye with his parents, because they just can't help being that specific mix of supportive and critical over his life choices. David can't get a straight review of his own work from his father, not without a few overly honest criticisms, and several "When I was starting out as a writer..." anecdotes. That right there would be enough to make me choose a different profession as my parents - David's at that difficult age where he finds his parents super-annoying, which is really any age.
At some point, the film starts the flashback sequences (ah, I should have known there would be a catch) that go back to show us how Joe and Joan met, and it turns out that he was her college professor, at a time when he was married to the first Mrs. Castleman, and Joan baby-sat for the couple. But slowly she worked her way into Joe's life, and by the time we get to the second set of flashbacks, Joe's lost his teaching gig (probably for having an affair with a student) as well as his marriage (umm, same reason) and so it's "publish or perish", as they say. Joan has a secretarial job at a publishing house, and overhears one executive saying that they need a good Jewish writer, like the other publishers do, so she steps forward to suggest Joe. But Joe's novel needs a lot of polish, so she steps in as a sort of "ghost editor".
Meanwhile, back in the present (which isn't the right use of "meanwhile", I know...) a younger writer has traveled to Stockholm to convince the Castlemans to let him write the definitive biography on Joe, and when Joe turns him down flat, he targets Joan instead. He reveals that he knows about Joe's many affairs, then puts forth the theory that maybe Joe isn't the great writer that everyone believes him to be, and perhaps the real writer of all those novels is someone hiding in plain sight. Gradually through toggling between the two advancing timelines (sort of a similar structure to "Wonderstruck" here) we're brought to the conclusion that the young writer could be right - this could explain why Joan has specifically asked to not be thanked or even referenced in Joe's Nobel acceptance speech.
The problem here, I think, is that assuming the theory is true, that Joe's nothing more than a figurehead, while Joan's the true creative genius, there's not a real explanation given here for the decades-long deception. Why, exactly, was this necessary? Was the patriarchy so powerful in the 1950's that a book by a male author would get published and one by a female author wouldn't? That can't be true, because Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and Agatha Christie all managed somehow. Or was there specifically a bull market at the time for a particular type of novel being written by male Jewish writers? This is all left just a little uncertain, I could have used some edification here that would justify this couple presenting an image to the world that wasn't truthful. Why couldn't they have shared co-writing credit on these novels, for example? Was there not enough room on the covers of their books for two names?
Sure, there's one female character in the flashbacks who decries the lack of opportunities for female authors, but is that enough of a justification? I'm not sure. And while Joan was writing eight hours a day, Joe was cooking dinner for the family, cleaning house and raising their son - is that really such an embarrassing job for a man, that he preferred the fantasy life of an author over his reality? They had such a great opportunity here to be a progressive couple and flip the traditional gender roles around, why didn't they take it? Then again, why do Stephen King and J.K. Rowling write some of their novels under pen names? It's a strange process when you can read a book and not be entirely sure who the author is, because the vagaries of publishing are sometimes shrouded in mystery. So who's really getting shafted here if Joe's not really the author of the books? Is it the public, or Joan herself? The couple seems to have enjoyed a pretty darn good life for a pair of frauds.
And it's odd that it takes the trip to Sweden to finally cause some tension between the married couple. If Joan knew about Joe's many affairs, why hasn't she expressed her dissatisfaction with them before this? And Joe had a pretty sweet deal, too - what with his wife writing the novels and him taking all the credit. Why would he want to ruin all that by sleeping around? Driving his wife away would therefore not only take a personal toll on him, but it would also mean the end of the writing career, right? So why take that chance? Obviously it just seems like a set of circumstances designed to create the greatest amount of drama within the confines of this film. I'm not saying it doesn't work, because mostly it does, but there's a fair amount of bending the story over backwards to bring it all to this place where it apparently needs to be.
Also starring Jonathan Pryce (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), Christian Slater (last heard in "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay"), Max Irons (last seen in "The Host"), Annie Starke (last seen in "Father Figures"), Harry Lloyd (last seen in "The Theory of Everything"), Elizabeth McGovern (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in America"), Alix Wilton Regan, Karin Franz Körlof, Johan Widerberg (last seen in "Ocean's Twelve"), Richard Cordery (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Jan Mybrand, Anna Azcarate, Peter Forbes, Jane Garda, Fredric Gildea, Nick Fletcher, Mattias Nordkvist, Suzanne Bertish (last seen in "W.E."), Grainne Keenan, John Moraitis (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Michael Benz (last seen in "Joker").
RATING: 6 out of 10 autographed walnuts
No comments:
Post a Comment