"Gone
Girl” David Fincher (2014) and “High Hopes” Mike Leigh (1988)
One of these movies is American and one is
not. One is recent and one is not. One is basically reactionary and one is
not.
Mike Leigh is the great British filmmaker who
makes movies about the working-class – precisely workers who are not morons or thugs. Name an American
director that does this? Can’t? Because there is none. He works with a recurring group of actors,
similar to Robert Altman. Leigh’s whole
‘oeuvre’ is worth a look. The later his
films, the less stereotypes you run into, and the more powerful they become. They all handle class and politics in a
personal, humanistic way. Leigh has just
come out with a new film, “Mr. Turner,” which is unusual for him, as it is about the radical, revolutionary painter JMW Turner, a British
impressionist. His last film, “Another
Year," explores class on a deeply personal basis, and is a great film.
HIGH
HOPES
“High Hopes,’ was made during the Thatcher
regime in England
and features two working-class lefties of sorts, Cyril and Shirley. The whole film contrasts two classes – the
Thatcher middle class feeling its oats and the hammered working-class still
trying to live decently. Cyril is a motorcycle
messenger and Shirley works on a gardening crew of some kind. They are in love. The central character in the
film is Cyril’s elderly mother, who is depressed, lonely and becoming
forgetful. She was nearly always a
housewife. Cyril is class-conscious to
the bone and resents his superficial, social-climbing sister and her sexist, money-grubbing
husband. The sister treats Mum cruelly,
while Cyril and Shirley try to defend her.
Living next door to Mum is a yuppie couple who have bought the council
row-house and turned it into a chic apartment.
Painfully at one point, Mum must hang out in the “Boothe-Braines” house
after forgetting her purse and keys in her own house. Given their outrageously bourgeois accents
and manners, the Boothe-Braines should really be located in a mansion in the
country-side, not some former council flat.
They seem to be obvious caricatures – but who knows, perhaps creepy
people like this actually exist.
Mike Leigh said this film was about the
difficulty of being a socialist. At one
point Cyril and Shirley take the Honda up to Highgate Cemetery
to visit the old man’s grave, Karl Marx.
Cyril doesn’t want to have kids because the world is so screwed up. Shirley does.
He says that all he wants is that everyone has enough to eat. Shirley tells him that is not going to
happen. They allow various wayward and
homeless people to sleep in their tiny side room. One, a naïve kid from the countryside who
knows nothing; one a friend who believes in social revolution but cannot find a
job and seems to have drug or emotional troubles. At the end of the film, it seems Cyril might
agree to have a kid anyway. Mum perks up
with them after a disastrous birthday party at the sister’s ‘detached’ house. They take her up to the roof of the apartment building
to look over the King’s Cross neighborhood in London, and she says, “We’re on top of the
world.” There is always a bit of a human
silver lining in every Leigh film, as his characters never give up.
GONE
GIRL
You might be scratching your head wondering
why this film has been lauded by many mainstream critics. Salon concentrated on the bloody shower scene and
Ben Affleck’s ‘junk’ (which was invisible in the film we saw in Georgia – the
censored south?). This is all typical film-class aesthetic criticism. The real story
of this film is its misogyny. In a world
were rape, murder and sexual assault against women is broad-based in the U.S. and many other
countries, here is a movie saying it’s all a frame-up by a really clever,
‘crazy’ woman. She stages her own abuse and death in order to get her husband arrested for murder - because she is so jealous of his affair with a younger woman. The poor man married the
wrong privileged New Yorker! The subtext
is that marriage can be a really, really bad jail.
This film is based on a book by a female
writer, Gillian Flynn. The film is so
full of arbitrary screen-writer suppositions that it comes across, not as a
real story, but as a prefabrication. Like the
horror film where you are supposed to make bad decisions like hanging around by
the chain saws, as the advert goes. Why
would the woman plan to kill herself?
Why would Affleck decide to stay with her because she is pregnant? Why would the Feds ignore a sliced-up body in
a fancy hidden home? Why wouldn’t the
local police continue their own investigation, or at least feed facts to the
Feds? Why is she crazy? Why would she want to stay with this Missouri doofus
anyway? They have nothing in common
really. How are they living in this
giant suburban house if they were broke?
All of it is artificial pretense.
The best part of the film is the negative depiction
of the cable news business and moralist scolds like Nancy Grace who trade in
rumors, hysteria and personalities. Of
course, this is all in the interest, eventually, of the ‘happy’ couple, their
coming child and the enduring wonders of marriage. Flynn, a Missourian with college professors
as parents, has written prior mystery books that contain negative descriptions
of women, according to Wikipedia.
Fincher directed mainstream films like “Alien 3,” “Fight Club,” “Panic
Room,” and “The Social Network” – Hollywood
films with no social conscience. They are a really good couple. That is the real marriage here – of misogyny and Hollywood.
(Commentary “Rape – Really?”
below. Use blog search box, upper left.)
Red Frog
October 17, 2014
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