True Love in the Movies

I have clawed my way to New York and back four times in the last two months. Our return on the penultimate occasion was a beat-the-blizzard action thrill ride, with cars sliding into guard rails and rolling backwards into the snowy woods. We were 20 miles from Boston when night fell and the blizzard began in earnest. Perhaps only 100 yards ahead were visible, and the mess of snow on the highway surface ruined any chance of us drivers seeing the paint that makes possible the crucial process of organizing ourselves into lanes. Yet the effort was well rewarded by a grocery store found still open upon our arrival, and by hot vegetable soup and crusty bread. That was the same trip when we won a wreath on Christmas Eve, tossed to us for free by a vendor getting ready to scrap a tragic heap of trees (as he hula-hooped with a four-foot diameter wreath himself).

On one of the earlier of these adventures, I insisted that we make for the Anthology Film Archives to see a show of Robert Breer short films. Breer made the short film 69 which had haunted me since I'd seen it in college, and I'd never bothered to learn more about him but always meant to. His work is abstract and experimental, and I've always recalled that 69 first interested me because without directly offering a narrative or even a recognizable image, it evoked a series of feelings that in a way added up to a story.



The program was difficult, and I give Jamie a lot of credit, first for sitting through it, and then for not pretending to have enjoyed it. The opening short, Blazes, is a low-tech assault, three minutes spent staring into a strobe light while you attempt to discern what colors and shapes are moving around in front of you. Even more of a challenge was the cruel Fist Fight, with its incoherent soundtrack and rapid cutting among images that tremble and fall out of focus. The gentle and lovely Fuji, with rotoscoped footage of the mountain seen from a window of a passing train, let us come down a bit from the high seas of avant-garde animation before we were dizzily deposited on the curb once more. I still contend that 69 is excellent, and I found that I feel about the same about Breer's material now as I did then: that while it's opaque, its energy is right there in front of me, and it really inspires me to make something.

The best Christmas film we saw this year was The Shop Around The Corner, which I picked based on an outstanding list that I found on Wikipedia that organizes not only movies that have Christmas itself as their subject, but movies which, to various degrees, incorporate Christmas into their plots, or simply use Christmas as a setting or backdrop to their stories. The film is essentially a romantic comedy, but the romance between the two leads, although sweet and well acted, is not its most interesting or memorable thread. What I loved more was the bigger picture of the shop and its employees and customers. The boss, the salespeople, the porter and the bosses' wife who never appears, but whose image is painted by the faces of the other characters as they speak of her (or to her on telephones)- each character is an individual that I cared about and wanted to follow. The world of this film is so lovingly realized, so vibrant and full of stories that even if you took away the main love story, the rest of it would carry on just fine.

Nevertheless, it reminded me of how much difficulty I have believing in love when I see it on a movie screen. Of all the hundreds of movies you've seen about two people in love, how many of them find a way to transmit a small piece of how love feels, what it is, why it happens in the first place- some glimpse of it that allows you to empathize with the characters and understand what they're experiencing? Love is usually presented to us the same way that Godzilla or a tap dancer is presented to us- as a fantastical object of entertainment, something to make us smile, but not for us to understand, think too much about, or believe in with any seriousness. Does it feel as though the filmmakers themselves really understand, or want to understand, the love they're selling? If I can't imagine that they do, how am I supposed to care about it?

I don't know how a great love story is written or told successfully, but when it does happen, it looks criminally easy to do. We reflected on this recently after seeing The African Queen. I believed in Bogart and Hepburn's characters- they were both insufferable nerds who appeared to perfectly deserve each other, and that is worth celebrating. Yet why should this be so simply and naturally true in one film and not in another? When they face down the Germans at the end and wind up in a tight spot, there really seems to be a lot at stake. The cartoonishness of the film allows you a bit of distance (we both remarked at how many moments felt exactly like a cartoon, not excluding the goofy jungle soundtrack), but in spite of the comic tone, my investment in the characters and my wish that they succeed were profound. I can only think of a few films that really bring a blossoming romantic connection to life for me, and this is one of them (also coming to mind right now are Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Before Sunrise).

Yet a love story doesn't even have to be so deeply convincing for a movie to completely succeed. Take Moonstruck, which we recently watched for the hundredth time. I certainly believed that Cher didn't love Danny Aiello, but her and Nicolas Cage? It was too whirlwind, too larger-than-life, not on a scale that I recognized. But do I care? The real subject of that film is not the romance between the leads, but the romance of being in New York City, and that feeling is burning madly in every scene. And it easily provides you with quotes to repeat endlessly while tramping through that city with your wife. The winner: "I seen a wolf in everyone I ever met, and I... SEE A WOLF... IN... YOU !"

Other movies we saw recently, all recommended:

True Grit, about which has been written, at this point, everything that could possibly be said (I'll just say I enjoyed it a lot);

Secret Sunshine, which is emotionally exhausting, but strangely thrilling in its willingness to explore novel questions about religion, grief and acceptance;

The Kids Are All Right, which we'd been meaning to see for months, and which is a plenty smart family drama, in spite of its plot mechanics;

and Toy Story 3, which winds up one of the only movie trilogies in history (how many are there?) in which all three films are pretty much great.