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It’s 1934, and two-bit sheet-music salesman Arthur Parker (Steve Martin) is deeply unsatisfied: with his work, with his marriage, with the drab everyday world he lives in. He wants to break out and seek adventure, romance, excitement, riches. He wants money to open his own record shop, he yearns to express his ardor, and he hankers for a little hanky-panky, but his prim and prudent wife Joan (Jessica Harper) won’t give up her nest-egg (if you know what I mean and I think that you do). Arthur takes up with a shy schoolmarm (Broadway baby Bernadette Peters) who harbors silver-screen dreams like his own. But nothing seems to make him happy, because nothing can.
Arthur’s inner contradictions are crushing. He rejects tangible pleasure at every turn: he pushes away meals though he’s hungry; he brushes off his wife’s hand-won wooing; after his lyrical daydreams of wooing his true love, he presses for a hasty hump on the couch; when a lady of the evening asks if he’d like to “have a good time,” he growls “No, I like being miserable!” Moments later he coos dreamily, “But I want to live in a world where the songs come true.” This is the heart of his ambivalence: Arthur craves the flimsy joys of fantasy, not the modest but attainable pleasures of the real world. He doesn’t want plain ol’ happiness; he wants the glamour of a Happy Ending, Hollywood style.
Coming on the heels of Steve Martin’s The Jerk, Pennies from Heaven was woefully mis-marketed as a fond fantasy glancing back at the giddy musicals of the 1930s. That misreading must have made the actual film all the more jarring for contemporary audiences.
Pennies from Heaven is a fantasy, all right, but a deliberately jarring one; the main characters break into song and dance to express their inner desires and fears, but after these glimpses into the dazzling paradise of their musical fantasies, the clunking return to the all-too-real world of grim Depression-era desperation stings viciously. With its cruel interplay of luminous pipe dreams and dismal reality, Pennies from Heaven portrays the alienating effect of glitzy Hollywood fantasy as effectively as Sunset Boulevard or Mulholland Dr., raising us up along with the characters to grace the silver screen, then thumping us unceremoniously back to the dim, heavily shadowed rooms and streets of Arthur’s everyday.
In these tawdry studies in dark and light, director Herbert Ross deliberately evokes paintings from the ashcan school, a point that gets hammered home when we see Arthur and Eileen through the famous diner window from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Then the angle changes, placing us inside the famous painting. It’s a risky ploy that Ross carries off again and again with breathtaking ease, recreating several Ashcan landscapes that give depth to the film’s heart even as they blend seamlessly into Arthur’s garish gimcrack world.
Writer-director Todd Haynes (I’m Not There, Safe) intended Velvet Goldmine to tell the story of David Bowie’s rise to fame, but Bowie refused his approval — and songs — when he realized the script focused on a largely-fictionalized account of his sexual exploits and public persona rather than his musical career.
Haynes made a virtue of necessity, rewriting and reframing the narrative. What could have been a mere bio-pic became instead a wider statement about the consuming nature of fame and power. Fittingly, the rewritten story follows the structure of Orson Welles’ notoriously not-a-bio-pic Citizen Kane: reporter Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is tapped to investigate the disappearing act of former rock idol Brian Slade, the glammest of the glam, whose most outrageous stage act drove him into obscurity.
As in Kane, the reporter tries to divine the icon’s history at second-hand, struggling to assemble the glib or sorrowful gossip of Slade’s scattered coterie into a coherent history. Unlike Kane, Velvet Goldmine ties the reporter’s personal narrative to the subject’s, expressing the slippery way we can incorporate a celebrity’s persona into our own histories, consuming the energy of those we admire or emulate, eroding their identities in favor of our own projections.
It could have been dreary or didactic, but instead the film is a giddy tissue of visual tales, richly laced with a soundtrack of glam-rock’s greatest hits, original and reworked (and notably minus any David Bowie). Velvet Goldmine shows us the grime under a layer of glitter, the sordid soul-drain that fame can become.
Big doings are afoot (and afeather) at the Tweedy chicken farm. Ginger, a flighty hen who’s escaped and been recaptured several times, hopes to persuade the other chickens to fly the coop en masse. Meanwhile, the sinister Mrs. Tweedy has hatched a scheme to shift their production from eggs to — duh duh DUH — chicken pies.
Mind you, I’m not intentionally recommending Chicken Run as a secret plot to turn your kids abruptly vegetarian just in time for a big poultry-consuming (and big-poultry consuming) holiday — but, uh, there is that possibility. The characters and story of Chicken Run are as compelling as the classic films it alludes to so fluently (including such greats as Stalag 17, The Great Escape, and Raiders of the Lost Ark). As Roger Ebert remarks, “This movie about chickens is more human than many formula comedies.”
[This review is cross-posted to The VideoReport.]
As Halloween creeps up on us, I suggest settling in with some movies to give yourself the chills — and nothing is better for that than a classic haunted-house story. Read the rest of this entry »
As I skulked around the unlit apartment, right hand clasping the hem of the blanket thrown around my shoulder ready to ward off any stray beam of sunlight, left hand clamped to my throbbing orbital socket covering my face from jawbone to hairline, I thought…
“Maybe the Phantom of the Opera just had migraines.”
Turns out, writing poems by recontextualizing movie quotes gets to be addictive.
I call this one:
I could tell you stories
You might say I sell peace of mind.
Insurance is my game.
Door-to-door.
Human contact’s the only way
to move merchandise.
In spite of what you might think,
I’m pretty good at it.
It doesn’t surprise me.
I believe in it.
Fire, theft, and casualty aren’t things
that only happen to other people.
Writing doesn’t work out,
you may want to look into it.
Providing basic needs
you could do worse.
I’ll keep that in mind.
My submission to the World Poetry Movement’s Bill Murray poetry contestis composed entirely of lines from Groundhog Day, in order and unaltered, recontextualized as an homage to the free verse of Frank O’Hara. I call it:
Meditations in a Celebrity Emergency
It’s your choice.
What’s it gonna be?
I’m thinking.
All the long-distance lines are down?
What about the satellite?
Is it snowing in space?
Don’t you have a line you keep open for emergencies
or for celebrities?
I’m both.
I’m a celebrity in an emergency.
Can you patch me through on that line, please?
Can I have one more with booze in it?
I like it here.
update: In the excitement of stumbling across such a lovely little piece of prose poetry, I didn’t notice that the WPM is probably operating a classic publishing scam. I fully expect to get a letter next month notifying me that I’m a semi-finalist and offering me a super-special author’s rate on the book.
Which is too bad, ’cause the accidental poem is a gem.
The Fella: [wrily] We should’ve played this at our wedding.
Elsa: I think we did. I added it to the playlist.
The Fella: … I’m insulted in retrospect!
Elli
Elsa
